Conflicted Memories: Europeanizing Contemporary Histories 9780857453600

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
LIST OF ACRONYMNS
Introduction CONTOURS OF A CRITICAL HISTORY OF CONTEMPORARY EUROPE: A TRANSNATIONAL AGENDA
Part 1 CONTESTED MEMORIES
Chapter 1 HISTORY OF MEMORY, POLICIES OF THE PAST: WHAT FOR?
Chapter 2 COMMUNIST LEGACIES IN THE ‘NEW EUROPE’: HISTORY, ETHNICITY, AND THE CREATION OF A ‘SOCIALIST’ NATION IN ROMANIA, 1945–1989
Chapter 3 WRITING NATIONAL HISTORIES IN EUROPE: REFLECTIONS ON THE PASTS, PRESENTS, AND FUTURES OF A TRADITION
Chapter 4 BETWEEN EUROPE AND THE NATION: THE INWARD TURN OF CONTEMPORARY HISTORICAL WRITING
Part 2 MULTIPLE CONFLICTS
Chapter 5 WAR AND CONFLICT IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN HISTORY, 1914–2004
Chapter 6 IN SEARCH OF A TRANSNATIONAL HISTORICIZATION: NATIONAL SOCIALISM AND ITS PLACE IN HISTORY
Chapter 7 THE ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR IN EURASIA: A BORDERLAND PERSPECTIVE
Part 3 TRANSNATIONAL INTERACTIONS
Chapter 8 EUROPE AS LEISURE TIME COMMUNICATION: TOURISM AND TRANSNATIONAL INTERACTION SINCE 1945
Chapter 9 INTEGRATION FROM BELOW? MIGRATION AND EUROPEAN CONTEMPORARY HISTORY
Chapter 10 TWENTIETH-CENTURY CULTURE, ‘AMERICANIZATION,’ AND EUROPEAN AUDIOVISUAL SPACE
Chapter 11 ECONOMICS OF WESTERN EUROPEAN INTEGRATION? PROVING THE BENEFITS, 1952–1973
Part 4 UNFINISHED POLITICAL PROCESSES
Chapter 12 A EUROPEAN CIVIL SOCIETY?
Chapter 13 INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST ATTEMPTS AT BRIDGE-BUILDING IN THE EARLY POSTWAR PERIOD
Chapter 14 NATION BUILDING IN THE ERA OF INTEGRATION: THE CASE OF MOLDOVA
Postscript THE SUBJECT(S) OF EUROPE
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
CONTRIBUTORS

Citation preview

Conflicted Memories

Studies in Contemporary European History General Editors: Konrad Jarausch, Lurcy Professor of European Civilization, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a Director of the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Studien, Potsdam, Germany and Henry Rousso, Senior Fellow at the Institut d’histoire du temps présent (Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Paris), and co-founder of the European network “EURHISTXX”

Volume 1 Between Utopia and Disillusionment: A Narrative of the Political Transformation in Eastern Europe Henri Vogt Volume 2 The Inverted Mirror: Mythologizing the Enemy in France and Germany, 1898–1914 Michael E. Nolan Volume 3 Conflicted Memories: Europeanizing Contemporary Histories Edited by Konrad H. Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger in collaboration with Annelie Ramsbrock

CONFLICTED MEMORIES Europeanizing Contemporary Histories

( Edited by

Konrad H. Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger in collaboration with Annelie Ramsbrock

Berghahn Books NEW YORK • OXFORD

First published in 2007 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2007, 2011 Konrad H. Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger First paperback edition published in 2011 All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Conflicted memories : Europeanizing contemporary histories / edited by Konrad H. Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger in collaboration with Annelie Ramsbrock. p. cm. — (Studies in contemporary european history ; v. 3) Papers from a conference held May 2004 in Potsdam. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-84545-284-1 (hbk) -- ISBN 978-0-85745-167-5 (pbk) 1. Europe—History—20th century—Congresses. 2. History— Philosophy—Congresses. 3. European cooperation— Congresses. 4. Collective memory--Europe--Congresses. I. Jarausch, Konrad Hugo. II. Lindenberger, Thomas, 1955- III. Ramsbrock, Annelie. D424.C665 2007 940.5--dc22

2006038844

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed in the United States on acid-free paper ISBN 978-1–84545–284–1 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-85745-167-5 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-85745-360-0 (ebook)

CONTENTS

( Acknowledgments

ix

List of Acronymns xi Introduction Contours of a Critical History of Contemporary Europe: A Transnational Agenda

1

Konrad H. Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger

Part 1 Contested Memories Chapter 1 History of Memory, Policies of the Past: What For?

23

Henry Rousso

Chapter 2 Communist Legacies in the ‘New Europe’: History, Ethnicity, and the Creation of a ‘Socialist’ Nation in Romania, 1945–1989

37

Dragos¸ Petrescu

Chapter 3 Writing National Histories in Europe: Reflections on the Pasts, Presents and Futures of a Tradition

55

Stefan Berger

Chapter 4 Between Europe and the Nation: The Inward Turn of Contemporary Historical Writing Pieter Lagrou

69

vi

|

Contents

Part 2

Multiple Conflicts

Chapter 5 War and Conflict in Contemporary European History, 1914–2004

81

John Horne

Chapter 6 In Search of a Transnational Historicization: National Socialism and its Place in History

96

Kiran Klaus Patel

Chapter 7 The Origins of the Cold War in Eurasia: A Borderland Perspective

117

Alfred J. Rieber

Part 3

Transnational Interactions

Chapter 8 Europe as Leisure Time Communication: Tourism and Transnational Interaction since 1945

133

Thomas Mergel

Chapter 9 Integration from Below? Migration and European Contemporary History

154

Karen Schönwälder

Chapter 10 Twentieth-Century Culture, ‘Americanization,’ and European Audiovisual Space

164

Marsha Siefert

Chapter 11 Economics of West European Integration? Proving the Benefits 1952–1973

194

André Steiner

Part 4

Unfinished Political Processes

Chapter 12 A European Civil Society? Hartmut Kaelble

209

Contents

Chapter 13 International Socialist Attempts at Bridge-Building in the Early Postwar Period

| vii

221

Örjan Appelqvist

Chapter 14 Nation Building in the Era of Integration: The Case of Moldova

237

Igor Cas¸u

Postscript The Subject(s) of Europe

254

Michael Geyer

Selected Bibliography

281

List of Contributors

289

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

( The project of „Europeanizing Contemporary History“ started some years ago as a modest endeavor to bring together historians from all over Europe who were interested in going beyond the conventional scope of diplomacy, high politics and EU-integration when discussing the 20th century. Thanks to the initiative of Henri Rousso and Pieter Lagrou, then both at the Institut d’histoire du temps present in Paris, these scholars founded a European network, called EurhistXX, during a conference at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (ZZF) in Potsdam in May 2004 (cf. http:// www.eurhistxx.de). This is the first volume documenting their intellectual exchanges and debates. We want to thank all presenters, discussants and session chairs for their support in making this event an exciting experience in transnational intellectual cooperation. We would also like to acknowledge the sponsorship of the event by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the support of the Ministry of Science, Research and Culture of the state of Brandenburg for the international cooperation efforts of the ZZF. Moreover we are grateful for Peter Carrier’s work as translator as well as for the editorial help of our student assistants Anna Littke, Nina Schnieder and Agnieszka Wierzcholska. Our special thanks go to Annelie Ramsbrock, whose commitment, coordinating skills, and friendly persistence were indispensable for turning disparate conference papers into a unified book. Konrad H. Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger Potsdam, October 2006

LIST OF ACRONYMNS

( CEEC Conference on European Economic Cooperation COPA Committee of Professional Agricultural Organisations in the European Union (Comité des Organisations Professionnelles Agricoles de L’Union Européenne) EBU European Broadcasting Union ECE Economic Commission for Europe ECITO European Central Inland Transport Organisation ECOSOC Economic and Social Council ECSC European Coal and Steel Community EEC European Economic Community EECE Economic Emergency Committee for Europe EESC European Economic and Social Committee EFTA European Free Trade Association

xii |

List of Acronymns

ERP European Recovery Program ETUC European Trade Union Confederation GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade GUS Commonwealth of Independent States/CIS (Gemeinschaft Unabhängiger Staaten) GUUAM Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Moldova IGDS Integrated Graduate Development Scheme MPPDA Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America OECD Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development RCP Romanian Communist Party RCPP Romanian Communist Party Programme UNICE Union of Industrial and Employers’ Confederations of Europe UNRRA United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration

Introduction

CONTOURS OF A CRITICAL HISTORY OF CONTEMPORARY EUROPE: A TRANSNATIONAL AGENDA

( Konrad H. Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger

In the soapbox speeches of politicians, references to Europe have until recently functioned as an institutionalized appeal to overcome the nationstate. Intellectuals like the political scientist Jerzy Mackow have lent weight to this notion by calling for a ‘European idea’—which he aptly calls ‘Europeanism’—analogous to the development of nationalism during the nineteenth century. In order to build a common identity on the basis of history beyond ‘a bunch of national narratives and legends,’ he argues ‘the Europeans need to learn and understand European history.’1 Even the past chairman of the Association of German Historians Johannes Fried warns that ‘in spite of cooperation’ the Europeans will not achieve ‘integration and a collective identity’ as long as their ‘national images of memory diverge.’2 During the summer of 2005 the citizen rebellion against Brussels via referenda on the European Constitution dealt the project to devise a historical grounding for further integration a blow whose consequences are still unclear. The grand vision of a United Europe strong enough to have a common foreign and security policy, but also diverse enough to maintain cultural differences, was firmly rejected by two of its partially sovereign member states in June 2005 on the grounds that fundamental changes should be made to the draft. Whereas the public had previously shown little interest in this topic as intellectuals debated the democracy deficit of ‘Brussels bureaucracy,’ French and Dutch citizens made use of the first possible opportunity to stage a practical revolt.3 Shortly afterwards, the fact that the Council of Ministers proved unable to come to a decision on a fundamental revision of the budgetary policy for the years 2007 to 2013 appeared to confirm the scepticism. In spite of the accession of Bulgaria and Romania, the European project has been forced to come to a stop—creating an opportunity to reflect on the significance or insignificance of its ‘historical identity.’ Notes for this section begin on page 17.

2

|

Konrad Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger

Fortunately, the European Commission has until now refrained from specifying a comprehensive strategy to legitimate European integration policy on the basis of a common view of history. All participants in the European project are following the explicit wish of the EU’s founding fathers to prevent a repetition of the historical catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century by creating common interests beyond the nation-state.4 However, the draft of the constitution devised by the European Convention in the summer of 2003 contains only vague allusions to the ‘cultural, religious and humanistic traditions’ on which a community of values might be founded, and to the need, despite a sense of pride in ‘national identity and history,’ to ‘overcome old divisions.’ There is no mention of national conflicts, ethnic cleansing, world wars, and genocides, and the passage about culture contains nothing more than a declaration of intention to contribute towards the ‘improvement of the knowledge and dissemination of the culture and history of the European peoples.’5 The discipline of contemporary history seems to be rather badly equipped to develop the outlines of a European view of history. Even the more critical representatives of the field still approach their objects within the context of the nation-state. And German historians who reflect on the course of development and periodization of contemporary history continue to focus on reappraising the National Socialist dictatorship and on writing separate postwar histories of the divided Germanies.6 The collapse of communism has introduced an additional topic into their agenda, concerning the second dictatorship, so that they now face the challenge of undertaking a ‘dual reappraisal of the past’7—an issue that may only partially apply to other countries. Only recently have authors like Christoph Kleßmann referred to ‘European contemporary history as a problem’ (in contrast to ‘European history’ in general) and pointed out the need for more systematic analysis of the western and eastern contexts as well as the European integration process.8 However, these appeals have so far yielded few substantive results. How should contemporary historians deal with the Treitschke-temptation to justify the integration process by constructing a European master narrative? Some colleagues like Jürgen Elwert from Cologne clearly do not allow themselves to be put off by either ideological scruples or the boredom that arises as a result of the predictability of such a history: ‘Just as national histories of the nineteenth century had provided essential elements on which national identities were based, modern European historical research must contribute towards supporting the European integration process by providing accompanying arguments.’9 Sceptics nevertheless warn against prematurely taking leave of the nation-state and against embarking on further political instrumentalization of history.10 If scholars are to gain the detachment necessary to deal with the object of knowledge known as ‘European contemporary history,’ the time has come for them to reflect on their own role in the process of European integration. The observations

Introduction: A Critical History of Today’s Europe

| 3

that follow will therefore outline some of the deficits contained in European views of history, explain the chronically inadequate responses to research on Europe, point out some interpretational problems that have yet to be solved, and draw on the contributions in this book in order to outline some suggestions for alternatives in regard to content and method.

The Patchwork of Memories Although European schoolbooks repeatedly use the same half-dozen images to illustrate dramatic moments in history, these overlaps are by no means proof of a common ‘European view of history.’ In her suggestive essay on this topic, Susanne Popp has discovered that David’s watercolour The Oath of the Tennis Court, or Goya’s oil painting The 3rd of May 1808: The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid, for example, appear in several textbooks. But it would amount to an overinterpretation if one were to declare that the fifteen most frequently used paintings constitute a ‘canon.’11 Like the huge and incomprehensible outline of the constitution, the failure of the EU to reach an agreement about the illustrations on the common currency should act as a warning against assuming transnational consensus. If an emerging community can agree neither on the leading cultural figures like Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Molière, and Goethe, nor even on outstanding architectural works, which are reproduced on the euro merely in the form of abstract drawings, one can hardly claim that there already exists a common memory culture.12 Similarly, the millions of tourists who make pilgrimages to the churches, palaces and museums of European capital cities each summer are generally presented with a national glorification of the past. Most artifacts on show are nonetheless the products of pre- or transnational relations. For instance, many of the marvellous works of art in Prague were produced in the multinational Habsburg Empire, which attracted outstanding artists from Italy, France and Germany to decorate representative buildings. Even when the origins of the various creators are mentioned, their works tend to be embedded in a narrative of Czech pride that largely suppresses references to Europe while placing emphasis on the present nation-state. Popular brochures present Prague less as a European city, which it undoubtedly was before, than as the capital of the Czech Republic—which it is certainly now. What is accurate as far as development since the late nineteenth century is concerned, might be misleading when it comes to periods before that, which were marked by very different dynastic, religious, and class relations.13 In March 2004, an incident at the Leipzig Book Fair revealed how far Eastern and Western Europeans still are from establishing a ‘common memory culture.’ When the Latvian European commissioner designate Sandra Kalniete claimed that ‘both totalitarianisms—National Socialism

4

|

Konrad Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger

and communism—were equally criminal,’ Salomon Korn, a member of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, demonstratively left the room because he felt that it was an insult to equate these dictatorships with each other.14 The debates about the meaning of the Vichy regime or about the participation of German representatives in the commemoration of the Allied landing in Normandy show how difficult it remains in Western Europe to bring the different national memories of opponents or collaborators of Nazism into line with those of perpetrators in the crimes of the Holocaust. In Eastern Europe, however, critical debate about the past under communism, as demonstrated in a special issue of Eurozine, is still in an early phase insofar as many states in the region continue to focus attention on justifying their precarious national independence.15 While the universalization of the American concept of the Holocaust reduces its usefulness as a ‘negative founding myth’ for Europe, the limitation of the trauma of mass “expulsion” to the East complicates common reference to this event as a Europe-wide memorial narrative.16 For this reason Stefan Troebst has recently reiterated a suggestion made already in 1950 by the Polish exile historian Oskar Halecki to distinguish variations in the European memory landscape caused by the catastrophes of the twentieth century: an Atlantic-Western European memorial community comprised of former Western military opponents of Germany and focusing on D-Day of 1944 and 8 May 1945, should be distinguished from German-speaking West-Central Europe with its multiple traumata resulting from the experience of two dictatorships, bombing raids, and total defeat. A further distinction should to be made with respect to East Central Europe, whose nations had to come to terms not only with two occupations in succession but, moreover, with being at the mercy of Soviet power as permitted by the Yalta conference. In contrast, victory in ‘The Great Patriotic War’ continues to provide a unifying bond for historical identity in the Eastern European states of the Russian Federation. In the case of the zone formerly controlled by the Soviet Union, different memory cultures have emerged that are marked by anti-Russian consensus (the Baltic republics), open conflicts about the past (Poland, Hungary, and also Ukraine and Slovenia), an ambivalent and apathetic attitude towards communist modernization (Bulgaria, Romania, and some Balkan states), and a uninterrupted authoritarian rule that prevents criticism of communist dictatorship (Moldova, Russia, Belarus, and other GUS states). Since the nation-state is expected to continue to be the dominant political unit in Europe in the near future, Troebst is rather pessimistic about the prospects for combining references to the past that characterize such different sites of memory as ‘Stalingrad,’ ‘D-Day,’ ‘Yalta,’ or ‘8 May 1945.’ ‘It is more likely that the division into four parts such as Western Europe, West-Central Europe, East-Central Europe, and Eastern Europe, as they are emerging at present, will at first become even deeper,’ for ‘public discussion has only just begun.’17

Introduction: A Critical History of Today’s Europe

| 5

In light of this patchwork of memory landscapes that are partly isolated and partly in touch with each other, the challenge is to create the greatest possible openness towards the experiences and approaches of the other. ‘Both things must be learnt: how to articulate one’s own misfortune and to remember that of others.’18 An exhibition called ‘The Idea of Europe’ at the German Historical Museum in Berlin demonstrated how difficult it is to practice such a degree of openness. Although its sculptures and paintings provided visual representations of the ‘myth of Europe,’ the old maps revealed that the task of defining the limits of the continent has not at all been easy. Certain common features exist, such as religious uniformity under Roman Christianity or political attempts to create unity under the Holy Roman Empire, but the development of sovereignty illustrates the extent to which the territory was in fact fragmented. The story of the rise of nation-states therefore indicates how the continent gradually disintegrated, whereas the opposed plans to set up systems of ‘eternal peace’ reveal that people rather hoped to pacify the entire known world at that time. The artifacts representing the will to unity in the final room of the exhibition thus testify to the clear insufficiency of the efforts to overcome centuries of discord and war.19 Numerous other examples could be mentioned to show the scarcity of signs that a common European historical consciousness already exists.

Research without Public Response A brief survey of scholarly work devoted to the theme of Europe reveals a contradictory pattern consisting of intense effort and a lack of public response. The lead discipline in this field has been political science, spearheaded by specialists such as Ernst B. Haas, who developed research on European integration as early as the late 1950s.20 This approach expanded rapidly within the field of comparative government following the foundation of European Studies centres at leading American universities, and even gave rise to a special organization, the European Community Studies Association. In recent years, descriptions of the emerging European polity from a political science perspective have become more and more complex, and scholars have also begun to carry out surveys (the Eurobarometer) in order to address qualitative questions about cultural identity. Many researchers thus see themselves as participating observers who combine analysis with political consultancy work in order to promote the integration process. They do this sometimes in a critical, but more often in an affirmative, way.21 In the field of history, some authors of schoolbooks have led the drive to construct a view of the past that is more compatible with Europe by breaking down national stereotypes. As early as the 1950s, a Franco-German schoolbook commission attempted to issue a common declaration on

6

|

Konrad Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger

the origins of the First World War that moved away from the one-sided verdict pronounced in the Treaty of Versailles.22 Over the last few decades, the Georg Eckert Textbook Institute in Braunschweig has undertaken similar negotiations with Central and Eastern European countries in order to reduce the propagation of historical enmity on either side. In the early 1990s, a common project even attempted to devise a ‘European Schoolbook,’ while individual authors propagated instructions for a transnational representation of history.23 Initiatives such as the Körber Foundation’s Student Contest have also contributed towards toning down the depictions of various conflicts, though most curricula continue to draw on national views of the past and thus perpetuate this approach in the present. Historical researchers have also devoted more time to Europe recently, albeit without being able to inspire many of their colleagues with enthusiasm. Initial empirical research and publications of source material about the origins of integration go back to the 1950s. More recently, the European University Institute in Florence has included this topic in its programme of research and published works that have stimulated considerable interest in the field.24 Some of the larger publishing houses in Germany have also produced book series on topics such as ‘Building Europe.’ The Beck publishing house has even founded a new multilingual journal with the not entirely original title Journal of Modern European History.25 However, there exist very few critical studies like the work by John Gillingham, which analyzes not only the successes, but also the failures of the unification process. Genuinely transnational investigations into European social and cultural history that go beyond the history of international relations and wars are still rare.26 The situation faced by the subfield of contemporary history is even more complex, for its origins are closely connected to the effort to come to terms with the ideological dictatorships of the twentieth century. Differing research priorities regarding the recent past have given rise to considerable disparities. Whereas in postfascist democracies contemporary history emerged mainly as a self-critical response to national transgressions, in Western European countries treatment of the Second World War has focused rather on National Socialist repression as part of the experience of occupation. By comparison, historians in Central and Eastern Europe have only just begun to revise their understanding of Soviet domination and to reappraise the consequences of communism. Periodizations are equally varied. In France ‘contemporary history’ starts with the revolution of 1789, and in Central Europe it generally begins with the First World War, whereas in Eastern Europe it refers to the period after 1945.27 Instead of doing research on major catastrophes of the first half of the century in a transnational perspective and understanding the Cold War as the division of Europe, most contemporary historians continue to operate within a national framework in order to do justice to the stories of their own people’s suffering, collaboration, or perpetration.

Introduction: A Critical History of Today’s Europe

| 7

In sum, the academic field of European politics and history is no less fragmented and varied than the memorial landscape known as ‘Europe.’ Productive research on the European Union, idealistic European didactics, and presentist pan-European historiography clash with the persistence of nationally defined themes of contemporary history, privileging particular versions of suffering to form a confused melange in which only a modicum of common trends and clusters is beginning to emerge. In dealing with Europe, contemporary historians have therefore barely begun to overcome this unsatisfactory situation by fostering a transnational dialogue about overarching sources, methods, and themes.

Contentions about Substantive Issues One of the chief causes of disinterest is the lack of distinctiveness of historical problems connected with the label ‘Europe.’ This becomes apparent in the geographical imprecision of what references to Europe mean. A quick survey of half a dozen new textbooks from the United States reveals a number of problem areas, the first of these being the uncertainty of European borders, which is the key to whether people speak in positive terms of a ‘rebirth,’ or in negative terms of a ‘dark continent.’28 The tendency to perceive Europe as the site of civilization and progress gives rise to celebrations of “Western Civilization” that emphasize US affinity with England and France during the world wars and include the smaller Western European states. But the twofold wartime enemy Germany and its neighbors fit this pattern only if they are perceived as a ‘close other,’ for their relapse into the barbarity of National Socialism is beyond comprehension. Moreover, Central and Eastern Europe are almost completely ignored because this area lay behind the Iron Curtain, while the role played by Russia both within and outside of Europe generally remains vague as well.29 This way of defining Europe from the point of view of Western Europe is not confined to the United States, for it also occurs cum grano salis in representations of Western European origin. A second set of problems concerns the themes arising from differing methodological perspectives and therefore the metanarratives that might lend coherence to interpretations. Does it suffice, as in many handbooks, to present an overarching history of international relations, wars, and peace treaties in combination with separate chapters about the domestic politics of specific countries?30 Should the presentation instead concentrate on the social process of modernization and celebrate the development of Europe as civilizing advance, only interrupted by crises and relapses that almost defy explanation?31 Or should it deal with the competition between the major ideological power centres of communism, fascism, and democracy, which determined the foreign and domestic policies of European states between 1917 and 1992?32 In spite of the decisive experiences of authoritarian

8

|

Konrad Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger

and totalitarian regimes, might the secular development of the economy and society, for instance in mass consumption and popular culture, moderated by the welfare state and global competition, not be in fact the essential theme on which a transnational history of Europe in the twentieth century ought to focus?33 A third area of controversy is the actual or perceived relationship between Europe and the rest of the world, for the cliché of ‘unity in variety’ may be dissolved only if it is contrasted with the alterity of the other. Most broad overviews tend to ignore the postcolonial deconstruction of Eurocentricity that happened in reaction to the suffering meted out by European imperialism throughout the world, for it would otherwise tarnish the positive self-perception underpinning the sense of cultural superiority in Western Europe. Indeed, did not the colonized peoples’ habit of perceiving all ‘white folk’ as ‘Europeans’ cause national differences to become blurred?34 A similar problem that is rarely discussed is the ambivalent relation between Europe and the English-speaking countries of North America and other overseas territories. Although the spread of European civilization in the transatlantic area could initially be understood as a form of outward projection, it led to the emergence of a more dynamic alternative in the New World, which was to save and subsequently rehabilitate the old continent during the world wars.35 What is specifically European about Europe, in contrast to the settlement colonies and North America? A final, and perhaps even more contentious issue, is the question of the fundamental values embodied by Europe, on which the common core of this Faustian civilization is based. Even if the Judaeo-Christian origins of European moral precepts are generally acknowledged, the Reformation refuted the idea that the Western world was united in its Catholic origins—not to mention the fatal element of anti-Semitism contained in both subsequent confessions.36 Another frequently discussed issue is the heritage of the Enlightenment and its attempt rationally to justify political and human rights on the one hand, and to strive towards finding practical means to improve living conditions on the other. However, both postcolonial and feminist theories have demonstrated important flaws in the Enlightenment project, because it has all too often been used as a means to legitimate the domination of white European men.37 How do the ideologies of fascism and communism, which cost the lives of millions of victims, fit into this overly positive self-image of the Europeans? Were they merely atavistic relapses or rather typical expressions of modern civilization?38 Many of these fundamental questions regarding the interpretation of European development have yet to be addressed by scholarship—a situation that has contributed to the historical amnesia of ‘Europe.’ Since a general historical study presupposes a clear definition of the issues, a genuinely European contemporary history requires the clarification of its

Introduction: A Critical History of Today’s Europe

| 9

objects and problems in advance. The time seems ripe to engage in intensive discussion about this topic on the basis of the different memories in the East and West that were outlined above.

Means of Methodological Rapprochement Since essentialist theories have not proven successful, a common view of the European past can only be developed by recognizing the plurality of contemporary histories. The attempt to bring together diverse national narratives under one pan-European roof is no more satisfactory than the teleological emphasis on the shared essence of the ‘Enlightenment and liberal-democratic heritage of Europe’ or the retroprojection of presentday attempts at integration onto the period before 1945. Precisely because knowledge, values, and perspectives differ drastically from nation to nation, the ‘plurality of interpretations of European history is completely inevitable.’ In order to avoid arbitrary interpretations, such a constructivist approach must aim to identify the specifically European dimension of transnational developments. According to Hannes Siegrist, it is ‘not a question of homogenizing or harmonizing European history, but of building coherence and determining relations between stories made by Europeans, with which Europeans can identify and on the basis of which Europeans can be distinguished from non-Europeans.’39 The classic way of analyzing common tendencies and individual variations is to compare national, regional, and local developments systematically. Even a comparison between just two cases can serve to clarify general trends and uncover distinctions—a method that proves to be even more effective when three or more units are included in the comparison. However, it is also necessary to question large-scale quantitative generalizations on the basis of more specific qualitative information, in order to avoid the danger of superficiality. Instead of making essentialist assumptions about Europe, empirical contrasts with other continents could serve to expose certain similarities among European characteristics beyond national boundaries. For this reason Heinz-Gerhard Haupt suggests that we should also take cultural factors into consideration when dealing with social science hypotheses, broadening their scope into a ‘comparative history of discourse and ideas.’ Such a perspective would transform Europe ‘from a fixed entity into a varied ensemble of attributions that vary according to interests, authors and the economic situation.’40 Another approach, which places greater emphasis on relations and interconnections, is ‘transnational history.’ With this concept, Klaus Kiran Patel, for instance, seeks to discover ‘interdependencies and transfers across (national) borders as well as mutual perceptions’ and also to distinguish ‘forms of interrelatedness,’ that is, to deal with structural connections below and beyond the nation-state. The quest to establish such

10

|

Konrad Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger

interactions breaks through the walls of national history, but in contrast to international history that deals with interactions between states, transnational history focuses more on social processes and cultural exchanges. The resulting discussions about notions of territoriality, transfer processes, transactions, etc. could prove to be extremely fruitful for an analysis of changing perceptions of identities and interconnections throughout Europe. Instead of establishing a new historical teleology, ‘the starting point of a transnational approach to European unification could be the question, what has the term “Europe” actually meant at different moments in history’?41 The concept of histoire croisée represents another ambitious attempt to think through the epistemological consequences of the multiplication of histories resulting from a transnational perspective. The ‘crossing’ of history presupposes that the transfer is not confined to a one-way direction, and that its object is not subjected to a process of material concretization. Meanings change as a result of the process of transfer, and the perspectives inherent in such a relation encourage not only a variety of viewpoints, but different histories as well. The connection between them does not develop on the narrative level of a unique and ‘true’ history, but of an ensemble of histories that are interconnected and yet not mutually assimilated. The suggestion to carry out a combined analysis of the ideological dependence of historical narratives and the complexity of historical issues, without neglecting either of these aspects, is not only helpful for the task of writing contemporary history from a transnational perspective, but is also part of a series of deconstructions of unified history that can be rendered in a single narrative. While drawing on theories of global history and postcolonial history, it is not by chance that the idea of histoire croisée has emerged primarily in relation to histories of intra-European relations in which antagonisms and affinities were closely bound up with each other. A final approach to contemporary history could be a self-reflexive history of historiography that addresses the relationship between political concerns, methodological approaches, and the conclusions which historians draw on the basis of their interpretations. Comparative analysis of the effect of changing historical views on the development of nationalism in Europe has already revealed the extent to which historians have functioned as designers of an ‘imagined community.’ There is ample evidence to show that scholarship became more professionalized in different countries precisely during the consolidation of the nation-state and that historians assumed the role of national prophets across the continent.42 This finding raises uncanny questions about the relation between European integration as a political process and the academic acclaim accorded to it by scholars who ought to be employing a more self-critical approach. Instead of simply celebrating Europe as a normative goal, after the destructive experience of nationalism they ought to treat Europe

Introduction: A Critical History of Today’s Europe

| 11

more dispassionately as a cognitive problem in order to live up to their scientific responsibility. Unless there is a constructivist theoretical and methodological understanding and an acceptance of plurality, Europeanized contemporary history is likely to remain little more than the sum of its component national histories. Classic studies of the emergence of the idea of Europe, the European state system, and the European economy and society have until now been able to shed light only on parts of the development of the old continent. The recent discussion about comparative and transnational approaches and the concept of histoire croisée provide valuable suggestions for a more complex approach that transcends national boundaries and explores common as well as divergent aspects both within and without.

Outlines of a Critical History of Europe What form might a critical contemporary history of Europe take, if it went beyond the Sunday speeches of politicians? The following observations will attempt to outline an alternative, based on four key questions. First, it seems necessary to understand Europe in terms of a framework of conflicting memories that cannot be magically fitted together to form a common view of the past. It required much effort to adapt Pierre Nora’s model of French ‘sites of memory’ to German history, for his closed system of a polyphonic master narrative of a nation that claimed to have been united for hundreds of years could not just be transferred to the German case, where a long history of disunity prevented such an affirmative construction. How can this same recipe be adapted to Europe’s history of nationstates?43 The new member states of the EU, which have only recently (re-)acquired sovereignty, show in particular that their independence is still largely being legitimated on the basis of a recovery of an autonomous national history.44 Only systematical reflection about distortions and simplifications resulting from mutually inflicted suffering will make it possible to break the shackles of national master narratives.45 This collection of essays therefore begins with the theme of ‘contested memories,’ examining the relation between national memory cultures and the political use of history in the course of European integration. Henry Rousso addresses such paradigmatic developments within national memory cultures as oral history, Pierre Nora’s ‘sites of memory,’ and the anamnesis of the trauma of Judaeocide, and inquires why, over the last decade and therefore fifty years after the event, the history of the Holocaust has established itself as a central feature of national memory politics that contrasts sharply with the optimistic imaginings of a ‘reborn’ Europe freed of the burden of the past. Dragoş Petrescus’s presentation of the political use of history in postcommunist Romania then explains why the quest to establish contemporary history writing that is critical of its own nation-state

12

|

Konrad Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger

and open to Europe is still far from being accepted as common property. His thesis is that the delayed construction of national identity under Ceaus¸escu’s oppressive rule has left Romanian memory culture preoccupied with its own problems of postcommunist transition, hindering a broadening of historical sensibilities. In contrast, Stefan Berger outlines the development of national historiographies as a form of academic practice in modern Europe. Apart from an initial phase of consolidation after 1945, he argues in a more optimistic vein that these histories were exposed to sustained disruptions that brought about a greater plurality of methods, theories, and objects. He concludes by discussing what shape might be taken by a ‘safe’ national history that could no longer be used to spur national antagonisms. Pieter Lagrou similarly treats the paradoxical ascendancy of the national focus in historical scholarship that emerged in the wake of the Second World War in Western Europe. He argues that it was precisely the historiographical projects that adopted a critical stance (often representing the viewpoint of minorities) towards the history of the Second World War, occupation, and the Holocaust, that for several decades encouraged contemporary historians to focus their attention inwards towards national spaces and institutions. He concludes by inquiring into the prospects for a systematically ‘unbounded’ contemporary history in the European context. The second part of the volume considers Europe not as a harmonious continent but as a sphere of bloody conflict, by placing emphasis on the almost permanent discord that has prevailed there. Religious quarrels, class struggle, national conflicts, ethnic cleansing, world wars, and genocides are not exceptions, but central threads of the European tapestry. Throughout the continent in the ruins of cities, destroyed landscapes, ubiquitous cemeteries, and black-rimmed pictures in family albums they have left traces of horror, that only someone with a naïve belief in progress could deny. The Germans certainly played a central role as the aggressors and oppressors, as the far-flung activities of their War Graves Commission show, yet other Europeans became persecutors and victims far from their home countries as well. The prevailing concern with national suffering does not do justice to these complex inter- and intranational conflicts. The historical perspective therefore needs to be enlarged in order to encompass more comprehensive aspects of such negative European interactions.46 John Horne ruminates on ‘war and conflict’ in the twentieth century by inquiring whether it is at all possible to write a contemporary history of Europe with these issues in mind. The lack of clarity of both the concepts of ‘Europe’ and ‘contemporary history’ paradoxically proves to be an advantage, because the chief features of the European wars and conflicts during the twentieth century—‘revolutions,’ ‘total war,’ ‘totalitarian ideologies,’ and the relation between territory, population, and statehood as well as the relation between democracy and decolonization in the various European nations—had a rather different impact from one case to another. None of

Introduction: A Critical History of Today’s Europe

| 13

these themes can adequately be dealt with on the basis of one nation or even all nations, for the experience of catastrophes in Europe is marked by heterogeneous temporal horizons and chronologies. Kiran Klaus Patel proposes instead an unusual transnational perspective on the history of National Socialism. This approach requires a broader periodization that is not confined to the dates of 1933 to 1945 as in the case of most national historiography, but encompasses the entire scope of the ‘Second Thirty Years’ War’ from 1914 to 1945. He claims that a transnational perspective facilitates the reconstruction of internal connections of this part of European history without presupposing the existence of a harmonious dream of a Grand Europe. Alfred Rieber similarly focuses on the Eastern part of Europe, and therefore on an often neglected region, by investigating the origins of the Cold War on the borderline between Europe and Asia. Instead of blaming the superpower rivalry, he places the conflict in the context of the longue durée of attempts at domination by large Eurasian state organizations. Leading to the spread of the Soviet sphere of influence in various border areas, the Second World War gave rise to a series of civil wars and resistance movements, ethnic cleansings and regime changes, none of which conformed to the confrontations and diplomatic accommodations of the superpowers during the Cold War. In the third part of this book, the past fortunately appears in a more positive light because these chapters focus on the transnational interactions that are no less ‘European’ than the conflicts between nation-states and national cultures. Even if cooperation among the European powers proved to be short-lived and political initiatives like the Hague Convention on the laws and customs of land warfare merely served to channel but not resolve conflicts, international contacts in other areas such as science and culture were far closer. Recent exhibitions about links between capital cities like Paris, Berlin, and Moscow have demonstrated that the cultural avant-garde was engaged in such lively exchanges that individual artists like Kandinsky can hardly be assigned to a single national context.47 During the height of imperialism at the beginning of the twentieth century, economic relations between leading European nations were considerably closer than during the interwar years or between these nations and their own overseas colonies.48 The interpretative task therefore consists of reconstructing these transnational networks and of uncovering in more detail the specific contribution made by Europe, which was initially considered to be identical with the civilized world but eventually began to acquire characteristics of its own. To uncover these elusive links, Thomas Mergel outlines the development of transnational tourism in Europe since 1945, inquiring as to what extent these collective experiences can be interpreted as part of the emergence of a Europe ‘from below.’ His thesis that mass travel can be largely defined as constituting a leisure-time Europe reveals a contradiction between a transnational opening towards other cultures and a

14

|

Konrad Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger

simultaneous closing off from them through efforts to preserve indigenous traditions. Karen Schönwälder explores the meaning of the migration experience for relations between European countries and between them and other countries beyond Europe. Although migration processes certainly increased during the twentieth century and became a central feature of European history, they still receive too little attention in writings on contemporary history. Marsha Siefert tackles the contentious issue of the Americanization of European popular culture through the commercial ascendancy of US rock music and Hollywood movies after the Second World War. At the same time she outlines the consistent efforts, spearheaded by the French government, to preserve some kind of indigenous European audiovisual space, which have been only partly successful due to the difficulty of establishing an equally attractive popular culture on a continent of many different languages that can hardly be said to contain a ‘common cultural heritage.’ André Steiner inquires into transnational interactions from the perspective of economic history by suggesting ways of investigating the economic effects of European integration before 1973 more precisely in order to determine whether growth was due to integration or to broader international developments. On the basis of empirical evidence from the automobile industry, he is able to show some positive effects of the common market without being able to sustain the more optimistic claims of the integration advocates. Although the results achieved in this field are still very limited, it is finally essential to analyze the exciting process by which a new political actor known as ‘Europe’ is emerging on the international stage. There already exists an impressive array of works written on the history of ideas, which primarily seeks to trace the development of various notions of Europe.49 The history of integration in the narrow sense has also been dealt with to some degree, even if a few of the English-language surveys tend to reproduce the noble pronouncements of politicians rather than the tribulations of European everyday life.50 Yet in order to develop an independent judgement, it is necessary to adopt a more critical attitude to the European rhetoric of unity, undertake a more thorough investigation of lobbying in Brussels, and place more explicit emphasis on the periodic setbacks that European enthusiasts are inclined to overlook. Finally, more imagination is needed when passing judgement on the supranational versus international aspects of the structures of the EU than has generally been the case, since the fixation on the emergence of a ‘United States of Europe’ merely tends to project the traditional nation-state model onto a bigger screen.51 The fourth part of this book therefore opens with an essay by Hartmut Kaelble about the emergence of European civil society. He inquires into the associational ‘foundations’ of the EU and its institutional landscape, concentrated in Brussels and Strasbourg, and comprising the European

Introduction: A Critical History of Today’s Europe

| 15

Commission, the Council of Ministers and European Parliament; then presents the agents of civil society, many of whose activities are conducted with an eye to influencing EU policies in areas of their special interests. According to Kaeble, these civil society actors operate more decentrally and with more autonomy than national representatives, but are significant building blocks of a shared public sphere in the future. Örjan Appelqvist deals with the origins of European political projects in the period after the Second World War by examining in detail the International Group of Democratic Socialists, an alliance of exiled socialist politicians in Sweden. He reconstructs their far-reaching plans for Europe and traces their partial blockage and deflection into international aid organizations. Even though it could not prevent the relative weakening of European efforts following the onset of the Cold War, this group produced sustained effects that are evident from the subsequent political impact of many of its protagonists. Igor Cas¸u examines a more recent example of ‘re-Europeanization’ on the very edge of Europe: at last liberated from the Soviet Union, the Republic of Moldova is now faced with the challenge of constructing a national identity out of an ethnically diverse Romanian and Russian population while at the same time finding a regional role in Southeastern Europe. Since affirmative attempts to create a shared memory tend towards oversimplification, it is essential to develop a critical history of Europe as an alternative to research committed to the rhetoric of integration. Such a history should accord just as much attention to negative aspects of the past, such as clashes of memories and bloody conflicts, as to the positive dimensions, such as transactions and integration processes. As Michael Geyer’s postscript suggests, this project ought to begin with people, their migrations, networks, and civil societies extending across national frontiers. Instead of operating with a normative notion, it will also need to confront the instability of the very definition of Europe, a continent united through military conflict as much as through trade relations and cultural exchanges. The essays presented in this volume do not pretend to provide conclusive assessments of these four themes, but should indicate the direction in which research could go in the future.

Challenges of Europeanization The aim of these observations on the problem of a shared European memory is to stimulate debate about a new approach to European history that takes into account the dynamics of integration processes without being confined to merely legitimating them after the fact. Following the enlargement of the EU in Eastern Europe, Stephan Martens warned that ‘the fantastic visions and ahistorical thinking of the political elite, especially the Franco-German elite, should not jeopardize Europe’s future.’ The technocratic pragmatism

16

|

Konrad Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger

of European politicians and bureaucrats in Brussels, who are struggling to find solutions to problems currently arising from the integration process, is insufficient because it neglects the clashing identities of member nations that have resulted from contrary historical self-images. A striking example of this effect is Britain’s resentment towards involvement in mainland Europe in the wake of the two world wars and its lost empire. Hubert Markl’s proposal to foster a ‘culture of forgetting’ is also questionable precisely because it precludes analysis of history that is both separate and shared at the same time.52 A mutual understanding of conflicting pasts can only emerge through an open, transnational process of discussion. In order to establish a ‘common memory culture,’ contemporary historians should switch their focus from the nation to bi-, tri-, and multinational points of reference. The obsessive preoccupation with the role of one’s own nation as either a victim or a perpetrator certainly shows that such a change is necessary: war and oppression presuppose the existence of an ‘other’ who regularly acted in the name of a ‘hostile’ nation or was assumed to be part of that nation. One’s own suffering and the suffering of others are therefore interdependent, raising questions that go beyond the scope of a single nation.53 Only such a frank avowal of past difference can preclude a shallow harmonization of Europe and thus pave the way for a critical understanding of the old continent as an area of incessant conflict between civilizing aspirations and contemptible crimes. One ought not to forget that the product of European modernization is not only progress, but also genocide. This irreducible ambivalence is the very basis for a learning process that aims at peaceful integration by means of negotiated treaties and common, democratically legitimated institutions.54 In order to establish a transnational approach to contemporary history a number of methodological and thematic problems have to be resolved. For example, traditional national historiography can only be overcome by inquiring into comparisons, interconnections, or intersections. It is equally important to agree on a cross-national periodization. Should analysis be based on the short or on the long twentieth century? Does the German division into old (before 1945), recent (after 1945), and current contemporary history (after 1989) provide a flexible solution?55 Moreover, supranational thematic clusters have to be identified, such as the competition between the fascist and communist dictatorships and parliamentary democracies, which were initially in retreat but have since met with success.56 Also addressed should be the multiple ways of overcoming the effects of war as well as the European project to build a welfare state on the basis of constant economic growth. Not forgotten ought to be the changing global status of Europe that has let to the loss of European supremacy, the dynamics of its self-destruction, and the partial economic and political recovery. Finally, it is important to inquire into the grassroots processes of mobilization within civil society that began to overcome the division of the old continent during the final quarter of the twentieth century.57

Introduction: A Critical History of Today’s Europe

| 17

Although a departure from the nation as the sole source of sovereignty and community is long overdue, it should not lead to an uncritical affirmation of the European project as a justification for a different political instrumentalization of the past. By substituting a normative history of Europe for a national history as a metanarrative, scholars would simply be jumping from the frying pan into the fire, because this process would entail similar mythologization. For instance, cold wars have been waged and people oppressed in the name of a united, ‘anticommunist’ Europe. As such, Europe harbours no comforting certainties about the future, because it is a container that can be filled with a wide variety of political values including, for example, unbridled neoliberalism. The ‘unifying power of the quest for truth underpinned by critical reflection’ must also remain a guiding principle for the Europeanization of contemporary history, so that researchers do not again subordinate themselves to a political project the implications of which are not only controversial, but still unknown in many respects.58 In order to preserve the European heritage of human rights and civil society, contemporary historians therefore must summon up more courage to be self-critical. The aim of ‘European contemporary history’ should not be a hasty harmonization but a critical acknowledgement of past differences, balanced by an appreciation of common ground. A homogenized integration history will have only a limited appeal, because it systematically exaggerates the positive interconnections, rather than addressing the conflicting and painful memories. The suffering inflicted by countries on each other during the last century was so intense that it requires great effort to neutralize the national identities derived from wars, dictatorships, mass murder, and expulsions so that they no longer breed enmity but can be recognized as recurrent dangers that have to be overcome. A common memory culture cannot be created by cute advertising symbols from Brussels, but must emerge out of a long process of talking and listening to each other. The ‘spirit of enlightening and enlightened scholarship’ can help to build bridges between traumatized memories, because critical research can expose the political function of nationalist legends. The challenge of writing a critical history of contemporary Europe consists in demythologizing European modernity and nationhood rather than mythologizing the bureaucracy of the EU.59

Notes Introduction to the conference ‘Thinking Europe: Towards a Europeanization of Contemporary Histories’ in Berlin/Potsdam, 6–8 May 2004. Cf. Kau, ‘Europäer, du mußt wandern,’ in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 11 May 2004, and Annelie Ramsbrock, ‘Patchwork Europa?,’ at http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/tagungsberichte/id=498.

18

|

Konrad Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger

1. Jerzy Mackow, ‘Europäismus,’ in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 17 December 2003. 2. Johannes Fried, ‘Erinnerung und Vergessen. Die Gegenwart stiftet die Einheit der Vergangenheit,’ Historische Zeitschrift 273 (2001): 561–93. 3. Ulrike Ackermann, ed., Versuchung Europa: Stimmen aus dem europäischen Raum (Frankfurt am Main, 2003). 4. Helmut Kohl, Erinnerungen 1930–1982 (Munich, 2004), 84ff, 208ff. Cf. Wilfried Loth, Der Weg nach Europa: Geschichte der europäischen Integration 1939–1957 (Göttingen, 1996), 3. 5. ‘Draft Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe,’ 18 July 2003, Section 3, Article III-181, 2.a, 146. http://european-convention.eu.int. Cf. “Bittere Erfahrungen” der Vergangenheit und der Prozess der Konstitutionalisierung Europas, conference at Berlin, 20–21 October, 2006. 6. Hans-Günter Hockerts, ‘Zeitgeschichte in Deutschland. Begriff, Methoden, Themenfelder,’ Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte (1993): B29–30, 3–19; Anselm Döring Manteuffel, ‘Deutsche Zeitgeschichte nach 1945: Entwicklung und Problemlagen der historischen Forschung zur Nachkriegszeit,’ Historische Zeitschrift 265 (1993): 1–29; Axel Schildt, ‘Nachkriegszeit: Möglichkeiten und Probleme einer Periodisierung der westdeutschen Geschichte nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg und ihrer Einordnung in die deutsche Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts,’ Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 44 (1993): 567–584. 7. Konrad H. Jarausch, ‘A Double Burden: The Politics of the Past and German Identity,’ in Jörn Leonhard and Lothar Funk, eds., Ten Years of German Unification: Transfer, Transformation, Incorporation? (Birmingham, 2002), 98–114. 8. Christoph Kleßmann, ‘Zeitgeschichte als wissenschaftliche Aufklärung,’ Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 52 (2002): B51/2, 3–12; see also Michael Gehler, ‘Zeitgeschichte zwischen Europäisierung und Globalisierung,’ ibid., 23–35. 9. Jürgen Elwert, ‘Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Nationalhistorie für Europa,’ unpublished manuscript, (Cologne, 2002). 10. Tony Judt, A Grand Illusion? An Essay on Europe (New York, 1996); and Harold James, Vom Historikerstreit zum Historikerschweigen: Die Wiedergeburt des Nationalstaates (Berlin, 1993). 11. Susanne Popp, ‘Auf dem Weg zu einem europäischen “Geschichtsbild”,’ Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 54 (2004): B7/8, 23–31. 12. Harold James, Europe Reborn: A History 1914–2000 (Harlow, 2003), 442f. 13. ‘Prag—das Herz Europas,’ [email protected]. 14. Christoph von Marschall, ‘Der nächste Osten: Wird der Völkermord zum Aufrechnungs-Exempel? Zum Streit um Hitlers und Stalins Verbrechen im Baltikum,’ Tagesspiegel, 1 April 2004; and Solomon Korn, ‘NS- und Sowjetverbrechen. Sandra Kalnietes falsche Gleichsetzung,’ Süddeutsche Zeitung, 31 January 2004. 15. Birgit Schwelling, ‘Das Gedächtnis Europas: Eine Diagnose,’ in Timm Beichelt et al., eds., Europa-Studien: Eine Einführung (Wiesbaden, 2005). Cf. ‘Summary for NZ 40–41,’ in Eurozine, no. 2, 2005: 1ff. 16. Michael Jeismann, ’Völkermord und Vertreibung: Medien der Europäisierung?,’ Historische Anthropologie, no. 15 (2005), 111–120. Cf. Aleida Assmann, ‘Europe as a Community of Memory?’ Annual lecture of the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C., 16 November 2006. 17. Stefan Troebst, ‘Holodomor oder Holocaust?’ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 4 July 2005. Vl. See also Heinrich-August Winkler, ‘Geteilte Erinnerung,’ Süddeutsche Zeitung, 14 July 2005. 18. Stephane Courtois et al., eds., Schwarzbuch des Kommunismus: Unterdrückung, Verbrechen und Terror (Munich, 1997); and Sibylle Quack, ‘Fremdes und eigenes Leid. Europa braucht eine gemeinsame Erinnerungskultur,’ Süddeutsche Zeitung, 14 April 2004. 19. Marie Louise von Plessen, Idee Europa: Entwürfe zum ‘Ewigen Frieden.’ Ordnungen und Utopien für die Gestaltung Europas von der pax romana zur Europäischen Union (Berlin, 2003), 33–41. 20. Ernst B. Haas, The Uniting of Europe: Political, Social and Economic Forces, 1950–1957 (Stanford, 1958); and Leon Lindberg, The Political Dynamics of European Economic Integration (Stanford, 1963).

Introduction: A Critical History of Today’s Europe

| 19

21. Gary Marks and Liesbeth Hooge, Multilevel Governance and European Integration (Lanham, MD, 2000). See also the newsletter of the Center for European Studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. 22. Joint declaration of French and German Historians, reprinted in Dwight E. Lee, The Outbreak of the First World War: Causes and Responsibilities (Lexington, MA, 1975) 4th ed. 23. Frederic Delouche et al., Europäisches Geschichtsbuch: Geschichtliches Unterrichtswerk für Sekundarstufe I und II. Erarbeitet von 12 europäischen Historikern (Stuttgart, 1992); Falk Pingel, Macht Europa Schule? Die Darstellung Europas in Schulbüchern der Europäischen Gemeinschaft (Frankfurt am Main, 1995); and Horst Gies, Nation und Europa in der historisch-politischen Bildung (Schwalbach 1998). Cf. also Eustory via www.stiftung.koerber.de. 24. European University Institute, ‘Publications,’ http://www.iue.it/PUB/. 25. Hagen Schulze, Staat und Nation in der europäischen Geschichte (Munich, 1994), 4. See the publisher’s announcement in Journal of Modern European History, 2003. 26. Jack Gillingham, European Integration: Superstate or New Market Economy, 1950–2003 (Cambridge, 2003). Cf. Hartmut Kaelble, Auf dem Weg zu einer europäischen Gesellschaft: Eine Sozialgeschichte Westeuropas 1880–1980 (Munich, 1987); and Gerold Ambrosius, Wirtschaftsraum Europa: Vom Ende der Nationalökonomien (Frankfurt am Main, 1996). 27. Alexander Nützendadel and Wolfgang Schieder, eds., Zeitgeschichte als Problem: Nationale Traditionen und Perspektiven der Forschung in Europa (Göttingen, 2004), 7–24. 28. See Harold James, Europe Reborn: A History, 1914–2000 (Harlow, 2003), and Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York, 1999). 29. Stuart Wolf, ‘Europa und seine Historiker,’ Comparativ 11 (2004): 50–71. Cf. Karl Schlögel, Die Mitte liegt ostwärts: Die Deutschen, der verlorene Osten und Mitteleuropa (Berlin, 1986); and Gesine Schwan, ‘Die Tücken der Ortsbestimmung—wo liegt Osteuropa?’ Osteuropa 52 (2002): 389–94. 30. Theodor Schieder, ed., Handbuch der europäischen Geschichte,(Stuttgart, 1967–1986), 7 vols.; and Herrmann Kellenbenz, ed., Handbuch der europäischen Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschicht (Stuttgart, 1980ff.), 6 vols. 31. Spencer M. Di Scala, Twentieth Century Europe: Politics, Society, Cultur ( Boston, 2000). 32. For alternative interpretations, see Francois Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 1999); and Eric J. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1917–1991 (London, 1994). 33. James, Europe Reborn, x. 34. Hanna Schissler, ‘Why teach Europe?’ unpublished manuscript, Braunschweig, 2001. Cf. Ute Frevert, Eurovisionen: Ansichten guter Europäer (Frankfurt am Main, 2003). 35. Volker R. Berghahn, America and the Cultural Cold Wars in Europe: Sheperd Stone between Philanthropy, Academy and Diplomacy (Princeton, 2001). 36. Krystof Pomian, Europa und seine Nationen (Berlin, 1990), 17ff. praises this Carolingian conception. 37. For an alternative voice, see Lynn Hunt, ed., The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History (Boston, 1996). 38. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, 2000). 39. Wolf, ‘Europa und seine Historiker,’ and Hannes Siegrist and Rolf Petri, ‘Geschichten Europas. Probleme, Methoden und Perspektiven,’ in Comparativ 11 (2004): 7–14, 50–71. Cf. also Bo Strath and Mikael Malmberg, eds., The Meaning of Europe: Variety and Contention within and between Nations (Oxford, 2002). 40. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, ‘Die Geschichte Europas als vergleichende Geschichtsschreibung,’ Comparativ 11 (2004): 83–97. 41. Kiran Klaus Patel, ‘Nach der Nationalfixiertheit. Perspektiven einer transnationalen Geschichte,’ Öffentliche Vorlesungen der Humboldt-Universität, no. 128 (Berlin, 2004), 9ff, 23f. See also Konrad H. Jarausch, ‘Reflections on Transnational History,’ H-German, January 2006. 42. Christoph Conrad and Sebastian Conrad, eds., Die Nation schreiben: Geschichtswissenschaft im internationalen Vergleich (Göttingen, 2002), 11ff.

20

|

Konrad Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger

43. Etienne François and Hagen Schulze, eds., Deutsche Erinnerungsorte (Munich, 2001), 3 vols. 44. Christian Domnitz, ‘Der heimliche Traum von Europa: Die europäische Einigung ist nicht allein eine Erfindung des Westens. Auch Polen, Tschechen und Ungarn dachten darüber nach—nur anders,’ Tagesspiegel, 5 May 2004. Cf. Stefan Berger, Mark Donovan, and Kevin Passmore, Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800 (London, 1999). 45. Martin Sabrow, ed., Abschied von der Nation? Deutsche Geschichte und europäische Zukunft (Leipzig, 2003). 46. Dan Diner, Das Jahrhundert verstehen: Eine universalhistorische Deutung (Munich, 1999). 47. See for example the exhibition catalogue Berliner Festspiele/Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, eds., Berlin—Moskau. Moskau Berlin: Kunst aus fünf Jahrzehnten, 1950–2000 (Berlin, 2003), 2 vols. 48. Ambrosius, Wirtschaftsraum Europa, 10ff. 49. Anthony Pagden, ed., The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union (Cambridge, 2002), and Wolf Gruner, Die deutsche Frage—ein Problem der europäischen Geschichte (Munich, 1985). 50. Mark Gilbert, Surpassing Realism: The Politics of European Integration since 1945, (Lanham, MD, 2003). Cf. The Journal of European Integration History, which has been in existence since 1995. 51. Speech by M. Rainer Lepsius in the Wissenschaftszentrum, Berlin. Cf. Ludger Kühnhard, Von Deutschland nach Europa: Geistiger Zusammenhalt und außenpolitischer Kontext (Baden-Baden, 2000). 52. Stephan Martens, ‘Das erweiterte Europa,’ Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte (2004), B17: 3–5. Cf. Hubert Markl, ‘Wo unser Herz schlägt. Was die Kinder in der Schule und die Studenten in den Universitäten heute alles lernen müssten: Wissenschaft und die kulturelle Einheit Europas,’ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 27 December 2003. 53. Holger R. Stunz, ‘German Suffering/Deutsches Leid: Re(-)presentations,’ conference report in H-Soz-u-Kult, 19 April 2004: http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de. 54. Mazower, The Dark Continent, 559ff. Cf. Also Konrad H. Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past. Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton, 2003). 55. Hans-Peter Schwarz, ‘Die neueste Zeitgeschichte,’ in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 52 (2003): 5–28. 56. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York, 2005). 57. Karl Schlögel, ‘Europas Comeback,’ Lettre international, no. 64 (2004): 6–10. 58. Ulrich Beck, ‘Europäische Lebenslügen,’ Süddeutsche Zeitung, 3 May 2005. Cf. Wolfgang Schmale, Scheitert Europa an seinem Mythendefizit? (Bochum, 1997). 59. Markl, ‘Wo unser Herz schlägt,’ and Sabrow, ‘Abschied von der Nation?’ Cf. Ute Frevert, ‘Was ist das bloß—ein Europäer?’ Die Zeit, 23 June 2005.

Part 1

CONTESTED MEMORIES

(

Chapter 1

HISTORY OF MEMORY, POLICIES OF THE PAST: WHAT FOR?

( Henry Rousso

According to common sense both within and beyond the boundaries of Europe, we more or less take for granted the existence of a European ‘culture’ or ‘civilization.’ In spite of geopolitical uncertainties, divergent points of view, and ideological discrepancies, this topos is firmly anchored in the collective imagination, even though it frequently gives rise to misunderstandings. Even the most chauvinistic of historians subscribe to this idea, out of either conviction or convenience. Moreover, several works have been written in recent years about the history of European institutions or organizations, and about the economic, social, and cultural history of European countries from a comparative perspective or on a transnational scale.1 These works are themselves the product of European networks that have mobilized resources within the framework of what may be called the ‘Europeanization’ of research and the increased movement of researchers and students. They have been so consistently supported—with varying degrees of discernment—by European research policies that it would be presumptuous to claim to be breaking new ground with this topic. Nevertheless, there are at least two reasons why it makes sense to rethink the premises on which the ‘Europeanization’ of present and future historiography is based. The first reason is that, until recently, European history was conceived in terms of a given political, geographical, and economic entity, and that our task was to shed light on its foundations, structures, and inherent characteristics. From this perspective, Europe was simultaneously the main object of research, the source of privileged financing, and sometimes also the beneficiary of results presented with a view to improving European public policies.2 Moreover, this Europe was still primarily ‘Western.’ However, the political, cultural, and even historiographical upheavals that took place in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and especially the integration of countries that once formed the eastern border of Europe, give rise to other Notes for this chapter begin on page 35.

24

|

Henry Rousso

perspectives and other questions, even retrospectively. Mark Mazower’s recent book Dark Continent gives an idea of the direction European historiography will probably take in the future.3 A history of Europe in the twentieth century that is in keeping with its times can no longer merely praise the merits of postwar growth, the miracle of Franco-German reconciliation, and the benefits of stable borders and political institutions. Two aspects of future European historiography are of particular significance. First, such a history must, in the future, take account of the heritage and memory of communism, a topic that is still controversial and even today has hardly been accommodated within ‘Western’ public consciousness. In some countries, in particular France and, to a lesser extent, Southern Europe, a considerable number of intellectuals and scholars have difficulty accepting the fact that this heritage harbours very negative connotations for tens of millions of Europeans whose experiences contrast starkly with their comparably lenient assessments of the large Western communist parties.4 In the same vein, other little-known or underestimated topics should be taken into account in the future, such as the significance of the compulsory migration of millions of people throughout Central and Eastern Europe after 1945, as well as ongoing ethnic tensions in some regions during the postwar years. The full extent of these tensions was not acknowledged in the West because it had been concealed during Soviet domination.5 In short, this alternative history of Europe entails the risk of being less optimistic, but is in sum more sensitive to historical gravity, the slow rhythms of change, and even the possible dead end that confounded progressive ideas characteristic of the early European construction process. At the same time, this would by no means imply a revaluation of the role played by national history. The second reason why we need to reexamine the history of Europe is that scientific steps forward in this field have largely been made within the framework of specialized university degree courses formally defined as the ‘History of Europe’ or ‘European History.’ These have not yet become so commonplace or widespread that they have had a lasting impact on the dominant historiographical tradition, nor have they changed the analytical framework of other areas of historiography. One can easily observe to what extent contemporary history, unlike medieval or modern history—a distinction that in itself requires careful thought—is still underpinned by a national narrative that emphasizes the idea of historical singularity. The persistent discussions about the ‘German special path’ (Sonderweg) are an example of this. A similar case is the continuing presence of the traditional topic of the ‘French exception’ in historiography, which is almost never put to the test of historical comparison since it appears to be firmly rooted in a specific political historical tradition.6 In most European countries, the majority of works written by historians specializing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are therefore largely confined to a national framework, even when they claim to deal with

History of Memory, Policies of the Past

| 25

transnational phenomena like the history of the two world wars or the period of National Socialism and Fascism. These examples are not chosen by chance. These two topics make up a large portion of recent research on contemporary history. They have attracted much attention, been at the centre of public discussion, and contributed a great deal to the renewal of contemporary historiography in general, which, over the last twenty years, has become one of the major fields of historical study.7 However, they are all too often dealt with from a strictly national perspective because they come within the scope of debates about the redefinition of national identities in some European countries. Examples of this phenomenon include the ‘Historians’ Dispute’ that took place in Germany in the mid 1980s, the controversies about the First World War or about the memory of the Vichy regime in France, or even the debates about the heritage of Fascism and antifascism in Italy. It is therefore not merely a question of writing an ‘alternative’ history of Europe, but of reflecting on the possibility (or impossibility) of approaching certain problems from a perspective that is not national— problems that can only be understood if they are considered in isolation from the specific framework of one country or another. One could conceive of a global history that is receptive to the multiple dimensions and interconnections arising from the various questions raised. The ‘Europeanization’ of questions should not therefore conform to political or ideological objectives, however praiseworthy they may be (such as ‘constructing Europe’), but rather adopt a heuristic approach, allowing historians to choose the most appropriate focal length in which to surpass or else explain in different terms a specific phenomenon, including the national phenomenon.8 The field of study devoted to collective memory offers a good standpoint from which to approach these questions. Over the last fifteen years, such studies have focused largely on the aftermath of wars, revolutions, dictatorships, and major massacres, as if bad memories were of top-priority interest to historians and to the human and social sciences in general. The same goes for the public policies of the past or even the policies of memory, which over recent years have invested a lot of energy in ‘managing’ tragic episodes of recent history and attempting to ‘repair’ them, sometimes decades after the events took place. Moreover, these two phenomena are interrelated, either because the historical writings preceded the policies or because they followed them and even reinforced their effect. How and why does memory, in particular the memory of traumatic events, continue to be an object of political and historiographical interest in a Europe where peace, stability, and economic prosperity are the prime values, and in a context in which war is almost of no consequence (even though it has not been completely eradicated)? Some historians go a step further: Has the considerable interest taken in the murderous events of

26

|

Henry Rousso

this century, above all in the Holocaust, not led to a biased and even distorted vision of the history of Europe after 1945? Much energy . . . has recently been devoted to exploring the complex ways in which the populations and states of postwar Europe remembered and forgot about different aspects of the war years. This analysis of Europe’s ‘undigested past’ . . . does, however, tend to privilege the particularly ‘postwar’ character of the subsequent decades, as if the history of western Europe after 1945 was little more than the after-shocks of the cataclysm which had preceded it. This is no more than a partial truth, and we also need to recognise that the contested struggle for postwar memory was often a mechanism by which the political forces of Europe in the 1950s and the 1960s competed for the present and the future by instrumentalising an increasingly distant past.9

This commentary is clearly aimed at historians of memory, and aptly reflects the disproportionate place accorded to the memory of the Second World War in the imagination of several European countries. It can serve as a starting point for two corollary questions: 1. What are the consequences of recent studies on memory? Have they emerged within a national context, or do they adopt a European perspective, and are these models all interchangeable with one another? 2. Why has the memory of the Holocaust acquired a central status over the last twenty years? And why has it become the object of new political initiatives on the European level?

Is the History of Memory National History? In general, and assuming that it is possible to take account of the huge number of works published on this subject, one can discern three major tendencies in the relatively new field of research known as the history of memory. The first and probably the oldest of these tendencies derives from the extensive work done in the field of oral history and from the attention accorded to eyewitness accounts in all areas of contemporary history: memoires, diaries, war notebooks, interviews, etc. This historiographical genre has been very successful because it appears to offer insight into the history of ‘ordinary people,’ those forgotten by history, a category that until recently had not been given recognition in mainstream history writing. This field of history has had a lasting impact on the history of women and gender, on the history of cultural and ethnic minorities, on the renewal of the history of social movements, and on the history of everyday life (Alltagsgeschichte). By definition, this form of history surpasses (or ought to surpass) any particular national framework: it is not possible to write an oral history of the French or the Germans; on the other hand, there are numerous oral histories of French workers or German women at a specific period in the history of the twentieth century.

History of Memory, Policies of the Past

| 27

Oral history is dominated by sociological and anthropological approaches and appears at first glance to be an appropriate way of ‘Europeanizing’ contemporary history. This phenomenon becomes apparent in studies about the war, based on the social experience of individuals and prioritizing witness reports by soldiers, prisoners, and victims among the civilian population, that adopt a comparative or transnational perspective from the start. It is also apparent in some writings on the Holocaust that focus on the utterances of survivors and use witness accounts while marginalizing the national dimension. In these examples, it is necessary to make distinctions with respect to the common experiences of certain populations or social categories throughout Europe: between the fate of Jews and other victims of National Socialism on the one hand, and more or less universal experiences that are not confined to Europe on the other; or between the experience of imprisonment and of the concentration camp system on the one hand, and the violence of war on the other. The scope of observation and analysis depends very much on the initial question posed. The second tendency arose in the wake of studies of what the historian Pierre Nora calls ‘sites of memory’ (lieux de mémoire), a notion that has since been given equal attention in Germany and Italy, where projects have been carried out that closely resemble the original.10 These projects strive to understand the way in which a society goes about reading its own past, and how it keeps the past alive, or commemorates or forgets episodes of its history. They are based on the relatively new idea that our relation to the past evolves over time, and that it is governed by a specific type of historicity that needs to be explained. This basic premise is shared by all historians of memory today. In the meantime, these projects have resulted in a sort of inventory of national traditions, which was doubtlessly part of the initial aim. In some cases, certain traditions have been invented by listing phenomena that, a priori, had no obvious memorial function or else offered no basis upon which to interpret the past. The essays contained in Les Lieux de mémoire include studies of ‘vectors of memory’ that convey an explicit and socially demanded representation of the past (monuments, museums, major historical works, etc.) as well as cultural, political, and social processes (language, sites of power, and the spatial division of territory, for example). These essays’ authors claim that they convey implicit representations of the past and, moreover, that they are signs by which we can identify the common elements of the national imagination shared by French people. This type of approach presupposes that there exists a very strong sense of national identity, as in France, Germany, or Italy. It also presupposes that political leaders play a significant role in the writing of history. It has often been said that the notion of ‘sites of memory’ cannot be applied to each and every nation: it encounters obstacles in the Netherlands, for example, where history does not play such a central role in

28

|

Henry Rousso

assuring social cohesion,11 and in the United Kingdom, where there is no ‘historical consciousness’ in the sense of an ‘official version of the past approved by the state.’12 Pierre Nora himself has insisted that the notion of ‘site of memory’ is specific to France, although the expression comes from the Latin locus memoriae, and is therefore part of the European linguistic heritage. He traces the specificity of this term back to the 1970s in France and the beginning of a crisis of French national identity, ‘where it has become apparent that a huge stock of collective memory, of historical memory acquired in the fervour of tradition, via the questioning of customs, disappeared into thin air, only to return by means of the scientific and reconstructive writing of history.’13 This ‘sense of loss’ was one of the motives underlying the project for Les Lieux de mémoire, whose specifically French dimension was underscored retrospectively in order to challenge any form of uncoordinated export of the concept, especially on a European scale: What counts [for all aspects of the history of memory] are not the objects, which are merely signs and traces of the past, but the kind of relation one has to the past and the manner in which the present uses and reconstructs it; as it happens, France, an archetypal nation-state, has been marked by considerable continuity as well as the radical breach of this continuity following the Revolution. This nation-state consolidated the wealth of its repertoire of historical events in a system of mythical and political references, in historiographical strata, in types of landscape and in an imagined world of traditions . . . which can be circumscribed by judicious choices and carefully dissected by means of historical analysis. Finally, and above all, during the course of the major transition . . . from one model of the nation to another, France experienced a decisive transformation from historical self-consciousness to patrimonial consciousness, which presupposes a mixture of familiarity and strangeness in relation to which research on sites of memory and symbols of identity acquires its full legitimacy and even necessity.14

These remarks are an expression of profound patriotism and do little to further the European cause. Apart from its epistemological richness, the concept ‘sites of memory’ is therefore perhaps the last manifestation of a type of classical national history that arose in the nineteenth century with the emergence of the nation-state. Moreover, it is interesting to note that, in the same collection of essays, the Dutch specialist of sites of memory, Pim den Boer, ends his essay with a statement about European identity that is more normative than analytical: ‘Europe,’ he argues, ‘needs sites of memory: not as a mnemonic technique merely to identify mutilated bodies, but in order to make people understand, forgive and forget.’15 According to Boer, European memory must be conceived within a horizon of expectation rather than within a space of experience, and is therefore something that has yet to be built rather than something to be exhumed.

History of Memory, Policies of the Past

| 29

The third main tendency within the history of memory is the preoccupation with effects of traumatic events, above all the history of the two world wars, of totalitarian systems, and of the Holocaust. Again, national presuppositions dominated the first studies to appear in this field. Norbert Frei’s work on the beginnings of the German memory of National Socialism, Peter Novick’s study of the Holocaust in American society, Tom Segev’s account of Holocaust memory in Israel, or even my own work on the memory of Vichy, all approach this subject by inquiring into respective national identities.16 It was not until a later phase of historiographical production that historians began to look at the transnational or comparative dimension of the problem.17 One of the reasons for this is that most quoted ‘monographs’ have revealed strong similarities between the countries in question. In particular they have demonstrated that public memories share the same patterns and the same historical rhythm, a conclusion that is valid beyond the particular context of each state and therefore encourages historians to seek explanations beyond the scope of national histories. This evolution unfolded in three broad phases, which may be summarized as follows: During the immediate postwar years, most countries that had been occupied by the National Socialists witnessed considerable tension between the need to put the past behind them and push ahead with national reconstruction on the one hand, and the need to pay homage to heroes and victims and start legal proceedings against collaborators, fascists, and ‘indigenous’ anti-Semites on the other. This had the effect of generally prolonging the violence of the war period, as in France and Italy, not to mention the civil wars in Greece and Yugoslavia, which broke out under different conditions. There followed a more or less protracted period of official silence, repression, and forgetting, which can be understood in this context as a fiction, that is, a stance that, though adopted voluntarily by the state or public opinion, by no means indicates that individuals in reality forgot the crimes committed against people or the suffering they endured. This period lasted about fifteen years before coming to an end in the late 1960s, and coincided with the period of national reconstruction as well as the process of European unification. In this respect, I would endorse Martin Conway’s suggestion that this ‘silence’ or ‘forgetting,’ in particular regarding acts committed within the framework of the Holocaust, doubtlessly derived from political and social necessity. Finally, since the early 1970s in the West and (to a lesser extent) after 1989 in the East, almost all European countries have witnessed a similar phenomenon of anamnesis, which has systematically brought to the fore questions relating to the legacy of National Socialism or fascism (in the broad sense of the term), collaboration between occupiers and occupied, and indigenous forms of anti-Semitism in occupied countries or in countries allied with the Third Reich.

30

|

Henry Rousso

The Weight of Holocaust Memory In recent years, the Holocaust has continued to play a significant role in collective memory. One of the most significant aspects of this history of memory is that the direct confrontation with the years from 1939 to 1945 has lasted much longer than the period of forgetting or repression. The ritual question ‘Why did it take so long before people began to talk about the Holocaust and assess and understand the responsibilities?’ needs to be replaced with the question, ‘Why are people still talking about it today, sixty years after the event, and even more so than during the immediate postwar years?’ Moreover, how can we explain why the memory of the Holocaust has now become one of the key issues in the European Union, at the expense of other commemorations? I would suggest two answers to these questions. The first is a series of explanations in diachronic form in close relation to the original event. Since the Holocaust is without comparable precedent (even though it is not the first ethnically, racially, or religiously motivated massacre to have taken place), it is not surprising that its legacy has taken on a singular and unprecedented character. The singularity of crimes committed against the Jews and the inability to get over the consequences, even two or three generations after the event, could explain why political trials of perpetrators were still being held (in particular in France and Germany) at such a late date, fifty years after the event. These trials, and the idea of ‘imprescriptibility’ on which they were based, not only broke new legal and judicial ground, but led to a profoundly new understanding of traditional judicial time (according to which judges and jurors are contemporary with the incriminating offence), and of the relation between justice and history (according to which sentences are founded on historical analyses as well as on direct witness accounts). In this explanatory model, the exceptional nature of the past event determines the ‘weight’ of this event in the present. The second answer refers to the occurrence of similar phenomena in recent years. This applies to countries like France, where the debate over the memory of the Second World War has been followed by intense discussions about memories of the Algerian War, or even in former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, many of which are at present having to face up to the heritage of two totalitarian systems. A similar and even more remarkable situation exists in countries outside Europe, as, for example, in the former dictatorships of Latin America, in post-Apartheid South Africa, in Cambodia, and in Rwanda, which have experienced the bloodiest genocides since 1945. Events here are unfolding in like fashion to those that followed the Second World War as described above: an initial phase follows the end of the dictatorship or war, during which debate focuses on forms of institutional transition, on the conviction of those responsible, on means of preserving the traces of the

History of Memory, Policies of the Past

| 31

past (collecting witness reports, revealing secret archives, etc.), accompanied by initial historical narratives that provide the foundation for a future national memory. Then, in more or less close succession, there follows a second phase during which states and/or public opinions of the respective countries prefer to forget and put the past behind them by throwing a veil of silence over the past dramas. Of course, it is still too early to say whether, and under what conditions, these countries will enter the third phase of development, that of anamnesis and the return of ghosts from the past. There are two possible explanations for this process, which are not necessarily contradictory: either the memory of the Holocaust acts as a model—whether implicitly or explicitly, as in the case of the memory of the Algerian War in France; or else the forms in which collective memory is today expressed resemble each other all over the world, even in relation to events which are entirely unconnected. For living together on a global scale, this means that our relation to the past or ‘regime of historicity’ (régime d’historicité) is specific to the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, and needs to be analyzed synchronically. What follows is a summary of some of the characteristic elements of this regime of historicity. The first element is that of ‘reparation,’ the increasingly systematic attempt to repair errors and crimes of the past, in particular on the part of states, whether they do this on their own initiative or are pressured into doing so by associations or social groups. Reparation generally takes on three forms: financial, consisting of reimbursements to people who were stripped of their property; legal, by means of investigations leading to trials; and symbolic, in the form of speeches expressing regret at the highest possible level, such as the king of Spain’s apology in 1992 for the expulsion of the Jews of Spain, or the various official declarations concerning slavery in the United States, as well as France’s stance towards Vichy and, of course, that of Germany towards National Socialism. A second element is the growing significance of the ‘judiciarization’ of the legacy of traumatic pasts: thus the law intervenes, either in the short term in the aftermath of the crisis (criminal proceedings against former communist leaders, or the ‘purging’ of administrations via ad hoc commissions), or in the long term (Holocaust trials in France or Germany); the law also intervenes on national or international levels. According to the specific context, this process can draw on criminal or civil law, or it can be limited to formal declarations like those made by parliamentary assemblies, which lend an official interpretation to a particular event endorsed by a written text, as in the case of the genocide against the Armenians. In these cases, history is based on norms that derive not from public or scientific discussions, but from written law. A third element is the ongoing process of ‘victimization,’ that is, the reading of history from the point of view of victims. To a remarkable

32

|

Henry Rousso

extent, historical experiences such as resistance against National Socialism or the fight for liberation from colonialism today place emphasis on the figure of the victim, whereas they previously focused on the figure of the hero (and consequently the martyr, who traditionally dies for a cause and sacrifices himself for the community): this represents a sharp transition from a political to a moral reading of the past. Has there ever been a ‘hero,’ a demigod in the Greek sense of the word, who calls for reparation in a court of justice? Although victims have indeed been forgotten and left out of the traditional versions of history written by states, victors, and scholars, the notion of victimization has become overrated today. A fourth element could be defined as the ‘denationalization’ of history, which refers to the means by which the international community, the European Union, and nongovernmental organizations intervene in order to prescribe the way in which various countries should come to terms with their past or write their history. The case of General Augusto Pinochet is a good example of this because, when legal proceedings were prevented from being instituted in Chile, it was first decided that he should be tried elsewhere and, therefore, that the question of how to manage the past in Chile should be dealt with abroad. There are several other revealing, albeit less explosive, examples, such as the recent condemnation of France by the European Court of Human Rights after the French courts had found that public statements made by the Association to Defend the Memory of Marshal Pétain constituted a ‘vindication of crimes and offences of collaboration with the enemy,’ an offence that had been defined in the postwar context; the European Court of Human Rights deemed that this judgement violated the principle of freedom of expression, in particular with respect to historical questions, while omitting any reference to the contemporary debate about Vichy in France.18 These examples constitute classical conflicts over norms of the sort that occur between national, European, or international levels. What distinguishes them from previous debates, however, is the fact that they touch upon questions concerning the interpretation of the past, which is mostly a national past, but which the retroactive interpretation tends to ‘denationalize.’

European Commemorations In light of these hypotheses, what possibilities lie in store for a ‘European memory,’ and what significance could it have? It is quite clear that this new way of reading the past, in line with the official interpretations of various European institutions, focuses primarily on the heritage of the Second World War and National Socialism. Almost all of the major (though rare) historical commemorations on the European level are devoted to this subject. Apart from 11 November, a date of considerable importance in several countries, it is worth mentioning the Day of Deportation (Journée de la

History of Memory, Policies of the Past

| 33

Déportation), introduced in the early 1950s, which remembers all types of deportees on the last Sunday in April each year; 8 May, on which several countries commemorate the end of the war on the western front in Europe; and 27 January, when the liberation of Auschwitz is commemorated in a ceremony introduced in October 2002. In recent years, the memory of National Socialism and of the Second World War in general, having been subsumed to Holocaust memory, have effectively become major political, cultural, and educational issues for the European Union. Following the spectacular intervention of the United States in this field since the late 1980s,19 they have also become more international. The European Union has also played a key role in setting up the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, launched on the occasion of the International Forum on the Holocaust, which took place in Stockholm from 26 to 28 January 2000. Thirteen of the original sixteen founding member states were either already or later to become members of the European Union.20 This task force decided that, from January 2003 onwards, the majority of school establishments in European countries should commemorate the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp on 27 January each year. The manifesto of the Task Force also declared that: It is appropriate that this, the first major international conference of the new millenium, declares its commitment to plant the seeds of a better future amidst the soil of a bitter past. We empathize with the victim’s suffering and draw inspiration from their struggle. Our commitment must be to remember the victims who perished, respect the survivors still with us, and reaffirm humanity’s common aspiration for mutual understanding and justice.21

The Stockholm Declaration, formulated at the forum, appears to consider the Holocaust to be a starting point and ongoing point of reference for Europe in the present and future. Not only are people still affected by memories of the Second World War over fifty years after the event, but Europe is being refounded on the basis of one of the most terrible acts ever committed and the worst events ever known in recent European history. Aside from the good intentions underlying this text, it is obvious that the Stockholm Declaration marks a radical shift within the foundation of the European Union. The original intention of the founding members was quite different, for they had aimed to eradicate the economic and political causes of the two world wars. However, this tradition has not been lost, and was even given ritual form with the creation of ‘Europe Day’ in 1985 on the occasion of the European Council meeting in Milan. This day commemorates the famous speech given by Robert Schumann on 9 May 1950 in Paris to mark the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). Very few studies have been written about this little-known and

34

|

Henry Rousso

rarely celebrated commemoration. The official website of the European Union nevertheless contains documents that offer insight into the underlying spirit of this day, in particular the official posters of the European Union from 1996 to 2004.22 The style of these images is remarkably naïve. Although they were drawn by different artists, they all allude to the world of children: the round dance in 1997 and 2004; roller-skates in 1998; and occasional shining stars. These posters inevitably conjure up variations of a book cover for St-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. There is one exception to the rule, namely, in 1996: this is the only poster that makes an explicit allusion to history by combining images of the past and present, depicting Robert Schuman on the occasion of his speech of 9 May 1950 in the Salon de l’Horloge of the French Foreign Office. It may appear trivial or unintentional, but it is remarkable that these posters contain no references to history, as if they were designed to commemorate something that emerged from nowhere. These images appear to invite us to celebrate a second birth by appealing to us and to our sense of citizenship as ‘born again Europeans,’ while committing memories of the Holocaust and the ‘dark continent’ to the void of oblivion. In 1848, the French philosopher Charles Renouvier published his Manuel républicain de l’homme et du citoyen, a kind of progressive bible in which a schoolchild expresses thanks to his teacher for all that he has learned: ‘You have uplifted my ideas so much by talking about the Republic and republican morals that I think I am leaving behind obscurity and seeing light for the very first time. I used to live in my village, and now I live in France. The Republic has turned me into a Frenchman twice over.’23 Perhaps this ode to the French Republic, one of the foundations of the sites of memory extolled by Pierre Nora, can be transposed to the European level, which would result in something like: ‘You have uplifted my ideas so much by talking about democracy and the morality of human rights that I think I am leaving behind obscurity and seeing light for the very first time. I used to live in my country, and now I live in Europe. The democracy of human rights has turned me into a European twice over.’ The concept of ‘second birth’ or ‘renaissance’ has the advantage—or the disadvantage, depending on one’s point of view—of relieving us of the burden of the past and liberating us from the debt of memory (an expression used by Paul Ricoeur). However, the history of national and European memory shows that in recent years, the tendency has been in the opposite direction. The dilemma facing the ‘Europeanization’ of memory is clear: How can we avoid, on the one hand, the illusions of a tabula rasa and the construction of an artificial memory without genuine historical foundations while on the other hand eschewing incessant rumination upon a murderous past dominated by national passions? Translated from the French by Peter Carrier

History of Memory, Policies of the Past

| 35

Notes 1. See, for example, Elisabeth du Réau and Robert Frank, eds., Dynamiques européennes: Nouvel espace, nouveaux acteurs 1969–1981 (Paris, 2002), one of the first publications of the network ‘Les identités européennes au XXe siècle.’ 2. It is partly in response to this tendency that the Sixth Framework Programme was created, based on a conception of the ‘Europeanization’ of research that is not centred on Europe as the primary object of study. It is this framework that structures the EURHISTXX network , which aims to focus less on the contemporary history of Europe than on contemporary history in general on a European scale. 3. Mark Mazower, Dark Continent. Europe’s Twentieth Century (London and New York, 1998). See also Tony Judt, A Grand Illusion? An Essay on Europe (New York, 1996). 4. This partly explains the controversy that broke out following the publication of the Livre noir du communisme, by Stéphane Courtois et al. (Paris, 1997), which proved to be far more lively in France than elsewhere (in English: The Black Book of Communism. Crimes, Terror, Repression, trans. Mark Kramer and Jonathan Murphy [Cambridge, MA. and London, 1999]). 5. This is obviously not valid for German public opinion. However, it is striking that the displacement of populations during the postwar years has been omitted from schoolbooks in France. The mere mention of this fact is even sometimes considered as an attempt to ‘banalize the Shoah,’ under the pretext that this theme is one used by the extreme right. Until new school programmes were introduced in 2004 in line with the expansion of the European Union, the history of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe had been disregarded, except when dealt with in terms of a protective zone around the Soviet Union. 6. See, for example, Serge Berstein and Michel Winock, eds., La République recommencée. De 1914 à nos jours (Paris, 2004) (in the series Histoire de la France politique). Although the claim to a ‘French exception’ is valid, it fails to acknowledge the fact that the claim to ‘singularity’ is the doctrine of almost every historiography focusing on the national dimension. This implies that one could set up a comparative interpretative framework facilitating closer observation of the genuine singularity of each national history and thereby allowing room for levels of explanation that are not exclusively national. 7. Cf. Pieter Lagrou, ‘Historiographie de guerre et historiographie du temps présent: Cadres institutionnels en Europe occidentale, 1945–2000,’ Bulletin du Comité international d’histoire de la deuxième guerre mondiale vol. 30–31 (1999–2000): 191–215. Online: http:// www.ihtp.cnrs.fr/equipe/Lagrou/historiographie_pl.html. 8. This argument draws inspiration from works on ‘micro history.’ Cf. Jacques Revel, ed., Jeux d’échelle: La micro-analyse à l’expérience (Paris, 1996). On the relation between national history and European history, see also Stuart Wolf, ‘Europe and Its Historians,’ Contemporary European History 12 (2003): 323–37. 9. Martin Conway, ‘The Rise and Fall of Western Europe’s Democratic Age, 1945–1973,’ Contemporary European History 13 (2004): 67–88, 72. 10. Etienne François and Hagen Schulze, eds., Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, 3 vols (Munich, 2001); Mario Isnenghi, ed., I luoghi della memoria, 2 vols. (Rome, 1997). 11. Cf. Pim den Boer, ‘Lieux de mémoire et identité de l’Europe,’ in Pim den Boer and Willem Frijhoff, eds., Lieux de mémoire et identités nationales (Amsterdam, 1993), 11–29. 12. Benedikt Stuchtey, review of the conference on ‘European Lieux de mémoire,’ German Historical Institute, London, 5–7 July 2002, in GHIL, Bulletin, vol. 24, (2002): 121–25, 124. Online: http://www.ghil.ac.uk/publ.html#Bulletin. 13. Pierre Nora, ‘La notion de ”lieu de mémoire” est-elle exportable?,’ in Boer and Frijhoff, Lieux de mémoire et identités nationales, 3–10, 4. 14. Idem., 10. 15. Pim den Boer, ‘Lieux de mémoire et identité de l’Europe,’ 29.

