National History and New Nationalism in the Twenty-First Century

A Global Comparison

Niels F. May, Thomas Maissen, Niels F. May, Thomas Maissen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000396348
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

National history has once again become a battlefield. In internal political conflicts, which are fought on the terrain of popular culture, museums, schoolbooks, and memorial politics, it has taken on a newly important and contested role. Irrespective of national specifics, the narratives of new nationalism are quite similar everywhere. National history is said to stretch back many centuries, expressesing the historical continuity of a homogeneous people and its timeless character. This people struggles for independence, guided by towering leaders and inspired by the sacrifice of martyrs. Unlike earlier forms of nationalism, the main enemies are no longer neighbouring states, but international and supranational institutions. To use national history as an integrative tool, new nationalists claim that the media and school history curricula should not contest or question the nation and its great historical deeds, as doubts threaten to weaken and dishonour the nation. This book offers a broad international overview of the rhetoric, contents, and contexts of the rise of these renewed national historical narratives, and of how professional historians have reacted to these phenomena. The contributions focus on a wide range of representative nations from around all over the globe.

1 National Historical Master Narratives and War Museums in Contemporary Europe

A Comparative Analysis

Stefan Berger

Introduction

One of the advantages of the European Union (EU), pro-Europeans argue, is that it has successfully replaced old national enmities with a spirit of co-operation and solidarity, banishing war from Europe after 1945. This chapter asks to what extent this European master narrative¹ is visible in contemporary European war museums and how the story of war is narrated in those museums today. In the first part of this chapter, the role of war in national historical master narratives is analysed. The second part turns to a theoretical examination of how the memory of war can be related to contemporary European memory regimes. Here, the reader is introduced to the idea of ‘agonistic’ memory. The main body of this chapter briefly discusses eight war museums/war monuments and relates their depiction of war to national historical narratives and diverse memory regimes. The selection of museums and monuments includes larger national museums, such as the Bundeswehr Museum in Dresden and the National Army Museum and the Imperial War Museum, both in London. It also incorporates smaller museums with a more specific focus on the two World Wars in the first-half of the twentieth century, which are often seen as the dark foil against which a brighter EU-dominated second half of the twentieth century can be contrasted. This is, for example, the major narrative arc of the House of European History in Brussels, an initiative of the European Parliament, situated right next to the parliament in the capital of Europe.² Amongst the smaller museums, this chapter investigates the Historial de la Grande Guerre in Péronne; the museum of the German capitulation in Berlin-Karlshorst; Schindler’s Factory in Krakow; the museum of the First World War in Kobarid, Slovenia; and the military cemetery in Redipuglia, northern Italy. Discussions conclude with some reflections on what these museums tell us about the interrelationship between national historical master narratives and contemporary memory frames in today’s war museums in Europe.

The Role of War in National Historical Master Narratives

In Europe and beyond, national historical master narratives played a crucial role in the legitimation of nation-states.³ Yet they were always contested and unstable. The concept of ‘nation’ belongs to those ‘essentially contested concepts’ about which there can only be an ongoing debate without the prospect of achieving closure.⁴ To a greater or lesser extent, these national historical master narratives have been made and remade continuously, as nation-states sought to reassure themselves and their citizens about how to define themselves and make themselves stand out in comparison with other nation-states. Talking about one’s own history invariably meant talking about others: ‘the self’ cannot be defined without ‘the other’. National histories often described this ‘other’ in an antagonistic way as being somehow inferior and worthless than the ‘self’. Other nation-states were portrayed negatively to make one’s own nation-state shine more brightly in its historical evolution. Not all national histories, however, were nationalist histories based on strong antagonisms to ‘others’. There have also been attempts to write national histories within a cosmopolitan frame, allowing the authors to highlight positive specificities of their own nation without denigrating those of others. Henri Pirenne’s de-ethnicised history of Belgium that he reworked as a result of his experiences in the First World War would be a good example of a national history that depicts Belgium as a unique meeting place of Romance and Germanic cultures.⁵

Whichever way national histories were framed, they found it almost impossible to evade the legacies of wars in national pasts. Wars, in all forms, have been central anchor points of national historical master narratives. Examples include civil wars, such as the one in Spain in the 1930s, or revolutionary wars, such as the revolutionary wars in France which followed the ‘Great Revolution’ of 1789. In central Europe, the 1848 revolutions led to a variety of uprisings that had an important legacy on national historical narratives in a range of different Central European countries. The 1917 October Revolution in Russia became a founding myth of communist Russia. The civil war in Spain between 1936 and 1939 became a significant and, in this case, highly contested element of conflicting national master narratives. Whilst versions of the Francoist interpretation of the civil war maintain their popularity among the supporters of the Partido Popular, the Left is trying to build a different Spain on the legacies of the republican resistance to Franco. Moreover, the civil war in Yugoslavia during the 1990s has figured prominently in the re-writing of post-Yugoslav national histories across all former republics of the multi-national state.

