Sphinx

The two most distinctive cries of the professional historian are “the simple answer is, we’re not sure” and “actually it’s rather more complicated than that”. This is how it should be: the past is complex, fragmentary and always in dispute, and it should go against all our instincts and training to pretend otherwise, however much this then annoys other people in dinner party conversations, let alone our colleagues in the social sciences. Of course, this does mean that our potential usefulness to others is strictly limited, unless we bite our tongues a lot; too much damned equivocating (I always think of the famous meeting of historians of Germany summoned by Margaret Thatcher to tell her whether reunification would be a Good Thing or a Bad Thing; well, of course it depends…). It’s scarcely surprising that most readers convinced of Thucydides’ status as a possession for ever and infallible guide to the reality of things tend to draw from him universal principles about power, justice and state motivations, rather than an understanding of the fundamentally chaotic, unpredictable and uncontrollable nature of events; no one much likes a Cassandra, but a Cassandra who says that, well, of course it might not happen, or not like that, and trying to do anything about it will probably make things worse in some unexpected way – that’s really annoying, if you want to draw on the past as a source of guidance. But in most cases it is the honest historical answer.

This is one reason why the pronouncements of Historians for Britain, whose views have come to prominence this week with an article in History Today by its chairman, Prof. David Abulafia, entitled ‘Britain: apart from or a part of Europe?’, have provoked a fair amount of amusement and/or bemusement among various historians with less determined views about the need for renegotiation of treaties with Europe and possible Brexit. How far will these people go in suppressing the urge to confess the existence of complexity and uncertainty? How much effort does it take to keep a straight face in proclaiming that Britain has a uniquely unbroken history, free from the taints of nationalism and other forms of extremism, characterised by a remarkable mildness of political temperament, that means we don’t really have anything much in common with those volatile continentals, and any new offer from the EU must reflect this distinctive character? It’s all so very Our Island Story, to be imagined as spoken (or maybe even sung) by Rex Harrison in his My Fair Lady role – “We’re such regular chaps. I mean, would I fall for one of those vulgar little ideologies and start chucking bombs at passing carriages? Why can’t those foreigners be more like us?” It’s not that complexity is ignored altogether, but it is all one-sided: it is emphasised that the relationship between Britain and Europe has always been complex (so the UK shouldn’t be treated like any old country), but Britain’s own history is proclaimed as a straightforward story of democracy, the rule of law, trade and so forth (so the UK shouldn’t be treated like any old country; we’re special).

Several historians have already written on the different myths that underpin such an account; see excellent posts by Neil Gregor and Charles West. The classical past plays a relatively small role in the publications that have appeared so far (though since the list of supporters of the Historians for Britain group includes Andrew Fear of Manchester, maybe we can hope for more in due course). Perhaps this is because it’s too inconveniently obvious that (most of) Britain was once part of a European cultural, political and economic sphere, before it embarked on its unique journey of distinctive character-building – so instead we get a quick invocation of the Roman Empire as the nightmare that we’re all desperate to avoid recreating because it will herald the return of Antichrist, or something – and as the Chief Executive of Business for Britain, which is some sort of sister or parent or umbrella organisation for Historians for Britain, notes in his Foreword to one of their publications, “it was no coincidence that the EU’s founding document was the Treaty of Rome”.

Slightly more frequently, we find references to the idea of Greece and its culture as one of the roots of Europeanness, a myth which obviously needs to be suppressed forthwith:

This sense of a heritage reaching back to ancient Athens was deployed to justify the premature accession of Greece to the European Community in 1981; and no doubt it also influenced the decision to allow the same country to adopt the euro even when it had a long way to go before it met the required conditions – there is no need to elaborate on the disastrous consequences for the Eurozone and, in particular, for Greece itself…

That’s actually rather clever; Abulafia doesn’t actually claim that the idea of Greek cultural heritage was invented for purely political purposes in the 1980s, rather than dating back several centuries and entrancing some of the finest minds in European and British history – but he neatly manages to convey that to anyone who doesn’t already know something about the topic, and for good measure then invokes, while carefully distancing himself from it, the claim that even the modern Greeks don’t really have any proper connection to classical culture.

This pattern of argument pops up repeatedly in this short collection on ‘European Demos’: a historical myth? that is one of the two research outputs of the group so far published. Indeed, it seems likely to recur in future, since it clearly offers a means of squaring the circle between professional integrity and political agenda. Time and again, the authors adopt the impeccable Thucydidean stance of attacking Myth in the interests of historical truth, whether the myth of an unbroken classical tradition as the foundation of the present or the myth of the existence of a European Demos. It doesn’t actually matter whether anyone is actually promoting or repeating such myths (I hadn’t previously heard of the idea of the European Demos; a quick Google reveals a limited number of discussions of the idea, none of which, as far as I can see, claim that it has any real existence beyond being a possible but problematic aspiration if the European project is to succeed). By attacking the myth, the historian creates the strong impression that there are such people, believing or claiming nonsensical things in pursuit of their campaign to destroy British sovereignty; the historian appears as the partisan of Truth, and the alternative myths – the unity of British culture and its absolute separation from European influence – are smuggled in under that assumed authority.

In a similar manner, Robert Tombs has great fun in his contribution parading the standard historical arguments against determinism in order to discredit the idea that the development of a European superstate and all-consuming European identity is an inevitable process (erm, has anyone actually claimed this? again, all the writers I can think of off-hand emphasise the difficulty and fragility of the European project, not its inexorable triumph); thus, because the historian has shown himself to be implacably opposed to determinism, the argument that the unique British character and history means that we can never be a proper part of Europe cannot possibly be deterministic in any way…

In other words, it’s not just that the historical narratives and claims being advanced are questionable, because that’s always true of all historical narratives and claims; the discipline is all about scepticism and debate. Rather, it is the deployment of a simulacrum of critical historical argument, involving all the tropes of reference to evidence, parade of critical acumen, rejection of myths and misconceptions, questioning of the motives behind statements and so forth, in order to present undeniably political claims as if they are objective historical facts from which political conclusions naturally follow. We are carefully reminded of the grounds on which historians claim authority, so that this authority can be employed for non-historical ends. Now, I have no problem with historians being political (see my last post if you want an example) – but I fail to see why they can’t admit this, rather than cloaking themselves in claims of neutrality and objectivity. “I didn’t jump to conclusions; I took a tiny step and there conclusions were.” No, that isn’t how it works…