In a famous passage in a speech to the House of Commons in 1922, Winston Churchill characterized the aftermath of the Great War:

Great Empires have been overturned.  The whole map of Europe has been changed.  The position of countries has been violently altered.  The modes of thought of men, the whole outlook on affairs, the grouping of parties, all have encountered violent and tremendous changes in the deluge of the world; but as the deluge of the waters subsides and the waters fall short, we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again.

Churchill's purpose was to call attention to what he saw as the unique persistence of the antagonism between Catholic and Protestant in Northern Ireland, which had been going on since the original colonization of Ulster by Englishmen and Scots in the seventeenth century.  As Churchill himself would have been fully aware, a similar metaphor would have been apt to describe the parallel emergence in Central and Eastern Europe of many historical local antagonisms, given new scope by the collapse of the Hohenzollern, Hapsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman Empires.  And, as colonial secretary, he had been dealing in the Middle East with conflicts among peoples to whom reference to Biblical times, to the Arab Conquests, or to the Crusades were perfectly natural, and in no sense mere antiquities.  Fermanagh and Tyrone were not exceptions--they were typical.  Human history is like that.

Churchill's powerful metaphor has thus renewed itself in my mind as we have witnessed in the last few years the collapse of the Soviet hold over Eastern Europe, and may be about to witness the collapse of the Soviet successor to the empire of the Romanovs.  For the young it is all very strange; to those whose memories go back beyond 1939 it is all very familiar.  It may be more familiar to Europeans than to Americans.  Americans have tended to see the collapse of Soviet power and the threat to the unity of the Soviet Empire in terms of a victory of free-market economics and liberal democracy over collectivist economics and single-party rule.  Europeans find the demonstration of national rivalries both within the Soviet Union itself and along its Western periphery as a dominant factor in the situation.  In this respect Americans risk renewing the disillusion that followed from accepting Woodrow Wilson's belief that Europeans could be taught to live in pleasant harmony.  Wisdom consists in facing reality.

Europe's history has been shaped very largely by its geographical position as a promontory of the old world landmass.  Its population reflects movements of peoples, mostly from east to west, over the centuries.  They were encouraged by climatic changes and demographic pressure, and were from time to time obstructed or diverted by political and military power, as with Rome.  There have also been some movements in the reverse direction--notably the eastward thrust of German colonization, warlike or peaceful, from the high Middle Ages to the eighteenth-century settlement of the "Volga Germans," now in the process of repatriation to a country with whom only the slenderest ties remain.  There were also the north-south movements of the Scandinavian peoples, largely by sea, but sometimes down the Russian river systems.  A Frenchified element among them--the Normans--carried their conquests further into the Mediterranean world.  Finally, and of particular relevance today, there was the northward thrust of Moslem peoples--Arabs conquering the Iberian peninsula and narrowly failing to establish themselves north of the Pyrenees; and later, the Turkish push into the Balkans and parts of Central Europe, establishing an empire of long duration.

Since the conditions for settlement and the ability of existing populations to fight off invaders were very unequally distributed, the ethnic and linguistic map is inevitably a checkered one with many unexpected anomalies.  The primal legacy was indeed linguistic; more than any other factor it is language that keeps Europe divided.  By the Middle Ages, the main linguistic groups of modern Europe were already perceptible: a Celtic group confined to the northwestern periphery and in retreat; a Latin or Romance bloc extending from the Atlantic to the Rhine Valley and into the Italian and Spanish peninsulas, with an isolated offshoot in Romania; a Germanic-Scandinavian group occupying most of central Europe; a Slavic group including all the lands to the east of the Germans, with its offshoot in the Balkan peninsula where it had to contend, as it still does, with Greek and Albanian.

These broad divisions, each of which in modern times has given rise to specific languages, have within them embedded islets of totally different speech families--Basque, Magyar, Finnish, and the languages of the Baltic peasant peoples.  English itself is hard to classify, since it is a unique amalgam of Germanic and Romance roots.  (Perhaps the English--and Americans--are to be forgiven for their belief that if you have English you do not need any other language.)

