11
historein ιστορειν
2011
ISSN: 110 8 -3 4 4 1
11 2011
9 7 7 1 1 0 8 3 4 4 0 06
www.nnet.gr
NEFELI PUBLISHERS
Pierre Nora Jörn Rüsen Wolfgang Benz Luigi Cajani Antoon De Baets
historein ιστορειν aand review the past otherofstories
AN ANNUAL PUBLICATION OF THE CULTURAL AND INTELLECTUAL HISTORY SOCIETY
Contents 5
Antonis Liakos
Introduction: How to Deal with Tormented Pasts
Pierre Nora
History, Memory and the Law in France, 1990–2010
10
Jörn Rüsen
Using History: The Struggle over Traumatic Experiences of the Past in Historical Culture
14
Luigi Cajani
Criminal Laws on History: The Case of the European Union
19
Marina Cattaruzza
How Much Does Historical Truth Still Matter?
49
Antoon De Baets
Conceptualising Historical Crimes
Wolfgang Benz
Holocaust Denial: Anti-Semitism as a Refusal to Accept Reality
59 69
Thanasis D. Sfikas and Anna Mahera
Does the Iliad need an Agamemnon Version? History, Politics and the Greek 1940s
80
Vangelis Kechriotis
From Oblivion to Obsession: The Uses of History in Recent Public Debates in Turkey
99
Marja Jalava
Kulturgeschichte as a Political Tool: The Finnish Case
125
Thomas W. Gallant
Women, Crime and the Courts in the Ionian Islands during the Nineteenth Century
137
Aris Sarafianos
In-N-Out Greece: Cultural Tourism in the Age of Diasporic Cultures
157
Eleni Andriakaina
John Seed, Marx: A Guide for the Perplexedd
Seraphim Seferiades
Yannis Voularis and Loudovikos Kotsonopoulos (eds), Στα μονοπάτια του Αντόνιο Γκράμσι: Πολιτική και πολιτισμός από το έθνος-κράτος στην παγκοσμιοποίηση [Along the pathways of Antonio
175 178
INTERVENTIONS
BOOK REVIEWS
Gramsci: Politics and culture from the nation-state to globalisation] Foti Benlisoy
Anna Frangoudaki and Çağlar Keyder (eds), Ελλάδα και Τουρκία: Πορείες Εκσυγχρονισμού Οι Αμφίσημες Σχέσεις τους με την Ευρώπη, 1850– 1950 [Greece and Turkey: ways to modernity; the encounters with Europe, 1850–1950]
180
Nikolaos Chrissidis
Ada Dialla, Η Ρωσία απέναντι στα Βαλκάνια: Ιδεολογία και πολιτική στο δεύτερο μισό του 19ου αιώνα [Russia vis-à-vis the Balkans: ideology and politics in the second half of the 19th century]
184
Erik Sjöberg
Basil C. Gounaris, Το μακεδονικó ζήτημα απó τον 19ο έως τον 21ο αιώνα: Ιστοριογραφικές προσεγγίσεις [The Macedonian Question, 19th-21st centuries: Historiographical approaches]
190
David Ricks
Dimitris D. Arvanitakis, Στον δρόμο για τις πατρίδες: Η Αpe italiana, ο Ανδρέας Κάλβος, η Ιστορία [Towards the nations: The Ape Italiana, Andreas Kalvos, the history]
194
Thomas W. Gallant
Andrekos Varnava, British Imperialism in Cyprus 1878–1915: The Inconsequential Possession
197
Effi Gazi
Niki Maroniti, Πολιτική εξουσία και εθνικό ζήτημα στην Ελλάδα 1880–1910 [Political authority and the: national question in Greece, 1880–1910]
200
Vasileios Dalkavoukis
Vassilis Nitsiakos, Στο Σύνορο: ‘Μετανάστευση’, σύνορα και ταυτότητες στην αλβανο–ελληνική μεθόριο [On the Border: Transborder Mobility, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries on the Albanian– Greek Frontier]
202
Androniki Dialeti
Daniel T. Lochman, Maritere López and Lorna Hutson (eds), Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700
205
Photini Danou
David Rollison, A Commonwealth of the People: Popular Politics and England’s Social Revolution 1066–1649
207
Dimitris Arvanitakis
Panagiota Tzivara, Βενετοκρατούμενη Ζάκυνθος
210
(1588–1594): Η νομή και η διαχείριση της εξουσίας από το Συμβούλιο των 150 [Venetian Zakynthos, 1588–1594: The allocation and management of power by the Council of 150] Alexandra Lianeri
Apostolos Lampropoulos and Antonis Balasopoulos (eds), Χώρες της θεωρίας: Ιστορία και γεωγραφία των κριτικών αφηγημάτων [States of theory: history and geography of critical narratives]
215
Dina Vaiou
Kostas Yannakopoulos and Yannis Yannitsiotis (eds), Αμφισβητούμενοι χώροι στην πόλη: Χωρικές προσεγγίσεις του πολιτισμού [Contested spaces in the city: spatial approaches to culture]
219
Pandelis Kiprianos
Alexander Kitroeff, Ελλάς, Ευρώπη, Παναθηναϊκός! 100 χρόνια Ελληνικής Ιστορίας, 1908–2008 [Greece, Europe, Panathinaikos! A century of Greek history]
222
Dimitris Plantzos
Susan E. Alcock, Αρχαιολογίες του ελληνικού παρελθόντος: Τοπία, μνημεία και αναμνήσεις [Archaeologies of the Greek Past: Landscapes, Monuments and Memories]
225
Nikos Tzafleris
Polymeris Voglis, Η ελληνική κοινωνία στηνν Κατοχή 1941–1944 [Greek society during the occupation, 1941–1944]
228
Loukianos Hassiotis
Stratos Dordanas, Η γερμανική στολή στη ναφθαλίνη: Επιβιώσεις του δοσιλογισμού στη Μακεδονία 1945–1974 [The German uniform in mothballs: Collaborationism’s survival in Macedonia, 1945–1974]
233
Yiorgos Stathakis
Sotiris Walden, Παράταιροι εταίροι: Ελληνική δικτατορία, κομμουνιστικά καθεστώτα και Βαλκάνια 1967–1974 [Unseemly partners: The Greek dictatorship, communist regimes and the Balkans 1967–1974]
236
How to Deal with Tormented Pasts
Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, history has been a battleground regarding the traumatic events of the past, mainly those of the same century. The past has become the apple of discord between historians, governments, lawmakers and the media. Memory wars and memory laws have reproduced each other and this spiral has spread from one country to the other. Although history and politics were always entangled in different forms and roles, today memory laws, history wars, transitional justice and the creation of an international framework of norms regarding the teaching of history at school level are presenting historians with new epistemological problems and moral dilemmas. This volume of Historein addresses the question of how to come to terms with dark pasts: partly in terms of the legacies of division and conflict created by them but mainly those pasts that still create suffering and are related with historical traumas. This is a pressing question because historians are obliged not only to research the past but to shift their attention from the question of what happened in the past to the question of what is happening in our present regarding its past. This latter question, which is the subject of this issue, marks a shift from history, as an enquiry into the traces of the past, to the historical culture which regards the way in which the past lives in the present and is related to our lives, decisions and future orientations.
Introduction
The idea to focus this issue originates in the panel on Ethics, Historical Research and Law, organised by Luigi Cajani at the 21st International Congress of Historical Sciences in Amsterdam in August 2010, in which Pierre Nora, Jörn Rüsen, Paolo Pezzino and Antonis Liakos participated. All the speakers agreed that laws attempting to regulate the ways we talk about the past constitute a new field of
How to Deal with Tormented Pasts controversy between historians, lawmakers and the European and national parliaments. The initial legislative intervention regarding the denial of the Holocaust was soon followed by new laws condemning north Atlantic slavery, colonial crimes, the communist repression in central and eastern Europe and specific crimes in national historiographies. Pierre Nora, in his intervention “History, Memory and the Law in France, 1990–2010”, recognises that governments and legislative bodies have the right to orientate the collective memory but disputes strongly the legal sanctions on topics concerning the representation of the past. He argues that the subjection of historical events to legal qualification renders any further discussion impossible at the risk of sanctions and paralyses research. He explains why he took the initiative to create the French association Liberté pour l’histoire. In his words, “it is up to the politicians to commemorate, to pay homage and to organise compensation; it is up to them to honour the victims. It is up to the historians to do the rest, to establish the facts and to propose interpretations of these facts, restricted by neither constraint nor taboo.” Taking an opposite position, Wolfgang Benz, in his article “Holocaust Denial: Anti-Semitism as a Refusal to Accept Reality”, argues that the law does not concern itself with historians and truth seekers but only those who deny or tend to marginalise the genocide of six million Jews. The denial or marginalisation of genocide is a typical attitude among people who share a rightwing extremist worldview and who adopt hate speech against Jews and immigrants. One of the main issues of concern in the public use of history and the memory wars is the conceptualisation of genocides and crimes against humanity. How can these horrific events be conceived? How can we talk and write about the mass killing of human beings and the destruction of their lives? What concepts should be used? Should we adopt a position of historical distance, or should we advocate the cause of the victims? Are genocides just something that happened in the twentieth century, or are historians more able and sensitive to see and explore them now because their mentality and the way of doing history has changed? Antoon De Baets, in his article “Conceptualising Historical Crimes”, reflects on the historicity of the concepts we possess and use. “Should crimes committed in the course of history that are comparable to genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes be referred to as such, whatever the label used at the time?” The framework of the present debate on mass atrocities is the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948. This law introduced a moral dimension in thinking and writing about the past. Does the involvement of morality in historical work strike at the value freedom of historians, one of the pillars of their profession, at least since the rise of nineteenth-century historicism? The neutrality and objectivity demanded of historical scholarship have, in fact, been replaced by open sympathy and a sense of respect for victims, which has gone along with open public revulsion at such acts, captured by the popular expression Never again!! Historians could no longer behave as distant and indifferent observers, without taking into consideration the moral ethic and implications of their writings. But does this preoccupation hinder the autonomy of historical thinking and prescribe historical interpretations and representations by the force of law or by political pressure? Jörn Rüsen responds to this question in his article “Using History: The Struggle over Traumatic Experiences of the Past in Historical Culture”. For Rüsen, although there is “a clear distinction between political and judicial intentions and norms, on the one hand, and the principles of proper historical thinking . . . on the other”, there are intersections between politics and law, and historical thinking. Rüsen reads 6
these intersections through three successive generations in Germany, where historians shared common perspectives on the past with public opinion. His conclusion is that historical research is not in contradiction with the universal principles of morality. It is the trap of moralistic ethnocentrism which leads historical integrity to be compromised through political intentions. Since the nineteenth century, historians have had a strong interest in international relations, and the history of foreign policy was a stronghold of their field. But genocides are not only a historical problem. Their politicisation through the question of official recognition, restitution and apologies have implicated history and historians in the forming of international policy. Since the end of the Second World War, petitions requesting recognition of more than 40 genocides from around the world have been submitted to international organisations and national parliaments. Some of them, such as the Armenian genocide, the Ukrainian Holodomor and Japanese atrocities in China and Korea are still the subjects of international dispute. Some others, such as the Rwandan and the Bosnian massacres, are being tried in international criminal courts. A number of genocides or massacres of communities are related to emerging nationalities and their campaign for recognition and emancipation, but there are also genocides espoused mostly by academics and campus activists such as those of the Native Americans and African slaves. Historians were called to advocate or oppose these petitions for official recognition, and, in one way or the other, were deeply implicated in all of these cases. But this involvement, although it allowed historians to address audiences much bigger than their usual readership, was not without consequences for what these audiences expected from them because the legal recognition and the institutionalisation of the Holocaust and the genocides which preceded or followed it affect the expectations of history, change the forms of representation and commemoration of these events and also impose terms on the nature of the related historical debates.
VOLUME 11 (2011)
HISTOREIN
By institutionalising the memory of crimes against humanity, the world order that was established after the Second World War defended a certain way of remembering the past and proclaimed it as a moral value that needs to be respected, even by coercion. In the following years, the expansion of the definition of what constitutes a “genocide” and the drive for recognition led to an effort by various nations or ethnic groups to seek revenge for the injustices they have experienced in the past. The term “genocide”, besides being a demand for justice, is a symbol of recognition for crimes committed since it has acquired performative power. It validates in the public memory the suffering of a community and produces a demand that it be respected at home and abroad. When genocides are declared as such, past sufferings acquire the status of a cultural distinction and become a source of moral obligation in politics and international relations. As a consequence, the official recognition of certain traumas and the institutionalisation of their memory becomes a way of dealing with the past under certain rules. At the same time, the institutionalisation of memory becomes highly selective, and not all memories are considered worthy of safeguarding. Memorialisation of the past in the public domain depends on power relations in the present, and there are horrendous crimes against humanity that are still unrecognised and unpunished because the victims do not have the power to bring their cases before the global public or because the perpetrators are still in power. But respect should be defended, and defended by law. The penalisation of the denial of genocide is the subject of Luigi Cajani’s “Crimi7
How to Deal with Tormented Pasts nal Laws on History: The Case of the European Union”. He refers to the memory laws not only in the countries of the European Union and in the European Parliament but also in Israel, Ukraine and Switzerland. He recognises that memory laws, and in some cases criminal legislation, are now the custodian of memory. Reading his article it is understandable why the intervention of the law in the remembering of the past means that historians and historical institutions can no longer perform their traditional role as the guardians of memory because the relationship with the past is much more diffused and, through the effects of new media, has acquired dimensions that make it impossible for academic institutions to control. The claim to history has become an uncontrollable force, affecting not only the learned elites but also the masses. History is read as literature and the borders between the reception of history, the historical novel and fiction are coming down. In contemporary historical culture, the traumatic stands for the sublime, martyrdom and victimhood stand for the heroic and the past is regarded as a symptomatology of unrelated symptoms and is connected with justice and moral demands. Finally, the new eponymous heroes of the past are not illustrious men but evil people. Marina Cattaruzza, in her article “How Much Does Historical Truth Still Matter?”, examines how historical narratives are affected by existing practices of victimisation and self-victimisation. Her purpose is to “examine to what degree the currently widespread attribution of victim status to groups of people in the past can be a hindrance to an unbiased historical analysis. In other words, to what degree do historians tend to adopt in their historical narrative to what I want to call here a “moral narrative”. Τhe changes in the ways we remember, initiated in the postwar period, were the result of synergies which have to do with the experiences of wars and mass sufferings but also with the aspiration to escape from the previous awful period and reconstruct a peaceful future, and in doing so verbalising and dealing with the past as much as possible. Through these shifts, history is now rarely conceived as a social science explaining the course of society. It has been transformed into a discipline focused on our relations with the past, including feelings about the past, the sense of respect, the request for acknowledgement and the attribution of justice. History was called to meet needs such as healing, respect, reconciliation and the moral reconstruction of societies in an environment where representation of the past was passing from the printed to the virtual world. New needs and new environments are outpacing the traditional role of history, as it has been conceived and elaborated in the communities of scholars based on the pursuit of a detached and purposeless knowledge. This shift brought history into the realm of historical culture, where historians are no longer the privileged definers of the relationship of the present with the past. As a consequence, in order to understand the new roles of historical communities, we should move beyond the normative concept of the uses and abuses of history and see history not as a window to the past, asking what happened in the past, but as a window into the house in which we are now living, asking how does the past operate in the present. We should not cease to be interested in the past, but we should also be interested in history as a cultural feature of our present societies; not how history should be conducted, but how it is in fact performing. This inversion of our outlook does not imply indifference to or an acceptance of the irresponsible uses of the past or the manipulation of history and historical consciousness. On the contrary, it helps historians understand better the complexity and the multiple dimensions of the environment in which we now work. Vangelis Kechriotis attempts such an exploration into the historical culture of the Turkey of 2011 in his article “From Oblivion to Obsession: The Uses of 8
History in Recent Public Debates in Turkey”. He presents two cases, one the TV series on the life of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent (1494–1566) and the other on a film on Bediüzzaman Said Nursi, a Kurdish scholar and political leader (1868–1960) of the early Republican period. Both events challenged the official version of the past and provoked extended reactions, polemics and debates. For Kechriotis, the political, social and demographic changes in recent Turkey have led to a questioning of the compatibility of individual and group memories with the public versions of the past. The result of this questioning is that state and academic elites have lost “the monopoly over the legitimacy to organise and interpret the past”. History becomes an arena where social or ethnic groups demand their emancipation from past stigmas and claim their participation in the shaping of the future. On the same ground, newly emerging elites are establishing their own hegemony and in the process undermining the authority of older ones.
VOLUME 11 (2011)
HISTOREIN
But what about the rigour of historical inquiry? Do historians, at least historians whose work is in the tradition of the European and American scholarly tradition of recent decades, have a distinct role in historical culture and in the uses of the past? What is expected from them in the coming to terms with a the civil war past? Taking the Greek debate on the Second World War and the Greek Civil War as a case study, Thanasis Sfikas and Anna Mahera, in their joint article “Does the Iliad need an Agamemnon Version? History, Politics and the Greek 1940s”, scrutinise the evidence, the argumentation and the epistemological presupposition of a group of revisionists. Yet, although a juxtaposition between the methodological coherence of historical thinking, on the one hand, and the political use of history, on the other, might be possible in the present, it is very interesting to note that when one views the history of historiography from a long perspective, the differences become more and more indistinct. According to Marja Jalava, in her article “Kulturgeschichte as a Political Tool: The Finnish Case”, the methodological modernisation of Finnish historiography and its turn to social history was concomitant with a turn to national history, dissociated from the prevailing model of political history in Sweden. Viewed from the long perspective and from a cultural point of view, the articles included in this issue of Historein make it obvious how history (or at least public history) has been transformed or understood and conceived as a political culture of back-projected accountability. From this point of view, the historical practices became also part of a broader tendency of verbalising and rationalising differences stemming from wars, civil wars, dictatorships and traumatic experiences. This international or global ideological context has gained increasing importance in shaping national debates and policies and in producing historical narratives in our time. Antonis Liakos
9
History, Memory and the Law in France, 1990–2010
History, memory and the law have been in a particularly intense relationship in France over the past twenty years or so. It is the intensity of this relationship which I wish to stress here by briefly recalling its history and its causes. This history chiefly began in 1990 with the Gayssot law, which makes it an offence to question or “contest” crimes against humanity as defined by the Nuremberg tribunal, an offence punishable by penal sanctions and which was extended to the crime of “genocide” two years later.
Pierre Nora Paris
However, the promulgation of this law did not at the time provoke much protest from historians. Indeed the opposite was true, being as it was taken within a specific context: the arrest of a milicien,1 Touvier, after years of accomplices turning a blind eye, and above all the increasing power of what has become known as “negationism” (Holocaust denial), started by Robert Faurisson and taken up by Jean-Marie Le Pen. There were only two well-known personalities from the historical community who spoke out. Madeleine Rebérioux, then president of the Human Rights League (Ligue des droits de l’Homme) in a sensational article in the magazine L’Histoire,2 and Pierre Vidal-Naquet,3 whom no one could suspect of complacency towards negationism, who had brilliantly picked apart its mechanisms and whose parents died during deportation. I will add here that personally I was not very favourable because, having worked for some years on the matter of national memory, I feared that by giving preference – were it for the best reasons in the world – to the
memory of a particular group, this would be but the thin end of the wedge; a process impossible to halt once set in motion. What is more, the existing legal armoury was sufficient as it had already permitted the conviction of Faurisson. However, these misgivings did not extend to formal opposition.
VOLUME 11 (2011)
HISTOREIN
It was only in 2005 that the historical community took action following two coinciding incidents. Firstly, the Mekachera law of 23 February 2005 according to which “the nation gives recognition to its repatriated French citizens” and stipulating in Article 4 that the school curriculum and textbooks were under obligation to “show colonisation in the positive light which it deserves”. Secondly, the Pétré-Grenouilleau affair, named after the historian who had shortly before published a book in the Bibliothèque des histoires series – a collection which I head at Gallimard – entitled Les traites négrières (The Slave Trades).4 The author won several prizes, yet he was taken to court by a black action group, the Collective of Antilleans, Guyanese and Réunionnais (Collectifdom), for statements published in Le Journal du dimanche that he made when receiving the French Senate’s history book award; statements which called into question the legitimacy of the 2001 Taubira law, which had been voted unanimously at the suggestion of the National Assembly deputy for Guyana, who declared that slavery and the Atlantic slave trade since the fifteenth century were a “crime against humanity”. These simultaneous incidents – one coming from the right, the other from the left – all of a sudden sensitised the historical community to the legislative drift, which for fifteen years had been leading the National Assembly more and more frequently and disturbingly to qualifyy the past. The parliament was liberally declaring historical events to be “crimes against humanity”, events which were certainly morally condemnable, but whose legall qualification rendered any further discussion impossible at the risk of sanctions. Four “memory laws” had thus been voted: in addition to the Gayssot law repressing the denial of the Jewish genocide, the law of 21 January 2001 by which, in a single article, “the French Republic recognises the Armenian genocide of 1915” (a tragedy for which France is in no way responsible); the law of 21 May 2005, known as the Taubira law, condemning slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, yet sparing the Arab and inter-African slave trades. Lastly, the colonisation law described above. A drift all the more disturbing for it came to light on this occasion that a dozen such laws were being drafted, starting with a law on the Romani people, another on the War in the Vendée during the French Revolution and a third on the famine in Ukraine in 1932. It is within this context that a widespread reaction occurred among historians. Firstly, a petition against the colonisation law was initiated, following a forum organised by Claude Liauzu, Gilbert Meynier and Gérard Noiriel, entitled “No to teaching an official history”, which led to the creation of the Vigilance Committee against the State Use of History (Comité de vigilance contre les us11
History, Memory and the Law in France, 1990-2010 ages publics de l’histoire, or CVUH), presided over by Noiriel. Secondly, at the initiative of 19 internationally renowned historians, the Liberté pour l’Histoire association was created, presided over by René Rémond, whom I had the honour of succeeding, and which quickly gathered several hundred members. This legislative drift could not in fact appear anything but dangerous to historians on several levels. Aside from the fact that it risked paralysing research and that it dangerously mirrored totalitarian practices, aside from the fact that this drift was not occurring in any democracy other than in France – already all good reasons to condemn it – this collection of laws was, in its very nature and in the eyes of professional historians, contrary to the very ethos of historical research. It demonstrated a tendency to reread and rewrite the whole of history exclusively from the victims’ point of view. It also demonstrated a regrettable tendency to project onto the past moral judgments belonging exclusively to the present without taking into account the change in the times; this being history’s very purpose and the very reason for learning and teaching history in the first place. Many historians were at first hesitant about joining Liberté pour l’Histoire because in its very principles it went as far as challenging the Gayssot law, which had taken on a sacred quality thanks to the increasingly pregnant memory of the Shoah. It is important therefore to be clear on this point. We continue, I continue, to be wary of the Gayssot law, all the more so since alongside the old reasons for not being in favour of it, an additional reason – the most powerful and important argument of all – presents itself: the Gayssot law was certainly not voted against historians, on the contrary; yet it was the legal model and template for all of the laws which followed; it inspired them. This had what is known as a perverse effect. A condemnation of the other laws, and following the very principle of all of these laws, would unavoidably entail a condemnation of this first law. It is now over 20 years since the law was voted, and even if we continue to regret it intellectually speaking, Liberté pour l’Histoire does not campaign for its suppression and does not wish to challenge it, for the simple reason that this legal and official challenge would only be seen in the public eye as authorising and even encouraging the denial of the Jewish genocide.
History and memory The wishes of Liberté pour l’Histoire have been heard at the national scale. A commission, presided by Bernard Accoyer, president of the National Assembly, led to a report being voted unanimously in 2008. According to its terms, with the existing laws remaining unchanged, it would be preferable for the National Assembly to abstain in the future from any law qualifying the past; all the more so given that constitutional reform from now on permits questions of memory to be settled not through laws but through “resolutions”. At the European level, the debate on legislation dealing with the past was reopened by a draft Framework decision of 17 April 2007, making it an offence punishable by imprisonment to “grossly trivialise” any genocide, crime against humanity or racist war crime. It represents, in 12
other words, a generalisation and even an extension and enforcement of the Gayssot law, and the 27 countries of the European Union were given two years to inscribe into their respective constitutions. At the time of ratification and at the suggestion of Liberté pour l’Histoire, France chose an option whereby it would only recognise those crimes against humanity defined as such by an international tribunal. This means that genocides during the twentieth century could be potentially recognised, but not those occurring earlier within the nation’s history.
VOLUME 11 (2011)
HISTOREIN
To conclude, let us clarify the precise separation made between the political and the historical, between history and memory, by an association such as Liberté pour l’Histoire. It is clear that political decision-making bodies have the right and indeed the duty to take an interest in the past in order to orientate and position the collective memory, this clearly lying within their province. Yet they do not have the right to make use of laws which qualify the facts of the past and dictate history. It is up to the politicians to commemorate, to pay homage and to organise compensation; it is up to them to honour the victims. It is up to the historians to do the rest, to establish the facts and to propose interpretations of these facts, restricted by neither constraint nor taboo. In short, to practice what Marc Bloch called their “metier d’historien” (profession of historian). If the debate in France took on this particular form and this intensity, generating books and debates, political divisions and an evocation of the bigger picture, there are two reasons for this. First, because the automatic recourse to the law, and with it all that is formal and judicial, exacerbated the relationship of politics with history and memory. Recent constitutional reforms planned to make it possible once more for deputies to vote for a “resolution” instead of a law, as they had been under the Fourth Republic, precisely in order to avoid these conflicts of memory. A “resolution” commits to nothing. What made the conflict so visible – and precisely allowed historians to win it, albeit provisionally – was the opportunity for the historical community to react. Various conditions contributed to this: the central Paris location, the legal means to create an “association” in accordance with the law of 1901, the ease of access to political figureheads, at least for the most well-known historians. This combination of factors does not exist in other European countries and the absence of these conditions does not make it easy for colleagues in the European Union to take action. And yet it is at this level that the game is now played.
NOTES *
This paper was delivered to the 21st International Congress of Historical Sciences, Amsterdam, on 23 August 2010. I would like to thank Prof Luigi Cajani for organising the roundtable debate and for offering me this forum.
1
A member of the “Milice”, the militia of the Vichy Regime.
2
Madeleine Rebérioux, “Le génocide, le juge et l’historien”, L’Histoire 138 (1990), 92–94.
3
Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Les Assassins de la mémoire, Paris: La Découverte, 1987.
4
Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, Les Traites négrières: Essai d’histoire globale, Paris: Gallimard, 2004. 13
Using History: The Struggle over Traumatic Experiences of the Past in Historical Culture
Jörn Rüsen Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen; University of Witten/Herdecke
It is the main intention of this article to defend the autonomy of historical thinking as a basis of our work as professional historians against any attempts to prescribe historical interpretations and representations by the force of law or by political pressure. The presupposition of this intention is a clear distinction between political and judicial intentions and norms, on the one hand, and the principles of proper historical thinking, which constitute historical studies as an academic discipline, on the other. For every professional historian, this distinction is evident. But, unfortunately, it is not as clear as it seems to be at first glance. There are intersections between politics and law and historical thinking as an integral part of our culture. In this article, I would like to address those principles of historical thinking which mediate between both sides. I think of fundamental principles of historical sense generation, which constitute the particularity of history in human culture and lie beyond the difference between politics, law and academia. If they are sufficiently explicated, it becomes evident why historical thinking always is an issue of politics, so that politics cannot be kept out of the realm of our profession despite the logical difference between a rational argumentation in academia and the power games in politics. History is a narrative answer to the question of who the people to whom the historians belong are. Historians are specialists in providing a proper and convincing answer to this question of identity. Herein lies the cultural function of their work, which, as academic professionals, they cannot abandon.
The narrative structure of historical thinking and its results in all forms of historical representation have a specific logic of making sense of the experience of the past for purposes of the temporal orientation in present practical life.1 The clear distinction between fact and norm, and empirical data and value judgments, loses its plausibility since in the procedure of telling a story both elements are synthesised. Take the idea of value-free research: We have to realise that this idea can be highly misleading if it really means that historians only use neutral facts and no norms and values in representing the past.
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Nevertheless, the idea of value-freedom2 can have an acceptable meaning if it means that historical statements have another logical form than ethical, moral or juridical statements. Additionally, it opens up and protects a space for rational argumentation in the field of historical culture. In doing so, it makes historical studies an academic discipline that is independent from any obedience to political and ideological prescriptions which may aim at determining the understanding of the past. I don’t wish to go further into this issue of academic autonomy and value-freedom in the humanities and social sciences.3 Instead, I want to look at principles of historical sense generation, which span the division of value-freedom and rational argumentation, on the one hand, and political obedience and legitimation by history, on the other. It has become a stereotype to make a clear distinction between the power of historical memory in the cultural life of the people and the academic distance from it.4 This may even reach a state of neutrality towards the needs for historical orientation in practical life. But this juxtaposition is misleading. A distancing, rational argumentation and the functioning in practical life are systematically interrelated in historical studies. Memory and academia share basic principles of sense generation. I want to address these principles in the special perspective of the cultural strategies of coming to terms with traumatic historical experiences. For me, the paradigm of these experiences is the Holocaust. Nobody can deny that the Holocaust is both a subject matter of historical research and academic interpretation and an essential element in the historical culture of not only Jews, Germans and all people who were involved in this event – as victims, perpetrators, bystanders, profiteers, witnesses or as simple contemporaries. It has a meaning for every human being. I would like to pick up the German case since it represents a remarkable structural change in historical sense generation. This change took place along the lines of the change of generations and of an intergenerational discourse, and it can be applied to many other cases of dealing with historical traumata. In an ideal typological manner, we can distinguish three attitudes towards the Holocaust in German identity formation, each of which is typical for a generation.5 I would like to characterise them in a very short and abstract way as the prewar, and the first and the second postwar generation. To say it in a very personal way: the generation of my parents, my own generation and that of my children. 15
Using History: The Struggle over Traumatic Experiences of the Past in Historical Culture The attitude of the prewar generation can be characterised as one of concealment. The traumatic experience of the Holocaust could not find a place in a pregiven pattern of historical understanding. This was even the case in academic discourse, where the Holocaust did not play an important role in coming to terms with the recent past in the new field of contemporary history. The acceptance of responsibility for Nazi barbarism would have destroyed the established historical identity of this generation, which was shaped by traditional nationalism. The second generation was deeply determined by a hidden transference of responsibility onto their innocent shoulders. They had to get rid of this burden and they did so through assuming a moralising attitude. Historical identity was brought about by a mentality of distancing oneself from the previous period of German history, by condemning it and the perpetrators, by throwing it out of the field of (positive) sense-bearing historical experience. The postwar generation developed its identity through this negative judgment and the idea of a universal morality that lay behind it. (By the way, it was this attitude that brought about a definite end to the so-called German “Sonderweg” (special path to modernisation), and which has integrated the political culture of the Federal Republic of Germany into the western tradition of democracy based on human and civil rights.)6 This way of dealing with the Holocaust is deeply ambivalent. Historical identity always needs elements of the past with which the people of the present can identify. In respect to the recent past, there were not very many events for identification, apart from the resistance and opposition to the Nazi regime. Rather, the more sensitive and reflective people identified with the victims. This could only be done by ignoring the pregiven chain of generations, where parents grow into the identity of their children. For the third generation, this breach could not be continued but had to be overcome. They had to reintegrate the morally guilty generation of their grandparents, and by doing so they brought a good deal of ambivalence into the historical culture and the collective identity of Germany. The most telling indication of this new relationship to the disturbing past of the Nazi period is the Holocaust memorial in Berlin.7 I think that my people – to date, at least – are the only ones to have erected a monument for their victims in the centre of their capital. I strongly believe that the German case is not an exemption but a paradigm for a forward-looking European historical culture.8 It includes the criteria of a universal morality in dealing with the past by overcoming its fatal consequences. A moral judgment based on universal principles makes a strong division between innocent victims and responsible perpetrators. And this division serves as a base line in the identity-forming historical perspective of modern and contemporary history. The distinction between victims and perpetrators is a necessary element of historical understanding, of course. But when it becomes the essence of forming historical identity, it falls into the trap of ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism is a strategy of identity formation which inserts positive values into one’s self-image and negative values into the image of the others.9 This is even the case when the sense criteria of universalistic morality were used in forming one’s own historical identity. Because of logical reasons, this use brings about the ethnocentric imbalance between historical evaluation and judgment since it makes a clear distinction between good and evil. This can easily be demonstrated by 16
the attraction of victimisation in conceptualising historical identity today. There is a corresponding phenomenon on the other side: the growing culture of officially apologising for misdeeds of one’s own people in the past. (Recently the Japanese prime minister gave an official apology for the treatment of the Koreans on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the annexation of Korea by Japan.) Victims are innocent, and the others are not. And this otherness includes not only the perpetrators.
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I think the achievement of ambivalence in historical culture is a chance to overcome this moralistic ethnocentrism, without negating universalistic moral principles of historical evaluation and judgment. Apologising is based on the same moral principles as the accusing of perpetrators by the offspring of victims. In this way, both sides share a basic values system. If apologising means that the dark side of one’s own history becomes integrated into the historical self-image of the people, a new concept of historical identity will be the outcome. Here, ways for reconciliation are opened up. But reconciliation needs the acceptance of the other side. And therefore a new element of historical culture has to be developed, namely forgiveness.10 There are only a very few examples of a historical culture of forgiving – like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa – but they do exist and have set new terms of trade in dealing with a burdening past.11 The moralistic attitude in historical culture finds its highly problematic equivalent in the field of identity politics, in the form of laws prescribing correct historical statements and attitudes. If this moralism becomes transformed by apologising and forgiving, identity politics will change as well. This change needs a common attitude towards the past in the cultural processes of identity formation brought about and shared by both the offspring of the victims and the perpetrators as well as of the other participants in the dark events of the burdening past. It must be an attitude that is essentially related to the realm of identity, and should spring from a mental activity which belongs to the essentials of human culture: We are all aware of this attitude – it is the general and fundamental cultural phenomenon of mourning. The aesthetics of historical culture provide a few, but remarkable, examples of historical mourning.12 It is an open question as to what it means to introduce elements of mourning into the academic field of history. But it is evident that mourning can be a procedure in intellectual activities like philosophy, so why not in history? In order to prepare academic historical discourse for the development of these new elements and strategies of sense generation, a change in the basic categories of historical interpretation is necessary. Historical thinking is mainly interested in human activity and agency. A corresponding form of human life – which is as elementary and universal as agency – is suffering. This dimension of human life has found much less attentiveness from the historians than the “res gestae” in the human past. This is so evident that a theory of historical consciousness might arrive at the result that it is one of the main functions of historical consciousness to cover, if not to suppress, the memory of suffering. The first attempts are already underway to represent suffering as a basic element of historical experience.13 But without a change in basic concepts of historical interpretation, the normal work of professional historians will continue to display an ignorance of suffering. 17
Using History: The Struggle over Traumatic Experiences of the Past in Historical Culture A new awareness of the fundamental importance of human suffering in understanding history is required. It has to be combined with the cultural practice of mourning and forgiving and the new, fundamental elements of ambivalence and ambiguity in the concepts of historical identity. All these elements have the potential to lead to a new form of historical culture in general and of academic discourse in particular. I would not hesitate to characterise these forms as genuinely humanistic. So our academic criticism of the political misuse of historical cognition and of political interference should not only defend the achievements of an open, rational discourse in historical studies but it should be an incentive for a new humanism in history.
