A European Homeland/Nation? Intellectuals and Debate on Europe in the Inter-War Period

In 1933, a number of European intellectuals among whom Paul Valéry, Johan Huizinga, Julien Benda, Hermann von Keyserling, gather at the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations in Paris to discuss the identity and history of Europe, in a symposium on "The Future of the European spirit." During the symposium, the participants try to define a common European narrative beyond national differences, and some of them evoke the idea of a European "homeland" or "nation", as has been already advocated in those years by Gaston Riou (Europe ma patrie, 1928) and Julien Benda (Discours à la nation européenne, 1933). Among the participants to the symposium, Salvador de Madariaga for example calls for a “European nationalism”; Georges Duhamel presents “Mother Europe” as an opposing force to the growing patriotism; Julio Dantas hopes for a “européenité” to be built as opposed to the individual “national” feelings. How do the notions of “homeland” and “nation”, and the related notions of “patriotism” and “nationalism”, contribute by analogy or opposition to construe one (or more) narrative(s) of Europe in these debates? Our purpose is to explore the issue of “narrating Europe” from a linguistic viewpoint: we will analyse the different formulations used by the participants to describe their European “nation”, and will identify the specific aspects and the historical implications of those different formulations, especially relying upon the works by Reinhart Koselleck on the history of these concepts.