Part of the importance of both historical research and the history taught in schools lies in the broad consensus among historians and wider society that our past is determinative of our way of being and of responding to the present. It is therefore self-evident that the right to determine the character of this being and pass that character down to succeeding generations may well find itself contested. History’s power to arrange, define and interpret the past on behalf of a given society, state or group has consistently exempted the discipline from the allegation levelled, on occasion rightly, at many other academic fields—of existing in an ivory tower, under privileged shelter from the influence of conflicting interests. To this day, historical narratives have been integral to the agendas and rhetoric of a wide range of political stakeholders, and have been challenged, battered and shaped by the rigours of public discourse and controversy. Countless examples from all periods of history and almost all world regions highlight the extensive use of history for political and ideological purposes, many of them nationalistic and chauvinistic in nature. It seems almost inevitable, then, that history is one of the most culturally and politically sensitive subjects taught in schools. Since it was first incorporated into school curricula in the nineteenth century, governments and political authorities have assigned to history education a central role in shaping social and political consensus, conscious of its power to help define allegiances, collective identities, social cohesion and the boundaries of social exclusion. States continue to recommend, impose or enforce official versions of history in the educational sector, despite the challenges to this practice articulated by historians, educators, intellectuals, journalists and social movements or political groupings.
Recent years have seen mounting academic and public interest in conflicts around history education, triggered primarily by significant global, social, cultural and political transformations in the wake of the Cold War, the development of a multipolar world order, the re-emergence of ethnic nationalisms, accelerated globalisation processes and the digital revolution. Awareness is growing of the fact that controversies about history education often act as flashpoints of conflict between and within nations over interpretations of the past, which in turn are closely related to social orders, their legitimacy in the present and visions of the future.
The Background to This Book
Conflicts Around History Education and History Textbook Diplomacy: A Look Back
History education and textbooks have been at the core of processes of national identity-building and of relationships to other countries since the rise of modern education systems. The debates, controversies and conflicts around the subject date back to history’s first appearance in formal school curricula. Considered a veritable instrumentum regni for forming good citizens, patriots and in many cases soldiers, school history was soon befallen by militaristic tendencies, reflected in the vision of raising ‘soldiers who love their guns’,1 which likewise became its first objective to come under critical fire. Textbooks and other educational media occupy a significant space in this nexus of identity-building and controversy. They are both constructions and constructors of social orders and of the knowledge to which a society ascribes particular relevance, which always includes and reflects representations of a collective self and of the value systems upheld by a societal body. History textbooks thus acquire the status of prime instruments driving national and citizenship education and the formation and transformation of public consciousness.2
At the outset of the twentieth century, pacifist movements, socialist circles and teachers’ organisations critiqued this function of educational media, seeking to revise history textbooks in order to rid them of images of ‘the enemy’.3 The imperative of the broad commitment to peace undertaken in the aftermath of the First World War drove the evolution of these movements at both international and non-governmental level; a rich literature4 details the various inter- and supranational initiatives aiming at the elimination of extreme nationalism and militarism from history textbooks. At the very first general meeting of the League of Nations in 1920, Japanese teachers petitioned for the examination and amendment of history and geography textbooks, an initiative in which they were supported by English trade unions.5 Soon afterwards, in 1922, the League of Nations set up the Comité International de la Coopération Intellectuelle, whose mandate included the revision of history textbooks.6 In 1933, several Latin American states signed an agreement to periodically review their history textbooks, and in 1937, under the umbrella of the League of Nations, 26 states signed the first and to this day only international declaration on the teaching of history and the revision of textbooks. Non-governmental initiatives in this area included the foundation of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace7 and, in 1926, of the Fédération internationale des associations d’instituteurs. Rooted, notably, in an initiative of two teachers’ associations, the French Syndicat National des Instituteurs and the German Deutscher Lehrerverein, the Fédération sought to promote educational collaboration ‘to prepare for peace through the cooperation of peoples in freedom’.8 In the interwar period, 20 international and 44 national historians’ organisations were involved in textbook-related discussions.9 These included the International Historians’ Congress of 1928 in Oslo and the International Conference of History Teaching, which had been set up in 1932 in The Hague with the explicit aim of revising textbooks with a view to promoting international understanding.
