Contents
 A Note on Citations and Translations
 Introduction
 1.
 2.
 3.
 4.
 5.
 6.
 7.
 Remaking the Great European Family
 The Birth of the Nation
 The Scramble for the World
 The War That Will End War
 A New Order for Europe
 Refashioning Europe
 The Once and Future Europe
 Notes
 Bibliography
 Index
Introduction
 I
 This is the story of an ambition, of a dream, of, some would say, an illusion.
 It is the story of a project, of a long, tortuous bid to unite groups of varied,
 diverse, and heterogeneous peoples, to give them a collective identity
 without robbing them of their individual identities—to make it possible to
 speak meaningfully, as the English scientist, philosopher, and loyal servant
 of the British crown Francis Bacon did in the seventeenth century, of “We
 Europeans”—nos Europai.1 “Europe” is a metaphor and an allegory. It is
 also, of course, more obviously a place, a continent, a small and
 indeterminate one, what the French poet Paul Valéry in 1924 called a
 “Peninsula of Asia,” whose frontiers have changed constantly, expanding
 and contracting over the centuries, ever since the word first began to be
 used by the Greeks in about 500 BCE.2 They understood it to be little more
 than the Greek islands and mainland, and all the obscure unexplored
 landmass that lay behind it. No one could be certain how extensive it was or
 quite where it ended. But for all that its known frontiers dissolved,
 sometimes imperceptibly, into Asia to the east and into Africa to the south,
 for all that these frontiers were human, political, cultural, and sometimes
 religious, they were nevertheless very real. “A man seems to take leave of
 our world…before he cometh to Buda,” wrote the English traveler Edward
 Brown in 1669 on crossing the border into Hungary, then under Ottoman
 rule. “He seems to enter upon a new stage of the world, quite different from
 that of the Western countries.”3
 But Europe, as the great French historian Lucien Febvre told an
 audience at the Collège de France in the final years of World War II—when
 any sense of what Europe had been, or might be again, except for a scene of
 seemingly endless carnage, had all but vanished—had throughout its history
always been far more than a mere place. Its geography was meaningless.
 “For there are no Eastern limits to Europe,” he said, “no impassable river,
 no insurmountable mountain chains, no arm of the sea, no great lake, no
 deserts of burning sands or glacial stones.” There is only history. “Europe is
 an ideal, a dream,” he went on, “for which men have been killed by the
 millions. Europe is a cultural idea (but to speak of culture today is almost to
 speak of dreams). Europe is an expanse of territory, of ever-expanding
 territory.”4Febvre was reaffirming, at a particularly dark moment, a
 conviction which had been, in one way or another, a part of European
 history since antiquity.
 It was in the eighteenth century, however, during what has come to be
 called the Enlightenment, that the idea that Europe could be understood as
 something more than a simple indeterminate geographical expression or a
 collective noun came slowly into being. “Europe” was a shared space, a
 single culture, which stood midway between the narrow and possibly
 perilous attachment to one’s “nation” or one’s “patria” and the imprecise
 amorphous identity called “humanity.” This, for instance is how the great
 jurist and political theorist Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de
 Montesquieu, in one of the jottings he called his “thoughts”—which I shall
 have cause to quote again—understood it. “If I knew something useful to
 me and harmful to my family”, he wrote:
 I would reject it from my mind. If I knew something useful to my family and not to my
 country, I would try to forget it. If I knew of something useful to my country and harmful to
 Europe, or useful to Europe and harmful to Mankind, I would look upon it as a crime. 5
 A patriot, wrote the English historian Edward Gibbon in 1776, in a similar
 vein, has the obligation to “promote the exclusive interest and glory of his
 native country; but a philosopher may be permitted to enlarge his views,
 and to consider Europe as one great republic whose various inhabitants
 have attained almost the same level of politeness and cultivation.” Gibbon
 was writing in the still turbulent wake of the Seven Years War of 1756–63,
 once called by Winston Churchill the real “First World War,” which, at one
 time or another had involved all of the great powers of Europe and their
 overseas empires. Yet even what Gibbon calls, almost dismissively, “these
 partial events” did not “essentially injure our general state of happiness, the
 system of arts, and laws, and manners, which so advantageously distinguish
 above the rest of mankind, the Europeans and their colonies.”6
By the late eighteenth century this sense that, despite almost perennial
 conflict, there existed a common European territory, some kind of common
 European identity, and common European interests, and that ultimately the
 individual states of Europe could not survive without each other, had
 become something of a commonplace. “Things are such in Europe” wrote
 Montesquieu, always the most acute political observer of his day, “that the
 states depend upon each other. Europe is one state made up of many
 provinces.”7 The great eighteenth-century French poet, playwright,
 historian, and philosopher François-Marie Arouet, better known by his
 sobriquet Voltaire, imagined Europe to be as a “kind of great republic,
 embracing several states…all having one and the same religious basis, the
 same principles of public law, the same political ideas, all of them unknown
 in other parts of the world.” What the Anglo-Irish jurist and political
 theorist Edmund Burke called, significantly, “the great vicinage of Europe”
 was, he claimed, despite his attachment to his own “little platoon,”
 “virtually one great state, having the same basis of general law, with some
 diversity of provincial customs and local establishments.…The whole of the
 polity and economy of every country of Europe has been derived from the
 same sources” to the point that “no European can be a complete exile in any
 part of Europe.”8
 Even the German philosopher and historian Johann Gottfried Herder,
 who had a very strong sense of the individualities of all the different
 cultures and “Fatherlands” of which Europe was now composed, believed
 that:
 In no one quarter of the Globe have nations been so intermingled as in Europe; in no one have
 they so often and so completely changed their abodes, and with them their way of life and
 manners.…In the course of ages the ancient family stamp of many European nations has been
 softened down and altered by a hundred causes, and without this the general spirit of Europe
 could not easily have been excited. 9
 There are many things which have, over the centuries, been identified as
 specific, if not unique to Europe. Two, however have been more enduring
 than all others, and have made the very idea of the unity of all its many
 different peoples ultimately possible. The first is something of a
 commonplace, if a highly fraught and contested one. As the eminent Italian
 jurist Aldo Schiavone has argued, of all the things which modern Europe
 has inherited from classical antiquity, two have been of lasting political
significance: the idea of representative government—“the Greek paradigm
 of politics as popular sovereignty”—and the Roman conception of rule
 under a common law “defined by reason.” It is, however, modern Europe
 which, through a long series of convulsions, revolutions, and reforms has
 succeeded, if only ever imperfectly, in uniting the two.10 The actual forms
 of government adopted by the different peoples of the continent have, of
 course, varied widely. But all have subscribed to the idea a of “civil
 society,” by which is meant a life lived under the protection of a universal
 system of law to which all its peoples might be supposed to have given their
 consent. It is a belief which, although—and in part because—it was so
 brutally suppressed in so many places throughout so much of the twentieth
 century, constitutes the main intellectual and ideological support on which
 the European Union now rests.
