...
Seriously, you have done nothing to address the ways this is not like China and are actually muddling the issue by treating it as something where all you need is some sort of equivalent to the mandate of Heaven to erase the vast differences between Europe's fragmented state of affaris and China....
Europe has had plenty of history to build on if that was enough. It isn't - as the fact the Byzantines failed to hold Italy might indicate to someone more concerned with studying the problems faced by OTL rulers than the people who start and encourage these "What if Europe wasn't made up of a multitude of competing polities able to acquire the means to defend their independence from those who want unification?" threads are.
Seriously. The Holy Roman Emperors in the Middle Ages claimed authority over other kings. Did this actually matter? Effectively, no.
And that wasn't for lack of history or a lack of ideology or a lack of any of the "We just need to pretend fragmentation is an unnatural state of affairs" beliefs that empire-wankers always advocate in defiance of any limits on imperial expansion or even internal imperial power.
For once I agree strongly with you, Elfwine--Europe clearly has been difficult to unify; in the two thousand years since the Romans planted the seed of the idea of unifying it, dozens of ambitious and powerful entities, some like the Roman Catholic Church with staying power on the scale of those two millennia, have tried to pull it all into one centralized polity--and generally failed, and the handful that came close to succeeding--Napoleon and Hitler come to mind--have seen their systems fall apart in their own lifetimes, leaving it as divided as ever in the aftermath.
I'd be very interested in your analysis as to
why this is so, rather than merely heaping scorn on those who obviously underestimate the nature of the challenge they are taking on. But
how do they underestimate it? What exactly stands in the way of a would-be Napoleon to not only break the opposing states one by one and assimilate them on his own terms but then set things up so the thing is stable?
Europe is not China, you observe. Quite obviously so. But what are the salient differences, what distinguishes European civilization from Chinese so that we can see why it is that emperors of all Europe are few and brief exceptions and a shifting balance of power between strong rival states the rule, the reverse of China's history?
When I want to give a hard and fast answer to this myself, I falter. The most obvious and apparent difference, I'm tempted to say, is geography. Han civilization cohered about the Yellow River. In my ignorance of the nuances of Chinese geography I don't see barriers comparable to those dividing the nation-states that formed the basis of the Westphalian system of nations. Those barriers in Europe in turn guaranteed (or appear to have, anyway, in hindsight) divergent cultural developments, divergent language systems for instance, as well as alternate trade routes that fed into each other but remained distinct. It seems that Europe has many natural nuclei of separate centers--Britain for instance being a set of islands, Scandinavia is across a sea (except Denmark of course bridges that sea...) There are many ports, giving access to separate river systems. There are lots of peninsulas, lots of broad systems of valleys divided by some serious mountain ranges, and so on.
Which raises the question--how then could Europe be in any sense a set, a system that makes some meaningful kind of whole that we are then tempted to imagine uniting? If politically unifying Europe is a chimera, why then does it nevertheless seem so clear Europe is in some sense nevertheless a distinct place?
I've seen the geographic argument attacked as oversimplified and debunked.
I wonder if you have some other approach to the paradox of Europe somehow unified in its stubborn diversity, that would shed light rather than heat on this argument here.