NOTES 1
For more details, see Jörn Rüsen, History: Narration – Interpretation – Orientation, New York: Berghahn, 2005.
2
The classical text on this issue is Max Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science”, in idem, Sociological Writings (The German Library, vol. 60), ed. Wolf Heydebrand, New York: Continuum, 1994, 248–259.
3
See Jörn Rüsen, “Historical Objectivity as a Matter of Social Values”, in Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney (eds), Historians and Social Values, Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2000, 57–66.
4
A typical example is Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire”, Representations 26 (1989), 7–25.
5
For a more detailed argumentation, see Rüsen, History, 163–204.
6
See Heinrich August Winkler, Germany. The Long Road West, 2 vols, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006, 2007.
7
Jan-Holger Kirsch, Nationaler Mythos oder historische Trauer? Der Streit um ein zentrales HolocaustMahnmal für die Berliner Republikk (Beiträge zur Geschichtskultur, vol. 25), Köln: Böhlau, 2003.
8
See, for example, Klas-Göran Karlsson and Ulf Zander (eds), Echoes of the Holocaust: Historical Cultures in Contemporary Europe, Lund: Nordic Academic Press 2003; Klas-Göran Karlsson and Ulf Zander (eds), Holocaust Heritage: Inquiries into European Historical Culture, Malmö: Sekel, 2004.
9
See Jörn Rüsen, “How to Overcome Ethnocentrism: Approaches to a Culture of Recognition by History in the 21st Century”, in Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies 1/1 (2004), 59–74; also in History and Theoryy 43 (2004), 118–129.
10 See Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006; “Memory, History, Forgiveness: A Dialogue Between Paul Ricoeur and Sorin Antohi”, Janus Headd 8/1 (2005), 14–25, available at www.janushead.org/8-1/Ricoeur.pdf,f accessed 6 Mar 2011. 11 See examples in Mamadou Diawara, Bernhard Lategan and Jörn Rüsen (eds), Historical Memory in Africa: Dealing with the Past, Reaching for the Future in an Intercultural Contextt (Making Sense of History, vol. 12), New York: Berghahn, 2010. 12 The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, for example. The issue of mourning in historical culture is addressed in Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1995; Burkhard Liebsch and Jörn Rüsen (eds), Trauer und Geschichte (Beiträge zur Geschichtskultur, vol. 22), Köln: Böhlau, 2001; Jörn Rüsen, “Trauma and Mourning in Historical Thinking”, Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in History and Archaeologyy 1/1 (2004), 10–21. 13 For example, Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, New York: HarperCollins, 1997, 2007. 18
Since the early 1990s, one can observe in Europe a proliferation of memory wars and controversies related to tragic historical events. The reasons are many and both of a domestic and international nature: the multicultural transformation of many societies that has involved the self-assessment of previously silent communities, which demand public recognition for what they consider their own historical identity; the crisis of Cold War political ideologies, which has given representation to political actors which were previously marginalised from the main historical narrative of states;1 tensions with former colonies, which claim reparations for colonial crimes and the slave trade;2 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the birth of new states which want to come to terms with past wounds. A particular feature of these memory wars is the use of the penal code in order to enforce a unique, official interpretation of these events and to punish diverging opinions. A corpus of new laws is thus being established, which are often mutually influenced and which have given rise to concerns over their impact on the freedom of expression and particularly on the freedom of historical research. Historians are in fact directly targeted by the provisions of these laws, alongside journalists, teachers, politicians and anybody who makes use of historical discourse. A significant example of these conflicts and of the political bias on historical discourse is the Holodomor, the famine of 1932–33 in Ukraine, which is matter of heated controversy not only between Russia and Ukraine
Criminal Laws on History: The Case of the European Union
Luigi Cajani Sapienza University of Rome
Criminal Laws on History: The Case of the European Union but also inside Ukraine. Historians debate on the interpretation of this event: some maintain that it was a genocide planned by the Soviet regime in order to crush Ukrainian resistance against collectivisation while others consider it rather as the consequence of gross mistakes on the part of the regime, which, unable to face an agricultural crisis, actually worsened it but which did not have the intention of targeting the Ukrainian people.3 On 28 November 2006 Ukraine’s parliament passed a law4 declaring the Holodomor an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people, and added that its public denial should be considered as dishonouring the memory of the millions of victims and humiliating the dignity of the Ukrainian people, and, therefore, be deemed unlawful. The issue was very much debated between the opposing anti-Russian and pro-Russian fronts, the former represented by President Viktor Yushchenko, who accepted the famine’s characterisation as genocide, and the latter by his opponent Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, who rejected it, arguing that the famine was the outcome of the mass collectivisation of farms which affected the whole Soviet Union and not specifically Ukraine. The divided opinion was mirrored by the vote: only 233 MPs supported the bill – a minimum of 226 votes was required for it to be passed – while 200 deputies abstained. This law had, of course, an international resonance. The Ukrainian government in fact acted in order to have other states recognise the quality of genocide. On 28 May 2008, Canada, where there is a strong community of Ukrainian origin, recognised the “Ukrainian Famine of 1932–33 as an act of genocide” and established an Ukrainian Famine and Genocide (“Holodomor”) Memorial Day,5 but without foreseeing a punishment for its denial. Also, the European Parliament recognised, on 23 October 2008, the Holodomor as “an appalling crime against the Ukrainian people, and against humanity”. The text of the resolution avoided using the term “genocide”, but in any case backed an interpretation which charged the Soviet government with the intention of targeting Ukraine: “[It] was cynically and cruelly planned by Stalin’s regime in order to force through the Soviet Union’s policy of collectivisation against the will of the rural population in Ukraine.”6 On the opposite side, the Russian Duma on 2 April 2008 approved a statement which expressed sorrow for the famine tragedy which struck much of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, but rejected the charge of genocide, asserting that “there is no historical evidence that the famine was organised along ethnic lines. Its victims were millions of Soviet citizens, representatives of different peoples and nationalities living largely in agricultural areas of the country.”7 The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe discussed the Holodomor in early 2010, and was directly affected by the domestic Ukrainian controversy. It received in fact three documents: two, from the Our Ukraine party and the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, respectively, which supported the interpretation of the famine as genocide, and another from the Party of Regions, which supported Yanukovych, who in February 2010 succeeded Yushchenko as state president, which asserted that the famine did not fully meet the criteria established for the crime of genocide by the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948.8 On 27 April 2010 Yanukovych attended a sitting of the Parliamentary Assembly, and when asked about his opinion on this pending issue, declared that the great famine of the 1930s had affected the Volga region, Belarus and Kazakhstan as well as Ukraine. He added that it had been a consequence of the policies of the Stalinist regime, and all countries had been affected. To recognise 20
the Holodomor as genocide in respect of one or another people, he said, would be incorrect and unfair. It had been a shared tragedy between all members of the Soviet Union.9 Encouraged in this way, on the following day the Parliamentary Assembly passed a resolution that stated “Millions of innocent people in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Russia and Ukraine, which were parts of the Soviet Union, lost their lives as a result of mass starvation caused by the cruel and deliberate actions and policies of the Soviet regime.”10
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On the issue of genocide, the resolution avoided a clear position: it simply mentioned that Ukrainian law recognised the famine as a genocide, without further comment. This cautious attitude had been actually suggested by the rapporteur, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, who observed that it was not opportune to back the thesis of genocide because in Ukraine historians and politicians were not unanimous on that and also because “I firmly believe that politicians, both on the national and on the international level, should avoid being involved in the interpretation of historical facts of the past.”11 In the context of the current history wars, this was a very significant stance for a politician to take. Yanukovych’s words in Strasbourg show how a political change can bring about change in an official historical interpretation. But Ukrainian law was still there, and on the basis of it Volodymyr Volosiuk, a member of the People’s Movement of Ukraine, a political party which opposed Yanukovych, sued him for this statement and asked the court to oblige the president to apologise before him and the Ukrainian people.12 Eventually, after a judicial path through some courts, on 8 December 2010 the Kyiv Court of Appeals acquitted Yanukovych.13 One might think that it would have been difficult for the court to condemn the president, but in any case it seems that, despite the law, the behaviour of the Ukrainian courts is not uniform. In fact, in January 2010 an Ukrainian court declared Joseph Stalin and several other senior Soviet officials guilty of genocide.14 But the following March, a court in the Donetsk region, in eastern Ukraine, refused to prosecute the editor of the Rodnoye Priazovye newspaper, who in an article had written that the Holodomor was not a genocide.15 This represents a worrying absence of legal certainty, which reflects the split in Ukrainian public opinion.
The prosecution of Holocaust denial The wave of criminal laws on history has its origin and model in the laws against the denial of the Holocaust. The first one was approved in Israel in 1986, and punished with five years’ imprisonment “any statement denying or diminishing the proportions of acts committed in the period of the Nazi regime, which are crimes against the Jewish people or crimes against humanity, with intent to defend the perpetrators of those acts or to express sympathy or identification with them”.16 In this text one must underline two points in order to allow for a comparison with similar laws. First, the definition of the criminal conduct: not only the simple and total denial of the event, but also the diminution of its size; and second, the restrictions placed on the prosecution: the aforementioned criminal conduct must be qualified by a clear, positive attitude towards the perpetrators. 21
Criminal Laws on History: The Case of the European Union Meanwhile, in Europe too the introduction of such a law was discussed as a response to the increase in incidents of anti-Semitism, often in connection with extreme right parties, and in cases of Holocaust denials. First came France in 1990 with the so-called Gayssot law (loi Gayssot).17 This law, which had the general intent of suppressing “every act of racism, anti-Semitism or xenophobia”, imposed one year’s imprisonment and a heavy fine (equivalent to €45,000 today) on those who disputed “the existence of one or more crimes against humanity defined by article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal appended to the London Agreement of 8 August 1945”, which made up the legal basis of the Nuremberg trials.18 For the identification of these crimes against humanity, both the competence of international and French courts was recognised. Concerning the nature of the criminal conduct targeted by the Gayssot law, one must note that the French text uses the verb “contester”, r which means not only “to deny” but also “to dispute” and “to doubt”. This semantic pluralism produces, therefore, a certain ambiguity in the interpretation of the conduct. With the French law, in any case, the simple criminal conduct is prosecuted, with no need of qualification, as in the Israeli law. The French Human Rights League (Ligue des Droits de l’Homme) criticised the Gayssot law for being useless in the fight against racism and dangerous for freedom of the press and of research:19 an argument which often recurs in the debates about prosecuting Holocaust denial. In an article written in 1990, the historian Madeleine Rebérioux added that this law was even superfluous, as shown by the fact that Robert Faurisson, a well-known Holocaust denier, had been convicted20 for his statements in 1981, when this law did not exist, on the base of the provisions that punished defamation. Moreover, she continued, judges and historians have different tasks and different strategies, which must not be confused: “Historical truth refuses the authority of a state,” she concluded. In a 1996 article, she also foresaw that this law would open the way to the definition of an official historical truth also for other genocides.21 Rebérioux’ clairvoyance was confirmed by the subsequent set of memory laws (lois mémorielles) that were approved in France under the pressure of various social groups. French citizens of Armenian descent endorsed the law of 29 January 2001 by which France recognised the “Armenian genocide” in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War.22 By its wording, this law thus assessed the existence of an historical event and its interpretation at the same time. While the law did not foresee a punishment for denial, this was soon to come, following the pattern of Holocaust denial. In fact, in April 2006 the Socialist MP Didier Migaud presented a bill on the Armenian genocide that extended the 2001 law by introducing the same penalty established in the Gayssot law. This bill was approved by the National Assembly on its first reading, on 12 October 2006,23 but in order to come into force it needed the approval of the Senate, which deferred making a decision for years before eventually rejecting it on 4 May 2011. During the debate in the Senate, one of the main arguments introduced by the rapporteur, JeanJacques Hyest, was that it was not the task of legislators to give juridical definitions of the past and to connect these definitions with criminal penalties.24 French citizens of black African descent promoted the Taubira law (loi Taubira), approved on 21 May 2001, which defined as crimes against humanity both the slave trade, in the Atlantic and Indian oceans, and slavery itself, practiced from the fifteenth century onwards “in America, in the 22
Caribbean region, in the Indian Ocean and in Europe against the African, Amerindian, Madagascan and Indian peoples”.25 This law also prescribed that the slave trade and slavery must be allowed “the position they deserve” both in school programmes and in historical research.26 This law, too, did not introduce any penalties. Initially, these two laws did not arouse any serious concern among historians and history teachers, but in 2005 a scandal erupted with the passing, on February 23, of the Mekachera law (loi Mekachera) on French colonialism, promoted by the lobby of the pieds noirs (French citizens repatriated after the end of the Algerian war). The law declared that “The nation expresses its gratitude to women and men who participated in the activities carried out by France in the former French départements in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Indochina and in the other territories previously under French sovereignty.”27
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Like the Taubira law, the Mekachera law dictated that the history of the French people overseas, and especially in north Africa, should be allowed the “position it deserves” in academic research; but then it went much further, prescribing that school programmes should also recognise the “positive role” played by the French people in that context.28 This latter clause, which enforced the precise interpretation of an historical event and therefore directly interfered with historical research and history teaching, immediately raised a storm of protest in France.29 The protest soon turned even more fiery because of an incident that showed how this new set of laws could become a dangerous tool to attack or blackmail historians. In September 2005, the Collective of Antilleans, Guyanese and Réunionnais (Collectifdom) sued the French historian Olivier PétréGrenouilleau, author of an important study on the African slave trade,30 on the charge of “denial of crimes against humanity”. This charge was based on a newspaper interview31 in which PétréGrenouilleau had maintained that the slave trade could not be regarded as a case of genocide and where he criticised the Taubira law in particular because, by defining the slave trade as a crime against humanity, it suggested an inappropriate comparison with the Holocaust. Patrick Karam, the president of Collectifdom, also announced that he would appeal to the competent authorities with a request that Pétré-Grenouilleau be suspended from academic teaching. The reaction of the academic world was very strong, and led to an appeal entitled Liberté pour l’histoire,32 which requested the abolition of all the memory laws, on the grounds that “in a free state, neither parliament nor the judicial authorities are entitled to define historical truth”. The mobilisation was eventually successful: indeed, the second clause of art. 4 of the Mekachera law, concerning the teaching of history, was abolished in January 2006, after the Constitutional Council had declared that French laws could not contain a prescription of that kind,33 and in the following February Collectifdom, confronted with these protests, withdrew its legal action against Pétré-Grénouilleau.34 Meanwhile, after France other European states had adopted laws against Holocaust denial, with some relevant differences. In 1992 Austria introduced a new article to the Verbotsgesetz (prohibition act), the 1947 law against Nazi activities, punishing with one to ten years’ imprisonment (or twenty years’ in case of a particularly serious offense) those who “deny, grossly minimise, approve or try to justify” genocide and other Nazi crimes.35 Thus other criminal conducts, typical 23
Criminal Laws on History: The Case of the European Union forms of crimes of opinion, were added to the denial category and became very successful, and were adopted by many jurisdictions. Germany in 1994 added to section 130 of the Strafgesetzbuch (criminal code), under the heading of “Incitement to hatred” (Volksverhetzung), a paragraph which punished with a fine or prison sentence of up to five years “whosoever publicly or in a meeting approves, denies or downplays an act committed under the rule of National Socialism . . . in a manner capable of disturbing the public peace”.36 This law came after ten years of parliamentary debates, during which the possibility of including other crimes against humanity was also discussed, but this idea was dropped because, it was felt, this would have belittled the special responsibility of Germany towards Nazi crimes.37 A Belgian 1995 law punished the “denial, minimisation, justification or approval” of the Nazi genocide with a fine or imprisonment from eight days to one year.38 In 2005 the extension of this law to cover other genocides was also discussed. The Belgian lower house approved a draft bill which included genocide and other crimes against humanity defined as such by every international court recognised by Belgium, by the Security Council or the General Assembly of the United Nations, and by a national court in Belgium or any other European Union member state.39 But in the event the Senate did not approve the project, which has not surfaced since.40 Luxembourg in 1997 introduced a new penal prosecution of racist acts, including art. 457.3 of the penal code, which punished those who “disputed, minimised, justified or denied the existence of one or more crimes against humanity and war crimes defined by article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal appended to the London Agreement of 8 August 1945”.41 For these crimes it recognised the jurisdiction of Luxembourgian, foreign and international courts. The sentence was eight days to six months’ imprisonment and a fine ranging from 10,001 to 1,000,000 francs, or only one of them. These provisions were also extended to cover genocides committed by states other than Nazi Germany, and in these cases only Luxembourgian and international courts were recognised. In 2002 Romania decided to punish “organisations and symbols with fascist, racist and xenophobic character” and the cult of personalities responsible for crimes against peace and humanity and for war crimes who were found guilty by a national or international court.42 In addition, the denial of the Holocaust was explicitly mentioned and punished by imprisonment from six months to five years and the suspension of rights.43 Other states have approved laws which punish denial and related criminal conducts in relation to genocide and crimes against humanity in general, without an explicit reference to those perpetrated by the Nazis. Art. 261bis of Switzerland’s penal code, introduced in 1993,44 punishes by a fine or by imprisonment of up to three years those who “deny, grossly minimise or try to justify a genocide or other crimes against humanity”. Under art. 240 of the penal code, in 2007 Portugal introduced the punishment for the denial of war crimes, crimes against peace and crimes against humanity, the penality being imprisonment from six months to five years.45 With no reference to the Holocaust or even an explicit mention of genocide, this article rather refers to the 24
three crimes envisaged by the Charter of the International Military Tribunal. Noteworthy is also the fact that only the denial of these crimes is prosecuted, and only in connection with public defamation or insult against individuals or groups because of race, colour, ethnic or national origin, religion, sex or sexual orientation. Spain is a case of particular interest. In 1995 a new article (607.2) was added to the penal code, which punished both the denial and the justification of genocide, without specifying the Holocaust or any other, and without mentioning crimes against humanity.46 But on 7 November 2007 the Spanish constitutional court (Tribunal Constitucional) declared it partially unconstitutional, affirming that only the justification of genocide can be prosecuted because it may amount, unlike the simple denial of it, to an incitement to violence.47 Thus the simple denial of genocide is considered a legitimate form of the freedom of speech, and it was erased from art. 607.2.
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A peculiar agenda has been adopted by some countries of eastern Europe in connection with the coming to terms of their postwar relations with the Soviet Union and of their own communist regimes. Poland in 1998 created the Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej) in order to investigate crimes committed in the country by the Nazi, Soviet and Polish communist regimes, and also other crimes against peace, crimes against humanity and war crimes,48 and imposed a fine or prison sentence of up to three years for the public denial of these crimes.49 In 2002, the Czech Republic introduced art. 261a of the penal code,50 which lumps Nazi and the communist crimes together: “Whoever publicly denies, questions, approves or tries to justify Nazi or communist genocide or other crimes against humanity committed by Nazis or communists shall be punished by a term of imprisonment from six months to three years.” All these laws make up a complex and heterogeneous picture which has its focus in the punishment of the denial of the Holocaust as a form of anti-Semitism, and therefore of racism, and which has been enlarged to encompass other historical events. The fact that the denial of the Holocaust is prosecuted does not affect historical research, because denial is totally unscientific. One can discuss whether the prosecution of Holocaust denial is effective and correct only on a social and legal level51 – and indeed this is a constant subject of debates. The very problem arises when legislators move from the prosecution of the denial of an historical event to the prosecution of the denial of their own official interpretation of an historical event, which, on the contrary, interferes with the freedom of historical research. By that, a fundamental conceptual shift, or rather a leap, is achieved, which is the real core of the problem. There is, in fact, no equivalence or continuity between the denial of the existence of an event, such as the Holocaust, and the denial of an opinion on an event whose existence is not denied. Moreover, one must also consider that the definition of genocide is far from having met general agreement among jurists and historians. Henry Huttenbach, editor of the Journal of Genocide Research, clearly depicted the state of the question in 2002: To date, genocide . . . lacks both a satisfactory conceptual definition and a consensus as to the inner make-up of genocide. Without a conceptual definition one is impeded in separating genocidal events from the non-genocidal; and, lacking a basic blueprint, it is unclear how and what to compare and, thereby, determine distinctive singularities and commonalities separating and linking genocides.52 25
Criminal Laws on History: The Case of the European Union Scholars’ opinions differ about the definition of genocide in terms of the intent and methods of the perpetrators and of the characteristics of the victims,53 and, therefore, also about the actual cases of genocide. Some scholars limit the definition of genocide only to the Holocaust (the thesis of the “uniqueness of the Holocaust”); others extend it to a great number of historical events, including the “colonial genocides” of the Herero, the Australian Aborigines and the Native Americans, with some finding cases as far back in history as antiquity.54 Also the definition of a war crime is a matter of debate: Anthony Grayling, a British philosopher, asserts that the air raids carried out by the Allied forces against German and Japanese cities during the Second World War were crimes against humanity.55 All in all, there is not – and there cannot be – a solid base for fixing in law a definition of historical events of this kind. Within this legiferation on history one can identify different trends as regards the definition of the criminal conducts and the historical events that are their object. Concerning the criminal conducts, in some states only the denial is prosecuted; on the contrary other states have added other conducts: approval, dispute, justification and (gross) minimisation. While denial and approval can be clearly enough defined, the meanings of dispute, justification and minimisation are rather blurred, and can lead to great uncertainties in judgment, and, therefore, to abuse. According to some jurists, for instance, justification and minimisation can mean that an historical event defined as a crime is explained or its gravity is diminished according to the context where it happened, for instance if it is considered as the reaction to a danger or to a previous act of violence.56 Moreover, some states punish these crimes in their simple form, while others punish them only when they are qualified. Concerning the historical events themselves, some states only mention the Holocaust, others refer to the crimes prosecuted by the Nuremberg tribunal, others include the crimes of communist regimes, while others generally speak about genocide or crimes against humanity perpetrated by whomsoever, thus opening up the way to the inclusion of every possible historical event characterised by mass massacres. And there is an additional problem: which authorities are recognised as being entitled to define an historical event as a crime? Some states clearly specify national or international tribunals, but others do not, thus creating an area of uncertainty about what conduct is punished and where. To take the case of the Belgian draft bill discussed in 2005, which recognises the sentences of many international courts and of the national courts of all European Union member states: what would happen in the case where the courts of two or more states delivered conflicting sentences? One has finally to remark that many states are absent from this picture: for instance the United Kingdom, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands have laws against racism, incitement to racial hatred and discrimination, but do not explicitly punish the denial of the Holocaust and also do not have criminal laws on other historical events. The reason is that these states have a strong tradition of safeguarding the freedom of speech. That shows that in the European Union there are two different areas of juridical tradition: a contradiction that the European institutions have tried to overcome.
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The initiatives of the European institutions European institutions have constantly affirmed the will to create a European identity consisting, among other shared values, of the fight against racism and discrimination.57 With this aim they have promoted an unrelenting set of initiatives in order to approximate the penal provisions of the member states.
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The first step in this direction was the Joint Action . . . to Combat Racism and Xenophobia of 1996,58 which established the judicial cooperation of the member states in order to fight the following criminal conducts: (a) public incitement to discrimination, violence or racial hatred in respect of a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to colour, race, religion or national or ethnic origin; (b) public condoning, for a racist or xenophobic purpose, of crimes against humanity and human rights violations; (c) public denial of the crimes defined in Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal appended to the London Agreement of 8 April 1945 insofar as it includes behaviour which is contemptuous of, or degrading to, a group of persons defined by reference to colour, race, religion or national or ethnic origin; (d) public dissemination or distribution of tracts, pictures or other material containing expressions of racism and xenophobia; (e) participation in the activities of groups, organisations or associations, which involve discrimination, violence, or racial, ethnic or religious hatred.59 This text defined two criminal conducts: condoning and denial. The former was related to every crime against humanity (§ b), and the latter was related to the Nazi crimes prosecuted by the Nuremberg tribunal (§ c), thus creating a difference, which seems to imply that only the Holocaust can be an object of denial, while other crimes are not denied but only condoned – what is in fact the case. The prosecution was based on the specific circumstances: racist or xenophobic purposes (§ b), and contemptuous or degrading behaviour towards a group of persons defined by racial, religious or ethnic features (§ c). These restrictions were relevant insofar as the simple condoning and denial were not criminalised, unlike in some laws which were already in force. This Joint Action had a seminal but scarcely effective role, and its purposes were picked up again by a new of juridical tool, the Framework Decision on Combating Racism and Xenophobia,60 submitted by the European Commission on 29 November 2001. Article 4 of this first proposal followed the footprints of the Joint Action of 1996, but with some important differences: the contemptuous or degrading circumstances were dropped for the punishment of the denial or trivialisation of the crimes prosecuted by the Nuremberg tribunal, and in their place was introduced the likelihood of disturbing public order: Member states shall ensure that the following intentional conduct committed by any means is punishable as criminal offence: 27
Criminal Laws on History: The Case of the European Union (a) public incitement to violence or hatred for a racist or xenophobic purpose or to any other racist or xenophobic behaviour which may cause substantial damage to individuals or groups concerned; (b) public insults or threats towards individuals or groups for a racist or xenophobic purpose; (c) public condoning for a racist or xenophobic purpose of crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes as defined in Articles 6, 7 and 8 of the Statute of the International Criminal Court; (d) public denial or trivialisation of the crimes defined in Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal appended to the London Agreement of 8 April 1945 in a manner liable to disturb the public peace; (e) public dissemination or distribution of tracts, pictures or other material containing expressions of racism and xenophobia; (f) directing, supporting of or participating in the activities of a racist or xenophobic group, with the intention of contributing to the organisation’s criminal activities. Like in the Joint Action, the criminal conducts are unevenly attributed: condoning was referred to the crimes defined by the Statute of the International Criminal Court, while for the crimes prosecuted by the Nuremberg tribunal, the prosecuted conducts were denial and – what was new in comparison to the Joint Action – trivialisation. Art. 6 sets the general features of the penalties, which had to be “effective, proportionate and dissuasive” (§ 1), and in particular it states that “the offences referred to in Article 4(a) and (f) are punishable by terms of deprivation of liberty with a maximum penalty that is not less than 2 years” (§ 3), thus giving the impression that these criminal conducts deserved more attention than those described in the other subparagraphs. At the same time, the Council of Europe was also active in the fight against racism, xenophobia and negationism, by opening to signature on 28 January 2003 the Additional Protocol to the Convention on Cybercrime, Concerning the Criminalisation of Acts of a Racist and Xenophobic Nature Committed through Computer Systems, which in art. 6 § 1 invited member states to punish the distribution through computer systems of material which denies, grossly minimises, approves or justifies acts constituting genocide or crimes against humanity, as defined by international law and recognised as such by final and binding decisions of the International Military Tribunal, established by the London Agreement of 8 August 1945, or of any other international court established by relevant international instruments and whose jurisdiction is recognised by that Party. In comparison with the Framework decision, there is a unique set of criminal conducts: some of them are similar (with slightly different words) to those of the Framework decision, but there is the addition of justification. Concerning the tribunals entitled to assess the crimes that cannot be denied or trivialised and so on, the Nuremberg tribunal is the only one which is explicitly mentioned here, while the International Criminal Court is replaced by a reference to other international courts, implicitly meaning the addition also of those on the former Yugoslavia and on Rwanda created by the UN Security Council in 1993 and 1994, respectively, and any future courts of this kind. 28
Unlike in the Framework decision, the Additional protocol also allows the prosecution of the simple criminal conducts (art. 6 § 1). This provision has nevertheless a restriction, because the following paragraph (§ 2a) gives to each state the possibility of prosecuting the conducts described above only if they are qualified, meaning in case that they were committed “with the intent to incite hatred, discrimination or violence against any individual or group of individuals, based on race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin, as well as religion if used as a pretext for any of these factors, or otherwise”.
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But most relevant – and surprising – is the provision of the final paragraph (art. 6 § 2b) which reserves to each state the right “not to apply, in whole or in part, paragraph 1 of this article”. Thus, states have total freedom in the adoption of the Additional protocol: they can punish only one criminal conduct, or they can limit the application only in relation to genocide and not to crimes against humanity, and they can even punish nothing at all and ignore this article. On this point the Additional protocol is totally different from the Framework decision, which instead is compulsory. This clause allows us to understand the disagreement inside the membership of the Council of Europe on the penalisation of denial and of the other related criminal conducts. And in fact, among the states which up to 31 July 2011 have signed the Additional Protocol, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Ukraine have made use of the rights in art. 6 § 2b, and quite a few states have not signed the Additional protocol at all, including Italy, Russia, Sweden and the United Kingdom.61 The Framework decision declared by art. 16 § 1 that the member states had to take the necessary measures to comply with it by 30 June 2004. This firm expectation fell short, because of the resistances of many member states.62 A meeting of the Justice and Home Affairs Council on 2–3 June 2005 gave evidence that an agreement was still far from being achieved. The presidentin-office of the Council, the Luxemburger Luc Frieden, said during a press conference: “We had a very political discussion about that framework decision today. I think this is less a legal document but rather more a political document . . . The draft framework decision, as amended many times by me and the working group over the past months, has found large support though not unanimous.”63 The main obstacle had been, he recognised, the different points of view in the member states on the freedom of speech: In some countries that means that freedom of expression knows almost no boundaries, certainly no boundaries imposed through criminal law sanctions. For others freedom of expression does have limits. Those limits that freely elected parliaments put into the criminal code, where the interests of others are in conflict with some fundamental human rights. This is a debate that one can have for ages. Less diplomatic newspaper reports unveil some interesting background details.64 On that occasion, the major opponent was Roberto Castelli, justice minister in Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right government, who announced that Italy was going to revise its laws on the freedom of speech, as a consequence of a trial initiated against the writer and journalist Oriana Fallaci for offences against Islam, and therefore he could not approve any decision of the Council before the Italian 29
Criminal Laws on History: The Case of the European Union parliament had passed a decision on this issue. But Italy was not the only state with concerns on this issue. Even before there had been differences between France and some Scandinavian states, which refused to give legal assistance in cases of Holocaust deniers prosecuted under French justice. The United Kingdom also maintained its reservations. The progress of the Framework decision stopped for some time, until in January 2007, with the beginning of the German presidency of the European Union, the German justice minister, Brigitte Zypries, announced her intention to bring about its adoption in order to extend the legislation criminalising the denial of genocides, notably the Holocaust, to all the member states of the European Union.65 A wave of critical reactions immediately followed, focusing – under the input of Zypries’ statement – only on the opportunity of prosecuting the denial of the Holocaust, and not of other historical events. The British political scientist Timothy Garton Ash wrote in the Guardian on January 1866 that this initiative, however well-intentioned, was “very unwise . . . [and] it would further curtail free expression – at a time when that is under threat from many quarters”. The German historian Eberhard Jäckel, in an interview on February 1 to Deutschlandradio,67 also asserted that the denial of the Holocaust was “a stupid thing to do”, which, however, did not need to be punished unless it incited hatred, and which could be combated more effectively by information. In Italy, a wide-ranging discussion took place in January, when the Italian justice minister, Clemente Mastella, immediately followed his German counterpart in proposing a law criminalising the denial of the Holocaust in Italy.68 This initiative also resulted in an outcry from Italian historians:69 in one single day, more than 200 scholars signed a petition asserting that such a law was dangerous, useless and counterproductive, on the grounds: that it would provide deniers with “the opportunity to present themselves as defenders of freedom of expression”; that in its efforts to impose historical truth, the state would expose this truth to the risk of losing all legitimacy and would undermine “confidence in the free confrontation of stances and in free historiographical and intellectual research”; and that laws criminalising incitement to violence, incitement to racial hatred, and the praising of crimes against humanity already exist in Italy. The petition concluded with the assertion that civil society alone was empowered to struggle against Holocaust denial by means of “a cultural fight, by ethics and by steadfast policy”. In the face of such opposition and outrage, Mastella modified his bill by eliminating all references to Holocaust denial and by turning it into a modification of the so-called Mancino law (legge Mancino)70 of 1993, which prosecuted racial discrimination, by imposing tougher penalties only on those who “disseminate ideas of racial superiority”.71 In the event, this proposed law was never tabled for discussion in the Italian parliament. Also the French association Liberté pour l’Histoire protested against the Framework decision, pointing out, among other things, the “perverse effects” of the Gayssot law.72 The concern of historians spread also beyond the borders of the European Union. In particular, the general assembly of the International Committee of Historical Sciences (ICHS), held in Beijing on 17–18 September 2007, approved a motion expressing great alarm at this possible intrusion of the law into the field of historical research, and inviting all affiliated organisations to thoroughly discuss the matter with their members; moreover, the ICHS decided to organise a special session on this issue at its next international congress, which took place in Amsterdam on 22–28 August 2010.73 A few days before the Beijing meeting, the American Historical Asso30
ciation issued a communication concerning the Framework decision, stating that any scientific research may only be assessed by experts belonging to the same research field. Therefore, if a historian should distort his evidence, the only measures to be taken against him, by colleagues specialised in the same field, should be the exclusion from academic posts and, in extreme cases, from publications. And it concluded: “If any other body, especially a body with the right to initiate legal proceedings and impose penalties, seeks to influence the course of historical research, the result will inevitably be intimidation of scholars and distortion of their findings.”74
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The criticism of historians did not influence the march of the Framework decision, which now speeded up towards its fulfilment. On 17 April 2007, the Council of the European Union issued a new draft.75 In this phase a new problem arose: the three Baltic countries, Poland and Slovenia demanded that the crimes perpetrated by the Soviet regime be included in the Framework decision.76 This initiative was not extemporaneous: three years before, in 2006, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe had voted a resolution which called for the international condemnation of the crimes of totalitarian communist regimes, not only those of the past, but also those still in power.77 This demand encountered opposition, for instance from the United Kingdom,78 and eventually its proponents abandoned it in exchange for the following declaration, appended to the text of the draft, which promised that the issue would be reconsidered in the future: The Framework Decision is limited to crimes committed on the grounds of race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin. It does not cover crimes committed on other grounds, e.g. by totalitarian regimes. However, the Council deplores all of these crimes . . . The Berlin declaration adopted on 25 March 2007 stated that “European integration shows that we have learnt the painful lessons of a history marked by bloody conflict”. In that light the Commission will organise a public European hearing on crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes committed by totalitarian regimes as well as those who publicly condone, deny, grossly distort or trivialise them, and emphasises the need for appropriate redress of injustice and – if appropriate – submit a proposal for a framework decision on these crimes. The public hearing on the crimes of totalitarian regimes, mentioned in this declaration, was organised a year later, on 8 April 2008, during Slovenia’s presidency of the European Union. Many speakers harshly condemned the double standard towards Nazi and communist crimes, which was widespread in western Europe for cultural and political reasons, and which was reflected by the draft of the Framework decision.79 The lenient attitude towards Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, who extolled the role of the Soviet army as the liberator of Europe, was also blamed. Because of that, the states which were once behind the “Iron Curtain” now felt that their suffering under the Soviet Union and their domestic communist regimes was not acknowledged in the new Europe. Moreover, the current concept of genocide was criticised for excluding political and social groups, a decision which was taken by the United Nations in 1948, when the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was approved, as a result of the pressure of the Soviet Union, and which has been adopted by the statute of the International 31
Criminal Laws on History: The Case of the European Union Criminal Court.80 At the end of the hearing, the Lithuanian delegation proposed a set of initiatives to investigate the crimes of communist and other totalitarian regimes in Europe and to promote awareness of them: among the proposals was the establishment of a day of commemoration for their victims on 23 August, the anniversary of the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact.81 Thus, both Germany and the Soviet Union were given equal responsibility for the outbreak of the Second World War. This demand was fulfilled only a few months later, when, on 23 September 2008, the European Parliament declared August 23 as the “European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism”.82 After passing through a debate in the European Parliament on 29 November 2007,83 the final text of the Framework Decision was approved by the Council of the European Union on 28 November 2008 and entered into force on 6 December 2008.84 Art. 1 § 1 opens, as usual, with a reference to racism and xenophobia: 1. Each Member State shall take the measures necessary to ensure that the following intentional conduct is punishable: (a) publicly inciting to violence or hatred directed against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin; (b) the commission of an act referred to in point (a) by public dissemination or distribution of tracts, pictures or other material. Then come two subparagraphs dealing with historical events and the related criminal conducts of “publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivialising”, which, unlike the first version of 2001, are evenly attributed to all genocides, crimes against humanity and war crimes: (c) publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivialising crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes as defined in Articles 6, 7 and 8 of the Statute of the International Criminal Court, directed against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin when the conduct is carried out in a manner likely to incite to violence or hatred against such a group or a member of such a group; (d) publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivialising the crimes defined in Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal appended to the London Agreement of 8 August 1945, directed against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin when the conduct is carried out in a manner likely to incite to violence or hatred against such a group or a member of such a group. According to art. 3 § 1, all these criminal conducts are “punishable by criminal penalties of a maximum of at least between 1 and 3 years of imprisonment”. In art. 1 § 1 (c) and (d) one can observe an important limitation on the prosecution, which was lacking in the first version of 2001: namely, that the aforementioned crimes cannot be prose32
cuted unless they have a racist or xenophobic aim and are likely to incite to violence or hatred. That means, that only qualified criminal conducts can be prosecuted. By that, historical research seems to be safe enough, but interpreting what “likely to incite” means is a slippery slope. In the following paragraphs of art. 1, there is a set of clauses which define possible additional restrictions to the application field of the previous norms, which were included in order to avoid conflicts with the peculiarities of the different juridical systems and traditions of the member states, thus giving them an important flexibility in the adoption of the Framework decision.
