The Formation and Expansion of the European Union
Summary
Liberty University
Introduction
Every history of Europe has to start at some arbitrary date, unless of course
an attempt is being made to cover everything since the emergence of Homo
sapiens. But some dates are more arbitrary than others. Unfortunately,
within the same period a date can mean something for one kind of human
activity but very little for another. Seventeen eighty-nine, for example, has a
thunderous resonance for politics but barely registers a bat’s squeak for
music or the visual arts. Sixteen forty-eight is of that kind. It looks like a
sensible starting point because it was in that year that the Peace of
Westphalia was concluded, bringing to an end a war that had lasted thirty
years and had inflicted more devastation on Europe than any previous
conflict. Moreover, it settled at least two major issues, for the independence
of the Dutch Republic from Spain was recognized, and the structure of
German-speaking Europe was settled for a century, and a half. More
important still was what lay behind those two settlements: the recognition
that confessional pluralism had come to stay. Both Catholic and Protestant
zealots would continue to dream dreams of the triumph of their true faiths,
but the stalemate recognized in 1648 was never seriously threatened. So this
volume’s initial date can be justified, but it must also be recognized that the
Westphalian settlement left as much unfinished business as it concluded.
The war between Spain and France sputtered on until the Peace of the
Pyrenees in 1659, and perhaps did not really end until the Bourbon
inheritance of Spain was given international recognition in 1714. In the north
and the east, the situation continued to be fluid, as Swedish supremacy was
contested by first one power and then another in a confusing series of wars
that did not end until the Peace of Nystad in 1721.
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‘Second Hundred Years War’ between England and France
What were to become the two dominant forces in international politics were
the ‘Second Hundred Years War’ between England and France, which did not
begin until 1688, and the expansion of Russia, which did not begin until
1695. If anything, the direction being taken by domestic politics was even
more uncertain. It was in 1648 that the French civil wars–the Frondes– began
and in 1649 that a republic was proclaimed in England, following the
execution of Charles I. The very different resolutions of those conflicts had to
await the beginning of Louis XIV’s ‘sole reign’ in 1661 and the ‘Glorious
Revolution’ of 1688 respectively. There were loose ends in 1648 and there
were to be loose ends in 1815. In the chapters that follow, the threads are
spun together to provide a guide through the labyrinth that seeks to be
coherent without being schematic. If there is no master-narrative of the kind
advanced by Hegel or Marx–or even the Whig historians–there are certainly
lines of development to be identified. In politics, the most striking of these
was the relentless march of the state to hegemony. By 1815 in most parts of
Europe the claims of the state to a monopoly of legislation and allegiance
within its borders were established in fact if not in law. Although there was a
rich multiplicity of constitutional forms, ranging from democracy to
autocracy, behind them all lay the sovereignty of an abstraction–the state.
Political structures unable to achieve that ‘monopoly of legitimate force’
(Max Weber) that lies at the heart of the state, such as Poland and the Holy
Roman Empire, became easy prey for rivals who had read the signs of the
times more accurately. Part and parcel of this development was
secularization, which in Catholic countries involved the exclusion of any form
of papal interference and everywhere dictated the subordination of church to
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state. But the blood that ran through the veins of the state was thin and
tepid. To motivate its members, the transfusion of something more inspiring
was needed. Increasingly, that was found in nationalism, a secular religion
with the ability to unleash devotion and hatred just as fierce as anything
experienced during the religious conflicts of an earlier period. Successful
states also needed to adapt to social change. Only those which succeeded in
integrating their elites could flourish. This might be achieved through a court,
as in Louis XIV’s Versailles project; or through a representative assembly,
such as the English Parliament; or through a service nobility, as in Prussia
and Russia; or through a combination of all three, as in the Habsburg
Monarchy. In every case, there proved to be an inbuilt tendency to that
ossification that seems to be inseparable from political institutions. Even the
unusually adaptable British solution was experiencing a hardening of the
arteries by 1815. Whatever their social complexion, all European states had
to come to terms with the emergence of a new kind of cultural space–the
public sphere. Situated between the private world of the family and the
official world of the state, the public sphere was a forum in which previously
isolated individuals could come together to exchange information, ideas and
criticism. Whether communicating with each other at long range by
subscribing to the same periodicals, or meeting face to face in a coffee-
house or in one of the new voluntary associations, such as a reading club or