 The other is perhaps less obvious. Europe, said the Greek geographer
 Strabo in the first century CE, was unique in being able to provide for itself
 all “the fruits that are best and that are necessary for life and all the useful
 metals,” and needed to import only luxury goods, “spices and precious
 stones” which, he said dismissively, “make the life of persons who have a
 scarcity of them fully as happy as those who have them in abundance.”11
 But only Europe as a continent, crisscrossed by trade routes from east to
 west, could do this, and never one alone of the many disparate peoples of
 the Mediterranean. Because, that is, life was so difficult for each of them
 individually that they could only survive by developing the great
 commercial networks which were to become the basis of their future
 expansion far beyond the limits of Europe. They were also, because of the
 intense competition which persisted amongst them, all forced from time to
 time into political unions, and were from time to time compelled to develop
 systems of alliance, federations, and leagues. In historical reality the
 Europeans were, of course, by no means the only peoples to recognize the
 value of cooperation. But few peoples have needed to cooperate with one
 another quite so often over quite such a long period of time. Leagues, or
 rather the ability to form leagues, came to be thought of as one of the
 features of the European peoples, and one of the sources of their success.
 The Persians, those great “others” of classical antiquity, conquered their
 neighbors. The Greeks may have done the same to theirs; but they also
 knew how to form alliances with them. The most famous of these leagues
 were the amphictyonies—the “leagues of neighbors”—of the ancient Greek
city states, originally intended as alliances to provide protection for the
 sacred shrines around the Mediterranean. The best-known, the Delian or
 Great Amphictyonic League, was believed to have been founded after the
 Trojan War to protect the Temple of Apollo on the island of Delos, but it
 was still in existence in the second century CE. These became a point of
 reference for many later generations of Europeanists eager to see in these
 remote classical origins the possibilities for the creation of a new and more
 enduring 
pan-European league. Leagues, like federations and
 confederations, offered simultaneously both individual freedom and
 collective security.
 “The cities of Ancient Greece,” wrote Gibbon of the origins of his “one
 great republic,”
 were cast in the happy mixture of union and interdependence which is repeated on a larger
 scale, but in a looser form, by the nations of modern Europe—the union of religion, language,
 and manners which renders them spectators and judges of each other’s merits; the
 independence of government and interests which asserts their separate freedoms and excites
 them to strive for pre-eminence in the career of glory. 12
 It was on this belief in the creative force of “union and interdependence”
 perhaps more than any other conviction that the possibility of a future
 European union rested. “Let us, however, immediately insist,” Lucien
 Febvre concluded his Collège de France lecture, “that European unity is not
 uniformity.”13 “Unity in diversity,” as the motto of the European Union has
 it.
