History is a better guide than politics

Date: 30/07/1998

With the EU poised to begin its most ambitious experiment to date with the advent of the euro, Mark Mazower argues that the debate over European integration would benefit from a healthy dose of the past

HISTORY should be brought to bear on the situation in Europe today.

While there is growing interest and concern about the way the European Union is going and about broader issues of peace, security and social evolution, historians contribute little by way of argument or insight to the debate.

For this reason, the discussion trundles along without much reference to history.

Most Europeans cling to a mythologised view of their past: a history in which the Second World War was won by the 'good guys'. But it was not really like that at all. The current debate about Europe is just the latest in a series of conversations, arguments and experiments about what the continent should be.

These started with the First World War, when the old order broke down irretrievably and became the seed-bed for different visions of what Europe should become. Should it become Communist, or a collection of liberal democratic nation states in line with the vision of US President Woodrow Wilson, or should it become a Fascist and hierarchical continent?

Since 1989, we have assumed that only one of those could have worked, because ultimately only one of them has triumphed.

In fact, they were all efforts to find solutions to problems of instability and the communal organisation of economic life.

If you were writing the history of democracy in the inter-war period, it would have been one of abject failure.

By 1939-40, very few people believed that Europe was a liberal continent because many parliamentary democracies had collapsed and given way to right-wing regimes.

You have to take the Nazi project seriously and explain why it failed. It did not fail because Europeans were innately wedded to liberty, but it did for a number of reasons which can teach us lessons when we look at Europe today.

One of the reasons it foundered was because it recognised only one form of nationalism - German - and attached no importance to anyone else's.

People are well aware that Germany moved into National Socialism and Russia into Communism but, if you look at the way people conceive of those regimes today, they do not see them emerging from European civilisation. They see them either as dictatorships imposed upon reluctant populations, or as evidence of marginal or pathological thinking.

In his controversial book Hitler's Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen fell into this same trap, characterising the Germans as a demonic race.

That may appeal to some people's prejudices, but it is nonsense. The recently published diaries of Viktor Klemperer, a German Jew who lived through the Third Reich, tell us what common sense would have told us anyway. Some people hated Jews and some did not, some were frightened and some were not.

The idea that these regimes could be defined as 'normal' is not a view which most people would share today, and yet that is the implication of contemporary historical writing.

We created a post-war myth which covered up the uncomfortable fact that most people in Europe in the late Thirties were happy living under authoritarian regimes and that democracy itself was substantially more anti-Semitic than the aristocratic or feudal systems which preceded it. We still have to come to terms with the 'Europeanness' of non-democratic regimes.

Similarly, the Cold War was not just a series of diplomatic episodes between the Russians and the Americans, but was about competing visions of how to order society and cooperate economically. For decades after the war, it was far from clear that Communism was any less effective than capitalism at doing this.

The reason democracy revived after the war, when it had appeared to be dead, was because politicians realised quickly enough that the kind of democracy they needed to introduce into Europe in the inter-war period simply was not good enough for the modern world.

They learned from Fascism and Communism that the state should take a different attitude to welfare and economic growth if democracy was to thrive.

The nation state remained a powerful political force during the Cold War. Historians used to believe that, during that period, the Americans told the western Europeans what to do and the Russians told the eastern Europeans what to do, but now they have changed tack.

Instead, after the war, there was a surprising revival of national governmental power at the diplomatic as well as the economic level. The British, the French and the West Germans remained powerful players in the international game, while the Russians also had to take notice of what the east Europeans wanted.

The great age of state-led capitalism came to an end during the Seventies; the moment at which the contemporary European project gathered momentum. To say that federalism has been pushed from Brussels ever since 1955 is historically inaccurate. It got under way in the late Seventies for specific economic reasons.

We should take a more nuanced view of the role of the nation state in the EU; a more complex, messier view of the relationship between states, of the concept of sovereignty and against the view that history must travel in one direction and that it should be 'ever closer union'.

This is the same type of language that was employed by the great ideologies. The truth is that the EU is a product of inter-state bargaining and not the result of visionaries imposing their dreams upon reluctant national governments.

Underneath the current debate over the euro - for or against it - is a disguised appeal to history. In private, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl says: "This is what history has shown us can happen in Europe, and this is what can happen again." Yet this is not usually articulated in public for the very reason that it does not sound plausible.

Look at armies in Europe today: they are getting smaller. The great era of conscript armies, which started in the 1870s, seems to be winding down because it is hard to justify spending so much public money on them. Where they do survive, this is to assuage historical memories in countries where people feel such armies are less likely to evade political control than professionals.

Look at borders. In the Twenties and Thirties, they were things to be defended against an army which faced you. Nobody looks at borders in that way today. Now they are about immigration and policing.

Of course, this argument can be overplayed. There are clearly some parts of Europe where the threat of war has not been banished.

The difference today is that these disputes are unlikely to jeopardise overall continental stability in the way they did in the past.

It is very easy to appeal to people's sense of fear, but there is no universal calculus of states which concludes that governments, if they do not form part of some overarching collective, will invariably look upon each other with hostility.

The debate about Europe is conducted in highly polemical and exaggerated terms largely because it is led by politicians rather than historians.

We need a sensible politico-historical discussion about what the real alternatives are, about what economic and monetary union really means and about the analogy between EMU and previous fixed exchange-rate systems.

Europe has lived for as long under such systems as it has under floating ones. In fact, floating exchange rates are a relatively recent and short-lived phenomenon of the 20th century.

The gold standard, which severely constrained national governments' autonomy in monetary and fiscal policy, existed quite happily alongside national state formation during most of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

There are differences between what late 20th century populations expect of their state compared with the past, but to talk as if this whole idea is frighteningly new and anathema to nations is simply bad history.

History is not an irrelevance. At the very least, it allows us to take a less apocalyptic view of the alternatives we face.

Mark Mazower is an historian at the University of Sussex, and has just published 'Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century'.

Viewpoint feature.