The Huns are back. Last week came the news that Joshua Novak, a primary school teacher who’s also a claimant to the throne of Attila, sees the opportunity to claim his historic role as leader of one of the forgotten peoples of Europe. Novak’s idea is that the European Commission should acknowledge the Huns and their heirs as one of Europe’s founding peoples.

The Novak initiative is a reminder of how deep the historical currents can run and how collective memory can shape present actions. I’ve been writing a new world history — set against a backdrop of the early 21st century clash between the West and the Middle East — and am left with an abiding sense of how long the history of humanity has been dominated by such horse-riding aristocrats.

In Britain and Europe the end of their dominance started only some two centuries ago and that short time span is a good reminder both of how far we have travelled and how difficult it is to enter the thought world of most of the human past.

It is equally difficult today. Once, what might have really mattered was life at the top — among the political elite — but as democracy has spread through the 20th century, so the political leaders have become increasingly nervous about what “the people” might be thinking.

So much work goes into constructing manifestos, initiatives and press conferences that we forget these are not exercises in reason but guesses and stabs in the dark about what might tickle an electoral fancy.

What politicians call a policy is really a hunch. And polling is really no different from the liver divination of Mesopotamia in 3,000BC when priests inspected entrails for a guide to the future.

In both cases we have professionals paid to appear knowledgeable — and responding with bogus science. And Britain is really so placid a place that it unnerves the politician who stops to think about what lies beneath the placidity — apart from a deep contempt for politics as an exercise and for most politicians as characters — which leads to the view that politics is a serious subject for trivial people.

When you consider the history of the world, you realise that most general elections are forgettable because their results are so inconsequential, like the elections of 1992 and of 2001.

Political vitality and relevance disappear when the party differences on tax and spend are measured by just a couple of percentage points. The general election of 2005 will be remembered as the moment at which the electorate showed an aversion to the prime minister’s personality and streak of messianic conceit.

Such personal issues become more important in politics when big social and economic issues are no longer debated. Blairism showed the vacuum in our politics. Where there should be a debate there is a gap.

But the elections that really matter open up a debate and have some social and economic bite. The election of 1906 produced a Liberal government, the first in Britain to embark on social progressivism in welfare reform and to tackle the House of Lords; 1945 and 1979 between them made the Britain of today: half welfarist-minded and half capitalist-inclined, a straddling and undecided democracy.

These dates matter because they take us into the deeper terrain of mentalities and attitudes. But among some historians there’s an aversion to this emphasis on deep historical structures. Don’t the great ones of history — Attila, Napoleon, Churchill — show that historical fortune favours the brave who seize the moment, regardless of circumstances? But what happened in Britain in 1940-42 is not really explicable without that sense of national independence that goes back to Alfred the Great in the 9th century. In the same way Napoleon was the heir to two traditions of French thought — the 17th-century one of military glory along with the 18th-century idea that France should civilise her neighbours.

If you do wish to be the kind of figure who leaves a mark, it seems important that you should consider yourself part of a narrative that is bigger than you. Take early Christianity. Its success can’t just be whittled down to Constantine thinking that the Christian God was better placed to give him victory and thus making it the state religion. There still remains the question of why, for three centuries before, Christianity was proving more resilient than the other religions such as Mithraism.

Here a conviction about purpose was basic. If God had a plan that gave Christianity an edge on paganism and its revolving cycles, a God who had intervened could do so again. Christianity won because it out-thought paganism.

In our own time we have one cause that does the job God did for early ages: the natural environment. The early 21st century is plagued by the contrast between the unity of the world at the level of technology, communication and science and the ever-greater disparities between the secular West and Islamic faith, between the rich First World and a Third World in subjection to capricious nature.

But then it’s impossible to explain the events of 1789 Paris without also referring to the cycle of poor harvests in the 1780s which led to price rises and riots.

When we look at the Gothic cathedrals of Europe such as Notre Dame and Chartres, we see the signs of renaissance, but what made it possible was the arrival of long summers in the 12th and 13th centuries. This made it possible for architects and masons to build for long periods.

To complain that these deep structures turn us into mere automatons is senseless. Chartres’s beauty is not explained by those long summers, and there have been plenty of summers since that failed to produce anything comparable.

The Huns were the product of a huge geopolitical power shift but it took the military genius of Attila to turn them into the dominant European power by the 5th century.

The context of deep structures explains the opportunities and the limitations to historical events. We need them to appreciate the scale of what has been achieved in some circumstances, as well as the magnitude of failure in others. But in explaining the response there is forever a quality before which even the world historian — let alone the politician — must bow his head and acknowledge a mystery at work.