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.