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Full text of Edward Mortimer's lecture 'What Future for Europe - 1814, 1914, or something else?'
This lecture was delivered in honor of Sir Michael Palliser in memory of Sir Michael Palliser GCMG, held at the House of Lords, London, 3 February 2014
"It’s an extraordinary honor, but also quite an intimidating challenge, to be asked to deliver this lecture in memory of Michael Palliser, in the presence of all three of his sons, several other members of his family, and so many other distinguished people.
"You have heard from Lord Kerr what a remarkable person Michael Palliser was, both as a diplomat and as a human being – a truly generous spirit, a man of sound judgement as well as high principle, and an infallibly loyal friend. Though I certainly didn’t know him as well as Lord Kerr did, I too was privileged to observe those different facets of his character, and I remember him with great affection as well as gratitude. I first met him in 1962, when I was 18 years old, in the slightly improbable surroundings of the British embassy in Dakar, capital of the then newly independent Senegal, a French-speaking country where I had been sent to teach English by Voluntary Service Overseas. In other words I was a pretty lowly order of being, while Michael was head of chancery in the embassy, but no one who knew him will be surprised to hear that he treated me as an equal, and made me feel at once that I had found a kindred spirit. In later years he showed the same courtesy and charm whenever my journalistic path crossed his ever-ascending diplomatic one, and at the various conferences where we met after he retired into the private sector in 1983.
"In his case that certainly did not mean abandoning public service. The 21st Century Trust and the Salzburg Seminar were just two of the many charities to which he donated his wisdom and a great deal of his time, but he deeply loved both, and as the Trust gradually spent down its endowment it was his brilliant idea that the two institutions, which had a broadly similar mission but complementary strengths, should join forces. He thus has a very strong claim to be considered the father of the Salzburg Global Seminar as we now know it, and it’s entirely fitting that this event in his memory is being held under the Seminar’s auspices, and organized by John Lotherington, the last Director of the Trust, who under the new arrangement became an indispensable pillar of the Seminar and a wonderful friend and partner for me in planning and implementing its programme – a task we have now thankfully handed over to Clare Shine.
"So when John asked me to give this lecture I knew two things. One was that I could not refuse. The other was that the lecture would have to be about Europe. As Lord Kerr has already told you, Michael was a European to his fingertips. As the son-in-law of Paul-Henri Spaak he was almost literally married to the European idea, and his whole diplomatic career was focused on the great task of bringing Britain into the European Community and then ensuring that it played a constructive role therein. I fear that his dedication to that task did not always endear him to the last British prime minister whom he served, and that is probably the reason why, unlike some other “PUS”s, he was never elevated to membership of this House – a great pity, as he would have had so much to contribute to its deliberations.
"Michael was deeply frustrated by the failure of many of his compatriots to share his European vision, and angered by what he saw as the perversity of important parts of the media and political elite in presenting the public with a consistently negative view of European institutions. He was dismayed by the rising tide of Euro-scepticism in his last years, and especially by the clamour, no longer confined to the political fringe, for Britain actually to leave the European Union. My first thought, therefore, when considering the topic for this lecture, was that I should try to sketch a strategy for keeping Britain in.
"That certainly needs doing, but I am probably not the right person to do it, and on further reflection I decided this is probably not the right occasion either. The Salzburg Global Seminar is after all, as its new name suggests, a global institution, based in the heart of Europe. Its concerns must be broader than the slightly parochial, albeit important, question of whether one EU member state should remain in the Union or not. Also, there is something depressingly negative about seeking only to prevent something one does not like. The whole point of European union is, after all, to transcend the parochial concerns of particular countries, enabling them all, by pooling their efforts, to achieve something better. So this evening I hope we can think a bit about the future of Europe, not just the future of Britain.
"And then I discovered that there is a specifically Salzburg way of approaching that question. Clare and John, with our friends at the International Peace Institute, were already plotting a session of the Seminar, to be held in Salzburg this August, on the theme of '1814, 1914: Lessons from history for a world at risk'.
