Old Europe

Old Europe is a term used in the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx which starts with the words:

A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.

When Marx used the term in 1848, the year of failed liberal revolutions across Europe, he was referring to the restoration of Ancien régime dynasties, following the defeat of Napoleon. Of his three sets of pairs, each pair links figures who might on the surface be considered adversaries, in alliances that he clearly sees as unholy, to set up one of history's most effective conspiracy theories. An "Old Europe" must find a mental contrast with a posited "New Europe."

In January 2003 the term resurfaced (probably mockingly) with U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to refer to those European countries who were not in favour of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Rumsfeld answered to a comment, that more than 70% of the people in Europe were not in favour of the war in Iraq:

"''You're thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don't. I think that's old Europe."

It is probably equivalent to the European Union, with the exception of those nations where the government supports the U.S. in defiance of its people, such as Spain and the United Kingdom.

The German translation altes Europa was the word of the year 2003 in Germany, because the Germans use it in some ironic way. The word went largely unnoticed in the English-language press.

In contrast to Rumsfeld's usage, for many young Europeans the term 'Old Europe' implies the existence of a 'New Europe', which now seems to include those nations which once were behind the Iron Curtain and in the USSR-controlled Warsaw Pact, but which now are lining up to enter the European Union, rather than flirting with the "old Europe" that is actually embodied in American-controlled NATO. So Old Europe and "New Europe" are flexible terms that reveal the point-of-view of the speaker.

Ironically it thus turned out a United States Secretary of Defense reintroduced a term first used by the creator of communism, the political ideology which has been demonized by the USA for decades.

Old Europe is also a term used by archaeologists and ethnographers to characterize autochthonous ("aboriginal") peoples who were living in Neolithic Europe before the immigrations of peoples speaking Indo-European languages, who arrived from the south-east, across the plains north of the Black Sea. The term was introduced by Marija Gimbutas, in The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974). Excavations in what was then Yugoslavia, in Macedonia, Greece and Italy made it possible for Gimbutas to focus on an investigation of the Neolithic period (which she termed "Old Europe") in order to understand cultural developments before the Indo-European influences.

Ancient Greek writers called the "Old European" pre-Hellenic dwellers in Greece "Pelasgians," a term that has been recently embraced by some modern writers and extended to include peoples from the Basque regions to the Caucasus.

Old Europe

See also