Nations and their Histories: Constructions and Representations

Nations and their Histories Constructions and Representations

Edited by

Susana Carvalho and François Gemenne

Nations and their Histories

Also by François Gemenne DEVELOPMENT, ENVIRONMENT AND MIGRATION: Analysis of Linkages and Consequences (co-author with R. Stojanov, J. Novosak, J. Opiniano and T. Siwek) GÉOPOLITIQUE DU CHANGEMENT CLIMATIQUE (forthcoming 2009)

Nations and their Histories Constructions and Representations Edited by

Susana Carvalho Department of Government London School of Economics and Political Science, UK and

François Gemenne Centre for Ethnic and Migration Studies University of Liège, Belgium Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations Sciences Po, Paris, France

Editorial matter, selection, introduction and conclusion © Susana Carvalho and François Gemenne 2009 All remaining chapters © respective authors 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–21860–4 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–21860–1 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Dedicated to Amélia, my beloved and adoring mother, and to Sandra, her younger sister and my guarding angel. (Susana Carvalho) To Christine, who knows all too well why this book matters. (François Gemenne)

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Contents Illustrations and Figures

ix

Acknowledgements

x

Contributors

xi

Introduction Susana Carvalho and François Gemenne

1

Part I National Histories and the Construction of Nations 1

Nationalism and the Making of National Pasts John Breuilly

2

The Comparative History of National Historiographies in Europe: Some Methodological Reflections and Preliminary Results Stefan Berger

3

4

5

6

7

7

29

‘Colonising’ The Past: History and Memory in Greece and Turkey Spyros A. Sofos and Umut Özkırımlı

46

The Politics of Memorialisation in Zimbabwe Terence Ranger

62

Beginning the World over Again: Past and Future in American Nationalism Don H. Doyle

77

Rediscovering Columbus in Nineteenth-Century American Textbooks Christine Cadot

93

Social Darwinism and Nationalism in Mexico D. A. Brading vii

111

viii

Contents

Part II

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

Present Representations of National Histories

Eternal France: Crisis and National Self-Perception in France, 1870–2005 Robert Gildea

139

Cuisine, Nationality and the Making of a National Meal: The English Breakfast Kaori O’Connor

157

National Restoration and Moral Renewal: The Dialectics of the Past in the Emergence of Modern Israel Allon Gal

172

Crafting Iranian Nationalism: Intersectionality of Aryanism, Westernism and Islamism Azadeh Kian and Gilles Riaux

189

The Union Des Populations Du Cameroun, from Vilification to National Recognition: The Evolution of State Discourses on the Nationalist Political Party in Post-Colonial Cameroon Carine Nsoudou Refashioning Sub-National Pasts for Post-National Futures: The Xhosa Cattle Killing in Recent South African Literature Jennifer Wenzel

204

223

A Season of War: Warriors, Veterans and Warfare in American Nationalism Susan-Mary Grant

237

Sinocentricism and the National Question in China Eric Hyer

255

Nation, History, Museum: The Politics of the Past at the National Museum of Australia Ben Wellings

274

Conclusion Susana Carvalho and François Gemenne

289

Index

291

Illustrations and Figures Illustrations 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5

Temple of Time (1845) Temple of Time (1860) Discovery of San Salvadore Discovery of San Salvadore Situation of America in A.D. 1492

97 98 100 100 102

Figures 6.1

Books with Illustrations of Columbus and of the Norsemen over the 19th Century 6.2 Value Judgement on Columbus

ix

104 105

Acknowledgements The initial idea for this book came about when we were chairing the 16th Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism (ASEN) held at the London School of Economics on 28–30 March 2006. We are very grateful to the Executive Committee of ASEN for entrusting us with the organisation of this conference, ‘Nations and their Pasts: Representing the Past, Building the Future’, which planted the seeds for the conception of this book . We would also like to extend our gratitude to the contributors of this volume, who agreed to submit a revised version of their conference papers as well as to those who were not speakers at the conference but have contributed with new additions. Although their opinions may not always be our own, it should be noted that we take sole responsibility for the structure and general argument of this book, as well as any omissions and errors that might be present in the following pages. We would not have been able to bring this book to a conclusion if it weren’t for the generous and selfless intellectual advice of John Breuilly. We were very honoured and proud to have a scholar, and an individual, of his calibre supporting us all the way. Our commissioning editors at Palgrave Macmillan, Amy Lankester-Owen and Gemma d’Arcy Hughes, have also been crucial to the development of this project. We would like to thank them for their vote of confidence and for their eternal patience with us.

x

Contributors Stefan Berger is Professor of Modern German and Comparative European History at the University of Manchester. He directed the five-year European Science Foundation Programme entitled ‘Representations of the Past: The Writing of National Histories in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Europe (2003–2008)’. He has just completed a British Academy funded project on the relations between Britain and the GDR, 1949–1990. He has published widely on comparative labour history, the history of nationalism and national identity in Europe and on historiography as well as historical theory. Among his most recent book publications are. (ed.). Writing the Nation: a Global Perspective (Palgrave, 2007), and Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth Century Europe, 1789–1914 (Blackwell, 2006); ‘Friendly Enemies: Britain and the GDR 1949–1990, with Norman la Porte (Berghahn, 2009); ed., Kaliningrad in Europa: nachbarschaftliche Perspektiven nach dem Ende des Kalten Krieges (Harrossowitz, 2009); ed. with Chris Lorenz, The Contested Nation: Ethnicity, Class, Religion and Gender in National Histories (Palgrave, 2008); ed. with Linas Eriksonas and Andrew Mycock, Narrating the Nation: National Identity in History, Media and the Arts (Berghahn, 2008). David Brading is Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge. He has taught Latin American history at Cambridge for more than 30 years and is generally recognised as one of the leading historians on Mexico. He’s the author of several books on Mexican history, including: Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico (1971), Haciendas and Ranchos in the Mexican Bajío (1979), The Origins of Mexican Nationalism (1985), the First America (1991), Church and State in Bourbon Mexico (1994) and Mexican Phoenix(2001). He has been awarded the Aztec Eagle, the highest decoration for a foreign citizen given by the Mexican government. John Breuilly is Professor of Nationalism and Ethnicity at LSE. Recent publications include Nationalism, Power and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Germany (2007), the introduction to the second edition (2000) of Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism and, co-edited with Ronal Speirs, Germany’s Two Unifications: Anticipations, Experiences, Responses (2005). Current work includes editing the Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism and writing on the modernisation of the German lands between 1780 and 1880. Christine Cadot is Associate Professor of Political Science at Paris 8 University. Her current research examines the artistic representations of Europe in museums, and more generally, the effects of national frames in discourses and representations of Europe. Her publications include xi

xii Contributors

“ ‘N’Oubliez pas le Guide!’ Les Identités Post-Nationales au Musée (Musée de l’Europe et National Museum of Australia)”, in Violaine Roussel (dir), Les Artistes et la Politique, Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, forthcoming 2009; “Fédéralisme et Lèse-Nation. Traduction et Criminalisation du Fédéralisme Américain sous la Révolution Française”, Revue TLE (Théorie, Littérature, Epistémologie), n°25, 2008, pp.165–176; and “Une Géométrie ‘Naturelle’ du Politique: Les Rues de Paris et de Washington D.C.”, Pouvoirs, n°116, January 2006, pp.45–64. Susana Carvalho holds a first degree in Political Science and International Relations from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. She joined the Department of Government of the London School of Economics (LSE) in 2004 to study for an MSc in Nationalism and Ethnicity. She is currently finishing her PhD research in the same department under the supervision of John Hutchinson. Her thesis studies the role played by nationalism in Portugal’s twentieth century regime overthrows. In 2006, alongside François Gemenne, Susana organised the 16th Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism (ASEN), entitled ‘Nations and Their Pasts: Representing the Past, Building the Future’. From 2006 to 2007, she was the Deputy Editor of Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism and the Co-Chair of ASEN. From 2006 to 2008, Susana worked as a Graduate Teaching Assistant on ‘Theories and Problems of Nationalism’ at the LSE. In the 2008–2009 academic year, she was a visiting Lecturer on ‘Nationalism in Spain’ and ‘Nationalism in Modern Europe’ at King's College London. Don H. Doyle is the McCausland Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, USA. He has also taught as visiting professor at the University of Rome, University of Genoa, Leeds University, the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, and Richmond University. His more recent books include Nations Divided: America, Italy, and the Southern Question; and edited (with Marco Pamplona) Nationalism in the New World (English and Portuguese editions). He is currently working on The Cause of All Mankind, a book reinterpreting US nationalism. Allon Gal is an Emeritus Full Professor, History Department, and a Senior Research Fellow at Ben-Gurion Research Institute, Ben-Gurion University, Israel. He is on the Editorial Board of Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Bialik Institute, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies and American Jewish History. He is a contributor to and editor of World Regional Zionism: Geo-cultural Dimensions, Shazar Center, Jerusalem, and Ben-Gurion University Press (in Hebrew), and (with A. S. Leousssi and A. D. Smith) of The Call of the Homeland: Diaspora Nationalisms, Past and Present (forthcoming) by Brill, Leiden and Boston. Current work includes editing (with M. Lissak) the forthcoming (in Hebrew) The Historical Foundations of Israeli Democracy and writing on the role of Western Zionism in the democratic course of the Yishuv and the state of Israel.

Contributors xiii

François Gemenne is a research fellow with the Centre for Ethnic and Migration Studies (CEDEM) and the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI), and a junior lecturer at Sciences Po in Paris. He recently completed a doctoral dissertation on the norms and policies addressing migration flows triggered by environmental changes, and is due to publish a monograph on the international politics of climate change in Fall 2009. From 2005 to 2006, he was the Managing Editor of Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, and in 2006 he organised the 16th Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism (ASEN) with Susana Carvalho. He holds a Master of Research in Political Science from the London School of Economics and a Master of Science in Development, Environment and Societies from the University of Louvain (Belgium). Robert Gildea is Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. Among his publications are Children of the Revolution. The French, 1799–1914 (London, Allen Lane, 2008), Marianne in Chains: In Search of the German Occupation (London, Macmillan, 2002), which won the Wolfson History Prize, France since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 1996), and The Past in French History (Yale University Press, 1994). He has edited Writing Contemporary History with Anne Simonin (London, Hodder Arnold, 2008) and Surviving Hitler and Mussolini, with Anette Warring and Oliver Wieviorka (Oxford and New York, Berg, 2006). Susan-Mary Grant is Professor of American History at Newcastle University, UK. She is the author of North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (2000), The War for a Nation: The American Civil War (2006), and various articles on American nationalism in the nineteenth century. Most recently she has published ‘Reimagined Communities: Union Veterans and the Reconstruction of American Nationalism,’ in Nations and Nationalism 14:3 (July 2008), an article derived from her current research project on American Civil War veterans and the development of American nationalism after 1861. Professor Grant is the current editor of the journal American Nineteenth Century History (Routledge). Eric Hyer is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, USA. He has published articles on territorial and security questions in China Quarterly (1992), Pacific Affairs (1995) and Journal of Contemporary China (2001) and has published research on China’s national and ethnic issues in the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs (2006). He is currently completing a manuscript on China’s boundary disputes and settlements. Azadeh Kian is Professor of Sociology and Director of Centre for Feminist Studies at the University of Paris 7-Paris-Diderot, and Researcher at CNRS

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Contributors

(Mondes iranien et indien). She earned her Ph.D. in 1993 in PoliticalHistorical Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her publications include: La République Islamique d’Iran : De la Maison du Guide à la Raison d’Etat, Paris, Editions Michalon, 2005. translated into Greek, Editions Kpitikh (Kritiki), 2006; Les Femmes iraniennes entre islam, Etat et famille, Paris, Maisonneuve & Larose, 2002; Secularization of Iran, a Doomed Failure? The New Middle Class and the Making of Modern Iran, Louvain & Paris, Peeters & Institut d’Études Iraniennes, 1998; ‘From Motherhood to Equal Rights Advocates: The Weakening of Patriarchal Order’, in Homa Katouzian et Hossein Shahidi (dir), Iran in the 21st Century. Politics, Economics and Conflict, London, Routeledge, 2008, p. 86–106; ‘La Révolution Iranienne de 1979’, in Michelle Zancarini-Fournel et Philippe Artières (dir), 1968,Une Histoire Collective, Paris, Editions la Découverte, 2008. Carine Nsoudou is currently completing her PhD thesis on the ‘Emergence of Political Cultures in Cameroon between 1918 and 1961 through a Comparative Study of Areas under French and British Rule’ at the Centre for African Research, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her research interests include nationalism, political practices and representations, as well as the political instrumentalisation of the concepts of national unity, tribalism and minorities. Kaori O’Connor is a research fellow in the Department of Anthropology, University College London. She obtained her PhD from University College London, and holds degrees in social anthropology from Reed College and from Oxford University. Her research interests include material culture, heritage, identity and the anthropology of food. She is the author of several books and articles touching upon these subjects including ‘The King’s Christmas Pudding: Globalisation, Recipes and the Commodities of Empire’ (Journal of Global History, 4:1, 2009), ‘The Secret History of the Weed of Hiraeth: Wales, Laverbread and Identity ‘(Journal of Museum Ethnography, 22, 2009), ‘The Hawaiian Luau: Food as Tradition, Transgression, Transformation and Travel (Food Culture and Society 11:2, June 2008)’; ‘The Body and the Brand: How Lycra Shaped America’ in Producing Fashion edited by Regina Blasczyck (University of Pennyslvania Press, 2007) and The English Breakfast: the Biography of a National Meal (Kegan Paul, 2006). Umut Özkırımlı is Associate Professor of Politics and the Director of Turkish-Greek Studies at Istanbul Bilgi University. His previous publications include Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), Nationalism and its Futures (edited collection, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), Contemporary Debates on Nationalism: A Critical Engagement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and Tormented by History: Nationalism in Greece and Turkey (with Spyros A. Sofos, Hurst & Co. and Columbia University Press, 2008). He is currently working on the English edition of a monograph on nationalism

Contributors xv

and EU-Turkey relations (to be published by Hurst & Co.) and an edited collection on nationalism in Cyprus, Greece and Turkey with Ayhan Aktar and Niyazi Kızılyürek (to be published by Palgrave Macmillan). Terence Ranger is Emeritus Professor of African History at the University of Oxford, having previously held chairs in Manchester, UCLA and Dar es Salaam. He first went to Zimbabwe, then Southern Rhodesia, in 1957 and was deported by Welensky’s Federal government in 1963. He has published seven monographs about the modern history of Zimbabwe and is currently completing an urban social history to be entitled ‘Bulawayo Burning’. In 1983 he edited with Eric Hobsbawm ‘The Invention of Tradition’. Gilles Riaux is a junior lecturer at Sciences Po Bordeaux. He obtained his PhD in 2008 from the University of Paris 8-Saint-Denis, and holds a degree in politics from Sciences Po Bordeaux. His publications include: *«The Formative Years of Azerbaijani Nationalism in Post Revolutionary Iran», Central Asian Survey, Vol. 27, n°1, 2008 pp. 45–58, ‘La Radicalisation des Nationalistes Azéris en Iran ‘, CEMOTI, n° 37, 2004, p. 15–42; ‘Être Jeune Militant Nationaliste Azéri en Iran’, CEMOTI, n° 38, 2004, p. 205–233. Spyros A. Sofos is Senior Research Fellow in European and International Studies at the European Research Centre and the Helen Bamber Centre for the Study of Conflict and Human Rights of Kingston University, London and coordinator of the Mediterranean Studies@Kingston Research Unit. His publications include Nation and Identity in Contemporary Europe (edited with Brian Jenkins, Routledge, 1996), Tormented by History: Nationalism in Greece and Turkey (with Umut Özkırımlı, Hurst & Co. and Columbia University Press, 2008) and Islam in Europe: Public Spaces and Networks (with Roza Tsagarousianou, forthcoming). Ben Wellings is Convenor of European Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra. His first degree was in Contemporary History and French in the School of European Studies at the University of Sussex. He gained an MSc in Nationalism Studies from Edinburgh University before completing his PhD on Nationalism and Britishness in Britain and Australia at the Australian National University. Between these stints in academia he has been a museum curator, a public affairs consultant, a parliamentary researcher and a merchant seaman – helping to keep England’s supply lines to cheap French lager open during the mid-1990s. He is currently researching aspects of English nationalism and identity. On this subject he has published ‘Rump Britain: Englishness and Bristishness, 1992–2001’ in National Identities, 9:4, p. 395–412 and ‘Empire-nation: national and imperial discourses in England’ in Nations and Nationalism, 8:1, p. 95–109. In 2008 he was Senior Visiting Fellow in the London School of Economics, Department of Government, researching the links between English nationalism and Euroscepticism.

xvi Contributors

Jennifer Wenzel is an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, where she teaches courses in world literatures and postcolonial theory. Her book on narrative recuperations of the Xhosa cattle killing, Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2009.

Introduction Susana Carvalho and François Gemenne

Nations and Their Histories: Constructions and Representations aims to address both the theoretical and empirical aspects of nation-building based on the study of nationalist interpretations of past histories, departing from different academic disciplines, such as history, sociology, political science and anthropology. Nationalism, whether studied as an ideology, a vision or a political or cultural movement, lays claim to the past as part of its effort to manage the present and to justify its goals for the future. The nation is not only the central idea for nationalists but also the bearer of a history, real or imagined, which shapes national identity and values. History is then the backbone of nationalism, considering that a nationalist movement or a nationalist ideology in order to legitimise its present claim to state power, a particular territory or a national identity, usually frames itself around a common past that unites the people under the same national ceiling and within the same historical vision of continuity. As a result, history tends to fall victim to practices of selective choice of the past on the part of nationalists both in opposition and in power who have constructed historical accounts of the nation – of its struggles, triumphs, glories, humiliations and defeats – designed to inspire their contemporaries and to mobilise them into taking part in their version of the nation’s destiny. The construction of the past in national histories emerged in modern times as a reaction to universalist Enlightenment. With the displacement of moral, philosophical and religious views of the past, nationalists developed a classification of the national character and of the special trajectories of their nation’s historical development with the aim of bringing cultural renewal and political independence to their nation (see Breuilly’s chapter on the making of the national past). History was therefore important to the creation of the modern nationstate both in the New and the Old World. From the 18th century to the 20th century, national historiographies legitimised European empires, devising national projects around the core areas, while at the same time they gave 1

2 Susana Carvalho and François Gemenne

meaning to the formation of new nationalisms in the periphery of these same empires. The construction of national histories became especially relevant when contesting nationalisms coexisted within the same region, pitching official master narratives against counter-narratives. Usually, in these cases, different interpretations of the same facts would arise, revised meanings would be given to the same historical memories, heroes and myths, and new connections would be created between the present nation and much older pre-imperial pasts (see Berger’s chapter on European national historiographies and Sofos and Özkırımlı’s chapter on Greek and Turkish national historiographies). In the New World, populated by newly-formed settler nations without an homogeneous ethnic composition and without ‘pasts’ – or at least without histories that identified a distinctive, cohesive people whose roots supposedly extended deep in time – new master narratives that celebrated the rebirth of a time that preceded imperial conquest and rejected any links with the European motherland had to be written (see Doyle’s chapter on the independence of the United States and Brading’s chapter on the mestizo conception of the 19th century and early 20th century Mexican nation). But history’s purpose in nationalist projects is not solely related with the desire to give substance to newly-created nations. History also plays a paramount role in the politics of the nation after its own formation. History, therefore, can serve the purpose of regenerating the nation through the continued celebration of its past, remembrance of its most important dates and feats and even through the daily practice of its most elemental customs, such as eating breakfast (see O’Connor’s chapter on the English breakfast). History can also be reinterpreted at times when national ideals are being revised. In this sense, official narratives of the past tend to change as a product of the alignment of current politics and nowhere else is that change most prominent than in the classroom where history textbooks are adjusted to master narratives as these change (see Cadot’s chapter on 19th century American textbooks). However, despite the fact that history can be seen as a pool of raw materials from which redefinitions of a nation’s character and destiny may be tapped on, as long as there are independent historians who explore alternative ways of conceiving the past that clash with the state’s driven politics of memory, the success of the latter seems to be limited (see Ranger’s chapter on the politics of memorisation in Zimbabwe). In assessing the rationale of history in nationalist movements and ideologies, the purpose of this book is twofold. First, this edited volume tries to understand the role played by history in the formation of national identity and nations around the world as mentioned above. Taking into account the fact that nationalists tend to highlight the past that best fits their doctrine (or to draft the doctrine that best defends their interests as reflected in the past that they most relate to), this volume draws attention to the importance of identifying the alternative past

Introduction 3

histories that are available to nationalists in their conceptualisation of the nation and why exactly these pasts, rather than other pasts, assume paramount importance in the discourse of the nation. In other words, the first part of the book tackles the role played by national histories and national historiographies in the formation of nations in the modern period. The second part, on the other hand, assesses how these national histories are represented in the present. Strong emphasis is given to the study of collective memories, symbols, myths, events and traditions portrayed as perennial phenomena by national histories in their present representation of nations and in their legitimation of current maps of identity. Nations, be what they may – an Old World imperial nation (see O’Connor’s chapter on Britain and Gildea’s chapter on France), a New World settler nation (see Grant’s chapter on the United States of America and Welling’s chapter on Australia), a nation with a strong and millenarian sense of destiny (see Gal’s chapter on Israel), a Persian nation at civilisational crossroads (see Kian and Riaux’s chapter on Iran), an African decolonised nation (see Nsoudou’s chapter on Cameroon and Wenzel’s chapter on South Africa) or a Sino-communist nation (Hyer’s chapter on China) – they all have in common the fact that they acknowledge and pay deference to the importance of history in their present cultural and political representations of national ideals and goals. It is not of relevance whether these representations are constructed or genuine as the aforementioned chapters show. As long as they resonate with the people they become the cement that keeps the national building erect and the expression that gives meaning to national histories.

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Part I National Histories and the Construction of Nations

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1 Nationalism and the Making of National Pasts John Breuilly

From histories to history In his discussion of different concepts of time, Charles Taylor considers the way in which Augustine introduced a ‘secular’ notion of time, relevant to the earthly city, though overlaid by a higher conception of time to be found in the heavenly city. Taylor (2007, p. 56) writes of: ... the gathering together of past into present to project a future. The past, which ‘objectively’ exists no more, is here in my present; it shapes this moment in which I turn to a future, which ‘objectively’ is not yet, but which is here qua project.1 Nationalist history is one way of gathering together past, present and future. However, to understand this one needs first to outline the emergence of the idea that ‘history’ was the chief, indeed the only, way of gathering time. The principal justifications for historical writing in the ancient world – other than to satisfy curiosity about strange and exotic peoples – were pragmatic and moral, and were to be achieved chiefly by preserving the memory of great deeds and men.2 The pragmatic purpose is apparent in Thucydides. His narrative history, including the ‘re-enactment’ of speeches given by leading figures at crucial moments, sets out the logic by which reasoning but passionate men come into conflict and unintentionally bring about disaster or triumph. This provides lessons to posterity: what happened in the past ... will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future. My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last for ever.3 Thucydides is the intellectual ancestor of Machiavelli, who wrote about the Roman historian Livy as well as The Prince, a ‘realistic’ manual for 7

8

John Breuilly

rulers; of Hobbes, who translated Thucydides into English; and of today’s ‘realist’ students of international relations. By contrast, historians of Rome – notably Livy – wrote the long-run history of their city, creator and centre of the greatest empire known to man, and reflected on themes of vigour and decline, virtue and corruption. Such history laid bare the relationship between moral and material achievements. It displayed cyclical tendencies whereby success bred prosperity which led to corruption, softness and decline in the face of an ascendant, more vigorous and primitive polity.4 The Jewish presentation of their history as God’s chosen people also meditated on virtue and vice and their contrasting consequences, only now not as the results of strong or weak action (with luck and a little interference from the gods) but as reward or punishment from the one true God with whom the Jewish people had struck a bargain. Greek and Roman polytheism produced multiple histories; Jewish monotheism created the premiss for universal history, albeit focused on one small society. Assyrians, Persians, Babylonians, Romans and others had a place in this history; as instruments of God’s wrath upon his chosen people. With Christianity the premiss was explicitly universalised as the one true God became the God of all people. But as the possibility of universal history opened up, it was subordinated to a religious world-view. The epochs of human history were derived from this world view: before and after Christ (though also seen as a sequence of empires) and a future when history would end with the Second Coming. Revelation and faith trumped historical knowledge. History had limited pragmatic and moral purposes – as in Augustine’s meditations on the earthly city – but the stress was on the limits. A sense of how to gather together time therefore was obtained primarily from sources other than history, above all from religion or philosophy. Meanwhile, for particular societies – especially their non-literate members – stories passed from one generation to the next were probably amongst the most important ways of constituting collective memory and identity.5 Nationalist history only became significant as a way of gathering time following a displacement of moral and pragmatic, religious and philosophical views of the past, as well as the decline of collective memory. In their stead developed a sense of history as linear and secular. Although one can discern elements of this in the 16th and 17th centuries, for example in the notion of anachronism used to unmask forgeries and to trace changing modes of organisation through legal texts, this new conception of the past became significant in the period c.1750–1850, in what Reinhart Koselleck (2004) has termed the ‘axial age’.6 Koselleck lays great emphasis upon the growth of a sense that the future will not be like past and present. This is caught, optimistically, in the idea of progress, which undermines views of human history as cyclical or constant. However, once the future is envisioned as radically new, this changes

Nationalism and the Making of National Pasts

9

one’s view of the past. It can no longer serve as a pragmatic or moral guide. Collective memory based on stories handed down from the past also have less purchase on present conduct. The freshly arrived immigrant in the city might cling to such stories for reassurance but they have to be transformed in meaning to help negotiate a path through a new world.7 This did not make the past irrelevant but instead changed the nature of relevance. Mankind was seen as on a determinate and generally upward path, passing through a set of stages. Different societies occupy different stages. It now becomes possible to envisage a universal history with unity and direction. The task of the historian is to uncover the forces which bind together and push forward progressive change. This also influenced how one should act towards the future, for example by seeking to accelerate or slow down change. Such a view generates phrases like ‘making history’ or ‘serving history’ (as a midwife helps a birth), condemnations of those who stand in the ‘way of history’ and accordingly will be consigned to the ‘dustbin of history’.8 However, these claims to universality, that history had an ‘end’ which was progress toward the age of reason,9 also encountered sharp rejections. One of these, the nationalist rejection, preserved elements of this new conception of the past and history but took them in a different direction.

