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Discussion
on "National History: construct or/and reality?"
Participants
Professor
Ottar Dahl (University of Oslo) Professor
Otto Dann (University of Koln) Professor
Marjatta Hietala (University of Tampere) Professor
Miroslav Hroch (EUI and University of Prague) Professor
Georg Iggers (Distinguished Professor, University of Buffalo)
Professor
Stuart Woolf (University of Venice) Dr.
Effi Gazi (University of Crete) Dr.
Bronislav Hronec (University of Bratislava) Dr.
Jitka Maleckova (University of Prague)Dr.
Eva Ring Agh (University of Budapest).
Hroch:
I think it is not so difficult for everybody to give some comments
on this basic problem of the relation between present and past
in the construct of national history.
Hronec: I think it is clear that human beings have always
lived in some form of collective constellations, from the manor
of feudal lords to the most international empires or from the
tribes to the neighbourhoods, but what seems to me to be distinctive
about modern constellations is that communities of language,
religion, territory, history constituted themselves as a unity
and clearly distinguished themselves from the others. So, the
nation must be one and it must be distinguished from the other
peoples and nations. The Slovak case cannot make a general pattern
of course, but nevertheless it shows how the nation can be created
out of almost nothing real in history. But although there is,
at least from my perspective, ill-foundation of Slovak history,
this myth would be very hard to dismiss. But an absolutely open
question I think is the case of the 20th century, when you can
see paradoxes -- that for example everybody would expect some
glorification of the Slovak state during the Second World War,
but paradoxically only a small proportion of the population
would have some positive feeling in this event. On the contrary,
there is a Slovak national uprising that in a way was the second
largest mass resistance against the Nazis in this part of Europe
during the Second World War, and this is incorporated into the
national narrative, paradoxically, probably thanks to the Communist
glorification during the 1950s and 1960s. So I think the crucial
question now is if this link to the past fits for democratic
behaviour or not, from today's perspective?
Woolf:
Could you elaborate slightly your very last point? I didn't
understand it, I didn't understand what you mean, if what fits
for a democratic process?
Hronec:
The glorification of the Great Moravian Empire, the fight against
the Hungarians.
Ring:
I think the national past is a construction. The whole of Hungarian
history was neglected, apart from some 18th century foreigners
who were interested mainly in revealing medieval sources and
presenting the deeds of different rulers. The Hungarian historians
published those works in the first place in the 1840s, which
no longer identified history with the deeds of the rulers, but
examined it with a more modern approach from a national point
of view. As opposed to this, the representatives of the liberal
political reform movement already after 1830 published in succession
their programmes concerning the future of the Hungarian nation,
in which they frequently applied historical arguments to prove
their viewpoints. Consequently, the political movements using
history as a legitimising argument were born earlier than history
writing itself. Essentially, the positivistic Hungarian historiography
was born only at the end of the 19th century, although its representatives,
disregarding the few exceptions, in their conceptions of the
past still preserved the clichés applied by the politicians
of the first half of the 19th century. That concerns, for example,
periodisation. Historiography rebelled against the mythical
concept of the past only at the end of the 19th century, and
this occasionally rose up a quite big storm. However, it has
to be admitted that the public was able to get rid of the inherited
clichés with great difficulty. The reconsideration of the concept
of the national past is still going on, even today. In the formation
of the concept of the national past, litetarure also had an
influencial role. The concept of the nation represented by writers
and poets was basically different from that of the liberals.
Some ideologists of liberal nationalism empasised that it is
not language that plays a decisive role in nation forming but
rather historicity, state rule and political existence. The
Hungarian writers have put the stem of equality among lanquage,
community and nation since the 16th century. I would like to
stress that literature contributed more to the formation of
the national past than historiography.
Hroch: And this literature was based on the concept of
the linguistic definition of the nation?
Ring:
Yes, and on myths and legends, and not on reality, political
and historical reality.
Lyttelton:
Is there a discovery or also an attempt to discover the popular
forms, the popular talents, to use this and to play a role in
popular cultures?
Ring:
Popular culture was very important in this period, and this
developed still in the 19th century. It is very interesting
but this is the same in Bohemia with Joseph II. Joseph II was
popularised in the 19th century in the folk, in the popular
texts.