36

|

Henry Rousso

16. Norbert Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik: Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die NS-Vergangenheit (Munich, 1996); Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York, 1993); Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston, 1999). 17. Pieter Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965 (Cambridge and New York, 2000). 18. European Court of Human Rights, The Lehideux and Isorni Case: c./ France (55/1997/839/1045), decision of 23 September 1998. 19. See Novick, The Holocaust in American Life. 20. Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, as well as Argentina, Israel, and the United States. See http://www.holocaustforum.gov.se/pdfandforms/deklarat . . . pdf. 21. Ibid., Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, eighth and final article. 22. Posters on http://europa.eu.int/abc/symbols/9-may/gallery_en.htm 23. Charles Renouvier, Manuel républicain de l’homme et du citoyen (Geneva, 2000), 231, a new edition published with a note on Charles Renouvier, a commentary, and extracts from his works selected by Jules Thomas, with a foreword and notes by Jean-Claude Richard, Maurice Aguhlon, and Laurent Fédi.

Europe Day 1996

Europe Day 1998

Europe Day 1997

Europe Day 2000

Europe Day 2001

Europe Day 2004

Chapter 2

COMMUNIST LEGACIES IN THE ‘NEW EUROPE’: HISTORY, ETHNICITY, AND THE CREATION OF A ‘SOCIALIST’ NATION IN ROMANIA, 1945–1989

( Dragoş Petrescu

‘Man is a complex animal who is tractable in some respects and intractable in others. Both the successes and the failures of our communist cases suggest that there is a pattern to this tractability-intractability behavior, that liberty once experienced is not quickly forgotten, and that equity and equality of some kind resonate in the human spirit.’ This is how Gabriel Almond concludes his study on communist political cultures focusing on the former Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, as well as on Cuba, Hungary, and Poland.1 It may be argued that, apart from liberty, equity, and equality, the notions of social integration, economic improvement, and national cohesion resonated as well in the spirit of the peoples ruled by communist regimes. Nevertheless, different patterns of compliance with, or opposition towards, those regimes developed in Sovietized Europe, which in turn determined different patterns of ‘exit from communism’ in the region. The breakdown of the communist regimes in Central and Southeastern Europe was followed by the reemergence of ethnic nationalism, most obviously in the former Yugoslavia and, to a much lesser extent, in the other former communist countries. In this respect, the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia contrasted sharply with the ‘velvet divorce’ between the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Even the more ‘Westernized’ countries of Central Europe had to face a rather widespread ethnic understanding of the nation. One can recall, for instance, the wall built in 1999 by the Czechs in a neighborhood in Ústí nad Labem to separate themselves from the local Roma community.2 Moreover, one should not forget that Western European states have gone through a process of nation-building lasting more than two hundred years. Nevertheless, the ethno-national demands of the Basques, Corsicans, South Tyrolean Germans, and the Irish in Northern Notes for this chapter begin on page 52.

38

|

Dragoş Petrescu

Ireland,3 or the current resurgence of nationalistic and xenophobic political parties in Austria, Switzerland, and Italy show that the democratic definition of the nation has home-grown enemies in ‘civilized’ Europe itself. However, ethnic nationalism did not become a major hindrance to democratic transition in the countries of Central Europe—especially in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic—in contrast to Southeastern Europe. As far as post-1989 ethnic nationalism is concerned, in order to identify the differences and similarities between the above mentioned regions, one should analyze first their communist legacies. In addition, issues such as the fragmentation of the national minorities within the boundaries of a given state and the adoption of different (ethno-)national strategies by majorities, minorities, and the external homelands, have to be addressed. Regarding the intricate problem of communist legacies, a topic that deserves thorough examination is that of the nation-building processes the Sovietized countries of Central and Southeastern Europe underwent during the period 1945–1989. Such an analysis would allow a better understanding of the problems posed by their integration into the European Union and the adoption of a supranational, European identity by their citizens. Therefore, this author proposes a discussion of the Romanian case that could also provide valuable insights into the even more difficult problems of adoption of a European identity by the countries that compose the ‘Europe of the rejected,’ i.e., those countries that missed the first wave of integration into the European Union, such as Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, Serbia, and Ukraine.4

Communist Romania: Building the ‘Socialist’ Nation In communist Romania no major protests ‘from below,’ on the model of Polish Solidarity, or ‘from above,’ on the model of the Czechoslovak Prague Spring, not to speak of a rebellion conducted both ‘from below’ and ‘from above,’ on the model of the Hungarian Revolution, emerged. Thus, when addressing the case of Romania, one is compelled to provide a convincing answer to a rather simple question: What hampered the development of a societal opposition towards a regime that was not only brought to power by a foreign superpower—the Soviet Union—but was also based on an ideology that had no local traditions whatsoever? Furthermore, after the period of Stalinist terror and, more importantly, the withdrawal of Soviet troops in the summer of 1958, what created a focus of identification with such a regime? To answer such questions is by no means easy. This paper argues that an answer can be found in the continuation of the nationbuilding process under communism, a process that entered a final stage in the early 1980s and eventuated in a cultural syndrome that may be

Communist Legacies in the ‘New Europe’ | 39

termed the ‘new nation syndrome.’ Such a syndrome played a major role in preventing the gradual development of societal opposition towards the regime and determined in many respects not only the atypical, violent character of the 1989 Romanian revolution, but also Romania’s protracted and painful transition to democracy. The question ‘When is a nation a nation?’ still provokes heated debates among scholars and lay people alike. In the case of Romania, the process of creating the nation did not come to an end in 1918, as a majority of Romanian scholars argue. Under communism, few intellectuals focused seriously on the issue of the formation of Romanian national identity. Usually, strong emphasis was put on the ancient roots of Romanian people, and Geto-Dacians and Dacian-Romans were obligatorily referred to as the ‘legitimate forefathers’ of the Romanians. At the same time, a majority of the historians and social scientists situated the moment of formation of the modern Romanian nation somewhere between the 1848 Revolution and the 1918 creation of Greater Romania. For instance, in a work published in 1967, the historian S¸ tefan Pascu argues that it was the ‘revolutionary struggle’ during the 1848 Revolution that concluded the process by which the modern Romanian nation was formed.5 Nevertheless, as Irina Livezeanu states in her work on interwar Romania, ‘the union of 1918 brought into being a deeply fragmented polity, and the startling effects of centuries of political separation presented great challenges to the newly enlarged state and to the sense of national identity of its population.’6 Similarly, Kenneth Jowitt has argued that during the interwar period ‘the elites and major sectors of the population lacked meaningful, shared sentiments of community and a relatively consistent, jointly shaped set of commitments to the nation-state itself.’7 The argument put forward in this chapter is that the nation-building process in Romania continued under communism. This particular element of Romania’s recent history made the elites and masses alike perceive the Romanian nation-state to be still ‘unrealized’ and continuously threatened by some of its neighbors, especially Hungary and the Soviet Union. As Rogers Brubaker argues, this tendency to see the nation-state as ‘unrealized’ forces it to adopt a dynamic political stance. Since the state was perceived to be not yet national in its entirety, it was imperative that it be ‘nationalizing.’8 Due to a combination of economic, social, and cultural factors, a decisive stage in creating the Romanian nation was reached in the early 1980s.9 It is this author’s opinion that communist Romania went through a piecemeal process of ‘ethnic bureaucratic incorporation’ (Anthony Smith) based on three main components: (1) elite manipulation, (2) cultural reproduction, and (3) modernization conducted from above. It is, however, another question as to how the Romanian communist elite conceptualized the process by which Romanian national identity emerged. The vigorous revival of national ideology after the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Romania in July 1958 poses difficult questions of

40

|

Dragoş Petrescu

interpretation with regard to the internationalist phase of Romanian Stalinism under Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, Romania’s first Communist supreme leader (1948–1965). Gheorghiu-Dej’s successor was Nicolae Ceauşescu (1965–1989). One can infer from Ceauşescu’s numerous speeches that he strongly believed that the process of formation of the Romanian nation had come to an end with the creation of Greater Romania in 1918: ‘The setting up of the (Romanian) unitary national state six and a half decades ago was a brilliant historic victory of the long heroic struggle of the masses for creating the Romanian nation and marked the coming true of the age-old dream of all Romanians to live in unity within the borders of the same country, in one free and independent state.’10 After coming to power in 1965, Ceausşescu was convinced that he was creating the Romanian ‘socialist nation.’ Although it is difficult to grasp from Ceauşescu’s speeches what exactly a ‘socialist nation’ meant to him, an analysis of his policies towards minorities reveals that he envisaged an ethnically homogenous Romanian ‘socialist nation.’ The official stance towards the idea of the ‘socialist’ Romanian nation was somehow clearer, and was based on the concept of the political nation. For instance, in 1976, in his introduction to a volume dedicated to the history of the Hungarian minority in Romania, Lajos Demény argued that Ceauşescu’s idea of the ‘socialist nation’ was close to the idea of a political nation.11 However, one should bear in mind the fact that Demény’s interpretation was meant to provide the regime’s assimilationist policies with a ‘human face.’ In reality, the main tenet of the Romanian Communist Party’s (RCP) policy towards ethnic minorities was that the egalitarian policies under communism would lead to the disappearance of ethnic identities. Under the Ceaus¸escu regime, the process of creating the modern Romanian nation entered its final stage. This aspect is also of prime importance in explaining why intellectual dissidence developed so tortuously in communist Romania, and only after the economic crisis had become evident. A legacy of interwar cultural debates, the national ideology remained powerful, and ideas, attitudes, and arguments associated with it played a major role in the cultural debates during the communist years, especially after 1958. The revival of such an ideology in the late 1950s and early 1960s, after a period of quiescence—though not of rejection—found an echo in the minds and hearts of the most gifted Romanian intellectuals. In Romania, to use George Schöpflin’s inspired phrase, ‘a legitimating discourse, that of ethnicity’ was not only a permanent feature of that country’s political culture, but was also a determinant in creating a focus of identification with, and loyalty towards, the regime.12 Until the early 1980s, this situation hampered the appeal of dissident ideas to a larger public who saw the regime as a defender of their country’s independence and territorial integrity. It must be added that a distorted version of ‘national’ history constituted a major ingredient of this legitimating discourse. Thus, history did matter in communist

Communist Legacies in the ‘New Europe’ | 41

Romania and was interpreted and reinterpreted in accordance with the immediate goals of the communist ruling elite. In order to support the argument put forward in this chapter, some theoretical and methodological aspects need to be discussed. As Walker Connor argues, ‘nation-formation is a process, not an occurrence.’13 In the case of Romania, the process of turning peasants into Romanians (to paraphrase Eugen Weber) became effective only under the national-communist regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu (1965–1989), in the context of an extensive programme of centrally planned urbanization, industrialization, increased communication, and expansion of education. When analyzing the process of nation-building in Romania during the period 1945–1989, this author draws on the concepts of ‘organic’ and ‘organized solidarities’ respectively, coined by the late Alexandru Duţu, an outstanding Romanian historian of mentalities.14 According to Duţu, organic solidarity is specific to the private sphere, which includes the family, the parish, voluntary associations, and the like, while organized solidarity belongs to the public sphere and can be found throughout history, from the stage of the councils of elders to the modern state. In cases of nation-building like that of Romania, the transformation from an imperial province into a national state took place primarily through reliance on organized solidarity. Organized solidarity, that is, a sense of solidarity that is developed and continuously reinforced from above within the framework of the nation-state (through education, internal migration, common socialization in large state enterprises, etc.), played a crucial role under communism and ultimately forged the Romanian nation. It should be emphasized that Duţu’s interpretation complements Benedict Anderson’s famous idea of a nation as an ‘imagined community.’15 While Anderson’s concept of ‘imagined community’ may be understood as a process originating mainly ‘from below,’ Duţu’s concept of ‘organized solidarity’ can be understood as a process initiated ‘from above.’ True, it is difficult, if not impossible, to provide a precise date for the creation of a nation. In the case of Romania, however, we are faced with the ‘late creation of the nation.’ Here, the notion of creation refers to a decisive shift involving the integration of large masses of the ethnic Romanian population into the ‘organized solidarity’ and ‘imagined community’ of the Romanian nation, rather than to the final, ultimate realization of nationhood. Methodologically, as mentioned above, the process of nation-building under communism is analysed in relation to three major lines of inquiry: (1) elite manipulation, (2) cultural reproduction, and (3) modernization conducted from above.

Elite Manipulation The Romanian communist elite’s relation to nationalism was intricate. It is still unclear to what extent the exacerbated nationalism of late

42

|

Dragoş Petrescu

Ceauşescuism originated from within the party elite. In other words: How much of Ceauşescu’s nationalism was prompted by interwar trends (via intellectuals faithful to the regime, for instance), and how much was due to his socialization among Gheorghiu-Dej’s men? In this respect, post-1989 testimonies of former nomenklatura members are both telling and puzzling, since they reveal that the so-called internationalist phase of Romanian communism was much less internationalist than previously thought. For instance, controversies over contested territories such as Transylvania pushed the Romanian communists to look for arguments from the nationalist repertoire even before they came to power in 1948. Gheorghe Apostol, a high-ranking party official, recalls a meeting with Stalin in December 1944 when, besides him, only Gheorghiu-Dej and Ana Pauker were present. The Romanian delegation prepared its plea for Transylvania by insisting that the history of the region from the Roman conquest onwards should determine its status. Clearly unimpressed by their historical arguments, Stalin decided that Transylvania should belong to Romania as a reward for switching sides on 23 August 1944. Apostol’s story is significant because it reveals that for the Romanians, what counted most when in the presence of Stalin were not the theses of the Fifth Party Congress, but the short-lived union of Transylvania with Moldavia and Wallachia under the medieval ruler Mihai Viteazul in 1600, on which the Romanian communists’ plea for that region was based. Such accounts raise doubts about the Romanian communists’ alleged full commitment to the Cominternist theses regarding the multinational character of Greater Romania.16 The problem of Bessarabia was more delicate than that of Transylvania. Although clear references to the Soviet-occupied Bessarabia could have damaged relations with the Soviet Union, recent testimonies show that the Romanian communist elite actually perceived that territory to be a part of historical Romania. In this respect, the episode related to the publication of Karl Marx’s Notes on the Romanians is significant. Paul NiculescuMizil, who at that time was the head of the Propaganda Section of the Central Committee and was therefore directly involved in the publication of Marx’s work, provides interesting details about the event. The manuscript was discovered in Amsterdam, translated for the use of the party leadership, and finally published in 1964 with an elaborated critical apparatus that recommended the volume as a purely scholarly work.17 In fact, Marx’s book offered the Romanian communists the incredible opportunity to express through the authority of a ‘founding father’ something they could not express openly: that the regime considered Bessarabia to be part of historical Romania. Thus, from 1964 onwards, Marx’s words would be imperiously quoted whenever necessary to support the idea of national history put forward by the Romanian Communist Party. Nikita Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1956) shook the Stalinist leader of

Communist Legacies in the ‘New Europe’ | 43

Romania, Gheorghiu-Dej. Desperate to remain in power, Gheorghiu-Dej devised an anti-destalinization strategy of political survival, based on independence from Moscow and extensive industrialization. This strategy was strictly adhered to by Ceauşescu. Since a thorough investigation of the RCP’s industrialization policies under Gheorghiu-Dej and Ceauşescu would exceed the limits of this chapter, this section focuses on a crucial aspect of communist Romania’s ‘independent path towards communism’: the completion of the nation-building process. As Ronald Linden has accurately observed, ‘Romanian leaders have successfully capitalized upon the non-Slavic identity of the population.’18 A majority of Romania’s population supported the RCP because of its policy of independence from Moscow. In August 1968, ten years after the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Romania, Ceauşescu gave his famous ‘balcony speech,’ in which he condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO) troops. The effect of Ceauşescu’s discourse on Romania’s population at large was far-reaching. This speech represented for many Romanians the ‘proof’ of Ceauşescu’s charismatic qualifications.19 Thus, Ceauşescu’s ‘charismatic leadership,’ to use Reinhard Bendix’s concept, acquired clear contours under the dramatic conditions of August 1968.20 Paul Goma, the initiator of the 1977 Goma movement and perhaps the most famous Romanian dissident, wrote about the mobilizing force of Ceauşescu’s August 1968 speech from the balcony: ‘Even now, in 1985, I cannot say that he then ‘acted’ as well that he was insincere. In spite of the hysterical atmosphere, those of us who, that August 1968, joined the Patriotic Guards, did this neither for him, Ceauşescu, nor for the communist party . . . not even for [socialist] Romania. Then, Ceauşescu appealed not to communists, but to . . . citizens; to defend, not the Party, but the country. By the force of arms.’21 Ceauşescu’s charisma was largely simulated after this speech by official propaganda with the aid of co-opted intellectuals. Nevertheless, the origins of his ‘charismatic leadership’ are to be found in the late creation of the nation or the new national syndrome, as shown below. What was generally perceived to be ‘proof’ of his charismatic qualifications was established at the beginning of his rule: Ceauşescu came to power in March 1965 and delivered his most famous speech on 21 August 1968. In the wake of the events of August 1968, far greater emphasis was put on historical ancestors’ struggle for independence and their heroic deeds. The equation was quite simple: in the past Romanians had had to fight against the Ottomans; under Ceauşescu they had to oppose the Soviets (more obliquely, some references were also made to the alleged irredentist stance of Hungary). According to Schöpflin: ‘Mythic and symbolic discourses can thus be employed to assert legitimacy and strengthen authority. They mobilize emotions and enthusiasm. They are a primary means by which people make sense of the political process, which is understood in a symbolic

44

|

Dragoş Petrescu

form.’22 In Ceauşescu’s Romania, the tendency to resort to historical myths came almost naturally. From the very beginnings of his rule, Ceauşescu displayed his appreciation for the heroic deeds of the medieval rulers of the Romanian principalities. Ceauşescu’s leadership style was also based—contrary to the leadership style of his predecessor, Gheorghiu-Dej—on a systematic programme of travelling through the country, whereby he regularly visited the most significant monuments and historic sites in each area.23 In the aftermath of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, Ceauşescu initiated an extensive programme of domestic trips designed to provide popular support to the independent policy of the RCP, in which Transylvania was the prime target of the regime’s propaganda efforts. Within a single day, on 26 August 1968, Ceauşescu visited three counties—Braşov, Harghita, and Covasna—and participated in no fewer than four mass meetings in the towns of Braşov, Sfîntu Gheorghe, Miercurea Ciuc, and Odorheiul Secuiesc. One should note that, in the counties of Harghita and Covasna, the majority of the population consists of ethnic Hungarians. It seems that, following the lesson of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Ceauşescu at that time feared that the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia would stir unrest among the Hungarian-speaking population of Romania. It is reasonable to argue that this was the case since, at the mass rallies in the towns of Sfîntu Gheorghe, Miercurea Ciuc, and Odorheiul Secuiesc, Ceauşescu ended his speeches by saying a few words in Hungarian. These were the only occasions on which Ceauşescu made an effort to speak in the Hungarian language.24 One mass rally in particular, held on 30 August 1968 in the Transylvanian city of Cluj, was of paramount importance with regard to the revival of historical myths in order to stir popular support for the RCP’s policies. On that day, in front of a large audience, Ceauşescu delivered a flamboyant speech in which he referred for the first time to the RCP as the direct successor to the heroic reigns of such Romanian medieval rulers as Ştefan cel Mare (Stephen the Great), Mircea cel Bătrîn (Mircea the Old), and Mihai Viteazul (Michael the Brave).25 From that moment on, the cult of ancestors and the manipulation of national symbols became key ingredients of Ceauşescuism. Ceauşescu’s posture of defiance towards the 1968 Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia misled statesmen, politicians, and scholars alike. His aim, as far as the Romanian majority was concerned, was to radically reinforce ethnic ties, a stance made clear by the launch of the so-called ‘theses of July 1971.’ These ‘theses’—a rather brief document structured on seventeen points, issued on 6 July 1971—embodied Ceauşescu’s rigid attitude towards education and cultural production. Ceauşescu reiterated the main ideas from this at a 9 July meeting of the RCP, which at that time was actively involved in developing propaganda and indoctrination. The ‘theses of July 1971’ constituted a radical attack on the cosmopolitan and ‘decadent,’ pro-Western attitudes in Romanian

Communist Legacies in the ‘New Europe’ | 45

culture, and signalled a return to cultural autochthonism.26 After the launch of the ‘theses’ in 1971, the regime began to place stronger emphasis on the contribution of history writing towards building the ‘socialist’ nation. The most important step would be to provide party guidelines for the writing of a ‘national’ history. Three years later, in 1974, the founding document of Romanian national-communism was issued: the Romanian Communist Party Programme (RCPP).27 This official document opened with a thirtyeight-page concise history of Romania that became not only the blueprint for the single compulsory textbook utilized in every school, but also the model for every piece of historical writing published in Romania, based on four conceptual ‘pillars’: (1) the ancient roots of the Romanian people, (2) the continuous existence of Romanians on the territory from ancient times to the present day, (3) the unity of the Romanian people throughout its entire history, and, (4) Romanians’ continuous struggle for independence. When a Romanian high-ranking party official exclaimed in a discussion with a foreign diplomat, ‘Independence is our legitimacy!’ he really meant it.28 In the Romanian case, until the mid-1980s, the nationalistic hatred for the Russians (and subsequently, for the Soviets) acted in favour of the regime. On a mass level, one of the lessons taught by the national history was that nothing good came from the East. The regime was prepared to nurture and exploit Romanians’ Russophobia, which, as Hugh SetonWatson puts it, ‘is second only to that of Poles.’29 This it did skillfully until the mid 1980s. However, the regime did not foresee the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev. After 1985, during the structural economic and moral crisis of Ceauşescuism, the launch of Gorbachev’s domestic perestroika led to the emergence of a totally different image of the Soviet Union and its leadership. ‘Gorbimania’ started to spread among Romania’s population, aggravated by the economic crisis and Ceauşescu’s orthodox vision of socialism. When Gorbachev paid an official visit to Romania on 25 and 27 May 1987, many Romanians hoped in vain that he would persuade Ceauşescu to introduce some economic reforms. The result was that the Romanians ceased to perceive the Soviet Union as a real threat to Romania’s sovereignty: they now looked to Moscow for support to set them free from the domestic tyranny of the Ceauşescu clan. People were eager to find out more about Gorbachev’s reforms. Pamphlets and brochures published in Romanian in the Soviet Union by the Novosti Press Agency circulated, especially in Bucharest, as a form of dissident writing. During the 1988–1989 period people avidly read Soviet brochures whose titles contained subversive words and syntagmata such as ‘restructuring,’ ‘renewal,’ and ‘a new vision.’30 In terms of nationalist propaganda, the key argument of the RCP’s legitimating discourse, that is, independence from Moscow, vanished after the inception of Gorbachev’s reforms. Consequently, the regime was left with a sole target: the Hungarian minority in Romania. On 20 December 1989, Ceauşescu affirmed that the revolt

46

|

Dragoş Petrescu

in Timişoara, which sparked the 1989 Romanian revolution, was the result of the activity of ‘hooligan elements, working together with reactionary, imperialistic, irredentist, chauvinistic circles . . . aiming towards the territorial dismemberment of Romania.’31 Ceauşescu was referring indirectly to neighboring Hungary and the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the new image of the Soviet Union among Romania’s population severely undermined the regime’s propaganda efforts. In the late 1980s, independence from Moscow ceased to be a major source of legitimacy for the communist regime in Romania. To paraphrase the statement of the Romanian top communist official quoted above, by the late 1980s independence had ceased to be their legitimacy.

Cultural Reproduction The teaching of ‘national’ history and geography contributed decisively to forging a national identity. This strategy was not employed by the communist regimes alone. For instance, in his work on the modernization of rural France, Eugen Weber emphasizes the use of history teaching for the nation-building process.32 Nationalism is also place-bound. Therefore, with regard to geography teaching, the presence of an identical map of the country in every classroom of every grammar school in Romania contributed decisively to the process of ‘imagining’ the nation. The generations raised under communism had a perception of the national territory that differed from that of the interwar generations. In the postwar imagination, Romanian national territory comprised Transylvania, but did not include Bessarabia. The mental map they harboured was based on the political maps they continuously saw in the classrooms. As a result, Bessarabia was no longer perceived by the large majority of the population to be part of historical Romania’s territory during the communist period, as the process of imagining the Romanian nation excluded that territory. Consequently, when Ceauşescu sought to win back popular support by raising the issue of Bessarabia in the late 1980s, he received very little popular backing. It is still difficult to establish the precise moment when the issue of Bessarabia surfaced in the RCP’s discourse. Niculescu-Mizil argues that discussions with the Soviets were initiated in 1973–1974 and were continued in 1978. Nevertheless, it was at the Fourteenth Congress of the RCP that Ceauşescu asked for the abrogation of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact.33 History teaching played an even greater role in the creation of ‘organized solidarity,’ as suggested by the significance ascribed to debates about the ethnic origins of Romanians. With regard to the process of Romanian ethno-genesis, communist historiography underwent three stages between 1948 and 1989. During the first stage, 1948–1958, as a result of the Russification campaign, official historiography placed emphasis on the Slavs and their role in the formation of the Romanian people. The second

Communist Legacies in the ‘New Europe’ | 47

stage, 1958–1974, was characterized by a relative ideological relaxation and a return to the theses of the interwar period, which concerned the role of the Romans and their mixing with the local Dacian population as the origin of the Dacian-Roman essence of the Romanians. The third stage, 1974–1989, was characterized by ‘Dacomania,’ which emphasizes the fundamental role of the ‘autochthonous’ Dacian element in the formation of the Romanian people.34 As already noted, the 1974 programme of the RCP imposed a blueprint for writing and teaching national history based on four conceptual ‘pillars’: (1) the ancient roots of the Romanians, (2) continuity, (3) unity; and (4) independence. None of these four sacred themes of Romanian historiography was brand-new: all these ideas were present from the moment history was institutionalized as a scientific discipline in Romania in the nineteenth century. Until the advent of Ceauşescuism, none of these themes became an axiom. Under Ceauşescu, however, they became the standard yardstick of historical interpretation. Thus, one of the major lessons of the national history taught until December 1989 was that the Romanian unitary nation-state had been continuously contested and threatened, and that it was the patriotic duty of all responsible Romanians to defend it at all costs. Consequently, the party obtained considerable popular backing by depicting itself as the sole guarantor of Romania’s independence and national sovereignty in the face of its irredentist neighbors, the Soviet Union and Hungary. The idea of a Romanian nation created on the basis of four conceptual ‘pillars’ reached the grassroots level through schooling, the press, cinema, radio, and television. Nevertheless, this process had started well before 1974, such that the year 1968 may be considered to be the turning point. It was not by chance that, in the aftermath of August 1968, one of the most powerful Romanian historical myths was revived: the myth of Mihai Viteazul (Michael the Brave) and his unification of the Romanian principalities in 1600.35 Michael the Brave was a medieval prince who, for several months in 1600, united the principalities of Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania (the main historical provinces of present-day Romania) under a single rule. The reign of Michael the Brave was the subject of one of the most successful movies produced under communism: Sergiu Nicolaescu’s megaproduction Mihai Viteazul. The movie, made in 1969 and released in 1970, represented the perfect embodiment of Ceauşescu’s vision of ‘national’ history. One can go further and argue that the movie was instrumental in forging the national identity of the majority of Romanians today. There are at least two main elements that support such an affirmation. First, the movie was, technically and artistically, well made. The main character, Michael the Brave, was played by one of the most gifted Romanian actors of the postwar period, Amza Pellea, and the team of supporting actors included the best actors Romania had at that moment. Second, the script was simple and direct: the story unfolded

48

|

Dragoş Petrescu

without complications, and the message could be understood by any kind of audience from the most sophisticated to the most ignorant. The story told by Nicolaescu’s movie followed verbatim the story told by history textbooks, and thus emphasized the above mentioned sacred themes of ‘national’ history. Since collective viewing was compulsory for pupils, the message contained by the movie reached the grassroots level efficiently and had lasting effects.36 After the launch of the 1974 RCP Programme, the regime devised a national festival, Cîntarea României (Song of Praise to Romania), which was initiated in 1976 and took place annually until 1989. A national sporting competition, Daciada, whose name clearly referred to the Dacian origins of the Romanians, was also launched. Daciada, however, had less influence on the formation of ethnic allegiance than Cîntarea României.37 The national festival Cîntarea României was important in forging the national identity of the presentday Romanians because it was devised as a huge cultural-ideological umbrella for the totality of cultural activities that took place in Romania after 1976. Thus, everything that could be identified as a cultural event had to be part of the national festival. Furthermore, the festival gathered not only professional artists, but also large numbers of amateur artists from all over the country. For the amateur artists the festival was first and foremost an opportunity to escape from their humdrum workplaces and spend a few days outside the factory (and sometimes out of town).38 The price to be paid was that they had to praise the nation and the supreme leader (Conducător), but many felt that it was worthwhile doing this. Insidiously, through the verses that people recited and the songs they sang, a set of values and attitudes was slowly inculcated. The result was that many acquired a profoundly subjective version of national history and came to believe that the RCP achievements were indeed a continuation of the heroic deeds of the medieval rulers. Let us not forget that the magic of the 1968 ‘balcony speech’ was still powerful. Also, one should bear in mind that it was only after 1981 that the economic crisis began to undermine the regime’s efforts to indoctrinate the population. Such a mixture of professionalism and amateurishness not only affected the quality of cultural production, but also made more space for those products that best served the communist propaganda machine. Many professional artists produced continuously, until the demise of the regime, artworks of pretentious bad taste depicting the supreme leader and his wife. The 1980s proved to be an especially fertile period for the production of this kind of kitsch.39 What is important for the present analysis is that at grassroots level the festival was instrumental in praising Romanianness and the unity of the party-state. Thus, through cultural reproduction, the regime succeeded in enforcing upon the ethnic Romanians a stronger sense of belonging to the organized solidarity of the Romanian nation. The perverse effects of this policy were acutely felt after the collapse of communism. In the early 1990s, the issues of national identity and loyalty

Communist Legacies in the ‘New Europe’ | 49

towards a ‘unitary nation-state’ received disproportionate attention and often overshadowed the issue of democratic transformation of the country. It is also due to such an approach to nationhood that Romania’s postcommunist transformation has been longer and more traumatic than in most of the former communist countries of Central Europe.

Modernization Conducted from Above Another issue that requires closer examination relates to modernization, or more specifically, to economic development and social transformation under communism. According to the 1930 census, Romania’s rural population made up 78.9 percent of the total population, while the urban population made up only 21.1 percent.40 After the communist takeover, during the period between 1948 and 1981, the rural population decreased from 76.6 percent to 49.9 percent, while the urban population marked a commensurate increase.41 At the same time, the rapid industrialization of the country resulted in the growth of the population involved in industry and a significant decrease in the proportion of the population involved in agriculture. Between 1950 and 1981, the population employed in agriculture decreased from 74.1 percent to 28.9 percent; conversely, during the same period, the population employed in industry increased from 12 percent to 36.1 percent. This process occurred in the context of a trend towards socialist industrialization, in which large masses of workers were concentrated in huge plants built close to urban areas. The significant shift in the rural-urban distribution of population, as well as the rapid increase of the population involved in industry in comparison to the population involved in agriculture, meant that large masses of peasants were exposed to urban life and city culture. These masses went through a process of cognitive dissonance, that is, they were forced to change their behavior, which, in the long-term, led to a change in attitudes. This cognitive dissonance effectively ‘organized’ their sense of solidarity beyond the organic solidarity characteristic of a face-to-face society, and led eventually to their integration into the ‘imagined’ community of the Romanian nation. The integration of the rural regions could have not been achieved without a sustained programme of economic development. The development of a network of paved roads and, following the Leninist principle, rural electrification, contributed a great deal towards the forging of the nation. Rural electrification was accompanied by the spread of cheap radio equipment, which brought rural Romania out of its autarchy. Furthermore, the spread of television in the late 1960s decisively influenced this process of cultural integration. Interwar Romania had a deplorable network of paved roads. More than ten years after the communist takeover, in 1956, paved roads still made up only 4.8 percent of the total network of 76,000 km, while in 1980 paved roads made up 20 percent of the total road

50

|

Dragoş Petrescu

network. In terms of electrification, the situation was equally distressing: in 1945, only 535 villages out of a total number of 15,000 were connected to the national grid. Yet in 1965 there were already 3,034 electrified villages, and by 1970 the number had risen to 10,591.42 The spread of education, which is a crucial ingredient in the process of cultural reproduction, is directly linked to industrialization and urbanization. True, in interwar Romania the rate of illiteracy declined substantially between 1918 and 1948. However, the vast majority of the population did not have more than four years of primary school. As already mentioned, the law of 1948 stated that, out of seven years of free education, four were compulsory; in 1955–1956, seven years of schooling became compulsory in urban areas, followed by a similar provision in 1959–1960 for rural areas. In 1961–1962, compulsory education was extended to eight years. While in 1938–1939 only 14 percent of pupils went beyond the primary level, as a result of the communist educational policies the percentage increased to 59 percent by 1965–1966.43 Consequently, successive generations of pupils, educated according to a unique curriculum defined at the national level, fully achieved—especially by learning ‘national’ history and geography— a profound sense of national identity. A corollary, however, was that the Romanian nation was understood mainly in ethnic and not in civic terms.

Conclusions The relevance of the Romanian case is twofold. First, it provides elements for evaluating the so-called Romanian exceptionalism within the Soviet bloc with regard to patterns of compliance with, and opposition towards, the communist regime. Second, the analysis of the Romanian case helps one understand better how major issues related to history and ethnicity were manipulated by the modernizing, national-communist regimes in Southeastern Europe and thus led to a more enduring communist legacy in that region as opposed to Central Europe. With regard to the first concluding remark, it may be argued that, apart from the timid economic boom of the 1960s and 1970s, an alluring facet of Ceauşescuism was the national ideology that provided a strong and enduring focus of identification with, and loyalty towards, the communist regime. National ideology, an enduring element of prime symbolic importance, was skillfully manipulated by Romanian communists. A cultural syndrome, the ‘new nation syndrome,’ provided unexpected support for the communist regime and hindered the development of an organized movement against the regime. This syndrome also hindered the rapid democratization of the country after the 1989 revolution. For instance, if one compares the societal response to the territorial losses of Romania in the summer of 1940 with the societal reaction stirred by the perceived threat of losing Transylvania

Communist Legacies in the ‘New Europe’ | 51

in January-March 1990, one understands better the argument put forward in this chapter. It may be argued that the conditions in 1940 were different from those in the early 1990s. In the summer of 1940 Europe was at war, Romania’s interwar system of alliances was dissolved, and there was not much room for manoeuvre. Yet at the same time, one should not underestimate the gravity of the situation in Romania at the end of 1989 and at the beginning of 1990. If one looks back at the single bloody revolution among the 1989 revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe, and the ‘power vacuum’ that followed, one realizes that, mutatis mutandis, the conditions were, in many respects, comparable. Nevertheless, what is important for the present analysis is the societal reaction, which in the case of post-1989 Romania was much stronger. When the leaders of the National Salvation Front claimed that the nation was endangered, different forms of self-organization and protests from below abounded.44 For instance, if one looks at the speed with which the nationalistic cultural association Vatra Românească (Romanian Hearth) spread and established branches all over the country, one is amazed by the initial success of this organization. However, it is questionable whether the nation was really under threat. One can go further and ask what the true goals of Vatra Românească were, and why its influence diminished drastically by the end of 1991, when political parties became consolidated. The crucial aspect here is that many people who were genuinely concerned with defending the integrity of their homeland—many of whom had never visited Transylvania—responded to the appeals of Vatra Românească and other similar associations, while during the same period no similar societal reaction ever came about in relation to Bessarabia. The second concluding remark suggests that an analysis of the Romanian case can be also relevant for examining the enduring communist legacies in Southeastern Europe as compared with Central Europe. True, the revolutions of 1989 have opened the way towards a united Europe. At the same time, this story of Balkan national-communism in a Romanian guise can tell us something relevant for the whole project of a united Europe. Up to the year 1989 there was no common European ‘usable past’ that would permit the unification of Europe. Nonetheless, Western Europe managed to put the basis of the European Union within the context of a Europe divided between the pro-American West and the Sovietized East. As already mentioned, the 1989 revolutions opened the way towards the unification of Europe, but the legacies and memories of a past that no one wants to be repeated were different in the West as compared with the East. For its part, the ‘other Europe’ is still divided between Central and Southeastern Europe, which are both haunted—to different degrees, to be sure—by the ghosts of the defunct communist regimes in the form of ethnic nationalism and xenophobia. In both Central and Southeastern Europe, the nation-building processes were continued under the communist regimes. However, because of an

52

|

Dragoş Petrescu

enduring legacy of backwardness in the region, dating back to the nineteenth century and beyond, the policies of social and cultural homogenization carried out by those regimes had been more effective in Southeastern Europe and resulted in simplistic conceptualizations of the nation based on ethnicity and (historical) myths, and therefore on exclusion, intolerance, and isolation. Thus, the 1991–1995 Yugoslav war represented more than a display of ‘Balkan,’ ‘centuries-old’ ethnic hatreds: it was a direct result of communist modernization and nation-building strategies and epitomizes therefore the most terrifying legacy of an unusable communist past. Consequently, it is this author’s belief that the Romanian case discussed above would contribute to a better understanding of the inception, demise, and legacies of national-communism in the ‘other Europe.’

Notes 1. Gabriel A. Almond, ‘Communism and Political Culture Theory,’ in idem, A Discipline Divided: Schools and Sects in Political Science (Newbury Park, CA, 1990), 168. 2. Ústí nad Labem is a city of around 106,000 inhabitants in the northwestern part of the Czech Republic, capital of the region of North Bohemia. A wall built by the local authorities in front of a Roma housing estate in order to separate the Roma community from the non-Roma residents of the respective neighborhood eventually came down in 1999, after prolonged pressure from the Czech government, backed by the European Union. 3. Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding (Princeton, 1994), 35. 4. For more on this see Dragoş Petrescu, ‘Reshaping Eastern Europe: Romania and the Europe of the “Rejected”‘, in Marius Turda, ed., The Garden and the Workshop: Disseminating Cultural History in East-Central Europe (Budapest, 1999), 281–95. 5. Ştefan Pascu, Formarea naţiunii române (Formation of the Romanian Nation) (Bucharest, 1967), 49–55. 6. Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building and Ethnic Struggle, 1918–1930 (Ithaca, 1995), 297. 7. Kenneth Jowitt, Revolutionary Breakthroughs and National Development: The Case of Romania, 1944–1965 (Berkeley, 1971), 89–90. 8. Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge, 1996), 63. 9. After 1981, the economic crisis and ideological decay undermined to some extent the regime’s efforts to further homogenize the Romanian ‘socialist’ nation. Nevertheless, the idea that various regional identities melted into a Romanian identity is also supported by the fact that the Romanian nation did not meet the same fate as the ‘unrealized’ Yugoslav or Czechoslovak nations, which disappeared after the 1989 revolutions. 10. Nicolae Ceauşescu, ‘Speech at the festive meeting for the celebration of 65 years from the Union of Transylvania with Romania held in Bucharest on 1 December 1983,’ Romania: Pages of History, no. 1 (Bucharest, 1984). 3. 11. Lajos Demény, ‘Introduction,’ Studii de Istorie a naţionalităţilor conlocuitoare din România şi a înfrăţirii lor cu naţiunea română: Naţionalitatea maghiară (Studies in the History of the Co-inhabiting Nationalities in Romania and Their Fraternization with the Romanian Nation: The Hungarian Nationality), vol. 1 (Bucharest, 1976), 5–6. 12. George Schöpflin, Nations, Identity, Power: The New Politics of Europe (London, 2000), 64. 13. Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding (Princeton, 1994), 223.

Communist Legacies in the ‘New Europe’ | 53

14. See Alexandru Duţu, ‘“Europa noastră” gîndită şi trăită’ (‘Our Europe’ Ruminated and Lived), in idem, Ideea de Europa şi evoluţia conştiinţei europene (The Idea of Europe and the Evolution of European Consciousness) (Bucharest, 1999), 9–12. 15. According to Anderson, a nation is ‘an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.’ Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991), 6. 16. For Apostol’s story, see Lavinia Betea, Maurer şi lumea de ieri: Mărturii despre stalinizarea României (Maurer and the Yesterday World: Testimonies on Romania’s Stalinization) (Arad, 1995), 260. 17. See Karl Marx, Însemnǎri despre români: Manuscrise inedite (Notes on Romanians: Unedited manuscripts) (Bucharest, 1964). For more on Marx’s manuscript, see Paul Niculescu-Mizil, O istorie trăită (A Lived History) (Bucharest, 1997), 251–93. 18. Ronald H. Linden, ‘Romanian Foreign Policy in the 1980s,’ in Daniel Nelson, ed., Romania in the 1980s (Boulder, Co, 1981) 229. 19. Ceauşescu’s speech of 21 August 1968 was published by the RCP’s daily Scînteia, no. 7802, 22 August 1968, 1. 20. Reinhard Bendix, ‘Reflections on Charismatic Leadership,’ in Reinhard Bendix et al., eds., State and Society: A Reader in Comparative Sociology (Berkeley, 1973), 616–29. 21. Paul Goma, Amnezia la români (Amnesia to Romanians) (Bucharest, 1992), 54. 22. Schöpflin, Nations, Identity, Power, 89. 23. Cristina Petrescu, ‘Vizitele de lucru, un ritual al “Epocii de aur”‘ (Ceauşescu’s Domestic Visits: A Ritual of the ‘Golden Epoch’) in Lucian Boia, ed., Miturile comunismului românesc (Myths of Romanian Communism) (Bucharest, 1998), 229–38. 24. The respective speeches by Ceauşescu are reproduced in Nicolae Ceauşescu, România pe drumul desăvîrşirii construcţiei socialiste: Rapoarte, cuvîntări, articole, ianuarie 1968—martie 1969 (Romania on the Road to Accomplishing the Socialist Construction: Reports, Speeches, Articles, January 1968—March 1969) (Bucharest, 1969), 422–54. 25. Ibid., 478. 26. Nicolae Ceauşescu, Propuneri de măsuri pentru îmbunătăţirea activităţii politico-ideologice, de educare marxist-leninistă a membrilor de partid, a tuturor oamenilor muncii—6 iulie 1971 (Proposals of Measures Aimed at Enhancing Political-Ideological Activity, of MarxistLeninist Education of the Party Members and the Entire Working People—6 July 1971) and Expunere la Consfătuirea de lucru a activului de partid din domeniul ideologiei şi al activităţii politice şi cultural-educative—9 iulie 1971 (Exposé at the Meeting of the Party Active in the Field of Ideology and Political and Cultural-Educational Activity—9 July 1971) (Bucharest, 1971). 27. See Programul Partidului Comunist Român de făurire a societăţii socialiste multilateral dezvoltate şi înaintare a României spre comunism (The Romanian Communist Party’s Programme for Establishing a Multilaterally Developed Socialist Society and Romania’s Advancement towards Communism) (Bucharest, 1975), 27–64. 28. Quoted in Mihai Botez, Românii despre ei înşişi (Romanians about Themselves) (Bucharest, 1992), 33. 29. Cited in Wayne S. Vucinich, ‘Major Trends in Eastern Europe,’ in Stephen Fischer-Galati, ed., Eastern Europe in the 1980s (Boulder, CO, 1981), 9. 30. See, for instance, Conferinţa a XIX-a a P.C.U.S.: O nouă viziune, hotărîri cu caracter novator (The 19th Conference of the CPSU: A New Vision, Innovative Decisions (Moscow, 1988), and Nikolai Şmeliov, Restructurarea aşa cum o vede un economist (Restructuring as Seen by an Economist) (Moscow, 1989). 31. See the text of Ceauşescu’s televised evening discourse of 20 December 1989, in Aurel Perva and Carol Roman, Misterele revoluţiei române: Revenire după ani (The Mysteries of the Romanian Revolution: A Comeback after Years) (Bucharest, 1991), 38–39. 32. As Weber puts it, ‘there were no better instruments of indoctrination and patriotic conditioning than French history and geography, especially history.’ Eugen Weber, Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, 1976), 333–34.

54

|

Dragoş Petrescu

33. Paul Niculescu-Mizil, De la Comintern la comunism naţional (From Comintern to National-Communism) (Bucharest, 2001), 448–49. 34. For more on this, see Vlad Georgescu’s pathbreaking study, Politică şi istorie: Cazul comuniştilor români, 1944–1977 (Politics and History: The Case of Romanian Communists, 1944–1977) (Bucharest, 1991). 35. For a classic interpretation of his reign, see Constantin C. Giurescu and Dinu C. Giurescu, Istoria Românilor (The History of the Romanians), vol. 2 (Bucharest, 1976), 324–80. 36. Sergiu Nicolaescu, Mihai Viteazul: Ultima Cruciadă (Michael the Brave: The Last Crusade), 203 min., distributed in Romania by Transglobal Media SRL. 37. For more on Cîntarea României, see Dragoş Petrescu, ‘Cîntarea României sau stalinismul naţional în festival’ (Song of Praise to Romania or National Stalinism in Festival), in Boia, ed., Miturile comunismului românesc, 239–51. On Daciada, see Georgescu, Politics and History, 124–25. 38. Such an assertion is also supported by what the present author observed directly while working as an engineer at the Romlux Tîrgovişte Electric Bulb Factory during the period 1987–1989. 39. See, for instance, the numerous paintings dedicated to the couple by both professional and amateur artists, reproduced in the Scînteia Almanac 1987, Bucharest, 25–31, and the Luceafărul Almanac 1988, Bucharest, 1–13. As for poetry, see Eugen Negrici, Poezia unei religii politice: Patru decenii de agitaţie şi propagandă (The Poetry of a Political Religion: Four Decades of Agitation and Propaganda), (Bucharest, 1995), 311–49. 40. Virgil N. Madgearu, Evoluţia economiei româneşti după războiul mondial (The Evolution of the Romanian Economy after the World War) (Bucharest, 1940; reprint, Bucharest, 1995), 23. 41. Michael Shafir, Romania—Politics, Economics and Society: Political Stagnation and Simulated Change (London, 1985), 47. 42. Per Ronnås, Urbanization in Romania: A Geography of Social and Economic Change since Independence (Stockholm, 1984), 246. 43. Ibid., 236. 44. The National Salvation Front (Frontul Salvării Naţionale FSN) established itself as the new ruling body of Romania in the aftermath of the sudden demise of the communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu on 22 December 1989. FSN had a very diverse membership, ranging from marginalized apparatchiks and technocrats close to the party to non-aligned critical intellectuals and radical dissidents who opposed at some point the megalomaniac policies of the former dictator. See Robert V. Daniels, ed., A Documentary History of Communism and the World: From Revolution to Collapse, (Hanover, NE, 1994), 345–46.

Chapter 3

WRITING NATIONAL HISTORIES IN EUROPE: REFLECTIONS ON THE PASTS, PRESENTS, AND FUTURES OF A TRADITION

( Stefan Berger

The rise of national identity discourses in Europe accompanied the growing professionalization and institutionalization of history writing in the nineteenth century. Consequently national history writing became, for about one century between 1850 and 1950, the dominant form of history writing across Europe. Of course, national history had been written long before the nineteenth century. Thus we can trace histories of England, for example, to medieval times.1 And of course, national history continued to be a popular genre after the 1950s, in big nation-states as much as in smaller and reemerging or nascent nation states. National histories thus possess a long and proud pedigree. This essay will begin by reviewing some of the key characteristics of national history writing in Europe in its heyday between the middle of the nineteenth and the middle of the twentieth centuries. It will then ask briefly what happened to national history after the Second World War before concluding with some reflections on the future of this powerful genre of historical writing.

The Pasts of National History Writing: Key Characteristics The rise of national histories in nineteenth-century Europe is intimately related to either the growing need of existing states to legitimate their territorial shapes or ambitions, or the attempts of stateless nations to free themselves from multinational states and empires. In each case, national histories were instrumental in providing the nation with a functional past, demonstrating the continuity of the nation through particular institutions, symbols, practices of resistance, or cultural, religious, and ethnic characteristics attributed to the people. Most myths of national origin date back Notes for this chapter begin on page 67.

56

|

Stefan Berger

to medieval times and a few go as far back as classical antiquity. Arguably, the need to construct long and, if possible, uninterrupted stories of national belonging was greatest in very young nation-states such as Germany and Italy, or in aspiring nation-states, where the question of national identity tended to be hugely contested. By comparison, older and well-established nation states such as England had a far more homogeneous national story line. But its essential uncontestedness also meant that this history had less of an impact on public debates than was the case elsewhere, notably in Germany, where the ‘historical sciences’ became the ‘leading science’ in the nineteenth century.2 Despite the importance of such different degrees of contestedness, we can safely say that no national history was entirely uncontested. Diverse narrative strategies and plots ensured that the national past could always be interpreted in more than one way. We are thus left with a striking paradox: all national histories tended towards homogenization but in effect ended up producing diversity and dissonance by inspiring their own counter-narratives, which were informed by different methodological and political perspectives. Historians were often close to power. If they were civil servants, they were in the direct pay of their political masters. In terms of promotion and access to resources, they had powerful incentives to write the kind of national history that served the political interests of their masters well. But not everywhere was the relationship between the historical profession and power a straightforward one of subordination. Historians could also further oppositional histories that were directed against existing governments and states. In aspiring nation-states, nationalist historians often set themselves against an empire´s claims to incorporate a particular territory, becoming spokespersons for nascent national movements. Hence a strong link emerged between national discourses and ideas of liberty and liberation from ‘foreign’ oppression. At times historians paid a heavy price for their commitment to national-liberal positions. Thus, for example, the leading national historian of Ukraine, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, the author of the ten-volume History of Ukraine-Rus published between 1898 and 1934, experienced the banning of his books, efforts by the authorities to jeopardize his career, and eventually even imprisonment.3 Russia did not have the most developed of civil societies in Europe. Yet oppositional histories there stood a better chance if they could rely on institutions of civil society that acted as foci of resistance to the claims of a particular state or empire. Such institutions gave historians the opportunity to keep their distance from the state and from the centres of power within that state. This in turn had far-reaching consequences for the way in which national historians constituted their narratives. The scientific turn in nineteenth-century history writing transformed historians into myth-breakers. They were determined to use their scientific methods to differentiate clearly between myths and truth. It was precisely because of their claims to objectivity that historians were able to

Writing National Histories in Europe

| 57

speak authoritatively about the past, and it was this objectivity that made historians so useful to those who wanted to exploit the past for political purposes. The key balancing act for national historians was, on the one hand, to claim a particular status as spokespersons for the nation who could prove scientifically the worth and value of that nation and, on the other, to be politically partisan on the basis of their objective truth claims.4 The juxtaposition between myth and history has determined the field of academic historiography ever since history as a profession was reinvented by historians such as Leopold von Ranke in the first half of the nineteenth century.5 Myths, in particular religious myths, were built into the conception of scientific history from its very beginnings. The founding fathers of ‘scientific’ history were not hard-boiled empiricists. They adhered to the notion that ideas found expression in historical events and actors. The historian’s act of interpretation was needed to extract these ideas from the mere facts of history. Yet it was through this act of interpretation that historians introduced new myths, the biggest of which was the invention of the nation and the subsequent writing of national history. The recent dominance of the constructivist school in nationalism studies has heightened our awareness of the roles played by historians in the construction of the myths of nations.6 With national history, they created a specific form of historical representation that accompanied the formation of the nation-state or sought to influence existing self-definitions of national consciousness. They created a variety of national master narratives that were situated within and were themselves part of cultural and political power relationships. Chris Lorenz concludes that the terms of the debate have been set up in the wrong way. Rather than juxtaposing ‘scientific’ history and myths, scientific history always already was ‘mythhistory.’ The demarcation lines between myths and history are artificial, and the breaking of myths is always accompanied by the formation of myths. In particular, ideas of an Urvolk (an ethnically pure people), foundational myths (i.e., the construction of foundational moments from which the nation reached a ‘point of no return’), dynastic myths, and myths of resistance (to foreign domination or to tyrannical figures) were all crucial elements of national history writing alongside mythical persons and events that gave special legitimacy to the nation. National historians often could not agree on which events, persons, and foundational moments were mythical and which were objectively true. This contributed further to the contestedness of national master narratives. Definitions of the nation merged to varying degrees with ethnic, religious, and class narratives, and national historians had to choose which narrative techniques to use in order to put together the various elements that made up collective identities in the nation-state. Attempts to define the nation via particular ethnic characteristics were as vague as they were wide-ranging. They could refer to culture, language, history, heritage, and biology, and often they did refer to all of these to different degrees. With

58

|

Stefan Berger

the rise of Social Darwinism towards the end of the nineteenth century, race perspectives became increasingly prominent, and there can be no doubt that the racialization of national discourse produced some of the most obnoxious national histories, which celebrate the racial superiority of those belonging to one nation over all others. The combination of nation and religion could, however, be just as intolerant. Particular nations were constructed as Protestant (Britain, Germany, the Netherlands), while others were regarded as Catholic (Spain, Ireland, Poland), and yet others seemed to merge effortlessly with Orthodoxy (Russia). The strong confessionalization of societies in the nineteenth century7 had a lasting impact on conceptions of national history writing. Religion provided key symbols, rituals, and collective practices underpinning national master narratives. National saints and religious festivals allowed for the expression of national sentiments. In particular where the ruler of the state was at the same time the ex officio head of the church, as in Russia or Prussia, dynastic history could merge with religious history to produce powerful national narratives. Although the merger between nation and religion could provide forms of millenarianism, in which the nation became the means of collective salvation, religious identities could equally produce powerful rivals to national identities. Hence Catholics in Europe often resented and resisted the nations’ insistence on absolute loyalty, and they were frequently persecuted for such resistance.8 In some respects nineteenth-century empires such as the Ottoman Empire found it easier to live with several separate religions coexisting with various degrees of autonomy, although even here local churches often proved powerful allies in the national liberation struggles of diverse Balkan nations. If religious identities retained a strong hold over the nationalizing imagination of Europeans, powerful class narratives emerged as a response to the social crises produced by industrialization. Class histories tended to use the nation as a quasi-natural frame of reference.9 Nevertheless, a national history that paid due attention to social concerns met with varying degrees of resistance: for instance, Karl Lamprecht and his attempt to turn traditional German history towards collective social and psychological processes were strongly rejected by the profession. In other countries, the pioneers of social history fared better. In Britain, the Hammonds, the Webbs, R. H. Tawney, and G. D. H. Cole, though academic outsiders, were tolerated and respected by the academic community. In the 1930s, the young Eric Hobsbawm had clear preferences for the London School of Economics over Cambridge, because it was closer to his own interests in social and economic history. But at the same time Hobsbawm retained a love for and dedication to Cambridge, which, after all, also gave renowned economic historians such as M. M. Postan room to flourish.10 Some Marxist historians attempted to give priority to class over nation. In social and economic histories, which started their phenomenal rise during the interwar period and peaked in the 1970s, class could

Writing National Histories in Europe

| 59

take precedence over nation, but many social histories continued to be national histories, and the social and national merged—sometimes to inspire important revisions of more traditional national narratives. The German example of societal history (Gesellschaftsgeschichte) is one example of this.11 In communist Eastern Europe after 1945, class would merge with nation in a futile attempt to produce national narratives that might legitimate the communist regimes. While the construction of national narratives proceeded in relation to narratives of ethnicity, religion, and class, it is equally vital to recognize that national histories were fundamentally gendered affairs. The historical profession was, until recently, a predominantly male enterprise, which produced highly gendered constructions of the nation. Its enemies were feminized, while self-feminization could occur if the nation was perceived as a victim. In this case, historians would talk about the ‘rape of the nation,’ thereby identifying the enemy of the nation as the male rapist. But self-feminization was also a characteristic of the Austrian national narratives, which compared the ability of Austria to prosper through marriage as a positive countermodel to the more warriorlike, i.e., male, qualities of its rivals. And Czech national historians frequently contrasted the ancient freedoms of Czech women with the oppression allegedly suffered by German women in order to underline the allegedly more democratic and egalitarian tendencies of the Czech nation in comparison to its mighty Western neighbor.12 National saints could be male or female (Bruder Klaus in Switzerland; Jeanne d’Arc in France). Allegorical representations of the state tended to be female, yet its active representatives were overwhelmingly male. Most national histories identified the awakening of national consciousness with male virility and strength. They imagined nations as families bound by blood ties. While the construction of national histories took place around gendered narratives of class, religion, and ethnicity, they also had a significant spatial dimension. In other words, the nation and its history had to be related to subnational as well as to transnational territorial entities. In fact, national identity discourses haven often been at their most effective where they worked through and incorporated local and regional identities.13 Some of the heroic national histories of the nineteenth century, for example those by Heinrich von Treitschke and Jules Michelet, relied heavily on a specific regional perspective. Federated nation-states, such as Germany after 1871 or Switzerland, were especially reliant on the incorporation of such regional perspectives. But regional histories did not have to go hand in hand with the national narrative. They could equally form foci of resistance against the encroachments of the national. Where regional sentiments posed a major obstacle to closer national integration, national narratives were often characterized by a marked antiregionalism. Similar ambiguities govern transnational European histories, which were often conceived of from a national perspective and consisted of

60

|

Stefan Berger

assemblages of national histories. The crisis of historicism at the end of the nineteenth century encouraged an interest in comparative historical sociology (e.g. Max Weber, Otto Hintze, and Marc Bloch) and furthered a global history of civilization (e.g. Henri Berr) and histories which focused on developing models of macrohistorical change (e.g. Kurt Breysig, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, and a whole range of Marxist scholars). But even before this crisis took hold, many national historians, including Ranke, Robertson, and Guizot, were at the same time scholars with a transnational vision. National narratives often claimed that their nations fulfilled specific transnational missions, for example, shielding Europe against enemies such as the Turks and Mongols (Poland, Russia, AustriaHungary, Spain). Smaller nations like the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg stressed that their usefulness to Europe lay in their function as a bridge between different cultures and sometimes between more powerful neighbors. But transnational narratives could also be attempts to transcend narrow national perspectives. Several European historians, such as Buckle, Gregorovius, Burckhardt, Huizinga, Venturi, and Carlo Rosselli, pitched their cosmopolitan narratives against the national(ist) mainstream of their times. In imperial histories the national was also closely bound up with the transnational. They were often written as global histories of national expansion. Empire had a particular place in discourses about the nation, while it also acted as an alternative to national narratives that concentrated only on domestic political developments within the nation-state. Colonialism and the intercultural contact it promoted led to histories of nonWestern peoples written by European authors. At the same time, colonial subjects began to import and adapt European constructions of nationhood and reassert independence from Europe by inventing their own national narratives. These non-European national historiographies also developed their own images of Europe, which in turn influenced European national narratives. The Empire was indeed writing back. The importance of territorial constructions of national histories is most obvious in narratives of war and violent conflict over contested space. Two or more national histories often laid claim to a single territory that figured prominently in the rivals’ national narratives. This was particularly noticeable where national histories emerged within multinational empires. Here national histories could be combined with histories of empire, but they could also be written as conscious alternatives to empire and even result in calls to destroy that empire. In turn, histories of empire were at times written against the growing influence of national narratives. One of the key problems for historians of empire was deciding how to draw clear lines between core areas of the empire and their peripheries, and how to describe the relationship between core and periphery. Particular areas were constructed as belonging to the core when they had figured prominently in the exploits of empire (e.g. Scotland within Britain, Ukraine within Russia).

Writing National Histories in Europe

| 61

Not for nothing did national histories pay special attention to border areas, which were places of interchange of ideas and goods, but also sites of rivalry and competition.14 Borders were violently contested and featured strongly in the histories of war that are such an important part of national narratives all over Europe. Warfare produced most of the wellknown heroes of national pantheons in Europe and led to a cult of death and sacrifice being incorporated into the myths of the nation.15 Because border territories belonged to the most contested spaces of nation-states, nationalism could be particularly intense at the border. Yet, at the same time, border territories often developed their own national narratives, which challenged those of the national core. Arguably, Russian national narratives from the second half of the nineteenth century were largely a reaction to emerging Ukrainian and Polish national identity discourses. And in some cases border territories also produced hybrid identities, which made them emphasize that their territory stood in between the cultures and sometimes the languages of two adjacent nation-states. These hybrid identities were often crushed in periods of intense European nationalisms, but in some places, such as Alsace, they survived and have flourished with the ongoing process of Europeanization since the second half of the twentieth century.16 When the key characteristics of national narratives are reviewed, it is striking how remarkably similar in makeup and structure the national story lines were. Yet despite these structural similarities, almost all national histories showed a remarkable zeal for demonstrating their alleged uniqueness, leading to a proliferation of special paths in European national histories. Most of these claims were connected to the notion that one national narrative was superior to that of others. Thus, the celebration of German culture included the denigration of Western European civilization as well as Slavic ‘barbarity.’ Conversely, Eastern European historiographies often portrayed their people as victims of a German Drang nach Osten. British notions of ‘progress’ and ‘liberty’ were connected to the perception of others, notably Ireland but also continental countries, as backward and tyrannical. The revolutionary tradition in France rendered all other national histories mere sideshows to the real progress of humanity, which, of course, had only taken place in France. In turn, no single event featured so strongly in so many different national histories as the French Revolution of 1789. It produced a range of national responses, most of which were hostile. In fact, the construction of inner unity necessitated sharp demarcations in relation to outer and inner foes (prominent among the latter were Jews, Roma, socialists, and Catholics) of the nation. Specific national characteristics entailed projecting the repression and denigration of others onto ‘national enemies.’ Such ideas contributed to the close association of national narratives with narratives of warfare and genocide—in particular during the first half of the twentieth century.

62

|

Stefan Berger

Towards the Present of National History Writing: Developments after 1945 Following the end of the Second World War, the ties between national narratives and an unprecedented history of bloodshed led many historians to reassess their story lines. Of course, the degree and timing of such critical questioning of the national differed among the various European nationstates. Arguably, the victors of the war reframed their national narratives less radically than the vanquished. It is, after all, the losers who more than the winners tend to develop greater methodological and historiographical insights and thereby shape future history writing.17 The British trajectory diverged from that of continental Europe, for Britain never experienced Nazi occupation and could celebrate 1940 as the nation’s ‘finest hour.’ British historians (mainly on the left) were thus satisfied with making the national narratives more socially inclusive rather than abandoning and transforming national perspectives altogether. By contrast, spectres of occupation, collaboration, and resistance were soon to haunt many continental national histories. However, immediately after 1945, a proliferation of attempts to stabilize traditional national narratives testified to the strength of the traditional national orientation of history writing. Conservative German historians such as Gerhard Ritter and Hans Rothfels juxtaposed the good German nationalism of the national-conservative resistance with the evil racism of the Nazis. They thereby sought to exorcize the spirit of fascism from German national narratives.18 Similar efforts characterized the writings of very different Italian national historians, such as Benedetto Croce, Adolfo Omodeo, and Luigi Salvatorelli, who argued that the origins of Italian fascism lay in the First World War and the Russian revolution rather than in specific Italian national developments. In fact, fascism became a kind of anti-Risorgimento, and the resistance to fascism became the most important reference point for stabilizing national narratives in Italy.19 A similar role was fulfilled by narratives of resistance against the German occupation in France, where Gaullist and communist resistance myths both relied heavily on presenting versions of the past that could be reconciled with more traditional French national narratives.20 But nowhere did these attempts to stabilize traditional national narratives go unchallenged. The Fischer controversy in Germany problematized, among other things, the unholy alliance between nationalism and historiography.21 In Italy historians close to the Communist Party took up the ideas of the archetypal Oxbridge don Dennis Mack Smith with a vengeance and contributed much to the fracturing of a traditional national discourse by arguing that Mussolini was in fact the logical end point of nineteenth-century Italian history.22 The critical questioning of the resistance myths in France also owed much to the influence from an outsider, Robert Paxton, whose indictment of the Vichy regime in 1972

Writing National Histories in Europe

| 63

had an explosive effect on a younger generation of French historians.23 During the 1960s and 1970s in continental Europe, the challenges to traditional national narratives tended to come from a reengagement with the histories of fascism and world war. In Britain, by contrast, it had more to do with the story of national decline and the rise of Celtic nationalisms, especially in Scotland and, to a much lesser extent, Wales.24 The trajectory of British national narratives was thus similar insofar as the traditional stories became less and less convincing. However, the source of the crisis of British narratives differed from that of continental narratives. The destabilization of traditional national narratives contributed to a genuine pluralization of the forms and content of history writing from the 1960s onwards.25 The advances of social and economic history since the interwar period ended the dominance of a political history geared towards the nation-state. But from the 1970s onwards, social history was in turn challenged by microhistory, the history of everyday life, and the history workshop movement. The 1980s saw the seemingly inexorable rise of cultural history, and in the 1990s, postmodernism and its influence on history writing was discussed to varying degrees in various national contexts. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, history was indeed a house with many rooms, and young historians in search of a PhD topic can now choose from a bewildering array of theories and types of history. The problem now hardly consists in the fact that one particular type of history writing dominates other types; rather, there is a very real threat that historians no longer speak a common language and choose to occupy their own little rooms in the much-extended house of history without ever establishing contact with the other occupants of the same house. Even more importantly for our topic, one may ask whether the pluralization of history writing has had an impact on the traditions of national history writing. Arguably the advances of social history did not signal the abandonment of earlier national commitments. To take just one example, institutes for the study of class and labour history were founded after 1945 in several European states (e.g. the Gramski Institute in Italy, the Institute Français d’Histoire Sociale in France, and the Archiv für soziale Demokratie of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung in Germany), but they often accepted the nation as a quasi-natural framework for a social perspective on national history. Equally, other forms of history writing, be they intellectual or cultural history, still often deal chiefly with the history of the nation-state in which the historian lives and works. The huge success of contemporary history in post-1945 Europe was again to a large extent based on debates and controversies that were national in character.26 Although different approaches to history writing did not necessarily lead to a denationalization of historical writing per se, social historians of the 1960s and 1970s often took far more critical approaches to national

64

|

Stefan Berger

history and moved away from the apologias of the nation-state that historians tended to deliver in the century between 1850 and 1950. However, the process by which postwar historians distanced themselves from the nationalizing commitments of their predecessors was hardly linear. In fact, the 1980s saw a series of concerted efforts to reestablish links between history writing and positive nation building. The Historians’ Dispute (Historikerstreit) of 1986 in Germany was in part an attempt to provide a national history that the German people could positively identify with. This, of course, meant removing National Socialism from the central place it had occupied in the memory culture of West Germany since the 1960s.27 In Italy, we encounter the monumental effort by Renzo de Felice to rewrite the history of Italian fascism in a more positive way and, at the same time, to attack the antifascism that had formed one of the most important ideological building blocks of the postwar Italian republic.28 During the 1980s France saw a massive revival of national histories, of which Fernand Braudel’s two volumes are the most striking and arguably the most noteworthy example.29 Braudel, the patriarch of the Annales School and champion of histories of civilization, returned to national history with a vengeance. Combining mysticism and nationalism in an epic, elegiac narrative, Braudel championed an eclectic mix of deeply conservative agendas. 30 In Britain, historians rediscovered themselves as guardians of the national past. Some sought to develop profoundly conservative reinterpretations of the past. Others were keen to produce school history curricula that would engender, above all, a proud national historical consciousness. 31 In all four countries, developments in the historiographical realm were intertwined with policies pursued by the governments of Helmut Kohl, François Mitterrand, Bettino Craxi, and Margaret Thatcher. The closeness of historians to political power still produced nationalizing narratives and strategies. However, it also needs to be stressed that powerful counter-tendencies were at work in all four countries. After all, the history workshop movements and left-of-centre social and cultural historians spearheaded the attempts in Britain to thoroughly analyze patriotic sentiment in history. In France, leading intellectuals such as Pierre Bourdieu remained intensely skeptical of the national turn of French history. In Italy, antifascism found many powerful defenders, and in Germany left-liberal historians claimed victory over their conservative nationalizing opponents in the Historians’ Dispute. The end of the Cold War increased the blurring of the picture presented by the state of national narratives in Europe. At a time when the world had been divided into a capitalist liberal-democratic bloc and a communist bloc, the very nature of bloc-building had encouraged the search for historical narratives that legitimated such supranational alliance systems, therefore going beyond the national framework. The breakdown of these Cold War blocs made this kind of narrative a much less pressing affair. Instead, the world witnessed the reemergence of nation-states that had not

Writing National Histories in Europe

| 65

existed during the Cold War. In reunified Germany, the Baltic states, and the multiple other successor states of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, national narratives became a way of positioning new nations in their postCold War surroundings. With the breakup of Czechoslovakia, the new Czech Republic and Slovakia faced the task of rewriting their national narratives. And in Italy, the post-Cold War world provoked a massive crisis in the national self-understanding of the postwar Italian republic, to which historians reacted by debating the kind of narratives that might in future legitimate the Italian nation-state. At the same time that national histories rose to prominence again in Central and Eastern Europe, the process of European integration was about to reach a new stage, first with the introduction of currency union, then with the expansion of the European Union. Yet the flowering of European discourses in the 1990s also produced anxieties across Europe. Vast sections of the European population found it difficult to leave their old currencies and national symbols behind and to endorse the vision of a common European future. The older national narratives seemed to embody something reassuringly familiar in the face of what was widely perceived to be a threat to the established nation-states of Europe. While the new Europe often promoted itself as a ‘Europe of the regions,’ this new emphasis on regional narratives produced even more tensions between them and the more traditional national narratives, especially in multinational states like Spain and Britain, where the regions (Catalonia, Scotland) produced their own nationalizing narratives. Overall, we are left with the impression that in the post-Cold War world, national narratives are at the same time beleaguered and flourishing.

The Futures of National History Writing: Is It Past Its Sell-by Date? It seems safe to predict that national history writing will continue to be an important mode of history writing for a considerable time to come. Although it is therefore unrealistic to declare national narratives a thing of the past, this raises the question of how to deal with them, especially as they have been, for much of the time since the nineteenth century, extremely explosive, reactionary, and dangerous in their consequences and implications. They have, after all, been used to legitimate wars, genocides, and the most horrific crimes. I would like to conclude by suggesting that, as historians, we can do two things to make national histories safer for the future. First, we need to explore in greater detail how national narratives have worked in the past. How were they constructed? Under what conditions did they flourish? Which ingredients made them particularly nasty or palatable? Comparing national narratives in a genuinely transnational way across Europe and beyond,

66

|

Stefan Berger

exploring their interrelationships, commonalities, and differences, will help to de-essentialize national stories in Europe. It will take away the ideas of ‘naturalness’ and ‘inevitability’ that made these national narratives so powerful during the course of the last two centuries.32 It is, after all, through historical master narratives that people make sense of the past and identify with a particular version of the past.33 Postmodern critiques of such master narratives have successfully questioned their uniformity and homogeneity and highlighted the explicit silences and omissions contained in them. Acknowledging the fruitfulness of a critique of master narratives does not, of course, entail any assumption about their eventual dissolution and disappearance. It would be foolish to ignore the power of national identity discourses and their underlying historical narratives. But we can make a first step towards defusing their explosive potential by laying bare the mechanisms and circumstances of their perpetual construction and reconstruction. If historians in the nineteenth century naturalized and essentialized national states, historians in the twenty-first century need to place emphasis on denaturalizing and de-essentializing the nation. If we can contribute towards a historical consciousness that is aware of its constructedness, history will work towards a more enlightened response to the continuing nationalist demagoguery.34 Secondly, a better understanding of how national narratives have worked in the past will encourage the writing of kaleidoscopic national histories, which are based on multiple memory cultures and incorporate diverse perspectives on the national past. The aim is to replace the paradigm of the single homogenous national history with an acceptance of many different national narratives. National historians and their audiences need to recognize that the pasts that historians construct are all put together from the pieces of a shattered mirror.35 Such a pluralization of narratives within the nation-state would be a way of combining national story lines with tolerance and the acceptance of differences within nationally constituted cultures. In the European context it will also be crucial to avoid a Europeanization of national story lines that would transfer homogeneity, unity, and superiority onto a European level. Here the danger is that new ideological closures, borders, and boundaries would encourage the vilification of non-European nations and cultures (as one sees occasionally in the contemporary debates about the Islamic world). Instead, it will be crucial to continue on the path of ‘provincialising Europe’36 in order to decenter the European experience within the transnational and global narratives of human development. The pluralization of historiographical discourses has arguably exploded the notion of paradigm changes in the historical sciences. Can we, as a historical profession, move from the plurality of histories to a multiplicity of national stories inside and outside of Europe that would recognize the fragmented nature of national identities in the past and bring about less harmful forms of national identity in the future?

Writing National Histories in Europe

| 67

Notes These thoughts have been prompted by an intensive and ongoing encounter with diverse national historiographies in Europe within the framework of a five-year European Science Foundation Programme entitled ‘Representations of the Past: The Writing of National Histories in Europe.’ For details, see the programme brochure entitled Representations of the Past: National Histories in Europe (NHIST) (Strasbourg, 2004), and the programme’s first and second newsletter entitled Representations of the Past: The Writing of National Histories in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Europe (NHIST), newsletters 1 and 2 (Strasbourg, 2004 and 2006). Also see www.uni-leipzig.de/zhsesf. 1. Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, 1997). 2. John Breuilly, ‘Historians and the Nation,’ in Peter Burke, ed., History and Historians in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2002), 55–87. 3. Frank E. Sysyn, ‘Discussion: Myths, Power and the Historian’s Responsibility,’ unpublished paper delivered at the World Historical Congress in Sydney, July 2005. 4. Wolfgang Hardtwig, Geschichtskultur und Wissenschaft (Munich, 1990), especially 103–60. 5. Chris Lorenz, ‘Drawing the Line: “Scientific” History between Myth-Making and Myth-Breaking,’ in Stefan Berger, ed., Narrating the Nation: The Representation of National History in Different Genres (Oxford, 2007). 6. For a succinct summary of the debate about constructivism in national identity studies see Anthony Smith, The Nation in History: Historiographical Debates about Ethnicity and Nationalism (Cambridge, 2000), 52–78. 7. Olaf Blaschke, ‘Das 19. Jahrhundert: ein zweites konfessionelles Zeitalter?,’ Geschichte und Gesellschaft 26 (2000): 38–75; Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Dieter Langewiesche, eds., Nation und Religion in Europa: Mehrkonfessionelle Gesellschaften im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 2004). 8. Oded Heilbronner, ‘Catholicism,’ in Stefan Berger, ed., Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth Century European History (Oxford, 2006). 9. See, for example, E. Levasseur, Histoires des classes ouvrières en France depuis la conquête de Jules César jusqu’à la Révolution, 2 vols. (Paris, 1859); idem, Histoires des classes ouvrières en France depuis 1789 jusqu’à nos jours, 2 vols. (Paris, 1867); F. Garido, Historia de las clases trabajadores, 4 vols. (Madrid, 1870). 10. Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (London, 2002), 121f. 11. Thomas Welskopp, ‘Identität ex negativo: Der “deutsche Sonderweg” als Metaerzählung in der bundesdeutschen Geschichtswissenschaft der siebziger und achtziger Jahre,’ in Konrad Jarausch and Martin Sabrow, eds., Die historische Meistererzählung: Deutungslinien der deutschen Nationalgeschichte nach 1945 (Göttingen, 2002), 109–39. 12. Jitka Malecˇ ková, ‘Nationalizing Women and Engendering the Nation: The Czech National Movement,’ in Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall, eds., Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2000), 293–310. 13. Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, 1990); Alon Confino, The Nation as Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany and National Memory 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997). 14. Hastings Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson, Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State (Oxford, 1999). 15. Monika Flacke, ed., Mythen der Nationen: Ein europäisches Panorama, 2nd ed. (Munich, 2001). 16. Stefan Berger, Border Regions, Hybridity and National Identity: The Cases of Alsace and Masuria,’ in: Q. Edward Wang and Franz Leander Fillafer, eds, The Many Faces of Clio: Crosscultural Approaches to History (Oxford, 2006), pp. 366–38. at the conference on ‘Border Studies: Theories and Concepts,’ University of Glamorgan, December 2004.

68

|

Stefan Berger

17. Reinhard Koselleck, ‘Erfahrungswandel und Methodenwechsel: Eine historisch-anthropologische Skizze,’ in Christian Meier and Jörn Rüsen, eds., Historische Methode (Frankfurt am Main, 1988), 13–62. 18. On stabilizations of national narratives in Germany, see Stefan Berger, The Search for Normality: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Germany since 1800, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2003), 40–48. 19. Jens Petersen, ‘Wandlungen des italienischen Nationalbewußtseins nach 1945,’ Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken, 71 (1991): 699–748. 20. Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (New Haven, 1994). 21. Volker Berghahn, ‘Die Fischer-Kontroverse: 15 Jahre danach,’ Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 6 (1980): 403–19. 22. Brilliant on all aspects of historiographical debate on Mussolini and Italian fascism is R. J. B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (London, 1998). 23. Christopher Flood and Hugo Frey, ‘History Writing: From the Annales to the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent,’ in Christopher Flood and Nick Hewlett, eds., Currents in Contemporary French Intellectual Life (Basingstoke, 2000), 63. 24. Richard J. Finlay, ‘Controlling the Past: Scottish Historiography and Scottish Identity in the 19th and 20th Century,’ Scottish Affairs, 6 (1994): 127–48; Neil Evans, ‘Writing the Social History of Modern Wales: Approaches, Achievements and Problems,’ Social History, 17 (1992): 479–92. 25. Lutz Raphael, Geschichtswissenschaft im Zeitalter der Extreme: Theorien, Methoden, Tendenzen von 1900 bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 2003), 215–27. 26. Alexander Nützenadel and Wolfgang Schieder, eds., Zeitgeschichte als Problem: Nationale Traditionen und Perspektiven der Forschung in Europa (Göttingen, 2004). 27. Some of the most important documents of the ‘Historikerstreit’ can be found in English translation in Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Original Documents of the Historikerstreit, the Controversy Concerning the Singularity of the Holocaust (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1993). The literature on the controversy is legion; for a sober perspective see, among others, Richard J. Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (London, 1989). 28. B. Painter, ‘Renzo De Felice and the Historiography of Italian Fascism,’ American Historical Review, 95 (1990): 391–405. 29. Fernand Braudel, L’Identité de France, 2 vols. (Paris, 1986). 30. On Braudel’s national history see Julian Jackson, ‘Historians and the Nation in Contemporary France,’ in Stefan Berger, Mark Donovan, and Kevin Passmore, eds., Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800 (London, 1999), 241. 31. David Cannadine, ‘British History: Past, Present and Future,’ Past and Present, 116 (1987): 189f. 32. This is also where the European Science Foundation programme on the writing of national histories in Europe will have an important part to play. 33. Krijn Thijs, ‘Von “master narrative” zur “Meistererzählung”? Überlegungen zu einem Konzept der ‚narrativen Hierarchie,’” Alfrun Kliems and Martina Winkler, eds., Sinnstiftung durch Narration in Ost-Mittel-Europa (Leipzig, 2005), 21–53. 34. This kind of history would also contribute to a history informed by Enlightenment values as outlined by Jürgen Kocka, Geschichte und Aufklärung (Göttingen, 1989). 35. For Germany, see Konrad H. Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton, 2003). 36. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000).

Chapter 4

BETWEEN EUROPE AND THE NATION: THE INWARD TURN OF CONTEMPORARY HISTORICAL WRITING

( Pieter Lagrou

As we all know, French contemporary history followed a very peculiar path. From 1789 until at least 1945, the French nation was deeply divided over the implications of the founding event of French contemporary history, the Revolution.1 From Robespierre to Napoleon III, Captain Dreyfus, Charles Maurras, Léon Blum, and Philippe Pétain, the cleavage over the legacy of the revolution—les guerres franco-françaises—provides again and again the interpretational framework needed to understand French history. Not that 1945 was the end of it: the momentous changes of 1958, 1968, and 1981 served each time to underscore how, in some inscrutably French way, French history was and is both peculiar and of universal impact. Explanations for events and evolutions are to be sought in the remote French past, not in contemporary events elsewhere in Europe. And speaking of singularity, who would disagree that contemporary history drew Germany into a tragically exceptional trajectory? The Sonderweg—Germany walking Germany’s ways—became an axiom for a generation of German historians, and an anxious obsession for several generations of Germany’s neighbors.2 The Sonderweg also split off from the European main road quite some time ago, seemingly because of some dysfunctional growth disorder, with different sectors going through badly synchronized stages of development—socioeconomic development, political development, retarded nationhood, Bismarck. Italy, so it seems, suffered from some of the same diseases but in a much more benign form, blundering its way into the twentieth century without causing too much harm and without ever being taken really seriously, least of all by the Italians themselves, which also ended up being a form of national singularity, if not national pride.3 Britain, of course, does not even need to differentiate itself from anything else: its self-definition Notes for this chapter begin on page 76 .

70

|

Pieter Lagrou

is vindicated by geography and it is as yet undecided which continent the island belongs to. National singularity is not the privilege of great nations alone. On the contrary, one needs only to mention Greece’s heroic resistance to centuries of Ottoman oppression and its peculiar combination of religious nationalism and a discourse of the cultural paternity of Western civilization and universal values, or think of the self-righteous position of Dutch historiography.4 The latter extols the European exception formed by a merchant republic turned fervently monarchist, a tolerant, multiconfessional, and peaceful society turning its back on an unruly continent, busily overlooking its maritime empire.5 And then, on a beautiful May day in 1940 . . . Witness also, of course, the recent staging of self-representations by the ten new entrants into the European Union, when folkore, from the knights of Malta in shining armour to Polish peasant folk-dances, quite distressingly supplanted what would have been legitimate pride in the transformation and modernization of these countries. It is easy, of course, to make fun of the navel-gazing tendencies of national historiographies and to caricature interpretations of national singularity. If, as historians, we privilege the diachronical dimension in trying to understand our objects of study, we are bound to trace the remote and singular origins and causes that primarily account for national divergence.6 If this observation is valid for all periods of history, contemporary historiography does seem to face two rather peculiar and paradoxical developments. First of all, contemporary historiography, particularly that part involved in the study of the twentieth century, seems much more absorbed by the paradigm of national singularity than are the histories of earlier periods. Secondly, and herein lies the paradox, this first statement holds true notwithstanding the fact that the convergence of European societies constitutes one of the most striking features of twentieth-century history. Ultimately, this constitutes a major intellectual impasse, the roots of which deserve close attention. We also need to ask ourselves how to get out of it. How and why did contemporary history withdraw into the conceptual frontiers of the nation? First of all, contemporary historians are the only ones who deal mostly with sources in their own language. As such, they are the children of the emergence of the nation-state, promoting linguistic unification and producing enormous amounts of source materials in the same language. Through this process—for the first time in history in most regions—the language of administration and of commerce, of justice and education and, increasingly, of the elites and lower classes, urbanites and rural population, became one and the same. Archivally and linguistically, contemporary historians have often been the captives of the nation-state. National historiographies and national educational systems then also developed widely diverging concepts and methods, unsuited for export. References to foreign historiography—insofar as one had access to

Between Europe and the Nation

| 71

them—became a matter of courtesy and display of erudition, rather than a way of challenging interpretations destined for internal use only. Thus did almost all European countries produce a generation of ‘linguistically challenged’ contemporary historians, scholars with less access to other languages than the previous generation of contemporary historians—a generation trained as medievalists, such as Henri Pirenne, Pierre Renouvin, or more recently Jean Stengers—or historians of earlier periods. The consequences of this were shrinking linguistic and geographic horizons in the research they conducted and in the models of interpretation they were capable of offering. This repli national was also an effect of the increasingly specialized training offered to students of contemporary history at European universities, where choosing contemporary history became a strategy to avoid Latin, German, French, Italian, or English, since none of these were indispensable for reading the sources of contemporary national histories. In the 1970s, language classes were often replaced by statistics and computer programming, but today it is prudent to state that the quantitative revolution fell short of its ambitions and that the realm of knowledge laid bare by mathematical skills did not challenge conceptual self-certainties in the same way language skills did. This is the negative side of introspection—’navel-gazing’ or the inability to look further than one’s national nose. It needs to be said, as an amendment to this, that territorial expansion allowed some national historiographies to cover a great deal of ground without ever leaving their national archival resources—historians of Napoleonic Europe, the British Empire, or the Third Reich, for example—allowing thereby, depending on the period of study, an undeniable ascendancy of certain national historiographies to a European level, which Danish, Catalan, or Retro-Roman historiography, for instance, never attained. However, and this is a second observation, there is also a more positive side to ‘introspection.’ Unlike their nineteenth-century predecessors, this new generation of contemporary historians were not producing servile legitimations of the nation-state. Theirs was a highly critical historiography more prone to self-flagellation than to chauvinism.7 The primacy of national singularity was self-incriminating, drawing attention to particular national responsibilities in the tragedies of the twentieth century, breaking with glorifying national narratives, unearthing the darkest episodes of national participation in crimes, of national proclivities for racism and authoritarianism. As a result of this militant engagement in social and political critique, in unmasking myths and exposing unpleasant truths, contemporary historiography from the 1970s on was heavily overinvested in the ‘dark years.’ Holocaust and Hitler rule, Vichy and the war in Algeria, were both more popular and considered intellectually more legitimate than the study of the postwar success of social democracy, the origins of the Treaty of Rome, or the history of health insurance. This

72

|

Pieter Lagrou

was also a historiography that privileged ideology over society, politics over economic development, and culture over demography. Yet, by focusing on the singular national responsibilities in the catastrophes of the twentieth century, this historiography was unable to account for the striking convergence of European societies: convergence of economic systems, of family models and demography, of social organization, consumption and culture, of political regimes, and of chronologies and shared caesura, all culminating in an unprecedented process of institutional integration, now called ‘European Union.’8 Dealing with this last theme was a specific branch of history, practised quite separately from the main stream of self-critical historiography and—to be honest—not held in equally high intellectual esteem. The ‘history of Europe’ after the 1970s was a subspecialty of the history of diplomatic relations—the business of treaties and negotiations. This history of Europe was not about European societies, whether they converged or not: it was about the relations between states and their strategies of national interest, thereby underlining the primacy of the nation-state even further. An intellectually even more problematic strand offered an idealistic and teleological narrative of European integration as the articulation of a ‘grand idea’ through history, with noble founding fathers and European nations inspired by the sincere desire for reconciliation, peace, and European federalism, but estranged from themselves by wicked nationalists, dictators, and totalitarian ideologies. The Treaties of Rome and Maastricht were, according to this reading, stages in which Europe’s true nature was revealed to itself, the accomplishment of centuries of shared aspirations, and the end of European history. Our noble ancestors Konrad Adenauer and Jean Monnet, Aristide Briand, Victor Hugo, and Erasmus were a new and barely more credible version of nos ancêtres les gaullois.9 Of course, contemporary Europe is not only the realization of a ‘grand idea’ and an ancient noble dream. It is also born of the disasters Europeans have inflicted on themselves, of the destruction of national particularities through war and revolution, population displacement and mass murder, the wiping out of cultural, political, and ideological diversity. As long as the historiography of contemporary Europe is characterized by the schizophrenic dichotomy between an idealist history of European convergence and a highly critical but strictly national history of European catastrophes, the project to write a European history of Europe is condemned to an intellectual impasse. Neither top-down history of Europe that disregards the tumultuous and bloody history of European societies nor a bottom-up history of European crises that is unable to go beyond the national framework, is intellectually satisfactory. Is there a way out? And if there is a way out, what do we have to change: our objects of study, or our methodology ? Should we preach transnational history or comparative history?10 To put the question differently: What’s wrong with comparative history, according to a recent strand of criticism?