"1914, you may say, is obvious enough. In this country at any rate, you can hardly open a newspaper or switch on a television set at the moment without being confronted with that grim centenary – the outbreak of what the French historian Annie Kriegel memorably called “la Grande Guerre – celle qui a cassé l’Histoire en deux”. That may perhaps be considered a Eurocentric view: it was above all the continuity of European history that was broken in 1914. But then we remember that, by entering on its 30-year orgy of self-destruction, Europe also ended, or greatly hastened the end of, the era of European world dominance. So yes, maybe it also broke world history in two.
"So far, so banal. The stroke of genius – contributed, I am told, by Colin Munro – was to bring 1814 into the mix. Now here I’m afraid even some well-educated global citizens of 2014 may be momentarily baffled. 1814? 1814? What the hell happened then? Some English-speakers may remember that the British burned the White House. Forget that for a moment, and think Austria: yes, the Congress of Vienna. You may think that was in 1815, because you know, or think you know, that it ended the Napoleonic wars, and wasn’t that in 1815? And actually it’s true that the Congress of Vienna went on into 1815. But it started in September 1814, and had virtually completed its work, and begun to disperse, before Napoleon escaped from Elba and persuaded France to go one final round with its victorious enemies. It took them 100 days to put him back in his box – or rather, to send him to a different and safer box much further away – but the political shape of Europe already hammered out in Vienna was then left largely unchanged.
"So in Austria, at least, 2014 brings us not one crucial centenary but two: 1914, when the “concert of Europe” collapsed, and 1814 when it was created; 1914, which marked the death knell of the Habsburg empire, and 1814 when a great servant of the Habsburgs (admittedly himself a Rhinelander, not an Austrian) managed to make Austria the central and dominant power in Europe; 1914, the moment of the sleepwalkers – leaders who blundered into a war that few of them really wanted but many came to believe inevitable – and 1814, the moment of the architects – leaders who put together a settlement and a system of inter-state cooperation that were to give Europe a uniquely peaceful century, only interrupted half way through by a few short wars which tidied up the map, making Italy and Germany into single states. And the question is, which of those two moments does today’s Europe most resemble? Are our leaders today sleepwalkers or architects? Or, can we learn, by studying those two epoch-making events, how to avoid the pitfalls of the one and emulate the successes of the other?
"In a way – but a way that is in itself quite worrying – the question is unfair. It’s unfair because, as I’m sure you will already have spotted, 1914 and 1814 are not strictly comparable moments in European history. 1914 came at the end of that peaceful century, whereas 1814 came after 25 years of revolutionary upheaval and continental war. And unfortunately it is generally at the latter kind of moment that “architects” get their chance: think 1919, and 1945.
"War is by definition destructive, but sometimes the destruction is creative. Obstacles to change are crushed, or bulldozed aside, in ways that are unthinkable so long as peace prevails. The world becomes molten, and therefore malleable. During war, and in the first flush of victory, leaders can make decisions affecting the lives of millions in a few days, or even a few minutes, in ways from which their peacetime predecessors, or even their peacetime selves, would certainly have flinched. They can set aside not only the opinions, but often also the rights, of those who might object – and not only of individuals but also of states and peoples who have chosen the wrong side, or are simply less powerful than themselves. Even the existence of some states is no longer sacrosanct.
"At the same time the horrors of war, the sheer scale of destruction and misery that it brings, demonstrate the dangerous fragility and dysfunctionality of the pre-war system, and thus persuade people that the effort to build a better one is not the stuff of romantic dreams but an absolute requirement of realistic statecraft. The idea of some limits on sovereign freedom of action, of the need for institutions with rules binding on all, seems less absurd. Victorious but war-weary states have the opportunity to devise an international order aligned with their national interests, but also an incentive to do the reverse.
"From such a moment in 1648 came the Peace of Westphalia and the system of state sovereignty in domestic affairs that was to endure in Europe for three centuries. From such a moment in 1814-15 came the short-lived Congress System (which lasted only till 1823), but also the idea of a Concert of Europe, which was to last a century. From such a moment in 1919 came the League of Nations; and from another in 1945 the United Nations – but also the process which, over several decades, was to bring about the European Union.