 II
 Most of the authors of these generalized claims were aware that although
 they all made much of the diversity of the modern European states, the
 unity of Europe, this “general spirit” as Herder phrased it, had already been
 “undesignedly prepared” by the one thing which he, at least, most despised:
 the Roman Empire.14 Like Herder, Gibbon too was convinced that in his
 day it had been precisely the “division of Europe into a number of
 independent states connected, however, to each other by the general
 resemblance of religion, language and manners” that had been responsible
 for the “most beneficial consequences to the liberty of mankind.”15 But,
unlike Herder, he was also convinced that the Roman Empire in the age of
 the Antonines, of the “Five Good Emperors” as they have come to be
 known—from Nerva (reigned 96–8 CE) until Marcus Aurelius (161–80 CE)
 —had been the “period in the history of the world during which the
 condition of the human race was the most happy and prosperous,” and
 which, of course, extended well beyond the frontiers of modern Europe to
 include “the fairest part of the earth and the most civilized portion of
 mankind.”16
 That, however, had all begun to disintegrate after the succession of the
 Emperor Marcus Aurelius’ son Commodus in 177, at which point the
 empire “fell into the hands of a single person [and] the world became a safe
 and dreary place for his enemies” until, slowly but ineluctably, in Herder’s
 words, “the machine fell apart and covered all nations of the Roman world
 in wreckage.”17 In 476, after more than two centuries of this agony, the
 German chieftain Odoacer deposed the last of the emperors, Romulus—
 referred to contemptuously as “Augustulus,” “Little Augustus”—and the
 Roman Empire in the West collapsed into a squabbling succession of
 fiefdoms, principalities, duchies, city states, and bishoprics.18 What
 remained, what still remains in many places to this day, is an image of
 ancient Rome as that moment when everyone in what we now call
 “Europe” lived a relatively safe, relatively stable, and prosperous life under
 the auspices of the Roman law. “It was their custom,” wrote Francis Bacon
 of the Romans, in 1605:
 to give a speedy denization, and in the highest degree; that is, not only a right of commerce, of
 marriage and inheritance, but also the right of suffrage, and of candidature for places and
 honors. And this not only to particular persons; but they conferred it upon entire families,
 cities, and sometimes whole nations at once. Add to this their custom of settling colonies,
 whereby Roman roots were transplanted in foreign soil. And to consider these two practices
 together, it might be said, that the Romans did not spread themselves over the globe, but that
 the globe spread itself over the Romans.
 It was, he concluded, “the securest method of extending an empire.”19 It
 was also, of course, at many levels a carefully nurtured illusion fostered and
 propagated by the Roman state itself, and has subsequently been made to
 serve a number of narrowly sectarian and nationalistic ambitions. But for all
 that, it was, as we shall see, to become a valuable imaginative resource for
 the future builders of European unity. For, in this vision of Rome, which
 Cicero, the last great orator and jurist of the Roman Republic, had tellingly
described as being more like “a protectorate [patrocinium] than an empire
 of the world,”20 it was possible to create the image of a league made up of
 free states bound together by a single body of law and a common
 citizenship in which a large number of diverse cultures and systems of
 belief could flourish unhindered, so long as they offered no threat to the
 common good. All of those from Bacon to the Russian-born French
 philosopher Alexandre Kojève (of whom more later), who between 1945
 and his death in 1968 worked in the French Ministry of Economic Affairs
 and exercised a considerable if hidden influence over the French
 involvement in the creation of the European Economic Community, knew
 full well that the realities of Roman imperial government and of life under
 the empire, even before the demise of the Republic in 27 BCE, had never
 been quite so benign or ecumenical. They knew that the empire had been
 acquired for the most part through conquest. They knew too that even if
 those conquests had often been carried out “in the interests of allies,” many
 of those allies had been chosen in order to enable expansion by defending
 them, so that, as Cicero himself recognized, “our nation has gained control
 of the entire world through defending its allies.”21 They also knew, of
 course, that the much-vaunted Roman grandeur had been built upon slave
 labor, and that because of this, as the great eighteenth-century philosopher
 David Hume remarked, “to one who considers coolly on the subject it will
 appear that human nature, in general, really enjoys more liberty at present
 in the most arbitrary government of EUROPE than it ever did during the
 most flourishing period in ancient times.”22 They knew that women had
 very little standing or social independence from their fathers or their
 husbands under Roman law and that fathers could exercise the power of life
 and death over their children. They were fully aware of all this, as they were
 of the gruesome brutality of the games, and of the cruelty and depravity of
 so many of the Roman imperial households. But the historical reality was
 not to the point. What mattered was the ambition, the objective, the
 perception of what a true confederation of peoples, of what Kojève would
 call a “true empire,” could be.
 At the end of the eighth century, Charles I, king of the Franks, known as
 Charlemagne, “Charles the Great,” set out to recreate at least a part of what
 he knew of all this. In 800, having conquered much of southern and central
 Europe, he had himself crowned by Pope Leo III as “Emperor of the
 Romans.” The Carolingian Empire covered most of central Europe, parts of
northern Spain, as far east as what is now Poland, and a large part of
 northern Italy. It was, of course, far smaller than the Roman Empire had
 been at its height, and it lasted less than a century. But it was the founding
 state of what would become the Holy Roman Empire—or after 1512, the
 “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation”—which would survive until
 brought to an ignominious end by Napoleon in 1806, and which was to
 have immense political significance, if not real political power, for later
 generations. It was also responsible for providing the initial political
 cohesion which would make all of Europe throughout the Middle Ages
 synonymous with what Pope Leo the Great in the fifth century designated
 the orbis Christianus, or, as it would be called in the European vernaculars,
 simply “Christendom.”
 Unlike its predecessor, however, which had, since the reign of the
 Emperor Antonius Pius, claimed (at least) to be a world empire, the
 Carolingian Empire was explicitly European, and Charlemagne himself was
 referred to, from the early nineteenth century, as Pater Europae, the “Father
 of Europe.” Over the centuries he came to represent the possibility of
 reuniting the French and German peoples—who have always been at the
 core of the geographical vision of Europe—and thereby of finally creating a
 single united Europe. The European Union has also taken up this legacy.