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Two clauses concerning the criminal conducts are declared by art. 1 § 2: For the purpose of paragraph 1, member states may choose to punish only conduct which is either carried out in a manner likely to disturb public order or which is threatening, abusive or insulting. The reference to public order meets, for instance, the requirements of Germany, which in fact annexed to the text of the Framework decision a reservation on this point.85 The following reference to the character of being “threatening, abusive or insulting” matches British legislation, which punishes “acts intended or likely to stir up racial hatred” perpetrated by “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or . . . any written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting”.86 Paragraph 4 touches the crucial point of the definition of the courts which are entitled to rule on historical events: Any Member State may, on adoption of this Framework Decision or later, make a statement that it will make punishable the act of denying or grossly trivialising the crimes referred to in paragraph 1(c) and/or (d) only if the crimes referred to in these paragraphs have been established by a final decision of a national court of this Member State and/or an international court, or by a final decision of an international court only. This clause was absent both from the Joint Action and from the first draft of the Framework decision, and has very relevant consequences. In fact, if the power is given only to international courts, the range of historical events which can be involved is quite limited. The international courts have up to now been the Nuremberg tribunal, the International Criminal Court, which has nonretroactive competence but can only judge crimes committed after 1 July 2002,87 and the ad hocc international tribunals, such as those on the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Of course, this limitation does not solve the root problem, because historical research on these recent crimes, and on futures ones, remains under fire. But at least previous historical events, such as those which have been object of the French memory laws or of Ukrainian legislation, are excluded. On the contrary, the competence of national courts has potentially no time limits, especially as they mainly follow laws passed by national parliaments, as one can see in the case of the Ukrainian court condemning Stalin for genocide. This clause has given rise to a very differentiated landscape: an historical event can be considered a crime against humanity in one member state and 33
Criminal Laws on History: The Case of the European Union not in another, and opinions regarding it can be punished in one member state but not in another. One can easily imagine the consequences of this for the free movement of historians or even for the translation of history books. This final version of the Framework decision also included art. 7 (Constitutional rules and fundamental principles), which gave more guarantees to the member states in terms of protection of freedom of expression. This article was absent in the first drafts and evidently reflects the tensions that characterised the long process of the finalisation of this text: 1. This Framework Decision shall not have the effect of modifying the obligation to respect fundamental rights and fundamental legal principles, including freedom of expression and association, as enshrined in Article 6 of the Treaty on European Union. 2. This Framework Decision shall not have the effect of requiring Member States to take measures in contradiction to fundamental principles relating to freedom of association and freedom of expression, in particular freedom of the press and the freedom of expression in other media as they result from constitutional traditions or rules governing the rights and responsibilities of, and the procedural guarantees for, the press or other media where these rules relate to the determination or limitation of liability. The breadth of free space granted by this quite indeterminate article seemed excessive to the European Commission, which quite unusually inserted into the minutes of the Council a statement which expresses its disagreement as an annex to the Framework decision: However, the Commission considers that Article 7(2) might be interpreted as allowing national law to prevail over Union law. In this connection, the Commission draws attention to the primacy of Union law.88 In this annex one finds not only this statement from the European Commission but also others expressed by some member states, which stress their own points of view and reservations on the implementation of the Framework decision. Among them there is the special concern with communism of some member states. Latvia asserted that the Framework decision should also encompass the crimes committed by communist regimes, and expressed a strong plea for putting both Nazi and communist crimes on the same level.89 Poland also joined the Latvian position on the inclusion of communist crimes,90 but in addition it stressed a particular point concerning the German occupation during the Second World War. It proposed a new criminal conduct, that of “public gross distortion”, with special reference to the use of the expression “Polish concentration camps”, which was considered as “shifting the responsibility for crimes committed for racist and xenophobic reasons . . . from the actual perpetrators thereof”.91 In fact, for many years Polish diplomacy has been engaged in combating the use of the term “Polish concentration camps” to refer to Auschwitz, Treblinka and so on, which surfaces from time to time in the media.92 This expression is certainly wrong and misleading, because it conflates the geographical location of the Nazi concentration camps with their historical perpetrators. But with this statement, the Polish government goes far beyond a diplomatic intervention aiming to redress a mistake, and seeks to make use of judicial power to punish a mistake. 34
Finally, very interesting is the attitude of France, which has declared that it will limit the competence of the Framework decision only to crimes which have been condemned by an international court.93 This position goes against the previous politics of the French memory laws, which have, in fact, experienced a turnaround because of recent domestic debates. In 2008, a parliamentary commission on historical memory, after consulting many historians, philosophers and jurists, declared that, even if the existing French memory laws could not be abolished, no more laws concerning historical events should be introduced, especially if they foresee a criminal prosecution, and invited the French government to enter a statement to art. 1 § 4 of the Framework decision.94
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The adoption of the Framework decision by EU member states According to art. 10 § 1 of the Framework decision, the general deadline for adoption was 28 November 2010, but up to the end of July 2011 many states had yet to do this. Those which have already adopted it give a motley picture, even more than expected looking at the clauses inserted in the text and to the appended statements. A very interesting case is Hungary because it provides clear evidence of the political biases that these laws have reflected. The Framework decision was first adopted in February 2010, in art. 269/C of the Hungarian penal code, which punished with three years’ imprisonment “anyone who in public infringes the dignity of victims of the Holocaust, or denies the reality of, or doubts or trivialises the Holocaust”.95 The law placed heavy limitations on the application of the Framework decision: it was purely a law against Holocaust denial, thus excluding the provisions of art. 1 § 1 (c). The prime minister then was Gordon Bajnai, of the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP). Soon afterwards, the political balance of forces changed, with the victory of the rightwing parties in the elections of 11 and 25 April 2010. The new government was led by Viktor Orbán, leader of the Hungarian Civic Union (Fidesz), which formed a coalition with the Christian Democratic People’s Party (KDNP) and the Movement for a Better Hungary (Jobbik), and one of the first bills approved by the new government was the amendment of art. 269/C,96 which replaced the specific mention of the Holocaust with genocide and other crimes against humanity perpetrated by both Nazi and communist regimes. Neither version indicates which courts are entitled to judge historical events, and restricting clauses, such as those on the incitement to violence or hatred, or disturbing public order, foreseen by the Framework decision, are also absent. Such a norm can therefore lead to abuses. Among the states once behind the “Iron Curtain”, Lithuania approved on 15 June 2010 art. 170– 2 of its penal code,97 which also explicitly mentions communist crimes: it punishes the public condoning, denial or gross trivialisation of genocide and other crimes against humanity or war crimes as defined in legal acts of the European Union or of the Republic of Lithuania (thus meaning their parliaments, a new authority besides the courts) or by a final decision of a Lithuanian or international court. It then adds the aggression of the Soviet Union and Germany against Lithuania during the Second World War, the aforementioned crimes perpetrated by the Soviet Union and by Germany, and finally other serious crimes against its citizens perpetrated in 1990–1991, during the independence struggle against the Soviet Union. These conducts can be punished only 35
Criminal Laws on History: The Case of the European Union if they are deemed threatening, abusive or insulting, or to disturb public order, and the penalty is a fine or restriction of liberty for up to two years. In 2009, Latvia amended its penal code,98 imposing the penalty of no less than five years’ imprisonment or community work on “a person who commits public glorification of genocide, crime against humanity, crime against peace or war crime or public denial or acquittal of implemented genocide, crime against humanity, crime against peace or war crime”.99 The definition of the criminal conducts is a bit different from the Framework decision, notably through the absence of “gross trivialisation” and its replacement by “glorification”. There is no indication of which courts are entitled to rule on historical events. Looking at the statement annexed to the Framework decision, one might be surprised that Latvia does not mention communist crimes: in any case, they must be considered as part of the general formulation. There are also other states which do not explicitly mention Nazi or communist crimes, but which prefer a generic reference without indication of the perpetrators. Slovenia, even before the final approval of the Framework decision, published in May 2008 a new penal code, in which art. 297 on “Public incitement to hatred, violence or intolerance” punishes by imprisonment of up to two years whoever “denies, diminishes the significance of, approves, disregards, ridicules, or advocates genocide, the Holocaust, crimes against humanity, war crimes, aggression or other criminal offences against humanity”.100 The set of criminal conducts is thus enlarged, with the addition of “ridicule”, which endangers cartoonists, for example. Slovakia in 2009 adopted the Framework decision with section 424a of its penal code, which punishes with one to three years’ imprisonment the conduct of condoning, denying or “seriously depreciating” a crime of genocide, a crime against humanity or a war crime defined as such by an international court whose jurisdiction is recognised by the Slovak Republic.101 On 13 April 2011 the Bulgarian National Assembly adopted the Framework decision by making some amendments to the country’s penal code.102 Among them, art. 419a punishes with imprisonment from one to five years the denial, justification or gross trivialisation of crimes against peace and humanity, in cases where these conducts are dangerous or violent or stir up hatred and target individuals or groups of people defined by “race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin”. In March 2011, Germany adopted both the Framework decision and the Additional protocol to the Convention dealing with cybercrime.103 The only change to art. 130 § 1 of the Strafgesetzbuch was the addition of individuals as targets, whereas before only groups were mentioned. This article, as we have seen, only dealt with the Holocaust. Concerning the other crimes against humanity or war crimes, nothing has been changed in the penal code because – as one reads in the preparatory report for this law – they are already covered by art. 140 of the Strafgesetzbuch, which punishes with a prison sentence of up to three years or a fine the public approval of a wide array of crimes, from sexual offences to high treason to counterfeiting of money, including crimes against humanity and war crimes in general.104 36
Romania considers that its legislation fully covers the requirements of the Framework decision, and therefore deems no further legal changes as necessary.105 The same decision has been taken by Portugal.106 In fact, as shown above, both states already punish various forms of denial and related crimes. Malta adopted, on 17 July 2009, an amendment to its penal code107 which closely follows the Framework decision. The new article, 82 B, punishes by imprisonment for a term between eight months to two years Whosoever publicly condones, denies or grossly trivialises genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes directed against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin when the conduct is carried out in a manner (a) likely to incite to violence or hatred against such a group or a member of such a group (b) likely to disturb public order or which is threatening, abusive or insulting.
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The following article, 82 C, includes in the same way crimes against peace, which it defines as (a) the planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances (b) participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts referred to in paragraph (a). This definition copies the wording of article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal. But once more, there is no indication of the other courts which are entitled to define the criminal nature of historical events. Other member states continue in their previous policy of punishing only racist behaviour in general but not specific forms of denial and other related criminal behaviours, thus ignoring the characteristic feature of the Framework decision. The United Kingdom considers that the Framework decision is already covered by the Public Order Act of 1986 and therefore no change is needed.108 A close insight into the British point of view and preoccupation about the risks for freedom of expression can be gained from the debates of the House of Lords in 2007. The upper house expressed concern about the language used in art. 1 for the definition of the criminal conduct, in particular concerning the restrictions of “likely to disturb public order” or “threatening, abusive or insulting” and the vague meaning of “grossly trivialising”.109 Also the prosecution of Holocaust denial was considered problematic, and in its reply, the government asserted that it did not intend to make it a criminal offence in the United Kingdom, as this would represent “an unnecessary infringement of freedom of expression”, unless it was expressed in a “threatening, abusive, or insulting way and incites racial hatred, or is likely to do so”, because in this case it would be already unlawful under the Public Order Act 1986.110 A similar stance has been taken by Ireland,111 on the basis of the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act of 1989, which punishes any oral or written expression or behaviour which are “threat37
Criminal Laws on History: The Case of the European Union ening, abusive or insulting and are intended or, having regard to all the circumstances, are likely to stir up hatred”, and by Sweden, in particular on the base of chap. 16 § 8 of its penal code, which prosecutes many forms of hate speech.112 In Denmark sect. 266 b of the penal code113 is considered to comply with the Framework decision.114 Also the Netherlands has not made any changes to its penal code, as announced in the statement annexed to the minutes of the Framework decision, where it declared that Articles 137c, 137d and 137e of the Dutch Criminal Code give a broad criminalisation of inciting to hate or violence, of insulting or discriminating because of amongst others race and religion. The term “race” includes also the characteristics skin colour, origin and national or ethnic decent. Under the scope of these Articles also fall condoning, denying or grossly trivialising of the international crimes, referred to in Article1 subparagraphs c and d, as far as such a conduct incites to hate or violence, insults or discriminates because of race or religion.115 In May 2011 Finland adopted the Framework decision by an amendment of the penal code which sharpened the punishment of racist and discriminatory conducts, but which did not mention the denial and similar conducts related to genocide and crimes against humanity.116 In Greece, which at present only punishes hate speech and racial discrimination, a justice ministry committee has drafted a bill which covers the provisions of art. 1 § 1 (c) and (d) of the Framework decision, with the condition that the definition of these events as crimes has been established by a national or international court. The foreseen punishment equals a maximum imprisonment of two years and a pecuniary penalty ranging from €1,000–3,000.117 As of July 2011, this bill has not yet been tabled in parliament. Finally, no initiatives or decisions for the adoption of the Framework decision have been taken up to July 2011 by the other member states.
Conclusions The many objections made to the Framework decision during its long history have brought about a final text which gives great latitude to member states in the process of adoption, and, as one can see from the current state of this process, this latitude has been widely exploited. All in all, the original aim of the Framework decision, the harmonisation of the penal provisions of the member states, can be considered to have failed for the moment. But even in its current weakened form, the Framework decision cannot be considered harmless and ineffective. In fact, it has caused the legislation on the punishment of denial and the other related criminal conducts to be adopted by member states which previously ignored it. In addition it has also fuelled the ongoing history wars in eastern Europe between Russia and its neighbours. Under President Vladimir Putin, the memory of the Great Patriotic War has been successfully reshaped as a main founding myth of the new state, together with a certain normalisation of Stalin.118 This vision obviously clashes with the negative vision of the Soviet Union’s victory and of its consequences that is nurtured in the former Soviet but now independent republics and in others states which were 38
behind the “Iron Curtain”. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine has already been dealt with. Another relevant incident in this clash was the removal of the monument to the Soviet soldier from the centre of Tallinn to a military cemetery on 27 April 2007, which aroused the indignation of Estonia’s Russian minority and of the Russian government and public opinion. The idea of dismantling Soviet monuments has also been debated in Latvia119 and in Poland,120 and an additional reason for outrage in Russia was the annual march held in Riga to commemorate the Latvian Waffen-SS, who fought against the Red Army.121
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There was a double response from the Russian side: a law and a commission. United Russia, the party supporting Putin and his successor, Dmitry Medvedev, introduced on 6 May 2009 a bill to the Duma, which punished with a fine of up to 300,000 roubles or imprisonment of up to three years the misrepresentations of the Nuremberg tribunal or of national trials or tribunals based on the Nuremberg tribunal aimed at the total or partial rehabilitation of Nazism and Nazi criminals, or the criminalisation of any actions undertaken by the member states of the anti-Hitler coalition, as well as the approval or denial of Nazi crimes against peace and humanity. The penalties were sharpened (a fine up to 500,000 roubles and five years’ imprisonment) if the culprit was an on-duty official or if these ideas were spread through the mass media.122 A few days later, on 15 May 2009, Medvedev signed a decree for the establishment of a presidential commission “to counter attempts to falsify history to the detriment of Russia’s interests”, among whose 28 members were mostly politicians and officials of Russia’s armed forces and of the intelligence service, with only three historians selected.123 The combination of the two tools could prove very effective in prosecuting unwelcome historical opinions. Both the bill and the commission met strong criticism both in Russia (for instance, from the human rights organisation Memorial and by a group of historians and intellectuals in St Petersburg) and abroad (among others by Liberté pour l’Histoire and by the American Historical Association).124 But the bill, even though it was approved by the Duma’s legislative commission, was not supported in the event by the government because of legal inconsistencies in the text and because it could result in undesirable foreign policy consequences.125 This stance can be interpreted as evidence for a changed attitude on Medvedev’s part towards the evaluation of the Soviet past and his policy of appeasement with Russia’s western neighbours, which can also be seen in his condemnation of Stalin for crimes against his citizens,126 in his visit to Katyń together with Poland’s President Bronisław Komorowski127 and in the fact that in November 2010 the Duma recognised Stalin’s responsibility for this massacre.128 In this new political context, the bill was resubmitted by United Russia to the Duma on 16 April 2010 in a different form, which only punishes “public approval or denial of Nazi crimes against peace and security of humanity determined by the Nuremberg tribunal verdict”, and with the same penalties.129 The punishment of accusations against the Soviet Union has thus disappeared. A positive outcome, for the moment, but, in any case, another piece of evidence for the political bias in history. The Framework decision has thus legitimised and supported the trend of passing criminal legislation on history, and its effects are not over, not only because of the foreseen possibility of the emergence of a new, similar text on crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes committed by all totalitarian regimes, with the communist ones being the clear target, 39
Criminal Laws on History: The Case of the European Union but also because art. 10 § 3 establishes that before 28 November 2013 the European Council shall review the text in the light of the implementation by member states. According to the European Commission’s statement on art. 7 § 2, a conflict can be expected with the member states that have not fully complied with the provisions of the Framework decision. The game is still on and its outcome will depend on the attitude of member states which have up to now resisted. In this context, one must underline the evolution of France’s attitude, which after opening the Pandora’s box of the Gayssot law, had the courage and determination of sealing it with the Accoyer report, listening to the opposition of historians and other members of civil society, and, thus, putting a first stop to the trend of the criminalisation of historical discourse.
Postscript This article was in press when the trend of French politics was reversed once more. On 22 December 2011, the National Assembly approved, on its first reading, a bill which extends the penal provisions of the Gayssot law to those who have “disputed or minimised in an extremist way (“contesté ou minimisé de façon outrancière”) the existence of one or more crimes of genocide defined by art. 211-1 of the penal code and recognised as such by the French law”. This bill has been officially presented as the implementation of the EU Framework decision, but actually it contradicts the French statement annexed to it. This bill was introduced by MP Valérie Boyer of the Union for a Popular Movement, President Sarkozy’s party, and subsequently the Socialist Party declared its intention to reintroduce again to the Senate, where the Left has the majority since the September 2011 elections, the bill on the Armenian genocide approved by the National Assembly in 2006 but repealed by the Senate in May 2011. Political observers have stressed internal political reasons for this new bill, which has provoked a heated reaction from the Turkish government (Natalie Nougayrède, “Coup de froid entre la France et la Turquie”, Le Monde, 22 Dec 2011; Patrick Roger, “Les députés pénalisent la négation des génocides”, Le Monde, 23 Dec 2011; Guillaume Perrier, “Génocide arménien: Ankara sanctionne Paris”, Le Monde, 24–26 Dec 2011). Immediate criticism has also come from the association Liberté pour l’Histoire (Françoise Chandernagor, “Lois mémorielles: un monstre législatif”, Le Figaro, 29 Dec 2011; Pierre Nora, “Lois mémorielles: pour en finir avec ce sport législatif purement français”, Le Monde, 28 Dec 2011).
40
NOTES 1
See the call for rehabilitation of fascism made in 2000 in Italy by postfascist members of the centreright coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi (Luigi Cajani, “L’histoire, les lois, les mémoires: Sur quelques conflits récents en Europe”, Revue française de Pédagogie 165 (2008), 65–76, here 66–68.
2
This was one of the main issues debated at the World Conference against Racism held 2001 in Durban, South Africa. See Michelle E. Lyons, “World Conference against Racism: New Avenues for Slavery Reparations”, Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law w 35 (2002), 1235–1268.
3
For a literature review, see Yaroslav Bilinsky, “Was the Ukrainian Famine of 1932–1933 Genocide?”, Journal of Genocide Research 1 (1999), 147–156.
4
Ukrainian law N° 376-V of 28 Nov 2006, Vidomosti Verkhovnoyi Rady Ukrayinyy 2006, No. 50, 504.
5
Parliament of Canada, Debates of the Senate (Hansard), 2nd Session, 39th Parliament, Vol 144, Issue 63.
6
European Parliament resolution of 23 October 2008 on the commemoration of the Holodomor, the Ukraine artificial famine (1932–1933), Official Journal of the European Union, 21 Jan 2010, C 15 E/78.
7
Gosudarstvennaya Duma, Evening plenary session, 2 Apr 2008.
8
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Doc. 12173, 1 Mar 2010, Commemorating the Victims of the Great Famine (Holodomor) in the former USSR, Appendix 3.
9
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Report of the sitting of 27 Apr 2010.
10
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Resolution 1723 (2010).
11
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Doc. 12173, 1 Mar 2010, Commemorating the Victims of the Great Famine (Holodomor) in the former USSR, Report.
12
“Kyiv court to consider appeal against Yanukovych for his statement on famine of 1930s”, Kyiv Post, 14 Jun 2010.
13
“Kyiv Court of Appeals sees nothing wrong in president’s statement on Holodomor”, Kyiv Post, 8 Dec 2010.
14
“Ukraine court finds Bolsheviks guilty of Holodomor genocide”, RIA Novosti, 13 Jan 2010.
15
“Legal precedent in Ukraine: journalist allowed to doubt Holodomor as genocide”, RIA Novostii 11 Mar 2010.
16
Denial of Holocaust (Prohibition) Law, 5746-1986, art. 1. It was passed by the Knesset on the lst Tammuz, 5746 (8 Jul 1986) and published in Sefer Ha-Chukkim No. 1187 of the 9th Tammuz, 5746 (16 Jul 1986), 196.
17
Loi n°90-615 du 13 juillet 1990 tendant à réprimer tout acte raciste, antisémite ou xénophobe. On the enforcement of this law see La lutte contre le négationnisme. Bilan et perspectives de la loi du 13 juillet 1990 tendant à réprimer tout acte raciste, antisémite ou xénophobe Actes du colloque du 5 juillet 2002 à la cour d’appel de Paris Commission nationale consultative des Droits de l’homme (CNCDH), Paris: La documentation française, 2003.
18
The crimes are the following: “a) Crimes against peace: namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the forego-
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Criminal Laws on History: The Case of the European Union ing; (b) War crimes: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labour or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity; (c) Crimes against humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war; or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.”
42
19
Madeleine Rebérioux, “Le Génocide, le juge et l’historien”, L’Histoire 138 (1990), 92–94.
20
Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris, 1re Chambre, 1re Section, Jugement rendu le 1er Juillet 1981.
21
Madeleine Rebérioux, “Contre la loi Gayssot”, Le Monde, 21 May 1996.
22
Loi n. 2001-70 du 29 janvier 2001 relative à la reconnaissance du génocide arménien de 1915.
23
Assemblée Nationale, 12 Oct 2006: Proposition de loi tendant à réprimer la contestation de l’existence du génocide arménien.
24
Sénat, Séance du mercredi 4 mai 2011, Journal Officiel de la République Française, 5 May 2011.
25
Loi n. 2001-434 du 21 mai 2001 tendant à la reconnaissance, par la France, de la traite et de l’esclavage en tant que crime contre l’humanité, art. 1.
26
Ibid., art. 2.
27
Loi n. 2005-158 du 23 février 2005 portant reconnaissance de la Nation et contribution nationale en faveur des Français rapatriés, art. 1.
28
Ibid., art. 4.
29
See the petition “Colonisation: non à l’enseignement d’une histoire officielle”, Le Monde, 25 Mar 2005. For a detailed reconstruction of these events, see Matthias Middell: “«Ce n’est pas à l’Etat de dire comment on enseigne l’histoire»: Geschichte und Geschichtswissenschaft in Frankreich”, Neue Politische Literaturr 2/3 (2006), 187–202; René Rémond, Quand l’État se mêle de l’histoire, Paris: Stock, 2006; and the dossier “L’État et ses mémoires”, Regards sur l’actualité 325 (2006).
30
Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, Les traites négrières: Essai d’histoire globale, Paris: Gallimard, 2004.
31
Christian Sauvage, “Un prix pour Les traites négrières”, Journal du Dimanche, 12 Jun 2005.
32
Libération, 13 Dec 2005.
33
Béatrice Gurrey, Jean-Baptiste de Montvalon, “Colonisation: Chirac évite un débat au Parlement“, Le Monde, 27 Jan 2006.
34
“L’historien échappe au procès grâce à Elkabbach”, Libération, 4 Feb 2006.
35
“Bundesverfassungsgesetz, mit dem das Verbotsgesetz geändert wird (Verbotsgesetz-Novelle 1992)”, Bundesgesetzblatt für die Republik Österreich, 19 Mar 1992, 743.
36
Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Strafgesetzbuch, section 130, § 3.
37
Thomas Wandres, Die Strafbarkeit des Auschwitz-Leugnens, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2000, 110–112.
38
Loi tendant à réprimer la négation, la minimisation, la justification ou l’approbation du génocide com-
mis par le régime national-socialiste allemand pendant la seconde guerre mondiale, 23 Mar 1995. 39
Chambre des Représentants de Belgique, DOC 51 1284/011, 21 Apr 2005: Projet de Loi modifiant les articles 259bis, 314bis, 504quater, 550bis et 550ter du Code pénal et la loi du 23 mars 1995 tendant à réprimer la négation, la minimisation, la justification ou l’approbation du génocide commis par le régime national-socialiste allemand pendant la seconde guerre mondiale.
40
Kenneth Bertrams and Pierre-Olivier de Broux, “Du négationnisme au devoir de mémoire: l’histoire est-elle prisonnière ou gardienne de la liberté d’expression?”, Revue de Droit de l’Université libre de Bruxelles 35 (2007), 75–134, here 188–119.
41
Loi du 19 juillet 1997 complétant le code pénal en modifiant l’incrimination du racisme et en portant incrimination du révisionnisme et d’autres agissements fondés sur des discriminations illégales.
42
Ordonanţa de urgenţă a Guvernuluii no. 31/2002, art. 1 and 2.
43
Ibid., art. 6.
44
Loi fédéral 18 Jun 1993, in force since 1 Jan 1995.
45
Lei n.º 59/2007 de 4 de Setembro Vigésima terceira alteração ao Código Penal, aprovado pelo Decreto-Lei n.º 400/82, de 23 de Setembro.
46
Ley Orgánica 10/1995, de 23 de noviembre, del Código Penal.
47
“Negar el genocidio entra en el ámbito de la libertad de expresión, según el Constitucional”, El País, 17 Nov 2006. For the full text of the sentence, see Tribunal Constitucional de España, STC 235/2007.
48
Ustawa z dnia 18 grudnia 1998 r. o Instytucie Pamięci Narodowej – Komisji Ścigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu, art. 1 and 2.
49
Ibid., art. 55.
50
Zákon ze dne 25. října 2000, kterým se mění zákon č. 140/1961 Sb., trestní zákon, ve znění pozdějších předpisů.
51
Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Les assassins de la mémoire: Un “Eichmann de papier”et autres essais sur le révisionnisme, Paris: La Découverte, 1991; François Dubuisson, “L’incrimination générique du négationnisme est-elle conciliable avec le droit à la liberté d’expression?”, Revue de Droit de l’Université libre de Bruxelles 35 (2007), 135–195; Emanuela Fronza, “The Criminal Protection of Memory: Some Observations About the Offence of Holocaust Denial”, in Ludovic Hennebel and Thomas Hochmann (eds), Genocide Denials and the Law, Oxford and New York: Oxford UP (2011), 155–181.
52
Henry R. Huttenbach, “From the Editor: Towards a Conceptual Definition of Genocide”, Journal of Genocide Research 4/2 (2002), 167–175, here 167.
53
Scott Straus, “Contested Meanings and Conflicting Imperatives: A Conceptual Analysis of Genocide”, Journal of Genocide Research 3:3 (2001), 349–375.
54
Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, New Haven: Yale UP, 2007.
55
Anthony C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities, London: Bloomsbury, 2006.
56
Emanuela Fronza, “Profili penalistici del negazionismo”, Rivista italiana di diritto e procedura penale, n.s., 42 (1999), 1034–1074, here 1050, 1061–1062.
57
See, for instance, the Declaration Against Racism and Xenophobia issued 1986 by the European
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Criminal Laws on History: The Case of the European Union Parliament, the Council, the Representatives of the Member States, meeting within the Council, and the Commission (Official Journal of the European Communities, 25 Jun 1986, C 158/01, 1–3), and the recent Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, art. 67 (2010).
44
58
“Joint Action of 15 July 1996 adopted by the Council on the basis of Article K.3 of the Treaty on the European Union concerning action to combat racism and xenophobia (96/443/JHA)“, Official Journal of the European Communities, 24 Jul 1996, L185/5, 5–7.
59
Ibid., Title I A.
60
“Proposal for a Council Framework Decision on combating racism and xenophobia”, Official Journal of the European Communities, 26 Mar 2002, C 75 E, 269–273.
61
Source: Council of Europe, Treaty Office.
62
For some broad information on this phase of the negotiations on the Framework decision, see Marc Bell, “European Union Strategies to Combat Racism and Xenophobia as a Crime”, in Rainer Nickel, Andrea Coomber, Marc Bell, Tansy Hutchinson and Karima Zahi, European Strategies to Combat Racism and Xenophobia as a Crime, Brussels: European Network Against Racism, 2003, 31 – 38.
63
Justice and Home Affairs, Press Release, 2 Jun 2005: “No agreement on the framework decision on combating racism and xenophobia at the Justice and Home Affairs Council.” (www.eu2005.lu/en/actualites/ communiques/2005/06/02jai-rx/index.html)l (all URLs in this article were last accessed on 31 Jul 2011).
64
Franco Papitto, “Razzismo, la UE non decide”, la Repubblica, 24 Feb 2005; “Direttiva UE sul razzismo. Castelli: la blocco per la Fallaci”, la Repubblica, 3 Jun 2005; Giacomo Galeazzi, “Il rinvio a giudizio per vilipendio dell’islam della giornalista. Castelli: dopo il «caso Fallaci» stop alla direttiva sul razzismo”, La Stampa, 3 Jun 2005; Ivo Caizzi, “UE e razzismo, stop italiano legato al caso della Fallaci“, Corriere della Sera, 3 Jun 2005.
65
Ian Traynor, “Germany bids to outlaw denial of Holocaust across continent”, The Guardian, 16 Jan 2007.
66
Timothy Garton Ash, “A blanket ban on Holocaust denial would be a serious mistake”, The Guardian, 18 Jan 2007.
67
“Historiker Jäckel: Holocaust-Leugner mit Ignoranz strafen, interview on Deutschlandradio”, 1 Feb 2007 (www.dradio.de/dkultur/sendungen/kulturinterview/588968).
68
Italy’s position on this issue is quite erratic. Roberto Castelli, who had in 2005 rejected the proposal, is a member of the Northern League (Lega Nord), which was part of the centre-right coalition, while Clemente Mastella was in 2007 member of the centre-left government, but Zypries’ initiative was warmly supported also by Franco Frattini, European Commissioner for justice, freedom and security and vice-president of the European Commission, member of the House of Freedoms (Casa delle Libertà), which was part of the centre-right coalition (European Union, press release 26 Jan 2007: Statement from Vice-president Frattini, on behalf of the European Commission, on the occasion of the International Day of Commemoration of the victims of the Holocaustt (27 January)).
69
“Noi storici contro la legge che punisce chi nega la Shoah”, l’Unità, 23 Jan 2007. The petition was initiated by Marcello Flores, Simon Levis Sullam and EnzoTraverso.
70
Legge n. 205/93, “Misure urgenti in materia di discriminazione razziale, etnica e religiosa”, Gazzetta Ufficiale, 26 Jun 1993, n. 148.
71
Alberto Custodero, “Mastella presenta la sua legge: 12 anni per apologia della Shoah”, la Repubblica,
25 Jan 2007. 72
Pierre Nora, “Liberté pour l’histoire!”, Le Monde, 10 Oct 2008.
73
General Assembly of the ICHS, Beijing, 17–18 September 2007 (www.cish.org).
74
“AHA Statement on the Framework Decision of the Council of the European Union on the Fight against Racism and Xenophobia”, Perspectives 45/8 (2007).
75
Council of the European Union, 8544/07, DROIPEN 43, Brussels, 17 Apr 2007.
76
Cécile Barbier, Dalila Ghailani and Philippe Pochet, “European Briefing: Digest”, Journal of European Social Policyy 17 (2007), 271–284, here 277.
77
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Resolution 1481 (2006): Need for international condemnation of crimes of totalitarian communist regimes (adopted on 25 Feb 2006).
78
House of the Lords, Committee Office: The Lord Grenfell, Chairman of the Select Committee on the European Union, to the Rt Hon Vernon Coaker MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Home Office, 19 Apr 2007.
79
Sandra Kalniete, “Divergences within European politics with regard to communist totalitarianism”, in Peter Jambrek (ed.), Crimes Committed by Totalitarian Regimes, Ljubljana: Slovenian Presidency of the Council of the European Union, 2008, 245–250; Girts Valdis Kristovskis, “The need for a reappraisal of the European history”, ibid., 223–225.
80
Ronaldas Racinskas, “Historical Justice for Europe: Why, When And How?”, in Jambrek, Crimes Committed by Totalitarian Regimes, 13–19; Dainius Žalimas, “The Need for Equal Treatment of Nazi and Soviet Crimes”, ibid., 81–84.
81
Emanuelis Zingeris, “Transition from the “Gulag Empire” to the Western Civilisation: Issues of Remembrance and Education”, in Jambrek, Crimes Committed by Totalitarian Regimes, 255–258.
82
Declaration of the European Parliament on the proclamation of 23 August as European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism, Official Journal of the European Union, 14 Jan 2010, C 8/ E 57–59.
83
European Parliament legislative resolution of 29 Nov 2007 on the proposal for a Council Framework Decision on combating certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia by means of criminal law (11522/2007 – C6-0246/2007 – 2001/0270 (CNS)).