Between Europe and the Nation

| 73

Transnational history proposes a change of paradigm via a change of objects of study. The main problem with national histories, in this approach, is a matter of focus, of the inadequacy of confining the research theme to its geographical framework. Historians should question the primacy of the nation as the obvious delimitation of their research, since many phenomena simply are not ‘national’; if we limit the research to a national case, we might get the interpretation wrong, since we do not get the complete picture or the real dynamics at work. Some phenomena superbly ignore national frontiers, for example migration, or in a different register, moments of revolutionary contagion such as 1848 or 1968. In order to surmount the limitations of national historiographies, historians have to choose other objects of study that are transnational by nature. This argument is also an implicit criticism of comparative history. If such a history proceeds by simply juxtaposing national case studies, it still takes the national framework for granted. Worse still, this procedure most often highlights national particularities and differences, thus reaffirming the postulat du national. The ambition to write a European history of Europe obviously requires us to go beyond the compilation of national case studies. Entgrenzung, i.e. breaking down borders, is a central challenge for contemporary history, and not only by transcending geographical boundaries. Contemporary historians also most often distinguish themselves by the narrow chronological scope of their research. Until recently, scholars of World War I and World War II were part of separate corporations who never met each other and did not read each other. The challenge ahead is not only to reconstitute the European continent in its entirety, but also to recompose the wholeness and the relatedness of different episodes of the twentieth century and beyond. The transnational approach needs to be coupled with a genealogical approach linking events and periods in a cumulative chain of experience. Four areas of research seem to hold particularly promising potential for Entgrenzung. A first set of questions relates to the three moments of contemporary continental change: 1918, 1945, and 1989. Postwar eras are a major historiographical challenge for the simple reason that the main models for understanding what happened to German society after 1918, for example, do not apply to France, and neither situation can be applied to the post1945 period. ‘Brutalization,’ retarded mental demobilization, forced return to normalcy, and moral and political conservatism: how do we make sense of this in a European and century-long context? And what is it exactly that brought the twentieth century to a close in 1989—for the whole of Europe, that is, and not only for former communist bloc countries?11 A second theme concerns regime change. Explaining the very recent status of parliamentary democracy as a consensual model is an important interpretative challenge. Popular support for authoritarian regimes characterizes Europe’s twentieth century at least as much as its recent total adhesion to the model of the parliamentary democracy.12 How do we make

74

|

Pieter Lagrou

sense of the succession of reactionary, fascist, and communist regimes, the brutal ideological swings, the changes and continuities of elites all over Europe, because of or in spite of regime changes? A European reading of these processes, with their wide regional time lags, discrepancies, and reversals, radically questions any teleological interpretation of the ascendancy of the parliamentary model and restores contingency to a fundamentally erratic history. The third theme comes closest to a strictly transnational approach, since it concerns nations and nationalities. In most of Europe, the nationstate is a recent phenomenon. What did it mean to be German, Hungarian, Polish, Greek, Bulgarian, or Ukrainian in 1908, 1919, 1941, and 1948?13 In any given locality, what was the horizon of human experience of the inhabitants in 1948, following the most massive population displacement in history? ‘Local’ memory was often a minority memory, and memories of Galicia, Bessarabia, or Anatolia were very much part of ‘Western’ European experience at that time. La tyrannie du national was not an invention of historians but of lawmakers, police and immigration officers, employment agencies, and ruthless architects of demographic reconstruction.14 The fourth and last theme concerns the welfare state. Beyond the contrasting political histories of European countries, the convergence of European societies is the result of relatively stable and largely shared social policies.15 One has only to look at the physical geography of European suburbs—in Berlin, Budapest, Birmingham, or Bari—to arrive at the question of the common processes that produced them. In this respect, the Cold War divide was not the watershed it appears to have been in diplomatic and political history. The years 1945–1970 even appear as a period of intense convergence, materializing longstanding aspirations and promises for social progress. Free and universal access to health care and education, the extension of old age pensions, unemployment benefits, and/or full employment created a new society that seemed to have overcome the social insecurity of the 1920s and 1930s. An aging population, small nuclear families, secularization, and moral tolerance are today features shared by all European societies and to some extent by them only. They also constitute the future horizons of social and political debate in Europe. So much for Entgrenzung. Does this imply, however, that we should subscribe to the expeditious death sentence condemning comparative history as old-fashioned and, worse still, as a nationalist plot? Even if we agree that not all historical phenomena can be captured by national history, we cannot simply decree that all objects of study are henceforth intrinsically transnational and that all things national are intellectually illegitimate. There might be a way of practising comparative history other than the sterile juxtaposition of national case studies, one that is not defined by objects of study but by the way in which we conceive of a question, that is, comparative history as a heuristic method. Comparative history should not imply exporting the preoccupations of one national historiography to

Between Europe and the Nation

| 75

another—laicité in Great Britain or lottizzazzione in Spain, for example, ad absurdum. Its added value lies in its potential to displace perspectives, in its potential for alienation, breaking the spell of self-evident national interpretations and, more importantly, national questions. Marc Bloch has written that every history is always at least implicitly comparative, contrasting a given object in its chronological, geographical, and social environment with other objects, with existing interpretations, and with the present the historian inhabits.16 Making this implicit comparison explicit can be a formidable source of inspiration. The otherness of the past, the altérité inaliénable du passé, is the main source of questioning and comprehension for the historian. It is the experience of temporal alienation that allows him to break away from the selfevidence of the present and to emancipate himself from an unquestioning reconstruction that takes existing narratives at their face-value. Unlike political scientists, historians do not test their theoretical a prioris with empirical fieldwork. They pretend that their questioning and their interpretation spring from their having experienced the alienation, displacement, and otherness that only a full immersion in the sources can procure. It is difficult, however, to reach this stage of alienation, to rid oneself of standard interpretations and to come to see one’s past as well as one’s present with the eyes of a stranger. This is all the more so when there is little temporal and spatial distance from one’s object of study, particularly when one is studying one’s own time and society. Explicit comparison can help the historian to avoid the standard reproach of engaging in an unproblematic, uncritical, and unquestioning reproduction of the past. The heuristic value of comparative history therefore does not lie as much on the level of interpretation as on the level of the formulation of research questions. It might just be that the nature of the Vichy regime is better understood by comparing it with other regimes existing simultaneously in other European settings—Hungary or Slovakia, for example—rather than by tracing its ideological roots back to obscure counterrevolutionary precursors. Endogenous reasons—singularities buried deep in the national past—cannot explain why similar evolutions take place in countries and regions where these endogenous factors are absent. Comparative history should be an invitation to revisit and question national interpretations, not a ceremonial occasion to reassert distinctiveness. As such, there is nothing particularly European, nor particularly related to the context of the incipient twenty-first century, to favour comparative history. It is a universal method of our trade that might simply be restored to honour. In the final analysis, the major contribution of a transnational or comparative history of Europe to contemporary debates today is subversive, rather than policially expedient. Will historians provide the outline of a ‘European identity’ rooted in ‘European sites of memory’ and recapitulated in a preamble to the European constitution, or is it rather their task to recall the intellectual fallacies of previous attempts to deliver

76

|

Pieter Lagrou

suitable historical narratives to the nation building projects of the day? Do historians have to preserve the past and save it from oblivion, or would they rather have a role in the emancipation of the present from the past and from a depressing ambient climate of profound nostalgia? With the enlargement of the European Union, the introduction of the common currency, and the project for a European constitution, the European project stands at a crossroads. More than ever, historians should critically expose the fact that the issue of the day is the need to renew the social contract founding our policial order on a European level—a debate about choices for the future, not about the essence of the European past, less still about dangerous and retrograde discourses on a European ‘identity.’

Notes 1. See, for example, François Furet, Penser la Révolution Française (Paris, 1978). 2. See David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-century Germany (Oxford, 1984); Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA, 1988); Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 4 vols. (Munich, 1987–2003). 3. See Emilio Gentile, La grande Italia: Ascesa e declino del mito della nazione nel ventesimo secolo (Milan, 1997); G. E. Rusconi, Se cessiamo di essere una nazione (Bologna, 1993); E. Galli Della Loggia, La morte della patria (Rome-Bari, 1996); L. Sciolla, Italiani: Stereotipi di casa nostra (Bologna, 1997); R. Bodei, Il noi diviso: Ethos e idee dell’Italia repubblicana (Turin, 1998); A. Schiavone, Italiani senza Italia (Turin, 1998). I am indebted to Irene di Jorio for bringing these titles to my attention. 4. Thomas W. Gallant, ‘Greek Exceptionalism and Contemporary Historiography: New Pitfalls and Old Debates,’ Journal of Modern Greek Studies 15, no. 2 (1997): 209–16. 5. See, for example, Chris Lorenz, ‘The myth of the Dutch middle way’ , Wissenschaftsrecht 33, no. 3 (2000): 189–209. 6. See Alexander Nützenadel and Wolfgang Schieder, eds., Zeitgeschichte als Problem: Nationale Traditionen und Perspektiven der Forschung in Europa (Göttingen, 2004), and the European Science Foundation project on ‘Representations of the Past: The Writing of National Histories in Europe’ (http://www.uni-leipzig.de/zhs/esf-nhist/index.htm). 7. See Pieter Lagrou, ‘L’histoire du temps présent en Europe depuis 1945, ou comment se constitue et se développe un nouveau champ disciplinaire,’ La Revue pour l’histoire du CNRS, no. 9 (2003): 4–15; and idem, ‘De l’actualité de l’histoire du temps présent,’ Bulletin de l’Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent 75, (2000): 10–22. 8. See also Michael Gehler, ‘Zeitgeschichte zwischen Europäisierung und Globalisierung,’ Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, B 51–52 (2002): 23–35 and Jost Dülffer, ‘Zeitgeschichte in Europa—oder europäische Zeitgeschichte,’ in Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, B1/2, (2005): 18–26. 9. Pieter Lagrou, ‘European Integration and the Legacy of the Second World War: The Invention of a European Tradition as a Means of Overcoming the German Problem, 1945–1965,’ in Barrie Axford, Daniela Berghahn, and Nick Hewlett, eds., Unity and Diversity in the New Europe (Bern, 2000), 79–95. See also Alan Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation State (Berkeley, 1992).

Between Europe and the Nation

| 77

10. See, for example, Johnny Laursen, ‘Towards a Supranational History?,’ Journal of European Integration History 8, no. 1 (2002): 5–10; Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka, eds., Geschichte und Vergleich: Ansätze und Ergebnisse international vergleichender Geschichtsschreibung (Frankfurt am Main, 1996); Hartmut Kaelble, Der historische Vergleich: Eine Einführung zum 1. und 2. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 1999); Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmerman, De la comparaison à l’histoire croisée (Paris, 2004). 11. The EURHISTXX network held a conference in Dublin in October 2005 on precisely this theme. 12. See Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London, 1998); and Martin Conway, ‘Democracy in Postwar Western Europe: The Triumph of a Political Model,’ European History Quarterly 32 (2002): 59–84. 13. For two recent brilliant examples, see Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (New Haven, 2003); and Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–1950 (New York, 2005). See also, among the most recent contributions, Philip Ther and Jürgen Danyel, ‘Flucht und Vertreibung in europäische Perspektive,’ Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 51 (2003): 3–4; Philip Ther and Ana Siljak, Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944–1968 (Lanham, MD, 2001). 14. Gérard Noiriel, La tyrannie du national: Le droit d’asile en Europe, 1793–1993 (Paris, 1991); but also, for example, Randall Hansen and Patrick Weil, Nationalité et citoyenneté en Europe (Paris, 1999); David Shearer, ‘Elements Near and Alien: Passportization, Policing and Identity in the Stalinist State, 1932–1952,’ in The Journal of Modern History 76 (2004): 835–881; Pierre Piazza, Histoire de la carte d’identité (Paris, 2004); Frank Caestecker, Alien Policy in Belgium, 1840–1940: The Creation of Guest Workers, Refugees and Illegal Aliens (New York, 2000). 15. See Hartmut Kaelble, A Social History of Western Europe, 1880–1980 (Savage, MD, 1989); François Guedj and Stéphane Sirot, eds., Histoire sociale de l’Europe: Industrialisation et société, 1880–1970 (Paris, 1997); Un siècle de protection sociale en Europe (conference proceedings, 1996), (Paris, 2001); Peter Baldwin, The Politics of Social Solidarity: The Classbase of the European Welfare State, 1875–1975 (Cambridge, 1990); Gøsta Esping-Andersen, Les trois mondes de l’Etat-providence (Paris, 1999). 16. Marc Bloch, ‘Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européennes’ [1928], in idem, Mélanges Historiques (Paris, 1963).

Part 2

MULTIPLE CONFLICTS

(

Chapter 5

WAR AND CONFLICT IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN HISTORY, 1914–2004

( John Horne

The first half of the twentieth century was the most violent period in modern European history. War, revolution, civil war, and the deliberate displacement or destruction of entire ethnic and cultural communities characterized much of the continent from 1914 to the early 1950s. Thereafter, conflict was frozen in less lethal and more institutionalized forms until the final decade of the century, when the end of the Cold War was followed by the extraordinarily peaceful integration of Europe—a process that continues today. The exception has been the violent implosion of Yugoslavia. This theme presents particular challenges for both a European reading of the recent history of the continent and the notion of ‘contemporary’ history. Wars and conflicts were by definition the result of difference and division, and they were not, in the main, self-referentially European. Nor did they affect all parts of Europe in the same way, let alone at exactly the same time. What (if anything) makes them ‘European’ in historical retrospect thus needs to be explored and demonstrated. Wars and revolutions also provide the major points of discontinuity in recent European history. The sense of the ‘contemporary’ stems in large part from the perceived links between these moments of rupture and the present—as shown by the common use of the terms ‘prewar’ and ‘postwar,’ ‘postcommunist,’ and so on. If the notions of historical temporality and ‘modern time’ were invented in the Enlightenment, the idea of the contemporary as something deriving from the power of recent history to shape current lives is due in no small measure to the ruptures of the twentieth century.1 Because the French experienced this sense of the contemporary earliest, with the French Revolution, and thus measured ‘contemporary history’ from 1789, the term ‘temps présent’ was coined in France to capture the specificity of the period since the Second World Notes for this section begin on page 93.

82

|

John Horne

War.2 Yet whether it is called ‘contemporary history,’ ‘Zeitgeschichte,’ or ‘histoire du temps présent,’ this recent past has particularly fluid temporal boundaries because it is redefined more rapidly and substantially by the evolving present than is the case with more remote periods. Both ‘Europe’ and the ‘contemporary,’ therefore, constitute unstable platforms for studying war and violence over the last ninety years. Yet this may be an advantage. Potentially, continental frameworks of analysis enable us to go beyond interpretations rooted in the nation-state or in the very divisions that produced the conflicts. Likewise, the idea of the ‘contemporary’ suggests that variable time frames may help pin down the changing continuities and discontinuities of the recent past. In other words, the very instability of both terms, ‘Europe’ and the ‘contemporary,’ makes them positive vantage points—provided that they are part of the question and not taken for granted.

Division and Unity in European History When thinking about how to explore war and conflict since 1914, it may help to draw a contrast with an influential tradition of historical writing about Europe since the Enlightenment. This tradition has been essentially binary. It has taken diversity to be a central feature of Europe, expressed by multiple states and by conflicts. But it has found unity in common cultural values, social arrangements, and political principles, summarized by the notion of a European ‘civilization.’ This was Voltaire’s ‘Great Republic, divided into several states . . . but all corresponding with one another,’ or Gibbon’s view that Europe was characterized by a ‘general resemblance of religion, language and manners . . . productive of the most beneficial consequences to the liberty of mankind.’3 The ‘civilization’ in question was usually thought of in the singular, as providing both beliefs and an identity that distinguished Europe and Europeans from other continents and peoples. In the triumphalist phases of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, it was all too easily confounded with ‘civilization’ as such and provided an ideology for different Europeans to justify their dominance over much of the rest of the world or other parts of Europe. It might be thought that with Europe’s descent into war and genocide, this tradition would have been abandoned. In fact it has proved remarkably resilient. For embattled liberal historians such as H. A. L. Fisher or Henri Pirenne, it defined what had to be saved from fascism and communism. As Fisher put it in 1936: ‘The kind of civilization which we specifically designate as European reposes not upon a foundation of race, but on an inheritance of thought and achievement and religious aspirations.’4 Recast as ‘Western civilization’ after 1945 to include North America, it provided a powerful historical paradigm in the Cold War, while as the ‘European idea’ it also informed the emerging process of European integration.5

War and Conflict in Contemporary European History, 1914–2004

| 83

The binary model of conflict and civilization is deeply unsatisfactory. Of course, there is no denying that certain cultural and political currents have marked the history of the continent as a whole. But one cannot argue without being reductive or essentialist that they produced a single ‘civilization’—as we have been reminded by the recent, acrimonious debate over the preamble to the proposed new constitution for the European Union. More importantly, the cultural or political currents often identified (Christianity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, science, democracy, etc.) have contributed to war and revolution, often decisively. Hence they should not be seen as a counterweight to diversity and conflict but rather placed among the causes of the latter. Above all, by monopolizing the transnational, the notion of ‘civilization’ consigns the explanation of war and conflict to European diversity, reinforcing a tendency to write political and military history in terms of nations and the state system. Yet the critique highlights the question: Can a continental level of explanation problematize what was subsumed in the notion of European culture or ‘civilization’? Can it ‘Europeanize’ our understanding of war and conflict? Or should the explanations remain with the nation-state (whose heyday was during this very period), making international relations and comparative national history the best approach? The answers to these questions lie mainly (but not exclusively) in the realm of cultural and political history. Confining myself to these fields, let me offer some suggestions as to what a transnational view of war and conflict in recent European history might have to offer.

War, Revolution, and Civil War: A European Story? The shift in chronological perspective produced by the events of 1989 resulted in a new thesis about Europe’s ‘short’ twentieth century that has gained wide acceptance.6 Yet the fall of communism and the end of the Cold War did not so much redefine as reopen the question of the historical roots of the contemporary period—a good example of the elasticity of the latter. The bicentenary of the French Revolution in the same year was a symbolically important coincidence. Not only did it prove divisive in France (where the decline of a republican political culture made the revolutionary legacy unexpectedly ambiguous) but it invited reflection on the links between the conflicts of twentieth-century Europe and the upheaval of the late eighteenth century—and still does so. At the risk of gross simplification, let me suggest that the latter was a profound moment because the ancient and widespread concept of sovereignty was reinvested in the abstract notion of the ‘people.’ This legitimated politics from below (through the concept of citizenship) and placed the principle of power (as well as its practice) in open-ended contention. It was a profoundly European moment, not only because it reverberated

84

|

John Horne

across the continent via the French Revolution but also because it was deeply contested. The reverberation was amplified in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (through ideas of liberalism and democracy). But sovereignty and self-determination were transferred to new concepts derived from culture (the nation), economics (social class), and later from biology (race).The revolutions of 1848 show the operation of a truly continental dynamic in propagating these emergent, and divergent, political languages.7 It was, of course, a long road from 1848 to the First World War. It was marked among other things by a process of partial dechristianization that helped translate transcendant and utopian impulses into secular politics.8 It was also marked by a self-conscious preoccupation with ‘modernization,’ which provoked anxiety and conflict and helped polarize the languages of politics (citizenship, nation, class, race) into ever more conflictual patterns.9 None of these developments played out the same way in different parts of Europe, but few zones of the continent were unaffected by them. They constitute a prehistory without which the wars and ideological conflicts of the period since 1914 are unintelligible, and it is one that cannot be written in national terms alone.

Total War Nonetheless, it was the era of violence pivoting on the two world wars that translated these developments into military and political conflicts on a European scale. Because states (and mainly nation-states) were the agents of this process (conducting war, making peace), its history has largely been written in national terms or from an international relations perspective. There are obvious reasons for this. The explosive potential of popular sovereignty and the conflicting ideologies in which it resulted only assumed concrete shape in the development of individual states and the crises they experienced. National politics, and their geopolitical interaction, thus provide coherent if well-rehearsed explanations for the revolutions and wars that transformed the continent. No one would deny the importance of this level of analysis. However, some themes have emerged that address the European dimension of conflict differently, linking it with the prehistory that I have just mentioned. These themes have been particularly evident in the cultural history of the First World War that has marked the revival of interest in that field in the last decade.10 They have also emerged from the first attempts at serious comparative work on the two world wars.11 The first of these themes is the scale and nature of the violence that characterized the two world wars in Europe. One way of approaching this is to consider the two conflicts as Europe’s second Thirty Years’ War—that is, as a continuous struggle that assumed ideological, diplomatic, and military

War and Conflict in Contemporary European History, 1914–2004

| 85

forms in different combinations and resulted in two episodes of generalized war.12 However, this explanation does not identify the particular dynamics of violence that characterized the military conflicts at a continental level. These expressed a new intensity of warfare rather than just a causal link between the two world wars, and it was this intensity of warfare that helped transform ideologies and politics in the longer term.13 Foremost among these dynamics of war was the dehumanization of the imagined enemy. In extreme cases, not even his submission and conversion but his physical displacement or elimination became the goal. The outbreak of war in 1914 crystallized preexisting tensions into antagonistic ‘war cultures,’ which presented the conflict as a total war for the survival of nations that were seen to stand for different ideological and cultural values.14 Externally, it was assumed that the enemy consisted not just of the state or the armed forces but the entire population. The logic (derived from the French Revolution), which assumed that citizens were also soldiers and that the state disposed of the entire economy in time of war, meant (when applied reciprocally to the enemy) that his whole society became a legitimate target.15 Economic warfare targeted civilian living standards, while strategic air power (which had been clearly imagined by the end of the First World War) ultimately targeted the civilians’ existence. In the German case, it did so from the start of the Second World War; as for the Allies, it escalated from economic to civilian targets, notably with the night bombing of German cities by the British.16 Internally, cultural and political mobilization for war generated powerful sentiments of community—seen by some as a new form of that Gemeinschaft whose apparent loss was mourned as a casualty of modernity. But the reverse side of this was a drive against the ‘enemy within,’ the deviant or treacherous ‘other’ who had to be controlled if not extirpated from the national community (virtually all the nations involved in the First World War had their own ‘stab in the back’ legend during the conflict). Cultural and political mobilization for war, in other words, was at once inclusive and exclusive, segregating both the nation and the outside world into antagonistic categories.17 With a militarized population, it also supplied the means to turn such imaginings into political programmes and even realizations. It is not surprising, therefore, if both wars in Europe produced episodes of radical repression against elements of the home population. The mass deportations of suspect nationalities by Stalin at the onset of the Second World War had been anticipated by the wave of forced deportations of frontier populations by the Russian army during the great retreat from Galicia in 1915.18 In the case of Ottoman Turkey, war triggered the genocide of between 800,000 and 1.2 million Armenians. This picture of extreme violence against a dehumanized enemy requires many qualifications that I cannot go into here. Its scope and intensity increased exponentially between the two wars. Also, it affected different zones of the continent differently. In the First World War, one is

86

|

John Horne

most struck in the West by the readiness of soldiers on both sides to face mass death in an unprecedented industrial conflict precisely because of the sense of total investment to which I have referred. The weight of violence tilted massively to the East in the Second World War, where soldiers and above all civilians were killed in millions not just through industrial destruction (the Wehrmacht reverted to technically more primitive forms of warfare during the Russian campaign) but above all by the propensity to see the enemy in extreme ideological and (in the German case) racially subhuman terms. Nazi Germany categorized the enemy in the West differently (Jews and communists excepted), so warfare there was far more restrained.19 The different treatment of prisoners of war in the two spheres marks the difference. Dissolving the distinction between combatant and noncombatant, construing the conflict in ideologically absolute terms, and reducing or eliminating the assumption of shared humanity are thus as important as the vastly expanded means of destruction in defining the violence of the two world wars in Europe. This may explain why, for all the differences in scale, smaller wars that were similarly marked by extreme ideological or ethnic conflict (the Spanish Civil War, the wars in the former Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1995) had episodes that recalled events in both world wars (with bestialized imagery of the enemy, direct targeting of civilians, and the killing of prisoners).20

Totalitarian Ideologies A second dynamic of conflict in Europe from 1914 to the early 1950s was bound up as much with revolution as with war, though it involved both. One might describe it as the emergence of ideologies whose internal dialectic required them to eliminate their own projected antagonists by violent conflict. Obviously, I am referring here to communism and fascism (if we agree, in the latter case, to give one name to what some would see as very different radical nationalist movements). As in the case of war, the aim is not to displace the classic explanations in terms of social appeal, economic dislocation, and political crisis, most of which use a national framework of explanation, or in terms of the comparisons that have been attempted between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany and between both and Stalinist Russia.21 Rather it is to see whether a transnational level of explanation has anything to offer. I observed that in the course of the nineteenth century, as cultural, economic, and biological paradigms gained intellectual currency, they were invested with the political agency and authority that had originally been associated with popular sovereignty. By 1914, cultural nationalism, social class, and racial biology had all generated influential creeds and movements, often in a variety of permutations. However, in a reversal of the

War and Conflict in Contemporary European History, 1914–2004

| 87

late eighteenth-century crisis, war now generated revolution rather than the opposite. Indeed, in some respects war was the revolution.22 The First World War not only precipitated the Bolshevik Revolution but stamped its outcome with a radical model of mobilization—war, communism, terror, and the dual struggle against White and interventionist armies outside, and the counterrevolutionary enemy within. The latter led to the destruction of the Cossacks, anticipating the ‘dekulakization’ of the 1930s. As many historians have noted, the instruments used by Stalin to conduct his second revolution from above, as well as the vision of permanent mobilization that drove it, owed a great deal to the origins of the revolution in the First World War.23 Likewise, the cultural nationalism that lay at the heart of Italien Fascism was crystallized by the war and given political purchase by defeat or perceived national humilation. Thus Mussolini constructed a fascist persona as soldier and wartime journalist and used it to found the movement in March 1919.24 The mobilization of extreme nationalism behind the German military government in 1917–1918 (e.g. the Vaterlandspartei), though it failed to reverse the disintegration of the war effort, generated a catastrophic vision of war in which the only possible outcomes were total victory or total defeat, and which included plans for a last-ditch Volkskrieg against Allied invasion. Along with paramilitary violence, the ‘stab in the back’ legend, and the ideal of the front community, this relationship between war and politics was inherited by the National Socialists, who of course added a biological and Social Darwinian racism.25 War thus shaped communism and fascism, and provided each with a metaphoric language for politics. More fundamentally, however, each of these ideologies assumed a dynamic model of society premised on a transcendent future that could only be reached via violent mobilization against the oppositional forces that the model itself proposed. The party and the charismatic leader were the self-appointed political agents who prosecuted the conflict, and the centrality of conflict to the belief system gave them the authority to use extreme violence in doing so. Naturally, the terms of the model were very different. The most obvious contrast was between the social science terminology of Soviet Marxism and the biological racism of National Socialism. The class conflict built into the former, though ultimately international, was most readily deployed in massive internal social engineering of the kind carried out by Stalin in the 1930s and imposed on Eastern Europe after 1945–1948. The Darwinian struggle for racial supremacy imagined by the Nazis, once the balance had been tipped against the forces of conservatism within Germany, was innately expansionist.26 What the two creeds shared, however, was a transcendent vision that promised to overcome the decadence of the existing order and establish an earthly utopia. Although each used extreme violence (this was less true of Fascist Italy), each also demonstrated a real capacity to generate faith among activists and intellectuals as well as broader support (as shown

88

|

John Horne

by work on public opinion in Nazi Germany or on the consoldiation of Soviet Communism through the Great Patriotic War).27 Of course, it is not hard to make the case that as manifested in the clash between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the ideological conflict that I am talking about was a pivotal event of contemporary European history—perhaps the pivotal event. But the influence of these ideologies was broader, affecting much of the continent in varying proportions and intensity. And because communism and fascism in their different ways subordinated the individual to collective categories, some of which were to be eliminated, they dismantled the idea of a shared humanity in a process that, I have suggested, lay at the heart of the violence of the Second World War. How Europe (rather than just a few countries) entered this ideological universe—and emerged from it—seems to me central to its twentiethcentury history. It is a theme that emerges with particular poignancy from the history of intellectuals who voluntarily adhered to fascism and communism as forms of faith, and sometimes sought to disengage from those same ideologies.28

Territory, Peoples, and States A third theme addressing war and conflict transnationally is that of the three-way tension between territory, peoples, and states. As cultural nationalism fed a heightened sense of linguistic and ethnic identity in the later nineteenth century and promoted the desirability of a culturally homogeneous nation as the basis for the state, the issue of borders, irredentism, and ethnic minorities became ever more acute. This, too, is a classic subject of national and diplomatic histories, from the breakup of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires to Wilsonian diplomacy and the successor states between the wars. But for many Europeans, the so-called ethnic cleansing perpetrated by all sides in the wars of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s (especially Serbs and Croats, and Bosnian Serbs in Bosnia) reopened issues which had long been consigned to the past. Was this ‘Balkan’ exceptionalism or part of a broader European pattern?29 Without denying the particularities of the Yugoslav case, the violence of these episodes (and their interaction with diplomatic ‘solutions’) was a reminder of the brutal processes by which ethnicity had been made to fit national models earlier in the century, usually also on the occasion of war and postwar settlements. The Armenian genocide of 1915–1916 was the result of the attempt by the Young Turks (faced with war and invasion) to construct an ethnically coherent basis for a modernized Ottoman Empire in Asia. The Greco-Turkish war of 1919–1922 ended in the mass expulsion of one and a half million Greeks from Anatolia and the reciprocal transfer of a smaller number of Turks from Greek Macedonia, the entire resettlement being endorsed by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.30

War and Conflict in Contemporary European History, 1914–2004

| 89

Yet the new states of Central and Eastern Europe founded after the First World War were ethnically and linguistically diverse and not necessarily intrinsically unstable. The period from 1938 to 1945, however, was accompanied by the greatest redistribution of populations of the entire century, principally in the East. This was achieved by a combination of redrafting frontiers to incorporate populations or territory and moving populations to accommodate new frontiers. Examples of the former are the German annexation of the Sudetenland and the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland, with Poland being displaced several hundred kilometres to the west. Examples of the latter include the expulsion of Sudeten Germans from postwar Czechoslovakia and the separating of Poles and Ukrainians in western Ukraine. This process was also one aspect of the chaos in Europe at the end of the war, with millions of former prisoners of war and displaced persons scattered across the continent.31 However, this dynamic of ethnic ‘rationalization’ was also supercharged by two larger imperial projects. The first was that of the Nazis to racially reorder Eastern Europe—a project that the army had already begun in a more benign form during the military occupation of the area in the First World War.32 The second was Soviet Russia´s campaign to reacquire the multiethnic borderlands of the Tsarist Empire. In both cases, the extreme violence unleashed by war furnished the means, while the ideological struggle that I have already discussed radicalized the process. Economic exploitation, forcible deportation (to Germany or further east), and mass murder were the Nazi solutions. Massacres (though on a lesser scale), deportation within the Soviet Union, and military repression of local nationalism were the tools of the Soviet Union. Anti-Soviet partisan warfare in the Baltic region and Ukraine continued until the early 1950s.33 The upshot after 1945 was a simplified ‘fit’ of ethnic and national identity into nation-states, compared to the interwar period. Ironically, the one area that largely escaped the process was Yugoslavia. The balance of the prewar kingdom was preserved in Tito’s federal state, despite wartime massacres (notably of Serbs and Croatian Jews by the Croatian regime) and the internecine feuding of the wartime resistance movements. No doubt the need to preserve national independence from the threat of Soviet domination after 1948 was a major factor. Hence, although there was no historical inevitability, there was a kind of logic to the explosion of ethnic violence and reordering of boundaries that occurred once communism fell and the external menace was removed. This reasoning trumps the argument of Balkan exceptionalism, since Yugoslavia was replicating what had occurred elsewhere in Central Europe in the context of more generalized violence fifty years before.34 In discussing these three dynamics of violence—total war, radically exclusive ideologies, and the connection between states, territory, and peoples—I am conscious that I have not addressed what must stand as the most radical (and one-sided) conflict of all in Europe since 1914—the

90

|

John Horne

Nazi genocide of the Jews. Nor do I have the space to address it here in any substance. But the question of whether, and in what sense, there is a European (as opposed to a German) explanation of the Holocaust seems to me to be a fundamental test of whether transnational explanations have a place in accounting for war and conflict in twentieth-century Europe. It is not just that the three dynamics that I have discussed all contributed to the genocide, though they clearly did: it was unarguably the product of implacable ideological enmity on the part of the Nazi elites, largely carried out in a space created by the ethnic project of racial resettlement, and conducted in the atmosphere, and with the tools, of a ‘total’ war effort. Nor is it even the fact that in ways that are still being pieced together, subordinate groups in the Nazi order collaborated in the genocide for their own purposes. It is rather that if there is anything to the idea of a European dimension to the wars and conflict of the last ninety years, the dynamics that helped produce the Holocaust had deeper roots and broader parallels, which may make it in some degree part of a common history.

Democracies, Colonialism, and Decolonization If democracies were by definition opposed to the radical authoritarianism of both the extreme left and the extreme right, they had their own versions of total war and were by no means immune to the coercion and violence involved in making peoples fit territories. Mobilizing against a ‘total’ enemy tested beliefs in tolerance, the rule of law, and individual liberties. State censorship and a mass self-censorship rendered liberal states such as Britain and France more repressive in wartime, as did the internment of enemy nationals. Hostility to the ‘enemy within’ resulted in a marked tendency towards xenophobia and witch-hunts against political minorities (i.e., supposed ‘defeatists’), of which the most striking example is perhaps the anti-German campaign of 1917–1918 in the United States, echoed by the internment of Japanese Americans in the Second World War. Nonetheless, democratic norms restrained the most lethal manifestations of hostility to the enemy and limited the transfer of wartime practice to peacetime ideology. In like manner, the presumption by liberal democrats that citizenship overrode ethnic identity as the basis of nationality was eroded by the dynamic of war and violence, as a brief comparison of the two postwar eras indicates. The Wilsonian vision that informed the peace settlement in Central and Eastern Europe after the First World War explicitly acknowledged the place of ethnic minorities in the nation-states that succeeded the multinational empires. By contrast, it was democratic governments in exile that planned the rationalization of the postwar Czechoslovak and Polish states to exclude the bulk of the German minority, and when the process occurred (before the consolidation of communist control), it met with little opposition from the ‘Western’ democracies.35

War and Conflict in Contemporary European History, 1914–2004

| 91

Nor were democracies exempt from the escalation of battlefield violence and the direct targeting of enemy civilians. Indeed, there was a concatenation of moral and legal issues relating to the latter that particularly concerned what one might call the liberal maritime states, whose isolation from the continent had traditionally led them to rely on naval power rather than mass conscript armies. Both Britain and the United States grappled with the legal and ethical questions posed by a maritime blockade that allowed the enemy’s war economy and civilian population to be directly targeted (and to which the German riposte in both world wars was unrestricted submarine warfare). It is no accident that the same two powers developed strategic air power between the wars as an additional and ultimately more effective means of paralyzing the enemy war effort at its source. Although during the Second World War the British could legitimately claim that they were responding to German targeting of civilians by aerial bombing, they (like the Americans) developed a capacity for saturation bombing that the Germans did not possess. This raised the ethical issues (which did not go undiscussed during the war) of using unprecedented violence against enemy civilians. The use of the atomic bomb in Japan was the ultimate expression of this mode of warfare and of the scientific capacities of the Western democracies’ war effort.36 Ultimately, the way in which military violence and ideological mobilization affected democratic powers is illustrated by the distinctive form of authority that they developed in wartime. If war was fundamental to the emergence of new sources of authority that in different ways benefited both fascism and communism, the same was true of liberal democracies. The latter required a unifying but profoundly civilian embodiment of authority that could simultaneously mobilize energies for war, curb the power of the military, limit authoritarianism, and strike a moral and political compact on the purpose of the war and the ultimate restoration of peacetime democratic norms, or even the advancement of the latter as a reward for wartime sacrifice. Lloyd George and Clemenceau came to power after crises of wartime government to fulfill precisely this role in Britain and France, and Woodrow Wilson performed a similar function for Allied as well as American public opinion. Arguably, all three men pioneered the figure of the charismatic democratic war leader, which Churchill, Roosevelt, and (in his own way) de Gaulle perfected in the Second World War. As references to the US suggest, the dynamic of war and conflict in the twentieth century, although proceeding from a European epicentre, both underlined the fluidity of Europe’s boundaries and exceeded European space. In illustration of the former point, the ethnic violence and state repression attendant on the breakup of Ottoman Turkey and the conflict with Greece straddled the Balkans and Anatolia. Also, if the belated Soviet declaration of war on Japan in 1945 meant that the Soviet conflict

92

|

John Horne

during the Second World War was a European one, it gave substance to that enlargement of Europe from the Don to the Urals first declared by a Swedish officer in the service of the Russian crown in 1730.37 The Urals formed a natural barrier sheltering the Soviet war effort, and de Gaulle, in seeking to avoid a bipolar postwar world, was using more than a figure of speech when he referred to a new Europe stretching from the ‘Atlantic to the Urals.’ Even more fundamentally, however, the very processes of war, ideological radicalization, and nation-state formation that originated in Europe destroyed European hegemony in the world (as shown by the decisive intervention of the US on the continent from 1944 on) while spreading to new portions of the globe. Decolonization and the conflicts that, in parts of Africa and Asia, have succeeded empire, can be seen in this light. Colonization (at least outside the predominantly European settler colonies) involved both coercion and complex transfers of ideas and aspirations, so that the colonial powers after 1945—nearly all of them democracies—confronted movements of ‘resistance’ and ‘liberation’ whose language, goals, and military expressions were deeply influenced by Europe. The Algerian Front de Libération National (FLN), for example, deployed a kind of levée en masse and rhetoric of national liberation that recalled French self-images of resistance to Nazi Germany. At the same time, the Cold War (whose origin and core remained in Europe) polarized much of the globe and disseminated ideological radicalization (some of it Soviet-derived communism) to emerging states. This process was exacerbated by the colonial powers, some of which used torture, repression, and extreme military violence in their colonies in the name of democracy—as the Algerian and Vietnamese conflicts both showed.38 In such an explanation there is no question of dismissing the complexity and specificity of developments in other parts of the world, or of summarily comparing the wars and violence that have occurred there with those in Europe.39 But the undoubted connections between what began in Europe and what occurred elsewhere show that contemporary European history must be related to the history of other parts of the world.

Conclusions I began with a question: What might a ‘Europeanization’ of the history of war and conflict over the last ninety years offer us? My conclusion is a genuinely provisional one. It might be objected that I have merely supplied a dysfunctional version of the ‘European civilization’ thesis. But I do not think so, because I have placed the emphasis on multiple dynamics, not on a metanarrative that seeks to impart an artificial cohesion to European history. More to the point, is it really possible to bypass the national framework and the history of interstate relations? Clearly not. Much of

War and Conflict in Contemporary European History, 1914–2004

| 93

what I have discussed assumed historical form only in nation-states and their interaction through war, diplomacy, and other channels. Nonetheless, the kinds of processes with which I have been concerned were all larger than any one state and had an observable interplay at wider levels. There were both commonalities and reciprocal differences in how wars were fought, how ideologies emerged, and how states tried to organize their territory and populations. Doubtless with more reflection, we might identify different zones of Europe as privileged fields for certain phenomena (for example, the way in which the processes I have discussed converged on Central and Eastern Europe during the Second World War). There are also different temporalities, since the processes we are talking about unfolded with varying chronologies. This means that the same phenomenon may have developed with differing timescales in different parts of the continent—which is another reason why the temporal boundaries of contemporary history are so fluid. The ethnic violence of the former Yugoslovia in the 1990s is a case in point, as is the way Spain in the 1930s anticipated elements of the larger conflict that began as soon as its own Civil War was over. There were, in other words, dynamics of conflict and violence working beyond as well as through the state system, which only a continental analysis can grasp fully. It might still be objected that such dynamics were ultimately not distinctively European but were the violent face of modernity, increasingly manifest in different forms across the globe. This is only partly true, however, since their origin was distinctively European even if they were subsequently generalized. It becomes an argument for relating European to world history (rather than seeing the former as some ultimate horizon) and thus relativizing aspects of European development. It may be no accident that the construction of a specifically European identity occurred in direct response to some of the most violent aspects of European history during a period when the latter ceased to be distinctively European. But perhaps I should end, as I began, by leaving that as a question.

Notes This essay was originally published in Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 1 (2004): 347–62. 1. Reinhart Koselleck, ‘The Eighteenth Century as the Beginning of Modernity,’ in idem, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing, History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford, 2002), 154–69; Hans Rothfels, ‘Zeitgeschichte als Aufgabe,’ Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 1 (1953): 1–8; David Thomson, ‘The Writing of Contemporary History,’ The New History. Trends in Historical Research and Writing since World War II (New York, 1967), 24–33, 31f. 2. François Bédarida, ‘Temps présent et présence de l’histoire,’ in idem, Histoire, critique et responsabilité (Brussels, 2003), 47–59, 58; Rainer Hudemann, ‘Histoire du temps

94

|

3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

John Horne

présent in Frankreich. Zwischen nationalen Problemstellungen und internationaler Öffnung,’ in Alexander Nützenadel and Wolfgang Schieder, eds., Zeitgeschichte als Problem: Nationale Traditionen und Perspektiven der Forschung in Europa (Göttingen, 2004), 175–200. Voltaire, Le Siècle de Louis XIV (Paris, 1751), chapter 2; Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1776–1788), chapter 3. H. A. L. Fisher, A History of Europe (London, 1936), 6. Carlton J. Hayes, History of Western Civilization (New York, 1949); Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, Europe: A History of its Peoples (London, 1990) (commissioned by the EEC). Cf., for a critical reflection, Luisa Passerini, ‘From the Ironies of Identity to the Identities of Irony,’ in Anthony Pagden, ed., The Idea of Europe from Antiquity to the European Union (Cambridge, 2002), 191–208. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London, 1994); Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London, 1999). Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions 1848–1851 (Cambridge, 1994). Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the 19th Century (Cambridge, 1975), 229–66. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Nationalismus: Geschichte, Formen, Folgen (Munich, 2001), 36–40; John Burrow, The Crisis of Reason: European Thought 1840–1918 (New Haven, 2000); Zeev Sternhell, Mario Sznaider and Maia Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton, 1994). For the First World War, see the annual yearbook of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne, 14–18 Aujourd’hui—Heute—Today, vols. 1–7 (1998–2004); and Rainer Rother, ed., Der Weltkrieg 1914–1918: Ereignis und Erinnerung (Wolfratshausen, 2004) (catalogue of exhibition at the German Historical Museum in Berlin). Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Annette Becker, Christian Ingrao, and Henri Rousso, eds., La Violence de guerre: Approches comparées des deux conflits mondiaux (Brussels, 2002); Bruno Thoß and Hans-Erich Volkmann, eds., Erster Weltkrieg—Zweiter Weltkrieg: Ein Vergleich (Paderborn, 2002). On the question of ‘total war’ as a historical process, see the series of conferences organized by the German Historical Institute, Washington, and published by Cambridge University Press, especially Roger Chickering and Stig Förster, eds., Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 2000); Chickering and Förster, eds., The Shadows of Total War: Europe, East Asia and the United States, 1919–1939 (Cambridge, 2003); Chickering, Förster, and Bernd Greiner, eds., A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937–1945 (Cambridge, 2005). On the First World War as the seminal catastrophe of twentieth-century German history, see Wolfgang Mommsen, Die Urkatastrophe Deutschlands: Der Erste Weltkrieg 1914–1918 (Stuttgart, 2002). Arno Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (London, 1981); Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 4, Vom Beginn des Ersten Weltkriegs bis zur Gründung der beiden deutschen Staaten 1914–1949 (Munich, 2003), 985. Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 14–18, retrouver la guerre (Paris, 2000). Michael Jeismann, Das Vaterland der Feinde: Studien zum nationalen Feindbegriff und Selbstverständnis in Deutschland und Frankreich 1792–1918 (Stuttgart, 1992); Stéphane AudoinRouzeau and Annette Becker, ‘Violence et consentement: la ‘culture de guerre’ du premier conflit mondial,’ in Jean-Pierre Rioux and Jean-François Sirinelli, eds., Pour une histoire culturelle (Paris, 1997), 251–71. Daniel Moran and Arthur Waldron, eds., The People in Arms: Military Myth and National Mobilization since the French Revolution (Cambridge, 2003). Max Hastings, Bomber Command (London, 1979); Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940–1945 (Berlin, 2002). John Horne, ‘Introduction,’ in idem, ed., State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War (Cambridge, 1997), 1–18.

War and Conflict in Contemporary European History, 1914–2004

| 95

18. Cathérine Gousseff, ‘Les Déplacements forcés des populations aux frontières russes occidentales, 1914–1950,’ in Audoin-Rouzeau, Becker, Ingrao, and Rousso, La Violence de guerre, 175–91. 19. Pieter Lagrou, ‘Les Guerres, les morts et le deuil: Bilan chiffré de la seconde guerre mondiale,’ in Audoin-Rouzeau, Becker, Ingrao, and Rousso, La Violence de guerre, 313–27. 20. Michael Richards, A Time of Silence: Civil War and Cultural Repression in Franco’s Spain, 1936–1945 (Cambridge, 1998); Norman Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 139–84. 21. Richard Bessel, ed., Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: Comparisons and Contrasts (Cambridge, 1996); Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, Stalinism and Nazism. Dictatorships in Comparison (Cambridge, 1997); Henry Rousso, ed., Stalinisme et nazisme : Histoire et mémoire comparée (Brussels, 1999). 22. For an early and still insightful statement of this inversion, see Elie Halévy [1930], ‘The World Crisis of 1914–1918: An Interpretation,’ in idem, The Era of Tyrannies: Essays on Socialism and War (London, 1967), 160–90. 23. Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis 1914–1921 (Cambridge, MA, 2002); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford, 1999), 8–11. 24. Paul O’Brien, Mussolini in the First World War: The Journalist, the Soldier, the Fascist (Oxford, 2005) ; Heinz Hagenlücke, Deutsche Vaterlandspartei: Die nationale Rechte am Ende des Kaiserreiches (Düsseldorf, 1997). 25. Michael Geyer, ‘Insurrectionary Warfare: The German debate about a “Levée en masse” in October 1918,’ Journal of Modern History 73 (2001): 459–527. 26. These crucial distinctions were of course at the heart of the Historians’ Dispute (Historikerstreit) in Germany in the mid 1980s. On the crucial differences between Nazi and Soviet policies, see Omer Bartov, ‘Historians on the Eastern Front: Andreas Hillgruber and Germany’s Tragedy,’ in idem,, Murder in our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing and Representation (Oxford, 1996), 71–88. 27. Ian Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1987); Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, 2001), 239–97. 28. Tzvetan Todorov, Mémoire du mal: Tentation du bien: Enquête sur le siècle (Paris, 2000). 29. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford, 1997); Naimark, Fires of Hatred. 30. Vahakn Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (Providence, 1995); Naimark, Fires of Hatred, 52–56. 31. Michael Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1985); Naimark, Fires of Hatred, 108–38. 32. Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge, 2000). 33. Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1589– 1969 (New Haven, 2003); Jan Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton, 2002). 34. Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War (London, 1992). 35. Margaret Macmillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (London, 2001), 496–97; Naimark, Fires of Hatred, 136–37. 36. Geoffrey Best, Humanity in Warfare: The Modern History of the International Law of Armed Conflicts (London, 1980), 244–62; Hastings, Bomber Command. 37. Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford, 1996), 8. 38. Raphaelle Branche, La torture et l’armée pendant la guerre d’Algérie, 1954–1962 (Paris, 2001); Daniel Moran, Wars of National Liberation (London, 2001), 15–27. 39. Cf. the controversy generated by Stéphane Courtois, ed. et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (London, 1999), in particular the introduction by Courtois.

Chapter 6

IN SEARCH OF A TRANSNATIONAL HISTORICIZATION: NATIONAL SOCIALISM AND ITS PLACE IN HISTORY

( Kiran Klaus Patel

At first sight, any discussion about the need for a Europeanized perspective on Nazism seems to be superfluous. It is obvious that the Third Reich and the years leading up to it embrace events of European and even of world historical importance. Without the First World War and the Great Depression—two turning points not only in German, but also in European and even global history—the Nazis’ rise to power would have been quite improbable. At least as of 1933, Europe was eagerly observing developments within Germany that culminated in the most important and radical form of European fascism. The Second World War and the Shoah began here, and in the following years the whole continent suffered from the Nazis’ war of extermination and racial exclusion. The impact of the regime on Europe and beyond the continent is therefore self-evident At the same time, historical research has often emphasized the uniqueness of Nazism. For a long time, this notion has been part of the ‘special path’ (Sonderweg) hypothesis, of the idea that German history, at least over the last two centuries, has followed a completely different path than other modern, Western societies. After its first formulation in the 1940s, the Sonderweg hypothesis developed into a central metanarrative of at least West German historiography in the 1970s and 1980s. Although it relied on an implicit comparison of German history with the history of Western societies, it did not trigger many empirical cross-national comparative studies. Rather, the Sonderweg hypothesis combined the moral question of the inquiry into the causes of Nazism with the search for longer continuities that lead up to the ‘breach in civilization’ (Zivilisationsbruch).1 Even if the Sonderweg hypothesis has lost influence in recent years, the idea of the uniqueness of Nazism as part of German history has remained a strong undercurrent in research. For example, Ian Kershaw recently argued that Notes for this section begin on page 113.

In Search of a Transnational Historicization | 97

Nazism has to be seen as an exceptional, singular phenomenon, since the regime was responsible for the most destructive war in history and since it perpetrated, on behalf of one of the most modern societies, a genocide so far unknown in human history.2 As true as Kershaw’s and similar characterizations are, we should not think that they come without a price. Since they see Nazism as something exceptional, there is an implicit tendency to set this phase of German history apart from that of other societies. And indeed, most research on Nazism concentrates on structures and developments within the boundaries of the German nation-state. Of course, German national history does hold many of the key explanations for the history of Nazism. The predominance of conservative elites, the continuity of bureaucratic traditions, and the public esteem of the military are only a few of these troubling continuities within German national history. And even an interpretation of German history that is not interrelated with other histories is still a part of European history: due to Germany’s central geographical location in Europe as well as its powerful position on the continent, its history always forms an integral part of the European past. However, a truly Europeanized approach to history should not stop at national borders. Rather, it should endeavour to integrate specific regional and national histories into larger narratives. But how can a Europeanized vision of the history of Nazism be achieved? My main thesis is that a transnational approach in particular helps us to overcome the dominant fixation on national histories. Especially in light of the regime’s multiple conflicts, this approach appears to be a fruitful means to integrate the history of National Socialism into larger, European and global perspectives. In what follows, I will start with an outline of what transnational history is. By concentrating on the regime’s multiple conflicts, I will then show how a transnational approach might add new insights to the findings of a nation-centered historiography. Third, in response to the fact that, when looking for continuities leading to the Third Reich, historical research so far has followed a trajectory that focuses on the German nation-state, I will point out some other dimensions that ought to be included, too. Finally, I will sum up my findings in a plea for a transnational historicization of Nazism as a step towards a Europeanized interpretation of the period.

From National Histories to Transnational History Interestingly, the question of how a Europeanized vision of the history of Nazism could be written was already posed immediately after the Second World War, parallel to the rise of the Sonderweg hypothesis. As early as the late 1940s, some historians had placed Nazism in a European perspective. Friedrich Meinecke, for example, wrote in his book The German Catastrophe

98

|

Kiran Klaus Patel

in 1949 that, ‘The phenomenon of Hitler’s National Socialism . . . cannot be deduced from the force of German developments alone.’ Rather, Meinecke considered Nazism to be a ‘western, not only a German problem.’ According to Meinecke, Nazism was the product of a moral crisis of Western civilization following the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, caused by secularization, mass mobilization, and industrialization. For Meinecke, a European perspective thus served as a key explanation for the regime, and the same is true of other influential West German postwar authors, such as Gerhard Ritter. However, these interpretations were highly problematic, especially since they had a tendency to play down continuities within German national history. Rather, they saw Nazism as a phenomenon alien to German history, thus exonerating the nation’s past. By emphasizing broader, European phenomena, there was an inclination to differentiate a ‘positive’ older German past from the Nazis’ atrocities.3 Therefore, this strand of interpretation has lost influence for good reasons, at least since the 1960s. Apart from these efforts, research has primarily relied on three approaches in order to relate Nazism to processes and experiences outside the German nation-state: first, diplomatic history; second, theories of fascism; and third, theories of totalitarianism. In the case of diplomatic or international history, research focuses on processes of decision making within nation-states or on international political relations. Thus, segments of ‘high politics’ have been researched.4 Theories of fascism and totalitarianism endeavour to identify similarities and differences in the structures of the political systems of regimes. Therefore, they either explicitly or implicitly build upon cross-national comparative history. Both approaches work with typologies or with ideal types and look for traces of these in their Realtypen, the historical forms of fascism or of totalitarianism.5 Such perspectives have been the most important means of overcoming isolationist interpretations that stress the uniqueness of Nazism. However, as different as these three approaches might seem, they all start from one assumption, which postulates the distinctiveness of nation-states and their histories. Moreover, they all tend to neglect certain kinds of contacts and connections between societies. In classical fascism and totalitarianism theory, these factors do not play any role. Diplomatic history normally focuses on the interactions between foreign policy elites and their respective decision making processes. Thus, only a very small—though obviously influential—field of contacts is being analyzed. At the same time, large parts of the past are being omitted simply because they do not fit into the main currents of research. The transnational approach tries to fill this gap. With transnational history, the research interest is shifted to the question of how a society such as Nazi Germany was connected and interrelated with the nations and other entities surrounding it.6 This approach is not completely new, of course. There have always been studies that we now would label as part of a transnational history. But apart from real desiderata, many of these earlier studies did

In Search of a Transnational Historicization | 99

not have very much resonance—they did not influence the master narratives of the Nazi period. In the international debate about transnational history, there are several methodological and conceptual aspects from which research on Nazism could profit. First, transnational history does not see nations and nationstates as unchangeable, stable entities, as primordial factors in history. Building upon newer, constructivist approaches to research and to theories on nationalism, transnational history emphasizes interwovenness and the mutual influences that societies exert on each other. For example, Daniel Rodgers has described the nation-state as a ‘semipermeable container, washed over by forces originating far beyond its shores.’7 Sometimes, the nation-state might appear to be the starting point of transnational interactions. But this relation can also operate in reverse, in which case the nationstate must be seen as a product of transnational structures or developments. In a third case, the relationship between the national and the transnational might best be described as mutual and dynamic processes of construction. It has to be noted that the nation-state plays an important role in all these constellations. Transnational history does not simply replace the older teleological orientation towards the nation-state with the new telos of a postnational society. By looking at processes that reach beyond national borders and by refraining from taking the nation-state to be a given unity, it may be possible to achieve greater awareness than in traditional research of the fundamental role that national consciousness, nationality, and nation-states have played in European history, at least over the last two hundred years.8 A second beneficial aspect is that transnational history overcomes the fixation on foreign policy elites that has characterized classical diplomatic historical research on interactions beyond the nation-state. Rather, the scope of research interest goes far beyond ‘high politics’ and highbrow culture. Instead, transnational history is interested instead in how ideas, people, institutions, and goods moved and circulated between different societies. The whole debate about the ‘Americanization’ of the world is a good example of a field of research that has left behind older, elitist notions.9 Third, transnational social and cultural interactions are no longer seen as one-way streets by which elements from one society spread invariably. Especially regarding this aspect, transnational history has largely profited from the insights of postcolonial studies. These exchanges are now seen as highly complex interactions in which processes of adaptation or, to be more precise, of decontextualization and recontextualization, must be analyzed. Also, they often impinge on the society from which they started. They build upon dynamic and interrelated practices that often involve more than two societies and must be seen as ‘entangled’ histories. Postcolonial studies can also teach us to shift our attention from the power centers and presupposed national entities to regions and specifically to social and spatial borderlands as zones of intensified contact and exchange. Reinterpreting the Third Reich in a transnational perspective thus implies

100

|

Kiran Klaus Patel

a contextualization and a decentering of the regime in favour of a more balanced interpretation.10 Fourth, in the context of transnational history three methodological procedures play a predominant role: analysis of perceptions, analysis of transfers, and comparative history. In methodological debates, analyses of perceptions and transfers are often blurred. But even if these approaches are closely connected, they can and should be distinguished. Perceptions are the prerequisite for transfers, but they do not always lead to this result. At the same time, processes of adaptation and of discursive delimitation often go hand in hand. Therefore, it seems necessary to differentiate these two kinds of processes and the analytical tools with which we study them, even if it often makes sense to combine their examination. The relationship between transfer analysis and comparative history is even more complex. For a long time, these instruments have been seen as incommensurable and incompatible, in German history as well as in other historiographies.11 The problematic consequence of this presumption for a transnational approach has already been mentioned, that is, the notion of the distinctiveness of entities. Comparative history can nevertheless play an important role for transnational history. Newer studies have shown how well it can be combined with the analysis of transfers under transnational auspices. Thus, a variety of combinations between cross-national comparisons and transfer analysis prove to be fruitful; most importantly by either comparing transnational (transfer) processes, or analyzing transfers as a corrective or as a supplement to a cross-national comparison.12 These four elements form an integral part of the agenda of transnational history that has been evolving over recent years. They build upon older strands of research, of course. Transnational history is not a complete novelty. Rather, it serves as an umbrella for all these approaches that lead beyond nation-centeredness, and thus helps them to leave behind their rather marginalized positions in their respective (national) historiographies. It is revealing that, until now, there have been comparatively few studies, and especially rather few German studies, that have tried to apply this agenda to the research of the Nazi period. Obviously, the darkest years of German and European history are difficult ground for approaches that contextualize Nazi Germany and relate it to other and larger settings. There are always the dangers of trivializing the terror of the Nazi regime, of false analogies and comparisons, and of exonerating Nazism. This was, for instance, exactly the problem arising from Ernst Nolte’s radical interpretation: for this German scholar, Nazism was a mere reaction to the more original terror of Bolshevism. This interpretation, with its apologetic tendencies, triggered the Historians’ Dispute (Historikerstreit) and ultimately did not win approval, for good reasons. Indeed, it is the exact opposite of what a transnational approach to the history of the Nazi period strives to achieve by contributing to an even richer, more complex understanding of Nazism, its roots, interactions, and its context, by adding new perspectives on the

In Search of a Transnational Historicization | 101

synchronic as well as on the diachronic level. In this sense, the work by François Furet proves to be of much more value as a source of inspiration and of orientation than that of Nolte. The French historian has also placed fascist movement and regimes—including Nazism—in a broader, European framework and related them to Soviet Bolshevism. By asking questions similar to those of Nolte, however, Furet came up with quite different conclusions. Accordingly, there are some causal connections and relations between the different totalitarian regimes, but they are by no means sufficient to explain any of these regimes. All in all, Furet’s oeuvre therefore can serve as a starting point for a transnational approach, even if he is mainly interested in the comparative dimension and has concentrated on the history of ideas and of great individuals.13 The task of approaching Nazism from a transnational perspective also has a methodological implication. Bringing a transnational dimension into the history of Nazism must also be seen as an acid test for the strengths and weaknesses of the transnational agenda, a gauge of its maturity and seriousness, which some scholars still question.

Synchronic Multiperspectivity Multiperspectivity in itself is nothing new for historical research, of course. Most historians of the Third Reich would agree that a diversity of perspectives is always necessary. Empirical research has time and again contrasted such diverging viewpoints—for example of rival Nazi institutions, by distinguishing perspectives ‘from above and below’ etc. In many books, however, these standpoints are confined to those of different German actors. Thus, these issues are being treated within the confines of German history. In particular, German research has until now often approached its subject from the perspective of Nazism itself, especially when dealing with the regime’s relationship to Eastern European regions. For some of these issues, thorough research has become possible only in the last fifteen years, since the end of the Cold War, when scholars have enjoyed freer access to archives in the former Soviet bloc. As early as the 1990s, research on war and genocide as the hallmarks of Nazism profited from the opening of those archives. So far, however, many studies are only using the German sources that had been locked away for so long. They primarily or exclusively rely on documents stemming from Nazi bureaucracies. Thus, a certain viewpoint prevails. A transnational approach would broaden the canvas to true multiperspectivity.14 The imbalance of research is most obvious in studies on the Second World War produced during the last decade, as a few examples might show. There are, for instance, many books on the persecution and annihilation of European Jewry. Quite a few of them—including such influential interpretations as the recent works by Christopher Browning or Peter Longerich—concentrate on

102

|

Kiran Klaus Patel

the Nazis’ actions, whereas the victims do not have a perspective of their own.15 Their experiences, past history, motives, and scope of action are not integrated into the analysis. Rather, these groups are only treated as ‘objects’ of German history. Other peoples under the yoke of Nazism are frequently described in a similar way, which is especially true for Russians and other peoples of the Soviet Union. The concentration on perpetrators’ history in German historiography—in itself extremely fruitful and overdue—has thus led to a degree of one-sidedness. By contrast, Götz Aly and Christian Gerlach, among others, have recently pleaded for a more integrated analysis. In their book on the extermination of Hungarian Jewry in 1944, they have argued that it is necessary to bring together the perspectives of Germans as well as of Jewish and non-Jewish Hungarians. Considering the relatively high level of independence of Hungary among the states in the German power sphere, this approach proves essential in order to understand the causes of mass murder in this ‘Holocaust after the Holocaust.’16 Other, even better examples of this integrated perspective are Bernhard Chiari’s study of the Belarussian hinterland in the years from 1941 to 1944 and the forms of occupation, collaboration, and resistance that we find there; or the work by Christoph Dieckmann and others on the occupation policy and the Holocaust in Lithuania. There can be no doubt about the clear German responsibility for the murder of more than 100,000 Lithuanian Jews by some 120 members of Einsatzgruppe A within half a year in 1941. But a full explanation cannot be reached without taking the direct or indirect participation of Lithuanians into account. The same holds true for the occupation of the country, where 660 German bureaucrats worked with some 20,000 Lithuanian civil servants who variously supported, modified, and resisted the will of the Nazis.17 There are also some other regions where focus on the Reich’s—or on any single other—standpoint provides insufficient ground on which to explain historical developments. In many cases, the Reich wielded less power than has long been thought. For example, Slovakia was not just a satellite of the regime, a pseudo-state that, like a slave, followed all orders of its German master. Rather, in the interactions between the Reich and the Slovakian elites, the Nazis’ position time and again could not be implemented. A close look at the interactions on a day-to-day level, based on archival research from both sides, thus reveals the issues where processes of transfer took place as intended by the Nazis, and where they were blocked by the Slovakians. More research on these interactions is needed, in particular for those countries where the Nazis did not see the inhabitants as inferior Slavs.18 The Second World War and the Shoah had their starting point in Germany, and it would be preposterous to deny or to play down the German responsibility. However, members of other European countries helped to translate these crimes into action, and as recent studies have shown, the elites of collaborating and occupied countries often had considerable

In Search of a Transnational Historicization | 103

influence on the political outcome. Especially in analyzing the Shoah, the dynamic processes of interaction between Germans and local elites are still often underestimated in research.19 After decades in which the history of the Shoah played only a minor role in German historiography, in recent years the debates have concentrated on the question of how the process of extermination began. These discussions centered on the dimension of decision-making. The history of the implementation, with its periods of acceleration as well as of retardation, was largely ignored. In order to answer the question why these changes happened, local conditions and non-German actors need to be brought into the analysis. By including these other actors and giving them a voice, we thus combine a transnational approach with a key plea of postcolonial studies. At the same time, a transnational approach can heighten the awareness of these dark chapters of the shared history of Germany and its neighbors—a past about which many people know little, especially in some countries of the former Eastern bloc. Also, there is no apologetic tendency in this research. As all the studies referred to show, a focus on local conditions reemphasizes the room for manoeuvre of German soldiers, civil servants, and other groups; and that so many of them opted for the most radical solution. The responsibility for the Reich’s policy did not just lie in Berlin and with Hitler but—as a transnational perspective might demonstrate even further—with thousands of individuals that had to take decisions in local conditions and face-to-face to the people they controlled, dominated, or murdered.20 By taking account of additional actors, we can achieve a more synchronic multiperspectivity. Another way of doing this is to carry out research in comparative history as a means of transnational history, or to be more precise, to compare transnational transfer processes. Examples of this are the research fields of occupation and resistance, both of which are appropriate for a cross-national approach. Nevertheless, the main tendency in research has been that each country merely dealt with its specific past and, in our context, its particular relationship to Nazism. Especially in Eastern Europe, many studies take the boundaries of German administration districts or of nation-states as a basis for their research, thus concentrating and structurally adopting the perpetrators’ view. However, more studies are needed that relate and compare these different processes and experiences.21 Another aspect of synchronic multiperspectivity stresses the transnational experiences that large groups went through as a result of Nazi policies. Myriads of soldiers and civilian occupation forces, of resettlers and refugees, of forced labourers, POWs, and DPs moved through Europe and the world. The streams of migration triggered by Nazism cannot be understood from the perspective of national history alone. For many of these persons, the change of place reconfigured the perception of nationhood and nationality; sometimes radicalizing earlier notions, sometimes destabilizing and modifying them.22 All in all, the German presence cut so

104

|

Kiran Klaus Patel

deeply into the Baltic states, Belarus, Belgium, and many other societies that even their recent histories cannot be explained without taking German intrusion into account. At the same time, these other peoples also impinged on German history—as illustrated by one ironic aspect: even as the Third Reich endeavoured to establish a society by building upon the concepts of racial homogeneity and purity, it was during the Nazi period that ethnic diversity reached a climax in modern German history. Compared to the eight million foreign workers that were on the territory of the Reich in August 1944, Adenauer’s Federal Republic was an ethnically homogenous country. Therefore, transnational constellations—albeit under the auspices of extreme racial and social inequality—were the norm and not the exception also for Germans, at least during the second half of the war.23 A transnational perspective could also heighten our awareness of the spatial dimension of history. The most obvious example of this is the changing territorial shape of Germany, which in the modern era was never as variable as it was during the Nazi period, even if historical research often starts from the assumption of a rather stable entity. The history of the ‘mental maps’ that Germans and other Europeans had during the period is just one question in this context that needs further consideration.24 But it is not only research on the Second World War, on issues of conflict and cooperation, of collaboration and resistance, that could profit from such an approach. Synchronic multiperspectivity also implies a higher awareness of ambivalences that counteract the dominant narrative of three Weltanschauungen shaping the twentieth century, that is, of the interpretation of a tripolar world civil war between liberalism, fascism, and socialism, seen as distinct and radically competing system alternatives. A combination of transfer analysis and comparative history under the auspices of transnational history can heighten our awareness of the synchronous and often overlapping dimensions of conflict, influence, and connection.25 Accordingly, we should refrain from exceptionalizing Nazism by taking it out of the context of its times. Rather, the mutual processes of perception and of learning between different nations—even during the 1930s and 1940s—deserve more attention in order to Europeanize the analysis of Nazi Germany and other countries during the era. In this respect, there are many blind spots. We know, for example, only little about how its Italian predecessor influenced Nazism. And, what is much more troubling: we have tended to overlook the contacts, perceptions, and even the fascination that democracies and dictatorships exerted on each other. Rather, we have adhered too rigidly to the idea that these political systems form radical dichotomies. This interpretation has dominated public and scientific perceptions since 1945, when the full extent of the Nazi terror became evident. And yet, there are grey zones that contradict this simplified model of clear-cut alternatives.26 The history of the United States might exemplify this tendency. The US is often seen as the fundamental alternative to Germany’s development

In Search of a Transnational Historicization | 105

during the 1930s and 1940s. While the United States faced similar challenges, it chose a completely different path from that of the Reich. In spite of all economic and social shortcomings, President Roosevelt’s New Deal gave new hope to the American people and revitalized the democratic political system. Of course, this interpretation is by no means wrong. But at the same time, it does not offer the full truth either. The trench dividing Nazi Germany and New Deal America was less deep than is often assumed. Nazism impinged on the New Deal, since it exercised certain political options that could not be pursued in the US—simply because they were considered to be ‘fascist.’ Thus, the scope of action of New Deal America was time and again restricted. An example of this is the debate about the militarization of society in the 1930s and early 1940s. Here, the perception of developments within Germany constrained the American discourse and political action.27 At the same time, Roosevelt’s administration even looked to the Third Reich for political inspiration. It was the president of the United States himself who ordered lengthy reports on Nazi institutions from the US embassy in Berlin—not to procure propaganda material against the Third Reich, but as a source of information and even of inspiration. Against this background, American experts studied Nazi institutions such as the regime’s public work schemes, its labour service, or the leisure time organization ‘Kraft durch Freude.’ As a result, some elements of the German measures were even adopted in a modified form and thus assimilated, for example in the case of air mechanics training.28 The impact of Nazism in the US was not an isolated case. Some Swedish politicians, for instance, also analyzed Nazi social policies in search of inspiration and integrated them into their political proposals. At the same time, their origin was the very reason why these ideas were unacceptable for other Swedes. The history of some social policy programmes in Sweden, in the United States, and in other countries therefore cannot be understood without taking into account these processes of refusal and adaptation.29 Again, it has to be emphasized that there is no apologetic tendency in the analysis of these perceptions, contacts, and exchanges. Tabooing them— and they have been tabooed for a long time—would be much worse. The transnational approach offers a means to avoid simplistic answers to complex questions. For example, we should not look for one-to-one copies, small ‘Third Reichs’ in New Deal America or in the Swedish Folkhemmet. At least in the specific cases mentioned here, all democratic politicians were well aware of the aporia they faced when turning to the Nazis for inspiration. For example, Roosevelt justified his own interest in the Third Reich with the words: ‘All of this helps us in planning, even though our methods are of the democratic variety!’30 And indeed, there were no direct copies but only piecemeal adaptations in which the highly ideological parts of the ‘original’ were cut out. All in all, the protagonists of the 1930s

106

|

Kiran Klaus Patel

were well aware of the dramatic distance between their political systems.31 But as they had to face two immense challenges within just a decade—the Great Depression and the Second World War—they did not restrict their search for solutions to lessons from their own past or to the situation in societies with a similar political system. Consequently, we should not continue to overlook these other contacts, however compromising and critical they might seem at first glance. In spite of the ideologies, the protagonists of those years time and again followed the famous saying from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: ‘It’s proper to learn even from an enemy.’32 As these examples have shown, the plea for synchronic multiperspectivity is not just a concession to political correctness. Only by bringing in the perspectives of all relevant actors are we able to give thorough interpretations of complex and dynamic relationships and processes. The Third Reich impinged too heavily on other societies for their history to be written without taking Nazism into account—and the same is true the other way round. A transnational approach might also help to further heighten our awareness of the repercussions of borderland experiences in the centers and of the fact that it was often not just the center and one periphery that interacted. In general, the transnational dimension does not account for only rather marginal issues, which fill small but irrelevant gaps. Rather, it can be crucial in order to gain a better understanding of key issues, such as the road to the extermination of European Jewry.

Diachronic Multiperspectivity Furthermore, we also need more diachronic multiperspectivity. Up to now, most studies have focused on continuities, changes, and ruptures within the boundaries of the German nation-state. This, of course, has been so for good reasons, since some of the most striking and troubling continuities lie in this field. Nevertheless, there are also connections and continuities outside the history of the German nation-state that deserve to be analyzed and that have been marginalized for a long time. Several dimensions must be differentiated. The first dimension of diachronic multiperspectivity leads us to continuities in German history that do not conform to the lines of the nation-state. Research has only recently reemphasized that the German Empire or Kaiserreich was not just a nation-state but also had influential imperial dimensions. In this respect, we have to take into account both the Reich’s overseas colonies and fantasies as well as its policy concerning its Eastern neighbors.33 Research on Germany’s overseas colonies has only recently moved from a rather marginal, slightly antiquated strand of research to the core of German historiography. Recent studies have emphasized the repercussions that the colonial experience had in Germany as well as in Europe as a whole. The most obvious example with respect to Nazism is the history of

In Search of a Transnational Historicization | 107

the first genocide of the twentieth century in the German colony of South West Africa. And yet we still do not have even one systematic analysis of the relationship of the Kaiserreich’s colonialism, and its policy of occupation and extermination, to Nazism.34 This is even more astonishing when we consider the fact that, as early as 1951, Hannah Arendt had already stressed connections between the colonial experience and totalitarianism, including Nazism.35 At the same time, Germany perhaps also had ‘too little’ of a colonial experience. Jürgen Osterhammel has pointed out that Germany was the only large country in Europe without a historical experience of enslaving others before the twentieth century. France, Britain, and other countries underwent painful processes in the nineteenth century in which they reformulated their perception of the non-European ‘other.’ There, the abolishment of slavery and a more humane perception of non-Europeans were the results of long discussions and intense contacts. Great Britain, France, and the United States thus shared a cathartic experience: the self-liberation from the state of being slaveholders. Germany, however, did not go through this process. According to Osterhammel, this might be an explanation why, during the Third Reich, Germany turned into an extreme form of a slave-owning society.38 There were also other, maybe even more important colonial experiences in Germany’s past. Again, a transnational perspective might help to integrate them into a better understanding of Nazism. In relation to its Eastern European neighbors, and especially to Poland, Germany had shown a colonial attitude long before 1933. The ideas of a civilizing mission, of völkisch nationalism, and of ethnic segregation and discrimination had also been part of the Kaiserreich’ s policy towards its own Polish minority.39 More radically, there are considerable continuities between the eastern theatre of the First World War—which historiography neglected for a long time—and the Nazis’ war some twenty-five years later. This is especially true for the war in Russia of 1918. Economic exploitation, territorial division, and the instrumentalization of national independence movements had already characterized the Reich’s policy in that conflict. During the last months of the First World War, the German political elites had discussed or planned large-scale resettlements, ‘ethnic cleansing,’ and even genocide on the basis of racist and völkisch ideology. Seen in this light, the Nazis’ policy appears to be a radical aggravation of former developments but not a complete novelty.40 Also, there are continuities between transnational experiences from the pre- and interwar years and the Nazi period. It has long been known that a large number of the leading Nazis of the first hour were Germans who had grown up in borderlands or who had had intense borderland experiences, for instance in the region of the Baltic states. There, they had come in contact with radical and specific forms of völkisch ideologies and policies in what was then called ‘Volkstumskampf’ (ethnic struggle). After their

108

|

Kiran Klaus Patel

rise to power, they imported these concepts into the power center and from there back to the peripheries of the Reich.41 Diachronic multiperspectivity should again focus not only on Germans but, in this case as well, on those with whom they interacted during the Nazi period. A transnational approach should therefore also look at the experiences that different European (and other) peoples had formerly had with Germany before the 1930s and 1940s, and at how this knowledge shaped their course of action during the Nazi period. At the same time, other experiences in their past histories must be included, too. As more recent studies have shown, the domestic situation of these societies during the 1930s had a major impact on their policy under German domination during the 1940s.42 Another closely related problem is the isolation of the Nazis’ terror, especially in research on Eastern Europe. There, we find a whole chain of domination and violence, especially in the eastern part of Poland, in the Baltic states, and the occupied parts of the Soviet Union. The continuity in the politics of ethnicization in this area is only rarely brought into the analysis. Even before the Nazis terrorized the region with a policy that built upon ethnic and racist categories, the Bolsheviks had exploited similar concepts. In anticolonial gestures, they sometimes had even created new nations, since in their understanding of the historical process, an age of nations was a necessary transitional stage and precondition on the road to socialism. Altogether, we thus find complex and dynamic interactions between self-ethnicization and several ethnicization processes in regimes with totalitarian claims. Only in the light of these continuities are we really able to explain the situation during the Nazi reign over these peoples.43 Again, this is not a means to exonerate Nazism or German history. Rather, only by contextualizing events are we really able to see how much the Nazi dictatorship surpassed the atrocities of other, authoritarian or totalitarian regimes. Moreover, we are then able to detect motives for resistance, collaboration, or permissiveness. Therefore, synchronic and diachronic contextualization must often go hand in hand. The aspects mentioned so far have highlighted the ‘pre’-history leading up to the Nazi period and the ways a transnational perspective can enrich our understanding. Of course, the same is also true for continuities and connections reaching beyond the caesura of 1945. A first example for these continuities is related to the notion of ‘Europe.’ For a long time, historiography has approached the history of the Nazi era without connecting it to the narrative of the process of European integration. However, the Nazis also had a conception of European unity. Especially after the winter of 1942–1943, the term ‘Europe’ was widely used in order to integrate ‘non-Germanic’ Europeans in ‘the fight against Bolshevism’ and against ‘American materialism and imperialism.’ In the context of the conception of Europe in Nazi propaganda, it is easier to understand

In Search of a Transnational Historicization | 109

the reservations expressed by some Europeans when, after 1945, Germans propagated European integration. Furthermore, recent studies emphasize the extent to which Nazi rule over Europe shaped some of the structures of European integration, especially in the economic field. For example, the wave of industrial standardization that swept through Europe during the Second World War ought to attract more attention. In the light of such continuities, European integration should not be seen as only a counterreaction to Nazism.44 Second, a transnational approach might help us to explain some of the most urgent questions of German history. How can the two halves of the twentieth century be integrated into one narrative? How can histories of extreme aggression, domination, and racial extermination on the one hand, and of economic success, democratic reorientation, and collective recovery on the other, be brought together? How was it possible that the same generation that actively built up the Third Reich could, only a few years later, just as eagerly bring about the Wirtschaftswunder and Westernization? Why did so many members of the German elite who had been responsible for terror and mass murder under the auspices of racism and war turn into law-abiding, peaceful citizens and sometimes even convinced democrats after 1945? One of the main explanations for this is the experience they acquired in transnational constellations and spaces. This generation experienced the complete failure of their radical ideology and political aims during the war. Their notions of racial superiority and supremacy proved to be disastrous. The sobering effect of unconditional surrender, of years as POWs in Siberia or South Carolina, therefore should not be underestimated in the recalibration of the trajectory of German history. In addition to these internalizations of transnational experiences, the direct international influence on the fate of the two German states is, again, a problem that requires discussion in a transnational perspective.45 A third example of the transnational character of the persisting influence of Nazism on Europe is the sphere of commemoration and memory culture. In spite of intense contacts between Europeans during the war years, especially between European resistance groups, it is remarkable that, after 1945, memories concerning the Nazi era were predominantly framed by the boundaries of nation-states. Only in the last decade has the idea of a more integrated perspective gained momentum. The most obvious example of this is the tendency to create a European and even global culture of commemoration around the Holocaust. Another example would be the recent pan-European discussions about expulsion and flight. Seen from a transnational perspective, the question arises how these memories were nationalized and later again denationalized; how they were forged into national narratives, integrating histories of self-assertion and of subjugation, of resistance and of collaboration. These complex processes are especially interesting in the case of countries such as

110

|

Kiran Klaus Patel

Poland, which underwent changes in not only large parts of its territory but also its population.46

In Search of a Transnational Historicization This brings me to my conclusion, a plea for a transnational ‘historicization’ of the Nazi period. Some twenty years ago, the German historian Martin Broszat demanded a new interpretation of National Socialism. He especially emphasized the need, first, to apply the same analytical categories to this period of German history as to others; second, to include long-term analysis; and, third, to consider the dimension of the experiences of everyday Germans. His plea also had other, more problematic connotations and ambivalences.47 Most important in our context is the fact that we now have many studies that live up to the best of Broszat’s expectations, including ‘longitudinal’ analyses crossing the chronological barriers of German history. The new frontier when studying Nazism, however, is to overcome the dominating isolationist premise. In our practical work, we should stop seeing Nazism exclusively as a part of the German past. Leaving aside the philosophical question of the epistemological implications of ‘historicization,’48 the term generally refers to a contextualized interpretation of history. After immense efforts to place Nazism in the context of German history, it is now time to widen the canvas to European and global perspectives. Some twenty years ago, Broszat demanded that the history of the Nazi period should no longer be treated as an ‘island’ in German history but should instead be embedded into its stream. Today, we need to extend our horizon even further by integrating the Nazi period into an entire ocean of histories.49 This is the transnational historicization we now ought to achieve. These ideas can be summed up in four points: 1. The transnational approach is not to be seen as the new paradigm, replacing all other and older strands of research. Key answers to many questions concerning Nazism do lie in the history of the German nation-state. Besides, diplomatic history and other older approaches that lead beyond the analysis of just one nationstate continue to be valuable. However, a transnational approach would add important insights. Many of the continuities leading to Nazism cannot be explained by means of national history alone— but the same is also true for a purely transnational approach. Often, transnational and national aspects were blurred and mutually influenced each other. Therefore, awareness of partial transfers, and of the dynamic interrelatedness between national and transnational factors, is essential.

In Search of a Transnational Historicization

| 111

Moreover, the transnational approach is not totally new. There has been a small but steady stream of studies ever since Nazism emerged that could be called ‘transnational.’ But these older studies did not have any conceptual point of reference. Also, new insights, especially from postcolonial studies, have only recently sharpened our understanding of processes reaching beyond the borders of nation-states. All in all, the label ‘transnational’ might help to bring these diverse pieces of work together in one framework and to feed a methodological debate. There has been a tendency to adopt this approach over the last few years, so the plea articulated here is also a diagnosis of a recent current in research.50 2. Of course, research on Nazism is not the only field that needs to be transnationalized. The transnational perspective should enrich other (national) histories, too. The territorial fixation on the nation-state is not a Sonderweg of German historiography; rather, this tendency has dominated all modern historiographies.51 Transnationalizing and Europeanizing research on Nazism can, therefore, only be a starting point towards more integrated approaches to European history. Thus, we should not always take the boundaries of nation-states as the parameters of our research. We must remind ourselves that in many cases the range of issues and the range of nation-states are not identical. This more issue-oriented perspective of the history of the first half of the twentieth century will have consequences for our chronologies. Even if the years from 1933 to 1945 in German history must be seen as a period in their own right due to the specificity of the dictatorship, this is not true for European history as a whole.52 On this level, it makes a lot of sense to see the phase from 1914 to 1945 as a unit. Considering the interwovenness of conflicts, exchanges, and contacts in those decades, the characterization of this period as a ‘second Thirty Years’ War’ seems to be appropriate. Even if some conflicts had started well before 1914 (for instance the Balkan wars of 1912–1913), and even if others did not come to an end in 1945 (for example the anti-Soviet partisan warfare in Ukraine), this periodization seems valid, especially since it is not restricted to a specific national perspective.53 3. A transnational approach to the history of Nazism contributes to a further contextualization of the German past on the path towards a Europeanized version of contemporary history. It builds upon the general insight that the nation can only be understood by including its entanglements. More specifically, Germany has always reached beyond its boundaries and it was deeply embedded in transnational and global flows. As Michael Geyer has recently argued, the main question for the history of the Third Reich in a transnational

112

|

Kiran Klaus Patel

perspective is why a country, so much dependant on interactions and global connections like Germany, resorted to the most brutal means, why it did not see its future in international cooperation, but opted for unilateral domination and war. In so doing, transnational history also helps us to state more precisely what Europeanization is. Our starting point should not be an attempt to prove the cohesion of European history—a history that is constituted as an especially dense, durable cluster of interactions on a continent whose boundaries vary over time. The transnational approach therefore exposes two dangers. First, it makes us aware that Europeanization cannot always include the continent as a whole. In order to transcend the fixation with national histories, it often makes more sense to focus on a specific region within Europe or on a transnational issue. Second, the plea for Europeanization should not lead us to simply replace the container ‘nation-state’ with the container ‘Europe.’ For many issues, the focus may be placed on Europe, as exchanges here were especially intense. However, as the examples of the colonial experience and of interactions between the Third Reich and New Deal America have shown, connections and interactions that reach beyond Europe need to be included as well.54 4. In general, a transnational approach to the history of the ‘second Thirty Years’ War’ could modify an emerging narration of European and of global history. In many studies, these years are seen as a period of nationalization, as a setback after a first period of globalization.55 While this is true if we take the principles of free market economy and democracy as a yardstick, it is quite questionable whether this also implies that the overall interwovenness of European and other societies decreased during the period. Not only trade and peaceful exchange bring people together, but also conflict and confrontation. The history of German POWs in North America, of American trucks in Russia, of Russian forced labourers in the Reich, remind us of this aspect of the conflict-ridden periods in the recent past of our continent. Maybe we should not underestimate the unintended consequences of these contacts as part of a history of globalization. Furthermore, a Europeanized version of history can help us to explain the ‘shattered past’ of our continent.56 For many European countries as well as for the continent as a whole, the twentieth century contains incommensurable narratives: histories of crises and war, of dictatorship and the loss of international power on the one hand; and histories of exchange, integration, and peace as well as of freedom, democracy, and wealth on the other. Therefore, we should not look for a harmonized narrative that

In Search of a Transnational Historicization

| 113

integrates these contesting elements artificially. Transnationalizing research on Nazism might be a starting point in an attempt to gain a better understanding of our past.

