Europe Was INVENTED. Here's How | Ash Sarkar Meets Roderick Beaton

ELI5/TLDR

Europe is not a place. It is a story — one that a Greek historian named Herodotus basically invented 2,500 years ago when he decided the Persian wars were a clash of continents rather than just another regional scrap. Everything since — Roman emperors, Christian kings, Ottoman sultans, Napoleon, Putin — has been people arguing over where “Europe” ends and who counts. Beaton’s pitch is simple and spicy: if you live here and want to be here, you’re European. Race and territory won’t hold. Culture, law, and the stories we tell will.

The Full Story

The argument in one sentence

Roderick Beaton has written a 400-page history of Europe that rests on one deliberately provocative claim. Europeans are people who live in Europe. Full stop. Not a race. Not a bloodline. Not a faith. A continent’s worth of people who have, over millennia, shown up and decided to stay.

“If people want to be here then that makes them European in my view.”

Ash Sarkar reads this line back to him and asks, politely, whether he had the far right in mind. Beaton smiles and doesn’t quite deny it. The book isn’t a political pamphlet. But the pamphlet writes itself.

Europe as a thing Herodotus made up

The framing device is elegant. In the 5th century BCE, the Persian Empire was the biggest empire the world had ever seen — Turkey to northern India, and every Greek city-state was a frog on the edge of that very large pond. When the Persians crossed the Hellespont and the Greeks improbably won at Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea, the historian Herodotus had a choice. He could write it up as a local scuffle. Instead he wrote it up as a clash of continents — Europe versus Asia, freedom versus tyranny, two civilizations eternally opposed.

“Herodotus quite deliberately weaponized a geographical term that was purely geographical until those days and gave it a geopolitical sense.”

Before Herodotus, “Europe” was just a direction on a map. After him, it was an idea — and every subsequent attempt to define Europe is a footnote to that original bit of creative journalism. Which is why Beaton is happy to call Herodotus both the father of history and the father of lies.

The Roman anomaly and why nobody could repeat it

The Romans held Europe together through violent conquest for 500 years. Nobody since has pulled it off. Not Charlemagne, not Napoleon, not Hitler. Beaton’s favorite almost-was is Charles V in the 16th century — Holy Roman Emperor, nephew of Catherine of Aragon, holding a deck of cards nobody had held since late Rome. He came close. Henry VIII was one of his rival candidates, which is a fun what-if.

Charles failed not because he wasn’t clever but because Europe had dispersed. Too many petty kingdoms, too many loyalties. The French king fought him harder than the Ottomans did. His own troops ended up sacking Rome and holding the Pope hostage. After that, the Roman-revival game was over.

The pattern since: fighting each other is part of what defines Europeans.

The migration story people get wrong

Beaton is careful here. Yes, the Roman Empire fell to mass migration. No, it looked nothing like today’s small-boat crossings.

“This was 200,000 men, women, and children with mounted horsemen escorting them… it was like European expansion, not like the migration that we see today into Europe.”

Think American pioneers pushing into “Indian territory” in the 19th century, not families fleeing in dinghies. Organized, armed, circling the wagons. Different thing entirely. He makes this point in the book and makes it again here, presumably because it keeps getting used as a bad analogy in modern debates.

Alexander the Great, probable psychopath

Sarkar confesses she doesn’t like Alexander. Beaton, who is supposed to be the careful historian, agrees enthusiastically. Killed his own friends. Probably had a hand in murdering his own father (who was stabbed in a theater in broad daylight, in Alexander’s presence). By the time he died at 32, he seems to have genuinely believed he was a god on earth. His Greek courtiers were ordered to bow. They did not like that.

Beaton sides with the minority view that Alexander’s ambitions were actually limited to the Persian Empire — once he hit northern India, which was where the Persians had stopped, he was ready to turn back. But he died before getting there.

