Nothing is inevitable

Europe’s ‘proud empire’ is entering a cul de sac of history

By Andrew Roberts

Nothing is inevitable. It was the first truth I was taught as a Cambridge undergraduate in the 1980s, and it has been italicised and underlined for me by everything I have learnt since. (I even use spellcheck to excise the word “inevitable” from my books, lest it’s crept in at a lazy moment.) The whole of human history is testament to the fact that vast sections of mankind can seem to be progressing towards what looks like an established goal, only to get sidetracked into cul-de-sacs, sometimes for decades, occasionally for centuries. So why do we still assume that an eventual return to any significant economic growth in the European Union is inevitable?

The news that Greece’s economy shrank by 7 per cent last quarter, and that for all his valiant efforts even George Osborne, the UK chancellor has been slapped with a downgrading threat by Moody’s, ought to focus us upon the thoughts of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci. For it was the leading thinkers of the Whig and Marxist historical determinist school who infected mankind with the concept that we were “progressing” somewhere, moving towards a fixed, positive future point. In economics, that idea is encapsulated in the assumption of economic growth as a kind of manifest destiny, almost the birthright of the species. All too often we see growth as something to be taken for granted as a natural part of the human condition; the rule rather than the exception. If Thomas Macaulay, Friedrich Engels and the other historical determinists had been right, and mankind was on a train track towards either the inevitability of universal liberty or a workers’ paradise, would we have wound up with a 20th century as scourged as it was?

The past two-thirds of a century have been atypical for the globe, and peculiarly conducive for growth. Never before had there been so prolonged a period when no two great powers went to war, if one counts Korea as a UN operation and discounts the Indochinese border incidents of the 1960s and 1970s. America was a powerhouse of innovation and leadership, in competition with a resurgent, confident Japan. Exchange rates went largely unmassaged. China was quiescent and unable to price European economies out of raw materials. Food and energy were cheap by historical standards. Trade and markets were generally freer (in the west) than ever before. Populations were rising, but controllably so. Interest rates encouraged lending, and competition between and within European countries was producing what Adam Smith had promised it would.

Today we still have Great Power peace – the Iraq and Afghan wars were small by any historical standards, and only rate about 20th in the list of the bloodiest postwar conflicts – but none of those other prerequisites for growth still exist in the same form. So why do politicians, chief executives, editors and other decision-makers still take it for granted that the holy grail of growth is there to be grasped? Why are we still in the grip of this irrational Whiggish optimism?

Isn’t it more likely that we have simply entered one of history’s classic culs de sacs, like the Ottoman Empire did between 1683 and 1923 (they had a Greek problem too), or the Holy Roman Empire did in the 17th century, or the Spanish empire in the 17th and 18th centuries, or the Austro-Hungarian empire throughout its short life? They all had anaemic growth rates, often lasting decades, as did that other failed empire, the USSR, for much of its existence. Even the mighty Roman empire – and no one equates today’s confederation based in Brussels with that – had a period of nearly 250 years in which it stopped growing both territorially and economically, but merely trod water. As the hymnal reminds us: “Earth’s proud empires pass away”, but if there is no obvious external threat, the gap between rising and falling can be a long one.

What each of those political organisms, and plenty of others, saw when living through their non-growth stages – and it’s debatable whether the Dark Ages millennium between the fall of Rome in 410AD and the 15th century Renaissance might also be added to the list – was a dearth of leadership and an evaporation of any true raison d'être beyond mere survival. None of the Ottoman sultans were up to reviving the attack on Vienna after 1683; the Holy Roman Empire lost all its zest after Charles V; Bourbon Spain was a backwater; Franz Josef’s Austria was romantic but ramshackle. Those shades hovering over Herman Van Rompuy and Manuel Barroso are the shades of history.

Yet it took Napoleon to put an end to the Holy Roman Empire and (temporarily) Bourbon Spain and the Great War to extinguish the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, and thankfully nothing so cataclysmic is on the horizon for Europe. Instead Presidents Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy are hubristically already attempting to use the present crisis to deepen and strengthen the EU’s powers over the member states. Yet what they have yet to provide is any intellectual grounding, beyond blind optimism, for the idea that future EU growth is likely, except perhaps as a piggybacking on future Chinese, American, Indian and Brazilian growth. Optimism is written into the DNA of the United States, it can be read in the second sentence of their Declaration of Independence and they are already showing signs of being impatient with this downturn. The Chinese have waited nearly seven centuries for this moment in the sun, and are not about to pass it up. Neither country’s long-term growth is inevitable, but the drive isn’t lacking.

By contrast the EU is giving off the strong historical whiff of an empire plateauing out into long years of relative stagnation, but with no external threat thanks to the west’s victory in the cold war a generation ago. Birth rates, defence expenditures, bond prices, welfare spending versus wealth creation; everything that historians look to in order to gauge the health of empires suggests that Europe’s fire has gone out.