While theEU is distended, the incentive to form European scientific collectives consolidates research on its history and crosses scales. A vast collective work shows how Europe has become, for 20 years, a field of historiographic experimentation.
History is written in relation to the major issues of the moment. The historiography of Europe has provided us with a striking illustration of this for a quarter of a century. The end of the “iron curtain” and the prospects for enlargement have given rise to a large number of histories of Europe since the 1990s. This was initially with the more or less explicit aim of legitimising a recent unification through the restored awareness of a unity in the long term. But the Union, barely having taken on a continental dimension, was called into question by increasingly virulent nationalist and sovereignist demands. While the future of the Union seems increasingly uncertain, has the death knell sounded for histories of Europe? Published the year following the victory of the leave In the United Kingdom, the voluminous work directed by Étienne François and Thomas Serrier provides important elements of an answer. The project managers of the work clearly have faith in a common heritage, the foundation of a collective future to be built, as the title indicates Europe. Our History, European heritage since Homer But there the analogy with national histories ends, as they were written from the XIXe century to arouse and maintain awareness of belonging. The objective here is no longer to highlight a deep unity and continuity across the ages, as in national histories.
Europe, a laboratory of transnationalism
The histories of post-1989 Europe, even if their first achievements were marked by the transposition to the continental level of the principles of national histories, very quickly became a privileged testing ground for overcoming “methodological nationalism”. The launch of European agencies and research programmes encouraged the development of new historiographical perspectives, involving reflection on the production of national histories and the conditions for moving to the transnational level. The internationalisation of networks and bibliographies revealed the shortcomings of investigations that held the national framework as the limit of evidence. At the same time, the increasingly easy crossing of borders, the development of the Internet and the digitisation of texts radically transformed the physical and mental space of research. Until 1989, collaboration between academics from different countries was rare, rather bilateral, slow and difficult: it has become the rule. It has given rise to new modes of approach, transnational in the definition of objects, concepts and sources. The epistemological and ideological critique of the “grand narratives” structuring national histories and their popularizations has given rise to new writings of history. Europe has thus become, for two decades, a field of historiographical experimentation.
Europe. Our History is the result of these transformations. The result of a collective workshop involving 109 authors, only a quarter of whom were French, the work brings together 152 texts on nearly 1,400 pages. Resolutely transnational, the approaches are essentially related to cultural history – which has been expanding rapidly in recent decades –, which has been less closely associated with the national framework than political history.
Polyphony
In the 2000s, Étienne François, a specialist in German history, co-directed the German places of memorywith explicit reference to the series of Places of Memory published by Pierre Nora between 1984 and 1992. In 2012, in collaboration with Thomas Serrier, another specialist in German history, he published European places of memory in the form of a number of the Photographic documentation. The 64-page essay has been considerably expanded and transformed. The aim of Europe. Our history is not limited to identifying places of memory with continental value. “United in diversity”: the motto chosen for the European Union since 2000 corresponds to the perspective of understanding its past proposed in the work. Against the linearity of the national historical narrative, a polyphonic approach is favored, based on a vast thematic range. Ulysses, the Kalashnikov, the plague and the wolf, libraries, the lingua francathe barricades: the variety makes this monumental volume a pleasure to read. The approach is also similar in another monumental work devoted to Europe and published shortly after: Europe, historical encyclopedia under the direction of historians Christophe Charle and Daniel Roche, which offers 620 articles on 2397 pages. The two works, however, treat temporality differently. Europe, historical encyclopediaafter a first part entitled “Foundations and Permanences” reintroduces a classic chronological presentation associated with themes: “Medieval Europe”, “Birth and Renaissance of Europe”, “Europe of wars, reforms and Enlightenment”, “Europe of discordances since the end of the XVIIIe century”. On the other hand, the composition of Europe. Our history frees itself in its organization from the great chronological divisions. Dates are absent from the titles of parts or contributions, except for 1968 and 1989 which refer less to events than to their memory. In each part, the rules of unity of time or place, classically practiced in historical works, are abandoned in favor of a thematic ordering. Throughout the texts, memory layers and temporal fragments alternate. Some of the themes covered relate to the long term (the countryside, love, death), others to the average temporality (museums, the emotions of the stadium) or to the short term (dissidence, Maoism). The treatment of space is also multiscalar: restricted and multiple (the square, the museum), it also sometimes has the dimension of a crossroads city (Prague, Venice, Vilnius) or of the world (the “divisions” of other continents operated by the European powers). The reader may be disconcerted at first by sequences that deliberately break with the usual taxonomies (universities, opera, Hollywood, cooking). In fact, he is encouraged to serendipity and the pleasure of new intellectual paths. From appropriations of Shakespeare to figures of the devil, from Don Quixote to Swinging Londonfrom the crusades to social citizenship, the cartographies of a dense network of European routes are emerging.
