‘A Struggle for European Civilization’: T.S. Eliot and British Conceptions of Europe during and after the Second World War

Abstract

Contemporary perceptions and imaginative portrayals of Great Britain’s role in the Second World War often interpreted it as a defence, not just of particular ‘British’ interests, nor of ‘universalist’ values against fascist tyranny (though both of these were recurrent themes), but as representing an intermediate position, loosely depicted as a ‘struggle for European civilization’.¹ Such disparate figures as Winston Churchill, T.S. Eliot, Bishop Bell of Chichester, Cyril Connolly, Julian Huxley, Harold Laski and J.M. Keynes, all talked of ‘European civilization’ in order to conjure up a picture, not just of specific war aims, but of a much more intangible commitment to a certain kind of social, political, religious and philosophical ‘culture’, embodied in the cumulative experience of two thousand years of European history. A conception of Europe, past, present and future, was invoked to describe ‘not just a geographical or economic entity’ but ‘a system of beliefs and ideas, an outlook, a culture, a way of life’.² Such a vision of Europe and its history was often portrayed at the time, not just as a good in itself, but as a stark antithesis both to the nationalist and ethnic ‘separatism’ artificially created by the Treaty of Versailles, and more recently to the mechanistic ‘uniformity’ being forcibly imposed on conquered territories by the ‘New European Order’ of Adolf Hitler.