Old Europe (politics) - Antecedent Uses

Antecedent Uses

The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 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. An "Old Europe" must find a mental contrast with a posited "New Europe".

In his ultra-nationalistic, anti-European book of 1904, America Rules the World, E. David used 'Old Europe' in the following context:

The true American citizen is by nature brave, honest, amiable, hospitable, patriotic, energetic and intelligent; he is practical and yet idealistic and enthusiastic. Cultivation and refinement make him a gentleman equal, if not superior, to the gentry of the best educated classes of Old Europe for manners and behavior. An educated American is the best and most generous of friends.

The term has also sometimes been used in film criticism, usually referring to the Europe remembered by Hollywood exiles from the final years before revolutions and the overthrow of monarchies affected much of the continent, and recalled in the films of such directors as Ernst Lubitsch and Josef von Sternberg.

Old Europe is also used to describe the prehistoric culture and people found in Europe prior to the migration of Indo-European peoples in the Neolithic.