How Augustus invented the republic that wasn’t

Rome had an absolute horror of monarchy. So when the Republic’s institutions cracked under the weight of running an empire, Augustus pulled a sleight of hand that lasted 1,500 years. He installed one-man rule and called it a republic.

“The res publica Romana was used right through the Roman Empire and it continued to be used in Greek actually right through the Byzantine Empire right through into our own 15th century. So it was a very powerful idea — but the republic didn’t have to be democratic.”

The word did a lot of work. It still does.

Hadrian, the technocrat with boundaries

Beaton’s favorite emperor is Hadrian. Partly because he was openly flamboyant (which was not entirely the done thing), partly because he was competent. He did something radically un-Roman: he drew lines and said the empire stops here. Wall across northern Britain. Wooden wall between Rhine and Danube. The Euphrates as a negotiated boundary with the Parthians. Forts along the Sahara.

Elite Romans thought this was unambitious. But Hadrian’s borders held, more or less, for 300 years. America, Beaton notes, inherited the other half of the Roman instinct — manifest destiny, power without limit. Washington’s founders read their Virgil. The Capitol has a Roman dome. The Supreme Court is a Greek temple built in the 1930s.

Constantine and the viceroy trick

Before Constantine, Roman emperors became gods after death. This was, Beaton suspects, not taken terribly seriously by anyone. Vespasian’s deathbed line — “Oh dear, I think I must be turning into a god” — gives the game away.

After Constantine converted (and was baptized only on his deathbed, hedging his bets), Christianity flipped from a bottom-up religion of slaves and women to a top-down religion of rulers. And the emperor became something new: God’s man on earth. Not a god. God’s viceroy. The divine right of kings, Beaton thinks, traces directly back to Constantine — the emperor now has more power in one sense (heaven backs him) and less in another (heaven outranks him).

Islam as Europe’s defining mirror

Every other group that showed up in Europe eventually converted to Christianity. Goths, Franks, Vikings — they all arrived pagan and left Christian. The one exception was Islam. That’s what made Islam a civilizational counterweight rather than just another invader.

“Al-Andalus Muslim Spain is probably the most civilized place in Europe apart from Constantinople… the Muslim civilization at that time is definitely in advance of certainly Western Europe.”

Beaton sees the late medieval moment as a domino effect. Ottomans take Constantinople in 1453, pushing Islam into Europe from the east. Christians push Muslims out of Iberia in roughly the same decades. And then, squeezed, Europe explodes outward — Columbus west, Portuguese around Africa. Columbus, it turns out, was obsessed with Islam. He thought he was going to sail around the world to retake Jerusalem from the other side.

The reconquista and the invention of race

Sarkar pushes him on Isabella and Ferdinand. They expelled Jews. Persecuted Muslims. Set up the Inquisition. Later came the expulsion of the Moriscos — Christians who were descended from Moors but were now suspect on grounds you couldn’t convert out of. This is where race starts doing work that religion used to do.

Beaton contrasts the Catholic reconquista with the Ottoman approach in the Balkans: the Ottomans let conquered Christians keep their religion, and the Orthodox Church became part of the Ottoman machinery. Result: by Franco’s time, Spain was essentially 100% Catholic. Greece and the Balkans remained Christian and eventually threw the Ottomans out. Tolerance, in one reading, leaves loose ends.

Russia, neither here nor there

Russia is culturally ambiguous, not racially. Orthodox Christian, yes. But most of it isn’t in Europe and arguably none of it really is. Beaton’s workaround: from 1703 to 1918, Russia’s capital was in Europe — St. Petersburg, designed by Europeans, modeled on Amsterdam, named in Dutch. The elites spoke French. Tsar Alexander I chased Napoleon out and sat at the Congress of Vienna as a European ruler. Nobody blinked.

Then the Bolsheviks moved the capital back to Moscow. The Soviet empire was explicitly anti-European. The 1990s briefly reopened the question. Then Putin. Beaton lays some of the blame on American capital behaving badly in post-Soviet Russia, enabling the kleptocratic capitalism that followed. The cultural frontier, like the geographic one, keeps shifting.

