Abstract
Reviewed by: Florian Greiner, University of Augsburg, Germany
The volume under review tries to link two strands of research: on the one hand perceptions of a European demise in the first half of the twentieth century have been well studied, particularly by intellectual historians. Paradoxically, the political, economic, cultural and spiritual crisis of the continent after 1914 promoted European thinking. On the other hand, constructions of space by Europeans changed enormously during those years for at least two reasons. Firstly, as a result of Europe’s apparently dwindling significance in the world, a sense of the altered geopolitical position of the continent arose, leading observers to diagnose a ‘dwarfing of Europe’ (Arnold Toynbee). Secondly, the simultaneous emergence of high modernity and revolutions in the fields of transportation, communication and mass production led to new spatial models inducing a diminution of distances and to what more recent historiography describes as a ‘hidden integration’ of Europe.
This book, containing contributions from an interdisciplinary and international team of authors, aims to show the impact of the European crisis as well as of the spatial revolution on the idea of Europe between 1914 and 1945. In their introduction, Vittorio Dini and Matthew D’Auria state that the interplay of perceptions of crisis and space triggered manifold images of Europe within the social elites. Looking at the works of a vast array of European intellectuals, the editors provide a profound overview of the discourse. They highlight the fact that, although some of these thinkers stressed an inevitable decline of Europe, many continued to believe in its central role, often depicting technical progress as an opportunity to establish a more united continent. In the field of economy such disparate figures as Francis Delaisi and Leo Amery demanded an integrated European economic area as the only means of counteracting the rise of the USA in a modern system of production and trade competition. Other intellectuals saw a need for closer political cooperation within Europe in the face of the new menace posed by Bolshevism.
While most articles are individually convincing, not all of them succeed in bringing together the two themes of the volume. Some – like Annamaria Ducci’s chapter on the identity function of museums after 1918 in the works of Paul Valéry or the paper of Adalgiso Amendola that shows the spatial foundation of Carl Schmitt’s conception of public law – primarily shed light on the changing notions of space in Europe. Others, like Zoran Milutinović’s analysis of the evaluations of the interbellum crisis by two Serbian intellectuals that interpreted Europe respectively as an illness and as a cure, or Annamaria Amato’s article on the Europeanism of Italian federalists Luigi Einaudi, Giovanni Agnelli and Attilio Cabiati, focus on European ideas without really considering the impact of space. This is especially regrettable in the case of Anita Prettenthaler-Ziegerhofer’s comparison of two of the central advocates of European unity in the interwar years, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi and Karl Anton Rohan. The author is certainly right in describing both of them as ‘Eurotopians’ sharing similar aristocratic roots and elitist networks, but it would have been profitable to contrast their views on the changing role of space. Other studies indicate that Coudenhove-Kalergi, founder of the Pan-European Movement, had high hopes for certain elements of (technical) modernity in bringing together the European peoples, whereas Rohan, long-time leader of the conservative and later fascistic Europäischer Kulturbund, proposed an emphatically anti-modernist concept of Europe.
Most engaging are the chapters that manage to incorporate both sides. Co-editor Matthew D’Auria argues that in light of the contemporary crisis, the federalist ideas of Europe espoused by Italian socialist politician and anti-fascist activist Carlo Rosselli developed from a territorial to a more social outlook. In the end Rosselli proposed a ‘radically new way of organizing Europe’s political space’ (120) via a fragmentation of state sovereignty in order to challenge the deficiencies of the nation state. Jan Vermeiren traces the history of the German Reich discourse, thus emphasizing the anti-liberal side of European thinking in this epoch. The idea of Germany as a historical, natural leader within a large Central European space had already gained popularity among Southern German Catholic circles as well as some liberal-minded Mitteleuropa adherents prior to and during the First World War. However, it became radicalized after 1918 and was used by völkisch-conservative Weimar intellectuals ‘to further legitimize territorial claims and to vindicate rule over non-German peoples’ (151), which in the end even allowed for linking the Reich myth to National Socialist conceptions of ‘Europe’. Richard Deswarte impressively shows the interconnections between the Americanization discourse and debates about Europe. European intellectuals’ views on America oscillated between admiration for the technical achievements of US modernity and rejection of its social and cultural implications, which allegedly posed the danger of a materialistic enslavement of the ‘Old World’. Americanism thus not only underlined the crisis of European space, but also served as a foil for discussing ‘the changes and consequences of Europe’s own modernization process’(86).
All in all the volume offers an original access to perceptions of Europe in the age of the world wars. By addressing the crucial issues of space and modernity, whose onset clearly sparked a ‘feeling of disorientation’ (13), but also provided ample opportunities to hope for a better future, it illustrates once more the ambivalence of images of Europe during this epoch. It is to be hoped that the book will stimulate further research that could more stringently address how technical progress and the spatial revolution have changed the relationship of the European idea to the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘Christianity’.