One of the biggest news stories of the past year has been the financial crisis in Europe. If European unification fizzles, it wouldn't be the first time.
But what does the current unifying force consist of? Bureaucrats and technocrats? A utilitarian ethic built around material comfort. Taxes, regulations, uniformity codes, and coercion. How inspiring!
But "inspiration" of some kind has been a big part of Europe, beginning in the Dark Ages. From Toynbee's Study of History (abridged), vol. I, page 13:
In fact the Empire fell and the Church survived just because the Church gave leadership and enlisted loyalty whereas the Empire had long failed to do either...
Thus the Church, a survival from the dying society, became the womb from which in due course the new one was born.
Some of that "leadership" was pure bureaucracy. The Catholic Church is almost an alien thing to people who grew up in the Protestant Midwest. As a young man I was on a airplane flight with a rather loud man a couple seats aft, who talked endlessly about his organizational headaches and Machiavellian office politics. He never mentioned the organization itself, but I just assumed it was a Fortune 500 corporation. When the jet landed and we started to unload I turned around to see what that obnoxious middle-aged man looked like. I was astonished to see a Catholic official of some middling rank.
One way to look at Europe is to say that it started on Christmas Day, 1210 years ago when Charlemagne was crowned as a Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III in St. Peter's basilica, on A.D. 800. The motivations of Charlemagne and the Pope are still matters of some controversy, but surely they thought they'd be more powerful working together. Using military might Charlemagne unified most of Europe. He forcibly converted the (German) Saxon heathens to Christianity. He introduced many reforms, including a new European currency, and the lower case letters that you are now reading.
His Empire didn't survive him, but his legacy was still vast. France and Germany have been the core of European civilization ever since.
A belief system and a government had given each other strength; one governed Europe's body, and the other its soul. Perhaps that's one problem for the current European experiment. In Brussels it has the bureaucracy to intrude on and micromanage the tiniest aspects of Europe's material life, but where is the belief system that can inspire the Europeans, now that Christianity has been dead since the Enlightenment of the 1700s, and Marxism fell with the Berlin Wall?
Global Warming was supposed to be that grand unifying belief system. Actually Environmentalism is the overall Faith, but without a focus it becomes vague and passive, and easy to postpone. After all, Christianity had its Nicene Creed and Crusades. Marxism had its internationalist "missionary" work, Comintern global convocations, and revolutionary eschatology. Europe needed Global Warming to extend the same emotional rhythms.
Good versus Evil, Sin and Salvation, eternity -- it's all there in the three European belief systems of Christianity, Marxism, and Global Warming. But they had something else even more important: the sense that they are humble instruments of something greater than themselves, something that puts History on their side, and makes their wishes inevitable.
Original Christianity had the Second Coming, Calvinism had Predestination, and Marxism had Historical (Dialectic) Materialism. These "...satisfied the same hunger for an assurance that the forces of the Universe are on the side of the Elect." [*] That is why the Warmists have been so insistent that the 'science is settled, the debate is over.' They need the whole world to acknowledge that they have indeed seen the Future.
And then Climategate and the Copenhagen fiasco happened. But that's for another day.
[*] RH Tawney in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, p. 129.
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