Introductory Paper
by Neal Ascherson
They used to say that in Russia it is the past that is unpredictable. That wisecrack formed part of the old Cold War discourse. It was a cartoon image of dictatorship which every few years arrests its historians, appoints new ones, and imposes a new and quite different narrative of national history.
Today, we would be wary of repeating that jeer. Not because Russian historiography has suddenly become sober, objective and cleansed of political propaganda (To find out the sometimes staggering things taught today in the history classes of Russian or other post-Soviet schools, you only have to look at Viktor Shnirelman’s analysis of textbooks). We would be wary because confidence in the objectivity of history has steadily diminished, not just in dictatorships but in apparently free and plural societies as well. We are all more aware than we used to be that the American, English, Irish or Belgian pasts, to name a few, have also become unpredictable. This decline of confidence has afflicted the West at the same time as the much better known decline in respect for representative democracy and its politicians – many of whom base their platforms on particular versions of recent history. It’s a good guess that these two decays of trust are related.
There are two extremes in the approach to recovering the past. One is Leopold von Ranke’s assertion that the historian’s job is to find out what really happened, how it really was – wie es wirklich war. This assumes that there is at least a residue of ascertainable truth about the past which can be established, like a buried building which can be uncovered. The other extreme is to regard the past as a huge, reeking tip of unsorted rubbish across which scavengers wander, pulling up interesting fragments which might fetch a good price or come in handy. In each age, historians and politicians select such fragments to assemble pretty structures in the fashion of the day.
Mommsen can be called a positivist, while the view of the past as trash, a deposit meaningless in itself, can be called post-modern and relativist. I suggest that there is a reasonable position between the two extremes. It certainly is both possible and necessary to find out something of what really happened (and to disprove lies about it). And yet it’s also true that all historical narratives are selective constructions by children of their times. And all of these selections respond, consciously or unconsciously, to social and political currents in the society around them.
In short, even if the rubbish-tip image is too dismissive, the past is a resource, a mine for politicians and thinkers. So how is this resource used? Here I rely on a seductive schema produced some years ago by François Hartog, in an article for Annales (Nov-Dec 1995, pp.1219-1236). Hartog suggests three successive phases in the use of the past. First, up to the end of the 18th century, there was the epoch he calls “historia magistra”, when it was believed that the study of the past illuminated the future. The past never repeated itself, and yet the future was never really new; it was composed of the past reassembled in fresh patterns. The over-used remark by George Santayana – that those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it – is a late example of that approach.
Second, following the French Revolution, came the “modern regime of historicity”, in which the future was used to illuminate the past. What Hartog means is that the scientific revolutionary spirit, Jacobin and later Marxist, thought that it had discovered the iron, inevitable laws of historical and social development. These laws could be used not only to predict the future but to re-interpret what had gone before.
This “modern regime” lasted from 1789 to 1989 – the year when European Communism collapsed. But after the Second World War, a third way of exploiting the past had begun to emerge. Hartog calls this “Presentism”. This is the recognition that the present is all that we know and that its claim on our loyalty is absolute. One slogan of the Paris May in 1968 was “Forget the Future!”. As Hartog says, that also implies subjugating the past. In his words, Presentism generates , “almost from one day to the next, the past and future which its daily needs require”. Henry Ford put it more crudely in 1916: “History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that’s worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today”.
Here we have returned to relativism, a bold defence of the right to knock the past into any shape the present needs. It appalled traditionalists, and still does. As TS Eliot complained nearly 50 years ago, “there is coming into existence a new kind of provincialism which perhaps deserves a new name. It is a provincialism, not of space, but of time; one for which...the world is solely the property of the living, a property in which the dead hold no shares”.
And yet Presentism has already begun to lose its nerve. The idea that the past is a squashy, plastic substance with no shape of its own is too terrifying for politicians. So there has arisen the concept of “Heritage”, now an indispensable part of national and international cultural policies. The core of Heritage is the right of the state to appoint an official past. All designated relics of the past, whether buildings, monuments or landscapes, are declared to be national patrimony. On the citizens, who are not consulted on the choice of what is to be so scheduled, is laid the duty to respect and conserve these objects, and to hand them on to their unborn successor generations. Out of this highly authoritarian idea flows the new mania for commemorations, a sign of a desperate need for roots and of a search by our ruling groups for new forms of legitimacy based on the past. “One day, my son, all this will be yours...whether you want it or not!”
And Heritage for the first time promotes the use of the past as an economic asset, as well as a political and cultural resource. The heritage industry and the tourism industry have become inseparable. Britain, for example, once described by an ebullient politician as entirely made of coal and entirely surrounded by fish, has been found to be covered by a layer of exploitable past like a layer of guano ten thousand years deep. The coal and fish have gone, but the past can be strip-mined and sold to the whole world.
But most of what we will be discussing here comes under the Hartog heading of “modern regime”. It may seem odd to call nationalism “scientific”. But each nationalism, in its 19th and 20th century forms, had a vision – sometimes messianic – of the future destiny of the nation, and used this vision as a beam of light to be thrown back onto the past. Glory to come implied, or even required, glory in history. It remained only to find it, by rejecting the foreign oppressor’s version, by studying forgotten documents, by creative archaeology or occasionally – as in 19th century Bohemia or contemporary Russia – by deliberate forgery. The profession of archaeology, especially, became an indispensable aid to nation-building, and in established nation-states advanced from an amateur occupation to a hierarchical state service.
Mobilised in this way, historians and archaeologists mined the past for several kinds of treasure. One was “priority”, the evidence that our people had occupied this land before their people – the imperial oppressors or threatening neighbours. In the 20th century, this produced countless “spade wars” between archaeologists. One famous example was the struggle between Poles and Germans to demonstrate that Slavs or Teutons first occupied the lands between Elbe and Vistula; it was no accident that the Nazi occupiers of Poland between 1939 and 1945 murdered the majority of Polish archaeologists. Another search was for “Golden Ages”, evidence that a subject nation had once possessed a high and literate court culture capable of producing epic poetry. Such “spade wars” still rage in corners of the world, for example in the Caucasus and the Balkans. Even in the United Kingdom, the interpretation of certain Iron Age sites in Northern Ireland can depend on the Unionist or Republican background of a researcher.
Perhaps the most vivid example of shaping the past to fit a concept of destiny is the English “Whig interpretation of history”. Perfected in the 19th century and taught everywhere until quite recently, this version showed the history of England as an inevitable upwards progress through the centuries towards fulfilment in the form of Westminster parliamentary democracy, world-dominating industry and a grateful Empire or Commonwealth. This was a feat not so much of history-making as of landscape gardening. Vistas of Anglo-Saxon lawn and Norman shrubbery led up past Tudor and Hanoverian flowerbeds to the country-house terrace of the present, where the proprietor sat contentedly surveying his estate. The design was so convincing that no other way of arranging the past of England seemed possible until the rebellion of left-wing social and economic historians (Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill and others) in the mid-20th century. Then at last arose an alternative history of England, hung not on dynasties and imperial battles but on the unknown or almost forgotten struggles of the common people for justice and equality.
Other countries, however, have contrived to maintain multiple, competing histories.
Sometimes this is the result of cultural repression. Poland, during the Partitions and occupations and again during the half-century of Communist rule, had two distinct and largely incompatible versions of recent history, each with its own powerful political charge. One was the official schoolbook version; in which the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, the deportation of two million civilians, and the Katyn massacre did not feature. The other, as I well remember, was the true version of what had happened, confided by parents to their children at night when they reached an age of discretion and supported by anecdotes about the fate of family members.
But plural histories are not confined to lands under foreign domination. France, since about 1830, has had a “Red” history for Republicans and radicals, and a “White” history for conservative Catholics and monarchists. Each had its own books, commemorating and celebrating quite different dates and individuals. But the last centenary of the Revolution, in 1989, showed that a third history of France was emerging, one which moves the focus from Paris and centralised “France” to concentrate on the provinces: the submerged ethnic and linguistic groups – Bretons, Provençals, Catalans and so on – which were often so brutally handled by monarchy and republic alike One fairly recent book about the tragic 1792 uprising in the Vendée and the vengeance taken by the forces of the Revolution was titled Le Génocide Franco-Français. In short, France is able to support histories with perspectives so unlike each other that the very outline of the country under discussion can vary. This diversity has to be healthy, and in the same way it seems unlikely that there will ever be a French consensus on what should or should not constitute patrimoine.
In most of these examples of history’s use for the construction of politics or identity, the historians have been looking for continuities. This presupposes a past with which they want to be continuous. However, all societies have accumulated episodes they would prefer to forget, episodes they may once have been proud of but which are unacceptable in the present. There have been two main ways of coping with them. One is denial. Belgium until very recently excluded from its national narrative the colossal atrocities committed in the Congo Free State, British school history does not dwell on the details of the long repression of Ireland, and it is only in the last few decades that American and Australian history has included the fate of indigenous peoples during the European settlement period.