Notes 1. Thomas Welskopp, ‘Identität ex negativo: Der “deutsche Sonderweg” als Metaerzählung in der bundesrepublikanischen Geschichtswissenschaft der siebziger und achtziger Jahre,’ in Konrad H. Jarausch and Martin Sabrow, eds., Die historische Meistererzählung: Deutungslinien der deutschen Nationalgeschichte nach 1945 (Göttingen, 2002), 109–39; Stefan Berger, The Search for Normality: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Germany since 1800 (Providence, 1997). However, some of the most important critics of the Sonderweg hypothesis were even stauncher defenders of a nation-centered interpretation of history. On German contemporary history (Zeitgeschichte), see Martin H. Geyer, ‘Im Schatten der NS-Zeit. Zeitgeschichte als Paradigma einer (bundes-)republikanischen Geschichtswissenschaft,’ in Alexander Nützenadel and Wolfgang Schieder, eds., Zeitgeschichte als Problem: Nationale Traditionen und Perspektiven der Forschung in Europa (Göttingen, 2004), 25–53. 2. Ian Kershaw, ‘Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism,’ in Journal of Contemporary History 39 (2004): 239–54. 3. Friedrich Meinecke, Die deutsche Katastrophe: Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen (Wiesbaden, 1946), 9–10; Gerhard Ritter, The German Problem: Basic Questions of German Political Life, Past and Present (Columbus, OH, 1965) (German edition, 1962). Similar arguments were used by the Catholic ‘Abendländer’: cf. Paul Wilhelm Wenger, ‘Föderalismus—deutsches und europäisches Schicksal, Neues Abendland 11, (1956): 245–53. 4. For this strand of research, see Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 4th ed. (London, 2000) [1985], 134–60; Marie-Luise Recker, Die Außenpolitik des Dritten Reiches (Munich, 1990). 5. For an overview of both theories, see Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship, 20–46. 6. On transnational history, see Gunilla Budde, Oliver Janz and Sebastian Conrad, eds., Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien (Göttingen, 2006); Johannes Paulmann, ‘Grenzüberschreitungen und Grenzräume: Überlegungen zur Geschichte transnationaler Beziehungen von der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis in die Zeitgeschichte,’ in Eckart Conze, Ulrich Lappenküper, and Guido Müller, eds., Geschichte der internationalen Beziehungen: Erneuerung und Erweiterung einer historischen Disziplin (Cologne, 2004), 169–96; Kiran Klaus Patel, Jenseits der Nationalfixiertheit: Perspektiven einer transnationalen Geschichte (Berlin 2004); see also the debates in the journals Geschichte und Gesellschaft (since 2001), and http://geschichte-transnational.clio-online.net (since 2004); Historia Contemporánea 16, (1990): 7–140, and 17, 19: 13–182, Journal of American History 79 (1995), 92: 419–542, and 86, (1999): 965– 1307, and especially Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, 2002). 7. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, 1998), 1. 8. Patel, Nationalfixiertheit, 9–11. 9. E.g. see Philipp Gassert, ‘Amerikanismus, Antiamerikanismus, Amerikanisierung: Neue Literatur zur Sozial-, Wirtschafts- und Kulturgeschichte des amerikanischen Einflusses in Deutschland und Europa,’ Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 39 (1999): 531–61. 10. For introductions, see Robert Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford, 2001); Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds., The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London, 1995); Sebastian Conrad and Shalini Randeria, eds., Jenseits des Eurozentrismus:

114

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

|

Kiran Klaus Patel

Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main, 2002). Cf. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka, ‘Historischer Vergleich: Methoden, Aufgaben, Probleme,’ in idem, eds., Geschichte und Vergleich: Ansätze und Ergebnisse international vergleichender Geschichtsschreibung (Frankfurt am Main, 1996), 9–45. For a less rigid but similar tendency, see Thomas Bender, ‘Introduction: Historians, the Nation, and the Plenitude of Narrative,’ in Bender, ed., Rethinking, 1–21. See also Kiran Klaus Patel, ‘Transatlantische Perspektiven transnationaler Geschichte,’ Geschichte und Gesellschaft 29 (2003): 625–47. ‘Historikerstreit.’ Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung (Munich, 1987); François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 1999). On this issue and generally on transnational perspectives of Nazi history, see also Kiran Klaus Patel, ‘Der Nationalsozialismus in transnationaler Perspektive,’ Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 49 (2004): 1123–1134. Cf., for a concentration on the perpetrators’ perspective, Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (Lincoln, NE, 2004); Peter Longerich, Politik der Vernichtung: Eine Gesamtdarstellung der nationalsozialistischen Judenverfolgung (Munich, 1998). Lucy S. Davidowicz, The War against the Jews, 1934–1945 (New York, 1975), addresses both the perpetrators’ and the victims’ perspectives, but deals with them in separate chapters; for an—admittedly extreme—position concentrating on victims, see Dan Michman, Die Historiographie der Shoah aus jüdischer Sicht: Terminologie, Anschauungen, Grundfragen (Hamburg, 2002); for an explicit example of an integrative approach, see Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York, 1997). Christian Gerlach and Götz Aly, Das letzte Kapitel: Realpolitik, Ideologie und der Mord an den ungarischen Juden 1944/45 (Stuttgart, 2002), 13. Bernhard Chiari, Alltag hinter der Front: Besatzung, Kollaboration und Widerstand in Weißrußland 1941–1944 (Düsseldorf, 1998); Vincas Bartusevičius, Joachim Tauber, and Wolfram Wette, eds., Holocaust in Litauen: Krieg, Judenmorde und Kollaboration im Jahre 1941 (Cologne, 2003); Christoph Dieckmann, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik und Massenverbrechen in Litauen 1941 bis 1944: Täter, Zuschauer, Opfer, unpublished PhD thesis (Freiburg, 2002). Tatjana Tönsmeyer, Das Dritte Reich und die Slowakei 1939–1945: Politischer Alltag zwischen Kooperation und Eigensinn (Paderborn, 2003); for an overview, see Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (New York, 2001), chapter 6. Christoph Dieckmann, Babette Quinkert, and Tatjana Tönsmeyer, eds., Kooperation und Verbrechen: Formen der ‘Kollaboration” im östlichen Europa 1939–1945 (Beiträge zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus, vol. 19) (Göttingen, 2003), 21. E.g. Hungary, where, according to recent surveys, only 2 percent of the population are well informed about the Holocaust, and 20 percent know nothing about it; cf. http// hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/tagungsberichte/id=421. This question has, for instance, been raised by Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland 1941–1944 (Hamburg, 1999). As examples of identity switches, see Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948 (Princeton, 2002). Ulrich Herbert, Geschichte der Ausländerpolitik in Deutschland: Saisonarbeiter, Zwangsarbeiter, Gastarbeiter, Flüchtlinge (Munich, 2001); idem., Fremdarbeiter: Politik und Praxis des Ausländer-Einsatzes” in der Kriegswirtschaft des Dritten Reiches (Bonn, 1985). Christoph Conrad, ‘Mental Maps,’ Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28 (2002): 340–514. Patel, Perspektiven. For influences of Bolshevism on fascism, see Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, especially chapter 6, on Italy, now see Armin Nolzen and Sven Reichardt, eds., Faschismus in Italien und Deutschland: Studien zu Transfer und Vergleich (Göttingen, 2005).

In Search of a Transnational Historicization

| 115

27. Kiran Klaus Patel, ‘Soldiers of Work’: Labor Services in Nazi Germany and New Deal America (New York, 2005), chapters 2 and 4. For another example, see Alice Kessler-Harris, ‘In the Nation’s Image: The Gendered Limits of Social Citizenship in the Depression Era,’ Journal of American History 86 (1999): 1251–79. 28. National Archives and Record Administration (NARA)/Hyde Park (HP), OF 58B, Box 4; NARA/College Park (CP), RG 59/862.504/545; RG 59/862; NARA/HP, OF 58B, Box 4; also see Patel, Soldiers. 29. Norbert Götz and Kiran Klaus Patel, ‘Facing the Fascist Model: Discourse and the Construction of Labor Services in the United States of America and Sweden in the 1930s and 1940s,’ Journal of Contemporary History 41 (2006): 57–73; on Sweden’s relations to Nazism generally, see Stig Ekman and Klas Åmark, eds., Sweden’s Relation to Nazism, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust (Stockholm 2003). 30. NARA/HP, PSF, Box 32; on this issue generally, see Patel, Soldiers, especially chapter 5. 31. Götz and Patel, Model; Patel, Soldiers. 32. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book IV, 428. 33. Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds., Das Kaiserreich transnational: Deutschland in der Welt 1871–1914 (Göttingen, 2004). 34. Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘Die Geburt des “Ostlandes” aus dem Geiste des Kolonialismus: Die nationalsozialistische Eroberungs- und Beherrschungspolitik in (post-)kolonialer Perspektive,’ Sozialgeschichte 19 (2004): 10–43, 16. 35. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 2004 [1951]). 36. Cf. Karsten Linne, ‘Weiße Arbeitsführer’ im ‘Kolonialen Ergänzungsraum’: Afrika als Ziel sozial- und wirtschaftspolitischer Planungen in der NS-Zeit (Münster, 2002); Chantal Metzger, L’Empire colonial français dans la stratégie du Troisième Reich (1936–1945) (Brussels, 2002). 37. Zimmerer, Geburt; idem, ‘Holocaust und Kolonialismus: Beitrag zu einer Archäologie des genozidalen Gedankens,’ Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 51 (2003): 1098–1119; Dirk van Laak, Kolonien als ‘Laboratorien der Moderne,’ in Conrad and Osterhammel, Das Kaiserreich transnational, 257–279; David Blackbourn, ‘Das Kaiserreich transnational: Eine Skizze,’ in Conrad and Osterhammel, Das Kaiserreich transnational, 302–24; and the ongoing project by Ulrike Lindner with the working title: Koloniale Praktiken und ihre gegenseitige Wahrnehmung im britischen Empire und im Deutschen Kaiserreich.” 38. Jürgen Osterhammel, ‘Aufstieg und Fall der neuzeitlichen Sklaverei. Oder: Was ist ein weltgeschichtliches Problem?,’ in idem., Geschichtswissenschaft jenseits des Nationalstaats: Studien zur Beziehungsgeschichte und zum Zivilisationsvergleich (Göttingen, 2001), 342–69. 39. Philipp Ther, ‘Deutsche Geschichte als imperiale Geschichte: Polen, slawophone Minderheiten und das Kaiserreich als kontinentales Empire,’ in Conrad and Osterhammel, Das Kaiserreich transnational, 129–48; Thomas Serrier, Entre Allemagne et Pologne: Nations et identités frontalières, 1848–1914 (Paris, 2002). 40. Cf. the conference report on http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/tagungsberichte/ id=544; Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I (New York, 2000). 41. E.g. Dan Diner, Das Jahrhundert verstehen: Eine universalhistorische Deutung (Munich, 1999), 47–53. 42. Dieckmann, Quinkert, and Tönsmeyer, Kooperation; Martin Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941–1944 (New York, 2000); Jan T. Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia, exp. ed. (Princeton and Oxford, 2002). 43. Jörg Baberowski, Der rote Terror: Die Geschichte des Stalinismus (Munich, 2003), 209–58; Richard Overy, Russia’s War (New York, 1998); Jörg Baberowski, ‘Auf der Suche nach Eindeutigkeit: Kolonialismus und zivilisatorische Mission im Zarenreich und der Sowjetunion,’ Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 47 (1999): 482–503; see also Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (New Haven, 2003). 44. Thomas Sandkühler, ed., Europäische Integration: Deutsche Hegemonialpolitik gegenüber Westeuropa 1920–1960 (Beiträge zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus, vol. 18) (Göttingen,

116

45.

46.

47.

48.

49. 50.

51. 52.

53.

54. 55.

56.

|

Kiran Klaus Patel

2002); Christian Joerges and Navraj Singh Ghaleigh, Darker Legacies of Law in Europe: The Shadow of National Socialism and Fascism over Europe and Its Legal Traditions (Oxford 2003). Cf. Ulrich Herbert, ‘Liberalisierung als Lernprozeß: Die Bundesrepublik in der deutschen Geschichte—eine Skizze,’ in idem., ed., Wandlungsprozesse in Westdeutschland (Göttingen, 2002); Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA, 1995); Petra Gödde, GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender and Foreign Relations, 1945–1949 (New Haven, 2003). Cf. a plea for a global culture of commemoration based on the Holocaust: Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter: Der Holocaust (Frankfurt am Main, 2001); see also Dieter Bingen, Wlodzimierz Borodziej, and Stefan Troebst, eds., Vertreibungen europäisch erinnern: Historische Erfahrung, Vergangenheitspolitik, Zukunftskonzeptionen (Wiesbaden, 2003). Martin Broszat, ‘Plädoyer für eine Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus,’ in Hermann Graml and Klaus-Dietmar Henke, eds., Nach Hitler: Der schwierige Umgang mit unserer Geschichte: Beiträge von Martin Broszat, (Munich, 1986), 159–73. Cf. Jörn Rüsen, ‘The Logic of Historicization: Metahistorical Reflections on the Debate between Friedländer and Broszat,’ History and Memory 9 (1997): 113–44; Glenn W. Most, ed., Historicization = Historisierung (Göttingen, 2001), especially vii-xii; Ernst Schulin, Arbeit an der Geschichte: Etappen der Historisierung auf dem Weg zur Moderne (Frankfurt am Main, 1997). Martin Broszat, ‘Eine Insel in der Geschichte? Der Historiker in der Spannung zwischen Verstehen und Bewerten der Hitler-Zeit,’ in Graml and Henke, Hitler, 114–20. See the workshop ‘Der Nationalsozialismus in transnationaler Perspektive,’ Humboldt University, 22 November 2004, organized by Sven Reichardt (University of Constance) and by the author. Lutz Raphael, Geschichtswissenschaft im Zeitalter der Extreme: Theorien, Methoden, Tendenzen von 1900 bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 2003). For the debate on this issue, see Ian Kershaw, ‘“Normality” and Genocide: The Problem of “Historicization”‘, in Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan, eds., Reevaluating the Third Reich (New York, 1993), 20–41, 24–28. With respect to the years 1914–1945, the term was coined by Raymond Aron, although the discussion about a ‘second Thirty Years’ War’ was much older, at least in Germany. On the adequateness of this term to describe the years from 1914 to 1945, see also Hans-Peter Schwarz, ‘Fragen an das 20. Jahrhundert,’ Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 48(2000): 1–36, 8–10. On this problem, see also see Attila Pók, Jörn Rüsen, and Jutta Scherrer, eds., European History: Challenge for a Common Future (Hamburg, 2002). On this interpretation as a key element of many studies, see Diego Holstein, ‘Globalization and Historical Writing since the “Global Village”‘, Comparativ 14 (2004): 102–16, 105; for an example of a recent study questioning this interpretation, see Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Geschichte der Globalisierung: Dimensionen, Prozesse, Epochen (Munich, 2003). For Germany, see Konrad H. Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton, 2003).

Chapter 7

THE ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR IN EURASIA: A BORDERLAND PERSPECTIVE

( Alfred Rieber

The present essay is an attempt to broaden the temporal, spatial, and social parameters of the origins of the Cold War by adding a third and fourth dimension in order to supplement the traditional two-dimensional approach that focuses on great-power rivalry and ideological combat in the twentieth century. The aim is to widen the overly narrow Eurocentric or Atlantic focus of previous studies and to expand the context of international politics. In a broader temporal-spatial or third dimension, the origins of the Cold War represent a phase in a prolonged struggle over the Eurasian borderlands that stretches back to the early modern period, when the great polyethnic, bureaucratic conquest empires—initially the Russian, Ottoman, Habsburg, Iranian, and Chinese—began to reverse a thousand years of nomadic military hegemony over sedentary cultures. The fourth, social dimension refers to the dynamic interaction between the conquered populations of the borderlands and the superordinate authority of the empires and their successors. In times of internal crisis or external wars, the civility of these relationships disintegrated into civil wars. The long-established pattern of imperial expansion on the one hand and resistance or accomodation on the other continued into the midtwentieth century, although the power relationships and the major players changed considerably over time as other imperial powers such as the British, Germans and Japanese entered the contest and distinctive ethno-territorial groups broke away from declining empires. In the Second World War, which in both Europe and in Asia began as a struggle over borderlands (Poland and Manchuria), a series of civil wars ran parallel to the fighting of conventional armies throughout the borderlands from the Baltic to the Pacific. As had been so often the case in the past, the subordinate populations and the great powers marched to different drummers, which vastly complicated the policies of both the Axis and Allies. By the end of the war Notes for this section begin on page 127.

118

|

Alfred Rieber

another power outside Eurasia, the United States, had become deeply involved in the future of the borderlands by virtue of its enhanced global role in the Second World War, the destruction of Germany and Japan, and the sharp decline of British power. Its relationship with the surviving great power of Eurasia, the Soviet Union, centered increasingly on the postwar disposition of the borderlands, where the outbreak or threat of civil wars embroiled both powers in a political confrontation that neither had desired or sought. In this analysis there are three contested terms that require careful definition: Eurasia, borderlands, and civil wars. For the purposes of this essay Eurasia should be regarded as a location and a process that combines geographical possibilities with patterns of culture.1 Spatially it was shaped over several millennia by a dynamic relationship between the steppe nomads and the agricultural populations on their northern and southern flanks. Up until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries nomadic migrations, military campaigns, and empire building dominated that relationship by virtue of the superiority of the armed horseman and the reflex bow over the armies and armaments of their sedentary opponents. This is not to deny the existence over long stretches of time of peaceful intercourse among the two types of cultures in the form of trade, intermarriage, gift giving, and military alliances. But the possibility of invasion and conquest by steppe nomads remained a constant threat along most of the frontier long after it had disappeared from Western Europe.2 The shift in power relationships was gradual and prolonged, but it reflected the growth of more efficiently organized multicultural, bureaucratic empires with improved military technology and financial instruments capable of repulsing, defeating, and ultimately conquering the nomadic peoples.3 This complex process involved not only the rise of independent centres of power based on agricultural surplus, as in the case of the Russian or Habsburg Empires, but also the conversion of triumphant steppe invaders into rulers of sedentary empires like the Ottomans, Safavids, and Manchus. The losers in the competition for the intermediate space that separated the political core lands of the expanding empires included not only the nomadic peoples but also the populations of several early modern states in Eastern Europe and Central Asia that failed to survive the struggle—the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth; the kingdoms of Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Georgia; the khanates of the South Caucasus and Central Asia. One result of the transformation of the steppe from a corridor of power, an arena of military prowess and socioeconomic vitality, into a contested zone, was a continuation of the rivalry among the bureaucratic empires even after the absorption of the borderlands into their respective realms. Their borders with one another were neither natural or ethnic and rested solely on the outcome of wars among them. A second result was the emergence of complex relationships between the core lands and the newly acquired territories on the peripheries of the empires, that is, the borderlands.

The Origins of the Cold War in Eurasia

| 119

The process of incorporating the conquered peoples into the bureaucratic empires created fresh challenges to the security and stability of the core lands. The imperial authorities attempted to consolidate their power by a variety of policies, ranging from cooptation of local elites and extension of religious toleration to deportation, resettlement, and repression. The local populations responded with an equally broad range of reactions, from assimilation and cooperation to resistance and rebellion. Part of the problem in stabilizing the borderlands arose from the nature of the frontiers. Established by wars of conquest, they often cut through ethno-religious groups, leaving substantial elements of the same people under different imperial rule. The combination of subordinate status and artificial division created such high levels of discontent and opposition that many of the borderlands earned reputations over time as rebellious provinces—the Kingdom of Poland, Hungary, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Sinkiang, and Mongolia, to name a few. Throughout their history, borderlands were arenas of civil wars, particularly when foreign invasions provided the opportunity to rebel against their overlords. The real or suspected disloyalty deeply impressed the outlook of the imperial authorities and, for similar reasons, their successors.

The Long Prelude Broadly speaking, there were three major phases in the evolution of the struggle over the borderlands with its dual characteristics of imperial rivalry and civil wars. The first, lasting from the sixteenth to the midnineteenth century, witnessed the growing power of the Russian Empire over its main rivals—the Ottomans, Iranians, and Chinese—and the Habsburgs over the Ottomans. But as of the early nineteenth century the British Empire, rooted more deeply in commercial than territorial interests, played an increasingly ambiguous role in the struggle over the borderlands, challenging Russian influence but also contributing to the weakness and economic dependency of Russia’s ancient rivals, the Ottomans, Iranians, and Chinese.4 In this period the development of nationalist sentiment in some of the borderlands gave powerful impetus to the borderland peoples’ internal struggle against imperial rule, particularly in those territories most susceptible to the influence of European social movements— Poland, Hungary, and the Balkans. Internal rebellions increasingly took on the character of national independence movements. Those supported by outside intervention—Serbia, Greece, Romania, and Bulgaria—achieved their goals. External events also forced the Habsburgs to recognize Hungarian autonomy. But Poland stood alone and failed to gain its independence until the three empires that had partitioned it collapsed in 1918. A second period began with the rise of the flank powers, namely a unified Germany and a modernizing Japan, latecomers to the competition over the borderlands. Their imperialist aims jointly targeted the Russian Empire,

120

|

Alfred Rieber

which by the end of the nineteenth century had reached the extreme limits of its territorial expansion. Japan was the first to challenge Russia’s hegemony in the Chinese borderlands by its conquest of Korea and penetration of Manchuria. The First World War opened the way for militarist groups in both Germany and Japan to override the moderates at home and impose, if only briefly, a near-total reconstruction of the borderlands from the Baltic to the Caspian and from Lake Baikal to the Pacific. The German experiments in creating a military utopia in the Baltic and a puppet Ukraine, along with the Japanese efforts to detach Eastern Siberia and dominate Mongolia, confronted the fledgling Soviet republic with its first experience in foreign policy in the form of direct threats to its existence.5 Stalin received his baptism of fire as a political and military leader under conditions of civil war and foreign intervention. Stalin was himself a man of the borderlands, a Russified Georgian who had spent the first three decades of his life and early years as a Marxist revolutionary in the multicultural complex of the South Caucasus. Together with his experience as a political commissar in the Red Army and as Commissar of Nationalities, his formative period convinced him that the relationship between the centre and periphery held the key to the construction of the Soviet state. The borderlands would provide resources and a territorial buffer against foreign intervention, but the Russian centre would provide the political stability, social homogeneity, and industrial power to secure control over the borderlands. The Communist Party would provide the integrating force. These were the principles upon which he drafted his federal design of the USSR and founded for his foreign policy.6 A third stage developed in the 1930s with the rise to power of the National Socialists in Germany, the triumph of the militarists in Japan, and the consolidation of a Stalinist state in the Soviet Union culminating in the Second World War and its aftermath. Hitler’s policies, evolving in ever more radical directions, combined two dark themes in German politics and culture—the myth of a Germanic battle for civilization against the Slavic East and a tradition of anti-Semitism—into a new crusade against Judaeo-Bolshevism. Hitler’s vision of war erased the differences between the external and internal enemy and conflated the ‘biological’ and the ‘ideological’ enemy, who were located in their most threatening form in the borderlands of Eastern and Southeastern Europe: the Jews, the Slavs, and the communists.7 The Japanese shared with the Germans a sense of racial superiority and a determination to expel the Russians from the Far Eastern borderlands. Since the turn of the century they had regarded the borderlands between China and Russia as the springboard for their domination of East Asia. The occupation of Manchuria in 1931 was the prelude to their penetration of Mongolia and North China. But their attitude towards the Chinese was more ambivalent than Hitler’s towards the Slavs. Strong feelings of cultural kinship with China were diluted by the entrenched belief that China could only be rescued from its political decline, and its subjugation and

The Origins of the Cold War in Eurasia

| 121

humiliation at the hands of Europe, by accepting Japanese leadership in the drive for a new order that would expel the Europeans from East Asia.8 The development of new radical ideologies, derived in part from older traditions and wielded by a radical political leadership, was not confined to the flank powers but also underwent a startling acceleration in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s command. Reacting in part to the militarization and expansionist designs of Germany and Japan, Stalin had launched his own transformation of society through collectivization, industrialization, and modernization of the armed forces. At the same time, he checked and in some cases reversed the policy of granting a degree of national-cultural autonomy to the non-Russian population (korenizatsiia). He conducted a purge of real and imagined internal enemies that appeared to strike indiscriminately. While these massive upheavals initiated from above appeared to affect every region and stratum of the population, it was some of the worst effects of collectivization, the end to political korenizatsiia, the purge of ‘nationalist’ cadres in both the republics and the Comintern apparatus, and forced population movements that had the most devastating impact on the Soviet borderlands. Yet in mute recognition of the power of linguistic autonomy to spark opposition, a lesson he had learned from his early years in Georgia, he avoided the errors of linguistic Russification that had bedeviled his tsarist predecessors. He kept alive, albeit under close surveillance, the idea of ‘national in form, socialist in content’ as the guiding principle of his policies in the national republics, even though the predictable danger and unintended cost in the long term, decades after his death, was the revival of national independence movements during perestroika, the third of the great crises over the borderlands that led to their separation and the destruction of the last imperial successor to the conquest states of the early modern period.9 Stalin’s negotiations in the summer of 1939 with both the Anglo-French and the Germans revealed his intentions of recovering the lost territories of the borderlands along the western periphery as a buffer against attack but also as a reunification of the Belarussian and Ukrainian populations and a historic reconstitution of the tsarist empire. But the territorial gains obtained by the annexation of the Baltic states, the abortive Finnish campaign, the fourth partition of Poland, and the seizure of Bessarabia were subverted by the harsh Soviet policies of deportation, purges, and collectivization imposed upon the populations of these regions. Stalin’s misguided attempt to make the borderlands more secure had the reverse effect of making them more susceptible to internal opposition when war broke out in 1941.10 The German and Japanese wars of aggression, launched initially in the borderlands, wrought devastation upon the civilian population that had no precedent in modern history. Their destruction of social and political institutions in the occupied areas, and their racial, harshly repressive, and in the case of the Nazis, genocidal policies constituted their ‘solutions’ to

122

|

Alfred Rieber

the problem of incorporating the borderlands into their empires. It was these radical, transformative policies, embodied in spurious slogans touting a ‘New Order’ and a ‘Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere,’ that were largely responsible for igniting or, in the case of China, reviving civil wars. But Soviet borderland policies contributed to the chaotic fighting behind the lines in the western borderlands. The German invasion of 1941 revived Stalin’s nightmare of nationalist opposition to Soviet rule in the borderlands. Anti-Soviet forces struck at the rear of the Red Army, carried out pogroms of Jews, killed Soviet army stragglers, and fought Soviet partisan detachments. They were particularly strong in Lithuania and Western Ukraine, but also showed strength in Estonia, Latvia, the Crimea, the Don Cossack region, and the North Caucasus as the Wehrmacht advanced into those areas. Only Hitler’s opposition prevented the formation of a large anti-Stalinist army recruited from Russian prisoners of war under a captured general, Andrei Vlasov. The Soviet government responded by creating a Central Partisan Staff in order to punish collaborationists, intimidate waverers behind the German lines, and carry out sabotage against the Wehrmacht. As a result of this civil war in the shadows, a ‘twilight zone’ extended behind the German front lines. In 1944 during the advance of the Red Army into Eastern Europe, fighting continued behind the Soviet front line, especially in the Baltic states and in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, where the Ukrainian Underground Army and the Polish Home Army persisted in their war against two enemies (Nazi and Soviet) and occasionally clashed with one another over disputed territory in Galicia. The civil wars in the Soviet Union continued in the postwar period, though with diminishing strength. However, without the shattering effects of German and Japanese expansion neither the civil wars nor the postwar Sovietization of the borderlands and the Cold War would have been conceivable.11 Japanese and German occupation policies, the Allied, mainly British and Soviet response, and the local politics of the conquered peoples combined to create unprecedented wartime conditions. Behind the well-defined battlefronts where conventional armed forces confronted one another, a different struggle emerged. Hitler’s so-called New Order amounted to a series of uncoordinated, often chaotic and contradictory initiatives that left its deepest and most destructive marks on the borderlands of Central, Southeastern, and Eastern Europe. States like Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia were dismembered, large territorial reallocations were made between Hungary and Romania, Romania and Bulgaria, Bulgaria and Greece, and in the Baltic states. Belarus and Ukraine were detached from the Soviet Union and variously incorporated into a German military regime. Puppet governments were installed; recruitment of auxiliary armed formations, massive labour drafts, and repressive deportations of populations were carried out. A murderous campaign against the Jews, though European-wide, had its most terrible effects in the borderlands.

The Origins of the Cold War in Eurasia

| 123

The German army followed Hitler’s call for a racial war of annihilation against the Russians. Despite the brutality and denigration of the conquered people, there were collaborators who not only assisted the Germans in administering the rump states but also provided volunteers for the Waffen SS and other special units of the Wehrmacht. It was only the Nazis’ contempt for those they conquered, their unwillingness to grant real independence to disaffected peoples like the Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars, and others, and Hitler’s fears of creating armies that might turn against him that prevented the Germans from exploiting to a far greater degree the internal social conflict in the interwar successor states and especially the borderlands of the Soviet Union in order to recruit large military formations to fight on the German side.12 Stalin’s response to civil wars in the Soviet Union was characteristically massive, ruthless, and indiscriminate. With Beria’s assistance and encouragement, he launched a series of deportations of peoples of the borderlands. He focused on ethnic groups that had supplied resistance fighters, even in small numbers, and those who inhabited districts along international frontiers or seacoasts. His process of selection was no longer guided primarily by class relations, as it had been for the most part in 1939–1940, but by ethnic identity. This meant that entire populations like the Germans, Chechen-Ingush, Kabardians, Crimean Tatars, and many others, as well as small colonies of Greeks, Bulgarians, and Persians, were swept up and dispatched to remote areas of the Soviet Union even as the conventional war was being fought and the need for transport was acute. Perhaps the most incomprehensible aspect of these repressive population movements was the demobilization and deportation of numbers of Red Army soldiers from the punished national groups during the later stages of the war.13 In the Far East, the Japanese also fostered collaboration by creating puppet regimes, first in Manchuria and then throughout occupied China. They sought to promote a separatist movement in Inner Mongolia. But as with the Nazis their arrogant, often brutal behavior towards the conquered populations, and their unwillingness to grant any measure of true autonomy to territories under their military occupation seriously compromised their efforts to win widespread support for their Greater East Asian CoProsperity Sphere. Their failure was evident not only in the borderlands of Manchuria and Inner Mongolia but throughout China and subsequently all of Southeast Asia.14 The resistance movements that arose in opposition to both the occupation forces and their collaborationist allies were both a reaction to the transformative policies of the Germans and Japanese and a response to appeals of desperation by the embattled British and Soviet leaders, Churchill summoning them to ‘set Europe ablaze’ and Stalin calling for a freedom-loving peoples’ war of liberation against fascism. But the resistance

124

|

Alfred Rieber

was itself divided in almost every country where it appeared. The main split was between nationalist and communist wings, but in some cases communal warfare broke out, as in Ukraine and Yugoslavia. Although the Holocaust is never directly included in an analysis of civil war, it should be remembered that killing Jews was not merely the preoccupation of external, that is, German forces. Fellow citizens also participated in their extermination, and what was this other than an aspect of civil war?15

The Denounment Both Britain (and later the US) and the Soviet Union sought to persuade resistance leaders to subordinate their internal quarrels to the greater cause of defeating the common enemy. This was in line with their general strategy of presenting a united front to the world despite deep ideological differences and divergent war aims. In the early years of the war Churchill and Stalin rated resistance movements according to their ability and willingness to fight. This also became the standard by which the Americans judged the value of the resistance. In the Far East, the American diplomats and military advisers to Chiang Kai-shek soon discovered that the Chinese communists were a more effective fighting force than the Kuomintang armies and made much effort to persuade the Nationalist leadership to accept a coalition or at least to desist from harassing the communists with their best troops.16 Ironically, Stalin gave his support to Chiang as the most effective anti-Japanese leader and supplied him with arms in the early stages of the war against Japan, ignoring the communists. It was only after the war and Stalin’s failure to extract the economic concessions he wanted from Chiang on Manchuria and Sinkiang that he reluctantly turned to support the Chinese communists in the civil war and bring on a confrontation with the US over the postwar fate of China.17 In Europe, the classic example of Western-Soviet agreement on the role of the resistance was the joint endorsement by Churchill and Stalin of Mihailovich’s Chetniks in Yugoslavia, and their subsequent shift to support Tito’s Partisans, who were actively engaging the German and Italian occupation forces. But as their armies began to liberate occupied Europe, the Western powers and the Soviet Union expected the local resistance groups to subordinate themselves to the command of the regular armed forces operating on their fronts. This is where the trouble began. The trajectory of the civil wars diverged in Western Europe and the Eurasian borderlands. In France and Italy the communist resistance, with a few individual defections, accepted the authority of the Allied (Anglo-American-Free French) command structure. But the situation was very different all along the western periphery of the Soviet Union. Poland was the classic and most tragic case. There the anti-German nationalist resistance (which was, to repeat, also anti-Soviet) refused to subordinate its activities to the

The Origins of the Cold War in Eurasia

| 125

Red Army command. The campaign organized by the Polish Home Army known under the code name ‘Tempest’ sought to liberate important towns and cities before the arrival of the Red Army and to greet the Russians as hosts in full possession of their domestic rights. The Warsaw uprising was the outcome of this policy.18 The double resistance of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, fighting against both German and Soviet forces, followed a similar pattern with similar results. But nothing exemplifies more dramatically the complexities of the civil wars in the borderlands than the communal fighting between the Polish Home Army and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in Western Galicia even as both battled their two great-power enemies.19 The most extreme nationalist elements in the anti-Soviet resistance continued to maintain their underground organizations even after the defeat of Germany in hopes that a clash between the Soviet Union and its Western allies would clear the way for a new phase in their national liberation.20 In Yugoslavia, Albania, and Greece, where the nationalist and communist resistance movements had battled one another for four years, neither side subordinated its primary interest—of gaining an advantage over the other in the postwar period—to the Allied and Soviet call for unity of action against the common enemy. In Romania, where there had been no resistance, and in Bulgaria, where it was confined to the Macedonian area under the influence of Tito’s partisans, the advance of the Red Army and overthrow of pro-German governments led rapidly to a polarization of society and the threat of civil war. In both countries the new governments, which were initially under the control of the traditional parties and the military, sought to check communist influence and evade provisions of the armistice agreements with the Soviet Union that imposed heavy economic burdens upon them. The communists agitated for strict fulfilment of the armistice, including rapid punishment of war criminals as a means of intimidating their opponents and enlarging their political influence. During this brief period the Soviet authorities as well as the Western representatives attempted to prevent a collapse of the coalition that would split the country and weaken the war effort. But fierce political in-fighting between communists and anticommunists polarized the Romanian and Bulgarian societies. Each side appealed to what it perceived to be its natural protectors—the Soviet Union and the West. The Soviet and Western representatives on the ground assumed, with persuasive prompting from their local ‘clients,’ that the other side in the struggle was acting at the behest of its great-power rival. In a series of political crises the Soviet Union and the Western powers lined up on opposite sides.21 In the meantime, the communist resistance forces in Yugoslavia, Albania, and Greece exploited the retreat of the Germans from the Balkans in order to crush the collaborationists but also to defeat the nationalist resistance. In the case of Greece, the British armed forces landed with orders from Churchill crush the communist forces occupying Athens. Stalin had already written off Greece and raised no objection. The Greek right-wing

126

|

Alfred Rieber

forces then violated a truce with the communists and touched off renewed fighting that led to a growing communist influence throughout the country. Once again, the Western observers attributed the outbreak of civil war to the machinations of Moscow. But the evidence shows that this accusation was unfounded.22 In Yugoslavia during the war Tito pursued a radical insurrectionist line, to Stalin’s distress, and only reluctantly accepted a few noncommunists into his postwar government while mercilessly hunting down his wartime rival in Serbia, Drago Mihailovich, and the fascist Croatian Ustasi. But Tito’s plans to expand Yugoslavia’s influence throughout the Balkans created difficulties for Stalin in two directions. First, Tito’s ambitions to acquire Trieste from Italy brought him to the verge of an armed clash with the British. Stalin reluctantly backed him but it is incorrect to assume, as the US and Great Britain did at the time, that Stalin had incited or encouraged him. Second, Tito’s activities in supporting the communists in Macedonia, Albania, and later in the Greek civil war not only threatened to embroil the Soviet Union to an even greater extent with the West, but also aroused Stalin’s suspicions. Tito’s attempt to patronize the Austrian and Italian communists, to dominate if not swallow up Albania, to establish close, bilateral relations with Bulgaria outside the Soviet umbrella, and to encourage the Greek communist insurrection took on the aspects of a Yugoslav communist imperialism that Stalin could not tolerate. But neither could he afford to discipline Tito while the political situation in the Balkans was in flux. It is now clear that, by planning for the founding congress of the Cominform in 1947, Stalin had originally planned to criticize the Yugoslavs as leftists as well as the French and Italians as rightists. But instead he used the Yugoslavs as a cat’s paw, in part in order to isolate them within the organization from the outset.23 Civil wars along the southern flank of the Soviet Union from Azerbaijan to Manchuria presented more opportunities than threats to Soviet interests. In Iran the Kurdish and Turkic minorities in the northwest periodically erupted in rebellion against the central (but hardly centralized) government in Tehran. Under Soviet occupation as of 1942, both groups pursued their historical claims for autonomy encouraged by the Soviet authorities, who perceived the advantages of using disturbances in the Iranian borderlands as a means of extracting economic concessions from the central government.24 They adopted a similar policy in Sinkiang, China’s most rebellious province, a borderland where Muslim rebels demanded autonomy and local Soviet officials manoeuvred themselves into the position of mediators in the conflict with the Nationalist government.25 Finally, in Manchuria Stalin attempted to extract even greater, mainly economic, concessions from Chiang than the Yalta agreements had endorsed by allowing just enough pressure from the Chinese communists to suggest what the outcome would be if the Nationalists refused to go along with him. Stalin’s attempts to penetrate the ethnic

The Origins of the Cold War in Eurasia

| 127

borderlands of Iran and China without annexing them strongly resembled the tsarist policies of the prerevolutionary decade. However, Great Britain and the US interpreted his designs as another stage in worldwide expansion guided by ideological fervour. They reacted by mounting their own interventionist campaigns in support of the nationalists in both countries, who adopted the ancient Chinese strategy of ‘using barbarians to defeat the barbarians.’ Once again, as in Europe, the prospect or reality of internal war dragged the erstwhile wartime allies into positions of confrontation. The last in the series was the outbreak of the Korean War. Kim Il Sung persuaded Stalin that he could end the division of the country by launching a civil war without risking an American intervention.26 The miscalculation, once again arising from the primacy of local interests in an ancient borderland contested by Japan, China, and Russia, spurred a further intensification of the Soviet-American rivalry, a massive rearmament, and the firm establishment in the US of the ‘national security state.’27 Standing in the shadows of the failed postwar foreign ministers’ conferences and the ideological pronouncements on both sides, civil wars in the borderlands flared and subsided according to their own rhythms. Diplomatically and militarily the West and the Soviet Union had long been schooled to regard one other as a potential enemy. With the exception of Roosevelt, the top leaders themselves shared many of these fears, reinforced by their advisers.28 Although they did not always trust their clients, whether communists or nationalists, they could not afford to ignore or abandon them in regions where their own strategic interests were at stake. As a result, local interests in the borderlands were often able to promote their own aims and establish different tempos for reconstructing the postwar world while appealing to their patrons to rescue them from domination by the ideological enemy that threatened them.

Notes 1. This definition differs from the original concept of Eurasia elaborated by Russian emigres in Prague in the 1920s and the polemical revival in Russia in the 1990s, both of which posit Eurasia as a unique civilization which more or less coincides with the Russian state in its imperial form. For an analysis of the original school, see Nicholas Riasanovsky, ‘The Emergence of Eurasianism,’ California Slavic Studies 4 (1967), 39–72. For its post-Soviet revival see Ilya Vinkovetsky, ‘Classical Eurasianism and Its Legacy,’ Canadian-American Slavic Studies 34 (2000): 125–40. A recent translation of the key text, ‘Iskhod k vostoku’ by the four founders, is in Ilya Vinkovetsky and Charles Schlacks, Jr., eds., Exodus to the East: Forebodings and Events: An Affirmation of the Eurasians (Idyllwild, CA, 1996). 2. Anatoly Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World, 2d ed. (Madison, WI, 1994), 233–63; Luc Kwanten, Imperial Nomads: A History of Central Asia, 500–1500 (Philadelphia, 1979);

128

3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

|

Alfred Rieber

Thomas Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China, 221 BC to AD 1757 (Cambridge, MA,), 1989. William Hardy McNeill, Europe’s Steppe Frontiers, 1500–1800 (Chicago, 1966); Carl Max Kortepeter, Ottoman Imperialism during the Reformation: Europe and the Caucasus (New York, 1972); Morris Rossabi, ‘The Legacy of the Mongols,’ in Beatrice Manz, Central Asia in Historical Perspective (Boulder, CO, 1994), 27–44; Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500–1800 (Bloomington, IN, 2002). The defense of India was the key to British-Russian relations. See Edward Ingram, The Beginning of the Great Game in Asia, 1828–1834 (Oxford, 1979), especially the introduction, which revises the theory of ‘the imperialism of free trade.’ For the German experiment, see Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, Warland on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge, 2000). For Japan, see James William Morley, Japan’s Foreign Policy, 1868–1941: A Research Guide (New York, 1974), and especially Hosoya Chihiro, ‘Japan’s Policies Toward Russia,’ in W. G. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, 1894–1945 (Oxford, 1987). Alfred J. Rieber, ‘Stalin, Man of the Borderlands,’ American Historical Review 106 (2001): 1651–91. Woodruff Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (Oxford, 1986); Michael Burleigh, Ethics and Extermination: Reflections on Nazi Genocide (Cambridge, 1997). Donald Keene, ‘The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 and its Cultural Effects on Japan,’ in Donald Shively, Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture (Princeton, 1971), 133–43; John Dower, Japan in War and Peace (New York, 1995), 271–78. Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, 2001). Jan Gross, Revolution from Above: The Soviet Conquest of Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton, 1988); Anthony Upton, Finland, 1939–1940 (London, 1974). Alfred J. Rieber, ‘Civil Wars in the Soviet Union, 1939–1947,’ Kritika 4 (2003): 129–62. Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945: A Study of Occupation Policies, 2d rev. ed., (London, 1981); Timothy Mulligan, The Politics of Illusion and Empire: German Occupation Policy in the Soviet Union, 1942–1943 (New York, 1988); Theo Schulte, The German Army and Nazi Policies in Occupied Russia (Oxford, 1989); M. I. Semiriaga, Kollaboratsionism: Priroda, tipologiia i proiavleniia v gody vtoroi mirovoi voiny (Moscow, 2000), 72–86; 414–528. N. F. Bugai, L. Beriia—I.Stalinu: ‘Soglasno Vashemu ukazaniiu . . . ,’ (Moscow, 1995). John Boyle, China and Japan at War: The Politics of Collaboration (Stanford, 1972); Owen Lattimore, Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers (London, 1962), 403–8, 427–39; Christopher Atwood, ‘The Japanese Roots of the Communist Autonomy Policy in Inner Mongolia,’ unpublished paper; Christopher Atwood, ‘The East Mongolian Revolution and Chinese Communism,’ Mongolian Studies 15 (1992): 7–83. I am grateful to the author for supplying me with these articles. Martin Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941–1944 (London, 2000). The best primary source for American policy in China remains the United States Department of State, United States Relations with China (Washington, D.C., 1949). For the military perspective, see also Barbara Tuchman, Stillwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–1945 (New York, 1970). For the diplomatic perspective, see Marc Gallichio, The Cold War Begins in Asia: American East Asian Policy and the Fall of the Japanese Empire (New York, 1988). Donald Gillin and Raymond Myers, eds., Last Chance in Manchuria: The Diary of Chang Kia-gnu (Stanford, 1989). The main negotiator with the Soviet authorities in Manchuria is the most valuable source on Stalin’s policy. See also A. M. Dubinskii, Sovetsko-kitaiskie otnosheniia, 1937–1945 (Moscow, 1980), and O. B. Borisov and B. T. Kolosov, Soviet Chinese Relations, 1945–1970 (Bloomington, IN, 1975), translated from the Russian edition of 1971.

The Origins of the Cold War in Eurasia

| 129

18. Ito Takayuki, ‘The Genesis of the Cold War: Confrontation over Poland, 1941–1944,’ in Yonusuke Nagai and Akira Iriya, eds., The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (New York, 1977); Jan Ciechanowski, The Warsaw Rising of 1944 (Cambridge, 1974); Krystyna Kersten, The Establishment of Communist Rule in Poland, 1943–1948 (Berkeley, 1991); Norman Davies, Rising ’44: The Battle for Warsaw (New York, 2004). 19. Timothy Snyder, ‘“To Resolve the Ukrainian Problem Once and For All.” The Ethnic Cleansing of Ukrainians in Poland, 1943–1947,’ Journal of Cold War Studies 1 (1999): 86– 120. 20. Hopes for an imminent clash between the Soviet Union and the Western powers inspired anti-Soviet resistance throughout Eastern Europe. For Estonia, see Mart Laar, War in the Woods: Estonia’s Struggle for Survival (Washington, D.C., 1992), 77–81, 176; for Lithuania, see Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv russkoi federatsiia (GARF) ‘Osobaia papka Stalina,’ fund 9401, opis’ 2, delo 96, listy 306, 310–14; for Poland, see Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii (RGASPI). fund 17, opis’ 128, delo 99, listy 4–5, ‘Pol’skaia reaktsiia i ee taktika v vovykh usolviikh,’ March 1946; Arkhiv vneshnei politiki russkoi federatsii, (AVPRF) f. referentura po Pol’she, opis’ 261, papka 308, delo 720, list 16. 21. Alfred J. Rieber, ‘The Crack in the Plaster: Crisis in Romania and the Origins of the Cold War,’ Journal of Modern History 76 (2004): 62–106. 22. John Iatrides, ed., Ambassador MacVeagh Reports: Greece, 1933–1947 (Princeton, 1980); John Campbell, ‘The Greek Civil War,’ in Evan Luard, ed., The International Regulation of Civil Wars (London, 1972, 39–40); Albert Resis, ‘The Churchill-Stalin “Percentages Agreement” on the Balkans, Moscow, October 1944,’ American Historical Review 83 (1978): 368–87; Ivo Banac, ed., The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933–1949 (New Haven, 2003), 352–53. 23. Iu.S. Girenko, Stalin-Tito (Moscow, 1992); Reginald Hibbert, Albania, National Liberation Struggle: The Bitter Victory (London, 1991). 24. Anvar Khamahi, Fursati Buzurgi Az Dast Raftah (The Great Opportunity Post) (Tehran, 1984), 338–41, based on the published account of the Iranian delegation’s negotiations with Stalin in Daad (Justice), nos. 713, 714, and 717. I am grateful to Firouzeh Mostashari for translating this material for me. 25. GARF, ‘Osobaia papka Stalina,’ fund 9401, opis’ 2, delo 99, listy 7–8. 26. For the origins of the Korean War as a civil war, see Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, vol. 1 (Princeton, 1981); for Stalin and Kim, see Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War (Stanford, 1993), especially chapter 5, and the documents and discussion ‘More Evidence on the Cold War in Asia,’ The Cold War International History Project 8–9 (1996–1997): 220–69. 27. Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (Boston, 1977), 401–8. Yergin pointed out that the outbreak of the Korean War enabled the Truman administration to obtain funding for its massive rearmament plan justified by the notorious policy document NSC-68. 28. See Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and the Cold War (Stanford, 1992), 26–54. Leffler describes the attitudes of the American foreign service and military as ‘ambivalent and disorganized’ but stresses that most were strongly anti-Soviet. After the purge of the ‘Litvinovtsy,’ that is, Soviet diplomats close to Maksim Litvinov, the reporting from embassies underwent a discernable shift from a strictly professional to a more ideological tone. The process can be observed most clearly in the latter period of the war. See T.V. Volokitina et al., eds., Vostochnaia Evropa v dokumentov rossiiskikh arkhivov, 1944–1953 gg. (Moscow, 1997).

Part 3

TRANSNATIONAL INTERACTIONS

(

Chapter 8

EUROPE AS LEISURE TIME COMMUNICATION: TOURISM AND TRANSNATIONAL INTERACTION SINCE 1945

( Thomas Mergel

Ideas of European integration are mostly shaped by the image of an increasing merger of distinct states. In this process differences are dissolved to be finally subsumed into one coherent social and political space with one homogenous public sphere inhabited by actors who perceive each other as similar. This idea derives from the common experience of the nation-building process and its homogenizing effects since the nineteenth century: diverse societies built a common new form, where differences were largely extinguished. This perspective has not remained unchallenged: disapproving skeptics highlight the value of European plurality, which should not be pressed into bureaucratic homogeneity as a result of industrial norms, legal regulations, or administrative standards. The Europe that is being built in Brussels and Strasbourg is in this view a sort of a colonizing power that imposes a certain way of life on indigenous peoples. In contrast, the advocates of continuing integration emphasize European commonalities, whether they are historical traditions like the Christian heritage or the Enlightenment, or political features like the European welfare state. But this argument provokes critical judgments when the eastward enlargement of Europe is at stake—that is, expansion into Orthodox, or in any case Slavic countries. The idea of a shared European identity comes under even more fire when the inclusion of nonChristian countries like Turkey is discussed. Whatever the outcome of debates like these may be, in the background there is always a homogenous picture of Europe that is shaped by the common experience of nation-building and the alleged amalgamation of prenational societies into coherent nations. The vision of Europe coalesced in such a way is evident in the project of a common market with only one currency, and in the aim of a shared European legal system or a European constitution. Notes for this section begin on page 151.

134

|

Thomas Mergel

The principle that European law overrides national law lucidly shows the European Union as a successor to the nation-state. Yet it remains unclear, if it is true at all, that nation-building emerged as a process of steadily increasing homogenization. In an interesting new book, Siegfried Weichlein has analyzed the process of nation-building parallel to the simultaneous process of the construction of regional identities in the late nineteenth century.1 His examples are Bavaria and Saxony, two states with strong collective identities and longstanding monarchic and administrative traditions. Weichlein’s thesis is not that what was going on was simply a process of homogenization, but rather that there were different relations between region and nation to be dealt with, which were changing over time. The nation meant something distinct in the two states, which at times understood themselves as nations, too; especially in Bavaria two national identities, a Bavarian and a German one, coexisted for a long time. Regional identities were in no way extinguished by national ones, for they rather reinforced each other reciprocally. Weichlein does not delve primarily into processes of homogenization but looks more for processes of social communication. His criteria of nation- and regionbuilding are not concerned with the question of how much the entities resemble each other. Rather, he inquires: How much did people interact? Thus, he investigates how many railroad travelers were counted, who corresponded with whom, and where national newspapers circulated. Thus, he constructs concepts of nation and of region that depend upon their mutual interaction. At present it seems that Europe is increasingly understood as characterized by plurality;2 at the same time, it is also more and more conceived as a social space, consisting of interactions. If this is the case, then the question does not concern the degree of homogeneity among citizens and structures, but rather the specifics and the density of communication and exchange.3 Theoretically one can, like Weichlein, follow Karl W. Deutsch, who inquired into the international relations among political and economic institutions as well as among the citizens themselves.4 Deutsch’s ‘interconnection approach’ has three dimensions. First, he analyzes the degree to which the actors are relevant for one another, which means that the actors care about each other—albeit not necessarily in a positive sense. Second, he looks at transactions in a material sense, at the exchange of information, goods, capital, and people between societies. Third, he inquires into the sense of community deriving from these exchanges and relevance structures. The second and the third dimension can be applied particularly well to communication below institutional levels. The question of homogeneity is not discussed within this framework, although the idea that more transaction leads to a greater sense of community and therefore more homogeneity is implicit in the approach. On a theoretical level, however, Deutsch’s concept enables contrary options, too. A high degree of international communication might bring not only peace and

Europe as Leisure Time Communication

| 135

friendship but also conflicts; strife also testifies to the mutual relevance of the actors. Following Karl Deutsch, the task would be to inquire into dimensions of transnational communication as the way in which Europeans come into contact with one another. Exchange would result in their relevance for each other; the other’s world would become a reference structure for one’s own life-world. The picture of Europe that derives from this approach is not one that leads to a desire for amalgamation. Rather, Europe is described as a space of communication, of exchange, and thus of mutual relevance. This may mean attraction as well as rejection. Historically, Europe has always been a region of intense communication, and not merely in a friendly manner. For centuries, in fact, exchange meant enmity and hatred. But if the argument holds that societies are held together by conflict just as much as by harmony, structures of relevance must bring about coherence, whether it is amicable or hostile. In this sense, what we learn from Deutsch is that actors communicating with each other continuously construct their partner as part of their own identity structures, so that this partner acquires importance. Continuous transactions are a prerequisite for a sense of community, and vice versa. Stable social structures are impossible without this communication, because communication facilitates trust. The fathers of Europe knew this when they encouraged the exchange of goods, money, and people. Increased interaction paves the way for the greater coherence of European society. Deutsch also assumed that more interaction creates closer contact and facilitates more trust. This assertion still needs to be examined.5 Transnational interactions take place in very different ways. Crossing the border in order to go shopping, which creates transnational consumer areas (as in the German-Dutch border regions), is one example. International student exchanges, city partnerships, or international youth camps practice such exchanges, many of them with the declared intention to teach mutual understanding and a sense of community. Studying or working abroad facilitates international exchange, and so do international media systems (like the French-German TV station Arte). Transnational interactions also take place in the use of pidgin languages like Kanak sprak (a blend of German, Turkish, and youth idioms) or Denglish (German-English mix). These idioms may perhaps aggravate teachers, but more importantly they offer communication avenues in multicultural environments.6 We have to distinguish forms of contact that are institutionally sponsored, like international cooperation between political parties, companies, lobbies, or other groups, from unplanned movements from below, when people come together for their own purposes. Institutional interactions may be more stable, yet they tend to be less inclusive. Political parties or interest groups have specialized officials to maintain international contacts; these professionals develop their own ways of communicating that make transnational interaction become routine over time. Cross-border

136

|

Thomas Mergel

shopping, however, is an activity that everybody can pursue simply by having money and crossing a border. In similar fashion to a camping trip, the chances for unplanned interactions are very high. Questions of transnational communication are treated intensely in the field of migration. Migrants cross borders in a very corporal sense, and they bring with them not only habits, their labor, and their language, but also historical memories, gender roles, and ideas of a good life. Even when these habits become blurred in the new environment of the German or French industrial city, they still can serve as points of orientation for the immigrants. The migration movements after the Second World War are of historic importance, not only because of the sheer number of people involved, but also because of the fact that, for the first time in European history, many of the immigrants stayed permanently in the new country. In 1945, Europe was at the peak of its ethnic homogeneity;7 thereafter it quickly developed into a multicultural society, which, as in the US, by no means created a conflict-free community. There was no easy commingling of new and old citizens. The migrants lived separately, and it took time for them to become integrated. They were made to do the least valued jobs and lived in the worst residential districts. However, over the years it became clear that the Italians, Spaniards, and Yugoslavs who had arrived since the 1950s nevertheless had become part of the German or French society. One reason for this development lay partly in the politics of European integration, which pushed the countries of origin closer towards the countries of arrival. Another reason was the fact that the places where the labor migrants came from became vacation destinations, since the Germans and the French, as of the 1950s, increasingly went on holiday abroad, preferring rural and cheap coastal resorts in the south. In some respects, the streams of tourists and the migrants moved in the opposite directions. Whereas migrants tended to wander from south to north, tourists traveled from Northern and Central Europe southwards. In this way, the movements of tourism and migration became entangled in many respects, and in the discussion that follows, both movements will be examined with respect to this special relationship. They have a lot in common. They are movements from below, even though both of them have always provoked massive institutional attention. Both are highly inclusive: almost everybody can be a tourist or a migrant, and frequently not much money is needed to adopt this role. A characteristic feature is, furthermore, a high degree of foreignness. The terms ‘foreign worker’ or ‘tourist’ are applied to people who do not belong to the society they are attracted to; the German equivalents illustrate these semantics even more lucidly. Although the word Fremdarbeiter is no longer in use because it smacks of nationalist ideology, the association of tourists with foreigners is still very vivid in words like Fremdenverkehr (tourism) or Fremdenzimmer (guest rooms). Both migrants and tourists are given other names once they belong to the host society.

Europe as Leisure Time Communication

| 137

Tourism as Transnational Interaction In some respects, tourism can be regarded as the flip side of migration.8 It is a form of migration itself—temporary migration to a foreign environment. Unlike many migrants, tourists choose this environment voluntarily. The place of vacation is chosen to ensure a pleasant experience, and it is therefore a constitutive feature of the tourist situation that it should not resemble everyday activities and places at home too much.9 Even if the tourist is an outsider and will be part of the vacation society only to a very limited degree, he is determined to find this society agreeable, and will perceive the location of his holidays in bright rather than in dark colors. In this respect, tourism inherently contains a positive perception of the holiday destination. The vacation society also deals with tourists in a way different from that in which the country of arrival deals with migrants. Tourists bring money and can become the economic basis of a vacation region, and therefore they expect to be treated with friendliness. Tourists overwhelm societies and change them in many ways that are not desired by the indigenous people. Yet even if natives criticize the tourist situation as a structure of alienation, the tourist’s own society and the one that is traveled to nevertheless come closer to each other. The vacation place acquires features from the tourists’ home society: shops, advertisements, and pubs start to look like the ones from their home country. In reverse, the tourists bring objects, cooking habits, and wine home from their holidays. They like to go to Greek or Italian restaurants and thereby foster foreign cuisines and tastes. Like the big waves of labor migration during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mass tourism is an outcome of industrial labor society. Both movements have run through an unprecedented process of expansion since the Second World War. Europe is the area with the most intense tourism. This is due, first, to the European economic ‘miracle’ after 1945, which successively embraced most European countries. Second, it is also a result of the European welfare state, which guaranteed a wide distribution of the surplus of money and leisure time. This meant unprecedented financial means and a record level of vacation time for a large part of the population. However, Europe is not only the region with the highest number of vacationers in the world, but also the area with the most advanced infrastructure for tourism. Until the early 1970s, when three quarters of all tourists worldwide traveled to Europe, its importance had increased steadily. Since then it has declined, but still more than half of the world’s tourists go to Europe on vacation.10 Between 70 and 80 percent of all Europeans go on holiday trips. Among them, two thirds spend their vacation in their home country, whereas about one fifth spend holidays in another European country. This means that about 87 percent of all Europeans go on holiday in Europe. By far the most popular destinations of the world are the countries around the Mediterranean Sea. About one third of all tourists travel to these shores for their vacation.11

138

|

Thomas Mergel

The tendency towards increased vacations and larger seaside resorts as the most popular vacation places applies more or less to Eastern Europe as well. Yet here, the level of tourist exchange has remained generally lower, since the Iron Curtain cut off the great East-West direction of movement. In Western Europe too, there is a notable exception to the general pattern: Britain, the motherland of modern tourism. Whereas in other European countries around three quarters of the people go abroad for their holidays, in 1990 only 41 percent of the British did so,12 and not until 1993 did more of them travel abroad than those who stayed on the island.13 Part of the explanation certainly lies in the strong class character of British society, which tends to allot narrow financial means to the lower classes. In the East and West, tourism and migration after 1945 were shaped by three big events. First, the Iron Curtain interrupted the traditional streams from the East towards the West. In relation to tourism, this created two Europes that kept only loosely in touch. In the East and West, separate beach resorts and skiing areas were developed; they were accompanied by different symbolic representations and different tourist populations. There were only a few points where tourists from the East and the West could meet, and they could do this only from the late 1960s on, when some Eastern destinations opened their doors to Western currency importers.14 At Lake Balaton or the Black Sea beaches, Easterners and Westerners met without intermingling much, because their financial resources, and thus their ways of holidaymaking, differed. This separation was politically desired and pursued, too: Western tourists should spend time and money in the Eastern resorts, but without influencing their Eastern neighbors.15 Second, as a consequence of the Iron Curtain, the tourist integration of Western Europe on the one hand, and Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe on the other hand, intensified, changing vacation habits. In Western Europe, a stream of tourism from the north to the south emerged; in Eastern Europe, it was mainly the four ‘Western’ countries—the German Democratic Republic, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary—that came into closer contact with each other. Both blocs registered closer connections between central and peripheral regions, with the central ones being more the areas of departure and the peripheral ones more areas of reception. In both the East and West, different habits of holidaymaking developed. In the West, tourists spent much of their vacation time as consumers focusing on individual preferences. In the East, vacation was more organized and undertaken collectively, and it was more closely connected with economic exchange. Traveling, even on vacation, was always an opportunity to transfer goods to deprived areas. In both parts of the world, still, tourism functioned equally as a consequence and a catalyst of intensified integration qua communication. The astonishing boom of Italian culture in Central and Northern Europe—cuisine, language, ice-cream bars—cannot be explained without those millions of tourists who had populated the shores of the Adriatic and the Ligurian coast since the 1950s.16 Similarly,

Europe as Leisure Time Communication

| 139

the success of Hungarian cuisine in the Eastern bloc is a result of East German, Czech, and Polish tourists spending holidays there. Finally, the simultaneous dissolution of the Eastern bloc and advent of European integration led to a new alignment of streams of movement. The homogenous spaces expanded towards the East; the western and southern countries of the former Eastern bloc became integrated very rapidly. Meanwhile, outward borders towards countries outside Europe were sealed more effectively. New destinations and new spaces of communication arose. Prague, for example, evolved into one of the most popular European cities. The beaches of the Baltic Sea, especially in the former GDR and Poland, are experiencing a strong boom, and the skiing resorts of the Polish and Czech mountain areas are competing with the Alps, not least because of lower prices. It is striking to see that the new members of the European Union are also the ones where Western tourism is increasing rapidly. For these countries tourist development is obviously one means for achieving more acceptance in Western Europe.

Tourism in the East and West since the Second World War The expansion of tourism is not only a result of modern industrial society17 but also owes much to the rise of modern consumerism. This is particularly true for the period after 1945, and even more so for societies that experienced the economic miracle. Less favored societies followed suit after a certain delay. A quarter of West German citizens went on a holiday trip in 1954; in 1970 the number was 40 percent, and during the 1990s two thirds of all Germans traveled for their vacation.18 Most big countries of Western Europe [except Britain] experienced similar developments. The countries around the Mediterranean took advantage of these trends; at the same time they were the countries from which the labor migrants started in order to find work in the north, which was exactly were the tourists came from. Both tourism and labor migration functioned as gigantic financial transfers from north to south. This was true in particular for Italy and Spain, but also for Greece and Portugal. The 1960s were the time when a tourist infrastructure was established in these countries, and as a consequence major growth started in all branches attached to tourism. Tourism needs transnational mobility, so tourism brought the European countries closer together even in political terms. In 1958, for example, Italy suspended visa obligations for most European countries. Governments started enormous programs to build holiday paradises in order to keep pace with the huge demand. These projects frequently took place in underdeveloped areas and had a second goal: to stop emigration by creating jobs. In this respect, tourism and migration processes were interconnected.19 An important feature of many of these holiday countries was the dictatorial regimes governing them. Even though tourist development had

140

|

Thomas Mergel

started before democracy arrived, the real boom only began after the dictatorships were overthrown. Greece, Spain, and Portugal saw a rise in tourism once their dictators had resigned, democratic governments had been established, and the European Community had welcomed these countries as new members. Here, European integration like tourism worked as a democratization program. In Spain, the number of tourists grew ninefold between 1960 and 1990, and the revenues increased by a factor of 60.20 In Greece, the number of tourists doubled during the 1970s alone. Between the end of the military dictatorship in 1974 and 1990, the numbers of tourists tripled.21 Thus, the integration of the Mediterranean countries into the political and economic framework of Western Europe gave a strong boost to the development of tourism. This was politically intended. In 1990, the International Year of Tourism, the EU declared tourism as a focus of its policy, because it believed that increasing wealth and growing interconnections were favorable for European integration.22 Migration and tourism were interwoven in even more dimensions. Migrant workers participated in tourism in several respects. Many of them, living in their country of destination, spent holidays in their country of origin, where they met their German or British colleagues. Even when they felt at home there, visited their relatives, or maybe owned some real estate, they began to adopt the habits of tourists. They lay on the beach or went on sightseeing tours. Tourists also adopted habits of migrants: they perhaps purchased a house on the island of Mallorca or in Tuscany and spent the summer there, with the intention of settling there permanently one day. Many German or English pensioners have chosen Mallorca or Tenerife as the site of their retirement home, and Germans who live in these areas have started to act as tourist suppliers themselves by renting out holiday homes. Thus the roles were interchanged: Spaniards became tourists in Spain; Germans became restaurant owners on Mallorca.23 Since most jobs are offered in the seasonal gastronomic sectors and the local work force supply is not sufficient for this big yet fluctuating demand, tourist societies, in particular those with longstanding traditions, often employ a high proportion of foreigners to serve the guests from abroad: Portuguese maids clean up French hotel rooms for British tourists, and Czech waiters serve German hikers in Austrian chalets. So tourism has led to growing transnational connections even beyond the bilateral relationship between hosts and guests. Tourists were not always welcome, precisely because contact caused problems. The foreigners brought different habits of living, they had high expectations regarding standards of civilization, and they lived according to different morals. Naked tourists (in churches: half-naked) disturbed the indigenous, often traditional communities, as did erotic relations with locals. It hurt their pride to work as waiters or maids for people who wanted to be guests—but guests don’t usually pay. On Spain’s Costa Brava it was the increasing contact between tourists and natives that fostered prejudices

Europe as Leisure Time Communication

| 141

among the latter, who began to think that the French had bad manners and the Germans were stingy.24 In tourist centers like the Adriatic shore or Mallorca, tourism established itself as a parallel society with rare contacts between natives and vacationers. The same was true for alternative vacation sites, where backpackers searching for untracked wilderness met other backpackers time and again instead—that is their vacation society consisted of other backpackers. They also had to search for people of their kind, because only with them could they exchange experiences and appreciate each other on the basis of shared expectations.25 The place of vacation became a sort of resource necessary for experiences that were not possible at home—but neither had they been possible in this place before. These processes changed tourist societies in many ways. New business and new jobs appeared. Frequently it were return migrants who occupied these jobs and became tourism entrepreneurs, because they were experienced in dealing with tourists and equipped with capital earned abroad. New social layers came into being: tourist workers and a new, service-oriented middle class emerged.26 Generational conflicts arose in these often remote areas, because young people felt attracted by the lifestyle of tourists, whereas the older generation tended to seek separation, afraid of the loss of traditional values. Women became emancipated, since they were often the ones who had to run the tourist business, while their husbands still worked as weekly commuters in the cities. Now the women earned their own money as maids or waitresses, thus gaining a measure of independence.27 In the Cappadocian village of Göreme, female backpackers changed gender relations substantially because they represented a role model that was attractive to many Turkish girls, while at the same time they got involved in love-based relationships with Turkish men. The idea of romantic love had not been indulged in before, so it was tourism that led to the introduction of this very Western concept of being together.28 For the purpose of tourism, projects of planned deindustrialization took place in French and Italian towns, because industry seemed to be incompatible with recreation. Landscape, cultural monuments, and cultural life were remodeled to suit the tourist gaze,29 spurring a process of retraditionalization: modernization in the wake of tourism could also mean the restoration of an antiquated design to towns and villages.30 It would be wrong to conclude that this meant alienation or a loss of roots, for some of these ‘roots’ were only discovered and constructed through tourism. Many Alpine villages never had looked so ‘traditional’ before tourism came.31 Above all, these constructions implied a unification of views. The inhabitants of vacation areas started to look at their landscapes and villages through the same eyes as did the guests; they began to see these places as unique and worth seeing. Both vacationers and natives assumed the tourist gaze. It seems to be important that this was not merely a one-sided process that occurred in peripheral countries, but one that took place in all countries.

142

|

Thomas Mergel

Along with the development of the countries on the margins, on the basis of tourists’ and migrants’ money, the Greek, Italians, and Spaniards began to travel as well, not only to beach resorts, but also to their relatives working in Germany or England. With tourism gaining importance, every location in every country could present itself as a tourist destination. Urban tourism led to a wave of self-marketing of cities and small towns of every sort. Alongside political capitals, cultural centers, and shopping paradises, even strongholds of heavy industry could count on tourism in the wake of their decline since the 1970s, remodeling themselves as tourist attractions well worth seeing. Just as London and Verona made money from tourism, so did the now deindustrializing coal and steel cities of the Ruhr area that began to rebuild their old plants for museum purposes.32 The argument that tourism is an ubiquitous phenomenon holds for the countryside too. The Europe-wide wave of agrotourism that became popular in the 1950s attracted not only those who lacked the financial resources to go abroad, but also those who were searching for a calm, if unspectacular, holiday off the beaten track of the tourist centers.33 With this wave, even remote areas of the Bavarian Forest, the Massif Central, or Abruzzo evolved into tourist regions, even if—or maybe because—they had a landscape or climate usually not associated with tourist attractions. The nontourist began to assume a tourism value; this status demonstrated the self-understanding of the tourist who did not want to be one because the term associates nonbelonging and a mere economic relationship. Some tourists behaved as nontourists because they wanted to be more authentic. They wanted to be visitors, friends, or explorers.34 The process of tourist development that appears at first sight to be a one-sided, even colonizing affair, is actually a manifold interwoven movement, in the course of which it was not only the tourist gaze—and with it, imaginations and fantasies about other places—that became generalized, though people came into contact with each other in a very physical sense as well. For decades, the direction of this movement was opposite to the streams of migration. But over time these streams became increasingly more complex and thus more similar. People settled in the place where they had traveled before, wine and other ‘typical’ goods were exported to the home places of tourists, ‘typical’ restaurants with Italian or Spanish cuisine were opened in Germany and the Netherlands. Developments like these transformed transitory encounters into more enduring structures. All this did not have to mean utter harmony. It was often a matter of course that tourists felt superior towards the locals. Of course, the places tourists visited were less civilized than they were themselves. They had to be, because a lesser degree of civilization was exactly what qualified them as a holiday resort. There were other dimensions of conflicts, too: the famous towel wars between English and German tourists on Mallorca fed on the fact that English and German people perceived each other as competitors.35 The towel wars were enacted as symbolic clashes between

Europe as Leisure Time Communication

| 143

two great powers. Other conflicts are also possible only as the outcome of contact: collective eruption of anger at overcrowded airports, railways on strike, trouble with dishonest taxi drivers, or arguments with landlords about the quality of accommodations. Many of these structures were quite similar in Eastern Europe, though there were also some differences.36 First, the rise of consumer society was much less dynamic under the communist regimes than in Western democracies, so mass tourism developed more slowly. Communist society was an economy of scarcity, with insufficient supply in many sectors essential for tourist development; in particular, tourism needed infrastructure, which was the Achilles’ heel of the socialist economy. Moreover, socialist countries were, for a long time, sealed off from each other. It was more difficult to cross borders than in Western Europe, and this was a main reason why domestic tourism remained strong in Eastern Europe. Finally, in socialist societies, vacation and tourism were tolerated only insofar as they helped the workforce to recover. Therefore, vacation did not count as a consumer good, but as a reward for the working people and those who were active supporters of the socialist system. Yet tourism became a matter of consumption even in the socialist system, against the intentions of the governing elites. During the 1970s mass tourism began to flourish. Even if the government tried to organize vacationing according to the rules of a planned economy, individual habits of traveling were never entirely disciplined successfully. The tension between control from above and privately organized vacation was a characteristic feature of Eastern tourism. Cross-border tourism was possible in Eastern Europe only after the late 1950s. In 1960, Poland was the first country to make it easier for vacationers to leave the country, albeit only to some other socialist countries. In 1961, the GDR followed. But not until 1972 could Poles travel to the GDR with only a visa stamp in their passport that was issued at the border. The four ‘Western’ countries Poland, Czechoslovakia, the GDR, and Hungary built up particular ties of communication.37 Here, a shared tourist space developed that was not completely integrated, but permeable; during the 1970s, the Bulgarian Black Sea sided with these countries. This coast, the German and Polish Baltic seaside, the skiing resorts in the upper Tatra, the Balaton, and the Mecklenburg lakes all because tourist spaces with a transnational scope, and with a certain dominance of the north-south movement. One could measure the growing importance of transnational tourism in relation to the number of tourist guidebooks issued in foreign languages.38 The tremendous growth rates were an indicator of how big the demand for vacation travel was, even in socialist labor societies. Between the 1950s and the end of the 1980s the number of guests on the GDR section of the Baltic Sea grew eightfold.39 When the vacation areas were gradually opened to Western tourists, these Eastern transnational destinations became important spaces of East-West communication. The

144

|

Thomas Mergel

Soviet Union did not participate in these developments. Until the end of Eastern socialism it remained more or less isolated, developing mainly domestic tourism. It was not easy to travel to Russia, even for citizens of other socialist countries. Nevertheless, some forms of tourism that were common in other countries evolved here as well. The development of tourism in the shortage-ridden economies of the Eastern world demonstrates that it was not consumer society alone that established mass tourism; rather mass tourism was a legitimate child of the productivity-oriented industrial societies of the twentieth century, be they capitalist or socialist. As a result of increasing productivity, these societies needed a reduced workforce to continuously produce more products, allowing working hours to decrease and vacation time to be extended— while expanding financial means for all layers of society. Because tourism was officially seen as a feature of socialist society and not as a phenomenon of individual consumption, the authorities searched for ways to organize vacation as a collective enterprise. The ideal behind this was the company community (Betriebsgemeinschaft) that lived together even during holidays and practised the socialist life style on the beach, too. In order to achieve this purpose, central agencies like the GDR vacation service of the Free German unions (FDGB-Feriendienst) tried to control vacations by offering all-inclusive holidays in central vacation areas; even the most pleasant time of the year was to be permeated by socialist indoctrination. The limited freedom of movement due to the Iron Curtain led to the establishment of a world of tourism in the East, which, as in the West, was advertised intensely because it offered not only leisure time, but also food for the imagination. An Eastern tourist gaze developed as well, offering mental maps specific to the East, with the Caucasus as the quasi-Alps of the socialist world, and the coasts of the Baltic and the Black Seas as its quasi-Mediterranean. The tourist agencies therefore sought to promote these areas as places that were much more apt for socialist needs than the Western resorts.40 During the 1980s it became evident that this strategy did not work. The longing for the Western paradises could not be stifled, a fact that became clear with the widespread demand for freedom of travel, one of the central tenets of the Eastern reform movements. Consequently, the fall of the Berlin Wall immediately unleashed a major wave of travel from East to West. Socialist propaganda was not able to wipe out the dreams of southern seashores and alpine summits. As early as the 1960s, it had become obvious that this fascination was still alive. The GDR therefore established cruise ships for workers of outstanding merit. On the MS Völkerfreundschaft they traveled through the Baltic and North Seas, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Mediterranean to the Romanian harbor Constanza, where they were picked up by an aircraft and brought home again. In order to prevent defections, the vessel passed the beaches and ports of Spain quite closely but did not enter the harbors; when going through the Bosporus

Europe as Leisure Time Communication

| 145

often some passengers tried to escape by jumping into the water, where boats waited to pick them up.41 Traveling collectively did not fulfill the desires of the citizens in socialist Europe either. Therefore forms of individual tourism sprang up that were subsequently impeded by the authorities. Nonetheless, they were successful and became quite important in Eastern tourism. Above all camping enjoyed high popularity, because it allowed people to withdraw at least partly from the culture of collectivity and organization. Since the distribution of campgrounds was a matter of central planning and camping was full of bureaucratic obstacles, in 1975 the driver Gerhard Müller invented a tent that could be erected on the roof of a Trabant car within two minutes.42 Other popular activities that lay at least partly beyond state control were nudism and individual hitch-hiking trips to the Soviet Union. Even in the Soviet Union during the 1960s and 1970s, the majority of vacationers were ‘wild tourists’: an estimated 50 to 85 percent of Soviet tourists went on vacation on a private and individual basis.43 Most of these were cases of families traveling together, because Soviet planning standards cared for the individual worker as a tourist rather than providing facilities for the whole family. Individual tourism in the East caused major problems for transport, housing, and food provision. Since these tourists did not show up in any plan, no capacities were foreseen for them, and even when private landlords filled this gap by renting out rooms (mostly illegally), the tourist areas experienced constant shortages. In resorts like Anapa on the Black Sea, the black market that developed to supply housing, food, and entertainment exceeded official tourism many times over.44 Nevertheless, most tourists had to spend a large part of their vacations wangling the necessary food, accommodations, and return travel. Due to socialist scarcity, traveling always had to fulfill an economic function for the tourists as well. A holiday trip also had the purpose of an exchange of goods that were scarce in the area of vacation, but available in the home of the vacationer—or the other way round.45 Economic exchange could also serve to cover vacation expenses. An East German tourist would travel to Poland with two suits in his luggage, so that one of them could be sold to defray costs.46 Around the vacation areas, zones of production and exchange sprang up that had nothing to do with immediate tourist demands. Around Zakopane, for instance, Polish farmers and craftsmen traded accommodations for consumer goods and construction materials that were scarce locally, but available where the vacationers came from. These construction materials kept the development of Zakopane as a winter resort going. At the beginning of the 1970s, 350,000 tourists per year spent their holidays here, around 90 percent of whom stayed illegally in private accommodations. These tourists were the customers of the legendary market of Nowy Targ in Southeastern Poland, where every Thursday, 20–30,000 people from Hungary, the CSSR, and even Bulgaria showed up to shop and trade. So Zakopane, just like other skiing resorts

146

|

Thomas Mergel

in the High Tatra, became a currency black market as a consequence of the exchange of goods across the German-Polish-Czech border triangle. As in the West, tourist transactions were ways of circulating goods, though not necessarily in the same direction as in the West. It was not only money and goods that were moved back and forth. Tourism also served as a bridge for people to meet across the two blocs: Zakopane and Karlovy Vary were two important places of encounter for East-West families torn apart by the Iron Curtain. Moreover, the big tourist destinations in the Western countries of the Eastern bloc were also focuses of interaction between Eastern and Western tourists. A triangle of interactions developed between locals, Eastern tourists, and visitors from the West, both facilitating contact and generating separation. Apart from those who wanted to meet family members, Westerners who traveled eastwards were initially adventurers and, so to speak, sophisticated vacationers; they wanted to demonstrate their difference from the people who went on holiday trips to Mallorca or the Costa Brava. Since the prices were moderate and the destinations advertised aggressively, it was largely travelers of modest means who made holiday trips to Eastern destinations. They met a culture of tourism that could not keep up with Western standards, at least in terms of quality. Hence the Westerners thought themselves to be superior, a feeling confirmed by the fact that they were given priority over Eastern tourists, because the former brought hard currency while the latter had less to offer. The Balaton and the Black Sea coasts were the places where GDR and Polish citizens could see Western consumer culture with their own eyes and experience the social esteem that accompanied it. The way East and West met in those places was therefore certainly not without conflicts. One exception to the East-West pattern was Yugoslavia. On the one hand, it was definitely not a Western capitalist country; on the other, it had opened up to the West early, be it in matters of tourism or of migration. Yugoslavs not only made up the second largest group of labor migrants in Europe; they were also frequent hosts for Western tourists. In 1970, 4.7 million vacationers traveled to Yugoslavia, more than twice the number of those who traveled to Greece.47 The relative proximity to the West and the comparatively well-equipped tourist resorts were improved by migrants, who provided an influx of hard currency. Foreign tourists, Yugoslav migrants—who perhaps built themselves a summer residence there—and the local people who lived off tourism were faced with fewer barriers to good relations than in other Eastern countries.

New Developments since 1990 Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the communist Eastern bloc the divided East-West European processes have once again begun

Europe as Leisure Time Communication

| 147

to converge.48 Especially Central and Eastern Europe have become part of a coherent Western and Central European space where goods, services, and people move more or less freely (especially since those countries have joined the European Union). It is likely that, after a long, contentious time of transition, most Balkan countries will participate in these developments as well, although Hungary has always been counted as a Central European and not as a Balkan country. The north-south connections that were important during the last fifty years certainly will not be replaced, but rather supplemented by the older East-West connections. Tourism in the East is still in its early stages. In 1997, the European countries around the Mediterranean offered beds to 8.5 million tourists, whereas all of Eastern and Central Europe could only account for 1.3 million.49 Here, barriers are still effective that have long vanished in north-south interactions: language misunderstandings, problems of currency transfer (almost forgotten since the introduction of the euro in Western Europe), corruption, trouble with accommodation quality, and unscrupulous taxi drivers. Problems like these are specific to societies not yet prepared for tourism. In order to assess them properly, it might be helpful to remember the experience of 1989–1990, when the first GDR citizens came to Western Germany and, meeting a society not prepared for this kind of tourist, were laughed at because of the prestige they attached to bananas and canned beer. This has changed completely. Today, East German tourists are not perceived in the West as foreigners because their habits of consumption have been adjusted. Since the countries of Central and Eastern Europe joined the EU in 2004, a number of integration processes that had been previously observed in Western countries have accelerated: the relations between labor migration and tourism, the adjustment of markets, the spread of communication media, the common currency, and the sharing of transport systems. But even if Poland is welcomed as a tourist destination, Polish labor migrants are less popular in Western Europe. The fact that illegal drugs are, since the opening of the Baltic, trafficked westwards over the same routes by which used cars are brought from the West to the East, shows the ambiguity of increased possibilities of exchange. These findings led to the establishment of a new transnational concept of crime control on the EU level after 1990, at almost the same time that the EU defined a higher priority for tourism as part of its new policy towards the East.50 It has suddenly become obvious how physically close these societies are to each other, and this feeling is much stronger in Germany than it is in other parts of Europe. This is particularly the case when it comes to tourism from West to East. Over the past fifteen years travel has increased enormously, above all to Poland and the Czech Republic, but of course from Western Germany to the former GDR too, which does not count as international tourism any more. In Poland, the number of tourists increased by 700 percent between 1988 and 1994 alone; in the Czech Republic and Slovakia,

148

|

Thomas Mergel

tourists in 2001 spent eleven times as much money as in 1988, 90 percent of which came from EU countries. In the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary, around 10 percent of all employees worked in the tourism sector.51 Some of them work in the coastal and lake resorts, but as the cultural centers gain in importance, cities are being spruced up with Western money. Above all, Prague and Budapest are to be mentioned as cities that are trying to regain their former importance as metropolises of the Habsburg Empire. Tens of thousands of foreigners have set up homes more or less permanently in these places, and they have changed the outlook (and the apartment prices) of these capitals considerably. Easterners are starting to travel as well. Between 1988 and 1994, travelers from the Czech Republic to international destinations increased from 7 to around 65 million, while Polish vacationers abroad quadrupled to 35 million.52 Even Romanians and Bulgarians have started to go to foreign destinations. Hence, the European Union has recognized tourism in Eastern Europe as a part of the process by which East and West are growing together.53

Final Remarks Are these hopes justified? Tourists in Prague or Warsaw often face ambiguous reactions comparable to those in Greece or Portugal thirty years ago. They do not always feel that they are welcome. Instead, they seem to be appreciated only to the extent to which they pour out money. From this perspective, unbounded optimism is not appropriate. Apparently, transnational interaction on its own does not automatically create a sense of community. The relationship between hosts and guests is, above all, an economic one, and tourist societies mostly become aware of the high costs of structural change only when it can no longer be reversed. Therefore, tourism often causes displeasure and tension between hosts and tourists who intend to be guests. Close contacts between hosts and visitors can lead to repulsion. It is not self-evident that international contacts lead to more understanding: the increasing visits to sites of memory in former Yugoslavia, for instance, have been related to the revival of nationalism in this region.54 The development of tourism appears to undergo a threefold process, which has been observed in Italy as much as in Greece, Portugal, and Turkey. It remains to be seen whether learning from tourism takes the same course in Central and Eastern Europe.55 The first step is that the tourists are welcomed emphatically as guests who overcome isolation and bring contact with the world outside. During this stage—in Italy in the 1950s, in Portugal and Greece as of the 1960s, in Turkey and on the Canary Islands possibly not until the 1970s—tourists report having had ‘real’ experiences of hospitality, cultural exchange, and a relationship

Europe as Leisure Time Communication

| 149

between hosts and guests that is not based primarily on money. During the second phase, when tourism is discovered to be a way of making money and facilities are developed rapidly and at high volume, the instrumental function of tourism as an economic factor becomes important. The relation between suppliers and tourists becomes more formal, and as a result, the quality of services does not keep pace with the expectations of the vacationers. This is the time when tourists feel exploited and complain about unfriendliness, bad service, and disinterested natives. Moreover, this is also the time when the locals begin to feel that tourism is a hostile movement that leads to the expropriation of their home, sometimes triggering open aggression against tourists. During this phase, feelings of alienation arise from structural change towards a service society, because it offends the pride of workers or farmers to be subservient to strangers for money. Yet, in a third phase, tourist societies learn that friendliness and openness can be not only a façade but a habit as well.56 A functioning tourism economy, so they learn, also rewards these traits, because tourists do not look only for a nice beach, but also for a temporary time-out from their everyday routine, which means a welcoming smile too. Experienced tourism societies therefore specialize in certain target groups whose expectations they think they can best meet. They train their personnel in order to make them good tourist guides, and they develop peculiar cultural offers and design the landscape to meet tourism demands. Yet these suppliers no longer see themselves to be ‘acting as if,’ but rather are proud of their home area as a place of tourism, and they perceive the authenticity produced for tourists as ‘real,’ such that they themselves think it is worth being experienced. In old Austrian skiing resorts, in Tuscany, and on the Cote d’Azur, such habits are cultivated. In this phase the tourist destination has become an emphatically service-oriented society. Endeavors are then intensified to protect the quality of the resort, for example by increased ecological protection. In this phase, tourist interaction may lead to structures of mutual understanding, because tourists and suppliers accept each other’s roles.57 This argument is supported by findings regarding the development of transnational trust in Europe. As Jan Delhey has shown, even on the level of the European Union and their citizens, the length of time during which people have lived together and the intensity of their contact are not a guarantee of a highly positive attitude in Deutsch’s sense. Delhey talks about positive relevance by using the notion of trust.58 His results show that, on a European level, the Swedish, the Dutch, the Luxembourgers, and the Danes are the peoples that encounter the most positive feelings among other nations. But the Scandinavians have not been members of the European Community for long, and most Europeans have less contact with them than with English, German, or French people. It is equally difficult to explain how Irish, Italians, and Greeks are perceived as less

150

|

Thomas Mergel

trustworthy people in Europe, for it could be argued that two out of these three countries are important for migration as well as for tourism, so that it is easy for Europeans to meet Italians or Greeks. Have they had negative experiences with them? It is more likely that the key factor here is fantasies, which are at least as important as real experiences: Scandinavia as a stronghold of wealth and the welfare state, Italy as the home of the mafia. Yet the picture changes when the question of mutual trust arises—that is, countries that perceive each other to be trustworthy. For this question, proximity is a decisive element. Swedes and Danes, Luxembourgers and Germans say that they perceive each other as trustworthy people much more frequently than, say, Danes and Britons, or Austrians and Swedes. Thus, it could be argued that one-sided imaginations require less proximity than mutual perceptions, which could mean that similar, reciprocal fantasies have evolved on both sides. What we are dealing with is therefore a combination of face-to-face communication and imaginations. Both of them work in tourist interactions. The vacation itself, but also the tourist place and the fantasies concerned with it, function to a large extent as imaginations that begin working before the actual interaction. The German picture of Italy during the 1950s and 1960s was largely drawn by fantasies of an Arcadian idyll as presented by illustrated magazines, press reports, or advertisements.59 These imaginations structured the ‘real’ interactions.60 The communication of tourist actors, therefore, thrives on interactions that generate mutually adjusted imaginations of both parties. Only interactions that ‘realize’ imaginations in this way can create closeness. Transnational interactions become more important, the more they are interwoven and take into consideration the imaginations of the other party. Consider the following example. Some kilometers from Cattolica on the Italian Adriatic coast, there is a fish restaurant that is extremely popular among German tourists (who vacation in this area in high numbers). The owner, who comes from the area, was in Hamburg during the 1960s as a foreign worker and had opened a fish restaurant in Hamburg in the 1970s. At the beginning of the 1990s he gave up this restaurant in order to open another one, now in Cattolica. Since he and his family speak excellent German and tourists from Hamburg frequently visit his restaurant, but also because the boss knows what German tourists like to eat, the restaurant flourishes and attracts plenty of local guests as well. This form of encounter is based on reduced foreignness, because both host and guest know both life-worlds, and thus the boss has some understanding of the tourist gaze as well. Tourism is not a magic wand for creating a European sense of community. It can lead to rejection as well as to attraction. Only as part of a histoire croisée of interaction and imagination it can become of importance for the process by which Europeans grow together.

