[Bilimsel Haber] Review: The Contested Nation: Ethnicity, Class, Religion and Gender in National Histories

[Gonul Pultar]

*Stefan Berger, Chris Lorenz.* /The Contested Nation: Ethnicity, Class,
Religion and Gender in National Histories./
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0230500064> Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 634 S. $110.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-230-50006-8.

*Reviewed by* Daniel Woolf
*Published on* H-Soz-u-Kult (April, 2009)




*S. Berger u.a. (Hrsg.): The Contested Nation*

In 1815, a Parisian teacher named Louis Taillefer defined the tasks of a
teacher of history. Such a man, said Taillefer, should confine himself
to the simple exposition of historical facts and the natural connections
between them. Douglas Johnson, The Historians, in: D. G. Charlton (ed.),
The French Romantics, vol. 2, Cambridge: 1984, pp. 274-307, quotation at
p 275 (my translation). Taillefer went on to recommend a number of
history books, including, Louis-Pierre Anquetil’s (1723-1806) Histoire
de France. The most noticeable feature about Taillefer’s list is that
every author on it was a cleric. The clergy would continue to have a
considerable role in French historiography through the next century. At
the same time, they would be rivaled by a number of lay authors who
would exceed most of them in fame. The tensions between religion and
secularization form one of the principle dynamics of what was arguably
history’s golden century, and one of several major themes of The
Contested Nation.

This, was the era, before the Great War, in which the influence of
history and historians on public policy peaked, and the impact of
nationalism had a great deal to do with this. Euro-American historians
would be intimately bound up not only with writing the past of their
countries but with their business as nation-states. A significant
expansion of history at British and American universities occurred to
promote the education of the nation’s future leaders, and in France, for
similar reasons, history reaped much of the benefit of late
nineteenth-century reforms.

Against the post-Napoleonic conservatism that manifested itself most
strongly in the homeland of the philosophes and the Jacobins, a more
moderate current of liberalism was also taking shape, and trying to
steer a course between radicalism and “ultra” reaction. This included a
movement within the catholic church by “liberal” Catholics to restore
the clergy’s reputation through historical research and teaching, and to
make use of the latest developments in philology. There was no direct
correlation between political power and historiographic influence: as
Pim den Boer has pointed out elsewhere, liberal historians such as
Guizot, Barante, Thiers, and Thierry flourished during the Restoration
(1815-30), while more conservative historians did so in the more liberal
regime of the July monarchy (1830-48); a position of opposition to
ruling authority stimulated the use of history to criticize and
undermine those in power.

This strongly supports the central thesis of The Contested Nation, of
swirling undercurrents and cross currents alternately supporting and
undermining nationalist impulses. One of the themes best handled in this
book is that of religion, which as an issue has a longer pedigree than
ethnicity, class or gender, the three other major subcurrents addressed
by many of the contributors. Historians, like scientists, mainly failed
to uncover irreconcilable contradictions between their research and
their faith, or even between a mechanical view of History and belief in
a higher power. Religious fissures between Catholic and Protestant,
which “pillarized” society in some countries (notably the Netherlands),
and even within Catholicism between liberal and conservative, would
exercise considerable influence over the direction of historiography,
and the setting of agendas, well into the twentieth century.

A hallmark of nationalist historical writing in the nineteenth and early
twentieth century, and of that deeply problematic term, ‘historicism’,
is a developmental view of History, which has been taxed, not unfairly,
with having given rise to the more dangerous forms of exceptionalist
nationalism, most notoriously Germany’s Sonderweg. In that sense, it
supplied the nationalism of the nineteenth century with a new historical
underpinning to replace the old discredited legends of the past. Why
trouble with Trojans, Scythians and mythical or pseudo-biblical heroes
such as Spain’s Tubal, grandson of Noah even as figures of exemplary
virtue, when the entire course of a nation’s past could be shown to be
as an organic process, as natural and predictable as the blooming of a
single plant? From the spirit and character of a nation, opined the
Herder-influenced Czech historian František Palacký, “a nation’s history
is born, as a flower from a seed and a fruit from a flower” (455-6), a
point well made in Maciej Janowski’s chapter. At the same time, the door
still lay open to take indisputably historical figures and weave a whole
new set of myths around them, and certain venerable tropes—the Tacitean
image of the free and virtuous Germanic warrior and its various national
counterparts, Czech, Slovak, Dane and so on—continued to exercise a
potent influence.