The intellectual foundations of nationalist history Enlightenment history operated with a notion of progress whereby man’s reason and freedom achieved ever-increasing sway.10 This was presented as the history of ‘society’ or ‘civil society’ to which the term ‘nation’ was often applied.11 This usually only embraced an elite in the present; there was a long way to go before most people would become enlightened. Accompanying and following political upheaval, war and economic transformation over the period c1750 to 1850, the idea of progress was elaborated, differentiated and questioned. It was also associated with social conflict (such as between classes), political agents (revolutionaries, reactionaries), and mechanisms (revolution, reform). The idea of ‘history’ itself as a force achieving things through men rather than being a record or records of specific deeds in the past came to full expression in Hegel.12 In enlightenment and Hegelian views of history there was a leading element in the progressive move of history. It might be a civilisation (European Christendom), a state (France, Britain), a social group (bourgeoisie, working class), or a ‘world-historical’ individual (Napoleon).13 Such a conception of history was congenial to whoever exemplified this leading element. From their perspective the (agreeable) fate of others was to become like them – usually after a period of subordination to their civilising, progressive power. Intellectuals claiming to represent those subordinated reacted ambivalently to this vision. First, they claimed a more central role for their nation in the historical process. They sought the secret of national difference not in ‘external’ forces

10 John Breuilly

such as climate or institutions, the typical explanations of enlightenment writers like Montesquieu and Hume, which produced a hierarchy of nations. Rather they saw ‘national character’ as moulded from ‘within’ and passed along from generation to generation. Culture, language, customs, common descent and race furnished preferred explanations of national character. This idea of essential, underlying uniqueness entailed a repudiation of the universalist idea of progress, if that meant imitating the path taken by more advanced nations. This was linked to a stress on emotion, identity, particularity and variety against what was seen as arid enlightenment concerns with reason, universal human nature and convergence on a single future. This alternative view justified itself by drawing on or constructing myths and memories, elaborating cultural stereotypes, and insisting that ‘history’ was not subject to some extra-historical force called ‘reason’ which enlightenment writers claimed to have discovered.14 Yet these intellectuals also wanted to appropriate the fruits of progress, pragmatically to gain the power that these were thought to bring but also because they found many of these achievements intrinsically attractive. This laid the basis for a national appropriation of the past. It took the form not only of historical accounts of past events but a historicising approach to language and literature, art and architecture, law and institutions. It repudiated universal history in favour of national history. Such work was conducted in intellectual sincerity. However, it was linked to nationalist projects, sometimes confined to cultural renewal or awakening, but more usually aimed at achieving political autonomy or independence. The essays in this book consider various aspects of this national appropriation of the past. Here I want to suggest ways of organising this large subject, especially in relation to the political work of nationalism.

Nationalist history before the nation-state I begin with an apparent paradox. The nation is an historic category which nationalists counterpose to universalist, a-historical rationalism. Yet the most important early forms of nationalism (if by this we mean minimally the demand for territorial autonomy made on behalf of a group termed a ‘nation’) came in universalist form and without appeals to national history. Doyle highlights the impact of Paine’s writing and his argument that Americans constituted a new nation founded on universal principles which would serve as a beacon for the rest of mankind. A similar argument is to be found in Jacobin nationalism alluded to by Gildea. It is present in the ‘proto-nationalism’ of the early insurgencies against Spanish rule in America mentioned by Brading. Yet the point needs qualifying. Each of these movements had a view of the past in which ancien regimes had imposed upon their nation. Brading refers to the claim in the 1821 Mexican Act of Independence of a 300–year history grounded in the Aztec nation. Some French radicals suggested that

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the Third Estate were the Gauls, rebelling against Frankish rule. However, such ideas were marginal at the time, and non-existent in North America. What history there was instead grounded itself in contrasts between corruption and virtue, age and youth, privilege and equality.15 There were ethnic or racial distinctions: against native Americans and black slaves in the Americas and non-French speakers in southern and western France. Independence movements picked up on ‘civic republican’ themes in vogue in the 18th century to argue that commerce, consumption and the preoccupation with freedom ‘from’ the state were softening and enervating the virtue of citizens who should participate in public life, militantly if need be, and focus their efforts on achieving freedom ‘in’ the state.16 Such arguments could generate epithets like ‘aristocrat’, ‘traitor’ and ‘counter-revolutionary’, juxtaposing these against ‘patriot’ and ‘citizen’, turning them into stereotypes, with physical (ethnic?) features such as dress, manners, speech habits and even physiognomy, and using these to justify mass violence. Elsewhere in Europe oppositional movements did engage from the outset in constructing a distinctive national past.17 Historical writing was accompanied by the collecting of national folklore and folksong, ‘discovering’ national epics, compiling grammars and dictionaries of the national language.18 We can see such activity in the Greek and Turkish cases analysed by Özkirimli and Sofos. Official historical accounts linked to the ruling dynasty are challenged. Classical Greek models are set against Greek Orthodoxy; Turkish values against Ottomanism; Slav virtues against the Germanic Habsburg dynasty. The Ottoman, Habsburg and Romanov empires play the same role as corrupt, ‘old’ powers against new, national projects as did the ancien regimes of Britain, France and Spain for the 18th century revolutionary movements. Gal shows how Zionists in the later 19th and early 20th century shift from conventional Jewish accounts of suffering and waiting upon God’s reward to selecting moments of heroism and resistance (Samson, the Macabean revolt, Masada). As with criticisms of Greek Orthodoxy, the ‘ancien regime’ comes to encompass the backward elements in one’s own nation. Xhosa cattle killing can be presented as a moment of resistance by the young oppositional nationalism of early 20th century South Africa. This search for resistances to colonial rule informed other nationalist historiographies in Africa and Asia.19 The same concern with resistance or independence moments is found in 19th century oppositional nationalist historiography in Europe. For Palacky and other Czech nationalists the Hussite moment was central. Lithuanian national historians looked back to medieval independence before the Union of Lublin (1569) with Poland. Polish historians could start more recently, with the rising against the final partition of Poland at the end of the 18th century but also looked back to medieval monarchies. Rumanian historians went back further, to pre-Roman or Roman times, before Slav incursions.20 This phase of nationalist historiography was not highly institutionalised. It was the work of small networks of intellectuals, often in exile or operating

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under constraints. Such exiles were in contact with each other, often opposed to the same imperial regimes, and this gave their activity a transnational character. They were – as is usually the case with zealots under pressure – argumentative and highly individualistic figures. At this early stage there was often fluidity about what was national and how this, including its past, was to be understood. All this inhibited the formation of orthodoxy. The oppositional nationalist historians deployed different idioms depending upon the material at their disposal and the problems to be confronted in seeking to move from intellectual work to political agitation. Greek, Polish, German, Hungarian and Italian nationalist historians had a high culture on which they could draw (above all, a literary language), usually connected to institutions such as a privileged church, local, if not state, government, and representative assemblies.21 Here the idiom employed was that of ‘historic’ nations which needed only to be freed from reactionary dynasties, often seen as controlled by more ‘primitive’ nations. Such idioms were close to those deployed by the ‘civilised’ and ‘progressive’ national discourses prevailing in Britain and France, and understandably received a sympathetic hearing in those countries.22 The situation was different for historians writing on behalf of ‘nations’ which lacked a literary language or control of important institutions. Sometimes these historians could credibly claim to locate these in the past, for example the Czechs in medieval Bohemia. Sometimes they built on subordinate institutions, as with Rumanian nationalists in relation to the Orthodox and Uniate churches. Where even these were vestigial or absent, nationalists shifted to language, folkore and folk customs, as with Lithuanian and Turkish (as opposed to Ottoman) nationalism.23 With the rise of anti-colonial nationalism in the 20th century, oppositional movements drew on all of these themes, as appropriate, though also re-introducing the ‘civic’ theme in order both the better to highlight the failure of European imperial powers to practice their own ideals and to focus on independence for the territorial political unit.24 The history was also influenced by the kind of political movement involved. There is a major difference between elements of an imperial elite turning to nationalism (Turks in the Ottoman Empire, Germans in the Habsburg Empire) and nationalists making claims on behalf of a largely peasant population confronted by an ethnically distinct ruling class (Rumanians in Transylvania, Ruthenians or Ukrainians in Polish Galicia). Elite nationalists found it difficult to take up socially transformative programmes like peasant emancipation while subordinate class-cum-ethnic movements often mobilised on precisely such programmes (for example, Kai Struve, 2001, pp. 347–371). Naturally all this influenced the way the past was read, which periods and social groups were highlighted. To summarise my argument thus far. There was an intellectual revolution on either side of 1800 which came to regard ‘history’ as a unified force with a logic of its own rather than as a collection of accounts of past actions.

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Grasping the nature of this history provided better understanding of the human condition than religion or philosophy. History began to displace the communal transmission of memory as the principal source of collective identity. Such ideas were taken up by nationalist intellectuals. However, the ways in which they did this varied according to what rendered particular historical claims credible and the political constraints at work upon the movements they helped build. In the oppositional phase this produced a rich and varied historiography but not as yet an institutionalised and orthodox view of the national past.25

National history in the new nation-state The process of nation-state formation has been an uneven and lengthy one. Arguably Britain and France had long been nation-states by 1800, although in France the revolutionaries denied that and saw themselves finally bringing nation and state together. The first ‘new’ nation-states were constructed beyond Europe, in the opposition of white Americans to British and Spanish imperial rule. Within Europe, some of Napoleon’s creations bore national names or meanings (Kingdom of Italy, Grand Duchy of Warsaw, the Illyrian provinces). However, those associated with nationalist struggles were only founded from the late 1820s (Belgium and Greece). The unification of German and Italian states between 1859 and 1871 dramatically altered the map of central Europe and inspired further nationalist projects.26 The slow collapse of Ottoman control over the largely Christian populations of the Balkans brought about further nation-states: Serbia, Rumania, Bulgaria. In the Americas civil and inter-state wars gave the new or re-formed states a more explicitly national character, as did the Meiji restoration in Japan.27 The comprehensive and sudden collapse of the Ottoman, Romanov, Habsburg and German empires in 1918–20 saw the formation of a swathe of new nationstates, legitimised by the doctrine of national self-determination advanced by Woodrow Wilson. It raised nationalist expectations in the empires of the victor states, in Europe, Asia and the Middle East (Manela, 2007). However, these empires were only demolished after 1945, the process reaching its climax in the 1960s and 1970s. Most recently, the collapse of Soviet communism in Eastern Europe ushered in another (final?) wave of nation-state formations. A near 200–year process of ‘nation-state’ formation has been accompanied by a bewildering variety of national histories which purport to explain and legitimise what had been achieved. However, the story is more complicated than: ‘one new nation-state – one new national history’. One wave of nation-state formations emboldened new nationalist claims and constructions of the past; one satisfied nationalist achievement provoked one or more oppositional nationalisms with their own versions of the past. Furthermore, intellectual idioms and approaches changed, as did the techniques and institutional contexts of history-writing.28

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Nationalist intellectuals, including historians, frequently played a central role in the politics of forming a nation-state, not just as publicists and ideologues but as practical politicians. Usually, in the euphoria of success, they saw this as the end of history, an end brought about by the nation itself. Jakob Burkhardt gloomily predicted that German history would now be presented as a road leading to 1871. One can generalise the prediction to all new nationstates. Others saw that the formation of the new-state was just the first step; ahead lay the difficult task of nation-building; making Italians and not just Italy, as Massimo D’Azeglio was reputed to have observed. One form nationbuilding took was constructing a proper understanding of the national past and impressing it upon the nation. The resources of a state provided means for doing this far beyond the scope of oppositional nationalism. It was now possible to support an academic elaboration of national history, as in universities like Berlin and Athens which became centres of an establishment view of national history. Özkirimli and Sofos show how in Athens Paparrigopoulos combined Hellenic and Greek Orthodox elements in his history. His counterparts in Berlin, Sybel and Treitschke similarly linked the history of the Prussian state to that of the German national spirit. Berger provides a European survey of various efforts to write ‘master narratives’ of the nation, pointing to the problems encountered and the solutions worked out. Wellings shows how the premiss that Australia only entered history with its ‘discovery’ by whites underpinned a master-narrative which excluded the indigenous population. Very interesting is his further argument that some nationalist historians are troubled by revisionism not so much because it challenges the white man’s story than because it fails to provide an alternative narrative. If national history is not a story, it is not a national history. Official, academic nationalist master-narratives were constructed in many, if not all, new nation-states. Berger outlines a range of reasons for differences between master narratives. Here I will focus on yet another source of conflict: disputes within one national historiography. One can point to two kinds of disagreement. The first relates to shifts from opposition to power. N’Soudou deals with a government claiming national legitimacy in conflict with nationalist forces that remain oppositional. Each side constructs a different history, focused above all on the process of national liberation, to explain why nationalism succeeded or failed, according to the two perspectives. The oppositional nationalists are frequently more utopian than those in government, criticising compromise and corruption which they see anticipated in the independence struggle. Garibaldi condemned deals struck with France and the Catholic Church (though for a time he certainly went along with the first) (Riall, 2007). Disappointed nationalists in new African states blamed neo-colonialism, again projected back into the colonial period. Official nationalists played down the role of mass resistance movements while critical nationalists exaggerated them. Another variant, as Ranger argues for Namibia, is that different traditions of resistance are picked

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up by the regime and its opponents. Mau-Mau activists in Kenya portrayed themselves as the true freedom-fighters who had compelled British retreat while collaborators reaped the rewards.29 Ranger in his essay argues that the Kenyan way of dealing with this tension was to ignore the past; sometimes the problems nationalists confront in relation to their past can lead to the marginalisation rather than manipulation of history. In the Zimbabwean case, the claim to be continuing the anti-colonial struggle is, as Ranger shows, central to the manipulation of history by the Mugabe regime.30 More subtly, official master-narratives often integrate elements which had stood outside or even against oppositional nationalism. I have mentioned Greek official history with its positive treatment of Greek Orthodoxy and, therefore, its distancing from earlier nationalists like Korais who, as a Westernising Hellenist, had condemned the Greek Orthodox Church as harshly as the Ottoman Empire, seeing the two as allies. More rarely, official nationalism radicalises its policies and, therefore, its history, in a bid to consolidate its power, as when the new Turkish Republic repudiated not only the Ottoman Empire but also the public claims of Islam. Such radical secularism is also found in the anticlericalism of French and Italian nationalism and in pan-Arab nationalism. Second, closely linked to the first point but not quite the same, are the tensions created when the new nation state leans towards some interests at the expense of others. Catholic critiques of German and Italian nationalism increased in intensity when confronted with official anti-clericalism. Regional divisions, not necessarily framed in ethnic terms, gave rise to competing historical interpretations. In relation to the essay by Hyer, Eduard Friedmann has argued that Sun-Yat-Sen represented a ‘southern’, while Mao Zedong stood for a ‘northern’ nationalism (Friedman, 1995; 2008). The same is true of conflicting views of Italy based on north/south distinctions which continue in the current League of the North (Sciatino, 1999). It applies to competing nationalisms in mid-19th century USA, culminating in the Civil War (Grant, 1996). It is the case with a Prussian, ‘small-German’ versus Austrian ‘great German’ nationalism, associated with distinct historiographies of Germany (Breuilly, 1996). It relates to a ‘Biafran’ construction of Nigerian history during the civil war of the 1960s. Ranger argues the same point in relation to a north versus central and south tension in Namibia. There are many more examples one could give. At the extreme, this leads to secessionist movements whose national understanding of the past has diverged so far from that of official nationalism as to claim to speak for a different nation with its own distinct history, as with Basques and Catalans in Spain. How far such differences are expressed in academic historiography depends not just on what differences there are but how the state is organised. A liberal state and decentralised university system (as in the German Second Empire) permits alternatives to official nationalism to be expressed. Official historians have advantages such as access to sensitive state archives and funding

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and patronage, but that is all. An authoritarian and centralised government, as in the early Turkish republic, represses challenges to the official view. It is all very well to have imposing academic historical legitimation but more important is for the state to be accepted by the population at large. One of the most potent weapons available to governments is the schooling system. This varies greatly. In some cases there is limited schooling and the government is unable to expand this very far in the face of poverty and, especially in undeveloped agrarian societies, popular indifference. Education in the proper national view of the past remains an elite affair, something which suits some elites. However, the general tendency has been for universal and compulsory elementary education, and often extensive secondary education, guaranteed if not directly furnished by the state, to establish itself. One obvious policy is to entrench the official nationalist view in school history teaching and text books. Cadot provides an account of 19th century US school text books, though the key political agent is state, not federal government. The shifts in emphasis from Columbus to Norse explorers as ‘discoverers’ of America is suggestive, linked by Cadot to a concern to draw distinctions between whites and blacks, Anglo-Saxons and Europeans, rather than as previously between all Europeans and native Americans. Even new nations quickly come to frame their history in national terms. Things do not remain static in nation-states. What were major concerns when the nation-state was formed get marginalised while new issues arise. For the USA from the 1770s until 1814 the principal conflict was with Britain. History framed in racial or ethnic, linguistic or cultural terms had nothing to offer in such a conflict. By the mid-19th century the situation has changed. Now such terms helped in the response to present conflicts and visions of the future and, therefore, tended to the construction of a different past. Brading provides an account of the shift from a ‘creole’ to a ‘mestizo’ view of the Mexican nation, linked to the new idioms of race and Social Darwinism, and generating an ethnic reintepretation of Mexican history. Ranger cites the argument that a number of states in Africa are seeking to wrest the dominant representations of the past from academic historians, in turn changing the tone and content of that history. The brief period of government by the Hindu nationalist party, the BJP, in India led to the production of new school histories and popular presentations of the Indian past. Studies of school history text books in nation-states can prove illuminating on the ‘official’ view of the national past and how this changes over time (for example, Berghahn and Schissler, 1987). More difficult to assess is how and to what effect they were used in schools. Some historians consider the disciplining impact of schools (and also military conscription) as more important than nationalist historical indoctrination. It is the habitual acceptance that the state can command attendance, enforce codes of conduct, and issue certificates which promote future careers which elicits obedience, even

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respect, rather than stories about the past. But much remains speculation in the absence of direct testimony from pupils.31 As with academic history, it is important to note the extent of pluralism. At one extreme competing nationalist or even anti-nationalist views of the past are taught, as where Catholic or other churches retain a major role in schooling and are at odds with official nationalism. Where oppositional mass movements such as those of organised labour form, these may have their own historians who present a different view of the national past from the official one.32 The nation-state may ‘contain’ these alternatives, so that a German and a French socialist might each express pride in their nationality and give a distinctive national shape to their socialism. Yet at the same time both will sharply distinguish between nation and regime, stressing that the government of the day is anti-national, identifying the nation with the labouring masses. At the other extreme authoritarian states, and even more totalitarian states in the 20th century, impose and often intensively propagate one view in the public sphere. One needs to distinguish between the capacity of brutal, authoritarian regimes to suppress alternative representations of the past and the far greater capacity required effectively to indoctrinate a significant part of the population with one official view. Nation-states seek to influence a broader public sphere beyond schools. They institute high days and holidays during which key events in national history are celebrated. They erect national monuments. They select and display national symbols such as flags and anthems, stamps and bank-notes. Many of these transmit historical information and views. As with schooling, it is easier to study intentions than effects. Some events decline in popularity, for example Sedan Day in Germany which celebrated the military victory over the French in 1870. Counter-events sometimes acquire mass support, for example May Day celebrations instituted by the labour movement.33 A nation-state may end up repudiating the very nationalism which gave it life. The revulsion against British and French imperialism and their bad faith towards Arab allies in the 1914–18 war against the Ottoman Empire, helped mobilise support for pan-Arab nationalism. This fitted with other pan-nationalisms which flourished at this time, providing mutual support and influence (Aydin, 2006). Arab nationalism was strongly secular (Lebanese Christians had played a leading role in formulating its ideas), marginalising Islam as well as opposing the new creations of Iraq, Syria, the Lebanon, Palestine and Saudi Arabia which were seen as imperial puppets.34 Yet already there were differences between these areas and the non- Ottoman Arab regions in north Africa. As each of these states gained independence so their regimes focused on their own interests. With the disastrous defeats by Israel in 1948 and 1967 attention shifted decisively to the territorial state. A different kind of nationalism had to be cultivated with a different view of the past. The failures of these states in turn can be linked to the rise of a new Islamism, eroding the secular tone of nationalism. And, as present

18 John Breuilly

situation and future prospect once again changes, so does the national view of the past.35

Naturalising the national view of the past Yet out of these constant shifts and conflicts over what is the nation, and therefore the national past, more enduring views emerge. This is of the nation and its past as something beyond current politics and ideology, as something natural which is just ‘there’. The key to this is the degree to which the nation-state becomes the ‘container’ of people’s lives.36 As different political and social forces dispute details of the national history, so increasingly they do so within an implicit agreement that there is an enduring national history, even if one cannot agree on many of its features. 37 There are, however, different ways in which this can happen. The first is to do with continuity both in the institutions of the nationstate and in the framing elements of a national view of the past. A few brief examples must suffice to support this point. England/Britain exhibits the greatest degree of apparent continuity in its central political institutions of any current nation-state. Not surprisingly this in turn became a key feature of the national view of the past. As a historical profession developed from mid-19th century, coinciding with the rise of a strongly national view of the past, so the continuous existence of central political institutions became the chief vehicle of that view. It was primarily an English view because that longterm continuity, stretching beyond medieval parliament and monarchy to late Anglo-Saxon institutions, only applied to England. A British view of the past is more obviously syncretic, brief, fragile and contested. The continuity was not only about longevity but the sense that gradualism was the principal form of change, empiricism and piecemeal reform the dominant temper of political culture. All these claims can and have been challenged (successful invasions in 1066 and, arguably, in 1688; revolution mid-17th century; social upheaval and transformation from late 18th century; and a history which is essentially about global expansion rather than island continuity) but there was sufficient truth in the continuity thesis for it to dominate academic, political and popular conceptions of a national past.38 French historiography could call upon a sense of continuity in terms of territory and statehood and this has dominated the sense of a national history right across the political spectrum.39 However, the succession of upheavals following 1789 undermined political institutional continuity and historical writing often identified with one or other side in those conflicts.40 In both these cases the ‘state’ or, to take a favourite English term, the ‘constitution’ provided the focus of a long, continuous history, even if it was more difficult for French than English historians to extend this from state to society. In the German and Italian cases the state was entirely lacking. Prussia could furnish a substitute but it was clearly unsatisfactory and

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contested, while there was nothing at all to serve in the Italian case, especially when anticlerical nationalism turned against the one extensive institution in Italy, the Papacy. Historians were forced to find other frameworks for a national past such as national culture or ‘spirit’, subjects which did not easily lend themselves to narrative history or a focus on political and military events. At least, however, these historians had some institutions to which one could refer (the Holy Roman Empire, the Italian city-states) and a continuous ‘national’ presence in land ownership, urban governance and church affairs. When one turns to nationalism based on subordinate cultural groups the vehicles for a national history become even hazier. Yet the sense that a nation must have a history ensured that unpromising material would be pummelled into the appropriate shape.41 Continuity in the lifetime of the nation-state itself is also important. Upheavals not only introduce disruptions in views of the past, they can lead to purges of existing universities and schools and other institutions, as with both the communist achievement of state power in much of Europe after 1945 and communist collapse in the early 1990s. The steady build-up of scholarly and popular historical work around a particular framework of interpretation is thereby interrupted. For example, the rapid marginalisation of East German historians after 1990 accelerated the decline of a Marxistcum-national view of the German past although one can assume that this was going to happen in any case (Fulbrook, 1997). These continuities of the nation-state as container operate at the level of reflective historical work. At another level this sense of containment is bound up with routinisation; the nation-state as providing the overarching frame for political conflict, economic activity and social and cultural matters. This is an argument made in a strong and distinct way by Billig (1995) in his book on banal nationalism. As Billig vividly expresses it, it is not the flag carried proudly by a group of patriots which matters in the long-run so much as the flag which hangs limply on every government building and school. It is the implicit contrast of ‘us’ and ‘them’, rather than the elaborate and explicit telling of a national history, which takes mental hold. Culture, Ernest Gellner once memorably remarked, is not having to think. Or as Nietzsche put it: Truths are illusions whose illusory nature has been forgotten, metaphors that have been used up and have lost their imprint and that now operate as mere metal, no longer as coins.42 It is the unexamined, cliché character of such banal nationalism which gives it its strength. When a crisis leads to the resurgence of what Billig calls ‘hot nationalism’, there is once again argument and dissent, even if the drip-drip continuity of banal nationalism provides a foundation for such hot nationalism.43

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This ‘view of the past’ associated with a naturalised view of the nation, does not take the form of explicit historical argument. Indeed, argument is the last thing such a view needs. Instead Englishness inheres in the nonpolitical, such as the English breakfast O’Connor writes about. Rather than a coherent narrative we have images and glimpses such as those provided by George Orwell (‘old maids biking to Holy Communion’) or John Betjeman (‘modest village inns ... the noise of mowing machines on Saturday afternoons’) or T. S. Eliot (‘Derby Day ... a cup final ... the music of Elgar’). Such images exclude as well as include, are fragmentary and changing, and have less credibility today then when they were, tellingly, all compiled in the 1940s.44 Indeed, when John Major pillaged the list in the 1990s, speaking of warm beer, cricket and spinsters riding bicycles at dusk, the response was mocking rather than respectful. As soon as these become matters of reflection and argument they lose their force. Such ‘natural’, ‘non-political’ images seem to have nothing to do with nationalism – if that is understood as something noisy, active and disputatious, indeed often to represent an alternative to nationalism (Echternkamp, 2002). Such images tend to support a defensive, inward-looking nationalism of the kind Gildea describes in seeking explanations for the rejection of Europeanism in the French referendum on a European constitution, explanations which go deeper than pragmatic fears about economic policies. I suspect one can find something similar in every western European country and in other developed parts of the world concerned about mass immigration or other challenges from low-wage, high unemployment economies. The comforting banalities and images turn into justifications for fear and exclusion.

