This article is taken from the April 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
In Europe: A New History professor Roderick Beaton sets himself a towering challenge — to tell the story of an entire continent and civilisation over the course of a few hundred pages. As questions about national and cultural identity swirl, and European powers are sucked into a struggle with a newly aggressive Russia, this is a timely and worthwhile project. As for any book of this scope, a great deal has to be left out, and a few points of continuity stressed, if a coherent story is to be told. Otherwise any reader is lost in a mass of complex detail and cautious hedging.
Even so, Beaton’s pace may simply be too brisk in this case. His book starts cogently enough, opening up the question of how to define Europe, and looking closely at the fascinating history of how Europe was thought of and deployed in the Ancient Greek world. Here, Beaton, a celebrated scholar of Greek history, is on his strongest ground. The last few chapters, detailing the transition from Victorian geopolitics to modernity, represent a cogent story of a shifting balance of power on the European continent, and Beaton, who has personal stakes in both Greece and Britain, is an effective narrator here as well.
(Penguin, £30)
But between these two well-told — but rather mismatched — halves, the narrative breaks down. We sprint away from the Battle of Marathon, thundering quickly past late-antique and medieval history. The question of what defines Europe shifts from Greek liberty, to Roman imperium, to Christian faith, with too little sense of what divides and connects them.
The emergence of a broadly construed idea of “civilisation” in early modernity is never narrowed in on, and ideas such as rationalism, nationalism, democracy and freedom jostle around without being clearly connected to a sense of “Europeanness”. This leaves much of the heart of the book as a speed run of the big events and trends in European history, but without much interpretation or narrative.
The book concludes with a plea for European unity against “atavistic nationalism” and the threat of Russia. Whilst this is easy enough to agree with in broad strokes, we are brought to this idea without the support of sufficiently strong definitions — and the provision of such clarity is just what such a work should aim at providing.
At its best, Beaton’s book is an engaging and undogmatic work that readably tells the grand story of Europe. Those unfamiliar with European history in its entirety may find this elegantly summarised narrative a useful starting point, since it introduces the question entertainingly enough. But as an answer to the question, one mistake jumps out above all: this is a top-down history of Europe.
The current vogue for “social histories” and attacks on traditional “battles and dates” approaches to education can certainly be taken too far, and it is absolutely the case that the student of history will understand little if he or she fails to grasp the treaties, polities and pitched battles that defined and contextualised everyday life. But ultimately the reverse is no less true. Perhaps because of the scope of his project, Beaton reproduces the worst extremes of history as timeline, with far too little appreciation of the beliefs and psychologies that ultimately drove those events.
The most obvious omission is any discussion of the most basic and important social structure that unified Europe from late antiquity right up until the 20th century — its landed gentry. We get some sense of this class through references to feudalism and later alliance systems, but the remarkable and unique fact that Europe was unified under a single aristocratic class, a unity that survived religious wars and much of modernity, is an omission too far.
This blind spot takes on further significance when we consider Beaton’s endorsement of the contemporary European Union. Though a sharp observer of America’s ambiguous role in European unity, he seems strangely credulous in the face of a radically top-down project largely driven by small numbers of political and technocratic elites.
This new European aristocratic class, much like the ancien régime at the time of the French Revolution, is concentrated in its imperial centres, rather than embedded in the localities it governs. The even more glaring omission here is of course globalisation, a process that began in Europe, and which he describes in harrowing terms in its darkest imperial episodes, and one that increasingly complicates questions of Europe.
Last summer, a British publication entitled The New European — a dissident pro-Remain voice in our media landscape — changed its name to The New World. This slippage is an example of precisely the problem with questions of European unity and identity today. Are supporters of the EU in favour of a distinctive European civilisational identity, or are they in favour of a borderless cosmopolitanism? The two are in clear, if implicit, tension.
This problem is not one the book manages to untangle. One can read the history of Europe, from “Plato to NATO”, as the history of tragic divisions and bloodshed caused by disunity, or as the outworking of heterogeneous genius produced by the competition amongst a plurality of cultures. One can readily make a compelling case for either, but Beaton struggles to do so, at times speaking of European unity as a deferred dream, at times seeming to sympathise with the pluralism of such civilisations as Ancient Greece, yet never exploring the two propositions in depth.
The paradoxical reality — that Europe was and is a single civilisation defined and enlivened by its internal pluralism — is implied in the story he tells, but never explicitly set out. It is an idea reflected in the EU motto in varietate concordia, but not consistently pursued by the EU itself. The fact that the EU is seeking to subject Europe’s diverse cultures to a single economic and legal zone, rather than collectively defending their particularity, seems precisely at odds with the Renaissance idea of concordia discors that the motto echoes.
The opposition of nationalism and Europeanism that he presents at the end of his narrative feels like a historian simplifying a complex historical story to suit contemporary prejudice. It also puts Beaton at odds with a fascinating provocation presented in Steve Davies’s The Great Realignment: Why the New Right is Here to Stay, in which he suggests that as national populism rises on the Continent, it will come to define the EU itself as a protectionist, “European nationalist” bloc.
In the coming decades, Europeans will likely be forced to work more closely together for national defence, to police borders and survive in an increasingly ruthless global marketplace. In doing so, old ideas — nationalism, Christendom, renaissance humanism, socialism — will again become live political questions. Greater European unity may well be the future, but I suspect nobody knows where it will end, or what it will look like.
