The Myth of the European Phoenix: From the Ashes of War to European Unification (1700-2015—and beyond?)

There is an observable chasm between “manifest destiny” in the narratives of the USA, and the erratic, often crisis-hit trajectory of the European Union. Yet much distance has been covered since the early Communities in the 1950s, to the enlargements of 2004 and 2007. Indeed, no political entity had ever survived on such a large scale in Europe, since the Roman Empire of Antiquity. Furthermore, it is possible to trace a genealogy of repeated attempts at pacification of the European continent even before the Congress of Vienna (1815), attempts that continued undeterred even after the destructions of two World Wars and the Cold War. Taking an approach from the longue durée, this paper will examine the following questions: why in the face of all odds and dramatic failures, have European political leaders periodically attempted new projects of peaceful unification of the continent? And should the current installment (the EU) collapse due to the combined onslaught of recent crises, could it be reasonably expected that they would try again? This paper will describe the conclusions of a multi-year research project in intellectual and political history: namely that the ideal of a European political pacification has been recurring constantly in modern history, predating and transcending the ideologies that founded the nation-states. It also proposes that this ideal has the potential of drawing the mass ideologies of sovereignty to a pan-European polity. It will end by exploring the political opportunities, but also the real risks, inherent in the possible fulfillment of this myth.