Towards a Language of ‘Europe’: History, Rhetoric, Community

Abstract

From Herder to Benedict Anderson, language and nation have been at the centre of ideas about (imagined) community. This hypothesis, however, poses a problem for analysing ideas about Europe. How can we understand “Europe” as a concept or form of identity when language and nationality are considered the foundation of imagined communities and loyalties? This article addresses this difficulty. It uses J. G. A. Pocock’s definition of “sub-languages” to suggest that one can investigate the rhetorical strategies, images and vocabularies with which texts articulate ideas about Europe. These sub-languages evoke imagined communities, most obviously when texts name and identify particular groups of people as “Europeans.” But by using images and rhetorics about Europe, these texts also appeal to a readership that comprehends—even if it does not fully accept—certain assumptions about the continent. In this way, texts evoke an imagined community of readers who purportedly share a similar way of understanding Europe, or who can perhaps be persuaded to think about it in similar terms. These processes are historically particular, and so the article concludes with concrete examples. It focuses on how early-nineteenth-century philhellenes evoked a European imagined community to solicit support for the Greek Revolution (1821–32).

Keywords:

• Idea of Europe
• imagined community
• European identity
• European language

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Alisa Miller, Justin Sausman, and the readers and editors of The European Legacy for their comments on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

1. Pocock, “Concept of Language,” 21.

2. Works influenced by Anderson’s terminology are very numerous. A small selection from several fields might include Huff, Women’s Life Writing; Cobb-Roberts et al., Schools and Imagined Communities; Shavit, New Imagined Community; Smith, Virtual Dreams, Imagined Communities; and Belfast Community Relations Council, Dissenting Voices/Imagined Communities.

3. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6, 42–46, 133.

4. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication, 41, 87, 89, 96, 171–72.

5. See Hastings, Construction of Nationhood, 3–5, 19–21; and Schulze, States, Nations and Nationalism, 104–10.

6. Edwards, Language, Society and Identity, 23, 131; and Thom, Republics, Nations and Tribes, 9, 195.

7. Herder, Essay on the Origin of Language, 53, 164–65; and Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy, 233.

8. Barnard, Herder’s Social and Political Thought, 57, 59.

9. Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, 102–3.

10. Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines, vol. 2, 197.

11. Humboldt, On Language, 46, 152–53.

12. Barbour, “Nationalism, Language, Europe,” 13.

13. See Barbour and Carmicheal, Language and Nationalism; Vick, “Language and Nation”; Fishman, “Language and Nationalism”; Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, 72, 89; and Flood et al., ‘Das unsichtbare Band der Sprache.’

14. Evans, Language of History, 10–11

15. Burke and Porter, Social History of Language, 3–15; and Burke, Languages and Communities, 3–6.

16. See Burke, “Heu domine,” 23–50.

17. Rivarol, De l’universalité de la langue française, 1, 42.

18. Oxford English Dictionary, “language,” sense 1(a).

19. Pocock, “Concept of Language,” 21–23; and Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, 25, 28–29.

20. For Pocock’s own writings on the idea of Europe, see “Deconstructing Europe” and “Some Europes in Their History.”

21. Pocock, “Concept of Language,” 21–22.

22. Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, 159–60, 112. “In order to have a language, there must be a community of speakers. … A language never exists except as a social fact. … Its social nature is one of its internal characteristics” (translation from Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 77).

23. Patrick, “Speech Community,” 578.

24. Pocock, “Concept of Language,” 35, 25–26. See also Wuthnow, Communities of Discourse, 12–16.

25. Gumperz, “Introduction,” 362–63, cited in Patrick, “Speech Community,” 582.

26. Meyerhoff, “Communities of Practice,” 526–48.

27. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication, 92, 97.

28. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 13.

29. Hymes, “Afterword,” 342, 335.

30. Holub, Reception Theory, 59–60, 53; and Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, 22–23.

31. Holub, “Reception Theory: School of Constance,” 319–46, 327; Iser, “Interactions Between Text and Reader,” 111–12; and Iser, “Indeterminacy and the Reader’s Response,” 13.

32. Iser, Implied Reader, xii, 275–76.

33. Ong, “The Writer’s Audience,” 12.

34. For more on this dispute, see Holub, Reception Theory, 103–4; and Fish, Is There a Text in this Class?, 7–9, 171.

35. Jacob, The Sovereign Map, 271.

36. Rose, “Rereading the English Common Reader,” 49; Hume, “Texts Within Contexts,” 78; and Price, “Reading,” 303–30.

37. Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette, 177, 132.

38. For a critique of “idealised” communities, see Nussbaum, Torrid Zones, 200.

39. Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, 89–101.

40. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, 450.

41. Wootton, “Narrative, Irony and Faith,” 92–93.

42. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, 450.