84
Council Framework decision 2008/913/JHA of 28 Nov 2008 on combating certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia by means of criminal law, Official Journal of the European Union, 6 Dec 2008, L 328/55–L 328/58. Comprehensive analysis of this text can be found in: Laurent Pech, “The Law of Holocaust Denial in Europe. Toward a (qualified) EU-wide Criminal Prohibition”, in Hennebel and Hochmann (eds), Genocide Denials, 185–234; Paolo Lobba, “La lotta al razzismo nel diritto penale europeo dopo Lisbona: Osservazioni sulla decisione quadro 2008/913/GAI e sul reato di negazionismo”,
[email protected] 3 (2011), forthcoming; and, with special attention to the comparison with the Belgian laws, in Bernadette Renauld, “La decision-cadre 2008/913/JAI du Conseil de l’Union européenne: du nouveau en matière de lute contre le racism?”, Revue trimestrielle des droits de l’hommee 21/81 (2010), 119–140.
85
“Germany assumes in particular that, for the purposes of implementation, the term “öffentliche Friede” as used in the relevant corresponding provisions of German criminal law is covered by the term “public order” as employed in Article 1 paragraph 2 of the Framework Decision” (Council of the European Un-
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45
Criminal Laws on History: The Case of the European Union ion, Interinstitutional File: 2001/0270 (CNS), 15699/1/08 REV 1 DROIPEN 91, Brussels, 25 Nov 2008, 5).
46
86
Public Order Act of 1986, art. 18 § 1.
87
See the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, art. 11.
88
Council of the European Union, Interinstitutional File: 2001/0270(CNS), 15699/1/08 REV 1, DROIPEN 91, Brussels, 25 Nov 2008, 4.
89
Council of the European Union, Interinstitutional File: 2001/0270(CNS), 16351/1/08 REV 1 DROIPEN 94, Brussels, 26 Nov 2008, 5–7.
90
Council of the European Union, Interinstitutional File: 2001/0270(CNS), 15699/1/08 REV 1 DROIPEN 91, Brussels, 25 Nov 2008, 4.
91
Council of the European Union, Interinstitutional File: 2001/0270(CNS), 16351/1/08 REV 1 DROIPEN 94, Brussels, 26 Nov 2008, 8.
92
Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej, False terminology in the foreign media used in reference to Nazi German concentration camps in occupied Poland: Report by the Information Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland; Government information on Polish foreign policy presented by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Prof. Adam Daniel Rotfeld, at the session of the Sejm on 21 Jan 2005.
93
“France declares, in accordance with Article 1(4), that it will make punishable the act of denying or grossly trivialising the crimes referred to in paragraph 1(c) and/or (d) only if the crimes referred to in these paragraphs have been established by a final decision of an international court” (Council of the European Union, Interinstitutional File: 2001/0270(CNS), 16351/1/08 REV 1 DROIPEN 94, Brussels, 26 Nov 2008, 7).
94
Assemblée Nationale, Rapport d’information fait en application de l’article 145 du règlement au nom de la mission d’information sur les questions mémorielles, Président-Rapporteur M. Bertrand Accoyer, (enregistré à la Présidence de l’Assemblée nationale le 18 novembre 2008), 181, 184.
95
2010. évi XXXVI. törvény a Büntető Törvénykönyvről szóló 1978. évi IV. törvény módosításáról.
96
2010. évi LVI. törvény a Büntető Törvénykönyvről szóló 1978. évi IV. törvény módosításáról (entered into force on 24 Jul 2010).
97
Baudžiamojo kodekso 95 straipsnio pakeitimo bei papildymo, kodekso papildymo 170-2 straipsniu ir kodekso priedo papildymo įstatymas, 2010 m. birželio15 d. Nr. XI-901, Vilnius.
98
Grozījumi Krimināllikumā, 74.1 pants. Genocīda, nozieguma pret cilvēci, nozieguma pret mieru un kara nozieguma attaisnošana (adopted on 21 May 2009 and entered into force on 1 Jul 2009).
99
The English translation of the Latvian penal code is provided by the governmental Tulkošanas un terminoloģijas centrs (Translation and Terminology Centre).
100
Ukaz o razglasitvi Kazenskega zakonika (KZ-1), Razglašam Kazenski zakonik (KZ-1), ki ga je sprejel Državni zbor Republike Slovenije na seji 20. maja 2008, Uradni list RS, št. 55/2008 z dne 4. 6. 2008.
101
Zákon č. 300/2005 Z. Z. z 20. mája 2005 Trestný Zákon v znení zákona č. 650/2005 Z. z., v znení zákona č. 692/2006 Z. z., v znení zákona č. 218/2007 Z. z., v znení zákona č. 491/2008 Z. z., v znení zákona č. 497/2008 Z. z., v znení zákona č. 498/2008 Z. z., v znení zákona č. 257/2009 Z. z.
102
Darzhaven vestnikk 33 (26 Apr 2011). The amendments entered into force on 27 May 2011.
103
Gesetz zur Umsetzung des Rahmenbeschlusses 2008/913/JI des Rates vom 28. November 2008
zur strafrechtlichen Bekämpfung bestimmter Formen und Ausdrucksweisen von Rassismus und Fremdenfeindlichkeit und zur Umsetzung des Zusatzprotokolls vom 28. Januar 2003 zum Übereinkommen des Europarats vom 23. November 2001 über Computerkriminalität betreffend die Kriminalisierung mittels Computersystemen begangener Handlungen rassistischer und fremdenfeindlicher Art, 16 Mar 2011. 104
Deutscher Bundestag – 17. Wahlperiode, Drucksache 17/3124: Entwurf eines Gesetzes zur Umsetzung des Rahmenbeschlusses 2008/913/JI des Rates vom 28. November 2008 zur strafrechtlichen Bekämpfung bestimmter Formen und Ausdrucksweisen von Rassismus und Fremdenfeindlichkeit und zur Umsetzung des Zusatzprotokolls vom 28. Januar 2003 zum Übereinkommen des Europarats vom 23. November 2001 über Computerkriminalität betreffend die Kriminalisierung mittels Computersystemen begangener Handlungen rassistischer und fremdenfeindlicher Art, Begründung A, III.
105
Personal letter from the Ministry of Justice, Department of European Affairs, 26 Oct 2010.
106
Personal letter from the Ministério da Justiça, Direcção-Geral da Política de Justiça, 3 Aug 2011.
107
Act No. XI of 2009: An Act further to amend the Criminal Code, Cap. 9.
108
Personal letter from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Europe Directorate, 20 Jan 2010.
109
House of the Lords, Committee Office: The Lord Grenfell, Chairman of the Select Committee on the European Union, to the Rt Hon Vernon Coaker MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Home Office, 19 Apr 2007, 24 May 2007.
110
House of Lords Debates, vol. 691, 20 Apr 2007, col. WA 97.
111
Personal letter from the Department of Justice and Law Reform, 22 Sept 2010.
112
Regeringskansliet, Justititie departementet Sverige, Underrättelse om nationella åtgärder för att uppfylla Sveriges förpliktelser i Europeiska unionen, letter to the Secretary of the Council of the European Union and to the Secretary of the European Commission, 20 Sept 2010.
113
(1) “Any person who publicly or with the intention of dissemination to a wide circle of people makes a statement or imparts other information threatening, insulting or degrading a group of persons on account of their race, colour, national or ethnic origin, belief or sexual orientation, shall be liable to a fine, simple detention or imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years. (2) When handing down the punishment, it is to be considered as an aggravating circumstance that the statement is in the nature of propaganda.”
114
Justitsministeriet, Civil- og Politiafdelingen, Supplerende samlenotat vedrørende de sager der forventes behandlet på rådsmødet (retlige og indre anliggender) og mødet i de blandede udvalg på ministerniveau med deltagelse henholdsvis af Norge og Island og af Schweiz den 27.–28. november 2008, 6 Nov 2008.
115
Council of the European Union, Interinstitutional File: 2001/0270(CNS), 15699/1/08 REV 1 DROIPEN 91, Brussels, 25 Nov 2008, 6.
116
Laki 511/2011 rikoslain muuttamisesta Annettu Helsingissä 13 päivänä toukokuuta 2011, Suomen Säädöskokoelma, 20 May 2011.
117
Athanasios Chouliaras, “Transposing the Framework Decision on Combating Racism and Xenophobia into the Greek Legal Order”, Eurocrim 1 (2011), 39–44.
118
Maria Ferretti, “La memoria spezzata. La Russia e la guerra”, Italia contemporanea 245 (2006), 525–
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47
Criminal Laws on History: The Case of the European Union 565.
48
119
“WWII veterans call for removal of Soviet monument in Riga”, The Baltic Times, 22 Jan 2007.
120
“Poland should also remove Soviet monuments – Katyn Committee”, RIA Novosti, 28 Apr 2007.
121
Tony Paterson, “Thousands pay tribute to Latvia’s fallen Nazi troops”, The Independent, 17 Mar 2010.
122
Gosudarstvennaya Duma, Zakonoproekt № 197582-5: O vnesenii izmenenij v Ugolovnyj kodeks Rossijskoj Federacii i v stat’ju 151 Ugolovno-processual’nogo kodeksa Rossijskoj Federacii (po voprosu ustanovlenija ugolovnoj otvetstvennosti za posjagatel’stvo na istoričeskuju pamjat’ v otnošenii sobytij, imevšich mesto v period Vtoroj mirovoj vojny); Nikolay Kaposov, “Le débat russe sur les lois mémorielles”, Le débatt 158 (2010), 50–59, here 50.
123
Ibid., 55.
124
Ibid., 56.
125
Boris Vishnevsky, “Za obelenje černych pjaten”, Novaya Gazeta, 25 Jan 2010.
126
Andrew Osborn, “Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev condemns Stalin”, The Telegraph, 30 Oct 2009.
127
“Poland’s Komorowski to visit Katyn massacre site via Moscow”, RIA Novosti, 8 Apr 2011.
128
Jan Cienski, “Medvedev visit marks turn in Polish relations”, Financial Times, 5 Dec 2010.
129
“United Russia party seeks to criminalise denial of Nazi crimes”, RIA Novosti, 30 Mar 2010; Nikolay Koposov, Pamjat’ strogogorežima: Istorija i politika v Rossii, Moskva: NLO, 2011, 243.
1 In February 2007 the prestigious Italian publisher Il Mulino released Italian-Israeli historian Ariel Toaff’s book Pasque di sangue: Ebrei d’Europa e omicidi ritualii (Bloody Easter: European Jews and Ritual Murders). The book received a glowing, full-page accolade from the Italian historian Sergio Luzzatto in the Corriere della Seraa shortly before its release. It was praised as a gesture of “incredible intellectual courage” and as a brilliant historical achievement.1 Luzzatto, nevertheless, remained alone in his praise. In the days that followed the publication of the book and, as they admitted, after a merely superficial reading, prominent experts on medieval, modern and Jewish history such as Diego Quaglioni, Adriano Prosperi, Giacomo Todeschini and Marina Cafiero commented on it in the pages of the most important (and other less important) daily and weekly Italian newspapers.2 Across the board the book was condemned in no uncertain terms. How can the vehement tone that marked the criticism of Bloody Easterr be explained? Well, in his book Ariel Toaff questioned a deeply rooted, central assumption in medieval anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism studies, namely that the admissions by Jewish defendants to having practised blood rituals were, without exception, made at the suggestion of Inquisition judges and elicited by means of torture. Having been subject to torture, the unfortunate victims were prepared to admit anything their judges wanted to hear. Toaff challenged this assump-
How Much Does Historical Truth Still Matter?
Marina Cattaruzza Berne University
How Much Does Historical Truth Still Matter? tion. On the basis of an impressive reconstruction of various rituals of Christian and Jewish heretical sects in which the prohibited substance of “blood” played a central role, he claimed that among marginalised, sectarian groups of Ashkenazi Jews, the blood of Christians (usually acquired for a fee directly from impoverished but very much living Christians) was used for Easter rites intended to damn the Christian oppressors. In a second article in the Corriere della Sera, Sergio Luzzatto argued on Toaff’s behalf, saying that a historian should not consider certain statements as a priorii wrong just because they were made under torture, especially if such statements are verified in other sources.3 But the reaction to Toaff’s arguments was so vehement that the author himself withdrew the book after a week. Among others, the author’s father, Elio Toaff, former head rabbi of Rome’s Jewish congregation, distanced himself publicly from his son’s argument. Ariel Toaff’s employer, the University of Bar Ilan in Tel Aviv, suffered the withdrawal of several million dollars in research money from private donors and the academic senate considered having their controversial colleague dismissed. This threat nevertheless has remained unfulfilled.4 In the meantime Toaff has republished the volume, after reformulating some of his arguments more precisely so as to avoid misunderstandings. His central thesis remains the same: in heretic Jewish sects the blood of Christians (sold to them illegally by people in need of money) was used in rituals held to damn the Christian oppressor. It cannot be excluded, so Toaff argues, that in a small number of cases the blood used was that of Christian victims. He is nevertheless not in a position to say anything about the frequency of such cases. On the whole, this hypothesis of actual ritual murder is presented much more carefully in the new edition and the focus is shifted more to the therapeutic and ritual use of human blood in both Christian and Jewish cultures during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In the introduction to the new edition, Toaff writes: “The central theses presented in the first edition remain unchanged. I present them again here in this new edition and accept the responsibility for doing so.”5 In his afterword, in which he summarises the criticism of his opponents, Toaff articulates an important position on which he believes the vehemence of the reaction to the first edition was based, namely that his book challenges a dyed-in-the-wool stereotype: this consists in the assumption that through history all Jews have been without exceptions passive and resigned victims.6 Toaff’s theses in fact challenge the assumption that victims are qua definition completely innocent. It is at this point that Toaff’s case, which affects the Ashkenazi Jewish communities of the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, touches on the central focus of this article, in which I want to examine to what degree the currently widespread attribution of victim status to groups of people in the past can be a hindrance to an unbiased historical analysis. In other words, to what degree do historians tend to adopt in their historical narrative what I want to call here a “moral narrative”?
50
2 The relationship of historical writing to the “truth” is by definition an ambivalent one.7 Historical practice is located in the site of tension between a critical examination of the sources and a narrative reconstruction, in which the historian fills the documentary gaps and interstices with his own imagination. That the claim to the truthfulness of history can only be limited and that the science of history is unable to recreate bygone reality was already discussed by Johann Gustav Droysen in 1857 in his lecture on “Historik”, in which he concluded that we are only able to recognise those elements of the past that are still present in one way or the other in the present.8 Of course, the discussion of the relationship of the science of history to the past has evolved ever since and a whole palette of positions on the existence or nonexistence of a past reality beyond its historical reconstruction has emerged. Most historians involved in empirical research agree even today that there is a relationship between a historical narrative and a past reality, while this relationship is denied for the most part by philosophers of history and epistemologists. As even Richard Rorty, one of the most prominent antirealists, commented several years ago, albeit as an aside at a conference, “What harm is done when historians rely on the commonsense assumption that there is a historical reality out there to ‘get right’?”9 In other words, the answer to the question of the existence of a historical reality does little to resolve the problem of the “truth postulate” or, in more modest terms, the “objectivity postulate”.
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The historical sciences can hardly do away with any normative claim to truth or objectivity, without calling into question their right to exist as such. But the claim to “historical truth” is always seen in a specific context and implemented for achieving specific goals. In a cursory examination of the Historical Abstracts database for example, since the beginning of the 1990s the phrase “historical truth” is used – as was to be expected – most often in connection with the revision of obsolete historical narratives in countries in transition from socialism or in connection with issues of “justice”, “reconciliation”, the repatriation of goods and compensation for injustices suffered, that is, the definition of truth relates to phenomena or aims which lay outside the proper field of historical research. Since “historical truth” is always dependent on the context and perspective, it is, in my opinion, inevitable that the contemporary “moralisation of the past”, as studied among others by Pascal Bruckner and Heinrich Lübbe,10 also affects historiographical practice, namely in the sense that elements of the prevailing moral discourse are absorbed, with little or no reflection, into the historical narrative and without them being sufficiently documented in the sources. The following considerations are therefore to be understood as a contribution to the critique of historical writing in the era of a hegemonic moralising discourse. The point is not to try to solve the problem of the moral interpretation of historical phenomena,11 but much more modestly to examine how historical narratives are affected by existing practices of victimisation and self-victimisation. In past times, historical writing took place mostly in interaction with national or ideological discourses;12 under such conditions objectivity was, of course, subject to distortions too. These distortions have so far been studied in the past more frequently than has been the case for the “moral narrative”, which is taken for granted today. 51
How Much Does Historical Truth Still Matter? 3 The ambivalence of many historiographical categories is something historians need to recognise, so that they can better cope with the inevitable limits to their own normative ideals.13 But this certainly does not mean refraining from having any such ideals at all. As the late German historian Thomas Nipperdey once said, “That, which we are able to achieve, is not a completely objective history but a more objective history.”14 The category of “understanding”, which implies that the historian does his utmost to gain the mindset of the historical subjects living in the period he is dealing with, has been repeatedly challenged because of its “epistemological relativism”.15 The aspiration to “historical understanding”, namely, is challenged by the fact that historians will never be able to fully bridge the gap between themselves and people acting in the past. The moral relativism implied by “understanding” has also been challenged, albeit less frequently, by Geoffrey Barraclough, for instance, who has accused historicism of “amorality”.16 This accusation cannot be ignored outright. In his/her attempt to determine the motivation of historical actors for their handling in the past, the historian cannot avoid developing at least a partial justification for their acts. It is notable that avowed historicists like Thomas Nipperdey and Wolfgang Mommsen were well aware of such moral dilemmas and called for the suspension of the need to “understand” in some extreme cases such as the Holocaust (or the Armenian genocide or the Stalinist terror).17 This is obviously not a methodologically satisfactory solution, since these extreme cases must first be recognised as such and defined as “radically evil”, above and beyond “normal evil”. In his important study on the Reserve Police Battalion 101, Christopher Browning made the following statement on the ambiguity of understanding: “Explaining is not excusing; understanding is not forgiving. Not trying to understand the perpetrators in human terms would make impossible not only this study but any history of Holocaust perpetrators that sought to go beyond one-dimensional caricature.”18 It is nevertheless true, as the political scientist Paolo Portinaro found, that the Holocaust is also the source of the crisis of historicism. This is not only because it is the “extreme case” par excellence but because this “civilisation breach”19 also radically questioned the idea of human progress. Besides, in comparisons between National Socialism and Communism it is often stressed that Communist crimes (as, for example, the elimination of “Kulaks”) were committed to achieve rational aims: consequently they were “understandable” and therefore incomparable with the national socialist ones.20 Besides, we are still lacking a systematical and comparative analysis of the specific aspects of the Holocaust which are not comparable with other genocides or mass murders.21 In taking note of this, I am not arguing against the singular character of the Holocaust even compared with other genocides.22 My point is rather that historians need a sharper analytical distinction between the elements which made up the unique character of the Holocaust and the comparable ones. In a 2006 essay I stated: “The ‘uniqueness’ of Shoah is . . . based on the simultaneous occurrence of genocidal elements (and first of all of genocidal will) in an unprecedented radical form. However, the single murderous elements are recognisable in other cases of genocide as well.”23 52
The German “Historikerstreit” (historians’ quarrel) of 1986 also has at its core the (moral and epistemological) Janus-headed nature of understanding. The scandal of Ernst Nolte’s argument was that, in his reasoning, the attempt to make Hitler’s deeds and primarily the murder of the European Jews “understandable” became recognisable. The most often quoted passage from the article “Die Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will” (The past what won’t go away) is, in fact, as follows:
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But nevertheless, the following question must be admissible, indeed it appears inevitable: did the Nazis, did Hitler, perform an “Asian” act perhaps only because they considered themselves and their own as potential or actual victims of such an “Asian” act? Was not the “gulag archipelago” prior to Auschwitz? Was not the “class genocide” of the Bolsheviks the logical and factual predecessor of the Nazi “racial genocide”? Are Hitler’s most secret acts not also to be explained in terms of his inability to forget [the Chinese torture of] the “rat cage”? Did Auschwitz perhaps have its origins in a past that would not go away?24 The historical unacceptability of these statements has been discussed innumerable times. It was, however, rarely pointed out that the emotional response that Nolte’s article met with was based on the fear of, even for one second, identifying with Hitler’s (admittedly paranoid) motives; it would have made the radically evil in some way “understandable”, shortening our distance from it. With his ambiguous and unclear formulations, Nolte had only himself to blame for the scandal that followed the publication of his theses. However, another protagonist in this historical dispute, Andreas Hillgruber, is an entirely different case. Hillgruber, a traditional historian of foreign policy and undoubtedly one of the best experts on the Second World War, had published shortly before the outbreak of the controversy surrounding Nolte’s theses a booklet entitled Zweierlei Untergang: Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europäischen Judentums (Double downfall: the dismantling of the German Reich and the end of European Jewry).25 Therein Hillgruber discussed in two separate and quite disparate chapters: first, the expulsion of the German population from the eastern territories and, second, the murder of the European Jews by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Hillgruber was lumped together with Ernst Nolte and thus drawn into the Historikerstreit. The massive attacks that he had to suffer can nevertheless only be explained in part as a result of his awkward correlation of two themes or his untimely sympathies for the German civilian population of the eastern territories. In his reconstruction of how the resettlement of millions of Germans came about, Hillgruber included not only Hitler’s war crimes but also Allied foreign policy goals (including those of the Soviet Union) and the policies of the Polish and Czechoslovak governments-in-exile. On the one hand, Hillgruber focused his argument on the category of the intentionality of historical subjects, which is today considered rather unfashionable. On the other hand, in his reconstruction of events he questioned the generally accepted causal link between “collective guilt” and “collective punishment”; his argument was that although the crimes of the German occupying forces in the Second World War were singular in their atrocity, they were not the main or only reason for the expulsion of the German population. In doing so, Hillgruber challenged a narrative that even today is very difficult to analyse critically, namely the historical narrative according to which the mass violence against the German population in the last phase of the Second World War and their expulsion from the Eastern territories are attributed exclusively to atrocities perpetrated previously by the Germans. 53
How Much Does Historical Truth Still Matter? Even today, when the state of research on the mass resettlements is much more advanced than in the mid-1980s, it is difficult to challenge explicitly such “moral coherence”, in spite of the fact that there is so little evidence for it in the historical documentation.26 In other cases beyond the one being discussed here (the more or less violent expulsion of the German population from parts of eastern central Europe), the category of “reaction” to the opposite party’s crimes is often used more or less consciously to justify atrocities against them, the “reactive” crimes of course being classified as less serious than those that provoked reaction. Such an assessment, which frequently flows into historical narratives as well, does not often stand the test of close analysis. Apparently, not only in the public sphere but also in historical discourse is it difficult to differentiate between the moral condemnation of crimes and the cognitive reconstruction of historical processes. In other words, it is not easy to resist the temptation to attribute to historical events a certain sense of justice, to use justice (inappropriately) as a historical category.
4 Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, a wave of new compensation negotiations for the various victims of National Socialism in the formerly communist countries has appeared. For the first time since the Second World War, victims of National Socialism who found themselves behind the “Iron Curtain” were included in such considerations by the Federal Republic of Germany.27 The opening of such proceedings, which were essentially a partial retribution for the victims from these countries commensurate with the payments made by the FRG to victims living in Israel and Western European countries between the 1950s and the 1970s, naturally contributed to reinforce the victim’s perspective when considering past events. Historians like Peter Novick, Omer Bartov and Tony Judt28 have stressed, each with their own accent, that the figure of the “freedom fighter”, which in the immediate postwar period played an essential role in social normalisation and stabilisation processes in both Eastern and Western Europe and in the USA as well,29 has been replaced by the figure of the “victim”, with all its archetypal characteristics of passivity, innocence and purity. Such a transformation is related to a broader conversion of values which occurred in Europe in the period after the Second World War and which led to an emphasis on civil and pacifist virtues as a reaction to the atrocities of both world conflicts.30 History writing today also tends to emphasise the representation of the suffering of the victims in place of the historical reconstruction of decision-making processes and structural conditions that could contribute to understanding this suffering. Such an emphasis inevitably leads to historical processes being interpreted in the simple dichotomy of victims vs. perpetrators. The Holocaust specialist Omer Bartov warned of the consequences of such a simplification a few years ago and demanded that historians not only refuse this simple model but also pointed out the effects that the use of such simplifications had produced in the past.31 Be that as it may, victimisation and self-victimisation today enjoys a great deal of popularity in public discourse, as demonstrated in how the past is being dealt with in the former communist countries. In a newer contribution on the subject, entitled “How to Deal with the Past”, Anatoly M. Khazanov and Stanley G. Payne define the following trends: 54
The status of victimhood was clearly recognised immediately after World War II, with respect to the victims of the Axis, but its meaning was changed and expanded later in the twentieth century, as the new ideology of political correctness replaced the class struggle with its own categories of victimisers and victims. Meanwhile, quite apart from the “victimist ideology” of political correctness, a constant revision of national narratives has taken place, with an ever-growing concern to achieve victimhood status, even on the part of countries that historically were primarily victimisers. Whenever possible, historical perpetration is downplayed, while, conversely, new claims of victimisation of quite a different order acquire growing importance.32
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In Poland, the publication of a study by the Polish-American historian Jan Gross on a bloody pogrom perpetrated by Poles in the town of Jedwabne in 1941 led to violent attacks, threats and lawsuits against the author;33 this is just a further example of how difficult it is for a national community to confront a deeply ingrained victim identity and to admit the darker side of its own history. The purpose of these reflexions has been, as I have already mentioned, to point out some of the potential problems that historical research may encounter in facing the dominant victim-andperpetrator dichotomy of public discourse. I hope that the examples have made my point clear; in the following I will briefly recapitulate my theories, concluding that: First, historical research has always been practised in a context marked by nonscientific, nonscholarly factors. This has been the case with national histories, the history of the labour movement or the history of various discriminated groups. But the affirmation of counternarratives or complementary narratives was easier in those cases than in the current public victimisation discourse. This latter discourse claims a higher and more universal moral legitimacy. This makes it all the easier for historical analyses that question even partial aspects of this construct to be accused of moral unworthiness. Second, the high moral authority attributed to the victim’s perspective creates a situation in which other values, in their limited scope perfectly respectable and legitimate, such as the specific morality of the quest for knowledge, are put at risk. To use Max Weber’s words, in the “battle of gods” (that is, of competing values) the winner may be decided before the debate begins. Criteria specific to the historical sciences, such as the ideal of a nuanced reconstruction of singular historic processes, or a sceptical and relativist attitude towards received knowledge, or the willingness to reconsider and reinterpret given facts, may all be massively affected. Finally, the higher good involved in the creation of a common value system intended to contribute to communication in a globalised world34 could lead to “historic truth” being subordinated completely to other “higher” values, thereby losing its status as a desirable scholarly ideal. Therefore, I return to my initial question to which I admittedly have no answer: “How much does historical truth still matter?”
55
How Much Does Historical Truth Still Matter? NOTES 1
Sergio Luzzatto, “Quelle Pasque di Sangue: Il fondamentalismo ebraico nelle tenebre del Medioevo”, Corriere della Sera, 6 Feb 2007.
2
“Gli storici demoliscono il libro di Ariel Toaff che dà credito alla calunnia antisemita degli omicidi rituali”, Informazione Corretta, 9 Feb 2007, www.informazionecorretta.it/main.php?mediaId=999920&sez=120 &id=19382, accessed 2 Feb 2011; Anna Esposito and Diego Quaglioni, “Pasque di sangue, le due facce del pregiudizio”, Corriere della Sera, 11 Feb 2007.
3
Sergio Luzzatto, “La storia divisa”, Corriere della Sera, 26 Feb 2007.
4
Davide Frattini, “L’Università difende Ariel Toaff”, Corriere della Sera, 14 Feb 2007.
5
Ariel Toaff, Pasque di sangue: Ebrei d’Europa e omicidi rituali, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008 (1st ed. 2007), 6.
6
Ibid., 366, 371, 390, 392, 393.
7
Cf. on this point the provocative article by Hayden White, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth”, in Saul Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992, 37–53. See also “Truth”, in Alun Munslow, The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies, London: Routledge, 2006, 236–238.
8
Johann Gustav Droysen, Historik, vol. 1: Rekonstruktion der ersten vollständigen Fassung der Vorlesungen (1857): Grundriβ der Historik in der ersten handschriftlichen (1857/1858) und in der letzten gedruckten Fassung (1882), ed. Peter Leyh, Stuttgart: Fromann-Holzboog, 1977, 8, 422. Several decades later, Benedetto Croce stated in late Hegelian manner that every form of history is contemporary history. Cf. Benedetto Croce, Teoria e storia della storiografia, Milan: Adelphi, 1989 (1st ed. 1915), 13–17.
9
Quotation in Thomas L. Haskell, “Objectivity: Perspective as Problem and Solution”, History and Theory 43, (2004), 341–359, here 347.
10 Hermann Lübbe, “Ich entschuldige mich”: Das neue politische Buβritual, Berlin: Siedler 2001, particularly 90–95; Pascal Bruckner, La tyrannie de la pénitence: essai sur le masochisme occidental, Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2006. 11 For a criticism of the “ethic relativism” in American historical writing, see, for example, Peter Novick, “That Noble Dream”: Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988, 282–288. 12 See, for example, Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (eds), The Contested Nation: Ethnicity, Class, Religion and Gender in National Histories, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; Lutz Raphael, Geschichtswissenschaft im Zeitalter der Extreme: Theorien, Methoden, Tendenzen von 1900 bis zur Gegenwart, Munich: Beck 2003. 13 Cf. “Objectivity”, in Munslow, The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies, 191–194. 14 Thomas Nipperdey, “Kann Geschichte objektiv sein?”, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterrichtt 30 (1979), 329–342, here 339. 15 “Historicism”, in Munslow, The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies, 141. 16 Geoffrey Barraclough, “The Historian in a Changing World”, in Hans Meyerhoff (ed.), The Philosophy of History in Our Time, New York: Anchor, 1959, 28–35. On the issue of the ethical relativism of historicism, see also Arnaldo Momigliano, “Historicism Revisited”, Mededelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandse 56
Akademie van Wetenschappen, Afd. Letterkunde Nieuwe Reeks 37/3 (1974), 63–70, particularly 7–8. On “historical understanding”, see Thomas Nipperdey, “Historismus und Historismuskritik heute. Bemerkungen zur Diskussion”, in Idem, Gesellschaft, Kultur, Theorie, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1976, 59–73, here 71–72. 17 Nipperdey, “Kann Geschichte objektiv sein?” 335; Haskell, Objectivity: Perspective as Problem and Solution, 350–351.
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18 Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men. Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, New York: Harper, 1993, xx. 19 Dan Diner (ed.), Zivilisationsbruch: Denken nach Auschwitz, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1988. 20 Dan Diner, “‘Zivilisationsbruch’: la frattura di civiltà come epistemologia della Shoah”, in Marina Cattaruzza, Marcello Flores, Simon Levis Sullam and Enzo Traverso (eds), Storia della Shoah: La crisi dell’Europa, lo sterminio degli ebrei e la memoria del XX secolo, vol. 1, Turin: UTET, 2005, 15–37; Enzo Traverso, “Comparare la Shoah: questioni aperte”, Ibid., vol. 3, 2006, 166–203; Omer Bartov, “Elusive Enemies”, in Idem, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000, 91–142, particularly 140–141. 21 Saul Friedländer, Mass Murder and German Society in the Third Reich: Interpretations and Dilemmas, London: Royal Holloway, 2001 (= Hayes Robinson Lecture Series, vol. 5); Marina Cattaruzza, “Il ruolo degli ‘uomini comuni’ nello sterminio degli ebrei europei”, Storia della Storiografiaa 30 (1996), 141–150. Harald Schmid has pointed astutely to the aporie between the theorem of Holocaust singularity and the contemporary universalising discourse, in which numerous genocides or mass murders are described as “Holocausts”. Cf. Harald Schmid, “Europäisierung des Auschwitzgedenkens? Zum Aufstieg des 27. Januar 1945 als ‘Holocaustgedenktag’ in Europa”, Jan Eckel and Claudia Moisel (eds), Universalisierung des Holocausts? Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik in internationaler Perspektive, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008, 174–202, here 177. 22 Marina Cattaruzza, “The Historiography of the Shoah: An Attempt at a Bibliographical Synthesis”, Totalitarismus und Demokratie: Zeitschrift für Internationale Diktatur- und Freiheitsforschung 3/2 (2006), 285–321, particularly 317–321. 23 Ibid., 320. 24 Ernst Nolte, “Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will: Eine Rede, die geschrieben aber nicht gehalten werden konnte”, in Rudolf Augstein et al. (eds), “Historikerstreit”: Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung, Munich: Piper, 1987, 39–47. 25 Andreas Hillgruber, Zweierlei Untergang: die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europäischen Judentums, Berlin: Prophyläen, 1986. 26 Marina Cattaruzza, “Endstation Vertreibung: Minderheitenfrage und Zwangsmigrationen in Ostmitteleuropa, 1919–1949”, Journal of Modern European Historyy 6/1 (2008), 5–29, here 7–11. 27 Constantin Goschler and Philipp Ther (eds), Raub und Restitution: “Arisierung” und Rückerstattung des jüdischen Eigentums in Europa, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer 2003. 28 Tony Judt, “The Past is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe”, in István Deák, Jan Tomasz Gross and Tony Judt (eds), The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath, Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000, 293–323, particularly 298–305; Bartov, “Elusive Enemies”. 29 See Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999; Judt, “The Past is 57
How Much Does Historical Truth Still Matter? Another Country”, in Pieter Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 30 James J. Sheehan, Where have all the Soldiers gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008, particularly 183–273. 31 Bartov, “Elusive enemies”, 137–142. 32 Anatoly M. Khazanov and Stanley G. Payne, “How to Deal with the Past?”, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 9/2–3 (2008), 411–431, here 422. 33 Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community of Jedwabne, Poland, Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001; Ruth Henning (ed.), Die “Jedwabne-Debatte” in polnischen Zeitungen und Zeitschtiften: Dokumentation, Potsdam: Deutsch–Polnische Gesellschaft Brandenburg, 2001; Laurence Weinbaum, The Struggle for Memory in Poland: Auschwitz, Jedwabne and Beyond, Jerusalem: Institute of the World Jewish Congress, 2002; Antony Polonsky (ed.), The Neighbors Respond: The Controvery over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland, Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004. 34 Thomas Maissen, “Nationalgeschichten als internationales Thema: Die Aktualität von Genozid-Vorwürfen und Entschuldigungen, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 27 Mar 2007.
