History too important to be left to national politicians as a social engineering project for their
ideological or ethnic visions of national identity.
First, the principle. The idea of ‘national histories' should be replaced with the unitary ideal of international history, that all official histories should be compatible with each other as literal facts must be. History is about matters of fact and their true explanation just as science is. Yet, while more or less the same science is taught in schools all over the world (with the exception of a few theocracies), national histories are very often self-serving opinion taught as fact, i.e. propaganda. The result is the dangerous cultivation by governments of the ignorance and resentment of their citizens.
Second, there should be a grievance mechanism that reflects the moral fact that the way history is taught is a matter not only for national
governments - democratic or otherwise - but of human rights below and international relations
above. The model might be the European Court of Human Rights, to which
both individuals and other member states can bring cases about the misbehaviour of national governments. But instead of legal judges we
would have a panel of internationally respected academic historians.
False, substantially misleading, or unjust official histories and school curricula would
lead to binding legal rulings against propagandist governments, including punitive fines and reform requirements.
I. Truth
Some may question whether history is actually about truth finding, or whether it has always been and can never be more than a story-telling enterprise. The extent and durability of disagreements between professional academic historians, even about such well-studied issues as the causes of the first world war, suggests that we cannot expect historians to converge on the kind of definitive consensus we associate with the natural sciences. History faces a particular difficulty as an observational science (like palaeontology or cosmology) in that it cannot create data and must instead make the most of whatever evidence happens to be available. And of course historians do not produce predictions that would allow us to test their interpretations independently and filter out less adequate accounts.
But the significance of interpretation and
debate among historians does not make history unscientific in the sense either of lacking a rigorous empirical methodology or of being uninterested in truth. The natural sciences also require interpretation and internal debate to work - they are not automated machines for generating hypotheses and testing them against data (the machine learning model). Climate scientists are presently hypothesising and debating over why the global warming effect seems to have paused, but that kind of collaborative rigorous testing of interpretations against observations is exactly what makes climate science a scientific enterprise rather than dogmatism. Nor is history merely a matter of opinion all the way down. As in physics but not as in literature, no one doubts that there are right answers about what happened and why.
On the one hand, the existence of substantial disagreements between professional historians should not distract us from the existence of substantial agreement on many points, not only about what did happen, such as the humanitarian catastrophe of Belgium's kleptocratic rule over Congo or the Armenian genocide, but also what did not happen, such as the convenient myth that the German military would have won WWI if it hadn't been for a Jewish conspiracy within the civilian government.
On the other hand, governments should make responsible use of the persistence of reasonable disagreement between experts about what happened and why. History is not a train you can get off at the most convenient station. National politicians should not be allowed to pick the story they like the best, any more than they should get away with picking the view of climate science that best suits their ideology and immediate political needs. If there really is substantial disagreement within the specialised epistemic community of professional historians that should be treated as a resource not a problem. We should not be surprised that the causes and moral responsibility for big complicated events like wars are themselves complicated, and that clear simple answers are often unavailable. The disagreements of historians can be used within the classroom to teach the limits of historiography as well as facts that deserve belief.
II. Justice
It is as ridiculous to have national politicians imposing their opinions and calling it history as it would be for them to choose what kind of evolutionary theory gets taught in science classes. But it is also a great injustice. The citizens of a country have a right to an official story that is also true, even if that is upsetting or inconvenient for some politicians or dominant ethnic groups. Their children have the right to study the truth rather than propaganda in public schools, to be treated with the respect due to future citizens rather than to be used as pawns in a game of social engineering. The victims of national crimes, whether at Auschwitz or Nanjing, and their descendants inside and outside the country, have the right to have the crimes against them acknowledged in the official accounts. The citizens of former colonies have the right to have the truth of their histories recognised in the histories of their colonisers.
Of course it is reasonable for national governments to decide to some extent which areas of the country's history should be the main focus in schools, just as they decide which areas of mathematics to teach to children and at what age. But this is limited by the demands of justice. Official history (text)books shouldn't lie outright about crimes like the Armenian genocide in Turkey or Japan's war-time atrocities across S.E. Asia, but they must also go beyond that bare requirement. They shouldn't lie by omission - misleading readers about such inconvenient facts by simply not mentioning them, as in supposedly liberal states like America and western Europe where inconvenient or shameful parts of national histories, such as the ghastliness of colonialism, are still skipped over or whitewashed in the curriculum. Official histories must be adequate for the education of their citizens about relevant facts of history. And that requires paying much more attention to the dark side of a nation's past than is usually the case: the oppression of empire, the moral quagmire of occupation, the crimes of autocrats and their accomplices, and so on.
