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Summary European History - BA1 VUB
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This is a summary for the course European History in the second semester of the 1BA. The summary contains all the necessary information to ace your exam.
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European History - Ch. 1 – IntroductionCourse Introduction
Why study history?
The long 19th century – Modern Europe
Modernity as a paradoxical concept
Deconstructing European History
• Deconstructing Europe
• Deconstructing History
Deconstruct: critically interrogate a particular concept, historical event, development, social phenomena etc.
1. Deconstructing Europe: Places and spaces of Europe
What is Europe?
Where does Europe begin?
Where does Europe end?
Who are the Europeans?
Europe
• As a continent
• The symbolic geography of Europe versus the physical geography of Europe
• As a civilization
• As a project
• As a memory
• As an inheritance
• As a responsibility
1. Deconstructing history: Why study history?
To escape the present, nostalgia, a longing for “what is forever lost”
• Risk: the “pastness of the past” and overstating rupture/discontinuity
To learn lessons from the past –how to deal with moral dilemma
• Risk: biases in what counts as the “great men and women of history”
To identify structural laws – Teleology (Marx/Fukuyama)
• Risk: causality and the risk of overdetermination
For political or ideological purposes
• Examples: a selection mechanism in higher education; nationalist projects; Post-colonial
”reclaiming of the past”
• Risk: conflation science and politics
So, there are many pitfalls, ….
why bother with studying history?
1.1. Why study history?
To understand change and how “the present” came to be
• Understand continuity and change
• Understand institutionalisation and revolution/transformation
“For every institution or value that disappears or is changed, another remains the same” – T.C.W. Blanning (2001)
Put the present day into perspective, to dismantle its “for granted” (obvious, or natural) character
• To acknowledge the power struggles that are the basis of today’s institutions, ways of life, etc.
• To question the uniformity of the European experience
• To “provincialise” Europe; to account for multiple paths/meanings of “modernity”
Dipesh Chakrabarty (2008): critique on “historicism”
• Historicism = the idea that “to understand anything, it has to be seen both as a unity and in its
historical development”
• As if there is a singular, linear trajectory to modern civilisation
, Historicism and the limitations of linear and singular conceptions of history:
Imaginary “waiting rooms”: One man’s present becomes another man’s future
Example: John Stuart Mill (1806-1873): On Liberty / On Representative Government
• Proclaimed self-rule as the highest form of government and yet argued against giving native
Americans (”Indians”) or Africans self-rule.
• According to Mill, Indians [native Americans] or Africans were not yet civilised enough to rule
themselves. Some historical time of development and civilisation (colonial rule and education, to
be precise) had to elapse before they could be considered prepared for such a task.
• Mill’s historicist argument thus consigned Native Americans, Africans and other ‘rude’ nations to an
imaginary waiting-room of history.
Put the present day into perspective, to dismantle its “for granted” (obvious, or natural) character
• To question uniformity
• To “provincialise” Europe (or the European experience)
• To account for multiple paths/meanings of “modernity”
Of particular relevance for the 19th century – “the birth of modern Europe”
• A tendency to mask the heterogeneity of the “European” experience
• A tendency to attribute a singular meaning to “modernity” and a singular trajectory to “modernity”
1.2. The long 19th Century (E. Hobsbawn)
1789 the collapse of French absolutist monarch ------ the eruption of the First World War in 1914
• From a society of orders (“estates”) to a society of classes
• Popular sovereignty and new modes of political legitimation
Economic and social transformation
Demographic explosion and mass migration
Dramatic changes in the political landscape
• Birth of new European powers: unification of Italy and Germany
• The consolidation of nation-states and imperialism
• The incorporation of the masses in politics
1.2. 19th century modernity
The normative pulse of Europe’s narrative of “modernity”
- The 19th century is often conceived as the era that put the “Enlightenment ideals” into practice.
But…
“What is the Enlightenment? There is no official answer, because the era named by Kant’s essay was never
demarcated by opening and closing ceremonies like the Olympics, nor are its tenets stipulated in an oath or creed.”