"Clearly 1914 was not such a moment. We should be grateful, but perhaps also fearful, that 2014 is not one either. Europe, with the exception of the Balkans, has been at peace now for nearly 70 years – and, horrible as the Balkan wars of the 1990s were, they never came close to igniting a general European war in the way the 1914 Balkan crisis did. Although General Sir Mike Jackson was certainly wise, in June 1999, to disregard an order from his NATO commander, General Wesley Clark, to seize Pristina airfield when Russian troops were already occupying it, we could all enjoy his remark that 'I'm not going to have my soldiers start World War Three' because we knew that such an outcome at that time was to say the least improbable, indeed practically unimaginable.
"Things were different before 1989, of course, when World War Three was a real possibility. At least once, in the Cuba missile crisis of 1962, it came terrifyingly close to happening. But the fact is that it did not happen. In the 21st century we have got used to the idea that wars are local affairs, usually happening in Muslim countries outside Europe. I am 70 years old, born a year and a half before World War Two ended, but neither I nor – a fortiori – anyone younger than me can actually remember it. For the vast majority of European voters, war is no longer a matter of personal first-hand experience. In that respect we are even further from war, in space and in time, than were the populations of the main European powers in 1914. Certainly we have had far fewer war 'scares' in recent years than they had had. But, as Christopher Clark points out in his brilliant book The Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to War in 1914, published in 2012, the fact that they had got through previous scares without war, combined with a sense of relative détente between the main powers in the last year or two, helped to breed a certain complacency among both decision-makers and the public. Although Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated on June 28, it was not until the last week of July that most people realised they were hurtling towards the abyss. Even the Austro-Hungarian leaders, who were determined to take military action against Serbia, do not seem to have realised that this would almost inevitably involve them in an all-out war with Russia: they assumed that Russia would be deterred by the mere threat of German intervention.
"In his conclusion, Clark makes a comparison between 1914 and the Eurozone crisis which was unfolding just as he was writing the last section of the book, in 2011 and early 2012:
It was notable that the actors in the Eurozone crisis, like those of 1914, were aware that there was a possible outcome that would be generally catastrophic (the failure of the euro). All the key protagonists hoped that this would not happen, but in addition to the shared interest, they also had special – and conflicting – interests of their own. Given the inter-relationships across the system, the consequences of any one action depended on the responsive action of others, which were hard to calculate in advance, because of the opacity of decision-making processes. And all the while, political actors in the Eurozone crisis exploited the possibility of the general catastrophe as leverage in securing their own specific advantages.
"He goes on to say, however, that 'the differences are as significant as the commonalities.' In particular, 'The powerful supranational institutions that today provide a framework for defining tasks, mediating conflicts and identifying remedies were conspicuously absent in 1914.' That sentence gives me pause. Which institutions does he have in mind? Presumably the EU itself, perhaps NATO, and perhaps the UN.
"Of these, NATO is probably the one we would consider most “powerful”, at least in a conventional sense. It is widely credited with successfully defending Western Europe against Soviet expansion during the cold war, and some would argue that it also prevented renewed conflict between France and Germany. (One recalls the famous remark attributed to its first Secretary-General, Lord Ismay, that its purpose was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down”.) Most members of the EU and of the Eurozone are now also members of NATO, and this may indeed be one of the factors that make military conflict between them less likely. Yet NATO’s star has dimmed somewhat since the end of the cold war, and today it is the EU itself that is most widely credited with keeping the peace in Europe. Indeed, the year before last it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for helping transform Europe “from a continent of war to a continent of peace”. The belief that it does so is certainly one reason, and perhaps the most important, why the current leaders of its member states are, for the most part, determined to keep it in being, and are able and willing to impose great sacrifices on their peoples in order to preserve it. If they see the possible failure of the euro as a “catastrophic” outcome, that is because there is serious doubt whether the Union could survive it, and behind that lurks the fear that, were the Union to dissolve, peace among its members could no longer be taken for granted.