It is exactly because history is so important to national identity that truth is a moral issue. It is one thing for an autocracy like Putin's Russia to impose an official history upon its people that suits the regime's purposes of self-legitimation. That is relatively easy to condemn. But democracies have no better moral claim to use history as propaganda to further a particular national identity among their citizens.
First, obviously, merely because the majority of citizens in a country find some version of history more agreeable doesn't make it true [previously], especially where citizens depend to a large extent on the government to provide their understanding of history in the first place. Facts require specialists trained in appropriate methods to track down, unlike opinions about the meanings of facts which are appropriate for general debate by ordinary citizens.
Second, while a democracy can make more legitimate choices than an autocracy about the meaning of history for the present, this is still limited by the facts. Suppose a democratic regime has the laudable aim of uniting the
country in shared national pride about its achievements and therefore tailors the official accounts of the country's history to exclude certain awkward facts of history that impede that. Such an exercise is self-defeating. Facing up to your country's shameful past is a necessary part of what
real national pride requires [previously]. Deliberate self-deception will haunt a
country as the portrait of Dorian Gray haunted him from the attic. And
in any case, this kind of national pride rests on the shaky foundations
of informational control, which are rather difficult to maintain in these days of Wikipedia. (Indeed, Wikipedia can claim much credit for internationalising knowledge, the rather obvious idea that facts, to be facts, should be the same whatever country you are viewing them from.)
III. Peace
Peace may be the greatest pay-off of internationalising
history because historical relativism is at the root of many contemporary political conflicts between nations and between ethnic groups. Most armed conflicts are fuelled by popular moral tribalism not
the realpolitik of cunning statesmen: a shared faith in the
righteousness of your group's cause and a belief that the other side are
monsters. Various explanations for this tribalism have been advanced,
but they are generally some version of a deep conflict between
different, incompatible value systems. The New Atheists, for example,
like to blame religion, since religions supposedly generate ultimate value
systems that are backed up by divine metaphysics and hence brook no
compromise. Such accounts suggest that moral tribalism is caused by
differences in abstract ideas, i.e. people are ready to kill each other
for eating pork, or for having the wrong beliefs about obscure metaphysical issues like the relationship between father, son and holy spirit in the holy trinity.
I have never found this very convincing. First, since religion in
most of the world is still a matter of inheritance rather than
individual conscience, the value-clash account doesn't add much to the
general perception that the fault-lines between warring groups tend to
be ethnic ones, especially in civil wars. Second, religion seems to work
more as a marker of group identity, for example as a shibboleth that is
hard for outsiders to fake - as 'Catholic' and 'Protestant' labels work
in Northern Ireland - than as a driver of conflict itself. On the
whole, religious affiliation seems to have more to do with determining
which tribe you fall into, or which you will fall back into when the
chips are down, than it does in generating the conflicts themselves. The real roots of many conflicts - though not all - lie in contradictory beliefs about the
way this world works rather than about the divine world, and an
important part of that are the very different histories told in each
tribe about how they and other tribes have thought and acted in the past.
In the Ukraine, for example, Soviet era history painted a picture
(continued in current Russian propaganda) of Ukrainian ethnic
nationalists' intimate collaboration with Nazism and the murder of Jews,
Poles and Russians. While under the nationalist government of Viktor Yushchenko (2005-10), Stalin's crimes took centre stage and the leader of a gang
that carried out mass murder, Stepan Bandera, was officially declared a
‘Hero of Ukraine'. Virulent mistrust is a natural consequence of this
use of government authority to perpetuate self-serving tribalist
narratives, fuelling both the Maidan revolution and the illegitimacy
with which many in the east of Ukraine see the new government.
Likewise, the simmering crisis between Japan and China has much to do
with the nationalistic propaganda taught in schools and little to do
with the geostrategic significance of a few uninhabited rocky islets. In China the hardly
communist any more CCP sought a new pillar for the legitimacy of its rule after crushing the China Spring of 1989, but in the process has unleashed a tide
of grievance based nationalistic aggression among its young people that
it struggles to hold in check. (Younger Chinese are far more antagonistic towards Japan than the generation that actually suffered Japan's genocidal occupation.) In Japan the failure of schools to
clearly and unequivocally explain the manifold crimes of the short-lived Japanese
empire (in contrast to Germany) has allowed an aggressive nationalist
movement to flourish that portrays Japan entirely as a victim and
demands repeal of the pacifist constitution.