Gazi:
I won't really use the word «invention» to define national history.
I prefer the word «construction», although I think that state
politics, especially in the 19th century have a substantial
role in the formation of a historical discourse about national
identity. This is particularly so in the second part of the
19th century when militant nationalism in the Balkans was particulary
strong. My impression is that there is also a constant interaction
between historical discourses and collective representations
of the past.
There
are two elements I would like to emphasise in this discussion.
The first one is that there are two trends in the Greek national
narrative which seem to be completely contradictory to each
other but which somehow co-exist. The first one is based on
the classical heritage that has been incorporated in the national
narrative as the first part in this long chain of historical
evolution. I think that this is strongly related to conceptualisations
of classical Greece in 17th, 18th and 19th century Europe and
to the formation of a Eurocentric view of civilisation in which
the Greeks tried to be included from the 18th century onwards.
The second trend has to do with the Christian tradition, the
Orthodox Christian heritage that has been represented in the
Greek narrative by emphasis on the Byzantine and the post-Byzantine
period.
The
second issue is that there seems to be a gap between elite and
popular culture in the Greek national narrative. The classical
heritage survived, to a certain extent, in forms of the elite
culture, especially in writings on philosophy or poetry or rhetoric
throughout the Byzantine or the post-Byzantine era. Orthodox
Christian elements were constitutive parts of a lively popular
tradition. I find fascinating the fact that these elements were
incorporated, although they were apparently contradictory, into
the Greek national narrative; but I think that, in a sense,
the final product is of an uncertain nature. It is the result
of a constant process of negotiation, even currently, even in
the 20th century, and it provokes constant identity crises,
with regard to the Greek national identity, to the conseptualisation
of the past, but also to the ways the Greeks place themselves
either in the East or in the West.
Hroch:
Positivism introduces, in the Czech or Hungarian case, some
kind of critical revisionism of these nationalist myths. Is
it the case also in Greece?
Gazi:
No, on the contrary. In Greece, positivism, the engagement with
historicism and the notion of objectivity is actually another
way of legitimising this version of national history.
Hronec:
There is exactly the same phenomenon in the Slovak case. The
very small part of positivist historiographers practically never
made any attempt to dismiss these myths. On the contrary, they
supported them.
Woolf:
But can I turn the question back towards the Czechs, at that
point, because it seems to me that it is clear that there is
some form of very loose association in terms of the way historiography
moves from a romantic to a positivist faith in any case, and
that within that context there is a shift in most countries
which could be dated... slightly but essentially somewhere around
the 1860s...?
Hroch:
Much later, 1880s - 1890s.
Woolf:
In Germany in the 1860s, elsewhere in the 1890s and 1880s. There
is no contradiction it seems to me between this and the legitimation
of a national narrative. On the contrary, it would seem to me
that the very purpose of «scientific history» is this over-formation
of the bearers who assigned their role to themselves more firmly
than before. They are setting the parameters of what they will
then be regarding as acceptable or not acceptable discourse
about the national past. What I would like to ask after listening
to this is when positivistic history starts in Hungary?
Ring:
In the 1880s
Woolf:
It is the 1880s, and is there also a similar sort of revision,
within the context of a national narrative, of what is acceptable
and what is not acceptable?
Iggers:
What is positivistic? Does that mean scientific in the 19th
century? Of course this began much earlier... and then of course
the question is if the claim raised by this supposedly scientific
history really was scientific. That means that you have a real
contradiction: on the one hand, you have the «Verwischenschaftlichung
der Geschichte» and you have the change from Geschichtesschreibung
to Geschichtswissenschadft which is supposed to mean objectivity;
on the other hand, it goes hand in hand with the creation of
ideology and myth. And one person who is deemed a great hero
of this whole development until today, who I think is basically
a very primitive myth maker, is Johann Gustav Droysen. I think
we have to be very careful because this positivistic historiography
is not necessarily objective. I mean that it uses scientific
language, scientific parameters, in order to propagate what
is basically romantic ideology.
Woolf:
Well, I wouldn't go as far as your last sentence. I wouldn't
agree with your last phrase, but until that there are no problems
at all: I was using it in terms of the 19th century positivism
deliberately.