Masonic lodge, the public acquired a collective weight far greater than the
sum of its individual members. It was from the public sphere that a new
source of authority emerged to challenge the opinion-makers of the old
regime: public opinion. The timing of this transition naturally varied across
Europe. First in the field were Britain and the Dutch Republic, for they had in
common relatively high rates of literacy and urbanization and enjoyed a
relatively liberal censorship regime. Mutatis mutandis, at the other extreme
and at the other end of Europe, it is next to impossible to find anything
resembling a public sphere or public opinion in Russia before the nineteenth
century. As we shall see, when managed effectively, public opinion could be
a source of extra resources and extra authority for a state. Where it was
ignored, misunderstood or alienated, as it was in France, the result could be
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revolutionary change. The forces that created the public sphere derived most
fundamentally from the expansion of Europe both at home and abroad. After
the acute problems of the first half of the seventeenth century caused by
war, recession, plague and famine, recovery was slow, fitful and patchy, but
gradually the indicators began to point upwards: rising population, higher
agricultural productivity, expanding trade and manufacturing, increasing
urbanization, and a resumption of colonial expansion. By the second quarter
of the eighteenth century, the process began to consolidate and accelerate,
although still punctuated by setbacks. Of special importance were the
improvements in physical communications that are discussed in the first
chapter. The benefits were spread unequally. First in the queue was the
state, whose appetite for more taxation to sustain the ever-increasing armed
forces reached out to grasp both the rich man in his castle and the poor man
at his gate. Next came the landowners, happily taking advantage of the
‘price scissors’ that opened up between the increasing sums they received
for their agricultural produce and the relatively declining cost of the
manufactured goods they purchased. With the price of land trebling and the
prestige attached to landownership undiminished, the enterprising could
flourish mightily. A key group were the tenant farmers, to whom credit for
most of the agricultural innovations of the period must be given. Also
blooming were the financiers, especially those who managed to get involved
in state financing, and the merchants, especially those involved in the
colonial trades. Enterprising manufacturers able to work outside the
restrictive practices of the guilds could enjoy a double benefit from the
growth of both the labour supply and the consumer revolution that gathered
strength as the eighteenth century progressed. In short, the economic
expansion of the eighteenth century produced a large and growing class of
beneficiaries. Perhaps best placed to make the most of the century’s
opportunities was a grandee who owned large estates rich in mineral
resources, served by good communications and located in industrializing
regions, and–perhaps most important of all–who was blessed with the
necessary intellectual and personal qualities to become an entrepreneur. In
an ideal world, he–and he would need to be a ‘he’ too, for women were
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subject to all manner of discrimination–would also marry into a family
engaged in government finance, investment banking and overseas
commerce. He would need a conscience robust enough to allow him to forget
the involuntary services performed by the seven million slaves transported
from Africa to the Caribbean during the course of the century. He would also
be well advised to be an Englishman and thus relatively immune to the
sudden visits from Nemesis in the shape of war or revolution, to which his
continental colleagues were so prone, especially after 1789. But the benefits
were spread very unevenly. Geographically, there was a sharp gradient from
the commercial north-west of Europe, where significant industrialization was
well underway by 1815, to the underdeveloped east, where one could travel
for weeks without encountering anything resembling a town and where, if
material and social conditions had changed at all, they had changed for the
worse. Here servitude, illiteracy, poverty and low life expectancy were still
the norm in 1815, as they had been in 1648. Even in the west the economic
expansion could not absorb the rapidly growing population. The inelasticity
of food production drove up prices, while the inelasticity of industry pushed
down wages. The result was impoverishment for that large proportion of the
population that was not self-sufficient. A new kind of poverty emerged, not a
sudden affliction by famine, plague, or war but a permanent state of
malnutrition and underemployment. It was also a vicious circle, for the
undernourished were not so wretched as to be unable to produce the
children who perpetuated their misery. They were also increasingly at the
mercy of market forces, as capitalism eroded the traditional society of orders
and its values. It is tempting to adopt a rationalist teleology to chart the
progress of the new values. ‘The age of reason’ or ‘the age of enlightenment’
are labels for the period so popular as to be almost clichés. But behind every
cliché there must stand a core of truth. This period did indeed witness a
degree of rationalism and secularization unprecedented in European history.