Europe as Leisure Time Communication

| 151

Notes I thank Christopher Görlich, Potsdam, for many suggestions and useful information. 1. Siegfried Weichlein, Nation und Region: Integrationsprozesse im Kaiserreich (Düsseldorf, 2004). 2. John Keane, ‘Questions for Europe,’ in Brian Nelson et al., eds., The Idea of Europe: Problems of National and Transnational Identity (New York, 1992), 55–60. 3. With this approach I follow Jan Delhey, who also gave me some suggestions: Jan Delhey, ‘Das Abenteuer der Europäisierung: Überlegungen zu einem soziologischen Begriff europäischer Integration und zur Stellung der Soziologie zu den Integration Studies,’ Soziologie 34 (2005): 7–27; idem, ‘Nationales und transnationales Vertrauen in der europäischen Union,’ Leviathan 32 (2004): 15–45; idem, ‘Europäische Integration, Modernisierung und Konvergenz. Zum Einfluß der EU auf die Konvergenz der Mitgliedsländer,’ Berliner Journal für Soziologie 14,4 (2003): 565–84; idem, European Social Integration: From Convergence between Countries to Transnational Relation between Peoples (Berlin, 2004). 4. In particular Karl W. Deutsch, Nationenbildung—Nationalstaat—Integration (Düsseldorf, 1972), and Deutsch et al., International Political Communities (New York, 1966). 5. For the argument of western convergence see Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Wie westlich sind die Deutschen? Amerikanisierung und Westernisierung im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1999); the opposite view is taken by Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through 20th Century Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2005). 6. Inci Dirim and Peter Auer, Türkisch sprechen nicht nur die Türken (Berlin, 2004). 7. Göran Therborn, Die Gesellschaften Europas 1945–2000: Ein soziologischer Versuch (Frankfurt am Main, 2000), 55ff. 8. For an overview, see Christoph Hennig, Reiselust. Touristen, Tourismus und Urlaubskultur (Frankfurt am Main, 1999). 9. Rudy Koshar, ‘What Ought to Be Seen: Tourist Guidebooks and National Identities in Modern Germany and Europe,’ Journal of Contemporary History 33 (1998): 523–40. 10. Statistics: Gareth Shaw and Allan M. Williams, ‘Western European Tourism in Perspective,’ in idem, eds., Tourism and Economic Development: European Experiences (Chichester, 1998), 17–41; for the 1990s, see Francois Vellas, ed., An Encyclopedia of International Tourism, vol. 1: Tourism Trends in Western Europe (Paris, 1995). 11. Tamara Rátz, European Tourism (Shékesfahérvár, 2004), 31. 12. Hartmut Berghoff, ‘Modern Tourism and the Rise of the Consumer Society,’ in idem et al., eds., The Making of Modern Tourism: The Cultural History of the British Experience, 1600—2000 (Hampshire, 2002), 165. 13. David Bowen, ‘Trends in United Kingdom Tourism,’ in Vellas, Encyclopedia, 233–40, 234. 14. Osttourismus—Chance der Begegnung: Urlaubsreisen nach Osteuropa. Conference, 23–25 October 1978, Loccumer Protokolle, 18/1978. 15. Stimulating studies of East and West German tourism are in Hasso Spode, ed., Goldstrand und Teutonengrill: Kultur- und Sozialgeschichte des Tourismus in Deutschland 1945– 1989 (Berlin 1996). 16. Dieter Richter, ‘Reisen und Schmecken. Wie die Deutschen gelernt haben, italienisch zu essen,’ in Voyage 5 (2002): 17–29. 17. For an overview and article collections going back to the eighteenth century, see Orvar Löfgren, On Holiday. A History of Vacationing (Berkeley, 1999); Shelley Baranowski and Ellen Furlough, eds., Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe and North America (Ann Arbor, MI, 2001); for anthropological case studies on societies dealing with tourism during the 1980s, see Jeremy Boissevain, ed., Coping with Tourists: European Reactions to Mass Tourism (Providence, 1996). 18. Richard Hill, ‘Tourism in Germany,’ in W. Pompl and P. Lavery, eds., Tourism in Europe: Structures and Developments (Wallingford, 1993), 219–41, 222f.; important data is also

152

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

41.

|

Thomas Mergel

contained in Axel Schildt, Moderne Zeiten: Freizeit, Massenmedien und ‘Zeitgeist’ in der Bundesrepublik der 50er Jahre (Hamburg, 1995), 180–208. At the Mediterranean coast of the French region of Languedoc, see Ellen Furlough and Rosemarie Wakeman, ‘La Grande Motte: Regional Development, Tourism, and the State,’ in Baranowski and Furlough, Being Elsewhere, 348–72. Isabel Albert-Pinole, ‘Tourism in Spain,’ in Pompl and Lavery, Tourism in Europe, 242–61. Helen Briassoulis, ‘Tourism in Greece,’ in Pompl and Lavery, Tourism in Europe, 285–301. Ian Barnes and Pamela Barnes, ‘Tourism Policy in the European Community,’ in Pompl and Lavery, Tourism in Europe, 36–54, 37f.; Rátz, European Tourism, 46ff. For Mallorca, see W. Isenberg, ed., Tourismus auf Mallorca (Bergisch-Gladbach, 1992). Oriol Pi-Sunyer, ‘Through Native Eyes: Tourists and Tourism in a Catalan Maritime Community,’ in Valene L. Smith, ed., Hosts and Guests, 2d edition (Philadelphia, 1989), 187–202. Hazel Turner, Living with Tourism: Negotiating Identities in a Turkish Village (London, 2003), 53f. For example, on the Cyclades: Paris Tsartas, ‘Socioeconomic Impacts of Tourism on Two Greek Islands,’ Annals of Tourism Research 19 (1992): 516–32. A. Lever, ‘Spanish Tourist Migrants,’ Annals of Tourism Research 14 (1987), 449–70. Hazel Turner, Living with Tourism, 137ff. John Urry, The Tourist Gaze (London, 2002). For example, on Malta, where, despite rapidly decreasing religiosity, the number of public religious celebrations increased steadily, especially on the occasion of high religious holidays. See J. Boissevain and P. Serracino Inglott, ‘Tourism in Malta,’ in E. de Kadt, ed., Tourism—Passport to Development? (Oxford, 1979), 265–284. Kriemhild Kappeller, Tourismus und Volkskultur: Folklorismus—Zur Warenästhetik der Volkskultur (Graz, 1991). Christopher M. Law, ed., Tourism in Major Cities (London, 1996); Manfred Zeiner et al., Städtetourismus in Deutschland (Bonn, 1995); Mechthild May, Städtetourismus als Teil der kommunualen Imageplanung: Dargestellt am Beispiel der kreisfreien Städte im Ruhrgebiet (Trier, 1986); Heinrich Robert Müller, Der schweizerische Städtetourismus unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Zürich, dissertation (Zürich, 1984). See, for example, Michaela Rödling, Urlaub auf dem Bauernhof, 2 vols. (Starnberg, 1974– 75) (a survey among tourists and suppliers about expectations and attitudes); Nathalie Disez, Agritourisme et développement territorial, dissertation (Clermont-Ferrand, 1996); Giovanna Bellencin Meneghel, ed., Agriturismo in Italia (Bologna, 1991). Compare the figure of the ‘Non-Tourist,’ in Turner, Living with Tourism, 43ff., esp. 51f. Jörn W. Mundt, Einführung in den Tourismus (Munich, 1998), 231f. Here, I follow the findings given in the research proposal for the Volkswagen Foundation: Włodzimierz Borodziej und Jerzy Kochanowski, ‘“Schleichwege”: Inoffizielle Begegnungen und Kontakte sozialistischer Staatsbürger 1956–1989,’ 2005. Beate Ihme-Tuchel, Das ‘nördliche Dreieck’: Die Beziehungen zwischen der DDR, der Tschechoslowakei und Polen in den Jahren 1954—1962 (Cologne, 1994). For instance, Ungarn: Ein aktueller Reiseführer durch das Ungarn von Gestern und Heute (Budapest, 1956); Józef Nyka, Kleiner Touristenführer durch Südpolen und Szczecin (Warsaw, 1966). Hasso Spode, ‘Tourismus in der Gesellschaft der DDR: Eine vergleichende Einführung,’ in idem, ed., Goldstrand, 21. Forthcoming: Christopher Görlich, Urlaub vom Staat: Zur Geschichte des FDGB-Feriendienstes in der DDR, dissertation (Potsdam, 2006). For the conception of mental maps see: Christoph Conrad, ed., Mental Maps (Göttingen, 2002). Gerd Peters, ‘Vom Urlauberschiff zum Traumschiff. Die Passagierschiffahrt der DDR,’ in Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, ed., Endlich Urlaub! Die Deutschen reisen, guidebook for the exhibition in the Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (SHGBD) (Bonn, 1996), 93–100.

Europe as Leisure Time Communication

| 153

42. Judith Kruse, ‘Nische im Sozialismus,’ in SHGBD, Endlich Urlaub!, 106–11, 106f. 43. Christian Noack, ‘Von “wilden” und anderen Touristen,’ Werkstatt Geschichte 36 (2004): 24–41, 31. 44. In Anapa during the 1970s, around one million ‘wild’ tourists took their holidays, only 20 percent of whom approached official agencies. See Noack, Wilde Touristen, 335. 45. See for example: Małgorzata Irek, Der Schmugglerzug: Warschau—Berlin—Warschau: Materialien einer Feldforschung (Berlin, 1998) (a traditional tourist-economic connection, viewed during the time of transformation). It should be mentioned that vacation-induced private smuggling of consumer goods like Chianti wine, cigarettes, and Stroh rum had very similar purposes in Western Europe too, at least until the introduction of the common European market. 46. Pawel Sowinski, ‘Schmuggel, Kleinbetriebe, Spekulation: Tourismus im kommunistischen Polen als eine Komponente des Schwarzmarktes (1956–1980),’ paper given at the conference ‘Sozialismus im Alltag,’ Potsdam, 2003. 47. Derek R. Hall, Tourism in Eastern Europe, 341–58, 342. 48. Heike Bähre, Tourismus in der Systemtransformation: Eine Untersuchung zum Reisen in der DDR und zum ostdeutschen Tourismus im Zeitraum 1980 bis 2000 (Berlin, 2003). 49. Claudio Quintano and Franco Garbaccio, eds., Turismo: Il futuro nell’Europa dell’Unione Monetaria (Naples, 2000), 239. 50. Paddy Rawlinson, ‘Bad Boys in the Baltics,’ in Adam Edwards and Peter Gill, eds., Transnational Organized Crime: Perspectives on Global Security (London, 2003), 131–42. 51. For statistics for 1988 and 1994, see Derek R. Hall, ‘Central and Eastern Europe: Tourism, Development and Transformation,’ in Shaw and Williams, Tourism and Economic Development, 345–91, 356f.; for 2001, see Rátz, European Tourism, 103ff. 52. Hall, Central and Eastern Europe, 366. 53. See the report of the Working Group on Tourism of the European Commission, Tourism Resources in Eastern Europe: Problems and Prospects for Cooperation, 2 vols. (Luxembourg, 1993). 54. Hall, Central and Eastern Europe, 373. 55. For the following, I refer to some theories on tourism, concisely summarized in Mundt, Einführung, 232ff. Like Mundt, I disagree with these theories insofar as they ignore the third degree of tourist learning described here. They suggest that an aggressive or apathetic attitude against tourism is the last step to be taken. In this case, it would not be explicable that obviously most tourist societies strive for ways to get along with tourism, and that most of them come to terms with tourism more or less well over time. See Richard Sharpley, Tourism, Tourists, and Society (Huntingdon, 1994), 178ff.; Chris Ryan, Recreational Tourism: A Social Science Perspective (London, 1991), 137. 56. For the following, see Boissevain, Coping with Tourists. 57. See the survey that compares the relationship of hosts and guests in an Austrian Alpine valley for the years 1976 and 1997: Ursula Wilhelm, ‘Auf dem Weg zum professionellen Umgang mit dem Gast: Zwei sozialpsychologische Untersuchungen über das Verhältnis von Gastgebern und Gästen im Ötztal 1976 und 1997,’ Voyage 4 (2001): 137–54. The results show that the aloofness of hosts towards guests has declined substantially; now the latter are viewed as more sympathetic, more serious, more empathic than twenty years ago. 58. For the following, see Delhey, ‘Nationales und transnationales Vertrauen.’ 59. Birgit Mandel, ‘“Amore ist heißer als Liebe”: Das Italien-Urlaubsimage der Westdeutschen in den 50er und 60er Jahren,’ in Spode, Goldstrand, 147–62. 60. Hennig, Reiselust, 10f.

Chapter 9

INTEGRATION FROM BELOW? MIGRATION AND EUROPEAN CONTEMPORARY HISTORY

( Karen Schönwälder

There is hardly any doubt that migration was a major factor that contributed to the reshaping of post-1945 European societies. Labour migration was a central component of the Fordist production system and a cornerstone of the ‘golden’ postwar decades, and migration was one factor that transformed social and demographic structures.1 Furthermore, migration, flight, and expulsion constituted central experiences in many Europeans’ lives. For others, the denial of the opportunity to migrate across borders may have been a key experience. Nevertheless, in many general national histories migration is still largely neglected. Gérard Noiriel, referring to France, has attacked ‘collective amnesia’ and demanded that migration should be recognized ‘as a problem that is internal to the history of contemporary French society.’ 2 Surely the latter is also true for the history of twentieth-century Europe, and ways in which migration should be integrated into a broader concept of contemporary European history need to be explored. This chapter does not claim to have completed this task. Rather, in order to illustrate the relevance of the migratory experience, the following text will outline selected aspects of a range of diverse developments linked to migration processes. The focus will be on the period since 1945 and on a European dimension—rather than on similar experiences in different nation-states.

The Relevance of the Migratory Experience It is not easy to estimate how many of the current inhabitants of Europe (or of its post-1945 population) are migrants, that is, people who now live in a country other than the one where they were born, or who in the past spent Notes for this section begin on page 161.

Integration from Below? Migration and European Contemporary History

| 155

longer periods of their lives in another country. A recent United Nations report gives a figure of 36 million international migrants in Europe.3 The foreign-born population, according to OECD figures, ranges between 8 and 11 percent in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. The proportion is much higher in Switzerland and Luxembourg, and lower in Spain and Portugal.4 For Germany, estimates have put the foreign-born population at about 12 percent.5 This is a higher share of the population than in the prototypical country of immigration, the United States. In the Netherlands, over 18 percent of the population were themselves born in another country or have at least one parent born abroad6—and it seems reasonable to include those whose parents immigrated in a group of Europeans whose lives were shaped or strongly influenced by a migration background. The 1990s were ‘the most migratory [decade] for the continent since the Second World War.’ But the whole period since 1945 ‘has been one of continuous international migration in Europe.’ As a Council of Europe report further suggests: ‘Europe is a beehive with an overall net inflow.’7 If we take into account the fact that most migrants do not settle permanently but return home, we arrive at much higher figures of people with a migratory experience. For the main labor recruitment period from the 1950s to the early 1970s, some estimates put the number of people involved at between 20 and 30 million individuals.8 Between 1946 and 1970, 6.9 million Italians emigrated, and 1.2 million Greeks did the same between 1951 and 1972. Between 1950 and 1997, West Germany alone received 24 million people of foreign citizenship, of whom 17 million did not stay.9 Of course these figures can only serve as examples, and they have to be treated with caution. Nonetheless, they may suffice to underline that migration has been a significant experience for Europeans.

Interaction and Integration But has migration been a European experience—an experience that fostered European integration and helped to unite Europeans? Has it promoted cultural transfers and mutual understanding? European migratory movements immediately after the Second World War can, to a considerable extent, be seen as a continuation of European mass movements across the oceans, mainly to North America. Until the 1960s in the Netherlands, numbers of emigrants exceeded those of immigrants.10 In the United Kingdom, too, this was the case until 1984 (with the exception of the early 1960s and 1973).11 But in the 1960s, Western Europe as a whole became predominantly a receiver of immigrants, and movements were now largely inner-European. In Southern Europe, this trend towards inner-European migration had begun earlier. To give just one example: of about 1 million Greeks who, between 1946 and 1977, left Greece, about 60 percent migrated to another European country.12 Recently, east-west

156

|

Karen Schönwälder

migration has again strengthened the inner-European component of migratory movements. For broad strata of the European population Europe now—in a peaceful context–became a lived experience, an ‘Erfahrungsraum.’ As Hartmut Kaelble further suggested, Europe, transcending national territory, ‘began to form part of a European way of life.’13 René Girault has referred to the milieus of the migrants as the ‘breeding ground’ of a European consciousness, and the labour migration of the 1960s and 1970s has been described as the European network of the ordinary people.14 Allegedly, ‘the awareness of belonging to a unity greater than the country of immigration, possibly due to the migratory experience, can encourage the development of a European identity or, more precisely, of an identity related to a European space.’15 Is this an idealization? Unfortunately, to my knowledge, wide-ranging empirical studies of connections between migratory experiences and attitudes to Europe, as well as to other Europeans, do not exist. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that years spent in other European countries, and the encounters between Europeans, have been without consequences for people’s knowledge about each other, mutual attitudes, and attitudes to European integration. There is scattered evidence: anthropological studies suggest that a European identity among Portuguese migrants was strengthened as they began to experience the benefits of free movement in the European Union.16 Strong pro-European attitudes in Italy may be related to the fact that Italians in particular profited from the right to free movement of labour in the European Economic Community. And the perception of the Greek military Junta of 1967—like the Spanish dictatorship—as a European challenge was at least to some extent due to the vocal presence of migrants from those countries who mobilized the international public and the trade unions.17 Likewise, groups of Eastern European exiles in the West constituted—if not generally bridgeheads of mutual understanding—surely a lobby for continued attention to and involvement in developments in the socialist East. It would be fascinating to study whether and how current migratory experiences west of the river Oder have an impact on the attitudes to the Union and to other Europeans that are held by citizens of the new EU member-states. Surely the migratory experience was not solely, and maybe not even predominantly, a unifying, pro-European experience. It was also an expression of deep divides: between the wealthy, labour-recruiting North and the poorer, labour-exporting South in the 1960s and 1970s, and between the secluded East and the relatively mobile West up to the late 1980s. Migration experiences were, and still are, extremely diverse. Encounters did not necessarily encourage friendship. In the 1940s, for instance, the British Colonial Office feared that members of a future African élite would turn against Britain because of the racism and discrimination they experienced as students in London or Oxford.18

Integration from Below? Migration and European Contemporary History

| 157

In Germany, contemporaries in the 1960s expressed their confidence that life and work in the Federal Republic would be beneficial for both the Southern European workers and Europe as a whole. As a leading economist explained in 1966, a ‘transference of our civilizational achievements’ to ‘people who partly still lived in a paradise-like situation of original bonds with nature and of true community’ was taking place.19 As he believed, ‘through the training we give them these people become disciplined workers at home and valuable members of society.’ Similarly, a one-page feature in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung emphasized the civilizing mission of Germans: ‘[U]niform, sober West German society’ had forced the ‘softer southerners to adjust in order to prevail. . . . It seems that it is indeed possible to achieve a lasting transformation of the more vegetatively existing Mediterranean type into a determined working personality.’ The countries of origin and Europe as a whole would thus profit from the influence Germany exercised.20 These views reflect colonial-style attitudes and images of Northern Europeans as the educators of those from the southern wilderness. An increasing homogeneity in Europe was envisaged as the result of hierarchical relations among Europeans and a one-sided adjustment. However, the hope was shared by emigration countries that labour migrants to Germany, France, and Belgium would acquire skills that they could then usefully employ in the industrial development of their countries of origin. Did they acquire such skills, and could they be utilized in the home country? In the case of Turkey, one study concluded that ‘the impact of labour export on the acquisition of new skills has not been very favourable. Comparatively few Turkish workers learnt new relevant skills and of those who actually returned to Turkey, not all made use of them.’21 Recent studies of the effects of emigration on the sending countries partly arrive at more positive assessments. They mainly emphasize the importance of remittances (as an indirect economic stimulus) and point to the role of even non-returning emigrants as investors or people who strengthen economic links between countries.22 We need more detailed historical studies to find out whether, when, and where such positive effects occurred. To date, a sceptical view predominates, assuming that migrants’ remittances and savings did improve the living standards of families at home but failed to have a considerable impact on economic development, that is, investment in industry.23 Perhaps migration was more effective in promoting the transfer of political and cultural skills, experiences and norms, rather than the acquisition and utilization of vocational skills and entrepreneurial spirits. Early studies among returnees to Turkey showed a significantly higher level of trade-union membership after return (42 percent compared to 24 percent).24 Studies of female labour migration reported how, for instance, women returning to Greek villages met with disapproval and suspicion because of their changed lifestyles. Returning female migrants were more often gainfully employed and less often helping family members, so

158

|

Karen Schönwälder

gender roles and power relations in families changed due to the migratory experience.25 It is possible that cultural transfers did not occur evenly in both directions. They may have to be described as a one-way process affecting the sending countries to a greater extent than the receiving countries. But this is still a hypothesis. In general, the debate about connections between migration, cultural transfers, and the development of a European society is at an early stage. Questions to be investigated include the relative importance of personal encounters for the diffusion and increasing similarity of values, lifestyles, and political aims as parts of a process of European integration, that is, of the social carriers of transfer and transformation processes. The history of the much-debated Americanization of Europe would suggest that, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the diffusion of norms and lifestyles does not necessarily require personal transmitters. On the other hand, the recent history of Central and Eastern Europe and the prominent role of émigrés in its economic and political life seems to demonstrate how important, in this case, returning emigrants from North America and Western Europe have been for the transfer of cultural and economic knowledge and experience—which suggests that in this case migratory experiences surely contributed to the process of European unification.

External Relations So far, this chapter has referred to postwar migration as an experience that possibly fostered European integration and helped to unite Europeans. But of course migratory movements after 1945 did not exclusively connect European countries. They were, and still form, part of dense networks between European and non-European countries and regions. Indeed, a number of scholars—like Jürgen Osterhammel, Shalini Randeria, and Sebastian Conrad—have in recent years reminded us that Europe should not be conceptualized as a self-contained, inward-looking world but as a civilization closely connected with a global environment. European history should be written as transnational history, as history of connectedness or ‘entangled histories’ (Verflechtungsgeschichte).26 It is a characteristic feature of developments after 1945 that, as Ari Zolberg pointed out, ‘the domain of international migration expanded to encompass the entire world, so that the resulting encounters [were] more varied than ever.’27 Other scholars have also emphasized how migratory networks changed after 1945: ‘New origin and destination countries emerged after 1950 to yield entirely new international migration systems.’ This system structure ‘by the 1990s connected Western Europe to source countries in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.’ 28 At the same time, the ‘migration fields of individual countries,’ that is, the systems connecting particular countries or regions to source countries of migration, differed markedly, ‘reflecting

Integration from Below? Migration and European Contemporary History

| 159

a range of historical . . . and geographical (especially proximity) processes.’29 Considering links between European and non-European regions, we can see that ‘Africa is a particularly important source for France and Portugal reflecting earlier colonial ventures, and for Italy and Belgium to a lesser extent. America is important for Portugal and Spain (mainly South America), and also for Greece and Italy. Asia is a major source for the UK, Greece and Italy.’30 Refugee migration has strengthened links between European and nonEuropean countries, although it should not be overlooked that large groups of asylum seekers came from European countries (such as Yugoslavia in recent years and Poland in former years) and Turkey. Nevertheless, asylum migration reinforced the shift in immigrant origins towards Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. On balance, there is a strong inner-European component of post-1945 migration (around the year 2000, 64 percent of about 20 million foreign nationals in the EU and EFTA were Europeans),31 but there are also migration systems (including cultural bonds) linking European and non-European regions—which are partly based on persistent historical patterns. Due to their colonial past, some European countries have particularly strong bonds with non-European regions. This is true for the Netherlands, where among those born in another country, 540,000 were born in a European and 820,000 in a non-European country. Arguably, postwar Britain became—through migration—less European. This is not only a matter of birthplaces, but of perceptions. Although major groups of migrants to Britain came from Ireland and continental Europe, public debates from the 1950s onwards focused on the alleged importation of US-style racial conflict as a consequence of ‘black’ immigration from the Caribbean and India, such that Britain was perceived to be becoming more similar to the United States. The migrants, insofar as they perceive themselves as part of a black community, often—and maybe increasingly—look to the US for similarities as well as political or cultural partners. David Gillborn, for example, has emphasized the enormous influence of events and discussions in the United States on the ‘black’ community in Britain.32 Again, we should be careful not to idealize interaction. As Stuart Hall emphasizes, a common European identity was forged by means of ‘actual relations of unequal exchange and uneven development.’ And he further argues: ‘Europe’s external relations with its Others has been central to the European story since its inception, and remains so.’ Hostile responses to immigration are sometimes motivated by definitions of European identity as Christian, non-Islamic, and white. In different ways, responses to migration have been motivated by particular images of Europe and the West, and definitions of European culture and identity are not unrelated to the experience of migration. Thus Britain’s laissez-faire attitude to nonEuropean immigration in the postwar years was strongly influenced by the belief that this issue would have a decisive impact on the struggle between ‘East’ and ‘West’ and that by granting freedom of movement and

160

|

Karen Schönwälder

by proving its tolerance, the Western world could demonstrate its superiority over the Soviet Union. A Western and European self-definition that places individual rights, tolerance, and the equality of humans at its heart contributed to an extension of immigrants’ rights and counterbalancing policies that aimed to prevent permanent immigration.

Transnationalism Internationalization and global communication channels may further strengthen extra-European links. In migration research, ‘transnationalism’ has recently been one of the most hotly debated issues. The term refers to multiple, border-crossing links and interactions between people and institutions. Social relations and networks as well as identities are assumed to no longer relate mainly to the territorially defined unit of the nation-state but to be hybrid. This perspective reflects a reorientation, in the course of which migrants are no longer seen to be torn between two cultures and thus incompletely assimilated. Instead, multiple identifications are perceived as a more or less permanent feature of life.33 Historians are well aware that long-term links with the old home are not a new feature of emigration. And yet, mainly since the 1970s and 1980s, transnational links seem to have acquired a new character. This is owed to new communication technologies, easier travel, liberalized markets, and greater political freedoms, which allow more intense, worldwide networks and communication in real time. As a consequence, integration processes could be transformed. Transnational links and hybrid identities could in future form a new basis for European—rather than nation-state—integration. At the same time, transnational spaces could also, as a frame of reference, increasingly compete with the nation-state as well as with Europe. Will immigration therefore contribute to a more integrated and more cohesive European community? At present, the relationship between immigration and the overall integration of societies is subject to controversy. Fears are growing, in societies marked by the disintegrative forces of globalization, that anything that further increases diversity may fuel dangerous divisions. Immigration could increasingly be seen as a process that has contributed to heterogeneity and led to heightened competition between multiple loyalties—and thus hindered integration. On the other hand, modern societies are highly differentiated, and Europeans could prove able to develop new forms of multiple, albeit not mutually exclusive, identities.

Concluding Remarks The points listed above underline the need to incorporate the various migratory experiences into our images of the recent European past. Some of

Integration from Below? Migration and European Contemporary History

| 161

the obvious links between migration history and other key processes in contemporary European history have not even been mentioned. Among those developments that affect European rather than national history, the role of migration policy in relations between states and its links with the political process of European integration is an important issue that has hardly been investigated.34 This chapter has aimed to provide food for thought and underline, by briefly pointing out some examples, that contemporary European history should not be written without according migration a proper place.

Notes 1. See Russell King, ‘From Guestworkers to Immigrants,’ in David Pinder, ed., The New Europe: Economy, Society and Environment (Chichester, 1998), 263–79; Russell King, ‘Post Oil-crisis, Post-Communism: New Geographies of International Migration,’ in Pinder, The New Europe 281–304; Klaus J. Bade, Europa in Bewegung (Munich, 2002); Karen Schönwälder, Rainer Ohliger and Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos, ‘European Encounters: Europe’s Migratory Experiences,’ in Karen Schönwälder, Rainer Ohliger, and Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos, eds., European Encounters: Migrants, Migration and European Societies since 1945 (Aldershot, 2003), 3–16. Ewa Morawska has recently emphasized how Eastern European societies were transformed due to the emigration of large parts of the surviving Jewish population as well as of parts of the educated elites. They not only lost a major part of their intellectual and cultural resources, but also became less liberal and more nationalist. See Ewa Morawska, ‘Intended and Unintended Consequences of Forced Migrations: A Neglected Aspect of East Europe’s Twentieth Century History,’ International Migration Review 34 (2000): 1049–87. 2. Gérard Noiriel, The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity (Minneapolis, 1996), xxvii. 3. United Nations (Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division), International Migration Report 2002 (New York, 2002), 3. Figures are based on numbers of foreign-born people and those with foreign citizenship. I have excluded the Russian Federation and Ukraine, for which the report lists another 20 million migrants. Due to the varying national statistics (some countries record figures for foreign citizens, others for members of ethnic minorities, etc.) all figures should be treated with extreme caution. 4. John Salt, Current Trends in International Migration in Europe, Council of Europe, European Committee on Migration (CDMG) (2005) 2 (Strasbourg, 2005), table 6. 5. Rainer Münz, ‘Ethnos or Demos? Migration and Citizenship in Germany,’ in Daniel Levy and Yfaat Weiss, eds., Challenging Ethnic Citizenship: German and Israeli Perspectives on Immigration (New York, 2002), 15–35, 21. 6. CBS (Statistics Netherlands), Statistical Yearbook of the Netherlands 2004 (Voorburg, 2004), 33. 7. John Salt, Current Trends in International Migration in Europe, Council of Europe, CDMG (2001) 33 (Strasbourg, 2001), 1. 8. Heinz Fassmann and Rainer Münz, ‘Europäische Migration—ein Überblick,’ in Heinz Fassmann and Rainer Münz, eds., Migration in Europa: Historische Entwicklung, aktuelle Trends, politische Reaktionen (Frankfurt, 1996), 13–52. 9. Christa Lörcher and Kai-Uwe Beger, ‘Bevölkerungsentwicklung und Zuwanderung,’ Universitas 54 (1999): 460–70, 461–62.

162

|

Karen Schönwälder

10. Hans Vermeulen and Rinus Penninx, ‘Introduction,’ in Hans Vermeulen and Rinus Penninx, eds., Immigrant Integration. The Dutch Case (Amsterdam, 2000), 1–35, 5. 11. David Coleman and John Salt, The British Population: Patterns, Trends, and Processes (Oxford, 1992), 433. 12. Lina Venturas, ‘Greek Governments, Political Parties and Emigrants in Western Europe: Struggles for Control (1950–1974),’ Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales 17, no. 3 (2001): 43–65, 45. 13. Hartmut Kaelble, Wege zur Demokratie: Von der Französischen Revolution zur Europäischen Union (Stuttgart, 2001), 124. 14. René Girault, ‘Das Europa der Historiker,’ in Rainer Hudemann, ed., Europa im Blick der Historiker: Europäische Integration im 20. Jahrhundert: Bewußtsein und Institutionen (Munich, 1995), 55–90, 86; Hartmut Kaelble, ‘Europabewußtsein, Gesellschaft und Geschichte. Forschungsstand und Forschungschancen,’ in Rainer Hudemann, Europa im Blick der Historiker, 1–29, 19. 15. Girault, ‘Das Europa der Historiker,’ 86. 16. Andrea Klimt, ‘Do National Narratives Matter? Identity Formation among Portuguese Migrants in France and Germany,’ in Schönwälder, Ohliger, and Triadafilopoulos, European Encounters, 257–80. 17. Venturas, ‘Greek Governments, Political Parties and Emigrants in Western Europe,’ 49. 18. Ronald Hyam, ed., The Labour Government and the End of Empire 1945–1951, (British Documents on the End of Empire, series A, vol. 2, part IV: ‘Race Relations and the Commonwealth’) (London, 1992), 22. For background information, see also Imke Sturm-Martin, ‘Liberale Tradition und internationales Image: Regierungspolitik in der Dekolonisationsphase,’ in Karen Schönwälder and Imke Sturm-Martin, eds., Die britische Gesellschaft zwischen Offenheit und Abgrenzung: Einwanderung und Integration vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Bodenheim, 2001), 112–32. 19. Hanns-Joachim Rüstow during the discussion at the meeting of the working group of the German economic research institutes, in Probleme der ausländischen Arbeitskräfte in der Bundesrepublik, report on the scientific section of the 29th meeting of members of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher wirtschaftswissenschaftlicher Forschungsinstitute, Bad Godesberg, 24–25 June 1966 (Beihefte der Konjunkturpolitik, no. 13) (Berlin, 1966), 158. 20. Günther von Lojewski, ‘Die Völkerwanderung zum Arbeitsmarkt,’ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 9 May 1964. 21. Suzanne Paine, Exporting Workers: The Turkish Case (Cambridge, 1974), 133. 22. Lindsay Lowell and Allan Findlay, Migration of Highly Skilled Persons from Developing Countries: Impact and Policy Responses (Synthesis Report, International Migration Papers 44) (Geneva, 2001). 23. Douglas Massey, Joaquín Arango, Grame Hugo, Ali Kouauci, Adela Pellegrino, and James Edward Taylor, Worlds in Motion: Understanding International Migration at the End of the Millenium (Oxford, 1998), 241. 24. Paine, Exporting Workers, 113. 25. Imra Emke-Poulopoulos, ‘Analysis of Changes in the Status of Female Returnees in Greece,’ in United Nations, ed., International Migration Policies and the Status of Female Migrants (New York, 1995), 164–78. 26. Sebastian Conrad and Shalini Randeria, ‘Einleitung. Geteilte Geschichten—Europa in einer postkolonialen Welt,’ in idem, eds., Jenseits des Eurozentrismus: Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main, 2002), 9–49, 42. 27. Aristide Zolberg, ‘Immigration and Multiculturalism in the Industrial Democracies,’ in Rainer Bauböck et al., eds., The Challenge of Diversity: Integration and Pluralism in Societies of Immigration (Aldershot, 1996), 43–65, 51. 28. Massey et al., Worlds in Motion, 275. 29. Salt, Current Trends in International Migration in Europe, 16. 30. Salt, Current Trends in International Migration in Europe, 10. 31. Salt, Current Trends in International Migration in Europe, 9.

Integration from Below? Migration and European Contemporary History

| 163

32. David Gillborn, quoted in John Gabriel, ‘New Contours of Anti-racist Politics,’ Patterns of Prejudice 32 (1998): 35–44, 40–41. 33. For an overview, see Steven Vertovec, Migrant Transnationalism and Modes of Transformation, CMD Working Paper #03–09m (Princeton, 2003). 34. Cf., for example, Romero’s assumption that ‘the issue of migration and, more broadly, of the interconnection among the various national labour markets and polities, deeply influenced the entire political and institutional configuration of western Europe.’ See Federico Romero, ‘Migration as an Issue in European Interdependence and Integration: The Case of Italy,’ in Alan Milward et al., eds., The Frontier of National Sovereignty: History and Theory 1945–1992 (London, 1993), 33–58, 33.

Chapter 10

TWENTIETH-CENTURY CULTURE, ‘AMERICANIZATION,’ AND EUROPEAN AUDIOVISUAL SPACE

( Marsha Siefert

Since the Renaissance—or more especially since its historical appreciation—the idea of Europe has resonated with the idea of ‘Culture.’ Artists, writers, musicians, and their works circulated throughout Europe while imperial capitals and emerging nation-states built institutions to train, exhibit, and judge artists and their work. By the nineteenth century what could be called the European cultural space was global, as opera houses and theatres were built in colonial capitals and outposts from Buenos Aires to Hanoi, and as European educators and performers took ‘Culture’ to the far reaches of empire. Even before the First World War, however, several major transformations had begun to take place in the arts. Mechanical reproduction, from mass printing to photography and sound recording, spread the reach of ‘great works’ to upwardly mobile populations, and educational efforts to ‘civilize’ extended to domestic populations. Not all of these works were to represent uplift and outreach. New competitors with ‘Art’ were produced abroad, especially in the United States. American machineries of mass production developed variations on popular genres that seemed to move with ease over national borders, as exemplified by American film. Hollywood became not only a location of cultural production but also a symbol of the American cultural advantage in European markets. Although on both sides of the Atlantic the European canon continued to set the standards of quality for ‘Art’ as ‘high culture,’ the popularity and profitability of Hollywood movies became a constant irritant, intensifying after the end of both world wars. In the second half of the twentieth century, television presented a form of cultural product and distribution that, while lamented by intellectuals, was exploited by entrepreneurs and reached whole populations on a daily basis. Since American audiovisual products seemed to dominate every screen by the end of the Notes for this section begin on page 186.

Twentieth-Century Culture, ‘Americanization,’ and European Audiovisual Space

| 165

1970s, a British critic proclaimed that the ‘media are American.’1 But of course European nations, singly and together, had been responding to ‘Americanization’ throughout the century. 2 This chapter will review and discuss how European nations, individually and collectively, responded rhetorically, legislatively, and artistically to the ‘Americanization’ of what has come to be called ‘audiovisual space.’

Theorizing ‘Americanization’ and ‘Audiovisual Space’ in the European Context ’Americanization’ is the term that has come to stand for a twentieth-century phenomenon that, while it has meant different things at different times for different countries, takes ‘popular culture’ as its signifier. Discussions of ‘Americanization,’ whether among diplomats, media industry officials, or intellectuals, 3 are part of a more far-reaching discussion about the impact of modernity, the massification of cultural forms, and the economies of scale whereby market expansion involved not only Europe but also the rest of the world.4 A discussion of Americanization coincides with the process of rethinking twentieth-century European history because the twentieth century was also the first time in which America had cause or occasion to dominate Europe in other ways, via both military participation in the world wars and the ‘soft power’ of their cultural products and practices. In Europe the debate is particularly poignant because in previous centuries what could retrospectively be called ‘European culture’ had dominated world markets and elite tastes through colonial ties. In more contemporary discourse about European identity, Americanization has been defined as the ‘other’ against which Europe must defend itself—even as American popular culture was said, perhaps only partly in jest, to be the only culture that all Europeans shared, or at the very least Europeans’ ‘second culture.’ 5 Since America cooperated by proclaiming the twentieth century ‘the American century’ as early as 1941, notably in a mass-market magazine named Life, it is hardly surprising that the term Americanization spans these years as a cultural constant. In the symbolic geography of the Americanization debate, Washington may be the source of policy, but Hollywood is its cultural home. Hollywood is the source of the ‘American imaginary,’ the intersection of the stories and the stars from the publicity machinery, carefully orchestrated by the young movie moguls, who were mostly European immigrants filming the American dream.6 Fan magazines, with glossy photos and attractive biographies, chronicled the lives in the ‘dream factory’ and presented an American aristocracy that travelled easily over national cultural borders. Hollywood film portrayed a world of riches and royalty, membership in which did not require literacy or status, while European artistic

166

|

Marsha Siefert

innovations—and often their innovators—were readily absorbed by Hollywood film studios. Inexpensive movie tickets enabled ‘average’ Europeans to become, as one critic lamented, ‘temporary American citizens.’7 ‘American culture’ and ‘popular culture’ are often interchanged in European Americanization discourse. As Maltby suggests, this interchangeability ‘indicates the ways in which ideas of aesthetic distinction have been intertwined with elite definitions of nationalism in the perception that “Americanization” involved a process of “levelling down” moral and aesthetic standards.’8 By the 1920s, the word ‘mass’ was already used to describe this type of culture whose coarsening effects were magnified for ‘vulnerable’ populations.9 At risk were the poor, who, according to the British historian R. G. Collingwood, ‘went amusement mad,’ as well as ‘the little girl typists’ caricatured by the German critic Sigfried Kracauer.10 But, as Hansen suggests, gender seems to have been a more important factor than class in worries about the early film audience.11 Young people were later added as a group to be rhetorically and legislatively protected from their absorption of ‘Americanization’ and were sometimes seen as its ‘stalking horse.’ Other authorities, attracted by film’s perceived potential for mass persuasion, hoped to harness its power; Lenin proclaimed it ‘the most important art.’ Fears of Hollywood-style Americanization recurred throughout the century with the coming of each new medium, but the most susceptible audiences remained the same. The other key word in the Americanization nomenclature is ‘entertainment.’ Maltby suggests that Europeans attempted to ‘contain the danger of American culture’ by classifying it as ‘entertainment’; certainly Hollywood was unafraid of—indeed, embraced—that classification as media moguls used the idea that Hollywood film was ‘just entertainment’ to market their wares internationally. Hollywood courted the mass audience and explicitly included the very viewers for whom the intellectuals feared—women, children, and the uneducated poor—where the ‘lowest common denominator’ was a goal, not a problem. This contrast raises two important points for this essay. First, by bracketing entertainment as belonging to the United States and often adopting the strategy of differentiating European movies as ‘art,’ European discourse on Americanization avoided discussion of what a European ‘popular’ culture might be like, and whether such a culture could be pan-European. American popular culture could fill in the void. Second, the entertainment classification emphasized the generic quality and overwhelming quantity of Hollywood films while granting the auteur label to European cinema, where the latter term defined a ‘distinction’ from the more plebian ‘movies.’ Of course this dichotomy was never absolute, but in times of ‘moral panic’ American media, with genres like westerns and ‘women’s films,’ were seen as a culprit. These critiques of ‘mass culture,’ a term inspiring a long history of European jeremiads, 12 did not divide Europe and America but rather allied cultural critics across the Atlantic.13

Twentieth-Century Culture, ‘Americanization,’ and European Audiovisual Space

| 167

Complaints about Americanization, which often emerge in public discourse over individual films or consumer products, have a cultural cast that draws on the visibility of American media ‘brands,’ from Mickey Mouse to Marilyn Monroe. But these are superficial manifestations of the political economy of American media industries that from their beginnings have been involved not only with Europe as a marketplace but also with European media companies as investors and distributors. Hollywood conglomerates have also sought, and increasingly required, European investment in processes that are not unlike the cooperation/cooptation of elites in earlier imperial periods. European efforts to visibly and substantively resist Americanization enter the realm of politics, economics, and diplomacy whenever a new regulatory regime is initiated, at a national or international level. These regulatory measures have, historically, defined the nature of the European ‘border checks’ on the entry of American media, whether through import or investment, into European ‘audiovisual space.’ Although the term ‘audiovisual space’ is relatively new in the European policy lexicon, a retrospective focus on the technologies associated with audiovisual space—film, television, video—also coincides with thinking about twentieth-century Europe. It was in this century that these technologies were developed into ‘culture industries’ and American corporate power was identified with their production, distribution, and identity. The concept of ‘audiovisual space’ can be used to reinterpret the usually separate histories of the film and broadcasting industries, especially as they have converged over time in terms of ownership, distribution, and content. 14 The histories of these ‘screen industries’ are often analyzed separately, both in the US and in European countries, in part because their administrations and regulations have been distinct, and in Europe broadcasting for the most part and until recently was primarily under state supervision.15 While American audiovisual industries have been defined as essentially commercial, European audiovisual industries share both values and regulatory strategies, even when the relevant audiovisual space is nationally defined. Founding documents and critical publications regularly appeal to values like ‘art,’ ‘education,’ and ‘public service’ in order to distinguish themselves from the commercialism of American mass media both in terms of organization and product. At the national level, European countries initiated similar protective measures to limit imported American media content and control the amount of American economic investment in domestic media industries. The American ‘content’ of European audiovisual industries has been the more transparent cause of outbreaks of anti-Americanization rhetoric, but for the sake of analysis it is imperative that the underlying structures that allowed cooperation and cooptation be rendered historically visible from the beginning of the century. During the last decades, an ‘ever closer’ European Union audiovisual space—ideally conceived as a ‘minimal common cultural currency

168

|

Marsha Siefert

of the moving image produced by Europeans and addressed to European audiences’16—has been defined as an economic or market space. The dominance of market logic can be traced back to the early film industry and beliefs about the factors of success. According to Bergfelder, ‘the history of European cinemas has always been characterized by two simultaneous yet diverging processes, namely the film industries’ economic imperative of international expansion, competition and cooperation . . . and the ideological project of recentering the definition of national cinemas through critical discourses and national film policy.’ 17 Invocations of the ‘economic imperative’ echo earlier justifications of European imperialism, and the continuity reinforces the European colonial reach that extended well into the structural formation of the international film industry. The ‘economic imperative’ in classical economic models of media industries favors economies of scale; the high cost of production is in the master copy, which can then be reproduced technologically in order to reduce the cost per copy. The classroom example is the Hollywood studio system, dominant between the 1920s and the early 1960s, that linked film production and distribution by means of the vertical integration of studio-owned theatre chains and recouped costs from the large US domestic market. What is now more frequently added is that, as early as the 1920s, major Hollywood studios cooperated sufficiently to share in lucrative overseas markets and enlisted the US government to support their ‘free’ trade. Thus dreams of a large home market and export potential as well as solicitations for state support and vocal national sentiments (especially against Americanization) shaped the supranational aspirations of European national audiovisual industries. The concept of ‘audiovisual space’ draws on a shift in symbolic geometry from the earlier prominence of the ‘sphere.’18 Historically, Habermas’s explication of the emergence of the ‘public sphere’ focused on Western Europe, print culture, and the late eighteenth century. Books and films seemed somehow similar as discrete objects, identifiable, whose movements over borders could be policed and yet carried with them ideas and potential influence. Spheres of influence were part of international relations jargon that suggested something intangible but felt, a way of describing ‘natural’ extensions over political borders. The dimension of ‘space’ became more imperative with the advent of broadcasting, where the ‘ether’ of space could not be easily contained: signals could be jammed, land transmitters had limited reach, but satellite broadcasting created through simultaneity a virtual geography of audiovisual space. Structurally, the regulatory regimes inherited from film, and the accumulated strategies of containment, were outdistanced by technological development and supranational market synergies. Given the multiple meanings of space, it is appropriate that the major European oversight agency is called the European Audiovisual Observatory.

Twentieth-Century Culture, ‘Americanization,’ and European Audiovisual Space

| 169

This chapter will recount the ways in which various formulations of audiovisual space by European nations and entities attempted to counter the perceived influences and effects of Americanization over the twentieth century. What constitutes Europe is also at issue, since over half the century spans the East-West divide and conditions the discourse of Americanization. This chapter will argue that both the interdependence of ‘the popular’ and ‘Americanization’ and the interdependence of the American and European media industries have a history as long as the industries themselves, and that this history reinforces the intersection of culture, economics, and politics in European audiovisual space. The history of popular culture or the history of audiovisual media cannot be told only through texts and crises, but must incorporate the ways in which culture, increasingly commodified, is an intimate component of the social, political, and economic history of Europe.

European Audiovisual Space and the American Film Industry For most of the twentieth century ‘Europe’ was a unified audiovisual space only in the eyes of Americans.19 Film developed in the first decades of the twentieth century within national contexts. Before the First World War, French films partly dominated European audiovisual space via centralized distribution and subsidiaries in Italy, Germany, and Russia—as well as the US—with a variety of popular genre films.20 The First World War had negative effects on European domestic film industries, and lingering instabilities in European political relations led to uneasy cooperation between them. But by the mid 1920s, when American films claimed over 50 percent of screen time in European theatres,21 representatives from Great Britain, France, and Denmark, led by Germany’s Universum Film AG (UFA), met in a series of conferences dubbed ‘Film Europe’ to establish a common European film market. Although there was talk of cooperation, and even of appeals to the League of Nations (of which the US was not a member), the efforts were short-lived.22 In part this had to do with the extent to which the US film industry was already a part of the European landscape. The US studios had established branch offices throughout Europe (and worldwide), and as a result of the American practice of ‘block booking,’ where a theatre bought multiple films from individual studios, they effectively created European subsidiaries of US theatre chains.23 While American market rhetoric claimed that US films dominated because of their democratic appeal and technological quality, Hollywood had solidified its international market aspirations institutionally in 1922 by establishing the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), which represented all the major Hollywood studios when negotiating trade agreements. The attempt to

170

|

Marsha Siefert

form a comparable European trade organization was one of the failures of the ‘Film Europe’ movement. The emergence of sound film in 1927 ‘nationalized cinema,’ as de Grazia notes, by accentuating the ‘cultural distinctiveness of local productions.’24 It also produced a period of instability in the industry, due to the huge investment of capital required to refit local film production studios and theatres, along with patent wars and experimentation with multiplelanguage films.25 Hollywood studios, with their European subsidiaries and patented sound system, used their capital and the promise of a steady supply of sound films to pay their way into the technological transformation of film production and exhibition.26 European governments tried to nurture domestic film industries by regulating the film trade at the national level with protective measures to minimize Hollywood imports and state support, often derived from exhibition income. By 1928 most European countries had introduced quotas that stipulated the number of films to be produced by the domestic film industry in relation to the number of imported films. National quotas were not difficult to circumvent, however, and the cash-strapped European film studios often encouraged US film studios to invest in local productions, fulfilling the requirement with ‘quota quickies.’ While some argued that the Hollywood studios deliberately made shoddy films that only the ladies who cleaned the sticky floors of the theatres ever saw, others saw quota quickies as employment and training for local film talent and as a means to maintain relationships with individual Hollywood studios. Take, for example, France, where the quota for French films in 1932 was only one in eight. Rhetorically and culturally, French critics were able to elaborate a notion of ‘artisan culture’ as particularly French and to create the cultural rhetoric of film as Art to which film critics on both sides of the Atlantic could refer. At the same time, a mid-1930s survey stated that 55 percent of French films were rejected for family viewing, compared to only 10 percent of American films. The attempt to reach a maximum number of ticket sales explains why, in 1935, over half of French theatre chains were either owned by US subsidiaries or by ‘US-friendly’ French ones to guarantee a steady supply of profit-making films.27 The Hollywood imaginary seized other European nations that dreamed of profits beyond their borders. Most recognized the value of Hollywood signs of success—stars, stories, and spectacles—while holding on to quotas and other protective measures. In the years prior to the idea of a European ‘common market,’ these projected audiovisual spaces derived from perceived linguistic and cultural affinities rather than any idea of ‘Europe.’ In Britain, Hollywood’s largest overseas market, Alexander Korda envisioned his Denham Studios as a ‘Hollywood on the Thames’ after the international success of his 1933 film The Private Life of Henry VIII. He also joined the American stars and directors of United Artists in 1935 and united with Selznick in 1949 to ensure the distribution of his films in

Twentieth-Century Culture, ‘Americanization,’ and European Audiovisual Space

| 171

North America. In 1937, J. Arthur Rank purchased the very same Denham Studios and, by the beginning of the next decade, had accumulated sufficient studios and shares in major film distributors to claim one third of the theatre seating capacity in Britain. With vertical integration and shares in Hollywood’s Universal Studios, it seemed for some time that Rank’s empire might succeed, even after the Second World War, but attacks on his ‘international’ (read American) style and other structural weaknesses were undermining. Still, during the pre- and postwar debates on film, Britons saw their natural market as the empire and the US rather than any part of Europe.28 Another aspirant to an alternative Hollywood was the Soviet Union. Its large domestic market and its investment in film distribution from theatres to traveling railroad cars and factory screens, not to mention its ideological commitment to film as propaganda, seemed to provide the necessary technological and audience prerequisites. The rise of the film collectives and the creation of a film school provided the personnel, and European recognition of its silent film exports in the 1920s seemed to provide a product base. Even the possibilities for ‘entertainment’ emerged after Grigori Aleksandrov’s popular musical films in the mid 1930s. But quantity remained a problem; in 1935 the head of the Soviet film bureaucracy visited major US film studios to study ‘efficient production.’ Like others from Europe, the USSR’s film chief criticized Hollywood for its ‘subjects of an ephemeral and seasonal nature’ and its failure to take advantage of film’s ‘artistic’ potential, but he acceded to the idea of ‘entertainment’ in his ‘cinema for the millions.’ Stalin approved his proposal to establish a Soviet Hollywood in the Crimea, but the Stalinist purges claimed him and crippled the film industry before the start of the Second World War.29 In these years the salient audiovisual space was coterminous with the USSR. Germany was in the best position to develop an alternative audiovisual space with a European base. Its large linguistic influence throughout Central Europe and its thriving cultural center in Berlin complemented UFA, which boasted the best-equipped movie studios in Europe with an efficient and a vertically integrated distribution and exhibition system that survived the transition to sound.30 In 1935 German filmmakers instigated an ‘international’ but primarily European consortium of film representatives (the International Film Chamber) at the Venice Film Festival. The gathering strength of National Socialism and the exclusion of Hollywood film from Italy in 1938 and Germany in 1939 transformed such voluntary efforts. With the onset of war Germany incorporated the film industries of conquered territories, expanding its already strong influence as a magnet for Central European film culture and personnel into an audiovisual space of broad continental European proportions.31 Under the Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, between 1933 and 1945 German cinema produced over 1,094 feature films, of which only 153

172

|

Marsha Siefert

were explicitly labeled as propaganda. Of the others, 523 were comedies and musicals, 295 were melodramas or serious dramas, and 123 were detective and adventure films. They relied on other elements of the Hollywood formula: domestic stars complete with fan magazines and press kits.32 Of course, these films were also not ‘just entertainment’; they were produced within a controlled bureaucracy that could embody everyday fascism. The success of this alternative European audiovisual space, from which the US and Britain were excluded, made it a special target of US ministrations in 1945.33 Given that 40 percent of Hollywood’s profits before the war had derived from overseas distribution, with Europe the most profitable region, the US film industry began postwar planning even before the war ended, with the acknowledgment and encouragement of the US State Department. Film executives in uniform considered American films as bearers of the American flag and sent them by the hundreds, in a ‘Marshall Plan of ideas,’ as one film producer said.34 The attempt of allies like Britain to make a separate peace with Hollywood by slapping on a 75 percent tax lead to stalemate, while the French Blum-Byrnes agreement in 1947 meant that the local industry provided 40 films while Hollywood sent 340.35 Former combatants, who had closed their markets to Hollywood much earlier, experienced an even larger glut; in 1946, US studios sent over 600 films to Italy, and by 1948 these numbered 668.36 The German denazification program included heavy doses of films, with intense competition in postwar Berlin.37 These negotiations were made much easier for Hollywood in 1945, with the creation of the Motion Picture Export Association of America (MPEAA), a business cartel composed of the nine major film companies. The MPEAA collected all foreign profits, which were distributed to members annually according to their shares of US gross income, whether or not an individual company had an international ‘hit.’ Therefore, Hollywood in essence created for itself an extended audiovisual space in which all studios benefited from cooperating in the scheduling and distribution of their films outside the US.38 This regulation of European audiovisual space was standardized in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiated during 1947 and adopted by seventeen countries in 1948, in which the MPEAA enlisted US State Department support. Although the European nations were able to resist American efforts to dismantle the national quota system based on mandatory screen time for domestic films, the Americans succeeded in restricting the negotiations to economic concerns (sidelining a cultural sovereignty argument), standardizing the types of quota regulation, and eliminating restrictions on suppliers.39 This European accession to the economic logic of cultural products represents a critical moment for the intersection of ‘Americanization’ and ‘European audiovisual space.’ Postwar Hollywood needed the European market. By the end of the 1940s its domestic profits had plummeted. After a successful antitrust

Twentieth-Century Culture, ‘Americanization,’ and European Audiovisual Space

| 173

prosecution by the US government, the Hollywood studios were forced to divest their ownership of theatre chains as of 1948. Demographic factors, such as the migration of city dwellers to the suburbs and family growth during the baby boom, shifted the location and composition of the decreasing movie audience even before the onset of new competition from television. As a result, by the early 1950s, Hollywood studios had begun to transform themselves from in-house film producers to film distributors who organized independent production via contracts with packagers. To further minimize their financial risk, the Hollywood studios dropped most of their ‘B’ pictures and concentrated on fewer, ‘bigger’ pictures in search of ‘hits,’ raised the price of admission, experimented with technological innovations like Technicolor and Cinerama, and looked to Europe for both filmgoers and profit. Unlike in the US, 1950s film admissions in Western Europe remained stable; for example, 3 billion tickets were sold in 1960, compared to only 1.2 billion in the whole of the United States.40 Europe also became a prime location for Hollywood’s ‘runaway productions,’ movies filmed on location in order to use the non-exportable revenues generated by the American films, to take advantage of inexpensive labor, and to fulfill the local quota requirements. ‘Runaway productions’ also provided ‘exotic’ locales and a source of stars to distinguish films from television programs. In Italy, for example, Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck took a Roman Holiday, and MGM’s 1959 prestige film Ben Hur, filmed in Rome, saved MGM from bankruptcy. For a time in the 1950s and 1960s, this American-Italian cooperation earned the sobriquet ‘Hollywood on the Tiber,’41 which was not necessarily a compliment. At the same time, European filmmakers, producers, and distributors demonstrated an increased sense of a shared European audiovisual space. Three of the four major European film festivals—Cannes (1946), Berlin (1951), and Moscow (1959), alternating with Karlovy-Vary (1956)—were securely established after the war, while the Venice Film festival, established in the late 1930s, reemerged as a key venue. American films were exhibited at these festivals, but in relative numbers to other European ‘national’ and independent cinemas. Competition was ‘national,’ but over the years an elite understanding of European films (and other national film cultures) emerged among practitioners and critics, along with a lively film marketplace established by 1960. Even in the US, the uncertain Hollywood market in transition, along with the rise of film studies at universities, supported increased importation of European films;42 if ‘art came to America from Europe,’ then so would cinema as art.43 In return, European critics began to reevaluate ‘classic American cinema,’ giving Hollywood products more artistic legitimacy. European filmmakers also began to enlarge their national audiovisual imaginaries through co-productions. For example, France and Italy agreed to a co-production agreement beginning in 1950, and by 1959, almost one fifth of Italy’s films were French co-productions.44 In West

174

|

Marsha Siefert

Germany co-productions began slowly, but by the early 1960s they had increased in sufficient numbers for them to begin outnumbering indigenous productions. After the ratification of the Treaty of Rome, many European countries entered into bilateral agreements, especially based on ‘cultural affinities,’ with Britain notably the least likely to enter into European agreements and preferring an American partnership. Overall, 1,091 European co-productions were made between 1949 and 1964. Many co-productions were genre pictures—that staple of Hollywood entertainment—but with a European gloss. They rarely conformed to the so-called ‘classic Hollywood genres’ but retained fluidity and drew upon recognizable heroes from nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, with a range of adventure stories from dime novels and comic strips, like the classic crime serials on Fantomas, Dr. Mabuse, and Fu Manchu. The most famous examples are the European westerns, from the GDR’s Indianerfilme to spaghetti/paella westerns.45 The fact that these genre pictures were able to be successfully exported, to create European stars, and even to parody themselves suggests, as Bergfelder argues, that they are more than a foil for auteur cinema and represent a key period when European popular culture emerged as entertainment and European audiovisual space provided significant national border crossings.46 Yet another European alternative emerged in the postwar period—a socialist audiovisual space. During the last days of Stalin’s rule, the Soviet studio system was again crippled by doctrinal supervision, but after 1953 filmmakers found ways to work within the centralized studio system. Annual planned allocations of film projects assigned to directors include prestige products as well as typical genre films, not unlike the A and B designations from the Hollywood system. Many republics established their own studios, with local oversight committees; in the 1970s, for example, the studio in Riga, Latvia, was called, not without irony, the ‘Western’ studio. Countries like Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania, which had no viable film industry before the war, built film studios in the 1950s and, along with the other nations, absorbed into the socialist bloc, adopted the USSR’s type of centralized national film system. By the 1960s filmmakers in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia had gained more control over their film proposals, even though they certainly looked over their shoulders. Film schools were established in most of these countries in order to provide personnel. A few American films were imported annually in order to generate revenue because, as elsewhere, ticket sales were used to finance local production. The MPEAA had negotiated an exchange agreement with the USSR in 1948, which became more effective after Stalin’s death. Of course, the nomenklatura as well as filmmakers saw almost all of the releases from the West in private showings where they were ‘reviewed’ for purchase, and European films were consistently more numerous than US films in the socialist bloc. Hungary in 1973 provides an example. The ‘West’ was represented by 11 US films and 24 European

Twentieth-Century Culture, ‘Americanization,’ and European Audiovisual Space

| 175

films (UK 6; France 8; Italy 5; FRG 3, and Denmark and Switzerland). Since hard currency had to be used to purchase both Western and Comecon films, those from the West outnumbered films from the ‘East’ by about 2 to 1 (GDR 6; Czechoslovakia 3; Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia, each 1; USSR 8).47 Until the fall of communism, the cost of film imports and political tensions formed an effective nylon curtain that filtered just a portion of Hollywood into this ideological audiovisual space.48 Overall, the 1950s and 1960s were years when national film industries responded to a range of postwar developments with vitality and imagination. However, at the supranational level the emerging economic consensus embedded in Europe as a ‘common market’ was increasingly applied to European audiovisual space. In the 1957 Treaty of Rome, film (and broadcasting) were defined as ‘services,’ with no cultural signifiers attached. As the European common market developed in the 1960s, another kind of market transformation took place in Hollywood. By the end of the 1960s all of the major Hollywood studios had been purchased by conglomerates, in which content became an asset to develop an ‘entertainment industry’ with diversified products in print, broadcasting, and film. Individual media companies were bought and sold for market value.49 For European film the rise of ‘entertainment’ conglomerates had significant consequences. As Guback warned at a 1974 gathering of European policy makers, ‘the creation of an economically integrated Europe favors the enlargement of firms to international stature, with concomitant trends toward standardization, at the expense of small enterprises and a great deal of variety.’ Rather, he argued, ‘the aim must be to preserve the mosaic of culture and to resist the temptation to rely upon bigness itself as a solution—even in the face of seemingly overwhelming political and economic trends.’50 Whereas in 1965 Hollywood’s The Sound of Music may have fallen on deaf ears in Germany and Austria,51 by 1975 its great white shark had his Jaws around the throat of European film.52

Television and European Audiovisual Space Western European broadcasting had, ever since its beginnings in radio, operated on a national basis as a public service monopoly, financed primarily by license fees. Their mandate was to offer a complete range of broadcast services to the whole population, a balanced and diverse program schedule with attention to minorities, and impartial political content. The goal was quality, not just ‘entertainment.’53 Given this amount of oversight, in contrast to the film industry, national television must have seemed to be less vulnerable to ‘Americanization.’ Yet, as Raymond Williams noted, broadcasting was different from earlier communications technologies, not only because the supply preceded the demand, but also because ‘the

176

|

Marsha Siefert

means of communication preceded their content.’ Once television channels were in place, time had to be filled with content. This question was generally resolved ‘parasitically.’54 Parasitically usually meant adapting earlier forms of content, e.g., books, plays, and films that had proven successful, or that were genre-based or star-based, creating expectations that would attract viewers week after week. Once again the US had the advantage in supplying the content for European television channels. The rapid saturation of the US with television sets by 1950 gave them lead-time, whereby Hollywood studios not only adjusted to their decreased audience but also fashioned a new role for themselves in the television business. As Hollywood jobs ‘ran away’ to Europe, jobs filming for television took their place. Each of the Hollywood studios sold their pre-1948 film library to a television network to feed the hungry channels; the studios later recognized their value and made ‘better deals’ selling newer American films to television networks. Beginning in 1955 the Hollywood studios entered the market for producing the prerecorded series and TV films that quickly became television’s ‘B movies.’ Capitalizing on genre conventions and on durable radio formats, soap operas entered daytime television; the so-called ‘horse operas,’ or B-western formats, along with detective shows, generated some of the earliest and most successful series.55 The film industry, thinking ahead, created a TV program export committee under the MPEAA as early as 1959.56 Therefore, as European television networks came into place later and experienced the same immediate demands to fill television time, the US television series were an available and relatively inexpensive option. By the late 1950s, I Love Lucy, the series that in 1951 accelerated the shift from live to filmed television programming, became the new emblem of Americanization. European public broadcasting authorities tried to select which US television programs they imported. Take the example of Sweden. In the 1950s, two child psychiatrists expressed their concern that the American children’s program Lassie ‘was a brutal and rough film reality’ with fistfights and loose guns. Gunsmoke and Bonanza also were accused of being ‘too violent.’ The Swedish Broadcasting Corporation’s response was to reassure parents that each episode was screened for violence, sensationalized sex, racial persecution, and ‘pure stupidity,’ and that some episodes were excluded from broadcast. The SBC also began replacing US with British programs, raising their share to 45 percent of all imported programming in 1977.57 But in 1970 they still imported at least one third of their programming, a situation shared especially by other smaller nations.58 By the mid 1960s the US exported globally twice as many television programs as all other nations combined, 80 percent of which were handled by the MPEAA. A study of imported television programming commissioned by UNESCO using program schedules from 1970–1971 provides a snapshot of American programming in Europe. In Western Europe imported US programs accounted for about one half of all programs and 15 to 20

Twentieth-Century Culture, ‘Americanization,’ and European Audiovisual Space

| 177

percent of all transmission times, with smaller countries accounting for larger proportions and prime-time programs accounting for a larger proportion of imported programming. Britain was the other major exporter and was a center for distributing American films,59 while the imported programming on ITV, its commercial channel, was all American, which demonstrated the increased importance of the Anglo-American audiovisual space in broadcasting. The Soviet Union produced most of its own programming; most socialist countries also imported some American and British programs, but only TV Belgrade imported as large a share as Western Europe.60 As early as 1950, European public broadcasters had formed a voluntary ‘televisual’ space for exchanging programs with each other. The Western European broadcasters created the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), naming their exchange program Eurovision, while socialist states formed a similar organization with its own program exchange, Intervision, at the same time. But the quantities of exchange within the EBU were small. Most EBU exchanges were broadcasts to neighboring countries with similar languages or live transmissions of football matches to audiences in both teams’ home countries.61 The relative invisibility of these exchanges prompted critics to quip that all that was known of the EBU was the Eurovision song contest. The organizations were also used for East-West exchanges, but in 1970 the total of news, sports, and feature films transferred from West to East amounted to only 3,000 hours, with 1,000 hours moving from East to West; entertainment films and television programs comprised at least half of exchanges in both directions.62 During these decades, each of the Western European public broadcasters came under increasing pressure from several factors: the high cost of producing domestic television programming per episode, the pressure applied by advertisers for some kind of commercial television competition, citizen protests against rising television license fees, accusations of bloated and politicized public broadcasting authorities, and the transformation of the European cinema market.63 Although nations differed in their response to these pressures in relation to the size and composition of their television structures and audiences, a common trend could be identified. In the case of Germany, Maase argues that the continuity between the 1920s and 1980s ‘was obvious: the mass audience demanded “more entertainment” from public broadcasting.’64 By the end of the 1970s various European consultative bodies had joined the discussion that was taking place between governments and broadcasters in its member states, usually called deregulation, which opened the system to competition, or some other type of reform.65 Charges that the US was ‘dumping’ cheap television programming, making domestic programming impossible to finance competitively, were also part of this discussion. 66 Looming large on the horizon was the reality of satellite television broadcasting, whether direct to homes or distributed via cable, and governments

178

|

Marsha Siefert

feared a decrease in their ability to protect their ‘national audiovisual space’ from multinational competitors. The launch of the first European communications satellite, Eutelsat 1-F10, in July of 198367 meant that Europe as a whole could provide a viable audience without relying on US telecommunications systems; American and European media firms publicly anticipated the potential of the new broadcasting possibilities and its expected profits from advertising. The Soviet Union had been demonstrating for decades the use of satellites for television coverage over large geographical areas; thanks to its Molniia communication satellites and 115 television centers, the USSR had defined a Soviet audiovisual space that covered over 90 percent of its population.68 These developments were complemented by the growing size and importance of the European ‘common market.’ This economic logic was extended in the 1980s to create a specifically European audiovisual space. Prompted by the European Parliament’s 1982 Hahn Report, which argued that European integration was unlikely to be achieved while mass media were controlled at the national level, a new directive was approved by the European Commission in 1984, to be fully implemented by 1991. The goals of this initiative, ‘Television without Frontiers,’ were to integrate the audiovisual market in order to improve competitiveness and stimulate audiovisual production. To facilitate the movement of television ‘without frontiers,’ the directive ‘effectively abolished the EU member states’ sovereignty over their national systems.’69 This directive opened the primarily state-run broadcast systems to commercial broadcasters, envisioning the type of mixed system that had been in operation in the UK since 1954. The main result of this directive was a spectacular growth in commercial television—growth that took place within national or (in some cases) linguistic markets rather than across Europe. This expansion of terrestrial commercial channels—from the four that existed in 198270 to 250 in 1997— created a demand for programming beyond the revenue base for creating new programs in individual European countries. In similar fashion to the cinema theatre owners who had desired bankable (meaning predictably profitable) films and chosen Hollywood, managers of commercial television stations needed to sell viewers to advertisers who financed the commercial channels. Program popularity mattered for the bottom line, and all stations competed for the same ‘mass’ audience. Hence, the new domestic commercial channels imported even more American programming, leaned towards American management styles, and adapted American programming strategies—therefore facilitating the ‘Americanization’ of the European television economy.71 A ‘Television without Frontiers’ directive in 1989 recognized this problem and included content quotas, with the aim of ensuring that at least 10 percent of programming was European. Most European nations had quotas for domestic productions, ranging from Sweden with 70 percent and France with 60 percent, to Britain and Italy with 50 percent.72 As in

Twentieth-Century Culture, ‘Americanization,’ and European Audiovisual Space

| 179

the film industry, however, these percentages were not filled in the way anticipated by the directives. In order to fulfill the quotas, many production units resorted to ‘quota quickies’ in television style.73 Moreover, an increase in the genres most disliked by critics, such as the game shows and talk shows that are also less expensive to produce, increased the impression that ‘Americanization’ was indeed taking place, even if the program was hosted in the local language. Quotas did not specify the time slots in which local programming had to be scheduled, so prime-time evening hours were filled with American television series and movies, known in European parlance as ‘television fiction.’ In 1991 54 percent of the dramas and comedies on European television were American. Coupled with statistics on cinema—in 1991 US films accounted for 81 percent of those screened in the European community and over 70 percent of the profits74—it is not surprising that ‘European cultural identity’ was again an issue within international debates about the proposed revision of GATT during the early 1990s. Other factors increased the sense of alarm and urgency among European commentators. The end of the Cold War meant that complaints against America did not necessarily need to be combined with expressions of anticommunism, and criticism no longer had to be muted. The new market formulations of globalization did not exclude the charge of ‘Americanization,’ and many argued that they were coterminous. As GATT negotiations were coming to an end in 1993, in what became known as the ‘Cola and Zola’ debate, a coalition of thousands of European artists, intellectuals, and producers signed a petition in major newspapers calling for culture to be exempted from the GATT revision on the grounds that it was ‘inalienable.’ 75 When the GATT agreement was eventually endorsed, quotas on film and television imports remained, and the audiovisual sector was exempted entirely by over forty signatories—including the US. Quotas were not enough, however, to encourage sufficient domestic production of television series and films that would satisfy the European cultural quotient desired for the whole of European audiovisual space. In 1988 the Council of Europe had created a fund called Eurimages to provide financial support for films that met a criteria of ‘Europeanness,’ defined by giving points for ‘European elements’—understood in terms of the nationality of the director, scriptwriter, stars, location of work—with limits on non-European funding.76 While early versions required at least three participating countries, the 1997 revision allowed co-productions, returning to the well-tried and generally preferred form of cooperation. The Eurimages program supports on average fifty feature films and five documentaries per year.77 A second program is financed by the European Union. Having reached its third generation by 2001, the MEDIA program ‘aims at strengthening the competitiveness of the European audiovisual industry’ by supporting new production companies, some audiovisual products, the training of film personnel, and the distribution and exhibition

180

|

Marsha Siefert

of European films. The latter takes place through the loosely organized Europa Cinemas, designed to program a significant number of nondomestic European films and help promote European films for young audiences.78 These admirable goals have produced notable audiovisual products, including over a thousand European co-productions, but have not made much of a dent in the American dominance of fiction programming and films on European screens. In 2000, the market shares for films distributed in the EU amounted to 15.7 percent national films in their own markets, 7.2 percent European films outside their own market, and 73.3 percent American films.79 In 2001, the volume of imported ‘fiction’ (television fiction and feature films, including repeats) on Western European TV channels reached over 320,000 hours, with the US accounting on average for about 70 percent of the imports.80 The US dominates imports, in spite of European quotas and financial support programs, for several reasons. First, the amount of money in the European support programs is a fraction of that spent on production in the audiovisual sector as a whole.81 Second, critics claim that the application process is so complicated and time-consuming that the process dominates the product. Third, programming purchase decisions by commercial television channels seek the reliability that formulaic American fiction seems to deliver in terms of audience numbers, whereas European imports have not performed as well.82 A fourth major factor was the transformation of European audiovisual space by means of intense competition among various commercial entertainment conglomerates and the stabilization of transnational television satellite channels. The convergence in film, television, and video or DVD markets encouraged competition for audiovisual content that could be recycled through various conglomerate holdings. As the first paying European TV station launched on the Eutelsat satellite in 1984, France’s Canal Plus (supported by the French government) exemplifies the synergy of such services. In the late 1990s, with added cable and satellite thematic channels, Canal Plus had fourteen million subscribers in Europe (excluding the UK) and North Africa. Significantly, Canal Plus provided financing for 80 percent of French films, but also was ‘Hollywood’s most substantial source of European funding.’83 The FrenchGerman cultural television channel ARTE, launched in 1990, has invested in over two hundred European films; its small budget matches its French broadcast market share of 3 percent.84 The RTL group of stations, owned by Bertelsmann of Germany, also had stations in neighboring countries. Kirch Media, another German firm, along with large corporations in Britain and Italy, all rapidly and eagerly defined their markets as European85 and diversified by buying ‘free’ (terrestrial) and pay-TV channels and contracting for European television rights to Hollywood films and series.86 But with the rapidly changing technology and the crowded competition for audience share, by 2003 Kirch had collapsed, Bertelsmann had had to restructure, and Vivendi Universal, the parent of the successful Canal

Twentieth-Century Culture, ‘Americanization,’ and European Audiovisual Space

| 181

Plus, had had to merge with America’s NBC, holding only 18.5 percent of the new entity known as NBC Universal as of 12 May 2004. 87 During the course of the century, through sales and mergers, this new corporation had acquired the film libraries of both the Universal and Paramount Hollywood studios. Thus far, competition within the European television market for a limited audience has created some transnational mergers— most with the United States.88 By the mid 1990s the satellite television market had stabilized sufficiently to carry on the ‘spirit’ of Americanization, with recycled US movies and TV series forming part of the offering of niche channels corresponding to further diversification of leisure activities. In 2000 there were 1,013 cable and satellite channels available in Europe, 122 of them devoted to movies.89 Prominent pan-European channels (PETV), which live up to their name by covering European audiovisual space, by 2002 numbered seventeen, nine of which were classified as entertainment and primarily dominated by American-based corporations. 90 These channels ‘localize’ their programs by dubbing them in the national language, by operating contracts with affiliates (usually cable television companies), and by offering space for local advertising. By 2002 transnational television stations reached 47.8 million European households, corresponding to twice the size of all EU markets excluding Germany.91 Judging by the amount of funds invested in the audiovisual sector, including film and television subsidies to European program contributions and the number of films produced, France would be the most powerful player in the European audiovisual space.92 New EU members are included in this picture. The small size of most of their populations and financial base, along with the privatization of their state-run film and television systems in the 1990s, have made them ripe for US and some European investment.93 For example, an attempt to create a pan-Central and Eastern European audiovisual space in the mid 1990s via an émigré-financed corporation called Central European Media Enterprises (CME) made political as well as media news in prolonged fights for market entrance and, since 2005, has operated nine television stations in six countries, with the notable exception of Hungary and Poland.94 The primary content was dubbed US programming, as on other commercial stations introduced into the former socialist bloc. Harmonization of national legislation with EU audiovisual policy as a requirement for EU accession95 has thus enlarged the market space, although it is still unclear how many of the new members’ domestic productions of film and television, which are fiercely defended, will be used to fill European quotas since European content elsewhere is so low. In Russia, even though Hollywood films have made great inroads (81 percent of the market share in 2004),96 no quotas have been instituted; rather, Russia’s television channels have constituted an area of national defense. Although several private stations flourished in the 1990s, they, and their oligarchic owners, have been sidelined, and

182

|

Marsha Siefert

Russian television has drawn on the Soviet library of films and state subsidies in order to hold on to its television sovereignty.97 At the beginning of the twenty-first century, European audiovisual space had been effectively ‘marketized.’98 Hollywood ‘brands’—the names of studios and the names of stars—are magnified by recycled programming on television and feature film logos, theme parks, and T-shirts. American companies share in and are shared by European owners, which are not dissimilar in scope but are larger in scale than the way in which Hollywood studios in their formative days participated in the distribution and exhibition of their films through European subsidiaries.99 Coproductions between the US and European countries are on the rise for both film and television; for example five out of the ten most popular films in Europe in 2004 were US co-productions and five of them were sequels drawing on previously profitable films.100 United States multinationals and their products are structurally integrated into the EU-directed version of European audiovisual space. This scenario is being transformed again by the convergence of digital media and screen cultures, but the patterns are unlikely to change. Whatever the market conditions, the issues remain embedded in the historical debate about twentiethcentury culture and European identity.

European Audiovisual Space and European Identity: Genres, Quality, and Culture A priori definitions of European identity have been fraught with comic turns. Already in the middle of the last century the quest for a European audiovisual product had been caricatured as an ‘American ingénue whose brother is an Austrian comic and whose mother is an Italian vamp married to a French leading man.’101 Artificial constructions have continued to plague those who attempt to define by example. In 1985 seven public broadcasters in the European Co-Production Association attempted to create ‘European programs.’ The major result was the coining of the term ‘Eurotrash.’102 As the discussion of the fertile postwar period suggested, films covered more audiovisual space when filmmakers drew upon shared histories and common cultural precedent to create a range of films and held differing expectations for the definition of success. ‘Common cultural heritage,’ a phrase pointedly used in the definition of culture in the 1992 Treaty on European Union, is also resonant. It tries to avoid the essentialist definitions of European culture of the early 1990s, whether these imply the model known as the ‘clash of civilizations’ or the definition of core values and/or experiences like Christianity or the Renaissance.103 Essentialist arguments had gained new strength after the end of the Cold War, when some postsocialist countries used the common cultural experiences of the Renaissance and their artistic contributions in

Twentieth-Century Culture, ‘Americanization,’ and European Audiovisual Space

| 183

order to argue for a reformulation of Central Europe104 and their ‘natural’ restoration to Europe by means of European Union membership. But the EU policy definition, with the centralizing notion of ‘unity in diversity,’ has also been criticized as an alibi for top-down patronage, with emphasis on preservation and protection of ‘museum culture.’105 According to the crude polarities in which America equals low culture and Europe equals high culture, the Shakespeare-Goethe model (maybe with Racine for political correctness but never with Chekhov) often emerged in private conversations, once the appropriate incorporation of policy language had been made. As Uricchio claimed, if ‘filmmakers explore the “high” culture side of their medium, by definition their cultural status will be regarded as (relatively) high and their box-office return will be (relatively) low. If they shift attention to the “low” or “mass” culture side of the spectrum, economic success is a good possibility whereas charges of selling out or “Americanization” are a certainty. But if they pursue the concerns of the cultural elite and attribute their modest audiences to competition from Hollywood, they have simply made a mistaken analysis.’106 Summed up in a 1991 French headline, ‘the higher the satellite, the lower the culture.’107 But it is equally telling that such arguments rarely mention the European literary products that have most easily crossed borders and transferred to celluloid or videotape. Dickens and Dumas, or Dr. Mabuse and Asterix, often published serially and in popular editions, are surely ‘popular’ even in the ‘industrial’ sense.108 The death of ‘Little Nell’ excited as much public interest in the nineteenth century as ‘who shot J.R.’ would in the 1980s. Such examples suggest that there are indeed abundant European sources that engage the ‘popular.’109 Severe critics of Americanization nonetheless do not trust Europeans to embrace their own popular culture. ‘A genuinely popular European cinema seems to be an impossibility,’ writes a sympathetic non-European observer who complains that cultural concerns in the ‘old world’ are ‘often so inward-looking, so self-enclosed, an implosion of a festishistic, unbearable heaviness of being.’110 Another critic feels that the success of American films is not just their ‘overt fantasy’ or ‘super spectaculars.’ What Europe seems to have lost is ‘a main source of fantasy and of the mythic dimension which American films possess and European films often do not.’ This loss is attributed to the decline of the ‘ordinary genre film.’111 One way to historicize this argument is to look to the previous century, when the United States was still a cultural outpost and the (Western) European canon was emerging in an earlier transnational cultural industry— opera. Of course, for many centuries opera was ‘Italian,’ even if it was performed elsewhere in Europe. Over time, local and national traditions developed, and by the nineteenth century opera was translated into local languages or composed ‘at home.’ As a culture ‘industry,’ opera required printed scores and publishing houses, singers and their managers, sites of performance, audience cultivation, and critical appraisal, while its vitality and reach was global in scale. In Paris, the ‘capital of the nineteenth

184

|

Marsha Siefert

century,’ distribution of opera was not unlike a cable television service, with different theatres for different languages and genres, and audiences differentiated by price. Opera managers desired popularity, since longer runs meant the recovery of investment; in Paris the critical accusations of popularity that plagued Meyerbeer and Massenet did not reduce audience numbers, and gimmicks like a roller-skating ballet created media gossip. Opera was a prime imperial export, with opera houses being built in colonial capitals from L’viv to Cairo.112 Pauline Viardot, a Spaniard married to a Frenchman and in love with a Russian, could perform an opera by a German based on a Greek tragedy and be a success in Paris. Viewed today from the ‘heritage’ perspective, opera appears to represent culture that travelled and was identified as ‘European,’ even as nations competed with national operas to enter the process by which canons were formed. These were the days when imperialism was still a ‘civilizing practice.’ A key difference between opera and cinema, as Benjamin so cogently put it in relation to art, was the issue of reproduction. But similarity should also be sought in the content that travelled. What enabled opera to ‘go global’ is not dissimilar to the ‘popular’—a melodramatic plot dramatizing personal relations that led to the christening of its broadcast form as ‘soap opera.’ The connections between opera and cinema as multimedia forms are well known. The hierarchy of opera within the arts and the hierarchy of individual operas within the canon have evolved to a significant extent in inverse proportion to their popularity, their named female heroines, and their melodrama. In opera’s ‘cultural heritage’ or ‘museum repertoire,’ the ‘ABCs’ of opera house financial survival (Aida, Boheme/Butterfly, Carmen) are bemoaned for their banality—the 1950s characterization of Tosca as a ‘shabby little shocker’ echoed most loudly.113 However much they were critiqued,114 these stories have travelled back and forth between print and stage, film and dance. Such cross-national/ethnic love stories remain a staple of many variants of this genre in today’s European films and television plots.115 As films they are judged not by the happy or tragic ending often used to differentiate Hollywood from European plots, but by other criteria: when they are ‘good,’ they rise above genre and become Romeo and Juliet. As suggested in the description of the importance of film genres for the revival of European film industries in the 1950s and 1960s, such stories can sometimes travel not only from one medium to another, but also across national boundaries. Even the television ‘soap opera’ or ‘serial’ has opened up difficult issues for what has been called, in the face of EU regulation, the ‘people’s Europe.’ One telling example involved television, melodrama, and the Holocaust. In the German historical profession, the discussion of the Holocaust was part of the Historians’ Dispute (Historikerstreit), but the issue was literally brought home to the public by the West German showing of the US television serial Holocaust in 1979, which attracted over twenty million viewers. The German complaints about the

Twentieth-Century Culture, ‘Americanization,’ and European Audiovisual Space

| 185

American hijacking of a German issue brought, in additional to critical response, a competitive audiovisual vision, the series Heimat, shown first in 1984, which also used the soap opera genre to dramatize a normal West German family during the war. The resulting controversies and public debate over the series suggest the potency of the issues but also the power of television to set an agenda.116 The United States had its own Roots and Will and Grace. The fragmentation of audiences notwithstanding, the importance of the audiovisual sphere to dramatize issues for its citizenry may be too imperative to be left to the market, which for corporate reasons, may represent American interests. Restoring value and the potential for quality to genre audiovisual products helps to redefine success not just in blockbuster or market terms. The European support schemes allow for a range of definitions of success and cannot be read in terms of profit and loss alone. However, Eurimages still asks its applicants to distinguish between ‘art’ and ‘commercial’ films, which may create invidious prejudgments. Many filmmakers of the present generation do not sense the distinction between auteur and genre so keenly as a defining factor in their art; in fact, filmmakers often feel empowered to draw upon eclectic sources, as long as this does not lead to punitive regulatory responses or denigration of film quality. Other centers of audiovisual production have created large niche markets in genres underdeveloped by Hollywood, such as the Latin American telenovela, Japanese animation, Chinese martial arts, and Indian romances. In Europe, nations favor various genres and become known for them, like thrillers from Spain and Germany, romantic comedies from the UK, and teen films from France; comedies play a large part in the viability of many national industries.117 The hierarchy of audiovisual genres and their assigned cultural value will not disappear. Rather, more commonly, a ‘cultured’ person can currently experience a range of cultural genres, including auteur cinema, without having to apologize.118 The use of regulation and the market to create a common culture runs the risk of promoting artificiality, especially in places where strong cultural traditions already exist. The postwar construction of nation-states provides numerous examples. By privileging market logic, we presuppose that members of various European states already have a European ‘imagination,’ whereby an ‘imagined community’ might emerge simply because it is in the same audiovisual space. The stories told by those communities in the late nineteenth century, even if transmitted via the media, grew from within the communities and drew upon those cultures. Even in the media world of the twentieth century, it is domestic programs that are preferred when available. And with the range of diaspora communities now living in Europe, those constituent community resources are widening even further.119 European audiovisual space has a number of safeguards that serve to delimit genre in a responsible way. In the United States, ‘entertainment’

186

|

Marsha Siefert

has come to dominate other forms of audiovisual products, from news to sports to political campaigns. As Wittebois argues, the profitability of the soap opera has led transnational media corporations in the US to use the genre’s assumptions and concerns as a master narrative in televisual prime-time storytelling.120 The inherent danger is that the needs of multinational corporations and the drive to attract audiences may, however European identity is defined, conquer more audiovisual space that ought instead to belong to a ‘public sphere where not only consumers but also citizens can participate in good governance. Any success in using European audiovisual space to broaden the definition of acceptable sources and ranges of culture would be totally undermined if a “democratic deficit” in the rest of audiovisual space decreased popular access and participation.’121 The history of the interdependence of European audiovisual space and the corporate players in the marketplace sounds a cautionary note with which to usher in the twenty-first century.

