Writing the Nation: A Global Perspective

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102300_0802X_Ol_preiv.qxp 4/9/2007 �Page ii Also by Stefan Berger The British Labour Party and the German Social Democrats, 1900-1931: A Comparison The Search for Normality. National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Germany Since 1800 Ungleiche Genossen? Die britische Labour Party and die deutsche SPD his 1931 Social Democracy and the Working-Class in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Germany Inventing the Nation. Germany The Force ofLabour: The Western Eurcpean Labour Movement and the Working Class in the Twentieth Century, edited with David Broughton Writing National Histories: Western Eurcpe Since 1800, edited with Mark Donovan and Kevin Passmore

Nationalism, Labour and Ethnicity, 1870--1939, edited with Angel Smith Policy Concertation and Social Partnership in Western Eurcpe. Lessons for the 21st Century, edited with Hugh Compston

Labour and Social History in Great Britain. Historicgraphical Reviews and Agendas 1990 to the Present, special issue of the Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts fiir soziale Bewegungen

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Historikerdialcge. Geschichte, Mythos and Gediichtnis im deutsch-britischen kulturellen Austausch 1 750-2000, edited with Peter Lambert and Peter Schumann Writing History: Theory and Practice, edited with Heiko Feldner and Kevin Passmore Towards a Comparative History ofCoalfield Societies, edited with Andy Croll and Norman LaPorte

The Other Germany. Peraptions and Influences in British-East German Relations, 1945-1990, edited with Norman LaPorte A Companion to Nineteenth Century Eurcpe Narrating the Nation. The REpresentation ofNational Narratives in Different Genres, edited with Linas Eriksonas

Writing National Histories. REpresentations of the Past in 19th and 20th Century Eurcpe, special issue of Storia della Storicgrafia, edited with Andrew Mycock

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Editorial matter, selection and introduction© Stefan Berger 2007. All remaining chapters© their respective authors 2007. All rights reserved.No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y.10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave

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Macmillan division of St.Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-H

978-0-230-00802-1 hardback

ISBN-10'

0-230-00802-X

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources.Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10

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This book is dedicated to my colleagues and friends in the who have taught me so much

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102300_0802X_02_prexii.qxp 4/9/2007 4o$PM Page vii Contents

Preface

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Bicgraphical Notes

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Introduction: Towards a Global History of National Historiographies Stefan Berger

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The Power of National Pasts: Writing National History in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe Stefan Berger

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Seven Narratives in North American History: Thinking the Nation in Canada, Quebec and the United States Allan Smith

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The Mirror of History and Images of the Nation: the Invention of a National Identity in Brazil and its Contrasts with Similar Enterprises in Mexico and Argentina Eliana de Freitas Dutra

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Writing the Nation in Australia: Australian Historians and Narrative Myths of Nation Mark Hearn

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Between Myth and History: the Construction of a National Past in Modern East Asia Q. Edward Wang

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Writing the Nation in India: Communalism and Historiography Radhika Seshan

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Writing the Nation in the Arabic-Speaking World, Nationally and Transnationally Birgit Schaebler

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Writing National and Transnational History in Africa: the Example of the 'Dakar School' lbrahima Thioub

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Select Biblicgraphy

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Index

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102300_0802X_02_prexii.qxp 4/9/2007 4o$PM Page ix Preface

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As always during the course of editing a book one accumulates many debts. This present volume would not have seen the light of day without the deci­ sion of the International Committee of Historical Sciences to adopt our pro­ posal for a key theme on national historiographies in global comparative perspective. In organising this key theme for the 2005 Sydney congress of the Committee I am particularly grateful to the ICHS's president, Professor Jiirgen Kocka, and the ICHS's secretary general, Professor Jean-Claude Robert for all their support. The proposal was launched through the Swiss section of the ICHS, and my eo-chair in the NHIST programme, Professor Guy Marchal, was instrumental in getting the Swiss national historical association inter­ ested in this theme. Guy also launched the entire idea of a European Science Foundation (ESF) programme on national history writing with an exploratory workshop he organised at the University of Lucerne in 1999. Inspired by this meeting I subsequently wrote a first draft of the proposal for the programme 'Representations of the Past: the Writing of National Histories in Nineteenth­ and Twentieth-Century Europe' and, together with my eo-chairs, Professor Guy Marchal and Professor Christoph Conrad, we assembled a team capable of leading the four teams which operate under the umbrella of the NHIST programme. Following two more workshops in Strasbourg and Leipzig, the programme proposal and the teams were confirmed and the ESF officially launched the programme in the spring of 2003. After two and a half years, it underwent a rigorous procedure of peer review, which strongly endorsed the programme. This is not the place to report in depth on the many activities of the NHIST. Detailed information can be found on its website: www.uni­ leipzig.de/zhsesf. But it is the place to thank my eo-chairs and team leaders, Professor Ilaria Porciani, Professor Chris Lorenz, Professor Lluis Roura, Professor Matthias Middell, Professor Tibor Frank and Dr Frank Hadler, with whom I have been privileged to develop intellectual partnerships and friendships over the last years. Special thanks also go to Professor Io Tollebeek and Professor Lutz Raphael for strongly supporting the NHIST as co-editors of crucial NHIST volumes. The harmony within the wider programme team has been vital to the communicative and organisational success of NHIST. Furthermore I would like to thank the more than one hundred scholars from thirty European countries who continue to co-operate tirelessly with NHIST in its explorations of national history writing. A very big thank you also goes to the scientific secretary of the programme at the ESF, Dr Monique van Donzel, and to the administrative secretary of the programme at the ESF, ix

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Ms Madelise Blumenroeder, whose patience and unstinting support for the programme have been invaluable throughout. Last but not least a heartfelt thank you also has to go to Dr Maurice Bric, NHIST's rapporteur on the ESF's Standing Committee for the Humanities. Right from the beginning he has given generously of his time to advise the programme chair and help him over many intellectual and bureaucratic hurdles. If the programme has been running smoothly and successfully and is on track it is in no small measure due to the combined efforts of all the people mentioned above. And if this volume could be put together, it is also due to the many things that I have learned from my colleagues in the NHIST. Therefore it seems appropriate to dedicate this book to them. I would also like to thank the authors of the volume for their patience and perseverance with their editor who asked them many times to revise their pieces, to take note of each other's articles and to comment on the editor's lengthy introduction. They have been model contributors and I hope that they are happy with the end result of their endeavours. Last but not least I feel a particular debt to Michael Strang and Ruth Ireland from Palgrave Macmillan. I have been discussing the NHIST programme with Michael for many months now and am very grateful for his interest and his support. Next year we will be launching a major Palgrave Macmillan book series which brings together the research results of the NHIST in a six-volume book series entitled 'Writing the Nation'. Ruth has been wonderfully supportive throughout the gestation period of this present volume and, as general edi­ tor of the book series, I am hoping to have the pleasure of further dealings with her over the next couple of years. Stefan Berger Disley, 1 August 2006

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102300_0802X_02_prexii.qxp 4/9/2007 4o$PM Page xi Biographical Notes

Stefan Berger is Professor of Modern German and Comparative European History at the University of Manchester. He has published widely on the his­ tory of nationalism and national identity, on historiography and on labour history. Among his most recent books are A Companion to Nineteenth Century Eurcpe (Blackwell, 2006), The Other Germany: Perceptions and Influences in British-East German Relations, 1945-1990, ed. with Norman LaPorte (ADEF vol. 52, Martin Wiessner Verlag, 2005), Inventing the Nation: Germany (Edward Arnold, 2004) and The Search (or Normality: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Germany since 1800, 2nd edn (Berghahn, 2003).

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Eliana de Freitas Dutra is Professor of History at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, MG. She is currently co-ordinating a research project entitled 'Brasiliana: Writings and Lectures of the Nation'. Among her publications are Rebeldes Litertlrios da RepUblica: Hist6ria e ldentidade Nacional no Almanaque Brasileiro Gamier (University of Minas Gerais Press, 2005), 0 Ardil Totalitdrio: Imagintlrio Politico no Brasil dos anos 30 (University of Rio de Janeiro Press, 1997), Caminhos Opertlrios nas Minas Gerais (Hucitec/INL, 1988) and Politica, Na�ao e Edi�ao (Anablume, 2006).

is Associate Lecturer in Australian History at Macquarie University, New South Wales. He has published widely in the field of Australian history, including scholarly articles in journals such as Gender and History, Rethinking History and Australian Historical Studies, and he is the co­ editor of Rethinking Work: Time Space Discourse (Cambridge University Press, 2006). He was awarded the C. H. Currey Memorial Fellowship from the State Library of New South Wales for 2006 to research the Fin de Siecle Imagination in Australia, 1890-1914. Mark Hearn

is Professor of History and Chair of West Asian History at the University of Erfurt, Germany. She held research fellowships and taught at the universities of Duke, Harvard and in Georgia, USA. She has published widely on the colonial and post-colonial histories of the Middle East and her book Rebellions in the Druze Mountain from Ottoman Times to Independence: a Historical-Anthrcpolcgical Study has been translated into Arabic (Dar an­ Nahar, Beirut, 2003). She is currently working on a book on the entangled histories of Europe and the Middle East, especially with respect to the question of a global modernity. Among her most recent publications is Globalization and Birgit Schaebler

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Bicgraphical Notes

the Muslim World. Culture: Religion and Modernity, ed. with Leif Stenberg (Syracuse University Press, 2004). Radhika Seshan is a Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Pune in India. She is a specialist in medieval Indian economic history and is developing an interest in gender studies. Her publications include many articles on medieval economic and gender history as well as three edited col­ lections: Fractured Identity? The Indian Diaspora in Canada (Rawat Publications, 2003), Visiblising Women: Facets ofHistory through a Gender Lens (jointly with K. K. Shah, Kalpaz Publications, 2005) and Medieval India: Problems and Possibilities (Rawat Publications, 2006).

teaches history at the University of British Columbia. Widely published in the fields of Canadian, Canadian-American, and comparative North American history, he is the author of Canada - an American Nation? Essays on Continentalism, Identity, and the Canadian Frame ofMind (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994, 2000), recently issued in French as Le Canada: une nation americaine? Reflexions sur le continentalisme, l'identite, et la mentalite canadienne, Trad. Sophie Coupal (Quebec: Les Presses de l'Universite Laval, 2005). A member of the Advisory Board of Canadian-American Public Policy and of the Comite Consultatif of Mens: Revue d'histoire intellectuelle et culturelle de l'Amerique fram;:aise, he is currently at work on a study of transnationalism in late twentieth-century Canadian-American affairs. Allan Smith

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is Chair of the History Department of the Faculty of Humanities of the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal. He is president of the Association for West African Studies and vice-president of the executive committee of the Association of African Historians. He also edits the scholarly journals Afrika Zamani and Afrique et Histoire. He has worked extensively on questions of social marginality in Africa from the colonial period to the present day. His numerous publications focus on the history of the Senegalese prisons and on the African historiography about slavery and colonialism.

Ibrahirna Thioub

Q. Edward Wang is Professor and Chair of the History Department at Rowan University, USA. Born and raised in Shanghai, he received his education partly in China and partly in the United States. His publications include: Mirroring the Past: the Writing and Use ofHistory in Imperial China (co-authored with On-cho Ng, 2005), Turning Points in Historicgraphy: a Cross-Cultural Perspective (co-edited with Georg G. Iggers, 2002), Inventing China through History: the May Fourth Approach to Historicgraphy (2001) and Postmodernism and Historicgraphy: a Chinese-Western Comparison (co-authored with Ku Wei-ying, 2000; in Chinese).

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History was a crucial element with which to construct nations and national identity. Nation-builders everywhere agreed: their nation had to have a history - the longer and the prouder the better. Creating national historical consciousness was widely seen as the most important precondition for engendering true national feeling in the wider population, as both the eth­ nicisation of the nation and its sacralisation only took shape against the background of history and heritage. But how, when, under which conditions and by whom was history used to create national identity? Was it used dif­ ferently in different parts of the world? Was there a European master narra­ tive of national history and were all other narratives of the nation derived from this master copy? The current volume explores these questions in global perspective with contributions ranging over all five continents. Its origins lie in a five-year European Science Foundation (ESF) programme entitled 'Representations of the Past: the Writing of National Histories in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe' that I had the pleasure to chair between 2003 and 2008.2 Exploring in detail the master narratives of about thirty European nation-states, the programme almost inevitably raised ques­ tions concerning the framing of national historical narratives outside of Europe and the cross-currents between European and non-European national histories. The principle of the nation-state was so obviously one of the most powerful transnational foci for spatial identities in modern history that it seemed worthwhile to explore the role of history writing in constitut­ ing the nation in different parts of the world. 3 I was lucky enough to gain the support of the World Historical Congress, which decided to make this one of its 'major themes' at its Sydney meeting in 2005, where many of the chap­ ters in this volume got their first airing as conference papers. Having pre­ sented the authors with the structural framework pursued by the ESF project, they had the task of applying it to their respective parts of the globe, so as to allow comparisons between the diverse ways in which national historical narratives were framed. They were specifically asked, first, to outline the institutionalisation and professionalisation of national historical writing, 1

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secondly, to analyse the national master narratives in relation to narratives of ethnicity/race, class, religion and gender, thirdly, to pay due attention to the interrelationship between national and sub- as well as transnational nar­ ratives (i.e. local, regional, continental and global histories), and fourthly, to look at territorial overlaps between national histories in their respective parts of the world (i.e. the role of contested territories on constructions of national histories). Finally, they were asked to augment the comparative perspective by looking at the emergence and development of transnational networks and contacts within the community of historians.4 Starting from the ESF project and therewith making Europe the bench­ mark for all other parts of the globe makes this project prone to accusations of Eurocentrism. It is true that subsequent chapters deal mostly with the kind of 'scientific' history writing which was invented in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century. It is also true that other ways of looking at history, including national history, that existed in other parts of the world, often far earlier than the eighteenth century, do not come into view much in this volume. 5 The book starts from the assumption that it was such European 'scientific' history which powerfully underpinned European forms of mod­ ern nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With colonial­ ism and imperialism, both ideas, that of the modern nation and that of 'scientific' history, spread to all other parts of the globe. Hence, it seems jus­ tified to compare the ways in which such European 'scientific' histories underwrote national projects in diverse corners of the world. This does not mean that the book is opposed to the post-colonial project of 'provincialising' Europe, i.e. problematising essentially European/Western benchmarks for universal history. 6 But Dipesh Chakrabarty himself has pointed out that any notions of authentically Indian representations of the past are problematic, as the very definition of history, at least in academic discourse, derives from a European model. 7 Professional, university- or academy-based historians struggled hard in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both inside and outside of Europe, to be able to define what is and what is not history. In the non-European world many pre-modern forms of historical imagination existed and inspired alternative and rival interpretations of the national past - interpretations which often stood in marked contrast to European 'scientific' ways of look­ ing at national history. If we take India as an example, Kumkum Chatterjee has pointed to interesting parallels and important differences between Indian conceptions of national history and European ones. 8 Tamil national­ ism created the region as nation just as Czech and Romanian nationalism did in nineteenth-century Europe. In fact, the region could and did become a crucial component of the nation in many parts of the world. For Europe this has frequently been emphasised for the German example,9 but Prasenjit Duara has pointed out similar processes for China.10 Although Duara explic­ itly rejected the European Enlightenment 'linear model' of history writing

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for the colonial world, his insistence that nation emerged at the interface of conflicting local, regional, national and transnational narratives is also something that rings true for many European national histories. To return to our Indian example, the parallels between Indian and European conceptions of national history do not end with the impact of regional his­ tory. 'Scientific history' promising 'authenticity' and 'hard evidence' also, according to Kumkum Chatterjee, won the day among India's professional historians. Hence Indian debates about what constituted history were debates where oral traditions and memories were pitted against scientific history, as was the case in the debates surrounding the kulagranthas that Chatterjee specifically examined. Those in favour of incorporating oral tradition and storytelling into notions of history tended to ignore an indigenous Indian scientific tradition which had developed independently from the European one. Nativism was so bound up with critiques of Western understandings of history that it was also constantly in danger of constructing the ordinary people as 'uncorrupted soul of the nation'. As in Europe, therefore, we often find in the colonial world the central paradox that rural communities and the people are championed by urban and educated scholars. Alternative non-scientific understandings of history remained popular in many parts of the world, including Europe, but 'scientific' history managed to establish itself as the only 'proper' form of history everywhere. In official discourse, only 'scientific' history was authoritative history. Given the victory of 'scientific history' everywhere, are modern national histories outside Europe purely derivative, as Benedict Anderson famously claimed?11 Are they spread by anti-colonial nationalisms in Asia and Africa in the twentieth century? Or are anti-colonial nationalisms, as Partha Chatterjee has maintained, distinctive and authentic forms of nationalism?12 The chapters in this volume seem to support Anderson in as much as they all emphasise the importance of European models, even if these models were invariably adapted and modified. One might also add that, of course, the very search for distinctiveness and authen­ ticity is derived from the European model of nationalism. Nevertheless, one should perhaps not underestimate authentic forms of non-European national histories which precede the modern age. Thus, for example, several studies on the Chinese historian Sima Qian have emphasised that his understanding of national history and his methodological approach to historical studies is fundamentally different from that of Western historiography. Especially his preference for multiple and competing stories is often juxtaposed to the Western model of linear and homogeneous narratives. 13 In China, in fact, we encounter ideas of nation and national enemies as early as the Han period and again in the Song period. And 'national history', at least in name, existed in East Asia from the seventh century, as shown in Japan's Six National Histories which were compiled between the eighth and the tenth centuries. And what about the forms of creole nationalisms in Latin America which are accompanied by constructions of national histories as early as the eighteenth

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century, at a time when many parts of Europe were still struggling to come to terms with the modern concept of nation? In some parts of Latin America we also encounter an intriguing mixture of scientific European history and native oral traditions.14 Benedict Anderson's thesis linking the early forms of creole nationalisms with the absence of language differences to the European motherlands and to the weakness of indigenous middle classes at the moment of national independence has come in for considerable criticism by scholars of Latin American nationalism. 15 But so far it is unclear what will replace it. When and where then do modern national histories first appear? My own chapter on European histories emphasises the longevity of historical narra­ tives about the nation ranging back, in some cases, to the middle ages.16 European humanism and the Reformation were crucial in establishing many of the key tropes that informed national narratives throughout the nine­ teenth and twentieth centuries. Yet it was only in the European bridge period between 1750 and 1850 that the national principle gained dominance over its rivals, such as religion, the dynastic principle and feudalism. The coming of modernity was accompanied by the victory of the nation-state over all rival forms of territorial and non-territorial allegiance. In the century between 1850 and 1950 it dominated identity constructions and it also dominated historical writing. Only during the second half of the twentieth century did the national principle undergo a series of profound challenges and crisis points, mostly in Western Europe and also in the Muslim world, as shown in the rise of pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism. And yet the national paradigm frequently showed a persistence and ability to maintain the primary alle­ giance of European citizens that makes it rather doubtful whether national histories and the national principle belong firmly to the past at the begin­ ning of the twenty-first century. Many historians in Europe today seek to explore issues of Europeanisation and localisation of historical writing in the hope of overcoming the many limits of the national paradigm, but almost everywhere in Europe, national paradigms are still among the most powerful structuring devices of historical narratives. In North America, white settler societies imported the concept of national history from Europe and employed it with great effect from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards. Processes of professionalisation and institu­ tionalisation, which gathered momentum in the last third of the nineteenth century, often started from the assumption of a transfer of historist ideas from Germany and Europe, although they were frequently based on a crude misunderstanding of Ranke and Co. 17 After 1900 things moved rapidly and many historians from around the globe already came to the top American uni­ versities rather than the top European ones to learn and study (national) his­ tory. Notions of a unified national history in North America were challenged in the 1970s as sub-groups in society discovered history as a powerful tool to legitimate their own aims and gain recognition within the nation. Historians began to celebrate diversity rather than insist on unity - most markedly in