Concluding points From the elaborate historical accounts of oppositional nationalism aiming at cultural renewal and justifying demand for political autonomy through the construction of master-narratives in new nation-states to the unargued images of banal nationalism in established nation-states is a long and complex path. By the end of this path little sense remains of ‘history’ with unity and direction, whether advocated by universalist or nationalist movements. This is especially so since the serial failures of the more utopian of these movements – such as communism and fascism and anti-colonial nationalism – were accompanied by massive violence. Fukuyama (1992) did have the temerity to write about the ‘end of history’ following the collapse of the Soviet Union, explicitly drawing on Hegel, but the ‘utopia’ turned out to be real, existing capitalism and liberal democracy, and even that sense of modest triumphalism has since diminished. Nationalism today is a word with negative connotations. Those who stress the values of the nation and a proud grasp of national history, look for other names, such as patriotism or homeland.45 Oppositional movements are now

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inclined to focus on human rights and democratic institutions instead of ethnic or national difference, recognising a shift in what language is most congenial to the international community, though they frequently go on to claim that it is a nation or ethnic groups whose rights are being abused and who are shut out of democratic participation. Yet the term ‘nation’ still carries a charge, a presumption about cultural value and political rights.46 Some analysts argue that globalisation and supra-national institutions like the European Union are eroding nationalism and will render it obsolete. If this produced a different, non-national view of our present and vision of our future, one could anticipate that it will also lead to a non-national sense of the past. In the field of historical studies there are indications that this is happening. There is a renewal of world history, and no longer in the sense of a succession of civilisations culminating with the ‘rise of the West’. Global networks and transnational connections are seen as having a long history, not being entirely recent changes impacting on a series of long-entrenched nations. There is also work on regional, local and ‘micro-history’. What is more, these kinds of historical work are connected, for example, in considering the impact of longdistance migration on specific communities, or of regional connections across ‘national’ boundaries. Nationalism and nation-state formation themselves are seen not as a series of self-contained histories but a contingent outcome from interactions between forces both more local and global. Historians of subjects such as mass migration, international economic history and the environment find little of value in a national view of the past.47 Yet there are many counter-arguments insisting that nationalism and the nation-state will not so easily be sidelined. The nation-state remains a powerful institution. There are many who argue that its very entrenchment gives it a democratic legitimacy that none of its challengers can match (Calhoun, 2007). Its very success makes its own historical self-image persuasive. The fact that the professionalisation of historical writing went along with the formation of nation-states and the construction of deeply researched and carefully argued national master-narratives makes it difficult to break with such views of the past (Berger, 1999). Most academic historians in most countries, for example, continue to be historians of their own countries. Even when historians argue in a critical, anti-nationalist way, they often do so by presenting a different view of the national past rather than breaking with the national frame itself.48 As Gildea shows, even the sense that the national might be transcended can itself generate yet another wave of nationalism. The naturalisation of the national takes it out of the realm of argument and refutation. National views of the past are contingent and constructed, constantly altering according to the results of diplomatic and military conflicts, changes in social and economic structures, and shifts in the idioms and methods used by historians. They are themselves contested, both between conflicting nationalisms and the ‘same’ nationalism. That is not to say that

22

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all such historical accounts are nothing more than the ideological reflex of nationalist politics. Even the most scientific and objective historical work has to start with questions, a ‘point of view’ and a set of methods. What matters is how far the questions, views and methods permit the reasoned and argued use of evidence. Often, however, the step is taken from reasoned historical argument to ideological assertion and it sometimes needs careful inspection to see just how and when this is done. However, whatever the quality of the specific historical work, there is also the larger framework within which it is undertaken. This framework is that of one or another form of ‘gathered time’, ways of connecting past, present and future. In the modern period a distinctive framework developed whereby history was seen as a unified, secular force tending in a particular, usually progressive direction. Nationalists rejected the universalist form of this understanding but appropriated it for national history. It thus became vital to understand and relate the true national past, usually in the form of a masternarrative, and to connect this to present conduct and future vision. Those nationalist constructions of the past have taken many different forms and have typically changed in the moves from opposition to nation-state formation and according to the subsequent duration and stability of the nation-state. Such national constructions, even if discarding earlier utopian associations, seem likely to remain central in academic, political and popular discourse.

Notes 1. In the heavenly city this gathering of time will take on the quality of eternity, beyond earthly understanding. 2. Herodotus, the first ‘historian’ we know of, catered for curiosity with his ethnographic accounts and pragmatic and moral concerns with his account of the war between Greek states and the Persian empire. 3. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, quoted in Burrow (2007, p. 48). 4. Generally see Ibid., ‘Part II: Rome’. Tacitus’s depiction of the ‘Germans’ draws the contrast; they were rebuke and threat to a decaying Rome (Tacitus, 1948). A similar principle of cyclical movement, applied to Islamic societies in the Middle East, was developed in the 14th century by Ibn Khaldun (2005). Aristotle proposed a cycle of constitutional change. 5. I say probably because, by its very nature, we can know little of such oral traditions in the past. It is all too easy to assume that all non-literate, small-scale societies possessed something called ‘ethnic identity’. 6. His German term was Sattelzeit. 7. On the form of this universal history, for example in Scottish enlightenment writers, see Burrow (2007, chapter 21, ‘Philosophic History’). On the displacement of memory by history see Pierre Nora and Lawrence D. Kritzman (1996). This is an abridged version of the original multivolume French publication edited by Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire (1984ff). On the changed function of stories and identity for the urban immigrant and its links to nationalism see Ernest Gellner (2006). 8. Karl Marx used the midwife metaphor; Leon Trotsky that of the dustbin.

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9. Don Doyle in his essay considers the huge impact of Paine’s writings on the American independence movement. One of Paine’s books was entitled The Age of Reason. 10. For Kant moral freedom was equated with rational autonomy. See his essay ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’ in Kant (1991, pp. 54–60). 11. As in the title of Adam Smith’s book The Wealth of Nations. 12. I draw heavily on Jürgen Habermas (1987, especially chapter 2); and David Owen (1994). For an introduction to Hegel’s own writings in English see ‘Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1827–1831)’ in Hegel (1999, pp. 197–224). 13. Hegel, who saw Napoleon in Jena in 1806 following the decisive French victories over Prussia, famously declared that he had seen the world spirit, sitting on a horse. 14. The story is a well known one which I will not repeat here. The best known figure in this nationalist reaction against enlightenment is Herder. See Barnard (1965; 2003). A good start in English on his own writing is Johann Gottfried Herder (2004). On stereotypes (which he calls ‘ethnotypes’) see Joep Leerssen (2006). 15. Nevertheless, as Cadot points out, a ‘young nation’ is still a nation, sharing something with an ‘old nation’. The imagery also suggests an organic view of history, even if now it is on the side of youth rather than maturity. 16. One aspect of this theme is taken up by Grant in her essay on images of militia and volunteers. It is found again in the rhetoric of the armée revolutionaire and the subsequent justifications of the levée en masse, and in the image of the citizen-soldier Simon Bolivar. For the civic republican tradition see J. G. A. Pocock (2003). The distinction between freedom from and in the state, as a distinction between modern and ancient liberty, was formulated around 1800 by Benjamin Constant, who favoured the ‘soft’ view against ‘hard’ Jacobins (Constant, 1988). 17. This is what Hroch has identified as the first stage (stage A) of many nationalist movements (Hroch, 1968; 1996, 78–97). See now his most recent general study of this (Hroch, 2005). 18. A good recent overview in Leerssen (2006). 19. African examples include the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879 and the Meiji-Meiji resistance to German rule in Tanganyika. Asian ones include the ‘revolution’ of 1857 in India (rejecting the British label ‘Indian Mutiny’) and the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900. Ranger, one of the contributors to this book, has been a pioneering historian of such resistances in East-Central Africa. See now Abbink (2003). My thanks to John Lonsdale for drawing this recent publication to my attention. 20. For a fine comparative analysis of five different nationalist historians see Monika Baar (2008). The collective project on national historiography coordinated by Stefan Berger (see his contribution to this book) will, when published, provide much detail about such historical work. 21. These were not modern elective institutions but estate assemblies, organised into nobility, burghers and peasants. Palacky’s ‘nationalist’ history began with studies on behalf of the Boheman estates. 22. One only has to think of the pro-Hellenic sentiments in Britain, vividly embodied in Byron’s death on the Greek side. Naturally, nationalist writers who were aware of the influence of public opinion in Britain and France and the power of these states in Europe, deliberately emphasised precisely what they anticipated such opinion would find attractive.

24 John Breuilly 23. These differences gave rise to the notorious distinction between ‘historic’ and ‘non-historic’ nations, or between ‘political nations’ and ‘mere cultural nationality’. I consider this in detail in John Breuilly (2008). 24. For Africa see the works cited in Note 19 above as well as Ranger’s essay in this book. For a good example of the varied arguments and associated historical representations for India see now Maria Misra (2007). 25. These are very bare assertions. Clearly collective memory continued to play an important role in many societies. Pragmatic and moral purposes of history continued to be asserted. ‘Time’ did not suddenly become empty and homogenous, to borrow terms from Benedict Anderson. People did not suddenly cease to believe in gods or a God as the source of meaning. Rather a new way of thinking about how to gather together past, present and future, one which endowed historical understanding with special importance, developed alongside and sometimes competing with the established ways. 26. Moses Hess (1962), for example, one of the intellectual founders of Zionism, was inspired by Italian unification, as both the date and title of his major book on the subject makes clear, originally published in 1862. 27. For the parallels between the mid-to-late 19th century territorial state formations in Asia, Europe and the Americas see Charles S. Maier (2005, pp. 32–55). 28. A number of chapters pick up on the increasing influence of Social Darwinian and race ideas in the historical writing of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. After 1945 there was a turn against such ideas and a greater focus on culture and language as creative of nations and their histories. In terms of approaches there was a new interest in economic and then social history from about 1900 with clear and obvious implications for national views of the past. For a good overview see Burrow (2007). 29. I draw on older references used when writing my book Nationalism and the State: namely, Barnett and Njama (1966), Rosberg and Nottingham (1966). My thanks to John Lonsdale for drawing my attention to more recent work on the Mau Mau such as Odhiambo and Lonsdale (2003). 30. It is a powerful argument elsewhere in southern Africa, especially amongst voices in the ANC critical of the failure of the post-apartheid regime to engage in radical land reform. 31. The classic study of schooling in terms of institutional inclusion, along with army, railways, mass literacy, etc., is Eugen Weber’s (1976) Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernisation of Rural France. This is very different from the approach based on schools as agents of top-down nationalist messages or from attempts to work out how subordinate groups receive and appropriate national values. 32. In the era of the Second International such historians were also schooled in the powerful ideas of Marxism. 33. A pioneering study of such official ceremonial was George Mosse’s (1975) The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars Through the Third Reich. Since then there have been many such studies. 34. A good example is Satr al’Husri who worked as the senior civil servant in the Ministry of Education in British-run Iraq. See Abeed Dawisha (2003, especially chapter 3), as well as S. Reeva Simon (1986). 35. For a survey of the shifts see James Mellon (2002). 36. I take the notion of the nation-state as a power container from Michael Mann (1993).

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37. The idea that nationalism is strengthened by such disputes is argued by John Hutchinson (2005). 38. For a good introduction see Burrow (2007). The historiographical continuity precedes the professionalisation of history, receiving perhaps its most eloquent expression in Macaulay’s volumes on English history published mid-19th century. The notion of gradualism also enabled historians to introduce the fashionable idea of evolution into a national historiography. 39. Thus Ferdinand Braudel, although challenging the dominance of political history, invested his sense of the centrality of the longue durée with national meaning with his three volume study of French identity. 40. In addition to his chapter in this book see Robert Gildea (1994). 41. For a comparative overview of recent historical writing on these four countries see Stefan Berger (2005). 42. Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth, quoted in Owen (1994, p. 21). 43. Billig’s book was in part occasioned by the bewilderment caused by British enthusiasm for waging war to regain control of the Falkland Islands, a remote place of which hardly anyone had heard or could locate on a map and where sheep outnumber people. However, Billig’s work is still ‘top-down’, studying what is printed in newspapers or said on the television but not extending to the problems of popular reception. 44. See Peter Mandler (2006, pp. 206–7), where these lists (I have left out many items) are quoted. 45. The Office of Homeland Security set up in the USA following 9/11 sounds more comforting than, say, the Bureau of National Security. 46. One sees it in arguments about ‘asymmetrical’ forms of regional autonomy in Spain and of federalism in Canada, where Catalans and Basques in the one case and Quebecois in the other case insist on having a ‘higher’ group status than other regionally concentrated populations, something which can cause problems in the very words used in constitutional documents. 47. For some of these initiatives see Bruce Mazlish and Akira Iriye (2005). For an historical view of globalisation see C. A. Bayly (2004). On global networks in history see J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill (2003). 48. For example, the relentlessly critical approach to German history of Hans-Ulrich Wehler and the school of historians associated with him, never doubts that there is a distinct national historical path.

References Abbink, J., M. de Bruijn and K. Van Walraven (ed.) (2003) Rethinking Resistance: Revolt and Violence in African History (Leiden: Brill). Aydin, C. (2006) ‘Beyond Civilisation: Pan-Islam, Pan Asianism and the Revolt against the West’, Journal of Modern European History, 4:2, 204–23. Baar, M. (2008) Historians and the Nation in the Nineteenth Century: The Case of EastCentral Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Barnard, F. M. (1965) Herder’s Social and Political Thought: From Enlightenment to Nationalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Barnard, F. M. (2003) Herder on Nationality, Humanity and History (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press). Barnett, D. L. and K. Njama (1966) Mau Mau from Within: Autobiography and Analysis of Kenya’s Peasant Revolt (London: MacGibbon and Kee).

26 John Breuilly Bayly, C. A. (2004) The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell). Berger, S. (2005) ‘A Return to the National Paradigm? National History Writing in Germany, Italy, France and Britain from 1945 to the Present’, Journal of Modern History, 77:3, 629–78. Berger, S., M. Donovan and K. Passmore (eds) (1999) Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800 (London: Routledge). Berghahn, V. R. and H. Schissler (1987) Perceptions of History: International Textbook Research on Britain, Germany, and the United States (Leamington Spa & New York: Berg). Billig, M. (1995) Banal Nationalism (London: Sage). Breuilly, J. (1996) The Formation of the First German Nation-State, 1800–1871 (London: Macmillan). Breuilly, J. (2008) ‘On the Principle of Nationality’ in G. S. Jones and G. Claeys (eds) The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Burrow, J. (2007) A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century (London: Allen Lane). Calhoun, C. (2007) Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream (London: Routledge). Constant, B. (1988) Political Writings, translated by B. Fontana in Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Dawisha, A. (2003) Arab Nationalism in the 20th Century: From Triumph to Despair (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Echternkamp, J. (2002) ‘ “Verwirrung im Vaterländischen”? Nationalismus in der Deutschen Nachkriegsgesellschaft 1945–1960’, in J. Echternkamp and S. O. Müller (eds) Die Politik der Nation : Deutscher Nationalismus in Krieg und Krisen 1760–1960 (Munich: R.Oldenbourg Verlag). Friedman, E. (1995) National Identity and Democratic Prospects in Socialist China (New York: M.E. Sharpe). Friedman, E. (2008) ‘Where Is Chinese Nationalism? The Political Geography of a Moving Project’, Nations and Nationalism, 14:4, 721–38. Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press). Fulbrook, M. (1997) ‘Reckoning with the Past: Heroes, Victims and Villains in the History of the German Democratic Republic’, in R. Alter and P. Monteath (eds) Rewriting the German Past: History and Identity in the New Germany (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press). Gellner, E. (2006) Nations and Nationalism, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell). Gildea, R. (1994) The Past in French History (London: Yale University Press). Grant, S. M. (1996) ‘When Is a Nation Not a Nation? The Crisis of American Nationality in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, Nations and Nationalism, 2:1, 105–29. Habermas, J. (1987) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity). Hegel, G. W. F. (1999) Political Writings, translated by H. B. Nisbet in Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Herder, J. G. (2004) Another Philosophy of History [1744] and Selected Political Writings, translated by I. Evrrigenis and D. Pellerin (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company). Hess, M. (1962) ‘Rom und Jerusalem’, in H. Lademacher (ed.) Moses Hess: Ausgewählte Schriften (Cologne: Melzer). Hirschhausen, U. von, and J. Leonhard (eds) (2001) Nationalismen in Europa. West- Und Osteuropa Im Vergleich (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag).

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Hroch, M. (1968) Vorkämpfer dern Nationalen Bewegungen bei den kleinen Völkern Europas (Prague: Universita Karlova). Hroch, M. (1996) ‘From National Movement to the Fully-Formed Nation: The NationBuilding Process in Europe’, in G. Balakrishnan (ed.) Mapping the Nation (London: Verso), 78–97. Hroch, M. (2005) Das Europa Der Nationen. Die Moderne Nationsbildung Im Europäischen Vergleich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). Hutchinson, J. (2005) Nations as Zones of Conflict (London: Sage). Kant, I. (1991) Political Writings, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Khaldun, I. (2005) The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, translated by F. Rosenthal (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Koselleck, R. (2004) Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press). Leerssen, J. (2006) National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press). Maier, C. S. (2005) ‘Transformations of Territoriality, 1600–2000’, in G. Budde, S. Conrad and O. Janz (eds) Transnationale Geschichte. Themen, Tendenzen Und Theorien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht), 32–55. Mandler, P. (2006) The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven: Yale University Press). Manela, E. (2007) The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anti-Colonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Mann, M. (1993) The Sources of Social Power: Vol.2: The Rise of Classes and Nation-States 1760–1914, 1st edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Mazlish, B. and A. Iriye (eds) (2005) The Global History Reader (New York: Routledge). McNeill, J. R. and W. H. McNeill (2003) The Human Web: A Bird’s Eye View of History (New York: W. W. Norton). Mellon, J. (2002) ‘Pan-Arabism, Pan Islamism and Interstate Relations in the Arab Word’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 8:4, 5–15. Misra, M. (2007) Vishnus’s Crowded Temple: India since the Great Rebellion (London: Penguin Books). Mosse, G. (1975) The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (New York: H. Fertig). Nora, P. and L. D. Kritzman (1996) Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. 3 vols, European Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press). Odhiambo, E. S. A. and J. Lonsdale (eds) (2003) Mau Mau and Nationhood (Oxford: James Currey). Owen, D. (1994) Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault, and the Ambivalence of Reason (London: Routledge). Pocock, J. G. A. (2003) The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, 2nd edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Riall, L. (2007) Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (New Haven and London: Yale University Press). Rosberg, C. G. and J. Nottingham (1966) The Myth of the Mau Mau: Nationalism in Kenya (London: Praeger). Sciatino, G. (1999) ‘Just before the Fall: The Northern League and the Cultural Construction of a Secessionist Claim’, International Sociology, 14:3, 321–36. Simon, S. R. (1986) ‘The Teaching of History in Iraq before the Rashid Ali Coup of 1941’, Middle Eastern Studies, 22, 1.

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Struve, K. (2001) ‘Bauern und Nation in Ostmitteleuropa: Sozale Emanzipation und nationale Identität der galizischen Bauern im 19. Jahrhundert’, in U. von Hirschhausen and J. Leonhard (eds) Nationalismen in Europa. West- und Osteuropa im Vergleich (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag). Tacitus (1948) The Germania, translated by H. Mattingly. (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Taylor, C. (2007) A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). Weber, E. (1976) Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernisation of Rural France (London: Chatto and Windus).

2 The Comparative History of National Historiographies in Europe: Some Methodological Reflections and Preliminary Results Stefan Berger

The nationalisation of European culture and thought in the 19th century included the nationalisation of history writing (Leersen, 2006; Hroch, 2005). Throughout much of the 19th and first half of the 20th century national history was the dominant show in town – never the only one, but for many the most important one. Increasingly, as the 19th century progressed, the history lectures and seminars at universities were dominated by national history, which was perceived by many historians as the highest form of history writing. National historical narratives underpinned a wide variety of nationalisms throughout Europe and were influential in justifying nation state formation, revolution, civil war, war, genocide and ethnic cleansing. The deep impact of historical national narratives on European culture is clear. It is therefore particularly important to investigate these narratives in a genuinely comparative and transnational way, a process that has been under way for a number of years now. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, a range of monographs and edited collections have sought to explore the theme (e.g. Lönnroth et al., 1994; Duchhardt and Kunz, 1997; Berger et al., 1999; Conrad and Conrad, 2002; Lingelbach, 2003; Raphael, 2003; Eriksonas, 2004).1 What I would like to do in this chapter is to discuss some of the methodological assumptions and some of the preliminary results which underpin and come out of these studies. I shall start off by reviewing the legacy of the ideas of national special paths, which were at the heart of historical national narratives. In the second section I would like to ask how comparative historians might be able to cluster the diverse constructions of national experiences according to specific research questions to be pursued. Finally, I will conclude by exploring the assumption that, regardless of all the many differences in the projection of national historical trajectories, the comparative history of national historiography is able to discern a European 29

30 Stefan Berger

path, or perhaps better a European highway of national history with multiple lanes. Ultimately, however, such a hypothesis can only be tested by comparing the national historiographies of Europe with national historiographies in other continents.

