Introduction

Conversing with his friend Jean Variot in 1908, the French philosopher Georges Sorel trenchantly remarked that in Europe peace was ‘an abnormal condition’. Inhabited by a number of different peoples with disparate interests, desires, and ways of life, Europe was the place of ‘warlike cataclysms’. A growing number of intellectual and cultural historians have stressed the need to consider the First World War a watershed in the history of the idea of Europe. Menno Spiering and Michael Wintle, for instance, have argued that the impact of the war on ideas and images of Europe, as well as on the projects of its unification, can hardly be overemphasised. Many books on the history of the idea of Europe, in fact, often interrupt their narratives in 1914 to resume them in 1919 or offer only fleeting remarks on discourses about Europe’s identity during the First World War.