There is no shortage of histories of Europe. In one year alone – 1996 – three were published within a few months of each other, by John Merriman, John Roberts and Norman Davies respectively. They are all still in print, having gone through several remunerative editions. This latest contender, courtesy of Roderick Beaton, the historian of Greece, stakes a bold claim to being new. “Why a ‘new’ history?” it asks. Answer: “Everything changed on the morning of Thursday, 24 February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine.” What has been at risk during the past four years since, Beaton adds, has been nothing less than the “moral, legal, political and cultural values” deeply embedded in European culture and the European Union.
So the teleological warning bells are clanging from the outset. And they become deafening with an endorsement of the liberal view that Ukrainian appeals to “Europe” for help were directed not to a geographical space but to “the rule of law and democracy”. This is the phrase Beaton takes as his protagonist, narrating the progress of those ideas from their distant beginnings to the present day. The actual location of Europe is of no concern, indeed “objectively, Europe doesn’t even exist”. Instead it is an idea, one first conceived by the Ancient Greeks, many of whom lived in Asia.
It soon emerges, however, that the mental atlas Beaton is using does not exclude geography altogether. On the contrary, one of his many excellent maps shows an enormous oval covering most of eastern Europe. It is there, between the White Sea in the north and the Black Sea in the south that “Europe shades into Asia” Ukrainians will be pleased to find Putin’s Russia there, including even St Petersburg, but less enthusiastic to find more than three-quarters of their own country in the same space. Locating Asia has always been a way of making a political point: in the 19th century, Metternich thought it began at the road leading out of Vienna towards Hungary, while West Germany’s postwar chancellor Konrad Adenauer preferred Magdeburg and the road to Berlin.
In short, Beaton’s opening remarks suggest it is high time to reprint Herbert Butterfield’s critique of liberal teleology, The Whig Interpretation of History, published nearly a century ago, in 1931. Happily, Beaton’s reading of Europe’s history as the tortuous path of the rule of law and democracy (soon joined by “sovereignty”) fumbling their way towards the EU does not prevent his writing an excellent book, well-informed and enjoyable.
He is also, of course, well aware of the darker sides of European dynamism, especially for those on other continents. He vaunts the global achievements of “European science, technology, medicine and systems of trade and finance rooted in the Enlightenment”, while acknowledging the human cost of colonial expansion (which killed 95 per cent of the indigenous population of North America, for example). The attempt to square the circle – “triumphalism and hand-wringing are equally misplaced” – is rather limp, though, as is his support for the Enlightenment’s uncritical admirers.
The sheer violence of Europe’s history can not be disguised or elided. Periods of peace, whether international or domestic, were remarkable only for their rarity. A good example has been provided by the way in which linguistic hegemony has shifted over the centuries. Latin replaced Greek because it was part of the Roman legionaries’ baggage trains, succumbing in turn to marauding Germanic and Slavonic hordes from the north and east. Of the vernaculars that emerged, the victory of French was a by-product of Louis XIV’s military conquests. Lingering long after French hard power had crumbled, eventually it could not withstand the linguistic imperialism accompanying the ships of the Royal Navy. Behind every form of soft power lurked an adamantine fist, whether it was the Romans razing Corinth or Louis XIV incinerating Heidelberg.
The big question is: how did one relatively small part of the globe become so dominant? By 1914, 11 “Western” countries (including the US) controlled nearly three-fifths of territory and population in the world and nearly 80 per cent of its economic output. One persuasive explanation is the competitive principle that lay behind the murderous internecine warfare. It is not clear where Beaton stands on this contested issue. He refers to Niall Ferguson’s Civilisation: The West and the Rest (2011) which makes the case, but does not commit himself, commenting only that it is difficult to see how an argument from hindsight can be proved or disproved. In any event, the First World War put an end to Old Europe’s hegemony, while accelerating its replacement by its American offspring. One attractive alternative to the “competition is good for you” explanation is the key role played by the import of extra-European techniques and inventions. From China alone came simple labour-saving devices such as the wheelbarrow, the forging of cast-iron, the magnetic compass, paper, printing and gunpowder, although it has to be added that the Europeans put their borrowings to far more effective use.
Along the way, it is difficult to find much evidence that Beaton’s “idea” of Europe had real influence. His lucid account of the rise and fall of states and regimes makes the main instrument of change look more like the “man on horseback”, from Alexander the Great to Lieutenant-Colonel Putin. A major “turning point in the history of Europe” is identified as the 40-year reign of Augustus (27 BC – AD 14), but even that is agreed to have been “peace imposed from the top; it was peace imposed by power”. Episodes held to anticipate modern Europe need not so much a pinch of salt as a Chinese wheelbarrow-load. Such a case was the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Beaton records with apparent approval that this has been called “an attempt to create a legitimate pan-European order” that “laid the foundation for modern Europe”. In view of the further information that the Council defined the doctrine of Purgatory, launched a campaign to root out heresy, established a new set of legal practices known as the inquisitio, and ordered the systematic persecution of Jewish communities, one can only rub one’s eyes.
These puzzling excursions into Euro-fantasy aside, there is so much here to admire. Among the many high points are the unravelling of ecclesiastical and theological issues; the analysis of the Crusades as “the first European colonial venture”; the explanation of the impact of the Ottomans in the 14th century; the deconstruction of Napoleon and his empire; and the multiple shortcomings and mistakes of Nato. The account of the origins and progress of the EU is commendably dry-eyed. The “EUphoria” of the 1990s, he writes, was “largely restricted to Brussels insiders, academics and a smattering of more or less idealistic enthusiasts”. (“And still is,” he might have added.)
The writing is consistently crisp and elegant (though the neologism “baked in” appears too often), and the insertion of an illuminating episode or contemporary observation is brilliantly deployed. The quotation from Zola’s La Bête Humaine, for example, is memorably effective. Complex phenomena are clarified with impressive concision and cogency. One odd deficiency, probably occasioned by a word limit, is the almost complete absence of musical and visual culture – no Bach, Schubert, Monteverdi, Verdi, Dvořák, Tchaikovsky; Beethoven only because he composed the music for the cantata proclaiming “Europe stands!” for the Congress of Vienna; Wagner only because he was Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s father-in-law; no Delacroix, Turner, Cézanne or Picasso. Yet the occasional aperçu – on Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait, for example – shows he can use this sort of evidence to good effect.
The book ends on a very downbeat note. It is not the rule of law or liberal democracy that is now dominant but autocracy. Failure in Ukraine will leave the “gates of Europe” open to further Russian expansion. Sounding increasingly like the voice of Brussels, he laments that national electorates are too preoccupied with the cost of living and the impact of immigration to care about geopolitical challenges. What is needed, he concludes, is more Europe, especially European solutions to European problems and a more effective European administration. Without them, “it is not inconceivable that an authoritarian Russian empire could end up stretching, undifferentiated, all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific”. Were that to happen, there would be “not an end of history, but a literal end to the history of Europe”. He might console himself with the thought that, as Lenin put it, “history is more cunning than any of us”.
Europe: A New History
Roderick Beaton
Allen Lane, 432pp, £30
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[Further reading: Matt Goodwin’s intellectual suicide]
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This article appears in the 25 Mar 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Easter Special
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