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Canada and least noticeably in Quebec, which always had been far less an immigrant society than either the USA or Canada as a whole. The Spanish and Portuguese colonists in Latin America were also importing concepts of nation and national history from Europe. The process of institu­ tionalisation and professionalisation of history writing began earlier than in North America. Chile is widely regarded as pioneering the institutionalisa­ tion of history writing/8 but other countries, for example Brazil, were also creating an infrastructure for 'scientific' historical writing by the 1830s and 1840s. Latin American historical institutions, publications and narratives were modelled closely on European foundations. They played an influential role in legitimating the struggle for independence and in constructing post­ independence identities. The attempts of national historians to use history to create homogeneity and coherence in what often were ethnically diverse societies only gave way to a greater recognition of diversity and multicul­ turalism in the context of the 1990s, when black and indigenous groups began using history to protest against centuries of discrimination. In Australia the first stirrings of a separate national narrative underpinning separate national identity constructions have been traced back to the First World War. Like in Europe and the Americas the pathfinders were self-taught amateurs. In Australia professional historians at the universities only began teaching and researching Australian history in the inter-war period. The con­ struction of a unified and glorious national past was relatively short-lived and from the 1950s onwards, critical voices could be heard loud and clear in the Australian historical profession fracturing the national storylines. Hence the period of time in which Australian historians wrote a glorifying and nationalist form of history was, certainly by comparison with Europe and the Americas, relatively short. But as in Europe and the Americas the story is not a teleological one of declining power of national narratives after the Second World War. The 1990s saw a conservative backlash with significant attempts to stop what some saw as the self-deprecating agenda of critical historians and to develop a new patriotism in historical writing.19 In comparison with Europe, new nations or white-settler nations have more of a problem with historical time, in that they have greater difficulties in locat­ ing the origins of their nations in the dim and distant past. Most European nation-states were built on assumptions of the longevity of the nation-state: the older, the better, the more authentic. If there was no continuity of state traditions, ethnicity came to the fore to claim a long tradition of proud oppos­ ition of 'the people' to foreign state oppression. By contrast, new nations, according to Gerard Bouchard's pathbreaking comparative work on new nation nationalisms, were faced with the dilemma that they either had to borrow the past of their mother country (a strategy followed by nation-states such as Uruguay, Argentina, New Zealand and Australia) or they had to borrow the past of the indigenous population (a strategy employed by Mexico and Peru). A third option was to decide that they did not need a long history and to

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reset historical time along the lines of Benjamin Franklin's famous words according to which the United States of America was a nation without ances­ tors. But many new nations, such as Brazil, the Caribbean island nations and Quebec, failed to resolve the problem of historical time satisfactorily and ended up with uneasy constructions of metissage and hybridity.20 If historical time in white-settler societies was problematic for national his­ toriographies, historians in East Asia, the Middle East, India and Africa could point, like their European counterparts, to constructions of national pasts which long preceded the modern age. In East Asia proto-nationalism was often linked with the spread of neo-Confucianism from China to Korea and Japan, which was met by both enthusiastic endorsement and rejection. Yet it was the encounter with Western imperialism which gave national history a new relevance and urgency in the colonial world. To develop national his­ tory which would contribute to nation formation was perceived as a neces­ sary step on the road to modernisation and Westernisation. Japanese historians were earliest off the mark and replaced the traditional Sino-centric with a new nation-centred view of history.21 European historians, such as Gustav Zerffi or Ludwig RieB, were invited to write introductions to historical stud­ ies or, as in RieB's case, to teach at Japanese universities. Although historians have argued that their influence should not be overestimated, their inter­ actions with Japanese historiography are testimony to Japan's efforts to learn from 'the West'.22 But by the end of the nineteenth century Japanese histor­ ians already began to turn away from the Westernisation paradigm, stressing instead indigenous Japanese values which justified the nation's beginning imperial expansion in East Asia. Japanese imperialism in turn spurred on national history writing in Korea and China, where historians emphasised their respective nations' claim to autonomy, if not superiority. Historiographies in all three countries had for centuries been focused on dynastic principles, which were now challenged by the national principle. Dynastic narratives had to fit and be accommo­ dated to the national narratives, if they were to survive in the Westernised historiographies of East Asia. The transfer of European ideas of historism, and of Ranke in particular, was, however, not unlike the case in the US, restricted to notions of empiricism and source criticism. 23 In Korea, Sino-centric understandings of history were based on relating time to legitimating dynasties; this was difficult to square with Western scientific ideas of history which linked time to concepts of 'progress'. 24 Western 'scientific' standards were frequently employed to demonstrate the longevity and proud history of the nations of Korea and China. The ebb and flow of the New Text Confucianism and its relations with the development of modern Chinese historiography and the Korean debates surrounding the rejection of the idea of a significant Chinese influence on Korea's high antiquity are examples explored by Edward Wang in his chapter. The strong ties between nationalism and history writing in East Asia seem to continue almost unabated to the present day and have

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survived the communist experiments in China and North Korea virtually unharmed. Modern Indian national historywas first written by the British colonists in an attempt to justify the British colonisation of the Indian sub-continent. When nationalist Indian historians responded to this imperial historio­ graphy they often felt the need to operate in the same scientific framework that their imperialist rivals championed. Adopting 'scientific' standards was one way of legitimating their rival nationalist narratives. Operating within the modernist framework of European historians, Indian historians often concentrated on demonstrating that India had everything that Europe had and more. It was, as Radhika Seshan argues in her chapter, the 'me too' syn­ drome of Indian historiography - a syndrome which can also be seen in a range of other colonial and post-colonial historiographies. Indigenous chal­ lenges to the Western historical framework existed. They emphasised that India had a much older and very different sense of history, located, above all, in familial chronicles. But at the Indian universities it was the Western frame of history which prevailed and which guaranteed that Marxist approaches to Indian history became by far the most popular ones in post-independence India from the 1950s onwards. Out of such academic Marxism the 'subaltern school' developed from the 1970s onwards. It was to create one of the most powerful critiques of Western and Europe-centred conceptual frameworks which inform many of today's writings on post-colonial historiographies. Like Asia, the Arab-speaking world and sub-Saharan Africa had to contend with European/Western interpretations of their spatial identities. During the second half of the nineteenth century Arab historians upheld notions of a greater Arab nation which were based on the cultural rediscovery of Arab language and literature and were meant to counter the colonialist and imperi­ alist narratives written by European historians of the Middle East. By the inter-war period many of the prominent Arab historians were trained at colo­ nial schools and universities in Europe and North America. The American University of Beirut also played an important role in providing an institutional home for narratives of Arab nationalism. But the audience of Arab national historians was, as Birgit Schaebler outlines in her chapter, first and foremost European. It was about 'writing the Arab nation into the minds of the Europeans'. This only began to change in the 1940s and 1950s when a new generation of Arab historians addressed an Arab audience and combined an emphasis on Arab language, history and community with an explicit anti­ European bias. In Egypt, for example, the founding figure of the academic school of history, Muhammad Shafiq Ghurbal, studied with Arnold Toynbee at the University of London, but when he became head of the history depart­ ment at Fu'ad University in 1936, he was keen that Egypt's history should be written by Arabs in Arabic.25 In many Arab nation-states, such as Syria, Arab nationalism overwrote a nation-state centred nationalism. 26 In the Arab­ speaking world it was not so much multiculturalism which challenged the

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idea of the nation at the end of the twentieth century, but Islamism. Its rep­ resentatives argued that Arabism found expression not in the concept of the nation but in religion. In sub-Saharan Africa national history was instrumental in the anti-colonial struggle of the twentieth century.27 Francophone African historiographies were arguably less anti-Western than their Anglophone counterparts.28 As Ibrahima Thioub argues in connection with the Dakar School of Senegalese historians, it was the scientificity of national history writing which made it appear to anti-colonialists, such as Leopold sengar Senghor, as the perfect tool with which to establish an authentic African identity whilst at the same time continuing a developmentalist project celebrating Senegal's contribution to the wider Francophonie. Establishing indigenous cultural credentials vis-a-vis the West went hand in hand with the continuing idea that one had to catch up with the West not only in Senegal. Emphasising African cultural heritage did not mean challenging European notions of progress. Already pioneers of African history, such as W. E. B. Du Bois sought to counter Hegel's famous dic­ tum that Africa had no history by describing ancient African kingdoms in a way that made them look comparable to European civilisations. 29 The insti­ tutionalisation of African national history as an academic discipline took place after the Second World War, but it could build on the work of local amateur historians who had written African history as early as the late nine­ teenth century. 30 It brought with it the effective separation of African from African-American historiography which had been a prominent feature of writings on Africa ever since the pioneering work of Du Bois. In many con­ temporary African nation-states one of the central tasks is to come to terms with multiethnic states which are the legacy of colonialism. How national history should be written for such entities remains hotly debated among his­ torians of Africa.31 For a minority of historians African history is the starting point for decentring Europe's and North America's place in world history,32 but for many historians in Africa the contemporary demands of the nation­ state make such a perspective seem illusory. As the case of the Dakar School demonstrates, the concern for the inde­ pendent African nation could lead historians to the pursuit of transnational agendas. Both the search for an authentically African civilisation in antiquity and the concern with the transatlantic slave trade are powerful examples of the ways in which concern for the African nation drove historians to look beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. In contemporary Africa, nationalist history still provides a powerful tool of those in political power with which they mobilise particular sets of collective memoirs. This is not just the case in Senegal. Zimbabwe, as Terence Ranger explains, provides perhaps the most saddening example of a kind of 'patriotic history' which currently legitimates political dictatorship and attempts to brainwash an entire generation.33 Ranger himself can be viewed as a historian who travelled a long way from using national history for the purpose of liberation and emancipation to

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Introduction 9

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become a vociferous critic of the xenophobic and dogmatic national history as propagated by the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. Liberation and emancipation had also been keywords in the arsenal of European Enlightenment historiography during the second half of the eight­ eenth century. Many Enlightenment historians developed a keen interest in national history and sought to explore national characters, but they did so with the ultimate aim of establishing common and universal characteristics of the conditio humana. The specificity of national characters and national histories began moving to the fore only with the onset of Romantic histori­ ography in the early nineteenth century. A direct response to the universal­ ist aspirations of Enlightenment historiography and the French Revolution, Romantic narratives employed history to establish the unique character of nations, legitimate their existence in history and justify their alleged super­ iority over other nations. Vernacular languages, literatures and cultures were given the stamp of authenticity. As my own chapter outlines, time frame­ works for the nation were developed which operated routinely with models of rise and decline, golden ages, lost homelands and national revivals. Much of nineteenth-century national historiography in North America was, like its European counterpart, framed in a Romantic mode. Dramatic stories of heroism formed the basis of the construction of 'national characters'. Canadian 'northernness' with its emphasis on location and climate was similar to the idea of the 'frontier' in US historiography, as both implied that the nation was forged in the process of a mastery of vast territorial spaces. Quebec's 'Gallic spirit' by contrast tended to emphasise more idealistic and spiritual dimensions of the national storyline. In Australia Romanticism in historical writing took the form of endorsing the traditions of British liberalism and the heritage of British racial origin. The myths of 'mateship' and egalitarianism made Australia a better Britain ­ without the negative effects of the English social class distinctions and improving on the considerable positive legacies that the British homeland had bequeathed on Australia. In some Latin American states, such as Mexico, nineteenth-century historians were also widely engaged on projects which were to demonstrate that the colonial society had in important ways improved on the motherland.34 This could take the form of defending Spanish colon­ isation or it could end in calls for an independent Mexico. In Argentina Romantic national narratives, like in North America, started from the import­ ance of vast open spaces to be settled and civilised. Celebrating the rustic individuality of a new people, white historians who tended to be part of the white colonising elite, set themselves the task of 'whitening' their respective nations. On the one hand, white-settler societies such as those of the USA, Canada, Latin America and Australia tended to construct histories which cele­ brated the struggles of ordinary citizens and their success in forging egalitar­ ian and free societies. On the other hand, omissions abounded in these narratives: violence against the indigenous peoples, sectarian struggles between

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the Protestant British and the Catholic Irish, the role of women in society, the emergence of new class distinctions and social differentiations - all of this was absent from the Romantic national narratives in white-settler societies. Their national storylines tended to rely on narratives of conquering an inhospitable and wild country that they civilised and cultivated. That these lands had been inhabited by other peoples which were often treated with the utmost contempt was widely ignored in the heroic national histories. Do we find parallels to Romantic national narratives outside of Europe and European white-settler societies? Neo-Confucianism in China can perhaps be seen as a parallel to Romanticism in Europe in that both seem to have been preoccupied with metaphysical and moralising concerns about the national past. Under the influence of Western Romantic paradigms of his­ tory writing Chinese historians began to search in China's high antiquity for the sources of the Chinese cultural revival. Like in Europe it became of para­ mount importance to trace the origins of the Chinese as far back as possible to 'prove' the authenticity and superiority of Chinese culture over everything else. The early generations of Indian national historians were also following a European Romantic paradigm in their quest to restore a long-lost past and thereby recapture a sense of pride and self-respect. In the Arab-speaking world and in sub-Saharan Africa one equally encounters notions of cultural rediscov­ ery and revival which have been at the very heart of the Romantic national history movement in Europe. The 'Arab renaissance' during the second half of the nineteenth century and Cheik Anta Diop's twentieth-century efforts to prove the authenticity and superiority of a genuinely African civilisation are prominent examples of such Romantic narrative constructions in the Middle East and in Africa. A prominent characteristic of Romantic historiography, albeit older and more persistent than Romanticism, was the strong gendering of national narratives. It became standard narratological practice in Europe to feminise national enemies, bemoan the rape of one's own nation by others and cele­ brate the nation as family. One of the central categories of early Australian national narratives was that of 'mateship' - a clearly gendered category stress­ ing the importance of male bonding in the outback and of male solidarities in hostile and difficult surroundings more generally. White-settler societies, including the Americas and South Africa, which defined themselves through a frontier which had to be pushed backward in order to expand the reach of the nation tended to have a strong male bias, as it was male characteristics, such as courage, physical strength, endurance, perseverance and struggle which were the most important ingredients in stories about how a nation came fully into its own by appropriating vast expanses of land. In South America historians have recently stressed the importance of the idea of 'honour' in gendering national discourses in this part of the world.35 Colonialist discourse often feminised the indigenous population in an attempt to justify the pater­ nalist authority of the coloniser over the colonised. For India Mrinilina Sinha

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has demonstrated how such discursive construction of Indian males as femi­ nine has worked. 36 During the second half of the nineteenth century Romantic history writing was challenged by what one might term positivist history writing in Europe. Through an even more rigorous application of the arsenal of 'scientific' methods these positivist historians began to debunk what they saw as the myths of Romantic national history. Not all of them subscribed to the rigor­ ous Comtean version of positivism, according to which one could verify or empirically measure discrete historical phenomena. And few actually believed in the possibility of discovering firm laws of human activity in the past. But most believed in the progressive historical evolution of knowledge and in the crucial importance of basing history on empirical facts. Using the word 'positivist' here as a blanket term for what has been described as an important move away from Romanticism, can be confusing, but for lack of a better term I am still using it in what follows. Those 'positivists' were often sceptical of attempts to ground national history in concepts of 'the people' and instead paid greater attention to the role of states and governing elites. Maintaining the self-image as pedagogues of the nation, they set out to provide an even more scientific and truthful mirror in which the nation would be able to see itself in its full glory. Scientific nationalism in history writing, whether in Romantic or positivist mode, emerged at different times in different places in Europe - in some places, such as Germany and France, it was already well developed by the middle of the nineteenth century. Elsewhere, for example in Ukraine and Latvia, it was only after the First World War that the ideas of nationalism and 'scientificity' merged fully. Once again, the Americas provide the closest parallels to the European scen­ ario in that the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a positivist challenge to Romantic forms of history writing. Stressing the factual orienta­ tion of historical sciences, historians made good use of the alleged 'scien­ tificity' of their subject area to emphasise in particular stories of impressive material growth in the US and Canada. In Latin America, historians began to chart the failure of their societies to produce an equally impressive economic performance, thereby occasionally producing national histories which were critical of aspects of post-independence national politics. And yet, the orien­ tation towards empiricism and source criticism in both North and South America continued to produce histories which sought to foster and strengthen national feeling. Whereas in Europe and the Americas the new positivism often re-enforced the traditional nationalism by means of emphasising the latter's more 'scien­ tific' basis, in Australia, a more rigorous application of scientific method went hand in hand with more critical perspectives on the national storyline. This might have something to do with the relative belatedness of the emer­ gence of scientific nationalism in Australian historiography. If notions of a separate Australianness only began to enter academic discussions about

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national history in the inter-war period, it was not long before Keith Hancock formulated the first critique of the Australian nation-building project, arguing that isolationism and an overdependence on the state had produced a 'monochrome culture of mediocrity'. Manning Clark continued the self­ critical re-evaluation of Australia's past after the Second World War, calling on his fellow historians to abandon the old comforting myths and face the more problematic aspects of Australia's past. As Mark Hearn argues in his chapter, this was taken up with a vengeance by the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s. In China a positivist challenge to neo-Confucian historiography resulted in calls to base history on more factual evidence well before the European influence made itself felt. China can thus be seen to have developed its own variant of historism which preceded and paralleled the movement of European historism. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it would be easier for Chinese historians to adapt Ranke and European historism because they could relate their calls for 'scientificity' to indigenous traditions. The New Text school of the nineteenth century critically reinterpreted China's past so as to bring it into line with Western conceptions and ideas. In Japan, positivism, like Romantic national history and historism itself, were more clear-cut Western imports, but the positivist challenge contributed to critiquing the mytholo­ gies of the Meiji state. Taguchi Ukichi, who wrote a multivolume national history of Iapan between 18 77 and 1882, was informed by the desire to show the workings of laws in Iapanese society - an idea which he clearly owed to his European predecessors Spencer and Buckle. Overall, the state remained very much the focus of] apanese historical narratives. A Historiography Office was founded to glorify Meiji rule and justify the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate by the Meiji who were ascribed divine origins. Scientific positivism was also crucial to the self-understanding of the found­ ing fathers of the Dakar School of historians. They used its tools as a bench­ mark for their diverse attempts to discuss the impact of colonial domination on African societies. As Ibrahima Thioub demonstrates, the outcome could be extremely different and range from straightforward nationalism, which depicted Africans as innocent victims of the colonial powers, to more com­ plex and self-critical narratives, asking uncomfortable questions about the collusion of African elites in projects of colonialism. Twentieth-century Marxism, both inside and outside of Europe, often took the mantle of positivism and was not averse to matching it to a nationalist outfit. Prominent cases include Stalinist Russia as well as Maoist and North Korean historiographical endeavours. In the Arab world Marxism provided the incentive to merge the concept of nation with the idea of revolution in attempts to provide social justice within the framework of a continuous and proud Arab culture. In parts of Latin America and Africa, Marxism was the ideology which seemed best suited to explain underdevelopment and exploit­ ation by international capital while at the same time holding out the vision of international workers' solidarity and the continuation of the modernist,