By the later Middle Ages, some of the centers of political power fashioned by an interplay of dynastic and tribal considerations have made their appearance; England, France, the German Holy Roman Empire (something less than a state and with no natural capital), Castille, Poland, Bohemia, Muscovy are visible.  In some cases geography gives protection to a territorial entity--Bohemia, for example, and what became Spain; but in the great plains stretching across Northern Europe from the Elbe to the Urals, no such protection exists.  The Poles have been part of European history from very early times, but not continuously in the same location.  If one looks at the maps that illustrate Adam Zamoiski's admirable history, The Polish Way, one can see the shift in boundaries through successive centuries, with the weight of the kingdom in the early Middle Ages lying well to the west of what later became the nucleus of the Polish state.  In 1466, it possessed not only a broad outlet to the Baltic but stretched far to the west of Poznan; in the south the principality of Moldavia brought it to the shores of the Black Sea.  The Polish-Lithuanian kingdom that was the victim of the eighteenth-century partitions was a country of vast extent.  When Poland regained its independence after the 1914-18 war, it failed to recover everything; and after World War II, Stalin deprived it of the territories it had recovered from Russia and compensated it with territories seized from Germany, thereby shifting it bodily to the west.  The result is that the map of Poland today looks more like that of the earliest Poland than that of Poland as it was known between the wars or prior to the partitions.

The shifting nature of the political map of Europe means that many nationalities may not be content merely with the self-determination which has been recovered in Eastern and Central Europe as a result of the Russian retreat.  Several can look back at a history of great power status, by the standards of the time in question.  Visiting the newly established museum of Czech history in the Hradschin in Prague, for example, one must come to the conclusion that Czech youths, for whom the display is obviously intended, are being deliberately given a rather expansive idea of the Czech past.

Language, though a primary factor in Europe's divisions, is not the only one.  The second set of fault lines is that which has been drawn by religious differences which sometimes coincide with the linguistic ones and sometimes do not.  The first great religious divide is that between the Eastern and Western churches: broadly speaking, between those peoples who received their Christianity from Rome directly or through Celtic or German intermediaries and those in the East and Southeast to whom it came through Constantinople (Byzantium).  This religious divide was enhanced by the question of the script in which the various languages came to be written.  Slavs within the Eastern Orthodox fold use the Cyrillic script in which Russian is written; Slavs who became Catholics (Poles for instance) use the Latin script.  The second fault line is that within Western Christendom itself--that drawn by the Protestant Reformation.

In both cases the original conversion was normally decisive.  But political conquests led to attempts by the conquerors to force their own religious adherence onto the conquered.  The current struggle in the Soviet Ukraine between the Orthodox church and the Uniates who accept papal authority reflects the seventeenth-century incorporation of the Western Ukraine into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.  Again, if the Czechs had not been defeated by the Hapsburg monarchy, Bohemia and Moravia might have become part of Protestant Europe.  Now that past is still alive.  While the Catholic church has played an important role in the recent revival of Czech nationhood, there is some degree of suspicion of clerical domination which may go back to the Hussite dissent of the fifteenth century.  The feeling is clearly very different from that in Slovakia with its quite different past.  And this helps to explain the difficulties felt in trying to find a proper formula for a united "Czechoslovakia."  But one must not oversimplify.  In Romania we have a religious-linguistic anomaly where a country of Latin speech is nevertheless Orthodox in religion.  In Transylvania, the Romanians confront the formally dominant Magyars, both Catholic and Protestant, as well as other minorities.

The duration and completeness of change resulting from war have varied.  The Reconquista (completed only at the end of the fifteenth century) formally ended the presence of Islam in Spain; but when the Turks retreated from the Balkans they left sizable Moslem elements.  In Western Europe the "wars of religion" of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gave Catholicism the upper hand in France, but divided Germany between Catholic and Protestant states--a division that has had to be taken into account in plotting the course of German unification.  Protestant Anglo-Saxons in the last century believed that Protestantism was particularly suited to courageous sea-going mercantile peoples.  It was the theme of the American historian John Lothrop Motley's many volumes on the Dutch struggle for independence from Spain.  Yet few would now hold that such affinities were decisive.  Protestantism's southward advance was limited by the military considerations arising from the geographical configuration of the Low Countries.  The political boundary between modern Holland and modern Belgium follows neither the linguistic nor the religious divide.

As with language so with religion: England is the odd man out.  The Anglican settlement has been seen as both Catholic and Protestant, and what was essentially a state church could not expect adherents on the Continent.  Its destiny has proved to be an extra-European one.  On the whole, despite talk of reunion, Protestantism has had the upper hand and has many vehicles outside the established church.  It is therefore not curious that the "Carolingian" streak among the founders of the European Community--the Catholic statesmen, Adenauer, Schuman, and de Gasperi--never appealed to the British.

Besides language and religion, three other elements have to be taken into account in trying to unravel the complexities of Europe's internal conflicts: class, commerce, and ideology.  Economic development has always been at an uneven pace, and this has produced startlingly different patterns of class relationships.  While in Western Europe feudalism and serfdom were on the decline from the late Middle Ages, in Eastern Europe things went the other way.  In Poland and Russia serfdom became increasingly ingrained in the early Modern period, when Eastern Europe functioned as a granary and purveyor of raw materials to nascent Western industrialism.  Modern industrial capitalism profited by the freer labor market to secure a head start in the West, which still endures.

