Table Of ContentFormations of European Modernity
Formations of European
Modernity
A Historical and Political Sociology of
Europe
Gerard Delanty
University of Sussex, UK
© Gerard Delanty 2013
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Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements ix
Introduction: A Theoretical Framework 1
Part I Sources of the European Heritage 31
1 The European Inter-Civilizational Constellation 33
2 The Greco-Roman and Judaic Legacies 50
3 Christianity in the Making of Europe 67
4 Between East and West: The Byzantine Legacy and Russia 83
5 The Islamic World and Islam in Europe 97
Part II The Emergence of Modernity 111
6 The Renaissance and the Rise of the West Revisited 113
7 Unity and Divisions in Early Modern European History: 130
The Emergence of a Westernized Europe
8 The Enlightenment and European Modernity: 147
The Rise of the Idea of Europe
9 The Rise of the Nation-State and the Allure of Empire: 169
Between Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism
10 The Historical Regions of Europe: Civilizational 195
Backgrounds and Multiple Routes to Modernity
11 Europe in the Short Twentieth Century: 215
Conflicting Projects of Modernity
Part III The Present and its Discontents 243
12 Europe since 1989: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism and 245
Globalization
13 Age of Austerity: Contradictions of Capitalism and 273
Democracy
14 The European Heritage as a Conflict of Interpretations 287
vii
viii Contents
Conclusion: Europe – A Defence 302
Notes 307
Bibliography 311
Index 332
Map of Europe 338
Preface and Acknowledgements
This book emerged out of an attempt to write a new edition of my
earlier book, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality(1995). The relative
success of the book, which was translated into seven languages and
widely cited, and the need to take account of significant developments
within Europe and the wider world that occurred since the early 1990s
seem to make a compelling case for a new edition. However, this soon
became an impossible task as the direction of my own work had
changed and the considerable amount of scholarship over the past two
decades or so presented a challenge to some of the conceptual founda-
tions of the book, which were primarily driven by a critique of the
instrumentalization of history. So it was not simply a case of updating
and revising an older work in light of changing times and new research.
The result is an entirely new and longer book that offers a more com-
prehensive perspective on the course of European history and society
than one confined to a critical history of the idea of Europe. In a more
specific sense it seeks to answer the question: what is the fundamental
structure of Europe? In more normative terms, I pose the questions,
what are the limits and possibility of the idea of Europe in the present
day?; or, how should we evaluate the European heritage today?
The following, in brief, is where I have felt it is necessary to offer a
new interpretation on the question of Europe and its history.
First, it is now essential to look at Europe in both a historical and
contemporary perspective from a global angle and to see it as one
among many world historical regions. My earlier book, while certainly
considering the global context in the historical analysis, was primarily
focused on the internal dynamics of European integration as far as the
present day was concerned. In this book the global perspective is more
strongly emphasized both in historical and contemporary context and
a greater place is given to the possibility of cosmopolitanism. In doing
so, it builds on what is now a very considerable body of literature in
global history that puts in new perspective the rise of the West and the
relation of Europe to the so-called non-western world, a theme I
explored in several publications and in particular concerning the rela-
tion between Europe and Asia. However, recourse to the global context
– which needs to be more than a northern hemisphere perspective –
alone is inadequate. The theoretical challenge is to combine a
ix
x Preface and Acknowledgements
consideration of the global context with internal processes of develop-
ment, since without such a macro-sociological account it is not poss-
ible to explain how long-term structures are formed: endogenous
factors alone rarely account for societal or cultural formations, but
neither do purely external accounts.
Second, following from the previous point, I am less inclined to
emphasize the over-riding importance of the transnationalization of
the nation-state by the EU and the coming of a new post-national
community within Europe. Although there is no doubt that the
Europeanization of the nation-state has been one of the most impor-
tant developments of the past five decades, it cannot be regarded as the
central focus for research on Europe, which is now in the throes of a
crisis that calls into question some of the most important assumptions
of the post-Second World War project of European integration. From a
critical and normative perspective, one of the most important contri-
butions of the project of European integration has been in the sphere
of rights. This has tended to neglect the question of social justice and
the problem of solidarity. The present work places a stronger emphasis
on the social question in the analysis of European transformation and
the need to take full account of not only the transformation of the
state, but also of major economic change in the nature of capitalism, all
of which have implications for democracy, social justice and solidarity.
Third, I am more sceptical today than I was in Inventing Europeof a
constructionist approach that primarily seeks to show how notions of
identity, Europe, nations etc are invented discourses; this includes the
argument I made in that earlier work that Europe has always been pro-
duced out of a relation of hostility to the East and that without an
external other the self had no identity. Such a position is useful for the
critical purpose of unmasking the ‘Grand Narratives’ of history, but
once this is done, and it has been done extensively, there are other and
more important objectives, which cannot be easily achieved by
recourse to what are fairly simplistic arguments and often polemical
positions. How to take account of a more complex set of considera-
tions, which suggest that Europe is not a single entity, has been one of
the challenges in the writing of this book.
Moreover, it seems to me, that the target of a critical approach must
now not only be the older Eurocentric conceptions of the European
heritage, but questionable claims made in the name of the critique of
Eurocentrism as well as the arrival of pernicious interpretations of
history, such as the clash of civilization thesis. So a corrective measure
is needed not only against the illusions that the older approaches pro-
Preface and Acknowledgements xi
duced, where these are still influential, but also the self-serving procla-
mations of relativism or of western triumphalism.
Fourth, my work over the past two decades has become more firmly
embedded in two bodies of theoretical literature, namely the social
theory of modernity and cosmopolitanism, which inevitably led to a
shift in emphasis. This book, as is suggested by the title, postulates the
centrality of modernity as the context in which to understand the
making of Europe and for making sense of its unity and diversity. As is
much discussed in recent and extensive literature, modernity is now
conceived as historically variable and is not specific to Europe, which
represents only one variant. This serves not only as a useful framework
in which to address global questions, but also as a way to understand
the internal processes and dynamics that led to the formation of
Europe as a structural reality and not only as a discourse or idea.
Moreover, it also suggests a way out of the impasse of constructionist
approaches that confine the analysis to identity and cultural construc-
tions and makes for a firmer macro-analysis of long-term change and
continuity. An analysis that is confined to the level of an account of
the idea of Europe will provide only a limited perspective. The cos-
mopolitan perspective, as developed in my book The Cosmopolitan
Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory (2009), is also strongly
present in this book as a critical and normative position that comple-
ments the perspective on modernity.
Twenty years ago political scientists and legal scholars dominated
the study of Europe, but today the social sciences have a good deal
more to offer to the study of Europe as a world historical region. The
present work is primarily a contribution to the historical and political
sociology of Europe. The macro-sociological perspective it offers is
guided by the critical theory framework to provide a reconstruction of
historical structures of consciousness and societal formations. The aim
of such a ‘critique’ is to render intelligible that which is opaque in
order to reveal alternative readings of the social world and the possibil-
ities inherent in the present. Such a work is obviously extensively
based on the work of numerous historians. Historians are concerned
largely with the particular and are sceptical of accounting for phenom-
ena by reference to broader constructions. Where they offer wider
interpretations they do so for the non-specialized reader and rely on
the narrative structure for a unity that is otherwise not possible. The
sociological approach I have adopted seeks to place historical phenom-
ena in wider frameworks of analysis without necessarily relying on the
form of a narrative. This is perhaps to do less justice to approaches in
