Morning Must-Read: Harold James: In Peripheral Europe, the Past Is Not Dead: It Is Not Even Past

Harold James: Europe’s fringes appear determined to escape into the past:

Europe’s western and eastern fringes obsess about dates that recall their struggles with the core: 1914, 1815, 1709, 1707, 1704, and 1612, among others. By contrast, the European core is obsessed with transcending history, with working out institutional mechanisms for overcoming the conflicts that scarred Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. The European integration project is a sort of liberation from the pressures and constraints of the past…. Is the European center currently too naive, or too idealistic? Is it really possible to escape from history? Or, on the contrary, is there something odd in the way that the European fringes obsessively resort to historical milestones?…. De Gaulle and Churchill knew plenty about war, and they wanted to transcend the blood-soaked legacy of Poltava, Blenheim, and Waterloo. They viewed history as offering concrete lessons about the necessity of escaping from the past. Today, Europe’s fringes, by contrast, appear determined to escape into it.