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progressive project. Especially in the 1960s and 1970s, arguably the global highpoint of Marxist influence at institutions of higher education, it was a common reference frame for historians from different continents. Marxist approaches to historical writing could also underpin powerful critiques of national master narratives. In India, Marxist history writing from the 1950s onwards broke away from dynastic history. The Marxists' concerns with analysing Indian 'feudalism' and discussing the hindrances to the develop­ ment of capitalism in India did not lead them to transcend national history but they did manage to give national history a more self-critical edge. And in a range of Western European countries as well as in North America, Marxist historians in a range of countries were in the forefront of formulating more self-reflexive national narratives from the 1960s onwards. Scientific nationalism, in its Romantic, positivist and Marxist guises, existed alongside the internationalist commitment of historians to the uni­ versal applicability of the tools of historical science everywhere. Like other sciences, the historical sciences underwent a thorough internationalisation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with diverse attempts in Europe, Asia and the Americas to form transnational associations and networks. Yet, scientific nationalism proved to be much stronger than any internation­ alist professional ethos, and the cultural demobilisation after the First World War was fraught with difficulties, as most historians all too willingly served their respective nations and governments in the pursuit of political aims and ambitions. 37 In the Second World War such political functionalisation of his­ toriography found its apogee in the justification of German historians for the racial state of the National Socialists, ethnic cleansing and the holocaust. It was the Second World War and the holocaust which marked the most fundamental rupture of national paradigms in most parts of Europe. But this was a delayed rupture, as the immediate post-war years saw, above all else, attempts to restabilise and reconnect to the traditional national narratives which had dominated the pre-war years. Only from the late 1950s onwards do we see attempts to engage more critically with the national master narra­ tives and either replace them with other national master narratives, or, in a few cases, to move beyond the national paradigm altogether. Political pro­ jects, such as the one of the European Union in Western Europe or the build­ ing of really existing socialism in Eastern Europe, once again sought to engage historians and functionalise their craft to provide identitarian narra­ tives which could underpin these transnational political projects. In a global perspective the transnational ambitions of European historiography should be compared more often with transnational endeavours elsewhere. Pan-Arabism, and pan-Africanism are two prominent examples of political transnational projects underpinned by a good deal of historical writing. From the 1930s onwards Arab historians constructed a pan-Arab nation on ideas of race, civilisation and material unity. They pointed to Arab achievements, stressing that they were greater than the achievements of classical Rome and Greece,

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which were perceived as the foundations on which European civilisation rested. And the search for black Athene as well as the description of an African antiquity which rested on the Pharaonic civilisation of Egypt served a very similar purpose of giving to Africans a long and proud history - some­ thing that had been routinely denied by the European imperialist project. The latter, by creating a Francophone, Anglophone and Lusophone African space, also contributed in important ways to forms of transnational identi­ ties which led to transnational histories being constructed. It was difficult to contain African history in the nation-state. In Asia and in the Americas, attempts to initiate either political or historio­ graphical projects with transnational ambitions were burdened with greater difficulties. In East Asia, Japan's failure to acknowledge publicly the atrocities committed in the Second World War continue to stand in the way of produc­ ing transnational historical narratives. Historians such as Saburo Ienaga have fought for many decades to include discussions on Japanese guilt in school curricula and other public media, but nationalist colleagues, such as Kanji Nishio, perceive such attempts as national 'masochism' and continue to ped­ dle old nationalist myths in their publications on national history. 38 On the Indian sub-continent the communalist orientation of history writing, which stemmed from British colonialist discourses constructing Hindu and Muslim as mutually exclusive identities, fed directly into the nationalisation (along ethno-religious lines) of India and it still contributes to the destruction of transnational spaces and ambitions. Australia's long-time refusal to accept its geographical position in Asia and its continued attachment to the European and Western mindframe isolated it in Asia. In North America, Canada is struggling to keep its mighty southern neighbour from swallowing Canada and in Latin America the national paradigm also continues to be used as a defence against the all-pervasive influence of the USA. If transnational projects have a different scope and differing ambitions in diverse parts of the world, the belief in stable and homogeneous national narratives is undermined in the present almost everywhere by the methodo­ logical challenges of the new cultural history, memory history, post-structuralist and post-colonial history. Yet national histories are far from being a spent force in the wider world. Many of the post-Soviet nation-states in Eurasia are good examples of the importance of national historical consciousness to nation-building projects in the contemporary period. 39 After the dissolution of Yugoslavia the new successor states perceived it as crucial to construct their own separate national histories. 40 In Palestine the construction of national history is widely thought to be a crucial part of the forging of a Palestinian identity.41 And minority nationalisms in Western Europe, from Scotland to Catalonia, are also busy constructing their own national pasts against the national narratives of Britain and Spain. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, most professional historians are looking for more open, more playful national identities, which can accept fracture, hybridity

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and contamination and actively celebrate diversity.42 Even in nations where history was crucial in underpinning nationalist myths of exclusion, such as in Ireland and Israel, revisionist historians have recently attempted to shed those nationalist myths in an attempt to move beyond the national paradigm.43 Attempts to escape the narrow national paradigm were facilitated by the increasing internationalisation of the historical profession after 1945. Unpre­ cedented possibilities for academic exchange programmes meant far greater mobility for European historians. Not only the EU in Western Europe and the alliance of communist states in Eastern Europe, but also a host of bilateral agreements ensured that many historians gained direct experience of differ­ ent national states and national histories. In particular the exchange pro­ grammes between North American universities and their counterparts in all other continents became the launchpad of much transcontinental traffic of historical ideas in the second half of the twentieth century. Of course, as Allan Smith points out in his chapter, transnationalism serves the national interests of the USA extremely well. Not only is it an important means to understand better the international position of the only remaining super­ power, it also tends to transmit the (self-)image of the USA as home of liber­ alism, democracy, progress, individualism and enterprise - an image which is crucial to maintaining the idea of an American mission in the wider world. The political functionalisation of history writing was a widespread phe­ nomenon in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In nineteenth-century Latin America, as Eliana Dutra reminds us in her chapter, historians were fre­ quently divided between those who used versions of national history to legit­ imate a rupture with colonialism and the colonial motherland and those who used history in favour of retaining the colonial ties. Post-independence history became a recruit to the struggle between those who favoured monarchist and those who preferred republican state forms, such as in Brazil or between those who argued for strong central states and those who were in favour of more federal structures, as in Argentina. Hispano-centric perspectives, such as the idea of Mexico as the New Spain, competed with indigenist narratives, such as the emphasis on the Aztec heritage in Mexican history writing. History wars also have a prominent place in Australia's national history. Here historians moved enthusiastically to endorse multiculturalism and denounce national identity as an invented tradition towards the end of the twentieth century. Rethinking the precise relationship between nation, gen­ der, race and class put micro-histories of national identity firmly on the agenda and made indigenous studies one of the most hotly debated areas of Australian national history. It provoked a conservative backlash in the 1990s, when his­ torians such as Geoffrey Blainey and Keith Windschuttle attempted to recast the story of white liberal progress denouncing the black armband brigade among their fellow historians. In addition, Australian national history remained isolationist and bound up in debates concerning the nation. Only rarely have Australian historians explored Australia's history in transnational

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perspective - linking it to the Asian-Pacific world around it. After the initial orientation towards Britain had been rejected, there was no reorientation towards the wider space that Australia inhabited on the globe but, on balance, an inward-looking, self-absorbed concern with Australianness. In Japan, historical criticism of traditional national mythologies was ruth­ lessly censored before 1945. During the Second World War the direct polit­ ical functionalisation of Japanese historiography was most evident in the way in which historians rallied around the Imperial dynasty and defended the idea of the descent of the emperor from the gods. Communist China also used historiography extensively to legitimate communist rule and challenge Western claims that the process of nation-formation had started in the West. China was held up as the oldest nation in the world. Communist and anti­ communist historiographies in both parts of Korea were united in their quest to proof 'scientifically' the longevity and autonomy of the Korean nation.44 During the British rule over India, history was an important battleground between the colonisers, enlisting it in the justification of their rule over the sub­ continent, and the colonised, seeking arguments for self-rule and national independence. Post-independence, history has remained a vital battleground for competing national identities on the sub-continent but also for differing political and religious projects within the Indian nation-state.45 In the Arab­ speaking world historians also did not escape the pull of politics. Notions of an Arab nation were central to Iamal Abdul Nasser's attempt to create socialism in Egypt and the plight of the Palestinians since the 1960s has continually sharpened the political edge of Arab historical narratives. To many historians the Palestinian liberation struggle showed both the necessity of and the path to greater Arab unity. The Senegambian story told by Thioub is also one in which the political functionalisation of national history writing looms large. The anti-colonial struggle for independence and the post-independence attempts to legitimate the state seem to feed almost seamlessly into the political mobilisation of collective memories in the present, where African historians are enlisted by various regimes to prop up uncritical versions of the past. National history writing has been serving national politics everywhere. As long as the nation-state remains an important political reference point, national histories will continue to loom large in historical writing. It was the very strength of that national framework which ensured that the national para­ digm was successful in accommodating and subsuming religious, class and race histories. 46 Whilst the transnational categories of religion, class and race had the potential of challenging the dominance of the national master nar­ rative throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they in fact rarely did so. They developed their most powerful appeal not against but in con­ junction with the national narratives. If we look at religion first, British, German, Swiss and Scandinavian narratives were mostly Protestant while Spanish, Portuguese and Polish narratives were often Catholic and Russian and Romanian narratives were frequently Orthodox. Confessional differences

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were at times an important marker of national enmities between nation­ states. Confessional rivalries within one nation-state often constituted differ­ ent master narratives which competed with one another. The idea of nations expanding or shielding Christian Europe from the infidels at Europe's bor­ ders was a powerful one in various national histories, including Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Poland and Russia. The proximity of theology and his­ tory writing in the nineteenth century fed into the nationalisation of reli­ gious discourses and the sacralisation of national discourses.47 In North America the strongest impact of religion on constructions of national historical narratives can be found in nineteenth-century Quebec, where Catholicism became central to identity discourses. Only after 1918 did some historians begin to rethink the strong ties between Quebecois national identity and religion in an attempt to recover lines of development more in line with those in histories of Canada and the USA. Especially after the Second World War this trend was re-enforced by a tendency to see the strong religious element in identitarian constructions of Quebec as something of an exaggeration. The strength of secular trends in Quebec since the last third of the twentieth century has further eroded the links between Catholicism and the Quebecois historical narrative. Links between Protestantism and the national narratives of the USA were extremely evident in particular in the treatment of the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers in America and the role of a Protestant ethic in the making of the individualist, enterprising and demo­ cratic spirit which allegedly pervaded the history of the USA. Like in the national narratives of Spain and Portugal, Catholicism loomed large in Latin American histories - as focus for identity in Catholic national histories and as important 'other' in liberal national histories. Like in many European nation-states which were multiconfessional, so in Australia religion was under­ mining rather than underpinning national cohesion. As a consequence most early Australian national histories chose to ignore the sectarian struggles between the Protestant English and the Catholic Irish on Australian soil. The anchoring of national narratives in Confucianism in China and Korea and in Shintoism in Iapan ensured that there was also a significant merger between religion and nation in East Asia. Japanese attempts to prove the divine ori­ gins of the Meiji sometimes brought history close to a form of historical the­ ology. Even in communist China an attempt was made to integrate Muslims into the national narrative by promoting Hui minzu (Muslim national) his­ toriography from the 1950s onwards.48 As mentioned above, religion was a major concern for the British histor­ iography of India. Presenting the British as protecting the Hindus from the oppressive Muslims, they also constructed Hinduism as a static religion pre­ venting social change. Religion thus played an influential role in exoticising India and dividing it along religious lines. When Hindu historical narratives increasingly began to challenge British rule after 1857, British narratives changed track and presented the British colonial presence as vital for protecting

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the Muslims. Hindus in turn accused Muslims of betraying the nation by putting allegiance to Islam before allegiance to India. Hindu national narra­ tives frequently excluded both Christians and Muslims from definitions of the nation. More recently Hindu nationalism has produced a range of histor­ ical accounts which project a fictional composite Hinduism into the history of early India. 49 In the Middle East notions of a pan-Arab nation were constructed against the European colonisers, but also to rival Islam. There were exceptions such as al-Husri, who argued that Islam was the product of the Arab national genius and therefore had to be connected to notions of a strong Arab nation, but within the tradition of socialist pan-Arabism, anti-Islamic sentiment pre­ vailed. Following the failure of socialist pan-Arabism, the rise of Islamism therefore brought ideas to the fore which saw the construction of an Arab nation as nothing but a Western imperialist plot. To Islamists Arabism found expression in Islam and not in the nation. In countries such as Lebanon, con­ fessional pluralism provided a major stumbling block for an integrated national history. Separate pro-Lebanese, pro-Syrian and pro-Arab narratives undermined the cohesiveness of any united Lebanese national narrative. To this day the national historical consciousness in Lebanon is struggling to come to terms with confessional plurality. 5° Elsewhere, for example in Turkey, secular and Islamist national narratives constructed different foundational moments and key events for their mutually incompatible national histo­ ries. 51 Throughout sub-Saharan Africa Christian missionaries have been vitally important for writing history in the nineteenth century. Often they combined a belief in European modernisation and progress with respect for indigenous cultures and Christian moral values. In nation-states such as Nigeria, which is divided into a Muslim north and a Christian south, Muslim and Christian national narratives produced rival accounts of national devel­ opments which rarely even talked to each other. If religion was frequently nationalised in historical narratives, the same can be said for class histories. Early labour movement history in Europe, which originated from within the fold of the labour movement, and early forms of social history practised in the universities and academies rarely privileged class over nation. Quite the contrary, they often gave the national storyline a different spin by introducing the concept of class. The communist historiographies which developed in the Soviet Union after 1917 and in Eastern Europe after 1945 often unimaginatively repeated the traditional national narratives with sometimes only the slightest of modifications.52 Class histories in North America became prominent at the universities from the 1960s onwards and, under the impact of the New Left, soon began to provide an important critique of American exceptionalism and key ideas of the liberal American national narrative. Yet most of labour history stayed firmly within the national framework for writing history (if anything, local and regional labour history became far more popular than transnational

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approaches), thereby creating more a national counter-narrative than attempt­ ing to overcome the national orientation of historical writing per se. In Latin America class became racialised to a significant extent, with Africans and the indigenous people generally forming the lowest social class and being excluded from the nation, even in countries, such as Brazil, where the national ideology made much of notions of hybridity and creolisation. It was only really towards the end of the twentieth century that mainstream historians took note of the complex ways in which issues of race and class were inter­ twined in Latin American national histories. 53 In Australia the central role of egalitarian 'mateship' in national narratives had, for a long time, served as an effective barrier against class analyses of Australian society. The change came here, like in the US, with prominent New Left critiques from the 1960s onwards. New Left historians insisted on analysing the class structure of Australian society and like their North American and European counterparts, they contributed in a major way to the emergence of more critical national narratives in Australia. Marxist historians were prominent in the systems of higher education in China, Japan and Korea after 1945. In communist China and North Korea, sterile and dogmatic forms of a state-sponsored and state-controlled class history emerged, but in Iapan and South Korea Marxist historical discourses also often supported hyper-nationalist versions of the past. Their criticism of capitalism in Japan and authoritarian forms of government in South Korea hardly influenced their continued endorsement of forms of historiograph­ ical nationalism. Marxist-inspired class histories in India from the 1950s onwards were, by contrast to East Asia, influential in providing national counter-narratives. Through the subaltern school of studies, Marxism was transformed into post-colonialism which was to present one of the greatest challenges to Western-dominated forms of historical writing, including national history, at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. In the Arab-speaking world, concerns with forms of social injust­ ice bred an interest in Marxism and an attempt to merge nationalism with populist perspectives. Taking the example of the sixteen-volume history of Egypt by Abd al-Rahman al-Rafi, which became known as the 'National Corpus', one can see how the category of 'the people' is replacing all other possible foci of national history, in particular the monarchy, which did not fit into this foremost example of popular-nationalist history writing. Al-Rafi's storyline was close to the interests of the National Party in Egypt. 54 When the Nasserite project failed, the attempted merger between radical populism and nation stood discredited and left the field wide open to Islamist interpre­ tations of the Arab past. In the Dakar school of history writing an interest in social class led some historians in the wake of Abdoulaye Ly to question the role of African elites in the transatlantic slave trade. But otherwise the strong ethnicisation of African history gave little scope to questions of class which was often discussed only in highly specialised labour history circles from the

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1970s onwards. These labour historians rarely had much impact on the writ­ ing of national histories. Race entered the historiographical discourses with the rise of Social Darwinism in Europe in the late nineteenth century. It grew out of the intense early concern of national narratives with ethnicity and ethnicised cultures (to the extent that nation was often used synonymously with ethnicity), and led in turn to attempts to categorise European nation-states according to alleged racial affinities. Hence it provided new typologies of friends and foes in national discourses across Europe. Especially after the First World War, notions of the racially defined Volk and the territorial space it allegedly occu­ pied served the purpose of legitimating demands for the revision of the peace treaties of Versailles and Trianon - most notably in the case of German and Hungarian historians. But versions of Volksgeschichte were prominent elsewhere in Europe and the Greek Megali idea rested on notions of racial superiority of Greeks over Turks just as much as German Ostforschung relied on ideas of racial superiority of Germans over Poles. ss In North American historical discourses racial tensions and discriminations within society were often ignored. National history was white history. This only began to change when the idea of a unified national history was challenged by what Allan Smith calls the 'politics of sub-group recognition'. s6 Canada endorsed the new diversity more wholeheartedly than the USA, but in both historiogra­ phies issues of race began to loom large in national histories and tended to give a critical edge to national storylines. One of the most intriguing mergers between the concepts of nation and race took place in parts of Latin America and is analysed in some detail in Eliana Dutra's chapter. In Brazil, historians propagated the idea of the nation consist­ ing of three races which together made up the unique composition of the Brazilian nation-state. In Mexico, racial fusion between colonial and indige­ nous populations produced the mestizos who were held up as being inherently superior in their qualities to Europeans. As the case of Argentina demonstrates, the idea of a mixed-race nation was not prominent across Latin America, but in Brazil and Mexico it provided the basis of a biological legitimation of the nation-state which emphasised ethnic heterogeneity rather than homogen­ eity. Of course, those constructions ignored the massive forms of discrimination faced by non-white parts of the populations in Latin America. In Chile, the indigenous Mapuche lost vast areas of land during the 1860s. In Argentina the indigenous population was systematically murdered during the War of the Desert (1879/80) which paved the way for the agricultural estates on the pam­ pas. In Guatemala, as late as the 1960s, indigenous people were systematically murdered, and the lives of the Amazonian people in Brazil are not respected even today. s 7 It was only in connection with indigenous and African groups forming their own associations and defending their rights in Brazil during the 1990s, that they began to use historical narratives in the pursuit of greater social equality and more equal opportunities. The treatment of the indigenous

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population of Australia has also been one of the topics discussed with great passion and intensity by the Australian historical profession for the past twenty years - ever since the issue became relevant in Australian national debates in the 1980s. As Mark Hearn argues in his chapter, race and indigenous studies form the most contested area of Australian national history today. In East Asia racial constructions of the nation, like in Europe, served the purpose of mass murder in the 1930s and 1940s. Japanese constructions of Chinese and Korean racial inferiority were an important factor in legitimating the cruel and sadistic treatment of millions of Chinese and Korean citizens under Japanese occupation and colonial regimes. Historians participated prominently in the racialisation of historical national narratives in Japan. Yet such racialised historical discourses could equally be found in China, where they built on the age-old idea of the 'barbarians' threatening China. Whereas the 'barbarians' had long been defined in terms of culture, such cultural 'oth­ ering' was easily biologised and racialised in the twentieth century. As in Europe, it might be possible to argue that an older concern with ethnicity and nativist traditions in Japan became racialised in the 1930s. Initially, an emphasis on Japanese rural communities and ordinary people was meant to provide alternatives to state- and emperor-centred national histories. 58 Such an opposition between ethnic and state-centred national histories can also be observed elsewhere in East Asia. In Vietnam, for example, a folk- and community-centred ethnic history remained steadfastly opposed to the official state-sanctioned version of history which emphasises centralisation and homogeneity. 59 British discourses on India were largely responsible for racialising religious differences between Hindus and Muslims. By linking 'caste' to 'race', they linked Hindus to conceptions of an 'Aryan race' and excluded Muslims from this racial classification. Race was also a category employed in Arab nation­ alist discourses after 1900, although language, politics, religion, heritage, history and community were all more important than racial definitions of the Arab nation. But the notion of race was by no means absent and could attach itself to other characteristics of the Arab nation. After all, the great Ibn Khaldun already argued that blood relationships were more important than all other ties and although he was referring more to kinship than to race, kinship relationships, in an organicist understanding of history, were, like culture, easily racialised. In African national history, the central concern with ethnicity has also led to a proliferation of racialised discourses: the interlinkages between ethnic groups and their struggles for dominance over specific nation-states led to the construction of internal 'ethnic' others, which were perceived as enemies of the nation. In the 1990s the genocide in Rwanda provided a gruesome example of where such racialised historical dis­ courses ended, although the parallel dissolution of Yugoslavia demonstrated that Europe was still not immune to the power of racialised historical narra­ tives at the end of the twentieth century.

