Unsettling signs appear in uncertain times. Across the Atlantic, the US has seen the inauguration of Donald Trump and the Op-ed pages of the New York Times feature references to a coming World War, while here in Europe the land war in Ukraine will soon enter its third year and, in response to recent tensions in the Baltic region, Finnish President Alexander Stubb declared Europe’s “holiday from history” now officially over.
On the other hand there is, at least, a consensus in Europe that cooperation and integration is the only way forward, both on the economy and defence. To address Europe’s economic stagnation, former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi released his highly anticipated report on competitiveness last September, in which European collaboration is seen as a prerequisite for the EU’s continued global relevance. To coordinate defence, NATO recently held the first NATO/Baltic sea summit, at which President Stubb advocated an increased consolidation of Europe’s strategic resources.
With Europe being plunged back into the mire of history, we would do well to take Stubb’s proclamation to heart and search out what answers history can provide, specifically by reflecting on previous examples of Intereuropean enterprise, both acknowledging bygone achievements and allowing former failure to serve as an object lesson. We needn’t look further than the Baltic region for such an example, for no historical institution so closely resembles, and can teach us as much about, the European Union of today as the medieval powerhouse of the Baltic, Hanseatic League.

Hans Holbein the Younger’s Portrait of Georg Gisze, a wealthy Hanseatic merchant.
What was the Hanseatic League?
This question is surprisingly difficult to answer, as The Hanseatic League (or simply the Hansa, from the Old High German for ‘guild’ or ‘group’) was a secretive organization without a charter or public register of its members. Even to contemporaries the league was somewhat of a mystery, being compared by outsiders to a crocodile, in that only its teeth were visible, while the rest of its body was hidden from view. Historians view the Hansa as a powerful medieval trading alliance of merchant cities and guilds primarily located in Northern Europe, founded in the late 12th century and reaching its peak in the 14th century. Will and Ariel Durant, in their mammoth Story of Civilization, describe the Hansa as follows:
[A]t its height in the fourteenth century the League bound fifty-two towns. It held the mouths of all the great rivers—Rhine, Weser, Elbe, Oder, Vistula—that brought the products of Central Europe to the North or Baltic Sea; it controlled the trade of northern Europe from Rouen to Novgorod. For a long time it monopolized the herring fisheries of the Baltic, and the trade of the Continent with England. It established courts for the settlement of disputes among its members, defended its members against lawsuits from without, and at times waged war as an independent power. It made laws regulating the commercial operations, even the moral conduct, of its member cities and men; it protected its merchants from arbitrary legislation, taxes, and fines; it enforced boycotts against offending cities; it punished default, dishonesty, or the purchase of stolen goods. It established a “factory” or trading post in each member city, kept its merchants under its own German laws wherever they went, and forbade them to marry foreigners.
While not advocating the same policies as the EU today, the Hansa did provide common frameworks in the realms of defense, the economy, law, culture and diplomacy. In terms of its development, we can understand the Hanseatic league as a rogue emporium, similar to the Venetian empire in its evolution from a loose trading network into a political powerhouse.
In this sense the EU’s own origins are quite similar. Not only did the European Coal and Steel Community, the institution from which the EU was born, seek to unite Germany and France first and foremost on the economic and industrial level, but each of the above listed functions of the Hansa, from defense to diplomacy, can also be found in the EU’s foundational Lisbon treaty.
With these parallels taken into consideration, it is all the more puzzling that one expert has recently spoken out, denying the Hanseatic League’s relevance for Europe today.
Ogilvie’s Perspective: The Hanseatic League and the EU
In a podcast published on the 12th of January, Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie of Oxford’s All Souls College joined host Ryan Reynolds to discuss the Hanseatic League. When asked by the host, ‘Can we draw any similarities between the League and, say, the EU?’ Ogilvie disavowed the idea outright and criticised the Council of Europe’s website for its purportedly romantic notion that the league could be seen as a forerunner to the EU. For this she gave two principal reasons:
Ogilvie’s first point of contention is that the Hansa, particularly after 1400, acted as a protectionist cartel, seeking to shield itself from disruptive competition, which stands in contrast to the EU’s free trade principles. The Hansa secured cartel profits for its members at the expense of rival merchants and ordinary consumers. It didn’t even guarantee free trade among Hanseatic cities, with staple regulations often used against each other. Secondly, Ogilvie highlights the Hansa’s limitations on the free movement of people. While individual traders were allowed in, they were often denied citizenship. Groups not welcome in the community, like the Jews, were excluded.

Detail from the Holsten Gate in Lübeck, courtesy of Konrad Hofmann via Unsplash.
As the merchants there [in the Hanseatic city of Lübeck] got so rich, they invited French architects in and asked them to build gothic buildings like France had. But because there was so little stone available in northern Germany, the architects had to use brick. So they invented a new, […] very flamboyant style, called ‘brick gothic’. (From Professor Ogilvie’s Interview)
In this response Professor Ogilvie assumes such an ideological chasm between the European Union and the Hanseatic League that she runs the risk of romanticizing the EU. As to her second point, that the EU provides for the free movement of people, one need only observe the weakening of the Schengen ideal present in, for example, Germany’s extension of ‘temporary’ border controls in place since 2015, to call Ogilvie’s assertion into question. This is not to mention the general crackdown on immigration into the EU in recent months, reified by the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, a deal which has been criticised for its harsh exclusion of unwanted immigrants.
As regards her first point, that the EU differs from the Hansa on account of its unwavering commitment to free trade principles, Draghi’s report seems to paint a different picture. In it Draghi suggests relaxing antitrust enforcement within the bloc to create so-called ‘European champions’, companies that can compete with their Chinese and American counterparts. This sort of internal regulation is anything but dissimilar to the measures taken by the Hanseatic League.
Being Pro-EU Doesn’t Mean Romanticising the EU
In drawing these comparisons I do not intend to advocate a rejection of Mr. Draghi’s report, nor imply the EU is on the wrong path. I only hope to make clear the peril in discounting the past at the expense of the present. The EU must learn from the mistakes of its forerunners, and we must see ourselves as a part of history, not apart from it. The Hanseatic league’s eventual decline was precipitated, as Professor Ogilvie herself notes, by increasing exclusivity and violence. We are currently in the midst of an uptick in the former, and it’s now up to us to be vigilant against the recurrence of the latter.
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