- Steven Pinker (2018)
18th century Enlightenment as a bridge-head between
• 17th century: scientific revolutions and the age of Reason
• 19th century political, socio-economic and cultural changes (industrialisation, urbanisation, secularisation,
democratisation,…)
Associated with core values; linked to the “modern condition”:
• Reason: as opposed to divine conditions and imperatives
• Science: evidence-based judgments
• Humanism: universal ideals, such as equality, liberty that apply to all humans
• Progress: human-made systems (government, market, international institutions) for the betterment of the
human condition
• Peace: belief in our ability to design peaceful cohabitation
I think, therefore I am. Billie Eilish
“On either side of the Atlantic, groups of public intellectuals have issued a call to arms. The besieged citadel
in need of defending, they say, is the one that safeguards science, facts and evidence-based policy. The
white knights of progress – such as the psychologist Steven Pinker and the neuroscientist Sam Harris -
condemn the apparent resurgence of passion, emotion and superstition in politics. The bedrock of
, modernity, they tell us, is the human capacity to curb disruptive forces with cool-headed reason. What we
need is a reboot of the Enlightenment, now”.
Henry Martyn Llolyd (2018)
• “White knights” present a selective reading of the Enlightenment
• Enlightenment thinkers, especially French intellectuals, placed a high value on the role of sensibility, feeling and
desire.
• Hegel (1770-1831): emphasis on rationality produces citizens who are alienated, dispassionate and estranged from
nature
• David Hume (1711-1776): morality is grounded in sense-experience: we judge the good/beautiful directly and
without need of reason
• 19th century romanticism, nationalism and fascism
“science can explain everything, but understands nothing”
1.2. Modernity, what is in a name?
• A category of historical periodisation
• A quality of social experience – a heightened sensitivity to what is unique about the present
• An (incomplete) project
1.2.1. A category of historical periodisation
The modernisation paradigm (sociology, 1960s)
Modernisation = the transformation from a traditional, rural, agrarian society to a secular, urban, industrial society
Macro-structural changes:
• Rationalisation, industrialisation and urbanisation (from feudalism to capitalism)
• Birth of nation-states and institutions of democratisation (representative democracy, modern bureaucracy, public
education)
Micro-individual changes – birth of “modern man”
• Reason-giving rather than tradition and habit
• Individualism, freedom and formal equality, meritocracy
• Faith in social, scientific and technological progress and human perfectability and rationality
1.2.2. A quality of social experience
Modernity
= the self-definition of a generation about its own technological innovations, governance, and socio-
economics
= a particular relationship to time, characterised by intense historical discontinuity or rupture, openness to
the novelty of the future, and a heightened sensitivity to what is unique about the present
Modernus: “of today” (as opposed to something that has past)
Modern – the good, the desired, the better.
Reinhart Koselleck (1979) Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time
• “der Moderne”, “les temps modernes”, “Neuzeit”, ”Nieuwe tijd”: a temporal distinction, yet one claiming a
distinctive breach with the past
• A historical consciousness and its transformation into a general model of social experience -An ability to
conceive of a future as distinct from the present and past
• 18th C. Enlightenment: a qualitative claim about the newness of the times; valorising substantive changes
1.2.3. An (incomplete) project
Modernity = a paradoxical form of temporality
• In a sociohistorical sense, all modernities grow old
• To remain “off today”, modernity needs to constantly re-establish itself in relation to an ever-expanding past.
As a result of such “updates”, modernity:
• Becomes less of a concept to describe a historical period
• Becomes more of a qualitative criterion to express a desired present/future
”Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category”
- Theodor Adorno (1903-1969)
, As part of the project of “updating” our relationship to the past:
There is a tendency to:
• Associate meanings of “modernity”, “modern man” with normative values, ideals and beliefs
• Re-interpret the past as a logical and orderly path to a cherished present (linear account of history)
• Define modernity in terms of “progress” or “development”
• “Progress” = defined in terms of the projection of certain people’s present as other people’s futures (singular
account of history)
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