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The racialisation of national discourses in Europe is, of course, inextricably linked with the holocaust in Europe. During the last two decades the holo­ caust has come to the fore in a wide range of national historical narratives in Europe and beyond. This was not the case at all immediately after the Second World War, when the holocaust was not central to any national storyline, including the German one. It was only from the 1960s onwards that a holo­ caust consciousness slowly but surely began to enter diverse national narra­ tives. The foregrounding of the holocaust in national history was paralleled by the development of more critical perspectives on traditional national sto­ rylines. Only in West Germany did this develop into a fully articulated the­ ory of post-nationalism during the 1980s, but even here, reunification led to a rethinking of the nation in which post-nationalism became a victim of the many attempts to make sense again of a unified German history. And yet, the new mainstream patriotism in Germany has incorporated holocaust remembrance as a crucial task of German memory politics. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, representations of the holocaust play a vital role in many nation-states,60 as holocaust centres proliferate and holocaust dis­ course informs international policy, e.g. in Kosovo in the 1990s and in the setting up of the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague in 2003. Arguably, an increased holocaust consciousness has fractured the mirror of homogeneous national histories in many European nation-states, but on a global level, the legacy of the holocaust has also been functionalised for more dubious political projects. Thus, it has served the State of Israel to justify the continued discrimination of Palestinians and to ignore worldwide pleas to help rectify the historical injustice done to Palestinians by the State of Israel. And it has served the United States to justify its 'war against terror' and the invasion of Iraq. It underpins a human rights discourse which sees war as necessary to uphold human rights on a global level. In the Middle East we find a vociferous counter-reaction to the holocaust narratives - with holocaust deniers being invited to a state-sponsored international conference in Teheran in 2006. While the holocaust has acquired a European and a universal dimension over the last decades, it is not the centre of historical consciousness and memory politics everywhere. In parts of what used to be communist Eastern Europe, including the Soviet Union, the coming-to-terms with the Stalinist past forms a major task for historians and has been at the centre of attention of modern and contemporary national history. In South Africa the apartheid regime forms the nadir of memory politics, and in many Latin American coun­ tries, e.g. Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala and Uruguay, military dictatorships and their widespread human rights violations form the centre of historical attention. In Turkey, the Armenian genocide in the First World War is far more central to the national historical discourse than the holocaust. If the holocaust did not become the central memory event everywhere, it did have an important impact on studies of nationalism, as scholars of

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nationalism after 1945 often posited a stark juxtaposition between an evil ethnic nationalism (of which the holocaust was supposed to form the high point) and a more benign political and civic nationalism (of which the USA and France were supposed to be prime examples). All of the chapters in this collection demonstrate that such a dichotomy between civic and ethnic national narratives will be impossible to maintain in future. National narra­ tives everywhere relied on a mixture of ethnic and civic elements.61 In immi­ grant societies, such as the white-settler colonies of the New World, the ethnic element was weaker. In the US, for example, national historical narra­ tives relied heavily on the consensual belief in liberalism, democracy, progress, individualism and enterprise. And yet, even here, such values were frequently tied back to the belief that they were inherent in a white Anglo­ Saxon race which was constructed as the elite of US society. What was, however, crucially important for national narratives was the existence of firm borders and the ability to construct histories around the continuous existence of states. 62 In this respect Europe remains divided between the areas in East Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, which, for much of the nineteenth century, remained under the control of trans­ national empires - the Romanov empire, the Habsburg empire and the Ottoman empire - and areas in Western and Northern Europe, where states with firm(er) and far less contested borders were often well established by the beginning of the nineteenth century. Borders also figured prominently in non-European national narratives. In Canada and the US, geography was in fact the most important factor in ascribing a unique character to the nation. The importance of geopolitics found its most celebrated expression in Frederic Jackson Turner's famous idea of the 'frontier' and its importance for the making of the USA. But the border between Canada and the USA also became a much­ studied object of national history from the Canadian side, as Canadian his­ torians struggled to create firmer cultural and intellectual borders vis-a-vis a United States which was seen as penetrating Canadian territories and minds economically and culturally. But the most studied border today is the south­ ern border of the United States with Mexico, where it is the US desperately trying to stem the tide of illegal immigrants. National borders are highly visible signifiers of power, and where they dis­ appear, such as in the core areas of the European Union, they also symbolise the constructions of new forms of political and social power. Power relation­ ships, more generally, have been central to the framing of national narra­ tives everywhere. They impacted on the historical imagination, just as the framing of the latter empowered particular social groups and cultural narratives and legitimated global or regional power politics of nation-states.63 Notions of national missions were vitally important to the construction of national historical narratives. During the era of high imperialism all European imperial powers claimed to have some form of civilising mission, according to which particular values inherent in the nation had to be spread to all corners of the

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world. Some European nations formulated missions to defend Europe and Europe's borders against alleged non-Christian, mostly Muslim invaders, thereby acting as Europe's shield and sword. During the Cold War and beyond, much of US history underpinned the projection of US history having the telos of defending and spreading the values of the Western world around the globe. But national missions did not necessarily consist in spreading national ideals across the world. They could equally mean cutting the nation off from outside influences. Russian slavophile historians thus frequently stressed the need to keep Western ideas and concepts out of Russia. 64 Historians in the pay of the Tokugawa dynasty in Japan equally stressed the need to stop Western influences from contaminating I apanese concepts of the nation.65 And in the USA there were many historians, at various times in its history (especially after the First World War) which emphasised that his­ tory taught the Americans not to get involved in wider world politics. By way of conclusion this volume provides considerable evidence for the liberating and emancipatory potential of national narratives - especially where they were employed in contexts of anti-colonialism, post-colonialism and forms of oppression of national minorities. Yet this evidence is out­ weighed by the contrary evidence that national narratives time and again led to intolerance, xenophobia, violence, war and genocide. Grounding national history on essentialised historical narratives contributed in signifi­ cant ways to a politics of radical othering which justified diverse forms of exclusion and mass murder. At the beginning of the twenty-first century some historians are attempting to champion forms of national history writing which would maintain openness, diversity and tolerance by presenting the nation as a shattered mirror containing multiple reflections or as a kaleido­ scope which changes shape whenever one turns the dial slightly. Playfulness and self-reflexivity have been catchwords of such attempts to write national histories of the twenty-first century.66 Others have warned against taking the nation-state, national history and national identity as benchmarks of sub­ and transnational identity formations. The latter are functioning differently and any comparison with the nation unduly makes the historical form of the nation-state a seemingly timeless and unchanging model for other forms of territorial bonding. And it might well inscribe some of the more dangerous and unhelpful characteristics of national identity constructions into those sub- and transnational units.67 Finally, there are those who are warning against all forms of emotive attachments based on history and identity. 68 They see the historians' task as one of critiquing all claims of a historically based identity. Historical writing should demonstrate the constant flux of identities and deconstruct allegedly supra-historical norms and values. Such radical critique of all forms of spatial and social attachments might perhaps open the way for solidarities below the level of identities. In global perspective, such a vision of history writing as permanent critique of identitarian constructions is perhaps the best hope against the nasty underbelly of national history.

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1. I am grateful to Q. Edward Wang for making a number of extremely helpful sug­

2.

3.

4.

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5.

6.

7. 8.

gestions which have improved this introduction. All remaining errors are of course, as always, entirely my own. For details see ww-w-.uni-leipzig.de/zhsesf. The main outcome of the programme is a six-volume book series entitled 'Writing the Nation' to be published by Palgrave Macmillan between 2007 and 2009. Apart from this, the programme yielded a whole range of publications, details of which can be found on the website of the programme. History writing was, of course, by no means the only or even the most important genre of constructing national pasts. For the impact of different genres on European national histories see Stefan Berger and Linas Eriksonas (eds), Narrating the Nation: the REpresentation ofNations in Different Genres (Oxford, 2007). On the importance of the historical novel for Indian national identity see Rumina Sethi, Myths ofthe Nation: National Identity and Literary REpresentation (Oxford, 1999). For the importance of such transnational networks see, for example, Peter Schbttler, 'Franzbsische und deutsche Historiker-Netzw-erke am Beispiel der frlihen Annales', in Hamit Borzarslan (ed.), REgards etMiroirs: Melanges Rfimy Leveau (Leipzig, 1997); John L. Harvey, 'An American Annales? The Revue internationale d'histoire economique of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre', Journal ofModern History 76 (2004), 528-621; Philipp Stelzel, 'Fritz Fischer and the American Historical Profession: Tracing the Transatlantic Dimension of the Fischer Kontroverse', Storia della Storicgrafia 44 (2003), 67-84; Stefan Berger, 'William Harbutt Dawson: the Career and Politics of an Historian of Germany', English Historical Review 116 (2001), 76-1 13. For an intriguing attempt to justify using the nation as a useful category o f analy­ sis in universal histories of historiography beyond the pre-modern-modern dichotomy, see Daniel Wool£, 'Of Nations, Nationalism and National Identity: Reflections on the Historiographic Organisation of the Past', in Q. Edward Wang and Franz Leander Filafer (eds), The Many Faces ofClio: Cross-Cultural Approaches to Historicgraphy. Festschrift for Georg G. I,ggers (Oxford, 2006), pp. 366-81 . Wool£ is currently preparing a multivolume global history of historiography. For details see http://www-.arts.ualberta.ca/�dwoolf/oxfordhistory.html. Other intriguing attempts to put historiography in a transnational and global perspective include Rolf Torstendahl (ed.), An Assessment ofTwentieth-Century Historicgraphy: Professionalism, Methodolcgies, Writings (Stockholm, 2000); Eckhardt Fuchs and Benedikt Stuchtey (eds), Across Cultural Borders: Historicgraphy in Global Perspective (Oxford, 2002), Georg Iggers and Q. Edward Wang (eds), Turning Points in Historicgraphy: a Cross­ Cultural Perspective (Buffalo, 2002), and the journal Historicgraphy East and West which first appeared in 2003 and is explicitly committed to the discussion of his­ tory writing in global perspective. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Frovincialising Eurcpe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000). For fascinating post-colonial perspectives on the Americas, discussing in particular historiographical questions, see also Mark Thurner and Andres Guerrero (eds), After Spanish Rule: Postcolonial Predicaments of the Americas (Durham, NC, 2003). For Africa, compare Richard Werbner, Postcolonial ldentities in Africa (London, 1996). Dipesh Chakrabarty, 'Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for "Indian" Pasts?', REpresentations 37 (1992), 1-26. Kumkum Chatterjee, 'The King of Controversy: History and Nation-Making in Late Colonial India', American Historical Review 110:5 (2005), 1454-75.

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9. Celia Applegate, A Nation ofProvincials: the German Idea ofHeimat (Berkeley, 1990); Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Wiirttemberg, Imperial Germany and National Memory 1871-1918 (Chapel Hill, 1997); also, comparing Germany with India, see Alon Confino and Ajay Skaria, 'The Local Life of Nationhood', National Identities 4:1 (2002), 7-24. 10. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives ofModern China (Chicago, 1995), chapter 6. 1 1 . Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991). 12. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ, 1993), especially p. 5 and chapter 4. 13. Grant Hardy (ed.), VVOrld of Bronze and Bamboo: Sima Qian's Conquest of History (New York, 1999); Stephen W. Durrant, The Cloudy Mirror: Tension and Conflict in the Writings ofSima Qian (Albany, NY, 1995). 14. For Columbia see Joanne Rappaport, The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Intetpretation in the Colombian Andes (Durham, NC, 1998). 1 5 . Claudio Lomnitz, 'Nationalism as a Practical System: Benedict Anderson's Theory of Nationalism from the Vantage Point of Spanish America', in M. A. Centeno and F. Lopez Alves (eds), The Other Mirror: Grand Theory through the Lens ofLatin America (Princeton, NJ, 2000), pp. 329-59; Michiel Baud, 'Beyond Benedict Anderson: Nation Building and Popular Democracy in Latin America', International Review ofSocial History 50 (2005), 485-98. 16. Lesley Johnson and Alan V. Murray (eds), Conapts ofNational ldentity in the Middle Ages (Leeds, 1995). 1 7 . For an intriguing comparison of professionalisation processes in France and the USA see Gabriele Lingelbach, Klio macht Karriere: die Institutionalisierung der

Geschichtswissenschaft in Frankreich und den USA in der zweiten Hiilfle des 19. Jahrhunderts (Gbttingen, 2003). Please also note that I use the term 'historist' and

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

'historism' rather than 'historicist' and 'historicism' consistently throughout the volume. As I first explained in a 1995 article in Past and Present, the English term 'historicism' refers to two separate ideas which should be kept apart: on the one hand, they refer to Rankean ideas about history as an evolutionary, reformist con­ cept which understands all political order as historically developed and grown, and on the other hand it also refers to ideas criticised by Karl Popper as seeing his­ tory developing according to predetermined laws towards a particular end. For Rankean ideas I use the term 'historism' - analogous to the German word 'Historismus' - and for Popperian usage I propose the more traditional 'histori­ cism' - analogous to the German word 'Historizismus'. Alien Woll, A Functional Past: the Uses of History in Nineteenth Century Chile (Louisiana, 1982). An excellent overview is provided by Martyn Lyons and Penny Russell (eds), Australia's History: Themes and Debates (Sydney, 2005). Gerard Bouchard, Geni:se des Nations et Cultures du Nouvelles Nations (Montreal, 2001). For the adoption of Western forms of historical thinking in Japan and China see also Peter Duus, 'Whig History, Japanese Style: the Min'yUsha Historians and the Meiji Restoration', Journal ofAsian Studies 33 (1974), 415-36; Luke Kwong, 'The Rise of the Linear Perspective on History and Time in Late Qing China', Past and Present 173 (2001), 1 5 7-90. Margaret Mehl, History and the State in Nineteenth-Century Japan (New York, 1998), especially pp. 71££. and 97ff. On Zerffi see also Tibor Frank, Ein Diener seiner

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(Vienna, 2002). 23. For China see Axel Schneider, 'Reconciling History with the Nation: Historicity, National Particularity and the Question of Universals', Historicgraphy East and West 1 (2003), 1 1 7-36. 24. Hyunsoo Lim, 'Rethinking the Concept of Time: Modem Historical Consciousness and Historiography in Korean Society', Korea fournal 41:1 (2001), 44--6 8. 25. Yoav Di-Capua, ' "Jabarti of the Twentieth Century": the National Epic of Abd al-Rahman al-Rafi and Other Egyptian Histories', International Journal of Middle East Studies 36:3 (2004), 429-50. 26. Y. Choueiri, 'Two Histories of Syria and the Demise of Syrian Patriotism', Middle Eastern Studies 23:4 (1987), 496-5 1 1 . See also, on many aspects of history writ­ ing in the Middle East, Bernard Lewis and P. M. Holt, Historians ofthe Middle East (New York, 1962). 27. See, generally on the role of history in the anti-colonial struggle David C. Gordon, Self-Determination and History in the Third World (Princeton, NJ, 1971); on the important Ibadan school of historians see Paul Lovejoy, 'The Ibadan School of History and its Critics', in Toyin Falola (ed.), African Historicgraphy: Essays in Honour offacob Ade Ajayi (Burnt Mills, 1993); on the impact of Ganda politics on Ganda historiography see also Michael Twaddle, 'On Ganda Historiography', History in Africa 1 (1974), 85-100. 28. Matthias Middell, 'Transfer and Interaction: France and Francophone African Historiography', in Fuchs and Stuchtey (eds), Across Cultural Borders, p. 172. 29. W. E. B. Du Bois, The NEgro (New York, 1915). 30. Joseph C. Miller, 'History and Africa/Africa and History', American Historical Review 104 (1999), 1-32; Andreas Eckert, 'Historiker, "Nation-Building" und die Rehabilitierung der afrikanischen Vergangenheit: Aspekte der Geschichtsschreibung in Afrika nach 1945', in Wolfgang Klittler et al. (eds), Geschichtsdiskurs, vol. 5: Globale Konflikte: Erinnerungsarbeit und Neuorientierungen seit 1945 (Frankfurt/Main, 1999), pp. 162-87. 31. On the example of Ghana see Michael Amoah, Reconstructing the Nation in Africa: the Politics ofNationalism in Ghana (London, 2006). 32. Steven Feierman, 'African Histories and the Dissolution of World History', in Robert H. Bates, V. Y. Mudimbe and Jean O'Barr (eds), Africa and the Disciplines: the Contributions ofResearch in Africa to the Social Sciences and the Humanities (Chicago, 1993), pp. 167-212. 33. Terence Ranger, 'Nationalist Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: the Struggle over the Past in Zimbabwe', Journal of Southern African Studies 30:2 (2004), 215-34. 34. On the construction of Our Lady of Guadalupe as a key national image in Mexico see the magisterial David Brading, Mexican Phoenix. Our Lady ofGuadalupe: Image and Tradition Across Five Centuries (Cambridge, 2001). 35. See, for example, Sarah Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens: Honor, Gender and Politics in Arequipa, Peru, 1780-1854 (University Park, PA, 1999); Susan Caulfield,

In Defence ofHonor: Sexual Morality, Modernity and Nation in Early Twentieth Century Brazil (Durham, NC, 2000). 36. Mrilinina Sinha, 'Gender and Imperialism: Colonial Policy and the Ideology of Moral Imperialism in Late Nineteenth Century Bengal', in M. Kimmel (ed.), Changing Men: New Directions on Men and Masculinity (London, 1987), pp. 217-31. 37. Keith Wilson, Forging the Collective Memory: Government and International Historians Through Two World Wars (Oxford, 1996).

