RSS

Contact us

Tuesday 2 December 2008

Barbarism and Civilisation: A History of Europe in Our Time

Best or worst?

After his famous ‘Age of . . .’ trilogy on the 19th century, E. J. Hobsbawm published a coda (best-selling but in my view much less satisfactory) on the history of the 20th century

For all that, Barbarism and Civilisation is an admirable work of scholarly synthesis, which should be required reading, not only for sixth-formers and undergraduates but also for anyone absorbed by the perplexing century we recently left behind. And what makes the book enjoyable as well as compelling are the incidental asides, acquired in the course of very wide reading, whether it’s the Fascist boss of Bologna deploring coitus interruptus and the resulting low birth rate with the command ‘screw and leave it in’ (it may sound better in Italian) or Enver Hoxha, the Communist dictator of Albania, whose favourite authors were Goethe, Kipling and Jerome K. Jerome.

A penultimate chapter examines the one calamity that followed the fall of Communism, the disintegration of Yugoslavia. This is something of a test for historians and Wasserstein passes, rightly pointing out that the ambiguities of the conflict — ‘that atrocities were in many cases two-sided or three-sided, that the Muslims of Bosnia enjoyed support from some very dubious elements’ — all ‘failed to register in the west’. In 1913 the British ambassador in Vienna had prophesied that ‘Servia will some day set Europe by the ears and bring about a universal war,’ and although Serbia set Europe by the ears again, we may be grateful that it did not bring about another larger war.

In his peroration on ‘Europe in the New Millennium’, Wasserstein looks at the way that ‘Europe has gone down in the world in the past century’, in terms of demography, its share of world population declining from 27 to 11 per cent from 1914 to 2007, along with the disappearance of the empires which once ruled half the world. But the economic statistics he quotes tell no tale of precipitous decline, as opposed to an inevitable shift of comparative balance; and foolish neocon notions about heroic ‘Americans from Mars’ putting ‘Europeans from Venus’ to shame look ever less plausible as the adminstration of Bush the Younger peters out ignominiously. Maybe Europe, in its troisième age (as the French gently call those of us over 60), still has something to teach the world, having shown that barbarism does not have to win the final victory.

Print this article  |  Email to a friend  |  Permalink  |   Comments (1)   |  Apollo Art Books

Post this entry to:   del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Advertisement

Spectator Business | Apollo Magazine

Corporate | Advertising | Privacy | Terms

Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP

All Articles and Content Copyright ©2008 by The Spectator | All Rights Reserved