POLITICAL HISTORY ALL OVER AGAIN?

In November 2006, a symposium on political history was held at the École des hautes études en sciences in the same building that houses the editorial offices of Les Annales, a French journal known for its advocacy of social history and its dismissal of political history. The symposium focused on the recently published New Directions in American Political History, edited by Meg Jacobs, Peter Novak, and Julian Zelizer, and its relevance to political history in Europe.Footnote ¹ The questions the symposium posed included: How is it possible to integrate workers, minorities, and women into the framework of political history?Footnote ² Do the state and political institutions have the same meaning, purpose, and power today that they had in the nineteenth century?Footnote ³ Is there room left for foreign policy in a political narrative that is still very much state-centered?Footnote ⁴ In a time of crisis of epistemological models, after the failure of the Marxist model and the unconvincing linguistic turn in the profession, how is it possible to write a new political history in Europe that tries to revitalize the field without going back to the old narrative of the past?

If comparative history is often a useful strategy to avoid national stereotypes and has great heuristic power, one should not neglect the specific questions and debates of each national historiography.Footnote ⁵ Nonetheless, even if historiography is unique to each country, what the countries share in common are expressions of politicization. Moreover, the writing of political history in Europe asks common sets of questions: Do political historians have to collaborate with other social scientists—among them especially political scientists, sociologists, or economists? What is the agency of historians in a field so influenced by battles around memory and political debates? To what extent is it possible to write a collective narrative without neglecting the work of social historians? Is it still relevant to work on a short span of time when so many historians believe in the longue durée framework?

THE EUROPEAN OUTLOOK ON POLITICAL HISTORY

Political history in Europe is decidedly distinct from American political history. The reason for this difference is obvious: history. European political history in the twentieth century has been shaped by the trauma of two world wars, political and ideological experiments in communism and fascism that have been models and counter-models for most European countries. Such differences from the American experience have given rise to different historical debates in Europe. For example, the hypothesis of a European civil war in the interwar years is probably one of the most debated questions in European historiography.Footnote ⁶ Furthermore, European countries also experienced a more rapid and extensive development of the welfare state, a larger expansion of the administrative state, and a dismantling of colonial empires. Such differences present a sharply different course than American political history.

The imposition of communist and fascist regimes in the Soviet Union and in Western and Eastern Europe poses for political historians myriad problems related to seismic regime change and the political and social consequences of rapid transformations within a nation. These changes include collective and individual suffering of ethnic and political groups and individual citizens. The variety of regime changes in European history presents scholars with rich opportunities for comparison, especially between the authoritarian regimes that have deeply transformed the Soviet Union (the “Great Experiment”), Italy, and Germany during the first half of the twentieth century. The military defeat or political collapse of these totalitarian regimes provides additional material for historians interested in regime change, as well as presenting sharp difference with American political history.

As well as confronting regime change, European historians inevitably contrast these violent political upheavals with the stability of democratic polities in England and France (excluding the four-year period of the Vichy regime). These issues of totalitarianism and democracy have created ideological division within European historical scholarship.

A CROWDED FIELD WHERE HISTORIANS AND NONHISTORIANS COMPETE

Ideology has been an extremely propitious terrain for political history. History reflects in many cases competing ideologies, contemporary political debates, and questions about past choices and policy decisions. For example, the history of the Italian republican regime has been subject to competing political interpretations, and antifascist resistance has been interpreted by Marxist historians as a war of national liberation and a class war. In Germany too, a country strongly hit by revolutions and political violence during the twentieth century, political concerns still influence historiographical debates, mostly about the German people's responsibility in the Shoah and the participation of the German political elite in the Nazi regime.Footnote ⁷

The politicization of history has been furthered through the increase of journalists and politicians writing histories with clear agendas in mind. History becomes a way to project current political debates into the past, either through reparation of past mistakes or through the commemoration of patriotic themes. In France, history has been legislated through the enactment of the Gayssot Act of 1990, which outlawed views that have been deemed racist, xenophobic, or anti-Semitic, and other subsequent laws. Such legislation by the state reveals the tenuous divide between history and contemporary politics. Both the right wing and the left wing have been involved in the administration of restricting historical discourse.Footnote ⁸ Laws have qualified past events as crimes (slavery as well as the Armenian genocide have been recognized as crimes against humanity). In 2005, legislation imposed biased interpretations of some of the most sensitive moments of French history, which are contested by most of the profession (especially the 2005 Act calling for the recognition of the efforts and merits of people who contributed to colonization, and for the recognition of the sufferings of forced repatriates from Algeria). This drift has reached a climax under President Sarkozy, who, in an attempt to cash in on the prestige of some of the left's pantheon figures, has redrawn the partisan lines in a revisionist fashion. French historians have resisted the intrusion of politicians by creating an association called Liberté pour l'histoire (or “Freedom for History”) in December 2005. Despite wide support, they have not been able to halt the movement.

