PART I
SCIENTIFIC APPROACHES TO
NATIONAL NARRATIVES
Chapter 1
Historical Representation,
Identity, Allegiance
ALLAN MEGILL
There is a tension in the âNational Histories in Europeâ project that became clear at the first session of the Glamorgan conference from which this volume is derived. The tension â and it is a legitimate tension â is between, on the one hand, history as offering a disinterested, âscientificâ account of historical reality that makes a claim, however attenuated, to objectivity and, on the other, particular human solidarities as objects not just of study but of commitment.1
The disinterested, scientific side of the project is manifested throughout the detailed research proposal that the âNational Histories in Europeâ research network submitted to the European Science Foundation in January 2002 in its successful bid to obtain funding. However, more generally accessible is an eight-page brochure describing the project that was put on the Web in February 2004. Consider the following account of the proposed activities of âTeam Twoâ (deeply involved in the Glamorgan conference), which was charged with the task of investigating the topic, âNarrating National Historiesâ. âNational âmasterâ narrativesâ, we are told,
always stand in close relationship with narratives, such as those based on gender, ethnicity, class and/or religion. In what ways have such social cleavages mattered to national history writing? This team will investigate the links and interdependencies between histories written from a national perspective and those written from a perspective of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and religion.2
The brochure goes on to identify five areas on which research will focus: origins and foundational myths of national histories; main actors and heroes in national narratives; the claims to uniqueness or to special missions in national histories; conceptions of decline, renewal and rupture in national histories; and the inclusion or exclusion of ânon-spatial Othersâ in national master narratives.
Everything that the brochure says here suggests that the researchers are engaged in an objective process of scholarly investigation. Of course, the histories on which they propose to focus were written âfrom a national perspectiveâ, as the brochure notes. However, there is no suggestion that the Team Two researchers will be writing from any such partial perspective. On the contrary, everything in the above statement suggests that they plan to be rigorously disinterested in their work. They want to show, as clearly and accurately as possible, how national histories relate to histories written from other perspectives. The researchersâ perspective is a would-be universal perspective: the perspective of those who desire to know how things really were and are.
On the other hand, the âNational Histories in Europeâ project also proposes to contribute to European solidarity and mutual understanding. The following statement in the brochure exemplifies this aspect of the enterprise:
National history is central to national identity. A sustained and systematic study of the construction, erosion and reconstruction of national histories across a wide variety of European states is a highly topical and extremely relevant exercise for two reasons: firstly, because of the long and successful history of the national paradigm in history-writing; and, secondly, because of its re-emergence as a powerful political tool in the 1990s in the context of the accelerating processes of Europeanisation and globalisation. National histories form an important part of the collective memory of the peoples of Europe. National bonds have been, and continue to be, among the strongest bonds of loyalty. A genuinely trans-national and comparative investigation into the structures and workings of national histories will play an important part [ . . . ] in preparing the way for further dialogue and understanding among European nation-states.3
I cannot object to the aspirations embedded in this statement. Further, the weighty research proposal of 2002 reveals the high degree of co-ordinated intelligence that has gone into the project, which is based, as the brochure says, on âthe collaboration of more than 60 leading scholars from more than 20 countriesâ.4 There is much to be learned from the programme of research that the project organisers have laid out. Nor do I object to the presence of the projectâs âcommittedâ side as such. For example, I do not claim that it is some sort of logical contradiction that a project should involve a commitment to both truth and social solidarity. On the contrary, a âdouble orientationâ or âunresolving dialecticâ is essential to the project of (scientific) historical research and writing.5 My comments have to do rather with refining certain aspects of the analysis and with pointing out some of its underjustified assumptions.
How much of a role can historical research and writing play in the attempt to move forward to a free, united, peace-loving and benevolent Europe? My general sense of the matter is that history has a relatively limited and specialised role to play in such developments. In fact, I think it rather dangerous when history gets committed to âthe good causeâ, whatever that cause may be. Rather, historyâs basic commitment ought to be to speaking both interestingly and truthfully about matters of the past. History should seek to offer, in Paul Veyneâs words, a rĂ©cit vĂ©ridique â a âtruthful narrativeâ. Admittedly, a âtruthful narrativeâ may turn out not to be a true narrative, as we learn when we see the errors and blind spots of one generation of historians being corrected by later generations. Historical knowledge always has a provisional aspect to it. Yet the historianâs distinctive duty is to speak truthfully about the past. The historian ought to criticise forthrightly erroneous or unjustified claims about the past, no matter how worthy and good-hearted are the commitments of those who make these claims. In this sense, historians have the task of maintaining a certain detachment between the past on the one hand and the present and the presumed future on the other.7
I am more favourably impressed by certain observations of Ranke, Marx and Nietzsche concerning the relation between history and current aspirations and desires than I am by the very positive view of this relation adopted by some recent historians. Famously, in 1824 the young Leopold Ranke remarked that âhistory has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future agesâ. Ranke took issue with this view. His work, he tells his readers, âwants only to show what actually happenedâ.8 Ranke was reacting here against a long tradition of thinking that gave to history the task of being a preceptor of life, offering general rules by which we might guide our actions. He was surely justified in rejecting the morally and pragmatically oriented approaches to history that he found in earlier writers. First, such histories could only produce distorted representations of the past. Second, the claim to offer lessons in ethics and prudence was fraudulent, for such-and-such actions in the past were judged exemplary on the basis of pre-existing views held by the authors in question, which they then found âconfirmationâ for in the past. The resulting history was thus an exercise in false confirmation, giving back to the present the presentâs own prejudices dressed up in the garb of antiquity.