 One of the buildings of the European Commission in Brussels is called “the
 Charlemagne Building,” and ever since 1950 Charlemagne’s capital, the
 city of Aachen—or Aix-la-Chapelle—has annually awarded a prize to those
 peoples—or things, as in 2002 it was awarded to the euro—who have
 contributed most to the “voluntary union of the European peoples without
 constraint.” The first laureate was the eccentric European federalist, the
 Austrian–Japanese Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi. In his
 acceptance speech in 1950 he called for a “Union Charlemagne,” that is,
 “the renewal of the Empire of Charlemagne as a confederacy of free
 nations…to transform Europe from a battlefield of recurring world wars to
 a peaceful and blooming worldly empire of free people!” Coudenhove
Kalergi’s characterization of the legacy of Charlemagne, and the EU’s
 embrace of it, is, however, deeply problematical. For the Carolingian
 Empire was clearly not, as most subsequent projects for European
 integration down to and including the EU have been, at least in the first
 instance, an attempt to bring an end to the incessant warfare between the
 various states of Europe and to restore to the continent a universal realm of
justice. It was, instead, a bid by a powerful tribal ruler to appropriate for
 himself the status and the glory of the former Roman Empire in the West. If
 the objective of integration is to bring the peoples of Europe together
 “without restraint,” then, clearly, it has to be achieved by some means other
 than conquest.
 III
 Coudenhove-Kalergi was, however, right about one thing. Every attempt at
 creating a unified Europe has been, initially at least, a response to a crisis
 which in one way or another has touched all the European peoples, and,
 until very recently, most of those crises have been caused by war.23 The
 most extensive and certainly the most devastating of all the wars that the
 European peoples have fought amongst themselves before World War I
 were the prolonged, often civil wars which followed the religious
 Reformation of the sixteenth century. In most of these, for the first time in
 their history, the combatants were not struggling over dynastic claims or for
 land or to defend the supposed rights of their rulers. They were fighting
 over beliefs.24 The wars, which had begun in the Holy Roman Empire in
 1546, spread steadily across the whole of Europe, bringing ever-increasing
 internecine conflict in their wake. They included the French Wars of
 Religion from 1562 until 1598, the English Civil War of 1642–9, and what
 the Spanish called the “Dutch Revolt” and the Dutch “the Eighty Years
 War” between 1566 and 1648. The final stage of this conflagration, which
 began in 1618 and lasted uninterrupted until 1648, came to be known as the
 “Thirty Years War.” It raged across the whole of central and eastern Europe,
 drawing into its maw at one time or another all the major states of the
 continent, from Spain to Sweden. The huge armies that it created left behind
 them vast tracts of the continent in smoldering ruins. When it was finally
 over, a third of the population of central Europe was dead. As Voltaire
 remarked in astonishment on rereading his own description of all this
 butchery: “Is it the history of snakes and tigers which I have just written?
 No, it is that of men. Tigers and snakes do not treat their own kind in that
 manner.”25
The series of agreements which brought all this, and with it all
 confessional conflict within Europe, finally to an end were signed between
 some two hundred Catholic and Protestant powers in the Westphalian cities
 of Osnabrück and Münster between May and October 1648, and were
 known collectively as the “Peace of Westphalia.” This was, in effect, the
 first modern treaty. It was the first treaty between sovereign nations which
 aimed at creating a lasting peace and not merely, as all previous treaties
 had, a temporary ceasefire. It was also the first truly international gathering
 of European states, and the first formally to recognize the existence of two
 new states, the United Netherlands, which had in effect established its
 independence from Spain forty years earlier, and the Swiss Confederation,
 which now became a sovereign republic, independent of the Habsburg
 Empire. From 1648, the disordered, divided monarchies of Europe slowly
 began to transform themselves into the modern nation states which most of
 them still are to this day.
 The Peace of Westphalia had been one lastingly consequential solution
 to the crisis. The other, which was scattered, imprecise, and initially
 inconsequential, took the form of a series of projects for a perpetual peace
 in Europe through the creation of a political union among the various
 European states. Although there are earlier proposals for a unified Europe
 going all the way back to Dante Alighieri’s De Monarchia of 1313 (which
 in effect only envisages a stronger, more centralized version of the Holy
 Roman Empire extended to the whole of Europe), the earliest of these to
 have any lasting significance was Le Grand Dessein (The Grand Design)
 composed by the Duc de Sully, finance minister to King Henri IV of
 France, between about 1617 and 1630, which was still being cited
 approvingly by the highly influential Swiss jurist Johann Caspar Bluntschli
 as late as 1878.26 It exists, however, only in fragments in Sully’s Mémoires
 printed in 1638, and until the nineteenth century was widely assumed to
 have in fact been written, as Sully indeed claims it was, by the king himself
 —which, perhaps more than its content, explains the frequent admiring
 allusions to the work. The Design proposed that the Habsburg monarchy—
 which at the time encompassed both Spain and Portugal and their respective
 overseas empires, and which Sully, unsurprisingly, looked upon as the
 prime cause of conflicts within Europe—be reduced to “the sole Kingdom
 of Spain,” and that Europe should thereafter be divided into fifteen states,
 as nearly equal as possible in both territorial extent and military power.
These would preserve the political forms—both monarchical and republican
 —and the religions—Catholic and Protestant—of their originals, and would
 be governed by a General Council composed of four delegates from the
 greater powers and two from the lesser which would exercise ultimate
 legislative authority over all the member states. There would be freedom of
 trade; and the customs barriers between the states, if not their borders,
 would be abolished. Presiding over it all, however, would, unsurprisingly
 perhaps, have been Henri IV himself, who, having brought the Wars of
 Religion in France to an end in 1598, would now go on to lead the rest of
 Europe toward a future of perpetual peace and renewed prosperity.27 What
 Sully and Henri had seen was that if France were to emerge from the civil
 and religious conflict that had divided the kingdom since 1562, and if a now
 religiously divided Christendom were to be able to resist the rising power of
 the Ottoman Empire, then Europe would have to rebuild, if not as another
 Roman Empire, then as something far closer to a federation of states.