58
Should crimes committed in the course of history that are comparable to genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes be referred to as such, whatever the label used at the time?1 This is the question I want to examine below. Let us compare the problems of labelling historical crimes with historical and recent concepts, respectively.2
Conceptualising Historical Crimes
Historical concepts for historical crimes “Historical concepts” are terms used to describe practices by the contemporaries of these practices. Scholars can defend the use of historical concepts with the argument that many practices deemed inadmissible today (such as slavery, human sacrifice, heritage destruction, racism, censorship, etc.) were accepted as rather normal and sometimes even as morally and legally right in some periods of the past. Arguably, then, it would be unfaithful to the sources, misleading and even anachronistic to use the present, accusatory labels to describe them. This would mean, for example, that one should nott call the crimes committed during the Crusades crimes against humanity (even if a present observer would have good reason to qualify some of these crimes as such), for such a concept was nonexistent at the time. A radical variant of the latter is the view that not only recent labels should be avoided but even any moral judgments of past crimes. This argument, however, can be countered with several objections. First, diverging judgments. It is well known that parties
Antoon De Baets University of Groningen
Conceptualising Historical Crimes involved in violent conflicts label these conflicts differently. And different terms imply different moral judgments, as Isaiah Berlin showed long ago: In describing what occurred I can say that so many million men were brutally done to death; or alternatively, that they perished; laid down their lives; were massacred; or simply, that the population . . . was reduced, or that its average age was lowered; or that many men lost their lives. None of these descriptions of what took place is wholly neutral: all carry moral implications . . . The use of neutral language (“Himmler caused many persons to be asphyxiated”) conveys its own ethical tone.3 In 2000, for example, the Council of Europe reported that the war of 1992–1995 in Bosnia and Herzegovina was referred to as “aggression” in Bosniac history textbooks, a “civil war” in Serbian history textbooks and a “war of liberation” in Croatian history textbooks.4 Second, euphemistic judgments. The opinions of contemporaries about such crimes usually diverge. On the one hand, at least some of the groups of contemporaries perceived as normal historical acts that would today be considered criminal – and it would be interesting to study this socalled normality and its context in contrast to the present-day situation. On the other hand, some groups of contemporaries did condemn the acts deemed criminal today and, in the process, invoked existing principles of humanity in defence of the victims, even if these principles were not as formalised as today. Almost certainly, a general, let alone unanimous, perception of acts deemed criminal today as “normal” was rare. Nevertheless, serious crimes from the past often received names which were perceived as euphemistic, even for many of those directly involved: “uprising” for “civil war” (the nationalists in their conflict with the republicans in Spain from 1936 to 1939), “final solution” for “extermination” (Nazi Germany towards the Jews), “police actions leading to excesses” for “war leading to war crimes” (the Netherlands fighting Indonesia’s independence from 1945 to 1949), and “order-keeping operation” for “colonial war” (France in Algeria during the independence struggle from 1954 to 1962).5 If the euphemisms were taken at face value, they could have serious consequences: soft expressions (police actions, order-keeping operations) do not have an imprescriptible character, whereas strong ones (war crimes) do. Third, politically inspired judgments. A variant of the argument in favour of the use of historical concepts is politically inspired. Political leaders and pressure groups may take the view that the past is unique and that therefore crimes from the past are incomparable to those in the present and that both deserve their own labels. This view is often inspired by a strong desire to avoid unfavourable historical parallels.6 Clearly, postulating complete incomparability over time is often self-serving. It is also radical: whoever takes such a position makes historical scholarship impossible. Such are the objections against the use of historical concepts to label historical crimes. Let us now examine the other side.
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Recent concepts for historical crimes The use of recent concepts can be defended with two arguments. First, compared to the relative arbitrariness with which many of the historical terms are used, legal concepts such as genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes are defined very precisely. Second, many concepts are created long after the realities they describe. As Hans Reichenbach and Karl Popper, among others, have shown, the context of discovery is different from the context of justification. Popper spoke about theories, but it is no different for concepts: concepts that were created in one (legal) context can often be used in another (historical) context in a scientifically justifiable way. Malicious intentions, criminal premeditation, widespread or systematic attacks on civilian populations, mass killings, inhuman policies and other essential ingredients of gross crimes are phenomena pertaining to all times. Therefore, there is no intrinsic reason why present labels could not serve for past crimes.
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The 1948 Genocide Convention itself acknowledges that genocide was a crime that occurred throughout history, because its preamble reads: “Recognising that at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity and [b]eing convincedd that, in order to liberate mankind from such an odious scourge, international co-operation is required.”7 Indeed, the Holocaust of 1939– 1945 has officially been called a genocide since the adoption of the Genocide Convention.8 Nobody can protest in earnest against this case of retroactive labelling because the Genocide Convention was drafted precisely with the Nazi atrocities in the minds of the drafters. From 1975, the Armenian massacres of 1915 were also increasingly called a genocide and not only because they seemed to fit the 1948 definition so well but also because the inventor of the genocide concept, the PolishJewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, developed the idea behind it when in the 1920s he learnt about the Armenian massacres. How sensitive this issue is may be inferred from the following incident. A United Nations photo exhibition on the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which was scheduled to open in April 2007, was dismantled because of Turkish objections to a reference which read: “During World War I, a million Armenians were murdered in Turkey.” The reference was intended to explain the connection between the Armenian massacres and Lemkin’s concept of “genocide”. Although the words “in Turkey” were removed after diplomatic consultations, the exhibition was postponed.9 Other massacres were also labelled as genocide in a 1985 United Nations document, the socalled Whitaker Report: The Nazi aberration has unfortunately not been the only case of genocide in the twentieth century. Among other examples which can be cited as qualifying are the German massacre of Hereros in 1904, the Ottoman massacre of Armenians in 1915–1916, the Ukrainian pogrom of Jews in 1919, the Tutsi massacre of Hutu in Burundi in 1965 and 1972, the Paraguayan massacre of Ache Indians prior to 1974, the Khmer Rouge massacre in Kampuchea between 1975 and 1978, and the contemporary Iranian killings of Baha’is.10 Several objections have been launched against the use of recent concepts. First, the arbitrary or limited character of unofficial recent concepts and definitions. If historical concepts can be arbitrary or limited, so can recent ones. Sometimes, scholars use concepts different from courtsanctioned labels. In 2001, for example, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yu61
Conceptualising Historical Crimes goslavia ruled that the mass murder of July 1995 in Srebrenica was a genocide. Despite the fact that the historians from the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation repeatedly used this judgment in their 2002 report about the Srebrenica events (but without mentioning even once that the tribunal had called them a genocide), they labelled it a “mass murder” for reasons of neutrality. This was unconvincing because a mass murder, however terrible, is different from a genocide. After 2002, the tribunal kept calling the Srebrenica murders a genocide in many new verdicts, which were confirmed by a judgment of the International Court of Justice in 2007.11 Obviously, such conceptual problems also penetrate definitions. Twenty years ago, Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn coordinated a study of 20 genocides in history. As one of the first works of its kind, it became a strong study but it had one major flaw: the authors did not adopt the United Nations definition of genocide to identify the historical cases of genocide; instead, they developed a broader definition of their own.12 Even if it is true that the official definitions of genocide and similar concepts are controversial and partially the product of compromise, often obtained after long years of diplomacy, it is difficult to defend the use of recent concepts for historical crimes if scholars apply their own working definitions. Historians can certainly deviate from official concepts and definitions, but they should convincingly justify why their alternative is better. Even if their justification succeeds, they pay the price of lowering the comparability of their work. Second, difficult categorisation. Official definitions of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes are precise, but also detailed. This complicates the task of proving beyond reasonable doubt the facts for each of the elements of the definition. If a crime transforms from a mass murder into, for example, a genocide, the burden of proof becomes more severe. This is the reason why almost without exception all genocides, also historical ones, provoke acrimonious debates about crucial aspects of the crime such as victim group types, chains of command and perpetrator intent and motives as inferred from the planning and scale of the crime. An example is the Holodomor (“death from hunger”), the famine of 1932–1933 which was called a genocide by the Ukrainian government of Viktor Yushchenko in 2008. That same year, however, the European Parliament labelled it a crime against humanity, not a genocide. In 2010, the succeeding president, Viktor Yanukovych, declared in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe that the Holodomor had affected many nationalities and ethnic groups, and that therefore it was not fair to label it a genocide. The president was promptly sued for defamation.13 Similar problems arise when we label practices as “crimes against humanity” and “war crimes” (both concepts having entered into international criminal law in 1945). In a rare study from 1997 about the impunity of perpetrators of violations of economic, social and cultural rights, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights explored four, of what it called, “historical precedents” of such violations: apartheid, slavery, the looting of cultural heritage and colonisation. The rapporteur of the study even called these precedents “crimes against humanity”.14 It is interesting to look at when these four precedents were labelled as crime categories for the first time. The United Nations called apartheid a subcategory of “crimes against humanity” in 1966. As to the second precedent, the International Criminal Court Statute determined that enslavement (a summary name for slavery and slave trade) was a subcategory of “crimes against humanity” in 1998.15 As to the third precedent, one extreme variant of the looting of cultural heritage, the destruction of historic monuments, if 62
carried out without overriding military necessity, was called a war crime in the two 1977 Protocols Additional to the Geneva Conventions. In 1998 the International Criminal Court saw this destruction also as a form of persecution, which is a subcategory of “crimes against humanity”.16 The first judgment in this regard (by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia) was pronounced in 2006.17 As to the last precedent, many forms of colonisation were accompanied by acts that would doubtlessly be called crimes against humanity today. King Leopold II’s Congo Free State (1885–1908) is an example. In some cases, colonisation even led to war crimes (during ruthless campaigns for expansion) or genocide (as with the massacre of Hereros in German South-West Africa, present-day Namibia, in 1904).18 Thus, it is indeed defensible to categorise some types of these four “historical precedents” as crimes against humanity. In addition, some types may fall under two or three labels: “destroying historic monuments” can be a crime against humanity or a war crime, and “colonial punitive expeditions” (iff they meet strict conditions) a war crime or genocide.
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Third, shifting categorisation. Labels can shift. In 1992, the United Nations General Assembly called “ethnic cleansing” a form of genocide, but in 2007, the International Court of Justice declared that ethnic cleansing was not a crime, but a policy that couldd include genocide.19 Such examples are rare at the international level but rather common when they become the object of national party politics (as the Ukrainian example has shown). Fourth, complex case law. Like categorising, judging concrete cases can be quite complex. In 2008, for example, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights ruled (11 to 6) that the 1994 conviction of a retired military officer for crimes against humanity for quelling a riot during the Hungarian Revolution of October 1956 was unjustified. On the one hand, it was not shown that the act of this officer formed part of a widespread attack on the civilian population; on the other it was proven that at least one of the victims was a combatant. Therefore, the officer could not have foreseen that his orders and shots constituted a crime against humanity.20 Also in 2008, a chamber of the European Court of Human Rights controversially ruled (4 to 3) that a punitive military operation by Soviet partisans in Mazie Bati, Latvia, in May 1944, could not be called a war crime. The case was referred to the court’s Grand Chamber, which in May 2010 reversed the ruling by judging (14 to 3) that it had indeed been a war crime and that the rule “no punishment without law” had not been violated.21 Fifth, challenges to categorisation. In October 2008, Judge Baltasar Garzón attempted to initiate a case against Franco and his generals for crimes against humanity during the civil war and the early period of the ensuing dictatorship (1936–1952). He maintained that he was permitted to investigate these crimes against humanity because they had no statute of limitations. A month later, however, judges from the Spanish National Court forced Garzón to drop the case with the arguments that the alleged perpetrators were dead and that the crimes were covered by an amnesty passed in 1977. Garzón’s decision not to apply this amnesty law, however, was supported by international treaty and customary law, which impose on states a duty to investigate the worst international crimes, including crimes against humanity. In 2008, for example, the United Nations Human Rights Committee called on Spain to repeal the amnesty law and to ensure that domestic courts did not apply limitation periods to crimes against humanity. In May 2010, the General Council of the Judiciary suspended Garzón from duty for the duration of his trial for abuse of power before the Supreme Court.22 63
Conceptualising Historical Crimes Sixth, politically inspired categorisation. As the use of the term genocide expresses the strongest possible condemnation of a crime, victim groups and their spokespersons are eager to use “genocide” as a trump card. Recently, a judge called the massacre of about 300 students at in the Tlatelolco district of Mexico City in October 1968 a genocide, but it is difficult to see how students fall under one of the four groups (national, ethnic, racial, religious) mentioned in the 1948 genocide definition. This judgment was overruled.23 To give another example: some define slavery inaccurately as a genocide or a “Black Holocaust”, but the slave traders’ intent was not to destroy the slaves but to exploit them as cheap labour.24 In a French legal case from 2005, the terms crimes against humanity and genocide were confused. The Collective of Antilleans, Guyanese and Réunionnais (Collectifdom) sued historian Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau in Paris because he allegedly denied in an interview that the slave trade was a crime against humanity – whereas the 2001 Taubira law had given it this status. In the interview, however, Pétré-Grenouilleau had said that the slave trade was a crime against humanity but nott a genocide. Observers thought that the real motive behind the accusation was Pétré-Grenouilleau’s 2004 book Les Traites négrières: Essai d’histoire globale [The black slave trade: an essay in global history], which viewed the slave trade as a phenomenon lasting thirteen centuries on five continents, of which the European slave trade (1500–1900) was but one part. The charges were dropped in 2006.25 Seventh, penalisation for deviant categorisation. Not only in France (as in the case of the Taubira law) but also elsewhere – in countries as diverse as Russia and Rwanda – so-called “memory laws” are regularly adopted, laws that seek to define the collective memory on a controversial historical subject by prescribing how people ought to think about certain historical episodes and by criminalising the denial of imprescriptible crimes (such as the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide). Article 19, a nongovernmental organisation, aptly formulated why such laws ought to be rejected: Memory laws too often end up elevating history to dogma . . . Such laws are both unnecessary – since generic hate speech laws already prohibit incitement to hatred – and open to abuse to stifle legitimate historical debate and research . . . [B]ecause they are open to abuse, the risk of disproportionate harm to freedom of expression is significant . . . It is very clear that international law protects merely offensive, as opposed to harmful, speech.26 States should prohibit the public condoning, denying or grossly trivialising of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes onlyy when they are forms of hate speech (that is, according to the United Nations, any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that at the same time constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence).27 In practice, most of the public condoning, denying or grossly trivialising of these grave crimes does not meet the incitement standard.28 The debate about the use of recent concepts for historical crimes implies that historians should develop a position vis-à-vis others who label crimes: politicians, legislators and judges. Politicians should not prescribe how history is written and therefore historians can neglect political views in principle (though often not in practice).29 When laws are adopted, historians should obey them, but this does not exclude the possibility to protest against national “memory laws” that again want to command a “correct” reading of history. In hate-speech matters, historians should 64
defend the narrow universal standard laid down in article 20.2 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. When judges are independent (and most international and many national judges are), their decisions have to be reckoned with. Deviation from the concepts used by these judges can only be justified through a better alternative.
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Conclusion Given all of the above arguments and positions, balancing historical against recent concepts is not easy, although some tentative guidelines can be given. To begin with, historians should always mention the historical concepts, that is, how certain crimes were named by different parties at the time of their occurrence, and discuss the meaning of such names. Readers can then judge for themselves if and why the author prefers to deviate from the historical vocabulary. Furthermore, it has been clearly shown that the use of recent concepts is not necessarily anachronistic and often plainly better. In addition, if one rejects historical concepts and uses recent concepts instead, it is permissible, though often confusing, to develop one’s own definitions for concepts that have already been defined under international law (as many scholars have done for the genocide concept). To be sure, scholars and others retain the right nott to adopt labels defined under international law for historical practices. They should, however, explain why their alternative label or definition is superior. In cases where the victims or perpetrators of these crimes are still alive, it is not recommended that historians define the nature of a given crime differently from international courts, with their elevated standards of evidence and huge research departments. In cases where all the victims and perpetrators of these crimes are dead, the use of either historical or recent concepts has to be pain-stakingly justified.30
NOTES 1 I found the first mentions of the term “crimes against humanity” in 1915 (if an earlier mention of 1854 in another context is excluded), of “war crimes” in 1934 and of “genocide” in 1943–1944. For “crimes against humanity” and “war crimes”, see articles 6b–6c of the charter of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg (1945); for “genocide”, see article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). For presently internationally accepted definitions, see the statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC): article 6 for genocide (definition identical to article 2 of the Genocide Convention), article 7 for crimes against humanity (this definition is a complete redrafting of the IMT text), and article 8 for war crimes (a definition based on the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the 1977 Additional Protocols). For the 1854 use of crime against humanity, see Jonathan Yovel, “How Can a Crime Be Against Humanity? Philosophical Doubts Concerning a Useful Concept”, UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs 11 (2007), 39–58, here 56. The so-called Whitaker Report attributes the coinage of the term “crimes against humanity” to Hersch Lauterpacht; see United Nations (UN) Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, Revised and Updated Report on the Question of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide [Whitaker Report]] (E/CN.4/ Sub.2/1985/6; 2 July 1985), paragraph 74. 2
Complete versions of most human rights instruments and legal cases mentioned in this essay are avail65
Conceptualising Historical Crimes able at www.concernedhistorians.org. I thank Jeanne Pia Mifsud Bonnici, Rosalind Franklin fellow at the Faculty of Law of the University of Groningen, for her thoughtful comments. A preliminary, much shorter, Dutch version of this paper appeared as part of “Onverjaarbare historische misdrijven”, Internationale Spectatorr 64/5 (2010), 293–297, here 294–296. The text was also part of a paper delivered as a contribution to the panel “History and Human Rights” at the 21st International Congress of Historical Sciences (Amsterdam, 23 Aug 2010). In addition, it was a contribution to the panel “History and Universal Justice” at the Fourth International Congress of History under Debate (Santiago de Compostela, 19 Dec 2010). 3
Isaiah Berlin, “Historical Inevitability”, in Idem, Four Essays on Liberty, y Oxford: Oxford UP, 1969 [1954], xxix, also 95, 115.
4
Council of Europe (Parliamentary Assembly), Education in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Report (Doc. 8663) (Online), 14 Mar 2000, paragraph II, 4g.
5
See also Toby Mendel, Study on International Standards Relating to Incitement to Genocide or Racial Hatred: For the UN Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide (Halifax, Canada: April 2006, available at www.concernedhistorians.org/to/239.pdf), f 8: “‘Direct’ incitement [to commit genocide] is more problematical to define, in part because it goes to the heart of what constitutes incitement . . . and in part because of the ingenuity of human beings, including in the commission of heinous crimes, whereby euphemisms or implicit forms of speech may be employed to largely the same effect as clear calls to commit genocide.”
6
I thank Peter Gran for drawing my attention to this argument.
7
See also the Whitaker Report, paragraphs 14–24.
8
The IMT Charter did not yet contain the genocide category. The UN General Assembly first affirmed that genocide was a crime under international law in Resolution 96 (I) (“The Crime of Genocide”), 11 Dec 1946.
9
Warren Hoge, “UN Genocide Exhibit Dismantled after Turkey Complains”, New York Times (Online), 10 Apr 2007.
10 Whitaker Report, paragraph 24. 11 See my discussion in “Na de genocide: Waarheidsstrategieën van rechters en historici” [After the genocide: truth strategies of judges and historians], Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis 116/2 (2003), 224–229. 12 Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies, New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1990. For evidence that genocide is not a new phenomenon, see Peter Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization, New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2002, 106–110. 13 European Parliament, “Resolution on the Commemoration of the Holodomor, the Ukraine Artificial Famine (1932–1933)”, 23 Oct 2008; Kyiv Postt (Online), 30 Mar 2009; “Ukrainian Sues Yanukovych Over Famine Statement”, Radio Free Europe/Radio Libertyy (Online) 15 Jun 2010. 14 UN Commission on Human Rights, Final Report on the Question of the Impunity of Perpetrators of Human Rights Violations (Economic, Social and Cultural Rights) (1997), paragraphs 28–52, especially paragraph 32. The plea of its author, El Hadji Guissé, to expand the 1985 UN definition of a victim (paragraph 137: “The status of victim and the rights attaching thereto are transmissible to the successors. This concept of successor should be understood in a wide sense”) was not taken up. See also UN Subcommission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, Recognition of Responsibility and Reparation for Massive and Flagrant Violations of Human Rights Which Constitute Crimes against Humanity and 66
Which Took Place During the Period of Slavery, of Colonialism and Wars of Conquest: Resolution 2002/5 (2002). This resolution was preceded by Decision 2000/114 and Resolution 2001/1. 15 Apartheid: UN General Assembly, Resolution 2202 (XXI) (1966) and UN, International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheidd (1973); enslavement: ICC, Statute (1998), articles 7.1(c), 7.2(c); slavery/slave trade: World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, Declaration (2001), article 13.
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16 Geneva Conventions Protocol I (1977), articles 53(a), 85.4(d), and II (1977), article 16; ICC, Statute, articles 8.2(b)ix, 8.2(e)iv. 17 International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Prosecutor v. Momčilo Krajišnik; Case no. IT-00-39-T: Judgement (www.un.org/icty; 2006), paragraphs 780–783, 836–840. 18 More examples in Marc Ferro (ed.), Le Livre noir du colonialisme: XVIe–XXIe siècle, de l’ extermination à la repentance, Paris: Robert Laffont, 2003. 19 UN General Assembly, Resolution 121 (The Situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina) (1992); International Court of Justice, Case Concerning the Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro): Judgment (2007),) paragraph 190. 20 European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), Case of Korbély v. Hungary (Application no. 9174/02): Judgment, 19 Sept 2008. The case was discussed under article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights (the legality principle: no one can be held guilty for acts that were not criminal at the time they were committed). The canonical formulation of this nullum crimen sine lege principle is article 11 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948): “No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed.” 21 ECHR, Case of Kononov v. Latvia (Application no. 36376/04): Judgment, 24 Jul 2008; ECHR (Grand Chamber), Case of Kononov v. Latvia (Application no. 36376/04): Judgment, 17 May 2010. 22 Amnesty International (AI), Report 2010, London: AI, 2010, 298, 300; Report 2009, 9 London: AI, 2009, 301, 303; Guardian (Online), 17 Oct 2008; New York Times (Online), 17 Oct 2008, 19 Nov 2008; The Times (Online), 19 Nov 2008. For another case, see David Oldroyd, “Anachronism and the ‘History Wars’ in Australia”, Scientia Poetica 10 (2006), 337–365 (discussing whether the resistance of indigenous Tasmanians against the white settlers between 1824 and the mid-1830s can be called guerrilla warfare and whether their eventual disappearance was a case of ethnic cleansing and genocide). For a case in which it was attempted to solve ancient wrongs by law – the Waitangi Tribunal in New Zealand (established in 1975) – see Rosalyn Higgins, “Time and the Law: International Perspectives on an Old Problem”, International and Comparative Law Quarterlyy 46 (July 1997), 510–511. 23 AI, Report 2006, London: AI, 2006, 182; AI, Report 2007, 7 London: AI, 2007, 25, 184; AI, Report 2008, London: AI, 2008, 16, 205; AI, Report 2009, 9 London: AI, 2009, 226; Human Rights Watch (HRW), World Report 2006, Washington: HRW, 2006, 203; HRW, World Report 2007, 7 Washington: HRW, 2007, 218; HRW, World Report 2008, Washington: HRW, 2008, 220–221. 24 Gert Oostindie, “Slavernij, canon en trauma: debatten en dilemma’s” [Slavery, canon and trauma: debates and dilemmas], Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis 121/1 (2008), 8–9, 18. 25 In December 2005, 19 historians, including Pierre Nora (Pétré-Grenouilleau’s publisher at Gallimard), 67
Conceptualising Historical Crimes signed a petition in support of Pétré-Grenouilleau and in protest against the increasing judicialisation of history in France, and founded an association called Liberté pour l’histoire with the aim of abolishing all French laws that regarded specific historical questions and restricted the freedom of historians. The petition was eventually signed by more than 550 historians. For the affair, see, among others, Libération (Online), 30 Nov 2005, 8 Jun 2006, 10 Aug 2006, and René Rémond, Quand l’État se mêle de l’Histoire, Paris: Stock, 2006, 8, 38–40, 94–95. For the context of the problem of memory laws (lois mémorielles), see Winfried Schulze, “Erinnerung per Gesetz oder ‘Freiheit für die Geschichte?’”, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterrichtt 59/7–8 (2008), 364–381 (373 for the Pétré-Grenouilleau case). 26 Article 19, “France: No More ‘Memory Laws’” (press release), 26 Nov 2008. General Comment No. 34 (Article 19: Freedoms of Opinion and Expression) (Geneva, 21 July 2011) provided by the Human Rights Committee, is very clear in its paragraph 49: “Laws that penalise the expression of opinions about historical facts (so called “memory laws”) are incompatible with the obligations that the Covenant [on Civil and Political Rights] imposes on States parties in relation to the respect for freedom of opinion and expression. The Covenant does not permit general prohibition of expressions of an erroneous opinion or an incorrect interpretation of past events.” For a consistent approach, see Article 19, The Camden Principles on Freedom of Expression and Equality, y London: Article 19, 2009, principles 12.1–12.3: “(12.1) All States should adopt legislation prohibiting any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence (hate speech) . . . (12.2) States should prohibit the condoning or denying of crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, but only where such statements constitute hate speech as defined by Principle 12.1. (12.3) States should not prohibit criticism directed at, or debate about, particular ideas, beliefs or ideologies, or religions or religious institutions, unless such expression constitutes hate speech as defined by Principle 12.1.” 27 Hate speech as defined in article 20.2 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. 28 That is the reason why historians have protested against the European Union Council Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA of 28 Nov 2008 on Combating Certain Forms and Expressions of Racism and Xenophobia by Means of Criminal Law w (2008). See Luigi Cajani, “Historians under Criminal Law: EU Legislation Casts a Shadow on Historical Research”, Perspectives on History, (www.historians.org/ perspectives), Oct 2009, and, Idem, Adoption de la décision-cadre européenne au 17 mai 2011 (Paris, 25 May 2011). 29 On 19 Jan 2007, journalist Hrant Dink was assassinated for his views on the Armenian genocide of 1915. On 14 Sept 2010, the ECHR unanimously ruled in Dink vs. Turkeyy that Turkey violated his right to life (by failing to prevent the murder although the police and gendarmerie had been informed of the likelihood of an assassination attempt and of the identity of the suspected instigators; and by not conducting an effective investigation into the failures which occurred in protecting Dink’s life); and his right to free expression (a guilty verdict for “insulting and weakening Turkish identity through the media” had been handed down in the absence of a pressing social need, which made Dink a target for extreme nationalist groups). The ECHR concluded that Dink was indirectly punished for criticising the official denial of the view that the 1915 events amounted to genocide. 30 In another context, I tried to solve the problem whether the demarcation between the use and abuse of history is a traditional one that has always existed or a modern one. See Antoon De Baets, Responsible History, y New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2009, 39–48.
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To belittle the significance of or deny that the Nazi state committed genocide against European Jews is a punishable offence in Germany and Austria, in Switzerland, France, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Lithuania and Poland. With this, legislators sought to protect Holocaust victims and their descendants from affront and insult. Further, this criminal sanction is the constitutional state’s response to antiSemitism, and so is more than acknowledging and honouring the presence of a Jewish minority in society or the official result of lessons drawn from history. Due to Germany’s historical responsibility for the Holocaust, how the genocide of the Jews is approached and handled is first and foremost a problem confronting German political culture. Interpreting the statutory provisions formulated to cover the elements of the offence of incitement to hatred has occupied the courts time and again (art. 130 of the German Criminal Code, paragraph 1, punishes the “qualified” Auschwitz lie, paragraph 3 the “simple” Auschwitz lie). In turn, this triggers at regular intervals a discussion in the media as to the purpose of punishment: for one faction the law is concerned with defending the dignity of the victims, while for the other consideration must be given to a cornerstone of democracy, namely freedom of opinion. To mention one case: the Central Council of Jews in Germany took legal action against the animal rights organisation PETA, which had canvassed support for its goals with the tasteless slogan “Holocaust on your plate”. The attorney representing the council ar-
Holocaust Denial: Anti-Semitism as a Refusal to Accept Reality
Wolfgang Benz Technische Universität Berlin
Holocaust Denial: Anti-Semitism as a Refusal to Accept Reality gued that “the campaign violates the victims’ right to dignity and belittles the persecution of the Jews”. The case went through a number of instances.1 Intellectuals fight for the freedom to express views and opinions, moved by concerns that the state is striving to prescribe a particular concept and interpretation of history. An initiative launched by French historians opposed to efforts to establish uniform legislation in the European Union (and extending criminal liability to other historical events like the genocide of the Armenians) has formulated its standpoint in the “Appel de Blois”: “In a free state, no political authority has the right to define historical truth and to restrain the freedom of the historian with the threat of penal sanctions.”2 Prominent lawyers such as Wolfgang Hoffmann-Riem, a former judge at the German Constitutional Court, are also skeptical. In his view, forbidding Holocaust denial does not contribute to protecting human dignity, to which the general secretary of the Central Council of Jews replied: “I would not even want to imagine how bad things would be in Germany if denying the Holocaust was not a punishable offence.”3 As much as the constitutional judge is right to say that human dignity cannot be protected by prohibitions, so is the historians’ concern of the inaccurate concepts of history that the state imposes via the decisions made by political and administrative authorities, and misplaced is their fear that state patronage hinders historical research. At issue is neither a threat to the freedom of research nor to freedom of expression. There is not one single historian who could promote Holocaust denial without disregarding elementary rules and scholarly methods of their discipline, and indeed in the history of Holocaust denial there is yet to be a historian among its proponents, only charlatans who act like historians, represent massive interest lobbies, and mislead their public to believe that they possess a competence they simply do not have. This is in stark contrast to protagonists of the rightwing scene like the Briton David Irving, who has mutated from journalist to Holocaust denier, and Horst Mahler, who has gone from lawyer to an obsessive neo-Nazi. Listening to them, and many others, one has the impression that they – fuelled by an egoistical craving for recognition – do not believe what they claim. Neither have anything to do with threatening the freedom of expressing opinions whatsoever, but with extremist rightwing propaganda dressed up as historical research, or with the neo-Nazi agitation of egomaniacs seeking public attention and their epigones. Attacks against historical truth, put forward as facts, constitute the criminal offence of incitement, however, and so undermine social peace. Viewing neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic campaigns as criminal activity began in the Federal Republic with the revision of paragraph 130 of the Criminal Code, enacted by the 6th criminal law amendment act of 30 June 1960. The revision was prompted by a wave of anti-Jewish graffiti at the start of the same year. Decisive was the verdict passed in 1994 against the then National Democratic Party (NPD) chairman Günter Deckert, who was given a suspended sentence of a year in jail for incitement. The Federal Court of Justice annulled the judgment on 15 March 1994, triggering a public debate,4 by stating that “merely disputing the gas chamber murders does not constitute an act of incitement.” Shortly after, on 13 April 1994, the Federal Constitutional Court made it clear that the right to freely express opinions is restricted by, on the one hand, the consideration of personal rights and, on the other, the necessity to furnish objective verification when alleging a claim is a fact. As early as 1980 the Federal Court of Justice had stated that acknowledging the Holocaust is part of the dignity of at least those Jews living in Germany, and consequently any denial of the geno70
cide represents a form of discrimination against them. In its decision on the persecution of Jews and the “Auschwitz lie”, the Federal Constitutional Court took the view that denying or doubting the persecution of Jews under the Nazi dictatorship violates the honour of the persons concerned. The highest court set the framework in unequivocal terms. Formally, assertions of fact are, in the strict sense, “not statements of opinion”: “in contrast to such statements, the objective relationship between the statement and reality predominates”. As far as the statement “that there was no persecution of Jews in the Third Reich” is concerned, this is “an assertion of fact which is proved to be untrue according to innumerable eyewitness reports and documents, the verdicts of courts in numerous criminal proceedings, and the findings of history. Taken by itself, an assertion of this content does not, therefore, enjoy the protection of freedom of opinion.” On this basis, the court concluded: “The historical fact that human beings were separated in accordance with the descent criteria of the so-called Nuremberg laws and were robbed of their individuality with the objective to exterminate them gives to the Jews living in the Federal Republic a special personal relationship to their fellow citizens; in this relationship the past is still present today.”5
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Legislators directly drew the consequences, deliberated on and passed a law amending the criminal code, determining the denial of the Nazi genocide as incitement (paragraph 130 of the criminal code) and placing it under severe punishment. Members of the German Bundestag followed the tenor of the Federal Constitutional Court. Gregor Gysi of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) was applauded even by the ranks of the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/ CSU) and Free Democratic Party (FDP) for his clear contribution to the parliamentary debate: By the way, all this has nothing to do with opinions. It isn’t even an opinion. What is being really expressed is nothing other than a mockery of Holocaust victims. And that is the intention of those who say such things. There is not one of them who in reality does not know better, perhaps except for an utterly naïve adolescent who believes whatever someone whispers in his ear. You don’t seriously believe that any one of them actually believes the nonsense they circulate. Each and every one of them knows very well that these crimes took place. Their goal is something else. To rehabilitate Nazism and make rightist extremism socially acceptable, they believe it is necessary to deny these crimes. This and no other intention is what we can accuse them of amid all this posturing.6 The malicious “Auschwitz lie” – an outrageous term insinuating that the reality of the Nazi genocide of Jews does not exist – stems from a brochure by the German neo-Nazi Thies Christophersen, a man well known to the courts. He was transferred to Auschwitz in 1944, where he was stationed at a pest control and plant protection facility. Claiming the competence of the eyewitness, Christophersen intermingles his own experiences (he was not involved in the extermination; the facility where he worked was located on the periphery of the camp complex) with arguments typical of rightwing extremism. This mélange serves the purpose of proving that life in Auschwitz, for everyone, including the prisoners, was actually quite pleasant. People danced and sang as they worked, and it took some time before the prisoners admitted to Auschwitz in an undernourished condition had “padded out” again.7 Holocaust denial or marginalising the genocide of six million Jews manifests a form of antiSemitism which for decades now has articulated itself in a variety of ways. Holocaust denial is 71
Holocaust Denial: Anti-Semitism as a Refusal to Accept Reality the pivotal concern of a “revisionism” which, as an auxiliary ideology, serves rightwing extremist propaganda. Those rightwing extremists describe themselves as “revisionists” on the rampage against a historical view of National Socialism and its crimes which is founded on research and facts. Originally they were stubborn Nazis who worked on defending National Socialism in the 1950s. At first they sought to mitigate German guilt for the outbreak of the Second World War. The chief witness at the beginning of the 1960s was the American David L. Hoggan and his book Der erzwungene Krieg (The Forced War), published in the far-right Grabert Verlag. Donning the guise of a scholarly study, the book has a wealth of source quotes and cross-references, footnotes and bibliographical references. Giving it the appearance of integrity and comprehensive knowledge of source documents, the real purpose of this guise was to present a view of history anchored in serious scholarship which shows Hitler to be an outstanding statesman and his opponents nothing other than belligerent monsters. Upon closer inspection, the source quotations proved to be fallaciously employed or outright forgeries, the bibliographical references largely incorrect and the argumentation nonsensical. But the book was extremely useful as a revisionist propaganda weapon, for which purpose it sufficed to take the title as a programmatic concern and refer to the purportedly key documentation.8 “Revisionism” established itself as auxiliary ideology serving rightwing extremist goals, its aim being to “decriminalise” history and furnish a whitewashed interpretation – achieved by way of falsification and manipulation – of the past. In the revisionist conception, the “Auschwitz lie” had a pivotal function as the ideology negating the crimes committed by the Nazi state, an ideology that Hitler apologists, old diehards and neo-Nazis sought to gloss over in order to retouch the historical image of National Socialism.9 Revisionism draws on and employs pseudoscholarly arguments and presents its concerns in common language. Imitating scholarship by adopting its forms – disquisition and footnote, lecture and seminar, conference and journal – does not, however, constitute academic soundness and seriousness but merely serves the purpose of creating confusion and negating historical truth. “Scientific material evidence” is supposed to invalidate and replace historical documents (doubting their authenticity has a long tradition among revisionists), so as to wipe out historical realities. The methods of revisionism include speculation on the effect of the poisonous Zyklon B gas used in Auschwitz as well as “calculations” on the amount of coal used and the capacity of the crematoria in the extermination camps, or the time needed to burn corpses. The goal is to “prove” that the mass murder of Jews was not even possible. One interested person (who in a letter introduced himself to the present author as a natural science graduate) delved into the problem of the impact and disposal of Zyklon B, because he suspected that “even at high temperatures a room gassed with Zyklon B would still be full of gas two hours later”. This acts as a foil to the reports on the killing process in Auschwitz where the gas chambers were opened immediately after the death of the victims, seeking to disclose them as being falsified. To support his thesis – the sole purpose of which is to prove that the murdering in Auschwitz could not have been in the same dimension as actually took place – he follows a line of argumentation pursued by other revisionists, namely 72
that it was impossible to produce the temperature needed for the poison gas to develop. According to his own portrayal, he did not let the matter rest with theoretical deliberations, but he tested his ideas in a practical experiment, which he describes as follows: “A small – certainly dilettantish – pilot experiment with two digital thermometers in a tolerably sealed crate, occupied by a single person, generated after a quarter of an hour an absolutely negligible rise of temperature along the timber flooring.” Presumably he employed his wife as test person and carried out the experiment in the laundry of the family home, all done to take a stand against historical truth.