Iggers:
But what I would be very careful about is the term «positivistic»
and I would also be careful about the term «critical». I mean
they called themselves «critical» and «scientific».
Dann:
And what about the Left positions, the socialist positions as
critical positions against the myth traditions. So I would ask
Effi Gazi: have you in the Greek tradition that Left, socialist
criticism of the myths, of the national fiction?
Gazi:
In the 20th century -- I think the first work was published
in 1908 and the second in 1924 -- the socialists attempted to
emphasise social parameters in the Greek national history. But
they never actually challenged entirely the established conception
of the Greek national narrative. To a certain extent, some of
them expressed some criticism about the emphasis on classical
Antiquity but they never came so straightforwardly to publicly
undermine its importance in the formation of the Greek national
identity.
Hietala:
During the 19th century, many attempts were made to write Finnish
history from the Finnish point of view because during the 18th
and the early 19th century the legends of the First Crusade
were still very influential. The Swedes had taken for granted
that they had been strong, educated and civilised and therefore
they had to subordinate the Finns. All good things in Finland
as culture, administration and justice were in their opinion
Swedish. As a result, in the 19th century there were in all
sectors attempts to try to show that Finns had had their own
history. The first serious history was published in 1869. It
wanted to emphasise the role of the Finnish people in creating
their history and was, on the scientific level, very much criticised
because it had eliminated the Swedish role. What about the «scientific
question?» Did our authors really think that they were «scientific»?
It's very difficult to say how «scientific» they were, what
kind of sources they had, because I think they were selective
and they wanted to interpret history from their own point of
view since it was so important to really create, to write Finnish
history. I want to mention one work which was very popular.
It was circulated around the country, among people, among the
middle class. This book, The Land of Our Own, you can
find it in every house where you can find people with education.
Hroch:
What about class interpretation of history?
Hietala:
In the 1910s, we have discussions and we have struggles for
theory. There were class theories, although we don't know if
they had any impact, if we are speaking of distribution of ideas
in textbooks.
Dahl:
I must confess that I am a bit uneasy about the distinction
between myth and reality as it is applied to scholarly work
in history. If the truth value is not an important part of the
distinction, the question will be the instrumental function
or value of certain conceptions, and one question then will
be as to the scholarly sincerity of those who launched these
myths. Are they launched by the conscious intention that they
are to have a certain function in a certain context without
regard to the truth? Or if it's considered as a programme, without
regard to the possibility of being realised? These are initial
doubts in my mind as regards this discussion.
As
to the Norwegian historians, they certainly had a conception
of a national cultural individuality, with a glorious past which
might be part of a myth perhaps. There was certainly a myth
of origin which has its most important manifestation in the
immigration theory, the separate immigration of the Norwegians
as a collective group, from the North. This clearly had a function
as an argument for the conception of a common Nordic nationality
and culture. This theory is thoroughly discarded of course now,
and in that sense I will call them myths, without any truth
value. But it must be emphasised that these Norwegian historians
were programmatically critical historians, followers of the
school of Ranke and Niebuhr, and with the expressed purpose
of the research to destroy myths. They strongly denied that
they would be willing to make compromises as to truth in order
to serve nationalistic purposes. So they had not this intention
of launching nationalistic myths to serve a programme or purpose.
So much on my part as regards this school of history, which
of course was on the winning side of the development of the
national ideology and politics.
I
would like to present an alternative case which was not on the
winning side. But when we consider these myths or constructs
within this field, we find that some succeeded and some did
not succeed. What is wrong then with those which did not succeed?
What I would like to focus on in our Nordic context is the ideology
and myth and programme which simply was Scandinavism, that is
the idea of a political integration of the three Scandinavian
territories' populations, or nations if you like, of Denmark,
Norway and Sweden. A project which to some extent may be seen
as parallel to the German project, the integration of several
political units in a larger, more comprehensive political national
Reich, but not so in Scandinavia; though it may be safely maintained
that the linguistic and cultural difference between the national
units within Scandinavia were no greater than within Germany.
