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'Europe' was not so much about a geographic place, as linked in people's minds with
Christendom. The Europe that 'meant' anything, that was seen as civilization, was Christian
Europe. There was only one real division, that being between Roman Catholicism and Eastern
Orthodoxy as a result of the Great Schism in the 11
th
Century between Rome and Constantinople.

In 1095, Pope Urban II, in his call for the first Crusade, referred to "barbarians on distant islands
seeking their food in the arctic seas like whales, speaking about peoples living in what we now
identify as the European region: Scotland, Scandinavia. In 1095, however, the inhabitants of
those areas were not all Christian and were, therefore, outside of any unifying symbolic meaning.

The Middle Ages came to a crashing end with the arrival of the Bubonic Plague the so-called
"Black Death in 1348. The Plague turned out to be among the worst pandemics in human
history, killing possibly as much as 60 percent of the European population in the course two years.
Such a catastrophic event would be bound to profoundly affect the direction of Europe and the
development of European identities. The next hundred years were marked by social, religious,
economic and political upheaval. Including the Hundred Years War.

Not all was necessarily bad from our perspective, however. The dying off of so many people, in
particular artisans and peasants, made those classes of people much more valuable, which
resulted in a raising of their standard of living, power and status. Without the Black Death, the rise
of the middle class would not have unfolded in the way that it eventually did. Certainly, the
Renaissance was the phoenix that arose from the ashes of the Middle Ages in the wake of
devastation of the 14
th
century.

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The Age of Exploration: Europeans leave Europe and start conquering others
The Protestant Reformation
The Printing Press
The Thirty Years War & Peace of Westphalia

During this era, Europeans began to assemble cultural identifications that overstepped religion.
This development was a result of a number of factors, not least of which was the beginning of the
Age of Exploration; Columbus hit the seas in 1492, shortly after the "Reconquista, when the
Spaniards drove the Moors out of Spain and were feeling expansive and celebratory about it. The
notion of Europe became transformed into an outward movement. As a side note, although
Columbus usually gets the credit for the start of the Colonial era (or the blame, depending on
one's perspective), it was actually a woman we should be pinning it on. Queen Isabella of Spain
made it happen, if we want to pin it on one person.

The ongoing restlessness of the Muslim Ottoman Turks meant that religious definitions didn't
totally go away. Most of their greatest immediate impacts were in the Balkans (southeast Europe,
beginning with the Battle of Kosovo in 1389) in largely Orthodox areas, but that doesn't mean
they didn't have the rest of Europe, or Christendom, worried.

That unifying theme of religion, however, was largely swept away by the Protestant Reformation,
which was a far more profound 'schism' in the church than the Great Schism between
Catholicism and Orthodoxy. The Reformation began in 1517, when a German monk by the name
of Martin Luther nailed a pamphlet, of sorts, on a church door, in which he roundly criticized the
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selling of indulgences (essentially, one could buy salvation or at least less time sitting in
purgatory).

Another important event during this era was the invention (in Europe the Chinese had already
come up with the idea) of the printing press in the 1400's. This development allowed for the
manufacture of mass produced text spreading ideas to people beyond the clergy and aristocracy,
including Luther's Ninety-five Theses on the Power of Indulgences.

From 1618 to 1648, Europe was gripped by a military and social conflict known as the Thirty
Years War. Mostly fought out on Germanic territory, this conflict was the culmination of the
Reformation, and was as much (or more) geo-political as religious in its motivations. It ended with
the Peace (or Treaties) of Westphalia in 1648.

The Enlightenment and Build-Up of the Age of Nationalism (18
th
century)
Secularism
Rise of the Fourth Estate (The Press)
The French Revolution

The beginning of the Age of Nationalism which was primarily a 19
th
century affair is generally
linked to the Enlightenment and the secularization of political power structures (secular = not
religious).

The 18
th
century is also the period of the rise of the "Fourth Estate, meaning the press or media;
newspapers and other forms of text-based mass media communication. t is called the "Fourth
Estate, because the press was seen as something beyond the usual social dynamic. The First
Estate referred to the clergy, the Second Estate was the nobility, and the Third Estate was
commoners. Edmund Burke, an Irish political theorist and statesman, was in the British House of
Commons one day in the late 1700's, and famously said of the press gallery, "Yonder sits the
Fourth Estate, and they are more important than them all.

The rise of mass-produced and distributed print media allowed for the development of what
Benedict Anderson calls "imagined communities, and such imagined communities are the key to
the development of the nation. According to Anderson, a nation "is imagined because the
members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them,
or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.

The French Revolution (1789) was a watershed moment in European identity formation. It was in
the making for a while, really, because of changes brought about by the beginning of
industrialization, the rise of the middle class and colonialism, all of which destabilized the old
feudal order and the reign of absolute monarchs.

The Revolution was originally about universal human rights, but because of Napoleon's (who
became the leader of France by the turn of the century) ambitions of empire, it segued (changed)
into it being about being French. That necessarily ran up against the rest of the region and made
just about everyone else in Europe hopping mad, staking out the posts of their own regional
identities.

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Napoleonic Expansion
'Others' in Our Midst
Saint-Simon and the Young Europeans
National Unifications
Colonial Expansion

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Looking at the German experience, what Napoleon's occupation of Germanic territories in the
early 19
th
century did was create 'an-'other'-in-our midst' feelings. At this time, Germans (which
was not yet the country of Germany, but a collection of dukedoms and principalities and city-
states and such), began to develop mythologies of indigenous German-ness, which were taken to
the greatest extremes over 100 years later under the Nazis.