The practical outcome of these initiatives was very limited. The international political situation between the world wars, especially during the 1930s, was not conducive to moral disarmament and most states were unwilling to accept any interference in a field as important and delicate as history education.10 One meaningful case is an initiative of the German and French teachers’ associations referred to above, whose representatives met in Paris in 1935 to revise their history textbooks in relation to sensitive issues. After a frank debate, they produced a set of recommendations, only to see them disavowed by the German government in its endeavour to implement the National Socialist version of history in Germany’s textbooks.11 This hurdle notwithstanding, the initiative cannot truly be called a failure, as its existence enabled the rapid resumption of communication after the war, leading to the early establishment of Franco-German agreements on textbooks.12
After the Second World War, endeavours to disarm history education and to radically transform it into an instrument for the promotion of peace and cooperation were resumed with renewed commitment, above all on the part of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO ) and the Council of Europe (CoE). Progressing beyond the idea of bilateral or multilateral history textbook revision, UNESCO proposed a new comprehensive vision, calling upon schools to teach world history, emphasise cultural and scientific topics and highlight ‘the interdependence of peoples and cultures and their contribution … to the common heritage’.13 French historian Lucien Febvre, referring to the limitations of earlier initiatives for the revision of national history textbooks, emphasised the relationship between a history conceptualised as the history of humanity and the notion of education for peace when presenting the plan for this project:
UNESCO’s engagement produced two major, multivolume historical works: The History of Mankind,15 published in the 1960s, and the seven-volume History of Humanity, published from 1994.16 UNESCO also had history teaching and textbooks in mind when it initiated its project to write a General History of Africa in 1964. This endeavour, conducted over the course of 30 years primarily by African historians and resulting in nine volumes, took a pluralist perspective on the continent’s history but has found only limited use in classrooms. History teaching in many African countries persists in taking a Eurocentric or nationalist view.17 A similarly low impact emerged from the ‘Cultural Charter for Africa’, issued in 1976 by the Organisation of African Unity, which addressed the issue of history teaching and textbooks within a conflict-laden post-colonial framework.18 An attempt to remedy the limited influence of these initiatives commenced in 2009 in the shape of a project aiming to use the groundbreaking volumes produced under the ‘Cultural Charter’ in educational settings.19[T]extbooks, nationalist by definition, designed to glorify the individual spirit of a people, cannot but place it in opposition to neighbouring peoples … National history based on politics, as it is taught more or less everywhere, will never tend to reconcile peoples. All one can ask of it is not to set off one against the other. If one wants to do more than this it is necessary to do something new … to create the opportunity for a new kind of teaching: an apolitical approach to world history, which is by definition pacifist.14
The Council of Europe, in line with its mission to create the cultural foundations for a European union, focused on developing a common European vision of history with the potential to overcome dangerous nationalisms. Its first initiative was a series of six conferences, held between 1953 and 1958, which provided a forum for an unprecedented exchange of ideas among historians from all the Council’s member states and gave rise to lists of specific recommendations for textbook authors.20 The CoE’s activities did precipitate long-term effects; over the decades, in tune with the new European political climate, the accent of the narrative in the history textbooks of many Western European states slowly shifted away from exclusively national viewpoints and towards a broader European perspective. After 1989, the accession to the CoE of many states with specific histories east of the Iron Curtain and tendencies towards a novel form of ethnic nationalism changed the landscape.21 Historians and teachers from these states ‘in democratic transition’ have been involved in efforts to diffuse the idea of a shared European history and to enhance mutual understanding in post-authoritarian and post-conflict contexts.22
From the outset, the European effort in reorienting history education has included a significant contribution by the Internationales Institut für Schulbuchverbesserung (International Institute for Textbook Improvement), founded in Braunschweig in 1951 by the German historian Georg Eckert, in whose honour it was renamed the Georg-Eckert-Institut für internationale Schulbuchforschung (Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research) after his death in 1975. The institute has organised a number of international, mainly bilateral conferences on collaborative textbook revision. While, from the 1950s onwards, it was possible to establish conference series or even textbook commissions with NATO member states such as France,23 the United Kingdom,24 and Italy,25 the involvement of states under socialist regimes generally remained restricted during the Cold War. The dialogue on textbook revision opened between West Germany and Czechoslovakia in 1967, during the Prague Spring, was subsequently suspended by the Husák government and not resumed for another 20 years.26 By contrast, the commission formed of Polish and West German members established in 1972 as part of West Germany’s policy of détente with the Eastern bloc has been active ever since.27 The first German-Israeli textbook commission was convened in 1981, and a second followed in 2010.28
Another impetus for rethinking history education was the advent of calls for democracy and justice in historical representations of various social groups. During the 1960s, social activists and scholars, principally in Western states, alleged that history curricula and textbooks were conservative instruments of control.29 As Linda Levstik argues in the context of the United States, ‘in a society torn by [issues of] civil rights[,] women’s rights, and anti-war protests, it was difficult to maintain the illusion that a unified history of progress and consensus was possible’.30 The transformations in history education emergent at this time drew further momentum from new epistemological premises in various fields of scholarship. Julian Dierkes attributed the changes to West German curricula that took place, for instance, in the 1960s to the shift from Historismus to Sozialgeschichte,31 from an emphasis on historicism to a focus on social history. Western societies in particular witnessed a revolution in education during this period and in the decades that followed, with a shift from teacher- to pupil-centred and from expository towards investigative learning.32 Previously silenced agents of history gained a voice in the public historical narrative, and new topics and historiographical approaches entered the educational canon.33 Research on the histories of minority groups, non-Western cultures, childhood, women and everyday life challenged the notion of one single national narrative revolving around political events and the actions of ‘the great and the good’. Textbooks evolved with the times34; Francis Fitzgerald claimed for the US context that ‘the text[book]s of the 1960s contain the most dramatic rewriting of history ever to take place in American schoolbooks’.35 The introduction to a collective work appearing in 1970 under the direction of Martin Ballard, entitled New Movements in the Study and Teaching of History, called for history teaching ‘to break out of [its] narrow nationalistic straitjacket … In a century of worldwide communications—and indeed of worldwide warfare—it has become inexcusable that teachers should continue to work from syllabuses which were designed to prepare pupils for life in a narrower environment’.36
Such new approaches to history education, however, taking root primarily in Western nations, did not serve to quell conflict around what and how to teach when it came to history. Indeed, the reverse appears true: with the dramatic changes in global politics that unfolded in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a new and more complex phase of controversies on history education took the stage. The collapse of the Soviet Union and of the geopolitical system of the Cold War engendered a new proliferation of historical voices speaking out for the first time in and beyond the domestic public space. Additionally, these changes permitted the opening of ...