Ranke was mainly interested in how a pragmatic conception of history was likely to distort our apprehension of the past. With Marx it is different. I am thinking, of course, of the beginning of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), where Marx regrets the harmful impact that representations of past events can have on action in the present. His words are famous but still worth quoting: Hegel, Marx mistakenly claims,
remarks somewhere that all great events and characters of world history occur, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce: rĂšCaussidi (PE) in place of Danton, Louis Blanc in place of Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848-51 in place of the Montagne of 1793-95, the Nephew in place of the Uncle.9
In short, Marx sees representations of the past as impairing historical actorsâ grasp of the present. Although in other respects their positions are dramatically different, Ranke and Marx are here making complementary points: the one holding that presentist concerns distort our representations of the past, the other holding that representations of the past impair our understanding of the present.
As for Nietzsche, his best-known discussion of historical matters is his Untimely Meditation of 1874, âOn the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Lifeâ. Although his conceptualisation in this essay is unclear, Nietzscheâs argument appears to be that the right orientation to the past involves some sort of fluid shifting among a âmonumentalâ attitude, which deifies figures in the past; an âantiquarianâ attitude, which engages in a kind of local reverence towards the past; and a âcriticalâ attitude, which subjects the past to condemnation. Nietzsche also suggests that there are competing âhistoricalâ, âunhistoricalâ and âsupra-historicalâ approaches to the past, but what he had in mind here is even less clear.10 However, in On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), Nietzsche articulated a position very different from that offered in the 1874 essay.11 In On the Genealogy of Morality Nietzsche writes that we ought to cultivate an attitude of âactive forgetfulnessâ with regard to the past.12 In this later work Nietzsche seems to be saying that we need to get over the past â not forgetting it, exactly, but certainly rejecting the notion that it has any sort of a priori claim over us.
What is common to these bits of Ranke, Marx and Nietzsche is a wish to distance the past from the present and future. In Ranke, the distancing is aimed at âsavingâ the past, whereas in Marx and Nietzsche it is aimed at saving the present and especially the future. Something like such an attitude of distancing, I contend, ought to be normative for historians now.
In fact, I think that it is normative among those historians who have thought seriously about the matter. Consider Lucien Febvre, the great co-founder of the Annales school. In a 1949 essay entitled âVers une autre histoireâ that memorialises his murdered colleague Marc Bloch, Febvre envisages a âproblem-orientedâ history, by which he meant a history that approaches the past with the aim of solving problems relevant to the present. As part of this project, Febvre wished to get away from what he saw as the burdening and distorting weight of the past. He criticised âtraditionalâ societies for âproduc[ing] an image of their present life, of its collective aims and of the virtues required to achieve those aimsâ, and then projecting a âsort of prefiguration of the same realityâ on the past.13 In contrast to the traditional view, Febvre judged that history is a liberation from the past: âhistory is a way of organizing the past so that it does not weigh too heavily on the shoulders of menâ.14 This liberation, Febvre explicitly states, involves a kind of forgetting. In Febvreâs view,
it is essential for human groups and societies to forget if they wish to survive. We have to live. We cannot allow ourselves to be crushed under the tremendous, cruel, accumulated weight of all that we inherit.15
Febvreâs view as expressed here seems to me to be quite different from the emphasis in the âNational Histories in Europeâ brochure on national history as âcentral to national identityâ, on national histories as forming âan important part of the collective memory of the peoples of Europeâ, and on the ânational bondsâ that âhave been, and continue to be, among the strongest bonds of loyaltyâ among Europeans.16 I do not mean to suggest that there is radical opposition here, for it seems clear that the âNational Histories in Europeâ project potentially leaves room for other ways of conceptualising bonds of unity among people. However, those other ways are not stated, and the limits of an approach focussed on âmemoryâ are decidedly not made clear.
In the research proposal of January 2002, the authors, referring to the national historiographies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, allude to âthe pretences of national history as an objective science working within the boundaries of a rational discourseâ. They find in this tradition of history writing âa plethora of mythopoetic conceptsâ that âstructured very diverse historical interpretationsâ.17 The authors and animators of the âNational Histories in Europeâ project are surely correct to suggest a connection between national histories and âmythopoeticsâ, and one looks forward to the further research that will help us understand in a more exact way how it was so. (One example of such a study is Linas Eriksonasâs National Heroes and National Identities: Scotland, Norway and Lithuania18). What I find inadequate in the proposal â in the midst of many other things that I admire â is an apparently too quick setting aside of any claim that âobjectivityâ in some sense might make upon us, and the abse...