Collective memory is made up of vivid pasts, reappropriated in more or less long temporalities. But others have suddenly died out. Among these bygone pasts is in fact the revolution, underlines Enzo Traverso. 1989, he recalls, was in communist Europe a revolution aimed at the reconquest of the past and no longer at the creation of a utopia. “The curtain is then drawn” on two centuries of revolutionary passions, the revolution becomes a past that no longer beats in the present (p. 1166). Marx-Engels, no more than internationalism or communism, are retained in the volume as components of “the European heritage since Homer”.
A World History of Europe
The crossing of historiographical borders does not imply denying the importance of political and religious borders in the European past. The book opens with the memory of the wars of XXe century as the foundation of today’s Europe. Never politically unified until recently, unlike China, Europe has been deeply divided over the centuries. Its unity, resulting from two World Wars and the Cold War, was imagined as a promise of peace. In varietate concordia : the Latin version of the European motto sounds like the overcoming of internal conflicts. But at a time when European identity is increasingly defined in opposition to what would constitute an irreducible and threatening otherness, in this case Islam, the work returns, through several contributions, to the long-term entanglement of Europe and Islam. It is in the Mozarabic Chronicle of 754 that the term “Europeans” appears to designate the troops of Charles Martel. And John Tolan underlines in his contribution that:
Europe, it seems, became Europe in association with and in opposition to Islam, conceived both as an “Abrahamic” religion close to and rival to Christianity and as a civilization capable of seducing as well as repelling the Europeans who observed it. (p. 388)
Mohammed, regularly denounced since the Crusades as a false prophet or deceitful heretic, has also been reconsidered by many authors of the XIXe century (Goethe, Lamartine, Carlyle) as a visionary hero and legislator.
The history of Europe, in fact, cannot be abstracted from a global history, at all levels. A small Chinese ginger jar in a painting by Vermeer (p. 1288) shows that the domestic life of the Flemish bourgeoisie in XVIIe century bears the mark of the trade practiced by the Dutch East India Company. Europeans, of course, granted themselves a position of singularity and domination by defining the history of the world in relation to themselves: “discovery” of other continents, application of a toponymy to colonized territories, universal imposition of the Gregorian calendar, etc. But recent historical research has been enriched by studies showing the need to question European autarky as well as superiority. The last and extensive part of Europe. Our History therefore outlines a move beyond “methodological continentalism” under the title “World Memories”, echoing the “world economy” put forward by Fernand Braudel.
Étienne François and Thomas Serrier clearly emphasized this in the prologue they gave to the volume: their aim was not to provide a definition of Europe, but to arouse curiosity and stimulate debate.
Connected by a multiplicity of mirror games, European memories cannot exist independently of one another. Far from being fixed, they live only through those who carry them; in permanent recomposition, they will be what we make of them. (p. 16)
The great workshop of historical research on Europe, very much alive, testifies to a great potential of innovation in terms of approaches and writings. The experience undertaken, by the richness of the reflections and the results produced, encourages to continue the enterprise and to take up other intellectual challenges. Whatever happens to the European Union, the history of Europe remains relevant.