It saw the publication of Newton’s Principia, Locke’s An Essay concerning
Human Understanding, Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, Montesquieu’s
The Spirit of the Laws and Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, just to
mention a few of the crucial texts that eroded the traditional theocentric
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view of the universe. Yet just as good a case could be made for calling it ‘the
age of faith’, for it was marked by a number of powerful religious revivals,
including Jansenism, Pietism and Methodism, and religious literature had
never been more popular. Nor was there any tapering off as the eighteenth
century progressed, as the great Romantic revolution demonstrated. As will
be argued in Chapter 10, it makes more sense to conceptualize cultural
developments not as a linear progression from faith to reason but as a
dialectical encounter between a culture of feeling and a culture of reason.
The most profound exploration of this existential conflict was undertaken by
Goethe in Faust, the gigantic poem of more than 12,000 lines that occupied
him off and on for most of his adult life and from which the following lines
can serve as an epigraph for this book: Two souls, alas, dwell within my
breast, and their Division tears my life in two. One loves the world, it clutches
her, it binds Itself to her, clinging with furious lust; The other longs to soar
beyond the dust Into the realm of high ancestral minds. PART ONE Life and
Death 1 Communications Communication is central to human existence.
Apart from basic physical functions such as eating and defecating, waking
and sleeping, nothing is more central. Whether the form it takes is symbolic,
as in speech, or physical, as in travel, it is communication between people
and people, or between people and places, that weaves the social fabric.
That is why communication provides the best point of entry to the past. A
time-traveller from today arriving in the seventeenth century would find no
aspect of everyday life more alien to modern experience. Coming from a
world which can be circumnavigated by air in less than two days, the shock
at finding oneself anchored in glutinous immobility would be profound. Only
with great effort, expense and time could even modest distances be
traversed. Moreover, instead of being comforted en route by the presence of
universal symbols, logos and language, the traveller would quickly encounter
incomprehensible dialects and patois. As we shall see, it was from problems
of communication, both physical and symbolic, that many of the distinctive
features of the old regime derived. ROADS For most Europeans in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was the condition of the roads
which dictated the pace of communications and the degree of mobility.
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Almost everywhere the ‘roads’ were tracks, with no foundations or drainage
and consequently deeply pitted by wheel-ruts. They were muddy quagmires
when it rained and dust bowls when the sun shone: ‘more like a retreat of
wild beasts and reptiles, than the footsteps of man’ in the view of an English
observer writing about the early eighteenth century. Even the main highways
would count for forest tracks today. The roads of Europe were essentially
those of the Roman Empire–after fourteen hundred years of neglect. Whether
in Galway or Galicia, the average speed for the great majority of travellers
rarely exceeded walking pace. Indeed, for most people the average speed
could only be walking pace, for the good reason that this was the only way
they could afford to move from place to place: ‘on Shanks’ pony’, ‘en el
coche de San Fernando’, ‘auf Schusters Rappen’, etc. In the weary words of
the Scottish poet Robert Fergusson in 1774, And auld shanks-naig wad tire, I
dread, To pace to Berwick. Travelling by horse-drawn coach was more
exclusive, a little faster, but much more expensive and arguably more
gruelling, as a contribution to The London Magazine entitled ‘The Miseries of
a Stage-Coach’ in 1743 made clear. After recounting the various discomforts
of a journey from London to York, which included beginning at three o’clock
in the morning, bumping and jolting along uneven roads, and having to put
up with fellow passengers who variously smelt of garlic, broke wind, snored,
talked incessantly, blasphemed and complained, the author concluded, If, of
stages the boasted convenients be sung– May I travel a foot, though it be on
a crutch. Journeys were seldom hastened by the routing of roads along the
shortest distance from point to point. The sinuous, time-and effort-consuming
nature of English roads was legendary. Although this meandering caused
travellers inconvenience, one foreign observer, Pierre Jean Grosley, when
travelling from Dover to London in 1771, saw it as a symptom of political
virtue: The high roads are very far from being exactly rectilineal; not but that
there are engineers in England skilful enough to draw a right line across a
field; but, besides that the dearness of land requires some caution, property
in England is a thing sacred, which the laws protect from all encroachment,
not only from engineers, inspectors, and other people of that stamp, but
even from the king himself; add to this, that, as we shall find in the Article of
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gardens, the right line is not to the taste of the English. Conditions on the
continent were no better, rather the contrary. Arthur Young found the post-
chaise which bore him from Calais to Paris in 1787 to be much worse and
even more expensive than its English equivalent. Nowhere did suspensions
cushioned by springs become common before 1800. Dutch coaches were
notoriously uncomfortable: an English visitor took one look at the vehicle
which was to carry him from Hoorn to Enkhuizen and declined to get aboard.
