The re-making of Europe: The long view

Introduction

Writing early in the present century, Habermas (2001) wondered what impetus there still was to political innovations in Europe, given their ‘rather wealthy and peaceful societies’ (p. 8). Without some crisis, steps towards building stronger and more democratic institutions for the European Union (EU) risked stalling. He need not have worried. The financial crisis of 2008, the imposition of austerity on the economies of the periphery, and the influx of refugees and economic migrants from the south-east have provided more than enough of a challenge. Nevertheless, positive steps to address these crises have as yet been fragmented and ineffective – and in some ways have only made matters worse.

I begin with three widely voiced judgements on the EU:

I re-examine these three judgements and the interconnected processes to which they refer.

The making of Europe

Those who promoted European integration following the Second World War hoped to move from the hurt and pain inflicted on each other, by generations of Europeans, to a new trajectory of reconciliation, solidarity and peace: a European demos transcending the divisions that had set national communities at each others’ throats. When they sought inspiration in Europe’s history, they looked back beyond the fissiparous nationalisms of recent centuries, the Ancient Regime of the 18th century and the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, to Charlemagne and the making of Europe in the High Middle Ages (Macgregor, 2016: Ch. 11).

For us also, that distance can help place our questions in a larger historical context – even if this then raises as many new questions as it solves. I start with Bartlett’s (1993) study of The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonisation and Cultural Change 950–1350. Bartlett describes a shared European culture and a shared sense of identity – in some sense a European demos. This was Latin Christendom – inspired by the Church of Rome and its expansionist crusades from the 11th century onwards, in alliance with the aristocracies of Charlemagne’s erstwhile domain. They spread to the pagan north and east and to the Islamic south, hungry for land and feudal dues. This expansion – and the wealth that it brought – then paved the way for the strong nation states of north-western Europe and the consolidation of their own national demoi.

Nevertheless, it was military technology, aristocratic greed and religious zeal that drove the new order. Local traditions were brushed aside and local people barely noticed. Cereal production, land enclosures and the feudal system displaced and subordinated the peasantry of the periphery. If there was a European demos, it was shaped by the raw power of the European north-west, no less than in modern times. Then as now, the cultural convergence of the European demos was energised by the inducements of agriculture, transnational markets and military firepower. Then as now, scholarly exchange provided a veneer of civility.

This may have looked to contemporaries like the ‘end of history’. Even here, however, new seeds and possibilities for disruptive change were also emerging.

First, the new urban settlements in the territories of the periphery typically involved charters from the aristocratic ruler. These offered freedoms and rights to the wealth extracted from the local area, in order to attract immigration from the north-west European core. Behind their protective walls, they enabled local creativity and interdependence to flourish and constituted themselves as new forms of community, limiting the jurisdiction of local rulers.

Second, the early shoots of what would later be celebrated as the ‘spirit of capitalism’ were already evident: new forms of bookkeeping and accounting, the social construction and regulation of new markets by those involved in trading networks and the endless struggle for positional dominance, born of confidence in God. Here were the seeds of an eventually very different economic order: not just the capitalism to which Marx, Weber and Tawney would give their attention, but the corporate behemoths that today bestride the EU.

Finally, while the conquerors from the north-west were victorious, in both economic and military terms, this was not without resistance. Local rulers sometimes survived by making complex alliances with immigrant aristocrats, in attempts to ‘ride the tide of change’. The English in Ireland became Gaelicised. The pagan Lithuanian state was born in response to the German threat and eventually dominated Eastern Europe.

It is therefore somewhat ironic that following the Second World War, the authors of European integration looked back to Charlemagne and the making of Europe in the High Middle Ages, as an inspiration – or perhaps a lazy nostalgia – for their own efforts to turn swords into ploughshares. That earlier making of the European people was achieved through violent conquest – and a readiness to disrupt and disregard those not sharing the political and cultural legacy of Latin Christendom. Collective memories celebrating the superiority of the conquerors left bitterness and resistance – interdependent histories of dispossession and injustice (Shoard, 1987). That dispossession is arguably no less a feature of European integration today.

The European demos

With the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, the people of Europe became citizens of the Union. This prompted a vigorous debate as to whether there is a European demos – a people with sufficient shared sentiments and history, to give legitimacy to the formation of a political community, which can act in their name and be democratically accountable to them. Particularly active in this debate have been German political scientists such as Habermas (2001) and Scharpf (2015). Only when there is a European demos, having a sense of shared identity, will there be the basis for distributive justice towards those who lose out, from the turbulence of economic and social change that European integration entails.

