Simon Jenkins - A Short History of Europe: From Pericles to Putin

The cliffs of Cape St Vincent stand high and wild on the Portuguese coast, forming the south-west tip of Europe. Here we can watch the sun sink at dusk into the Atlantic, where the earliest Europeans believed they had reached the end of the world. Each night they thought they were seeing their source of heat and light extinguished by the ocean, to be reborn the following morning. I know of nowhere more conducive to such myths. Beyond these barren cliffs the viewer sees nothing but an eternity of sea. Behind is a land mass over which have rolled waves of tempestuous history.

Europe is primarily a modest peninsula off the north-west corner of Asia. It extends from the Portuguese coast north to the Arctic, south to the Mediterranean and east to the Caucasus and Ural mountains, where a rough metal sign by a road marks an arbitrary boundary. This continent has no deserts and just one notable mountain range, the Alps. Mostly it is fertile alluvial plain under a temperate sky, home to 750 million people, or more than twice the population of the USA.

Europe has no claim to pre-eminence among the worlds agglomerations of peoples. Others can rival it in size, civilization and prosperity. Its emergence into imperial dominance towards the end of the second millennium was spectacular and short lived. But Europes diversity and military supremacy, its dynamism and economic energy, its scientific prowess and cultural creativity give it a special place in human history. Even today, in a period of relative decline, it remains a magnet to refugees, migrants, scholars and travellers from across the world.

The word Europe emerged in the sixth century BC as referring to the mainland north of Greece. It has never had agreed borders. At first it was synonymous with the Roman empire and then with Christendom, both of which extended beyond the limits of present-day Europe to embrace large tracts of Asia and Africa. The eastern boundary has never been fixed but is generally accepted as the Urals, the Black Sea and the Caucasus mountains. This includes European Russia but excludes Turkey east of the Bosphorus as well as Georgia.

Any short history of this continent is essentially about its politics, the struggle of people for power over land. Hobbes declared that humans are born to perpetual conflict. Whether that conflict need be violent remains an open question, but Europes story starts with those who were successful in battle, with the rulers rather than those they ruled. This is a narrative of power in a continent whose story, at least until recently, has been dominated by the practice of war, and therefore by the processes by which wars are prepared and concluded. Even today, Europeans seem unable to find a constitutional formula for living at peace with each other. They argue incessantly over what is meant by Europe.

I am aware that history is the home to controversy. Some historians will regard a political approach to Europes story as partial, seeing it as shutting out those who were victims of power, variously the poor, the enslaved, women, immigrants and outsiders. They all have their histories, as valid as mine. So too would foreigners who lived under Europes imperial yoke see Europe in a different light. I can only repeat that this book is about the wielding and distribution of power in the narrative of one continent. It must stand as the beginning of all other narratives.

Mine is a conventional history. I have divided Europes story into periods. Most broadly they are the classical world, the Middle Ages, the growth of states, and the modern era. The first embraces Greece and Rome. The second covers the triumph of Christendom, first around the Mediterranean and then over northern Europe, coupled with the rise of the Holy Roman Empire and the coming of Islam to the Mediterranean basin. The third period sees the rise of nations, the wars of religion and succession, and the ideological revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I end with the cataclysms of the past century, and the reconstruction of the continent we know today.