 In 1623, an obscure French monk named Éméric Crucé, with no
 connection to Sully, published a similar, if yet more ambitious project, Le
 Nouveau Cynée (New Cyneas), offering “the best occasions and methods
 for establishing a general peace and freedom of commerce for the whole
 world.” This laid out elaborate plans for a world federation—although
 Crucé was, in fact, concerned predominantly with Europe and its perpetual
 conflict with the Ottoman Empire—governed by a permanent conference of
 delegates based in Venice, a convenient gateway, geographically and
 culturally, between Europe and the Ottomans. These would have
 represented not only all the nations of Europe, but also the Ottoman Empire
 itself, Persia, China, “Ethiopia,” Africa, and Russia. They would have
 arbitrated between these regions and might also have been allowed to use
 force against any dissident member (although where this force was to come
 from Crucé does not say). The Pope would have been the president and the
 Sultan his deputy. There was to be a common currency, standardized
 weights and measures, and free trade. It was an early outline, as some have
 seen it, of the League of Nations, the United Nations, and the European
 Union, all somehow rolled into one.28
 As the European states continued to battle mercilessly with one another,
 even after the Treaty of Westphalia had seemingly put an end to any future
 possibility of confessional conflict, a steady flow of proposals for the final
 abolition of war, some pragmatic, most impossibly improbable, followed in
the trail of the Grand Design and the New Cyneas. They included William
 Penn’s An Essay towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe of 1693;
 Some Reasons for a European State of 1710, by Penn’s friend and fellow
 Quaker John Bellers; the Declaration for a Lasting Peace in Europe by the
 “Old Pretender” (known to his followers as King James III of England and
 VIII of Scotland) of 1722; the Scheme of A “Perpetual Diet” for
 Establishing the Public Tranquillity of 1736 (which was more of a proposal
 for conquering the Ottoman Empire) by Giulio Alberoni, skilled social
 climber and cardinal in the service of Philip V of Spain; a parody by
 Voltaire in 1770, which is in reality a plea for universal religious toleration;
 the Project for Perpetual Peace between the Sovereigns of Europe and their
 Neighbours by a former galley slave, Pierre-André Gargaz, which so
 impressed Benjamin Franklin that in 1782 he printed it on the press he had
 set up on his estate at Passy outside Paris; and Jeremy Bentham’s A Plan for
 a Universal and Perpetual Peace of 1789, which, among other things,
 called for the dissolution of the European overseas empires, which he
 denounced as “violations of common sense” and “bungling imitations of
 miserable [Greco-Roman] originals.”29
 Many of these, however, owed rather more than their titles to a bulky,
 ponderous work by Charles-Irénée Castel, abbé de Saint-Pierre, A Project
 for Establishing a Perpetual Everlasting Peace in Europe, written in 1713,
 a text whose influence, attenuated but perceptible, has carried down through
 the centuries, via the pioneer socialist Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon in the
 nineteenth century to the founders of the European Union—a term which
 Saint-Pierre seems to have been the first to use. Saint-Pierre—the “pacific
 philosopher, a friend of the human race,” as he called himself—was, in
 many respects, a remarkable and remarkably prescient man, and his project,
 although it is unwieldy, prolix, and presents itself merely as commentary on
 the Grand Design, not only was far more radical than any of its
 predecessors, and some of it successors, but also in some respects comes far
 closer to describing the kind of quasi-federation which Europe has
 subsequently become. A diplomat who had been a negotiator of the Treaty
 of Utrecht in 1712–13 which had ended the War of the Spanish Succession,
 and who had been expelled from the Académie française in 1718 for
 denouncing the rule of its patron, Louis XIV, Saint-Pierre devised plans for
 a graded tax system—virtually unthinkable in the early eighteenth century
 —and for free education for all, both men and women. His Project
envisaged a future European federation drawn together through the
 beneficial effects of trade, bound by a “treaty of European Union” but ruled
 not as individual states are, by a single sovereign, but by a council or diet
 on which the princes of every member state would sit, and by which all the
 disputes that arose across the continent would be resolved, without, or so he
 believed, seriously damaging the authority of the monarchs of the
 individual states. This, Saint-Pierre was convinced, would eliminate
 warfare, except as a means of last resort, and thus bring the greatest
 happiness to the greatest number, and finally demonstrate to princes that
 their true interests lay not in conflict but in what he called bienfaisance, or
 “beneficence,” which was an expression of that “sympathy” which all
 human beings were supposed, as individuals, to share with one another.30
 Saint-Pierre hoped that one day it would be possible to extend this
 federation to Asia, Africa, and America, but he reflected that any such
 proposal at this date would make his plan seem absurdly unrealistic. Even
 without attempting to embrace the entire world, the Project was duly
 mocked by most of those who read it. Voltaire dismissed it as “a chimera
 which could no more exist among princes than it could among elephants
 and rhinoceroses, or wolves and dogs.”31 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,
 ironical as ever, remarked that it reminded him of a “device in a cemetery
 with the words: Pax perpetua [Perpetual peace]; for the dead do not fight
 any longer: but the living are of another humour; and the most powerful do
 not respect tribunals at all.” 32 (Leibniz, himself, however, had his own
 project for Europe as a kind of revitalized Holy Roman—and hence
 German—Empire.) In 1756 Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote a brief
 “Judgment” on the Project (the only thing of substance that emerged from
 what was intended to be an edition of Saint-Pierre’s entire oeuvre), and
 although he acknowledged that many would toss it aside, as they would any
 such utopian project, as mere “vain speculation,” it was, he believed,