Notes The author would like to acknowledge the aid of a Faculty Research Grant from the Central European University. 1. Jeremy Tunstall, The Media Are American: Anglo-American Media in the World (London, 1977). 2. As early as 1902 the British journalist W. T. Stead published a short book called The Americanization of the World or the Trend of the Twentieth Century. 3. Studies of Americanization and Europe have proceeded on a national basis and concentrated on the period since 1945. See Richard F. Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley, 1996); Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994); Uta G. Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley, 2000); R. Kroes, R.W. Rydell, and D. F. J. Bosscher, eds., Cultural Transmissions and Receptions: American Mass Culture in Europe (Amsterdam, 1993). Richard H. Pells treats the whole of Europe in Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated and Transformed American Culture Since World War II (New York, 1997). See also Alexander Stephan, ed., The Americanization of Europe: Culture, Diplomacy and Anti-Americanism after 1945 (New York, 2005). 4. See Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmoderism (Bloomington, IN, 1986). 5. Philip Schlesinger, ‘Should We Worry about America?’ in Annemoon van Hemel, Hans Mommaas, and Cas Smithuijsen, eds., Trading Culture: GATT, European Cultural Policies and the Transatlantic Market (Amsterdam, 1996); Rob Kroes, ‘Imaginary Americas in Europe’s Public Space,’ in Stephan, The Americanization of Europe, 337–360; Kuisel, Seducing, 237. 6. Neal Gabler attributes the European influence particularly to Jewish emigrants, primarily from Central and Eastern Europe. See Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood ( New York, 1988).

Twentieth-Century Culture, ‘Americanization,’ and European Audiovisual Space

| 187

7. Cited in David Ellwood, ‘Hollywood’s Star Wars,’ History Today 44, no. 4 (1994): 6. 8. Richard Maltby, ‘“D” for Disgusting’: American Culture and English Criticism,’ in Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Steven Ricci, eds., Hollywood and Europe: Economics, Culture, National Identity 1945–1995 (London, 1998), 106. 9. See, for example, Sabine Hake, ‘Theorizing the Cinema, the Masses and the Nation,’ in idem, The Cinema’s Third Machine: Writing on Film in Germany, 1907–1933 (Lincoln, NE, 1993), chapter 3. 10. Siegfried Kracauer, ‘The Little Shop-Girls Go to the Movies’ [1927], in idem, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, 1995). The importance of the ideas on film and mass entertainment developed by members of the Frankfurt School is interwoven with both public and academic debates to this day, not least because so many of them spent time in the United States and formed a transatlantic intellectual space. Kracauer was actually more ambivalent about the possibilities of entertainment than were Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment. See ‘Introduction,’ in Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter, and Deniz Göktürk, eds., The German Cinema Book (London, 2002), 2–4. 11. Miriam Hansen, ‘Early Silent Cinema: Whose Public Sphere?’ New German Critique 29 (1983): 147–84, 173–74. 12. For a review see Patrick Brantlinger, Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay (Ithaca, 1983). 13. Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York, 1989); See Frank Trommler, ‘Bridging Intellectual and Mass Cultures across the Atlantic,’ in Frank Trommler and Elliott Shore, eds., The German-American Encounter: Conflict and Cooperation between Two Cultures, 1800–2000 (New York, 2001), 256–66. 14. This focus excludes the large and influential American popular music industry, which engendered similar institutional resistance, especially with rock music. In the music field the Anglo-American connection was prominent. See Simon Frith, ‘Does Music Cross Boundaries?’ in van Hemel, Mommaas, and Smithuijsen, Trading Culture., 157–163. 15. The separate analysis of film and broadcasting industries also has other sources. As Petro suggests in a report on a Cinema Studies conference in 1986, the debate over bringing television studies into that field drew on fears of the quantitative studies dominant in television effects studies but also on the ‘lesser quality’ of television programs. She sees this also as a gendered debate. Patrice Petro, ‘Mass Culture and the Feminine: The ‘Place’ of Television in Film Studies,’ Cinema Journal 25, no. 3 (1986): 5–21. 16. Philip Schlesinger, ‘Wishful Thinking: Cultural Politics, Media, and Collective Identities in Europe,’ Journal of Communication 43, no. 2 (1993): 8. 17. Tim Bergfelder, ‘The Nation Vanishes: European Co-Productions and Popular Genre Formula in the 1950s and 1960s,’ in Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, eds., Cinema and Nation (London, 2000), 139–52, 139. 18. Arjun Appadurai introduced another geographical suffix, ‘-scape,’ with reference to the ‘mediascape’ to approach this change from a more anthropological and global perspective. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1996). 19. Jack Lang, French Minister of Culture: ‘The countries of Europe, encumbered as they are with all sorts of historic, linguistic and sociological barriers, were more or less impervious to each other, while the European market—unified—existed only for the Americans.’ Cited in Miller et al., Global Television, 107. 20. On the French domination of early cinema, see Janet Staiger, Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market, 1907–1934 (London, 1985). Pathé was also a major distributor of sound recording in this period, making it one of the first multimedia corporations. 21. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ‘Introduction,’ in Nowell-Smith and Ricci, Hollywood and Europe, 3. In 1925 Hollywood accounted for 95 percent of British film revenues and 70 percent of the French. Douglas Gomery, ‘Economic Struggle and Hollywood Imperialism: Europe Converts to Sound,’ Yale French Studies 60 (1980): 80. The German market

188

22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

|

Marsha Siefert

was strongest; in 1925–1926, with 50 percent US imports, only 3 US films, including one starring the dog Rin Tin Tin, made money. Thomas J. Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany (Berkeley, 1994), 154–55. See the contributions in Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby, ‘Film Europe’ and ‘Film America’: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange, 1920–1939 (Exeter, 1999), and Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary (London 2000), 120. The connections established between French and German filmmakers, however, lasted and helped Ufa exiles in Paris and the US into the 1940s. See Sibylle M. Sturm and Arthur Wohlgemuth, eds., Hallo? Berlin? Ici Paris!: Deutsch-Französische Filmbeziehungen,1918–1939 (Munich, 1996). See Douglas Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System (New York, 1986). Victoria. de Grazia, ‘Mass Culture and Sovereignty: The American Challenge to European Cinemas 1920–1960,’ Journal of Modern History 61 (1989): 70. Richard Maltby and Rush Vasey, ‘The International Language Problem: European Reactions to Hollywood’s Conversion to Sound,’ in David W. Ellwood and Rob Kroes, eds., Hollywood in Europe: Experiences of a Cultural Hegemony (Amsterdam, 1994). Gomery, ‘Europe Converts to Sound.’ John Trumpbour, Selling Hollywood to the World: US and European Struggles for Mastery of the Global Film Industry, 1920–1950 (Cambridge, 2002), 147, 226–57; de Grazia, ‘Mass Culture,’ 71. Even so, the English named the Americanisms that were sullying the Queen’s English as a reason for retaining film quotas against Hollywood. Moreover, Korda’s ‘quintessential English film,’ The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), had a Hungarian director, star, and writer, and the author of the novel was a Hungarian Baroness. For maps of ‘Hollywood on the Thames’ in the mid 1930s and a diagram of the Rank Empire in 1947–1948, see Ian Jarvie, Hollywood’s Overseas Campaign: The North Atlantic Movie Trade, 1920–1950 (Cambridge, 1992), 165, 257. Trumpbour, Selling, 141, 148, 151, 177–78, 191, 205–27; Nowell-Smith, ‘Introduction,’ 9; Paul Swann, ‘The British Culture Industries and the Mythology of the American Market: Cultural Policy and Cultural Exports in the 1940s and 1990s,’ Cinema Journal 39, no. 4 (2000): 27–42. Richard Taylor, ‘Ideology as Mass Entertainment: Boris Schumyatsky and Soviet Cinema in the 1930s,’ in Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds., Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema, (London, 1991), 203–209, 214 and ‘Mr. Shumiatsky on American Films,’ New York Times, 4 August 1935, section 9, 3; Denise Youngblood, ‘Americanitis: American Film Influences in Russia,’ Journal of Popular Film and Television 19, no. 4 (1992): 148–56; Marsha Siefert, ‘Allies on Film: US-USSR Filmmakers and The Battle for Russia,’ in idem, ed., Extending the Borders of Russian History (Budapest, 2003), 373–400. German companies also challenged American dominance in setting the technological standards and providing the equipment for the conversion to sound. Gomery, ‘Economic Struggle’; Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After, 115–16. Although too complex to expand upon here, the area of technological standards has long been another way in which European companies have combated American imports. Different television, video and digital standards are only the most recent in the technological conflicts. See Miller et al., Global Hollywood, chapter 4. Ufa also had important export markets in South America and the Middle East. Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema, 106. De Grazia, ‘Mass Culture,’ 67, 77–81; Victoria de Grazia, ‘European Cinema and the Idea of Europe, 1925–1995,’ in Nowell-Smith and Ricci, Hollywood and Europe, 22–26; Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien, ‘Introduction,’ in idem, Nazi Cinema as Enchantment: The Politics of Entertainment in the Third Reich (Rochester, 2004); Patrice Petro, ‘Nazi Cinema at the Intersection of the Classical and the Popular,’ New German Critique 74 (1998): 41–55. Ufa has attracted a number of historical interpretations because of its importance for both Weimar and the Third Reich. For a review of interpretations see especially

Twentieth-Century Culture, ‘Americanization,’ and European Audiovisual Space

34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51.

52.

| 189

Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema, 107–8 and Hans-Michael Bock and Michael Töteberg, ‘A History of Ufa,’ in Bergfelder, Carter, and Göktürk, The German Cinema Book, 129–138. Walter F. Wanger, ‘Donald Duck and Diplomacy,’ Public Opinion Quarterly (fall 1950). He also described Hollywood as ‘a veritable Athens of celluloid.’ Cited in David Ellwood, ‘Introduction: Historical Methods and Approaches,’ in Ellwood and Kroes, Hollywood in Europe, 6. Ellwood, ‘Introduction,’ 12. David W. Ellwood, ‘Italy: Containing Modernity, Domesticating America,’ in Stephan, The Americanization of Europe, 253–276. Thomas H. Guback, ‘Shaping the Film Business in Postwar Germany: The Role of the US Film Industry and the US State,’ in Paul Kerr, ed., The Hollywood Film Industry (London, 1986), 245–75. Reinhold Wagnleitner, ‘American Cultural Diplomacy, the Cinema, and the Cold War in Central Europe,’ in Ellwood and Kroes, Hollywood in Europe, 196–210 Paul Swann, ‘The Little State Department: Washington and Hollywood’s Rhetoric of the Postwar Audience,’ in Ellwood and Kroes, Hollywood in Europe, 176–196; See also Ian Jarvie, ‘The Postwar Economic Foreign Policy of the American Film Industry: Europe 1945–1950,’ in Ellwood and Kroes, Hollywood in Europe, 155–175. Trumpbour, Selling, 276. Nowell-Smith, ‘Introduction,’ 9; Fiona Handyside, ‘“Paris Isn’t for Changing Planes; It’s for Changing your Outlook”‘: Audrey Hepburn as a European Star in 1950s France,’ French Cultural Studies 14 (2003): 288–90. Tino Balio, ‘The Art Film Market in the New Hollywood,’ in Nowell-Smith and Ricci, Hollywood and Europe, 63–73. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America (New York, 1975), 292. The few foreign films that did come to the United States before this time were usually accompanied in advertising by quotations from critics, which became as common in US films only in the mid 1960s. Shyon Baumann, ‘Marketing, Cultural Hierarchy, and the Relevance of Critics: Film in the United States, 1935–1980,’ Poetics 30 (2002): 243–62. The equation film = art = Europe may have been helped by television’s replacing the movies in the role of entertainer. Nowell-Smith, ‘Introduction,’ 8. Tim Bergfelder, ‘Extraterritorial Fantasies: Edgar Wallace and the German Crime Film,’ in Bergfelder, Carter, and Göktürk, The German Cinema Book, 39–47. This description derives from Bergfelder, ‘The Nation Vanishes.’ Figures from Peter A. Toma and Ivan Volgyes, Politics in Hungary (San Francisco, 1977), 113–14. Of course few Western films reached rural areas outside the capital. I am investigating these relationships in a separate project. Postwar socialist film industry studies written before the fall of communism include Jerzy Toeplitz, ‘Cinema in Eastern Europe,’ Cinema Journal 8, no. 1 (1968): 2–11; Val S. Golovskoy with John Rimberg, Behind the Soviet Screen: The Motion-Picture Industry in the USSR, 1972–1982 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1986); Mira Liehm and Antonín J. Liehm, The Most Important Art: Eastern European Film after 1945 (Berkeley, 1980); Károly Nemes, Films of Commitment: Socialist Cinema in Eastern Europe, trans. András Boros-Kazai (Budapest, 1985). Tino Balio, ‘Introduction to Part 1,’ in Tino Balio, ed., Hollywood in the Age of Television (London, 1990), 39–40. Thomas H. Guback, ‘Cultural Identity and Film in the European Economic Community,’ Cinema Journal 14, no. 1 (1974): 2–17, 10, 16; de Grazia, ‘European Cinema,’ 26–29. Ruth A. Starkman, ‘American Imperialism or Local Protectionism? The Sound of Music (1965) fails in Germany and Austria,’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 20 (2000): 63–79. Each nation, both members and nonmembers of the EC, had specific and complex responses to developments in the film industry. Factors like the post-1968 youth and consumer culture and a generational change in the film industries, plus the impact of

190

53. 54. 55.

56.

57.

58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63.

64.

65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70.

|

Marsha Siefert

television, were important. But, as Garncarz suggests for Germany, the fundamental shift in state funding policies from ‘commercial’ to ‘art’ films also contributed to the success of Hollywood blockbusters. Joseph Garncarz, cited in Peter Krämer, ‘Hollywood in Germany/Germany in Hollywood,’ in Bergfelder, Carter, and Göktürk, The German Cinema Book, 236, fn. 35. The history and goals of public broadcasting are recounted in numerous publications. See Mark Raboy, ed., Public Service Broadcasting for the 21st Century (Luton, 1995). Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (Hanover, 1992 [1974]), 19. This summary is based on Balio, ‘Introduction,’ and James L. Baughman, ‘The Weakest Chain and the Strongest Link: The American Broadcasting Company and the Motion Picture Industry, 1952–60,’ in Balio, Hollywood in the Age of Television, 91–114. The US TV networks and others connected with the business had formed an export association that ceased in 1970 when production and distribution of television programs had become centralized within Hollywood. Thomas H. Guback, ‘International Circulation of U.S. Theatrical Films and Television Programming,’ in George Gerbner and Marsha Siefert, eds., World Communications: A Handbook (New York, 1984), 156–57. Dag Blanck cites these examples from work of Ulf Jonas Bjork in ‘Television, Education and the Vietnam War: Sweden and the United States during the Post-War Era,’ in Stephan, The Americanization of Europe, 91–114, here 96–98. Varis, ‘Global Traffic,’ 146; Petros Iosifidis, Jeanette Steemers, and Mark Wheeler, European Television Industries (London, 2005), 74–75. West Germany and France also sold broadcasting programs during this period, but many of them went to the developing world as a low-cost form of ‘cultural distribution.’ Tapio Varis, ‘Global Traffic’ , 143–52. Gerd Hallenberger, ‘Aesthetic Conventions in European Media Cultures,’ Emergences 11 (2001): 117–18. Varis, ‘Global Traffic.’ See national studies in Roberto Grandi, ‘Western European Broadcasting in Transition,’ Journal of Communication 28, no. 3 (1978); and Robert K. Avery, ed., Public Service Broadcasting in a Multichannel Environment: The History and Survival of an Ideal (New York, 1993). Kaspar Maase, ‘From Nightmare to Model? Why German Broadcasting Became Americanized,’ in Alexander Stephan, ed., Americanization and Anti-Americanism: The German Encounter with American Culture after 1945 (New York, 2005), 78–106, 86. Iosifidis et al., European Television Industries, chapter 2. Critics of the American television flow to Europe were also joined by Americans and those from the developing world in academic and international organizations like UNESCO in what became known as the media imperialism debate of the 1970s, culminating in the New World Information Order debates and the US and UK withdrawals from UNESCO in 1984. Intellectuals have revised or critiqued the cultural imperialism thesis in light of globalization debates and the historical reconstruction of its adaptation and selective reception in Europe. For a review see Jessica Gienow-Hecht, ‘Academics, Cultural Transfer, and the Cold War—A Critical Review,’ Diplomatic History 24 (2000), 465–94. European PTT’s had sponsored this satellite for telecommunications, but it was also capable of carrying video channels. Peter Dunnett, The World Television Industry: An Economic Analysis (London, 1990), 188. Mark Wheeler, ‘Supranational Regulation: Television and the European Union,’ European Journal of Communication 19 (2004): 355. Before 1982, the private commercial channels were Britain’s ITV (established in 1954), MTV in Finland, CLT in Luxembourg, and Berlusconi’s channel(s) in Italy. The UK is sometimes regarded as the Trojan horse for American audiovisual interests; see Richard Collins, Broadcasting and Audio-Visual Policy in the European Single Market (London,

Twentieth-Century Culture, ‘Americanization,’ and European Audiovisual Space

71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88.

89. 90.

| 191

1994), 13. Also, because Britain had dealt with a wave of ‘Americanization of television’ in the 1950s, the impact was much less jolting and immediate than, for example, in France. Richard Collins, Media and Identity in Contemporary Europe: Consequences of Global Convergence (Bristol, 2002), 53–55. The phrase is Tunstall and Machin’s, cited in Iosifidis et al., European Television Industries, 35. Obviously these developments profoundly affected national public service broadcasters. Richard Collins, ‘Public Service and the Media Economy,’ Gazette: International Journal for Communication Studies 60 (1998): 364–65; Graham Murdock, ‘Introduction,’ in Jan Wieten, Graham Murdock and Peter Dahlgren, eds., Television Across Europe: A Comparative Introduction (London 2000), 61; Taisto Hujanen, ‘Programming and Channel Competition in European Television,’ in Wieten, Murdock, and Dahlgren, Television Across Europe, 80. Iosifidis et al., European Television Industries, 76. Mel van Elteren, ‘GATT and Beyond: World Trade, the Arts and American Popular Culture in Western Europe,’ Journal of American Culture 19, no. 3 (1996): 59–74. Ellwood, ‘Introduction,’ 8. Miller et al., Global Hollywood, 36–37; van Elteren, ‘GATT,’ 47. Anne Jäckel, European Film Industries (London, 2003), 59. http://www.coe.int/T/E/Cultural_Co-operation/Eurimages. http://europa.eu.int/comm/avpolicy/media/index_en.html. European Audiovisual Observatory, ‘European Cinema Attendance Stagnates as Local Films Fail to Travel,’ in Press Release, 5 May 2003. http://www.obs.coe.int/about/ oea/pr/mif2003.html. European Audiovisual Observatory, ‘American Fiction and Feature Films Continue to Dominate Western European Television Channel Programme Imports,’ in Press Release, 28 January 2003. http://www.obs.coe.int/about/oea/pr/a02vol5.html. Wheeler, ‘Supranational Regulation,’ 353. Iosifidis et al., European Television Industries, 138–39. Miller et al., Global Hollywood, 102–3. Anne Jäckel, European Film Industries, 55–57; Iosifidis et al., European Television Industries, 14. Hallenberger, ‘Aesthetic Conventions,’ 117. Miller et al., Global Hollywood, 102. See Iosifidis et al., European Television Industries, 50–54. NBC Universal is a subsidiary of General Electric (United States). For a timeline and description of the holdings of NBC Universal see http://www.nbcuni.com/About_NBC_Universal/Company_Overview/. Following the corporate trail is an ongoing challenge. For constant updates see Columbia Journalism Review’s website ‘Who Owns What’ http://www.cjr.org/tools/owners/. For EU-sponsored reports on media concentration, see European Federation of Journalists, ‘European Media Ownership: Threats on the Landscape’ (Brussels, 2002), at http://www.ifj-europe.org/. See also Richard A. Gershon, The Transnational Media Corporation: Global Messages and Free Market Competition (Hillsdale, NJ, 1997), for the market formulation, and Jeremy Tunstall and Michael Palmer, Media Moguls (London, 1991), for a critical overview. Jean K. Chalaby, ‘Deconstructing the Transnational: A Typology of Cross-Border Television Channels in Europe,’ New Media and Society 7, no. 2 (2005): 165. Among nonfiction television channels, the Eurofeed for CNN was established in 1985, and CNN achieved global coverage in 1989 by purchasing space on a Soviet satellite. Euronews, the EBU-sponsored transnational station, began in 1993, the year the broadcasters from Intervision joined EBU. Of entertainment channels, including Discovery and National Geographic, the largest global network is MTV, which can be viewed in 80 percent of the world’s nations; most of its music videos are in English. Eurosport has French and EBU sponsorship. Jean Chalaby, ‘Transnational Television in Europe: The Role of Pan-European Channels,’ European Journal of Communication 17, no. 2 (2002): 183–204. An EBU-sponsored all-European channel called Europa noticeably failed.

192

|

Marsha Siefert

91. Jean K. Chalaby, ‘Television for a New Global Order,’ Gazette: International Journal for Communication Studies 65 (2003): 457–72, 459. 92. Throughout the last decade of the century France produced on average twice as many films as Germany and at least 50 percent more than the UK and Italy, its nearest rivals; over half these films were co-productions. Jäckel, European Film Industries, 48. 93. See European Federation of Journalists, ‘Eastern Empires: Foreign Ownership in Central and Eastern European Media: Ownership, Policy Issues, Strategies’ (Brussels, 2004) at http://www.ifj-europe.org/; South East European Network for Professionalisation of the Media (SEENPM), Media Ownership and its Impact on Media Independence and Pluralism (Ljubliana, 2004) at http://www.mirovni-institut.si/media_ownership/; Dina Iordanova, ‘East Europe’s Cinema Industries since 1989,’ Javnost/The Public, 6, no. 2 (1999): 45–60. 94. Colin Sparks, ‘CME and Broadcasting in the Former Communist Countries,’ Javnost/The Public, 6, no. 2 (1999): 25–44; http://www.cetv-net.com. 95. Hedwig de Smaele, ‘Audiovisual Policy in the Enlarged European Union,’ Trends in Communication 12, no. 4 (2004): 163–80. 96. Council of Europe, ‘Focus 2005,’ 45 at http://www.obs.coe.int/oea_publ/focus.html.en. 97. Marsha Siefert, ‘From Cold War to Wary Peace: American Culture in the USSR and Russia,’ in Stephan, The Americanization of Europe, 185–217. Pay television channels can be received in the capital and locations of international populations, but the cost is prohibitive for a majority of the population. 98. Murdock’s coinage is more accurate than ‘privatized’ because the landscape still includes public broadcasters. Graham Murdock, ‘Digital Futures: European Television in the Age of Convergence,’ in Wieten, Murdock, and Dahlgren, Television Across Europe, 41–42. 99. WTO regulation is said to make it easier for American companies to be regarded as local firms in European countries and hence make use of the national tax breaks and investment opportunities for film and television production and distribution. 100. European Audiovisual Observatory, ‘Major Markets Buoyant in 2004 as European Union Cinema Admissions Top 1 Billion Milestone,’ Strasbourg, 4 May 2005. 101. French critics cited in de Grazia, ‘Mass Culture,’ 80. 102. Hallenberger, ‘Aesthetic Conventions,’ 120. 103. On the core values/experiences see Anthony Smith, Nationalism (New York, 1991), 174. 104. See Milan Kundera, ‘A Kidnapped West, or Culture Bows Out,’ Granta 11 (1984): 95–118; George Schöpflin and Nancy Wood, eds., In Search of Central Europe (Totowa, NJ, 1989). 105. See Chris Shore, Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration (London, 2000). 106. William Uricchio, ‘Displacing Culture: Transnational Culture, Regional Elites, and the Challenge to National Cinema,’ in van Hemel, Mommaas, and Smithuijsen, Trading Culture, 78. 107. Jack Lang, Culture Minister of France, cited in Gienow-Hecht, ‘Shame on US,’ 478. 108. Laurence Levine, ‘Folklore of Industrial Society: Popular Culture and its Audiences,’ and T. Jackson Lears, ‘Making Fun of Popular Culture,’ American Historical Review 97 (1992): 1369–99, 1417–26. 109. Of note is the fact that, with regard to British novelists, Gaye Tuchman and Nina Fortin have argued that in order to raise the cultural level of the ‘novel’ as genre, women novelists had to be ‘edged out’ of the great literary tradition. Gender affected the characterization of the artist as well as of the audience. Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers and Social Change (New York, 1989). 110. Ellwood, ‘Introduction,’ 9–10, citing Ien Ang, ‘Hegemony in Trouble. Nostalgia and the Ideology of the Impossible in European Cinema,’ in Duncan Petrie, ed., Screening Europe: Image and Identity in Contemporary European Cinema (London, 1992). 111. See also Nowell-Smith, ‘Introduction,’ 13. 112. See, e.g., Bruce Kuklick, ‘The Future of Cultural Imperialism,’ Diplomatic History 24 (2000): 503–8, 505.

Twentieth-Century Culture, ‘Americanization,’ and European Audiovisual Space

| 193

113. Joseph Kerman, Opera and Drama (New York, 1956); the allusion to Wagner is intentional. Adorno’s criticism of opera for these very reasons also reinforces its relation to the mass culture critique. 114. The long history of critique was revived by Catherine Clement, Opera, or the Undoing of Women (Minneapolis, 1989) and its many rejoinders. It has also been argued that the entrance of a number of women into the field of musicology made the revival possible. 115. Anneke Smelik, ‘“For Venus smiles not in a house of tears”: Interethnic Relations in European Cinema,’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 6 (2003): 55–74. 116. It is ironic that Heimat presented a critique of materialism and consumption through a consumer product intended to counter US materialism. David Morley and Kevin Robins, ‘No Place Like Heimat,’ in idem, eds., Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries (London, 1995); New German Critique 35 (1985): 3–24; Anton Kaes, chapter 6, in idem, ed., From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film (Cambridge, 1989). 117. Jäckel, European Film Industries, 32–33; 27–28; Janet Staiger, ‘A Neo-Marxist Approach: World Film Trade and Global Culture Flows,’ in Alan Williams, ed., Film and Nationalism (New Brunswick, NJ, 2002), 242–44. 118. Pertti Alasuutari, ‘“I’m Ashamed to Admit It but I Have Watched Dallas”: The Moral Hierarchy of Television Programmes,’ Media, Culture and Society 14 (1992), 561–82. 119. See Deniz Göktürk, ‘Beyond Paternalism: Turkish German Traffic in Cinema,’ in Bergfelder, Carter, and Göktürk, The German Cinema Book, 238–47. 120. James H. Wittebols, The Soap Opera Paradigm: Television Programming and Corporate Priorities (Lanham, MD, 2004). 121. Murdock, ‘Digital Futures’; Philip Schlesinger, ‘From Cultural Defence to Political Culture: Media, Politics and Collective Identity in the European Union,’ Media, Culture and Society 19 (1997): 369–92.

Chapter 11

ECONOMICS OF WESTERN EUROPEAN INTEGRATION? PROVING THE BENEFITS, 1952–1973

( André Steiner

The Europeanization of economic life is not a new phenomenon in recent history. Traders have consistently been connected throughout the various parts of Europe, and the emergence of the modern nation-state did not bring transnational economic activities to an end. The first multinationals emerged in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, and their economic importance further increased in the twentieth century. But the attempt to create a transnational economic area with supranational institutions was successful for the first time only after the Second World War. Western European integration began as an economic process with the Marshall Plan, and was first institutionalized in the framework of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1952 and then in the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1958. We are well informed about their origins.1 Research on this integration process has focused in particular on the political and diplomatic aspects of the development of these institutions, as well as on their economic policies. Their progress and some of their setbacks have therefore already been thoroughly dealt with. However, this research has concentrated essentially on the period that preceded the foundation of the European Economic Community in 1957. Only recently have some studies been published that deal in detail with the historical development of these institutions during the 1960s.2 However, the real economic consequences—such as the change in trade patterns between the six member states of the EEC as well as in trade patterns with countries outside the EEC, and the share in productivity growth caused by the integration process—and these changes’ relation to political decisions made by the various protagonists (politicians, national governments, supranational institutions, trade associations) have been insufficiently researched until today. Moreover, we know little about the Notes for this section begin on page 202.

Economics of Western European Integration? Proving the Benefits, 1952–1973

| 195

reactions of companies to the institutional and economic integration process or about their attempts to influence it. In this chapter, I will first summarize the main findings of previous research, then explore some questions that may provide a better understanding of this epoch from an economic perspective, and finally, outline some related problems.

Assumptions of the Integration Literature Western European integration in the postwar era was based on four motives: first, it was an instrument to secure peace; this was, second, connected to proposals to find a solution for the ‘German problem’; third, the integration of national markets was a means to solve the economic problems of limited markets; fourth, integration was seen as a way to maintain a distinct political and economic European position with respect to the United States, and a military position with respect to the Soviet Union.3 Alan Milward has in particular emphasized that the integration process was a result of the efforts made by nation-states to rescue their own existence. After the ‘great slump,’ the Third Reich, and the devastation caused by the war, it seemed necessary to ensure economic prosperity and to improve the welfare state. To this end, the economic integration of Western Europe was believed to be necessary.4 However, there also existed conflicts of interests between specific branches of trade that stood to gain or lose from integration. Political motives, in particular the aim to integrate West Germany within the Western world, played a decisive role in the integration process. The Federal Republic was, for example, allowed to extend its sovereignty rights. Furthermore, the fact that Western Europeans were striving to gain more autonomy from the United States meant that they were prepared to make compromises when creating the European Community. Institutional integration within the European Community for Coal and Steel was used as a political framework for market integration and growth.5 The exceptional growth in Western Europe in the 1950s was ensured initially by the Marshall Plan and by the convertibility of currencies, these being originally confined to the member countries of the European Payment Union. This growth was a precondition for establishing the full convertibility of the currencies in 1958.6 However, we do not know exactly to what extent this growth was also considered to be a requirement for the creation of the European Economic Community in 1958. According to Wilfried Loth, the growing economic attraction of the European Community—its six members comprising France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, and Luxembourg—was responsible for its stability, despite the various crises that befell the integration process. Loth therefore described the EEC as ‘an instrument for a socially acceptable increase in productivity.’7 It remains certain that the EEC, with its high growth rates, low unemployment, and rapidly increasing international trade, generally

196

|

André Steiner

enjoyed a stronger position during the 1960s than the United States and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). However, its performance was only a little better than that of other Western industrialized countries and was by far exceeded by Japan.8 The Western European integration process certainly contributed to political stabilization on the continent and was a thus condition for economic growth.9 Yet the economic consequences were not as clear as Loth thought. Integration means that economic barriers between independent states were abolished step by step, that national economies became intertwined and the markets for goods and factors of production grew more interdependent. Economic theory supposes that such tariff unions—as in the EEC during its first phase—have static and dynamic consequences that lead to a growth of economic welfare. Trade creation and trade diverting effects are generally static: on the one hand, as trade between member countries grows, demand shifts to the most efficient supplier within the Community. On the other hand, a tariff union—unlike a free-trade area— not only reduces or abolishes the tariff barriers between member countries, but establishes a common external tariff as well. And this external tariff of the union excludes even more efficient producers in the world market. The benefit of demand thereby goes to those suppliers within the Community that are most efficient in the Community—but perhaps less efficient than those on the world market. If the effects of trade creation exceed trade diversion, there will be a gain in welfare. Furthermore, this theory predicts dynamic effects: the reduction of tariff and non-tariff trade barriers generally leads to an increase in competition. This in turn creates more incentives for additional innovation, while the enlargement of the common market leads to the production of more goods at lower cost, that is, economies of scale. As a result, specialization and international division of labor as well as cooperation in research and development and technology transfer increase, and know-how spreads faster. This results in an increase of productivity.10 These theoretical predictions of gains in growth corresponded to the expectations of the politicians when they founded the EEC, which were expressed in the Spaak Report of 1956.

Unsettled Research Questions To this day, it is still not clear to what extent these effects were actually achieved during the first stage of European integration up to 1973, when the EEC was enlarged for the first time. The available findings on this subject are inconsistent, and it remains difficult to deduce from them any clear historical judgement.11 Research on empirical economics focuses mainly on static effects and only seldom looks at the dynamic consequences of the integration. Moreover, these existing estimations were often methodologically unsatisfactory because they did not distinguish

Economics of Western European Integration? Proving the Benefits, 1952–1973

| 197

sufficiently between the various factors other than European integration that may have influenced growth, such as the general condition of the world economy or the consequences of ‘Atlantic integration.’ They did not succeed in clarifying the relation between the degree of integration and economic development. The currently available studies that deal with the consequences of integration in trade all conclude that, during the first phase of the European Community for Coal and Steel prior to 1958, trade in coal and steel between member countries did not increase very much. From 1961 onwards, additional trade in manufactured goods was created as a result of the EEC. As trade within the Community increased, trade with countries that did not belong to the Community decreased. Tradecreating effects were thereby supposed to be higher than trade-diverting consequences.12 In the agrarian sector, however, trade was diverted more than in other sectors because the EEC pursued a highly protectionist policy. If we compare the costs of trade diversion as a consequence of the Common Agricultural Policy with the positive effects in manufacturing, the outcome is not very clear. The results established by Bela Balassa indicate that the costs did not exceed the gains, but consumed a considerable part of the latter. Overall, the profit from integration for the EEC-6 was estimated to correspond to less than 1 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) until the beginning of the 1970s.13 Some researchers even thought—albeit without providing convincing empirical arguments—that Western European integration was of no significance for economic development and modernization processes.14 This is a decisive shortcoming of past research, which has paid little attention to the dynamic effects of integration. One of the most famous specialists on the economic integration, Jacques Pelkmans, described our knowledge about the dynamic effects of the European integration as ‘cloudy at best.’15 Economic historians refer to the growth of trade within the Community as a consequence of integration. However, trade with countries outside of the Community decreased. Some researchers note an increase in the integration of commodity markets, although the integration level of the period before the First World War was reached again only in the second half of the 1960s. To a large extent, the growing level of integration was a consequence of the rapid development of intra-industrial trade, that is, the exchange of commodities of the same class. Unfortunately, however, more detailed analyses of the historical context of the trade of manufactured goods do not exist to this day. The increase in the migration of labor did not foster a substantial integration of labor markets. Furthermore, the capital markets were only partially integrated during the period in question, despite the fact that the foreign direct investments increased. In general, goods markets were integrated to a certain degree, but this process was not matched by the labor and capital markets. In this respect, the effects of Western European integration were often relativized.16 Similar findings were presented for the

198

|

André Steiner

European Free Trade Association (EFTA), which was founded in 1959 as an alternative to the EEC.17 In sum, we have to face the fact that research about the economic consequences of the Western European integration process during its first stage does not take sufficiently into account all possible aspects and therefore remains insufficient. We are relatively well informed about economic and political decisions taken in relation to security questions and foreign affairs, which initially resulted in the founding of the ECSC and then in the treaties of Rome. Much is also already known about the behavior of the various protagonists in this process (national governments, individual politicians, trade associations).18 There have also been some studies written about the practical activities of the ECSC, in particular in relation to the recent development of the coal and energy sectors.19 By contrast, little is known about the economic policies of EEC institutions prior to the early 1970s,20 and there are no studies about the reactions of companies to the institutional and social integration process and their economic and political influence on this process. Even more recent work on single business histories deals with this subject only in passing.21 In short, our knowledge about the economic consequences of the integration process in Western Europe, about the behavior of companies, and about the economic policy of the EEC and of national governments and trade associations, contains many gaps. If the European integration process is to be studied more thoroughly, the focus should not only be placed on the economic consequences of this integration process from its early stages in the 1950s until the beginning of the 1970s. Research needs to go beyond this in order to analyze these economic consequences in relation to policies of European institutions and national governments as well as to trade policies of the companies. In this way, it might be possible to further analyze the channels by which integration measures had a real impact, and to learn more about their economic consequences. A more thorough examination of the European integration process would require researchers first to check whether and to what extent integration, in the economic sense, has taken place. The most convincing criterion for the integration of markets is the convergence of prices. However, it is very difficult to measure this convergence exactly without encountering huge practical problems.22 The convergence of prices is therefore not a feasible indicator. Instead, we should inquire into the theoretically predicted effects: Did competition increase? Were production and trade more specialized? Did the economies of scale grow? Such analyses would require an extended data base on the level of the industrial sectors, and would probably make it possible to judge in which sectors integration effectively led to consequences. In addition, one should investigate the question of whether the trade integration of member countries of the EEC is effectively developing in line with comparative cost benefits.

Economics of Western European Integration? Proving the Benefits, 1952–1973

| 199

Although this assumption has been made by specialists,23 it is not plausible because intra-industrial trade, that is, the overwhelming part of newly created trade, cannot be explained by the theorem of comparative costs. It is more likely that this occurred as a result of growing specialization in the various industrial sectors that stimulated growth. Furthermore, one could estimate the effects on productivity in the various sectors and national economies, and thereby show which countries had gained how much and how this affected the welfare of the Community. Since we do not have a solution to the methodological problem of how to distinguish quantitatively the described effects from general conditions of growth, qualitative assessments should be used to assess the historical plausibility of the findings. In this way, it will be possible to demonstrate the connection between growth and integration. In a second step, we should solve the problem of how the consequences of integration measures worked in practice. One could begin by asking to what extent and how these measures were pushed and accompanied by politicians. The actions of the Common Commissions of the ECSC, the EEC, and national governments require analysis in order that we may better understand which integration measures were initiated or prevented, and what their objectives were. One may also ask to what extent economic consequences were anticipated and the actual results acknowledged. Furthermore, it would be interesting to find out how companies tried to influence the integration measures by means of their trade associations. For example, the problem of the gradual reduction of tariffs urged acting politicians to inquire how much structural change could be achieved or allowed in which sector. The national points of view on this question differed according to the particular traditions and the given industrial structure. Furthermore, opinions within particular countries as well as between the industrial sectors tended to vary. It therefore seems worthwhile to ask whether the industrial sectors created cross-border coalitions in order to protect their interests. National politicians thought in these terms, especially in relation to the latent contradiction between productivity that was to be achieved and the social acceptance of the structural change that was connected with it. This was already visible during the coal crisis at the end of the 1950s, when member countries subsidized coal production.24 The inland tariffs and trade quotas were abolished, and common tariffs for nonmember countries were introduced step by step until 1968. It might also be interesting to inquire into the interests of member countries as well as those of manufacturers or purchasers affected by this process. This gradual liberalization of trade within the Community has to be taken into account if we intend to estimate the quantitative effects of the integration process.25 In a third step, research on the impact of integration may be completed by analyzing to what extent companies brought their corporate strategy into line with integration measures and their consequences. Did the

200

|

André Steiner

integration measures influence decisions about innovations, production, or investments, or even sales strategy within businesses? In other words, was the increase in economic competitiveness and of exports causally connected to integration measures?

The Case of Automobile Production On the basis of a preliminary study and initial research carried out in the archive of the European Commission, it is now possible to assess some of the real economic consequences of the integration process in automobile production. This industry was one of the most important growth areas during the first phase of Western European economic integration, and was that part of manufacturing in which the effects of integration were most keenly felt. One must nevertheless note that, although customs duties between member countries were considerably reduced during the 1960s, several obstacles remained in place, preventing foreign vehicles from being sold on certain domestic markets. One of the effects of this restriction was that the majority of dealers remained tied to specific car companies. And in addition to customs duties, compensatory taxes had to be paid when importing goods. In the Benelux countries, as well as in France and Italy, import quotas also initially existed and were only gradually abolished subsequently.26 The removal of customs duties between member countries nevertheless allowed foreign manufacturers a considerable penetration of domestic markets. Prior to the creation of the EEC in the mid 1950s, the shares of German exports in the French car industry, as well as of French exports in the German car industry, were minimal, comprising a mere 1 percent.27 Trade in passenger vehicles became more vigorous following the first reduction of customs duties for automobiles within the Common Market early in 1959.28 In 1960, French manufacturers could garner approximately 5 percent of the German market, while 3 percent of all cars sold in France came from Germany. Once the customs duties for private cars sold within the Community had been drastically reduced in 1962, the proportions of reciprocal exports in each country rapidly rose to 6 and 7 percent in the mid 1960s. Mutual trade developed in a very similar way in relation to Italy, the third-largest car manufacturer and consumer in the EEC. The German automobile industry welcomed the reduction of customs duties not only within the EEC but also for all those developed industrial countries that were included within the framework of the GATT negotiations.29 The European Commission even suggested that ‘the perceptible increase in imports within the Community in relation to imports from third countries proves that businesses clearly prefer to deal with vehicles produced in member countries, which is largely a consequence of the benefits of reduced customs duties.’ Following the agreement to introduce a further step-by-step reduction of customs duties, the Commission also expected to

Economics of Western European Integration? Proving the Benefits, 1952–1973

| 201

see stronger growth of intra-European trade than of trade with third countries.30 Although internal Community trade had developed less vigorously as a result of the crisis of 1966 and 1967, the final abolition of domestic customs duties for private cars in early 1968 rapidly revived trade within the EEC.31 However, this may also have been a result of the general economic upturn. As a consequence, 11 percent of cars bought in Germany were from France. The development of British exports and imports during the same period also suggests that these processes were indeed related to Western European economic integration and were not just a result of the exceptional growth of the Golden Age. During the 1960s, the British car market was protected by a steep import duty of 28 percent. This is why German and French exports to the British market saw very little increase, and why recorded export figures more than doubled from the moment the UK entered the Common Market in the period between 1973 and 1976 when compared to 1970. By the mid 1970s, the founding members of the EEC therefore had as large a share of the British market as the one they had in other original member countries. On the other hand, the UK’s share of the car market in other Community member states remained at a low level until 1976. On the whole, the French car industry was able to increase its market share most from the sale of car exports in Community member countries and in the UK.32 These developments can be best explained in terms of the relative unit costs borne by producers who had the largest share of the mass market in their respective countries. In the mid 1950s, the Volkswagen group of companies in Germany had the lowest costs. Those of Renault were more than twice as high. Volkswagen had, for a long time, been building only one type of car, the ‘Beetle,’ which gave it the advantage of putting into practice a number of incremental improvements, based on the experience gained over a number of years. When Volkswagen began to produce other types of cars in the 1960s, its costs began to rise. Renault’s costs improved as a result of the devaluation of the franc in 1958, and because of the continual control of costs and rationalization. As early as 1970, Renault’s relative unit costs were lower than those of Volkswagen, whereas those of the British producer, British Leyland, were the highest. This explains at least in part why British producers were not able to expand their share of the market in other Community countries even after the UK had joined the EEC. It was remarkable how differences between relative unit costs in each country decreased during the 1960s and 1970s at precisely the moment when trade was increasing.33 However, it is by no means clear whether the relative unit costs had an influence on trade development, or whether trade rather influenced the relative unit costs. In addition to the reduction of relative unit costs, the concentration of large automobile manufacturing companies also increased, which had been predicted in theory and by a report published by the EEC as early as

202

|

André Steiner

1971. Moreover, economies of scale can also be demonstrated empirically.34 The question nevertheless remains as to whether there is a connection between trade development and economies of scale. Claims made about the dynamic effects of integration therefore remained imprecise, because it was unclear how economic factors were going to evolve in relation to each other. In order to solve this problem we need to take into consideration the lessons of economic history (that is, qualitative assessment and considerations about plausibility referred to above), for this question cannot be answered with the help of statistics alone. On the whole, one may assume that the economic consequences of European integration were greater than generally believed. However, their impact on economic development was not as profound as some statements by politicians suggest. Although static effects were positive, they did not have a decisive impact on the increase of social welfare. But if we take dynamic effects into account, the contribution of the integration process towards growth in Western Europe may be assumed to be greater. One may suppose that this contribution to the exceptional growth of the 1950s and 1960s remained relatively insignificant, but this is nonetheless only a hypothesis, and the questions raised above remain open. The answers to them will make a substantial contribution to the economic history of the Western European integration process.

Notes 1. See Wilfried Loth, ‘Beiträge der Geschichtswissenschaft zur Deutung der europäischen Integration,’ in Wilfried Loth and Wolfgang Wessels, eds., Theorien europäischer Integration (Opladen, 2001), 87-106; Clemens Wurm, ‘Early European Integration as a Research Field: Perspectives, Debates, Problems,’ in Clemens Wurm, ed., Western Europe and Germany: The Beginnings of European Integration 1945–1960 (Oxford, 1995), 9-26. 2. Wilfried Loth, ed., Crises and Compromises: The European Project 1963-1969 (Baden-Baden, 2001); Anne Deighton and Alan Milward, eds., Widening, Deepening and Acceleration: The European Economic Community 1957–1963 (Baden-Baden, 1999); Uwe Röndigs, Globalisierung und europäische Integration: Der Strukturwandel des Energiesektors und die Politik der Montanunion 1952–1962 (Baden-Baden, 2000). 3. Loth, ‘Beiträge,’ 96f. 4. Alan Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation State (Berkeley, 1992). See also Alan Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945–51 (London, 1984). 5. Christoph Buchheim, ‘Comments on European Economic Integration: Did It Matter in the Past, Will It Matter in the Future?,’ in Richard Tilly and Paul Welfens, eds., European Economic Integration as a Challenge to Industry and Government (Heidelberg, 1995), 67–69, 68. 6. On the establishment of the convertibility, see Christoph Buchheim, Die Wiedereingliederung Westdeutschlands in die Weltwirtschaft 1945-1958 (Munich, 1990), 166–70. 7. Loth, ‘Beiträge,’ 99. 8. C. W. A. M. Paridon, ‘European Economic Integration: Did It Matter in the Past, Will It Matter in the Future?’ in Richard Tilly and Paul Welfens, eds., European Economic Integration as a Challenge to Industry and Government (Heidelberg, 1995), 29–65, 33ff.

Economics of Western European Integration? Proving the Benefits, 1952–1973

| 203

9. Buchheim, ‘Comments,’ 68. 10. See Jacques Pelkmans, European Integration: Methods and Economic Analysis (Harlow, 1997); Willem Molle, The Economics of European Integration: Theory, Practice, Policy, 4th ed. (Aldershot, 2001); Wim Kösters, Rainer Beckmann, and Martin Hebler, ‘Elemente der ökonomischen Integrationstheorie,’ in Loth and Wessels, Theorien europäischer Integration, 35–86. 11. See, for example, Werner Abelshauser, ‘The Re-entry of West Germany into the International Economy and Early European Integration,’ in Wurm, Western Europe and Germany, 27–53, 49. 12. See Bela Balassa, ‘Trade Creation and Diversion in the European Common Market. An Appraisal of the Evidence,’ in idem, ed., European Economic Integration (Amsterdam and New York, 1975), 79-118, 104. See also Michael Davenport, ‘The Economic Impact of the EEC,’ in Andrea Boltho, ed., The European Economy: Growth and Crisis (Oxford, 1982), 225–58, 227; Molle, Economics, 134. 13. Balassa, ‘Trade Creation,’ 115f. 14. Göran Therborn, European Modernity and Beyond: The Trajectory of European Societies 1945–2000 (London, 1995), 195–99. 15. Jacques Pelkmans, ‘Economic Theories of Integration Revisited,’ Journal of Common Market Studies 18 (1980): 338. See also Balassa, ‘Trade Creation,’ 113ff. 16. See Gerold Ambrosius, Wirtschaftsraum Europa: Vom Ende der Nationalökonomien (Frankfurt am Main, 1996), 61ff. See also Gerold Ambrosius, ‘The Federal Republic of Germany and the Common Market in Industrial Goods in the 1960s,’ in Régine Perron, ed., The Stability of Europe: The Common Market: Towards European Integration of Industrial and Financial Markets? (1958–1968) (Paris, 2004), 47–61. 17. Norman Aitken, ‘The Effect of the EEC and EFTA on European Trade. A Temporal Cross-Section Analysis,’ American Economic Review 63 (1973): 881–92; EFTA, The Effects of EFTA on the Economies of Member States (Geneva, 1969). 18. Werner Abelshauser, ‘“Integration à la Carte”: Der Primat der Politik und die wirtschaftliche Integration Westeuropas in den 50er Jahren,’ in Josef Wysocki, ed., Wirtschaftliche Integration und Wandel von Raumstrukturen im 19. und 20.Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1994), 141–158; idem, ‘Wirtschaft und Rüstung in den fünfziger Jahren,’ in Josef Wysocki and Walter Schwengler, Wirtschaft und Rüstung: Souveränität und Sicherheit (Anfänge westdeutscher Sicherheitspolitik, vol. 4) (Munich, 1997), 1–185; Werner Bührer, Ruhrstahl und Europa: Die Wirtschaftsvereinigung Eisen- und Stahlindustrie und die Anfänge der europäischen Integration 1945–1952, (Munich, 1986); idem, Westdeutschland in der OEEC: Eingliederung, Krise, Bewährung 1947–1961 (Munich, 1997); Till Geiger, ‘Reconstruction and the Beginnings of European Integration,’ in Max-Stephan Schulze, ed., Western Europe: Economic and Social Change since 1945 (London, 1999), 23–41; John Gillingham, Coal, Steel and the Rebirth of Europe, 1945–1955: The Germans and French from Ruhr Conflict to Economic Community, (Cambridge, 1991); idem, European Integration 1950–2003: Superstate or New Market Economy? (Cambridge, 2003); Constantin Goschler, Christoph Buchheim, and Werner Bührer, ‘Der Schuman-Plan als Instrument französischer Stahlpolitik,’ Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 37 (1989): 171–206; Richard Griffiths and Brian Girvin, eds., The Green Pool and the Origins of the Common Agricultural Policy (London, 1995); Matthias Kipping, Zwischen Kartellen und Konkurrenz: Der Schuman-Plan und die Ursprünge der europäischen Einigung 1944–1952 (Berlin, 1996); Hanns Jürgen Küsters, Die Gründung der Europäischen Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft (BadenBaden, 1982); Wilfried Loth, Der Weg nach Europa: Geschichte der europäischen Integration 1939–1957 (Göttingen, 1990); Milward, Reconstruction; idem, European Rescue; Dietmar Petzina, ‘The Origins of the European Coal and Steel Community: Economic Forces and Political Interests,’ Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft 137 (1981): 450–68; Thomas Rhenisch, Europäische Integration und industrielles Interesse: Die deutsche Industrie und die Gründung der Europäischen Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft (Stuttgart, 1999); Markus Schulte, ‘Industrial Interest in West Germany’s Decision against the Enlargement of the

204

19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

|

André Steiner

EEC: The Quantitative Evidence up to 1964,’ Journal of European Integration History 3 (1997): 35–62; idem, ‘Challenging the Common Market Project: German Industry, Britain and Europe 1957–1963,’ in Deighton and Milward, eds., Widening, 167–83; Guido Thiemeyer, Vom ‘Pool Vert’ zur Europäischen Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft: Europäische Integration, Kalter Krieg und die Anfänge der Gemeinsamen Europäischen Agrarpolitik 1950-1957 (Munich, 1999). Werner Abelshauser, Der Ruhrkohlenbergbau seit 1945: Wiederaufbau, Krise, Anpassung (Munich, 1984); Werner Bührer, ‘Die Montanunion—ein Fehlschlag? Deutsche Lehren aus der EGKS und die Gründung der EWG,’ in Gilbert Trausch, ed., Die europäische Integration vom Schuman-Plan bis zu den Verträgen von Rom: Pläne und Initiativen, Enttäuschungen und Mißerfolge (Baden-Baden, 1993), 75–90; Christian Conrad, Europäische Stahlpolitik zwischen politischen Zielen und ökonomischen Zwängen (Baden-Baden, 1998); Christoph Nonn, Die Ruhrbergbaukrise: Entindustrialisierung und Politik 1958–1969 (Göttingen, 2001); Régine Perron, Le marché du charbon, un enjeu entre l’Europe et les Etats-Unis de 1945 à 1958 (Paris, 1996); Röndigs, Globalisierung und europäische Integration; Dirk Spierenburg and Raymond Poidevin, The History of the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community: Supranationality in Operation (London 1994). Ambrosius, Wirtschaftsraum; Martin Dedman, The Origins and Development of the European Union, 1945–95: A History of European Integration (London, 1996); Gillingham, European Integration; Peter Stirk, A History of European Integration since 1914 (London, 1996); Derek Urwin, The Community of Europe: A History of European Integration since 1945 (London, 1991). See Werner Abelshauser, ed., Die BASF. Von 1865 bis zur Gegenwart: Geschichte eines Unternehmens (Munich, 2002), 498f., 585f., 606; Volker Wellhöner, ‘Wirtschaftswunder’— Weltmarkt—westdeutscher Fordismus: Der Fall Volkswagen (Münster, 1996), 182, 203-8. See Molle, Economics, 131ff. See Johannes Bähr, ‘Integrationseffekte und Integrationspotentiale in unterschiedlichen Wirtschaftssystemen: Das geteilte Deutschland im Vergleich,’ in Eckart Schremmer, ed., Wirtschaftliche und soziale Integration in historischer Sicht (Stuttgart, 1996), 241-58, 251. Ambrosius, Wirtschaftsraum, 83; Röndigs, Globalisierung, 350–361; Urwin, Community, 53. See Ambrosius, Wirtschaftsraum, 98f. See Ständige Arbeitsgruppe für Dokumentation und technische Hilfe, Sektor Metall: Automobilpreise im Gemeinsamen Markt, 2.10.1959, Brussels Archives of the Commission of the European Community (in the following BAC) 160/1990 -78.; EWG, Kommission: Die Automobilindustrie in den EWG-Ländern (Kurze Übersicht), Juni 1960, BAC 118/1983—745, Bl. 134f. This and the following figures about the market penetration see in: Nicholas Owen, Economies of Scale, Competitiveness and Trade Patterns within the European Community (Oxford 1983), 55. EWG, Kommission: Die Automobilindustrie in den EWG-Ländern (Kurze Übersicht), Juni 1960, BAC 118/1983—745, Bl. 123f. Verband der Automobilindustrie (VDA): Stellungnahme der deutschen Automobilindustrie zum Fragebogen der EWG-Kommission betreffs “Trade Expansion Act,” 10.4.63, BAC 118/1983—464, Bl. 103–107. EWG, Kommission, GD Wirtschaft und Finanzen: Studie über die Lage und die Entwicklungsaussichten auf dem Automobilmarkt der Gemeinschaft, 11.12.63, BAC 26/1969–576, Bl. 316–349; Communauté Economique Européenne, Commission: Etude de la situation et des perspectives d’évolution du marché automobile de la Communauté. Document de travail préparé par les services de la Commission en vue de la réunion du 21 janvier 1965, avec les délégués de l’industrie automobile, BAC 118/1983—747, Bl. 155–191; Communauté Economique Européenne, Commission: Etude de la situation et des perspectives d’évolution du marché automobile de la Communauté. Document de travail préparé par les services de la Commission en vue de la réunion du 13 janvier 1966, avec les délégués de l’industrie automobile, BAC 160/1990 -78.

Economics of Western European Integration? Proving the Benefits, 1952–1973

| 205

31. Kommission, GD Wirtschaft und Finanzen, Dr. U. Mosca an Achim Diekmann, Geschäftsführer des Verbandes der Automobilindustrie, 13.6.69: Communautés Européennes, Commission: Etude de la Situation et des Perspectives d’évolution du marché automobile de la communauté. (1968—1969—1971), BAC 130/1983—210; Communautés Européennes, Commission: Etude de la Situation et des Perspectives d’évolution du marché automobile de la communauté. Document de travail préparé par les services de la Commission en vue de la réunion du 3 Avril 1970 avec les délégués de l’industrie automobile, BAC 160/1990 -78. 32. See Owen, Economies, 55. 33. Owen, Economies, 62f. 34. Owen, Economies, 68f. See: Commission des Communautés Européennes: Etudes. Les indices de concentration et leur application concréte au secteur de l’automobile dans la Communauté, BAC 42/1988—1786.

Part 4

UNFINISHED POLITICAL PROCESSES

(

Chapter 12

A EUROPEAN CIVIL SOCIETY?

( Hartmut Kaelble

In recent years, the term ‘civil society’ has played an increasingly significant role in the language of the European Union. It is employed in speeches given by the president of the European Commission, in the much-discussed white paper on Governance in the European Union, and in debates about the European Constitution, as well as in the catalogue of research topics supported within the Sixth Framework Programme and in several hundred additional documents published by the EU. It is nevertheless still a matter of dispute whether a civil society has in fact emerged on the level of the European Union or whether, as the sceptics claim, the EU still consists merely of a regular meeting of heads of governments, a bureaucracy, a court of justice, and a parliament that exist in a vacuum without an intermediary civil society. There are various reasons why it is important to inquire whether a civil society has emerged on the level of the European Union. This question is a fundamental part of the debate over the European Constitution. Opponents of the constitution argue that a genuine constitution must emanate from among the ‘people,’ or at least from the centre of civil society. At the same time, they claim that no such civil society exists in Europe, and that one will come into being only if there is a common language and a common European public sphere. Advocates of the constitution argue that numerous organizations representing civil society are already involved in ongoing discussions about the constitution, and that a written constitution may also be a decisive step on the way to a European civil society. Civil society is also an essential aspect of the debate about the democracy deficit in the European Union. Sceptics argue that this deficiency cannot be reduced by simply granting greater authority to the European Parliament regarding questions of legislation, the election of the European Commission, and budget decisions. They claim that only a European civil society can guarantee the reduction of the democracy deficit by helping to build a bridge between parliament and citizenry, and by providing an Notes for this section begin on page 219.

210

|

Hartmut Kaelble

indispensable foundation for the effective functioning of the parliament. In the past, say the sceptics, the absence of a civil society meant that citizens had no opportunity to influence decisions made at the European level. The optimists generally adopt a similar approach to the problem of deficient legitimacy, while stressing such positive signs as the slowly increasing authority of the European Parliament, and indications that a European civil society and a European public sphere are emerging. The following essay deals with the development of civil society on the level of the European Union. It does not contain an analysis of the general state of civil society today, but a historical inquiry into approximately the last fifty years of European integration. A historical investigation into this topic is particularly revealing, because it permits us to identify progressive and regressive tendencies, that is, both positive and negative aspects of European civil society. Moreover, historical analysis can demonstrate how European civil society differs from civil societies on the national level, and how the relations between these levels evolved over time.1 For this reason, this essay begins with a few preliminary remarks about the concept of civil society, followed by a survey of the phases in which civil society has developed on the European level, and concludes by asking whether this transnational civil society on the European level differs from national civil societies and, if so, in what way.

A New Concept Over the last decade or so, the concept of civil society has undergone a remarkable boom in both scientific and political language. Conferences in the field of social sciences have been organized on this topic, books have been written about it, and scientific networks set up.2. Politicians likewise make frequent use of this term. Civil society has become an international and certainly a European concept, not only in the official jargon of the European Union but also among experts in the European public sphere. This concept is nevertheless by no means uncontroversial. In certain academic and political circles, people treat it with suspicion or even reject it outright. For quite a number of commentators, it is either too fashionable or too explicitly rooted in the Cold War, or too devout, or too offensive to trade unions, or too closely connected with the world of nongovernmental organizations. There are various reasons why the concept of civil society has experienced such an impressive boom in spite of such reservations. One reason for this trend was the increasing public, political, and academic interest in human rights and democracy during the upheavals of 1989 and 1990, and in the course of the transformation of former communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe since the 1990s. The popularity of this concept may largely be ascribed to the fact that it was reintroduced by intellectuals

A European Civil Society?

| 211

and dissidents from Central and Eastern Europe. Although people in these countries today consider civil society to be a Western concept and treat it with scepticism, this has had little effect on the popularity of the term, at least in established Western countries. In this context, the concept of civil society is an expression of the expectation that the transformation of dictatorships into democracies cannot be guaranteed by constitutions, independent parliaments, political parties, and courts of justice alone, but that a stable democracy also depends on the existence of a civil society. According to this argument, there can be no democracy without a civil society. Several traditional democracies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries certainly did not possess well-developed civil societies, and even today civil societies in Western democracies have reached very different stages of development. Yet we continue to expect civil societies to play an important role in democracies. The concept of civil society was also revived in reaction to the renewed outbreak of violent ethnic conflicts, especially in Southeastern Europe, but also in Africa and as a result of continuing violence in Northern Ireland and in the Basque Country in Spain. This is why the term civil society is frequently used to refer to nonviolent social relations. It therefore implies civil values such as tolerance, understanding, and mutual trust. The origins of the concept of civil society can also be traced back to the phase of economic difficulties experienced ever since the 1970s and 1980s, as well as to the financial crisis of the modern welfare state. In this context, civil society is an alternative, albeit one that operates alongside rather than instead of the welfare state. It signifies non-state organized help and support for other citizens in need, with reference to the non-profitmaking charitable associations and enterprises commonly known as the ‘third sector,’ as well as to the values of aid, social commitment, and social responsibility to ameliorate poverty and adversity. Finally, the emergence of this concept on such an international scale is very much connected with the rapid increase in transnational communication between academics. If today communication between specialists in academic circles were still bound by national borders, as it was during the 1960s and 1970s, the concept of civil society would probably not have aroused such international attention.

Periods of European Civil Society The aim of this article is to show that a civil society is in the process of emerging on the European level. This development began well before the Maastricht Treaty in the last decade, when the authority of the European Union was considerably extended. Since its beginnings during the 1950s, European integration has invariably been coupled with the development of civil society, although this development was neither consistent nor linear

212

|

Hartmut Kaelble

and often encountered obstacles. Until now, research has focused on very general aspects of this process, while rarely referring to the notion of civil society. For this reason, I intend to sketch three brief periods in the development of European civil society since the beginning of European integration. This periodization inevitably involves simplification and cannot capture the full complexity of the situation, though it does reveal the basic issues at stake.3 The history of European civil society goes back further than that of European integration. It would be short-sighted to suppose that European civil society emerged at the same time as the European integration process. The origins of European civil society are threefold. It arose first out of transnational Europe-wide organizations, enterprises, social movements, and networks whose goals were not solely profit or power, and that were not based on networks of families or friends. It is founded, second, on the transnational values of tolerance, civilized codes of human behavior, nonviolence, and fair discourse. It originated, finally, in a political civil society that influenced the development of the European public sphere; since there was no integrated European power centre at that time, it attempted to construct one, or else sought guidance from the large European diplomatic conferences, the League of Nations, the Organization for European Economic Cooperation, or the European Council. This long-term history of European civil society is still to be written, and will necessarily incorporate the churches, Freemasons, the Red Cross, international women’s organizations, international trade unions, European integration movements, and transnational intellectuals’ forums. These constitute an essential part of the history of civil society since the 1950s. The first phase of the history of European civil society since the beginning of European integration occurred during the 1950s and 1960s and dates back to the foundation of the so-called Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and the Economic European Community (EEC) before enlargement, to the time of decolonization and the peak of the Cold War, when the Berlin Wall was built. This was also a period of exceptional economic prosperity, mass consumerism, and rapid improvement of living standards, a time in which people believed in unlimited material progress, systematic planning, and ‘futurology.’ During this period, the common European civil society faced a large number of apparently insurmountable obstacles. Europe was deeply divided in at least three ways. It was segmented into nations whose relations, in the aftermath of two world wars, were regularly marred by deep mistrust and drew on long traditions of distinct national civil societies. It was also split by the Cold War into Western and Eastern spheres of influence controlled by the Allied and Soviet powers respectively. There existed further divisions between Catholic, Protestant, and secular worlds. Each of these spheres developed a strong, but at the same time, exclusive civil society that remained impervious to its counterparts. Civil society was hardly effective enough to overcome

A European Civil Society?

| 213

the sense of deep mistrust and mutual exclusion between these different spheres. European civil society encountered huge obstacles during this period whose dimensions surpassed any previous or subsequent ones. The civil society that emerged in relation to European integration during the 1950s and 1960s had two entirely unconnected origins. On the one hand, European movements were still in existence, some of which were rooted in European resistance efforts against the occupation of foreign territories by the National Socialists during the Second World War. These experienced a boom throughout Europe after the war, but lost impetus as early as the 1950s as a result of the Cold War and the foundation of the ‘small’ EEC, which took place without the participation of Great Britain, Scandinavia, and the alpine countries. These movements were independent from the ECSC and the EEC, but had only limited influence on the policies of European institutions while concentrating rather on the goal of creating a united Europe. On the other hand, the ECSC and the EEC led to the foundation of agricultural and industrial interest groups: the Committee of Professional Agricultural Organizations (COPA) and the Union of Industrial and Employers’ Confederation of Europe (UNICE). Unlike the European movements, which were confined to member states of the EEC, these were purely umbrella organizations whose existence was largely dependent on the extent to which EEC institutions and, above all, the European Commission, including the Economic and Social Committee (EESC), listened to them. They were focused on the EEC and had no grounds for existence outside the Common Market, in which barely more than two fifths of all Europeans (in a territory excluding the European part of the USSR) lived at the time.4 Most members of the transnational European civil society during the 1950s and 1960s had little to do with the EEC, whether or not they were active within or outside EEC countries. This applies to the Red Cross, the then newly founded Amnesty International, European international sport associations, churches, the Rotary Club and Lions Club as well as European cultural organizations, which were among the wide variety of interests represented in the European civil society.5 This European civil society, which emerged partially after the Second World War but also had far deeper roots in the past, was targeted at national governments and the public sphere in Europe, and was increasingly confined to Western Europe as a consequence of the Cold War. A second phase in the history of European civil society began in the late 1960s and continued until the first half of the 1980s. During this period the EEC and European Community were enlarged to include first Great Britain, Ireland, and Denmark, then Spain and Portugal, so that by the end of this period they were home to approximately two thirds of the population of Europe (excluding the USSR). This period differed radically from the previous one insofar as it was marked by an upheaval of cultural and social values. It was a time in which new economic difficulties—the oil

214

|

Hartmut Kaelble

crisis, inflation, growing unemployment and poverty—arose. It marked the gradual overcoming of the Cold War, though this was interrupted by acute international tensions, for example, during the early 1980s when people began to debate the limits of economic growth, environmental dangers, new epidemics, the crisis of the welfare state, the limits of progress and systematic planning, and even new ways of life, as well as new communication and transport technologies. This was the main period in which European civil society expanded within the sphere of influence of European institutions. Numerous interest groups were founded on a European level, including the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) and organizations with cultural aims, but also sporting associations. Transnational civil society organizations were no longer initiated exclusively by governments, but increasingly by representatives of civil society itself.6 Numerous other civil society organizations emerged during the same period, including networks, projects at the European level, the European Rectors’ Conventions, and conventions of municipal authorities or networks of political scientists. Even the churches became aware of the significance of European integration. This expansion of European civil society did not emerge in a vacuum, for it was related to the growing sense of trust between European nations (a trend that has been thoroughly documented in the case of France and Germany since the 1970s), and to increased communication as a result of the city partnerships, larger numbers of exchanges between high school pupils and university students, trips made by tourists and business people, the intensification of exchanges between European elites and experts, and the concerted Europeanization of the Europe-wide import and export of goods and consumerism. Another factor of intensified integration was the gradual lowering of social barriers between the various Christian churches. The expansion of European civil society can only be understood if we take into account the broader context of the social and cultural movement towards transnationality. The connection between European civil society and European integration nevertheless remained generally loose and indirect. The European Community’s authority was limited, and its primary task conceived to be the creation of a European economic market. Other activities of the European Community were largely subordinated to this central aim. For this reason, only syndicates were generally able to enter into dialogue with European institutions, which they did by turning directly to the European Community and by setting up offices in Brussels. The third phase began in the late 1980s. This period differed from the previous two periods because the authority of the European Union had increased considerably since the mid 1980s following the introduction of the Single European Act and the three new European treaties signed in Maastricht, Amsterdam, and Nice. This authority increased ‘almost at the speed of light,’ as Javier Solana, the High Representative for the Common

A European Civil Society?

| 215

Foreign and Security Policy, remarked in an interview in 2000. The project of the European Union was not confined to building greater economic cohesion between member states, for it acquired new authority in the areas of domestic security policy, social policy, immigration policy, and education. It even made some headway into developing foreign policy and international security policy. Although the European Union still does not have the ability to act in the same way as a nation-state, it possesses far more comprehensive decision-making powers than the European Community did in the early 1980s. At the same time, Europeans grew more aware of European issues, either as a result of the regular European elections held since 1979, or because of the numerous referenda held to ratify new treaties or to decide whether new countries should join the EU. European civil societies were thus confronted with entirely new requirements for participating in and influencing the decisions of the EU. The end of the division of Europe into eastern and western blocs also removed one of the main obstacles to a European civil society. Dramatic changes likewise took place in the areas of transport, communication via personal computers, the Internet, high-speed train travel, and also resulted from the lifting of passport controls on several European borders. In short, this period ushered in favourable conditions for a European civil society, but at the same time made far higher demands on it than before. European civil society did not change very drastically during this period, in which European civil society associations, organizations, projects, and networks expanded continually. Organizations with new objectives, such as human rights, peace, the environment, and women’s rights, emerged alongside other, more traditional civil society associations. Between 1995 and 2000, the number of intermediary groups with offices in Brussels rose from around 2,200 to 3,500.7 Approximately 2,000 organizations, offices, and enterprises registered to take part in a single special event in 1996, the Social Policy Forum of the European Commission. Moreover, not only associations but also other civil society organizations became more diverse and more professional during this time.8 The rapid expansion of the authority and policies of the European Union appears to have strengthened the bond between European civil society and European integration, even though the connections between the two did not become as strong as they were at the national level. Both the European Football Association and the national football associations were strongly affected by a verdict of the European Court of Justice, the so-called ‘Bosman verdict.’ The churches intervened more directly and more publicly in European decision-making processes, in particular during discussions about the Treaty of Nice and the European Constitution. The growing authority of the EU prompted civil society organizations, which had previously merely observed the European integration process from a distance, to set up offices in Brussels. At the same time, it became impossible to avoid the question of whether European civil society was

216

|

Hartmut Kaelble

indeed sufficiently developed and inclusive enough to effectively influence everyday decisions concerning the union, its legal framework, and its representation of civil society values, and thereby to play a convincing role in discussions with the European Union. On the whole, people tend to underestimate the history of European civil society. Few commentators know how many organizations, movements, and enterprises are active on the European level. And hardly anyone realizes that the official number of interest groups registered at the European level is not much smaller than the number registered at the national levels, such as in Germany, a country that certainly does not have a shortage of interest groups.9 People also often underestimate how far the history of the European civil society reaches back in time, how broad its scope is beyond the narrow sphere of influence of the European Union, and how inappropriate it is to interpret it merely as the forerunner of European integration at the grassroots level. There are good reasons why this widespread underestimation of European civil society came about. They are connected with the peculiarities of European civil societies, which will be described in more detail in the final part of this essay.

Peculiarities of Civil Society on the EU level In spite of its variety and complexity, European civil society clearly differed from its national counterpart in Europe during the course of its development over the last fifty years. In this time, the European civil society did not simply come to resemble national civil societies. It is therefore questionable whether we should assess the development of the European civil society in relation to the model of national civil societies, which so often leads us to perceive the former as an incomplete, underdeveloped, or unsuccessful variant of national civil societies. The fundamental principles of civil society in each case are similar. However, transnational European civil society faced quite different challenges and therefore operated according to a logic of its own, which means that it was autonomous, and had a distinct approach to the public and a specific form of civil society plurality. The development of European civil societies is characterized by four peculiarities. First the historical development of the European Union, which began not as a state but as a project to create an economic market, and as a customs union founded on principles of political security, had considerable influence on European civil society, which therefore was and remained more asymmetrical than national civil societies. The interest groups representing farmers and industrialists had an unusually strong influence, because European integration until the 1980s had focused primarily on creating a European market for agricultural and industrial products. At that time, people rarely took an interest in the European service sector market.

A European Civil Society?

| 217

For the same reason, it was a long time before European civil society managed to establish connections with European institutions beyond interest groups. Initial attempts to secure a wider European integration beyond the customs union failed twice: first during the late 1940s, when it was decided to restrict the Council of Europe to advisory and organizational, rather than supranational institutional functions; then again in 1954, when the European Defence Community was rejected, which automatically led to the suspension of the European Political Union. This asymmetry within European civil society became gradually less pronounced from the 1970s onwards following the foundation of other interest groups that effectively enabled other elements of civil society to begin working in collaboration with the European institutions. However, the power of industrial and agricultural associations remains exceptionally strong to this day, which is evident from the unusually high agricultural subsidies provided for in the European budget. Secondly, the relation between European civil society and the public sphere differed from the relationship on the national level. This was due to the fact that the political public sphere on the European level operated according to different rules from the national level. European civil society had less recourse to the deliberate mobilization of its citizens, to demonstrations, rallies, strikes, dramatic public events, press campaigns, and television appearances. A quieter form of civil society than the national civil societies, it sought to influence European politics by means of reports, petitions, memoranda, talks, telephone calls, and specialist conferences instead. This quieter approach is often mistakenly perceived as a weaker version. Just because they do not hear about it, many people assume that it does not exist. This unspectacular and less publicly perceptible activity of the European civil society was, and still is, closely connected with the ways in which European institutions operate. In the past, the European Council, one of the two power centres of the EU, was almost entirely inaccessible to European civil society and could be influenced only via the intermediary action of national civil societies. Until now, the European Parliament has been far weaker than most national parliaments, and therefore has been a less interesting target group for public actions taken by European civil society. It also has deliberately refrained from appealing to the mass mobilization of a European public sphere. The main target group for European civil society was, and still is, the European Commission, a bureaucracy that was more responsive to the unspectacular methods employed by European civil society than to the spectacular mass mobilization of European citizens. Moreover, while the European Union makes many decisions, it generally does not implement them, leaving this task to the national administrations. Close collaboration between the executive and civil society was more common on the national than on the European level. A third pecularity, the fact that European civil society rarely mobilized European citizens in public, may be ascribed to its particular form

218

|

Hartmut Kaelble

of transnationality. European civil society consisted generally of amalgamations of national organizations, and therefore had the means neither to build a direct membership nor to improve contact with members. Members of the various national associations had little contact with one another. European civil society generally had no local roots and consisted primarily of speakers, activists, officials, and professional lobbyists. This is another reason why European civil society was seldom capable of persuading its members to take part in spectacular public actions, and why it rarely acquired the appearance of a movement. As a rule, protests against decisions made by the European Union were therefore confined to the national level. Only a few associations like COPA, representing the interests of European farmers, had the potential to mount a concerted transnational protest, though they rarely put this into practice. Finally, European civil society expressed its autonomy differently from national civil societies. Since it had less direct contact with citizens, it did not feel compelled to assert and prove its autonomy in public. At the same time, the European Commission exerted an influence on the development of European civil society. In particular since the late 1980s, when the turnout at the European elections began to sink and the results of numerous European referenda were notoriously close and uncertain, the European Commission took an interest in building closer ties between European citizens and the EU, and therefore in developing a more cooperative civil society. The European Commission’s benevolent contribution to the creation of civil society did not bring only advantages, for it occasionally also posed a threat to the autonomy of European civil society. European civil society was thus, for a number of reasons, far more decentralized and multipolar than national civil societies. Amalgamations of national organizations or movements on the European level largely remained weak. Moreover, such cooperation did not help to conceal the differences between national associations and projects. The national organizations and associations occasionally operated directly on the European level and thereby promoted the decentralization of European civil society. European civil society had a more decentralized structure because it was precisely on the European level that rifts within the civil societies of some European countries became visible. The broad range of religious contradictions within national civil societies, that is, the variety of distinctions between Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and secular civil societies, which were of no particular significance in most European countries, became fully apparent on the European level, where they had to be renegotiated in a process that reinforced the decentralized structure of European civil society. Another reason why European civil society had a more decentralized structure than national civil societies is that it had to incorporate successively the civil societies of new member states, introduce them to the European civil society’s working methods, and at the same time lend them a voice. This extremely significant, yet all too often neglected factor should

A European Civil Society?

| 219

be taken into consideration when incorporating new member states from Central and Eastern Europe, whose civil society traditions differ from the old member states.’ It is essential that these states have a say in European civil society.

Notes This essay was translated from the German by Peter Carrier. 1. Thomas Fetzer, ‘Zivilgesellschaftliche Organisationen in Europa nach 1945: Katalysatoren für die Herausbildung transnationaler Identitäten?,’ in Hartmut Kaelble, Martin Kirsch, and Alexander Schmidt-Gernig, eds., Transnationale Öffentlichkeiten und Identitäten (Munich, 2002), 355–92; Hartmut Kaelble, Wege zur Demokratie: Von der Französischen Revolution zur Europäischen Union (Stuttgart, 2001). 2. Manfred Hildermeier, Jürgen Kocka, and Christoph Conrad, eds., Europäische Zivilgesellschaft in Ost und West: Begriff, Geschichte, Chancen (Frankfurt am Main, 2000); John Keane, Democracy and Civil Society (London, 1988); Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals (London, 1994); Michael Walzer, ‘The Idea of Civil Society,’ Dissent 39 (1991): 293–304; Charles Taylor, ‘Die Beschwörung der “Civil Society”’, in Krzysztof Michalski, ed., Europa und die Civil Society: Gastelgandolfo-Gespräche 1989 (Stuttgart, 1991), 52–81; Robert Putnam, ed., Democracies in Flux: The Evolution of Social Capital in Contemporary Society (Oxford, 2002); Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, eds., Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, MA, 1992); Emanuel Richter, ‘Die europäische Zivilgesellschaft,’ in Klaus Dieter Wolf, ed., Projekt Europa im Übergang? Probleme, Modelle und Strategien des Regierens in der Europäischen Union (Baden-Baden, 1997), 37–62. 3. Beate Kohler-Koch, ‘Interessen und Integration: Die Rolle der organisierten Interessen im westeuropäischen Integrationsprozeß,’ in Michael Kreile, ed., Die Integration Europas (Opladen, 1992), 81–119; Rüdiger Tiedemann, Aufstieg und Niedergang von Interessenverbänden: Rent-seeking und europäische Integration (Baden-Baden, 1993); Hartmut Kaelble, Wege zur Demokratie, chapter 11. 4. Justin Greenwood, Interests in the European Union (Basingstoke, 1997); Tiedemann, Aufstieg und Niedergang; Konrad Schwaiger and Emil Kirchner, Die Rolle der europäischen Interessenverbände: Eine Bestandsaufnahme der europäischen Verbandswirklichkeit (BadenBaden, 1981); Hans-Wolfgang Platzer, Unternehmensverbände in der EG: Ihre internationale und transnationale Organisation und Politik (Kehl, 1985); Eric Bussière and Michel Dumoulin, Milieux économiques et intégration européenne en Europe occidentale au XXe siècle (Arras, 1998); Michel Dumoulin and Anne-Myriam Dutrieue, La Ligue Européenne de Coopération Économique (1946–1981): Un groupe d’étude et de la pression dans la construction européenne (Bern, 1993); Rudolf Hrbek, ed., Bürger und Europa (Baden-Baden, 1994); Wolfgang Streeck, ‘Gewerkschaften zwischen Nationalstaat und Europäischer Union,’ in Dirk Messner, ed., Die Zukunft des Staates und der Republik (Bonn, 1998), 218–46; Ingrid Stöckl, Gewerkschaftsausschüsse in der EG: Die Entwicklung der transnationalen Organisationen und Strategien der europäischen Fachgewerkschaften und ihre Möglichkeiten zur gewerkschaftlichen Interessenvertretung im Rahmen der Europäischen Gemeinschaft (Kehl, 1986). 5. Alessandra Canavero and Jean-Dominique Durand, eds., Il fattore religioso nell’integrazione europea (Milan, 1999); Anne-Marie Autissier, L’Europe culturelle en practique (Paris, 1999). 6. Beate Kohler-Koch, ‘Interessen und Integration.’; Hartmut Kaelble, Wege zur Demokratie. 7. Wolfgang Wessels, ‘The Growth and Differentiation of Multi-Level Networks: A Corporatist Mega-Bureaucracy or an Open City?,’ in Helen Wallace and Alasdair R. Young,

220

|

Hartmut Kaelble

eds., Participation and Policy Making in the European Union (Oxford, 1997), 17–41, chart 2.2; Christine Landfried, Das politische Europa: Differenz als Potential der Europäischen Union (Baden-Baden, 2002). 8. Rainer Eising and Beate Kohler-Koch, ‘Inflation und Zerfaserung: Trends der Interessenvermittlung in der Europäischen Gemeinschaft,’ in Wolfgang Streeck, ed., Staat und Verbände (Opladen, 1994), 175–206; Beate Kohler-Koch, ‘Interessen und Integration’; Wolfgang Wessels, ‘The Growth and Differentiation of Multi-Level Networks,’ 17–41; Bernhard Weßels, ‘Probleme der Demokratie in der EU,’ in Hans-Dieter Klingemann et al., Entwicklung und Perspektiven der Demokratie in Ost und West (= WZB Discussion Paper) (Berlin, 2003), 29–39; Sonia Mazey and Jeremy Richardson, eds., Lobbying the European Community (Oxford, 1993); Maurizio Bach, Die Bürokratisierung Europas (Frankfurt am Main, 1999); Hedwig Rudolph and Dieter Plehwe, European Institutionalisation and Supranational Governance, unpublished manuscript (Berlin 2001); Christine Landfried, Das politische Europa; Robin Pedler and Rinus van Schendelen, eds., Lobbying the European Union (Aldershot, 1994); Christian Hey and Uwe Brendle, Umweltverbände und EG: Strategien, politische Kulturen und Organisationsformen (Opladen, 1994); Bernhard Ebbinghaus and Jelle Visser, ‘Barrieren und Wege “grenzenloser” Solidarität: Gewerkschaften und europäische Integration,’ in Streeck, Staat und Verbände, 223–55; Bernhard Ebbinghaus and Jelle Visser, The Societies of Europe: Trade Unions in Western Europe since 1945 (New York, 2000). 9. Bernhard Weßels, ‘Probleme der Demokratie in der EU,’ 32.

Chapter 13

INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST ATTEMPTS AT BRIDGE-BUILDING IN THE EARLY POSTWAR PERIOD

( Örjan Appelqvist

It is all too easy for historians to allow the Cold War division process of 1947–1948 to retroactively overshadow the tentative character of the apprehensions, projects, and choices guiding different political actors during the postwar planning period that spanned from the final phase of the Second World War and the immediate transition to conditions of peace. It is all too easy to forget the weight of history felt by European postwar planners at that time, realized primarily as fear: of a repetition of the economic chaos after the First World War, and of renewed German aspirations to avenge and dominate. As an antidote, this chapter highlights the endeavours of an idealistic, liberal-socialist current among European politicians—expressed in the 1943 Manifesto of the Internationale Gruppe Demokratischer Sozialisten (IGDS), which followed the intense institutional struggle surrounding the creation of the United Nation’s Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) and the establishment of the European Reconstruction Program (ERP). It proposes an evaluation of the relative strengths of liberal and realist readings of the outcomes of their actions in three case studies.

Architects in Exile In September 1942, thirty-six people from fourteen different countries met in Stockholm to discuss the peace goals contained in a proposal elaborated by leading Norwegian social democratic refugees in Stockholm. The meeting took on a semi-clandestine atmosphere, since Swedish authorities had forbidden any political activity that might annoy the representatives of National Socialist Germany. The group, which eventually named itself Notes for this section begin on page 235.

