2nd Week Long live the Karlings

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Charlemagne

Long live the Karlings

The emperor Charlemagne is the wrong father-figure for Europe

Sep 2nd 2010

BEYOND the octagon of Aachen cathedral lies the golden shrine of St Mary, holding ancient relics that are displayed every seven years: the cloak of the Virgin, the swaddling clothes of the infant Jesus, the loincloth of the Saviour on the Cross and the cloth that held the severed head of John the Baptist. Such wonders made Aachen one of the great pilgrimage sites of medieval Europe. In these more sceptical times, it is the other golden casket here that commands the visitor’s attention: the one bearing the remains of Charlemagne.

The Frankish warrior-king, crowned as heir of the Roman emperors by Pope Leo III in 800, is still revered locally as a saint. More importantly, he is the icon of Europe’s newer, secular faith: political and economic integration. Since 1950 Aachen has bestowed a yearly Charlemagne prize on the figure deemed to have done most to promote European unity. The winners are mostly a predictable cast of grandees. In 2002 the prize was awarded not to a person but to the euro. And in 2004 the judges conferred the prize on Pope John Paul II; a reversal, perhaps, of Leo’s coronation of Charlemagne.

Charlemagne has long been called “the father of Europe” (he even instituted a common currency). Yet he is a flawed symbol. He ruled by a sword called “Joyeuse”; anathema to those good EU citizens who abjure war and adopt “Ode to Joy” as their anthem. As well as Saracens, he smote future Europeans—Saxons, Slavs and more. His alliance with the pope exacerbated the schism between western and eastern Christianity.

Charlemagne’s empire, moreover, was ephemeral. The partition engendered by his grandsons’ civil war proved more lasting. Louis (or, rather, Ludwig) the German, took the lands east of the Rhine that would one day become Germany; Charles the Bald got the western lands, the core of the future France. The eldest, Lothair, got the middle bit, destined to be fought over endlessly. Aachen, the heart of the empire, became a frontier town. Known as Aix-la-Chapelle in French, it changed hands between Napoleon and the Prussians. In the second world war it was the first German city to fall to the Allies and much of it was reduced to rubble (although the damaged cathedral survived). Charlemagne’s remains were taken to a coal-mine for safekeeping.

A pilgrim to Aachen, particularly the new incarnation of Charlemagne as a humble columnist, should not be too cynical. Charlemagne is a more palatable figure than some of the European empire-builders that followed him, be it Napoleon, Hitler or Stalin. Like Abraham, he is supranational, the forebear of both the French and the Germans. By remembering the man Germans call Karl der Große, perhaps Europeans can overcome their bitterness at the Kaiser and the Fuhrer.

For Jurgen Linden, a former mayor of Aachen and now chairman of the board that awards the Charlemagne prize, the starting point for any discussion of Europe is still the war. “I remember the ruins from my childhood. There was a border. It was almost impossible to go to the Netherlands or to Belgium. People smuggled butter, cigarettes and coffee,” he says. Today Aachen is prospering, democracy is firmly rooted, no passport is required to visit neighbouring, or more distant, countries and much of the continent enjoys a single currency. All this, thanks to Europe.

The normalisation of Germany was achieved by yoking it to the cause of European unity; Germany provided the economic motor and France drove the bus (Britain was later hitched behind in a trailer, trying to apply the brakes). Now Europe is bigger, as is Germany. France and Germany are drifting apart, not helped by the fact that their leaders, Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, dislike each other and understand each other even less. It is said that they can converse only in broken English. Armin Heinen, professor of history at Aachen’s university, says modern German identity was built on reconciliation with the French Erbfeind, or hereditary enemy. “Now that we have an enlarged Europe, we have so many other hereditary enemies we must deal with.”

Decades of half-steps towards integration have made a strange chimera of Europe: part superstate, part United Nations; a French-inspired system that now mostly speaks English; a single market that still lacks a single system of patents; a common currency without a joint economic or fiscal policy. Brussels moves ponderously. European integration was already being overtaken by globalisation when the financial crisis struck. Its proudest creation, the euro, may yet be overwhelmed by the ensuing sovereign-debt crisis.

Was Jerusalem builded here?

The unity of Europe has always been like the heavenly Jerusalem, an ideal never to be reached. But increasingly Europe’s business is conducted in an earthly Jerusalem, with its grubby contests over money, influence, jobs and national status. Ever-closer union has become ever harder, like trying to push together magnets of the same polarity. In the past the crisis might have prompted another great leap towards integration, as some Euro-cheerleaders hoped it might. These days the task is merely to preserve what has been achieved: to shore up the euro, to shelter the single market from protectionism and to contain a populist anti-immigrant backlash that threatens the European Union’s cherished free movement of people.

By now the imperial Charlemagne might have unsheathed Joyeuse. Firm leadership certainly looks attractive. Yet Europe’s messiness is its strength: rows are no longer settled by the sword. The EU is a voluntary group of democracies. For all its faults, more states want to join and none wish to leave. So the EU is likely to last longer than Charlemagne’s empire. Forget the great Karl; the bickering little Karlings are better.

Economist.com/blogs/charlemagne

Europe