It is often these divergent distorted histories of victimhood and
blame-transference - rather than the usual suspects, moral relativism and
religious fanaticism - that create and sustain dangerous moral
tribalisms. By connecting present politics to past betrayals they
perpetuate stereotypes of the homogeneity and monstrousness of the other
group; and they drive people further into their own sectarian identity in search of security and united by a sense of grievance, at the
expense of their other, broader identities as citizens or as human
beings. Historical relativism is thus directly relevant to modern
politics and especially the dramatic failures of civil politics that lead to armed
conflicts between and within states. International history addresses this root cause of distrust between groups not only by giving people more confidence in the truthfulness of official histories, but by putting history itself beyond the domain of national political contestation.
IV. Prudent Politics
Finally, international history can be justified as a defence of sovereignty itself. True patriots should demand truthful history because delusionary history endangers the nation they love. History may not repeat itself exactly, but it does rhyme. Without a generally shared truthful understanding of how things really happened it is easy for a country to fall back into the same old dangerous patterns, such as the seductive allure of war or autocracy in times of political crisis. A knowledge of one's national pathologies is of great use in defence of one's national values and institutions.
Patriotic politicians too have good prudent reasons to give up their power to propagandise history and accept the jurisdiction of an international tribunal. Doing so actually enhances the sovereignty of national governments. The common sense conception of sovereignty is of a government's 'libertarian' power to decide matters of tax, war, justice, education, etc for itself, unconstrained by other agents, whether those be citizens, laws, or foreign governments. But another conception of sovereignty concerns the positive ability of governments to act effectively, and it is this real power to get things done that most politicians care about. It turns out that there is a trade-off between these two conceptions, in that the greater the degree of discretion governments insist on retaining the less able they are to get important things done in the modern world.
That is firstly because the modern world is multilateralist and rewards cooperators more than exceptionalists. Renouncing some sovereign rights makes a country better off in terms of its ability to achieve valuable goals; for example, joining the World Trade Organisation and accepting its trade rules and adjudication mechanism leads to more trade and more economic prosperity. Maintaining a delusional self-serving history imposes significant costs on a country's international standing and relationships which renouncing historical exceptionalism can remove. Compare how well Germany gets on with all its neighbours nowadays, and even Israel, as a result of explicitly accepting the international account of its history, with the persistent suspicion felt by Japan's neighbours because of its evasiveness about what version of history it accepts. Such suspicion undermines the scope for mutually beneficial trading and security relationships because who can know which values a nation really endorses now if it is still in denial about its crimes then. Who can trust the promises of a country that prefers to live in a fantasy world rather than the one everyone else lives in?
Renouncing certain sovereign rights also reduces the volatility and ferocity of domestic political contests. Examples of this include the constitutional separation of church and state, the rule of law (independent judiciaries), and the peaceful transition of power by regular democratic elections. And these may be doubly backed up by signing on to binding international
treaties to make compliance more difficult to evade, as in the case of the European Convention on Human Rights (with 47 parties).
The general logic is that putting some powers permanently outside the scope of political contest, like ruling out some methods
of making war, benefits all parties by making national politics more moderate, stable, and successful. A winner-takes-all model, such as in Ukraine, where political contests end in prison terms for the losers and new official histories that delegitimise their supporters is not conducive to the long term flourishing of the country (or its politicians!). When so much is at stake political factions do not politely concede defeat merely because something as trivial as a vote count goes against them. The winner-takes-all model undermines the exercise of sovereignty since it may so increase the ferocity of the contest for power as to undermine the effective power to rule of whichever side does eventually manage to take over the government. Far sighted patriotic politicians recognise that the state is actually stronger when it renounces the 'sovereign' right to throw government opponents and critics in prison. They should also recognise the benefits to their country of taking history out of politics.
Notes and further reading
This is a revised and extended version of a column I published on 3 Quarks Daily.
Akim Reinhardt has a friendly critical discussion of my proposal over at The Public Professor
There have been some efforts at international history already - e.g. this jointly written French-German textbook.
The BBC Documentary 'Missing Histories' explores the present international problems caused by different national histories of the Sino-Japanese war of 1937-45.
