Movement for the Abolition of War

Myth Truth and Nation state: how our 'histories' help create our wars

Notes from a talk given by Professor Stefan Berger at a public meeting at the House of Commons on October 14th 2009. This MAW event explored the role of nationalism in perpetuating war, and looked at how the teaching of history may contribute to improving international relationships, overcoming mistrust and conflict between nations. Jeremy Corbyn MP assisted in arranging the meeting, and attended the event.

Professor Berger is Professor of Modern German and Comparative European History at the University of Manchester. He is director of the international research programme ' Representations of the Past: The Writing of National Histories in 19th and 20th century Europe.'

Professor Berger's introduction to the talk

Thanks for their invitation to the Movement for the Abolition of War, especially

Christine Titmus. Thanks too to Jeremy Corbyn, who, among many other things, has

recently courageously defended the proud traditions of multiculturalism in this

country against the wave of nationalist rhetoric about ‘Britishness’ which has badly

affected even the Labour Party in recent months and years. (I refer to the debates

regarding citizenship tests and a points system not very long ago, and Gordon

Brown’s suggestion that we should all hoist a Union Jack in the back garden.

Incidentally, there is a widespread belief that a citizenship test should have a history

section: that a sense of national history is an important precondition for becoming a

citizen. History then has an important role to play in the public life of the nation.)

The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev said: ‘Historians are dangerous. They have to be

watched carefully.’ This shows the paranoid mindset of a totalitarian regime which

wanted to control and vet all historical knowledge, but also draws attention to the

wider relevance of history writing for societies and polities.

Our sense of identity is often based on a sense of history. This is captured in the

witticism: ‘A nation is a group of people united by a common mistake about their

ancestry and a common dislike of their neighbours.’ This is not just true for national

identity: it also applies to class, religion, ethnicity and gender; but what I want to

argue here is that the strong link between history and national identity has produced a

range of catastrophes in Europe’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century past, and that it is

therefore better to abandon any attempt to base citizenship on a national identity

informed by a strong sense of an allegedly common history.

Let me give you some examples:

The French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars

The constitution of the modern nation is exemplified in the French revolution. It

includes a strong sense of their own historical importance; the setting up of the first

national archives (with papers from the revolutionary constitutional assembly as the

first deposit); and the construction of Frenchness around issues of citizenship (egalite,

liberte and fraternite). In the name of that constitutional patriotism the revolutionaries

fought a bloody civil war inside France, murdering so-called enemies of the French

nation in their tens of thousands in the Vendee and elsewhere, and letting the

guillotine work overtime in the pursuit of cleansing the nation of its enemies.

Although France was attacked by an alliance of the dynastic states surrounding it, the

revolutionary wars soon turned into wars of expansion, exporting the revolutionary

values to neighbouring countries and occupying them in the name of liberty. Some

years later the Napoleonic attempt to create a Europe-wide French empire was based

on a similar ethos: the mission of the French nation to spread the universalist values

of the revolution and liberate the peoples of Europe from the yoke of dynastic rule.

Ironically, French aggression gave a major boost to nascent national movements

across Europe; the Napoleonic wars left between 3.5 and 6.5 million Europeans dead.

The 1848 Revolutions in Central Europe

Like the French revolution of 1789 the European revolutions of 1848 demonstratedth century to the last third of the 19th century; but with regard to nationalism, theth century; no other professional group was as

the early link between nationalism and an emancipatory movement which sought

greater participation of the European bourgeoisie in the government of their

respective states. Liberalism and nationalism were certainly close allies from the late

revolutions were certainly extreme. German parliamentarians at Frankfurt were keen

to adopt definitions of Germanness which would allow them to incorporate as much

territory as possible into the future German nation state. They argued ethnically at one

end and politically at another depending on how it suited them. There was rivalry with

other nationalists, shown in Czech politician Palacky’s refusal to come to Frankfurt

and his counterplan to set up a Czech assembly in Prague. Palacky was the key

national historian of the Czechs in the 19

heavily represented in the Frankfurt parliament as professors, among them a good

number of historians, whose works all testify to the strong link between national

history and nationalist political projects.

