A reader and fan of the Holy Roman Empire writes:
Before you write another article on European history you ought to read Peter H.Wilson’s book on the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.
Only then will people understand German and also European history.
Europe most likely would or could have been an extension of the Ottoman Empire.
The German King and Emperor Charlemagne started of a fantastic empire which lasted for a thousand years and resulted into a Europe as we know it today.
In today’s Europe we need to be united simply because of the modern global IT.
Its the modern way of communicating which will shape the future of Europe .
Tito’s Yugoslavia is no comparison to the “Old Reich”
Your article “European history on a sand dune “for the last thousand years doesn’t reflect the successful evolution of Europe supported by the Thousand year history of the Holy Roma Empire.
It’s a view. But it makes us ponder (briefly) the greatest issue in politics – timescale. What measures success?
By the standard of longevity alone the fantastic HRE was a success, stretching from 800AD to 1806 and Napoleon, whose idea of an empire was to run it himself.
But was Europe ‘united’ and ‘successful’ during that period? Not exactly. Wikipedia kindly lists in a very long list wars and conflicts in Europe down the ages and the long HRE centuries saw more than their fair share thereof.
It’s always interesting to look at maps of Europe down the ages and see how countries and empires rise and fall and maybe even disappear, only to pop up again centuries later. See eg Bosnia – not featuring on the maps of free European countries much if at all between 1300 and 1990, only to reappear as Yugoslavia broke up.
This suggests that the ‘deepest’ impulses and loyalties of our different European communities draw on ideas of language and kinship. Nations. Hence the moral and political logic of #Brexit as a way to finding new ways to express modern partnership between Europe’s countries other than through clunky bossy remote central structures.
Hence my piece was right after all:
The European Union is like every other attempted pan-European project of the past 1000 years. It will rise then fall and vanish. It’s safe to say that in the lifetime of our children (and perhaps far earlier) it will change beyond recognition if not disappear entirely. The EU eerily resembles Tito’s Yugoslavia: a bizarre experiment in ‘brotherhood and unity’ that proved unable to resolve the contradictions it created for itself, and ended in disaster.
QED.
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Wise reader Edward Spalton writes:
In the early 19th century the German states ( successors to the HRE) formed the first modern ” Common Market” ( Zollverein) with a common external tariff and free internal circulation of goods – and very successful too. It was complete around 1842. In 1848 the revolutionary German Parliament resolved that the Balkan area was part of Germany’s natural economic hinterland and that no significant Slavic power should be allowed to arise there.
In the same year, Engels asserted in the Neue Rhenische Zeitung that the Serbs were among those peoples insufficiently developed to participate in the coming revolution and which would have to be made to disappear. This wasn’t simple anti Slavism, as he thought the Poles had a good revolutionary potential. Perhaps it is an example of what a Serbian friend calls Pravoslavophobia – hatred and fear of Orthodox Slavs.
That certainly played a part in the 1999 intervention in Yugoslavia where Western propaganda insisted on Serb ” Primitivism” . Tito’s settlement ensured that many Serbs lived as minorities in non Serb states – not too uncomfortably whilst the Yugoslav equivalent of PC was upheld. But once the state boundaries became international, many Serbs found themselves living in successor states with ambitions to be ” Serbenrein”.
David Owen remarked that he found the West’s insistence on Tito’s gerrymandered borders incomprehensible – and he was no friend of Serbia.
For a generation previously the Bundesnachrichtendienst and German NGOs had worked to promote separatism in Yugoslavia. From my small and intermittent reading on the matter, it seems that this destabilisation by Germany is more openly discussed in Germany than it is here, where the “Demon Serb” theory was so successfully promoted during the Western intervention by -amongst others- Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell.