In the first place, it may be taken for granted that historical education in most European countries has traditionally possessed a strong nationalistic flavour. In its origins in the nineteenth century, history-teaching was recruited to the service of patriotism. In its most primitive form, it consisted of little more than a rota of the names, dates, and titles of the ruling dynasty. From that it progressed to a recital of the nation’s heroes, victories, and achievements,
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In its most extreme form, it deliberately set out to condition schoolchildren for their future role as killers and casualties in the nation’s wars.
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On the other hand, it is not right to assume that nationalistic history-teaching has passed unchallenged. There has been a long countercurrent of trying to inculcate an awareness of wider horizons; and practices changed radically after 1945, at least in Western Europe.
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A remarkable textbook on ‘modern history’, published in Austrian Galicia in 1889, directly confronted the assumptions of the age of nationalism. The book was designed for Polish-language secondary schools. Its author, a historian from Warsaw, who could not publish freely in his home city, then under Russian rule, explained the priorities:
In the struggles and achievements of the modern era, nations do not act on their own, but collectively. They are joined together in a variety of interrelated groupings and alliances. For this reason, we are obliged to use the ‘synchronic method’, that is, to speak of all the nations who participated in the events of any given time. Such general history cannot present a complete picture of all the nations involved; and … their individual histories … must be consigned to (the category) of special, national histories.
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The result was a book where, in volume I, covering the period from the Renaissance to 1648, Habsburg and Polish events occupy exactly 71 and 519 pages respectively. The author makes a careful distinction between ‘Poland’ and ‘the Polish-Lithuanian-Ruthenian-Prussian state’. The student could learn in some detail about ‘the Catholic and the Lutheran Reformations’, as about Islam and the
Ottomans. The geographical range stretched from the Portuguese voyages of discovery to Ivan the Terrible’s conquest of the Khanate of Kazan, from Mary Stuart’s overthrow in Edinburgh to Charles V’s expedition to Tunis.
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This volume would rate more highly on the non-nationalist scale than many still emanating from member states of the European Community.
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It is also fair to say that concerted attempts have been made in recent years to purge educational materials of the grosser forms of misinformation. Bilateral textbook commissions have worked long and hard on such matters as militarism, place-names and historical atlases, and one-sided interpretations. Scholars and teachers are possibly more aware of the problems than previously.
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In the last analysis, two extremes can be observed. At one extreme is the cosmic approach, where historians are expected to write, and students to learn, about all parts of the world in all ages. At the other extreme lies the parochial approach, where attention is reserved for one country in one short period of time. The cosmic approach has breadth, but lacks depth. The parochial approach has the chance of depth, but lacks breadth. The ideal must be somehow to strike a balance between breadth
and
depth.
On this score, one has to admit that the centrally planned syllabuses and textbooks of Soviet bloc countries were sometimes more successful than those of their Western counterparts. Though the actual content tended to be horrendously chauvinist and ideological, the chronological and geographical framework was often admirably comprehensive. All Soviet schoolchildren had to work their way through the five stages of historical development, gaining some knowledge of primitive society, classical antiquity, ‘feudalism’, ‘capitalism’, and from 1917 so-called ‘socialism’. Courses on the history of the USSR insisted on giving priority to the leading historical role of Russia and the Russians. At the same time, even in the worst years of Stalinism, any standard Soviet textbook would devote space to the ancient Greeks, Scythians, and Romans, to the history of the Caucasus, to the empires of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, and to the Muslim states of Kazan or Crimea. One would look in vain for such things in most general histories of Europe.
In England, in contrast—where the syllabus of history-teaching has largely been left to individual schools and teachers—the chronological and geographical framework tends to be extremely narrow. Even senior pupils studying history at advanced level are often confined to standard courses such as ‘The Tudors and Stuarts’ or ‘Britain in the Nineteenth Century’.
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Local history provides an interesting solution to some of these dilemmas. It draws on the familiar and the down-to-earth, encourages individual exploration and research, and is relatively resistant to nationalistic or to ideological pressures. It is well suited to subjects such as the family, which is readily understood by schoolchildren, whilst being used by specialists as the basis for far-flung international theorizing.
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At the other end of the scale world history has been developed, both at schools and universities. It has strong arguments in its favour for the education of a generation which must take their place in ‘the global village’.
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Its critics would
argue, as some argue about European history, that the sheer size of its content condemns all but its most able practitioners to deal in worthless generalities.
Naturally, narrowness of one kind provides an opportunity for breadth of a different kind. The narrowing of chronological and geographical parameters enables teachers to widen the variety of techniques and perspectives that can be explored within the chosen sector. Generally speaking, English pupils are relatively well grounded in the study of sources, in causational problems, in the connections between political, socio-economic, and cultural factors, and in the art of thinking for themselves. Here, their historical education has strength. On the other hand, there really must be something wrong if their studies are limited to 5 or 10 per cent of the span of only one-third of just one of the 38 sovereign states of the world’s smallest continent.
The problem of national bias will only disappear when historians and educators cease to regard history as a vehicle for state politics. More than 1,800 years ago the Greek writer Lucian
(ad
120–80) advised that ‘the historian among his books should forget his nationality’. It was sound advice. In the longer term, the definitive history of Europe will probably be written by a Chinese, a Persian, or an African. There are some good precedents: a Frenchman once wrote the best introduction to Victorian England; an Englishman is now established as the leading historian of Italy, and the only survey of British History to give proportionate weight to all four nations was written by an exile in the USA.
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So far, none of the experiments aimed at writing history ‘from the European point of view’ has met with general acclaim. Some historians, such as Christopher Dawson, have made the attempt by appealing to Europe’s Christian foundations.
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But Dawson’s Catholic thesis did not illuminate the pluralism of recent centuries, and did not convince his predominantly WASP readership. Others have taken the task of tracing the drive for European unity.
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The trouble here is that the list of contents is exceedingly short. Nation-states and national consciousness have been dominant phenomena throughout the era when history has been written as a systematic science. To a large extent, national histories have been allowed to predominate through the lack of alternatives. This may be regrettable; but it reflects the true condition of a Europe that has been deeply divided over recent centuries. Ever since the fragmentation of Christendom during the Renaissance and the Reformation, Europe has had no unifying ideal; historians cannot pretend otherwise. As some analysts have realized about the United States, the mosaic of Europe is every bit as important as the melting-pot.
In all probability, therefore, it is still too early for a satisfactory European synthesis to be conceived and accepted. National sensitivities still abound. National histories cannot simply be abandoned; and it would be a gross distortion if the differences between Europe’s nations were to be wilfully submerged ‘in some bland Eurohistory’:
European history may be more than the sum of its parts; but it cannot be built except by studying those parts in their full idiosyncrasies … It seems that… we cannot be content with national history; but ‘pan-European history’ cannot be easily achieved.
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This is wise counsel. The implication is that the reformulating of European history must inch forward alongside the gradual construction of a wider European community. Neither will be built in a day.
Unfortunately, national bias dies slowly. In April 1605, soon after England and Scotland were joined in personal union, Sir Francis Bacon wrote to the Lord Chancellor recommending that ‘one just and complete history be compiled of both nations’. His wish has not yet been granted. In the words of one of the few British historians who are trying to address the problem of British identity, ‘the ingrained reluctance to ask fundamental questions about the nature of Britain remains constant.’
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Two Failed Visions
The prevalence of nationalism in the twentieth century has not encouraged inter-, nationalist history. But two forceful attempts were made to overcome prevailing divisions, and to provide the ideological framework for a new, universal vision of Europe’s past. Both attempts failed, and deserved to fail.
Of the two, the Marxist-Leninist or Communist version of European history started first and lasted longest. It grew out of Marxism, whose spirit and intentions it ignored, and in the hands of the Bolsheviks became one of the coercive instruments of state policy. In the initial phase, 1917–34, under enthusiasts such as M. N. Pokrovsky (1868–1932), it was strongly internationalist in flavour. Pokrovsky fully accepted that history was ‘politics turned towards the past’; and he threw himself with gusto into the fight against chauvinism. ‘Great Russia was built on the bones of the non-Russian nations,’ he wrote. ‘In the past, we Russians were the greatest robbers on earth.’ Yet for Stalin the rejection of Russia’s imperial traditions was anathema; and from 1934, when Stalin’s decrees on history-teaching took effect, the direction changed abruptly. Pokrovsky died, and most of his unrecanting colleagues were shot. Their textbooks were suppressed. In their place there appeared a virulent brew of vulgar Marxism and extreme Russian imperialism that was served up by all the ideological agencies of the USSR for the next fifty years.
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The twin elements of communist history were at bottom contradictory. They were held together by the messianic dogma of an ideology that no one could openly question. The pseudo-Marxist element was contained in the famous Five-Stage Scheme, that led from prehistory to the Revolution of 1917. The Russian element was predicated on the special mission awarded to the Russian nation as the ‘elder brother’ of the Soviet peoples and the ‘vanguard’ of the world’s proletariat. By Lenin’s own admission, Soviet Russia was not yet as advanced as Germany and the other industrialized countries. But the ‘world’s first socialist state’ had been created to sow the seeds of the world revolution, to hold the fort of socialism during capitalism’s terminal decline, and to inherit the earth at the end. In the meantime, superior Soviet methods of social organization and economic planning would soon ensure that the capitalist world was rapidly overtaken. Indeed, as the
final chapter of the textbooks always stressed, the Soviet Union was surging ahead in everything from military might to living standards, technology, and environmental protection. The final victory of socialism (as communism was always called) was taken to be scientifically proved and
inevitable
.
Despite its lip-service to ‘socialist internationalism’, the historical thinking of the Soviets paid homage both to ‘Eurocentrism’ and, in a backhanded way, to ‘Western civilization’. Its Eurocentrism found expression in the fund of European examples on which Marxist-Leninist argument was based, and in the mania for European-style industrialization. It was specially blatant in the emphasis placed on the historic destiny of the Russians. Soviet assumptions on this last score caused offence to the European members of their empire, had an unsettling effect on the comrades of the communist movement in the Third World, and was the principal cause of the Sino-Soviet split. In Chinese eyes, the droves of Soviet advisers and technicians who appeared in China in the 1950s gave a worse display of European arrogance (and bad machinery) than any previous wave of ‘foreign devils’ they had known. For the Chinese, as for Baits, Poles, or Georgians, the Russians’ belief in their own superiority was bizarre. If Russians were accustomed to think of themselves as ‘Westerners’ in relation to China, they were obviously ‘Easterners’ in relation to the main body of Europeans.
There is no doubt that Soviet communism proclaimed ‘the West’ to be the ideological enemy. At the same time it did not deny that its own roots lay in Europe, and that Lenin’s dearest wish had been to link the revolution in Russia with the expected revolution in Germany. So ‘Western civilization’ was not all bad. Indeed, so long as they were dead, leading Western figures could be readily admired. The point was: the West had grown decadent; the East, in the hands of the heroic proletariat, had stayed vigorous and healthy. Sooner or later the capitalist regimes would fade, the socialist fatherland would give them a final push, the frontiers would fall, and East would be rejoined with the West under Soviet Russian leadership in a new revolutionary brotherhood. This is what Lenin had dreamed of, and what Leonid Brezhnev would have in mind when he talked of‘a common European home’.
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This view of the communists’ messianic mission was exported, with local variations, to all the countries which the Soviet Union controlled. In its strictly historical aspect it sought to instil two cardinal dogmas—the primacy of ‘socio-economic forces’ and the benign nature of Russia’s expansion. It was greatly boosted by the Soviet defeat of Germany in 1941–5, and was still being taught as gospel to tens of millions of European students and schoolchildren in the late 1980s. Right at the end of communism’s career, the General Secretary of the CPSU, Mikhail Gorbachev, revived the slogan of ‘a common European home’.
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It was seized on by many foreign commentators and widely welcomed; but Gorbachev never had time to explain what he meant. He was dictator of an empire from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka—a peninsula as remote, and as European, as neighbouring Alaska. Could it be possible that Gorbachev’s dream was of a Greater Europe, stretching right round the globe?