I summarized the whole course of European History based on the lectures and the book, given at the VUB for students of Business Economics, Social sciences, Politieke Wetenschappen
Why study history ?
To escape the present (distraction), nostalgia, a longing for “what’s forever gone” (=
past things were way better, sayings of older ones)
RISK: too strong demarcation between the past and the present; if you look at the
past as a way of escaping the present, there is a tendency of overexaggerating,
disconnect or rupture/discontinuity between past and present
To learn lessons from the past: we’re confronted with moral dilemma, key
figures/many people look at the past for inspiration.
RISK: a lot of biases in what counts as the “great men and women of history”
Knowledge of the past will help us to identify structural laws, as if humans in society
can’t be exact or precise but we will try to identify structural laws and evolution
changes in men’s behaviour, allowing us to predict the future and see an endpoint to
historical development as men kind.
Teleology : (Both presume that we as men kind are evolving towards a specific,
identifiable, predictable endpoint)
1. MARX
Classless, stateless society; ordinary folk will rise up against the upper classes,
overthrew the class system. Future: endpoint of history => best society without
income gap, inequalities…
2. FUKUYAMA
Endpoint=> we’re already there; for him it is a liberal democracy, we’ve found the
best political system, we’re allowed to fight, to quarrel, to have disputes without
breaking up into warfare.
Liberal democracy = mechanism allowing us to deal with disagreement, we have
institutions that help us with conflicts, disagreements and differences.
System of pluralism=> allows democracy, thus having the best society for Fukuyama.
RISK: If we look at the past for structural laws, there can be a risk of
overdetermination:
• Having too strong believing causal prediction in the social science but also in
the history
• Endpoints (Marx and Fukuyama) aren’t uncontested; are we all equal? Do we
live in a society in which differences between classes are irrelevant? (Marx)
• Fukuyama (90’s): liberal democracy => west is supported by individual values
and underpinned by reason and rationality. Have we reached this?
Perhaps endpoints of Fukuyama are too strongly formulated.
To prove something, to build story, agreement to their favour, history and political =
intermingled ( or ideological purposes)
Examples:
1. In the past history education was conceived as prove of one’s proper education.
(Memorize past facts, seen + intelligent).Today it is less the case, we have google.
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, 2. Selecting reading of history alight with national projects. First history writers
weren’t fully independent, they were writing in commission of a particular nation
state. Conclusion => Historical facts alight with national projects. To prove
autonomy of a nation vis-à-vis another nation.
3. Post-colonial movement, deliberation movement (outside of the west):
- goes back to the past in attempt to rewrite history
- as a result of colonial rule: a lot of information were written by global north
(west)
- traditional data being used to tell stories about the global south are
reinterpreted
- new data are used to tell/reclaim an alternative story of the past that is giving
a better account of so called indigenous or native experiences with colonial
rule.
- past: historical writings done by colonist themselves
- historical purpose for going back to history
- main idea: balance power of the past !!!
RISK: Politics and science are too conflated.
To understand change and how “the present” came to be
- Change and continuity (e.g. mass migration)
- Institutionalisation (democracy; how it took place) and revolution/transformation
“For every institution or value that disappears or is changed, another remains the
same.”
- Studying history: understands us why in the present we do what we do.
Turbulent times => today times are challenging (google it = a lot of pages) but also in
the 19th century ( mass migration, world wars…)
Put present day into perspective, to dismantle its “for granted” character (normal to
live in a democratic centre,…)
- Acknowledge the power struggles that are the basis of today’s institutions, ways
of life etc. ( If historical events would have been different , today’s outcomes
would be different too)
- To question uniformity of European experience, critical awareness of
arbitrariness of present way of living.
- Studying history also challenges the uniformity of the past; when we look at the
past there is one particular story told to us, a singular story ( e.g.
industrialisation= people moved from country side to urban centres).
Industrialisation happened not in an uniform way, it was different in different
countries, you can’t only industrialize in one particular way.