A Europe of special paths? the legacy of the search for authenticity It has been part and parcel of methodological nationalism in history writing to postulate ‘special paths’ of nations. Everywhere in Europe national historians were keen to argue that the history of ‘their’ nation was somehow peculiar and displayed unique characteristics. The search for national Sonderwege was a legacy of European Romanticism, which put such heavy emphasis on the authenticity of national cultures that it became of key importance to establish notions of difference. Some of the big imperial nations in Europe were adept at constructing national peculiarities which served the purpose of legitimating empires. In Britain it was constitutional history, which was at the heart of establishing the slow and peaceful evolution of a parliamentary democracy through the centuries. The British parliament as ‘mother of parliaments’ and the legacy of constitutionalism also predestined Britain to spread the values of constitutionalism throughout the world, giving it a civilising mission which underpinned British imperialism. In Spain national progress was often intimately connected with the spread of Christianity and more specifically, Catholicism. The Reconquista was a key example of how the nation protected not only Spain but Europe from the Infidels and the history of Spanish colonialism was also a history of spreading the values of Christianity around the globe. In Germany historians sought to combine the history of the Kulturstaat with that of the Machtstaat, arguing that it was, in Thomas Mann’s words, a special machtgeschützte Innerlichkeit which protected the advances of real culture (Mann, 1918). The spread of such culture into Eastern Europe was frequently regarded as Germany’s mission in Europe. French 19th and 20th century historians overwhelmingly wrote national history from the vantage point of the revolution of 1789, out of which emerged a republican and laicist France. The values of the revolution were universal but they were also national, which allowed the ‘grande nation’ to formulate an imperial mission to spread ‘egalité, fraternité et liberté’ around the globe. In Soviet Russia it was another revolution, that of the Bolsheviks of 1917 which became the key structuring device for national history in the post-1917 period. It allowed Soviet Russia to formulate a Communist civilising narrative, according to which its national mission as ‘motherland of the proletarian revolution’ was to liberate other working-class nations from the dominance of their respective bourgeoisies. But national historiographies in these cases did not one-sidedly legitimate empires. One can also argue the reverse, namely that empire historiographies

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constructed nation states. Land- and sea-based empires needed to integrate different regions of the empire in diverse ways. In the process of doing so, historians of empire constructed ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ areas of empire and formulated national projects around the core areas. The successful integration of Scotland and Wales into a British national narrative and the equally successful integration of Siberia, Byelorussia and Ukraine into a Greater Russian national history are good examples of this trend (Berger and Miller, 2008). If we look at some of the medium-sized and smaller European nation states, their historians were not less prone to formulate notions of exceptionalism. Poland was described as ‘Christ among nations’ indicating the long history of suffering leading to salvation and ultimate triumph. The theme of suffering and repression is prominent in a wide range of national histories, which deploy it to mark out national history from an ‘oppressive’ other. In Catholic Irish historiography it is the English and the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, whereas in Polish national history it is the Russians/Soviets and Germans which are depicted as the main oppressors. Stories of repression form a prominent telos of national histories, where they only recently emerged from the tutelage of an ‘oppressive’ state and are seeking to construct their own lineages, for example in Belarus, Ukraine and the Baltic states. Stories of national victimhood are also combined with forgetfulness about degrees of complicity with former oppressor states. One of the most blatant examples of such forgetfulness is the construction of Austrian national history after 1945. Arguably it only established itself firmly as being independent from a wider German national history after the Second World War, when Austrian national historians from the far left to the right came up with the idea of Austria as ‘first victim’ of Hitler and National Socialist Germany, thereby marking itself out as a victim of, rather than perpetrator in, National Socialist crimes between 1938 and 1945. Next to narratives of repression we encounter narratives of mediation in the diverse attempts to construct special national paths in historiography. Luxembourg historians after 1945 increasingly framed the history of Luxembourg around a particular European mission, which increasingly seemed to coincide with the European Union. Belgian historians, especially Henri Pirenne, argued that Belgium fulfilled a particular role as a bridge between different cultures, in particular French and Germanic cultures. It was distinguished not by a particularly pure language or ethnicity, but by being a meeting point of diverse cultures and peoples. Many of the Communist countries after 1945 combined a Marxist framework of history writing with the propagation of national characteristics which allowed these historiographies to produce distinct Communist trajectories of national historical development. In Communist Albania, a working-class national narrative was combined with state-sponsored atheism in such a way as to mark out the Albanian nation before all other Communist nations. In East Germany ideas of a socialist German nation as the outcome

32 Stefan Berger

of all the progressive national traditions underpinned identity discourses which were constructed vis-à-vis West Germany. Communist Yugoslavia also embarked on the search for Yugoslav national identity which could overcome the national narratives of the diverse parts making up Yugoslavia. It concentrated very much on the successful resistance to fascism in the Second World War and the idea of self-liberation. However, this attempt was unsuccessful, as the professional historians in Yugoslavia by and large retained a sub-Yugoslav national outlook and concentrated on writing the histories of Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Bosnia – often with their own, mutually contradictory, special paths (Brunnbauer, 2002). Ideas of special paths were connected to notions of difference, which in turn often mutated into discourses about the superiority of one’s own nation over others. There was already a certain amount of tension in the work of early cosmopolitan nationalists, such as Johan Gottfried Herder, who, on the one hand, declared the basic equality of all nations whilst, on the other, constructing hierarchies of nations according to their particular virtues (Nisbet, 1999). British constitutionalism, German Kultur, French revolutionary values, Catholicism in Spain and Poland, Orthodoxy in Russia and Rumania, Lutherism in Denmark, Sweden and Finland all served the purpose of marking out these particular nations vis-à-vis others, who were frequently constructed as their ‘national enemies’. However, as indicated above, inferiority could also become a mark of honour, especially if it could be connected to the suffering of the nation at the hands of a ruthless ‘other’. Polish and Irish historiography are prime examples of such constructions. With regard to the various markers of nationality, be it language, culture or ethnicity, historians sought to establish firmly that the markers for their particular nation were genuinely pure, important and durable. National histories were nowhere uncontested and they invariably came in the plural. Nevertheless, one can say that some national histories were more homogeneously grouped around particular narratives, whilst others were characterised by narrative dissonance, that is very diverse national narratives competing for superiority in the nation state. So, for example, nations with a strong Catholic narrative often produced liberal counter-narratives intent on demonstrating the negative influence of the Catholic Church on the national development. In Spanish historiography liberal historians were keen to point to the Inquisition as one of the darkest chapters of Spanish national history. In France, the revolutionary republican traditions served as a powerful antidote to the previously close association of the French nation with Catholicism. In fact republicanism soon dominated the official historiography, marginalising Catholic national narratives of France to a significant extent. In 19th century Ireland it was, by and large, representatives of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, which dominated historical writing and, between W. H. Lecky and J. A. Froude, managed to construct quite different

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histories of Ireland. But it was fundamentally different to the Catholic Irish historiography which was to blossom under the Irish state after 1922. It was characteristic for the establishment of exceptionalist arguments that their authors usually restricted their enquiries to ‘their’ nation states and did not feel it necessary to look beyond the borders of ‘their’ nation state. Yet, it is a truism that one can only establish exceptionalisms through comparison. In fact, if we look at the special paths reviewed above, we detect similarities in the narratives, which already make those special paths look less special. Thus, for example, a variety of constructions focus on the early and continuous state histories with special reference to institutions, such as the monarchy or parliament. Others, by contrast, look towards cultural markers of collective national identity, especially the emergence of vernaculars and the strength of a literary national tradition. Others again connect the national trajectory to the nation’s particular religious and denominational character, thereby postulating a symbiotic relationship between a particular religion and national development.

Comparison and the need for clustering narrative constructions of national histories One way of trying to compare the construction of national narratives is therefore to cluster those narratives which display similarities in the construction process. Thus, for example, it would make sense to compare those national narratives, in which notions of sacrifice or mediation play a prominent role. Likewise it would be intriguing to compare those in which the national peculiarity is linked to an international mission which legitimated various imperialist ventures. But ultimately, as with all comparisons, everything depends on the question(s) asked, and therefore one can envisage very different forms of clustering, depending on which particular question is being pursued. Before we come to the problem of clustering, however, one other methodological problem needs to be addressed: what kind of national histories are to be compared. Given the prevalence and strength of national history writing in the modern period, it seems impossible to compare whole bodies of national historiographies. Here the concept of national master narrative might be usefully deployed to limit the number of actual histories to be compared. The development of the idea of ‘master narrative’ has a very complex history (Thijs, 2008), but we can talk about master narratives as dominant narratives as expressed in key texts, which were widely received as being particularly subtle, masterful and authoritative. These were master texts also in the sense that they were frequently copied and used as an interpretative framework for a whole body of other literature. National historical master narratives thus provide narrative frameworks which national history writing accepted widely and which therefore can be found in many forms of

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national history writing. The narrative framing of those master national histories can be explored through a set of questions including: who are central actors of national histories? Which historical figures populate the national stage? Who are described as enemies of the nation? Who has agency? How is the passing of time structured in national histories? What importance is attached to concepts such as progress or contingency? What periodisation does the story follow? What origins are constructed? The answer to these and related questions will provide us with a better idea of the narrative framing of historical master narratives. It is through such historical master narratives that people make sense of the past and identify with particular versions of the past (Middell et al., 2000). Whilst one might sympathise with postmodernist critiques of such master narratives, it would be facile to assume their dissolution and disappearance. Instead, one needs to analyse how they are perpetually reconstructed. Comparative clustering can take place around the ‘most similar’ paradigm suggested above, but it can also be organised around a set of pertinent themes relevant to most, if not all national histories. I would suggest four such themes: first, the institutionalisation and professionalisation of history writing. The professionalisation and the nationalisation of historical writing are parallel processes, which are intimately related. Professional historians’ truth claims and objectivity claims were most often connected to nations in the 19th and 20th centuries. Everywhere in Europe, the process of history writing itself was connected to the emergence of nationhoods and nation states. History was to a large extent the history of nation formation. The nation was the telos of history and through ‘scientific’ history writing, historians could provide objective foundations for their respective nations. Hence the timing and nature of processes of professionalisation were bound to have a major impact on the framing of national master narratives (Porciani and Raphael, 2010, forthcoming; Porciani and Tollebeek, 2010, forthcoming). When were the first chairs of history founded at national universities? When did the first seminars appear? When were major national source collections published? The close interrelationship between older learned societies and Enlightenment historiography on the one hand and processes of professionalisation in the 19th century on the other merits closer attention. The same is true for the transitions from an older ‘amateur’ national historiography, often rooted in antiquarian interests and societies, to a professionalised historiography, often tied to the ambitions of a nationalising state. What was the role of academies, associations, museums and journals in establishing national master narratives and ensuring their success with wider publics? Whilst the establishment of a professionalised and institutionalised national history took place in most parts of Europe at some point during the long 19th century, in some rare cases, it only started in the 20th century. Particular places of learning often radiated wide and far into European historiographical culture: Göttingen, Berlin and the German

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universities did so before 1914. Paris became the place for historians after 1945. And increasingly, from the 1960s onwards, North American universities took the lead in setting the historiographical agenda in Europe. The same can be said about particular individuals who often acted as beacons of orientation and were genuinely European in their reach and influence. In the 19th century one thinks, for example, of Herder, Mazzini, Michelet and Ranke, and in the 20th century Lamprecht, Braudel and Hobsbawm come readily to mind. Quite apart from the towering intellectual figures and institutions influencing identity discourses throughout Europe, one can also identify more limited forms of regional transfers across neighbouring regions (Troebst, 2003). Over the past two decades historians of cultural transfer have firmly established the fact that one cannot compare without taking into account the cases which are to be compared (Berger, 2003). Only if it is acknowledged that we are not comparing isolated cases but cases which are interrelated in manifold and complex ways, does the comparison make sense, for it is only then that we recognise that adaption, adoption, rejection and reception all played a major role in constructing ‘national experiences’. A second pertinent theme to be explored comparatively concerns the interrelationship between national master narratives with other master narratives, e.g. those of ethnicity/race, religion and class. We can produce a range of clusters according to which interrelationship looked particular prominent in given national historiographies (Berger and Lorenz, 2008). Regarding ethnic narratives, for example, it makes sense to compare notions of origin and national beginnings in the historical narratives. How are migrations dealt with and what impact is attributed to the migrations regarding the changing character of the nation? Were there notions of an Urvolk, and how do those notions relate to ideas about ethnic purity? Ethnic national narratives were particularly important in challenging multinational and imperial states, such as Spain, Britain or the Habsburg Empire. It makes sense to compare those challenges in order to find answers to the question, why they were successful in some cases and not in others. The racialisation of ethnic narratives in the last third of the 19th century is characteristic of many national historiographies and again deserves systematic comparison. How did the ideas of Social Darwinism enter the historical discourse about nation? While ethnicity in the first half of the 19th century was often used to mean culture and cultural similarities, the race discourse biologised culture and made it a matter of genetic and biological determinism. Did some discursive constructions of ethnicity/culture lend themselves to such racialisation more than others? What did the national narratives do with ethnic ‘others’ within the territory of the nation state? One thinks of transnational European peoples, such as the Jews or the Roma, or of ethnic minorities, such as the Samis and the Lapps in Scandinavia and Finland or the Sorbs in Germany. Especially in East Central and Eastern

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Europe the rich tapestry of parallel constructions of competing ethnicities clashed badly with the aspirations of national master narratives for ethnic purity. The homogenising desires of the latter produced ethnic cleansing and genocide in the context of the Second World War and its aftermath. Only the framework of the European Union has allowed the narrative celebration of diversity in European history. For the first time, mixing and in-between-ness had positive connotations. In-between peoples in classical European borderlands began to celebrate their status rather than fear to be viewed as a potential threat to the nation state. Ironically, such a perspective only developed when the rich ethnic mix of Europe was but a historical memory. And, as the case of Yugoslavia in the 1990s powerfully underlined, ethnic diversity could still be made into a major problem leading to ethnic cleansing and mass murder. However, the eventual (albeit belated) intervention of the EU and the USA to stop the bloodshed was based to a considerable degree on the historical argument that Europe had to draw lessons from the history of the Second World War and the Holocaust. If ethnicity and national narratives were tightly interrelated, the latter often displayed a more ambiguous relationship to religion (Haupt and Langewiesche, 2001). On the one hand, they sought to replace religion as a key marker of collective identity, but on the other hand, they also were keen to integrate religion into the national narrative. Hence, almost everywhere in Europe, the national narratives came to be identified with particular religious or denominational links. The comprehensive confessionalisation of whole societies in 19th century Europe left a mark on conceptions of national identity. Religion provided key symbols, rituals and collective practices which strengthened national historical master narratives. National saints and religious festivals, for example, feature prominently in the latter. In terms of class narratives it is very noticeable that Communist histories produced a range of mergers between national history and class ideology. Early labour movement historians already wrote class histories in order to facilitate the integration of the working classes into their respective nation states. In Communist states, historians again worked largely within national frameworks and sought to adapt traditional national narratives to the Communist ideology. Thus, for example, Czech national history under Communism continued a well-established antagonistic dialogue with German national history as the key ‘other’ of Czech self-definitions. Portraying Czech and Slovak national history as a particularly proletarian history, it could be juxtaposed to German national history in which the bourgeoisie and feudal classes played prominent roles. Thus it was the national history as class history which marked out Czechoslovak history vis-à-vis its main ‘other’ – Germany. But there have also been Marxist scholars who sought to overcome methodological nationalism with reference to Marxist internationalism. In the Soviet Union of the 1920s Marxist internationalism in historical writing

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flourished only briefly. In Western Marxism we find influential champions of transnational comparative history writing. However, theirs was mostly an oppositional history seeking to write against the grain of national(ist) history. By contrast, in the Communist nations of Eastern Europe, state historians espoused the merger between Marxism and nationalism. The Czechoslovak national narrative is by no means unique in relating the national story to the development of a particular social class. In Denmark, for example, extensive debates surrounding the free peasants focused on the extent to which this class could be described as the backbone of the nation. Other national storylines are more firmly tied to other social classes. In the Polish and Hungarian cases, the nobility has been relatively important not only in developing the national storylines but also in featuring in them as nation-forming classes, whereas in British and German national narratives, pride of place in most narratives goes to an urban-based, educated and propertied bourgeoisie. Whilst gender is not a master narrative analogous to those of ethnicity/ race, religion and class, it nevertheless features strongly in European national histories. It would be mistaken to assume that national histories are all-male histories, which exclude women. The nation is most frequently imagined as family and as such national histories need both male and female heroes and heroines. They possess very different virtues, according to the gender stereotypes prevalent at the time of writing, but both male and female virtues are perceived as being necessary for the flowering and development of the nation. In a surprising number of cases, one also encounters female heroines which conform more to male gender stereotypes than to female ones. One only needs to think of Queen Boadicea in Britain or Jeanne d’Arc in France. However, given the fact that much national history was political history, and that women remained excluded from the political sphere for much of the modern era, many national histories are male-centred. This even produced attempts, in Norway and also in Finland, to write a female national history as a counter-history to the male-dominated genre. But the gendering of national histories is not just about the place of women in national histories. It is about the deployment of gendered metaphors, tropes and narrative devices which abound in national histories and which remain woefully under-researched (O’Dowd and Porciani, 2004). National enemies are routinely feminised and periods of extreme national suffering are frequently portrayed as ‘rape’ of the nation. The misfortunes of the nation are placed on the shoulders of foreign-born wives of indigenous kings or foreignborn rulers. The betrayal of women is made responsible for the downfall of nations and their defeat by the hands of their national enemies. Sexual deviance is related to responsibility for national catastrophe. Overall, the place of gender as a structuring device of national histories cannot be overestimated. A third theme for comparative analysis is the interrelationship between national master narratives with sub- as well as transnational narratives. Here

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we can, first of all, form a cluster of those national narratives which seek to build on established local and regional identity discourses. The importance of such sub-national identity discourses for the construction of national narratives in a variety of different European contexts is well established (Thiesse, 1999). One might ask further, under which circumstances such regional identity discourses in multinational states and empires turn themselves into national discourses. It is, after all, a peculiar phenomenon that several regions have displayed an ability to turn themselves into nations whilst others have not. But it is not only the subnational identity discourses which have been of major importance to the construction of national master narratives. Transnational stories, including European and imperial storylines, were often national storylines in disguise (Middell and Roura, 2010, forthcoming; Hadler and Mesenhöller, 2007). How often, for example, has the history of Europe been written as the sum total of its (usually bigger) nation states? What European missions did the nation states formulate? How did national discourses legitimate schemes of imperial expansion? The methodological nationalism which characterised so much historical writing in the 19th and 20th centuries was in complex and sometimes contradictory ways linked up with an accelerating transnationalism of the historical profession which started in the last third of the 19th century. Given the historians’ scientific (wissenschaftlich) pretensions, it is not surprising that they aimed at a transnational dialogue which found expression in an increasing number of international conferences, transnational research projects and the emergence of world historical congresses (Erdmann, 2005). At the beginning of the 21st century such transnationalisation has reached endemic proportions and it is easy to write satires on academic life which takes place on airplanes and in-between continents. On the European level, much research-funding is already being provided by the European Commission for projects which need several European partners to collaborate and the percentage of such funding is bound to rise much faster than national funding over the coming years. Yet without a methodological turn away from national paradigms, such transnationalisation of the historical profession does not necessarily undermine methodological nationalism; for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, it simply institutionalised methodological nationalism on a transnational level. The fourth theme relates to the problem of overlapping national histories and the role of borders and borderlands, which have been vitally important for national narratives (Frank and Hadler, 2010, forthcoming). In many cases the nation defined itself most acutely at the border. A comparison of constructions of borders and contested territories and their role in national histories promises to shed important light on one of the key components of national histories. One could also produce a cluster of borderlands in Europe and look at the ways in which borderlanders and their attempts to construct borderland identities managed to survive the mighty nationalising drives

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of national narratives and carve out niches for themselves within and even between national histories.

Unity in diversity? towards a comparative history of national historiographies in Europe The different research questions reviewed above will provide a framework for the clustering of European national historiographies. Only such meaningful clustering will allow us to make use of the comparative method and combine it with cultural transfer studies in order to arrive at a synthetic overview of how national history writing across Europe differed and what it had in common. For a start, the beginnings of national history-writing in Europe are quite diverse. Whereas many parts of Europe can trace those beginnings to the high and late medieval period (Armstrong, 1982; Geary, 2002), others can look back no further than the early 20th century. Despite such differences we can nevertheless identify two important pan-European waves of national history writing going back to the early modern period. First, humanism produced a wide array of scholarship which dealt in categories of the national (Helmrath et al., 2002). Secondly, the Reformation marked a period in which national history became an important weapon in the arsenal of Protestant nations against the universalism of the Catholic Church and those (nation) states allied to it. While medieval and early modern constructions of the nation established particular ways of talking about the nation, including popular metaphors, tropes, heroes, enemies and myths of origin, they fundamentally differed from modern national narratives in their scope and appeal. The construction of modern national identities coincided with the construction of a professionalised and institutionalised historiography emancipating itself from theology. Being a professional historian included a claim to having a privileged vantage point onto the past. It was qua their professionalism that historians could claim to interpret the nation’s past and speak on behalf of the nation’s past better than anyone else. However, that claim was accepted to varying degrees in different parts of Europe. Whilst history could rise to become the leading academic discipline in the German lands during the 19th century, in Britain it never occupied such a prominent position (Osterhammel, 1993). Partly this was to do with the lack of professionalisation and institutionalisation in Britain, but partly also with the fact that the historical master narrative was relatively well established and uncontested – at least if compared with most areas of Central and Eastern Europe. The nation was already there and whilst history served to legitimate it, the historical profession and the knowledge it produced had a different degree of urgency in areas undergoing projects of nation formation. If geography had an important impact on the function and presence of national history writing, so had chronology. Whilst 18th century

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Enlightenment historians wrote national histories in order to emphasise general principles of historical development manifesting themselves in different nations, in the 19th century, Romantic historians delivered national histories which concentrated on what made nations unique and special (Bann, 1995). In the later 19th century, national historians tended to see themselves as more professional, working closer to the sources and therefore having a greater insight into the past than their Romantic predecessors. Debunking Romantic myths about national history became a favourite pasttime of later generations of historians, but this did not mean that the latter were any less nationalist than the Romantic historians. In some respects one can argue the reverse. At least some Romantic national historians were still influenced by the Enlightenment. Their nationalism, following Herder, depicted a marked ambiguity between cosmopolitan egalitarianism (i.e. every nationalism is of equal value) and claims of nationalist superiority of one’s own nation over others. And, of course, the more they could claim to be professionals, the more it underlined their authority to speak on behalf of the nation. Their status as spokespersons for the nation involved them in often highly politicised debates about the shape and nature of the nation state and its relation to both its internal and external enemies (Breuilly, 1997). Especially in recently formed nation states, such as Germany or Italy, and in nations seeking to establish their own state (often by breaking away from empires), historians were very close to politics, serving the interest of the state (being sometimes employed by the state) or undermining existing state structures. National histories were thus both legitimatory and oppositional – depending on the national circumstances. At times, historians became politicians and politicians wrote history. The First World War highlighted the political function of historians, as they became involved in war propaganda (for Germany see Stibbe, 2001). They used history to legitimate their respective nation’s struggle, to denounce their opponents and to justify claims on territories. A similar use of national history can be observed in the Second World War, and in civil wars such as the Spanish one after 1936 or the Russian one after 1917. Dictatorships of the right and the left routinely sought to streamline national history into a version which served the dictatorship, whilst banishing all other forms of historical writing. This brings us to the interesting phenomenon that national histories were also written in exile (Tortarolo, 2007). Exiled historians often formulated national counter-narratives, which sometimes remained marginal, but frequently became important after ‘regime change’, when the historiography which underpinned a dictatorship gave way to other forms of historiography and the search for new national master narratives produced an opening for different narratives. Historians in exile could also be influential in encouraging research among historians of their host country into the history of their country of origin. The most famous examples in this respect are the

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historians, who had to leave Nazi Germany. In Britain and North America they not only wrote a different German national history, but they also engendered much interest among English-speaking historians in the history of Germany and the German lands. The prominence of German history among British and North American historians of the post-Second World War period has much to do with the presence of a German exile historiography, and this ‘foreign’ national historiography has in turn come to influence German historiography. One only has to think about the impact of David Blackbourn’s and Geoff Eley’s critique of the German Sonderweg (Blackbourn and Eley, 1984). It is noticeable that British and North American historians had the power to start or influence debates on national history elsewhere, e.g. Robert Paxton and the French discussions on Vichy (Paxton, 1972), Dennis Mack Smith and the question of continuities between the Risorgimento and Italian fascism (Mack Smith 1959), or Paul Preston and the Spanish debates surrounding the legacy of Franco and the Spanish civil war (Preston, 1993). After 1945 national histories in Western Europe experienced a delayed break with traditional national paradigms following attempts to stabilise these traditional paradigms after the massive upheaval of the Second World War. With some exceptions, most notably Britain, but also some of the ‘neutral’ countries, such as Spain, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland, the war was crucial in reconceptualising national history throughout Europe (Flacke, 2004). Many national histories in Western Europe now became more self-reflective and, in the process, more self-critical. In Eastern Europe, the Communist regimes enforced the writing of national history under Marxist guidelines, but in many places this saw an adaptation of traditional national master narratives rather than their complete abandonment or replacement. In some respects the revision of those traditional master narratives was less thorough than was the case in Western Europe, which might also help to explain why nationalism erupted with such force in some regions of Eastern Europe after the collapse of Communism. It would, however, be mistaken, even for Western Europe, to postulate a terminal decline of national histories from the 1960s onwards. While parts of professional history have indeed moved in the direction of transnational and comparative history, in order to overcome the national focus of historiography, many parts of Europe (both West and East) witnessed a revival of national history writing in the 1980s, which was exacerbated by the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe around 1990 (Berger, 2005). German reunification brought a search for national normality and a renewed interest in reinterpretations of the national past. The crisis of the post-war Italian republic made many historians rally to the topic of national history in order to fend off a perceived threat of disintegration and (northern) separatism. In multinational states, such as Britain, Spain or Belgium, separatist nationalisms began to produce their own national histories – often to underpin claims for greater autonomy or even independence. In Eastern Europe the peaceful

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separation of Czechoslovakia necessitated the re-writing of national history in both parts – the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The violent disintegration of Yugoslavia saw historians in the vanguard of those justifying the setting up of nation states in the different parts of Yugoslavia and even legitimating acts of ethnic cleansing in the name of securing or demolishing the territorial integrity of the new territorial regimes. The setting up of post-Soviet national states, such as Byelorussia and Ukraine also brought with it attempts to construct national histories underpinning projects of nation formation.