He allowed his luggage to be put in but preferred to walk the 13 miles (21
km). If he had walked on into the Holy Roman Empire, he would have found
no respite. In the view of James Boswell, the typical German coach was a
‘barbarity’, as it was ‘just a large cart, mounted on very high wheels, which
jolts prodigiously. It has no covering and three or four deal boards laid across
it serve as seats.’ His verdict was confirmed by the Russian Nikolai Karamzin,
who recorded in 1789: ‘The Prussian “stagecoach”, so-called, bears no
resemblance whatever to a coach. It is nothing but a long covered wagon
with two benches, and with neither straps nor springs.’ Its slowness and
unreliability were also notorious; one contemporary complained that the best
way of learning the need to be patient, apart from marriage, was travelling
around Germany. It was no better south of the Alps, where Arthur Young
described the carriages as ‘wretched, open, crazy, jolting, dirty dung-carts’,
adding, ‘to step at once from an agreeable society into an Italian voiture is a
kind of malady which does not agree with my nerves’. Travelling on the
King’s business was no guarantee of comfort or speed, as Louis XIV’s special
envoy, Nicolas Mesnager, found when he went to Madrid in 1708. From
Bayonne he reported to Versailles that his journey had already taken nine
days, due to the poor state of the roads and the disorder of the staging
system. In terms of distance, he was already more than halfway to his
destination, but he estimated that he would be another fortnight on the road,
so difficult was it to obtain mules. Four or six draught-animals were needed
to pull a coach and they had to be changed every 6 to 12 miles (10 to 20
km), depending on the condition of the roads. In England it was calculated
that one horse was needed for every mile (1.6 km) of a journey on a well-
maintained turnpike road. So, for the 185 miles (300 km) from Manchester to
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London, 185 horses had to be kept stabled and fed to deal with the
seventeen changes required by the stagecoaches which travelled the route.
Those horses in turn required an army of coachmen, postillions, guards,
grooms, ostlers and stable-boys to keep them running. As a coach could
carry no more than ten passengers, fares were correspondingly high and out
of reach of the mass of the population. A journey from Augsburg to Innsbruck
by stagecoach, although little more than 60 miles (100 km) as the crow flies,
would have cost an unskilled labourer more than a month’s wages just for
the fare. On the very eve of the coming of the railway, after significant
improvements to roads and carriages had brought the cost down
appreciably, a stagecoach journey from Paris to Bordeaux was still costing
the equivalent of a clerk’s monthly wages. Writing in the middle of the
nineteenth century, the German social historian Karl Biedermann estimated
that travelling had been fourteen times more expensive two generations
earlier. Only the introduction of a steam locomotive able to pull a train
carrying hundreds of people could create economies of scale and thus
democratize travel. Yet although the coming of the railways in the second
quarter of the nineteenth century certainly did represent a revolution in
transportation, it should not be allowed to overshadow the very real progress
that had been made in the previous century or so. France led the way with
an early initiative promoted by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s chief
minister for domestic affairs. One of his first measures, after securing the
disgrace of his rival Fouquet in 1661, was to centralize responsibility for the
maintenance of roads. In 1669 special ‘commissioners for bridges and
highways’ were appointed to serve alongside the intendants, the most
powerful provincial officials. As a first step towards their upgrading, all roads
were classified either as ‘royal roads’ (chemins royaux) with a width of
between 23 and 33 feet (7–10 m), or secondary roads (chemins vicinaux) or
side-roads (chemins de traverse). Following Colbert’s death in 1683, the
project faltered and then became bogged down in a general relaxation of
central control. By the end of the century it was reported from Flanders that
the supposedly paved ‘royal road’ from Lille to Dunkirk was now impassable
at several points, obliging merchants to send their goods from the coast by
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water to Ypres and then to employ double the usual number of horses to
drag their carts along the muddy track that led to Lille. In general, Pierre
Léon has concluded, the situation in 1700 was no better than it had been in
1660. Significant improvement did not come until the 1740s, when the
service was reorganized and a special academy established to train
engineers in the art of road-building. The growing interest of the French state
can be charted in the amount of money it was prepared to make available.