 nevertheless a demonstration of the “general and particular utility” of
 “moral truth.”33 He disagreed, however, with the idea that a federation
 could achieve peace (historically, as he pointed out, most had been created
 for the purposes of war). Nor did he believe that commerce encouraged
 harmony and cooperation, but that in reality it only increased the sources
 for competition between states and thus the grounds for war. In the end he
 came to the conclusion that the kind of federation of states Saint-Pierre had
 conjured up out of his overly optimistic imagination would require a
situation in which “the sum of particular interests did not overpower the
 common interest and…each one sees in the good of all, the greatest good
 which he could hope for himself.” The only possible way to bring that about
 would, in his view, be a revolution. And if that were the case, then “who
 among us would dare to say whether the European League were more to be
 feared than desired?”34
 The person who substantially transformed the idea that the only way to
 bring about perpetual peace was by means of a league of nations was
 Immanuel Kant. In the wake of the Treaty of Basle on April 5, 1795—
 which had ended the War of the First Coalition between the monarchical
 states of Europe and Revolutionary France, and which had ceded to France
 all territory West of the Rhine, and allowed Russia, Austria, and Prussia to
 carve up Poland between them—Kant laid out his own project for ending
 warfare. He called it Toward Perpetual Peace, a Philosophical Sketch. In
 1795 Kant was 71 years old and widely admired throughout Europe as
 perhaps the most important, the most ambitious European philosopher since
 Aristotle.
 Toward Perpetual Peace is, its title makes clear, a contribution to an as
 yet unfinished project. It is a proposal, a mere “philosophical sketch” which
 will lead “toward” a condition that can only be realized in future times.
 Perhaps for that reason it is written, unpromisingly, in the form of a series
 of articles—and Kant’s lengthy reflections on the meaning of each one—for
 a hypothetical universal peace treaty. It is, however, a treaty unlike any
 which had hitherto existed and, in Kant’s mind, was the only one which
 could ensure the future, and inescapably cosmopolitan development of the
 human race. Its conclusions were to have a powerful and widespread, if also
 diffuse, influence well beyond the confines of professional philosophy. It
 has left its mark on many later generations, and its presence can still be seen
 not only in contemporary discussions about global governance and global
 justice, but also in the creation of the universal institutions intended to
 sustain them, in the League of Nations, in the United Nations, and, perhaps
 most clearly of all, in the European Union.
 As Saint-Pierre, whom Kant cited frequently, had acidly observed, the
 sovereign powers of Europe as they were currently constituted were no
 different from “the little kings of Africa, the unhappy Caciques, or the little
 sovereigns of America.” There existed among them nothing which could be
 described as a “sufficiently powerful and permanent society.” The closest
they had come was the Swiss Federation or the states of the Netherlands. As
 a consequence, all the other powers were ceaselessly driven to war to
 resolve their differences.35 Kant agreed. Every treaty organization by which
 the states of Europe had sought to bind themselves—including the one
 concluded at Basle—had been nothing other than a “mere truce, a
 suspension of hostilities, not a peace,” since none of them had ever aimed at
 a “stable, permanent condition.”36 Saint-Pierre’s project may have been
 illusory and without any practical value, since all such proposals have
 always been “ridiculed by great statesmen, and even more by heads of state,
 as pedantic, childish, and academic ideas,” but that, in Kant’s view, was
 probably only because Saint-Pierre had believed that “its execution was too
 near.”37 His basic claim, however, that perpetual peace, within Europe or
 beyond, could only be brought about by some kind of federation was
 inescapable. The only way, Kant insisted, to bring an end to the current
 condition of unstructured barbarism between the states of the world was for
 all of them to form “a general league of nations, establish a public
 legislation, define a public authority to appropriate national prerogatives,
 and thereby make possible a universal peace.”38 Kant’s own project was far
 more ambitious than those of any of his predecessors; and it was an attempt
 not so much to resolve a problem, however pressing, within Europe as it
 was to transform the entire international order.
 The question for Kant, the question which Saint-Pierre and most
 previous propagandists for perpetual peace had singularly failed to answer,
 was how the kinds of international communities that had been envisaged
 were to be brought into being in such a way that they would not collapse
 under the slightest pressure. As Rousseau had observed, when it came to
 means Saint-Pierre “reasoned like a child.” He imagined “naively that it
 would be enough to assemble a Congress, suggest some articles, have them
 signed, and then all would be done.”39 But as both Rousseau and, with even
 greater urgency, Kant fully realized, to create Saint-Pierre’s “European
 Union,” it would first be necessary to transform utterly the kind of
 relationship which existed between states. Individual societies were bound
 together by a pact between rulers and their citizens or subjects. The same,
 however, clearly did not apply between states, where the only contracts that
 had ever existed had taken the form of treaties—what Kant called a “peace
 pact (pactum pacis)”—and these had only ever put an end to a “current
war…but not a condition of war, of always finding pretexts for a new
 war.”40 If these unsatisfactory arrangements were to be replaced by
 anything more binding, then nations would have first to change their own
 political identities. In this Saint-Pierre and Rousseau had been looking in
 the right place, but even Rousseau had failed to grasp the full implication of
 his own claim that nothing resembling Saint-Pierre’s project could come
 into existence unless each state created a form of government in which “the
 sum of particular interests did not overpower the common interest.”