"Of course, not everyone shares that fear. There are many, especially in this country, who consider it overblown and self-serving. Some, like Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party, even argue that “rather than bring peace and harmony, the EU will cause insurgency and violence”. That claim too may sound far-fetched and hysterical, but it is hard to deny that the sacrifices currently demanded of European peoples, particularly in the southern half of the continent, are creating a favourable terrain for the growth of nationalist and xenophobic movements, some of which are ready to resort to violence – one thinks particularly of the Golden Dawn party in Greece. It will be a tragic irony indeed if the measures taken in the name of preserving the Union turn out, instead, to have deprived it of legitimacy in the eyes of many of its citizens, thereby weakening it possibly to the point of collapse. Many people are ready to draw that conclusion from the expected results of this year’s European elections, even before knowing them – although it may be that some are talking up this danger for tactical reasons, hoping that the actual result will fall short of their dire predictions, and so enable them to claim that the tide against extremism has turned. If so, the tactic is to say the least a risky one, for such predictions can easily prove self-fulfilling.
"Even so, I hesitate to say that Europe runs a risk of repeating the catastrophe of 1914. Perhaps my own imagination has been lulled into complacency by the long, fat years of peace, but I do find renewed warfare between states in Europe quite hard to imagine. Certainly no one could accuse the main European states of indulging in an arms race, which was one major cause of insecurity and even paranoia in the world of 1914. It is mainly economic security that seems threatened in Europe today, and while there are risks of violence these seem more likely to run along fault lines within societies – between ethnic and religious groups, or perhaps between forces of order defending the interests of the privileged, under the guise of the rule of law, and forces of disorder expressing the anger and despair of a rising generation denied any prospect of rewarding employment.
"But where Europe in 2014 does seem to resemble Europe in 1914 is in the prevailing pessimism and even resignation among the political elite. In the absence of economic growth – or, anyway, of the kind of growth that would make ordinary people feel more hopeful about their own and their children’s prospects – no one seems to be able to generate positive enthusiasm for any political vision. The best we can hope for is to hold the line and prevent the worst. Even when it comes to the United Kingdom itself, our efforts to dissuade the Scots from leaving it seem to focus entirely on the additional risks and dangers they would thereby incur. No English leader dares to tell the Scots that we love them; nor have I heard the “Better Together” campaign suggest that being part of the UK is the more exciting choice, still less that it might actually be – perish the thought! – more fun.
"Can we Europeans break out of this gloom, and find a new belief in ourselves? I long to think so, but I wonder if the phrase 'we Europeans' actually means anything any more. Perhaps that’s because – after eight years in the United States and five in Austria – I have now been living for the last two years in the UK, where to express any positive feeling about Europe or to identify oneself as a European has become almost taboo. It was refreshing and salutary this month to read, on the splendid openDemocracy website, an article headed 'I believe in Europe: a Roma perspective', written by a first year master student in Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Central European University in Budapest, who feels 'strongly tied to both Hungarian and Roma cultures'. This writer sees the EU as 'a good example of how peace can be achieved and maintained if there are common goals we can agree on and if all the citizens are treated equally'. That reminds us how important 'Europe' can still be to a member of a minority in a member state which shows alarming signs of backsliding from what had been accepted as common European values. Similarly, recent events in Ukraine remind us how important Europe can be to people living outside the current borders of the EU, who still see membership as the best chance of raising their society to higher standards, ethical as well as material. And last June, in Salzburg, some of us heard a truly inspiring speech from Kristalina Georgieva, the Bulgarian who speaks and acts for Europe in seeking to respond to the needs and aspirations of people in other parts of the world afflicted by crises and disasters. Why, I remember wondering, do we never see or read about her in the British media? Why isn’t she, rather than her compatriots who allegedly come here as criminals or welfare scroungers, the face that 'Europe' presents to the British people?
"Should these examples not persuade us to put a higher value on our own membership? Do they not give us an obligation to try harder, with others, to make European institutions work better, rather than make such a nuisance of ourselves that the rest of the Union will rejoice in our departure? Let’s suppose, for a moment, that we want to do that. How do we go about it? How can those of us who think that Europe is still an ideal worth struggling for regain the initiative?