The debate contrasts the EU and the nation. The latter has a well-defined demos, the former has not reached that stage. Nevertheless, this oversimplifies the contrast. As we have seen, the individual member states and their political institutions were not always established on the back of a national demos. On the contrary, it can be state formation itself that brings about a self-conscious demos, forged out of disparate communities and cultures. This may remain a work in progress, or a work arrested and incomplete. The formation of a demos may then leave those constituent communities advancing competing projects for their shared national destiny.

The national demos is therefore typically, to repeat, a contested and power-laden construct, as is its relationship to democracy and citizenship. This is true even of the United Kingdom, a long-established nation state that has remained immune to foreign invasion for almost a millennium. That period has seen a variety of rebellions and fissiparous movements, not least in recent decades. There have also been recurrent challenges to the aristocratic dominance entrenched by the Norman invasion and its legacy of elite social privilege. Thus, for 20th-century writers such as Tawney (1964 [1931]) and Raymond Williams (1961), it was by mobilising the English people, in egalitarian opposition to unbridled privilege, that they could be bound together, in solidarity and common purpose, and their political institutions made effective.

Nations and their political institutions spring, however, not just from the designs of the peoples who inhabit a particular territory, but also from those of their neighbours and the great powers. Within each of those nations, this interdependent history may then divide the peoples in question, as much as it unites them. The legacy of conflict and contestation can make some borders problematic, from Ireland to the Balkans. It may engender a politics of reconciliation and amnesty – or one of retribution and revenge (Deák et al., 2000).

The forms of economic and political governance adopted now by the EU have the power to heal or to reopen those historical wounds. Some fault-lines of historical conflict, both between and within individual nations, may have more chance of healing in the context of a European demos, than within that of the nation state. Ireland is a good example, given additional topical significance by the debates around Brexit. Nevertheless, some forms of EU governance also have the power to reopen submerged and half-forgotten historical antagonisms, notably those arising from the legacy of the Second World War, as illustrated by recurrent tensions in recent years between Germany and Greece and Poland.

It was never, however, just a matter of a national versus a European demos. For the British, there was always the rival attraction of the Anglosphere – never more than today, as Trump’s America appears as the main prize for post-Brexit trade deals (Pearce and Kenny, 2018). For the French, plans for European integration were closely associated with their continuing interest in Africa and various projects of neocolonialism (Hansen and Jonsson, 2014). It was also, however, part of their effort to resist the Anglosphere and ensure French pre-eminence in post-Second World War Europe. This was the Francosphere as demos.

Meanwhile, if a European demos is indeed forming, it is taking many forms, not all of which embody the noble sentiments of solidarity and civility which German scholars espouse. Eurosceptic parties draw on each other’s experiences and political toolkits to strengthen their critique of the European project. They build alliances of European peoples determined to set the EU institutions on fire. ¹ The EU institutions, hardly fit for purpose, provide the grit around which this transnational sentiment can opportunistically organise itself.

Insecurity and Euroscepticism

Since the financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing programmes of austerity, many local communities across Europe have faced growing insecurity. This has produced a sense of dismay and vulnerability, with a readiness to blame immigration and European integration.

In June 2016, the United Kingdom voted to leave the EU, in the most vivid and dramatic expression of this Euroscepticism. The aim was ‘take back control’ of its money, its trade deals and, above all, its borders. Immigration into the United Kingdom over the decade until 2016 had been 5.77 million. ² Many immigrants went into areas of low-cost accommodation, alongside the working-class households from whom many Leave voters came. During the same period, austerity and recession meant cuts in public services, in jobs and in benefits, which hit those same communities particularly hard. Was it surprising that established residents should infer a causal connection? And was it surprising that they felt insecure and abandoned? ³

One response has been rooted in the national memories of ‘Britain alone’ in 1940: an island people self-reliant and self-contained, and with a strong sense of its external boundaries. This figures large in the language and imagery of the Brexiteers and their hostility to immigration. A second response to community insecurity is also, however, possible – also rooted in the 1940s, that crucial moment of Britain’s national redefinition. Even while the Second World War was still under way, the government set out a new social contract, with a vigorous social policy strongly related to national identity and solidarity (Marshall, 1950; Titmuss, 1963). This set the fraternity and mutual interdependence of citizenship against the divisions and inequalities of class and the turbulence and insecurity of an urban industrial society.