Apart from revolutions and civil wars, there are also so-called wars of liberation, which have been an important ingredient in European national historical master narratives. One only needs to think of the anti-Napoleonic wars in Europe in the early nineteenth century to see how they were retrospectively narrated as proud moments of national resistance to foreign occupation, even if much of that resistance was, at least to the same extent, directed against those who restricted liberties regardless of their nationalities. In German territories, for example, ‘wars of liberty’ conducted against all forms of tyrannical and absolutist government were reinterpreted as ‘wars of liberation’ in the nationalising atmosphere of the nineteenth century.⁶ Apart from the anti-Napoleonic wars, many of the wars of aspiring nation-states against empires or multi-national states were also declared ‘wars of liberation’ in the nineteenth century, such as the struggle of the Greeks and Bulgarians against the Ottoman Empire, the fight of Italy, south-eastern and Central European nations against the Habsburg Empire and the battle of the Irish against the British, to mention just some of the most notable examples.

Of course, there are also wars between different nation-states that have figured prominently in national historical master narratives. The Franco-German wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have produced notions of a ‘hereditary enemy’ on both sides of the border and, in many accounts, a deadly desire for revenge on national history on both sides of this border before Franco-German reconciliation during the process of Europeanisation after 1945. The Danish-German War of 1864 has been more of a long-standing traumatic event in Danish national histories than in German ones. Going further back in history, the Hundred Years’ War between England and France played an important role in English national histories in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both the Patriotic War against Napoleon and the Great Patriotic War against National Socialist Germany occupied an essential part of national historical master narratives in Russia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Both World Wars of the twentieth century had major repercussions on the understanding of national history in all European countries.

Last but not least, imperial wars hold a significant place in national historical master narratives. In the past, they were frequently remembered as proud memories of imperial achievements, as shown in J.R. Seeley’s histories of the ‘expansion of England’ and the making of a ‘Greater Britain’.⁷ With all modern empires, so-called ‘civilising missions’ were written into the national histories of the imperial nations who acquired colonies. Imperial wars were justified in the struggle against universal backwardness and for alleged universal (i.e. Western) civilisation. Towards the end of the twentieth century, imperial wars became more associated with shameful memories of colonialism. A paradigmatic case is the attempt to ‘come to terms’ (Aufarbeitung) with or ‘work through’ the National Socialist past in Germany – a process that started in the 1960s and is still ongoing today. It has earned German history politics the reputation of being the ‘good boy’ of traumatic memory politics, and it is often paraded as a good example of how to deal with those difficult national pasts elsewhere, although a number of critical voices have also pointed to the German penchant for being the first in everything – from the most violent attempt at empire formation to coming to terms with this failed attempt.⁸ In fact, many (former) imperial states have seen efforts to work through their imperial pasts, e.g. the French debates surrounding the legacies of the Algerian war. It is also interesting to observe that some national histories have chosen to forget their imperial pasts. This is the case with Swedish national historical narratives, which remain mostly silent about the early modern Swedish Empire and, instead, focus on twentieth-century histories of the benign welfare state, neutrality, and the promotion of peace and human rights. Denmark’s ‘Oldenburg Empire’⁹ and the recasting of German history between the 1880s and 1940s as national rather than imperial also point to the importance of forgetting about empire in national historical master narratives.

This briefest of enumerations should have made one thing clear: both nation-building and, consequently, national historical master narratives were inextricably linked to war. As national histories were influential in shaping national memories, histories of war also had an impact on memory regimes in Europe. How those wars were integrated into national histories and national memories differed substantially over time and place. Examining war museums is one way of investigating the relationship between historical master narratives and memories of war in contemporary Europe. Before examining the war museums, however, this text will begin by reflecting on the development of memory regimes in Europe.

