Federico Chabod’s History of the Idea of Europe

My paper focuses on the peculiar ‘Idea of Europe’ investigated and developed by the historian Federico Chabod. He first focused on the History of the idea of Europe during the course that he held at the University of Milan in the troubled 1943-44 academic year. Significantly, while the city was occupied by Nazi military forces, Chabod choose to focus his attention on Europe and on the History of the idea of nation. Both fields of investigation will later become subjects of a book, where the issue of European history is described as «something that I particularly care about», a «historiographical problem strictly bound to the problems of our time». Europe’s narrative pushes Chabod, whose research methods were previously tied to institutional and diplomatic sources, towards an intellectual interpretation of the topic. The question that drives Chabod’s research is: «when did the name Europa begin to mean not just a geographical issue, but a also an historical one?». According to Chabod, the answer to this question is what differentiates the idea of nation from that of Europe: whereas a nation can be defined both on a «naturalistic» or «voluntary» background, Europe is the product of a cultural process founded on «moral solidarity and spiritual connection». My paper eventually underlines how this vision was deeply involved in the post-war attempt to get rid of brutal nationalisms, but can not avoid the danger of stating a moral superiority of European culture