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38. For a perceptive Japanese-German comparison see Sebastian Conrad, 'Entangled Memories: Versions of the Past in Germany and Japan, 1945-2001', Journal of Contemporary History 38:1 (2003), 85-99. 39. Rawi Abdelai, 'Memories of Nations and States: Institutional History and National Identity in Post-Soviet Eurasia', Nationalities Papers 30:3 (2002), 459-84; Ronald Grigor Suny, 'Constructing Primordialism: Old Histories for New Nations', Journal ofModern History 73:4 (2001), 862-96. 40. Wendy Bracewell, 'The End of Yugoslavia and New National Histories', Eurcpean History Quarterly 29:1 (1999), 149-56. 41. Jihane Sfeir-Khayat, 'Historiographie Palestinienne: la Construction d'une Identite Nationale', Annales 60:1 (2005), 35-52. 42. For the move in Europe towards transnational perspectives in the area of history schoolbooks compare Hanna Schissler and Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal (eds), The Nation, Eurcpe and the World: Textbooks and Curricula in Transition (Oxford, 2005). For the example of the success story of a state-sanctioned transnationalism in the area of school textbooks see also Michael G. MUller, 'The Joint Polish-German Commission for the Revision of School Textbooks and Polish Views of German History', German History 22:3 (2004), 433-47. For an explicit rallying call to use transnationalism to come to European forms of history writing see Guy Hermet, 'Histoire de l'Europe et Historire des Nations', Vingtii:me Sii:cle 71 (2001), 73-8. For another call to write transnational European rather than national history in a post-Cold War world see Michael Geyer, 'Historical Fictions of Autonomy and the Europeanisation of National History', Central Eurcpean History 22:3-4 (1989), 316-42. 43. Stephen Howe, 'The Politics of Historical "Revisionism": Comparing Ireland and Israel/Palestine', Past and Present 168 (2000), 225-53. However, the history of Palestine before 1 9 1 8 is still being told very differently by Turkish, Israeli and Arab authors. See Maurus Reinkowski, 'Late Ottoman Rule over Palestine: its Evaluation in Arab, Turkish and Israeli Histories, 1 9 70-1990', Middle Eastern Studies 35:1 (1999), 66-97 . 44. For a recent instalment i n the history wars between Chinese and Korean historians see Yonson Ahn, 'Competing Nationalisms: the Mobilisation of History and Archaeology in the Korea-China Wars Over Koguryo/Gaogouli', Japan Focus, 9 February 2006, http://japanfocus.org/products/details/183 7 (accessed 25 July 2006). 45. On the relationship between politics and history writing see also Vinay Lal, The History ofHistory: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (Oxford, 2005). 46. In European and even more so in global perspective Paul Kennedy's optimistic prediction of the 1970s that national historical narratives were declining in importance cannot be sustained at the beginning of the twenty-first century. See Paul Kennedy, 'The Decline of Nationalistic History in the West 1900-1970', Journal ofContemporary History 8:1 (1973), 77-100. 47. See especially Anthony D . Smith, Chosen Pecples: Sacred Sources ofNational ldentity (Oxford, 2003). 48. Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, 'From "Literati" to "Ulama": the Origins of Chinese Muslim Nationalist Historiography', Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 9:4 (2003), 83-109. 49. An important critique of such attempts is provided by Romila Thapar, Interpreting Early India (Oxford, 1994). 50. Axel Havemann, 'Historiography in Twentieth Century Lebanon: Between Confessional Identity and National Coalescence', Bulletin ofthe Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies 4:2 (2002), 49-69.

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5 1 . Alev Cinar, 'National History as a Contested Site: the Conquest of Istanbul and Islamist Negotiations of the Nations', Comparative Studies in Society and History 43:2 (2001), 364-91 . 52. For some examples see Ulf Brunnbauer (ed.), (Re-)Writing History: Historicgraphy in Southeast Eurcpe After Socialism (MUnster, 2004); Maciej G6my, 'Past in the Future: National Tradition and Czechoslovak Marxist Historiography', Eurcpean Review of History 10 (2003), 103-14; Carsten Riis, Religion, Politics and Historicgraphy in Bulgaria (Boulder CO, 2002). 53. On the complex interrelationship between race, nation and class see the intri­ guing essays by Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London, 1991). 54. Di-Capua, ' "Jabarti of the Twentieth Century" '. ss. Ingo Haar and Michael Fahlbusch (eds), German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing, 1919-1945 (Oxford, 2004). 56. On the role of race in the construction of history in North America see Maghan Keita, Race and the Writing ofHistory: Riddling the Sphinx (Oxford, 2000). 57. For all of this see Nicola Miller, 'The Historiography of Nationalism and National Identity in Latin America', Nations and Nationalism 12:2 (2006), 201-21, especially p. 204. 58. Ronald A. Morse, 'lanagita Kunio and the Folklore Movement: the Search for Japan's National Character and Distinctiveness (New York, 1990). 59. Patricia M. Pelley, Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories ofthe National Past (Durham, NC, 2002). 60. Martin L. Davies and Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann (eds), How the Holocaust Looks Now: International Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2006). 61. This is also confirmed by more recent general texts on nationalism in Europe; see, for example, Timothy Baycroft and Mark Hewittson (eds), What is a Nation? Eurcpe, 1789-1914 (Oxford, 2006). 62. A very helpful introductory text is provided by Hastings Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson, Borders: Frontiers ofIdentity, Nation and State (Oxford, 1999). 63. On the close interrelationship between social power and historical narratives see also John Breuilly's inaugural lecture at the University of Birmingham entitled Myth-Making or Myth-Breaking? Nationalism and History (Birmingham, 1997). 64. N. V. Riasanovsky, Historical Consciousness and National Identity: Some Considerations on the History ofRussian Nationalism (New Orleans, 1991). 65. Hiroshi Watanabe, 'Historiography as a Magic Mirror: the Image of the Nation in Japan, 1600-1990', in Erik Lbnnroth, Karl Molin and Ragnar Bjbrk (eds), Conaptions ofNational History (Berlin, 1994), pp. 175-87. 66. For the German case see Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton, 2003). 67. Thus, for example, Hartmut Kaelble has been warning against making the nation­ state the benchmark for the European Union. See in particular idem, 'The Historical Rise of a European Public Sphere?', Journal ofEurcpean IntEgration History 8:2 (2002) 9-22. 68. Allan Megill, 'Historical Identity, Representation, Allegiance', in Berger and Eriksonas (eds), Narrating the Nation.

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Proto-nationalism and pre-modern European narratives about the nation

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National history writing in Europe is older than the nineteenth century. In fact, we find authors writing about natio and nationes in the middle ages and in early modern Europe. Take, for example, the case of the twelfth-century English historian William of Malmesbury, 2 whose Deeds of the Kings of the English conveys a clear idea of the political and cultural unity of a nation called England. Having a distinct notion of a civilising process, William's text praises the English for becoming civilised under the influence of the Normans and formulates a specific mission of the English for civilising the barbarous Celts, i.e. the Welsh, Scots and Irish. The central theme of William's history, the progress of civilisation, is taken up much later by David Hume in the eighteenth century. Hume admired William's writings and shared his Francophilia as well as his belief in progress and civilisation - central themes indeed of the entire eighteenth-century historiography in Europe.3 But well before the eighteenth century, the European humanists took up the topic of the nation with a vengeance. 4 Humanist scholars across Europe created a pool of common memories, values, symbols and myths oriented towards a spatial entity called nation, even where, as in the Italian or German lands, no nation existed. Concepts of geography, territory and his­ tory were linked to the idea of nationhood. Whereas medieval historians had often been monks, humanists were an urban-based and university-trained cosmopolitan elite. Where they were in the direct pay of monarchs and state authorities they tended to construct their national narratives around their masters' state-building attempts. This was particularly noticeable in the court of the Habsburg emperor Maximilian I. The invention of the printing press towards the end of the fifteenth century was crucial in allowing the national discourses to spread more easily and interact with one another.5 A European public sphere began to emerge in which ideas about the nation were being discussed. 30

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As humanists were often classical scholars, they tended to fall back on clas­ sical texts for determining characteristics of particular nations. A good example is the rediscovery of Tacitus's text about the Germanic tribes from the end of the first century AD by Italian humanists in the fifteenth century. They used it to demonstrate that only their Italian forefathers in the Roman Empire possessed culture and civilisation in contrast to the barbarians who had not come under the benign civilising influence of Rome. However, in response to their Italian colleagues, German humanists, such as Jakob Wimpfeling, Conrad Celtis and Ulrich von Hutten inversed this argument and formulated a catalogue of virtues of the Germanic warrior people who were charac­ terised by honesty, openness, decency, love of liberty and purity of morality. The Germanic tribes were thus positively contrasted with the degenerate, decadent and effeminate Romans. Humanists were not only concerned with defining national character. They also were keen to search for origins and emphasise the longevity of the nation. Thus German humanists argued that the German people descended from a certain Tuisco, the oldest adopted son of the biblical Noah. National heroes were crucial, as they symbolised all national virtues and defended the national 'essence' against foreign threats. Sometimes national narratives in Europe shared national heroes, as was the case with Charlemagne, who appeared in both French and German narra­ tives of the nation, but more often national heroes were unambiguously national characters. This was particularly necessary, as humanists already tended to define their own nation against that of other nations, in particu­ lar neighbouring nations which were frequently perceived as crucial 'others' to the 'own' nation. Thus German humanists tended to criticise the French and Italians for being over-civilised, corrupt and arrogant. Their luxurious lifestyle promoted laziness and led to decline - something that was often ridiculed and mocked in German humanists' narratives about France or Italy. The idea of enemies of the nation was thus already well developed in the sixteenth century. 6 The Reformation of the sixteenth century could build on the humanist discourse about the nation. Medieval theories of transla­ tion had legitimated the power of the pope. Protestant monarchs and heads of state across Northern, Central and Western Europe used the idea of a Protestant nation as an anti-universalist appositional term against the pope and constructed national pasts which were separate from and opposed to Rome. National narratives became a useful tool to defeat the militant univer­ salism of the Counter-Reformation and legitimate the setting up of Protestant nations. The Reformation thus became of foundational import­ ance to many Protestant nations in EuropeJ As we can see from this brief overview, many of the tropes of national belong­ ing and identity, which were prominent ingredients of national histories, went back to medieval and early modern times. But I would still like to maintain that major change occurred during the second half of the eighteenth century. Modern nations differed fundamentally from medieval and early modern

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nations and hence modern national histories also had a very different quality and function from medieval and early modern national histories. Only with the advent of modernity during the European 'bridge period' (Sattelzeit) between 1750 and 1850 did loyalty to the nation become the most important means of legitimating states.8 Only then did nation replace and merge with religion, dynasticism and feudalism to produce the crucial cement in the relations between dominant and dominated. Before 1750 nation and national histor­ ies did not play this important role. Hence a qualitative change took place in the writing of national histories which needs closer observation.

National history writing and the arrival of modernity in Europe, 1 750-1850

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The second half of the eighteenth century marked the beginning of a new understanding of history as science, something which has been described by Heiko Feldner as 'scientificity'.9 The new scientific self-understanding of his­ tory spread with the institutionalisation and professionalisation of history as an academic subject. At the universities history became an important subject in its own right. Historical research institutes and history societies were founded and academies came into existence in which history often had an important position. Some of these institutions were royal foundations, like the royal academies in many countries. Some were founded by aristocrats, like the grandee foundations in Hungary. Others, such as many learned soci­ eties in the urban centres of Europe, had middle-class benefactors. And some, like the Welsh University of Aberystwyth, even had an important working-class input, as in this specific case, the coppers of the South Wales miners were instrumental in raising a substantial portion of the money for the university. The locus of social and cultural power tended to be important for the development of national narratives across Europe. The universities of G6ttingen and Berlin in the German lands are often quoted as the places where changes in teaching and research came together to produce a novel sense of what history was all about. Philology and source criticism became crucial tools of the historian to make distinctions between 'myths' and 'truths'.10 The historical seminar was the place where professors and students would explore the remnants of the past together and expand, through research, our knowledge of the past on a scientific basis. Leopold von Ranke came to symbolise this new understanding of historical writing in the nineteenth century, and historians from across Europe flocked to Germany to get apprenticed to a German master, who would provide them with the tools of historical craftsmanship. 11 The institutionalisation and professional­ isation of historical writing, which found such powerful expression in the European cult surrounding the figure of Ranke, led to the introduction of more clear-cut dividing lines between the amateur and the professional, between literature and history, or, for that matter, between 'myths' and 'history'. The

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ideology of 'scientificity' contributed in a major way to genre-building and it set up the historians as authoritative spokespersons for what 'actually hap­ pened' in the past. It was this authority which made historians so prominent as nation­ builders in nineteenth-century Europe. They were not the only ones, to be sure. Other, often neighbouring subject areas, with equal claims to 'scien­ tificity', interrelated with history to provide arguments in favour of national causes. Geography, archaeology, cartography, numismatics and genealogy readily spring to mind and are by no means an exhaustive list of the subjects enlisted in the shaping and framing of national master narratives. Arguably the most successful national histories across Europe were those which inte­ grated the findings of diverse scientific disciplines to give a comprehensive description of the national character. To take the example of geography, the Swiss, British and Russian national narratives were all deeply influenced by the definition of the Swiss nation as being shaped by the Alps, of the British nation as being defined by the sea and the Russian nation as being forged across the vastness of the Russian empire stretching from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to East Central Europe in the west and from the polar circle in the north to the Asian sub-continent in the south.12 Yet the second half of the eighteenth century, when the new 'scientific' paradigm began to emerge, was also the high point of Enlightenment history. 13 Its emphasis on universal categories, such as progress and liberty, meant that its practitioners were often not very interested in national peculiarities and specifics. Rather they sought to establish the workings of universal human principles and characteristics in the past. This led many to write trans­ national forms of history, but even where they wrote about the history of a particular nation, they often did so in an attempt to demonstrate universal principles in the history of that particular nation. And yet there is no straight­ forward dichotomy between a history writing committed to Enlightenment universalism and a history writing dedicated to the subsequent Romantic nationalism. After all, Voltaire, Montesquieu and Hume all showed a keen interest in issues of national character and differences between nations.14 August Ludwig Schl6zer in G6ttingen is good example of the joint interest in national specifics and universal principles. Schl6zer's vita and oeuvre demonstrates of how little significance a narrow national focus was to him, although he did write national history. Having studied in Uppsala in Sweden, he became a professor of Russian history in St Petersburg before tak­ ing up the chair in history at the University of G6ttingen in 1768. Here he developed not only his interest in Scandinavian and Russian history, but also his general interest in the peoples of the wider world. His commitment to universal history went hand in hand with a deep mistrust in the generalities produced by philosophers of history.15 The French Revolution of 1 789, with its declaration of the rights of man, symbolised the highpoint of the attempt to build a new society on some of

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the universal values championed by the Enlightenment, but it also marked a turning point for historical studies. When the French exported their univer­ sal values in the revolutionary wars of the 1790s and the Napoleonic wars of the 1800s, national history became an important means in other parts of Europe to defend the specific and peculiar against the universal aspirations and imperial expansionism of France. National history now became a response to Enlightenment universalism. It was in this context thatJohann Gottfried Herder's ideas on national history spread like wildfire across Europe, making Herder another figure of truly European significance in national history writing.16 Herder postulated that each people had the right to live in their own nation. According to Herder it was not history, but poetry and language which best expressed the soul and essence of the nation. Far from championing a narrow nationalism, Herder, who remained deeply influenced by Enlightenment thought, in particular the ideas of Gottfried Wihelm Leibniz, advocated a genuine pluralism of nations which all had their unique value. An outspoken opponent of colonialism and of the oppression of minority nationalisms in European empires, Herder's nations were cosmopolitan entities. And yet, his concern with the originality of national cultures opened the door to all those subsequent nationalists who were keen to find arguments that their particular nation was more original and hence of more value than other nations classed as 'derivative' or 'second-hand'. Herder gave a voice to all those non-dominant ethnic groups of Central, East Central and Eastern Europe which, during the long nineteenth century, were keen to establish their own nation-state.17 He inspired national revivals which were being carried by linguists, poets, collectors of folk songs and fairytales, and, last, but not least, historians. Influenced by Herder, historians developed an arsenal of arguments in favour of national peculiarity and specificity. Citing the work of linguists they emphasised the role of language as indicator of common historical origins, often ranging back to the middle ages.18 They pointed to a distinguished literary tradition in highlighting the achievements of their respective nations. They frequently stressed links between nation and religion and more than one nation was declared 'holy' in remembrance of particular services rendered to religion. God was fre­ quently invoked as forging a nation's character or sowing the seeds of a nas­ cent nation. National stories across Europe became stories of 'golden ages', 'lost homelands' and 'national revivals'. National epics, such as the Finnish Kalevala, were rediscovered in order to construct mythical 'golden ages' and demonstrate the longevity of the nation and of national ambitions. Where there was a lack of hard evidence, historians were not averse to inventing sources and, in some cases, even whole epics in order to enhance the creden­ tials of one's own nation. The invention of the Scottish bard Ossian and the forgery of the K6niginhof and Griinberg manuscrips by vaclav Hanka are important examples of such 'inventions of tradition'.19

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Historians illustrated the virtues of their nation and measured those virtues against the alleged moral failings of others. Romantic national his­ tory was in vogue not only in East Central Europe, as the well-documented example of Belgium shows.20 Nations defined themselves against other nations, in particular neighbouring ones, but nations also were constructed against alleged internal enemies. Jews, socialists and Catholics made fre­ quent appearances in various European national histories as corroding the internal unity and eating away at the national cohesiveness of national souls. Cultural conservatives, such as the Hungarian national historian Szekhl identified Jews in particular with the degrading impact of modernity on European society. By contrast, monarchs and dynasties were often hailed as symbols of integration and unity. Monarchs were, of course, not the only national heroes. Founders of nations, such as Bismarck or Garibaldi, saviours of the nation such as William Wallace and Churchill, reformers of the nation, such as Peter the Great and the Freiherr vom Stein, military leaders, such as Moltke, de Gaulle or Gustav Wasa, cultural icons such as Shakespeare, Schiller, Cervantes, Moliere or Dante, and great religious leaders such asJan Hus and Martin Luther - they all filled the pantheon of national history writing which became obsessed with 'great men'. 21 National histories throughout Europe were always highly gendered affairs.22 Thus, for example, enemies of the nation were routinely depicted in feminised forms, while the awakening of national consciousness was identi­ fied with masculine strength and virility. Yet historians often spoke of periods of foreign domination or repression as periods in which the nation had been 'raped', thereby identifying the enemy nation as male rapist. National saints could be female as well as male and although most active representatives and heroes of the nation were male, there were exceptions such as Marianne and Joan of Arc in France, Maria Theresa of Austria and Queen Luise of Prussia. In Czech national history, the freedom of Czech women in ancient Czech his­ tory was routinely contrasted with the oppression allegedly suffered by German women - a narrative ploy to underline the more democratic tendencies of the Czech nation. But overall, the close relation between war and nation-state formation tended to exclude women in the national storylines, as it was the male citizen-soldier and his heroism which took centre stage. Occasionally women made an appearance as warriors. Thus Polish women were assured a prominent place in national histories as they took up arms in 1831 against Tsarist Russia. Mythical Boadicea could be depicted as having fought for Britishness against the Roman invaders. And the bakeress of Aljubarrota famously contributed to the victory of Portugal over the Castilian forces in the battle of Aljubarrota in 1385 - an incident recalled in most national his­ tories of Portugal. But more generally speaking, female combatants did not fit into the gender order of nineteenth-century historical narratives and were written out of those narratives, such as the German 'sword virgins' who had fought alongside their male comrades in the wars of liberty in the 1810s.23