The treatment of national minorities in European nation states

The Jews have been systematically excluded from virtually all national histories

across Europe. A good many of them were straightforwardly anti-Semitic, blaming all

the ills of the nation on the Jews. Famous examples include Heinrich von Treitschke’s

German history from the 1880s, and Gyula Szekfu’s Hungarian national history from

the 1920s and 1930s. Although there is no direct line between Treitschke and the

holocaust, there is no denying the fact that there is a persistent strain of anti-Semitism

in German history, something that Helmut Walser Smith has recently drawn attention

to again, and that historians played an influential role through their national histories

in perpetuating anti-Semitic feeling in Germany. Anti-Semitism was pervasive

everywhere in Europe. It needed the Nazis and their specific obsession with anti-

Semitism for the Holocaust to happen, but still it is intriguing to reflect on the fact

that most Germans had been taught their history in a way which excluded the Jews

and often showed them as enemies of the German nation. This was certainly a

contributory factor to the lack of German resistance to the systematic persecution, and

eventually the attempted annihilation, of European Jewry.

The Jews, however, were by no means the only minority suffering systematic

exclusion and vilification in national histories.

The Samis, an ethnic group which can be found across the Scandinavian countries,

Finland and Russia, have been excluded in all three. There have been centuries of

assimilationist policies (in the name of civilisation and culture) and no mention of

them in national histories; Only over the last twenty years have they slowly been

integrated into history textbooks, national history museums etc.

The Gypsies are another transnational ethnic group, found throughout Europe, which

has suffered vilification and systematic exclusion from national histories, again

culminating in systematic mass murder.

It is not just ethnic groups which have been systematically excluded and vilified:

socialists, communists and revolutionaries have been denounced time and time again

as ‘fellows without a fatherland’, persecuted, driven into exile and murdered for their

political convictions in the name of the nation and patriotism. As they allegedly

divided and weakened the nation, they had to be uprooted from the nation. Once again

the sense of a homogeneous and essentialised national history, which did not

recognise plurality and contestation, was responsible for the creation of such ‘internal

enemies’ of the nation.

Imperialism and the sense of a 'civilisational mission'

A sense of positive national history underlay the claim of European nations that they

were rightfully subjugating the rest of the world in order to spread progress and

modernity to all corners of the globe. Recent historical work, which has shown the

full horror of what European colonialists did in the name of civilisation and progress

in Algeria or in Kenya, has met with harsh reactions, arguably precisely because they

still dent a positive national master narrative prevalent in many European societies

today: Stora (1) received death threats in France and had to leave the country

temporarily; Elkins (2) was subjected to very negative critiques of her method, and

there was no shortage of historians of the British empire to jump to its defence. Most

notorious of these was Niall Ferguson, whose history of British empire was broadcast

on Channel 4 not so long ago; his accompanying books were bestsellers (3), and the

message of all of it was that, despite some bad things happening, the British empire

was also a force for good, and the world really needs a ‘first nation’ with the guts to

create an empire – and it is no secret, I think, who Ferguson was calling upon for our

time.

The First and Second World Wars

Nationalist hubris and the role of history/ historians played a part in justifying

territorial expansion for Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union, Rumania, Hungary and a

whole array of other countries involved in the fighting. Generalplan Ost of the Nazis

involved celebrated historians who, incidentally, continued their careers unharmed

after 1945. National history was used to justify territorial expansion, ethnic cleansing

and genocide.

No doubt, National Socialism and its criminal energy were bolstered by and supported

by a particular sense of exclusive German national identity. It is perhaps the most

frightening example in the twentieth century of the fateful alliance between nationalist

history writing and violence, war and genocide. It is, of course, closely followed by

the ‘red nationalism’ of the Soviet Union. Under Stalin there was massive emphasis

on national history underpinning national identity, and key figures in national history,

including Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great were now portrayed as positive

figures. Russia was to be the big brother showing the way to other nationalities in the

Soviet Union, and there was repression of independent national narratives in Ukraine,

Byelorussia, the Baltic states and elsewhere. Ethnocentrism existed even within the

concept of Soviet patriotism: the glorification of the Great Patriotic War in the post-45

period supported Soviet identity, but also left no room for critical coming-to-terms

with the past, including the darker sides of Soviet warfare, including the Katyn

massacre, and the Red Army’s behaviour in occupied Germany. National history was

only written in heroic mode.

But it would be a fallacy to believe that nationalist history and its consequences in

terms of collective violence was a particular characteristic of totalitarian twentiethcentury

states: liberal-democratic states could be equally affected.