A European path of national history writing? This is admittedly a broad-brush sketch of a comparative history of national historiographies and it will need considerable detail to fill in the many gaps on the canvass (which is the aim of the six-volume book series under the direction of Berger, Conrad and Marchal, 2008–2010). Such detail will invariably highlight many fine differences between national experiences, and yet, despite the legacy of a multiplicity of national special paths, it seems possible to discern broad similarities in European attempts to write national histories. They include the parallel and closely intertwined processes of the rise of professional history writing and the rise of nationalism in 19th century Europe, the strong interrelationship of national historical paradigms with other master narratives, in particular those of ethnicity/race, religion and class, the equally close bonds of national histories with histories of sub- and transnational places, and, finally, the importance of borderlands and contested borders for the framing of national histories. In addition, the similarities stretch to the gendering of national histories across Europe, the political functionalisation of national master narratives especially in the context of nation formation, war and civil war, and the longevity of the importance of national historical narratives which continue to inform collective identity processes into the present time. In some respects then, we may indeed be able to speak about a ‘European path’ in the construction of national historical narratives, although one should not underestimate the many different lanes on this path on which national histories travel with different speeds and under different guises. How some of these European characteristics of the relationship between history writing and national identity formation relate to similar processes elsewhere in the world, is a project well worth the attention of comparative historians, as this volume and related publications demonstrate (Berger, 2007; Fuchs and Stuchtey, 2002).

Note 1. Many of the examples in this article are taken from draft chapters for the many publications produced by a European Science Foundation Programme entitled

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‘Representations of the Past: The Writing of National Histories in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Europe’ (NHIST), which I had the pleasure to direct between 2003 and 2008. I would like to thank the more than 150 scholars from across Europe who participated in the NHIST programme for making the whole thing happen. For an introduction to the NHIST programme see also Berger and Mycock (2007) and the programme website, http://www.uni-leipzig.de/zhsesf, last accessed 30 December 2007.

References Armstrong, J. (1982) Nations before Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press). Bann, S. (1995) Romanticism and the Rise of History (Boston, MA: Twayne). Berger, S. (2003) ‘Comparative History’ in S. Berger, H. Feldner and K. Passmore (eds) Writing History: Theory and Practice (London: Hodder Arnold), pp. 161–179. Berger, S. (2005) ‘A Return to the National Paradigm? National History Writing in Germany, Italy, France, and Britain from 1945 to the Present’, Journal of Modern History, 77, 3, 629–678. Berger, S. (2007) Writing the Nation: a Global Perspective (Houndmills: Palgrave McMillan). Berger, S., M. Donovan and K. Passmore (eds) (1999) Writing National History. Western Europe since 1800 (London: Routledge). Berger, S. and A. Mycock (eds) (2007) ‘Europe and its National Historians’, special issue of Storia della Storiografia, 50. Berger, S. and C. Lorenz (eds) (2008) The Contested Nation: Ethnicity, Religion, Class and Gender in National Histories (Houndmills: Palgrave McMillan). Berger, S. and A. Miller (2008) ‘National Building and Regional Integration, c. 1800–1914: the Role of Empires’, European Review of History, 15, 3, 317–330. Berger, S., C. Conrad and G. Marchal (eds) (2008–2010, forthcoming) Writing the Nation, 6 vols (Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan). Blackbourn, D. and G. Eley (1984) The Peculiarities of German History. Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Breuilly, J. (1997) Myth-Making or Myth-Breaking? Nationalism and History (Birmingham: University of Birmingham). Brunnbauer, U. (ed.) (2002) Umstrittene Identitäten. Ethnizität und Nationalität in Südosteuropa (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang). Conrad, C. and S. Conrad (eds) (2002) Die Nation schreiben: Geschichtswissenschaft im internationalen Vergleich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). Duchhardt, H. and A. Kunz (eds) (1997) ‘Europäische Geschichte’ als historiographisches Problem (Mainz: Institut für europäische Geschichte). Erdmann, K. D. (2005) Toward a Global Community of Historians. The International Historical Congresses and the International Committee of Historical Sciences, 1898–2000 (Oxford: Berghahn). Eriksonas, L. (2004) National Heroes and National Identities: Scotland, Norway and Lithuania (Brussels: Peter Lang). Flacke, M. (ed.) (2004) Mythen der Nationen. 1945: Arena der Erinnerungen (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern). Frank, T. and F. Hadler (eds) (2010, forthcoming) Borders and Nations: Confrontations and (Re-)Conciliations (Houndmills: Palgrave McMillan).

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Fuchs, E. and B. Stuchtey (2002) Across Cultural Borders. Historiography in Global Perspective (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield). Geary, P. J. (2002) The Myth of Nations. The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Hadler, F. and M. Mesenhöller (eds) (2007) Lost Greatness and Past Oppression in East Central Europe: Representations of the Imperial Experience since 1918 (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag). Haupt, H-G. and D. Langewiesche (eds) (2001) Nation und Religion in der deutschen Geschichte (Frankfurt/Main: Campus). Helmrath, J., U. Muhlack and G. Walther (eds) (2002) Diffusion des Humanismus. Studien zur nationalen Geschichtsschreibung europäischer Humanisten (Göttingen: Wallstein). Hroch, M. (2005) Das Europa der Nationen. Die moderne Nationsbildung im europäischen Vergleich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). Leersen, J. (2006) National Thought in Europe. A Cultural History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press). Lingelbach, G. (2003) Klio macht Karriere. Die Institutionalisierung der Geschichtswissenschaft in Frankreich und den USA in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). Lönnroth, K., K. Molin and R. Björk (eds) (1994) Conceptions of National History (Berlin: K.G. Saur). Mack Smith, D. (1959) Italy: a Modern History (s.l.: Mayflower). Mann, T. (1918 [1983]) ‘Bekenntnisse eines Unpolitischen’ in T. Mann Aufsätze, Reden, Essays, vol. 2, 1914–1918 (Berlin [O]: Aufbau). Middell, M., M. Gibas and F. Hadler (eds) (2000) Zugänge zu historischen Meistererzählungen (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag). Middell, M. and L. Roura y Aulinas (eds) (2010, forthcoming) World, Global and European Histories as Challenges to National Representations of the Past (Houndmills: Palgrave McMillan). Nisbet, H. B. (1999) ‘Herder: the nation in history’ in Michael Branch (ed.) National History and Identity. Approaches to the Writing of National History in the North-East Baltic Region. Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society), 78–96. O’Dowd, M. and I. Porciani (eds) (2004) ‘History Women’, special issue of Storia della Storiografia, 46. Osterhammel, J. (1993) ‘Epochen der britischen Geschichtsschreibung’ in W. Küttler, J. Rüsen and E. Schulin (eds) Geschichtsdiskurs, vol. 1: Grundlagen und Methoden der Historiographiegeschichte (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer), pp. 157–188. Paxton, R. (1972) Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order (New York: Knopf). Porciani, I. and J. Tollebeek (eds) (2010, forthcoming) Institutions, Networks and Communities of National Historiography: Comparative Approaches (Houndmills: Palgrave McMillan). Porciani, I. and L. Raphael (eds) (2010, forthcoming) Atlas of the Institutions of European Historiographies, 1800 to the Present (Houndmills: Palgrave McMillan). Preston, P. (1993) Franco: a Biography (London: HarperCollins). Raphael, L. (2003) Geschichtswissenschaft im Zeitalter der Extreme. Theorien, Methoden und Tendenzen von 1900 bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: C.H. Beck). Stibbe, M. (2001) German Anglophobia and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Thiesse, A. M. (1999) La Création des Identités Nationales: Europe XVIIIe–XXe Siècle (Paris: Seuil).

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Thijs, K. (2008) ‘The Metaphor of the Master. “Narrative Hierarchy” in National Historical Cultures of Europe’ in S. Berger and C. Lorenz (eds) The Contested Nation: Ethnicity, Religion, Class and Gender in National Histories (Houndmills: Palgrave McMillan). Tortarolo, E. (2007) ‘Objectivity and Opposition: Some Émigré Historians in the 1930s and early 1940s’ in Q. E. Wang and F. L. Fillafer (eds) The Many Faces of Clio. Cross-Cultural Approaches to Historiography. Essays in Honor of Georg G. Iggers (Oxford: Berghahn). Troebst, S. (ed.) (2003) ‘Geschichtsregionen: Concept and Critique’, special issue of European Review of History, 10.

3 ‘Colonising’ The Past: History and Memory in Greece and Turkey Spyros A. Sofos and Umut Özkırımlı

Nationalist projects always look back in time, seeking to demonstrate the ‘linear time of the nation’, its undisputed diachronic presence. Although the timing and the circumstances of the emergence of Greek and Turkish nationalisms are not identical, both projects were informed by the hegemony of Western European modernity and its prevailing attitudes towards the past. As such, both Greek and Turkish nationalisms developed an ambivalent relationship with the past as this past constituted a resource not only for instilling national pride and establishing beyond doubt the diachronic existence of the nation but also validating it in the international arena, making it an acceptable member of the civilised world – by repressing the traces of the ‘backward’ Ottoman Empire from their newly written historiographies.

Modern Greece in the shadow of European classicism Greek nationalism, an intellectual and political movement that emerged in the 18th century, intimately linked with contemporary European intellectual traditions and trends, rested upon a project that involved extensive engagement with the past. Partly the offspring of Philhellenism and European romantic classicism of the end of the 18th and the turn of the 19th century, it was premised on the fusion of the utopian ideals of Hellas and modern day Greeks. The tone and frames of reference of this endeavour were set by the diaspora of Greek-speaking and/or Orthodox intellectuals in major European cities throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. In the context of this diasporic activism, the secular classicist outlook of one of the major exponents of Greek nationalism and its intellectual counterpart of Neohellenic Enlightenment, Adamantios Korais, influenced considerably the relationship of modern Greece to its putative past, even after his original vision was moderated by political exigency and considerations of those at the helm of the nation-building process. Korais identified the original locus of the Greek nation and the civilisation generated by it in classical Greece, which was incidentally identified as one 46

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of the sources of intellectual inspiration of European Enlightenment and modern Europe. This invaluable heritage was allegedly preserved through the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and although suppressed during the Middle Ages by Latin and Byzantine Christianity, was eventually re(dis)covered during the Renaissance and through the European Enlightenment. As we have suggested elsewhere (see Özkırımlı and Sofos, 2008, chapter 2), for Korais and his fellow nation-builders, modern Greek society had severed its links with this past and its heritage due to the intolerance of Byzantine Christianity, the lack of education of the clergy and the leadership of the Greeks during the Ottoman occupation and, perhaps more importantly, the ‘debilitating’ and ‘barbaric’ Turkish influence on their compatriots. Korais himself quite often projected the ‘amnesia’ from which his compatriots suffered and the state of ‘oblivion’ in which they lived to the presence of the ‘Turk’ in his ‘homeland’. We use the term projected here in two senses: first, to point out that despite his publicly declared belief in the undisputed relationship of his compatriots with their classical ‘progenitors’, implicit in his conduct was a disappointment and lack of faith in them. Korais could barely stand staying in his home town, Smyrna, and never attempted to visit the independent Greek state whose establishment he so much worked for. Second, his intellectual activism can be seen as informed by an orientalist perspective, a desire to narrate modern Greeks’ identity before them, for them; to project on them the image of Greece that the West had created in order to validate and legitimise its assumed superiority. In many ways, his compatriots were seen as a proxy of European Enlightenment. On closer look, the Greek Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman Empire shared the contempt Korais showed towards ‘the Turk’ as their culture failed to live up to the standards of the enlightened West. As a result, the task at hand was to retrieve the forgotten past and reconnect modern Greeks to it. Much of the work of Korais focused on the restoration of the links of modern with classical Greece: a substantial number of his publications consisted of translations into French and Greek of classical and Hellenistic works known as the Hellenic Library. The rationale of this effort was made explicit in his introductions to the various works that comprised the Hellenic Library, which, at the end of his life Korais published as a collection of prolegomena. There Korais argued that the intellectual growth of his compatriots constituted a prerequisite for their political emancipation, that is their liberation from Ottoman domination (1833, p. 23). Undoubtedly such a venture was not fated to reach his compatriots in their entirety as literacy was quite limited among the Greek-speaking populations of Southeastern Europe, Asia Minor and beyond, and their readiness to recognise classical antiquity as their past was doubtful. It was, however, highly symbolic of the shape and direction that modern Hellenism’s engagement with its putative classical past was to take over the next two centuries: in the words of Artemis Leontis, the classical Greek heritage is the particular

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past that haunts the Greek present (1995, p. 19) as modern Greeks were essentially expected to live up to the cultural achievements of their putative ancestors and to gain their ‘rightful’ place among the ‘civilised’ European nations, which after all, it was believed, were the cultural offspring of classical Greece. Neohellenic Enlightenment can be thus seen as an act of ‘colonisation’ of the culture of the populations that were to be designated as Greeks. It instituted a centre of gravity, a ‘kernel’ around which attempts to explore identity and to engage in narrations of the self in modern Greek society were to revolve. It is not surprising in this context to remark that, between 1837 and 1843, the teaching of Greek history at the University of Athens, the institution that was to produce the intellectual and political elite of the new state, was confined to the teaching of ancient Greek history (Karamanolakis, 2004, pp. 27–9). Similarly, Alexandros Soutsos remarked in 1845 that ‘today, the intellectuals of our tiny state revolving around Athens celebrate only victories exacted against the Persians and [remember] only the Academies of Platos, ignoring or forgetting the subsequent glory of the Hellenic nation’ (quoted in Svolopoulos, 2006, p. 17). In many ways the gravity of what was seen as a glorious classical past was such that it obliterated all other memory and experience.1 Through the colonisation of memory and the past, the people who eventually made up modern Greece defined themselves in an ambiguous way by both confirming their overdetermination by a dominant and ‘undisputed’, often alien, past, as well as resisting to embracing it fully: it is characteristic that modern Greeks today call themselves νεοέλληνες (Neoellines, Neohellenes) implicitly distinguishing themselves from their putative ancestors who are routinely called οɩ αρχαíοɩ, or οɩ αρχαíοɩ Έλληνες (archaioi or archaioi Ellines, the ‘ancients’, used as a noun, or the ancient Greeks). Although the use of the noun-like term οɩ αρχαíοɩ may be taken to connote a mere distinction between modern and ancient, it often denotes distance, a rift or a binary quasi-antagonistic division. Nevertheless, in this context of the prevalence of an overarching classicist obsession, modern Greek society was to invest vast amounts of energy and effort to establish beyond doubt its inextricable links with a past ‘only temporarily forgotten’. As we will see in the next few pages, historiography, folklore, literature, the educational system and a host of other scientific institutions developed in the service of this objective, the making of modern Greece in the image of its ancient counterpart.

A necessary compromise: rehabilitating Byzantium The classicist hegemony over the Greek past was facing a threat primarily from the inconsistencies in the narrative it had produced: whereas the

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influence and gravity of the classical past remained undisputed, other elements of the past were much more problematic for those engaged in the process of weaving a national narrative. In such attempts, the linear past of the nation was invariably disrupted, as Korais and his disciples could not account for the severing of modern Greece’s link to classical antiquity that the establishment of a Christian (not Hellenic) Byzantine empire, the ‘dark’ centuries of the Middle ages and the often ‘unnational’ conduct of the Church,2 the clergy and other elites which dominated the Rum millet of the Ottoman Empire entailed. And, despite the romantic faith of Greek nationalists and the European philhellenes alike in the potential of the peasants and shepherds of the Ottoman Empire identified as the heirs of Pericles, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle to undergo an eye-opening cultural regeneration experience, the situation on the ground remained disappointing for Korais and his like-minded nation-builders. Enthusiasm for the chosen privileged classical past was not forthcoming and probably not one of the priorities of a population that either had no sense of relationship to those who had produced in these lands a civilisation almost two millennia ago or whose most tangible and material remnant were the ruins scattered throughout the Ottoman territories and, often unbeknown to its users, a host of vernaculars preserving elements of ancient Greek. On the other hand, although the Hellenic, classical past was resurrected and in many ways imposed on the population, there remained an important gap in the project as its proponents could not establish a clear thread that would convincingly assert the continuous presence of the Greeks and their Hellenic culture in the Balkans and Asia Minor from classical antiquity to the present. The contentious lapse in the historical narrative had to do with approximately 15 (!) centuries that made up the period of Byzantine and Ottoman rule. Indeed, several European commentators of the period, and most notably, the Austrian scholar Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer who was vilified in modern Greek historiography for his contribution to the debate (1827, 1830, 1836, 1860), threatened the Neohellenic Enlightenment continuity and provenance thesis by arguing that modern Greeks had nothing to do with the ancient inhabitants of the peninsula and Asia Minor, and indeed a lot to do with the Slavic and Albanian tribes that populated the region during the period of Byzantine decline. To this ideological problem was also added a more practical one. The Christian Orthodox Church, despite its ambivalence with reference to the Greek national(ist) project, still had influence on local societies and Orthodoxy had permeated the realm of everyday life. In addition to this, its undisputable links with Byzantium made it extremely difficult for the early Greek nationalists, first to ignore the reality on the ground and second, to circumvent over a millennium throughout which the Orthodox Church and Orthodoxy had a real and effective presence. For many of the nation-builders that followed Korais, this dilemma was starkly posed as the

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practicalities of their project made necessary an accommodation with a past that had been denounced and derided. The combined threat to the very basis of the project of revival of classical Hellas that the Fallmerayer thesis represented and the practical problems that the supression of the Byzantine and Ottoman past entailed were swiftly met by a reformulation of the official history of Greece, a reformulation that has until the time of writing been the orthodoxy in Greek historiography. This reformulation project was spearheaded by Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, deemed by many the major modern Greek historian, and often recognised as the founder of Greek national historiography. Paparrigopoulos’s first publication ∏ερí της Εποɩκíσεως Σλαβɩκών Φύλων τɩνων εɩς την ∏ελοπόννησον (About the Emigration of Slav Tribes in Peloponnese, 1842) confronting the claims advanced by Fallmerayer that modern Greeks were of Slavic and Albanian descent, gave a foretaste of his overall position vis-à-vis the historical continuity of Hellenism. His magnum opus appeared 17 years later, in 1860, when the first volume of his Іστορíα του Ελληνɩκού Έθνους (History of the Hellenic Nation), comprising six volumes completed in 1877, was published. Paparrigopoulos adopted the periodisation of Greek history introduced by the historian and folklorist Spyridon Zambelios, which distinguished three significant periods in the history of Hellenism: ancient, medieval and modern Hellenism, and integrated Byzantium in Greek historiography by proposing a Hellenic-Christian synthesis formula. Having engaged in research on the Byzantine Empire, Paparrigopoulos argued that the latter constituted a distinct phase in the development of Hellenism as a result of the creative encounter Hellenism had with Christianity. According to Paparrigopoulos, although since 1830 several histories of Greece, ancient and modern, were published in the West, they had an ‘incomplete and amputated’ understanding of the unity of Hellenism (1878, p. 832). For him, the presence of Hellenism in the shores of the Aegean and beyond has been uninterrupted. Although classical antiquity was still considered to be an important moment in the life of Hellenism, it nevertheless constituted one of many significant moments to which Byzantium was added. Through this reformulation, the previously derided anomaly of the Byzantine Empire was rehabilitated as part of a seamless continuous presence of Hellenic culture and people in the region. Paparrigopoulos’s Greek nation straddles these pasts, which were previously seen as alternative and mutually exclusive, fairly unproblematically, and what becomes the unifying force, the point de capiton of the national narrative, what is supposed to obscure the litany of instances of rupture, discontinuity, and disruption of the past five millennia is the transcendental character of the Greek nation, resting primarily on the belief in the latter’s civilising mission. The intellectual movement that Paparrigopoulos inspired sees the nation as a mystical and a-temporal entity surviving through various transformations, bypassing the actual people who make the national

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community and questioning their sovereignty. The past and future mission of an ideal Hellenic-Christian civilisation becomes sovereign and displaces any vestiges of a civic Greek identity. It is this definition of the nation that will inspire adventures such as the Megali Idea which eventually led, in 1922, to the Greek invasion of Asia Minor. This was also echoed in several political projects throughout the 20th century such as that of the Hellenic-Christian synthesis that a group of army colonels will clumsily use to legitimise their coup d’état in 1967. The rehabilitation of Byzantium and the Hellenization of the Orthodox Church and their often antagonistic relationship with Western Christendom would also give the intellectual support necessary for the development of significant social movements in modern Greek life such as the Neoorthodox movement that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. Although Paparrigopoulos’s project represented a fairly radical reorientation of the relationship of modern Greece to its past, it should be pointed out that the exponents of the Neohellenic Enlightenment were not oblivious to the practical implications and benefits of such overtures to aspects of the past and heritage that their own project sought to repress in the first instance. Thus a set of intellectual debates and empirical research was initiated after the establishment of the new state under the rubric of Λαογραφíα (laografia, folklore, from the Greek λαός-laos, people, and γράφω-grafo, write/ compose) and made a distinctive and important contribution to the making of modern Greece. This body of research and debate, represented by its practitioners as rooted in the study of the concrete cultural experience of the Greek people (λαός) was, at first sight, markedly distinct from the realm of abstract grand ideals that the movement of Neohellenic Enlightenment was advancing. Armed with the legitimacy of their claimed proximity to the living culture of modern Greeks (in contrast to the remoteness – cultural and physical – of the diasporic intellectuals who first articulated the notion of Greek nationhood), the first Greek folklorists set out to study and codify folk culture. But behind this perception of the folklorist’s gaze as matter-of-fact and down to earth lay a substantially different reality. Folklore in Greece developed in the context of the very same concerns and debates that Neohellenic Enlightenment gave rise to. Λαογραφíα in Greece, far from being an impartial and unemotional intellectual pursuit, was framed by what Herzfeld calls ‘the ideological needs of [the Modern Greek] emergent polity’ (1986, p. 9). The discipline’s founders, Nikolaos Politis and Spyridon Zambelios as well as their successor in the interwar period, Stilpon Kyriakidis, despite different nuances in their overall outlooks, tried to translate the extremely diverse and localised practices and memory, often ‘corrupted’ by foreign influences of many kinds, into a national heritage, giving the discipline the role of a nation-building institution par excellence. What is more, folklorists almost invariably saw folk culture as a set of living practices/yet fossilised remains whose origin or provenance has to be located in classical antiquity, thus