"Certainly there is no shortage of sensible proposals for making the EU work better, emanating from think tanks such as the Centre for European Reform or the European Council on Foreign Relations. Yet as one reads them, it is hard not to feel that 1914 feeling pressing down on you. There were many admirable, sensible people working for peace in pre-1914 Europe. Margaret MacMillan devotes a whole chapter to them in her wonderfully readable new book, The War That Ended Peace. But they were shrugged off, as well-meaning idealists. Their ideas had little or no impact on the world-weary politicians, diplomats and generals who determined the actual policies of the great powers. And somehow it’s the same when you read a pamphlet such as Charles Grant’s How to build a modern European Union. Excellent suggestions, you think, but what chance is there that the beleaguered leaders of today’s European states, buffeted at every turn by sceptical media and publics, or by lobbies whose interests can hardly be reconciled, would ever actually agree to adopt them? These are the voices of sanity, but who is listening? What would it take to get them a hearing, such that leaders would feel themselves under public pressure to adopt their ideas, rather than to avoid them?
"Could this year’s European elections act as a wake-up call? Could we so frighten ourselves with the monsters we elect to the European Parliament that we are shocked out of our passivity and defeatism, and rediscover our sense of urgency about making Europe a beacon of hope – making hope, rather than fear, the driving force of European politics? Perhaps, but I would not count on it.
"Do we need a different economic program – a kind of European New Deal that would throw fiscal caution to the winds and use public spending to create jobs and stimulate consumption? I am not an economist, but even some quite cautious or “orthodox” economists, such as my former colleague Martin Wolf on the Financial Times, seem to advocate this. The trouble is, there is no way for one or even a few of the deficit countries in southern Europe to adopt such policies on their own and remain in the Eurozone. It would have to be done at the level of Europe as a whole, with Germany taking the lead. And it runs completely against economic principles which are deeply rooted in the German psyche, reaching far beyond mere calculations of material interest and into the realm of morality. The word Schuld, it has been pointed out, means not only debt but guilt.
"Perhaps above all we need a genuine European political space, in which we could all have the same conversation instead of 28 parallel national ones. As things stand, European elections are not taken seriously. They tend to register a lower turn-out each time round, which is one of the reasons why fringe parties can do so well. This is not because the European Parliament is an impotent talking-shop, as used to be said. In fact the Parliament now has considerable powers, and individual MEPs certainly have more power than their backbench counterparts here in Westminster. But European election campaigns, at least as reflected in the media, never focus on the actual decisions that the European Parliament will take. They are seen essentially as mid-term elections, in which the electorate of each country can register its frustration with the government in power without the risk of electing another government that might be even worse. The choices to be made by Europe as a whole are not seriously discussed.
"Democracy at the European level is almost impossible because there is no European demos. Many people would say there never can be such a thing, because we all speak different languages. The example of Switzerland convinces me that this is not an insuperable obstacle. In theory we could have multilingual European media in which people who speak different languages could be talking, and listening, to each other. Can such media be created? Not, for sure, by bureaucrats in Brussels. They would need to be fully independent, and full of entrepreneurial flair. Perhaps, in the brave new world of online journalism, such a thing is possible. But even if it happens, it will take quite a few years to bring about that European demos. For the moment, are we so far away from July 1914, when an Austrian journalist close to the foreign ministry wrote that the notion that Austro-Hungarian statesmen had a 'responsibility to Europe' was nonsense because 'there is no Europe' – only separate, national public opinions that were not listening to each other?
"Well, I’m sure my friend and former colleague at the FT, Bronwen Maddox, is going to have a field day pulling apart those gloomy maunderings of a septuagenarian Europhile, whose greatest success in down-to-earth electoral politics was to come second in the European election of 1984 in Surrey West (well behind the Marquess of Douro but ahead of a certain Keith Vaz). What about the other discussant – also a friend and former colleague, Terje Roed-Larsen? Well, he is certainly a European, I’m sure he has views on Europe’s future, and since he comes from a European country that has kept out of the EU maybe he has some useful advice for us Brits. But he is above all a global statesman, a long-time servant of the United Nations, and I suspect he may want to say something not just about Europe but about the state of the world.