Conquest and patterns of settlement created an overlap between national and class divisions.  In the late Czarist Empire, the western provinces acquired in the partitions of Poland were peopled by a Polish nobility ruling over a Russian, Byelorussian, and Ukrainian peasantry.  In Galicia, a Polish landed class ruled over a Ukrainian peasantry; when the Poles rebelled in 1848-49, their Hapsburg monarchs incited their peasantry to attack them.  German penetration into the Baltics gave rise to a landowning class, the "Baltic Barons," who supplied many important figures in the military and civil services of the Russian czars, right down to the Revolution of 1917.  Similar alignments of class and national divisions could be found in the lands once belonging to the Hungarian Crown; and at the other end of Europe in what is now the Irish Republic, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the entrenchment of the "ascendancy," a Protestant landlord class ruling over an indigenous Catholic peasantry.

Commerce (and later mining and heavy industry) also made it hard to divide Europe between homogeneous nation-states.  It would seem to be an almost universal rule that ports and other trading centers attract groups of foreign residents.  This was true even of Western Europe--one thinks of the Hanseatic merchants in late medieval London or of the Jews of Amsterdam.  But what was occasional and of modest size in Western Europe--and therefore rarely a source of political complications--was almost the rule in the East.  In Eastern Europe the towns rarely recruited themselves wholly or even predominantly from the neighboring countryside.  If it was a local center of administration, a town would largely be inhabited by members of the ruling nationality--Russians in the Czarist Empire, Germans in much of the Hapsburg Empire.  If it was a center of commerce, there would be Germans or Jews or others alien in language or even religion from the native substratum.

Frederick Jackson Turner succeeded in making the moving frontier so emblematic of American history that it is all too tempting to believe that, while North America was being settled, Europe's population was fixed in place.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Always the movement of people went on--some attracted by prospects of trade or employment; others by the deliberate fruit of political planning, like Bismarck's settlement of German farmers in the once (and now again) Polish province of Poznan.  Wars accelerated movements and produced new ones such as those which accompanied the ebb and flow of battle on the eastern front in World War I, or the subsequent flight of Russians from revolution and civil war.  Indeed, until quite recently the moving frontier of the United States might best be seen as an overspill of movements within Europe itself.

World War II saw some drastic tidying up of the European map.  Hitler eliminated the vast majority of Europe's Jews and most of the rest found refuge thereafter in Israel or the United States.  The victorious Allies brought about further movements--Poles moving west in front of the Russians and themselves expelling the Germans from Pomerania, Poznan, and Silesia; the Russians eliminating Germans from East Prussia, the Czechs expelling Sudeten Germans.  The acceptance of the new frontiers, at least for the time being, did not halt the process.  Persecution and discrimination in the Soviet Union, violence and counter-violence in the Balkans have all tended to make people conclude they would feel easier among their own kith and kin, however many generations they have been separated from them.  It has, however, not been a question of leaving lands or cities vacant.  We must assume that when the Russians call what used to be the city of Konigsberg "Kaliningrad" they have in fact replaced East Prussians with Russians.  We know that while the Germans no longer figure in the Baltic states and while Danzig--a historic German city--is now the Polish city of Gdansk, Russians have been settled in large numbers in Latvia and to a lesser extent in the other Baltic states.  Over the years, the names of many other cities have been changed to reflect the presence of new political rulers--Pressburg is now Bratislava, Laibach is Lublijana, Lemberg is Lwow (or, as the Ukrainians would prefer, Lviv).

We should not make too much of these things, but we should not forget them either.  Peoples do forget them.  A striking example of this has been the reaction to the claims for independence of the three Baltic states.  In looking at the issues raised, how many outsiders have reflected on the fact that Estonia and Latvia had had no independent statehood at any time in the past except for the two decades previous to their annexation by Stalin in 1940?  And while Lithuania had an historic past, its most important period had been as part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, not on its own.  In the inter-war period it was a smaller Lithuania, and Vilnius, now claimed as its capital, had been successfully annexed by Poland.  Kaunas (Kovno), its capital between the wars, and Vilnius (Vilna) were in the past very largely Jewish cities and have certainly played a more important role in Jewish culture than in the essentially peasant culture of Lithuania.