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internalising the classicist argument, and whose existence constituted proof of an eternal immutable Greekness in a way reminiscent of the project of Paparrigopoulos (Damianakos, 1987, p. 28; Herzfeld, 1986, pp. 53–75). To some extent, Greek folklore both shares Korais’s dismay with regards to vernacular culture or even its dismissal, yet it sees in it a veritable national resource: it ‘colonises’ it and expropriates it in ways that Korais and his fellow nationalist intellectuals had not even imagined. The Greek rendering of folklore, λαογραφíα, and not εθνογραφíα (ethnografia), ethnography, is not accidental but denotes precisely this ambiguity which marks folklorists’ attitude towards the creators/performers of folk culture, the people. As Herzfeld argues, this choice of terminology sees the people (λαός) as a living part of the transcendental ethnos, proving through its practices the eternal character of an absolute moral entity (1986, pp. 11–13). Folklore has developed into a powerful institution, both in its own right, and as a formative influence in school curricula (Frangoudaki, 1978; Beaton, 1980, p. 190). As a discipline in its own right, it has had an undisputed place in the realm of scientific discourse as the Academy of Athens sanctioned the discipline through the establishment of its own Folklore Archive (founded in 1918 by Nicolaos Politis, with Stilpon Kyriakidis as its first Director). As Sofos and Tsagarousianou (1992) have pointed out, folklore has also been popularised as a host of local organisations, amateur folklorists and politicians alike have produced a vast corpus of folklore ‘studies’, a new genre of popular literature that is underpinned by the national role of the discipline. Another means of popularisation of folklore has been the national and local media which have been further propagating the discourse of folklorists, professional and self-appointed alike, by constructing, sustaining and reproducing annual calendars dotted with events and rituals through their coverage of local and national activities. In this context, the origins of contemporary practices are routinely attributed to pre-Christian Hellenic traditions and customs drawing upon the work of popular culture experts. By the end of the 19th century, the disciplines of history and folklore had acquired a veritable nation-building mission. Their findings, propagated through school curricula and the development of the modern Greek historical novel, permeated public discourse and popular memory. The synthesis achieved was not unproblematic as the weight of classical antiquity but also of the heyday of Byzantium was dwarfing modern Greek society and overdetermining the present. Whatever reminded of the Ottoman presence or threatened in any way the continuity of Hellenism was banished to the realm of oblivion, as folklore, history, literature and other fields of cultural activity were promoting a state of social amnesia and selective remembering. As a result, the agendas of the political and intellectual elites of the modern Greek state were to be informed by this selective relationship to the ‘Greek’ past. This historical selectivity was projected in the present through the establishment of a rigid distinction between a high (classicist and modern) and a

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low (traditional-Romaic) culture. It did so by largely discrediting the ‘oriental’, or the ‘Romaic’ aspects of the culture of the majority of modern Greeks (Herzfeld, 1986, p. 40; Leigh-Fermor, 1983), which, viewed as remnants of the Ottoman, and, in some cases, of the Byzantine past, were thought to be opposed to the ideals, and therefore to deny the very ‘essence’, of Greek identity. However, this distinction was not simply an academic or ideological one; it provided the ground upon which ‘purist’ interventions in cultural life would be based, the ‘purification’ of modern Greek language being the most pervasive, durable and contested intervention of the kind (Skopetea, 1988, pp. 99–118; Moschonas, 1981: ζ΄- πβ΄ ).3

Between orientalism and occidentalism: in search of a glorious Turkish past Just as the Greeks before them, the Turks themselves were not aware of their distant past until relatively recently. Traditional Ottoman histories paid scant attention to the history of the Turks before the establishment of their dynasty in Anatolia and generally ignored their pre-Islamic past (Kushner, 1977, p. 27). It was only in the closing decades of the 19th century that the ‘Turks’ began to cast a curious gaze into the ‘past’, encouraged by the publication of several historical accounts focusing on ancient Turkish history. Ahmet Vefik Paşa was one of the first intellectuals to establish a link between the Ottomans and the broader Turkic world by arguing that the former were only one of the many tribes of the great Turkish nation, and that their mothertongue was a dialect of a language spoken over wide areas outside the boundaries of Turkey. In his book Tarih-i Alem (World History), his contemporary Süleyman Paşa contributed to this endeavour by focusing on the pre-Islamic history of the Turks. In a private correspondence, Süleyman Paşa laid down explicitly that ‘Ottoman’ was only the name of a country, and that the language and literature of the ‘Turks’ should be duly called Turkish (Heyd, 1950, pp. 105–6; see also Gökalp, 1968, pp. 3–5). In all these accounts, the Turks were presented as an old race which had established many states under different names, with an innate ability to civilise others. This was also the approach espoused by the apostles of Turkism, notably Ziya Gökalp. ‘Other peoples’, wrote Gökalp, ‘are compelled, in order to adopt modern civilization, to depart from their past. But the Turks have only to turn back to their ancient past’ (quoted in Heyd, 1950, p. 112). This paved the way for his famous thesis on the three stages of Ottoman-Turkish history. In the first stage, the Turks were a racial group (kavim) in Central Asia; in the second a religious community (ümmet) in the Ottoman Empire; and in the third a modern nation (millet) within the borders of the new Turkey (Gökalp, 1959, pp. 245, 126–34; Heyd, 1950, pp. 159–60). For Gökalp, what mattered was not ‘objective history’, but what he called ‘national history’, which he regarded as an art rather than a science. The main task of national

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history was pedagogic, that is to strengthen patriotism by describing the glorious past of the nation. It was, however, in the early republican period that these ideas reached their climax and assumed canonical status, at least at the state level, in the form of the Turkish History Thesis. A veritable case of social and political engineering, the thesis portrayed the Turks as the architects of a glorious civilisation in Central Asia, until they were forced by climate change and drought to migrate to various parts of the world, sowing the seeds of the world’s major civilisations. The thesis also asserted that the Turks were the first inhabitants of Anatolia, hence the forefathers of all peoples who have dwelled there throughout history, from the Hittites to the Romans, including the Greeks. But the founders of the republic differed from early Turkists in one important respect: whereas Gökalp and his predecessors saw Ottoman history as part and parcel of Turkish history, they strove to cut off the new republic from its immediate past, which they depicted as a period of decay and selfdenial. Instead, they romanticised the Turks’ pre-Islamic past, presenting it as a quasi-mythical ‘golden age’. The main tool used to inculcate this new historical vision was education.4 The educational crusade began with the opening of Millet Mektepleri (Schools of the Nation) to teach the new alphabet in 1928 and continued with the rewriting of history textbooks. The first outcome of this process was Türk Tarihinin Anahatları (The Outline of Turkish History), prepared by selected members of the recently established Türk Tarihini Tetkik Heyeti (The Society for the Study of Turkish History) in 1929–1930. The book was meant to replace Türkiye Tarihi (History of Turkey), the textbook used in the first six years of the republic, which asserted that the Turks were living in tribes before their conversion to Islam, thereby adopting an Ottomancentred view. By contrast, The Outline of Turkish History devoted only 50 pages to Ottoman history, while 200 pages talked about other Turkish states and civilisations, 100 pages about the Turkish sources of other civilisations (mainly of those based in Anatolia); the rest of the 605 pages was devoted to Chinese, Indian, Iranian and Egyptian civilisations. The Introduction stated that the book was written for a specific purpose: In most history textbooks that are published in our country so far, and in their French originals, the role of the Turks in world history has been downgraded consciously or unconsciously ... The aim of this book is to correct these errors which caused so much harm to our nation which finally achieved its rightful place in the world. (quoted in Ersanlı, 2003, p. 122, our translation) This excerpt interestingly articulates a perception of Ottoman historiography as a vehicle of distortion in tandem with its French (by extension,

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Western European) counterparts. By misrepresenting the history and reality of the ‘Turkish’ people, it has become a source of ‘misrecognition’ for the Turks. The result, in the eyes of the elites, was a disoriented and alienated society, unable to realise its full potential. The Outline of Turkish History was followed by the four-volumes Tarih (History) which was published in 1932 and contained the most extended version of the history thesis. The first, second and fourth volumes of History are 400-pages each, whereas the third volume dealing with the Ottoman Empire is only 200 pages. This volume occasionally referred to the Ottoman Empire as the ‘sick man of Europe’, and talked about it as a foreign empire which had no relationship to Turkishness. The fourth volume confirmed the existence of the Turks before the Turkish Republic, and talked about a series of successful states, but implied that the Ottoman Empire was, in a way, the weakest link in this long line of succession (Ersanlı, 2003, pp. 132–4).

Weaving an official national history Needless to say, history textbooks were not the only tool the regime used to propagate the new conception of history. The history thesis was introduced on a more formal basis in two History Congresses held in Ankara in 1932 and 1937, respectively. As the congresses were seen as an extension of the educational crusade, school teachers made up the bulk of the participants to the first congress, with 198 high school and intermediate school teachers and 18 university professors attending the congress. In his welcoming speech, the Minister of Education Esat Bey (Sagay) asserted that a nation can only learn about its past or its homeland, language, literature and arts by studying history. Yet the history textbooks the Turks had used up to that point, mostly translations, refrained from acknowledging the historical existence of the Turkish nation and its contribution to world civilisation (Birinci Türk Tarih Kongresi, 1932, pp. 5–14; see also Ersanlı, 2003, pp. 139–88). İhsan Şerif, one of the delegates, similarly lamented: It is now forty-five years that I teach history. Every year, I went through a period of embarrassment and moral suffering, which was when I had to teach the Turkish portion of history. My words took on a morose and melancholy tone, because I knew very little about what happened in the heights of Central Asia, which, for thousands of years, has been our ancestors’ motherland. (Birinci Türk Tarih Kongresi, 1932, p. 14)5 Following the First History Congress, The Society for the Study of Turkish History, which was responsible for the writing of history textbooks and promulgating the history thesis, was replaced with Türk Tarih Kurumu (Turkish Historical Society) in 1935. It was this society which organised and presided over the Second Historical Congress in 1937. This time the emphasis was on

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archaeology, and the participants were overwhelmingly university professors and researchers, half of whom were from European countries. Sixty papers were presented, most focusing on the archaeological excavations of the mid-1930s which aimed at establishing ‘scientific’ evidence for the Turkish origins of Anatolian civilisations, hence proving the claim that ‘the Turks were there first’ (see İkinci Türk Tarih Kongresi, 1943). The new nationalist vision and its incarnation, the history thesis, was a broadbrush strategy to instil pride in Turkishness, to denounce the competing claims of the Greeks and the Armenians over Anatolia, now redefined as the perennial ‘Turkish’ homeland, and to legitimise the secularising modernist thrust of the new regime by banishing the Ottoman-Islamic past to oblivion. More specifically, the thesis fought racial prejudice through ‘scientifically’ establishing that the Turks belonged to the Indo-European family of nations, and not to the Mongoloid yellow race (Çağaptay, 2006). The thesis maintained that the Turks had already become, in their motherland, civilised enough to know the use of wood and metal, while the rest of the humanity was living in caves, leading a most primitive life. In fact, it was the Turks who created the civilisations of China, India, Mesopotamia, North Africa and Europe when they were forced to emigrate from Central Asia, introducing key elements of a ‘civilising process’ such as agriculture, the domestication of animals, and so on. Clearly, one of the aims of such a formulation was the (re)positioning of the Turkish nation within the group of ‘civilised’, modern nations of the West. This represented a double coup, in the sense that it challenged the dominant European orientalist view that the Turks were inferior or uncivilised, while it simultaneously posited Western modernity as a coveted prize. In many ways, by unsettling a Eurocentric perspective on the world, the Turkish History Thesis was an attempt to ‘colonise’ the self-image of the Turks. The thesis also repudiated the ‘false’ conception of Turkish history, which purportedly reduced a long and distinguished national presence to the few centuries of Ottoman imperial history. Thus the thesis claimed that Turkish history did not begin with Osman’s tribe, but 12,000 years before Jesus Christ (see Afet İnan’s paper in Birinci Türk Tarih Kongresi, 1932). The exploits of the Ottomans constitute only one episode in the history of the Turkish nation which had established several other empires throughout history. Finally, the thesis sought to demonstrate the racial and historical continuity of the Turks in Anatolia, from the Bronze Age to the Seljuks. This it did by pointing to new archaeological findings, which supposedly proved that the Turks founded the Hittite civilisation in Anatolia some 4,000 years before the Christian era. The civilisation of Anatolia was thus as ancient as those of Egypt and Mesopotamia. In this framework, the thesis also argued that the Turkish peoples who travelled westwards created the Aegean civilisation, which developed in time cultural centres like Troy, Crete, Lydia, Ionia and so on, thereby refuting the thesis of the ‘Greek miracle’ (Copeaux, 2001, pp. 115, 118; Çağaptay, 2006, p. 53).

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The Turkish Historical Thesis needs to be understood in the context of the broader Kemalist project which entailed a complete break with the immediate, Ottoman-Islamic, past. The twin targets of the regime’s execrations were the dynasty and the caliphate. Hence the various textbooks produced in this period blamed the autocratic regime of Abdulhamid for every disaster that hit the Turkish nation between 1877 and 1922. Decadence, corruption, self-denial were some of the terms the books used to describe this period. On the other hand, the institution of caliphacy was characterised as a tool in the hands of the sultans, which they used liberally to block change or to prevent any reform that might have helped the nation to catch up with the West. This also explained why the Turks lagged at least 300 years behind the Europeans. But one nagging question remained: how to fill in the vacuum created by the demise of institutionalised Islam and the dynasty which had pervaded the fabric of everyday life for more than six centuries? In other words, how could the new regime acquire the legitimacy it so badly needed? One of the answers the regime came up with was history. It thus turned the clock back and focused on the Turks’ pre-Ottoman, pre-Islamic past, projecting onto it the principles it was trying to inculcate in the present. Its closest allies in this campaign were ‘missionary historians’ who were inextricably involved with the process of ‘nation-building’. In fact, most of the members of The Society for the Study of Turkish History were actively involved in politics. The Turkish Historical Thesis quickly became the backbone of Kemalist nationalism in the early republican era, the kernel around which narrations of Turkishness were to be constructed. It formed the core of what, following Sofos and Tsagarousianou (1992), we would call ‘scientific nationalism’, that is, ostensibly scientific or quasi-scientific discourses which are used to legitimise the particular construction of Turkishness favoured by the Kemalist elites. It is therefore not surprising that the thesis constituted the guiding principle of civic education for many years to come.

Historical closure and nation-building Our attempt at a critical reading of the nationalist histories and the ways in which the past has been constructed/mobilised through them demonstrates that nationalist genealogies are highly complex constructs which, despite their claim to offer linearity and continuity, are marred by ambiguity, discontinuity and disruption. Therefore in each particular case, we need to get past the façade, the semblance of narrative closure, identify the alternative pasts that are available at any given moment and determine ‘which’ past is chosen by the nationalist elites. In the case of both Greece and Turkey, nation-builders had several options at their disposal. And when the available alternatives were deemed incapable of providing answers to the dilemmas they faced, they were prepared and capable to invent new ones. In many ways this was the course of action

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chosen by Turkish nationalist elites who became convinced that the institution of the new nation necessitated a radical rupture with aspects of the given past. This was not the case in Greece, as both domestic and Western elites had recourse to an ‘established’ and ‘documented’ past, albeit not one which was readily recognised and accepted by the majority of the population who was invited to own it. In a nutshell, whereas in Greece, the relationship to the chosen past was dubious and problematic, in Turkey, what was problematic was the past itself, which was largely an invention of consecutive generations of intellectuals and nation-builders. This problematic relationship to the past, or even the nature of the past itself, compels us to consider the circumstances and the reasons underlying the selection of a particular past; to address the question of ‘why’ this past and not others, to probe into the interests that are secured in and through that selection. Clearly, any attempt to give an answer to such questions can only be partial and will not do justice to the complexity of the processes involved. Several factors, conscious and subconscious, political, cultural, economic, social and historical are involved here, as are various unforeseeable contingencies. What seems to have been a central concern in both Greek and Turkish nationalisms’ engagement with the past was a two-pronged quest for legitimation. On the one hand, the particular past the nationalist elites opted for was deployed to legitimise the decisions they took regarding the eventual shape their nations were to assume. On the other hand, and equally importantly, the past was invoked to justify the inclusion of the Greek and Turkish nations into Western modernity. As both Greece and Turkey emerged out of what Western orientalist narratives represented as a backward Ottoman Empire, their nation-building elites agonised over both the self-image of their nations and the way these were to be perceived by significant others, notably the advanced and ‘civilised’ West. The final question that needs to be addressed in some detail relates to the ways in which the choices of the nationalist elites are implemented and imposed. To this end, both nationalist projects invested considerable resources and energy in establishing meaningful links to a past that often was problematic. Greek and Turkish nationalists had to resort to the organisation of the denial of the past, the promotion of social amnesia (for more examples, see Özkırımlı and Sofos, 2008, chapters 5 and 6), or the forgetting of aspects of recent or more remote experience that were not congruent to the narration of their respective nations. The memory and experience of Byzantium in the case of Greece and of the Ottoman Empire in both cases had the potential of disrupting the coherence of the nationalist imagination and had to be erased or banished to oblivion. In this context, not only a concerted intervention in the process of historiographical construction of the past was carried out, but also a broader engagement with the various loci where memory and experience are deposited and reproduced. Therefore, both nationalisms gave prominence to projects such as the purification of

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language, as they saw in these not merely a linguistic intervention but a more ambitious attempt to expunge the past. Nevertheless, however well-designed and -implemented nationalist social engineering was, it was not able to eliminate entirely the baggage of the undesirable past and the resistance its living memory generates. Nationalism’s encounter with such instances of resistance often required accommodation and compromises. The accommodation of Orthodoxy and Byzantium through the revisionism of Paparrigopoulos, but also through folklore and allied disciplines, and the accomodation of Islam in Turkey were nothing but attempts by the nationalist discourse to circumscribe resistance and to consolidate its hegemony. Such interventions were actually tantamount to processes of ‘colonisation’ as they sought to introduce and impose values and representations that were alien to the people who were ‘chosen’ to participate in the nationalist projects. By altering the most fundamental means of expression, the official as well as everyday languages, and by intervening in some of the key areas of socialisation and social reproduction, nation-builders attempted to colonise the very fabric of the societies they sought to ‘empower’. The preoccupation with history and the propagation of its ‘authentic’ version through schooling as well as through the recourse to scientific nationalism in other areas of social life led to its fetishisation to the point of obsession as the image of Mustafa Kemal dictating sections of the history textbooks of his time amply demonstrates. In all these endeavours, amid the obsession with history and the agonising struggle to impose and reproduce preferred representations of the past, what remained constant and central, the point de capiton of Greek and Turkish nationalist historiography, was the belief in, and representation of the nation as a mystical, a-temporal, even transcendental entity whose survival is more important than the survival of its individual members at a given time.

Notes 1. It should, however, be stressed at this point that, despite his secularism, Korais himself realized that some accommodation of Orthodoxy in a modern Greek nationalist project was necessary, perhaps unavoidable. As Chaconas (1968) points out, referring to Korais’s evolving nationalism at the time of the Greek War of Independence, ‘perplexed by the unnational and selfish conduct of the military chieftains [during the Greek War of Independence ... he appealed] to their altruistic and religious sense’, essentially realising that his ‘fellow Greeks’ were not readily captivated by the classical past that he offered them as a source of inspiration and, as a result, more pragmatic means of incitement such as appeal to honour, morality and religion were needed. 2. Characteristic of this ‘unnational’ stance is a tract published in 1798 and entitled ‘Paternal Exhortation’ that has been attributed to Patriarch Gregory V: To preserve the holy Orthodox faith. ... the Lord had created from nothing the powerful Ottoman state to take the place of the Byzantine Empire which had

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begun to deviate from the true faith. ... The new regime of Liberty is a trick of the Devil, superficially attractive, but in fact contrary to the Holy Scriptures and designed to deprive men of every heavenly and earthly wealth. (quoted in Campbell and Sherrard 1968, pp. 52–3) Ironically, Gregory V did not escape the wrath of the Sultan and was hanged as soon as the Greek War of Independence erupted in 1821. 3. For a more detailed discussion of this linguistic intervention, see Özkırımlı and Sofos (2008, Chapter 2). 4. Not surprisingly, the number of primary schools rose from 4,894 in 1923–24 to 6,599 in 1928–29 and to 6,713 in 1931–32. A similar increase can be observed in the number of students, from 341,941 to 523,611, in the same period (Üstel, 2004, p. 128). 5. This passage is also quoted in Tekin Alp (1970, pp. 218–19). We use here Kedourie’s translation.

References Alp, T. (1970) ‘The Restoration of Turkish History’, in E. Kedourie (ed.) Nationalism in Asia and Africa (London: Frank Cass), 207–24. Beaton, R. (1980) Folk Poetry of Modern Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Birinci Türk Tarih Kongresi: Konferanslar, Müzakere Zabıtları (1932) (İstanbul: T.C. Maarif Vekâleti). Campbell, J. and P. Sherrard (1968) Modern Greece (New York: Frederick Praeger). Chaconas, S. G. (1968) Adamantios Korais: A Study in Greek Nationalism (New York: American Monograph Series). Copeaux, É. (2001) ‘Le Récit Historique Turc, Une Réponse au Miracle Grec. Mishellénismes’, in G. Grivaux (ed.) Les Mishellénismes. Actes du Séminaire Organisé à l’École Française d’Athènes (16–18 mars 1998) (Athens: EFA), 111–20. Çağaptay, S. (2006) Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism in Modern Turkey: Who is a Turk? (London and New York: Routledge). Damianakos, S. (1987) ∏αράδοση Ανταρσíας καɩ Λαɩκός ∏ολɩτɩσμός (Athens: ∏ λέθρον). Ersanlı, B. (2003) İktidar ve Tarih: Türkiye’de ‘Resmi Tarih’ Tezinin Oluşumu (1929–1937) (İstanbul: İletişim). Fallmerayer, J. P. (1827) Die Geschichte des Kaisertums von Trapezunt (Munich: Weber). Fallmerayer, J. P. (1830) Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea während des Mittelalters. Teil 1: Untergang der peloponnesischen Hellenen und Wiederbevölkerung des leeren Bodens durch slavische Volksstämme (Stuttgart and Tübingen: J. G. Cotta). Fallmerayer, J. P. (1836) Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea während des Mittelalters. Teil 2: Morea, durch innere Kriege zwischen Franken und Byzantinern verwüstet und von albanischen Colonisten überschwemmt, wird endlich von den Türken erobert. Von 1250–1500 nach Christus (Munich: Weber). Fallmerayer, J. P. (1860) ‘Das albanesische Element in Griechenland’, Abhandlungen der Historischen Klasse der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 8, 3, 657–736 and 9, 1, 3–110. Frangoudaki, A. (1978) Τα Αναγνωστɩκά Βɩβλíα του ∆ημοτɩκού – Іδεολογɩκός ∏εɩθαναγκασμός καɩ ∏αɩδαγωγɩκή Βíα (Athens: Θεμέλɩο). Gökalp, Z. (1959) Turkish Nationalism and Western Civilization, Selected Essays, translated and edited by N. Berkes (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd).

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Gökalp, Z. (1968) The Principles of Turkism, translated by R. Devereux (Leiden: E.J. Brill). Herzfeld, M. (1986) Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece (New York: Pella). Heyd, U. (1950) Foundations of Turkish Nationalism: The Life and Teachings of Ziya Gökalp (London: Luzac & Company Ltd and The Harvill Press). İkinci Türk Tarih Kongresi, İstanbul 20–25 Eylül 1937, Kongrenin Çalışmaları, Kongreye Sunulan Tebliğler (1943) (İstanbul: Kenan Matbaası). Karamanolakis, V. (2004) Η Συγκρότηση της Іστορɩκής Επɩστήμης στην Ελλάδα. Η ∆ɩδασκαλíα της Іστορíας στη Φɩλοσοφɩκή Σχολή του ∏ανεπɩστημíου Αθηνών 1837– 1932, PhD thesis (Athens: University of Athens). Korais, A. (1833) Συλλογή των εɩς την Ελληνɩκήν Βɩβλɩοθήκην, καɩ τα Πάρεργα Προλεγομένων, καɩ τɩνων Συγγραμάτων του Αδαμαντíου Κοραή (Paris). Kushner, D. (1977) The Rise of Turkish Nationalism, 1876–1908 (London: Frank Cass). Leigh-Fermor, P. (1983) Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece (London: Penguin). Leontis, A. (1995) Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press). Moschonas, E. I., (1981) Η δημοτɩκɩστɩκή αντíθεση στην κοραϊκή μέση οδό (Athens: Οδυσσέας). Özkırımlı, U. and S. A. Sofos (2008) Tormented by History: Nationalism in Greece and Turkey (London: Hurst & Co). Paparrigopoulos, K. (1842) Περí της Επɩκοíσεως Σλαβɩκών Φύλων τɩνών εɩς την Πελοπόννησον (Athens). Paparrigopoulos, K. (1878) ‘∏ερí των ∏ερɩπετεɩών της Iστορíας του Ελληνɩκού Έθνους εν τοɩς καθ’ημάς χρόνοɩς’, Παρνασσός, Β΄, 825–40. Skopetea, E. (1988) Το Πρότυπο Βασíλεɩο καɩ η Μεγάλη Іδέα (Athens: ∏ολύτυπο). Sofos, S. and R. Tsagarousianou (1992) ‘The Politics of Identity: Nationalism in Contemporary Greece’ in J. Amodia (ed.) The Resurgence of Nationalist Movements in Europe (Bradford University Occasional Papers), 51–66. Svolopoulos, K. (2006) Η Γένεση της Іστορíας του Νέου Ελληνɩσμού (Athens: Βɩβλɩοπωλεíο της Εστíας). Üstel, F. (2004) ‘Makbul Vatandaş’ın Peşinde: II. Meşrutiyet’ten Bugüne Vatandaşlık Eğitimi (İstanbul: İletişim).