In the years that followed the Second World War, the social contract between State and citizen, across the Western world, involved a pooling of risks and uncertainties through systems of social security. The same period saw governments confronting the economic instability of capitalist society. This has sometimes been characterised as a consensual process, the benign fruit of economic progress (Wilensky and Lebeaux, 1958). Nevertheless, as T. H. Marshall (1950) warned: ‘in the twentieth century, citizenship and the capitalist class system have been at war’. It was only out of that struggle that institutions of shared security emerged.

By the 1980s and 1990s, however, and not only in the United Kingdom, these institutions were becoming somewhat threadbare. The economic crisis following 2008 – and the programme of austerity that followed – provided the coup de grâce. Solidarity failed, all but the wealthiest suffered and the working-class communities suffered most of all. They sensed their vulnerability in particular to the loss of jobs – whether these were taken by newcomers from inside or outside the EU, or by the stronger economies of the EU core, outcompeting local employers and creating economic wastelands.

Across Europe, the 2008 crisis undermined the legitimacy of major social and political institutions. The general direction of social policies has been to push many into the market place, narrowing public generosity towards those in need. The burden of austerity has thus fallen on the most disadvantaged, multiplying the uncertainties to which they are exposed.

Social and economic justice

This article started with three commonplace judgements on the EU – its success in healing the wounds of war, its failure to win democratic engagement and its vulnerability now to the seeds of disintegration. It has argued that each of these judgements is overly simplistic and for reasons that are closely interconnected. These are, moreover, the ‘high politics’ of European integration, expressing the concerns of political elites. Against these, I propose a rather different agenda, in relation to social and economic justice, the turmoil, dislocation and hurt that European integration produces, the critical questioning of political elites and the creative diversity of the Union. I deal with each of them in turn.

European integration in the High Middle Ages involved the dispossession of the peasantry from the common land and their subjection to a feudal system of agriculture. This was a project driven by social and economic elites. EU policymakers have been perennially concerned that their electorates tend to see modern European integration in similar terms; hence, their wish to provide the EU with a ‘social dimension’. This involved ensuring common social standards (as much to avoid unfair competition between businesses as to benefit citizens) and exchanging best practices in policies for education, training and social welfare. It developed particularly during the Delors presidency, with the move to the Single Market and with growing concerns at the turn of the century over the weakness of the European economy, as new digital industries began to dominate. ⁴ This was never, however, so ambitious as to intrude on the prerogatives of the member states in social policy, a major area of spending and political saliency with the domestic electorate.

The financial crisis of 2008 changed everything. Now it was the banking system and the public finances that needed protection – by providing a safety net for those banks that held bad risks and by austerity policies that shifted the burden of that safety net onto the population as a whole. The result was particularly severe for the weaker economies of the Eurozone, required to follow the currency’s budgetary disciplines, but without any mechanism for solidarity between them, only a debtors’ prison for the worst offenders.

The consequence was rising unemployment and impoverishment across much of the periphery. Imprisoned within the straitjacket of German ordo-liberalism and austerity, the EU proved unable to develop a European solution for an interconnected European economy. The long-standing reluctance of national governments to have the EU institutions involved in their national social policies, coupled with the prominent role played by the EU institutions in the enforcement of austerity, meant that those institutions had little to offer the mass of the European population, in terms of social and economic justice in hard economic times.

With the economic desertification of southern Europe, and conflict across the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) area, pushing many towards the European north-west, it is not surprising that the populations of the north-west have turned against such incomers. This is especially the case with local communities which are suffering from austerity and lack of investment and in which fear intensified the competition for local jobs. These are the ‘hot politics’ with which European citizens are fundamentally concerned and by reference to which they judge their politicians. It is, however, easy for local and national politicians to blame the more distant institutions of the EU. This has been a potent brew for the politics of European disintegration.

Social and economic security for communities across the continent has become a central political challenge for the EU. If Europe-wide economic and social changes of the 21st century are to be managed successfully and with public consent, they will need a new social contract to underpin them. ⁵ This will in turn require reforms to the institutional order of the EU and more active democratic engagement with markets and corporate interests.

Going well beyond traditional welfare systems, this reorientation of European policy might have three main elements.

Turmoil, dislocation and hurt

War and conflict drove the making of Europe in the High Middle Ages, as it did, mutatis mutandis, in our own time. In that earlier period, it left a legacy of resistance, albeit scattered and in general ineffective – and indeed, largely forgotten, with the history being written principally by the victors.