In a democracy, historians can resist official history: they can reject it on the basis of scientific evidence; they can also publish their own research independently of the official agenda. This is certainly not the case in a nondemocratic regime where historians have not only been deprived of free expression, but where history becomes the monopoly of the state. In such regimes, historians can dissent by publishing illegally or aboard at their own risk. History in Communist Russia served political functions to justify factional divisions or policy changes. Crimes were concealed by the historian, whose task was to produce a narrative that rationalized the destruction of the old order by violent means and the imperative to create the new regime. Soviet historians were expected to produce a metanarrative to make sense of the Soviet experience both internally (as a needed Russian revolution) and externally (as a contribution to “world historical development”). Under these conditions, it was impossible to produce a counter-narrative to the official government-endorsed history.Footnote ⁹ Dissenting history came from the West, often written by exiled historians living in the United States. The collapse of the Soviet Union has not put an end to the extreme politicization of Russian history, albeit in a different way. Current Russian historiography presents a catalogue of Soviet crimes and a tendency to idealize prerevolutionary Russia.

Whether in democracies or formerly authoritarian regimes, political history has become too crowded a field. Political attempts at producing official history and the mass publication of historical narratives by nonhistorians have fed the suspicion of the profession vis-à-vis political historians. The latter have tried to respond by distinguishing their work from that of amateurs, mostly by stressing the key role of historical sources, and by borrowing concepts and methods from other social sciences.

OPENING UP TO POLITICAL SCIENCE BUT KEEPING ONE'S SPECIFICITY

Because political science is a discipline much less likely to be penetrated by nonprofessionals and considered to be a “harder” social science, some European political historians have turned to social science methodologies. This interest has led European scholars, especially in France, to look at institutions, policy agendas, and interest groups in the development of the state. This view has generated greater cooperation in France between historians and political scientists to create what scholars Henry Rousso and Michel Offerlé call an “interdisciplinary fabric.”Footnote ¹⁰ While this collaboration has been of great value, historians realize the drawback of writing contemporary history without access to archival sources. Instead, political historians have drawn on social science insights from political science and sociology to interpret past epochs in which archival sources are available.Footnote ¹¹ Although extremely heuristic, such collaborations have exacerbated the problem of the specificity of political history (versus other disciplines and versus nonprofessional history). Are political historians of the temps présent (“present time”) doomed to produce a second-rank political science? The problem is all the more acute in many European countries, and especially in France, that political science has ventured regularly into recent history. Political historians have fortunately prevented this from happening by sticking to the core of their discipline instead of trying to produce what they had not been trained to do.

The influence of social science on current European political history is especially strong in the rich literature on regime change.Footnote ¹² While political scientists tend to focus on the necessary conditions for regime change, historians have explored periodization as they reflect on ruptures and continuities, origins and heritages. In short, they continue to examine the essence of history: the meaning of time. In this new focus, continuity becomes as important as change. Italian historians have placed fascism in the twentieth century not as a disruption in national history, but as a consequence dating to the unification of Italy in the late nineteenth century. Similarly, the weight of fascism continues to be felt in the postfascist transition. In Germany too, the idea of a Sonderweg has been questioned and Nazism appears less an accident of history than the result of structural and social forces. Russian historians have addressed similar questions of continuity. Was the Bolshevik takeover a coup d’état or a continuation of autocracy in another form?Footnote ¹³ Looking at the end of the Soviet experiment more than seventy years later, was the collapse of the Soviet Union an experiment doomed from the start? Were the causes of the political failure to be found in the plethoric and control-oriented political apparatus built over the years? Was the failure due to autarky and a deficient economy? Will post-Communist Russia be haunted by its past or will its future be a tabula rasa?