 Kant’s project was markedly different from those of all his predecessors.
 They had worked with the assumption that a lasting peace might be
 achieved between the states of Europe—and in some cases the entire world
 —while both the structure of government within each nation and the legal
 order to which each belonged remained unchanged. Kant took a radically
 different view. Peace—perpetual peace—could only be achieved through
 the creation of an entirely new international legal order, one which would
 be capable only of bringing peace between nations but also of creating an
 order of justice amongst them. For peace without justice could only ever be
 ephemeral.
 Unlike all his predecessors, Kant had seen that only states which shared
 the same political form would be able to enter into a lasting peaceful union
 with one another. The kind of union which Sully had imagined, in which
 monarchies and republics were supposed to cooperate happily together, was
 in practice unthinkable. (The same is still broadly true, one might argue, of
 the United Nations.) Furthermore, the only political form under which such
 a union was possible was what he famously called a “representative
 republic.” This he defined as a society in which no individual should be
 constrained by any external—that is, purely human—law except for “those
 to which I could have given my consent.”41 In Kant’s view, only in a
 republic in which the legislator was obliged to pass laws “in such a way that
 they would have been able to arise from the united will of an entire people”
 and which was thus a “system representing the people in order to protect its
 rights in its name” would the individual, “even if he is not good in
 himself…nevertheless be compelled to be a good citizen.”42 Such a
 republic was also the only one which “offers a prospect of attaining the
 desired result, i.e. Perpetual Peace,” since only when they were the ultimate
 arbitrators of the law would the citizens be in a position to “give their free
 assent, through their representatives, not only to the waging of war in
general, but also to each particular declaration of war.”43 Only in a truly
 representative republic do the base interests of the individual coincide with
 the interests of the state as a whole.44 For the citizens of a state, going to
 war inevitably means not only “taking upon themselves all the hardships of
 war”; it also means being compelled, once the war is over, to assume the
 “burden of debt that embitters peace itself, and that can never be paid off
 because of new wars always impending,” thereby making their “cup of
 troubles overflow.”45 In a situation in which it is they who decide whether
 to take up arms or not, they are only likely to do so if they are certain there
 can be no solution other than war. Although Kant himself forcefully denied
 that his “representative republic” was a “democracy”—since what he
 understood by “democracy” was the regime of ancient Athens, and possibly
 of Revolutionary France during the Terror—it does meet the requirements
 of what today would be called a “liberal democracy.”46
 The representative republic was not, however, only the means of
 ensuring that justice be extended to all its citizens. It was also the only form
 of government which was capable of creating what Kant called the “lawful
 condition” in which a union of states might be created. This he called
 variously a “world-republic,” a “league of peoples,” a “state of nations,” an
 “international state,” a “universal union of peoples,” a federation, a
 confederation, a partnership, and a permanent state congress.47 The model
 to which Kant returned most often—a model to which, as we shall see,
 many others would also later return—was that of the Amphictyonic
 Leagues of ancient Greece. But no matter what form this might take, it
 would be a peaceful, consensual body, and all those who joined it would do
 so because they perceived it to be in their particular interests, and they
 would do so of their own volition, and once joined, “every state, even the
 smallest could expect its security and rights not from its own might, or its
 own juridical judgment, but only from this great federation of nations.”48
 What Kant was advocating, however, was no superstate—or what he calls a
 “state of nations”—much less an empire, that “graveyard of freedom,” but a
 free association which would lead to an “increasing culture and the gradual
 approach of human beings to greater agreement in principles.”49
 When this happened, a new form of interstate law—what he famously
 called the “cosmopolitan right” (ius cosmopoliticum or Weltbürgerrecht)—
 would come to replace the old law of nations (ius gentium), which in Kant’s
opinion had always been an utterly ineffectual code, since between states,
 as they then existed, there was no “common external constraint.”50 But this
 would be far more than a simple law. It would be an entire order of justice.
 For Kant the realization of the new league and of the “cosmopolitan
 right” to which it would give birth still lay far in the future. It was, he
 admitted, a “dream of perfection,” but like all such ideas it should not
 abandoned, as he had said of the Platonic republic, “under the very
 wretched and harmful pretext of its impracticability.”51 So long as we are
 free—morally and intellectually—we can only go on hoping that some kind
 of cosmopolitan world will be achieved. His objective had always been to
 obtain what he calls “a history of future times, i.e. a predictive history.”52
 For although animals, if left to themselves, reach their “complete destiny”
 as individuals, humans can only do so as a species, and they can, therefore,
 get there only “through progress in a series of innumerably many
 generations.”53 The “complete destiny” of man always remains a distant but
 attainable goal, which makes it the duty of all beings “to work toward this
 (not merely chimerical) end”54; and while the human race may experience
 many setbacks on its long journey through time, and although “the tendency
 to this final end can often be hindered, it can never be completely
 reversed.”55 Kant, despite his initial reliance on Saint-Pierre, was offering a
 solution to what he saw as a human, not a narrowly European, problem. His
 league would be a union of world states. But there can be no doubt that not
 only could the conditions for the formation of the new amphictyonic league
 only arise in Europe, but they would, in all probability, and possibly for
 innumerable centuries, have to remain there.