In modern times, it was the determination to avoid further war and conflict that inspired European integration. Reconciliation trumped revenge – the lessons of Versailles had been learned. In addition, within Western Europe new lines of potential conflict with the Soviet Union reinforced the urgency of reconciliation with Germany.

Nevertheless, the moral ledger of brutal conflict and oppression cannot be easily wiped clean; it leaves unresolved hurt. Germany acknowledged its guilt in relation to the Jews, but perhaps not sufficiently in regard to the populations of the countries it invaded and devastated. ¹⁰ Yet, during the Second World War the populations of the occupied countries were also gravely compromised. Most of Europe collaborated – and even took advantage of German occupation to settle ethnic and territorial scores. In Hungary, for example, the treaties imposed at the end of the First World War had produced tensions and hopes for revenge that structured domestic politics throughout the inter-war years – and the readiness to enter into alliance with Germany during the Second World War (Deák et al., 2000: 39–73, 295, 307). Each nation is fractured – none is a homogeneous and cohesive entity with a shared purpose.

Wartime memories and myths were then significant in the construction of post-war states – further complicated by the new east–west divide (Deák et al., 2000). These memories still fester – as witnessed in the furore in Poland, during 2017–2018, over the extent of Polish involvement in the German treatment of Polish Jews during the wartime years. ¹¹ The United Kingdom avoided German occupation and the moral compromises this might have entailed, but its own history, in relation to Ireland, is replete with such bitter memories of an intertwined history, that this still threatens a precarious peace. This has also proved the most difficult element of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal agreement with the EU.

The intertwined hurts of war can only heal as those involved listen to each other, recognise the hurt, acknowledge their responsibility and, where possible, make restitution. The same goes for the economic turmoil and desertification of today: the result, not of impersonal markets, but of national and European policies, whose effects reverberate across the continent, destroying the livelihoods of local communities and citizens far removed from the centres of power. Germany has been central to the economic transformations that have reshaped the EU, but also to the austerity policies which the EU institutions have imposed. This has been unfortunate, to say the least, in reopening some of the scars and memories of war (most obviously in regard to the treatment of Greece – see Varoufakis, 2017).

How the EU deals with such ‘hot’ politics could reopen those ancient wounds, so that they become deep fractures. It could, alternatively, establish a system of social and economic justice, in which the distant consequences for local communities across the continent, of policy decisions taken by powerful European political and business elites, are not left unnoticed and neglected, a matter to be dealt with by local actors, with their limited scope for action. That could indeed set the seal on post-war reconciliation, establishing European social and economic peace for the 21st century.

Critical scrutiny and creative diversity

Such an agenda of social and economic justice would surely, however, flounder. Solidarity among European citizens is too weak to support distributive justice towards those who lose out from European integration, as argued in the German debates on the European demos.

Van Middelaar (2014) asks how far European citizens already have a shared sense of European identity. Not much, to judge by their cultural politics and symbols. The European public seems to recognise itself culturally only through the competitive circus of the Eurovision song contest and the European football championship – playing out memories and historic grievances that divide, vilify and blame.

He asks, second, what benefits does the EU offer its citizens, as an anchor for their affections? Freedom of movement is one benefit, but it can also increase competition for jobs in the host countries. These effects and costs were always ‘vastly underestimated’ (p. 261).

Middelaar turns finally to the involvement of the European public in political change, as they interrogate their politicians. The European Parliament has had little success in mediating between the people and those who govern, and the very fact that European politics has been extremely consensus-oriented detracts from real debate. We walk on eggshells: forever aware of our conflicting histories, ancient wounds and sensitivities easily reawakened. The halting development of a European demos is hardly surprising.

One response has been that while Europe is too large an expanse for direct democratic participation, interaction among national democracies is both feasible and desirable. This demoi-cracy would give expression to democratic interdependence among the peoples of Europe, with ‘horizontal transfers of authority, cooperation, impact and representation’ (Nicolaidis, 2013). It could be a creative process out of which a European demos might eventually emerge (Innerarity, 2014). But through what cross-national practices and transfers would such a European demoi-cracy be constituted (Scharpf, 2015)?

One approach is via the principle of subsidiarity. This became well established in the Euro-lexicon through the Maastricht Treaty. Initially, it was understood as devolution of decision-making downwards. As far as possible, matters should be managed at the national or sub-national level, unless there are cross-border externalities. This is why social policy has remained very much a responsibility of national governments.