- To “provincialize” Europe, to account for multiple paths/meanings of “modernity”
• There are different paths in processes from the past/ to our current
practises
• Important to recognize that the singular uniform European experience,
well there is no singular European experience. (e.g. conversations with
global south, Europe give advice to countries there, they guide them.
It’s important that we account for the diversity of experiences before we
start giving advices to other countries.
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, - Chakrabarty (2008): Critique on “historicism “:
Historicism= the idea that “to understand anything, it has to be seen both as an
unity (uniform experience) and in its historical development.”
• Why would look at the main common denominator (in the past)
• What its shared across the main European countries = European experience (hard to
generalize from very unique, different countries into one European experience)
• If we put things in historical development, past historical research would see history
in a very linear fashion along the lines with Marx and Fukuyama who actually said
“how are you going to modernize/democratize”
• There is a tendency of telling the European experience of the 19 th century in a very
neat, ordinary, linear fashion and obviously this has a pedagogic function. (because if
you tell someone, first came this then this; it makes sense, but it isn’t like that. We
are chaotic, there is progress, development…)
• Today we worry about for instance a rise in authority values or democratic systems
are under pressure, it’s fashion to speak about a democratic backsliding, about a
democratic regress/deconsolidation. It isn’t not, because in the 19 th century the
process of democratization wasn’t linear. There was a lot of regress, push-back,
counterrevolution…
• Chakrabarty has an agenda, when he says that we need to see European
history as the history of Europe. It’s not unique experience, it’s only Europe folks but
often times the European experience is elevated to a standard against other
countries of the world are measured and evaluated. This results in problems in
power games and power struggles between global north and global south.
Historicism and the limitation of linear and singular conceptions of history:
- Example of Chakrabarty: imaginary waiting room of history( one man’s
present becomes another man’s future).
- John Stuart Mill (19th century), wrote two magnificent philosophical works on
liberty and Representative Government. His works => situated within liberal
taught and have inspired liberal democracy in Europe.
At the same time as he was proclaiming democratic self-rule powered by the
people as the highest attainable standard for government, this is the best
form of government it isn’t despotic rule by a monarch, a dictatorship. No,
democratic self-rule = best thing you can imagine.
But at the same time Mill argued against giving self-rule at Africans or Indians.
( e.g British commonwealth, colonial frameworks)
- So on the on hand he said “power to the people, but not these people” =
paradox
- According to Mill Indians and Africans weren’t yet civilised enough to be able
to rule themselves. They first have to go through a stage of being educated
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, by their western coloniser before they actually have the skills to properly to
rule themselves.
- Coloniser -> to another human : “wait hang on we will speak about
universalism and general human rights but for you I’ll make you wait.” => in
de waiting room until you’re sufficiently civilised.
- What was civilised according to Mill, was based on a western experience.
Again here => western way of living was taken as a measure to evaluate
another.
- 16th- 19th century: civilisation of Europeans; now Indians and Africans have to
go through this. Before they can rule themselves.
Of particular relevance for the 19th century – “the birth of modern Europe”
- A tendency to mask the heterogeneity of “European” experiences. Be the bad the
bad industrialization, democratization.
- A tendency to attribute a singular meaning to modernity and a singular trajectory
to modernity.
19Th Century: The long 19th century (Eric Hobsbawn)
1789 the collapse of French absolutist monarch till 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
19th century : modernity
The normative pulse of Europe’s narrative of “modernity“:
- Not simply by discussing a period, chronological
- Europeans = fan of 19th century, thins we like became modern.
- 19th century is often conceived as the era that put the “Enlightenment ideals”
into practice (intellectual ideas about reason and science trickle down into the
society and made Europeans modern)
(look at essays Stephan pinker and Martin Lloyd )
Enlightenment= “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 Parker
- It’s not like intellectuals met up and started to write handbooks about their ideas,
if they ended up in the same room it would end in a dispute.
- Enlightenment is part of European DNA, when political actors nowadays say that
the ideas of enlightenment are under pressure as the result of migration inflicts.
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