43. Wootton, “Narrative, Irony and Faith,” 92–93.

44. Burrow, Gibbon, 60.

45. For discussion of the Decline and Fall’s reception, see Womersley, Gibbon and the ‘Watchmen of the Holy City’, esp. 12–172. For sales and circulation, see O’Brien, “The History Market,” 122–23.

46. Leavis, “The Irony of Swift,” 366.

47. Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, 94.

48. Cohen, “Sentimental Communities,” 106–32. There is a large literature on sentiment and sociability. See, for example, Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability; and Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility.

49. Clarissa was translated into French in 1751; Julie into English in 1761; and Werther into English in 1779, initially from a French translation. See Greene, “The French Clarissa”; Mander, “Rousseau ‘à l’anglais’”; Long, “English Translations of Goethe’s Werther”; and Reed, “Continental Influence,” 83.

50. Cohen, “Sentimental Communities,” 123; and Alliston, “Transnational Sympathies,” 145. For more on the “international character” of the novel in general, see Reed, “Continental Influence,” 77; and Dow, “Criss-Crossing the Channel.”

51. For an overview of the conflict, see St Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free.

52. Blaquiere, Narrative, ix, 35; Bollmann, Remarques, 3.

53. Blaquiere, Report, 18, 21. For more on Blaquiere’s career, see Rosen, “Blaquiere, Edward (1779–1832).”

54. For a detailed discussion, see Stock, Shelley-Byron Circle, 175–97; and Stock, “Real-and-Imagined Spaces.”

55. Hughes, Address, 1; Hughes, Considerations, 201–2, 207–8, 215, 220; Raffanel, Histoire, 2; and Anon., Cause of Greece, 11.

56. Sheridan, Thoughts, 433, 457; Erskine, Letter to the Earl of Liverpool, 1, 5–6; Hughes, Address, 8, 11–21; and Leake, An Historical Outline, 6–7, 13.

57. Bulwer, Autumn in Greece, 62; Stanhope, Greece in 1823 and 1824, vii; Browne, “Narrative of a Visit,” 392, 400; Blaquiere, Greece and Her Claims, 7; Blaquiere, The Greek Revolution, 7, 178, 284; Anon., The Cause of Greece, 3, 15, 24; and Napier, War in Greece, 8.

58. Angelomatis-Tsougarakis, 9–12; and Stock, “Real-and-Imagined Spaces,” 3–4.

59. For the mediation of classical texts through Arabic sources, see Dussel, “Europe, Modernity and Eurocentrism.”

60. Blaquiere, Narrative, vi–vii; Stanhope, Greece in 1823 and 1824, 11, 142; and Raffanel, Histoire, v. St Clair argues that the Greek cause was particularly attractive to people on the edges of political power. See St Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free, 30, 254.

61. Erskine, Letter to the Earl of Liverpool, 7; and Stanhope, Greece in 1823 and 1824, 137.

62. Napier, War in Greece, 11–12.

63. Winter, “Impossibilities of Translation,” 68–82, 69. For a selection of similar views, see Joseph, “Why Isn’t Translation Impossible?” 86–88. For the conceptual and historical issues at stake, see Steiner, After Babel, 248–311.

64. Rougement, Vingt–huit siècles; and Rougement, Idea of Europe.

65. Rougement, Vingt–huit siècles, 7.

66. Rougement, Idea of Europe, xi.

67. Rougement, Les chances de l’Europe, 65; and Rougement, Meaning of Europe, 93.

68. Eysteinsson and Weissbort, “General Introduction,” 1. See also Joseph, “Why Isn’t Translation Impossible?” 86–97.

69. Rougement, Les chances de l’Europe, 46, 9; and Rougement, Meaning of Europe, 65, 11.

70. Blaquiere, Report, 13–14.

71. Among many examples, see Anon., Cause of Greece, 23–24; Hughes, Considerations, 202; and Parry, Last Days, 170. For the opaque authorship of the Parry volume, see St Clair, “Postscript to The Last Days.”

72. Raffanel, Histoire, 11.

73. Bollmann, Remarques, 3; Stanhope, Greece in 1823 and 1824, 18; Blaquiere, Narrative, 54; and Voutier, Mémoires, 329.

74. For discussion of related issues in a late twentieth-century context, see Chilton and Ilyin, “Metaphor in Political Discourse.”

75. See Hay, Europe, 87, 109–10; and Burke, “Did Europe Exist Before 1700?” For recent scholars closely associating Europe and Christianity, see Geremek, The Common Roots, 84–94; Mikkeli, Europe as an Idea, 17–31; and Le Goff, The Birth of Europe, 5, 15–28.

76. For critical reflections on familiar narratives about Europe and Christianity, see Burke, “How to Write a History of Europe”; and Lee and Bideleux, “‘Europe’,” 166.

77. See Stock, Shelley-Byron Circle, 196.