The Lisbon Process of March 2000 was concerned with the development of a dynamic but socially cohesive knowledge-based economy. National responsibility was retained for most of the relevant policies, but systematic comparison of national performance by reference to common benchmarks would assist the transfer of best practice. This was subsidiarity understood as horizontal cross-national policy learning and convergence, even if within much of the Lisbon process, such cross-national learning has remained limited and rather bureaucratic (Atkinson et al., 2005: Ch. 6).

It was, however, never clear whether the Lisbon Process was intended to track the progress of member states towards a single common future, defined by reference to common economic and technological imperatives. Or were benchmarks of national performance instead meant to display different scenarios of potential development, with real political choices and trade-offs (Room, 2011: Ch. 16)? If so, how far should these debates involve wider public scrutiny, with domestic political leaders forced to justify their performance by comparison with good practice in other countries? Social benchmarking of this sort could have major consequences for their political credibility. This would be subsidiarity understood as creative and critical scrutiny upwards.

This is consistent with some of the pressures for change around the 2020 European Strategy, the updated Lisbon Process, which called for more opportunities for citizens and communities to participate in European governance, along with trade unions and other civil society organisations (Natali and Vanhercke, 2015: 248, 258). This would constitute a powerful commitment to good governance on the part of the EU, for while it would affirm national responsibility, it would also affirm community interest in how that national responsibility is exercised (see also De la Porte et al., 2001: 300–301). This sort of creative subsidiarity could thus provide one way of addressing the ‘democratic deficit’ discussed earlier – connecting-up communities and associating them in a transnational demos.

In some small and modest ways, there are already prototypes of this within the history of the EU. One was the succession of ‘pilot programmes’ to combat poverty launched by the Commission between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s (Room, 2014). Poverty was of course outside the scope of community social policy as defined by the Treaty of Rome (Collins, 1975). These programmes were therefore small and required special decisions by the Council of Ministers – but their novelty and their concern with the living conditions not just of workers, but of citizens in general, gave them a certain freedom to develop outside the normal constraints of Commission functioning. So did their small scale, which obliged the Commission to limit them to a range of local communities and to work in concert with non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

The result was a succession of initiatives involving local communities from across Europe, connected through the evaluation experts on whom the Council had insisted. Once connected, they used that intelligence network for their own purposes. Local projects were able to bring their peers together on their own turf, to enrich the debates with city decision-makers in which the local project was involved; they also brought Commission officials and national civil servants to events at which those decision-makers would have to defend their policy choices, in the glare of international publicity (Room, 1986: Ch. 4). This was a foretaste of the ‘creative subsidiarity’ that local communities can exercise, exposing local, national and European decision-makers to public scrutiny – and associating those communities in a transnational demos, critical of the prevailing order.

Small prototypes of this sort will not change the world, but they may provide models on which other social and political actors can draw – including national parliaments. Hereby a transnational European demos – a demoi-cracy indeed – is in some measure constituted from below. This involves not just securing mutual respect for what Scharpf (2015: 1, 16) terms ‘legitimate diversity’, but also building new forms of that diversity, through transnational association and practice. This would balance an ‘ever-closer union’, as the goal of European development, with an ever more diverse and creative union, enjoying strong social solidarity and participatory democracy (Leonard, 1999: Ch. 5).

Meanwhile, however, national governments invoke mandates established by the European authorities, under the rules of fiscal consolidation, against domestic opponents of austerity (Streek, 2014: Ch. 3). New forms of domination are also being developed by corporate and financial interests, using the transnational spaces that European integration offers (Varoufakis, 2017: Ch. 7). Thus, against the apolitical market optimism of recent decades, what European austerity has exposed are the social class divisions of capitalism. This is why any reform process is much more than an exercise in economic management and social cohesion; it is fundamentally political, a struggle for social and economic justice.

Conclusion: re-making ourselves together

Much of the discussion on European integration has tended to assume a single direction of travel. The debate has been about the scope for a ‘multi-speed’ Europe, as against progressing at the pace of the slowest vessel. The European Commission’s White Paper of March 2017 continued this theme. Now, however, there is growing acknowledgement of the multiple possible futures for Europe – and the political choices in which the people of the Union need somehow to be involved, if they are not to join the growing army of Eurosceptic recruits.

The ‘democratic deficit’ of the EU is in part a constitutional question, concerned with the institutions through which citizens can have an effective political voice. It is also, however, a question of how the uneven distribution of the benefits of economic integration – and the insecurity and inequality it tends to produce – can be made consistent with the demands of social cohesion and political stability.