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Women instead made a regular appearance as anti-heroes. Thus, the Polish historian Lelewel depicted the foreign-born wives of Polish kings as the source of all evil foreign customs weakening Polish national culture. And many Spanish national narratives made a woman, Florinda 'La Cava', the main cul­ prit in the story of the Arab invasions of the peninsula in the eighth century. Most national histories were concerned with depicting the nation as a large family, in which male and female virtues were combined to produce perfect harmony and unity. Male and female images thus often appear next to each other. References to the Tsar as father figure of all Russians coincide with invocations of 'mother Russia'. Frederick II of Prussia appears next to Queen Luise of Prussia as a major embodiment of German national virtues. Women mattered in national histories - as queens, saints, mythical founding figures, as those who had sacrificed themselves for the nation, as model mothers and role models for contemporary women. Women were the integrative, bridge­ building, friendly, protective and homely face of the nation, the necessary counterpart to the warriors and statesmen who guided the nation through peril. In particular where historians attempted to sacralise nations, women often played an important role as martyrs for the national cause. The gendering of national narratives was arguably as prevalent in Russian national history as it was in British national history and can be found in Norwegian national narratives just as well as in their Greek counterparts. Yet the question has to be addressed whether 'zones of nationalism' in Europe translate into 'zones of national history writing'.24 Is the character of nation­ alism in Western Europe fundamentally different from nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe? More recent research on nationalism has shed considerable doubt on this assumption. 25 And yet it did matter for the fram­ ing of national storylines whether nation-states could be constructed as already existing nation-states or whether they were future projections. Historians in England, France, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain could build their stor­ ies on unbroken traditions of statehood. Borders in Western Europe hardly changed at all after 1815. Hence territorial overlaps figured less prominently in Western European national histories than in their Eastern European coun­ terparts. There was the conflict between Portugal and Spain over the tiny Spanish enclave of Olivem;:a, and of course, there were border conflicts in Central Europe, notably Germany, e.g. the Schleswig question involving Denmark and the Alsace question involving France. But this hardly com­ pares to the situation in Central and Eastern Europe, where border conflicts and overlapping national histories were often central to the construction of national narratives. Here one city could not only have several different names, but also belong to several national narratives, as is the case with the Austrian Lemberg, which also is the Polish Lw6w and the Ukranian Lviv (not to speak of the Jewish and Armenian worlds of the city!). In Central and Eastern Europe where multinational empires dominated the nineteenth-century landscape, a multitude of non-dominant ethnic groups struggled to construct their own

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national storylines. They often looked precisely to Western European soci­ eties for models of successful nation-building. Occidentalism in East Central and Eastern Europe attempted to adapt and accommodate a range of Western ideas and practices of nation-building. At the same time, Protochronism, i.e. the notion that the East already preceded Western developments in key areas, could be used, most famously perhaps in the Romanian national nar­ rative, to guard the nation against accusations of backwardness and failure. Where national history was more difficult to construct and more con­ tested, there it tended to play a much larger role in underpinning national identity. Inversely, where there was a greater consensus on the underpin­ nings of the national storyline, national history had less of a role to play. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British history and its successful construction of a nation based on the principles of constitutional reform, individual liberty and benign imperialism would be a case in point.26 Yet even in Britain the construction of a consensual national history could not paper over all of the cracks of the multinational state, as the Irish began to contest the national storyline, ultimately constructing their own national history in opposition to British imperialism.27 In nineteenth-century multi­ national states, which were weaker than Britain, e.g. Spain, competing national narratives appeared more readily, for example in Catalonia and the Basque country. The empires of Central and Eastern Europe struggled far more visibly to contain multiple national histories than the nation-states of Western Europe. The Holy Roman Empire had already collapsed in 1806, and although the German lands struggled to form a united German nation-state in the follow­ ing decades, historians did much to construct national storylines. Following the unification of Germany under Prussia in 1871, the Prussian school of his­ toriography, postulating that it had been Prussia's mission all along to unify Germany, quickly rose to dominance. The Habsburg empire fought in vain against the establishment of an Italian nation-state in March 1861. The Habsburgs were to grant Hungary a semi-autonomous status within the empire, thereby only awakening other Slav nationalisms to the fact that they were discriminated against. Few national historians were so prominent in stak­ ing out the national claims vis-a-vis the empire as the Czech historian Palackf.28 The Romanov empire in Russia had to contend with the stirrings of nationalisms on its borderlands. Most prominently, of course, the Poles rapidly developed national narratives challenging the division of Poland in 1795 and working towards the resurrection of an independent Poland. But also in the Ukraine, in Finland and in the Baltic states autonomous national narratives made an appearance during the nineteenth century.29 Unlike the Habsburgs, who attempted to accommodate the diverse nationalities with­ out giving up the empire, the Romanovs responded to such stirrings of bor­ derland nationalisms with intense campaigns of Russification. Historians lent a hand by justifying why particular areas of the empire were Russian.

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In the Ottoman empire, the successful struggle of the Greeks for their own independent nation-state proved to be hugely inspirational for a variety of other nationalities across South Eastern, Eastern and East Central Europe. Each of these national struggles developed and built on narrations of the nation seeking to stake out claims of national originality and authenticity. National historians across the Habsburg, Romanov and Ottoman empires complained bitterly about empires as 'prisons of the peoples' of Europe. The emphasis of national history here was on oppression and suffering under the imperial powers. 30 Yet national historians as apologists for and prophets of the nation-state did not dominate the profession entirely. Powerful critics of the growing obsession with national history writing included Lord Acton, Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge after 1895, who championed empire against nation and praised in particular the Habsburg empire as guar­ antor of peace and stability in East Central Europe.31 The nineteenth-century Lucerne-based historian Eutych Kopp described the key ingredients of Swiss national history as pure fiction, for which he was duly denounced as an Austrian traitor.32 But such critical voices could not prevent the forward march of national history writing in the nineteenth century. For about one century, between 1850 and 1950, it was by far the dominant form of history writing in Europe.

The apogee of national history writing, 1850-1950 While the Romantic mode of national history writing continued well into the second half of the nineteenth century, towards the end of that century, with processes of professionalisation and institutionalisation of history writ­ ing growing ever stronger, one can observe a positivist backlash against Romanticism. Historians now put even greater emphasis on source criticism and set about debunking a whole range of 'historical myths' peddled by Romantic historiography. In East Central Europe, for example, Pekaf began demolishing PalackY's notion of Hussitism as bearer of modern democracy in the Czech lands and Bobrzyriski did the same with Lelewel's celebration of 'gentry democracy' in Poland.33 What remained constant, however, was the notion that history was a kind of mirror in which the nation could see itself as it was. Historians were the ones holding up the mirror. But unlike in the fairytale of Snow White, the mirror was not bound to 'truth', despite the protestations of historians. Hence every holder of the mirror saw in it what he had constructed, meaning that those with an interest in national history never had just one mirror but several mirrors, i.e. competing narratives. And yet everyone holding a mirror claimed that his was the only genuine article. Historians continued to see themselves as pedagogues of the nation. Heinrich von Treitschke in Germany, Nicolae Iorga in Romania or Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos in Greece were all busy framing and legitimating the

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nation-state. National historians did not emerge at the same time everywhere. Especially in Eastern Europe, major works of national history appeared rela­ tively late. Thus, for example, one of the first major Ukranian national his­ torians, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, wrote his History of Ukraine-Rus in ten volumes between 1894 and 1934.34 In Estonia a national master narrative was only beginning to be formulated in the inter-war period - with the formation of the University of Tartu in 1919 and the work of Hans Kruus being particu­ larly important. 35 This was in striking contrast to Lithuania, another Baltic state, where amateur historians such as Teodor Narbutas or his contempor­ ary Daukantas established a national master narrative as early as the 1830s and 1840s.36 Such synchronicity of the asynchronic (Erns! Bloch) calls for diachronic as well as synchronic comparisons of national history writing across Europe and beyond. Whenever and wherever historians acted as spokespersons for the nation, they strove to emphasise the unity of the nation and, frequently, the super­ iority of their nation over other nations. The cosmopolitan beginnings of the national ideology in Herder were increasingly forgotten as the nineteenth century progressed. And yet historians were also part and parcel of a profes­ sion which rapidly Europeanised itself towards the end of the nineteenth century. As most university-trained historians believed that scholarship was objective, science, they argued, should know no national boundaries. The beginnings of the world historical congresses, for example, go back to 1898. 37 It was difficult to maintain and uphold such internationalist sentiments in the first half of the twentieth century, when two world wars saw the enlistment of historians in the war efforts of their respective countries. 38 Especially after 1918 military demobilisation was not followed by cultural demobilisation, so that history was enlisted like never before in attempts to make politics, redraw boundaries and functionalise the past for national gain in the pre­ sent.39 During this high period of national history writing the crucial ten­ sion between intense nationalism and commitment to transnational professional networks could not be resolved. If historians found it difficult to combine a transnational self-understanding with national commitment, they certainly struggled to maintain the unity of the national master narrative and fend off alternative interpretations of the national history or the national character. In particular, religious and class narratives time and again threatened the cohesiveness of the dominant national storyline. They had to be integrated into the national master narra­ tive - a task which frequently produced friction and historical controversy. If we look at the issue of religion first, we can observe that throughout much of Central, Western and Northern Europe historians were, with few exceptions, overwhelmingly Protestant. Even where they were not devout Christians, a 'cultural Protestantism' reigned supreme in these historiographies - with Catholicism often perceived as a backward, superstitious and altogether anti­ national force which stood in the way of progress. The anti-Catholicism of

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Protestant national historiographies was re-enforced by the liberal inclina­ tions of many nineteenth-century national historians. In some parts of Europe Catholicism was directly linked to the repression of national ambi­ tions. Thus, in the Habsburg empire Catholicism was widely identified with German pro-empire sentiments, whereas the national aspirations of the Czech, Slovak and Magyar people were given expression in religious terms through their Hussite, Lutheran and Calvinist beliefs. In Britain Catholicism was externalised as 'foreign' - with the Protestant British empire standing tall against Catholic influence in continental Europe.40 The Finnish histor­ ian Renvall was explicit about depicting Catholicism as foreign to Nordic thinking. Narratives which came to regard Protestantism as a central ingre­ dient of national identity often linked the Protestant religion to the evolu­ tion of the political nation. Constructions of British constitutionalism, Swiss republicanism and German constitutionalism all depended heavily on under­ standings of Protestantism. Catholic narratives were consciously excluded and frequently regarded as a monstrosity, although individual Catholics, such as Lord Acton in Britain and Franz Schnabel in Germany could become respected members of the historical professions. In religiously mixed countries, such as Germany, Switzerland or indeed Slovakia, it tended to be the Protestant storylines which dominated the historical profession. But diverse confessional communities (Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Jews) shaped their own separate national narratives often under­ pinning distinct religious milieux. In Germany and the Netherlands, for example, national narratives became pillarised according to different confes­ sional denominations. In France, by contrast, the major dividing line was between the secular narratives and their Catholic alternatives. This was similar in countries which were confessionally homogeneous. In Lutheran Sweden and Catholic Spain the dividing line also ran between secular and religious national narratives. Where there was little tension between nation and reli­ gion, as in some monoconfessional countries, such as Norway, religion did not play an important part in the national narrative. It could in effect be taken for granted. By contrast, in Eastern Europe religion could serve as an important marker of difference in border areas, for example, between Orthodox Russians, Uniate Ukrainians and Roman Catholic Poles.41 Confessional aspects could, of course, only become important in national rivalries, where hostile nations claimed allegiance to different confessions. As Poland and Lithuania were both Catholic and as Prussia/Germany and Estonia/Latvia were all Protestant, national rivalries had to be linked to other than confessional differences. Religion and nationalism formed strong alliances, but they also produced considerable tensions. Nationalism has often been perceived as a form of secu­ lar millenarianism in which politics was replacing religion as the key to sal­ vation.42 At the same time, religion sometimes became a powerful rival to the nation's claim for absolute loyalty. In many respects, nineteenth-century

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empires such as the Ottoman empire found it easier than nation-states to live with several separate religions coexisting with various degrees of auton­ omy. With the advances of secular education and the rise of the scientific state in the modern period, the principles of religion and nation could present stark choices, but equally there were many attempts to bring them together. Religion remained a shaper of people's destinies and identities, but the uni­ versal aspirations of all world religions often sat awkwardly with national ambitions. It was not by chance that in nineteenth-century Italy, the neo­ Guelphs failed to build the Italian nation-state around the papacy. Nowhere did a European nation define itself exclusively by religion. Unsurprisingly it was a Frenchman, Ernest Renan, in his classic attempt to define a nation, who argued that religion was not a sufficient basis for the establishment of mod­ ern nationality. 43 Yet religion undoubtedly belonged to one of the most pow­ erful bonds within many national communities and those which aspired to become one and was thus used effectively to underpin national storylines. Religious beliefs had a lasting influence on both French (Thierry, Guizot) and German (Ranke, Droysen, Sybel) nineteenth-century historiography. Not infrequently historians understood their own work as tracing and docu­ menting God's actions in the past.44 Great personalities in history were pre­ sented as agents of a higher will. Many nineteenth-century German historians studied theology and came from families of vicars and pastors. In their writ­ ings religious discourses became nationalised and national discourses became sacralised. Religion served the nation, but also became a crucial element of understanding the nation. Nation became the new religion. The structure of national narratives often paralleled the structure of the New Testament. The suffering, death and resurrection of Iesus equalled the destruction, ruin and eventual resurrection of the nation. Polish historians often referred to Poland as 'Christ of nations', and comparisons with the passion of Christ were easily made in other historiographies as well, e.g. the Hungarian one. 45 In many nations religion became a key ingredient of national self­ understanding. Orthodoxy and Romanianness became virtually synony­ mous. 46 The Swedish nation was constructed as a Lutheran bulwark against Russian (and by implication also Orthodox) expansion. Sweden had of course also defended European Protestantism against the Catholic Counter­ Reformation in the Thirty Years War. Denmark was often identified with a rather inward-looking Lutheranism in the nineteenth century.47 In PalackY's narration of the Czech nation fifteenth-century Hussitism was the central ingredient of Czech national identity. In Poland and Lithuania the Catholic church as an institution was constructed as having guaranteed the survival of the nation during prolonged periods of statelessness. 48 Catholicism was crucial to the national narratives produced under Franco and Salazar in Spain and Portugal.49 Both nations achieved national greatness only by fusing church and crown. Greek national narratives presented the Orthodox church as a bridge to the classical heritage of Greece. 'Helleno-Christianity' became the cradle of

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European civilisation and culture and therefore established a superior pos­ ition of the modern Greek nation over all its rivals.50 Religion played the greatest role in the construction of national narratives where national missions were defined in religious terms. Spanish and Portuguese national narratives stressed how both nations brought Catholicism to half the globe and how they drove the Muslims out of Europe. Poland, Russia, the Habsburg empire and Greece also presented their national histor­ ies in terms of shielding Christian Europe from the infidels. The battle of Mohacs against the Ottomans in 1526 was presented as a national catastro­ phe for Hungary where the Hungarians sacrificed themselves for the sake of Christian Europe. The Greek struggle for independence was presented as a model for other Christian nations in the Balkans to establish their national narratives against the foremost Islamic power in Europe. 51 The Reconquista in Spain was an epic of national recovery in which Europeans triumphed over Arab culture. Overall, religious storylines helped to unify national narratives, although they could also threaten that unity. The same ambivalence can be observed in the interrelationship between national and class narratives. With the emergence of the social question in the nineteenth century, politicians, social reformers and historians began to write about social classes and, in particular, about the working classes. Those histories which gave the greatest attention to questions of class often emerged from within the European labour movements rather than from within the European universities in the nineteenth century. Labour activists, though, mostly depicted class and class conflict within the national framework. Such a choice already indicated the desire on behalf of many socialists not to transcend the national storylines but to reframe them into stories which would be able to incorporate class. Eduard Bernstein's histories of the labour movement in Germany and Robert Grimm's histories of the labour movement in Switzerland are examples of such inclusive class histories. 52 Their class narratives were alternative national narratives including different visions of national identity rather than attempts to overcome national identity. In different European nation-states these efforts met with diverse levels of resistance from official historiography. The German historical profession was one of the most rigorous in attempt­ ing to prevent the emergence of class narratives well into the twentieth cen­ tury. Gerhard Ritter's description of Eckart Kehr as Edelbolschewist in the early 1930s, and Hans Rothfels's successful attempt to prevent Gustav Mayer access to archival material during the years of the Weimar Republic are just two prominent examples of such attempts at exclusion. 53 In Britain, by con­ trast, the narrative construction of 'the people' was often used to defuse the disruptive potential of class and to unify the national narrative around issues of constitutionalism, freedom and individualism. 54 Writing national history under the framework of 'the people' allowed historians such as Trevelyan to merge class and nation and write an inclusive national narrative.

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Around the turn of the twentieth century class began to move into aca­ demic discourse, in particular where social and economic history became more prominent within the historical profession. Yet at the same time class was also nationalised. Thus, for example, Karl Lamprecht's interest in class and societal issues found expression in German national history. 55 In Britain the Hammonds, Webbs, R. H. Tawney and G. D. H. Cole brought class and social history to the fore, but dealt almost exclusively with national topics. The early Annalistes were arguably less interested in the national framework of history writing than any other professional historians in inter-war Europe and actively encouraged the writing of comparative and transnational his­ tory using categories of 'class'.56 The same is true for the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, founded in 1935, which explicitly championed the writing of a transnational and comparative history of class. 57 Here we find the first attempts to challenge the dominance of the national paradigm in history writing. The class paradigm was an important tool for these efforts, as historians, e.g. Arthur Rosenberg, privileged 'class' over 'nation' as the basic framework of historical analysis. 58 There were other prominent critics of national master narratives in this classical period of national history writing, none perhaps more famous than Herbert Butterfield whose Whig Inte1pretation of History argued forcefully that not every event in English his­ tory should be judged against the allegedly eternal values of individual lib­ erty, constitutional government and religious tolerance. But they rarely presented an alternative to that which they wanted to do away with. Those who adopted class rather than nation as a leading framework for their histor­ ies had developed such an alternative. Yet much more common remained the introduction of 'class' into 'nation'. As social history gained ground within national histories, 'class' became an important part of national history. Class histories challenged the older, almost exclusively political, construction of the nation. They sought instead to insert social constructions into national history. The new concern with 'class' and 'society' did by no means signal the abandonment of earlier national commit­ ments, as is evident in the hyper-nationalism of German T/olksgeschichte, the intense patriotism of leading figures of the Annales school and the much commented on Englishness of the Webbs. Soviet historiography after 1917 did not abandon the national framework either. Existing Russian national narratives were occasionally denounced as bourgeois and there were calls to replace them with revolutionary national narratives, which were meant to highlight the contribution of workers to the forging of the nation-state. But under Stalin Soviet historiography adopted and adapted many of the Russian nationalist storylines that had been prominent in Tsarist historiography. 59 Thus, for example, it was even less possible in Stalin's Soviet Union than in Tsarist Russia to suggest that the origins of the first Russian state had been anything other than Slav. The debate on the origins of the first Russian state had in fact been a long-standing one. Ever since the eighteenth century

