When it came to the fate of Europe, Sir Lewis Namier[i] was ideally equipped to brood over the vasty deep. Modern European history is an unending struggle for mastery between mighty contenders: triumph and disaster, hope and despair. For millennia, much of human existence had been a dreary cycle of poverty and oppression, while most human beings' lives were merely an animal struggle for food, clothing, shelter and sex, at a marginally more advanced level. Then came the possibility of fundamental change. Despite the occasional relapse, religion was ceasing to be a demiurge of war. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, so often used as a symbol of Church-inspired strife, seemed to have been banished to the art galleries. The political opportunities offered by the Enlightenment plus the economic ones arising from the scientific and industrial revolutions appeared to open the way to a dramatic break from the miseries of the past. Perhaps Beethoven's Ode To Joy could become the national anthem of a joyous European future.

Just over 120 years after that work was first performed, the era of misery had returned. Enlightenment: the light had been extinguished by the darkness of a new Dark Age. Though the horses had given way to tanks and warplanes, an Apocalypse had been let loose in Europe. Tens of millions had been butchered; millions more were refugees. Cities had been shattered and with them, centuries of heritage. Germany, a flower of European culture, had descended into bestiality.

Ezra Pound lamented the casualties of the First World War, who had died 'For an old bitch gone in the teeth/ For a botched civilisation.' By 1945, the botch was surely terminal. As the displaced straggled and starved, America and Russia were confronting one another across the ruins and the graves. it seemed likely that the Europeans, whose forbears bestrode the globe while shaping its history, would have a new and final role: providing the playing-field for a Third World War - likely to prove fatal as far as Europe was concerned. 

Thus far, that fate has been avoided. Although it would be comforting to believe that this is because Europe has learned wisdom, there is no abiding comfort in self-deception. Europe has avoided destruction, only because of mutually-assured destruction. The terrible consequences of a Third World War would not merely fall upon one continent. That said, Europe does not only live under the unthreatening shadow of the superpowers' armouries. Today, there are other, darker menaces. Hans Christian Andersen wrote a children's story, ‘The Princess and The Pea.’ In it, a girl demonstrates her suitability to be a Princess. Her bed has been heaped with twenty mattresses, but there is a single pea under them, so she is unable to sleep. In the case of modern Europeans, there are two peas under the mattresses, Palestine and Pakistan, both reasons for geopolitical sleeplessness, both legacies of Imperial exhaustion. The fall of Empires is rarely a benign process. As new grievances replace old and optimism gives way to disillusion, there is always a hazard from tumbling masonry. In this case, some of that masonry could be nuclear. Preserving our botched civilisation - and we have nothing else - will require many qualities, as well as luck. Above all, we will need hard thinking in pursuit of tough-mindedness. That makes many modern Europeans uneasy. They prefer to take comfort in self-indulgence. We can only pray that history will not be too brutal in exposing this error. 

So why did everything go wrong? To put it mildly, the question is easier to address than to answer. Mighty intellects have tried, including Lewis Namier, the name he chose in later life. He possessed formidable powers of scholarship reinforced by linguistic gifts and enhanced by a profound and lifelong experience of tragedy, both personal and political. He was born in Galicia, in the midst of a political earthquake zone. His parents were Jews, who had acquired land and wished to pass as Polish gentry. Young Namier was not circumcised, and did not know of his Jewish origins until he was nine years old. Thereafter, he was a wanderer, in search of belonging and a secure identity. However distinguished he became, that was always beyond his reach. This may explain why he was often a difficult character; some even used the word 'paranoiac'. But even those who admired him knew that he was different.

Although he had a diverse career, history was his vocation. This had two aspects. He wanted to work out why so much had gone wrong in Europe, and why so much had gone right in England. Although the latter is his claim to a monumentum aere perennius, he arrived at it by a strange route. Though Laurence Sterne did not quite write 'they order these things better in France', he has been thus misquoted down the generations by many members of the cultivated English bourgeoisie, who were mainly thinking about food and wine. But even before Sentimental Journey appeared, Montesquieu had become what one might describe as the first French anti Sterne-ite. He and later figures including the liberal economist Claude-Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850), and the historian Francois Guizot (1787-1874) who served as a French Foreign Minister (1840-1848) and Prime Minister (1847-1848), believed that in politics, they order these things better in England. They attributed this to the constitutional settlement which emerged after the Glorious Revolution - a retrospective Christening - and believed that France should learn from that example. In effect, they were Gallican Whigs.

Namier agreed about English superiority and one might have thought that he would have accepted the entire thesis: not so. In part, this may have been a matter of temperament. Even if he had wished to play either role, he was not suited to being a laudator temporis acti, or a disciple of Macaulay's. But there was a basic intellectual divergence. The Whig historians believed that England owed its success to a coalition of grandees and ideology. A mixed government, controlled by the Whig aristocracy, all steeped in their Party's nostrums, could safely be trusted with almost permanent power, which enabled it to cure the Tories of any residual Jacobitism until they too were fit for a period of hegemony, under that most Whiggish of Tories, the Younger Pitt.