The past in toto still had an essential role to play in both the shaping
of new, national states and in the making of a citizen body with primary
loyalties to that state. This is the period at which “modern”
nationalism emerged (a process continued in colonial areas during the
twentieth century), complete with public celebrations of past heroism,
the construction of statuary and other lieux de mémoires, and even the
outright “invention of tradition”. One of the most outspoken
postcolonial critics of nationalism, Partha Chatterjee has pointed to
the central place it plays in the modernist narrative of the progress of
liberty and civilization, and the capacity of some of its students to
explain away its more destructive manifestations as somehow deviant.
Chatterjee is right to point out the problem with making nationalism the
exclusive property of either the left or the right. Nationalism was and
is in itself neither essentially liberal nor conservative though it has
often been associated with both.

The Romantic nationalism of the first part of the nineteenth century was
often linked to a sense of identity built upon a shared sense of a
people’s ethnic or even political past—for an example one need only
think of the Greek war of independence against the Ottomans (1821-28), a
conflict out of which the modern Greece was born, complete with an
identity, the common understanding of an ethnos, and a common language,
all of which had largely been lost in previous centuries. The impact of
nationalist historical consciousness was magnified, following the
revolutions of 1848 and the return of progressive ideas in liberal or
even radical political clothing, by national unification movements such
as the Italian Risorgimento, and in the emerging independence of former
satellites in Europe from imperial rule and that of other former
colonies in North and South America. Yet even then it retained a
conservative side: the Austrian historian Josef Alexander Helfert,
advisor to the minister of education, thought that a nationalism defined
by cohabitation in the same boundaries and loyalty to the same
government needed protection: an “Austrian” history had to be invented
and promoted, ideally through a new Nationalgeschichte which would head
off any repetition of the class tensions of 1848.

Though there had certainly been eminent historians in newly established
kingdoms like Belgium prior to their independence, sovereignty or the
drive toward it provided an urgent need to establish both the shape of a
national past and the capacity to write about it: recent struggles for
independence were grafted on to a longer master-narrative that included
much earlier, medieval conflicts with external oppressors, as noted in
the Beyan and Majerus essay in this volume. Even those regions such as
Bohemia that did not achieve political autonomy during the period still
celebrated their separate identity and marked out a distinctive past.
Thus Palacký’s five-volume account of the Czech nation from earliest
times to the Habsburg union of 1526 espoused a highly romantic and
nationalist view of the Czech heritage—he boasted that the Czechs had
existed as a people since before the Austrians and would still be around
after them. The chapter on Scandinavia makes it clear that this was not
strictly a Habsburg phenomenon. European Jews, after centuries of
rabbinically-dominated treatments of their past, acquired a modern
national history for the first time, well-treated in Ulrich Wyrwa’s chapter.

As we all well know, nationalism was not necessarily a good thing for
history under all circumstances. Although many nationalist-minded
historians like Palacký saw no contradiction between their promotion of
a political agenda and their duty to the emergent “profession”, and
though, with some exceptions, outright documentary forgery in the
medieval and early modern mode was rare, there were inevitably points of
conflict between strict devotion to the evidence and the impulse to tell
a coherent narrative (though this is only a problem if one assumes that
such a thing as an unbiased and transparent narrative can potentially be
written). Nationalist history could be extraordinarily blinkered in
focus and aristocratic in tone—were not the great heroes of the past
principally nobles and monarchs rather than the common man? As recently
as 1884 the politician and historian Kálmán Thaly (1839-1909), answering
the charge that Hungarian historians were woefully insular, declared
that world history, positivism and democracy were values and subjects
alien to the Hungarian historiographical tradition.

German romanticism and Hegelianism traveled well outside their nominal
borders, and influenced the historical writing of the nineteenth-century
Nordic countries: the Volk concept appears (as Folk) in national
histories of Sweden, Norway (affiliated with Sweden through royal union
from 1814 to 1905), Denmark and Finland (the latter detached from the
former’s influence and moved into the Russian orbit in 1809).
Folklorists like the Norwegian P.A. Munch and the Finnish
novelist-historian Zacharias Topelius (1818-98) used their countries’
heroic pasts to construct national histories where none had existed, as
demonstrated by Peter Aronsson and his coauthors, though as in Germany
the folk heritage was an ambiguous tool—it supported regional,
pan-Nordic sentiment as much as it did the formation of independent
states in Norway and Finland. It was somewhat less problematic for the
dominant powers of the region, Sweden and Denmark. South of Finland in
the Baltic region, nationalist sentiments were much slower to develop.
The histories of Estonia and Latvia were written largely by their Baltic
German intellectual elites prior to their independence in 1918, national
sentiments from the 1860s producing relatively little by way of
historiography. Lithuanian historiography has been more fully
documented, though its story is similar. Tied to Poland through much of
the late medieval and early modern periods and dominated by Russia in
the nineteenth century, Lithuania had actually lacked a written language
prior to the late fourteenth century—early historical sources emanated
from Russian, German or Polish writers. Unlike other ethnic groups,
Lithuanians thus had little by way of historiographical tradition prior
to the romantic-era historian Simonas Daukantas (1793-1864), who wrote
in Lithuanian and created a dubious pedigree for his people in a remote
barbarian tribe; there is a comparison to be made here perhaps between
Baltic and Balkan, given the Greek example. Daukantas had no immediate
followers. Between 1832, when the Russians closed the University of
Vilnius, and the early twentieth century, Lithuania produced no
academically-trained historians of its own, though distinguished Poles
such as Lelewel, who taught at Vilnius, wrote about the Lithuanian past.
The creation of a sense of national identity where none had existed fell
to non-professionals: minor noblemen, poets and linguists, who were more
interested in creating a heroic past than in following the canons of
western historical scholarship. Collectively, their work provided an
essential ingredient for the establishment in 1918 of Lithuania’s own
short-lived independence. Unsurprisingly, the peoples of many of these
territories were often considered as falling outside the main stream of
History in accounts written by Russian, Polish and German historians, or
they were simply shoehorned into the larger national narratives of the
larger states, as were many of Russia’s subordinated ethnic groups, most
notably Ukraine as described in the chapter by Anna Veronika Wendland.