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As the reasoning behind his line of questioning, he notes that there is a “venerated law” among natural scientists “that a prevailing view, theory or the like leads to false conclusions should only one of the starting assumptions be false – here in a figurative sense the impossibility of disposing Zyklon B after its use in mass gassings”. And as a motive for his research, he alleges that he “experienced in the Weimar Republic the increasing estrangement between Germans and Jews – to a large part provoked by Jewish immigration from the East”; it is his wish, he continues, to “once again have an unprejudiced relationship between Germans and Jews that had been so natural in Wilhelmian Germany”.10 The verdict of professional natural scientists on such lines of inquiry pursued by revisionists is devastating: they are nothing but a “blend of hypocrisy, small-minded smugness and crudely put-on naivety with ostensible scientific objectivity” is the quintessence of one report.11 The American Fred Leuchter, a self-proclaimed engineer and expert on execution technology, is the author of the Leuchter Report, in circulation since 1988. This report has allowed deniers of the genocide and apologists of Nazism to adopt a new tactic when challenging historical reality, namely to attempt to prove with scientific and technological arguments that the mass murders in Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek and all the other sites of extermination were not possible for technological reasons. In a further concoction,12 Leuchter examined the concentration camps of Dachau and Mauthausen as well as the euthanasia murder site at Hartheim. Thanks to plenty of publicity in the rightwing camp (where the outcome of his dilettantish zeal was celebrated as a “scientific sensation”), epigones have propagated this political fanaticism born out of apologist motives, presenting it as an urge to gain knowledge which served their understanding of historical truth. As in 1992 when the former Nazi Otto-Ernst Remer (a retired major general and, after 1945, a protagonist in the neo-Nazi scene for decades) had to answer charges of denying the genocide in court, he commissioned a chemistry graduate with the task of writing an “expert assessment on the formation and verifiability of cyanide compounds in the ‘gas chambers’ of Auschwitz”. Featuring tables and graphics, figures and “chemical analysis”, the attempt was once again undertaken to prove that, from the perspective of hard science, the murders in Auschwitz were not even possible. The report is named after its author, Germar Rudolf (b. 1964), who began his career as a rightwing extremist with this “expertise”. He was active under a host of pseudonyms abroad, including the role as editor-in-chief of the journal Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung (Quarterly Journal for Independent Historical Research), a forum devoted to Holocaust denial. At Remer’s trial the court refused to accept the report. Nonetheless, for the revisionist movement it became a key document, and its author a martyr for the unteachable. In March 2007, after ex73
Holocaust Denial: Anti-Semitism as a Refusal to Accept Reality tradition from the US where he had lived for years, he was sentenced in Mannheim to two-anda-half years in prison. In the view of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, his extradition from the US to Germany alone was a great setback for the revisionist camp. The aforementioned journal for “independent historical research” changed tack, renouncing Rudolf’s efforts to furnish a “scientific” argumentation and favouring instead open Holocaust denial.13 In the obscure internet presence Metapedia, a platform operating from Sweden for rightwing extremists which characterises itself as an “alternative encyclopedia about culture, philosophy, science and politics”, a “Holocaust formula” has been explicated. It imitates the scientific-technological quest for knowledge, but is in truth is nothing other than a confused string of numbers and data on the “gas chamber temperature”, which is of “great significance for understanding the Holocaust”. This nonsense aims to create confusion on a new front, namely that of the “gas chamber temperature”. Exploiting such methods, Holocaust deniers play on the public’s uncertainty in historical and moral problems, tap into widespread reservations against and stereotypes of Jews, and skillfully ferment conspiracy theories and nationalist feelings. The grotesque arbitrariness of extremist notions and theses is probably most clearly shown in the fanaticism with which Horst Mahler denies the Holocaust. The former lawyer (b. 1936) was a cofounder of the Red Army Faction in the 1970s and spent almost ten years in jail for aiding and abetting attempted murder and the escape of prisoners, before he turned from a leftwing into a rightwing extremist. At the end of the 1990s he emerged as an ideologue of revisionism. From 2000 to 2003, Mahler was member of the NPD and organised its defence case in banning proceedings pursued by the federal government. He justified his leaving of the party with its lack of radicalism. Supported by a few supporters who had joined his circle to form a “German Seminar” in 1994, Mahler discovered the continued existence of the German Reich, installed himself as the leading protagonist of a “seizure of the word” and launched a “campaign against the apparentness of the Holocaust”. Driven by a pathological need for recognition, he cast himself – far beneath his intellectual abilities – as “Reich administrator” and announced: “The German Reich is alive! Judeo-American despotism and its global kapos will perish.”14 He based his argumentation on the thesis that the Holocaust had never taken place; it was merely alleged so as to suppress the German nation. Charged with incitement to hatred, from February 2004 until January 2005 Mahler stood in the dock of the main criminal chamber of Tiergarten district court in Berlin. He was given a ninemonth suspended sentenced. Mahler exploited the trial proceedings, using them as a stage to present himself as an anti-Semite and champion revisionist positions in endless tirades, juristically declared part of the “defence plea” with quotes, which were nothing other than wild speculation and assertions. In its verdict the court acknowledged that his by no means original interpretations were characterised by the indulgence of provocation, that his rants were driven by intellectual egomania and a craving for recognition. The small horde of supporters were in the main bored by Mahler and his monologues, if they had not already opted to flee when faced with his obsessions. As one of the masterminds behind revisionism, Mahler had established a reputation through eloquence and dramaturgical skill with phrases and quotes which had found resonance on the internet. He had condensed the ideology 74
of revisionism in an infamous sentence, which perhaps most tellingly reflects the emotions of Holocaust deniers: “Billions of people would be willing to forgive Hitler and the German people for the genocide of the Jews if he had committed it, simply because they could not imagine any other solution to the Jewish question than the murder of the Jews.”15 The self-proclaimed right to the interpretational high ground over German history – nationalist and exculpatory in its lineaments – is the real driving force behind revisionist undertakings. The denial, or at least the belittling, of historical facts in the context of Nazi rule has a tradition which goes back to the period immediately after the collapse of Hitler’s Germany. The unteachable (and at the same time disappointed) Nazis had an existential interest in minimising German war guilt, in justifying the invasions of Poland and the Soviet Union (interpreted as preventive wars), in enslaving and robbing entire peoples (seen as a national or military necessity), and in denying the murder of the Jews (for which though there was no feasible justification). And those who were not directly involved in the crimes wanted to withdraw behind a pretension of innocence, claiming that they had not known, that they had not been involved or else by inwardly resisting what they had seen or known.
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Denying the reality of the Holocaust, the entrenched “refusing to believe” that six million Jews were murdered, and the argumentation whitewashing Nazi crimes was and is reserved for a small circle of ideologically fixed apologists of the Nazi regime, whose importance in the rightwing extremist scene seems to be diminishing, but for that their arguments are finding approval or serving to bolster hopes in the very centre of society as the distance to the historical events increases. Efforts to correct history contrary to the facts and establish a neo-Nazi view of history had for a long time isolated the revisionist cartel of Holocaust deniers, not only from the majority but also rightwing extremists who did not wish to be defined as neo-Nazis. This began to change in the 1980s. Not one serious historian is part of the revisionist circles. In the 1980s, however, there were attempts to provide the “revisionists” with the entry ticket to serious scholarship. Through vague formulations Ernst Nolte had seemed to indicate that it would be worthwhile to consider the arguments put forward by the revisionists, and he even went as far as to characterise the ideology producers of “radical revisionism” active in the USA and France, in other words those denying Auschwitz, as superior to “the established historians in Germany” in terms of their “command of the source materials and the verification of sources”.16 Although the “revisionists” never attained serious status, as the Historikerstreitt (historians’ quarrel) showed, which in essence revolved around the question whether Auschwitz was merely a reactive response to Stalin’s crimes and thus not singular and less grave, the debate left behind its mark, generating among the general public a certain perplexity and helplessness which then manifested itself in a growing aversion towards further critical questioning and controversy. In January 2005 the NPD faction in the state parliament of Saxony launched a very deliberate and planned revisionist attack. In the parliamentary session of 21 January 2005, which was dedicated to commemorating the bombing of Dresden in 1945, the NPD deputy Holger Apfel spoke of “coldblooded, planned industrial mass murder of the civilian population” of the city, and demanded that a “state foundation” be set up “as central memorial site for the civilian victims of the bombing”. Then, his party colleague Jürgen Gansel declared: “the bombing Holocaust of Dresden has no causal 75
Holocaust Denial: Anti-Semitism as a Refusal to Accept Reality connection to either 1 September 1939 or 30 January 1933. The plans to annihilate the German Reich existed namely for a long time, before the first National Socialist was born in Versailles.”17 Provocation directed against the consensus achieved on Germany’s commemorative culture was the method with which the NPD in Saxony, endeavoring to show off at an intellectual level, gained some public attention. Proudly the provocateurs pointed out the approval they allegedly received “from the very middle of society” for their mocking attacks against the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, labeling it the “Reich victim field” or the “Federal shame facility”. Furthermore, they invoked the results of opinion polls, according to which – as they presented it – “national attitudes” of resentment of foreigners were on the rise. Under the title “Revisionism for the political centre”, in March 2005 the NPD paper Deutsche Stimme boasted that the “breaking of the Dresden taboo” was a signal that the “anti-German preachers of repentance” were coming “under pressure”. The intention and goal were disclosed in the announcement of success, which – in a typical, integral part of the provocation – is sent out in advance and employs menacing imagery: in the ‘Super Commemoration Year’ of 2005, which is to once again lubricate the re-education machinery sixty years after the end of the war, what particularly hurts the politicians of atonement is that the national opposition has managed to establish position lights for a revision of history right in the centre of society. With its spirited manner and the taboo-breaking phrase of “bombing Holocaust”, which is historically completely permissible, the NPD faction in the state parliament of Saxony has blasted enormous holes in the tower of guilt in which the Germans have been held captive for exactly the last sixty years.18 The loudmouthed NPD deputy had used the metaphor of “bombing Holocaust” in the state parliament to give the destruction of Dresden the dimensions of a genocide, while simultaneously relativising the murder of the Jews. In the March edition of the Deutsche Stimme, he once again crowed with an article on “Why the NPD’s choice of words in the state parliament of Saxony was correct”. His remarks on semantics and the usage of the term “Holocaust”, intermingled with quotes from the most diverse sources, in which the (highest possible) numbers of victims of the air attack on Dresden are stated, are to underpin the equation of the murder of the Jews with the air war over Germany. The argumentation, which deliberately evades explicating its ideological intentions or mentioning historical context, follows the pattern of “demonstrating proof” pursued by the revisionists, who, in order to marginalise the Holocaust, referred to irrelevant sources and mobilised a citation cartel made up of likeminded authors. The intention is easily recognisable: namely to create a semblance of serious and scholarly proof, enabling them to cause disorientation, a perfect scenario to then anchor their own reading of history in public discourse.19 More essential than rightwing extremist provocation and attempts to relativise the Holocaust – which always feature the argument of the increasing distance to the historical event – are other manifestations, for instance, how the consensus on historical truth is being eroded by disinterest and ignorance, or those attempts to construct a secondary interpretation of history which goes hand in hand with the deconstruction of a historical culture nurtured by the experience of the Nazi past (with differing accentuation in the Federal Republic of Germany and German Democratic Republic). Here, we will examine a representative example. 76
The most prominent and effective medium of revisionist journalism is the National-Zeitung, an organ published by the Frey media empire of Munich, and closely affiliated to the German People’s Union (DVU), of which Gerhard Frey was chairman and main backer, and which has meanwhile merged with the NPD. Monotonous but heralded with the revelatory pathos of accusation, the themes dealt with for decades include the Second World War, Allied war crimes, the genocide of the Jews, all rehashed with the aim of asserting an apologist view of history over historical facts. Typical is an article boasting the heading: “Was Germany alone guilty? How the Second World War really came about”. There we can read:
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Anyone who today dares to contradict the thesis of German sole responsibility for the outbreak of the Second World War and points out the respective portion of blame of the victorious powers has to muster great courage. Even 70 years after the outbreak of the horrific struggle between nations, no sovereignty in dealing with the truth is recognisable in the Federal Republic of Germany, but rather what US President Truman already knew continues to be valid: “History is written by the victors.”20 If any proof was needed as to how necessary it is to explain historical issues rather than just look away, then the staff of the National-Zeitungg provides it week in, week out, regurgitating the same stereotypes year after year. What is essential, however, is that which is located between the lines and in the advertising section, where books are hawked with titles like Concentration Camp Lies or The Who’s Who of Jewry. The most successful, most widely circulated and long-lasting weekly in Germany’s far-right scene is characterised by its repetitious appeals to a stuffy patriotism, to feelings of self-pity and the threat posed by foreigners. Evoking traditional nationalist values and ideals is crystallised thematically around the Second World War, the expulsion of Germans from easterncentral Europe after 1945, the Allied occupation and Germany’s alleged ongoing lack of power and playing on the fear of being “swamped” by foreigners. The leitmotif of the agitation is an aggressive revisionism which extends from the “question of war guilt” through to doubting the dimensions of the Holocaust, which relativises the genocide and articulates anti-Semitism. Embellished with stereotyped regret at the shortcomings of a small minority of perpetrators, anti-Jewish resentments are deployed and related to current debates such as the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, compensation for Holocaust victims or the purported Jewish influence in Germany and the world. The image of the hostile, vengeful and powerful Jew is propagated as a means to keep alive traditional prejudices; it is part of a political staging which manipulates the historical genocide of the Jews and its repercussions in the collective memory and mind. As part of this staging, prominent Jewish figures are regularly the target of base attacks by the National-Zeitung. The important link in transporting ahistorical constructs – the worst of which is the “Auschwitz lie” – from the rightwing extremist spectrum via the conservative camp into the heart of mainstream society is obvious. Besides revisionists and rightwing radicals, right-conservative circles also have a part in anchoring resentments in public discourse. Claiming to pursue purely progressive and educational intentions, they challenge the alleged threat to the freedom of expression presented by the “prohibition of independent thinking”, prescribed terminology and the supposed superiority of the leftist media, while seeking to erect anti-Enlightenment bastions to overcome “neototalitarian methods and strategies”. 77
Holocaust Denial: Anti-Semitism as a Refusal to Accept Reality The main goal of this crusade against the purported pressure to conform to certain views is “political correctness”, which has succeeded older constructs (“collective guilt”, “reeducation”). With all the ambition of a conspiracy theorist, this term is understood as an omnipotent and omnipresent machinery, churning out convictions and views which are exploited by enemy forces (above all “the left”), and against which resistance needs to be urgently organised so as to avert danger for the nation, fatherland and other values. A trivial but essential reason for relativising the Holocaust in general consciousness lies in the transformation of information media, which now presents the deniers with new and effective opportunities. Not only does the gigantic assortment of information available on the internet on all manner of topics marginalise the information itself, but the medium itself is eminently suited to spreading disinformation and camouflaging its creators. Within a decade the internet has become the globe’s most important instrument of propaganda. Criminal activities like asserting the “Auschwitz lie” are placed in the internet anonymously (for example, through US providers), thus evading the German criminal justice.21 In the communications media the denial of the Holocaust is accompanied by manifestations of traditional anti-Semitism. On its homepage, a “Bürgerreform Europa” presents a text called “Unmasked Talmud” and the claim that since 1900 every single prophecy in the Elders of Zion has come about “unerringly accurately and with devastating certainty”.22 What possibilities exist to combat Holocaust denial? The means of the criminal justice system are limited because, despite being a criminal offence in Germany (“Auschwitz law”), revisionists claim the freedom of expression and, when guided by tactical nous, the incitement of contradicting facts can be conducted in such a way that it is untouchable juristically. This is proven again and again by the press of the extreme right when it set its assertions in the form of a quotation or a question, embellished with duplicitous outrage at Nazi crimes. The criminal justice system can therefore only clamp down on those who are careless, or on propagandists who actually seek out the martyr’s role for the impact it ensures. What remains indispensable is to teach schoolchildren about the Nazi persecution of Jews. Appropriate to the material and objectively – i.e., oriented on the cognitive dimension and not appealing to feelings of guilt and moral emotions – school lessons must lay down the foundation of convincing knowledge, one that cannot easily be jolted. However, schools need the support of professional scholarship and the media, on the one hand, and parents, on the other. If the subject matter taught in school is relativised in the family context by being flippantly doubted, through ignorance or disinterest, then anti-Semitic deniers of the truth have already captured terrain. The most important prerequisite for repelling these forces, therefore, remains the democratic consensus of citizens, namely that the historical truth is not to be surrendered to the sensation mongering of sections of the media nor turned over to the political interests of a minority of aggressive nationalists, neoNazis and rightwing extremists. In the pro and contra as to whether the “Auschwitz lie” is a criminal offence, there is, besides juristic definitions and political arguments, the laws of reason and the imperatives of humanity, quite apart from the postulates of ethics. For civil society and a state based on the rule of law, it follows that denying the genocide of the Jews needs to be combated with the instruments of the justice system. 78
NOTES 1
Jost Müller-Neuhof, “Schuldig bei Vergleich”, Der Tagesspiegel, 11 Jul 2008.
2
Arno Widmann, “Der Kampf um die Erinnerung: Historiker wenden sich gegen ein staatlich verordnetes Geschichtsbild”, Frankfurter Rundschau, 23 Nov 2008.
3
Frank Jansen, “Holocaust-Leugner nicht bestrafen”, Der Tagesspiegel, 10 Jul 2008.
4
Hanna Borgwardt, “Die Strafbarkeit der ‘Auschwitzlüge’”, in Heribert Ostendorf (ed.), Rechtsextremismus: Eine Herausforderung für Strafrecht und Justiz, Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2009, 233–266; c.f. Thomas Wandres, Die Strafbarkeit des Auschwitzleugnens, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2000.
5
Beschluß BVerfG [Decision of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany], 1. Senat, 13 Apr 1994 [Karlsruhe 1994].
6
Deutscher Bundestag, 12. Wahlperiode, Stenographische Berichte, 18 May 1994, 19670. Bonn, 1994.
7
Thies Christophersen, Die Auschwitz-Lüge, Mohrkirch: Kritik, 1973 (numerous further editions).
8
David L. Hoggan, Der erzwungene Krieg: Ursachen und Urheber des 2. Weltkriegs, Tübingen: Grabert, 1961; Hermann Graml, “David L. Hoggan und die Dokumente”, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterrichtt 14 (1963), 492–514.
9
Jürgen Zarusky, “Die Leugnung des Völkermords: “Revisionismus” als ideologische Strategie”, in Wolfgang Benz (ed.), Auf dem Weg zum Bürgerkrieg: Rechtsextremismus und Gewalt gegen Fremde in Deutschland, Frankfurt a. Main, 2001, 63–86.
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10 Correspondence between Dr S. and the author, Aug/Oct 1992. 11 Letter from the Department of Synthetic and Analytical Chemistry, TU [Technical University] Berlin, to the author, November 1992. 12 Fred A. Leuchter, Der zweite Leuchter Report: Dachau, Mauthausen, Hartheim, Hamilton, Ontario: Samisdat Publishers, 15 Jun 1989. 13 Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz [Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution], Verfassungsschutzbericht 2007, Vorabfassung, 111. Cologne, 2007. 14 Rainer Erb and Andreas Klärner, “Horst Mahler vor Gericht”, Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 14 (2005), 111–134. 15 Ibid., 123f. 16 Ernst Nolte, Streitpunkte: Heutige und künftige Kontroversen um den Nationalsozialismus, Berlin: Propyläen, 1993, 304. 17 Sächsischer Landtag, Plenarprotokoll 8. Sitzung, 4. Wahlperiode, 21 Jan 2005, 460f. 18 “Revisionismus für die politische Mitte: Antideutsche Bußprediger unter Druck”,Deutsche Stimme, Mar 2005. 19 “Deutsche wieder den aufrechten Gang lehren: Warum die NPD-Wortwahl im Sächsischen Landtag richtig war”, in Deutsche Stimme, Mar 2005. This and the article “Revisionismus für die politische Mitte” are placed under headline “Tabubruch Dresden” [Breaking a taboo in Dresden], by which a symbol is to be clearly constituted. 20 National-Zeitung, 2 May 2008. 21 Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz [Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution], Verfassungsschutzbericht 1998, Cologne, 1998. 22 Juliane Wetzel, “Antisemitismus im Internet”, in Das Netz des Hasses: Rassistische, rechtsextreme und neonazistische Propaganda im Internet, Vienna: Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes, 1997, 89. 79
Does the Iliad need an Agamemnon Version? History, Politics and the Greek 1940s The debate on communism smells of mothballs. Communism no longer exists either as a social or an economic practice or a political proposition or an ideological vision. — Stathis N. Kalyvas1
Thanasis D. Sfikas & Anna Mahera Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
University of Ioannina
History and politics after the end of the Cold War The epigram consists of two sentences that a historian could never have uttered, no matter what the challenge from his interlocutor might have been. The historian seeks to understand how the past weighs on the present; he highlights the historicity of the present, yet without weighing up his work on the basis of dubious political assessments which he posits axiomatically. Were he to do this, it would amount to an act of subversion not only of his own work but of the work of historiography in toto as a positive social value, or even more, it would be a violent political misappropriation of history. Since the late nineteenth century the gradual domination of mass democracy has created a functional split between the world of politics and the world of scholarship. Politics is based on value judgments and preceptive formulations. Historians, on the contrary, calibrate their mental activity so as to comprehend reality itself as much as possible. The rejection of the reification of the social world lies at the core of the historical vocation.2 The historian shows that the things that surround us are traces of human activity in the past and therefore he seeks to animate those traces, to uncover and describe the faces that created them.3 Empathy, not in the sense of identification but in the sense of a careful and meticulous observation, is the foremost and most binding condition in the historian’s route. Although the retrospective view is a clearly insurmountable obstacle for the attainment of full empathy with the history he is trying to understand,
he never ceases to strive to that end. Besides, he needs a lengthy amount of time in order to carry out his research; hence he always places himself at a temporal instance from the timeliness that changes daily. The ungerminating language of “the end of” this or that or of whatever is of no concern to the historian, unless he has decided to change job and append himself profitably to his contemporary state of things.
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One further problem which springs from the reification of the past is that it offers the observer the opportunity to make short work of concepts, philosophical currents and social and political movements, replacing them without hesitation with the political regimes which were supposed to represent them and now are extinct. After the fall of the socialist regimes of Eastern Europe, especially among less sophisticated scholarly communities, the tendency was widespread to dispose summarily not only of whatever had been associated with those regimes but also of everything that Marxism stood for, and especially its relation to the idea of revolution. This tendency stands at the opposite of the line of the Bloomsbury Set, which, in an era that was also turbulent and transitional, argued that “nothing mattered except states of mind, our own and other people’s of course, but chiefly our own . . . consisted of timeless, passionate states of contemplation and communion, largely unattached to ‘before’ and ‘after’”.4 In the case of contemporary approaches, “before” and “after” demarcate spaces that do not communicate with each other, and thus the student of history finds no reason to feel the splits and turning points and to interpret them; he finds it sufficient to ascertain and enhance them, to turn them into insurmountable barriers even for his own endeavour. In so doing, supporters of such undifferentiated generalisations in history or in the social sciences deliberately forgot that Marxism never insisted that it introduced a new philosophy or a new concept of man, since it derived its foundation from Hegel’s philosophy, which it aimed to turn into reality. If therefore one makes short work of Marxism, one should also do likewise with Hegel, with philosophy itself, and finally with the world as we have contemplated it. And yet, why has this point, which in the last few decades has been the strongest barrier to the postmodern, in the Greek case of the “new wave” historiography not been dealt with even as a hintt of a problem? Why did the Greek “new wave” have such an easy ride in spreading itself?
The ‘revival of history’ vs. ‘historical thinking’: introducing the Greek ‘new wave’ For the past ten years or so, Greek historiography on the 1940s – a decade marked by war, defeat, occupation, resistance and civil war – has had to grapple with a new approach which calls itself the “new wave”. In an intellectual and epistemological juncture which naively claims that the only task of each era towards history is to rewrite it, in the case of contemporary Greek historiography the task is discharged through the renovation and restoration of older frameworks and interpretative schemes relating to the history of the pivotal 1940s. The chief agents of this 81
Does the Iliad need an Agamemnon Version? self-styled “new wave” are political scientists Stathis N. Kalyvas (Yale University) and Nikos Marantzidis (University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki). The venture began with a paper presented by Kalyvas at a conference on the Greek Civil War held at King’s College London in 1999,5 and carried on with the publication of a book chapter entitled “Red Terror: Leftist Violence during the Occupation” in 2000,6 and then took on the form of a ten-point manifesto published in the masscirculation Athens daily newspaper Ta Nea in March 2004.7 There followed three books which, according to political scientist and historian Ilias Nikolakopoulos, comprise the “trilogy of muddle”:8 the first book deals with armed bands which mainly collaborated with the occupying powers during the Second World War;9 the second book is the publication of a subsequently altered version (by the diarist himself) of the diary of a Communist Party notable, Dimitris Vlandas, covering the years 1947–1949;10 and the third with the historiography of the Greek 1940s bearing the equivocal and unwarranted title Η εποχή της σύγχυσηςς [The age of muddle].11 The thrust of the new wave is deceptively simple. As the old rightwing narrative would have it, albeit more crudely, Greece in the 1940s had faced a dramatic groundswell of popular support for the National Liberation Front (EAM), created by the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) in 1941; yet that support was founded mainly on the violence and terror which the communists had visited on opponents, waverers and bystanders. Greek history in that decade can be summed up in the “three rounds” of the determined communist attempt to seize power by force of arms in 1943– 1944, in December 1944 and in 1946–1949. Although by 1949 the Left had lost the political and military struggle, subsequently it succeeded in establishing its own historiographical orthodoxy for nearly half a century, until the “new wave” came in to put things straight and obliterate those rosy leftist narratives about freedom-loving national liberation fighters. With few exceptions, the controversy generated by this “new” – or, as it also calls itself, “postrevisionist wave”12 – has focused on the sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit ideological and political coordinates of the venture. In large part this is due to the fact that with a noteworthy frequency, the views of the “new wave” are buttressed by a regular shower of shorter pieces by Kalyvas and Marantzidis, published in the Sunday press, which offers good opportunities to charm the unsuspecting and enlist those ready to accept the “new” truth of the “new wave”. In such a short piece by Kalyvas from March 2009, wholly representative of the “new” paradigm and style, the self-referential narcissism of the “new wave” is encapsulated in the contention that in the domain of Greek historiography on the 1940s there have been only three “leaps” to the truth: the first was a collaborative volume edited by John O. Iatrides in 1981;13 the second was Mark Mazower’s book on Greece during the Axis occupation, published in 1993;14 the third “leap” is the emergence of the “new wave” which appeared in 1999–2000 and is going strong to this day. Numerous scholars who studied the Greek 1940s in between these great “leaps” have to this day being wasting themselves on “sterile questions which were more closely related to the metaphysical anxieties of the Left than with the demands of research” – the latter now being clearly stipulated by the “new wave” – with the result that “myths and clichés that from a scholarly point of view have been totally devalued are incessantly regurgitated”:15 the reader is not privy to any information about how, when and by whom all that had gone on before has been “totally devalued”, unless the alert reader is expected to feel that the self-referential narcissism of the “new wave” offers the glaringly obvious answer; and it probably is, because, according to 82
Kalyvas, the research, publications and conferences of the “new wave” have set off its “dominant role ... in the formulation of the research agenda”.16 Still, persistence in a controversy that privileges the political or ideological or even stylistic features of the “new wave” discourse tends to cloud the fundamental weakness of the venture – its theoretical, methodological, analytical and normative practices which fundamentally subvert its scholarly credibility.17
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Politics and contested histories in Greece The political and intellectual juncture in which the “new wave” venture came to unfold its approach was instrumental in determining in large part the gravity with which its views were invested in the context of Greek historiography on the 1940s. Contemporary politics and contemporary history have been closely related, though in a nonlinear manner. The history of the 1940s was about the essence of politics, and the politics of the post-civil war period derived part of its content and legitimacy from that history of the 1940s. Until 1974 a rightwing version predominated, but a leftist rival did exist and did have its audience among leftist circles in Greece and in the communities of the Greek communists exiled in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe after the end of the civil war in 1949.18 The domination of the Right was more historiographical and less cultural. After the “metapolitefsi” (the “political changeover”) of 1974 and the fall of the military dictatorship which had been established seven years earlier, the Left was politically represented by three segments – the social-democratic Pasok, the orthodox Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and the splinter KKE Esoterikou (Internal) which distanced itself from the pro-Moscow mother party. Each of the three leftist parties cherished and projected a rival version of the past. At first glance, the common thread among these three leftist versions was the rejection of the rightwing narrative of a triple attempt by the KKE to come to power by force of arms in the 1940s and offer the country as a prize to communist Slavdom and Joseph Stalin. The Pasok version condemned the deeds of the Right in the 1940s but also the “mistakes” of the communist leadership; the KKE Esoterikou version was similar to the Pasok rendition, the main difference being the dosage of communist leadership “mistakes”. As for the orthodox version of the KKE, it did vary according to national politics and innerparty politics, and at times de-emphasised the more divisive experience of the civil war of 1946–1949 in favour of the more “unifying” experience of the “national” resistance to the Axis occupiers in 1941–1944. This was especially the case with the KKE version of the 1980s; since the 1990s the party has gradually shifted towards stressing the national-liberation credentials of communist action in the 1940s not only in terms of the resistance but also in terms of the civil war, while currently it is veering towards a more revolutionary correct narrative. After the end of the civil war in 1949, the Greek Left salvaged from the events of the 1940s a silent cultural narrative of heroism and defeat, while the victorious Right clenched the politically and socially dominant narrative of victory. Since the metapolitefsi of 1974 the Greek Right has found it increasingly difficult to uphold its narrative, as political and scholarly conditions became favourable to an academic study of the 1940s. For more than two decades such studies rendered 83
Does the Iliad need an Agamemnon Version? increasingly untenable the victor’s narrative and established schemes of periodisation and interpretation that appeared more supportive of a “leftist” edifice. The “historians’ debate” that was inaugurated with the publication of the “new wave” manifesto in March 2004 was an assault on the only thing that the Left had kept from the 1940s. Yet, despite the charges of the “new wave”, there was nothing odd or uncommon about the dominance of a leftist narrative on the Greek 1940s. Especially in the postwar era, the relationship between history and politics has been a complex adventure: the historical narrative was often forced to resort to temporary and unstable forms, albeit especially interesting, since it was dominated and almost repressed by restrictions dictated by politics. On the other hand, Marxism was a very flexible analytical tool when dealing with the concepts of revolution and history; hence Marxism was a tool friendly to the scholar who did not only want to ascertain “the end” of history and summarily entrench himself in his academic discipline. It was a flexible tool mainly to the extent that the concepts Marxism used for the interpretation of history were philosophically ambivalent. In his lectures at the École Nationale d’Administration, Raymond Aron used to say of Marxism that, on the one hand, there was revolution as a rationally necessary development and, on the other, there was revolution as the inescapable course of history.19 This created possibilities for interpreting the facts in a manner that equated the credibility of Marxism with the credibility of history. In 1947 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his Humanisme et Terreur,20 referred to Leon Trotsky’s last thoughts on the question of the revolution. Trotsky believed that if after the Second World War the proletariat did not seize its destiny in its own hands, thereby realising a revolution that would be the prelude to the abolition of classes and of nations and the first step towards world socialism, then one would have to conclude that the Marxist proposition on the socialist revolution that would resolve the contradictions of capitalism was ultimately a proposition which history had belied. Merleau-Ponty, who wanted to continue to believe in Marxism, commented on Trotsky’s views that it was history that had been wrong and that the only correct way to face history was through the prism of Marxism.21 The non-Marxist Aron said of the revolution that did not happen that it would be equally valid to conclude that either history or Marxism had been wrong.22 In an analytical framework equally fluid and with the Greek juncture of the 1940s bearing some of the hallmarks of a revolutionary period, the discourse of the Left on the civil war could unhurriedly invest in the fulfilment of the Marxist vision. The inevitability of revolution could not be put in doubt, therefore Marxism was ideologically and morally strengthened, while as a rationally necessary development, a Greek Civil War-cum-revolution absolved history from having been wrong. Depending on the standpoint of each observer, defeat could be ascribed as a mistake or as a failure or even as treason perpetrated by the historical agents; but whatever the exegesis, what was truly important had indeed occurred, history was innocent and the Marxist discourse on revolution had been fulfilled. In its Greek version, the post-Second World War juncture bore all the characteristics of a revolution that had failed23 and historians could portray it with the “admirably equivocal” terms of Marxism.24 The “revolution” came after disasters which augured salvation, disasters that were fertile and redemptive, disasters that affected equally devout Christians and university graduates, those who believed in the vengeance of the wretched and the poor and in the overthrowing of social values, but also those who believed that science and ra84
tional organisation could influence decisively the course of mankind. When the time was right, the Left could construct its narrative on the 1940s and make it dominant, because it located itself in a space where political defeat and political victory could have no other impact on it but to strengthen it, since political defeat and political victory were the dialectical opposites of a political act that hadd been undertaken.
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Even so, the “new wave” claim that the leftist domination of the historiography on the 1940s is a Greek aberration was no accident. It was related to a juncture which, a decade after the collapse of the socialist order in Eastern Europe, sought the ironing out of all European exceptions, aberrations and irregularities in view of the intensification of a Europe-wide process of closer but ever utilitarian integration through leveling. It was more or less at the same time that French historiography settled its account with the history and the memory of Vichy,25 and while simultaneously denouncing itself as the last Stalinist historiography in Europe, it took care to rid itself both from the national “founding myth” of the French Revolution and from the communist illusion. Thus the persistence on a “leftist” historiographical reading of the 1940s as a Greek aberration and the focus of the “new wave” on this feature came to respond to a social demand: a seemingly scholarly view of the past was needed to validate what the future would bring, without any footnotes about possibilities, missed opportunities or alternative choices and outcomes. In the “new wave” framework it was this problem that decided the balance – indeed, the dosage – between scholarly research and the satisfaction of the social demand. Research must be shaped in a manner that does not cast doubt on its scholarly credibility. This, in turn, corresponded to a modicum of veritable scholarly endeavour, since the very aim of scholarly credibility was served primarily by the academic titles and credentials of some of the architects of the “new wave”. These credentials and titles were repeatedly and ceremoniously screened by the mass media, while to some degree they were used by the “new wave” authors themselves in order to prop up the credibility of their propositions. Still within the same framework, scholarly activity should state its findings in a manner that does not simply respond to social questions but actually overpowers and abolishes them; and to do this it has had to attune itself to the cacophony of the mass media, to learn how to bypass memory, to minimise empirical evidence and ultimately to shrink theoretical contemplation.