Ukraine and the army question

Beaton thinks European expansion into the former Soviet republics was “ham-fisted.” He is skeptical of NATO expansion on fairly literal grounds — what is a North Atlantic treaty organization doing on the far side of the Black Sea? But he also thinks former Soviet states have every right to pick a direction, and Ukrainians have, in about a decade, emerged as Europeans in a way their grandparents wouldn’t recognize.

Sarkar closes with the real question. Can Europe avoid being conquered by Russia or bought by America? Beaton’s answer is short.

“Short answer, yes. I think we probably do [need a European army]. I even would dare to say I think we ought to have a European nuclear deterrent.”

Europe is economically one of the great powers. Culturally, one of the most influential places on earth. But it speaks with many voices, and the analogy that haunts him is the Greek city-states — hundreds of them, each fiercely autonomous, each eventually gobbled by Rome. The equivalent Rome now could be America. Or Russia. Or China.

Key Takeaways

Herodotus invented the geopolitical idea of Europe by writing the Persian Wars as a clash of continents. Before him, “Europe” was just a direction.
Rome held Europe together for 500 years; nobody has managed it since because Europe dispersed into petty kingdoms that refuse to aggregate.
Augustus’s genius was calling one-man rule a “republic” — a linguistic trick that survived 1,500 years.
Hadrian was the rare Roman who accepted boundaries. His frontiers held 300 years.
Constantine’s conversion flipped Christianity from bottom-up to top-down and invented the template for divine-right kingship.
Islam is Europe’s constitutive “other” because it’s the one religion that never got absorbed — every other incoming group eventually turned Christian.
The Catholic reconquista invented race as an identity category that survives conversion (the Moriscos problem).
Russia has been more and less European at different times; its current anti-European posture is a political choice, not a fixed cultural fact.
Today’s migration debates misuse the Gothic analogy. The Goths arrived as organized armies of 200,000; modern migrants arrive as families in dinghies. Not the same thing.
Beaton thinks Europe needs its own army and possibly its own nuclear deterrent to avoid being swallowed by America, Russia, or China.

Claude’s Take

Novara Media is a left-wing UK outlet, and Ash Sarkar is one of its sharpest voices — a declared communist with a journalism habit. Worth keeping in mind, though this particular interview is softer-edged than a Novara segment usually runs. Sarkar is clearly having fun and Beaton is a professor selling a book, so the politics are ambient rather than explicit.

What’s good here: Beaton’s “Europe is an invented story” thesis is a genuinely useful frame, not a trendy one. It gives you a way to think about European identity that neither collapses into “white Christian heritage” nor evaporates into pure abstraction. The Herodotus move — pointing to the specific paragraph where a historian decided to geopoliticize a geographic term — is the kind of precise intellectual history that punches above its weight.

What to watch for: the argument that Europeanness is open and chosen is politically useful for the left, and Beaton (a classicist from Edinburgh) wears his cards pretty openly. When he says the reconquista was harsher than Ottoman rule of the Balkans, he’s right factually, but he waves it past quickly. When he says European colonization of the Americas was partly a reaction to being “squeezed” by Islam, that’s an interesting thesis but it is a thesis — the book How the West Came to Rule he cites is heterodox Marxist economic history. Useful, but not consensus.

His Putin analysis is fair and non-hysterical. His call for a European army is now mainstream in Brussels (less so in London) and sits oddly with his classicist’s skepticism about expansion — the logic of “we need more centralization to survive” is exactly what turned Rome from republic to empire.

The most underrated moment is when Sarkar, a Muslim Brit, says the Acropolis made her feel more European than her white British husband does. That anecdote does more for the book’s thesis than 30 pages of argument would.

Score: 8. Well-argued, genuinely learned, funny in places, and the frame is portable. Loses points for the occasional hand-wave and for Novara’s general tendency to let guests it agrees with finish sentences unchallenged.