What the European institutions lack is not so much ingenuity in constitutional reform, as the capacity and the will to address the insecurity and inequality that this uneven economic integration has been generating. This will require much more than a single market and a single currency; adding further layers of political union will also not suffice. What is needed is a Europe-wide social contract, committed to social and economic justice for communities across the continent, as outlined earlier. No less important is for these communities to have opportunities for active and critical citizenship – ‘creative subsidiarity’ of the sort just described – putting them confidently in charge of their own destinies. This is a necessary bulwark against social and political dissolution – and a precondition for establishing a European demos.

This means that ‘creative subsidiarity’ is not the final destination of this article. The question is rather how we can remake ourselves out of the pool of shared European experience. However, maybe we can do this only by first confronting our own ugly face in the interdependent history we have wrestled over – facing up to what we have done to our nearest, if not our dearest. This will involve, alongside the celebration of what we are as nations, a reflective musing on the injuries we have inflicted on others.

This is not, therefore, just about ensuring that the EU institutions are scrutinised and held to account, but rather that we as European nations are held to account by our neighbours – and are ready to present ourselves for their scrutiny. We draw on our shared experience, not just by borrowing from them ‘what works’ but also by heeding ‘what hurts’. This is evidence-based policymaking as restitutive justice. It means allocating and accepting responsibility, for hurts past and present, and for the way in which power has been exercised.

That is after all what we expect, within a national demos. The accountability of government is only a means to that end: ensuring social and economic justice from our national community. We expect to hold people and organisations to account – and to enforce their responsibilities as neighbours. At a European level, in contrast, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) is concerned only with whether the EU institutions and the member states have behaved as they should under the Treaties. The Commission has some role in regulating corporations and governments and it has the power to levy fines for breaches of European regulations. Neither ensures restitution for hurt caused. The Strasbourg Court of Human Rights likewise does no more than make judgements; it cannot punish or require restitution; that falls to national courts and governments. The social costs imposed by actors from one country on the communities and citizens of others are largely disregarded.

This means recognising the complex and indirect chains of causation by which the costs and insecurities generated by wealth creation are visited on many less able to bear them (Hayward, 2006; Room, 2015). It requires a readiness and capability to heed the distant consequences of our actions and the distant drivers of our own pain, instead of attributing these ills to the individual failings of those on whom they fall: the disconnected and the disempowered. This is what a new European demos will surely involve – with European people holding political and economic power to account without regard to national boundaries. Thus, as Nicolaidis (2013) argues,

Germans and Greeks should not only have the right to put the problems they create for each other’s democratic health on each other’s political agenda, but should entrench institutional mechanisms to address them . . . From this, an enlarged mentality may even emerge, as Kant would have it, of thinking from the point of view of everyone else. (pp. 6, 9)

This is, however, far from the current reform agenda of the EU. Austerity remains entrenched and there is a sad lack of strategic vision. Not least, it hides the ascendancy of the corporate behemoths that today bestride the EU. It is not only in relation to nationalistic governments and ossified EU institutions that the reforms discussed here would need to be developed, but in relation to the corporate world: taking back control from corporate Europe and holding them to account. The EU was established in the afterglow of liberation from German occupation; it is now the corporate occupation of our political and social institutions that must be addressed, if Europe is to enjoy social and economic peace for the 21st century and not dissolve into competing fragments.

The making of Europe in the High Middle Ages saw the aristocracies of Charlemagne’s erstwhile domain spreading across Europe. They appropriated the common lands, imposed feudal dues and forced the peasantry to conform to the new order. Bartlett sees continuities between this and the European expropriation of colonial territories in the Americas, Asia and Africa during more recent centuries. ¹² Recent decades have likewise seen public spaces and assets appropriated for private benefit, monetisation and corporate expansion: not least, those public services and forms of collective solidarity established in mid-20th century to protect against the insecurities of the market place. This is what Galbraith (2009) describes as the ‘Predator State’.

Even amid the aristocratic ascendancy that Bartlett describes, new seeds of disruptive change were, however, emerging. Newly established towns constituted themselves as new forms of community, resisting the power of the feudal ruler and weaving their own networks of trade and communication. Such hinterlands of resistance were again to play a key part, in limiting the expansion of European empires across Africa and Asia in the ensuing centuries (Darwin, 2007). Alongside the celebratory history of the conqueror, there was insurrection and challenge. Today also, there may yet be scope to remake Europe.