"So let me devote my last few minutes to that – and suggest that perhaps in 2014 the global framework, rather than the European one, is more appropriate for considering the lessons of 1814 and 1914. In those years after all, Europe dominated much of the world. The Napoleonic wars involved fighting in the Middle East, India and North America as well as Europe. And the Great War that started in Europe in 1914 is now better known as the First World War. Today’s European powers, by contrast, were little more than pawns in the cold war, and in military terms are still massively outgunned by the US, while in economic terms they are dwarfed by China and increasingly challenged by other emerging economies – the BRICs, and now, we are told, also the MINTs.
"These changes have inescapable geopolitical implications. European states no longer confront each other over possessions or spheres of influence in other parts of the world – though one still hears the occasional echo of that in sub-Saharan Africa. Instead, Europe as a whole struggles to retain its status even as one lead player among others on the global stage. Two of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council – three if one counts Russia – are still European states, but it is commonplace to observe that this is a relic of 1945, preserved in aspic by the Charter but unrelated to 21st-century geopolitical reality. It is the world as a whole that has reverted, after the binary parenthesis of the cold war, to a multipolar structure much more reminiscent of Europe in 1814 or 1914. And it is in this context that 1914 is now most often invoked as a cautionary tale.
"The part of Great Britain 1914 – globally dominant for the past century but now feeling the twinges of relative if not absolute decline – is played in the currently fashionable reprise by the United States, while China 2014 is cast as Germany 1914 – the rising power demanding its “place in the sun” and building up its military strength to back that claim. But from another angle the US today can be seen as resembling Germany then. We should not forget that in 1914 many Germans were obsessed with the rise of Russia, an illiberal state but a country with vast demographic resources and a rapidly expanding economy. Some believed that war between the two was inevitable and that it would be better to have it sooner rather than later, while Germany still had a hope of holding its own. Others would have preferred to avoid a direct confrontation but were dragged into one because they felt obliged, for reasons of honour and prestige, to support their ally Austria-Hungary – a declining power in its region which felt itself goaded beyond endurance and resorted to a military response: could this be Japan today?
"We should also remember that the 1914 crisis began, not with an army crossing a frontier, but with an act of terrorism – an act followed by a fatal but understandable overreaction. There too it is not hard to find analogies in the world today.
"Such analogies can never be exact, and may be dangerously misleading. But most would agree that interstate war is much easier to imagine today in East Asia than it is in Europe. There is an arms race there, while the “powerful supranational institutions” which Christopher Clark detects in Europe are almost entirely absent. Between China and Japan, unlike France and Germany, World War Two was not followed by any historic reconciliation. In the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands both countries are now pursuing a policy of brinkmanship. A miscalculation by one side or both leading to serious hostilities can hardly be ruled out. If it happens, the US will surely try to contain it but could easily find itself drawn in by a logic not altogether unlike that which drove Germany to war in 1914.
"Let us hope that awareness of what happened in 1914 will help avert that, as it apparently helped avert world war in 1962 when President Kennedy had been reading The Guns of August.
"But perhaps actual war is not the only analogy we should be worrying about. While world war and nuclear devastation remain real possibilities, about which we cannot afford to be complacent, there is another threat hanging over humanity in the 21st century which could cause destruction, suffering and conflict on a scale at least comparable to that of the Great War. I refer of course to climate change. And here, I fear, the parallels may be alarmingly close. All of us are aware of the danger, just as everyone was aware of the danger of a general war in 1914. But, as then, many are prepared to shrug it off, deeming that what has not happened yet – or not on a scale to interfere seriously with their personal lives – has a good chance of not happening at all, and that there are many more pressing problems to be getting on with. Others are convinced that the threat is real, and take some measures to confront it, but find themselves hemmed in by a web of conflicting claims and interests which ensure that these measures are not enough to make a real difference. Each state or group of states makes its move conditional on that of some other state or states, but agreement on priorities and strategies proves endlessly elusive. The metaphor of the sleepwalkers seems even more apposite here than it does to the unfortunate statesmen of 1914. The architects are badly needed. But do we need catastrophe to strike once again before the architects are given their chance?
"I hope that in Salzburg in August that question will be high on the agenda."
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