National Histories and National Memories in Europe

In a recent article in Memory Studies, Anna Cento Bull and Hans Lauge Hansen distinguished between three different memory regimes: antagonistic memory, cosmopolitan memory, and agonistic memory.¹⁰ Before the Second World War, the dominant form of memory in Europe was antagonistic memory. If this concept is applied to national historical master narratives, most of them indeed tell antagonistic tales that distinguish between a positive ‘self’ and one or, often, several negative ‘others’. National histories told the story of the nation as the evolution of a good national character over time that was engaged in fending off bad ‘foreign’ national characters and their attempts to influence the good ‘self’. Nations became moral categories where good (us) could be neatly distinguished from bad (them). National heroes acting in national histories were juxtaposed with national enemies belonging to other nation- states or empires, or both. Antagonistic national histories producing antagonistic national memories were monologic and unreflexive. In other words, they spoke only to the converted; that is, to fellow nationals seeking to find confirmation of ‘self’ and delineation from ‘others’ in national historical master narratives. Both the producers and the consumers of such national historical master narratives were unwilling to reflect on how their narratives had been constructed. Instead, they were presented as ‘objective’ truths, legitimated by the historical sciences whose scientific judgement could be trusted. National histories underpinning national identities in this way justified war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide if it could be fitted into its antagonistic setup. The ‘other’ had to be fought and even physically destroyed since it was necessary to maintain the good ‘self’ that the ‘other’ wanted to destroy. Antagonistic memory regimes were passionate about the ‘self’ and, at the same time, had no feelings for the ‘other’. They relied heavily on emotions to mobilise the ‘self’, allegedly to protect the ‘self’ against its many enemies.

According to Bull and Hansen, this dominant antagonistic mode of remembrance was replaced with a cosmopolitan mode of remembrance in the decades following the end of the Second World War. The emergence and development of the EU played a substantial part in framing these forms of cosmopolitan remembrance. Thus, it is no surprise that cosmopolitan memory can be found as a dominant memory frame in the House of European History, which opened in Brussels in 2017. Here, traditional national histories with their antagonistic modes of remembrance and their nationalisms led Europe into the abyss of the first half of the twentieth century – with its World Wars, genocides, and all forms of ethnic cleansing. In the museum, this dark half of the twentieth century is contrasted with a much brighter second half, when, following the model of Western Europe under the auspices of the EU, the Western European nations came together to overcome old enmities and built a common European space. National histories do not disappear, but nationalism is now recognised as an ‘evil’ and the antagonistic politics that nationalism favoured is consigned to the past. The new cosmopolitan memory frame still thinks very much in moral terms of ‘good and evil’, but these are no longer related to national selves and others. Instead, they relate to ideologies – with liberal capitalist democracies figuring as ‘good’ and totalitarianisms, both in their fascist and communist variants, together with nationalism, figuring as ‘evil’.

Cosmopolitan memory puts great emphasis on multi-perspectivity and multi-vocality, as it seeks to bring into dialogue various national memory regimes in an attempt to reach agreement on a new cosmopolitan frame to which all national memories should be able to commit. It is obvious that this search for a cosmopolitan memory frame is a huge advance on older antagonistic memory frames and it should indeed be regarded as a great achievement of Europeanisation during the second-half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, it also has its shortcomings. Its multi-perspectivity and multi-vocality are limited: it has produced exclusions of its own. Anyone outside of the liberal capitalist democratic frames that characterise the nation-states within the EU was deemed unfit to participate in the dialogue about a common cosmopolitan memory frame. This affects both the populist right and the anti- capitalist left in Europe. The discussion that cosmopolitan memory frames have produced between different voices is one that aims at reaching consensus (i.e. closure). It is dialogic, but once the debate has reached an agreement and closure, it is in danger of becoming an unassailable orthodoxy that can no l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• National History and New Nationalism in the Twenty-First Century: Introductory Remarks
• 1 National Historical Master Narratives and War Museums in Contemporary Europe: A Comparative Analysis
• 2 Populism and Nationalism in Recent British Historiography
• 3 German National History in the Age of ‘Aufarbeitung’
• 4 The Remarkable Persistence of the Spirit of the Dutch Nation: Contesting Dutch Identity in Contemporary Public and Historical Discourse
• 5 Production and Politics of the National Narrative in France
• 6 The Resilience of National Histories: ‘Two Spains’ versus the Periphery?
• 7 Reflections on Swiss Historiography in Times of New Nationalism
• 8 Nation and the ‘Retrotopic’ Politics of History in Poland
• 9 ‘Politics of History’ and Authoritarian Regime-Building in Hungary
• 10 The Past that Never Left? Nationalism, Historiography, and the Yugoslav Wars
• 11 The Ottomans and ‘My People’: The Populist-Nationalist Discourse in Turkey under the AKP Government
• 12 Independence, Revolution, War, and the Renaissance of National History in Ukraine
• 13 Between ‘Europe’ and Russian ‘Sonderweg’, between ‘Empire’ and ‘Nation’: Historiography, Politics of History, and Discussion within Society in Russia
• 14 Res Publica Historicissima: The Politics of History in Israel
• 15 National Pride versus Critical History: American Memory Wars
• 16 Memory, History, and the Politics of the Hindu Right
• 17 Chinese National History: The Manchu-Qing in New Clothes
• 18 New Nationalism in Japan in the Twenty-First Century
• Conclusion
• Notes on Contributors
• Index