So there seems not to be any basic obstacle to the development
of the Scandinavian nation. This was really a serious political
project in the late Middle Ages. It did not succeed in the Middle
Ages but it was launched again in the very era of nationalism,
around the middle of the 19th century. And it also gathered
considerable following as a movement and in that sense, it succeeded.
Hietala:
I want to add one thing that I forgot to mention, which is common
for all Nordic countries, especially for Sweden and Finland.
When we are talking about scientific writing, we have some advantages.
We have a long statistical tradition. For example, in the case
of Finland or in Sweden or even in Norway, you can use facts,
you can really take facts from several sources. You can find
how many people live there, what their mortality rates are.
That was the way Finnish scientists started to publish, already
during the 1840s, those scientific tables: what the mortality
rate was and what kind of diseases there were. This type of
activity belongs, especially in Finland, to this nationalistic
field and we have to eliminate these myths or legends that wanted
to show that we had had our independent history. I really don't
know if they used statistical material in Norway.
Dahl:
There was statistical material from the Danish Norwegian period,
and it was utilised by the historians around the middle of the
century.
Woolf:
Could I come in on this, quite simply? I wrote a book on statistics,
historical statistics. There is no doubt about the quality of
Scandinavian statistics and the precocity of them. They are
still ideologised in one particular sense which is quite simply
they are state-produced. Hence, statistics are in the service
of the state and hence offer a very strong support to interpretations
of the identification of a nation with the state. Beyond that,
I think the question to ask is, for example, about what languages
were used, about those parts of Scandinavia which felt themselves
distinct. And of course it comes down to be supremely the case
of Norway, about whether Norwegian was a separate language or
not, what language was used and in what circumstances it was
used, at home, in prayer, in public places and so on. I would
have imagined that the same question, though I know nothing
at all about it, would have presented itself in terms of the
use of Swedish and Finnish, in terms of the statistics as well.
Can
I pursue slightly further on this? From 1861, the International
Statistics Association was arguing very strongly for the inclusion
in the decennial censuses of a question about the use of language.
This was an issue of great dispute of course, obviously in the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, but it seemed to have been accepted
in most places as far as I know. Was the question of language
ever included in the decennial censuses of the population, in
the latter part of the 19th century, from the 1870s?
Hietala:
May I answer on behalf of the Swedish Finland? The Bureau for
Statistics was created in 1865, and they immediately became
part of this international association and very early wanted
to follow the guidelines. In Finland, when we had an autonomous
status, a state in the Russian Empire, they wanted to really
take seriously this language problem and they wanted to publish
in Finnish.
You
mentioned that these statistics are a creation of the state
and that is true. But on the other side, the wealth of a nation
is in its population and that is why it was so important to
count every person in this dispersed settled Finland, just for
taxation purposes, and for the army, and so on. But I think
that they were quite serious in trying to have the most reliable
statistics, at least from the middle of the last century.
Dann:
I would like to come back to the last point of Ottar Dahl, the
pan-Scandinavian tradition. What was the role of historiography
there and was there a myth production about this Scandinavian
idea? I think myth production is a sign of success in political
fields.
Dahl:
There was an emphasis on the near-relatedness of these populations
in these states or national areas. On common culture they were
closely related, on the possibility of fruitful collaboration,
friendly coexistence, and not really in contrast to ideas of
national character. Of course, the strongest impulse to this
movement came from Denmark. But the movement had many adherents
both in Norway and Sweden. In that sense it succeeded.
Hroch:
I think Otto Dann's question was in the direction: did some
historians write the history of Scandinavia in this conception?
Did they try to create a conception of Scandinavians, not of
Norwegians, Danes ...?
Dahl:
In Denmark, there was a strong scholarly tradition of conceiving
the old Nordic civilisations as one Nordic culture or civilisation.
The cultural product of this era was common property of the
whole area. And this was the main point of opposition between
the Norwegian historians and the Swedish and the Danish. The
Norwegians emphasised the individuality of the three nations.
Dann:
I asked first in direction to historiography. Second, did there
exist pan-Scandinavian myths? The idea of a common language
for instance, the old Icelandic Sagas?
Dahl:
The language of the Sagas was from this point of view considered
a Nordic common language.
Dann:
We have now two more cases to discuss: the Czech case and the
German case.