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Slavophiles insisted on the Slav origins of Russia and Normanists argued for the Varangian origins of the Russian state. It is interesting to note that some non-Russians, such as Gustav Ewers, stood on the Slavophile side of the scholarly divide, whilst some Russians, such as Mikhail Pogodin, were on the Normanist side. But in Stalinist Russia the state and the Communist Party validated and enforced Mikhail Lomonosov's arguments about the Slavophile roots of Russia. As the class discourse emerged in the nineteenth century, its propagators almost invariably attempted to link it to the national discourse by claiming that the social, cultural and political exclusion of the working class from the nation was unjust. The workers formed the true nation and therefore needed to reassert their belonging. It was those enjoying 'privilege' at the cost of others who were branded parasitical and standing in the way of unity. The central concern with unity linked class and national narratives. Like national narratives, class narratives were obsessed with finding the origins of national class struggles and creating a continuous history of nationalised class strug­ gles from the dim and distant past to the present. Both narratives were con­ cerned with eradicating sectional, 'selfish' interests. But where was that selfishness located? In many countries this was the aristocracy, but increas­ ingly, the middle classes also formed key obstacles to unity. This kind of dis­ course always raised the question which social class should be regarded as the main carrier of the national idea. The answer to this question was remarkably diverse in different parts of Europe. In Poland it was the gentry and many historians, like Lelewel, stressed how important for nation-formation the struggle of the gentry against absolutism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had been. In more industrialised countries, notably Britain, con­ structions of the nation were predominantly middle class and framed the national storylines around issues of continuing industrial, political and cul­ tural progress. In Scandinavia and the Ukraine, where free peasants formed an important section of the population, the nation was constructed around ideas of peasant liberties which had to be defended against encroachments by an indigenous or, more often, 'foreign' elite. Where the class enemy was foreign, class conflict became easily ethnicised. Hence in the Habsburg empire the German-speaking elite was frequently perceived in national nar­ ratives of non-Germans as a major national and class enemy. Some smaller nations, such as the Czechs and Slovaks, self-consciously tended to depict themselves as plebeian nations who stood against 'foreign' elites and aristo­ cratic privilege. Class narratives were often centrally grouped around revolutions and revo­ lutionary events. Revolutions were foundational moments for nations (France, 1789; Russia, 1917), but they were also moments in which class and nation came into conflict. Revolution was frequently an absent 'other' even in those national storylines that did not contain a successful revolution of their own. Some national stories, such as the British and the German ones,

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were preoccupied with demonstrating that revolution was not necessary. Here revolution and class were frequently depicted as standing outside of the national tradition. Narratives of revolution were invariably narratives of the extension of democratic rights and liberties. As such they highlighted exist­ ing disunities and exclusions. Where they failed, questions surrounding lack of unity lingered. Where they succeeded, claims of refound unity laid the foundation of revolutionary myths of origins, of nations reborn, rejuvenated and unified by the revolutionary experience. Yet everywhere we also find counter-revolutionary narratives which presented a different picture of the revo­ lution as dividing the nation and usurping and destroying national tradi­ tions. Hence the republican French narratives viewed 1789 as source of unity and strength, whereas the Catholic French narratives lamented 1789 as the decline of traditional French values and norms. Even within the pro­ revolutionary narratives, class variants could put a very different gloss on how the narrative was framed. As long as the Greek revolution was repre­ sented as a national rising against Turkish oppression, it was a story of national unity. But when Yanis Kordatos interpreted the revolution prima­ rily as a social rather than a national rising, directed against both Turkish and indigenous Greek oppressors of the people, class reframed the national history in important ways. Revolutions themselves redirected national narratives in significant ways. In England the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was in many respects the start­ ing point of a tradition of historical writing which paved the way towards the dominance of the constitutionalist, Whiggish, progressive national his­ tory. Such narratives, in which 1688 itself figured prominently, dominated English national history before the 1960s. 1789 marked the starting point of the French republican narratives characterised by strong universalist ambi­ tions for which the Great Revolution was the central reference point. And the revolutions of 1848 in the German lands led to a significant reorienta­ tion of North German liberal nationalist historians away from an anti-statist British-type liberalism and towards (Prussian) statism, power politics and realpolitik. Most revolutions, whether they succeeded or failed, also pro­ duced distinct exile traditions of national history writing. Historians finding themselves on the losing side of a revolutionary conflict were forced into exile, where they continued to develop alternative national storylines. This was the case with both the fascist and the communist dictatorships of the twentieth century. In both cases the state and the party intruded into the autonomy of the historical profession and attempted to undermine, silence and intimidate those historians not in line with the prescribed national his­ tory. But the national histories of Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal were written by a whole range of exiled historians who continued their profession often under difficult circumstances in diverse domiciles of exile during the period of the fascist and authoritarian dictatorships. And national histories of communist East Central and Eastern European states after 1945 were

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given a prominent airing in the West during the time of the Cold War. Yet the national histories produced in exile were rarely straightforward continu­ ations of the national paradigms defeated in or silenced by a revolution. In most cases exile national histories were influenced in multiple and complex ways by the experience of exile and by the exposure to the historical culture of the host country. Thus, for example, the prominent German historian Hans Rothfels was influenced by his enforced American exile, although in his case there are also many subtle continuities which connect his radical conservatism of the inter-war years to his liberal conservatism of the years after 1945 60 The potential of class to challenge the dominant national master narrative was purportedly absent in narratives of race. Culture and language had been the mainstay of the Romantic ethnicisation of national histories in the nine­ teenth century. Ethnic narratives thus tended to become interchangeable with national ones. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the rise of Social Darwinism in Europe contributed to the emergence of categories of 'race' in national history writing. Ideas of cultural superiority were now com­ bined with ideas of racial breeding. Thus, for example, East Central European historiographies now had to cope with and react to German histories which linked an alleged mission to civilise Eastern Europe with the superiority of Germanic racial stock over the Slav races. In particular in those countries, like Germany and Hungary, where the post-First World War settlements left large ethnic minorities outside the bor­ ders of the nation-state, a racialised national(ist) history writing became ever more popular in the inter-war period and extended the previously dominant ethnic-statist interpretations of the nation.61 Claiming the right of the nation to unite people with the same ethnic background, this history con­ tributed to the revision of borders and justified war, ethnic cleansing and genocide. German T/olksgeschichte is perhaps the best-known example of such a racialised history writing in the inter-war period. But it was by no means unique.62 If we look, for example, to Greece, we observe the popular­ ity of the Greek Megali idea which postulated that the former Byzantine lands were really Greek and therefore needed to be liberated from the Turks. It was precisely the parallel construction of different ethnic narratives on the same territorial space which made the principle of ethnicity so explosive, as it immediately raised the question of what to do with the 'ethnic other'. Where more established nation-states and their histories traditionally ignored their ethnic minorities and wrote them out of the national story (e.g. the Samis in Norway, Sweden and Finland; the Eskimos in Denmark; the Romani in Hungary), in the context of the upheaval produced by the Second World War, ethnic and racial definitions of the nation led to unprecedented forms of barbarity, including genocide and widespread ethnic cleansing. It was to have a deep impact on the way that national storylines were recast through­ out Europe in the decades after 1945.

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Towards post-national national histories? From the end of the Second World War to the present63

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National histories across Europe were re-examined following the upheaval of war, occupation, collaboration and genocide between 1939 and 1945. Adjusting the national storylines in Europe to the post-war world also meant coming to terms with the Cold War division of Europe. Immediately after 1945 historians across Europe struggled to stabilise existing national narratives amidst much insecurity and soul-searching. Unsurprisingly the most radical re-evaluation of the national past came in the one country which had been directly respon­ sible for the mayhem which had engulfed Europe for six years: Germany. Here Alexander Abusch formulated a vision of German national history which was quickly dubbed the 'theory of misery' (Miseretheorie), as he nar­ rated the course of German history as a succession of disasters. 64 Outside observers of German national history, such as A. I. P. Taylor in Britain, tended to agree in 1945 that German national history had only known extremes and therefore stood at almost the polar opposite to the gradual reform which characterised the British national master narrative.65 More surprisingly, the soul-searching among those responsible for drafting the German national master narrative was relatively short-lived. Abusch's theories quickly fell out of favour with the East German communists who wanted to construct a national history which would help to underpin and sustain the new communist Germany. And in West Germany a virtually unchanged historical profession was keen either to remain silent or to seek excuses for its widespread support for Nazism and war. National Socialism was widely portrayed as the exception to an otherwise untainted national tradition. Those countries which had been allied to Nazi Germany faced the difficult task of explaining this alliance and positioning it in the national narrative. East of the Iron Curtain, Hungary and Romania took refuge in the officially decreed anti-fascism, which freed the vast majority of the people from any guilt. Only the ruling classes had been responsible for a wicked alliance with the German fascists and they had been punished in the post-war revolution­ ary events which had brought the communists to power. In Romania a period of strict internationalism and hyper-critical perspectives onto national his­ tory in the early 1950s was followed by a long period of intense nationalism, sponsored by the communist leader Ceaucescu whose regime sponsored many of the traditional nationalist narratives. In Hungary the official anti­ fascist discourse papered over successfully the fact that Hungarians were not just victims but also perpetrators in the Second World War and its accompa­ nying ethnic cleansings and genocide. In Western Europe it was especially Italy where historians had the task of locating an indigenous fascist movement in the national continuum. They did so, by and large, by defining fascism as the anti-Risorgiomento, i.e. as

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anti-national. Just as German historians wrote National Socialism out of German national history, so their Italian counterparts did the same with fas­ cism. Like their German colleagues, Italian historians by and large empha­ sised that the good national tradition had been preserved in the resistance against fascism and especially against the German occupation after 1943, which was presented as struggle for national liberation and rebirth resulting in the foundation of the Second Republic. In countries which had experienced occupation during the Second World War, resistance movements were crucial in re-establishing proud national narratives after 1945. France is a good example.66 Historical narratives down­ played the widespread collaboration with the National Socialists and instead depicted the resistance movement as representing the French nation united in its struggle for freedom and national resurrection. In its communist variant this resistance story carried a heavy class inflection, whereas in its more dom­ inant Gaullist variant it promised reintegration and salvation to all Frenchmen regardless of class. In Denmark the traditional anti-German orientation of the national master narrative was re-enforced after the Second World War. The occupation was understood as national humiliation by an aggressive and expansionist neighbour who was met with collective resistance. The only country which had fought the Second World War from begin­ ning to end against National Socialist Germany and had escaped occupation was Britain. Here the national narrative was also deeply influenced by that experience. It was widely constructed as 'Britain's finest hour', in which the principles of individualism, constitutionalism and liberty had won against the ideas of tyranny and dictatorship.67 But the suffering of all Britons in the war had also drawn renewed attention to the many social inequalities which characterised this 'island nation'. And the history of the war was written as the history of the growing recognition that social reform and social justice must follow the wartime heroism. Hence the victory of the Labour Party in 1945 and its subsequent attempt to establish a welfare state and a more equal society were directly linked to the wartime experience. But the British national narrative had always been one of gradual reform and Labour's reforms after 1945 could be written into that national storyline as just the latest instal­ ment of a long and continuous national history. 68 Similar strategies had not been an option across much of continental Europe, where the attempted stabilisation of traditional national storylines tended to be short-lived. More critical perspectives on national narratives emerged from the late 1950s onwards and contributed to a reorientation of history away from the national paradigm. In Germany, the work of Fritz Fischer on the outbreak of the First World War questioned the idea of National Socialism as a mere freak accident in German national history. 69 Post-Fischer a new generation of historians began to ask questions concerning the roots of National Socialism in German national history. The first German nation­ state between 1871 and 1945 was seen more sceptically. By the 1980s, there

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were those historians who argued that a unified Germany had only been a temporary arrangement in Europe and an experience which had not been a happy one for millions of Germans and Europeans. It was something not to be repeated. In Italy left-of-centre historians followed the lead of Dennis Mack Smith in arguing that Italian fascism had emerged out of the Risorgiomento nationalism of the nineteenth century rather than being an aberration.l0 Again, the tradi­ tional national narrative became questionable, as Italian historians analysed the many links between fascism and nineteenth-century Italian nationalism. Elsewhere in Europe, the resistance myths began to crack in the 1970s and 1980s, as historians uncovered how widespread the collaboration with the National Socialist occupation regimes had been. 71 Even in countries which had managed to stay neutral during the conflict, awkward questions eventually began to surface. In Sweden and Spain they focused on the degrees of economic (and in the case of Spain also military) co-operation with Nazi Germany during the war. In Switzerland they con­ centrated on the question of Swiss banks and the property of millions of Iews which had vanished in the Nazi annihilation camps. The Bergier commis­ sion in Switzerland, which investigated the actions of Swiss banks during the Second World War, produced twenty-five detailed studies in the period between 1996 and 2001.72 It is only with the beginning of the twenty-first century that Spain has started to debate some of the most unpalatable aspects of the Franco dictatorship.73 In Finland it was only during the 1980s that historians began to uncover the close collaboration of Finnish generals with the Germans in the war against the Soviet Union. Before that the role of Finland as an ally of National Socialist Germany was mostly denied. Where the traditional national narratives became questionable, historians began to look elsewhere. In Sweden, for example, national history began to be constructed around the idea of Sweden as a pioneer and model of the wel­ fare state. In several European countries, the post-war popularity of the idea of Europe was also clearly a response to the crisis of national histories and identities. With the formation of the European Union and NATO, questions of the unity of the European continent and of the Western community of nations appeared on the agenda. While both Nazi barbarity and Asian com­ munism had to be written out of what constituted Europe, the search was on for historical evidence which could demonstrate that the new Cold War alliance system in the West was based on common ideals, values and polit­ ical practices. Yet the rather short-lived flourish in the genre of intellectual history of Europe in the 1950s demonstrated above all that it would be rather difficult to construct a history of the continent whose telos was realised in a united states of Europe.74 The continent was so clearly the product of violent conflict and war that history was rather a poisoned chalice for European identity. By contrast, national narratives continued to thrive and the move to contemporary history since the end of the Second World War has, if

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anything, strengthened the nationalisation of historiographical traditions, as contemporary history, perhaps more than any other history, has been national history. 75 If West European historiographies struggled after 1945 to come to more critical evaluations of traditional national narratives, it looked as though East European communist historiographies would be more willing to break with those traditional national histories. The idea of the anti-fascist struggle against Nazism and its allies was combined with the notion of national history containing two lines of tradition. The first comprised all those factors, things, events and personalities which hindered progress, while the second incorp­ orated everything that furthered progress. While the former ended in fascism, the latter found its apogee in the communist presence and future. Communist histories were careful to construct 'the people' as standing on the side of progress; hence 'the people' had also opposed fascism and welcomed the communist transformation. The identities of rulers and ruled in the present was an important precondition for historians' interpretation of the past. But the foremost fighter against fascism in all communist historiographies, was, of course, the Soviet Union. Hence anti-fascism did not only allow the national historians in communist Eastern Europe so salvage the national tra­ dition. It also gave them an opportunity to hail the Soviet Union as father­ land of the proletariat which had to be protected against the evil forces of capitalism. Such internationalism was easily combined with a continued fix­ ation with traditional national history - painted red.l6 Especially in coun­ tries such as Hungary, Slovakia and Poland, where there was little indigenous Marxist historiography before 1945, the merger between class and national paradigms contained many traditional narratives. Most famously, of course, the national histories of the Soviet Union immediately after the 'great patri­ otic war' were as Russo-centric and favourable on virtually all aspects of Russia's imperial past as never before. But elsewhere in communist Eastern Europe, historians have also noted intriguing continuities from the old national to communist and back to the new national storylines. In Estonia, for example, the theme of national awakening remained a popular one throughout the communist yearsJ7 In neighbouring Latvia, some historians praised the Latvian SS troops for making an important contribution to the Latvian national causeJ8 The strong nationalisation of communist histori­ ographies in Eastern Europe during the Cold War also helps to explain why many East European countries witnessed a relatively smooth transition from communist to nationalist histories in the post-Cold War period. Demands for new national histories could be heard throughout Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism. Ironically, traditional national narratives were often conserved better in the communist historiographies of Eastern Europe than in the pluralising historiographies of Western Europe, where war, genocide and the many dark shadows, which had criss-crossed Europe in the first half of the twentieth

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century, could not be kept off the memory landscape forever.l9 The darkest of those shadows, the holocaust, was not central to national history writing in any European country. Even where the national narrative could have been framed around 'the nation' helping to save 'its' Jews, as was the case in Denmark or Bulgaria, it did not happen. And in the classic country of per­ petrators, Germany, the memory of Germans as victims dominated the national narratives well into the 1960s. Germans were victims of Hitler, of Allied bombing, of ethnic cleansing, of rape, torture and unbearable condi­ tions in Soviet prisoner of war camps. Only from the 1970s onwards did the holocaust become the cornerstone of national history writing in Germany. And from this time onwards holocaust narratives elsewhere in Western Europe also tended to become more self-reflective and critical towards collaboration of their respective nations in the annihilation of European Iewry. This trend was facilitated by changes to the historical profession in the 1960s, when the expansion of higher education systems in Western Europe led to exploding numbers of university historians.80 As it became increas­ ingly more difficult to control access to the historical profession, challenges to traditional national narratives proliferated. Not only was the pool of European historians getting bigger, the history of Europe, or rather, the his­ tory of the European nation-states, was also practised with increasing impact in much better equipped American universities. The exchange programmes within Western Europe but also between Europe and North America meant that more and more historians were exposed to other national academic sys­ tems which often widened horizons and spurred an interest in transnational and comparative history. Historians were no longer primarily the propagators of the nation, but came to see themselves as mediators between different national cultures. The growing internationalisation of the historical profession also meant that distinct national styles of history writing decreased in impor­ tance. And the national framework for history writing became itself con­ tested terrain, as historians turned to sub- and supra-national frameworks for writing history. The European-wide breakthrough to social history in the 1960s was rarely combined with a move away from the national paradigm. Fernand Braudel and parts of the Annales sidelined nation - partly by focusing on early mod­ ern and medieval history. Some social historians in East and West, Eric Hobsbawm in Britain, Jiirgen Kocka in the FRG or Jiirgen Kuczynski in the GDR, attempted to privilege 'class' over 'nation' as a basic framework for analysis. However, genuinely transnational and comparative historiography remained rare. Most of social history continued to be written in a national vein. National institutes, dedicated to the study of class and labour history, were founded after the Second World War, e.g. the Italian Gramsci Institute, the French Institut fram;:ais d'histoire sociale, or the German Friedrich-Ebert­ Foundation. When, with the onset of a new, post-industrial era in the 1980s the nationalised class master narratives declined and found themselves in

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serious crisis,81 a genuine pluralisation of the historiographical profession and its methods followed. The new political history, the new cultural his­ tory, the new international history, women's history, gender history, history from below, post-modern and post-structuralist history began to emerge next to and challenge older forms of history writing. Some of the new themes and methods also began to challenge the framework of national his­ tory. Women and gender historians, for example, argued that any discussion of the position of women and of gender relations within society could not be restricted to the nation-state. 82 History from below challenged the assump­ tion that it was the national framework which was most meaningful to the people in their everyday lives.s3 Post-modernism and post-structuralism con­ tributed to undermining essentialised notions of national identity and paved the way towards constructivist and narratological interpretations of national belonging. s4 At the beginning of the twenty-first century few professional historians would still profess an unproblematic belief in unified national narratives. And yet more sceptical and more playful perspectives on national history began standing side by side with recurring attempts to renationalise iden­ tities and histories in a variety of European nation-states. The heritage mania of Thatcherite Britain had its supporters among professional historians, such as Geoffrey Elton, who famously called for more patriotic history.ss The German Historikerstreit of the 1980s was arguably the best-known and most protracted attempt by liberal-conservative historians to argue that national history was necessary to underpin a sense of national cohesion and give a feeling of national belonging to people. s6 In the 1980s those who argued in favour of post-national perspectives and wanted to hang West German iden­ tity not on national history but on variants of constitutional patriotism seemed to be winning the day, but the unexpected reunification of the country in 1990 brought a second instalment to the Historikerstreit, which marked the notable come-back of national history. Sl If it was the return of the nation-state which contributed to the renation­ alisation of German narratives in the 1990s, it was the crisis of the nation­ state in Italy which provoked historians there to rally to the defence of the Italian nation. ss In France key representatives of the Annales school, such as Fernand Braudel, who had championed the move away from national per­ spectives in the post-war era, returned to the theme of the nation with a nos­ talgic and patriotic lens. sg And the collapse of the communist regimes across Eastern Europe witnessed a variety of attempts to resurrect national histories. Some of these fed directly into renewed acts of ethnic cleansing and geno­ cide, as was the case in the former Yugoslavia.90 Some brought with them xenophobic reactions and deeply problematic continuities to national pasts, as was the case in the Baltic states and in Slovakia. Yet the return to national history in Europe after the end of the Cold War was not straightforward. In Germany, for example, the search for a normal

