Greater Europe’s Western Frontier
America's Troubled Ménage à Trois
The USA is not an exception to the Old World. It is the Western third of a ‘Greater Europe’, comprising Old Europe, Russia, and North America. This triangular relationship has dominated international politics for nearly two centuries. JD Vance’s and Donald Trump’s boorish treatment of this troubled ménage à trois can be best understood through the history of the invention of the West after 1830.
Invention of the West & the American Frontier
The era of 1750 to 1830 was crucial to the formation of the modern world, but not for reasons that are usually supposed. Rather than marking the triumph of the West and the birth of the American Experiment, this period witnessed the Invention of the West and the extension of Greater Europe to its western frontier of North America. This reframing challenges our conventional understanding of how the modern global order emerged and offers crucial insights into contemporary geopolitical tensions.
While this era encompassed the American, French, and Industrial Revolutions, different scholars have interpreted its significance in markedly different ways. Hannah Arendt viewed this period as marking a fundamental divergence between the New and Old Worlds. The New World became the refuge of freedom. The Old World was the harbour of hate. Similarly, Niall Ferguson interpreted this era as demonstrating the inherent superiority of Western civilization, arguing that this was the decisive time when the "killer apps" of the West demonstrated their most potent effectiveness on behalf of the virtuous British Empire and its rebellious, raucous and righteous child, democratic America.
However, John Darwin's more nuanced account focuses on the broader Eurasian evolution in economics, geopolitics, and culture during this transformative period. You can watch my Youtube video summary of John Darwin’s account of the Eurasian Revolution of this era here: Eurasian Revolution | Rise and Fall of Global Empires | 1750 to 1830. His analysis reveals that the new balance of power provoked by the threefold revolutions across Eurasia was extremely fragile. The period was marked by significant territorial reorganization: Britain lost direct control of its American colonies, even as it maintained considerable influence, while simultaneously gaining control of the more lucrative prize of India. Meanwhile, France and Spain divested themselves of most of their North American possessions. The Napoleonic Wars, far from being merely a European conflict, represented a period of global upheaval that threatened the balance of power between Western and non-Western powers across the world.
The consequences of these developments would profoundly shape the nineteenth century and continue to define the political language of the liberal West. During this period, Europe's empires embraced a new form of world order and worked to reconcile with their former American colonies to implement it globally. This new order was so influential that modern authors, such as Henry Kissinger, who write about the Westphalian world order, are actually projecting backward this nineteenth-century European state system. As John Darwin observes,
"European societies recoiled from war and embarked instead upon an uneasy experiment in political and economic cooperation under the ideological banner of a wary, limited and contested liberalism."
(Darwin, After Tamerlane, p. 224)
This development had far-reaching implications for the relationship between Europe and America. Contrary to popular belief, America did not grow apart and exceptional from Europe during this period. Instead, it evolved as an integral part of what Darwin terms "Greater Europe." As he explains,
"A 'Greater Europe' emerged to include both Russia and the United States in a vast zone in which political and cultural differences were moderated by a sense of shared 'Europeanness' (Americanness was merely a provincial variant) in the face of recalcitrant nature, hostile indigenes or 'Asiatic' competitors." (Darwin, After Tamerlane, p. 224)
This conceptualization of a "Greater Europe" helps us understand the complex triangular relationship between Europe, Russia, and North America that has dominated international politics for nearly two centuries. This is the same troubled ménage à trois that Mikhail Gorbachev sought to house in his vision of a Common European home, and it is the same triangle that erupted in controversy when JD Vance and Donald Trump accused European nations of not paying their fair share for collective defence.
The three lovers and antagonists transformed themselves into rulers of the world by inventing the idea of the West.
“For if Europe was to transcend its old Eurasian limits and command the centre of the world, it had to become something more. It had to be reinvented as the ‘West.” (Darwin, After Tamerlane, p. 224)
The invention of the West as a concept was fundamentally tied to Europe's need to overcome competing Eurasian powers and command the World Island in Mackinder’s term. This reinvention was built upon several crucial foundations: the broad geopolitical stability across the three zones from the 1830s to the 1880s, the effective operation of the concert system in Europe and Russia, and their policy of non-intervention in the Americas. This last point proved more significant than the often-celebrated Monroe Doctrine of 1825 in securing American hegemony within its hemisphere.