Hroch:
I could continue with what Ottar Dahl just started. It is not
irrelevant if we accept the position of relativism or not. I
mean, we can't accept the concept that it didn't matter if national
identity was based on voluntaristic lies and manipulations,
or on honest efforts to discover or to reconstruct the truth...
so, how they understood it -- naturally influenced by ideologies,
influenced by their time, political interests and of course
by errors... Therefore I think the discussion about critical
historiography, or about what they called «the authority of
historical truth» is very important. Of course, we can never
say 100% exactly how it was and so on, but this honest effort
to achieve more and more exact information about the past is
something very important. We have to accept it because if we
don't set a point of departure, then it doesn't matter if everything
could be invented about the national past. Then there are no
limits to invention, so to speak. Then we run the risk to be
denounced -- that our own picture of the historical discourse
is a voluntaristic one, too.
Now
to the Czech case. In more general terms, we have a construct
-- it was Palacky who started this concept in the middle of
the 19th century. This conception of history is related not
only to the present, but also to the past because this past
existed, as well as to something which has not yet been stressed
very much here, to the historiographical tradition of the given
country. Now it is very important -- let's say in the Czech
case -- if or how far the historical past of the given nation
as construction is compatible with the present national movement.
Now let us see the Hungarian movement: we have a national movement
that is a political one, for political goals, for autonomy or
independence, just in the middle of the 19th century, and we
have a past, which is a political one, with a historical nation
-- of course defined a little bit differently or rather differently,
but it is the political past of a nation. Then you can use without
complication this past as a material for the construction of
national history, with many ideological faults and so on, but
there is no problem in doing it, or it is not very difficult
to do it. Then you have the opposite case, the Slovak case,
where you have of course a past, a social past, a cultural past
-- people lived in Slovakia and they spoke Slovak. And the Slovak
national movement at the beginning was not a political one.
The question would be then: why did these Slovak patriots need
political history, why did they need a state? For them the most
important political argument could be «we have lived here in
these territories for centuries and we are here present as a
people.» And some of them said that. In the Czech case, we have
a national movement based on the ethnic concept, stressing linguistic
goals, and we have a conception of national history that stresses
state history and the political past. We have the past where
some kind of statehood existed -- the Crown of Bohemia -- where
there exists some state which is a material for the construction
of political history. But this political past of a state was
incompatible with this nation without state and without any
national political goals, political claims. So it would also
be very logical for the Czech construction of national history
to orientate itself to the people's history. The explanation
for this I think lies in the historiographical tradition. The
historiographical tradition since the Middle Ages had been based
on the history of the state. So this historiographical tradition
was somehow stronger than the reality of this national movement
being a linguistic, ethnic and cultural one.
If
we continue then to the second half of the century, when a new
political programme emerged as a programme of historical right
-- historical right in the sense that the Czechs were presented
as the unique nation in this historical unit of the Lands of
the Crown of Bohemia -- it is no longer compatible with the
reality in the past, because the reality was a different one.
This was the reason, or the point where these revisionists'
criticisms started (social democrats but also others) and I
think that from this tension we could explain the fact that
the Czechs have the largest number of articles on «the sense
of Czech history». There was a huge discussion on what sense
our history has. I think it could be explained by the tension
between this ethnic concept of the nation and the political
claim based on historical rights. It's only my hypothesis, but
nevertheless, I think it is a very interesting phenomenon, this
discussion of which sense our history has, all the time, until
the 20th century.
Maleckova:
Can I just add something that occurred to me when you were speaking?
I think that there may be one other factor to think of and this
is the influence from the outside. For example, you see that
the Czechs or the Hungarians are using the state, they have
a state and they use it, so you try -- in the Slovak case also
-- to find a state to which you can relate ...
Hroch:
In the Czech case it is the German one, it is the German concept
of "Reichsgeschishte".
Maleckova:
I think that this impact of more developed historiographies,
or generally of the more developed nations, or of the rivals
also is one of the reasons why history was constructed. One
thing that we didn't stress really is why we are doing it: we
want to show to ourselves that we are as good as the others,
and we want to show to the others also that we are not worse.
We were not worse, and maybe now we have some problems, but
our past was as good if not better than yours.
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