4 The Politics of Memorialisation in Zimbabwe Terence Ranger

State produced history in contemporary Africa Africa is now in a new era of state produced nationalist history. Alessandro Triulzi has recently argued that: public history in many parts of Africa has largely overcome academic explorations of the past, while its strongest ally, an ill-defined ‘public memory’, under the guise of state rituals and public memorialisation of past events, has come to dominate the public arena filling the fluid space which exists between memory and history with a disturbing asphalt-like cover of enduring cement. In this wide-ranging and politically-oriented process, the State often acts as a primary agent of history, if not its main promulgator and interpreter. As professional historians are relegated to a secondary role, or at times dismissed as public agitators, a forcefullyshared vision of the nation’s ‘collective memory’ is drafted in government offices by state intellectuals in order to settle accounts with the country’s troubled past ... The ensuing result is the moulding of state-driven policies of memory aimed at rewriting the national script by enhancing unwritten norms of exclusion which set apart citizen from subject, freeborn from bondage-bound, patriots from sell-outs. (Triulzi, 2006, citing Jewsiewicki and Mudimbe, 1993) Triulzi gives many examples of public memorialisation and restoration all giving a ‘symbolic new embodiment of the “nation” they reveal ... History is undoubtedly at the centre of politics today’ (Triulzi, p. 8). He discusses the public history arising out of war and liberation struggles in the Horn and in Southern Africa. ‘The “return” of the state as the main guide of African politics has brought new forms of state memorialism: history, especially public history, has been used as a powerful tool for political mobilization’ (Triulzi, p. 15). Triulzi’s analysis is compelling and, as we shall see, fits some African cases very well indeed. Yet African nation-states vary enormously in their capacity 62

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to produce a public national history. I propose to make a comparison of national history in Kenya, Namibia and Zimbabwe to reveal the limitations as well as the potential of ‘state-driven politics of memory’.

The Kenyan case Kenya desperately needs a national history but does not have one. The brilliant Kenyan writer and journalist, Parselelo Kantai (2006), has described the dilemma of ‘the nation’ in Kenya. ‘Independent Kenya was founded on a pact of forgetting the past – the spirit of Harambee. To achieve this, histories both collective and personal had to be swept under the national carpet ... The drama of forging a nation was a single narrative in the continuous present tense – the narrative of Development. Any invocation of the past brought instant punishment.’ When development faltered, an official narrative was developed which saw ‘Kenya as born of a heroic armed struggle against colonialism’. But as Kantai observes, this ‘automatically excludes most Kenyans’ and ignored the reality that ‘the Mau Mau were losers in both war and peace,’ firmly excluded from Jomo Kenyatta’s government at independence which rewarded instead their ‘loyalist’ enemies. As a result when the NARC coalition replaced Moi’s authoritarian rule and tried to memorialise this heroic past, history returned the second time as farce. The public were treated to a series of historical faux pas. One of NARC’s first orders of business was the search for Dedan Kimathi’s grave – in order to exhume the Mau Mau leader’s remains and give him a hero’s burial ... In the event, a highly political event graced by Cabinet ministers, nobody could remember where he was buried. His bones have never been recovered. Then a man was brought from Ethiopia and presented to the public as the disappeared Mau Mau hero, General Stanley Mathenge. This act itself, taking a survivor out of the national closet – with all his pent-up secrets, his 50 years of anonymity – seemed to confirm that NARC’s victory over 40 years of KANU rule was the key to opening up the past. It was not to be. After a few nervous days in which he was presented to the public ... ‘General Mathenge’ couldn’t take it any more. He revealed that he was actually Lemma Ayanu, an Ethiopian peasant farmer ... He was dispatched to the national laboratory and DNA tested, then sent swiftly back to Ethopia’. (Kantai, 2006) State memorialisation does not always work. The Kenyan state has lost control of the past. Kantai writes that ‘the nationalist moment has passed: the fervour with which the past could be used to flay the skins of the saboteurs of nationalism no longer exists. The past has lain under the carpet for so long, it seems to have rotted away and died. In its place is a growing sub-nationalist culture’.

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He writes with sympathy of ‘the father of Kenyan history and Africa’s most celebrated historian’, Bethwel Ogot, (Ndeda, 2003) who ‘has spent his career writing Kenya into being’, but who rose at a book-launch in 2006 ‘and declared the Kenyan project dead’. (Kantai, 2006; Ogot, 1972, 1996, 2003). But here was not a case of a professional historian marginalised and silenced by state intellectuals. Rather Professor Ogot is tempted to become silent – ‘Why should I write history when nobody pays any attention to it?’, he asked after the post-electoral violence in Kenya – because of the failure of the Kenyan state to embody the nation of which Ogot had once dreamed.

The Namibian case Namibia seems to fit Triulzi’s model rather better. Discussing the Namibian state history and the establishment of a Namibian Heroes’ Acre in 2002, Reinhart Kossler writes that: ‘The image of the liberation struggle conveyed and publicized in Heroes’ Acre as well as by other media, centres on the military aspect and the war waged mainly from exile ... Thus, a whole array of unarmed, as it were civil, dimensions of the liberation struggle, such as the workers’ and trades union movement, student activism, the role of churches, and activities of traditional communities and their leaders, is obscured by this vision ... The hegemonic image of the liberation struggle as a war ... tends to shroud the broad character of anti-colonial struggle’ (Kossler, 2007, p. 372; Melber, 2003). Yet, as Kossler emphasises, Namibia has a ‘rich and varied, but also very diverse, historical experience and heritage on which public memory building can draw’. The state hegemonic narrative of liberation war privileges the experience of northern Namibia, where the guerrilla war was fought, over the rest of the country. But the central point of reference for ‘most people in the central and southern parts of the country ... most people identified as Herero, Nama or German (speakers), as well as Damara and San’ was the German colonial genocide of 1904 rather than the guerrilla war against South Africa. The result has been a communal memorialisation of resistance and oppression quite separate from the national one. ‘For various regions and various groups there are different central events and time periods that are still remembered and also formally memorialized.’ (Kossler, 2007, p. 368). Describing the still dominant monuments of the German colonial period in the centre of the Namibian capital, Kossler notes that ‘remarkably, it is on a non-state, broadly civil society level’ that they are ‘counter-balanced by projecting alternative memory contents on to the public realm’. Traditional communities commemorate the deaths or burials of revered chiefs and by so doing ‘highlight both the particular community’s historic contribution and their present claims and pursuits, thus blending communal with national historical accounts and asserting a rightful place for the community within national history’. The date of burial of the Herero Chief Samuel Maharero,

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whose body was returned to Namibia in 1923 after his death in exile from the German genocide, has become institutionalised as Herero Day; the date when Kaptain Hendrik Witbooi was killed in action in 1905 against the Germans has been commemorated by the Nama for several decades, first as Witbooi Fees and now as Heroes Day. The Swapo Namibian government sought to ignore such ‘ethnic or communal’ commemorations in the interests of national unity (Kossler, 2007, pp. 375–7). When the genocide centenary came in 2004 the Herero Genocide Committee organised an event in January which was attended by the German Ambassador but not by any member of government. By the time of the central commemoration on 14 August, which was attended by the German Minister of Economic Co-operation who made an emotional apology and promised reparations, the central government was obliged ‘by the weight of this gathering’ to send a senior representative. Kossler writes of the challenges posed to a single hegemonic state national history ‘by Namibia’s fragmented past’ (Kossler, 2007, 377–81). Meanwhile academic historians have been transforming the historiography of Namibia (Gewald, 1999; Hayes, 1998; Katjavivi, 1998; Melber, 2003; Shigwedha and Nampala, 2006. The closest thing to a state intellectual in Namibia is Ellen Namhila, 1998 and 2005, but her writing expresses disillusionment with the hegemonic national narrative).

The Zimbabwean case By contrast Zimbabwe today fits Triulzi’s model very well indeed. A version of the nation’s history is critical to the ‘legitimacy’ of Robert Mugabe’s regime; state intellectuals have been busy producing and propagating it; in a nation very much less ethnically diverse than Kenya or Namibia there have been few communal or local commemorations to challenge the hegemony of state memorialisation. Zimbabwean historians and public intellectuals have great difficulty in making any effective challenge to the state’s narrative. Yet this is a relatively recent development in Zimbabwean national historiography. Indeed Zimbabwe offers an ideal case study for successive stages of nationalist historiography. I have myself made a distinction for Zimbabwean historiography between ‘nationalist’ history, the history of the nation, and ‘patriotic’ history. (Ranger, 2004; for a highly sceptical view of this triple distinction as merely ‘making terminological distinctions without a real difference as the basic assumptions remain the same’, see Roberts, 2006). I shall discuss each of these in turn and indulge myself with some reference to my own development as a historian of Zimbabwe.

‘Nationalist’ historiography When it began in the 1960s Zimbabwean ‘nationalist’ history involved tracing the roots of African nationalism, its connections with ‘mass consciousness’

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and with insurrections – the uprising of 1896–97, now called in Zimbabwe ‘the First Chimurenga’, and the guerrilla war of the 1960s and 1970s, now called ‘the Second Chimurenga’. It did not claim that these were the only important historical questions but that they were important questions which had been obscured or denied by main-stream Rhodesian historiography. I began my own Africanist career as a ‘nationalist’ historian par excellence; I was a member of the African nationalist parties between 1960 and 1963; I was embarking upon a history of nationalism in Southern Rhodesia; I was reacting against the Rhodesian denial that there was any significant African history. When I re-read my correspondence, now deposited in Rhodes House, I am struck by the close relationship between my first articles on Rhodesian/ Zimbabwean history and the African nationalist leadership. I sent all my articles to the nationalist detainees and restrictees and they responded with enthusiasm. I find among my papers a letter from Ndabaningi Sithole, then leader of the Zimbabwe African National Union, and a fellow scholar. Sithole’s own study of rural nationalism had been written in and smuggled out of Salisbury prison (Sithole, 1970). In 1970 he wrote to me from jail to say that he had managed to read my first book, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896–7 (Ranger, 1967). He thought it was a book which ought to be prescribed reading for every schoolchild in the country. Naturally I was pleased. My second book, The African Voice in Southern Rhodesia (Ranger, 1970) was received with equal enthusiasm. In view of subsequent depictions of nationalist history as truckling to the rulers of post-colonial African states, at least I can claim that I was writing for people in prison rather than for people in power. I don’t repent of my early ‘nationalist’ history. It was work that had to be done, and which was, of course, being done by others, particularly by the first African academic historians (Samkange, 1967; Bhebe, 1979). But it certainly led to distorting over-simplification. In its early stages this search for roots and connections led to the co-option of any sort of resistant practice as ‘proto-nationalism’ – African-initiated churches, for example, both Pentecostal and millenarian, which can now clearly be seen as anti-state rather than as anti-colonial (Ranger, 1986b); urban riots, which can now be seen as struggles over urban culture or as class struggles rather than as nationalist protest (Ranger, 2006); strikes, which fit more easily into a narrative of workers’ struggle than into a narrative of revolutionary nationalism (Phimister and Raftopoulos, 2000). As for nationalism itself it can now be seen as multiple rather than single; different in the towns than in the countryside and different from region to region. It is almost a matter of ‘nationalisms’ rather than of ‘nationalism’ (Alexander et al., 2000; Scarnecchia, 2008b). One of the dangers of ‘nationalist’ history was that it might be read to amount to the total significant history of Zimbabwe. After 1980, when some of the people who had been in prison became the people in power, and I was able myself to return to Zimbabwe and re-commence research, I thought

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that exactly this was happening in the new school texts. In 1982 I wrote a review of this too triumphant ‘nationalist’ history: It is possible, I think, to define four ways in which the new historical consciousness is deficient. In the first place it makes too restricted an appeal to the African past ... A second danger is of a coarsening of interpretation in the process of repetition. Instead of the original ‘nationalist’ historiography of the 1960s being modified and corrected by means of radical insights or by the application of a penetrating class analysis, it sometimes seems that the initial nationalist propositions are being extended and over-stated ... A third deficiency of the new historiographical consciousness is that it almost entirely ignores the details of white political, economic and social history ... The fourth deficiency is that very little of this history deals directly with the experience of the people ... The demand for ‘pride in culture and civilisation’ makes it all too easy for another type of elite history to flourish. (Ranger, 1983)

The history of the nation The answer, I thought, was to move to a total history of the nation. The history of the nation, which I and many others then went on to practice, involves seeking to set African nationalism in its overall context, including African accommodation with colonial hegemony, rural society and peasant consciousness, urban society and trade unionism, the experience of women and children, settler culture, etc. It seeks to be an inclusive record of multiple pasts. One such past was the peasant experience. By 1980 I had myself begun to move from defining rural resistance as essentially anti-colonial to seeing it essentially as agrarian protest, which could happen as readily in a postcolonial situation as in a colonial one. I set out this shift in focus in two essays. One was published in 1976 and argued that ‘nationalist’ historiography had been ‘catering for interests that were too easily satisfied and too little demanding ... Many young Africans see African historiography as having contributed exclusively to cultural nationalism ... but the poor and hungry cannot eat past cultural achievements’. I called for a new emphasis on the problems of poverty and on the history of peasantries (Ranger, 1976, pp. 22 and 25). The other was given to a comparative conference on black resistance in 1983 under the title ‘From Nationalist Revolt to Agrarian Protest’ (Ranger, 1986a). These proclamations found expression in my Peasant Consciousness and Guerrilla War (Ranger, 1985). As I explained to a lecture audience in 1988, I was aiming ‘to write a people’s history, in which peasants rather than chiefs would be the protagonists, in which change rather than tradition

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would be the theme’ and in which nationalist fervour would give way to ‘peasant consciousness’ (Ranger, 1988). But it is difficult to shake off a reputation once earned. This book too has been seen, I think mistakenly, as part of ‘nationalist’ historiography even though I said nothing, in fact, about the significant history of formal African nationalism in the Makoni district on which I focused. But I did too un-problematically assume that Makoni peasants supported Zanla guerrillas, even while arguing that they bound guerrillas to their own agendas (Kriger, 1992). Since then there has been an outpouring of rural studies by historians, anthropologists and political scientists. An equal amount of energy has gone into studies of industrial workers and of urban life, most of it seeking to rebut the co-opting claims of nationalism. Morgan Tsvangarai, then General Secretary of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade unions, introduced a history of the labour movement in Zimbabwe by claiming that for ‘an oppressed class, the recovery of its history is a source of strength for its ongoing struggles. In Zimbabwe’, he went on, the history of the labour movement has usually been subordinated to the struggles of the nationalist elite ... the complex relationship of the movement to the growth of national parties and nationalist ideology has frequently been simplified to suit the triumphalist views of nationalist history. We hope that this study provides a more comprehensive view ... The history of a nation-in-the-making should not be reduced to a selective heroic tradition, but should be a tolerant and continuing process of questioning and re-examination’. (Raftopoulos and Phimister, 1997, see also Raftopoulos and Sachikonye, 2001) Urban social and political history has been explored in the same spirit (Raftopoulos and Yoshikuni, 1999; Barnes and Win, 1992; Barnes, 1999; Yoshikuni, 2007; Ranger, forthcoming). The African middle classes and their ambiguous relationship to nationalism have been studied (West, 2002; Ranger, 1995). The historical experience of African women has been discussed (Schmidt, 1992; Jeater, 1993) and their exploitation by patriarchal nationalism described (Nhongo-Simbanegavi, 2000). Tsvangarai’s formula – ‘the history of a nation-in the making’ – is a good elaboration of what I have called ‘the history of the nation’. And it is in that spirit which I myself have written my books on Matabeleland (Ranger, 1999; Alexander et al., 2000). White Rhodesian history is still badly in need of revision though Alois Mlambo (2002) has written a book about white immigration and my own latest article deals with the tensions between white cabinet ministers and the white city councillors of Bulawayo (Ranger, 2007). The only overall history of Zimbabwe yet to appear – Ian Phimister’s study of ‘class accumulation and class struggle’ (Phimister, 1988) – balances in

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each chapter the activities of metropolitan capital, of white settler interests, and the history of black peasants and workers. It is very much not a ‘nationalist’ history and the book ends in 1948 before mass nationalist parties had made their appearance but its own Marxist teleological narrative prevents it from being total ‘history of a nation-in-the-making’. Many of these books, however, consider the topic of African nationalism without being in any sense ‘nationalist’. They are bound to do so given nationalism’s centrality in Zimbabwe’s recent history. We still badly need to know more about its social composition, its organisation and its ideas. My own latest edited collection on Zimbabwe (Ranger, 2003) deals with the question of how and why the authoritarian tendencies in nationalism have overwhelmed its original libertarian and democratic aspirations.

‘Patriotic’ history While all this ‘history of the nation’ work was going on, of course, examples of ‘nationalist’ history were still being produced. And then, quite suddenly, there emerged in the 2000s a new variant – ‘patriotic’ history, the name now given to the version of history offered by Mugabe himself and the regime intellectuals. It is an extreme version of the narrative of ‘nationalist’ history, reducing the total history of Zimbabwe to a sequence of revolutionary resistance – the sequence from the First Chimurenga through the Second to the Third (the acquisition of commercial farm land in the 2000s). It glorifies the spirit mediums who were hanged after the 1896 uprising, especially the medium of the great Nehanda spirit, seeing the subsequent Chimurengas as the working out of her dying prophecy. Rather than being ‘a tolerant and continuous process of questioning and re-examination’ it seeks to be exclusive and to divide Zimbabweans into ‘patriots’ and ‘traitors’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2004). It marginalises urban life and worker activism. It is intensely patriarchal and minimises the significance of women (Campbell, 2003). Robert Mugabe himself is hailed as the keeper of patriotic memory. Mugabe represents ‘that powerful, elemental African memory going back to the first Nehanda and even to the ancient Egyptians and Ethiopians’, wrote Tafataona Mahoso in the Sunday Mail of 16 March 2003. ‘The Zimbabwe opposition ... have exposed themselves as forces opposed to Mugabe as Pan-African memory, Mugabe as the reclaimer of African space, Mugabe as the African power of remembering the African legacy and African heritage which slavery, apartheid and imperialism thought they had dismembered for good.’ Mugabe represents ‘deep ancestral memory’, contrasted to Western ‘mechanical, even computerized recall’. National intellectuals dominate monopoly state television and radio, and write continually in the state-controlled press to elaborate the tenets of ‘patriotic’ history. Youth militia are taught it; compulsory courses in it have been introduced into

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universities, side by side with the old History curricula. Public rituals are performed at Heroes’ Acre and at the Great Zimbabwe ruins. It has become a powerful and almost un-contested ideology (Ranger, 2004, 2005). The continuing significance of ‘patriotic’ history could be seen on the eve of the March 2008 elections when the state-controlled Herald carried no fewer than three editorials invoking history. Richard Nyamahindi’s ‘Of History and the Mother of All Polls’ told ‘Zimbabweans who are going out to vote [that] there is need to guard our history, land and other resources conscientiously ... Zimbabwe’s history is so significant in this election’. In the same issue Nathaniel Manheru (pen-name of Mugabe’s information secretary, George Charamba) predicted a Zanu PF landslide because Tsvangarai and Simba Makoni had betrayed history. ‘The debate is cast’ he admitted ‘in rabidly nationalistic overtones’. The issues were sovereignty and empowerment as embodied in liberation history. The opposition were depicted as ‘pentecostals’, erasing history in the flush of neo-liberal salvation. After the victory of the MDCT in the March parliamentary elections the state intellectuals alleged that the Zimbabwean people themselves had betrayed history. ‘As we brace for the run-off’, declared a Herald editorial on May 30 2008, ‘a poll which could make or break everything we fought for since our forefathers took up arms against the settler infidels in 1896, we must ask ourselves whether we have measured up to Murenga, the legendary fighter, in whose honour we have christened our three revolutions’. After the MDC won the parliamentary seat in the district of her birth, it was said, Nehanda must be turning in her grave. Mugabe’s publicity secretary lamented in the Herald of 3 May 2008 that ‘a mere X on a piece of paper, all done in time shorter than life-creating ecstasy, can steal a free people, steal a heritage, steal a freedom, steal a land, steal a future’. Maybe, he wrote, ‘we shall have to shoot – yes shoot – the ballot box for the preservation of our independence’. And shoot and beat and proclaim ‘patriotic’ history they did in order to achieve Mugabe’s empty victory in the June 2008 presidential re-run. And now, as the Zimbabwean unity talks begin, ‘patriotic’ history rejects the language of human rights and governance in favour of a deep historical legitimacy based on struggle and traditional religious endorsement. In a column in the Sunday Mail of 19 July 2008 ‘patriotic’ history’s major ideologist, Tafataona Mahoso, dismissed talk of ‘governance’ and human rights as ‘totally alien and contemptuous to the history, experience and values of the vast African majority’. All ideas that Robert Mugabe lost ‘legitimacy’ in the March 2008 election ‘point to utter ignorance or contempt of the values of the people of Zimbabwe and the interests which Zimbabweans have fought and defended throughout the First, the Second and the Third Chimurenga’. Nationalists included the slogan ‘One Man, One Vote’ in their demands only ‘because they believed that the vote would bring them their land’ and not because they wanted parliamentary democracy. ‘The governance thread which unifies the First, the Second and the Third Chimurengas’ is

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the blessing given to them by the spirit mediums, on behalf of the mhondoro ancestors. ‘The success of the African liberation movement (the guerrillas) was that they made indigenous land reclamation the main objective and motive of the armed struggle and were given the blessing by the mhondoro to shed blood as long as this was to be done in order to free the people and the land’. So the ‘liberation movement and its leaders earned their legitimacy in the 15 years of armed struggle in the countryside’. The 1980 election ‘did not create the legitimacy of the liberation movement. It only confirmed a leadership ... already made legitimate’. Subsequent elections re-confirmed it. But no election can nullify it.

The predicament of Zimbabwe’s academic and civil society intellectuals So far Mugabe’s Zimbabwe conforms closely to the Triulzi model. And it does so also in terms of the plight of Zimbabwe’s professional historians and civil society intellectuals in their unsuccessful attempts to counter ‘patriotic’ history. Few of them have had access to the press and none to television and radio. Many have left for South Africa, Europe or North America. Many young Zimbabwean historians are academically successful, publishing in major journals and attaining posts in Western and South African universities. But they have little influence in Zimbabwe itself. Dr Miles Tendi has recently completed an Oxford doctorate on the reception of ‘patriotic’ history in Zimbabwe and on the debate about the past among the country’s state, academic and civil society intellectuals. In a brilliant recent article he discusses the failure of radical or liberal historians and political scientists to produce an effective answer to ‘patriotic’ history. Denied access to the media, unable to conduct their own public commemorations, in some cases too uncritically tied to ‘neo-liberal’ definitions of human rights and democracy, dismissing ‘sovereignty’ as an out-moded concept, these intellectuals have effectively criticised the distortions of ‘patriotic’ history in journal articles. But they have failed to produce an alternative account of Zimbabwean history which might be used by opposition parties or by indigenous NGOs. Tsvangarai’s electoral appeal is to ‘change’ rather than to the tolerant, plural history he called for in 1997 (Tendi, 2008).

Elections, violence and historical memory: Kenya and Zimbabwe compared The contrast I have drawn in this chapter between Kenyan and Zimbabwean public history has been clearly shown in the differing appeals to history made during post-electoral violence. Namibia has so far been spared this. In Zimbabwe, as we have seen, the discourse of ‘the nation’ is firmly in state hands. Zimbabwean intellectuals have to de-construct the nation before

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they can re-construct it (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2009). In Kenya, however, the construction of the nation has been taken as a top priority by a brilliant group of writers and academics, who once took Kenya for granted and saw themselves as pan-Africanists, but who now realise that they cannot leave the expression of national identity to the cumbrous and anti-intellectual Kenyan state. Meanwhile history on the ground in Kenya has assumed an aggressively regional character. In Kenya various ‘nationalities’ have appealed to 19th century war leaders and prophets for inspiration and justification in their fight against Kikuyu domination of the state. In Zimbabwe the state monopolises such appeals extending back to the example of the prophetess Nehanda. There is certainly regional resentment in western Zimbabwe but Ndebele activists cannot invoke pre-colonial prophetic legitimation. Paradoxically, the appalling violence with which the Zimbabwean regime has ‘shot the ballot’ has largely taken place outside Matabeleland and in deep ‘Shona’ areas so that Ndebeles who cannot forget the atrocities committed by the Fifth Brigade in the 1980s are slowly coming to see them as authoritarian rather than ethnic. As the Zimbabwean state press continually boasts, Zimbabwe is not another Kenya either in terms of the effectiveness of state power or in terms of the effectiveness of state ideology (Ranger, 2008, ms). The intellectual work that needs to be done in Zimbabwe is to produce a securely grounded indigenous doctrine of human rights rather than to make historical arguments for federalism or nationalism.