222

|

Örjan Appelqvist

Internationale Gruppe Demokratischer Sozialisten, had grown from an amalgamation of three different sources: the Norwegian group of exiles in Stockholm, some internationally engaged Swedish social democrats, and a larger group of political and trade union activists from Central and Eastern Europe. The broad extent of their activity—seventy-six of them were to participate in the proceedings of the group—and the fact that they came from Germany as well as from occupied countries and neutral Sweden, attest clearly to the transnational networks of solidarity that existed even under the harshest of conditions. Their work is well documented in Klaus Misgeld’s book of 1976.1 The German group of twenty-one was the largest, consisting of Social Democratic Party (SPD) and trade union officials and journalists. The fifteen members from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Austria also represented a mixture of political and trade union activists. The Norwegian group was smaller but very influential. Their most prominent member, Martin Tranmael, had long been the chief editor of Arbeiderbladet, the leading paper of the Norwegian social democrats. The members from Sweden were crucial since they held important positions in the local social democratic establishment and in the central apparatus of the trade union movements.2 Their main problem was not how to win the war but how to win the peace. They were to have regular meetings right up to the end of the war, also working in subgroups on specific topics. The general outline of their program was spelled out in their May Day Manifesto of 1943, Peace Goals of the Workers’ Movement, published in the Swedish Trade Union’s weekly, Fackföreningsrörelsen.3 As Misgeld shows, the discussions were inspired by the ideas of the Atlantic Charter, and by Churchill and Roosevelt’s 1941 Declaration on the Peace Goals of the Allies. But it went further, by rejecting a simple adherence to the Allied position and following the ideas of the Labor Party Declaration of 1942.4 In answer to the question of how to win the peace, the IGDS planners drew on two basic ideas. First, they claimed that Versailles should not be repeated. A lasting peace could not be built on revenge, punishment, and retribution. Recovery must be achieved on the basis of a common reconstruction, and the defeated Germany must be allowed to recover in order to be able to contribute to healing the wounds. Second, for this to be possible the wartime alliance between Anglo-Saxon and Soviet powers must be continued in the form of peacetime cooperation. Any one-sided appeal or attempt to impose nationalist interests to the detriment of the other would be fatal to the reconstruction in general and to the interests of smaller nations in particular. In order to further these goals, they urged that the workers’ movement in Europe should build a new International—it was through transnational cooperation that national conflicts could be eased. Several people from this group were later to occupy important positions in their home countries: ministers, trade union leaders, journalists, ambassadors. Four of them would become actors of special importance in

International Socialist Attempts at Bridge-Building in the Early Postwar Period

| 223

European postwar history: Gunnar Myrdal, Alva Myrdal, Bruno Kreisky, and Willy Brandt. The creation in 1947 of the first regional organization of the UN, the UN Economic Commission for Europe, was largely inspired by these same ideas. However, their immediate hopes for the postwar period met with failure. Instead of the wartime alliance extending into a period of cooperation, the Cold War followed. Instead of being a joint all-European effort, the economic recovery proceeded under a double regime of hegemonic power dominance in a Europe that was profoundly divided, both economically and politically. Their hopes for a concerted transnational solidarity throughout the workers’ movement were similarly dashed, and the coming decades were characterized by deep divisions along national and ideological lines. The IGDS is thus very much an example of an unfinished political process, a transnational effort that failed.

Value Premises and Preliminary Questions In terms of values, the division between realism and liberalism has affinities with that between pessimism and optimism. In international relations theory, liberals tend to stress nonviolent methods of conflict solution, creating mutual trust as a basis for continuing longterm relations, whereas realists focus on power balances and the creation of positions of military and economic strength as a prerequisite for safeguarding interests and promoting stability. From the point of view of realists, the advent of the Cold War can be seen as a logical result of competition between the two world powers, or even as the defence of Western democracy by the United States and the United Kingdom against a communist threat. From a liberal standpoint, one might consider it regrettable that the broad social movement for cooperation, democracy, and egalitarian reforms was to be curtailed in both the East and the West, and that the historically close-knit European fabric of economic interdependence was to be still more deeply rent by economic and military war preparations. While working on Gunnar Myrdal’s theoretical and political legacy, I came to share his view that values are an inescapable part of our work as historians and that the quality of our scientific discussion is only heightened by a willingness to make these values explicit. It is evident that my interest in the efforts of this group of Democratic Socialists is influenced by the fact that I share a lot of their value premises: I think it was a tragedy that the peace was not won on an all-European scale. Having been declared, these values must be distinguished from theoretical analysis. One may ask, for example: Why did the efforts of the Democratic Socialists fail? This question requires analysis of specific historical processes, whereby every theoretical perspective reveals the relative strength of its

224

|

Örjan Appelqvist

premises. If we inquire why the aspirations of a group of actors did or did not succeed, we touch upon the issue concerning the relative influence of actors and factors on the international scene. And it is here that genuine scientific discussion starts, since the explanatory value of different theoretical perspectives depends both on the nature of the question and the craftmanship of the individual historian. If we consider the transnational effort towards the postwar reconstruction of the Internationale Gruppe in terms of a laboratory, we may formulate the following questions: • What happened to the postwar manifesto of the Democratic Socialists and their attempt to build a new socialist International? • What happened to the steps towards bilateral bridge-building— between Sweden and Poland and between Sweden and the Soviet Union—that IGDS member Gunnar Myrdal, then Minister of Commerce, tried to implement during the first two postwar years? • Who promoted the creation of the UN Economic Commission for Europe? Why was it discarded as the organizer of the European Reconstruction Program, the so-called Marshall Plan? Here, I will touch upon the creation of the ECE as an instance of an international all-European effort for reconstruction, inspired by the manifesto of the IGDS. • What can liberal and realist readings explain about these processes? I will conclude with some reflections on whether these experiences provide any lessons for future attempts at broader European cooperation. Although this question is too broad to be answered within the scope of this essay, it certainly underscores the pertinence of inquiring into the significance of the unfinished history of the interregnum between the Second World War and the bipolar Cold War world.

The Work and Reception of the Internationale Gruppe The work of the Internationale Gruppe was inspired by the Atlantic Charter, but also by discussions among Norwegian exile circles. Martin Tranmael, who for more than twenty years had been the leading ideologue of Norwegian social democracy, wanted to guard against the outspokenly Atlanticist policy, advocated by Trygve Lie and others, that bound Norway to the foreign policy of the UK. Together with Willy Brandt, then a journalist as well as a German socialist, Tranmael sent out Fredsmåle for Arbeiderrörelsen (Labor Movement Peace Goals) to encourage broader discussion among exiled social democrats and trade unionists in Stockholm. The publication of their five-page manifesto in the trade union weekly and the accompanying presentation at a meeting of the local social democratic

International Socialist Attempts at Bridge-Building in the Early Postwar Period

| 225

organization in Stockholm were signs that they had been granted at least semi-official recognition. Assembling representatives from both Nazi-occupied countries and Germany in the midst of the war to agree on the need for joint reconstruction must be seen as a major accomplishment. But the more precise the discussions were, the more necessary it was to be vague—especially when it came to the difficult question of territorial adjustments. Even though the participants understood that such adjustments would be unavoidable, they expressed the hope that strengthening all-European federalist institutions would reduce the importance of national borders. According to the IGDS, the threat of renewed calls for revenge within Germany should be diffused not by exacting devastating economic reparations from this country, but rather by dismantling the economic power structure that National Socialism had built upon. A thoroughly democratized Germany would foster cooperation instead of aggression. This attitude also coincided with Swedish interests in official circles: having been heavily engaged in trade with Germany during the war, Sweden would have much to lose if economic chaos broke out in Germany. However, the manifesto’s expressed wish to cooperate not only internationally with the Soviet Union, but also domestically with communists in various countries, gave rise to considerable controversy in Sweden, where the manifesto reflected the larger role communists played in the resistance against National Socialism in the occupied countries. The manifesto factored prominently in several of the social democratic speeches at the May rallies of 1943. Its first effect was to open the Swedish labor movement to the international issue. It was perceived as a sign of transition within Swedish social democracy—away from a subdued neutralism towards a more principled attitude of opposition to National Socialism in Germany. After the publication of the manifesto, great effort was made to develop its themes in more detail and adapt them to the changing fortunes of the war. But the war lasted longer than the refugees had predicted, and the longer the war went on, the stronger the nationalistic component within anti-Nazi resistance became. With no visible popular resistance against Hitler in Germany, the representatives of labor parties and resistance movements started to ask themselves: ‘Where is that other Germany?’ The first general attempt to create a new socialist International in the postwar era was the International Socialist Conference held in March 1945 in England in conjunction with a Labor Party conference. Alva Myrdal, a member of the IGDS, participated as a representative of Sweden’s social democratic movement. In the end, the postwar declaration of the conference was not at all in line with the aspirations of the Internationale Gruppe. The declaration was clearly aimed towards a ‘Vansittart’ solution, intent on punishing the German people. It discarded any

226

|

Örjan Appelqvist

talk of the two Germanys as ‘unjustifiable self-foolery,’ and declared the need to establish an occupation regime for Germany for ‘a considerable time’ to come. It even left open the question of whether Germany would ever recover the right to sovereign statehood: ‘That will depend on the Germans themselves.’ Moreover, it was clear that the consequences of the occupation should be dire. The plans called for an extensive reparations program over five or six years. Germany should not only have to repay or return all looted property, but also provide its former foes with machinery and tools and the like. Furthermore, there was to be largescale organized forced labor: German people should be sent to formerly occupied countries to rebuild their economy. Finally, all costs of the occupation armies should be paid by the Germans.5 Even though the program stipulated that the German people should not starve, it nevertheless made it clear that they could not expect to have any greater right to high living standards than Russians, Poles, Norwegians, or other peoples that had suffered German occupation. The conference declaration gave the Internationale Gruppe some consolation only with respect to its other central point—that of continued cooperation between the wartime Allies. According to the declaration, a twenty-year cooperation agreement between Great Britain and the Soviet Union should be a cornerstone of a future Europe. But since this was to be done at the expense of the German people, the declaration and the mood of participants at the conference brought profound disappointment to Alva Myrdal, the Swedish representative at the conference. Having heard her report in the Internationale Gruppe, one of the Germans complained that the national delegates sounded rather like military press officers. The proceedings of both the Labor Party conference of 1944 and the international discussions in March 1945 are blatant testimony to the renewed strength of nationalist attitudes in the final months of the war in Europe, which arose at the expense of ideological ties and thus lent weight to realist readings of political conditions at the end of the war.

Bilateral Bridge-Building If the avenue of internationalist cooperation between social democrats thus seemed closed, what other means were available to promote the ideals of the Internationale Gruppe? When the manifesto of the IGDS was published in 1943, Gunnar Myrdal had recently been appointed chairman of the Swedish Postwar Economic Planning Commission. Together with his deputy Richard Sterner, also an IGDS member and head of the central Trade Union Research Division, he played a key role in developing Sweden’s plans for international economic cooperation. In 1945 he became Minister of Commerce, and two of his major initiatives in trade

International Socialist Attempts at Bridge-Building in the Early Postwar Period

| 227

policy aimed to use Sweden’s trade relations to further a larger European economic cooperation. One of his first decisions in government was to go to Warsaw in August 1945 to negotiate a four-year bilateral trade agreement between Sweden and Poland. Sweden should give prompt reconstruction aid to Poland, restoring harbor facilities at Szczecin as well as railway communications, so that Poland could resume coal exports. In addition, Swedish industrial exports should be geared towards reconstruction needs, and lead to the opening of Poland’s trade relations with Western Europe in general. Myrdal’s personal ties with leading Polish politicians, including Oskar Lange, ensured that both sides agreed about the long-term significance of this bilateral treaty: it would benefit Poland’s economic independence as well as that of other buffer countries in a Europe dominated by the Soviet and American powers. The other major initiative was the conclusion of the five-year Trade and Credit Agreement between Sweden and the Soviet Union in 1946. Originally developed by Swedish export industries as a means to secure new profitable markets, the task of developing close economic ties with the Soviet Union was also seen as a way of securing the independence of Finland. The entire agreement was based on a very large Swedish government loan of one thousand million Swedish crowns,6 since it was clear that the Soviet Union needed credit in order to stimulate foreign trade. When Myrdal became Minister of Commerce, he integrated this trade agreement in a larger international framework. According to one of his collaborators, ‘it should inspire the Americans to do likewise, with a generous giant government credit. That would be a way of creating a spirit of cooperation between East and West even after the war.’7 In 1946, following the onset of conflicts among the Allied powers and the subsequent Cold War rhetoric, Swedish business circles became more reluctant to accept the tenets of this agreement.8 The liberal and right-wing press, which had previously been favourable towards the agreement, suddenly saw an opportunity to turn it into a political weapon against social democracy: by playing on ancient anti-Russian feelings among Swedes, they gave vivid descriptions of the disastrous effects that would ensue from the agreement. Nonetheless, Myrdal succeeded in pushing the deal through parliament with a rather large majority. These two initiatives show how important states and state machineries were as actors during the initial open yet confused phase of postwar reconstruction. At the same time, the actual development of these bilateral trade relations reveals the limits of the authority of the Swedish government over business interests. The trade agreement with Poland assumed an annual Swedish surplus of a hundred million Swedish crowns, to be covered with government loans. But since Swedish industrial firms practically refused to export goods without generous compensation for nationalizations, the net result was that Poland exported far more goods

228

|

Örjan Appelqvist

than it received.9 Thus it was Poland that supported Swedish reconstruction, not the other way around. Swedish-Soviet trade equally failed to live up to expectations: a number of contracts were signed concerning mainly industrial equipment, electrical generators, and fishing vessels, but there were only reluctantly and belatedly delivered by Swedish businesses. Only half of the credits were ever used, and a broader political effect was absent.10 This case demonstrates the considerable drawbacks of an excessively state-centric analysis of international relations. It suggests that the margins of manoeuvre available to various states are very much dependent on domestic power relations and institutional factors, and thus underscores the relevance of a pluralist and institutionalist reading of this period.

The Third Avenue—an International All-European Organization? The third case I want to discuss concerns the establishment of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe and its fate. The first two years after the war were dominated by national efforts towards reconstruction in the newly liberated countries, and by the development of the occupation regime in Germany. The winter of 1946–1947 was a time of severe crisis, and not only in the starving Germany. Above all, this period was marked by an energy crisis, and there was a scarcity of coal in all regions. It was clear that any further national recovery was predicated upon the resumption of regional economic ties. The arterial system of the European economy had to be reconstituted. Immediately after the war, several emergency institutions had been set up by the Allied authorities. The UNRRA organized relief aid for the masses of refugees. The European Coal Organisation delivered rationed coal from the Ruhr district but also from British and American sources. The European Commission on Inland Transports [ECITO] and the Economic Emergency Committee for Europe [EECE] dealt with day-to-day problems of provision. The general economic crisis made it clear that these organizations had to be replaced by an organization with far greater capacities—not a simple coordination of Allied military authorities, but a truly international organization with a broad regional basis. The proposal originally came from Polish Minister of Labor and Social Welfare Jan Stanczyk at the General Assembly of the UN in February 1946, and was unanimously adopted on principle. The path from principle to practical implementation was long, however, for it took all of 1946 to produce a resolution on the practicalities, and only in March 1947 was the formal decision made by the Economic and Social Council of the UN (ECOSOC) to establish the Economic Commission for Europe as a ‘semi-autonomous and permanent’

International Socialist Attempts at Bridge-Building in the Early Postwar Period

| 229

organization, an assembly for free discussions that was ‘empowered to make recommendations on economic matters.’ This was not merely a continuation of the coordination of transport, coal deliveries, and economic assistance for the emergency institutions on a permanent basis, for it acquired highly specialized economic expertise providing analyses and recommendations on economic matters. And by planning to employ 187 officers in Geneva, it was the first international civil service to be built on a regional level, based on the UN Charter.

Who took the initiative and who was reticent? The first thing to note, following the close account by Václav Kostellecky in his book UN Economic Commission for Europe, is the active role played by the representatives of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Norway—that is, by small and medium-sized nations for whom a more multilateral cooperation would widen the scope of manoeuvre. Second, the attitudes of the representatives from the UK and US were clearly divided. On the British side, the UN representatives Henry McNeill (ECOSOC) and David Owen (Executive Assistant to UN General Secretary Trygve Lie), seconded by Richard Stafford Cripps (President of the Board of Trade), advocated the agenda for the ECE, while the Foreign Office under Aneurin Bevin was generally sceptical, fearing that a multilateral organization might diminish the leverage that the UK could wield as a trading nation. On the American side, Kostellecky claims that divisions ran between economic and political experts within the State Department. New Deal liberals such as Isador Lubin, Paul Porter, and Walt Rostow were all in favor of the agenda and ‘exercised strong leadership by getting the ECE going.’11 On the other hand, the political wing of the State Department feared ‘obstruction from the Russians’ and grew more wary in the first months of 1947. The Soviet diplomats were very hesitant from the beginning and expressed reservations about a permanent regional organization that might turn against them. Another fear that Molotov voiced in talks with Oskar Lange, the Polish delegate to the UN, was that the Soviet Union would have to provide statistical information and eventually accept UN economic observers. Ultimately, however, Lange succeeded in securing a neutral position from Molotov.12 The final elaboration of the tasks and competences of the UNECE was, significantly, left to representatives of ‘the Big Four’ in the ECOSOC. Although the Soviet representative had some doubts about the vast powers accorded to the ECE with respect to the investigation and treatment of practical cross-border problems as well as to recommendations concerning even Germany, they accepted the overruling. When the UNECE was formally established on 28 March 1947 as the first regional

230

|

Örjan Appelqvist

organization within the UN, it may very well, as Kostellecky states, have been the very last possible moment at which such a decision could have been taken.13

The Choice of Executive Secretary Gunnar Myrdal, then Sweden’s Minister of Commerce, was chosen as the first Executive Secretary of the UNECE. Myrdal provided an obvious personal link with the Internationale Gruppe. This choice was not fortuitous. It might have been surprising that this post was offered to an economist from neutral Sweden, but it again testifies to the relative importance of transnational networks between liberals at that time. Myrdal had close contacts in the UK, Norway, and Poland as well as in the US. The Assistant General Secretary David Owen—who played a crucial role in Myrdal’s selection—had been in Sweden during the war, and had even participated in meetings held by the Internationale Gruppe. Trygve Lie knew Myrdal through his contacts with Arne Skaug, Ragnar Frisch, and other Norwegian economists. And among the Polish representatives were several of his friends, made both during refugee years in Stockholm and in connection with the trade negotiations between Sweden and Poland after the war. During the early war years, Myrdal had been scientific leader of a large research project on race relations in the US;14 therefore he was equally well known in liberal circles on the other side of the Atlantic. Far from accidental, his nomination testifies to the strength of the general liberal ideas of the Internationale Gruppe and to the importance of personal networks of actors in the international arena. When the ECE opened its first session in May 1947, seventeen European nations were present. It was broader than any previous postwar meeting in Europe.15 The importance attached to the session was marked by the list of participants: Henry McNeill (Minister of State in the Foreign Office), Will L. Clayton (Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs in the State Department), Paul Porter (US Special Representative in Europe). The USSR was represented by Valerian Zorin, Czechoslovakia by Jan Masaryk, and France by André Philip. In the wake of the deadlock at the Moscow Meeting of Foreign Ministers, it was greeted with positive expectations in the general opinion. The British weekly The Economist hoped it would be ‘a useful businesslike forum in which Europeans from East and West could participate.’16 The rather tense atmosphere of the proceedings sparked many heated discussions, most of which were resolved behind the scenes in meetings between Myrdal and the heads of delegations. The commission had to settle the balance of competence between the ECE and the member states, the relation to the Allied Control Authority in Germany, voting rules, and so on. I will not dwell on these issues here,17 but it is worth noting that in all these discussions there was generally a genuine effort to make the ECE work. As the US representative Clayton said, ‘Reconstruction could only

International Socialist Attempts at Bridge-Building in the Early Postwar Period

| 231

be achieved through teamwork.’18 Summing up the two weeks of discussion, the Polish representative Jacek Rudzinski praised as ‘the major achievement of the first session that it had been possible to build a bridge between the Western Powers and the Soviet Union over the chasm which had appeared in Moscow. The Russians had come . . . and pledged to continue cooperation.’19

The Crucial Decision: Geneva or Paris? Soon after being established, the role of the ECE gained the attention of world politics in May and June 1947. The reason for this was obvious: the announcement of the European Reconstruction Program, also called the Marshall Plan, in a speech by the US Secretary of State George Marshall in June. It meant that the US promised to provide large-scale economic assistance to the countries of Europe. This initiative had been discussed throughout May in the State Department, and was well known by the actors in Europe as well. It of course raised a vitally important question: Who was going to administer aid on the European side? This question remained unanswered for two months, resulting in a fierce battle for influence. It was a very clear example of the struggle between national interests and integrationists, and between national bureaucracies and international institutions. For Gunnar Myrdal, the case was clear: the advanced expertise of the 190-person strong staff being assembled in Geneva and the broad European representation made ECE the obvious choice to ensure a level-minded and fair distribution of the American aid. At the end of May Myrdal flew to Paris and London to discuss the transfer of the emergency organizations, the so-called E-organizations, into the ECE and also the general role of the ECE in European reconstruction. In London he met with active support from the economic side of the British government: not only from his longtime friends, Sir Richard Stafford Cripps, President of the Board of Trade, and Hugh Dalton, Chancellor of the Exchequer, but also, following discussions, from Herbert Morrison, Lord President of the Council. They all supported the strong multilateral approach Myrdal was pleading for. His contacts with the representative of the Foreign Office, Henry McNeill, were less fortunate. In general, the Foreign Office resented Myrdal’s insistence on an independent recruitment policy, as well as his insistence on having a Soviet deputy as well as a British one, and on selecting the names himself. McNeill warned Myrdal that ‘it would be a very bad beginning if he placated the Russians at the expense of an American misunderstanding.’20 This controversy over recruitment was underpinned by divergent principles: while Myrdal wanted the Secretariat of the ECE to be ‘a body of International Civil Servants,’21 the Foreign Office wanted the national states—and in particular the British state—to have the deciding voice in

232

|

Örjan Appelqvist

the recruitment process, contending also that British officials in the ECE should act on national instructions. The case for universalism, using the existing UN institution in order to channel ERP aid, was obviously quite strong, and it won considerable support in the UK. But in the end national interests, as perceived by realists, proved to be stronger on both sides of the Atlantic. According to Kostellecky, it would seem that the real decision was taken during discussions in the US State Department between George Kennan and Will Clayton, who represented the political and economic wings of the department respectively. Clayton, Under Secretary of State and at that time regarded as ‘the nation’s most foremost statesman,’ had participated in the first session of the ECE in Geneva. He had initially proposed ‘a coordinated European recovery program assisted and primed by the US. The initial approach should be Europe-wide in order to avoid undesirable psychological repercussions in Western Europe and to attract if possible the Soviet Union and the satellites.’ The ECE was proposed ‘as the most appropriate agency for handling such a program.’22 But after the failure of the Meeting of Foreign Ministers in Moscow, there was a growing climate of suspicion, expressed particularly by George Kennan. He professed to be surprised by the Soviet participation in the ECE: ‘In any case the Russians are there and we have to reckon with them. . . . But they may try to worm themselves into the administration of it, and they will drag their feet so that the thing will never work at all unless it works to their benefit.’23 The growing importance of power politics was also reflected in Clayton’s memorandum of May 19—one of the two principal documents preparing the speech of Marshall—where he stated that the three-year grant should be ‘based on a European plan which the principal European countries, headed by UK, France and Italy should work out. . . . We must avoid getting into another UNRRA. The United States must run the show.’24 This declaration is an expression of clear-cut power politics, both in its insistence on the overall control by the US and in its intention to use the main national states of Western Europe as the tool for exercising such control. But what about the rest of Europe? On this issue, Clayton was also explicit in a memorandum he wrote some days later: ‘While Western Europe is essential to Eastern Europe, the reverse is not true. Coal and grains from Eastern Europe are important to Western Europe, but these products will be exported westwards in any event because of the necessity of obtaining vital foreign exchange for necessary products from the West creates a suction which the USSR is incapable of counteracting, and there can only be absolute and final Soviet domination of Eastern Europe by force of arms. It was concluded that a European economic federation is feasible even without the participation of Eastern European countries.’25 In the finalized form of these considerations, the actual speech of George Marshall made no explicit reference to the ECE. All references

International Socialist Attempts at Bridge-Building in the Early Postwar Period

| 233

to all-European participation were arguably designed only to soothe the agitated public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic. When relaying the contents of the speech to Ernest Bevin in advance, Dean Acheson, Marshall’s close aid in the State Department, made it clear that they expected a British initiative as a response. On the day before Marshall’s speech, a memorandum by one of the Board of Trade officials, David Waley, explicitly spelled out this expectation: ‘We are now told that Europe, preferably under UK leadership must, between now and November work out such a plan.’ As for the role of the ECE, he stated: ‘There is much to be said in favor of the ECE undertaking such a job. . . . If we were to set up a new body to do the work which excludes Eastern Europe, this would be a new and decisive step to splitting Europe into two antagonistic economic blocs.’ The proposal by the Economic Relations Section at the Foreign Office nevertheless argued from a strongly realist position: ‘Nobody seems to think that a “plan” for Europe is really a serious proposition or anything more than eyewash designed to extract dollars from a reluctant Congress. If this is so, the danger of Russia obstructing a plan falls to the ground. It might even be desirable that Russia should obstruct and so incur the blame for failure to produce a serious plan.’26 The record of the Foreign Office meeting ended with considerations about the fact that the ECE was too newly established to be able to tackle such a heavy task as the reconstruction planning—‘to ask it to prepare a “plan” for Europe here and now would be like asking it to run before it can walk’—but, in my opinion, the real argument lay in the lack of control rather than in a lack of expertise. The Foreign Office thus decided to bypass the Second Assembly of the ECE slated for July and to issue a joint invitation, together with the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to a separate conference in Paris, the Conference on European Economic Cooperation (CEEC).27 The decision had all the consequences both Clayton and Waley had anticipated, providing ‘a decisive step to splitting Europe into two antagonistic economic blocs.’ Long before the delegates arrived in Paris, the division of Europe was sealed and the ECE relegated to the sidelines of European integration as a purely technical and scientific organization. The way in which this was to be accomplished was nothing more than a technicality.

A Pyrrhic Victory for the IGDS The announcement of the Marshall Plan was a vindication of the idea of the Internationale Gruppe that vengeful harsh punishment was not a way to build a stable peace. The economic crisis early in 1947 had forced Western European countries to abandon the policy of taking revenge on Germany that they had adopted early in 1945. It was all too obvious that Germany must be given a helping hand to recover if the

234

|

Örjan Appelqvist

European economy was to prosper. But although this showed that the first of the two tenets of the Internationale Gruppe had been accepted, it happened on terms that entirely contradicted the other convictions they held. Instead of using the ECE at the level of international integration, as a way of overcoming difficult national conflicts, the management of the CEEC by the UK and France caused the national states to strengthen their power in the process—especially the US, UK, and France. And instead of paving the way for an all-European integration, balancing powers between small and medium-sized nations, the division resulting from the Paris conference built a bipolar system based on exclusion and major power dominance.

The Struggle over the ECE from a Theoretical Point of View The proponents of a liberal theoretical perspective on international relations can deduce strong arguments from this third case study about the establishment of the ECE. The mere fact that the ECE was established in the midst of growing dissension between the Allied powers is evidence of the strength of ideas, even when they are not unequivocally supported by states. The constitution process also provides convincing arguments against a crude realist position, according to which states are the only relevant actors on the scene and act according to putatively clear national interests. Instead, the evidence points towards the pervasiveness of individual actors in international organizations, the importance of transnational networks, and the relatively open battles waged within the administrations of individual nations in order to define the character of specific national interests. However, when national interests are clearly perceived to be in conflict, and when the power to distribute major material resources is involved, the realist interpretation of priorities gains credence. Both in the US and the UK, it was arguments pertaining to control that motivated a course of action leading to the division of Europe. Though the initiative of the Marshall Plan and the invitation to the Paris conference were formulated as inclusive all-European proposals, the actors themselves perceived them as mere lip service designed to allay the fears of public opinion. The practical steps of the policy were devised in order to ensure political control of the process.

Conclusion The institutional struggle leading to the establishment of the CEEC, rather than the ECE, as a coordinating body must be understood in relation to

International Socialist Attempts at Bridge-Building in the Early Postwar Period

| 235

its broader context. This process was a confirmation of political choices underpinned by a choice of method: to channel US economic aid through agents dominated by nation-states rather than through a universalist UN body. In general terms, it could be said that whereas the transnational liberal networks, of which the IGDS was only one, played an important role in determining the terms of postwar integration discussions, the outcome of the conflict was decided by broader power configurations. This, however, would be a far too somber a final note. For even though the ideas of the Internationale Gruppe were defeated in the short term, they nevertheless survived to surface later as dominant policies. Over a period of ten years, the UN Economic Commission for Europe under Gunnar Myrdal developed an inclusive kind of International Civil Service ethos that provided space for all-European cooperation in the midst of Cold War rivalries. During the 1970s, another member of the Internationale Gruppe, Bruno Kreisky, was an important architect of the bridge-building role that neutral Austria was able to play in Europe and elsewhere. When Willy Brandt knelt down at the Warsaw Ghetto Monument in 1970, he marked the beginning of an Ostpolitik determined to foster cooperation over and in spite of ideological divides. And the persistent work towards disarmament and peaceful conflict solutions by Alva Myrdal was also inspired by the internationalist discussions in the Internationale Gruppe. Ideas do matter. And unfinished histories have a tendency to reappear in later conjunctures with unexpected force. In the long-term perspective, supporters of all-European integration have been able to build upon firm material realities: the economic division of labor in Europe today does not follow national borders, but is a broad arterial system of economic and cultural interaction that has evolved over centuries. In this respect, the Cold War division will perhaps be perceived merely as a rather short parenthesis.

Notes 1. Klaus Misgeld, Die ‘Internationale Gruppe Demokratischer Sozialisten’ in Stockholm 1942– 1945: Zur sozialistischen Friedensdiskussion während des Zweiten Weltkrieges (Stockholm, 1976). 2. A full list of IGDS members and short biographies are presented in Misgeld, Die ‘Internationale Gruppe Demokratischer Sozialisten,’ 181–86. 3. ‘Demokratiska socialisters fredsmål’ (Peace Goals of Democratic Socialists), Fackföreningsrörelsen, no. 4 (1943): 23–30. 4. ‘The Old World and the New Society,’ the so-called Interim Report, presented at the Labour Party Conference in May 1942. 5. Quotes from the conference declaration, in the personal archive of Alva Myrdal. 6. The equivalent of USD 240 million at that time. 7. Sweden’s chief negotiator, Rolf Sohlman, quoted in G. Hägglöf, Fredens vägar (Stockholm, 1973).

236

|

Örjan Appelqvist

8. It is interesting to note the different attitudes within the US administration. See Örjan Appelqvist, Bruten Brygga: Gunnar Myrdal och Sveriges ekonomiska efterkrigspolitik 1943– 1947 (Stockholm, 2000), 384–99. 9. The Swedish trade deficit with Poland from 1946 to 1953 amounted to 558.6 million Swedish crowns. The Swedish-Polish trade relations are dealt with in detail in Appelqvist, Bruten Brygga, 336–41. 10. For a detailed and general discussion of these relations, see Appelqvist, Bruten Brygga, 367–99. 11. Václav Kostellecky, UN Economic Commission for Europe: The Beginning of a History (Göteborg, 1989), 25. 12. Ibid., 28. 13. Ibid., 36. 14. Resulting in the publication of An American Dilemma, 1944. 15. In addition to national representatives, a number of non-governmental organizations, especially trade unions, were also present, including other relevant UN bodies. 16. 3 May 1947, quoted in Kostellecky, UN Economic Commission for Europe, 58. 17. A very clear account of these is given by Kostellecky, UN Economic Commission for Europe, 57–82. 18. Ibid., 61. 19. Discussion with M. Holliday, 24 May (Public Record Office, UK–hereafter PRO- Serial archive UE 4242/2993/53.); Kostellecky, UN Economic Commission for Europe, 77. 20. PRO-UE 5526/2607/53. Quoted in Kostellecky, UN Economic Commission for Europe, 98. 21. Quoted from a memorandum presented by Gunnar Myrdal to the heads of delegation at the ECE on 10 May 1947. Kostelleckýs personal archive, Archive of Labor Movement, Stockholm—hereafter STO-23.1.10. 22. Memorandum sent on 9 May to Kennan through Clayton’s aides. See Kostellecky, UN Economic Commission for Europe, 89. 23. Lecture in War College on 6 May 1947. Quoted in George F. Kennan, Memoirs 1925–1950 (London, 1968), 339. 24. The full text of the memorandum is in Foreign Relations of the United States—hereafter FRUS 1947, vol. III, 232. Quoted in Kostellecky, UN Economic Commission for Europe, 92. 25. The summary of discussions at the meeting of the heads of offices in the State Department on 28 May 1947. FRUS—1947, vol. III, 235. Quoted in Kostellecky, UN Economic Commission for Europe, 93. 26. Waley to Cripps, 4 June 1947, PRO-UE 4781/168/53. See Kostellecky, UN Economic Commission for Europe, 102. 27. Later formalized into OEEC, the fore-runner of the present OECD.

Chapter 14

NATION BUILDING IN THE ERA OF INTEGRATION: THE CASE OF MOLDOVA

( Igor Caşu

The Republic of Moldova: A Southeastern European Country? Theoretical Background The term Southeastern Europe refers to the former Yugoslav republics (except Slovenia), Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania—territories that were under the Ottoman Empire for centuries, along with Greece. Most of the inhabitants of these territories, with the exception of Croatia, are Orthodox Christian. I include Croatia and leave out Slovenia because of the way in which Croatian nationalism evolved over the last century and a half. I also leave out Hungary, even though most of this country was a part of the Ottoman Empire for about two centuries. Hungary could be considered as a country peripheral to the Balkans ,1 since it has more in common with Polish, Czech, and Slovak patterns of development and political stability, at least in the post-Cold War era. Southeastern Europe hence coincides roughly with what, over the last two centuries, has been called the Balkans. One difference is that the former term is a more neutral, geographical denomination, while the latter is rather ideological and geopolitical. This is not the only such case in early modern and modern history. There have been various cases when geographical denominations, i.e., neutral ones, have become fraught with ideological or geopolitical connotations. One of the first examples in this regard relates to the way Europeans dealt with colonial peoples, what Edward Said called the ‘invention of Orientalism.’2 Larry Wolf, in his inspired study of a cultural phenomenon created by the Western European Enlightenment, coined the expression ‘the invention of Eastern Europe.’3 In 1997, Maria Todorova published a book on ‘imagining the Balkans.’4 Vesna Goldworthy focused on the role Notes for this section begin on page 251.

238

|

Igor Caşu

of literary works in imagining these types of ‘Ruritania.’5 In all these case studies, what were initially geographical terms evolved to denominate geopolitical and ideological constructions rather than mere territories as such. It has been pointed out that such terms reflect a Eurocentric bias, that is, a Western European approach towards the Other, depicted as something different and subsequently stereotypically pejorative, value-ridden, having negative characteristics contrasting with the allegedly purely positive characteristics of Western Christian civilization. As a matter of fact, Western Europe as such is itself a more recent invention than one is usually inclined to think—it is a creation of the Cold War era. In this way, from a geopolitical and ideological point of view, the Federal Republic of Germany became a Western European country, even though before the Second World War Germany had been perceived as a Central European country. In the same manner, Greece and Japan became part of the West after 1945.6 These kinds of strategies are basically ideological, not in the sense that ideology is simply false or that it represents reality in a distorted way, but in that it is false in a certain manner and distorts reality in a certain mode for a precise goal.7 At the same time, it should be pointed out that various national or regional entities, like Western Europe for instance, exist only in historical relations and fields of power.8 In short, every strategy of selfrepresentation and group formation has been dependent on the creation of negative Others. In this regard, Edward Said remarked that ‘European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.’9 As Todorova argues, the Balkan Peninsula was ‘invented’ in 1808 by August Zeune, a German geographer. Until the early nineteenth century, Southeastern Europe was known variously as the ‘Hellenic,’ ‘Illyrian,’ ‘Thracian,’ ‘Dardanian,’ ‘Roman,’ or ‘Byzantine’ Peninsula. Other names for this area have included ‘European Turkey,’ ‘Turkey-in-Europe,’ the ‘European Ottoman Empire,’ the ‘European Levant,’ and the ‘Oriental Peninsula.’ Ethnic designations have been in use for a long time, especially before the Ottoman Empire seized the territory: ‘Greek Peninsula,’ ‘SlavoGreek Peninsula,’ ‘South Slavic Peninsula,’ and so on.10 In 1929, after the political changes brought about by the First World War, another German geographer, Otto Maul, pleaded that the most adequate name for the territory under discussion would be Südosteuropa. That change was quite justifiable in an era when Southeastern Europe was becoming part of a new international security framework, the so-called cordon sanitaire. In Mathias Bernath’s words, Southeastern Europe is a ‘neutral, nonpolitical, nonideological concept, which, moreover, abolished the standing historicalpolitical dichotomy between the Danubian monarchy and the Ottoman Balkans that had become irrelevant.’11 In the early 1930s, however, the term Südosteuropa entered into the ideological discourse of Nazi Germany as a part of Lebensraum propaganda and was subsequently compromised

Nation Building in the Era of Integration

| 239

as a neutral denominator. It should also be noted that on the whole, while German authors contributed to the geographical and geopolitical delimitation of the Balkans and Southeastern Europe, British writers, such as E. M. Foster, Lawrence Durrell, Evelyn Waugh, Bernard Shaw, and Olivia Manning, were more inclined to stigmatize and demonize the peoples inhabiting the area.12 Without going into further details, it is sufficient to note that Bessarabia was a part of the Ottoman Empire for three centuries up to 1812. In the interwar period, due to the fact that Bessarabia was integrated into Greater Romania, most of the present-day Republic of Moldova once again became a part of Southeastern Europe, both politically and economically.13 Nowadays, it is culturally and linguistically almost the same, so one could reasonably pose the question: Why is post-Soviet Moldavia not considered a Southeastern European country? After all, it is a Balkan country (in terms of Ottoman legacy), or at least a Balkan peripheral (not core Balkan) country—like Turkey, for example. The reason why historical Bessarabia as a whole does fit the definition is given by Imanuel Geiss. Southeast Europe or, for short, the Balkans, is to be understood as countries between Germans and Italians to the West, Russians and Turks to the East, from Hungary to Greece. Most of the regions are mountainous and highly fragmented geographically, hence also ethnically and politically. Thus, the Balkans were for most of their history under imperial rule—Byzantium, the Ottoman Sultans, the Habsburgs. If they lived in precarious independence, they fought each other over rival sub-imperial claims. Where they overlapped in space, such as in Bosnia-Herzegovina between Croats and Serbs, they clashed in wars once the Balkan peoples or nations were back on the stage of sovereign states or nation building.14

Bessarabia, it is true, fits the above definition, in addition to having been under tsarist and Soviet direct rule for over a century and a half. But these two imperial legacies overlapped the previous Ottoman legacy of three centuries from the early 1500s to the early 1800s. When asked to define the Balkans as briefly as possible, Maria Todorova said that the Balkans are an Ottoman legacy. So, according to one of the most authoritative historians of the region, Bessarabia is included in that definition of the Balkans. These are only a few arguments, at least historical and geographical ones, demonstrating that the present-day Republic of Moldova could be regarded as belonging specifically to that part of the ‘other Europe.’ I am using the terms Moldavia, Bessarabia, and (Republic of) Moldova interchangeably, even though they refer to different historical periods and have different spatial and conceptual connotations. Needless to say, except when otherwise specified, I use the term Moldavia in reference to the period after 1812 in the eastern part of the former medieval principality of Moldavia. At the same time, it should be noted that, during the medieval period, the Latinized form Moldavia15 was used. After 1991 some

240

|

Igor Caşu

authors mistakenly took this for the Russian form.16 If Moldavia were a Russian form of Moldova, it would be considered normal to renounce this colonial name and return to the native form, Moldova.17 In the nineteenth century and the interwar period, both tsarist and Bucharest authorities used the term Bessarabia to distinguish that territory and its inhabitants, for various purposes, from the western part of Moldavia situated between the Prut River and the Carpathian Mountains. After the Second World War, the Soviets reintroduced the Latinized form Moldavia, and the term Moldavians was loaded with a clear ethnic meaning. For my part, I use the terms Bessarabian(s), Moldavian(s), and Moldovan(s) as regional and civic connotations rather than ethnic ones. It should be added that Bessarabian and Romanian have been names used mainly by others from the East or West, while the primary selfidentification of the population is, and has been for centuries, Moldavian (moldovean, moldoveni). In other words, the medieval state and regional identification have survived.18 At the same time, when specifying that the majority of the Moldavian population are ethnic Romanians, I mean first of all their historical, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural identity. This leaves open the question as to whether they favor or oppose their belonging to a wider community, that of Romanians making up an ethno-nation19 as a whole. Charles King summarizes the discussion on present-day Moldavian identity as follows. Apart from the three decades of Greater Romania, from 1918 to 1940, the inhabitants of postcommunist Romania and post-Soviet Moldavia have spent most of the two centuries apart. The Romanians and their cousins east of the Prut River have lived under separate legal, administrative, political, and religious systems, all of which in various ways were intent on creating as wide a gulf as possible between them. Both history and history-makers have produced an uncertain sense of distinctiveness among today’s Moldovans. Most freely admit that they speak something akin to Romanian . . . but most also refuse to describe their nationality as ‘just’ Romanian. As in much of Eastern Europe, shifting borders meant shifting cultural policies, and the peculiar sense of identity among modern Moldovans is the legacy of both. It is thus impossible to give a linear account of Moldovan nationhood, for whether they even constitute a nation in a cultural sense is highly dubious. There is no distinct literature, no separate language, no history apart from that of the states and empires of which they have been part. Yet most Moldovans feel themselves to be something other than simply Romanians, and since 1991, they have had their own state to show for it.20

Finally, one should stress the Europeanization of contemporary history, the central topic of this volume, which I define as an attempt to overcome the national paradigm in historiography and reconstitute things past in a regional and continental framework. Meanwhile, from the anthropological point of view, Europeanization is perceived as a strategy for self-representation and a device for power that fundamentally

Nation Building in the Era of Integration

| 241

reorganizes territoriality and peoplehood, the two principles of group identification that have shaped Europe in the last centuries. Perceived in this way, Europeanization is both a vision and a process.21 As for the Republic of Moldova, as a precondition for Europeanization, I think that first of all it should be de-Sovietized, both politically and economically as well as militarily, and then reincluded in the regional architecture of Southeastern Europe, as it was for centuries before the early 1800s and during the interwar period. In this sense, I would say that post-Soviet Moldavia needs Southeastern Europeanization before or in conjunction with the Europeanization process. For better or for worse, this seems to be the most viable alternative to its primarily geopolitical identification as a post-Soviet republic. The Baltic States—also occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940 as a result of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact—escaped this fate due to a series of cultural, political, and economic factors, but it should also be recalled that their claims have been perceived more seriously because they acted as a group of three states. The Republic of Moldova has no such advantage and thus needs a special strategy for de-Sovietization and de-Communization.

Bessarabia/Eastern Moldavia in the Southeastern European Context In 1903 Bessarabia entered into the annals of the new century as a result of the much publicized Chisinau anti-Jewish pogrom. On this occasion, the New York Times and other influential American and Western European newspapers launched a large-scale campaign condemning the violation of human rights in tsarist Russia as a whole. Even though there were similar pogroms before and afterwards in the eastern part of the empire, Chisinau marked a turning point in the internationalization of that problem. Chisinau became a symbol of government complicity in sustaining discrimination against a certain segment of its subjects.22 A decade afterwards, the Balkan wars broke out and, whether justifiably or stereotypically, the region came to be seen as a focal point of endless violent ethnic hatred. Both the Chisinau pogrom and the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 symbolized and anticipated a century of ethnic conflicts, mass killings, and total warfare. In both cases too, the emergence of modern national identities was a factor. As Omer Bartov pointed out, modern identity, war, and genocide have been closely related, the first exacerbated by the second and giving birth to the third.23 In the 1990s the Balkan confrontation resurfaced, and ethnic violence as well as ethnic cleansing, once thought to be a phenomenon of the past, reemerged in that part of Europe. ‘Balkanization’—the fragmentation of previously unified polities into small and inimical states—once again became a reality in Southeastern Europe. Almost at the same time, the present-day

242

|

Igor Caşu

Republic of Moldova, comprising more than three-quarters of historical Bessarabia, resuscitated the interest of Western journalists, scholars, and politicians. It became the first country in the post-Cold War era to witness the rehabilitation of a more or less soft communist regime after ten years of transition to democracy and market economy. The return to power of former nomenklatura personnel has occurred in other countries of Central and Eastern Europe, but with different labels and electoral platforms. In February 2001, Moldavia became the only country in which a party bearing the word ‘communist’ in its official name, and openly calling for the reestablishment of a state-run economy and other elements of Soviet-type societies, succeeded in winning a parliamentary majority. How, then, should the present-day Republic of Moldova—comprised of the bulk of historical Bessarabia and a tiny territory across the Dniester River—be considered in terms of geopolitics and identity? What is Moldavia’s place in the new European post-Cold War architecture? The majority of scholarly and policy accounts include it in the category of postSoviet states. This is true enough in relation to certain facts: it was part of the Commonwealth of Independent States after 1991, and the problems it faces are very similar to those experienced by other former Soviet republics, notably the European ones. But I think this is just part of the story and does not reflect the broader perspective of the historical process, especially in the long term.24 Lucan Way, for instance, has explained communist parliamentary as well as presidential victories in February 2001 in terms of a pluralism by default paradigm, viewed in a short-term perspective as a consequence of the Soviet legacy. ‘Pluralism by default’ refers to ‘a situation in which competitive politics is primarily the outgrowth, not of an institutionalized civil society or strong opposition, but rather of a fragmented and polarized elite and weak state unable to monopolize political control.’25 This concept is, however, somewhat narrow and obfuscates other short-term and long-term explanations as well as recent developments in the area. For instance, there are about one million Moldavians working abroad. Some 55 percent of them are in Russia, 18 percent in Italy, and the rest in Greece, Portugal, Germany, Ireland, etc. They transfer about 1 billion dollars annually to their families, but only 5 percent of that sum is invested; the rest covers consumption and current payments. This explains, if only partially, the communists’ victory in the parliamentary elections of February 2001, since the average age of Moldavians working abroad is thirtyfive, and they usually cannot vote.26 The older generation, by contrast, is very active during elections and tends to vote overwhelmingly for conservative, nostalgic parties such as the Communists. In contrast to Romania, for instance, in Moldavia the words communist and communism have much appeal, especially among older generations of Moldavian citizens, regardless of their ethnic allegiance. This reflects a collective mentality that is deeply afraid of change, even though the present is perceived critically.

Nation Building in the Era of Integration

| 243

Such a situation could have more profound causes than one might think. Over the long term, however, one is inclined to postulate that the Soviet legacy could hardly be considered to be the sole explanation for the situation and its economic and political instability. The first layer could be identified as coinciding with the Ottoman period. The Ottoman legacy, as Wayne Vucinich has pointed out, imprinted certain characteristics on the subjects of that empire from a longue durée perspective, i.e., for a long time afterwards. The Ottoman social system fostered many undesirable habits (e.g., the bribe, or bakhshish, distrust of the government, and so forth) that lived on after the Empire’s demise. Centuries of feudal bondage contributed to the prevalence of yavashlik, a state of being characterized by lethargy, indifference, indecision, and a tendency toward submissiveness, which grew out of the necessity for survival. This can be easily detected in the attitude toward authority—apprehension but at the same time humility and acquiescence. Coupled with subservience is cleverness, expressed in attempts to get around obstacles, including those erected by authority, by using none-too-ethical (from the point of view of the government) or even illegal means. The notion persists that it is perfectly permissible to cheat and steal from the government, a problem with which none of the successor states has been able to cope altogether successfully. The peasant suspicion of government, the police agent, and the tax collector has its origin, at least partially, in his experiences under Ottoman rule. . . . The future being uncertain, the subjects of the Ottoman Empire developed a rather hedonistic attitude toward life and a great appreciation of leisure.27

These characteristics were preserved under the subsequent tsarist and Soviet regimes, especially by the latter through its policy of mass famine in 1946, deportations, forced collectivization, and industrialization. Indeed, the state controlled every aspect of society through the party nomenklatura, centralized economy, and KGB. Since private property had been forbidden and everything belonged to the state, that is, to ‘nobody,’ it was not immoral to steal what was considered to belong to ‘nobody.’ In legal terms, however, that ‘nobody’ was very real, and in response to the desire to escape penalties, corruption was widespread. The state was perceived as an enemy, not as an ally, in contrast to Western-style societies that all but worship the law and respect its guarantor—the state authority. At the same time, both the Ottoman and tsarist regimes preserved religious and dynastic loyalty as the main criteria of identification and allegiance, thus hampering the emergence of a modern national identity.28 Later, the Soviets understood the potential of ethnic identification for mass mobilization and managed to use it in the interests of the regime. In the Bessarabian case, after 1945 local Moldavian identity was elevated to the status of an ethno-nation above all to legitimate the annexation of the Prut-Dniester river from the neighboring socialist state of Romania. This situation was very similar to that pursued

244

|

Igor Caşu

by Tito with respect to Macedonia.29 For various reasons, however, the Moldavian experiment did not go as far. After 1990, the Romanian language and the history of Romanians was rehabilitated and taught in all schools and universities in the Republic of Moldova. Another comparison with other Balkan states could be made with present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina, which tries to legitimate its independence as a nation by striving to create a distinct language and identity—Bosniak.30 Thus post-Soviet Moldavia is an identity in transition, and the Soviet nationbuilding process has proved to be a reversible one, unlike, for instance, the Macedonian case. When thinking of Europeanization in the framework of unfinished political processes, it can be noted that the present-day Republic of Moldova epitomizes the most difficult problems Southeastern European and postSoviet states have experienced in the last fifteen years. These include political instability; the political, economic, and military pressure of the former hegemonic power; the violent internal conflicts of 1992; corruption; a low standard of living; ethnic polarization; an unfinished nation-building process; and widespread nostalgia for the recent, i.e. Soviet, past.31 In short, it is a territory rather than a state. The official government controls less than one tenth of its territory and about one third of its borders. The eastern part seceded in 1990 by proclaiming itself the so-called Transdniestrian Moldavian Republic (TMR). Supposedly this was sparked by the introduction of linguistic legislation and the fear that the Bessarabian part would unite with Romania. Unlike Bessarabia, the TMR, a strip of land alongside the Dniester River, was never a part of the medieval Moldavian principality or interwar Romania. In terms of ethnic composition, it is similar to the Georgian separatist region of Abkhazia, where about 40 percent of the population is comprised of titular nationality people; there are fewer Russians than Ukrainians but altogether they comprise up to 50 percent of the population.32 In both cases, the Russian Federation’s military bases sustain local secessionist movements. At the same time, today’s self-proclaimed TMR is trying to legitimate its existence as an heir to the interwar Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, created by Stalin in 1924 on Ukrainian territory.33 The name ‘Moldavian’ served as an irredentist claim to Romania rather than reflecting the real situation in the 1920s, when only 30 percent of the population identified itself as Moldavian.34 Another secessionist region, Gagauzes in the south of Moldavia, was reconciled and reintegrated in December 1994 with the creation of an autonomous territorial unit. Although based on cultural and linguistic criteria, Gagauzes preserved the Russian language in its administrative and education systems, as in the Soviet era. Thus, the case of Gagauzes most directly reflects the fact that ethnic issues have been instrumentalized by local elites in their struggle for power and prestige.35 The international community, however, especially the Council of Europe, has criticized this

Nation Building in the Era of Integration

| 245

approach to solving ethnic problems by offering territorial autonomy as a dangerous precedent for other secessionist movements.36

Some Social, Economic, and Political Indicators in PostSoviet Moldavia in the Southeastern European Context Apart from the nation-building problems and identity issues that make Moldavia similar to both post-Soviet and Southeastern European states, it is also worth considering some socioeconomic indicators. The main indicators I have selected are urbanization, the level of democracy, and the structure of the economy. Moldavia is the least urbanized of the European post-Soviet states. Its level of urbanization is closer to the average in the Southeastern European states. Some 46 percent of its population is urban, a slight decrease from 47 percent in 1990. By comparison, the average Southeastern European urbanization rate is 53 percent.37 As for the level of democracy, according to the Freedom House ratings for Central and Eastern Europe 2001, Moldavia is also closer to the Southeastern European average (of 3) than to those of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia (5).38 Over the last four years, however (from 2001 to 2004), due to the centralizing policy of the communists, Moldavia dropped in this rating, and is now closer to European post-Soviet states. We hope that this may be only a short-term tendency. The overall structure of the economy also situates Moldavia closer to its Southeastern European counterparts than to the post-Soviet states. Agriculture contributes half of its GNP, and its per capita GNP is by far the lowest among both groups of states. In terms of corruption as well as human trafficking, there is no controversy—Moldavia ranks near the top on the worldwide level.39 Moldova cannot solve these issues by itself, since international illegal networks are deeply involved in these processes. Only the direct involvement of the European Union and the United States could help in this regard. The OSCE and the Council of Europe are formalistic organizations that lack real instruments to change these reported problems.

The Identity Debate and Contrasting Historical Narratives in Post-Soviet Moldavia As I noted earlier, the Romanian language and the history of Romanians has been taught at all levels in all Moldavian schools since 1990. It is important to note that, in minority schools, Romanian is taught as a special subject and the textbooks on the History of Romanians are translated into Russian (for Russian, Bulgarian, and Gagauzes schools). Since 1990 there have been attempts to switch to the history of Moldavia, but since

246

|

Igor Caşu

that would mean including the western part of the medieval principality of Moldavia, now a part of Romania, that approach would have created conceptual and theoretical difficulties and was dropped. There have been attempts to change the existing national history curricula in favour of a so-called integrated course since the communists returned to power in February 2001. Without going into detail, it is worth noting that both the history of Moldavia and the integrated course represent an attempt to return to Soviet-style history, especially regarding national identity and foreign policy. The situation is very difficult since local Romanians comprise 64 percent of the population although they do not yet have a clearly defined ethnic identity. Ukrainians make up 14 percent, Russians 13 percent, Gagauzes 3.5 percent, and Bulgarians 2 percent.40 The local Romanian-speaking elite tends to encourage a nation centred on its Romanian core, while minorities favour a loose civic-state identity called Moldavian. One of the paradoxes, however, is that even though the minorities still consider the term Moldavian fraught with ethnic connotations, there is no broad willingness among them to embrace a Moldavian identity. At the same time, ‘external homelands’41 are another variable deeply involved in Moldavian politics. Russians and Ukrainians ask their mother countries to interfere in Moldavian politics to promote their interests or protect privileges from Soviet times, and other minorities engage in similar behavior. Gagauzes, for instance, established an autonomous status with strong support from Turkey, which is speculating on linguistic and racial kinship. Bulgarians, in turn, can thank the direct involvement of the authorities in Sofia for their success in obtaining a special status for the Taraclia district in the south, where they are in the majority, as well as a national university. Thus, in the post-Soviet period the Moldavian state has pursued an agenda whose two goals have been somewhat contradictory or at least very difficult to reconcile. These goals are to maintain a sense of ethnic identity among the Romanian-speaking majority and, at the same time, to try to integrate the other minorities that are largely unfamiliar with even the basics of the Romanian language. This is a problem, since every modern society needs a common societal culture in order to function normally and one of the key elements in this regard is a common language spoken by more or less all members of a given society.42 As Will Kymlicka put it, a ‘societal culture’ means ‘a territorially-concentrated culture, centred on a shared language which is used in a wide range of societal institutions, in both public and private life—schools, media, law, economy, government, etc.—covering the full range of human activities, including social, educational, religious, recreational, and economic life.’43 In other words, meeting the challenges of minorities should be ‘understood as revising the terms of integration, not abandoning the goal of integration.’44 Like the society as a whole, recent Moldavian historiography reflects the identity dilemma as well as the complexity of majority-minority

Nation Building in the Era of Integration

| 247

relations. One can distinguish two main currents in post-Soviet Moldavian historiography that I would call pro-Romanian and pro-Soviet respectively. I call the first pro-Romanian because it represents the conviction that Moldavian identity exists only as a regional one in the general framework of a larger, ethno-national one, i.e. the Romanian ethno-cultural area. In this sense, the independence of the Republic of Moldova is seen as a temporary stage preceding union with Romania. The pro-Romanian current, or panRomanianism, as Charles King termed it,45 is represented by the majority of researchers and professors at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences, the history faculties of the Moldova State University, State Pedagogical University, and Free International University of Moldova, as well as the great bulk of high school teachers. Some are moderate and others radical. As a rule, the latter represent former Moldavian Soviet historiography, compromised by writings on the ‘ideological front’ during the Soviet era. Basically, the pro-Romanian current is preoccupied with covering topics and interpretations considered taboo by Soviet historiography, such as the turning points in Bessarabian history in 1812, 1918, 1940, and 1944. The events of 1812, 1940, and 1944 are viewed in negative, pejorative colours and interpreted as part of a national drama, the separation of the region from the rest of the cultural and linguistic space. Usually only aspects related to ethno-demographic changes and assimilation policies are touched upon; economic aspects are neglected in this kind of master narrative. At the same time, 1918 is the most important positive event in the whole history of the nation, the peak of its heroic, centuries-old endeavours. The pro-Soviet current, in turn, is comprised of a minority of historians, who are generally very elderly. I call this current pro-Soviet because its main common feature is a glorification of and nostalgia for Soviet times. Another element of their master narrative is a pro-Russian stance. Thus 1812, 1940, and 1944, when Bessarabia was isolated from Southeastern Europe as a whole, are considered positive moments in the history of the region. The events of 1918, however, are dramatized as an unnatural break in the ‘progressive’ relations between Moldavian and the Russian and other Soviet peoples. In this way, this current continues the traditions of the pre-1989 historiography. Even the tsarist regime is considered progressive. This is not new, since one of the most important paradigms in Soviet historiography, which began in the late 1930s, was that of the lesser evil. In this sense, Romania and the Romanian national project as a whole are viewed as the greatest enemies of Moldavian-Russian friendship. That is why another crucial element in the pro-Soviet current is Moldovanness, or the existence of ethnic differences between Moldavians and Romanians. Sometimes, the Moldavian people or nation, as in former Soviet narratives, refers to the multiethnic, multinational character of the Republic of Moldova’s citizens. Another distinguishing characteristic of the pro-Soviet current is that it explains the mass deportations, mass famine, and other

248

|

Igor Caşu

atrocities of the Soviet era in a manner that is closer to a justification of Moscow’s policies in the region than the moral condemnation shared by the pro-Romanian current. To be sure, the tragic events of 1940s and early 1950s are largely covered, but basically the narrative is inclined to stress that this was part of an inevitable struggle against class enemies. The magnum opus of the pro-Soviet current is the History of the Republic of Moldova From Ancient Times to Today,46 published in Russian and Romanian in 1997 and reprinted in 2004. The communist leadership of Moldavia openly supported the latest edition since it expresses their deep convictions about the way the interpretation of the past should project the future toward the post-Soviet area. In this regard, President Voronin complained as early as 2001 that the history of Romanians is a history of a different ethnic group and country and counterproductive to the idea of an independent Republic of Moldova.47 Other officials complained that ‘we are educating citizens for another state.’ Nevertheless, the Moldavian Association of Historians has been supported by the Moldavian Writers’ Union, the Association of Journalists and other influential NGOs, student organizations, and trade unions in their stand against changing the History of Romanians to just History, called an integrated history. What is at stake is not just a change in the name of the discipline of history to be taught in schools and higher educational institutions, but its content as well as the collective of authors called upon to write it. To be more precise, the ‘integrated history’ is going to be written by the authors of the volume published in 1997, as mentioned above, i.e. by pro-Soviet, openly anti-Romanian and anti-Western historians. Experts from the Council of Europe and Euroclio tried to mediate the discussions between the two contending currents by organizing a series of seminars in Moldavia and, most notably, in Braunschweig, Germany, but these attempts have not been successful so far. Another important idea related to the introduction of the new history narrative is that it should be accompanied by the elevation of Russian to the status of the second state language. This measure is not justified, since the majority of Romanianophones already speak Russian, but only a small minority of Russian speakers are fluent in Romanian. The introduction of Russian as a state language would have divisive, not integrative consequences. Civil society is opposed to history and language changes. This was epitomized by a prolonged strike in downtown Chisinau from January to March 2002. At the same time, there is another extreme history narrative in the secessionist region of Transnistria that tends to legitimate its own geopolitical and identity policies. This kind of legitimizing narrative was recently developed in the official three-volume tractatus on the history of the TMR published in 2001 in Tiraspol.48 As Vladimir Solonari has argued in an article in Kritika, the central topic the tractatus addresses is the friendship of peoples, full chapters being compiled from Soviet history books.49 One interesting claim is that the would-be Transdniestrian people

Nation Building in the Era of Integration

| 249

(pridnestrovskij narod) are supposed to have a special feeling of belonging to a certain regional, meta-ethnic identity as a result of sharing common experiences, especially during the Second World War. It thus implies, directly or indirectly, Romania’s responsibility in administering Transnistria during the war years 1941–1944, involving mass killings of civilians, notably Jews, and points to the official policy of Romanianization. It can be noted that if the history of Romanians tends to foster a Romanian, a Southeastern European, and a European identity as a matter of fact, the alternatives proposed nowadays seek to re-create a Eurasian identity according to the Soviet pattern. Thus, clearly history and collective memories are intertwined with the ideological and foreign policy agendas of two competing trends in Moldavian politics and society.

Southeastern European History in Moldavian Universities There are four universities in Moldavia in which history is taught as a separate speciality: Moldova State University, the State Pedagogical University, and the Free International University of Moldova, all based in Chisinau, and Cahul State University, which was recently opened in the south of Moldavia as part of the Lower Danube Euro-region project. All of the Moldavian faculties of history offer courses that deal directly or indirectly with Southeastern European states. These courses focus basically on the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires and are compulsory. In the same category are courses dedicated to the history of Romanians from ancient times till today. At Moldova State University, for example, there are also two mandatory courses on Southeastern European history proper: the first one focuses on the Middle Ages and the second one on the modern period. Another set of two courses, inherited from Soviet curricula, focuses on Southern and Western Slavs; consequently, after 1991 these courses began to comprise all ethnic groups and nation-states from the Balkan region. Western Slav history has thus been included in a more general course on Eastern European history, including Russia. These changes occurred not only at Moldova State University, but also at other Moldavian universities. At the State Pedagogical University, for instance, there is a special course on Balkan National Movements. In some private higher education institutions such as the Perspectiva Institute of International Relations, a special course on Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century, half of it focused on the Balkan region, is taught to students specializing in international relations and political science. At the postgraduate level, in 1998 a special department, the UNESCO Chair of South East European Studies, was set up at Moldova State University. During the academic years from 1998 to 2004, the UNESCO Chair of South East European Studies focused on postgraduate courses, offering master’s degrees for more than sixty students in all. The Chair has offered

250

|

Igor Caşu

many courses ranging from history, political science, history of religions, nationalism studies, and art history to folklore studies covering different historical epochs from ancient times to the present using an interdisciplinary approach.50 It has established its own journal, Pontes. Review of South East European Studies, the first interdisciplinary and regionally focused Moldavian publication.

Conclusions One can conclude that the present-day Republic of Moldova has multiple and overlapping identities not only in the ethno-national sense, but in the regional sense as well. In order to escape its categorization as a post-Soviet state, the Republic of Moldova needs to be accepted primarily as a Southeastern European country because it has more in common with the smaller states of the region than with Belarus, Russia, or Ukraine, for instance. In other words, before it is ‘Europeanized,’ Moldavia needs ‘Southeastern Europeanization’ as a strategy for de-Sovietization and deCommunization. Disputes over national identity are intimately related to the foreign policy agendas, i.e. to the issue Quo vadis Moldavia, West or East? Those who are eager to embrace Romanian identity represent the majority of intellectuals of various backgrounds and ages as well as the younger generation unaffected by the totalitarian education of the recent past. Pan-Romanian attitudes thus go hand in hand with the idea of reestablishing the status quo ante 1940 or at least some sort of reintegration into Southeastern Europe and Europe as a whole. On the other hand, those who seek to encourage Moldavian distinctiveness are represented by Russified Moldavians or minorities that usually do not speak Romanian, but identify with a loose category of internationalists. This current, in politics, culture, and society in general, is represented by a tiny minority of intellectuals and a large number of uneducated or less educated Moldavians who lack experience and knowledge of anything other than Soviet and post-Soviet realities and share pro-Soviet and pro-Russian attitudes. All in all, politics, society, culture, and most notably historiography are deeply permeated and divided more or less sharply by the identity debate. Even though the pan-Romanian and pro-European intellectuals and younger generation are the majority in Moldavian society, this social stratum has obtained only cultural or moral capital,51 while economic and political capital is still retained by the former nomenklatura apparatus. The massive migration of young Moldavians abroad, especially since the mid 1990s, further complicates the situation because otherwise they would represent the emerging middle class, pushing for change and reforms that would help to overcome the present deadlock. Even though most arguments point to the fact that the Republic of Moldova is today basically a post-Soviet country in terms of political,

Nation Building in the Era of Integration

| 251

economic, and identity issues, it is also true that it has a specific place in the region. Although a member of the Community of Independent States since its founding in 1991, it did not adhere to the military package of the CIS. The Republic of Moldova is a member of the GUUAM alliance, together with Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan, a kind of alternative—led by Ukraine with the blessing of the US—to the Russianrun CIS. Moreover, Moldavia became a member of the Pact of Stability for South Eastern Europe on June 28, 2001 under the communist President Voronin. This date marks the anniversary of the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia in 1940, when the province was once again isolated from other Romanian territories and Southeastern Europe as a whole. Is that simply a coincidence? What if it means, if only symbolically, that even one of the staunchest pro-Soviet politicians in Moldavia cannot stop the dream of intellectuals and civil society from coming true sooner or later?

Notes 1. Misha Glenny, The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, 1804–1999 (New York, 1999), xxii. 2. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1979). 3. Larry Wolf, The Invention of Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization in the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, 1994). 4. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York, 1997). 5. Vesna Goldworthy, Inventing Ruritania. The Imperialism of Imagination (New Haven, 1998). 6. Gerard Delanty, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality (New York, 1995), especially 30– 47, 115–29. Kohn’s famous dichotomy between Western and Eastern nationalism thus included Germany in the latter category. See Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism [1944] (New York, 1967). 7. See David McLellan, Ideology (Buckingham, 1995). I am quoting from the Romanian translation, (Bucharest, 1998), 13. 8. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York, 1980); Michael Geyer, ‘Resistance as an Ongoing Project: Visions of Order, Obligations to Strangers, Struggles for Civil Society,’ Journal of Modern History 64, supplement (December 1992): 217–41. 9. Said, Orientalism, 3. See also Stuart Hall, ed., Modernity and Its Futures (London, 1992), 275–80. 10. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 26–27. 11. Quoted in ibid., 28. 12. See Vesna Goldworthy, Inventing Ruritania. 13. See, for example, South Eastern Europe: A Political and Economic Survey prepared by the Information Department of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in collaboration with the London and Cambridge Economic Service (London, 1939), 203. 14. Imanuel Geiss, ‘Serbia Seen from the West,’ in Slavenko Terzic, ed., Europe and the Serbs (Belgrade, 1996), 523. 15. The most famous book on medieval Moldavia in Latin was Descriptio Moldaviae, by Dimitrie Cantermir (1718), written for the Berlin Academy. The Latin form has been

252

16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

|

Igor Caşu

transmitted into the English, French, and German languages. For the German usage of Bessarabia and Moldavia, see Sabine Krause and Vasile Dumbrava, ‘Identitatea basarabenilor vazuta de germani,’ in Al. Zub and Flavius Solomon, eds., Basarabia: dilemele identitatii (Iasi, 2001), 105–110. One of the first authors to do this was Nicolas Dima, From Moldavia to Modova: The Soviet Romanian Territorial Dispute (Boulder, CO, 1991). This was true for other ethno-national entities such as Tataria–Tatarstan, Kirgizia—Kyrgyzstan, etc. The best account of these overlapping identities is to be found in Cristina Petrescu, ‘Contrasting/Conflicting Identities: Bessarabians, Romanians, Moldovans,’ in Balázs Trencsényi, Drago Petrescu, Cristina Petrescu, Constantin Iordachi, and Zoltán Kántor, eds., Nation-Building and Contested Identities: Romanian and Hungarian Case Studies (Budapest, 2001), 153–78. I use the concept ‘ethno-nation’ and ‘ethno-nationalism’ in the sense proposed by Walker Connor in his Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding (Princeton, 1994), namely a nation based on a single ethnic group with cross-border allegiance, like the German nation, not on a wide range of ethnic groups like the United States, defined as a civic, political nation. Charles King, The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture (Stanford, 2000), 6–7. See more in John Borneman and Nick Fowler, ‘Europeanization,’ Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (1997): 487–514. The best account of the Chisinau pogrom is to be found in Edward Judge, Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy of a Pogrom (New York, 1992). See also my review in Pontes. Review of South East European Studies 1 (2004): 169–70. The best volume of documents is Ja. M. Kopanskij, ed., Kishinevskij pogrom 1903 goda: Sbornik dokumentov (Kishinev, 2000). Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (Oxford, 2002), especially 91–142. Fernand Braudel, ‘Histoire et sciences sociales. La longue durée,’ Annales. Economies. Sociétés. Civilisations, no. 4 (1958): 725–53. Lucan Way, ‘Weak States and Pluralism: The Case Of Moldova,’ East European Politics and Societies 17, noss. 3, (2003): 454–82, 463. See Basa-Press Agency, 3 May 2004. Wayne Vucinich, The Ottoman Empire: Its Record and Legacy (Huntington and New York, 1979), 120–21. Barbara Jelavich, The History of Balkans, vol. I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 165–70; Andreas Kappeler, Russland als Vielvölkerreich: Entstehung, Geschichte, Zerfall (Munich, 1992). Loring Danforth, The Macedonian Conflict: Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World (Princeton, 1995), 28–78; Jonathan Matthew Schwartz, ‘Civil Society and Ethnic Conflict in the Republic of Macedonia,’ in Joel Halpern and David Kideckel, eds., Neighbors at War: Anthropological Perspectives on Yugoslav Ethnicity, Culture, and History (Philadelphia, 2000), 382–400. Bohdana Dimitrova, ‘Bosniak or Muslim? Dilemma of one Nation with Two Names?’ in South East European Politics 2, no. 2, (2001): 94–108. One of the best and up-to-date accounts about Moldavian transition is to be found in Igor Botsan, ed., Transition: Retrospectives and Prospects (Chisinau, 2002). Valery Tishkov, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in and After the Soviet Union: The Mind Aflame (London, 1997), 92. A. Ju. Skvortsova, ‘Narod Pridnestrov’ja: sobstvennaja identichnost’?’ in Moldova Academic Review, no. 1 (2002) (electronic version only). Vsesojuznaja perepis’ naselenja (1926), vol. IV, Narodnosti, rodnoj jazyk naselenija SSSR, Moscow, Gosstatizdat, 1928, xxiv; Kiril Stratievskij, ‘Izmenenija v administrativnom delenii i v sostave naselenija Moldavskoj ASSR (1924–1940),’ Revista de Istorie a Moldovei, no. 2

Nation Building in the Era of Integration

35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46.

47.

48.

49. 50. 51.

| 253

(1995): 29; Ion Siscanu, ‘Formarea _i dezvoltarea RASSM,’ Cugetul, nos. 5–6 (1992): 64. On the post-Soviet period, see Oazu Nantoi, ‘Cu privire la situatia din raioanele de Est ale Republicii Moldova (1992–2000),’ in Aspecte ale conflictului transnistrean, (Chisinau, 2001), 9–18. Jeff Chinn and Steven Roper, ‘Territorial Autonomy in Gagauzia,’ Nationalities Papers 26 (1998): 87–101; Sylvie Gangloff, ‘L’émancipation politique des Gagaouzes, turcophones chrétiens de Moldavie,’ Cahiers d’études sur la Méditeranée orientale et le monde turco-iranien 23 (1997): 231–57; Charles King, ‘Minorities Policy in the Post-Soviet Republics: The Case of the Gagauzi,’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 20, no. 4 (1997): 21–25. Jeff Chinn and Robert Kaiser, Russians as the New Minority: Ethnicity and Nationalism in the Soviet Successor States (Oxford, 1996), 175. Departamentul Analize Statistice _si Sociologice, Anuarul statistic al Republicii Moldova 1997, (1997): 59. www.freedomhouse.org, Country Report Moldova, 2002. For a broader discussion on corruption in Moldova from the historical, psychological, and legal points of view, see Vasile Gurin, ed., Coruptia: Studii privind diferite aspecte ale coruptiei în Republica Moldova (Chisinau, 2000). Totalul recensamântului unional al populatiei din RSS Moldoveneasca din anul 1989 (Chisinau, 1990), 92–93. On the concept of ‘external homelands,’ see Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationalism and National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge, 1999). In this sense countries like Switzerland are more of an exception than a model to follow. See Pascal Sciarini, Simon Hugg, and Cédric Dupont, ‘Example, Exception, or Both? Swiss National Identity in Perspective,’ in Lars-Erik Cederman, ed., Constructing Europe’s Identity: The External Dimension (Boulder, CO, 2001), 57–90. Will Kymlicka, ‘Western Political Theory and Ethnic Relations in Eastern Europe,’ in Will Kymlicka and Magda Opalski, eds., Can Liberal Pluralism be Exported? Western Political Theory and Ethnic Relations in Eastern Europe (Oxford, 2001), 18. Ibid., 35. Charles King, ‘Moldovan Identity and the Politics of Pan-Romanianism,’ Slavic Review 53 (1994): 345–46. Andruscjak, V. E. P. A. Bojko, P. P. Byrnja, _ I. I. Jarkuckij, V. P. Platon, N. D. Russev, A. Ju. Skvortsova, K. V. Stratievskij, N. P. Tel’nov, V. I. Tsaranov, N. A. Ciaplygina, and P. M. Sornikov, Istorija Respubliki Moldova: S drevnejshih vremjon do nashih dnej (Chisinau, 1997). Quoted in Anatol Petrencu, and Ion Negrei, ‘Istoria românilor, scut al identitaii _si demnitatii nationale,’ in În apararea istoriei si demnitatii nationale: Culegere de documente (Chisinau, 2003). A. Ju. Skvortsova, I. G. Smirnov, B. G. Bomesko, A. P. Lisovina, E. A. Bognibov, L. E. Repida, and P. M. Sornikov, Istorija Pridnestrevkoj Moldavskoj Respubliki, 3 vols., (‘Tiraspol,’ 2001–2002). Vladimir Solonari, ‘Creating a “People”: A Case Study in Post-Soviet History Writing,’ Kritika: Exploration in Russian and Eurasian History 4 (2003): 411–38. See Igor Casu, ‘South East European History in Moldavian Universities,’ Pontes: Review of South East European Studies 1 (2004): 160–62. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Social Space and Symbolic Power,’ Sociological Theory 7 (1989): 14–25.

Postscript

THE SUBJECT(S) OF EUROPE

( Michael Geyer

Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat had a way of disappearing ‘quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.’ This uncanny ability left behind a flummoxed Alice (‘I have often seen a cat without a grin . . . ; but a grin without a cat?’) and generated a major conundrum when the cat’s grinning head appeared on, of all places, the Queen’s Croquet Ground. In view of the intrusion, the king wanted the cat beheaded, because anything that had a head could be beheaded, while the executioner argued vehemently that he could not behead a head without a body, whereupon the queen stated that if ‘something was not done, she’d have everybody executed, all round.’ The cat resolved the problem, whether to anybody’s satisfaction we do not know, by disappearing—although, presumably, it was still there, somewhere.1 The Cheshire cat’s grin seems a perfect allegory for Europe. It unquestionably has a presence, even if there is no body attached to it. What this presence is all about is hard to tell, though. When reading through the historiography on Europe, the sense of too much of a benevolently grinning presence and, at the same time, of too little substance to have any effect is overwhelming. In fact, the overbearing presence of an otherwise ineffective subject has become something of a common complaint—and not just in historiography.2 So, forget the myth-histories of Europe and the cottage industry to give historical depth and legitimacy to the EU.3 Forget as well the efforts to put Europe on Venus and the counterassertion that, on planet Earth, Europe is superior to the United States.4 The question is where this Europe is and what it does in order to merit our attention. For Europe to be a subject of history, it has to have a discernible effect. And while one would want to acknowledge with Carroll that a grin—or the fleeting presence of an appearance—may have an immense effect, experience suggests that cats are far more likely to scratch. Hence, where are the marks that Europe leaves? Short of the questionable choice of beheading the subject—and proving its existence by virtue of the dead Notes for this section begin on page 274.

The Subject(s) of Europe

| 255

certainty of a corpse to be disposed of—evidence of Europe’s tangible effects is needed in order to demonstrate that it is more than a mirage. But where to find it? A great deal of useful work has been done on this issue that counters the first impression of a generously funded Euroeuphoria. On one hand, there has been ever more sophisticated, historical, and social science-based scholarship on European integration.5 On the other hand, the exploration of European sensibilities and of a European public sphere have opened up new opportunities.6 This literature is quickly moving beyond a state of innocence when an older Western civic tradition was partly rediscovered and partly reinvented. Both approaches provide subjects for history because there is a body of sources, an archive, attached to them, and both point to Europe as a subject that has agency.7 They thus resolve the old conundrum that located both archives and agencies exclusively in the nation. However, the problem with both these approaches is their nominalism—their identification of Europe with what calls itself European. I suggest that in order to identify the subject(s) of Europe, we go beyond what calls itself European in order to discern all actors and agencies that interlock so as to ascertain a higher unity of parts. Kiran Klaus Patel called the entire syndrome of transborder connections ‘transnational.’8 He uses this concept to encourage the study of nations as sites of cross-cutting influences. Others think that the definition is vague and more suggestive than useful.9 But the salient point of the historical debate on transnationalism is that local, regional, or national affairs can never be entirely explained from within, endogenously, but depend on actors reaching across borders and boundaries into the most local and most intimate of relations; therefore, these affairs must be understood exogenously.10 Europe may not self-evidently and self-consciously spring from this tangle of affairs, but it is a wager worth making that we find Europe in this deep enmeshment. In fact, we should even be able to explain why Europe is so difficult to find in there. The reasons, I submit, are twofold. First, the Europe that emerges from transnational relations is quite different from the mental map we make of Europe.11 Second, it is quite the opposite from what we would expect Europe to be—a place of belonging and the ultimate refuge of Gemeinschaft.12 Therefore, the reason for the difficulties with Europe is that we prefer the grin that is in the name over the scratches that come with the body.

People Who Move and People Who Stay The difficulty of finding Europe is readily apparent if we follow the recent historiography in its effort to conceptualize Europe as a social space. One promising strand of this literature focuses on migration.13 This approach makes sense because the freedom of movement—of people, things, and knowledge—defines modern European experience and, in the course of

256

|

Michael Geyer

two hundred years, has defied all efforts within Europe to curtail it. However, the migration of people, essential as it is for the European condition, generates a map of Europe that is completely at odds with what Europe has become.14 The Europe that emerges from its transborder traffic ranges to the ends of the world, much as it takes in the world. Moreover, the people who cross borders have no more (and no less) a sense of Europe than anyone else. They have a way of disappearing within nations or diasporas, or of getting ‘lost in transition’ (Eva Hoffmann) rather than becoming Europeans.15 Even so the people who stay put reject anybody who moves. Migrants are transborder subjects, but what makes them subjects of a European history is harder to tell. The other strand of the literature concentrates on civil society and explores how people who stay gain European experience or become part of a transnational European society. The suggestion is that civil societies are, in principle, open societies in which people, things, and knowledge reach across borders and, thus, make ideal Europeans.16 Once again, though, even the transnational societies do not, for the most part, coincide with mental maps of European spaces, and their Europeanness remains vague or unexplained.17 But most of all, civil societies do not, as far as I can tell, move enough across borders to make them into European subjects. Nonetheless, there is a discernible European effect at work in civil societies. Together they constitute a space of common experience, even though the border-crossing is not quite what it is made out to be and does not, by itself, produce the European identity that is so eagerly anticipated.18 Therefore, the question is: How does civil society ‘do’ Europe? In trying to puzzle out what gives the grin a body, I have come up with three suggestions. First, consider families and communities as European subjects; second, treat migration and migrants as the systemic counterweight to nations; third, think of civil societies as supreme mimickers of one another. Take these elements together, and you will have not only a European space of experience, but also a subject of European history that is worth its name. This subject is the freedom of movement, which comes to life in all the actors that embody it. Let us begin with the ineluctable, historiographical reference to bankers, aristocrats, and high society as prime examples of transborder existence and European experience. Of course, the observation is sound (although one cannot help but think that its main source is the tabloids). The aristocracy, especially the ruling houses, have built their own European community in complex and far-reaching marriage alliances over centuries. Bankers, international merchants, and diamond traders have depended on trust in their transactions, and trust over long distances is best maintained by elective or biological family ties (and a strict code of family honor).19 By the same token, ‘high society’ has always met in spas all over Europe and other retreats such as casinos, hotels, luxury liners, and railway stations that have retained a certain air of worldliness up to the present day.