Commerce has done more than dictate the location of cities and who inhabits them.  It also carves out routes by which ideas migrate.  For most of Europe's history, trade routes followed either the coastlines or the river valleys.  Railways also followed the river systems.  The links thus forged may be different from those imposed by the politically dominant powers of a particular time.  The possibilities of this approach have been fully exploited in the remarkable book, The Danube, by Claudio Magris.  Written originally in Italian by a professor at the University of Trieste whose academic subject is German literature, the work is itself symbolic.  For Trieste was the outlet to the sea for the Hapsburg Empire in which the Danube provided a vital thread.  Now as the northern parts of Yugoslavia--Slovenia and Croatia--feel ideologically and economically drawn again towards Central Europe and away from their links with Serbia, this past once more becomes relevant.  Nor must one forget that the Dalmatian coast has memories and memorials of a Venetian as well as Roman past.  Whose sea is the Adriatic?  Can it be a bond between the peoples of its littoral?  Even such considerations do not complete the picture of unsolved national problems now exploding in the Balkans as totalitarian governments fall--Albanians caught between Serbs and Greeks; the ultimate fate of the Macedonians.  No map is final.

One cannot omit the different degrees to which modern secular ideologies have supplanted or combined with religious or national adherence.  Most European ideologies, including democracy and socialism, can be traced to the impact of the French Revolution.  From its legacy many different lessons could be drawn.  In many countries, the national and socialistic elements came to the fore; in one sense the Russian Revolution did no more than carry the message to its extreme.  But communism's theoretical universalism was alien to the feelings of the rest of Europe.  The true inheritors of 1789 were the national socialists and fascists who, in the Europe of the 1930s, could be found under various local guises from the Iberian peninsula in the West to Romania in the East, with Germany and Italy as alternative models.  Britain yet again appears as an exception--being very little affected by the Continent's ideological struggles and carrying on a commitment to its own form of bourgeois democracy.  And thus there is yet another reason why in Britain the rhetoric of a united Western Europe has had less appeal than among its neighbors.

Soviet power in Eastern and part of Central Europe, the sudden collapse of which marks the beginning of the present phase in the history of the Continent, struck ideological roots in an uneven fashion, as the course of events subsequent to the withdrawal of that power have made plain.  As the heady months of 1989 recede we can see how premature was the assumption that communism was in total retreat and that any form of collectivist economic and social policies had no future.  Those peoples who had always been part of or open to the West--Poles, Czechs, East Germans, Hungarians--have tried to resume their impeded march towards democracy.  Even in these countries, the mental wrench of dispensing with an all-powerful state apparatus is proving almost as much of an obstacle as that of finding and holding a new place in the world economy.  In Romania and in the Balkans, it is not even clear that the attempt is being made--Slovenia and Croatia are the exceptions that prove the rule.  As for the Soviet Union itself, one needed to be a Western innocent to believe that what Mikhail Gorbachev meant by perestroika was the abandonment of the communist core of his beliefs.

For all these reasons, the talk of a "common European home" must be looked at with some degree of skepticism; far more immediate are the dangers stemming from the freedom of the states that have rediscovered their independence to pursue ancestral claims and ancestral hatred.  It is of course difficult from case to case to be certain how seriously to take a particular danger.  Clearly rhetoric may sometimes be adopted for purely domestic purposes.  For instance, the revival of the anti-Semitism of earlier periods in Poland and Romania might lead one to believe that this must be so.  There can be no material significance in anti-semitism in a country like Poland with hardly any Jews, or Romania with only an insignificant minority.

Western Europeans should not be quick to criticize their Eastern neighbors.  They are also prone to allow ideological rhetoric to substitute for concrete achievement.  I have heard a Belgian cabinet minister proclaim that a "United States of Europe" is a must, while dismissing the idea that the existence of nine different languages among the present twelve members of the Community could present any problem--and this was the representative of a country which has had successive governmental and even constitutional crises because of its inability to cope with a mere two languages.  While Corsica is in a state of latent insurrections, while Northern Italy rebels against the diversion of its productive wealth to the corrupt economic and social fiefdoms of Rome and the South, is there not a case for saying that existing national unities are already being stretched and that it is unwise to believe that those who cannot manage these more local problems will do better at a higher level?

It is true that the American Founding Fathers brought it off--but they had the embryo of a nation to bring to birth.  Europe is not a nation.  The dreary steeples are still there.  Can Americans then afford to say that all this has no meaning or lesson for them?  In principle there is no reason to believe that the reasons for the cohesion of peoples or their rivalries are peculiar to any one continent.  Indeed, if one were looking for an illustration of the capacity of language and religion to make for a national group's survival, francophone Canada would provide an obvious example--the more striking in that its sense of identity has persisted into a period of partial secularization.  So far the United States itself offers no true parallel.  But if one's concern is with the American national interest, I would advise looking carefully at the language statistics of the Southwest.  European experience tends to make one skeptical about the duration of treaty settlements--is Guadalupe Hidalgo a necessary exception to the general rule?

Lord Beloff is an emeritus professor at the University of Oxford.  His most recent book is Dream of Commonwealth, 1921-1942.