Preparing counters to ‘patriotic’ history in Zimbabwe Zimbabwe already possesses many more human rights organisations than Kenya and their numerous and detailed reports, documenting state violence between March and June 2008, dwarf Kenyan attempts to document postelection killings. These reports are based on a network of representatives reporting from every district in the country, giving Zimbabwean human rights documentation a ‘national’ character. Some of them set out their own histories of persistent human rights abuses by successive regimes in colonial and post-colonial Zimbabwe. In response the Mugabe regime has begun to arrest and prosecute civil rights activists for collecting and disseminating ‘false’ information about direct and indirect state violence. As we have seen, the indefatigable Mahoso depicts human rights discourse as ‘neo-liberal’, globalised rhetoric. Robert Mugabe is said to be ‘in denial’ about the atrocities used to ensure his ‘re-election’ as president. This contemporary and historical debate is at the centre of the emergence of a new historiography for Zimbabwe. Certainly no historian can afford to ignore the persistent strain of violence in Zimbabwe’s past (Alexander et al., 2000). Meanwhile, the historical work under way to counter ‘patriotic’ history is taking two forms. One is the production, for the first time, of overall

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histories of Zimbabwe, coming right up to the present. A volume edited by Alois Mlambo and Brian Raftopoulos, with chapters written exclusively by Zimbabwean historians, is nearing completion. Another volume, edited by two young Zimbabwean historians, asks ‘What History for Which Zimbabwe?’ (Chipembere et al., forthcoming). Its aim is set out in the Introduction: ‘Our intention is to go beyond the academic and political debate on patriotic history and starting from where Zimbabwe is now to explore alternative and plural ways of conceiving its past ... We are committed to “pluralism and difference.” We are also committed to bringing together again the now uncoupled dual aim of the original nationalist and liberation movements – both national sovereignty and human rights and democracy. Today in Zimbabwe there is a dangerous polarisation not only between “heroes” and “sell-outs” but also between two views of the past. One – which enunciates patriotic history – puts all its stress on national sovereignty and denounces talk of human rights and democracy as “neo-liberal.” The other, which certainly does not want to produce an un-patriotic history, emphasizes the entitlement of Zimbabweans to rights and freedoms. What is needed is a history which brings together the double aims of liberation and which includes all those who have been left out’. This Introduction, saying that historians need to widen their focus, alludes to a second level of historical production – the local ‘history-scapes’ constructed by clan elders and spirit mediums. At this grass-roots level spirit mediums are certainly not captured by the state. There are multiple Nehanda mediums, some critical of state land ‘reform’, others leading the way in land re-possession, others deploring the failure of the state to observe ancestral rituals (Fontein, 2006; Sadomba, 2008). Nehanda may be invoked by the state but her mediums are often harried, silenced or prosecuted. In many ways ‘patriotic’ history is a shaky construction, claiming to represent but really silencing voices from below. And this is especially true of what Joost Fontein in a brilliant recent article calls ‘the politics of the dead’. ‘Patriotic’ history seeks to monopolise heroic bones by means of the national Heroes’ Acre and its provincial counterparts. But as Fontein writes: ‘The exhumations and reburials of liberation war dead engaged with sometimes competing, more often intermeshing, attachments to the dead; by close kin, clans, ethnic and regional communities or work and war comrades and political affiliates, as well as political parties and the “state”.’ He writes of the tension between re-worked national histories and ‘the often angry demands of marginalized communities, kin and the dead themselves for the restoration of sacred sites or for the return of human remains. Bones and bodies can confront heritage and commemorative processes by restoring silenced or marginalized pasts back to the present, contesting or under-mining the dominant narratives of political elites.’ Moreover, there are all those other bodies – of the ‘traitors’ in the narrative of ‘patriotic history’, the Ndebele dead in the 1980s, the MDC dead in the

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2000s. ‘It is likely that in the future the unsettled dead of Zimbabwe’s most recent violence will return in their demands for reburial, cleaning and commemoration, just as the spirits of ... the victims of the gukurahundi [atrocities in Matabeleland] continue to demand commemoration. Perhaps one day their bones and troubled spirits will ... be turned into heritage for a new political regime in Harare’ (Fontein, 2008; Scarnecchia, 2008a). The old ‘nationalist’ historiographical rhetoric about ‘the African Voice’ may have been discredited as we realise how multiple and contradictory those voices are. But the need to hear multiple voices from below is just as important as it ever was. Perhaps even Triulzi’s ‘ill-defined public history’ need not be captured and cemented over by the state.

References Alexander, J., J. McGregor and T. Ranger (2000) Violence and Memory (Oxford: James Currey). Barnes, T. and E. Win (1992) To Live a Better Life (Harare: Baobab). Barnes, T. (1999) We Women Worked So Hard: Gender, Urbanization and Social Reproduction in Colonial Harare, Zimbabwe, 1930–1956 (Portsmouth: Heinemann). Bhebe, N. (1979) Christianity and Traditional Religion in Western Zimbabwe, 1859–1923 (London: Longman). Campbell, H. (2003) Re-claiming Zimbabwe. The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Mode of Liberation (Claremont: David Philip). Chipembere, E., G. Mazarire and T. Ranger (eds) (2010) What History for Which Zimbabwe? (Harare: Weaver) Fontein, J. (2006) The Silences of Great Zimbabwe: Contested Landscapes and the Power of Heritage (London: UCL Press). Fontein, J. (2008) ‘The Politics of the Dead: Living Heritage, Bones and Commemoration in Zimbawe’, ms., April. Gewald, J. B. (1999) Herereo Heroes, A Social Political History of the Herero of Nambibia, 1890–1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Hayes, P. (ed.) (1998) Namibia Under South African Rule. Mobility and Containment, 1915–46 (London: James Currey). Jeater, D. (1993) Marriage, Perversion and Power: The construction of moral discourse in Southern Rhodesia, 1894–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Jewsiewicki, B. and V. Y. Mudimbe (eds) (1993) History Making in Africa (New York: Columbia University). Katjavivi, P. (1998) A History of Resistance in Namibia (London: James Currey). Kantai, P. (2006) ‘Death of the Kenyan Dream’, The East African, 31 (July). Kossler, R. (2007) ‘Facing a Fragmented Past: Memory, Culture and Politics in Namibia’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 30: 2, 361–82. Kriger, N. (1992) Zimbabwe’s Guerrilla War. Peasant Voices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Melber, H. (ed.) (2003) Re-Examining Liberation in Namibian Political Culture Since Independence (Uppsala: Nordic African Institute). Mlambo, A. (2002) White Immigration into Rhodesia. From Occupation to Federation (Harare: University of Zimbabwe). Mlambo, A. and B. Raftopolous (eds.) (2009) A History of Zimbabwe (Harare: Weaver). Namhila, E. (1998) The Price of Freedom (Windhoek: New Namibia Books).

The Politics of Memorialisation in Zimbabwe 75 Namhila, E. (2005) Kaxumba kwNdola: Man and Myth. The Biography of a Barefoot Soldier (Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien). Ndeda, M. (2003) ‘Nationalist Historiography in Kenya. A Look at the Changing Disposition of B. A. Ogot’s Works Since 1961’, Paper Presented at the Codesria’s Thirtieth Anniversary Celebrations, 10–12 December, Dakar, Senegal. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2009) Are There Zimbabweans? (Oxford: Peter Lang). Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2004) ‘Puppets and Patriots: A Reconstruction of the History of the Decisive Phase of the Struggle for Zimbabwe, 1977–1980’, ms. Nhongo-Simbanegavi, J. (2000) For Better of Worse. Women and Zanla in Zimbabwe’s Liberation Struggle (Harare: Weaver). Ogot, B. (ed.) (1972) Politics and Nationalism in Colonial Kenya (Nairobi: EAPH). Ogot, B. (ed.) (1996) Ethnicity, Nationalism and Democracy in Africa (Kisumu: Maseno University Press). Ogot, B. (2003) My Footprints in the Sands of Time: An Autobiography (Victoria: Trafford). Phimister, I. (1988) An Economic and Social History of Zimbabwe, 1890–1948 (London: Longman). Phimister, I. and B. Raftopoulos (2000) ‘ “Kana Sora Ratswa Ngaritswe”: African Nationalists and Black Workers – the 1948 General Strike in Colonial Zimbabwe’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 13: 3, 289–324. Ranger, T. (1967) Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896–7 (London: Heinemann Educational). Ranger, T. (1970) The African Voice in Southern Rhodesia, 1898–1930 (London: Heinemann Educational). Ranger, T. (1976) ‘Towards a Usable African Past’, in C. Fyfe (ed.) African Studies Since 1945 (London: Longman). Ranger, T. (1983) ‘Revolutions in the Wheel of Zimbabwean History’, Moto (January). Ranger, T. (1985) Peasant Consciousness and Guerrilla War in Zimbabwe (London: James Currey). Ranger, T. (1986a) ‘Resistance in Africa: From Nationalist Revolt to Agrarian Protest’, in G. Okihiro (ed.) In Resistance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press). Ranger, T. (1986b) ‘Religious Movements and Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa’, African Studies Review, 29: 2, 1–69. Ranger, T. (1988) Chingaira Makoni’s Head: Myth, History and the Colonial Experience (Indiana: African Studies Programme). Ranger, T. (1995) Are We Not Also Men? The Samkange Family and African Politics in Zimbabwe, 1920–64 (Oxford: James Currey). Ranger, T. (1999) Voices From the Rocks. Nature, Culture and History in the Matopos (Oxford: James Currey). Ranger, T. (ed.) (2003) Nationalism, Democracy and Human Rights (Harare: University of Zimbabwe). Ranger, T. (2004) ‘Nationalist History, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 30: 2, 215–34. Ranger, T. (2005)’The Uses and Abuses of History in Zimbabwe’, in M. Palmberg and R. Primorac (eds.) Skinning the Skunk – Facing Zimbabwean Futures (Uppsala: Nordic African Institute). Ranger, T. (2006) ‘The Meaning of Urban Violence in Africa: Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1960’, Cultural and Social History, 3: 2, 193–228. Ranger, T. (2007) ‘City Versus State in Zimbabwe: Colonial Antecedents of the Current Crisis’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 1: 2, 161–92.

76 Terence Ranger Ranger, T. (2008) ‘Elections and Identities in Kenya and Zimbabwe’, ms., Oxford. Raftopoulos, B. and I. Phimister (1997) Keep on Knocking. A History of the Labour Movement in Zimbabwe, 1900–97 (Harare: Baobab). Raftopoulos, B. and T. Yoshikuni (ed.) (1999) Sites of Struggle. Essays in Zimbabwe’s Urban History (Harare: Weaver). Raftopolous, B. and L. Sahikonye (ed.) (2001) Striking Back. The Labour Movement and the Post-Colonial State in Zimbabwe, 1980–2000 (Harare: Weaver). Roberts, R. S. (2006) ‘Traditional Paramountcy and Modern Politics in Matabeleland. The end of the Lobengula Royal Family – and of Ndebele Particularism’, Heritage of Zimbabwe Publication No. 25 (Harare: History Society of Zimbabwe). Sadomba, W. Z. (2008) War Veterans in Zimbabwe Land Occupations (Wageninen: Wageninen UR). Samkange, S. (1968) Origins of Rhodesia (London: Heienemann Educational). Scarnecchia, T. (2008a) ‘In Zimbabwe Today, Politics is Violence’, ACAS Bulletin, 79. Scarnecchia, T. (2008b) The Urban Roots of Democracy and Political Violence in Zimbabwe (New York: University of Rochester Press). Schmidt, E. (1992) Peasants, Traders and Wives. Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe, 1870–1939 (London: James Currey). Shigwedha, V. and L. Nampala (2006) Aawambo kingdoms, History and Cultural Change, Perspectives from Namibia (Basel: P. Schlettwein Publishing Company). Sithole, N. (1970) Obed Mutezo, The Mudzimu Christian Nationalist (London: Oxford University Press). Tendi, B. M. (2008) ‘Patriotic History and Public Intellectuals Critical of Power’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 34: 2, 379–96. Triulzi, A. (2006) ‘Public History and the Re-Writing of the Nation in Postcolonial Africa’, Afriche & Orienti, Special Issue II, The West and Africa. West, M. (2002) The Rise of an African Middle Class in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1898–1965. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). Yoshikuni, T. (2007) African Urban Experiences in Colonial Zimbabwe. A Social History of Harare before 1925 (Harare: Weaver).

5 Beginning the World over Again: Past and Future in American Nationalism Don H. Doyle

The theme of this book, history and the formation of national identity, goes to the heart of a debate that has framed our understanding of the origin and meaning of nationalism for the past two decades or more. The prevailing argument has been that nations are inventions of the modern age and that they rest their case for nationhood upon false claims to deep historic origins. The ‘modernist’ argument tells us nationalism involves ‘imagined communities’ that rest on ‘invented traditions’, fabricated historic myths, legends and heroes, all concocted to create an aura of legitimacy through historic perpetuity. Nationalist historical consciousness, according to the modernists, insinuates itself in the banalities of everyday life: national holidays, statues, memorials, the names of streets and plazas, history lessons in school, and through literature, art, music, all aimed at creating a popular illusion of eternal national distinction and magnificence. The historical narrative resulting from the deliberate efforts by nationalist elites is one that casts the nation as the natural expression of a people with origins deep in the past and a future without end. Because most modernists see nationalism as a pernicious force, they see their task as exposing the historical fallacies that underpin it. Ernest Renan’s (1882) prescient lecture, ‘What is a Nation?’, anticipated the modernist critique of the role of history in forging national identity when he observed: ‘Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle of] nationality’. When Eric Hobsbawm (1990) offered his blunt summary of Renan’s point – ‘getting its history wrong is part of being a nation’ – he captured perfectly the modernists’ derision towards the historical claims for nationhood.

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The debate between modernists and rival schools of thought can be understood in large part as a disagreement over the authenticity of nationalist historic foundation myths. Modernists, like Eric Hobsbawm, say they are bogus inventions designed to legitimise the authority of the modern state. Anthony Smith (2000), one of the leading critics of the modernist orthodoxy, emphasises the tremendous importance of the myths and symbols of ancient ethnic nationhood to our understanding of the intense loyalty that attach people to modern nations. Their historical accuracy is beside the point, Smith would argue; it is the symbolic importance of those myths and the sharing of common historic memories that make a people a nation. Both sides agree in the end that nationalism rests on a people’s historic claim to nationhood, whether imagined or real – or something of both. This debate over the historic origins of nations came to dominate so much of the discussion of nationalism for the past quarter century, that we have failed to question its underlying premise and its applicability to the great varieties of nationhood around the world. The idea that modern nations justify their existence by their historic existence as a people may seem obvious and incontrovertible; however, this notion that nationhood rests on historic perpetuity stems from a peculiarly European view of the world. We need to broaden our understanding of the great varieties of nationalism that have taken form in the modern world. We need to consider different types of national identity placed along a wide spectrum with one end occupied by nations bound by a profound sense of ancient historic origin while at the other end the promise of the future, the repudiation of tradition, homogeneity and past injustice may form the foundation of a new national identity. Let us begin by turning to nations without pasts – or at least without histories that identify a distinctive, cohesive people whose roots supposedly extend deep in time. Foremost among these are nations born of settler colonies whose struggle for independence typically involved rejection of the indigenous people and repudiation of the empires sponsoring their original settlement. Anti-colonial nationalism often employs a narrative of imperial oppression and injustice leading to liberation and independence. Conquered indigenous peoples logically organise their nationalist ideology around a nostalgic historical narrative of their pre-colonial culture and proclaim their nation as the rebirth of something that preceded imperial conquest. Nations deriving from settler colonies, such as the United States, however, require a different sort of ideology. Typically, this involves rejecting the mother country and the past they share. For rebellious colonial settlers the nation’s history, in no small measure, begins anew with independence. Many such new nations came to define themselves by their novelty and new found independence from the cultural as well as political dominance of the mother country. Though this model may fit many of the new nations of the Americas, the foremost example is the United States.

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The absence of American national identity The United States was one of the many new nations that emerged from the break up of European empires in the Western Hemisphere in the half century between 1775 and 1825. The American wars of independence, instead of being isolated events in distant lands, were an integral part of the wave of nationalist movements that swept through much of the European Atlantic world in the Age of Nationalism. In his path-breaking interpretation of the spread of nationalism in the modern world, Benedict Anderson (1991) referred to the new American nations as ‘Creole pioneers’ that ‘provided the first real models of what such states should “look like”.’ ‘Out of the American welter’, Anderson wrote, ‘came these imagined realities: nation states, republican institutions, common citizenships, popular sovereignty, national flags and anthems, etc., and the liquidation of their conceptual opposites: dynastic empires, monarchical institutions, absolutisms, subjecthoods, inherited nobilities, serfdoms, ghettoes, and so forth’. In the new nations of the Americas, Anderson continued, ‘a “model” of “the” independent national state was available for pirating’. As his expression ‘Creole pioneers’ suggests, Anderson emphasised the role of the Spanish colonies in providing models for Europe, but their movement towards independence followed the United States by more than a third of a century. It was in the United States, the ‘first new nation’, not the former Spanish, Portuguese or French colonies, that Europeans could witness a successful model of republicanism (Lipset, 2003). Anderson’s argument may be oversimplified and his emphasis on the Spanish American republics as pioneers and models is dubious, particularly in light of his puzzling neglect of the United States as a widely imitated model for independence and nationhood (Armitage, 2006). Nonetheless, Anderson’s claim that the new American republics presented a prototype of nationhood rather than an aberrant exception invites us to see the emerging nations of the Americas in the first wave of modern nationalism. The success of American independence movements, the creation of many new states and their break with the past pointed towards a model of nationhood that did not rest on historic claims to antiquity nor on any sense of distinctive peoplehood. The United States of America deserves special attention in this story, not least because of its precedence and success as a model for other new nations. The basic elements of nationalism in the United States appear to be the very opposite of what we think of as the European model of the nation as the reawakening of an ancient people. History bound the Thirteen Colonies to Britain, not to a separate American national identity. Right up to the time they declared independence, even the most ardent American rebels hurled their protests against crown and parliament as ‘freeborn Englishmen’, full and equal members of the British Empire, and they insisted that the British

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had better treat them as such, not as vassal subjects. It was British exclusion of the Thirteen Colonies from membership and respect within the British Empire, and British punishment of colonials for protesting these matters, that set loyal colonists on the unpredictable road towards separatist rebellion. Whatever their grievances against British policy, before 1776 most Americans saw themselves as proud members of the British Empire and its far-flung parts. Their identities as New Englanders, Virginians or South Carolinians nested within their identity as British. There was little evidence indicating a distinctive identity as Americans as they approached 1776. Even then, it was tenuous and incomplete, as demonstrated by the defection of thousands of Loyalists, who fled, mostly to Canada, during the Revolution. It is telling that there was no term to describe the people of British North America. Before the Revolution the collective term ‘American’ was first employed by rulers in Britain, as Liah Greenfeld (1992) explains, to provide ‘a purely geographical qualifier’. It was simply a shorthand term to distinguish those British who lived in the American colonies, and it in no way implied any cultural difference, nor any ethnic distinction. ‘American’, in this sense, might be used in the same way one might refer today to ‘Africans’ or ‘Asians’ without imputing any specific national meaning to the term. Likewise, the French referred to ‘Americans’ in their Caribbean colonies, just as the Spanish might use ‘American’ to refer to their colonials in Argentina or New Spain. As Metternich would later famously say of Italy, ‘America’ was merely a ‘geographic expression’. Furthermore, it was one British North American colonists rarely used to describe themselves. Their primary identities were either provincial (Pennsylvanians, Virginians, etc.) or national, that is, British or English. The self-descriptor ‘American’ came into common usage among rebellious colonists as they forged an inter-colonial alliance in solidarity against British policy. Even then, it is noteworthy that ‘America’ did not even enter the name of the new government minted in 1774 as the ‘Continental Congress’. The Declaration of Independence of 1776 announced to the world the ‘united [sic] States of America’ and specified that ‘these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES’. It was the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, adopted in 1777, that made its first order of business the appellation for the new nation: ‘The Stile of this Confederacy shall be “The United States of America” ’. Insofar as what they called themselves indicated some basic measure of nationalist sentiment, the national identity of the former Thirteen Colonies followed – at some distance and unevenly – the move towards independence and nationhood. The strongest form of nationalism coursing through pre-Revolutionary America was British not American. Most colonists believed themselves to be members of the freest, most powerful empire in the world and they were proud of their place within it. The appeal to American nationalism was inherently

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weak, not only because of this ‘imperial patriotism’, as John Murrin (1987) calls it, but also because the simple facts of historic origin and cultural ties to Britain all undercut any sense of separate American identity (Breen, 1997; Greene, 1993). Except for the protest movement that galvanised the American colonists during the Stamp Act crisis in 1765 and the formation of the First Continental Congress nine years later, American colonists had no inter-colonial institutions binding them together. Nor is there plausible evidence, most contemporary historians agree, of an American proto-nationalist tradition emerging from a long, smouldering opposition to British rule that united Americans. It was the American tradition of local self-government that colonists were defending against the imposition of British imperial governance in the colonies after 1763. It was their common grievance against the new imperial policy that emerged at the end of the Seven Years (French and Indian) War that generated the makings of an inter-colonial scaffolding from which a nation could be constructed; and it was British intransigence in the face of sustained protests that finally forced the colonists to consider independent nationhood. The bonds between the American colonies and Britain were historic and political, of course, but Britishness was also embedded in everyday life of American colonists, in language, religion, law and customs. Not all Americans understood themselves to be British, and fewer still English. The colonies had long been a refuge for Europeans from a great variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds. Ironically, New England, easily the most rebellious region of British North America, was the most English. Its population originated from the Puritan exodus that occurred between 1620 and the English Civil War of the 1640s, and there had been very little immigration into New England for more than a century. By the time of the American Revolution, New England was into its fifth and sixth American-born generation. In this sense, New Englanders were at once the most English and the most American. Both identities might well explain their proclivity for protest and rebellion, for they were ‘freeborn Englishmen’ claiming their rights as British citizens and New Englanders long accustomed governing themselves. The claim to Britishness would not have resonated with many of the American colonists; large numbers might as easily define themselves by not being English. Estimates from the first census in 1790 indicate those of English descent constituted less than half the total US population, while those descending from Great Britain and Ireland made up a little over two thirds of the population. Africans claimed almost 19 per cent of the population, Germans 7 per cent and the rest from the Netherlands, France, Scandanavia, Spain (Henretta and Nobles, 1987; McDonald, 1980). Given the colonies’ history as an asylum for religious dissenters, impoverished servants, and assorted refugees, there were few common links – ethnic, religious, or ideological – that provided Americans with a sense of national

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community distinct from and in opposition to their membership of the British Empire. The historian John Murrin (1987) explains this succinctly: ‘The American continent could boast no common historic institutions other than crown and Parliament. It had acquired no shared history outside its British context. Likewise, the American settlers possessed only one language in common: English. In both cases, the logic of national identity pointed back to Britain, to counterrevolution, to a repudiation of the bizarre events of 1776’. It was out of the events of 1775–76, however, that British colonists rather suddenly became American nationalists.

Tom Paine: America as refuge from the past The task of American nationalists would be not to suddenly concoct an American national history and identity, but instead to repudiate their British past, reject Old World tradition and celebrate their new nation’s future. They set out to destroy historic bonds of affection towards what the rebels themselves commonly referred to as the ‘parent’ or ‘mother country’. In doing so, they invited their fellow rebels to a kind of patricide, or at least the deliberate alienation of affection between child and parent (Jordan, 1973; Blakemore, 1995). Instead of building a nation on a historic past of a fictive family, American nationalism would emphasise the shared destiny of youth seeking their own way in the world. Of necessity, this American brand of nationalism was to build on common aspirations for the future – not shared memories of the past. No one understood this enterprise better than Tom Paine whose enormously popular booklet, Common Sense (1776), more than any other single piece of propaganda guided the American turn from protest to revolution. It took an outsider and a newcomer to tell Americans they were more than just a collection of protesting provinces – they were a nation in the making, a people distinguished, not by any essential bonds of blood or belief, but by their distance from Old World corruption. They were a nation, Paine further explained, insofar as America would serve as an inspiration to other peoples; America was to become, in Paine’s poignant phrase, an ‘asylum for mankind’. Newly arrived from England in November 1774, Paine came to America at the u