Taken as a whole, The Contested Nation is a deconstructive effort to
uncover the cover-ups in nineteenth-century nationalist historiography,
including Europe’s internal equivalent of the subaltern, whether class,
gender or religious minority. It does an excellent job of highlighting
many tensions within the master-narrative of nationalist history. It
thus contests and enriches, though it does not utterly subvert, our
historiographic master narrative, according to which the nation and
history were both invented in their modern forms in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. We have known for a very long time that
forces such as language, religion, and ethnicity did not align perfectly
with the building of the nation, or more specifically, of the
nation-state, but I know of no single book that has brought these
contradictions to the fore quite like this. Gender is a more recent
discovery, but it too recurs as a theme in these chapters, and the
twentieth century sections of the individual chapters emphasize its
importance, which has outlasted class in a post 1989 world.

One of the strengths of the volume is that it also interrogates its own
concepts. Before launching into its impressive series of national and
regional surveys, and unravelling the loose threads of odd colour from
various nineteenth- and twentieth- century tapestries, it pauses to
impose some conceptual clarity on the matter, in the introduction to the
volume, in Chris Lorenz’s careful examination of the various categories
at play and warning against philosophical category-confusion, and Krijn
Thijs’s decoding of the different meanings of the word ‘master’ in
connection with master narratives. I wish that ‘The Other’ had been
subjected to the same scrutiny as it is in some danger of becoming the
buzzword de jour. As an umbrella term for the kinds of “othering” that
are a major theme of the book however, I find especially compelling the
notion of ‘codes of difference’, useful term to group ethnicity,
language, gender and class together despite the clearly different planes
on which they belong.

This is already a long review of an extraordinarily lengthy tome, and it
would be entirely unfair to criticize the book for Eurocentrism in view
of the very specific focus of its umbrella NHIST project on Europe’s
national histories, and the very careful way in which the successive
volumes in the series collectively examine the relationship of
nationalism and history within a dazzling number of contexts. I do
wonder if there might have been room for at least one chapter by a
non-Europeanist to provice perspective from that greatest of all
‘Others’, the world of the colonies, of the east, of Africa and India,
of China and Japan. There are hints of this in occasional references to
Latin America, and in a very interesting parallel examination of Turks
and Greeks. Nor am I proposing that ‘orientalism’ be expressly added to
the mix, though there is something to be learned from the
self-orientalization of certain national historiographies, notably Iran,
which rejected its Arabic and Muslim past in favour of a rediscovered
Herodotean connection to the Achaemenids (not unlike, again, the Greek
rediscovery of Hellas). Similarly, the kinds of tensions between class
and nation that are so well covered in this volume clearly had parallels
in the East and Southeast Asian histories of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries: the late Qing Chinese historians, and their
republican and communist successors, had the unenviable task of
constructing a national history in the face of over 2000 years of
dynastic history—a much deeper problem there than perhaps in Europe,
since while there was an ethnic sense of China and the Zhongghuo, it was
not predicated on notions of nationhood in any European sense.

But perhaps these are issues for another volume in the future. The
history of historiography in Europe will have to take account of this
book and its forthcoming companions. We stand at a transitional point
between an older, much more linear narrative of the history of history
and a much more difficult and complex, but surely more accurate version
of the same story.


Daniel Woolf. Review of Berger, Stefan; Lorenz, Chris, /The Contested
Nation: Ethnicity, Class, Religion and Gender in National Histories/.
H-Soz-u-Kult, H-Net Reviews. April, 2009.
*URL:* http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24699