A more sophisticated form of denial is to claim that a society or nation has been so transformed that there is no continuity with a criminal past, which happened “in another country”. As Mary Fulbrook has argued, one classic example was the East German assertion that Nazi crimes were committed by a capitalist and Fascist Germany which no longer existed east of the river Elbe. The French and Russian revolutions rejected continuity with preceding regimes in similar ways. So did the Red Guards of the “Cultural Revolution” in China, who not only disclaimed the past but set out to destroy the material evidence of Chinese history and its custodians. The argument here is that moral responsibility rests with a given ruling group, not with some imaginary essential “nation”. A revolutionary leader is therefore entitled not only to declare a new history, using the future to reinterpret the past, but to abolish the past itself. As Rabaud de St-Etienne said in the early years of the French Revolution, “Everything must be destroyed - yes, everything! - because everything must be created anew”.
The alternative is to admit these “shameful” episodes into national narratives, by a process of deliberate confrontation. In the case of slavery, for instance, it is now proposed that states like Britain or the USA – their living populations in the 21st century – have inherited responsibility and guilt for what was done to Africans between the 17th and 19th centuries. This is certainly an open-hearted and courageous notion, which can only reduce international prejudices and resentments. And yet it’s worth pointing out that it involves a decisive rejection of “Presentism”, and reinforces the new authoritarian “Heritage” approach to the past. Responsibility for the past is being dumped on the inhabitants of the present, even though those living individuals took no personal part in the crimes of previous generations and may even have grown up ignorant of their existence.
We are now living in an age of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, of international criminal tribunals, of huge history-based group claims to restitution of lands or personal property, of national apologies for deeds done generations before, of the arrest in London of an elderly tyrant charged with murder and torture in Chile a quarter-century before. The “right to truth”, and sometimes to retribution, is held to reach not only beyond national frontiers but also beyond the grave, across that impassable frontier which separates the living from the dead.
In all these processes, history is being rescued, rewritten and occasionally invented in order to produce reconciliations or “closures” in the present. Some of them are spontaneous efforts by a nation to cleanse itself, as with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. Others are to some degree unwilling responses to international or internal pressures on governments. The commissions investigating atrocities in Chile’s Pinochet dictatorship or Argentina’s “Dirty War” had mixed motives, the thirst for truth but also the wish of their governments to avoid provoking the military by conventional criminal trials.
Apologies, so far, usually take the form of individual statements. The Pope, without naming names too precisely, has apologised for the sins of the Catholic Church against Jews, women and other minorities over the last 2000 years. President Clinton apologised for the American overthrow of the King of Hawaii in 1893, for the detention of Japanese-Americans during the last world war, and for his country’s treatment of Guatemala in the 1950s. The British Queen visiting New Zealand found herself apologising for the acquisition of Maori lands in the 19th century. Today, searching the Internet for “apologies and history” produces an almost endless list. Apologising is in vogue.
In most of these formal reassessments of the past, the historian and the archaeologist are key witnesses. In Australia or North America, indigenous groups employ archaeologists to authenticate their claims that their verifiable ancestors occupied lost territories. Historians are at the centre of the arguments about governmental apologies and compensation for slavery and the slave trade. Experts on the history of the Balkans are consulted by the International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague.
What are we to make of this new concern with correcting history? On the positive side, this is an aspect of how the idea of universal human rights is becoming reality. Reconciliation between nations and within divided nations requires some basic agreement on what is held to be the truth about the past. That in turn requires painful admissions. And it also requires a commitment by those who make the admissions to make good some of the historic damage. In a touching declaration to “the native peoples of Canada”, the order of Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate recognised that “with every sincere apology there is implicit the promise of conversion to a new way of acting”. This may mean new policies, but it may also mean money or land. Those who win the “right to truth” often move on to demand rights of restitution or compensation. (Terror of compensation explains why the British government blocked the European Union’s wish to apologise for the slave trade, at Durban this year).
But questions remain to be asked. Changing histories is only one more way of exploiting the past in order to overcome conflict and encourage national and international unity. Such changes will always leave a disgruntled residue of people who prefer the old history they grew up with, and regard the new one as a pack of politically-correct humbug. This is especially true with new histories which insist that the living must inherit the guilt of the dead. John Howard, the right-wing prime minister of Australia, refused to apologise for the practice of removing Aboriginal children from their parents. He said that he felt “deep sorrow”, but added: “Australians of this generation shouldn’t be required to accept guilt and blame for past actions and policy over which they had no control”. You do not have to admire Howard or his xenophobic policies to take his point. In the same way, it is understandable that young Germans living in a globalised dot-com age are exasperated when they are held responsible for what their grandfathers did during the Third Reich.
I end with three brief conclusions. The first is that we still have no satisfying way of defining the moral relationship of living people to the past of the community into which they happen to be born. The second is that human societies will always reshuffle what remains from previous ages into an infinity of different shapes to justify what they want to do or to be. And the third conclusion, following from the second, is that no single version of history is permanently valid, and that a genuinely mature society must expect and tolerate competing accounts of the past.
© 21st Century Trust