A brief history of alcohol in Europe

    Alcohol has been produced and drunk in Europe for thousands of years, usually made out of whatever materials were locally available. Fermented alcoholic drinks and (from the thirteenth century) spirits were often also used as a medicine, a practice that continued until the early twentieth century and the advent of modern medicine. Alcoholic drinks were commonly preferred as they were less likely to be damaging to health than (impure) water, and drunkenness was also common, although repeated drunkenness was sometimes condemned. Laws on alcohol did exist, but normally for reasons of public order or to regulate the market rather than for public health. However, this picture changed with a series of developments in mediæval and early modern Europe, including industrialization, improved communications links, and the discovery of stronger, distilled beverages. European elites were faced with a situation of urban squalor that included unprecedented public drunkenness in lower classes – and both they and (in some countries) emerging workers’ movements attributed much of this to alcohol.

    Large ‘temperance’ movements, therefore, spread across much of Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, driven by concerns over spirits before often moving on to an opposition to all alcoholic drinks. In some cases this led to a complete ban on alcohol in a country or area, although elsewhere less drastic systems of alcohol control were adopted. In most, but not all, countries the temperance movement has since faded, to a position of little significance by the end of the twentieth century. The idea of ‘alcoholism’ as a disease also grew during the nineteenth century, with many European countries developing homes or asylums to treat ‘alcoholics’. Although temporarily out of fashion at the height of the temperance period, the ‘addiction concept’ fitted the ideological climate of the mid-twentieth century and became popular once again. Yet in recent years, the ‘new public health movement’ has become the dominant paradigm for discussing alcohol-related problems, allowing a broader discussion than a focus on a small subset of ‘alcoholics’.

    Today’s Europe includes a wide range of uses and meanings of alcohol, ranging from an accompaniment to family meals to a major part of rites of passage. Alcoholic drinks are full of meaning, with drinking behaviour able to communicate the formality of an event or the division between work and leisure. Drunkenness is equally symbolic, with ‘drunken comportment’ – how people act under the influence of alcohol – varying across Europe. Meanings and practices vary within as well as between countries, sometimes linked to the identities of different groups. This can occur through many alcohol-related channels, from the association of a particular drink with regional or national identity, to the meaningful non-use of alcohol in many European Muslim communities.