European political historians have drawn from political science in other ways as well, especially in the importance of political parties and the development of national party systems. The study of party government, partitocrazia, is central to contemporary Italian history.Footnote ¹⁴ British historians have given particular attention to the decline of the Liberal party, the rise of the Labour party, and the revival of the Conservative party in the late twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁵

RECONCEPTUALIZING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POLITICS AND SOCIETY

Social forces in modern Europe transformed the form and practice of political institutions in the administrative state. Women played an especially important role in shaping political institutions, political parties, and social reform movements. British, Italian, and French historians have produced a valuable literature on the role of women in social reform movements and political parties, as well as specific struggles to achieve the vote and incorporation in modern political life.Footnote ¹⁶ This scholarship raises questions as to the meaning of citizenship in modern democracies. Through such issues, European political historians have sought to reconceptualize the relationship between politics and society. Recent scholarship on the nexus between state and society emphasizes reciprocal interactions between institutions and social groups. This literature has paid closer attention to how average citizens inform state policy and shape political parties, as well as becoming instruments for educational, judicial, and economic reform. The idea of “generation,” a demographic group cemented by shared values, has become essential to understanding social and political change.Footnote ¹⁷

After long skepticism regarding social explanations, historians of authoritarian regimes have also opened to social history. The totalitarian school was criticized for its shortcomings and unfounded assumption that civil society had been annihilated. Revisionist Russian historians turned to social history to understand political history. Soviet historians had argued that civil society was nonexistent in prerevolutionary Russia. Beginning in the 1960s, the first signs of a revisionism appeared when historians began to focus on the effects the Bolshevik revolution had on various social groups.Footnote ¹⁸ In the process, revisionists began to examine the importance of the individual in history, the role of intellectuals, and the meaning of resistance to political forces.

A similar turn occurred in Italian history around this same time, as a new generation of historians began to study life under fascism. Political historians began to explore how the military, the church, the bureaucracy, and business retrained independent political power, which restrained the full extent of totalitarian control.

TRANSNATIONALIZATION FIRST, EUROPEANIZATION SECOND?

Since the early 1990s, European political history has increasingly absorbed a more transnational approach to history. Much of this interest in transnational history has focused on ideological appeals of communism, fascism, and social democracy. Several attempts have been made to study transnational political forces in a European framework, especially those whose ideology had universal ambitions and appeal, such as communism and fascism, or which had a natural European extension, such as Christian Democracy.Footnote ¹⁹ The transnational appeals of leftist terrorism in the 1960s and 1970s,Footnote ²⁰ and the emergence of the Green movements, have also attracted serious scholarly attention. Characteristic of the contemporary obsession with national identity, Pierre Nora's “lieux de mémoire” methodology has been transposed to the GermanFootnote ²¹ and Italian contexts.Footnote ²² In each country, the long process of memorialization has given birth to vivid narratives that help us understand the strength and weakness of the nation, the links between the state and society through the military and the education system, and eventually the forms of resistance toward a centralized state.

Transnationalist approaches have created intense debate among European political historians. George Mosse's Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, maintains that two world wars in Europe have led to a brutalization within all European societies during the interwar years and the post–World War II period. According to Mosse, this brutality is evident in the rise of fascist and communist political movements, as well as in European society itself.Footnote ²³ The publication of The Black Book of Communism has generated intense historiographical controversy among European political historians. This book appears to have attracted less attention, and therefore created less controversy, among American political historians, which in itself reveals distinguishing differences with European political historians.

Larger political and social histories of Europe have begun to appear. Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes maintains that communism, an ideology born in Europe, provides the key to understanding political dynamics in the twentieth century.Footnote ²⁴ Mark Mazower offers a response, in effect, to Hobsbawm in Dark Continent, which views fascism as the driving force in European political history in the twentieth century and attempts to explain the decline of Europe in a globalized world.Footnote ²⁵ Still, these books are unique, and few historians have undertaken comprehensive political histories of modern Europe. The basis for such comprehensive histories, however, is being laid in a rich literature that is developing out of the integration of the European Union. Studies have been undertaken of member-states’ relations vis-à-vis Europe, while other scholars have explored political elite attitudes toward the European Union, changing public attitudes toward European union, and tensions between national sovereignty and supranational political and judicial institutions.

Indeed, the dismissal of traditional political history in the 1960s and 1970s created spaces for experimentation and innovation on both sides of the Atlantic.Footnote ²⁶ Yet the revitalization of political history in Europe and the United States comes at a time of intellectual crisis when traditional standards of history and the value of history itself has been questioned by postmodernists.Footnote ²⁷ This presents the greatest irony in the current revitalization of political history in Europe—and perhaps in the United States: while a new generation of political historians has emerged on the Continent, informed by interdisciplinary perceptions and expansive in their definition of political history beyond parties and leaders, history as an empirical discipline has itself come under profound questioning. Such questioning, while of intellectual value, however, comes at this critical juncture in European politics, a point in history when history itself should matter.