Magazine article New Statesman (1996)

Neighbourhood Watch: Modern Europe Is Born out of Conflict

Magazine article New Statesman (1996)

Neighbourhood Watch: Modern Europe Is Born out of Conflict

Article excerpt

Europe: the Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to the Present

Brendan Simms

Allen Lane,720pp, [pounds sterling]30

The old Cambridge Modern History, written more than a century ago, was a splendid read. The overall editor, Lord Acton, was confident that not much more history needed to be done and Cambridge refused to institute a doctoral research degree of the German type (and gave in only in the First World War, when there was a need for US dollars that otherwise would have gone to Heidelberg or Tubingen). The emphasis was confidently on the international, diplomatic and military story - there wasn't too much about peasants.

Brendan Simms is a fellow of Peterhouse, which in old Cambridge was the outstanding college for history, with Herbert Butterfield its presiding spirit, supported by still-read specialists on continental Europe, such as Denis Mack Smith. Simms is a natural successor to them and the spirit of the place has seeped into his unrepentantly old-fashioned, lively and erudite history of Europe since 1453.

The book is centrally concerned, rightly, with Germany, which Simms knows at first hand. Its great strength is that you are always reminded that European countries did not grow autonomously. Europe was fragmented and the fragments, in conflict, greatly affected each other's development.

Europe is very ambitious in scope and covers successive periods in thematic chapters - "Empires, 1453-1648", "Successions, 1649-1755", "Revolutions, 1756-1813" and on to "Partitions, 1945-1973", with a final section on "Democracies, 1974-2011". The references are prodigious, multilingual and extremely useful.

I used to have fun with Turkish students quoting an article that I regarded as the ultimate in time-wasting: "Little-known aspects of the coronation of Joseph II". I now stand corrected. The Church stopped the Holy Roman emperor Joseph II from touching the congregation for scrofula, which was alleged miraculously to disappear if a newly crowned emperor laid on hands. This was modernisation (liberalism) from below and so, once you understand the context provided by Simms, you can see that it was not such a meaningless article after all.


The popes were heroically anti-modern. Gregory XVI, in 1836, inveighed against railways and there were only two rutted and bandit-ridden roads across the Apennines in the papal states. (I also have fun with students pointing out that the last Vatican castrato survived long enough to be recorded, warbling forlornly, on one of the first gramophone discs in about 1902.) But the Habsburg rulers of Italy at that time were, by contrast, go-ahead and sensible: there was an administrative and legal liberalism at work in, for instance, Tuscany or Milan that made the Risorgimento unnecessary (and, anyway, look where that led with Mussolini).

Simms knows what he is talking about, though he is better on his home territory of the 18th century than on the 20th, where there is just too much that has to be included. Still, it is better to have a history of Europe as a whole, in this way.

You could make a case that each country is most influenced by its neighbour to the east: England by France, France by Germany, Germany by Russia (or, in the old days, Poland), in each case drawing further and further away from the Anglo-Saxon verities in which the old Cambridge historians firmly believed. Simms begins his book with a great threat from the east, the Ottoman Turks (whose own story owed much to Persia). …

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