Pierre Léon’s figures demonstrate that the budget specified by Colbert in
1668 envisaged only 0.8 per cent of national expenditure, although pressure
of war in the 1670s did not allow even that target to be reached. From an
average annual expenditure of 771,200 livres between 1683 and 1700 there
was a sharp increase in the following reign to 3,000,000 livres for 1715–36,
to more than 4,000,000 in 1770, 6,900,000 in 1780 and 9,445,000 in 1786,
representing a 213-per-cent increase in the course of the century. The
cumulative effect of greater expertise and investment was to create arterial
roads capable of carrying passenger transport much more quickly and
reliably than in the past. This is one improvement that can be quantified: in
1650 two weeks were needed to travel from Paris to Toulouse, by 1782 that
had been cut by more than half; in 1664 it took ten or eleven days to travel
from Paris to Lyon, a century later just six days; in the seventeenth century it
had taken at least three days to cover the 60-odd miles (100 km) from Paris
to Rouen, on the eve of the Revolution it could be managed in thirtysix
hours. Perhaps the most spectacular reduction was in the time needed for
the route to Bordeaux, which shrank from fifteen days in 1660 to fiveand-a-
half in 1789. According to Daniel Roche, there was not a city in France in
1789 that could not be reached in a fortnight. In 1786 the duc de Croÿ left
Calais at 5.30 in the morning and reached Paris in time for a late supper at 8
p.m., having travelled 170 miles (280 km) at an average speed of almost 12
mph (20 k.p.h.). Such a dramatic acceleration in the pace of travel was
perhaps the Ancien Régime’s most impressive domestic achievement. It was
given its most durable visual tribute by Joseph Vernet, in his magnificent
painting of 1774 entitled The construction of a highway (now in the Louvre).
In the foreground a group of workmen are creating a broad paved road,
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supervised by a foreman who is pictured reporting to a group of engineers on
horseback, dressed in smart blue uniforms with gold facings; the road winds
its way along an embankment cut out of the side of a hill, towards a
threespan bridge, itself under construction with the assistance of two large
cranes; the ultimate destination is a hill-top town, overlooked by a large
windmill. The entire painting speaks of hostile nature tamed by human
ingenuity and labour. There is also literary evidence in abundance. The sharp
eye and mordant pen of Arthur Young found much in France to criticize, but
the roads excited his enthusiasm: the road from Calais to Boulogne, was
‘excellent’; the road from Limoges to La Ville-au-Brun was ‘truly noble’; the
road to Montauban ‘finely made and mended with gravel’; the roads in
Roussillon ‘made with all the solidity and magnificence that distinguishes the
highways of France…stupendous works…These ways are superb even to a
folly…There is a bridge of a single arch, and a causeway to it, truly
magnificent; we have not an idea of what such a road is in England’; and so
on. Yet the glamour generated by rapid passenger traffic from Paris to the
provinces concealed several tenacious problems. Freight continued to move
at its earlier lethargic pace of 2–21 /2 mph (3–4 k.p.h.). The cloth of Laval in
Mayenne still took two good weeks to reach the ports of Brittany and
Normandy and three to four weeks to reach Lille. Even along the new arterial
routes from the capital, the improvement registered by passenger traffic was
not replicated by freight, which needed three weeks in 1715 to travel from
Paris to Lyon and only five or six days fewer in 1787. Along the lateral roads
linking one provincial town with another there was no perceptible change: a
journey from Amiens to Lyon lasted between twentyfive and thirty days in
1787, just as it had done in 1701. Adam Smith identified the problem in The
Wealth of Nations (1776): In France the great post-roads, the roads which
make the communication between the principal towns of the kingdom, are in
general kept in good order; and in some provinces are even a good deal
superior to the greater part of the turnpike roads of England. But what we
call cross-roads, that is, the far greater part of the roads in the country, are
entirely neglected, and are in many places absolutely impassable for any
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heavy carriage. In some places, it is even dangerous to travel on horseback,
and mules are the only conveyance which can safely be trusted.
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