Crucially, this period saw the emergence of a cohesive common ideology across this sphere that represented the first viable manifestation of what we sometimes call the "liberal rules-based order." Darwin wrote,
“Geopolitical stability in Greater Europe favoured the growth (gradual, erratic, contested) of a minimal common ideology of ‘limited liberalism.’"
(Darwin, After Tamerlane, p. 224)
The Liberal West and its American Variants
This ideology had common tenets, and by the 1870s, all states within Greater Europe had adopted some form of liberal constitution, standing in stark contrast to what Karl Marx dismissively termed "Asiatic despotism." This triumph of Hegelian liberalism occurred well before the 1990s, suggesting that Francis Fukuyama's famous declaration of the end of history in 1989 was less a proclamation of a New World, and more a celebration of the restoration of a century-old regime after the revolutionary turmoil of the twentieth century.
This liberalism manifested in distinct national variants across Greater Europe. In continental Europe, Benjamin Constant's liberalism held sway, while Britain developed its own characteristic blend of free trade, Christian missionary zeal, and ‘a nation of shopkeepers’. Even "autocratic" Russia developed its own form of liberalism and variant of the Western ideal. As Darwin notes,
“Even the so-called ‘Slavophiles,’ who rejected the ‘cultural cringe’ of the Westernizers towards European thought and manners as alienating and atheistic, imagined Russia as a Christian Slav nation whose reforming elite would be in spiritual and political sympathy. with the peasant masses” (Darwin, After Tamerlane, p. 233)
The American variant of that liberalism found expression on Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier. But John Darwin’s global history of the USA and Greater Europe offers a more insightful account of the West, American liberalism and the frontier. It will reshape your perspective on this history. I have recorded my audio reading of the crucial passage (pp. 234-236) of John Darwin, After Tamerlane, that deals specifically with the history of the American frontier of Greater Europe.
Audio Reading of John Darwin’s history of America as part of Greater Europe
For paid subscribers below I have provided my commentary on this passage, and my interpretation of how the final frontier fantasy of American history repeats itself in the conflicts of the multipolar world today. There is a strange echo from the story of the emergence of Greater Europe in the nineteenth century that can be heard in the defeat of the ‘Collective West’ in the twenty-first century.
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World History Tour - Recap and Coming Up Next
Coming up on Saturday: Health and the USA - why does America have such bad health outcomes and how does it affect its role in the world?
We have reached week five of the eight-week world history tour of America. Let’s recap.
Week One - Hispanic Heritage
Reimagine the Hispanic History of the USA (25 January, book recommendation)
Manifest Destiny Meets Machismo: The Strongman Tradition in American Politics (29 January, deep dive)
Week Two - Atlantic Philosophies
Hannah Arendt’s Vision of Freedom | Walter Benjamin's Poetry of History (1 February, interview with Samantha Rose Hill)
Atlantic Romantics: How America Forgot its Greater European Past (5 February, deep dive and book recommendation)
Week Three: Empire and Hegemony
Crooked Timber of the US Empire (8 February, book recommendation)
The American Hegemony Project, According to Adam Tooze (12 February, deep dive)
Week Four: Deep State and Foreign Policy
Is the USA Dr Jekyll or Mr Hyde? Or is... (15 February, book recommendation)
Deep State & Dark Soul | USA & Kissinger (19 February, deep dive)
Week Five: The Frontier and the West
The USA's Final Frontier Fantasy (22 February, classic essay audio and book recommendation)
Greater Europe’s Western Frontier: America's Troubled Ménage à Trois (26 February, deep dive)
Week Six will look at the major social issue of health.
Week Seven will look at the biography of Barack Obama
Week Eight will look at F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925) and its legacy in American culture and literary modernism.
After America, the schedule for the rest of the year is:
China - 22 March to 14 May
India - 17 May to 9 July
Europe - 12 July to 3 September
Modernism - 3 September to 18 October
Russia - 18 October to 10 December.
By becoming a paid subscriber of the Burning Archive, you get all the weekly insights, deep dives, and slow reads of this unique world history tour.