Another factor in this us-them developing sense of national identity was the emancipation of the
Jews in Prussia in 1812, allowing them full rights of citizenship. This policy of inclusion had the
interesting effect of more conscious thought given to difference. t fudged the 'safe' boundaries
between (Christian) German and Jew, and for some people, increased awareness of and
entrenchment into cultural identity coincides with the loosening of categories marking insider from
outsider.

The Age of Nationalism was initially linked with very liberal ideals, and in what seems like a
paradox, hopes for a united Europe. An early 19
th
century political philosopher by the name of
Comte de Saint-Simon felt that a society governed by technocrats scientists and industrialists
would replace religion with rationalism and eradicate poverty and social inequality. He was also a
proponent of a unified Europe under a single, technocratic body politic that would also allow for
national independence.

Saint-Simon attracted a group of young followers known as the Saint-Simoneons, who, in turn,
laid the groundwork for the pan-European, progressive and passionately nationalist Young
European movement: Young Germany, Young Switzerland, Young France, Young Italy, Young
Poland. The Young Europeans felt that a 'United States of Europe' could only be supported by
the achievement of national unifications and independence.

The Young European movement reached its climax in the mid-1800's with the Revolutions of
1848. Young urbans (mostly students) started throwing up barricades in the name of political
democratization and liberalization, particularly in Central Europe (Austro-Hungary). The problem
was that most of Europe was populated by "peasants, who were nothing if not conservative.
Nationalism became inward-looking.

Nation building in Europe was in full swing by mid-century, marked most notably by the
Resorgimento (unification) in Italy and German unification in 1871. For Otto von Bismarck, the
engineer of German unification, nationalism and national identity were merely tools supporting
state power. He was not a 'romantic' about it like the Young Europeans had been, but he was not
above manipulating that Romanticism. He was also rather cynical about the idea of Europe for
him, the needs of 'Europe' were wholly outside the needs and wishes of Germany.

At the same time, for all Europeans, 'Europe' had become equivalent to superior civilization as a
result of interpretations of Darwinian evolutionary theory (Darwin, by the way, did not think too
highly of this form of 'cultural evolutionary' theory). For the Europeans, 'Europe' was the pinnacle
of human evolution and synonymous with progress. This self-confidence was reflected in rapid
colonialization outside Europe (empire building with the "clever use of flags, as Eddie Izzard
described it) and increased industrialization and military expansion among European nations.
These activities amounted to an arms race, which culminated in WWI.

The Second Thirty-Years War
WWI
The Interwar Years
WWII
The Cold War Division of Europe

The first half of the 20
th
century saw devastating conflict, the dramatic rise of new political
systems (communism and fascism), unprecedented cultural imperialism, violent nationalisms,
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massive economic upheaval, mass scale genocide, and the loss of two whole generations of
young men.

The start of World War is generally simplified as 'caused' by the assassination of Archduke
Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, by a Serb nationalist in Sarajevo (Bosnia
the Balkans came relatively late to the nationalism game, but when they did, they did so violently).
In reality, Ferdinand's assassination was little more than a handy excuse to get something started
that everybody had been itching to do.

The War ended in 1918, having wiped out a generation of largely German, French and British
young men in the trenches of France. Everybody looked to the Germans as the real instigators of
the conflict, and the terms of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles held them largely, if not totally
responsible, placing on them a severe policy of punitive reparations. What was left of that
generation of German men went back home to a crippled economy and general social malaise.

In that kind of situation, when everyone is hungry, downtrodden and physically and emotionally
pummeled, the climate is just right for someone to come along and say, "Hey, come on,
everybody. it's good to be German! Buck up everyone! Hitler's rise to power stems directly from
these conditions, and rested in large part on the National Socialist (Nazi) romanticization of
German-ness and Bismarck's (and Prussia's) residual ambitions of empire and military might.
One big reason (some say the reason) that Germany did not revert to such extremism after they
got trounced in the Second World War is because of the Marshall Plan, the US plan for rebuilding
Europe after the war, which poured money into Germany.

By 1945, however, with the end of the war, Europe was divided in half. Now we recognize many
different Europes: Mediterranean, West, Central, East, the Balkans, Scandinavia, Iberia. During
the Cold War, however, there were only two Europes: East, dominated by the Warsaw Pact and
the Soviet Union (who had been allied with the US and Britain against the Germans), and West,
dominated by the US and NATO.

That takes us to where we really start to look at Europe anthropologically.

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The Berlin Wall, the great physical symbol of the Cold War divided Europe, came down in 1989,
and the generation of European who came of age in that post-divide period are the so-called
"89'ers in German, die Achtundneunziger. The 1990s presented a brief period of ebullient
celebration of a united Europe, particularly among young people, and a very busy time in the
ongoing projects of the European Union.

But with the free-flowing boundaries and opened borders of the EU and EU hopefuls, came social
anxiety, too. During the first decade of the 21
st
century, nationalists in several countries went into
high gear promoting fear of the "slamization of Europe. Conversely and correspondingly, others
in Europe have grown increasingly anxious about the resurgence of extremist and violently
xenophobic nationalism.

The crisis in the Eurozone has seemed to eclipse that discourse in recent years, and the
continued experiment of the European Union is up in the air. t feels like a period of 'watchful
waiting'. The anthropology of Europe is about the mid-20
th
century era to the present and into the
future.
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