The Subject(s) of Europe

| 257

The jeunesse dorée and, more recently, the jet set of fashion and film have also acquired a distinctly transnational flair. Their sense of exclusivity and their easy recognition and knowledge of each other runs counter to the ‘pillarization’ of Europe into national territories and people. But although they are glamorous exemplars of transnational society and of European experience, they are also rather rare. Then again, put in their proper context these exemplars may not be so exquisite after all. The bonds of family, kin, and community are at the heart of their transborder relations, and these bonds stretch far and wide indeed. Thus, it is not just aristocrats and rich American heiresses (and the occasional Irish artiste like Lola Montez) who get engaged across borders. Neither is it only a case of European diaspora populations, like Jews or Sinti and Roma, who are also commonly noted in this context. Border populations—and minority populations—have always had the habit of moving and marrying back and forth. Some of these borders—and it is intriguing to figure out which ones—were and are more permeable than others, and state borders were by no means the greatest obstacles.20 Ethnic and religious ties, like a common language or lack thereof, play(ed) a much more important role. Transgression was always part of the game. It is true that the occasional commoners’ marriage seems a puny event in the grand picture of European affairs, but if the many borders are taken together, they produce a great many transborder marriages. Needless to say, the range and reach (and the sheer size) of this traffic has expanded over time. Lately, it might be said that marriage markets have become delocalized insofar as distant strangers are truly everywhere owing to the mobility of people for purposes of education, employment, or pleasure. It also seems the case that older barriers—not only of prejudice, but also representing the fear of distance and the uncertainty of foreign affairs—have diminished or, in any case, shifted. Marital border-crossing is still not the norm, but it has become far more frequent and far less transgressive, although class, and ethnicity, and not least, religion matter as they always did. The upshot is that, rather than having a Europe of multiple borderlines being crossed locally all over the continent, we can observe a Europe as a social space of family relations emerging. It goes without saying that this Europe expands into the wider world much as it takes from it—and neither of these exchanges is necessarily balanced, fair, or without bias. Therefore, why cast around frantically for Europeans if your neighbor’s daughter gets married in Holland and the neighbors themselves move to the Costa del Sol? For better or worse, this is Europe—by no means all of it, but not an insubstantial part either. The fact of the matter is that family and kinship, as well as community-based networks, are among the prime facilitators and mediators of transborder traffic. Of course, families are not all of one kind either. Marital ties may have become more acceptable. But some of these family networks are outright criminal, if we think of drugs and prostitution. Others, like the omnipresent African panhandlers, are

258

|

Michael Geyer

barely tolerated. Yet others, like the semipermanent residencies of pensioners on the southern rim of Europe, have repopulated entire regions. Still, whether criminal, developmental, or recreational, they make up one kind of a European experience. These folks share a whole series of communal associations and institutions that are also strangely absent when it comes to accounting for European identities. Religious communities and churches are one such source of transborder and, indeed, genuinely transnational communities. In fact, they have formed some of the most vital European transnational groups. Religious orders like the Jesuits have pushed the transnationalism of its members and its institution further than most other such groups. Universities like the Gregoriana have gone further in their Europeanness than most secular institutions with a European name. Pilgrimages have had a long tradition of crossing borders and mixing people. The list could be extended, but suffice it to say that the capacity of these community-based networks to stretch over long distances and to maintain commonalities and solidarities—as well as to enforce norms and values—is vastly underrated. Further, the importance of family and community for migration became evident in the 1970s, when immigration in key European countries increased significantly even after labor migration was curtailed.21 Much of the growth resulted from family reunions. This pattern fits what the newer historiography has found out about the staggered, step-by-step nature of migratory moves and the elaborate family-, kinship-, and community ties that have facilitated them. Migration is not, as was previously assumed, an anonymous process of ‘uprooting,’ but the extension of families to distant horizons.22 Where historians tended to see cheap labor and an unruly, alien laboring class, we discover a rich network of community relations that covered the tracks of the various ‘migration systems’ along which people moved. Therefore, family and community are among the most prominent social ties that bind Europe together and that link Europe to the world. What looks like an atavism or an exquisite exception to the norm, is one of the basic realities of Europe. The difficulty of thinking of migration in terms of family and community should give us pause for thought. Family and community tend so much to be taken as cosy sites of belonging that their prominence in facilitating migration may initially have appeared to be counterintuitive. A quite similar difficulty is at work, if we think of nations as the main and constituent element of Europe. Of course, nations have become sites of belonging and attachment. But throughout the past centuries European nations had either not enough or too many people—and this is quite apart from the added issue that some of the settled (minority) populations were unwanted and that some of the people who were needed for economic reasons were unwelcome as well. However, with rare exceptions, there was and is no part of Europe that has not either imported or exported and, on top of that, forcibly removed people (or admitted the expellees).23

The Subject(s) of Europe

| 259

Therefore, migration is one of the processes without which a Europe of nations could not exist—or, in any case, would not exist the way it does. With so many people moving or being forced to move all over Europe (and the world), unsettlement is as constitutive for Europe as settlement. The very least we can say is that the unsettlement and dispersal of people in migration is to their settlement and ingathering in nations as antimatter is to matter. Only if we put both sides together do we come to understand European history as a field of study and Europe as a subject of history. Understanding Europe through the lens of its unsettlement gives us a more appropriate sense of what Europe has become. First, the expansion of Europe and Europeans across the globe and the twentieth-century contraction and reversal of this development establishes the baseline of European development. Long ago, Geoffrey Barraclough pointed out this fact as the seminal feature of modern Europe.24 It seems utterly inappropriate to think of Europe as what it has become (little Europe) without taking note of the grand reversal of demographic trajectories. Europe is, as a result, both larger (more global) and smaller (more local) than the mental maps of the latter-day Europeans suggest. It encompasses both a ‘Far East,’ a ‘Far West,’ and a ‘Far South,’ but the mentally mapped European bonds (of civilization, modernity, ‘whiteness,’ race) prove tenuous and uncertain.25 Second, migration has always been weighed down by ‘bonds of servitude.’26 The sheer multiplicity of these bonds and the creativity in generating, legitimating, sustaining, and renewing them are difficult to overlook. Even when slavery was rejected within Europe, servitude was never far from what Europeans condoned for migrants. As these bonds were successively lifted for certain populations, they were maintained or introduced for others.27 (The forced labor regime of the Third Reich is an extreme and inhuman expression of this more general tendency—inhuman, because the violence of this regime was deliberately directed against family and community ‘back home’ and at the site of labor.28) The freedom of movement has become an extraordinary European privilege for all those who do not have to move. This freedom is maintained within a regime that ‘binds’ its migrants. Third, the flip side of migration—and of European mass migration— is a fear of moving that is deeply ingrained in the European experience. Histories of migration have demonstrated the many ways this fear of the unknown was reduced to a bearable minimum and have thus cut through the lore that chronicles both the exuberance and misery of leaving home. But given the unsettlement of the entire continent, the stakes have always been a little higher than that. Migrants may have found ways to accommodate their fears, but the settled populations, although free to move, instead turned place, territory, and people into figures of unchanging and unmoving authenticity. It would seem that nations and nationalism in Europe—the many fictions of belonging and of the transcendence of

260

|

Michael Geyer

place—only make sense if we account for the bracing, emotional disturbance that unsettlement has generated. Of all European sensibilities, the fear of unsettlement and the concomitant insistence on settlement is one of the strongest. Despite the tangible benefits migration has brought to European societies, migrants and migration have always been treated more as a curse than as a blessing.29 In short, the Europe of nations was and is unimaginable without the Europe of migrations. Therefore, Europe is a space of both nations and migrations.30 Their unavoidable imbrication is one of the prime subjects of European history. Settlement, though, might leave the wrong impression if it is read as a static term in contradistinction to the (spatial and social) mobility of migrants. This underestimates the mobility of European societies in general and discounts the prodigious ability of European society to absorb mobile people (while often separating out migrations and migrants). ‘Settlement’ should be understood as a highly active and, indeed, proactive process of establishing and maintaining social bonds, or of quite literally creating society where there was none, or of reproducing society under changing conditions. The turn to the nation and to nationalism as an ‘imagined community’ (Benedict Anderson) or as a ‘site of memory’ (Pierre Nora) is the prototypical mode of stabilizing and anchoring mobile societies.31 But the much more powerful means to the end is the rise, or more exactly, the creation of ‘civil societies.’ One must leave aside the generic problems with the concept, which are debated at length in the pertinent literature.32 The more immediate concern is civil society’s uncanny ability to leap across borders, to move from place to place, and even to become transnational without ever leaving home. The modular quality of civil society makes it a supremely transborder and yet local, and indeed, localizing, subject. It is an extraordinarily potent subject of European history in this regard. Historians have gathered quite a bit of material about the ways in which civil society crosses borders. They point to gymnasts, hikers, singing clubs, and other such distinctly national organizations, highlighting their appreciation of the feats of individuals, even those whose nations are treated as foes. Although civil society pressed for the nationalization of education, its members, especially the better-off, also not only insisted on learning foreign languages, but often enough sent their children abroad for schooling or at least for an extended stay. Moreover, civil societies kept themselves acutely familiar with the newest developments in the arts and sciences across borders, traveled widely, or read European ‘world literature.’33 Meanwhile, virtually every sphere of civil society was and is informed by a never-ending stream of international congresses. It is not just that scientists have met regularly and that national intellectuals and academics have perused each other’s journals; but that everybody else has done so as well—lawyers, health officials, social welfare advocates, and so on. The most glamorous of these international meetings are public

The Subject(s) of Europe

| 261

exhibitions—in art, technology, economy—that show off the newest inventions, which instantly provoke discussion across Europe (and beyond) and establish distinctions. All this—and much more could be adduced—amounts to the simple fact that, during much of modern history, civil societies were by no means myopic in pursuing their nationalizing ends. They cherished a common civility across borders. They often also shared a common humanism and a sense of the superiority of Western civilization. The operative term for this state of affairs is cosmopolitanism—and it seems to me that much of what is rediscovered in the name of the transnational qualities of civil society is cosmopolitanism, which always knew of the benefits of an open mind and an open world.34 This worldliness of civil society is worth recalling because of the utter blindness that extreme nationalism wrought deep into the second half of the twentieth century. The emergent historiography of civil societies demonstrates both sides of the coin.35 We might thus say that, although they can get thoroughly spooked, civil societies exhibit an openness in order to countenance what others say, write, or what they do. But the question is where this open-mindedness comes from. Yes, civil societies reach across borders and see themselves in an international context. But I would suggest that there is more at stake than curiosity in these cross-border comparisons (which, incidentally, have not found the attention they deserve). There is more of a commitment to and a dependence on others than these cross-border connections suggest at first sight. The striking thing about civil societies is how quickly their modes of association—their clubs, attitudes, sensibilities, and behaviors—spread. This suggests that civil societies thrive on a good deal of adaptive learning, and that they are driven in this by social competition, or so it seems if we look at the international meeting culture and their quest for excellence. Thus, rather than looking at members of civil societies crossing borders, the altogether more productive approach would seem to look at ‘civil society’ as a mode of social organization and valuation, spreading and multiplying. In fact, civil societies have moved extremely quickly from one end of Europe to the other (and beyond), and over time, their velocity has dramatically increased. They rose with societies on the move and outran people on the move. Two further points derive from this initial argument. First, with civil societies, it is knowledge and cultural codes of sociability and societalization (Vergesellschaftung) that move, while people stay in place. The transfer of knowledge and cultural codes makes civil societies peculiarly ‘transnational,’ while simultaneously preserving, and indeed, advancing boundaries between them. Social capital is readily borrowed and adapted across borders. Historical scholarship by and large underwrites these observations, but finds it difficult to accept that the transborder effect of civil society should derive from its sheer competitiveness. Historians prefer to think of civil society as a solidaristic enterprise, which mutes or counters competition, rather than as one that

262

|

Michael Geyer

thrives on it.36 Therefore, they emphasize the transborder commonalities and quasi-inherent differences, rather than transborder competition over the adaptation of social forms, knowledge, and collective ideals. In this, they miss in my opinion what civil societies do best: competitively move social knowledge that provides the means for settling urbanizing and industrializing societies on the move. Of all the knowledge and codes that were and are circulating, knowledge about ‘society’ and its modes of societalization is by far the most precious and sought-after commodity.37 The transmission of functional knowledge and of aesthetic appreciation is better known, but for the most part the knowledge and codes about society and how it is ‘made up’ have proved far more vital. They show ways and means to generate social forms for unsettled societies. What is transferred is knowledge about societalization as an antidote to unsettlement. The rapid cross-border spread of associational cultures or of new forms of sociability is one example.38 The modular adaptations of gender roles, of fatherhood and motherhood, or of sexual norms fits the same pattern.39 The search for working-class ‘fraternity’ is yet another demonstration of the same phenomenon.40 In many instances, transmission of social knowledge was a matter of curiosity and sheer envy or admiration (if they can play soccer, we can do it, too). Elements of ‘civil society’ thus came to nestle in unlikely environments. They were championed by extremely varied social groups—women, workers, aristocrats.41 Transmission was never linear (as imagined in more banal versions of ‘Americanization’), but always adaptive and transformative in the sense that it allowed for the shedding of old and the development of new social forms. But transmission and adaptation always also reflected an edge of competitiveness, a desire to be ‘modern,’ and a process of learning how to make society work beyond tradition.42 While beyond the purview of this essay, this way of thinking may also help make sense of the purported convergence of European societies. The argument for convergence has been made, among others, by Hartmut Kaelble.43 Others have instead insisted that Europe has always formed a common social space with reference to marriage and reproductive behavior.44 But it seems that both kinds of arguments could profit from the notion of Europe as a communicative space in which individual and collective choices concerning societalization move rapidly, if in distinct social packages, across borders. If we think of convergence less as an effect of structural transformation than as a stratified process of learning, imitating, and adapting social forms across borders, we should be able to discern societalization as a distinctly European, transborder, and, increasingly, transnational project. We would likely also discover that the classic trinity of class, gender, and ethnicity, while inflected by national markers, develops in a cross-border synchrony that makes European society in all its diversity so patently and transparently unified.45

The Subject(s) of Europe

| 263

It is not that if you know one of a kind, you know all; but if you know one of a kind, you can discern and, possibly, cherish ‘distinctions,’ how another inflects a similar way of life. If you are a truly experienced European you can actually ‘surf’—or, to borrow from another subcultural context, ‘vogue’—those differences. In fact, the very act of playing with distinctions—and for a brief, happy post-World War II moment, the freedom to do so without fear of ostracism along lines of class, gender, or ethnic solidarities—is one of the main features of modern European societalization.46 Such a surfeit of play is generally better understood in the realm of fashion and consumer style than in the everyday domain of social interaction, but imitation, adaptation, and play—style—have always been at the heart of European identity. Europe therefore is a highly stylized experience. Distinction on a European scale is only feasible if we think of Europe as a socially competitive, communicative space, in which knowledge about societalization moves rapidly and in which institutions like the Catholic church, movements like the New Social Movements, and forces like consumer capitalism do battle in order to propagate their knowledge.47 If social knowledge—its competitive production, transfer, and adaptation—has been a key element in the cross-border traffic of civil societies in the past two centuries, there are a few instances that bring back transnational people into the concept. There are, in other words, genuinely transnational civil societies. It turns out that they mostly emerge at the margins. The most telling case for the formation of a more genuinely transnational civil society is the Jewish diaspora in Europe.48 This diaspora is usually credited with an inherent ability to create familial and communal spaces across nations due to its common Judaism or because of diasporic family ties. But the communalism of the Jewish diaspora is easily overvalued. Jewish belonging was and is inscribed locally, and while such locales could travel and stretch, communalism also mediated against a crossborder sense of commonality. ‘Civil society’ innovations overcame these obstacles. Jewish transcommunal and transnational activism grew with the nineteenth-century ‘confessionalization’ (reform vs. orthodoxy), politicization, and ‘humanitarianization’ of Judaism. Philanthropy became a crucial medium.49 The most powerful expression of this transnationalism was, of course, Zionism, the political movement to build a Jewish homeland in Palestine.50 These were distinctly ‘transnational’ mobilizations in that they did for once what theory suggests that transnationals do: they addressed and captured a cross-border membership. Although practice lagged behind hopes and expectations, over decades they reshaped and reoriented the outlook of their members towards a common, supracommunal and supranational project (and not simply a common destiny). And they practiced what they preached, indelibly transforming both modern Judaism and conditions in Palestine.51

264

|

Michael Geyer

Other examples of distinctly transnational organizations of civil societies are the antiracial, anticolonial (and occasionally anti-Western as well as anti-Christian) mobilizations among what one might call ‘metropolitan’ colonials.52 Some of these mobilizations followed predominantly national or ethnic lines (with ethnicity and nationalism being adapted to fit older realities). Others lived off communal kinship and family ties, which stretched and crossed over from the colony into metropolitan territory. But all of them tied into metropolitan networks of culture and education (which they adapted to their own ends), and many of these mobilizations had a multiethnic and multinational membership or, alternatively, learned from each other, reached across borders, and ricocheted back into colonial societies.53 The various ‘pan-’ movements are the most self-conscious efforts of this kind.54 Both secular and religious groups, often bound together by common metropolitan experience, come to mind, the Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood being one of the most prominent and notorious examples.55 We may want to think of these transnational groupings in terms of the long tradition of political exiles and expatriate communities that made Belgium, France, Switzerland, and England (and the United States) focal points of nineteenth-century transborder and transnational mobilizations.56 Their organizations, their memberships, and their communicative spaces built on transnational solidarities and were clearly meant to reach into and transform local societies—with the struggle against oppression and for democracy being one of the key goals to achieve this end. However, these exile societies also demonstrate the difficulties of transnationalism. Even if they managed to pluralize their membership, the relation between host country and exile organizations remained tenuous. Moreover, the transnationalism of membership proved to be the exception rather than the norm, and the extension of social norms and values into homelands proved to be a losing proposition. This was surely not the end of transnational mobilization, but it suggests the limits of transmissibility of civil society as social knowledge.57 A similar predicament was also evident in the socialist and the feminist movements in the late nineteenth century. They developed an elaborate congress culture; they influenced each other; most prominently, they shared collective ideals. Thus one might attribute to these mobilizations, if not a collective identity, a commonality of values and projects for a future society. However, they remained first and foremost internationalist in that they retained organizational autonomy along national lines.58 Whether they differ in this respect from the New Social Movements a century later must remain uncertain. The 1960s (student and feminist) movements showed a keen cross-border awareness, a common set of readings and discussions (although the debates remained quite remarkably local), a certain level of information sharing, and even a minimal cross-border circulation of membership, but in view of the intense civil

The Subject(s) of Europe

| 265

society networking of the late nineteenth century, this seems hardly innovative.59 Still, over the last quarter of the twentieth century, transborder social and institutional networking became so much tighter that common horizons of meaning and belonging have slowly and hesitantly developed in the face of overarching challenges. A new set of distinctly transnational civil action groups like Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and Doctors Without Borders took on, in typically spectacular gestures, entire states and transnational enterprises. They suggest new approaches to breaking open an older mould in which knowledge moved so that people might stay. But this is still tenuous stuff, if compared to the much more advanced transnationalism of major corporations in industry, banking, and the media.60 An exploration of these latest developments exceeds by far the scope of this essay. The main goal so far has been simply to demonstrate what is commonly known but easily forgotten, and rarely applied. National existence is contingent—and always has been, now maybe more so than ever before—on cross-border traffic. Therefore the nation only makes sense in the context of its cross-border affiliations. The surprising thing about the latter is that people move, whereas (civil) societies stay. People on the move stretch family and community ties over long distances and are enabled by modern means of transportation and communication to do so on an ever more routine and everyday basis. In an age of migrations, communal ties prove to be remarkably transnational. By contrast, (civil) societies nationalize and localize unsettlement. They do so through competitive learning processes, in which knowledge and cultural codes move remarkably quickly across borders. Their result, however, is not a transnational, but more of a national society. The more successful the transfer and the more essential the knowledge that is passed on, the less we see of it. This is where the mythologizing of endogenous development and of authentic histories starts.61 The modularity of civil society invites such fiction, when in fact the transnationality of knowledge and the ease of its transfer make national myth-making possible. This is really all that needs to be demonstrated in order to prove the case for a transnational history of Europe.

The Unity of Europe The transborder traffic of people and civil societies demonstrates that there is more to Europe than its nations. However, such traffic also ranges far beyond Europe and points towards a global and, more specifically, a trans-Atlantic and Eurasian world. It manifestly does not hold the key to how Europe as a discrete region has come into play. How, then, does Europe come together? What constitutes Europe’s unity?62 The preferred response among historians consists of searching for a common sense of belonging and identifying it with the rise of a European

266

|

Michael Geyer

public space—which is not, as far as one can see, a discourse, but a highly self-conscious production about who and what Europeans are in relation to the world and to each other.63 There is also a growing literature on what ‘the world’ has thought about Europe.64 It turns out that Europeans have talked a great deal about themselves and done so for much longer than is commonly thought—much as the ‘world’ never stopped talking about Europe. However, it is problematic to conclude from this that Europe was actually talked into existence. This is not to downplay the power of public debate, the role of intellectuals in shaping it, or the public and popular amplifications of their productions. But it is altogether more realistic to start with an argument that is less dependent on presumptions about commonality, especially if a sense of belonging is also taken to be voluntary.65 This Europe existed, but its vulnerability and its recurrent disappointment over so many of its ‘eurovisions’ suggests that other forces are at work. Europe, I submit, was moulded into a common space even when and where commonality was denied outright. It took shape for most of its history as an involuntary and highly conflictual space. Europe is first and foremost a space of unsettlement—and not just in terms of migration. But at the same time Europeans always undertook to untangle conflict and to establish a semblance of order. In this sense, Europe time and again emerges from a search for stability, for overarching structures or ‘regimes’ that would help reduce or contain this notoriously conflictual entity. This is an old ‘libertarian’ argument, albeit with an ‘institutional’ twist.66 The failure of ‘universal’ empire, along with the notorious competitiveness of polities and communities on the Eurasian panhandle, is the European condition. However, Europe takes shape—becomes a Europe of choice—in the persistent efforts to rein in competition and to ameliorate catastrophic breakdowns. Therefore, we need to look at both forces: the frighteningly fracturous nature of the subcontinent, and the creative and practical intelligence that aimed at ordering it. Ute Frevert is right when she makes war into the key for the unity of European history.67 Of course, she also wants her Europeans to be good, which leads her to think of Europeans as people who, in commemoration of past wars, have learned to develop a common identity. If so, this Europe is yet to come into existence.68 The Europe we know is one in which Europeans have fought each other throughout their history—that is, they have fought more and more persistently among themselves than with others. Their very grand conflagrations—their religious wars, their revolutionary wars, their nationalist wars—defined entire ages and turned the European war spaces into killing fields. But even smaller and more selective wars affected all. Europe thus comes about first and foremost as a fought-over space, which takes shape—becomes localized—in its killing fields. One of the most basic ‘European’ gestures was and is to acknowledge funeral rites for enemies. Of all the signs and symbols of Europe’s unity, soldiers’ cemeteries or memorial stones are the most prominent.

The Subject(s) of Europe

| 267

Conversely, the denial of funerary rites, as in the Holocaust, was and is the ultimate breach of Europeanness. We need not dwell on the many efforts to structure the European war space into a ‘European system.’ What matters in our context is the ability to seal off, over time, an interior space of ‘Europe’ against external threats. This segregation of a distinctly European war space made imperial powers key actors in defining Europe. The “continent” took definite shape, on the one hand, with the Habsburg Empire rejecting the Ottoman onslaught and an emergent Russian Empire relentlessly pushing back the Ottoman sphere of influence over an Islamic Eurasia, and on the other, with the assertion of British maritime control over the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. The import of resources, for war and commerce, from the world at large made clear the imperial edge over Europe. An imperial state of war thus held Europe together as an interior space for most of its modern history—from the outside, as it were, although not from the ‘periphery.’ The Cold War (in its European theatre) was the latest of these grand, ‘extrinsic’ manoeuvres to constitute a European interior vs. a global exterior. Neither the spatial expanse covered by this war nor the centrality of ‘extrinsic’ powers in shaping Europe’s destiny had changed very much since the eighteenth century. Europe’s history—and not just that of early modern Europe—makes no sense without its imperial guardians and their wars .69 The consolidation of an interior space also facilitated the projection of violence beyond Europe. It set a Western (Christian and secular) world against ‘despotic’ and ‘barbarian’ civilization—a tripartite construction of the world that could still be seen in the three worlds of the Cold War. Much more has been adduced regarding the relationship between Europe and its other(s), but the basic tripartite episteme proves to be remarkably consistent.70 The imperial state of war thus also shaped a European state of mind. More specifically, the imperial division between an exterior space and an interior space set up two distinct war regimes: ‘civilized’ wars fought within according to an evolving jus in bello, and ‘civilizing’ wars of conquest fought without.71 The evolution of a normative European war regime within is an aspect of the pacification of ‘Europe,’ which is commonly, if somewhat misleadingly, summarized under the dual notion of the Westfalian system and humanitarian law.72 The enterprise of structuring and ordering the European war space, of turning it into a space of common conduct and shared norms, reveals Europe and its boundaries and suggests a prominent site where we can actually find Europe—in its constraints on violence. Suffice it to say that this regime broke down time and again. But the extent of the labor—intellectual, social, and political— invested in making it work makes the argument that peace was invented in Europe palatable despite its hyperbole.73 If the war regime structured a common European space, the containment of ‘savage’ violence and the art of peacemaking ‘constituted’ Europe in thought and practice. Thought on

268

|

Michael Geyer

war and peace is certainly one of the most persistent strands of European ‘identity,’ even if it is neglected in the literature on European identity.74 The grand question concerning Europe in all of this was and is whether ‘little Europe,’ i.e. the inhabitants of Europe’s interior, is capable of making peace without recourse to global empire. Carl Schmitt thought it was (and saw the imperial ‘wing’-powers as the source of all trouble).75 And it is true that some of the best thought on peace in Europe and on Europe in peace emanated from within—Kant being one of the founding fathers of this vision of Europe.76 But Kant’s subtle irony also suggests what historical accuracy imperatively demands. Europe’s interior space was regularly set on fire from within—in modern times most notably in the two devastating efforts, by France and Germany respectively, to overthrow extrinsic empire by asserting hegemony. It is not by chance that both of these wars were ‘revolutionary’ wars in the sense that they overthrew the rules of conduct as well as the rationale of fighting war. (That they also expressed the deep mutual antagonism between ‘revolutionary’ France and counterrevolutionary Germany is another matter.)77 The goals of these wars were systemic, intending to destroy the regime that regulated conduct in Europe, rather than utilitarian, seeking to gain relative advantage and leverage within an existing regime. With both endeavors having been defeated and the imperial guards thrown into their own conflict (at their global peripheries) at the end of the twentieth century, the question remains, pace Schmitt, whether a post-imperial Europe is capable of making peace from within. It is surely capable of thinking peace as a way of belonging, but has yet to prove whether it can turn thought into action and, more importantly, governance. The civil war in Yugoslavia and its postwar regime suggest that Europe has made only limited progress in this respect. On the other hand, the self-assertion of Eastern European nations within Europe suggests that there might yet be another springtime for Europe. However much they fought each other, Europeans also depended on each other for their livelihood and their well-being. Therefore, Europe is constituted in equal measure as a space of mutual exchange. We got a first whiff of this Europe when we were looking at Europe as a social space. Historically, this social space is but one aspect of a more encompassing regime of exchanges, which is why, in actual fact, we should look at an entire range of exchange relations—of people, knowledge, things, and money— in order to gain a full appreciation of how Europe has come about. Suffice it to say that there is no part of Europe that is so complete that it can do without Europe. For better or for worse, locals become Europeans by depending on each other. Here, a brief comment on the role of trade must suffice in order to illustrate the point. Historical scholarship on Europe has lately steered away from the study of the rise, expansion, and transformation of Europe’s commercial space, although an older tradition had insisted on

The Subject(s) of Europe

| 269

Europe being constituted by way of its economic exchange relations.78 In part, this neglect is a counter to European integration literature, which is overdetermined by economic matters. In part, the problem is, once again, that Europe as an economic space is both larger and smaller than the little Europe that has been envisioned in the process of postwar European integration. But it is nonetheless a discrete space that has a distinct historic shape. A European commercial space did emerge out of the (long-distance) traffic of commodities and people that reached back into early modern times and beyond. The early modern evolution of this commercial space need not concern us here, except for the observation that, not unlike the interior war space, the commercial space of Europe also precedes the modern era and thus lends further credence to the epochal nature of the notion of Europe as a space of interaction. In any case, a European commercial space was fully formed in the industrial revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.79 The defining ‘modern’ moments came with the dramatic expansion and intensification of economic activities across Europe beginning in the mid nineteenth century and, again, in the mid twentieth century. This Europe stretched into North America as well as into Eurasia. It emerged in two extended cycles of economic growth with their own respective ups and downs, the latter vicissitudes having concerned German historians far more than the actual long cycles.80 In each of these, trade and capital flows grew faster among a small group of interconnected nations—in actual fact, regions—than did the national product in real terms, and they grew much faster within Europe, even in less well connected regions, than between Europe and (most parts of) the rest of the world.81 Expanding exchange and growing connectivity produced neither stability nor homogeneity. Industry and commerce leaped across borders and congealed in multiple regional centers of production. (The regional as opposed to the national basis of industrial growth and commercial exchange should be duly noted.) The time-lag of industrial innovation became ever shorter and, with new products and new technologies (the second and third industrial revolutions respectively), could be reversed in ‘no time.’ But this leveling of the playing field, as it were, rather increased competition across Europe and destroyed entire industries, even as the overall prosperity of European nations grew. Industrial ‘take-offs’ intensified competition and re-divided Europe. Some regions pulled ahead, defining the national and European future as export platforms for industrial goods, while others remained stagnant or fell behind. Yet others developed as dependent producers, be it as resource providers for agricultural goods, raw materials, or, as we have seen, people.82 In any event, the Europe of commercial interaction was always also a divisive and contentious one. It was never a solidaristic enterprise, but a starkly competitive, even cut-throat one, in which cascading divisions of class and labor established tiers of power and influence, wealth and welfare.

270

|

Michael Geyer

The fact that this Europe split in the middle during the second iteration of the growth cycles, into a Eurasian and a trans-Atlantic part (and that the former collapsed in 1989), points to some grander divisions or fault-lines between what Europe was and what it was not. The nineteenth-century British imperial division of labor had generally favoured a separation between industrialized zones and agricultural or raw material-producing hinterlands, with Eastern Europe (and Russia) distinctly part of the latter. But only in the long crisis of the world economy did this division turn into an insurmountable breach that separated an industrial world from a ‘periphery,’ or as some prefer, ‘third world’ both within and without.83 The Soviet Union fought its way back into contention with its own forced industrialization (and the victory of the Red Army). The segregation of Eastern Europe is the product of this self-assertion of the Soviet Union, but in light of what happened to the rest of the predominantly agricultural and raw-material producing world, it is a dubious conjecture that, without Soviet influence, Eastern Europe would have found a place in the transAtlantic industrial elite space.84 Industrial Europe, the core of the EEC, formed an extraordinarily exclusive space. This space in turn was anchored in an Atlantic economy. The shifting of ‘hegemonies’ from Great Britain to the United States as well as the inherent tensions and differences between the two Atlantic rims (flamboyantly dramatized in Franco-American animosities) must be duly noted.85 However, what matters is the dependence of industrial Europe as an interior commercial space on the ability of first Great Britain and subsequently the United States to maintain exchange relations among its constituents and between them and the rest of the world.86 Deep into the late twentieth century and long after European integration was under way, Europe depended crucially on extrinsic mechanisms of stabilization—on a monetary guardian, as it were.87 Europe—more precisely the industrial regions that drew Europe together—controlled neither external relations nor the mechanisms of internal exchange. The list of projects that attempted to rein in competition from within in order to get leverage without is long and impressive. The best known among them are autarkic projects of an economic Großraum that had an impact on the Nazi politics of conquest. However, even the radical ideas and plans of the 1940s had their background in the notion of empire as a self-contained global space that circulated in the late nineteenth century as an antidote to rampant growth and competition.88 The more common industrial strategy consisted in elaborate cross-border mergers and cartels whose purpose was to shift the site of regulation from Finanzkapital, as it were, to the level of corporations. The initial impetus for this ‘transnationalization’ of European industry had a great deal to do with efforts to gain control over or, alternatively, to outwit monetary mechanisms. The tensions inherent in these efforts can be seen in the cartelization drives at the turn of the century and the grand plans for organizing European economies in the

The Subject(s) of Europe

| 271

interwar years (emanating both from Germany and France and from smaller countries that tried to control their destinies), as well as in the disagreements over economic policies in the first decades of the European Economic Community.89 Their overall thrust consisted in regulating and organizing production on a European scale—and in this they succeeded rather remarkably well, whereas Großraum projects failed dismally.90 Managing and regulating the economy from within the circle of ever more tightly connected regions and nations, meanwhile depending on the monetary guardianship of the United States, became the key for turning a European economic space into a European order. Global monetary politics gained momentum only in defining and shaping a European commercial space in the late 1970s and 1980s. This is also the moment when the global division of labor that had been in place since the early twentieth century became unstuck.91 The latter fact need not lead to the conclusion that the EU, as the end product of a short century of trials and errors in managing an interconnected European economy from within, is history. But it surely indicates that at a moment when the EU was on the verge of turning itself into a political body, the very underpinning of the EU, Europe as a self-regulated interior economic space, was being rapidly eroded. War and commerce seem self-evident points of departure for an exploration of Europe. Culture lends itself to the same kind of exploration, but is left here for separate consideration at a later point.92 By contrast, the notion of Europe as an interior political space sounds rather more fanciful. Everyone knows, or so it seems, that the one thing Europe lacks is a common politics. It may have a multi- or intergovernmental system, even elements of transnational governance, but the latter lacks legitimacy. There is no significant, transnational political public despite the considerable effort expended to create one. There is no European political passion, no common European political experience. The nation is the site of politics; the state guarantees rights.93 The EU, in contrast, regulates the size of bananas and the shape of lollipops. Worse, this is all true despite the hyperbole, and therein lies the current problem of the European Union. It is decidedly wrong, however, to presume, first, that there was no intergovernmental cooperation prior to postwar European integration, and second, that Europe as an interior political space is defined by the Brussels bureaucracy (even if we think of it as a more effective institution than is commonly asserted). While not well known or understood, intergovernmental regulatory cooperation is by far the less contentious of these two issues. Whatever the tabloids may write about Brussels, the secular growth of a body of international law is really the most important aspect of this development—and modern Europe could not do without its body of international law and its trust in the ability to enforce it. Also, states have always been deeply involved in a wide variety of intergovernmental initiatives, which

272

|

Michael Geyer

often have intersected with nongovernmental ones. Humanitarian activism is a good case in point, for which the division of labor between (national) Red Cross organizations and the International Committee of the Red Cross may serve as an example.94 (This is a difficult case for civil society advocates, who would like their civil societies to steer clear of government interference. In reality, European governments have always been involved in inter- or transnational civil society enterprises, whether we think of the role of Britain’s Royal Navy in the antislavery movement or seemingly more innocent activities, like the selection of items for the grand exhibitions). The rapidly growing number of intergovernmental bodies, which regulate anything from waterways to broadband, is the other, more prominent aspect of this development.95 This regime of cross-border, interstate rules and regulations evolved in the attempt to solve common problems, which—as was and is the case with, for instance, the Rhine river—required a quite extraordinary level of institutional and political networking and was always susceptible to nationalist unilateralism.96 The salient point here is that Europeans have ‘done’ regulation for a long time, even if we know relatively little about the historical dimensions of these European affairs.97 In the EU, this regulatory approach has been stretched to its utmost limits because of a lack of transnational politics and of a commensurate political sphere.98 The lack of a European public and political sphere is noteworthy because, as we have seen, European civil societies have had a long tradition of identifying common political concerns such as internal and external security and welfare, education and knowledge, nature and nurture (environment and agriculture), or infrastructure and regional development. In fact, the list of self-identified European political issues is long, because there is (and, I would argue, has always been) a sense of the interconnectedness of European politics.99 Thus, it would seem entirely plausible to map a common political space of intergovernmental practice in the sense that each government is keenly aware of what the others have done. However, each government also pushed intergovernmental practice into the realm of experts, lawyers, and administrators. Irrespective of how well developed the sense of the commonality of political issues was, European politics were shaped by quite different concerns that overruled all others. The key agenda that spread like wildfire through modern Europe was self-government and popular sovereignty—and the latter privileged national politics over inter- and transnational government. The unequivocal success of the nation as a site of sovereign politics is one of the most striking things about contemporary Europe. Even diehard nationalists would not have expected, only a century ago, the total eclipse of empire and the emergence of a European political space that is exclusively composed of (large and small and some tiny) self-governing nations. Self-government based on the principle of popular sovereignty, and hence republicanism, was an uncertain proposition even in France. In

The Subject(s) of Europe

| 273

a world of super-states, imperial nations, and hopelessly fragmented regions, Europe’s collective republicanism, its insistence on self-government as an expression of popular sovereignty, stands out like a sore thumb.100 In hindsight, the regime of self-governing nations appears self-evident; surely it always had its supporters. But the opponents of self-government were formidable, and they ruled Europe. ‘Empire,’ and universal empire at that, had not just been a ‘traditional’ ambition of European rulers, for it also appeared to be the most promising way of keeping Europe from fracturing. The Paris peace treaties after World War I are a good indication of this mindset in that the ‘great powers’ grudgingly accepted self-determination in principle within Europe, but in practice did nothing to support it. The failure of the new republics only exacerbated the hue and cry for a return to empire—quite apart from the fact that some of the new republics, like Poland, wanted to become empires in their own right. If anything, it was not self-governing nations, but transnational tyrannies—from Napoleon to Stalin and Hitler—that appeared as the main alternatives to imperial rule.101 And even the post-World War II reassertion of the nation is better explained within an imperial context than without. Yet, neither empire nor transnational tyranny prevailed, although their rivalries have dominated modern European history. What succeeded, in waves of self-assertion followed by setbacks and breakdowns, is the quest for national self-determination—and self-determination as an expression of popular sovereignty. The first thing to note is the missionary quality of the republican ideal of self-government, which leaped across all European boundaries—and, indeed, beyond Europe. If there ever was a European political public it was a public clamouring, in so and so many voices, for self-government, whether in the first half of the nineteenth or in the second half of the twentieth century.102 This republican public could more often be found in exile than at home, at the margins than at the centre, and in resistance rather than in power. It had its centres in France, Switzerland, and Belgium, while Prussia beat republicanism out of its future Germany for good in 1848. Moreover, this Europe was shaped at the peripheries. For without Ireland, Poland, and Serbia on the one hand, and without the national independence movements in the Third World, it is difficult to imagine that empire would have yielded so completely. However, republicanism was the dominant force that, against all expectations, has become the regime that defines a common European political space.103 The weakness of republican political regimes—and conversely the strength of imperial ones—has always been considered to be their presumed inability to cooperate. Who and what should compel autonomous republics to acknowledge the legitimate interests of others, and who would establish legitimacy? There is an element, if not of cutthroat rivalry, than of a stubborn insistence on the political autonomy

274

|

Michael Geyer

inherent in national sovereignty. But it is also evident that self-governing nations persist only if and to the extent that they band together. The Swiss Tagsatzungen are among the earliest examples of this kind of logic (although they are now no longer read as the basis for modern, post-1848, Switzerland).104 In contrast to the cautious Swiss, the European past is littered with grand projects of mutual cooperation that led nowhere and ended in bitter disappointment, notwithstanding the clear and present dangers of noncooperation. Despite their European clamor, fragmentation was the downfall of the revolutionaries of 1848 and has haunted self-governing republics ever since (with the tensions between interwar Poland and Czechoslovakia being one of the more spectacular examples). It continued to vex European integration at every turn. Then again, only now has Europe become a political space of self-governing republics, and it remains to be seen what they will make of this unique condition. The challenge, therefore, is government in a Europe of selfgoverning republics. Kant’s wager on eternal peace is more timely than ever. Europe, despite all protestations to the contrary, has never been a solidaristic space and is not now. Europe has never been a Gemeinschaft. The Europe we encounter here is not a matter of choice; the unity we observe is most assuredly not in everyone’s best interest; and those who want Europe because they selfconsciously embrace it are likely to have been excluded and expelled from the Europe they tried to create. Therefore, it is better to think of Europe as a conflictual space of existence rather than as a chosen place of belonging. And yet, this Europe is also a place in which no part can leave the other alone, because each part depends, even if in unequal measure, on the others. Europe is constituted historically and in the present inasmuch (and wherever) it has been able to make this competitive interdependence its common project. So, there is a cat, where one may see but a grin, and it does as cats do—it scratches. But it would seem that one can learn to live with this condition far more easily than with a disappearing grin.

Notes 1. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland: Authoritative Texts of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, The Hunting of the Snark, Backgrounds, Essays in Criticism, ed. Donald J. Gray (New York, 1971), 53, 69. 2. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, ‘Auf der Suche nach der europäischen Geschichte: einige Neuerscheinungen’, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 42 (2002): 544-56; Jost Dülffer, ‘Europäische Zeitgeschichte—Narrative und historiographische Perspektiven’, Zeithistorische Forschungen 1 (2004): 51-71. 3. Michael Mitterauer, Die Entwicklung Europas—Ein Sonderweg? Legitimationsideologien und die Diskussion der Wissenschaft (Vienna, 1999).

The Subject(s) of Europe

| 275

4. See the acerbic critique of the literature in Tony Judt, ‘Europe vs. America’, New York Review of Books, 10 (February 2005): 37-41. 5. Maurizio Bach, ed., Die Europäisierung nationaler Gesellschaften, (Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, Sonderheft, 40) (Wiesbaden, 2000); Rainer Hudemann, Hartmut Kaelble, and Klaus Schwabe, eds., Europa im Blick der Historiker (Historische Zeitschrift. Beiheft N.F., vol. 21) (Oldenbourg, 1995). 6. Hartmut Kaelble, Europäer über Europa: Die Entstehung des europäischen Selbstverständnisses im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 2001); Alexander Schmidt-Gernig, ‘Gibt es eine “europäische Identität”? Konzeptionelle Überlegungen zum Zusammenhang transnationaler Erfahrungsräume, kollektiver Identitäten und öffentlicher Diskurse in Westeuropa seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg’, in Andreas Kunz and Jürgen Schriewer, eds, Diskurse und Entwicklungspfade: Der Gesellschaftsvergleich in den Geschichts- und Sozialwissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main, 1998). 7. The much debated book by Luisa Passerini, Europe in Love, Love in Europe (New York, 1999), is an example of the latter. 8. Kiran Klaus Patel, Nach der Nationalfixiertheit: Perspektiven einer transnationalen Geschichte (Berlin, 2004). See also Jürgen Osterhammel, ‘Transnationale Gesellschaftsgeschichte: Erweiterung oder Alternativ?’ Geschichte und Gesellschaft 27 (2001): 464-79. 9. See the forum articles on transnational history ‘geschichte.transnational’, available on http://geschichte-transnational.clio-online.net/ [last accessed 15 August 2005]. I prefer the more conventional definition of transnational relations as ‘regular interactions across national boundaries when at least one actor is a non-state or does not operate on behalf of a national government or an intergovernmental organization’, to which I would add that the actor must have a multinational membership. Transnational agents can be distinguished from transgovernmental ones, although the distinction (as for example in the case of the Red Cross) is not always self-evident. I will also introduce transor cross-border subjects, who, despite their ungainly name, cannot be overlooked. The orthodox definition of transnational can be found in Thomas Risse-Kappen, ‘Bringing Transnational Relations Back: An Introduction’, in Thomas Risse-Kappen, ed., Bringing Transnational Relations Back In: Non-State Actors, Domestic Structures, and International Institutions (Cambridge, 1995), 3-33, 3. 10. Michael Geyer, ‘Deutschland und Japan im Zeitalter der Globalisierung: Überlegungen zu einer komparativen Geschichte jenseits des Modernisierungs-Paradigmas’, in Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds., Das Kaiserreich transnational: Deutschland in der Welt 1871-1914 (Göttingen, 2004), 68-86. 11. Frithjof Benjamin Schenk, ‘Mental Maps. Die Konstruktion von geographischen Räumen in Europa seit der Aufklärung’, in Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28 (2002): 493-514. 12. Hans Geser, ‘Zuviel Gemeinschaft in der Gesellschaft? Europa in der Zwangsjacke entdifferenzierender kommunitaristischer Integration’, in Maurizio Bach, ed., Die Europäisierung nationaler Gesellschaften (Wiesbaden, 2000), 456-80. 13. Klaus J. Bade, Migration in European History (Blackwell, 2003). Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650, 2d ed. (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2003). 14. Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham, NC, 2002). 15. Dirk Hoerder and Leslie Page Moch, eds., European Migrants: Global and Local Perspectives (Boston, 1996). 16. Dieter Gosewinkel, ed., Zivilgesellschaft: National und Transnational (Berlin, 2004). 17. Hartmut Kaelble, A Social History of Western Europe, 1880-1980 (Dublin, 1990); Göran Therborn, European Modernity and Beyond: The Trajectory of European Societies, 1945-2000 (London, 1995); Stefan Hradil and Stefan Immerfall, eds., Die westeuropäischen Gesellschaften im Vergleich (Opladen, 1997); Manfred Hildermeier, Jürgen Kocka, and Christoph Conrad, eds., Europäische Zivilgesellschaft in Ost und West: Begriff, Geschichte, Chancen (Frankfurt am Main, 2000).

276

|

Michael Geyer

18. René Girault, Identité et conscience européennes au XXe siècle (Paris, 1994); Reinhold Viehoff and Rien T. Segers, eds., Kultur, Identität, Europa: über die Schwierigkeiten und Möglichkeiten einer Konstruktion (Frankfurt am Main, 1999). Robert Frank, ed., Les identités européennes au XXe siècle: Diversités, convergences et solidarités (Paris, 2004). 19. Heinz-Gerhardt Haupt, ‘Erfahrungen mit Europa: Ansätze zu einer Geschichte Europas im langen 19. Jahrhundert’, in Heinz Duchardt and Andreas Kunz, eds., ‘Europäische Geschichte’ als historiographisches Problem (Mainz, 1997), 87-103. 20. Michael Drake, ed., Time, Family and Community: Perspectives on Family and Community History (Oxford and Cambridge, MA, 1994). 21. Ludger Pries, ed., Transnationale Migration (Baden-Baden, 1997). 22. James T. Fawcett, ‘Networks, Linkages, and Migration Systems’, International Migration Review 23 (1989): 671-80. Dirk Hoerder, ‘Migration in the Atlantic Economies: Regional Origins and Worldwide Expansion’, in Hoerder and Moch, European Migrants, 21-51. 23. Jytte Klausen and Louise Tilly, eds., European Integration in Social and Historical Perspective: 1850 to the Present (Lanham, MD, 1997). Thomas Faist and Eyüp Özveren, eds., Transnational Social Spaces: Agents, Networks, and Institutions (Ashgate, 2004). 24. Geoffrey Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History (Harmondsworth, 1967). 25. One of the few to comment on this condition is Gerald Stourzh, ‘Statt eines Vorworts: Europa, aber wo liegt es?’ in Gerald Stourzh, ed., Annäherungen an eine europäische Geschichtsschreibung (Vienna, 2002), ix-xx. 26. On the question of bonded labor, see Hoerder, Cultures. On ‘bonds of servitude’, see Thomas Bender, ed., The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley, 1992). 27. Farley Grubb, ‘The End of European Immigrants Servitude in the United States’, Journal of Economic History 54 (1994): 794-824. 28. Despite Bade, Europa in Bewegung, the debate on German forced labor remains strangely disconnected from both the debate on forms of servitude and the comparative debate on free and unfree labor. 29. Etienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton, 2004). 30. Mirjana Morokvasic and Hedwig Rudolph, eds., Wanderungsraum Europa: Menschen und Grenzen in Bewegung (Berlin, 1994) is one more title that signals a by now generally accepted approach to European history, but also reflects its dilemma. The subject of migration is difficult to overlook; it just happens to be ‘another’ history. 31. Craig Calhoun, Nationalism (Minneapolis, 1997). 32. See the essays by Kocka, von Beyme, Hagemann, and Hann in Hildermaier et al., eds., Europäische Zivilgesellschaft, as well as the essays in Arnd Bauerkämper and Manuel Borutta, eds., Die Praxis der Zivilgesellschaft: Akteure, Handeln und Strukturen im internationalen Vergleich (Frankfurt am Main and New York, 2003). 33. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA, 2004). 34. A similar argument can be found in Gerard Delanty and Chris Rumford, eds., Rethinking Europe: Social Theory and the Implications of Europeanization (London and New York, 2005). 35. Ralph Jessen, Sven Reichardt, and Ansgar Klein, eds., Zivilgesellschaft als Geschichte: Studien zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden, 2004). 36. Ursula Nothelle-Wildfeuer, Soziale Gerechtigkeit und Zivilgesellschaft (Paderborn, 1999). Hence the reluctance of many of the Eastern European and Latin American civil society advocates to come to terms with neoliberalism. See also John Keane, Civil Society: Old Images, New Visions (Stanford, CA, 1998). 37. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Geselligkeit und Demokratie (Göttingen, 2003) demonstrates the case. 38. Etienne François, Sociabilité et société bourgeoise en France, en Allemagne et en Suisse, 17501850 (Paris, 1986).

The Subject(s) of Europe

| 277

39. Göran Therborn, Between Sex and Power: Family in the World, 1900-2000 (London, 2004). Therborn also shows the limits of adaptation. 40. Thomas Welskopp, Das Banner der Brüderlichkeit: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vom Vormärz bis zum Sozialistengesetz (Bonn, 2000). 41. Gunilla-Frederike Budde, ‘Das Öffentliche des Privaten: Die Familie als zivilgesellschaftliche Kerninstitution’, in Bauerkämper and Borutta, Die Praxis der Zivilgesellschaft, 57-75. 42. Nancy G. Bermeo and Philip G. Nord, eds., Civil Society before Democracy: Lessons from Nineteenth-Century Europe (Lanham, MD, 2000) point toward this perspective, which is ultimately derived from Tocqueville. It should be noted that Tocqueville argues the case both for unsettled society as the fountainhead of civic enthusiasm and for civilmindedness as the source of democratic engagement. 43. Kaelble, A Social History of Western Europe. 44. Michael Mitterauer, The European Family: Patriarchy to Partnership from the Middle Ages to the Present (Chicago, 1982). 45. Wilhelmus A. Arts, Jacques A. Hagenaars, and Loek Halman, eds., The Cultural Diversity of European Unity: Findings, Explanations and Reflections from the European Values Study (Leiden, 2003). 46. Gerhard Schulze, Die Erlebnisgesellschaft: Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart (Frankfurt am Main, 1992). 47. It should be evident that this is an exclusive and privileged space. Although nonWestern motives have been continuously imported (Japonism, primitivism, exoticism) throughout the entire modern age, they have been validated only by their European adoption. This separation was breaking down in the last quarter of the twentieth century and is a source of extraordinary strain, but the social and cultural imperative of being and staying in control appears to be one of the key elements of European selfconsciousness. 48. David N. Myers and William V. Rowe, eds., From Ghetto to Emancipation: Historical and Contemporary Reconsiderations of the Jewish Community (Scranton, 1997). 49. Michael A. Meyer, Judaism within Modernity: Essays on Jewish History and Religion (Detroit, 2001). 50. Eli Lederhendler, The Road to Modern Jewish Politics: Political Tradition and Political Reconstruction in the Jewish Community of Tsarist Russia (New York, 1989); Michael Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996). 51. David Sorkin, ‘Between Messianism and Survival: Secularization and Sacralization in Modern Judaism’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 3 (2004): 73-86. 52. Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (London, 2005) is a recent ‘post-colonial’ defense of the metropolitan spirit in the colonies. 53. Jacques Girault and Bernard Lecherbonnier, eds., Léopold Sédar Senghor--africanité, universalité: 29-30 mai 2000, Université Paris-13, Centre d’études littéraires francophones comparées (Paris, 2002); Jacqueline Leiner, Imaginaire, langage, identité culturelle, négritude: Afrique, France, Guyane, Haiti, Maghreb, Martinique (Tübingen, 1980). 54. Imanuel Geiss, The Pan-African Movement: A History of Pan-Africanism in America, Europe, and Africa (New York, 1974). 55. Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (London, 1969); Mansoor Moaddel, Islamic Modernism, Nationalism, and Fundamentalism: Episode and Discourse (Chicago, 2005). 56. Beatrix Meßmer, ‘Die politischen Flüchtlinge im 19. Jahrhundert’, in André Mercier, ed., Die Flüchtlinge in der Weltgeschichte (Bern, 1974), 209-39; Lloyd S. Kramer, Threshold of a New World: Intellectuals and the Exile Experience in Paris, 1830-1848 (Ithaca, 1988); Herbert Reiter, Politisches Asyl im 19. Jahrhundert: Die deutschen politischen Flüchtlinge des Vormärz und der Revolution von 1848/49 in Europa und den USA (Berlin, 1992).

278

|

Michael Geyer

57. Jürgen Osterhammel, ‘Kulturelle Grenzen in der Expansion Europas’, Saeculum 46 (1995): 101-38. 58. Susan Zimmermann, ‘Frauenbewegung, Transfer und Trans-Nationalität: Feministisches Denken und Streben im globalen und zentral-osteuropäischen Kontext des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts’, in Hartmut Kaelble, Martin Kirsch, and Alexander SchmidtGernig, eds., Transnationale Öffentlichkeiten und Identitäten im 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 2002), 263-302. 59. Dieter Rucht, ‘Zivilgesellschaftliche Akteure und transnationale Politik’, in Bauerkämper and Borutta, Die Praxis der Zivilgesellschaft, 371-90. 60. Alfred D. Chandler and Bruce Mazlish, eds., Leviathans: Multinational Corporations and the New Global History (Cambridge, 2005). 61. Michael Geyer, ‘Historical Fictions of National Autonomy and the Europeanization of History’, Central European History 22 (1989): 316-42; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (revised and extended edition) (London, 1991). 62. On this issue, see Richard Münch, Das Projekt Europa: Zwischen Nationalstaat, regionaler Autonomie und Weltgesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main, 1993). 63. Gerard Delanty, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality (New York, 1995); Luisa Passerini, Identità culturale europea: idee, sentimenti, relazioni (Scandicci, 1998); Viehoff and Segers, Kultur, Identität, Europa; Hartmut Kaelble, Europäer über Europa: Die Entstehung des europäischen Selbstverständnisses im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 2001); Anthony Pagden, The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union (Woodrow Wilson Center Series) (Cambridge, 2002). 64. Urs Bitterli, Die ‘Wilden’ und die ‘Zivilisierten’: Grundzüge einer Geistes- und Kulturgeschichte der europäisch-überseeischen Begegnung (2d rev. ed.) (Munich, 1991); Anthony Pagden, Facing Each Other: The World’s Perception of Europe and Europe’s Perception of the World (Aldershot, 2000); Bo Strath, Europe and the other and Europe as the Other (Brussels, 2000); Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (New York, 2004). 65. Ute Frevert, Eurovisionen: Ansichten guter Europäer im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 2003). 66. Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (Cambridge, 1973). 67. Ute Frevert, ‘Was ist das bloß: Ein Europäer?’ Die Zeit, 23 June 2005. A similar argument is given in her ‘Europeanizing German History’, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 36 (2005): 9-24. 68. Henry Rousso, ‘Das Dilemma eines europäischen Gedächtnisses’, Zeithistorische Forschungen 1 (2004) [available from http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/16126041Rousso-3-2004]. 69. In a nutshell, and with a British inflection, see C. A. Bayly, ‘The First Age of European Imperialism, c. 1760-1830’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth Studies 26 (1998): 5-10; Also see Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1988). 70. Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Entzauberung Asiens: Europa und die asiatischen Reiche im 18. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1998); Bitterli, Die ‘Wilden’ und die ‘Zivilisierten’. 71. On the notion of civilization in international law, see Gerrit W. Gong, The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Society (Oxford, 1984); Edgar Wolfrum, Krieg und Frieden in der Neuzeit: Vom Westfälischen Frieden bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg (Darmstadt, 2003). 72. Klaus Bussmann and Heinz Schilling, eds., 1648, War and Peace in Europe, 3 vols. (Münster, 1998); John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York, 2002); Geoffrey Best, Humanity in Warfare (New York, 1980). 73. Michael Howard, The Invention of Peace: Reflections on War and International Order (New Haven, 2000).

The Subject(s) of Europe

| 279

74. Francis H. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace: Theory and Practice in the History of Relations between States (Cambridge, 1963); Winfried Baumgart, Vom europäischen Konzert zum Völkerbund: Friedensschlüsse und Friedenssicherung von Wien bis Versailles (Darmstadt, 1974). 75. Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des jus publicum Europaeum (Cologne, 1950). 76. Immanuel Kant, ‘Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf [1797]’, in Wilhelm Weischedel, ed., Werke in zehn Bänden, vol. 9: Schriften zur Anthropologie, Geschichtsphilosophie, Politik und Pädagogik (Darmstadt, 1964), 191-251; Martin Ceadel, Thinking about Peace and War (Oxford, 1987). 77. The intellectual mediator between Napoleonic and German wars was Carl von Clausewitz, whose study of war still holds the keys to both (except that nobody is quite sure who has the right one). Andreas Herberg-Rothe, Das Rätsel Clausewitz: Politische Theorie des Krieges im Widerstreit (Munich, 2001). 78. Gerold Ambrosius, Wirtschaftsraum Europa: Vom Ende der Nationalökonomien (Frankfurt am Main, 1996). 79. The nature of this space becomes most evident in the emergent world histories of this period. See Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Geschichte der Globalisierung: Dimensionen, Prozesse, Epochen (Munich, 2003); C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA, 2004); Lee A. Craig and Douglas Fisher, The European Macroeconomy: Growth and Integration and Cycles 1500-1913 (Cheltenham, MA, 2000). 80. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Time (London, 1994). German historiography was crucially influenced by Hans Rosenberg, Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit (Berlin, 1967). 81. Lee A. Craig and Douglas Fisher, The Integration of the European Economy 1850-1913 (New York, 1997). 82. A. J. H. Latham, The International Economy and the Undeveloped World 1865-1914 (London, 1978). 83. The global collapse of agricultural and raw material markets has not received the scholarly attention it deserves. Generally Harold James, The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression (Cambridge, MA, 2001). 84. T. Iván Berend, Central and Eastern Europe, 1944-1993: Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery (Cambridge, 1996). 85. Patrick Karl O’Brien, and Armand Cleese, eds., Two Hegemonies: Britain 1846-1914 and the United States 1941-2001 (Aldershot, 2002). 86. Charles P. Kindleberger, World Economic Primacy, 1500 to 1990 (New York, 1996). The theory of world economic hegemony is problematic, but the control of the monetary sinews of exchange is very real. 87. Lars Magnusson and Bo Strath, eds., From the Werner Plan to the EMU: In Search of a Political Economy for Europe (Brussels, 2001). 88. Sönke Neitzel, Weltmacht oder Untergang: Die Weltreichslehre im Zeitalter des Imperialismus (Paderborn, 2000). 89. Carl Strikwerda, ‘The Troubled Origins of European Economic Integration? International Iron and Steel and Labor Migration in the Era of World War I’, American Historical Review 98 (1993): 1106-29; Peter Krüger, Wege und Widersprüche der europäischen Integration im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1995); John Gillingham, Coal, Steel, and the Rebirth of Europe, 1945-1955: The Germans and French from Ruhr Conflict to Economic Community (Cambridge and New York, 1991). 90. John Gillingham, European Integration, 1950-2003: Superstate or New Market Economy? (Cambridge, 2003). 91. Arrighi, ‘The Social and Political Economy of Global Turbulence’ contains the relevant literature. 92. It suffices to reiterate the reference to Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA, 2004).

280

|

Michael Geyer

93. Klaus Eder, Kai-Uwe Hellmann, and Hans-Jörg Trenz, ‘Regieren in Europe jenseits öffentlicher Legitimation? Eine Untersuchung zur Rolle von politischer Öffentlichkeit in Europa’, in Beate Kohler-Koch, ed., Regieren in entgrenzten Räumen (Opladen, 1998), 321-44; Heidrun Abromeit, Democracy in Europe: Legitimising Politics in a Non-State Polity (New York, 1998). 94. Caroline Moorhead, Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross (Boulder, CO, 1998). 95. Martin H. Geyer and Johannes Paulmann, eds., The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War (Oxford, 2001). 96. Mark Cioc, The Rhine: An Eco-biography, 1815-2000 (Seattle, 2002). 97. Rainer Maria Lepsius, ‘Die europäische Gemeinschaft: Rationalitätskriterien der Regimebildung’, in Wolfgang Zapf, ed., Die Modernisierung der Gesellschaften (Frankfurt am Main and New York, 1991), 309-17; Rainer Maria Lepsius, ‘Die Europäische Union als Herrschaftsverband eigener Prägung’, in Christian Joerges, Yves Mény, and J. H. H. Weiler, eds., What Kind of Constitution? What Kind of Polity? Responses to Joschka Fischer (Florence, 2000), 203-12. 98. Jürgen Gerhards, ‘Westeuropäische Integration und die Schwierigkeiten der Entstehung einer europäischen Öffentlichkeit’, Zeitschrift für Soziologie 22 (1993): 96-110. See the essays by Jürgen Gerhards, ‘Europäisierung von Ökonomie und Politik und die Trägheit der Entstehung einer europäischen Öffentlichkeit’ and Klaus Eder and Cathleen Kantner, ‘Transnationale Resonanzstrukturen in Europa. Eine Kritik der Rede vom Öffentlichkeitsdefizit’, in Maurizio Bach, ed., Die Europäisierung nationaler Gesellschaften (Wiesbaden, 2000), 277-305 and 306-31, respectively. 99. The welfare state is a case in point. While each nation-state developed its own, they all observed what others did and the experts met regularly. Criminology is another example, which points to dense intergovernmental networks in addition to civil society networks. 100. This is what I took from Hartmut Kaelble, Wege zur Demokratie: Von der Französischen Revolution zur Europäischen Union (Stuttgart, 2001). 101. Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York, 1999). 102. The common reference is the springtime of nations in 1848. Axel Körner, ed., 1848-A European Revolution? International Ideas and National Memories of 1848 (New York, 2000). 103. Krzysztof Pomian, L’Europe et ses nations (Paris, 1990). 104. Hans Conrad Peyer, Verfassungsgeschichte der alten Schweiz (Zürich, 1978).

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

( Abelshauser, Werner. ‘“Integration à la Carte”: Der Primat der Politik und die wirtschaftliche Integration Westeuropas in den 50er Jahren.’ In Josef Wysocki, ed., Wirtschaftliche Integration und Wandel von Raumstrukturen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Berlin, 1994. ———. ‘The Re-entry of West Germany into the International Economy and Early European Integration.’ In Clemens Wurm, ed., Western Europe and Germany: The Beginnings of European Integration 1945–1960. Oxford, 1995. Ackermann, Ulrike, ed. Versuchung Europa: Stimmen aus dem europäischen Raum. Frankfurt am Main, 2003. Ambrosius, Gerold. Wirtschaftsraum Europa: Vom Ende der Nationalökonomien. Frankfurt am Main, 1996. Arts, Wilhelmus A., Jacques A. Hagenaars, and Loek Halman, eds. The Cultural Diversity of European Unity: Findings, Explanations and Reflections from the European Values Study. Leiden, 2003. Autissier, Anne-Marie. L‘Europe culturelle en practique. Paris, 1999. Bach, Maurizio. Die Europäisierung nationaler Gesellschaften (Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, Sonderheft, 40). Wiesbaden, 2000. Bade, Klaus J. Migration in European history. Malden, MA, 2003. Balibar, Etienne. We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Princeton, 2004. Baranowksi, Shelley, and Ellen Furlough, eds. Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe and North America. Ann Arbor, MI, 2001. Barnes, Ian, and Pamela Barnes. ‘Tourism Policy in the European Community.’ In Pompl and Lavery, Tourism in Europe. Bender, Thomas, ed. Rethinking American History in a Global Age. Berkeley, 2002. Berend, T. Iván. Central and Eastern Europe, 1944–1993: Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery. Cambridge, 1996. Berger, Stefan, ed. Narrating the Nation: The Representation of National History in Different Genres. Oxford, 2006. Berghahn, Volker R. America and the Cultural Cold Wars in Europe: Sheperd Stone between Philanthropy, Academy and Diplomacy. Princeton, 2001. Bingen, Dieter, Wlodzimierz Borodziej, and Stefan Troebst, eds. Vertreibungen europäisch erinnern: Historische Erfahrung, Vergangenheitspolitik, Zukunftskonzeptionen. Wiesbaden, 2003.

282

|

The Subject(s) of Europe

Bitterli, Urs. Die ‘Wilden’ und die ‘Zivilisierten’: Grundzüge einer Geistes- und Kulturgeschichte der europäisch-überseeischen Begegnung. 2nd rev. ed. Munich, 1991. Bloch, Marc. ‘Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européennes’ [1928]. In his Mélanges Historiques. Paris, 1963. Boer, Pim den. ‘Lieux de mémoire et identité de l’Europe.’ In Pim den Boer and Willem Frijhoff, eds., Lieux de mémoire et identités nationals. Amsterdam, 1993. Borneman, John, and Nick Fowler. ‘Europeanization.’ Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (1997): 487–514. Boissevain, Jeremy, ed. Coping with Tourists: European Reactions to Mass Tourism. Providence, 1996. Buchheim, Christoph. ‘Comments on European Economic Integration: Did It Matter in the Past, Will It Matter in the Future?’ In Richard Tilly and Paul Welfens, eds., European Economic Integration as a Challenge to Industry and Government. Heidelberg, 1995. Buruma, Ian, and Avishai Margalit. Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies. New York, 2004. Bussière, Eric, and Michel Dumoulin. Milieux économiques et intégration européenne en Europe occidentale au XXe siècle. Arras, 1998. Bührer, Werner. Ruhrstahl und Europa: Die Wirtschaftsvereinigung Eisen- und Stahlindustrie und die Anfänge der europäischen Integration 1945–1952. Munich, 1986. Cederman, Lars-Erik, ed. Constructing Europe’s Identity: The External Dimension. Boulder, CO, 2001. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, 2000. Collins, Richard. Broadcasting and Audio-Visual Policy in the European Single Market. London, 1994. Conrad, Christoph, and Shalini Randeria, eds. Jenseits des Eurozentrismus: Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt am Main, 2002. Conway, Martin. ‘Democracy in Postwar Western Europe: The Triumph of a Political Model.’ European History Quarterly 32 (2002): 59–84. ———. ‘The Rise and Fall of Western Europe’s Democratic Age, 1945–1973.’ Contemporary European History 13 (2004): 67–88. Davies, Norman. Europe: A History. Oxford, 1996. Deighton, Anne, and Alan Milward, eds., Widening, Deepening and Acceleration: The European Economic Community 1957–1963. Baden-Baden, 1999. Delanty, Gerard, and Chris Rumford, eds. Rethinking Europe: Social Theory and the Implications of Europeanization. London, 2005. Delhey, Jan. European Social Integration: From Convergence between Countries to Transnational Relation between Peoples. Berlin, 2004. Delouche, Frederic et al. Europäisches Geschichtsbuch: Geschichtliches Unterrichtswerk für Sekundarstufe I und II. Erarbeitet von 12 europäischen Historikern. Stuttgart, 1992. Duroselle, Jean-Baptiste. Europe: A History of Its Peoples. London, 1990. Duţu, Alexandru. Ideea de Europa şi evoluţia conştiinţei europene (The Idea of Europe and the Evolution of European Consciousness). Bucharest, 1999. Dülffer, Jost. ‘Europäische Zeitgeschichte—Narrative und historiographische Perspektiven.’ In Zeithistorische Forschungen 1 (2004): 51–71.

Selected Bibliography

| 283

———. ‘Zeitgeschichte in Europa—oder europaïsche Zeitgeschichte.’ Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte no. 1–2 (2005): 18–26. Fassmann, Heinz, and Rainer Münz. ‘Europäische Migration—ein Überblick.’ In Heinz Fassmann and Rainer Münz, eds., Migration in Europa: Historische Entwicklung, aktuelle Trends, politische Reaktionen. Frankfurt am Main, 1996. Fetzer, Thomas. ‘Zivilgesellschaftliche Organisationen in Europa nach 1945: Katalysatoren für die Herausbildung transnationaler Identitäten?’ In Hartmut Kaelble, Martin Kirsch, and Alexander Schmidt-Gernig, eds., Transnationale Öffentlichkeiten und Identitäten. Munich, 2002. Flacke, Monika, ed. Mythen der Nationen: Ein europäisches Panorama. 2nd ed. Munich, 2001. Frank, Robert, ed. Les identités européennes au XXe siècle: Diversités; convergences et solidarités. Paris, 2004. Frevert, Ute. Eurovisionen: Ansichten guter Europäer im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main, 2003. Schenk, Frithjof Benjamin. ‘Mental Maps: Die Konstruktion von geographischen Räumen in Europa seit der Aufklärung.’ Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28 (2002): 493–514. Gehler, Michael. ‘Zeitgeschichte zwischen Europäisierung und Globalisierung.’ Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte no. 51–52 (2002): 23–35. Geiger, Till. ‘Reconstruction and the Beginnings of European Integration.’ In Max-Stephan Schulze, ed., Western Europe: Economic and Social Change since 1945. London, 1999. Gies, Horst. Nation und Europa in der historisch-politischen Bildung. Schwalbach, 1998. Gilbert, Mark. Surpassing Realism: The Politics of European Integration since 1945. Lanham, MD, 2003. Gillingham, John. European Integration: Superstate or New Market Economy, 1950–2003. Cambridge, 2003. Girault, Réne. Identité et conscience européennes au XXe siècle. Paris, 1994. Glenny, Misha. The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, 1804–1999. New York, 1999. Grazia, Victoria de. ‘European Cinema and the Idea of Europe, 1925–1995.’ In Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Steven Ricci, eds., Hollywood and Europe: Economics, Culture, National Identity 1945–1995. London, 1998. ———. Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through 20th Century Europe. Cambridge, MA, 2005. Greenwood, Justin. Interests in the European Union. Basingstoke, 1997. Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard. ‘Die Geschichte Europas als vergleichende Geschichtsschreibung.’ Comparativ 14, no. 3 (2004): 83–98. Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard, and Dieter Langewiesche, eds. Nation und Religion in Europa: Mehrkonfessionelle Gesellschaften im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main, 2004. Hildermeier, Manfred, Jürgen Kocka, and Christoph Conrad, eds. Europäische Zivilgesellschaft in Ost und West: Begriff, Geschichte, Chancen. Frankfurt am Main, 2000. Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig. Geselligkeit und Demokratie. Göttingen, 2003. Horne, John, ed. State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War. Cambridge, 1997.

284

|

Selected Bibliography

Howard, Michael. The Invention of Peace: Reflections on War and International Order. New Haven, 2000. Hradil, Stefan, and Stefan Immerfall, eds. Die westeuropäischen Gesellschaften im Vergleich. Opladen, 1997. Hrbek, Rudolf, ed. Bürger und Europa. Baden-Baden, 1994. Hudemann, Rainer, Hartmut Kaelble, and Klaus Schwabe, eds. Europa im Blick der Historiker. (Historische Zeitschrift. Beiheft N.F., vol. 21). Oldenbourg, 1995. Jarausch, Konrad H., and Michael Geyer. Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories. Princeton, 2003. Jarvie, Ian. Hollywood’s Overseas Campaign: The North Atlantic Movie Trade, 1920–1950. Cambridge, 1992. Jeismann, Michael. ‘Völkermord und Vertreibung. Medien der Europäisierung?’ Historische Anthropologie 13, no. 15 (2005): 111–20. Joerges, Christian, and Navraj Singh Ghaleigh. Darker Legacies of Law in Europe: The Shadow of National Socialism and Fascism over Europe and Its Legal Traditions. Oxford, 2003. Judt, Tony. A Grand Illusion? An Essay on Europe. New York, 1996. Kaelble, Hartmut. A Social History of Western Europe, 1880–1980. Dublin 1990. ———. Europäer über Europa: Die Entstehung des europäischen Selbstverständnisses im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main, 2001. ———. Wege zur Demokratie: Von der Französischen Revolution zur Europäischen Union. Stuttgart and Munich, 2001. Kaelble, Hartmut, Martin Kirsch, and Alexander Schmidt-Gernig, eds. Transnationale Öffentlichkeiten und Identitäten. Munich, 2002. Keane, John. Democracy and Civil Society. London, 1988. ———. ‘Questions for Europe.’ In Brian Nelson et al., eds., The Idea of Europe: Problems of National and Transnational Identity. New York, 1992. ———. Civil Society: Old Images, New Visions. Stanford, 1998. Keene, Donald. ‘The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 and Its Cultural Effects on Japan.’ In Donald Shively ed., Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture. Princeton, 1971. Kellenbenz, Herrmann, ed. Handbuch der europäischen Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte. 6 vols. Stuttgart, 1980. Kerman, Joseph. Opera and Drama. New York, 1956. Kershaw, Ian. The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich. Oxford, 1987. ———. ‘“Normality” and Genocide: The Problem of “Historicization”.’ In Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan, eds., Reevaluating the Third Reich. New York, 1993. ———. The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation. [1985] 4th ed. London, 2000. ———. ‘Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism.’ Journal of Contemporary History 39 (2004): 239–254. Kershaw, Ian, and Moshe Lewin. Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison. Cambridge, 1997. Kersten, Krystyna. The Establishment of Communist Rule in Poland, 1943–1948. Berkeley, 1991. Kipping, Matthias. Zwischen Kartellen und Konkurrenz: Der Schuman-Plan und die Ursprünge der europäischen Einigung 1944–1952. Berlin, 1996.

Selected Bibliography

| 285

Klausen, Jytte, and Louise Tilly, eds. European Integration in Social and Historical Perspective: 1850 to the Present. Lanham, MD, 1997. Koselleck, Reinhart. The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing, History, Spacing Concepts. Stanford, 2002. Krüger, Peter. Wege und Widersprüche der europäischen Integration im 20. Jahrhundert. Munich, 1995. Kühnhard, Ludger. Von Deutschland nach Europa: Geistiger Zusammenhalt und außenpolitischer Kontext. Baden-Baden, 2000. Lagrou, Pieter. ‘European Integration and the Legacy of the Second World War: The Invention of a European Tradition as a Means of Overcoming the German Problem, 1945–1965.’ In Barrie Axford, Daniela Berghahn, and Nick Hewlett, eds., Unity and Diversity in the New Europe. Bern, 2000. ———. The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965. Cambridge, 2000. Landfried, Christine. Das politische Europa: Differenz als Potential der Europäischen Union. Baden-Baden, 2002. Loth, Wilfried. Der Weg nach Europa: Geschichte der europäischen Integration 1939–1957. Göttingen, 1996. ———. ‘Beiträge der Geschichtswissenschaft zur Deutung der europäischen Integration.’ In Wilfried Loth and Wolfgang Wessels, eds. Theorien europäischer Integration. Opladen, 2001. Magnusson, Lars, and Bo Strath, eds. From the Werner Plan to the EMU: In Search of a Political Economy for Europe. Brussels, 2001. Milward, Alan. The European Rescue of the Nation State. Berkeley, 1992. Moch, Leslie Page. Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650. 2nd ed. Bloomington, 2003. Naimark, Norman M. Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe. Cambridge, MA, 2001. Nemes, Károly. Films of Commitment: Socialist Cinema in Eastern Europe. Trans. András Boros-Kazai. Budapest, 1985. Noiriel, Gérard. La tyrannie du national: Le droit d’asile en Europe, 1793–1993. Paris, 1991. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, and Steven Ricci, eds. Hollywood and Europe: Economics, Culture, National Identity 1945–1995. London, 1998. Nützenadel, Alexander, and Wolfgang Schieder, eds. Zeitgeschichte als Problem: Nationale Traditionen und Perspektiven der Forschung in Europa. Göttingen, 2004. Osterhammel, Jürgen. Geschichtswissenschaft jenseits des Nationalstaats: Studien zur Beziehungsgeschichte und zum Zivilisationsvergleich. Göttingen, 2001. Pagden, Anthony. Facing Each Other: The World’s Perception of Europe and Europe’s Perception of the World. Aldershot, 2000. ———, ed. The Idea of Europe from Antiquity to the European Union. Cambridge, 2002. Passerini, Luisa. Identità culturale europea: idee, sentimenti, relazioni. Scandicci, 1998. ———. Europe in Love, Love in Europe. New York, 1999. Patel, Kiran Klaus. Jenseits der Nationalfixiertheit: Perspektiven einer transnationalen Geschichte. Berlin, 2004. Pingel, Falk. Macht Europa Schule? Die Darstellung Europas in Schulbüchern der Europäischen Gemeinschaft. Frankfurt am Main, 1995.

286

|

Selected Bibliography

Plessen, Marie Louise v. Idee Europa. Entwürfe zum ‘Ewigen Frieden’: Ordnungen und Utopien für die Gestaltung Europas von der pax romana zur Europäischen Union. Berlin, 2003. Pók, Attila, Jörn Rüsen, and Jutta Scherrer, eds. European History: Challenge for a Common Future. Hamburg, 2002. Pompl, W., and P. Lavery, eds. Tourism in Europe: Structures and Developments. Wallingford, 1993. Popp, Susanne. ‘Auf dem Weg zu einem europäischen “Geschichtsbild”.’ Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte nos. 7–8 (2004): 23–31. Raphael, Lutz. Geschichtswissenschaft im Zeitalter der Extreme: Theorien, Methoden, Tendenzen von 1900 bis zur Gegenwart. Munich, 2003. Rátz, Tamara. European Tourism. Shékesfahérvár, 2004. Rhenisch, Thomas. Europäische Integration und industrielles Interesse: Die deutsche Industrie und die Gründung der Europäischen Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft. Stuttgart, 1999. Rieber, Alfred J. ‘Stalin, Man of the Borderlands.’ The American Historical Review 106 (2001): 1651–91. Rother, Rainer, ed. Der Weltkrieg 1914–1918: Ereignis und Erinnerung. Wolfratshausen, 2004. Rousso, Henry, ed. Stalinisme et nazisme: Histoire et mémoire comparée. Brussels, 1999. Sandkühler, Thomas, ed. Europäische Integration: Deutsche Hegemonialpolitik gegenüber Westeuropa 1920–1960 (Beiträge zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus, vol. 18). Göttingen, 2002. Schlesinger, Philip. ‘Should We Worry about America?’ In Annemoon van Hemel, Hans Mommaas, and Cas Smithuijsen, eds., Trading Culture: GATT, European Cultural Policies and the Transatlantic Market. Amsterdam, 1996. Schmale, Wolfgang. Scheitert Europa an seinem Mythendefizit? Bochum, 1997. Schwan, Gesine. ‘Die Tücken der Ortsbestimmung—wo liegt Osteuropa?’ Osteuropa 52 (2002): 389–94. Schwartz, Jonathan M. ‘Civil Society and Ethnic Conflict in the Republic of Macedonia.’ In Joel Halpern and David Kideckel, eds., Neighbors at War: Anthropological Perspectives on Yugoslav Ethnicity, Culture, and History. Philadelphia, 2000. Schwelling, Birgit. ‘Das Gedächtnis Europas: Eine Diagnose.’ In Timm Beichelt et al., eds., Europa-Studien. Eine Einführung. Wiesbaden, 2005. Schönwälder, Karen, Rainer Ohliger, and Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos, eds. European Encounters: Migrants, Migration and European Societies since 1945. Aldershot, 2003. Schöpflin, George, and Nancy Wood, eds. In Search of Central Europe. Totowa, NJ, 1989. Shaw, Gareth, and Allan M. Williams, eds. Tourism and Economic Development: European Experiences. Chichester, 1998. Siegrist, Hannes, and Rolf Petri. ‘Geschichten Europas. Probleme, Methoden und Perspektiven.’ Comparativ 14 (2004): 244–68. Smelik, Anneke. ‘“For Venus smiles not in a house of tears”: Interethnic relations in European Cinema.’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (2003): 55–74. Stephan, Alexander, ed. The Americanization of Europe: Culture, Diplomacy and Anti-Americanism after 1945. New York, 2005.

Selected Bibliography

| 287

Stirk, Peter. A History of European Integration since 1914. London, 1996. Stourzh, Gerald, ed. Annäherungen an eine europäische Geschichtsschreibung. Vienna, 2002. Strath, Bo. Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other. Brussels and New York, 2000. Strath, Bo, and Mikael Malmberg, eds. The Meaning of Europe: Variety and Contention Within and Between Nations. Oxford, 2002. Stuchtey, Benedikt. Review of the conference on ‘European Lieux de mémoire,’ German Historical Institute, London, 5–7 July 2002. In GHIL, Bulletin 24, no. 2 (2002): 121–25. Online: http://www.ghil.ac.uk/publ.html#Bulletin. Ther, Philip, and Ana Siljak. Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944–1968. Lanham, MD, 2001. Ther, Philip, and Jürgen Danyel. ‘Flucht und Vertreibung in europäischer Perspektive.’ Zeitschrift für Geschichtwissenschaft 51, no. 1 (2003). Urwin, Derek. The Community of Europe: A History of European Integration since 1945. London, 1991. Wagnleitner, Reinhold. Coca-colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War. Trans. Diana M. Wolf. Chapel Hill, NC, 1994. Wolf, Klaus Dieter, ed. Projekt Europa im Übergang? Probleme, Modelle und Strategien des Regierens in der Europäischen Union. Baden-Baden, 1997. Wolf, Larry. The Invention of Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization in the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford, 1994. Wolf, Stuart. ‘Europa und seine Historiker.’ Comparativ 14 (2004):50–72 . Wurm, Clemens, ed. Western Europe and Germany: The Beginnings of European Integration 1945–1960. Oxford, 1995.

CONTRIBUTORS

( Örjan Appelqvist is Professor of Economic History at the University of Stockholm. His main fields of research are European post-war history and the life and work of Gunnar Myrdal. Among his publications are: (with Stellan Andersson) Essential Gunnar Mrydal. New York, 2005 and ‘Civil servant or politician? Dag Hammerskjöld’s role in Swedish government policy in the Forties’. Sveriges Riksbank Economic Review 3 (2005): 33. Stefan Berger is Professor of Modern German and Comparative European History at the University of Manchester. His interests range over comparative labour history, the history of national identities and nationalism as well as historiography and historical theory. At present he is directing a five year European Science Foundation programme entitled “Representations of the Past: The Writing of National Histories in Europe” and completing a British Academy funded project on the relationship between Britain and the GDR. Recent publications include: ed. A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Europe, 1789-1914. Oxford, 2006; The Other Germany. Augsburg, 2005; Towards a Comparative History of Coalfield Societies. Aldershot, 2005 and Inventing the Nation: Germany. London, 2004. Igor Cas¸u is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of History, Moldavian Academy of Sciences. His fields of research are Soviet nationalities policy, nation-building and the creation of national identities, ethnic relations and contemporary Moldavian and European historiography. His recent publications include: ‘Zur Binnendeportation von sowjetischen Deutschen und Juden im und nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg’. In Krista Zach et al., eds., Migration im südöstlichen Mitteleuropa. Auswanderung, Flucht, Deportation, Exil im 20. Jahrhundert. Munich, 2005; ‘Ethnonational Identity, Minorities and Federalism’. In Alexander Rubel, Alexandru Zub, and Favius Solomon, eds., Südosteuropa im 20. Jahrhundert. Ethnostrukturen, Identitäten, Konflikte. Konstanz, 2004: 119-130.

290

|

Contributors

Michael Geyer is Samuel N. Harper Professor of modern German and European History at the University of Chicago. His main fields of research are modern German history, the history of war, as well as global history. Among his recent publications are: ‘Endkampf 1918 and 1945: German Nationalism, Annihilation, and Self-Destruction.’ In Alf Lüdtke, and Bernd Weisbrod, eds., No Man’s Land of Violence: Extreme Wars in the 20 th Century. Göttingen, 2006: 35–67; ‘Virtue in Despair: A Family History from the Days of the Kindertransport.’ In History & Memory 17, no. 1/2 (2005): 323– 65; and (with Charles Bright) ‘Regimes of World Order: Global Integration and the Production of Difference in Twentieth Century World History.’ In Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Anand A. Yang, eds., Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History. Honolulu, 2005: 202–238. John Horne is Professor of Modern European History at Trinity College, Dublin, a member of the Royal Irish Academy and an executive member of the Centre de Recherche at the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne, France. He has published widely on the history of the Great War and of twentieth-century France, including: Démobilisations culturelles après la Grande Guerre. Paris, 2002; (with Alan Kramer) German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial. New Haven, 2001; ‘Entre expérience et mémoire: les soldats français de la Grande Guerre.’ Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 60, no. 5 (Sep.-Oct. 2005): 903–19. Konrad H. Jarausch is the former director of the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam and Lurcy Professor of European Civilization at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. His research interests are currently focused on the nature of the East German dictatorship, the crisis of the social market economy beginning in the 1970s and the problem of interpreting 20th-century German history in general. His recent publications include: (with Michael Geyer) Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories. Princeton, 2002; After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1990 (New York, 2006); and Risse im Bruderbund: Die Gespräche Honecker—Breshnew 1974–1982. Berlin, 2006. Hartmut Kaelble is Professor for Social History at the Humboldt University in Berlin and speaker of the Sonderforschungsbereich on comparative globalization. His main fields of research are the comparative social history of Europe, the history of European integration as well as European identity and the European public sphere. Some of his books are: Europäer über Europa: Das europäische Selbstverständnis im 19.und 20. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main, 2001; Wege zur Demokratie: Von der französischen Revolution zur Europäischen Union. Munich, 2001 and The European Way. Oxford, 2005. Pieter Lagrou is Professor of contemporary history at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and is a researcher at the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent

Contributors

| 291

in Paris. He is currently working on the topics of war and international law and on the convergence of European societies in the twentieth century. Among his recent publications are: ‘Armes Belgien? Kriegsverbrecherprozesse gegen Deutsche in Belgien, 1944–1951.’ In Norbert Frei ed., Transnationale Erinnerungspolitik. Munich, 2006; ‘La “guerre honorable” et une certaine idée de l’Occident: Mémoires de guerre, racisme et réconciliation après 1945.’ In François Marcot ed., Les Résistances, mirroirs des régimes d’oppression? France, Allemagne, Italie. Paris, 2006 and ‘La storia del tempo presente nell’Europa postbellica: Come si sviluppa un nuovo campo disciplinare.’ Novecento. Per una storia del temp presente 11 (2004). Thomas Lindenberger is deputy director of the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam and teaches at Potsdam University. His current research interests center on questions of “mass Media in the Cold War” as well as on issues of historical methodology and theory. His publications include: Öffentliche Polizei im Staatssozialismus: Volkspolizei, SED-Staat und Herrschaftspraxis, 1952–1968. Cologne, 2003; ed. Herrschaft und Eigen-Sinn in der Diktatur: Studien zur Gesellschaftsgeschichte der DDR. Cologne, 1999; and ed.Massenmedien im Kalten Krieg: Akteure, Bilder, Resonanzen. Cologne, 2006. Thomas Mergel is Professor of 19th and 20th century history at the University of Basel. His research interests include European social and cultural history of the 19th and 20th century and the history of political culture and political communication. Among his publications are: Parlamentarische Kultur in der Weimarer Republik: Politische Kommunikation, symbolische Politik und Öffentlichkeit im Reichstag 1919–1933. Düsseldorf, 2002; Grossbritannien seit 1945. Goettingen, 2005; and (with Benjamin Ziemann) eds. European Political History, 1871–1913. Aldershot, 2008 (forthcoming). Kiran Klaus Patel is Assistant Professor of Modern History at Humboldt University in Berlin and spokesperson of the joint research project: Imagined Europeans. The Scientific Construction of Homo Europaeus. In 2006/7, he is a John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at the Center for European Studies, Harvard University. His research interests focus on the modern European and American history, especially on transnational perspectives. His most recent publications include: Soldiers of Labor: Labor Service in Nazi Germany and New Deal America, 1933–1945. New York, 2005; “Auslese” und “Ausmerze”. Das Janusgesicht der nationalsozialistischen Lager. In Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 54, 2006 339–365. Dragoş Petrescu teaches modern history at the University of Bucharest and is a member of the Board of the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (CNSAS). His research interests are focused on modernization and nation-building processes in Southeast Europe as well as the historical comparison between fascism and communism in East-Central

292

|

Contributors

Europe. His most recent publications include: ‘The Political Culture Approach to the Study of Communism: The Case of Romania, 1945–1989.’ In Alexandru Zub, and Adrian Cioflâncă eds., Cultură politică şi politici culturale în România modernă. Iaşu, 2005 and ‘“Rebellious” vs. “Non-Rebellious” Nations: British Perceptions of Romanian Anti-Communist Dissidence in the 1980s.’ In Dennis Deletant ed., In and Out of Focus: Romania and Britain—Relations and Perspectives from 1930 to the Present. Bucharest, 2005. Alfred J. Rieber is Professor of History at the Central European University in Budapest and Professor Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. His main fields of interest focus on Russian social history, Soviet foreign policy and comparative studies of Eurasian borderlands. His most recent publications are: (with Alexei Miller) eds. Imperial Rule. Budapest, 2004 and the two chapters: ‘Stalin as Georgian: The Formative Years’ and ‘Stalin as Foreign Policy Maker: Avoiding War, 1927–1953.’ In Sarah Davies, and James Harris eds., Stalin. A New History. Cambridge, 2005. Henry Rousso is a senior researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) and former director of the Institut d’histoire du temps présent (IHTP) in Paris. He is teaching at the University of Paris-10 Nanterre. His work is focused on the history and memory of the Second World War, and more generally on the uses of the past in contemporary societies. Among his publications are: Vichy, An Ever-Present Past. Hanover, 1998 (with Éric Conan): The Haunting Past: History, Memory, and Justice in France. Philadelphia, 2002; Vichy. L’Événement, la mémoire, l’histoire. Paris, 2001; and ed., Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared. Lincoln, 2004. Karen Schönwälder is head of a programme on Intercultural Conflicts and Societal Integration at the Social Science Research Center in Berlin. Her research interests include migration and integration policy in Germany and Britain, the ideology and practice of New Labour, and the history of German universities and academia. Among her publications are: European Encounters: Migrants, Migration and European Societies since 1945. Aldershot, 2003; ‘Why Germany’s Guestworkers were Largely Europeans: The Selective Principles of Post-war Labour Recruitment Policy.’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 27, no. 2 (2004): 248–265; and (with Peter A. Klaus) ‘Multiculturalism in Germany: Rhetoric, Scattered Experiments and Future Chances.’ In Keith Banting, and Will Kymlicka eds., Multiculturalism and the Welfare State: Recognition and Redistribution in Contemporary Democracies, Oxford, 2006. Marsha Siefert teaches in the history department at the Central European University in Budapest. Her research interests include Cold War culture and communication, Russian-American relations, film, and the social history of music. Among her publications are: Mass Culture and Perestroika in the Soviet Union. Oxford, 1991; Extending the Borders of Russian History:

Contributors

| 293

Essays in Honor of Alfred J. Rieber. Budapest, 2003; and ‘From Cold War to Wary Peace: American Culture in the USSR and Russia.’ In Alexander Stephan, ed., The Americanization of Europe: Culture, Diplomacy and AntiAmericanism since 1945. New York, 2006. André Steiner is Professor for Economic and Social History at the University of Potsdam and a project leader at the Zentrum fuer Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam. His work focuses on the economic history of modern Germany and on the European integration process. Among his recent publications are: Von Plan zu Plan: Eine Wirtschaftsgeschichte der DDR. Munich, 2004; and ‘Reactions of Industrial Firms to the Price Regulation by the State during Pre-War National Socialism.’ In C. Buchheim ed., The German Industry in the Third Reich. Stuttgart, 2007.