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national identity post-1990 often produced a consensus around Westernised forms of national identity. In this narrative, exemplified by Heinrich August Winkler's national history published in 2000, the Federal Republic of Germany had learned the lessons from a hyper-nationalist past and become Westernised.91 In Britain, the success of the 'four nations' approach to British history in the 1990s spelt the end of the long dominance of English over Scottish, Welsh and Irish histories.92 The lament of David Starkey over the loss of a powerful English national narrative is a minority voice among aca­ demic historians today, albeit the voice of a powerful propagator for trad­ itional national narrative on prime-time television.93 Media history in many countries across Europe has played an important role in renationalising his­ torical narratives in the 1990s and beyond. In France, debates about Vichy and Algeria have not allowed the return to more patriotic narratives and the recent uproar following the passing of a law in the French parliament allegedly calling on teachers and university researchers to portray the benefits of the French empire, clearly indicate the limits of renationalisation of the historical profession in 'la grand patrie'.94 The history of empire has, of course, been intensely nationalised in the dif­ ferent national historiographies in Europe. But at the same time, not the least under the impact of post-colonial approaches to history writing, it has become virtually impossible for academic historians to present the history of empire as an extension of a glorious national history. Post-colonial perspec­ tives have helped to fracture the national storylines of European nation­ states.95 Winston Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Pecples was arguably the last gasp of an imperial history singing the praises of the Anglo-Saxon race as colonisers and bearers of civilisation. 96 Fifty years on, imperial history writing is not only acutely aware of the negative balance sheet of colonial­ ism and imperialism, but it also asks predominantly about processes of cul­ tural transfer of social, cultural and political practices not only from Europe to the non-European world but also vice versa, from the colonised and sub­ altern periphery to the metropolitan centre. This research is successfully dis­ solving static and unchanging understandings of centre and periphery which informed an older world systems analysis. 97 The concern with transfer and transnationalism in fact goes well beyond empire histories. During the 1990s and 2000s younger historians have fre­ quently adopted comparative and transnational methods in order to go beyond national history. At the same time, however, other historians have warned not to throw out the baby with the bathwater and to recognise the importance of the national framework for many aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history. They have therefore sought to establish forms of national history writing which were cognisant of the methodological and theoretical challenges to an older national history and which presented a kaleidoscopic view of the nation - multi-perspectival, fractured and non­ essentialist.98 At the beginning of the twenty-first century it looks as though

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a more self-reflective national history will continue to coexist with a grow­ ing popularity of transnational and comparative perspectives which relativise the importance of the national framework for analyses and interpretations of the past. Many historians across Europe are looking forward to a genuine Europeanisation and perhaps even globalisation of historical writing,99 but they are facing an uphill struggle in a Europe, where nation-states still remain the strongest anchor of identity and the most pertinent framework for history writing.

Conclusion: towards a happy eclecticism?

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National history writing was not a child of the nineteenth century. Many of the national tropes were much older and went back to medieval or Renaissance Europe. During the eighteenth century Enlightenment historians wrote national histories. But it was only with the emergence of the Romantic mode of history writing in the nineteenth century that national history was writ­ ten to define primarily what was specific and special about nations under­ stood as collective personalities with their own unique characters. Language, literature, culture and history became defining characteristics of distinct eth­ nies striving to build nations and create states for such nations. In the nine­ teenth century the thorough nationalisation of historical writing coincided with the professionalisation of the historical discipline to produce historians who were in the vanguard of nation-builders across Europe, because they could speak authoritatively about the nation's past. The rise of historicism in European historiography was a means of lending 'scientific' authority to the subject of history writing and crediting its practitioners with a special role as interpreters of the past who possessed, through their science, the key to understanding the present and predicting the future. The framework of the nation was widely different in nineteenth-century Europe. It ranged from long-existing nation-states in Western and Northern Europe, such as Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark, to nations which had a past experience of independent state­ hood but no present nation-state, such as Poland, Lithuania, Hungary and the Czech lands, to those nations who could not construct any institutional anchor to their national ambitions and therefore were thrown back on ethno­ cultural definitions of the nation, such as Finland, Norway, Slovakia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Serbia and Croatia. And there were those, like Greece, Italy and Romania who discovered their ancient forefathers of classical Greece, the Roman empire and the Dacians to argue that there was essential continuity in national character from those classical antecedents to the present time. Yet regardless of the remarkable diversity of the national framework, the building blocks of Romantic national history were remarkably similar across Europe from West to East and North to South. Following Herder, the ethnici­ sation of the national storylines brought with it greater attention to language

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and literature, including the language and customs of the 'ordinary folk'. The concern with the originality of cultures led to a European-wide compe­ tition in which historians had the task to demonstrate that their particular culture was more original than others. The worries about originality were often exacerbated by concerns with origins. Here historians vied with each other to prove that their nation had longer and more substantial roots in the dim and distant past than other nations. Myths of origin soon populated diverse national histories across Europe. Long histories invariably meant his­ tories of decline and renewal in which periods of degeneration were suc­ ceeded by ages of restoration and 'golden ages' in which the nation had made a major contribution to European civilisation. Each nation was defined not only by their unique national souls but also by their national enemies, both internal and external. Those enemies were frequently feminised, pointing to the importance of the gendering of national narratives in Europe. National enemies were often overcome by national heroes and both, heroes and enemies, belonged firmly to the pantheon of Romantic national narratives. Eventually the heroic Romantic national narratives were being challenged by positivist traditions as the nineteenth century progressed and the institu­ tionalisation of historical research increased - demanding ever higher standards of source criticism and historical professionalism. The Romantic histories were re-examined, found wanting and denounced as peddling historical myths and half-truths. Yet the more rigorous positivist historiographies did not abandon the national orientation of history writing. Quite the contrary, they gave the national storylines even firmer 'scientific' grounding. Professing to be part and parcel of an international community of professional histor­ ians striving to achieve the same high standards of craftsmanship in framing their stories, historians struggled to maintain the cohesion and singularity of national histories in the face of competing narratives of religion and class which threatened to challenge the national paradigm. Under the circum­ stances, national histories were remarkably successful in subsuming those alternative narrative frameworks under their genre. When the European nations clashed in the First World War historians and their narratives were vitally important in sustaining the cultural mobilisa­ tion of nations and providing arguments for the war effort. Intriguingly, the military demobilisation after the First World War was not followed by a cul­ tural one. The inter-war years in fact saw the radicalisation of national nar­ ratives in particular in those nation-states which had lost significant territories as a result of the post-war settlements of Versailles and Trianon. Germany and Hungary in particular developed racialised versions of ethno-cultural narra­ tives which sought to revise the post-war boundaries and extend their national borders to incorporate all those who were regarded as ethnically German and Hungarian. But national narratives flourished elsewhere as well and when the European nations clashed for a second time in a military conflict which not only spanned the continent but the globe, national narratives

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and their purveyors were in the forefront of those legitimating the war, eth­ nic cleansing and genocide. After 1945 attempts to restabilise traditional national narratives were short-lived, as, from the late 1950s onwards, more self-critical and self-reflective perspectives on the national past came to the fore in a wide range of European nation-states. From the 1960s the increase in the number of historians and the pluralisation of methods and themes contributed to the relative decline of the genre of national history writing. Yet, throughout the Cold War era the nation remained an important frame­ work for the writing of history in both Eastern and Western Europe, even if it lost its exclusive and almost total hold over the historical profession that it had in earlier times. The Europeanisation of the political framework in Western Europe seems to have stabilised multinational states by de-emphasising the relevance of the national framework. Hence Spain, Britain or Belgium still exist as national entities, albeit embattled ones, whereas the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia have all disintegrated in the 1990s when confronted with the power of ethnic storylines unrestrained by communist imperialism. But a renationalisation of historical writing could not only be observed across Eastern Europe. It was also very much in evidence, for diverse reasons, in parts of Central and Western Europe. As the EU's attempt to arrive at 'ever close union' could be constructed as a threat to national identities and as separatist nationalist movements surfaced in a variety of West European nation-states, historians rallied to the defence of the national framework. And yet, the renationalisation of historical narratives in the 1990s possessed a very different quality to the nationalisation that was so prevalent in the nineteenth century and the inter-war period. They have at times been described as post-classical national narratives, in that they are far more self-reflexive and far more aware of the constructed nature of all forms of national belong­ ing than their predecessors. Hence they are also far more playful and toler­ ant of other constructions of national identity. Have, one is tempted to ask, national historians in contemporary Europe defused the dangerous aspects of national narratives, especially their exclu­ sivism and essentialism? Has theJanus-faced character of the national para­ digm been overcome and is the nation today a vehicle for emancipation, political rights and freedom rather than war and genocide? Are we indeed moving towards a 'happy eclecticism' under the impact of globalisation and post-modernism? The picture certainly remains somewhat different for dif­ ferent parts of Europe, and it would, in my view, be premature, to say good­ bye to national paradigms and narratives which might yet prove their ability to turn nasty. National others within Europe are still very much in existence and even European 'others' are being constructed in the form of Turkey and Russia in particular. Yugoslavia and the fate of many Yugoslav historians dur­ ing the 1990s should also be a warning sign not to write off the vicious sides of an essentialised and racialised national history.

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Notes

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1. This chapter could not have been written without the existence of the five-year European Science Foundation programme entitled 'Representations of the Past: the Writing of National Histories in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Europe', which I have had the pleasure of directing since 2003. I am grateful to the well over one hundred scholars from around thirty European countries who have attended its workshops and conferences and contributed chapters to publications of the programme. For details see http://www·.uni-leipzig.de/zhsesf. 2. John Gillingham, 'Civilizing the English? The English Histories of William of Malmesbury and David Hume', Historical Research 124 (2001), 1 7-43. 3. ] . G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge, 1999). 4. Caspar Hirschli, 'Das humanistische Nationskonstrukt vor dem Hintergrund mod­ ernistischer Nationalismustheorien', Historisches fahrbuch 122 (2002), 355-96; Reinhard Stauber, 'Nationalismus vor dem Nationalismus? Eine Bestandsaufnahme der Forschung zu "Nation" und "Nationalismus" in der frlihen Neuzeit', Geschichte in Wissenscha{t und Unterricht 47 (1996) 139-65; Johannes Helmrath, Ulrich Muhlack and Gerrit Walther (eds), Diffusion des Humanismus: Studien zur nationalen Geschichtsschreibung eurcpiiischer Humanisten (Gbttingen, 2002). 5. For a masterly account situating history writing in England between the late fif­ teenth and the early eighteenth centuries within the history of print culture see Daniel Wool£, Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000). 6. Franz Bosbach, 'Der franzbsische Erbfeind: zu einem deutschen Feindbild im Zeitalter Ludwig XIV', in idem (ed.), Feindbilder: Die Darstellung des GEgners in der politischen Publizistik des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit (Cologne, 1992), pp. 1 1 7-39; Ekkehard Klug, 'Das "asiatische" Rut3.land: Uber die Entstehung eines europ.iischen Vorurteils', Historische Zeitschrift 245 (1987), 265-89. 7. Heinz Schilling, 'Nationale Identit.it und Konfession in der europ.iischen Neuzeit', in Bernhard Giesen (ed.), Nationale und kulturelle ldentitiit: Studien zur Entwicklung des kollektiven Bewu[!,tseins in der Neuzeit (Frankfurt/Main 1991), pp. 192-252. 8. The term Sattelzeit was introduced to historical studies by the German historian Otto Brunner to characterise the period between 1750 and 1850, in which the old feudal order was replaced by modern commodified relations. See Pim den Boer, 'The Historiography of German BEgriffsgeschichte and the Dutch Project of Conceptual History', in lain Hampsher-Monk, Karin Tilmans and Frank van Vree (eds), History ofConapts: Comparative Perspectives (Amsterdam, 1998), p. 1 8 . 9. Heiko Feldner, 'The New Scientificity i n Historical Writing around 1800', i n Stefan Berger, Heiko Feldner and Kevin Passmore (eds), VVfiting History: Theory and Practice (London, 2003), pp. 3-22. 10. For the importance of that distinction for historical writing and the difficulty of maintaining it, see Chris Lorenz, 'Drawing the Line: "Scientific" History between Myth-Making and Myth-Breaking', in Stefan Berger and Linas Eriksonas (eds),

Narratit�g the Nation: the REpresentation of National Narratives in Different Genres (Oxford, 2007). 1 1 . Georg G. Iggers and]ames M. Powell (eds), Lecpold van Ranke and the Shaping ofthe Historical Discipline (Syracuse, 1990). 12. DavidJ. M. Hooson (ed.), Gecgraphy and National Identity (Oxford, 1994). 13. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: the Science ofFreedom (New York, 1996), pp. 368-95. 14. Joep Leersen, 'The Rhetoric of National Character: a Programmatic Survey', Poetics Today 21:2 (2000), 267-92.

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15. Johan van der Zande, 'August Ludwig Schlbzer and the English Universal History', in Stefan Berger, Peter Lambert and Peter Schumann (eds), Historikerdialcge:

Geschichte, Mythos und Gediichtnis im deutsch-britischen kulturellen Austausch 1750-2000 (Gottingen, 2003), pp. 135-56. 16. H. B. Nisbet, 'Herder: the Nation in History', in Michael Branch (ed.), National History and Identity: A;,proaches to the Writing ofNational History in the North-East Baltic REgion, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Helsinki, 1999), pp. 78-96.

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1 7 . On non-dominant ethnic groups in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe see the eight-volume book series entitled Comparative Studies on Governments and Non-Dominant Ethnic Groups in Eurcpe (1850-194C) (Dartmouth, 1991-3). 18. Patrick Geary, The Myths of the Nations: the Medieval Origins of Eurcpe (Princeton, 2002). 19. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983) was, of course, the main inspiration for the rich vein of research into diverse 'inventions of tradition'. 20. ]o Tollebeek, 'Historical Representation and the Nation-State in Romantic Belgium (1830-1850)', Journal ofthe History ofIdeas 59 (1998), 329-53; also Herve Hasquin (ed.), Histoire et Historiennes dEpuis 1830 en Belgique (Brussels, 1981). 21. On national heroes see Linas Eriksonas, National Heroes and National Identities: Scotland, Norway and Lithuania (Brussels, 2004). 22. Specifically on historiography see the pathbreaking study of Bonnie Smith, The Gender ofHistory: Men, Women and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA, 1998), and, more recently, Ilaria Porciani and Mary O'Dowd, History Women, special issue of the Storia della Storicgrafia 46 (2004). See also more generally Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann and Catherine Hall (eds), Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2000). 23. On the link between citizenship and military service and the exclusion of women from the political sphere in nineteenth-century Europe see Ute Frevert, 'War', in: Stefan Berger (ed.), A Companion to Nineteenth Century Eurcpe (Oxford, 2006), pp. 417-31. 24. Ernest Gellner has argued prominently that nationalism developed in 'zones', from Western through Central to Eastern Europe (roughly zones one to three); see, for example, his 'Nationalism and the International Order', in idem, Encounters with Nationalism (Oxford, 1996), pp. 20-33. 25. Mark Hewittson and Tim Baycroft (eds), What is a Nation? Eurcpe, 1 789-1914 (Oxford, 2006). 26. John Breuilly, 'Historians and the Nation', in Peter Burke (ed.), History and Historians in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2005), pp. 56-87. 27. Joep Leersen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary REpresentation ofIreland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork, 1996). 28. ]. F. ZaCek, Palackf: the Historian as Scholar and Nationalist (The Hague, 1970). 29. Stephen Velychenko, National History as Cultural Process: a Survey of the

Interpretations of Ukraine's Past in Polish, Russian, and Ukranian Historical Writing from the Earliest Times to 1914 (Edmonton, 1992). 30. Frank Hadler and Mathias Mesenhoeller (eds), Vergangene Grdf5e und Ohnmacht in Ostmitteleurcpa: REpriisentation imperialer Erfahrung in der Historicgraphie seit 1918 (Leipzig, 2007). 3 1 . Roland Hill, Lord Acton (Yale, 2000). 32. Guy P. Marchal and Aram Mattioli (eds), Erfundene Schweiz: Konstruktionen nationaler ldentitiit (Zurich, 1992); on Switzerland see also Oliver Zimmer, A

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Contested Nation: History, Memory and Nationalism in Switzerland, 1 761-1891 (Cambridge, 2003); Guy P. Marchal, Schweizer Gebrauchsgeschichte. Geschichtsbilder, Mythenbildung und nationale ldentitiit (Basel, 2006). 33. Maciej Janowski, 'Three Historians', CEU History DEpartment Yearbook (2001!2), 199-232. 34. Serhii Plokhii, Unmaking Imperial Russia: Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the Writing of Ukrainian History (Toronto, 2005); T. Prymak, 'Hrushevsky and the Ukraine's "Lost" History', History Today 39 (1989), 42-6. 35. S. and J. Kivim.ie, 'Estnische Geschichtsforschung an der Universit.it Tartu 1920--1 940: Ziele und Ergebnisse', in G. von Pistohlkors, T. U. Raun and P. Kaegbein (eds), The Universities in DorpaUTartu, Riga and Wilna/Vilnius 1579-1979 (Cologne, 1987). 36. Antanas Kulakauskas, 'Rediscovery of the History of Lithuania in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries', in Branch (ed.), National History and Identity, pp. 259-64. 37. Karl Dietrich Erdmann, Toward a Global Community ofHistorians: the International

Historical Congresses and the International Committee of Historical Sciences, 1898-2000 (Oxford, 2005). 38. For the example of Germany, see Matthew Stibbe, German Anglcphobia and the Great War, 1914-1918 (Cambridge, 2001).

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39. On 'cultural demobilisation' compare John Home, 'Kulturelle Demobilmachung 1919-1939: Ein sinnvoller historischer Begriff?', in Wolfgang Hardtwig (ed.), Politische Kulturgeschichte der ZwischenkriEgszeit 1918-1939 (Gbttingen, 2005), pp. 129-50. 40. Chris Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth Century Eurcpe (Cambridge, 2003). See also Keith Robbins, History, Religion and Identity in Modern Britain (London, 1993). 41. On the strong impact of religion on nationalising tendencies in Central and Eastern Europe see Joachim Bahlke and Amo Strohmeyer (eds),

Konfessionalisierung in Ostmitteleurcpa: Wirkungen des religidsen Wandels im 16. und 17. fahrhundert in Staat, Gesellschaft und Kultur (Stuttgart, 1999); Hans-Christian Maner and Martin Schulze Wessel (eds), Kirche und Staat, Religion und Gesellschaft in Ostmitteleurcpa in der ZwischenkriEgszeit (Stuttgart, 2002). 42. Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (Oxford, 1993); Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Dieter Langewiesche (eds), Nation und Religion in der deutschen Geschichte (Frankfurt/Main, 2001). 43. Emest Renan, 'What is a Nation?' [1882], reprinted in Vincent P. Pekora (ed.), Nations and Identities (Oxford, 2001), p. 172£. 44. Thomas Albert Howard, Religion and the Rise ofHistoricism (Cambridge, 2000). 45. Arp