Europeans

The Europeans are a collective historical subject rather than a single character: a civilization whose influence rests on its varied national traditions, especially the contrasting temperaments of the English and French. Their history is marked by a recurring tension between the possibility of wider human loyalty and the persistence of national rivalries. The wars that ravage Europe expose both the cultural strengths that might have helped it endure and the political and psychological weaknesses that repeatedly defeat them.

Identity and Cultural Influence

In the account of the First Men, Europe stands among the oldest and most refined surviving centers of culture, set against the United States, the youngest and most self-confident of the great nations. The contrast is not simply between old and new. The United States is already reshaping human life through its products, capital, and mass media, while Europe’s importance lies in a cultural inheritance that can still temper and clarify thought. That inheritance is carried unevenly by peoples with different ideals and faults, not by a unified European character.

The English and French have a particularly consequential influence on Europe’s intellectual climate. Though sharply separated in taste and ideals, they are described as more skeptical than other Western peoples and, at their best, more capable of dispassionate yet creative intelligence. Their differences can therefore serve as a corrective to uncritical romance. But the same traits have damaging expressions. English caution can become timidity or moral cowardice; French confidence can become complacency and a failure to regard France dispassionately. The English are capable of generosity and heroism, yet also of abandoning ends they have proclaimed vital. The French, in the narrator’s account, more often fail through blindness to their own national interests. These distinctions matter because Europe’s cultural influence depends on qualities its governments and peoples do not reliably turn into sound policy.

The European War and the First Impulse Toward Unity

The European War, known at the time as the War to End War, is the first and least destructive of the world conflicts that demonstrate the First Men’s inability to govern their own nature. A tangle of motives, some honorable and some disreputable, draws the antagonists into a conflict for which both are prepared even though neither seriously intends it. Differences between France and Germany combine with the rivalry between Germany and England; stupidly brutal gestures by the German government and military command help divide the world into camps. Yet the opposing sides cannot be distinguished by any clear difference of principle. Each claims to defend civilization, and each commits acts of brutality as well as acts of heroism and unusual generosity.

As the war continues, its peoples develop a genuine, passionate desire for peace and a united world. For a time, the conflict between tribes gives rise to a loyalty that reaches beyond tribalism. But the impulse remains fragile: it lacks clear direction and the courage of conviction. The peace that follows is therefore significant less as a settled achievement than as evidence of how close the Europeans come to a higher allegiance, and how persistently national attachment limits it.

The later Anglo-French War reveals how easily that unresolved tension can turn against Europe. After a French airman goes astray and crashes in London following a peace message, the accident helps precipitate the destruction of both countries. The scale of the consequence is out of proportion to the initiating mistake. The war’s aftermath briefly produces a more practical cooperation than the peace after the European War had achieved: France and England, exhausted and unable even to sustain their hatred, work with the League of Nations to reconstruct themselves and one another, without reparations or new alliances. Their change of mood reflects not only disaster and the temporary collapse of national organization, but also the rise of pacifist and anti-nationalist forces and the League’s publication of the war’s origins, exposing both combatants to public judgment.

Unity, Fear, and Political Fracture

The destruction of France and England is also a cultural loss. Despite their faults, the two peoples had helped temper Europe’s mentality; their skeptical and creative qualities were needed in a world prone to uncritical romance. The Anglo-French War thus becomes more than a contest between neighboring states. It removes a counterweight at the moment when Europe most needs one. Its consequences might have differed: had the London accident not occurred and the war been prevented at the outset, the movement toward unity begun by England’s peace message might have gained lasting conviction. Instead, the prolonged sequence of wars contributes to the mental deterioration associated with the First Dark Age.

European efforts at political consolidation continue under the pressure of mutual distrust. After the Anglo-French War, people who think of themselves as wholehearted Europeans fear that they may suddenly succumb to patriotism and help cripple Europe again. This dread helps drive the formation of the European Confederacy: every European nation except Russia surrenders sovereignty to a common authority and pools its armaments. The declared purpose is peace, but the United States interprets the arrangement as directed against itself and withdraws from the League of Nations, while China remains in the League in hopes of using it against its rival.

The Confederacy looks cohesive from outside but is insecure within and breaks during every serious crisis. Europe becomes something like a single nation in sentiment, yet that unity grows less from common loyalty than from common fear of the United States. The Russo-German War supplies the final consolidation, with economic and sentimental causes intertwined: Europeans fear the financial conquest of Russia by the United States and see an attack on Russia as a way to strike at American power. The wars also reveal the League’s limits. Although it gains real prestige and can prevent many minor conflicts, it cannot prevent major wars when national loyalties overwhelm its authority. In the Russo-German War, opposing international blocs form around American support for Russia and Chinese support for Germany; the League is temporarily eclipsed by the division.

Destruction and Historical Legacy

After Europe’s destruction, the League again becomes a focus for those seeking a loyalty wider than the nation, but it is dominated by China and no longer represents cosmopolitanism in the same way. The organization later divides into rival American- and Chinese-dominated Leagues, each claiming universal authority. This succession of attempted unions and renewed fractures makes Europe’s history an early demonstration of the book’s central political difficulty: institutions can embody a wider human loyalty, but their existence does not dissolve the national attachments that repeatedly overpower it.

The final catastrophe is literal as well as cultural. Poison gas kills the peoples of Europe; every center of intellectual life is blotted out, and only uplands and mountains escape in the agricultural regions. The spirit of Europe survives thereafter only in fragments within the minds of Americans, Chinese, Indians, and other peoples. Its disappearance does not erase its earlier influence, but it ends Europe as an independent bearer of that inheritance. The arc is therefore both tragic and cautionary: a civilization capable of helping clarify the world’s thought repeatedly fails to convert its capacity for skepticism and cooperation into durable political unity, and the wars that expose that failure ultimately scatter its cultural legacy beyond its former home.