Bridge over troubled waters: The concept of “Europe” and modern international order(ing), 1618-1815 (part I)

As a partially integrated European polity receded before and after the Thirty Years’ War and the Peace of Westphalia (1648), the category of ‘Europe’ gained ground in the writings of the period and remained, ever since, a feature of ‘international’ politics. Against the background of a challenged conception of ‘empire’ (as a composite political order associated with the Holy Roman Empire), the category of ‘Europe’ emerges in tight association with the notions of ‘moving parts’ and of ‘balance’. Manoeuvring between conceptions of political pluralism (diversity of sovereign polities) and conceptions of cultural compatibility (‘Europe’ as a ‘civilization’ against which others should be ‘measured’), the concept of ‘Europe’ operated as an early encapsulation of modern aspirations of universality and plurality usually associated with the Enlightenment(s). At the same time, ‘Europe’ follows from a vanishing political-moral ordering in which the category of politics as the realm of ‘crises’ becomes paramount. Incidentally, the present debate on ordering slowly shifts from polity to politics. Afterwards (after the American, French and Haitian revolutions), ‘Europe’ is invoked as a moral token against the re-enactment of another inception of ‘empire’ as political order – the Roman(istic) empire with fledgling ‘universalistic’ aspirations during the Napoleonic Wars. By doing so, ‘Europe’ was invoked (as a legitimate conception of political order alternative to ‘empire’) by a sketchy concert of states victorious over Napoleon – the Concert of ‘Europe’ follows. In this sense, our paper approaches the multifaceted inception of the category of ‘Europe’ articulated with what Reinhart Koselleck calls the emergence of ‘crisis’, roughly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.