From ‘revisionism’ to ‘postrevisionism’ and ‘new histories’ These practices have recently peaked in Η εποχή της σύγχυσηςς [The age of muddle], which so far is the most ambitious attempt of the “new” and “postrevisionist” “wave”. In the first instance, the use of the terms “postrevisionism/postrevisionists” both by those who embrace it and by some of their critics is mechanistic and ultimately misleading. Referring to the latter, Nikos Marantzidis correctly points out that the critics of the “new wave” often identify local history studies with “‘revisionism’ (which obviously recalls those who dismiss Nazi crimes) and with ‘postmodernism’”, to add, equally correctly, that if “this is not a case of extreme deviousness, it is [a mark of] deep ignorance and [of] an inability to understand the debate”.26 It is largely the latter, but at this point it is essential to clarify a certain measure of ambiguity in the relationship between the modern and the postmodern. 85
Does the Iliad need an Agamemnon Version? In its later phase the postmodern has often sought refuge in a “new” modern, in a pattern that was familiar both to broader audiences as well as to academic tribes; it is a pattern that can more easily promote its vacuousness under a gloss of “progress”. The Greek “new wave” appears to have acceded to that version of the postmodern when in its manifesto it posits itself as “new” and, upon closer inspection and in relation to the history of postwar Greece, it is obliged to define as modern that which followed the defeat of the Left in the civil war. This assertion is explicitly made by Kalyvas, who celebrates the fact that the entire Greek society escaped the pathology of underdevelopment which continues to plague the majority of the world’s population. Today it is obvious that the “grey years” of postwar Greece were the most crucial years of the country’s leap and, paradoxically and ironically, the defeat of the Left in the civil war was a prerequisite for that.27 This quotation illustrates the precipitate attempt of its author to uncover the terms of a new modernity in postwar Greek society. The defeat of the Left in the civil war is enlisted in a game of provocations and defiance which the “new wave” right from the outset was determined to play in order to climb up the ladder of Greek historiography. Yet the concept of the “grey years” of Greece’s “leap” is much more interesting with regard to the origins of the “new wave” itself. The concept is used to bring back the idea of the “modern” in the empty space created by the negation of modernisation, socialism and industrialisation (specifically with regard to heavy industry), in other words the negation of all those concepts that have lost their appeal since the late 1980s.28 Interestingly, they lost their appeal not only because they were associated with aspects of the Stalinist version of modernisation that was universally repudiated, but also because western thought took care to characterise in toto Marxism and socialism in their very nature as negative “Promethean” ideologies.29 Yet because it is difficult to formulate an attractive political imperative after the “end of history”, and having excluded from one’s political thought the dimension of the future and of radical change (if not of progress itself), then a new “modern” instead of the suspect “postmodern” should be posited. The new “modern” in reality preserved only the external outline of what modernism had once been, so that the well-established western “paradigm” might continue to prevail.30 Thus the ambiguity of the concepts that permeate the vocabulary of the “new wave” extends also into epistemological issues. To cite one instance, it is at least a dubious minority view that the concepts of objectivity and interpretation are mutually contradictory or that “the modern historiographical tendencies” put the concept of “objectivity” into question;31 a far more precise formulation would be that they tried to do so but failed, as John Lewis Gaddis, a neighbour of Kalyvas’ at the History Department of Yale University, argues convincingly.32 A similar problem is associated with the use of the terms “postrevisionism” and “postrevisionists”. These terms are derived from American – and certainly not British – historiography and denote something that is very specific: the interpretative paradigms of American historiography on the “Cold War”, which began with the “orthodox/traditionalist” school that blamed postwar developments on Soviet ideological and geostrategic expansionism; carried on with the “revisionists” who blamed it all on American economic imperialism; and then ended up with the large, 86
diffuse and diverse wave of “postrevisionists”, who include the full range from crypto-orthodox to crypto-revisionists plus all the intermediate nuances and varieties. It is therefore hard to duplicate in Greek historiography the original “postrevisionism”, for the real thing includes a wide spectrum of approaches, paradigms and interpretations, from Michael Hogan’s corporatism to Melvyn Leffler’s national security model, and from Michael Hunt’s ideology to Jessica GienowHecht’s cultural transfer and Kristin Hoganson’s gender approach.33 Greek “postrevisionism” seems to have a long way to go since at present it identifies only three common threads in its venture: the turn to the “mass level” and “the view from below”; interdisciplinarity with the pumping of working hypotheses and analytical tools from history, political science, cultural studies, sociology and social psychology; and the lack of any connection between these approaches and any “concrete ideology, faction or party”.34
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As regards interdisciplinarity, surely “autonomy is not the same thing as exclusiveness or selfsufficiency”,35 but this should not cancel the necessary approach to, and treatment of, history as an autonomous discipline. The uncritical obsession with interdisciplinarity relegates history to the level of a utilitarian database for the erection of the theoretical constructs of the social sciences, fundamentally misunderstanding “the integrity and importance of history as a study of man in society in the past”.36 Then, the argument about the lack of any connection between these approaches and any “concrete ideology, faction or party” recalls Terry Eagleton’s broadside that “ideology, like halitosis, is in this sense what the other person has”:37 the critics of the “new wave” are “ideologically partisan scholars, accustomed to simplifying aphorisms”.38 The comparative method, which is prescribed as an antidote to Greek historiography’s self-centredness and parochialism, is supported by enlisting Claudio Pavone’s verdict on the Italian resistance as a civil war, just as the Italian Fascists used to call it for decades, as well as by reference to a book by an Italian journalist on “the civil war and the violence of the Communist Party” of Italy during the liberation period.39 But the reason why this should be the case in the Greek context remains nebulous. History is defined in the main as “‘a discipline of context’. It deals with a particularr problem and a particularr set of actors at a particularr time in a particularr place.” The particular and its historical context cannot be ignored simply because the evidence must be placed under the seductively impressive dome of a social science model.40 This syncretism is akin to the linguistic mechanism of metaphor, which is employed to find similarities among dissimilarities or, in the best of cases, to compare things that are similar but not identical.41
The algorithm of violence One of the key analytical and methodological features of the “new wave” is the emphasis on the study of localities (the smaller, the better), the generalisations on the basis of temporal and spatial fragments, and a particularly vigilant eye on violence. According to the “new wave”, early works of local history appear to suffer from “an inability to generalise from their conclusions, though the researchers themselves did not seem to be particularly concerned with doing so”.42 However, it is not clear how the works of the “new wave” allow that sort of generalisation, even though generalisation is stated as constituting its major concern. According to Marantzidis, Ka87
Does the Iliad need an Agamemnon Version? lyvas’ research “focuses on the region of Argolis, but it attempts to draw conclusions that have a more general value”,43 though the reader is left at a loss as to precisely how this is attained. On the contrary, it is explicitly stated that local history can “contribute to a new synthesis of the whole picture, of the ‘general scheme’”.44 When doubt is cast on the generalising potential of the partial and the local, it is admitted that generalisations have nothing to do with conclusions: “what can be generalised are the methodological prerequisites of scholarly research on the [Greek] civil war”. One of these prerequisites is “the use on the one hand of new theoretical tools (violence is one such [tool], though not the only one) and on the other systematic and creative empirical research, with objectively measurable data”.45 Yet the theorisation of violence and its elevation to the key tool obscures the fact that violence has been one of the essential building blocks of every political order, and that ideology may restrict or facilitate the pursuits of human beings but it does not predetermine them.46 With the “theoretical tool” of violence serving as an algorithm,47 reason and necessity are driven out of the narrative, and thereby the failures and mistakes and bloodshed perpetrated by the Left were not aberrations in an otherwise shining path (which is what “leftist” historiography claimed, according to the “new wave”) but plain old communist crimes. Thus the trajectory from the heroic paradigm to the narrative of blood and terror conveniently bypasses the Greek Left’s modernising project in the 1940s. Instead, the algorithm of violence and the “red terror” paradigm are posited as a complete, closed and self-referential system that is not open to question precisely because it is assumed as containing no ambivalent propositions: the numbers of those “slaughtered by the communists”, in Greece and the world over, are thus the only empirical data in the history of science that do speak for themselves.
The ‘new wave’ as an unstructured ‘scientific revolution’ The “new wave” launched itself on a platform of provocation, defiance and arrogance that would have befitted a version of the Iliadd written by Agamemnon, since the “epic” of the 1940s had in its view been written by the vanquished Trojans. Invoking the outlook of the poet of the real Iliadd is illuminating both in terms of repelling the challenge and in terms of its initial formulation by the “new wave”. There is a fundamental difference between the Trojan War and the war of the Iliad, which Aristotle had already discerned:48 “the Trojan War is eventful, horizontal and victorious; the war of the Iliadd is tragic, vertical, with no victor.”49 The real war is that of the Iliad, which “refutes the traditional end of the ten-year long Trojan War or at least places it under poetic dispute”:50 whether written by the victors or the vanquished, the Trojan War is simply myth-making. The poet of the Iliad resolved the challenge by dividing his sympathies equitably between the Achaeans and the Trojans, though with a tinge of empathy towards the latter.51 The “epic” of the Greek 1940s has proved rather more intractable to handle. The challenge of the “new wave” has brought to the fore inadequacies and shortfalls among Greek historians at large, and more so among those studying that particular period. In both cases they seem to have taken the bait of the provocation, sometimes with the humility of a painful but not particularly effective self-criticism, and sometimes with the sort of political riposte which, even when 88
it is not parochial, it is never systematic enough to stop feeding a sterile cycle of argument and counter-argument.52 No doubt, in the course of the past decade the representatives of the “new wave” have exposed themselves in manifold ways, epistemologically as well as politically. But their audacity has never been particularly risky since it has been supported by a strong media nexus which excels in the practice of political paternalism. Still, this audacity was one of the few positive offspring of the “new wave” endeavour, and it could be replicated with a view to reinvigorating academic debate, systematising historiographical criticism in Greece and affording the group of specialists on modern Greek history the opportunity to chisel out the features of a distinctive scholarly identity. This observation is deliberately intended here to indicate primarily the general dysfunctions of the Greek academic system, and less to betray the real intent on the part of the authors of this article to absolve themselves of any responsibility for a dynamic that ultimately did not fulfil itself.
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If there is a benefit from the relaunch of conservative historiography in the guise of the “new wave”, it is that it clearly demonstrates the deadlock of all kinds of attempts to canonise particular methodological, analytical and interpretative approaches and priorities. The normative discourse of the “new wave” aims to impose its own methodological and interpretative doctrine, in turn rejecting and promoting research priorities in a manner that is both arbitrary and arrogant: for instance, questions such as “‘what was the cause of the end result’”, that is, what were the causes of the particular outcome of a particular historical phenomenon, or “what was the ‘real’ strategy of the KKE in 1944 or in 1946 . . . were often related to metaphysical matters of limited or no real content which served expediencies that are now unrealistic”.53 If one excludes the traces of audacity and daring embedded in the challenge of the “new wave”, historians are left with an off-putting remainder. The rationale which the “new wave” put forward to justify its onslaught on the historiography of the 1940s has largely obscured the other terms of its presence, its real scholarly gravitas and a few potentially interesting research initiatives. All went down under the dominant theme song: we are the “new” because we assert something that is different from the dominant historiographical model and we are free of ideology because we are not lefties. Apart from the logical gaps endemic in them, what is startling in these statements is a quasi-prohibition of alternative ways of reading historical facts which envelops them like a mist threatening not so much the historical tribe but Greek society itself. This might well signify the passage from the times of ideological debates and arguments, when each point of view fortified itself behind its own propositional barricades but at the same time recognised the manifest importance of debating rival political points of view, to a time when the camera, instead of rising to include other things too, is irredeemably sinking into a single angle to the exclusion of all rivals. Indeed, energised by the assumption that the dominant “leftist” narrative had moulded the particular segment of the past into a single true story, the “new wave” came and fragmented the segment into numerous and largely incongruous pieces and at the same time imposed on it the unity of the old 1943–49 rightwing narrative of the “three rounds”. In so doing it recycled old stuff through the fragmentation of space and the unification of time. Developments that are spatial and temporal – i.e., occurring at a fragment of space and during a fragment of time – are pro89
Does the Iliad need an Agamemnon Version? jected across time and across space as having universal applicability and, thereby, validity and explanatory power. The impressive contrapuntal self-definition of the “new wave” was projected by way of a manifesto and banished, without much ado or expert knowledge, the preceding Greek historiography on the 1940s to the margins of international historiographical production, while at the same time it isolated the Greek Civil War from the international context of the origins of the Cold War; paradoxically, the “new wave” was supposed, on its own assertion, to have come with a view to blunt such rough edges. Yet how could it do so when, according to its architects, Greek historiography appeared to be just throwing away its mothballs and coming out of the closet after a heavy winter that had lasted for decades, whereas the Greek Civil War popped up almost as a peculiarly Greek aberration at considerable distance from analogous cases in Europe and elsewhere? Inconsistencies such as these, but also the broader internal contradictions of its attempt to rejuvenate Greek historiography on the 1940s, have not only aggravated the credibility of the “new wave” in the context of the scholarly debate but have also affected adversely the formulation and the appeal of the response. In the main, they prevented “leftist” historiography from focusing on a clear and accurate critical stand. When the endeavour suffers from manifold and obvious weaknesses, it is usually difficult to find the ends of the thread and to uncover the aim behind the haphazard treatment of the evidence, especially when the agents of the critical response are diverse and clearly fragmented by their own internal arguments and conflicts. “In a word,” as Marc Bloch used to say, “the fallacy is clear, and it is only necessary to formulate it in order to destroy it.”54 The Left in this connection has not formulated the fallacy clearly enough; therefore during the ten years that the “new wave” has hit on Greek historiography, its contradictions and the black-out over the traces of its twisted historical reading have often worked in its favour, strengthening its presence and scattering and disorienting the critique which at first seemed manifestly obvious. For instance, the “new wave” propagates a shift from the elite to the mass level, and it does so by forgetting that what happened in the past, and what we make of it in the present, depends on human interaction and agency – what people chose, how they judged, what they did, and what ideas they entertained about themselves, the world and others. Instead, the “new wave” founded its endeavour largely on criticising other people’s views, steadfastly refusing to budge from the temporal and ephemeral assessments of its present. Thus, in historical terms, it seems to have never heard of the fundamental choices available to people in most of the world for at least 15 or 20 years after 1935: fascist or antifascist, in favour of resistance or collaboration, with the communists and their allies or with the capitalists, with the “West” or with the “East”. This weakness, which is nothing less than a refusal to look at the past on the past’s own terms, stems from a fundamental confusion on the part of the “new wave” between moralising, on the one hand, and the assessment of the moral and ideological choices that people made in the past, on the other.55 Driven by a desire to avoid the former, the “new wave” ultimately rejected the latter, which is nonetheless a task for historical scholarship par excellence. As for the reason why it wanted to avoid the former, it was perhaps an attempt not to appear to be associated with any “concrete ideology, faction or party”; but it was an attempt undermined by the very contrapuntal selfdefinition of the “new wave” historiography: since the entire project to rejuvenate the field was 90
based on the rejection of the “leftist” version,56 on the negation of leftist morality and ideology, would it not be logical to assume that the “new wave” was simply its rightwing mirror-image? This assumption is perfectly valid and legitimate, though it contradicts the claims of the “new wave” itself. But the main difficulty is not to be found in the foundational inconsistencies of the “new wave”. The negation of the “leftist” narrative sets out from the present to anchor itself in the past in a manner that is unabashedly ideological, thereby delegitimising the historical perspective and outlook. In the case of postwar history the tone is set for the historian by two poles which are usually, during the course of writing up, mutually exclusive. The first is that of the international postwar dynamics which forms the ideal environment for the emotional and ideological involvement of the historian. The second is the pole of the Cold War, which, although it temporally appears as the immediate outcome of the postwar juncture, analytically exhibits major discontinuities with the preceding period. In the broader canvass of postwar history, the years of the Greek Civil War were a transitional period, when history passed from one form of dispute to another, when defeated enemies came back to haunt their victors and their victims and old friends became foes.
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The historian constantly seeks to synthesise realism and ideology in a coherent and cohesive narrative which interprets history rather than vindicates it with a lethal overdose of hindsight. Scholarly history is in a constant state of argument with the diffuse “collective memory”. Therefore the historian needs to be able at any moment to control and overcome the intellectual ties created between the “we–them” of conventional wisdom and the scholarly historical community.57 There is, of course, another solution, and it is an easy one, since it can be put to use immediately when the historian decides not to address the difficult problem of the relationship between history and politics, but instead decides to abolish it and devote himself to his own universe, thereby speeding up the end not of politics but of history. A third solution for the vexing issue of postwar history is the one selected by the “new wave”: to scuttle history into an unrelenting political reality and leave on the surface only those fractals of memory which politics can manipulate.
Determinism58 and teleology59 as scholarly wisdom Epistemologically, part of Greek historiography has been nurtured and raised on a diet of deterministic certainties purporting to be of Marxist stock. There should be no need to recount here the rejection by Marx and Engels themselves of the mechanistic and simplistic applications of their ideas. The dignity of possibilities needs to be restored to the study of history just as it has long ago been restored to the study of the natural world. Physicist Richard Feynman may be of use to some historians when he claims that “Nature permits us to calculate only probabilities. Yet science has not collapsed.”60 History, in particular, should be written forwards, not backwards,61 for the simple reasons that (a) it may be told backwards but it is lived forwards;62 and (b) it “is determined only as it happens”.63 Deterministic and teleological interpretations stem from the use (not the abuse; use, in this case, is abuse) of hindsight. Yet, in contrast to the effortless and cost-free “wisdom” and “perspicacity” of writers and readers, who are ex officio “blessed” with knowing the end of days, in the perfect91
Does the Iliad need an Agamemnon Version? ly real world of the past “the picture was more uncertain, and other possibilities seemed more likely”.64 Even if it was A.J.P. Taylor’s love of provocation that led him to taunt that “in real life the inevitable rarely happens”,65 it remains true that what is seen as “inevitable” exists only retrospectively as a tool of interpretation rather than one of prognostication.66 In a sense, everything is determined, “but it might as well not be, because we can never know what is determined”.67 Pretending otherwise means that hindsight makes the narration of the past a “selective, partisan, anthropocentric and mediated undertaking”, as historical questions which are raised a posteriori tend to preempt “a future which had not then been written but one which we insist upon seeing as preordained . . . If truth by definition encompasses that which might have happened but did not, it is also valid that we cannot in any case know what might have happened. And therefore we do not have the right either to fear it or feel nostalgic for it.”68 Possibility, in other words, is inherently connected with reality. “Possibility,” Antonio Gramsci wrote, “is not reality: but it is in itself a reality. Whether a man can or cannot do a thing has its importance in evaluating what is done in reality. Possibility means ‘freedom’.”69
Epilogue: Do beans grow upside down? Critical historiography reminds those who follow it that their ways were made possible by those who came before and walked on paths that were different.70 A product of some of those who followed was a variety of self-styled “new histories” which emerged in the 1950s and the 1960s and had as a major characteristic the study of the multitudes as opposed to the numerically microscopic but economically and politically powerful elites whose actions and writings had until then been the almost exclusive preoccupation of historians.71 The outcome was that social-science history, microhistory and local history may have rescued the “masses” and the “anonymous” ones from what E.P. Thompson dismissed as “the enormous condescension of posterity”, but they often ended up reducing “every human being to a statistic, a social type, or the mouthpiece of a collective discourse”.72 But it was from Max Weber as well as from Antonio Gramsci that historians learnt that ideas, institutions and culture are not simply “the superstructure”; whereas on the question of the relationship between history and the “social sciences”, it is worth recalling Lawrence Stone’s exhortation that it might be time for the historical rats to leave rather than to scramble aboard the social scientific ship which seems to be leaking and undergoing major repair. History has always been social, and it was attracted by the siren songs of the social sciences because it thought – perhaps somewhat mistakenly, it now appears – that they were also scientific.73 In the case of the Greek “new wave”, the triumphalist self-assertion of its brand of “new history” creates the illusion of a neutral and value-free approach and the reality of a new doctrinaire and scholastic discourse. Yet the “new” and the “old” are not subject to self-determination, while the incitement to enrich the inquiry and the affirmation of the new paradigm are materialising in such a manner that “the ‘common’ interpretation of the recent past is . . . composed of the manifold fragments of separate pasts, each of them . . . marked by its own distinctive and assertive victimhood.”74 92
The assertion of victimhood is in itself a form of instrumentalising the past as part of the attempt to shape collective political and social memory through the manipulation of knowledge and academic power; and in that game, the demon that haunts Greek historiography, according to the “new wave”, is the same demon that is held accountable for the events of December – not of December 1944 in Athens but the riots of December 2008 in Athens; it is “the ideology of the ‘metapolitefsii generation’ which discovered its utopia in the romantic construction of the 1940s: in the heroism it sought, the revolution it fantasised, the youth it lost, but also in the convenient alibi for the prosaic present it administered.”75
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It would be hard to disagree with regard to the fantasies and the political insolvency of that generation. But the historiographical post-1974 generation does not write en masse books dedicated to “the ghosts of [their] adolescent years” nor is it ignorant of the institutional and practical meaning of the term “secretary of state”.76 It is essential to follow systematically the recent historiography on the history of the Cold War – to which the Greek history of the 1940s forms an integral part – in order to grasp that the methodological, analytical and interpretative rigidities and obsessions that are inherent in any canonisation attempt widen the gap between home-grown and home-consumed historiography and international production. One instance might serve as an allusive postscript: on the art of bodycounting the “victims of communism” at large and in the Soviet Union in particular, and on the acrobatics of western Kremlinologists, Moshe Lewin counters that anticommunism is not an analytical tool for the study of Soviet history, much in the same way that the attempt to “‘Stalinise’” the entire Soviet phenomenon, as if the USSR had been a vast gulag from 1917 right down to 1991, is unrealistically bizarre.77 By analogy, nor is anticommunism a scholarly tool for the study of Greek history in the 1940s, much in the same way that the communists and their friends then had not been members of a mass-murder syndicate or a terrorist mass organisation. The political implications of the Greek historiographical “new wave” cannot be ignored and will continue to generate debates for as long as history and politics are locked in a never-ending battle for supremacy, legitimacy and meaning. But politics is one thing. Accuracy is another: You would not fulminate quite so much, if you had had my many wild-goose chases after facts stated by men not trained to scientific accuracy. I often vow to myself that I will utterly disregard every statement made by any man who has not shown the world he can observe accurately. I wish I had space to tell you a curious History, which I was fool enough to investigate on almost universal testimony of Beans growing this year upside down. – I firmly believe that accuracy is the most difficult quality to acquire. – I did not, however, intend to say all this.78 Nor should we.
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Does the Iliad need an Agamemnon Version? NOTES 1
Stathis N. Kalyvas, “Ο ακρωτηριασμός της λογικής” [The mutilation of logic], To Vima/Nees Epoches, 19 Feb 2006.
2
Gérard Noiriel, Introduction à la socio-histoire, Paris: La Découverte, 2006, 3.
3
Antonis Liakos assesses the relationship forged between the traces of the past and the historian as a perpetual dialogue that connects the constructor/narrator with the presentism of his hyper-ego. See Antonis Liakos, Πώς το παρελθόν γίνεται ιστορία; [How the past is turned into history?], Athens: Polis, 2007, 284–285.
4
John Maynard Keynes, Two Memoirs, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949, 83.
5
Stathis N. Kalyvas, “Aspects of the Civil War during the Occupation: The Argolid, 1943–44”, unpublished paper presented at the Centre for Hellenic Studies, King’s College, London, 18–20 Apr 1999.
6
Stathis N. Kalyvas, “Red Terror: Leftist Violence during the Occupation”, in Mark Mazower (ed.), After the War Was Over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation, and State in Greece, 1943–1960, Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000, 142–183.
7
Stathis N. Kalyvas and Nikos Marantzidis, “Νέες τάσεις στη μελέτη του εμφυλίου πολέμου” [New trends in the study of the civil war], Ta Nea/Vivliodromio, 20–21 Mar 2004. Also, Mark Mazower, “Κανένας από τους μύθους δεν αντέχει πλέον . . .” [None of the myths holds out any longer . . .], Ta Nea/Vivliodromio, 20–21 Mar 2004.
8
Ilias Nikolakopoulos, “Το ‘νέο κύμα’ και η τριλογία της σύγχυσης” [The “new wave” and the trilogy of muddle], Ta Nea/Vivliodromio, 7–8 Feb 2009.
9
Nikos Marantzidis (ed.), Οι άλλοι καπετάνιοι: αντικομμουνιστές ένοπλοι στα χρόνια της Κατοχής και του Εμφυλίου [The other chieftains: anticommunists-in-arms during the years of the occupation and the civil war], Athens: Estia, 2006.
10 Dimitris Vlantas, Ημερολόγιο 1947–1949 [Diary, 1947–1949], eds Yiorgos Antoniou and Nikos Marantzidis, Athens: Estia, 2007. On reactions and the debate sparked by this publication, see Ioanna Papathanasiou, “Χρήσεις και καταχρήσεις των πηγών ή η ιστορία ως εντύπωση” [Uses and abuses of sources or history as a sensation], Ta Istorikaa 25/47 (2007), 457–473; Nikos Marantzidis and Yiorgos Antoniou, “Για τη (χαμένη;) τιμή της ιστοριογραφίας: το ‘χαμένο’ ημερολόγιο του Δημήτρη Βλαντά” [On the (lost?) dignity of historiography: the “lost” diary of Dimitris Vlandas], Nea Estiaa 163/1811 (2008), 965–983; Ioanna Papathanasiou, “Χρήσεις και καταχρήσεις των πηγών ή η ιστορία ως εντύπωση II: λίγα ακόμη λόγια για τη σκόνη των παραποιήσεων” [Uses and abuses of sources or history as a sensation II: a few more words on the dust of distortions], Ta Istorikaa 25/49 (2008), 472–480; Nikos Marantzidis and Yiorgos Antoniou, “Ο δεύτερος θάνατος του Δημήτρη Βλαντά: η κομμουνιστική ηγεσία και οι μνήμες του Εμφυλίου σήμερα” [The second death of Dimitris Vlandas: the communist leadership and the memories of the civil war today], Ta Istorikaa 26/50 (2009), 226–230; Ioanna Papathanasiou, “Xρήσεις και καταχρήσεις των πηγών ή η ιστορία ως εντύπωση ΙΙΙ: δέκα σημεία που δεν περιμένουν απάντηση” [Uses and abuses of sources or history as a sensation III: ten points that await no response], Ta Istorikαα 26/50 (2009), 230–232. 11 Yiorgos Antoniou and Nikos Marantzidis (eds), Η εποχή της σύγχυσης: η δεκαετία του ’40 και η ιστοριογραφία [The age of muddle: the 1940s and historiography], Athens: Estia, 2008. 12 Yiorgos Antoniou and Nikos Marantzidis, “Το επίμονο παρελθόν” [The persistent past], in Yiorgos Antoniou and Nikos Marantzidis (eds), Η εποχή της σύγχυσηςς [The age of muddle], 40, 42–43, 45 and passim. 13 John O. Iatrides (ed.), Greece in the 1940s: A Nation in Crisis, Hanover: University Press of New England, 1981. 14 Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–44, New Haven: Yale UP, 1993. 15 Stathis N. Kalyvas, “Συστηματική αναπαραγωγή μύθων που έχουν απαξιωθεί επιστημονικά” [Systematic 94
reproduction of myths that have lost scholarly value], Kathimerini, 8 Mar 2009. 16 Stathis N. Kalyvas, “Μια δεκαετία ερευνητικής ανανέωσης: Η έρευνα και οι αντιδράσεις” [A decade of renewing research: Research and reactions], To Vima, 18 Oct 2009. 17 For two early alerts on the “new wave”, before it launched itself with the manifesto of March 2004, see Thanasis D. Sfikas, Πόλεμος και ειρήνη στη στρατηγική του ΚΚΕ, 1945–1949 [War and peace in the strategy of the KKE, 1945–1949], Athens: Filistor, 2001, 74–75; and idem, review of Mark Mazower (ed.), After the War Was Over, in Journal of Cold War Studies 4/3 (2002), 137–140. For a collection of perceptive and accurate rejoinders, see Hagen Fleischer’s review of Mazower’s edited volume in Epistimi kai koinonia 11 (2003), 270–281; idem, Οι πόλεμοι της μνήμης: Ο Β΄ Παγκόσμιος Πόλεμος στη δημόσια ιστορίαα [The wars of memory: the Second World War in public history], 3rd ed., Athens: Nefeli, 2008, 218–220; Ioanna Papathanasiou, “Στρατευμένες ιστορίες και ιστοριογραφία: προϋποθέσεις στη συζήτηση για τη δεκαετίας του 1940” [Partisan histories and historiography: prerequisites in the debate on the 1940s], I kyriakatiki Avgi, 9 May 2004, 24–25; Ilias Nikolakopoulos, “Η ‘κόκκινη βία’ και ο εξαγνισμός των δωσιλόγων: μια δήθεν ανθρωπολογική προσέγγιση” [“Red violence” and the expiation of collaborationists: an anthropological approach of sorts], Ta Nea/Vivliodromio, 22–23 May 2004. Christos Hadziiossif, “Δεκέμβρης 1944: τέλος και αρχή” [December 1944: end and beginning], in Christos Hadziiossif and Prokopis Papastratis (eds), Ιστορία της Ελλάδας του 20ου αιώναα [History of Greece in the 20th Century], vol. 3/2, Athens: Vivliorama, 2007, 371–372, 387–390. See also Thanasis D. Sfikas, Το «χωλό άλογο»: οι διεθνείς συνθήκες της ελληνικής κρίσης, 1941–1949 [“Lame horse”: the international dimensions of the Greek crisis, 1941–1949], Athens: Vivliorama, 2007, 67–107.
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18 Antonis Liakos, “Εισαγωγή: αντάρτες και συμμορίτες στα ακαδημαϊκά αμφιθέατρα” [Introduction: guerrillas and bandits in academic auditoria], in Hagen Fleischer (ed.), Η Ελλάδα ’36–’49: από τη δικτατορία στον εμφύλιο [Greece 1936–1949: from dictatorship to civil war], Athens: Kastaniotis, 2003, 28. 19 Raymond Aron, Introduction à la philosophie politique: Démocratie et revolution, Paris: Editions de Fallois, 1997, 167–168. 20 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et Terreur: Essai sur le problème communiste, Paris: Gallimard, 1947. 21 Ibid., 104–105. 22 Aron, Introduction à la philosophie politique, 169. 23 “The victorious revolution that was lost” is the title of the memoir-cum-narrative by the communist Thanasis Hantzis, first secretary of the central committee of the National Liberation Front from 1941 to 1944; see Thanasis Hantzis, Η νικηφόρα επανάσταση που χάθηκε (1941–1945) [The victorious revolution that was lost 1941–1945], 3 vols, Athens: Papazisis, 1977–1979. 24 Raymond Aron’s phrase in Aron, Introduction à la philosophie politique, 161. 25 Henry Rousso, La Hantisse du passé, Paris: Textuel, 1998, 68. 26 Nikos Marantzidis, “Η τοπική διάσταση στη μελέτη της κατοχής και του ελληνικού εμφυλίου πολέμου” [The local dimension in the study of the occupation and the Greek Civil War], in Yiorgos Antoniou and Nikos Marantzidis (eds), Η εποχή της σύγχυσης, 192–193. 27 See Stahis Kalyvas, “Κάτω από το φόβο και τη βία: όταν μια προσωπική μαρτυρία καταφέρνει να φωτίσει πλευρές του εμφυλίου που έμεναν κρυμμένες στο σκοτάδι” [Under fear and violence: when a personal testimony succeeds in shedding light on aspects of the civil war that remained hidden in the dark]; review of Kyriakos Athanasiou, Υιός συμμορίτου [Son of a bandit] (Athens: Vivliorama, 2003), To Vima/ 95
Does the Iliad need an Agamemnon Version? Vivlia, 4 Apr 2004. 28 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, London: Verso, 2002, 8. 29 For the Promethean dimension and qualities of communist ideology, see David Priestland, The Red Flag: Communism and the Making of the Modern World, London: Penguin, 2010, esp. xxi–xxiv. 30 Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 9. 31 Stathis Kalyvas, “Συλλογική μνήμη, δημόσια ιστορία και πολιτική ορθότητα: η δεκαετία του ’40 μέσα από τρεις ιστορικές εγκυκλοπαίδειες” [Collective memory, public history and political correctness], in Yiorgos Antoniou and Nikos Marantzidis (eds), Η εποχή της σύγχυσης, 206, 207. 32 John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. 33 For two shortcuts to the voluminous literature, see Michael Hogan (ed.), America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995; Μichael Hogan and Thomas Paterson (eds), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 34 Yiorgos Antoniou and Nikos Marantzidis, “Το επίμονο παρελθόν”, 40–43; emphasis in the original. 35 Geoffrey R. Elton, The Practice of History, London, Flamingo, [1967] 1984, 36. 36 Lawrence Stone, The Past and the Present Revisited, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987, 31. 37 Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction, new ed., London: Verso, 2007, 2. 38 See the contributions of Yiorgos Antoniou, Nikos Marantzidis, Stathis Kalyvas and Katerina Tsekou in Antoniou and Marantzidis (eds), Η εποχή της σύγχυσης, 50, 44, 199–254, passim, 390. 39 See the contributions of Yiorgos Antoniou and Nikos Marantzidis in ibid., 22–23, 195–196. 40 Stone, The Past and the Present Revisited, 31. 41 Robert L. Ivie, “Cold War Motives and Rhetorical Metaphor: A Framework of Criticism”, in Martin Medhurst et al. (eds), Cold War Rhetoric: Strategy, Metaphor, and Ideology, new ed., East Mansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 1997, 73. 42 Marantzidis, “Η τοπική διάσταση”, 175, 178. 43 Ibid., 181. 44 Ibid., 182–183, 184. 45 Ibid., 182. 46 Arno Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions, Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000, 4, 9, 71, 75. Geoff Eley reminds his readers that “in Europe, democracy did not result from natural evolution or economic prosperity. It certainly did not emerge as an inevitable byproduct of individualism or the market. It developed because masses of people organised collectively to demand it.” See Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002, 4. 47 For the definition of an algorithm as “a set of rules that allows us to compute the answer to a particular question”, see Samir Okasha, Philosophy of Science, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002, 91. 48 Dimitris Maronitis, “Από την Οδύσσεια στην Ιλιάδα” [From the Odyssey to the Iliad], in Homer, The Iliad, trans and postscript by Dimitris Maronitis, vol. 1, Athens: Agra, 2009, 287. 49 Ibid. 50 Dimitris Maronitis, “Ιλιάς εξ επαφής” [The Iliad by contact], in Homer, The Iliad, d vol. 2, Athens: Agra, 2010, 96
321. 51 Ibid., 322. 52 A representative sample of the Greek historians’ debate on the 1940s, as fought out in the domain of public history, can be found in a special supplement of the Athens daily newspaper Ta Nea, published in December 2004 under the title “Διάλογος για την Ιστορία: 18 ειδικοί συζητούν για τη βία στον Ελληνικό Εμφύλιο” [Debate on history: 18 experts on violence in the Greek Civil War].
