Magazine / History / Narrating the Nation / Article | 06/05/2008

Narrating the Nation: The power of the past

Primitive myths, national heroes and future perspectives record the national history of a state. Since the 1980's, "the nation” has experienced a renaissance and revival of the past discourse, and could therefore fuel concepts of enemies.

The building of nation states was and is connected in the closest possible way with the construction of a past which is as homogenous and as proud as possible, and which loses itself in the mists of time. This connection is no modern phenomenon.[1] Medieval English chroniclers like William of Malmesbury already formulated clear ideas of a politically and culturally unified nation, which occupied a specific territory and stood for specific institutions, interests and values.[2] There are parallels to be found in France, Norway, Sweden Catalonia and in many other areas of Europe which in the Middle Ages had a developed literary culture and forms of statehood.

Photo: photocase.de

In the 15th and 16th centuries, the European humanists were already formulating a comprehensive catalogue of national memories, symbols and myths.[3] During the Reformation, national history became an important intellectual weapon in the struggle against the universalism of Rome.

However, most researchers into nationalism do not contest the fact that national discourse took on a new quality with the American and French double-revolution at the end of the 18th century. In the transitional period in Europe between the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries – what Reinhart Koselleck calls the "straddle time" (Sattelzeit) - a series of factors lent new weight to the nation: better and quicker communications and means of transport made mass mobilisation possible on an unprecedented scale; industrialisation, secularisation and the transition from feudal to civil society gave national discourse a new frame of reference; the introduction of conscription and compulsory education, printing and the ideas of liberalism caused the concept of nation to appear in a new light. The nation was increasingly sacralized, and the concept of nation was linked with demands for political participation on behalf of the citizenry and lower social classes.[4]

The transition to modernity saw not only a revolution in discourse about the nation but also the establishment of history as a distinct discipline with claims to academic rigour which in turn gave historians privileged access to the interpretation of the past. This claim allowed historians to present themselves as keepers of the national grail. To be sure, their extensive scholarly works did not necessarily have mass appeal. To this day, historians write for their colleagues and for students, and only a few get through to a general public interested in history. But historians have also worked as speechwriters, speakers and journalists and they thus acquired a pivotal role between scholarship, the public and politics.

On the whole, nationally oriented history has always been especially important in situations where there has been a strong tendency towards instability or uncertainty in national discourses. The more uncertain the national identity, the more necessary it seemed to make the national past certain, and the more important therefore was the study of history. In Great Britain in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Protestantism, imperialism, the sea, "splendid isolation" and distance from the powerful continental states (France and Germany) provided the backdrop for an extremely stable national discourse which was hardly ever questioned. History developed late and never became a leading academic discipline. Debates about the national past remained peripheral. Most national narratives were determined by a largely unquestioned Whig historiography.[5] Germany was the opposite of Britain in this regard. The rivalry between different concepts of the nation state was part and parcel of Germany's late development as a state in the 19th century: arguments about which states should form part of a united Germany were mixed with different political ideologies (liberal, conservative and socialist) and with (partly mutually exclusive)national discourses based on religion.

As a result, although the writing of history was not in demand to the same extent everywhere as the keeper of the national grail, nonetheless in the course of the 19th century there were in nearly every corner of Europe attempts to press national history into the service of existing nation states, or of ones which were yet to be created. National histories propagated by the state were especially popular in nation-states which were still young, such as Germany, Italy and even Norway. When in 1811 the new University of Oslo was founded, there were only eighteen professors, but two of them were professors of history (with an emphasis on Norwegian history).[6] However, the state was never the only, and sometimes not even the main, motor of national histories in Europe. We have to thank the civil-society activities of middle class and aristocratic groups, and later also of the labour movement, for a series of important European national histories. They were particularly important in places where the institutionalisation and professionalisation of history as a discipline did not set in till later on, for instance in Great Britain, and also in places where national histories had imposed themselves against existing empires, i.e. especially in East Central and Eastern Europe. Civil-society activity was therefore often the forerunner of national institutions. For example, the origins of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences lie in the Hungarian Scientific Society founded in 1826.[7]

The different degrees of professionalisation of history in Europe had important effects on the specific relationship between the study of history and the propagation of the national idea. Early professionalisation in Germany implied both distance from politics and closeness to the state, whereas the relatively late development of historical studies in the Balkans, by contrast, produced closeness to politics and distance from the state (from the imperial state). Politicians in this part of the world were very often the first historians, since they found in the instrumentalisation of history an important weapon for their political demands for the creation of their own nation. There was also an overlap between historical and political careers in the 19th century in Western European nations, especially France. But as historical scholarship was increasingly professionalised, such jumps between careers became less common.

The clearest sign of this transformation of national history into an academic discipline were the shelf-loads of collections of sources and documents which appeared in numerous European countries in the 19th century, often modelled on the German "Monumenta Germaniae Historica". The creation of institutions led to the establishment of historical seminars in universities, as well as of national archives and academies. The scientific conference blossomed into a form for scholarly exchange. The footnote became an identity card; the historical seminar became the laboratory for scholarly work. The more scholarly Clio, the muse of history, became, the greater was the tension between historians as prophets of the nation and historians as a trans-national community of specialists dedicated to objectivity in their attempts to recount the past "as it actually was" (Leopold von Ranke).

Photo: photocase.de

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