 Kant has left his mark on almost all thinking about the possibility of
 some future world order, from his own day to this. All the international
 institutions, from the creation of the League of Nations in 1919, of the
 United Nations in 1945, to that of the European Union between the Treaty
 of Rome in 1957 and the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009, bear some trace of the
 idea that, although we are still very far from achieving anything resembling
 a universal league of peoples, we may indeed be said to have reached the
 stage at which “a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt
 everywhere.”56 The United Nations, wrote the idiosyncratic Sir Alfred
 Zimmern, classicist and a key policymaker during World War I who
 exercised a powerful influence on its ideological formation, was “the res
publica with which it is our duty to concern ourselves” and which “extends
 to the ends of the earth.”57 It was to be, in time, the expression of Kant’s
 “cosmopolitan right.”
 What Kant’s optimistic vision of the future notably lacked, however, was
 an explanation of how his new international order was to be organized and
 governed. Only once does he suggest that the “permanent congress of
 states” would be a Europe-wide court of arbitration which would allow the
 minsters of the individual states to look upon “the whole of Europe as a
 single federated state which they accepted as an arbiter, so to speak, in their
 public disputes.”58 But what institutional form this would take he does not
 say.
 The year before the appearance of Perpetual Peace, Marie-Jean
Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, a champion of equal
 rights for women and for all peoples of all races, and an abolitionist who
 devised the world’s first state education system, looked forward into what
 he believed to be an imaginable future, when “the peoples [of the world]
 will learn that they cannot become conquerors without losing their liberty,
 that perpetual confederations are the only way to preserve their
 independence; that they should seek for security not for power.” When that
 time arrived, nations would be driven by politics and morals to “share the
 goods created by nature and industry,” and thereby finally bring to an end
 those “national hatreds,” and in that distant epoch, “institutions, better
 conceived than those projects for perpetual peace which have occupied the
 leisure time and consoled the minds of certain philosophers, will accelerate
 the progress of this fraternity of nations.”59
 Both Kant and Condorcet lived in the shadow the French Revolution.
 Kant thought that he had seen in it, despite the horrors of the Terror, proof
 of the apparent progress of the human will.60 Condorcet, who died in
 mysterious circumstances in a Jacobin cell in March 1794, despite being
 one of its most notable victims, believed it to be the culmination of “a
 revolution in the destinies of the human race.” Both recognized that the
 Revolution had changed the political landscape not only of France, but of
 the whole of Europe, if not of the entire world; that it had, in Condorcet’s
 words, embraced “the whole economy of society, to change all social
 relations, to penetrate to the smallest link of the political chain.” Both too
 believed, for very different reasons, that the French had, in effect,
succeeded in creating the world’s first truly “representative republic,” that
 the revolutionaries had been, in Kant’s words:
 [the] first to dare, in a great nation…to maintain in the people their rights of sovereignty, that
 to obey only those laws whose mode of creation, even if it has been entrusted to their
 representatives, has been legitimated by their immediate approbation, and which, should
 [those representatives] threaten their rights or interests, they may always secure their reform,
 by a regular act of [their] sovereign will. 61
 The creation of the French Republic in 1792 had done all that. Kant,
 however, insisted that Louis XVI’s decision to call the Estates General on
 May 5, 1789, so as to pass on the burden of an “embarrassment of large
 state debts” to his people had constituted a legitimate transfer of power, as a
 consequence of which the “monarch’s sovereignty wholly disappeared…
 and passed to the people.” The dissolution of the monarchy, the creation of
 the Republic, and all the revolutionary violence which followed had been a
 result of Louis’s unwarranted attempt to wage war on his own people in
 order to recover what he had freely and voluntarily contracted away. In this
 the French Revolution had, therefore, been no revolution at all, but the
 unintended consequence of Louis’s: “very serious error of judgment.” It had
 also, although this was not something Kant makes comment on, created the
 French nation, the idea of which the French would subsequently seek to
 export to the rest of Europe.62 France therefore had, in a few short years,
 created a model for the kind of state, united, democratic, and dependent
 upon a single source of shared political authority, out of which the future
 united Europe would eventually be built.
 What Kant had not foreseen, however (he died in1804), was that it
 would also be responsible for unleashing twenty-three years of warfare
 across most of Europe, as the new French Republic first fought off an
 alliance of European monarchies bent on its destruction and then, under
 Napoleon, set about uniting as much of Europe as it could conquer in order
 to transform the continent into a new French Empire. Like the Wars of
 Religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these too were
 ideological wars, and they too would create a crisis, the response to which
 would also mark the beginning of a new project to unite the peoples of the
 “great republic of Europe.” It is a project that is still unfinished. But the
 European Union as it is today is not, as it has so often been represented, the
 haphazard outcome of a sometimes desperate bid to rescue the nations of
the European continent from the consequences of the devastation inflicted
 upon them by World War II. The objectives, the aspirations, and the ideals
 which have driven its “founders” and their successors—those are the
 creation of a long historical process. This book is an attempt to tell their
 story.

Give a **long and comprehensive** summary of the above text. Ensure your summary **includes all necessary details** and explains the **main ideas and arguments** of the passage without omitting any details.