Meanings of Europe and Meaning in History

Is there a lack of reliability in the narratives on European past because overwhelming facts of division hinder us to write a single comprehensive history? Is the tale necessarily incoherent because the outer geographical limits and internal partitions of the place we call Europe are changeable and fluent since the term came into use? I would answer in the negative, firstly because divisions and conflicts represent also a commonality where narratives can draw upon; secondly, because the ambiguity of borders that make the parties share one and the same division does not really hamper the strength of timespatial representations: on the contrary, such ambiguities make their ideological and emotional attractiveness. European ambiguities are no exception from the rule. Writing a coherent history of Europe is possible, I therefore argue, provided we write it as the history of the uses the term was made of in the past. Calling “Europe” a limited quota of the earth’s surface was a spatial act that attributed an ideological meaning to that particular division. I will observe continuities and changes in the discourses on European since the 18th century. I will try to clarify what the European projects consisted of and whether it was characterized by a time-resistant nucleus of meaning. I will argue that the inner coherence of the European project stems both from the Christian and humanist assumption according to which history cannot be senseless, and the specific universalist meaning that Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophies attribute to human, especially European, history.