European Civilization: A Long-Term Narrative Based on European Values

The idea of Europe and the European project generally have been at least implicitly based on a set of European values, which underpin an idea of civilization. But that set of European values, in all its inherent Eurocentrism, has not remained static over the centuries. This paper investigates how it has changed over time, and how such values have, in some cases at least, remained constant. Christianity already carried an important set of values for Europe in the medieval period, and in the Renaissance an early form of European identity can be said to have taken shape, linking Europe for example to a set of economic ideas (early capitalism) and political notions of order and power. In the period of the Enlightenment the list of ‘values’ was modified and extended, for example to include European rationality, and fresh of ideas of what ‘civilization’ actually meant. The paper will concentrate on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when  new elements like democracy and the link to the Ancients (Plato to NATO) made their entry into the list of European essentials, and then later the sometimes fraught relationship with Communist and American ‘values’, followed latterly by ‘soft power’ and human rights. In a bid to unpick Eurocentrism, this contribution to a debate on European narratives attempts to unearth the changing claims to a set of exclusive civilizational values on which a narrative of Europe has been based.