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53 Stathis Kalyvas, “Εμφύλιος Πόλεμος (1943–1949): Το τέλος των μύθων και η στροφή προς το μαζικό επίπεδο” [Civil war, 1943–1949: The end of myths and the turn towards the mass level], Epistimi kai koinonia 11 (2003), 41; idem and Nikos Marantzidis, “Νέες τάσεις στη μελέτη του εμφυλίου πολέμου” [New trends in the study of the civil war]. 54 Marc Bloch, Apologie pour l’histoire ou métier d’historien, 6th ed., Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1967, 43; English translation: Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, Manchester: Manchester UP, 1954, 41. 55 Kalyvas, “Συλλογική μνήμη”, 207. 56 There is of course no single ‘leftist” version, but it is true that “outsiders tend to see uniformity in other groups and fine distinctions within their own”. See Stefan Collini’s “Introduction”, in C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, [1959, 1964] 1998, lv. 57 David Joravsky, “Communism in Historical Perspective”, The American Historical Review w 99/3 (1994), 839. 58 “Determinism” is here used to denote any metaphysical belief that there can only be one possible history of the world and that “at any given time, given the past, only one future is possible”. See Robert Audi (ed.), The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999, 228–229. 59 “Teleology” is used here to denote “the philosophical doctrine that all nature, or at least intentional agents, are goal-directed or functionally organised”. “External teleology” asserts that “human beings can anticipate the future and behave in ways calculated to realise their intentions”. “Internal teleology”, on the other hand, ascribes to nature itself a telos in the sense of a final destination. See Audi (ed.), The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 905–906. 60 Richard Feynman, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, London: Penguin, [1985] 1990, 17. 61 Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism, London: The Bodley Head, 2009, 3. 62 David Reynolds, America, Empire of Liberty: A New History, London: Penguin, 2010, xvii. 63 Gaddis, The Landscape of History, 141. Emphasis in original. 64 Richard Overy (with Andrew Wheatcroft), The Road to War, rev. ed., London: Penguin, 1999, xvi. See also Niall Ferguson, “Virtual History: Towards a ‘Chaotic’ Theory of the Past”, in Idem (ed.), Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, London: Papermac, 1997, 1–90; Gaddis, The Landscape of History, 91–109. 65 A.J.P. Taylor’s Introduction to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, London: Penguin, 1967, 47. 66 Michael Scriven, “Truisms as Grounds for Historical Explanations”, in Patrick Gardiner (ed.), Theories of History, London: Collier Macmillan, 1959, 470. 67 Stephen W. Hawking, Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays, London: Bantam, 1993, 126. Emphasis added. 68 Konstantinos Tsoukalas, “Το λευκό και το άλικο” [The white and the scarlet], review of Grigoris Farakos, 97
Does the Iliad need an Agamemnon Version? Ο ΕΛΑΣ και η εξουσία [ELAS and power] (2 vols. Athens: Ellinika Grammata, 2000), To Vima/Vivlia, 17 Dec 2000. 69 Antonio Gramsci, “The Philosophy of Praxis”, in Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, eds Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, London: Lawrence and Wishart, [1973] 2005, 360. 70 Michael Bentley, Modernising England’s Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism, 1870– 1970, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005, 232. 71 Stone, The Past and the Present Revisited, 22. 72 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, London: Penguin, [1963] 1980, 12; Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History, 2nd ed., London: Granta, 2001, 189. 73 Stone, The Past and the Present Revisited, 31–32. Stone made this exhortation in 1987. 74 Τony Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, London: Vintage, 2009, 4. 75 Kalyvas, “Συλλογική μνήμη”, 246. See also the following three newspaper articles by Kalyvas: “Η κουλτούρα της μεταπολίτευσης” [The metapolitefsi culture], Kathimerini, 14 Dec 2008; “Γιατί η Αθήνα καίγεται” [Why Athens is ablaze], To Vima, 14 Dec 2008; “Μια δεκαετία ερευνητικής ανανέωσης: Η έρευνα και οι αντιδράσεις” [A decade of renewing research: Research and reactions], To Vima, 18 Oct 2009. 76 See Thanasis D. Sfikas, “Ο ναρκισισμός των μικρών πραγμάτων: περί σύγχισης, ιστοριογραφίας και άλλων δαιμόνων” [The narcissism of small things: of muddle, historiography and other demons], O Mnimon 30 (2009), 335 and passim. 77 Moshe Lewin, The Soviet Century, London: Verso, 2005, 4, 98–126, 378, 397–402. 78 Extract from a letter by Charles Darwin to an unknown correspondent, published in full by Stephen Jay Gould’s editor Leslie Meredith in his “note to the reader” in Stephen Jay Gould, The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox: Mending and Minding the Misconceived Gap Between Science and the Humanities, London: Vintage, 2003, x.
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Debating history In early 2011, two scandals related to history tormented Turkish public opinion. The first one was the television series Muhteşem Yüzyıll [The magnificent century], which refers to the era of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent (1494–1566), and the second the film Hür Adam: Bediüzzaman Said Nursii [The free man: Bediüzzaman Said Nursi], which refers to the Muslim Kurdish scholar and political leader (1868–1960) of the early republican period who was at odds with the elite of the newly founded state. For more than a week, the productions dominated television talk shows and some newspaper front pages. The television series, in particular, triggered a huge uproar. Even before the series began, tens of thousands of people emailed the Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK), which supervises broadcasting, complaining about the trailer. When the first episode was broadcast, an angry mob gathered in front of the private television station airing it. Some among the crowd were even dressed up in Ottoman attire to protest against what they perceived as the mistreatment of their glorious forefathers. Judging from the spokespersons, both at the demonstrations and later on television talk shows, it was clear that the reactions had been orchestrated by Nationalist Action Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP) and Great Union Party (Büyük Birlik Partisi, BBP) circles, namely the political extreme right which also claims a devout Muslim identity. Thus, the problem was twofold. On the one hand, the series insulted Muslim sentiment by presenting Sultan Süleyman, who, let us not forget, had inherited from his father, Sultan Selim I (1470–1520),
From Oblivion to Obsession: The Uses of History in Recent Public Debates in Turkey
Vangelis Kechriotis Boğaziçi University
From Oblivion to Obsession the title of the caliph, the leader of Islam, a title that Selim himself had taken from the Mamluk dynasty, whose authority he brought to an end when he conquered Egypt in 1517. How was it possible that the leader of Islam spent his time hanging around with a cup in his hand, occasionally filled by his servants, and indulging in the temptations of his concubines? In vain, the producers tried to explain that the cup did not contain alcohol but şerbett (a sweet and spicy beverage) and that the harem existed because the sultan made frequent use of it. Surrealistic arguments made it into the press. Did the sultans and caliphs drink or not?1 Did they have sexual intercourse with women who were not officially their wives or not?2 How does this correspond to a devout Muslim identity?3 All this noise boiled down to the puritan, conservative morality dominant among a large part of the population in Turkey today.4 The channel was even threatened with the banning of the series by the RTÜK, at the encouragement of Bülent Arınç, a vice-premier in the pro-Islamist Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) government, who raised the issue in parliament. The radical Islamist newspaper Yeni Şafakk played a role in voicing discontent. In the first of a series of articles entitled Muhteşem Rezalett [Magnificent ridicule], one of Süleyman’s biographers, Okay Tiryakioğlu, explained that “The fact that Turkish TV series have in recent times been sold abroad has had an impact. Profit is the aim. The viewers will deliver the necessary punishment. There is even a gay scene; such nonsense is unacceptable.” The audience had a different view, though, as the TV series had the highest rating ever. Another historian, Mustafa Armağan, with respect to the same issue, claimed: “The first person who wrote that Kanuni [the lawgiver, a moniker attributed to Süleyman because of the legislation he introduced], used to drink was [the historian] Halil İnalcık. I do not know where he got the information from. Kanunii was a sultan who prohibited alcohol.”5 When, in the following episodes, the sultan led the Ottomans to glorious victories, the reactions started to dwindle. However, it was not only the political circles sensitive to religious issues that had a certain opinion on that. Eventually, the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP) took a position in favour of the series. Its vice-president, Engin Altay, expressed his support for free expression6 and denounced what he described pejoratively as osmanlıcılık (obsession with the Ottomans).7 CHP members, however, have been busy trying to defend Ataturk’s legacy. In the film Hür Adam, the heroic role attributed to an Islamist and Kurdish leader who openly denounced the abolition of the caliphate and the exclusively Turkish character of the state, caused frustration among Kemalist circles. Much of the criticism focused on three scenes. When Said Nursi was asked by a local bureaucrat to wear a European hat and remove the Islamic sarık, he said that the latter could only be removed together with his head. The second one was the scene where an officer in prison together with Said Nursi was so much affected by the latter’s words that he took off his uniform, lay it down and performed the Islamic prayer (namaz) on it. The third and most controversial refers to a presumed meeting between Said Nursi and Mustafa Kemal. There, when the latter explained that they should show certain laxity over the use of alcohol and the people’s attire, the former got distressed and left the room, slamming the door behind him and leaving the future founder of the republic in contemplation. Many historians claim that such a dramatic exchange never actually took place.8 On the evening of the opening reception, a group of twenty people protested in front of the theatre. They were supporters of the National Party (Ulusal Parti), a marginal, ultra-Atatürkist party. They denounced what they said was the slandering of Atatürk and they described Said Nursi not as a “free man” but as a “miserable/disgusting man” 100
(sefil adam).9 Atatürkists also accused the director of producing an artefact of propaganda for the Nurcu movement, the dominant religious order both in Turkey and abroad, is inspired by the Risale-i Nurr (Path of divine light), Said Nursi’s seminal publication, and which is led by the strong hand of the hugely influential Fethullah Gülen. Moreover, it was claimed that only members of the order watched the film.10 Adding to the tension, even before the launching of the film, the chief state prosecutor in Ankara filed a lawsuit against the entire production team “for insulting the spiritual personality of Atatürk and for inciting the people and society to endorse hatred and commit a crime; for slander, terrorist propaganda and activities aiming at destroying the Turkish Republic”.11 On the other hand, when the culture minister, Ertuğrul Günay, a very moderate politician, was interviewed about it, he argued that “if in this country there is going to be democracy and pluralism based on freedom of speech and thought, we should get used to films, books [and] publications on Bediüzzaman, Kanuni Sultan Süleyman or Atatürk”.12
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All this time, I kept asking my students whether they had seen the television series or the film. Most of them were appalled and wondered how I could have expected them to watch such nonsense. My response was the aim of this paper. For a society like the Turkish one, which, everyone agrees, used to suffer from a purposeful amnesia, it is noteworthy that everything somehow has now become historicised and that so many spend so much energy to claim their arguments in pseudo-historical debates, at a time when so many and important problems still preoccupy the Turkish people. Esra Özyürek, in her introduction to a relevant volume she edited, argues that the systematic efforts “to foster forgetfulness” did not eliminate memories altogether. Past experiences coexist in individual memories.13 Nowadays, as multiple means provide access to all sorts of information about the past, the latter is challenged and reshaped according not only to current political and social concerns but also those individual memories. To be sure, this is a much broader phenomenon and does not only apply to Turkey. As Frank Ankersmit has demonstrated, there has been, of late, a shift from the grand schemes that provide history with meaning to individual experience and subjectivity. The new subject, however, is not the self-confident subject of modernity but the suffering, suppressed or transgressive subject. What is crucial, however, is that memory does not only reflect individual experience but rather it elaborates and reorganises the latter so that it makes meaningful what has been part of living experience as well. Thus, the past is reshaped and filtered through personal experience. This is what the Dutch historian describes as the “sublime historical experience”.14 More specifically, however, my purpose here is to argue that all these debates and conflicts resulting from the apparent unleashing of memories, images and concepts which are mediated through new channels of information do not eventually alienate those inspired by them from more pressing social and economic issues. On the contrary, they become metaphors that point directly to current preoccupations. In other words, they are highly political. Such overlapping, of course, is related to the process of transformation that Turkish society has been undergoing over the last decade as a result of domestic demand but also the attraction that European accession still represents for many, even though this has fallen in recent years. What is crucial in this process is that a society that used to live in the present has come to realise that, in order to move faster towards a widely longed-for future, it has to set the record straight as regards the past. As Meltem Ahıska, who has studied the Occidentalist tenet underlying the process of modernisation in Turkey, argues: “The 101
From Oblivion to Obsession ‘present’ cannot simply be reduced to a naturalised and privatised time embedded in everyday life or to a segment in the national-durational time of modern history that connects past and future in the moment. The present has its own politics of time and space that is overdetermined by what is called history, itself a geographical-temporal representation.”15 In this sense, she is critical of Nilüfer Göle, who, in her works, has reflected on the notion of alternative modernity, maintaining that due to the “time lag” stigmatised and internalised as “backwardness”, non-westerners are “alienated from their own present which they want to overcome by projecting themselves either to the utopian future or to the golden age of the past”.16 Commenting on the notion of the “time lag”, Ahıska observes that, although it looks like “a timeless element of the self-definitions of the non-Western”, it should yet not be essentialised and identified with a past heritage. The past itself is related to “the historical dynamics of modernity”.17 Such an assessment invites us to reflect on the equally time-bound quality of the newly emerged narratives of the past, not with respect to their subjective or collective character but in recognition of the fact that they are organised according to a specific conceptual repertoire and a meaning of historical process heavily marked by the postnational or postmodern condition. Building on these arguments, I will briefly discuss two main historical topoi of Turkish public debate, namely the exchange of populations and the Armenian genocide. Both events represent two traumatic moments in the process of the transformation of the empire into a nation-state. Both refer to the fate of the non-Muslims of Asia Minor/Anatolia and, in this respect, to the essential other of modern Turkish identity. Finally, both have been consistently silenced in the process of nation-state building. This discussion will demonstrate, I hope, that the engagement with personal experience, which surfaces at a time of a widespread demand for the democratisation of Turkish society, leads inevitably to cracks in the edifice of what has been described as the official narrative. Having said that, some clarification is required here. It might be the case that the narratives that replace the older ones reflect the contested historical past more accurately. However, the recent challenges might also eventually lead to a new official narrative, which will establish its own hegemony in the political and cultural sphere. After all, the cases I discuss do not concern but a rather limited part of the entire population. From this point of view, it can be argued that they have little to offer to democratisation, a process which entails, first and foremost, broad participation in decision-making. What is important, though, is that not only the official narrative but those agents that the latter has so far legitimised, namely certain state-sponsored elites, are placed in doubt. The demand for a new hegemony may eventually fail to integrate the cases I discuss here, as new elites emerge and take advantage of the current fluidity to set their own rules. It is clear to me, however, that large parts of the population welcome such transformations since they could not easily fit the earlier modernist project.
Oblivion as a means of creating a new society The Republic of Turkey from the very beginning tried to severe all bonds with the Ottoman past. This was not an easy task. Yet, it was a necessity. Already, by the end of the eighteenth century, the glorious days of the empire were a remote past. If we take as a landmark the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca of 1774, which gave the Russians a free hand in the Black Sea and authorised their intervention on behalf of the Orthodox Christian subjects of the empire, for the next century and a half, the Ottoman Empire struggled against the symptoms of a deep crisis, which was 102
fiscal, demographic but also social and political in character. When, inspired by European liberal ideas as well as deteriorating domestic conditions, the Balkan nations, in the geography that was considered as the stronghold of the empire, began achieving independence one after the other, the empire reacted by introducing reforms. The tensions triggered by the uneasy coexistence of domestic dynamics, social and economic transformations and external intervention led eventually, through a protracted period of war in 1911–1922 (the Italian–Turkish, Balkan, First World and Greek-Turkish wars), to the demise of the empire and the emergence of a new republic and a new nation. The end of empires and the triumph of nation-states in the post-First World War period gave birth to a new paradigm both in institutional as well as cultural terms. The very notion of empire was discredited and was considered synonymous with authoritarian rule, the lack of democratic institutions, the ethnic engineering of populations, and cultural and social decline. This prevented for decades politicians and theorists alike from addressing the Ottoman Empire within the global framework of colonial experience and the subsequent independence movements, the Turkish one notwithstanding, as part of the anticolonial struggle. As Ahıska has pointed out: “In parallel to the manoeuvre of the Kemalist discourse that rendered the dynamics of the colonisation of the coloniser Ottoman invisible, social theory has also not fully addressed the complexities involved. Consequently, the Turkish ‘replica’ of modernity is either taken too literally or remains invisible in theories of modernisation, Orientalism and postcolonial criticism.”18 It is only recently, for reasons also related to the crisis of the paradigm of nation-state domination, that interaction and continuities between the Ottoman Empire and nation-states both in the Balkans and the Middle East have attracted more attention.19 Moreover, eventually, Ottomanists broke this condition of peculiarity for the Ottoman Empire and introduced to its study the literature on Orientalism and postcolonial criticism.20
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The elite of the new state thus, on the one hand, with the enthusiasm fuelled by the final victory in a war of independence against all odds and, on the other, as a result of the tremendous suffering and loss that the collapse of the empire had entailed for everyone, set out to create not only a new state but also a new society and identity. Both the sultanate and the caliphate were abolished. The connection between the two in the public sphere but also in the popular sentiment was so intimate that in the “hegemonic imagination” the monarchy was identified not only with absolutism and authoritarianism but also with the dominance of religion. On the contrary, the republic was automatically equated with democracy and the rule of law. It has been very difficult for secular Turks, even today, to accept that there are several countries in Europe where the regime is monarchical and not republican and where democracy and human rights are much more developed than in Turkey. One of the main concerns of the republican elite was to eliminate religion from the public sphere. Religious schools (medrese) and shrines (türbe) were closed down and all pious foundations came under the jurisdiction of the Directorate General of Pious Foundations (Vakıflar Genel Müdürlüğü). Even the use of Arabic in prayer was banned. The language also had to be Turkified and cleansed of Arabic and Persian elements, more typical being the replacement of the Arabic with the Latin alphabet. Legislation had to be tuned with European law. The same applied to attire, with the compulsory introduction of the European hat and the ban on the fez, which had, in its turn, been introduced by Sultan Mahmut II, the mastermind of the nineteenth-century reforms.21 Together with all this, the institutionalisation of language and history through the foundation of relevant institutions liberated the republican elite 103
From Oblivion to Obsession from the recent past, it was presumed, and allowed it to experiment with theories on the historical provenience of the Turkish nation in antiquity and in Asia, in a different time and space.22 All this, of course, apart from stressing the rupture and delegitimising the Ottoman past, relied on the vast demographic transformation that had led to the extermination through deportation or genocide of the non-Muslim population in Anatolia, which was destined to become the territory of the new Turkish state. As Keyder has pointed out, both the population exchange and the Armenian deportations played a key role in the formation of the nation-state ideal, which can only be understood in its interrelation with the aforementioned developments. In other words, “the Turkish nation was itself formed through this process of ethnic unmixing”.23 Keyder also demonstrates the major difference in state-citizen relations before and after the foundation of the republic. During the late Ottoman period and as a result of the economic and social reforms of the second half of the nineteenth century, the state had partly endorsed “the idea of self-limitation”, which allowed for a civil society to emerge based on the rule of law.24 Especially, the respect for property rights is considered an achievement in the establishment of an efficient liberal regime. The 1858 legislation, in particular, by way of defining individual property rights on land, opened up the Ottoman Empire to the world land market. However, as nationalist strife proliferated during the 1910s and the Greeks and the Armenians were forced to leave, it was “locally powerful or politically connected individuals” that took over landed property. Actually, all abandoned property was considered “nationalised” and thus belonged to the state. However, many properties that were not seized by the state were granted by local political patrons to their clients.25 This system of distribution of practically abundant lands reversed the liberal economic policies of the late Ottoman period and this resulted in a suppression of a capitalist mentality. As Keyder concludes: “The republican state became a reincarnation of the classical patrimonial Ottoman state, dispending land and benefits to its trusted clients, thereby able to perpetuate its patron status above the law . . . This distribution served both to expedite the creation of a native bourgeoisie and also to make it beholden to the state.”26 These newly created elites were more dependent on the republican state, which is described as “much less accountable and therefore more autocratic and arbitrary” than the Ottoman one. The debates on the exchange of populations and the Armenian deportations will be addressed within this conceptual frame.
The exchange of populations The experience of forced migration which determined the fate of populations in the Balkans and Asia Minor as an outcome of the long First World War in the region resulted not only in a reorganisation of the ethnic and religious profile of large areas but also in the development of new economic and social conditions. These conditions necessitated the permanent resettlement and integration of the newly arrived Muslim populations. This integration would be achieved through state policies which functioned on two levels: on the one hand, the resettlement of areas which were abandoned by departing populations as well as the distribution of land holdings and appropriate equipment aimed at the social and economic support of the refugees. On the other, state education and army conscription would accelerate their cultural assimilation. This demographic and social engi104
neering27 led to the formation of a particular sense of belonging. These populations, having undergone a violent process of “separation”, found themselves in a state of “liminality”, since they had definitely departed from their society of origin but were never fully incorporated into the receiving society.28 In fact, during this period the term “refugee” was used in order to differentiate all these populations that were displaced as the result of the breakup of the empire at the end of the First World War from “immigrants”, a term marking a much older practice of population movement. The difference in the twentieth century was that there was considerably less territory available to accommodate these populations than in the past and that these forced migrations attracted the attention of political leaders. Therefore, state policies were based on the attempt to provide new roots for the uprooted “since the demarcation of new nations and territorially bounded states demanded the allocation of particular people to particular spaces”.29 These refugees represented for the host countries not only a burden that they had to deal with but also a potential domestic political threat and, until they were incorporated, a challenge to the social order. In the case of Turkey, the exchange aimed at the cultural homogenisation of society.30 Actually, it has been argued that the notorious Vatandaş Türkçe konuş (Citizen, speak Turkish) policy of the interwar period, which banned any language other than Turkish from public spaces, was only partly addressed to nonMuslims: Greeks, Armenians and Jews. Its main target were the Muslim but ethnically diverse populations – Albanian, Bosnian, Pomak, Cretan, Circassian, Laz, Aphaz, Arab, etc. – who were obvious candidates for integration.31 Yet, the individual experience of national identity, as Barbaros Tanc has demonstrated with respect to the refugees of the population exchange, may differ from the official version which forms the basis for state building.32
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Recently, Turkish society has witnessed an increasing interest in the ethnic origins of the populations that originate in the Balkans and the Caucasus. Since I arrived in Istanbul eleven years ago, what has struck me has been the attraction that anything related to Greek culture (music, language, food, etc.) especially has had on a particular, educated and socially well-off part of the population. Initially, I was sceptical of this trend, as I thought that it was related to the recent Greek–Turkish rapprochement.33 Soon, however, as I became more familiar with the language and the people and I consulted with colleagues who specialised on similar issues, I found out that this interest was not only pertinent to Greek culture but it concerned anything related to the Balkans. In this respect, the recent political developments in the Balkans and the whole of eastern Europe have played a key role. During the war in Yugoslavia, in particular, many Turks, whose families had originally fled these very lands devastated now by warfare, saw images from forgotten, imagined or even mystified homelands that television brought into their homes on a daily basis. Moreover, a new wave of refugees, those who had already started to flee from Bulgaria since 1986 due to the policies of Bulgarisation implemented by the last communist government, or the Bosnians and the Kosovars who fled from the war in their territories, brought Turkish public opinion into contact with an experience and a process which lay at the origin of the foundation of the Turkish Republic and which the state-building process had wiped out. In popular memory, however, these origins had never totally faded away. In Turkish historiography, the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey had been largely ignored. As Fikret Adanır has demonstrated in a relevant review article, the very few works that appeared in the period from the 1950s to the 1980s concerned mainly issues of geo105
From Oblivion to Obsession politics and demography.34 It was only during the last two decades that relevant works have been published, this time dealing with the contentious issues of the reception and integration of the refugees or the importance of their origins for self-identification. Kemal Arı has narrated the efforts of the administration to deal with the exchange of populations in a text which might be considered a rather canonical one, in the sense that it has set the framework of the debate but also because it reiterates certain tenets of the official ideology.35 The responses from other scholars were various. Mehmet Ali Gökaçtı36 focused on the political rivalries of the exchange and drew attention to the issue of converted Muslims, which has not been discussed much in the literature. Ayhan Aktar, on the other hand, has argued that the exchange of populations was efficiently manipulated by the republican administration in the course of the efforts to create a national bourgeoisie through the removal of non-Muslims.37 Finally, historiographical accounts have been accompanied by memoirs or travelogues which cover the period between the Balkan Wars and the forced migration in 1923.38 The most recent literature regarding the issue assesses the fact that the experience of the Muslims who were forced to migrate from Greece to Turkey resembles the one on the other side of the Aegean. Despite the long-standing belief that, due to the considerable smaller scale of migration and the abundance of land and property left behind by the departing Greek-Orthodox populations, Muslims were provided with adequate means of survival, especially in western Anatolia, new studies have shown that actually the problems they had to deal with were similar. Moreover, their cultural and social assimilation was not accomplished until much later.39 Equally important is the fact that in recent years a younger generation has taken over studying the way this policy was implemented in diverse localities.40 As Tutku Vardağlı has pointed out, more recent studies, as is the case with similar works on refugees on the other side of the Aegean, have followed the new trends in historiography and especially the cultural turn and the broader acceptance of oral history methods.41 Indeed, a series of oral history projects was launched focusing on the last survivors of that dramatic period.42 However, the experience of these divided populations was at least in one point different from that of the Greek Orthodox. They lived through the first years of the republic in a period when a new national identity was emerging. Thus, while suppressing their particular cultural legacy, they had to participate on equal terms in the development of what was going to become their new identity. This offered them the chance to claim their own space in a nation which had yet to be created. An interesting field where one can trace this interweaving of state ideology and self-identification is literature. With respect to literature, Herkül Millas has argued that in the course of an effort to create a national identity based on the Turkishness of Anatolia, all irredentist discourse and references to lost motherlands were prohibited. Therefore, the issue was highly politicised and therefore “it was very difficult for authors to make literary references to the exchange without connecting it to some kind of political criticism directed either at the idea of forced exchange itself or at the practical consequences of its implementation”.43 This attitude has followed two paths. The most mainstream one in support of this policy is that the exchange was beneficial for the Turks since the state achieved national homogeneity. The other, opposing, view considers the Greek Orthodox as faithful Turks who belonged in Anatolia. These paths have been described by Millas as the ethnic and the civic one, accordingly. Moreover, for the Turkish authors, the moth106
erland used to be the land over which the Ottoman or the Turkish states had established sovereignty. Even when certain authors such as Yaşar Kemal are critical of the deportation process, they criticise the state and not individuals.44 Parallel to the developments in the literature portrayed above, which demonstrate the plurality in the approaches, recently there has been a popular assessment of this transformation which underscores the competence of postnational collectivities to claim their own place in public culture. The normalisation of political life after the mid-1990s played a crucial role in the search for a new identity. As already described above, the influx of Muslim-Turkish populations from Bulgaria and Albanian populations from Kosovo brought to Turkish society a new awareness about the contemporary problems of Muslim Turks in the Balkans and led to a regeneration of the interest in the experience of previous migrations. Both the newcomers but also the descendants of those who arrived from the Balkans became active, founding associations and seeking to reiterate a particular sense of identity, through rediscovering long-abandoned customs, languages and places. Without abandoning their share in Turkishness, their specific origin became a denominator of a different quality which allowed them to claim a heritage far richer and more encompassing than the one their forefathers had to assimilate to.
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Dwelling on the Greco–Turkish population exchange, Aslı Iğsız has described the emergence of nostalgia at two different levels: the first refers to a prenation-state “multiculturalism” or diversity which has become common in public representations of a community identity. This is the kind of nostalgia that has been dominant among the Greek Orthodox community of Istanbul since the early 2000s, “which became emblematic of a selective nostalgia for Istanbul’s ‘past cosmopolitanism’”.45 In that context, personal histories have created an alternative and “brought a plurality or polyphony to the more straightforward nationalist official historiography that contains homogenising tendencies of the past and present peoples in Turkey”.46 Second, Iğsız argues, while, as has been already mentioned, official identity politics and nationalist historiography aimed to erase diversity and produce a “homogeneous” nation of the Muslim millet that would figure as “Turks” over a nationalised territory, from the 1990s onwards, there has been a trend to personalise this geography by using familial attributes and memories for self-identification which lead to maps of “origin”.47 However, this narrative of conviviality and of a paradise lost occasionally coalesces with an equally powerful nationalistic discourse, especially among migrant populations from more recent periods of republican history, who have cut their bonds with their homelands in the Balkans. Esra Bulut has studied the way “religion” affected official Turkish responses to the ethnic tensions and conflict that have occurred in southeastern Europe since the end of the Cold War, focusing on the conflicts in Bosnia Herzegovina and Kosovo, and to a lesser extent on the case of relations with the Republic of Macedonia. She has studied the intertwining of religion and Turkish national identity and the central place that the issue of religion occupies in politics over Turkey’s past, present and future.48 Despite the instrumentalisation of religion, however, as Sylvia Gangloff has argued, it seems that the only real policy of solidarity towards these communities has been accepting, almost without any restrictions, refugees from the Balkans who could find shelter in Turkey.49 Yet, these discursive strategies have played an important role in the reappropriation in Turkey of the Ottoman past. The Islamist dailies, in particular, have frequently highlighted the cultural affinities between Turkey and 107
From Oblivion to Obsession the Balkans, as well as the tolerance and peace that reigned under Ottoman rule. Thus, this discourse insists on “the duty of the Turks, as heirs of the Ottomans, to save oppressed Muslims”.50 The overall issue of recent migration of Muslim populations from the Balkans to Turkey goes far beyond the horizons of this paper. Suffice to say, it has been tackled by anthropologists and sociologists alike, occasionally with an emphasis on the policies of discrimination implemented by the Turkish authorities with respect to different migrant groups from the Balkans and the Middle East.51 Yet, interestingly, this has developed alongside a discourse on reconciliation and understanding promoted particularly by those descendants of the Muslims who arrived in western Anatolia during the exchange of populations. An example will better illustrate this claim. A decade ago, in 2001, largely as a result of the earthquake diplomacy between Greece and Turkey, second-generation descendants of that period founded in Istanbul the Foundation of Lausanne Treaty Emigrants (Lozan Mübadilleri Vakfı, LMV), which, according to its own proclamation, aimed to pave the way for a debate on issues concerning the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey.52 The founding members of the association, most of them with a background of leftist activism, have persistently employed an antinationalist discourse. Following the electronic forum that the LMV established several years ago, which now must count more than a thousand members, has been an interesting experience. Forum members seek information about the places in Greece from where their grandparents originated. It is obvious that, in most cases, it is the first time they have been able to address such a forum and their excitement is genuine. They do not even know the present Greek name of their hometown or village and this is what they begin with.53 One can assume that it is the existence of such a forum that gives these people the incentive to publicly investigate their origins somewhere else and share this feeling of belonging with former compatriots. Interestingly, even if this forum has brought to life the notion of a “lost homeland” among the descendants of the refuges, the way this notion is constructed is significantly different from nationalist imaginations in Turkey and elsewhere. First of all, the emphasis is not on the suffering of their ancestors due to their uprooting and the hard conditions they came across when they arrived in Turkey. It is mainly based on shared cultural elements, such as language, food, ceremonies, etc. Secondly, the foundation has been very active in organising trips to the places in Greece where the refugees derive from, mainly Macedonia, Epirus and Crete. Typically, participants later describe their impressions in relevant postings. They are full of emotion and surprise for the new places and the people they came across on the trip, but they do not, despite their dismay at the destruction of Ottoman buildings and monuments, employ a resentful discourse or express hard feelings against the way the locals treated them. Moreover, this forum has been used by historians and anthropologists, among others, who have profited from the interaction with the descendants of the exchangees but also responded to questions and publicised their research which is relevant to the purposes of the association. The LMV itself organises similar activities, more prominent being the two conferences entitled “Our Common Heritage”, which took place in Mustafa Paşa (in Greek Sinasos) and Rethymno (in Turkish Resmo) in September and October 2004, respectively, and was even awarded an international prize.54 This does not mean, of course, that there is nobody among the forum’s members who thinks differently. The following event will illustrate the tensions which can be triggered and demonstrates the ambiguous impact that territorial displacement can have on the formation of social and ethnic identities in a postnational context. On 30 January 2005, on the 82nd anniversary of the 108
signing of the protocol for the exchange of populations, the journalist Deniz Madanoğlu published an article in the leftist newspaper Birgün which referred to scholarly works on the subject, and particularly one by Ayhan Aktar, who used the terms “Greek Muslims” and “Turkish Christians”, pointing to the fact that the exchange was based on religion and not on ethnicity.55 The terms Greek and Turkish in this respect referred only to nationality. This article triggered a vivid debate among the members of the group. Some of them, who had already accused the leadership of the association of being pro-Greek, for supporting the local Istanbul Greek-Orthodox population and ignoring the sufferings of Muslim Turks in Greece and Bulgaria, were very adamant in their claim that their ancestors were Turkish “through and through” (öz be öz) and nobody had the right to call them Greek. The debate took a nasty turn and the moderators of the group decided to block those who used aggressive nationalistic language.
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Two years later, another interesting controversy broke out. In the spring of 2007, on the eve of the election for the presidency of the republic, which so much divided Turkish society, the USbased sociologist and diasporic Muslim culture specialist Mücahit Bilici made an interesting claim, in an article in the pro-Islamist newspaper Yeni Şafak.56 In his view, in Turkey there were two countries, or two societies. On the one hand, those who were indigenous, from Anatolia and were ethnically Turks, and, on the other, those who came from the Balkans and the Caucasus and, though they were ethnically different, were eventually Turkified. In an attempt to compensate for their ambiguous origins, the latter imposed, under the guise of secular Turkism, an authoritarian regime over those whose Turkishness was more genuine but was also attached to Islam. One can see this division between the two parts even geographically, said Bilici, with the former dominating only in the west and partly the south of the country, where their immigrant forefathers had settled. Of course, the clear implication here is that the AKP and its presidential candidate, Abdullah Gül, represented the indigenous population whereas the opposition CHP party the “foreigners”. This, as schematic as it may seem – for instance, there are immigrant communities in other areas of Anatolia as well – is an attempt to reverse the quite dominant discourse of recent decades in Turkey of a division between “white Turks”, namely the westernised urbanised ones, and the “dark Turks”, the Anatolian mob. This discussion exceeds the limits of this paper, but one should not fail to mention that many of the ideological shifts that have taken place recently in Turkey can be attributed to the rising bourgeois awareness of these “dark Anatolians” and their claim to a hegemonic role. Similar racist references occasionally appear with reference to particular ethnic groups, as it has recently been the case with the Circassians. Such an article, however, was considered by many LMV members as an attack against those who originated from Rumeli (the Ottoman Balkans). One of the leading figures claimed that, in reality, the target was Mustafa Kemal (who was himself from the Balkans) as well as modern democratic values and the secular and multicultural way of life. Their forefathers who had come with the exchange were intimidated with monikers such as infidels (gâvur) or half-infidels (yarım ( gâvur). r More recently, they themselves seem to have been exposed to racism and religious fanaticism, being described as Salonican converts (Selanik Dönmesi) or Sabbateans (Sabetayist). We have seen the result of racism and religious fanaticism with the assassination of an Italian priest in Trabzon, the murder of Hrant Dink in Istanbul and of three missionaries in Malatya in 2007.57 This parallel unfolding of a pluralistic perception of the past- and criminal-ethnic nation109
From Oblivion to Obsession alism constitute equally important aspects of the painful implementation within Turkish society of policies based on universal civic and human rights. Issues of identity are treated by the authorities with much more sensitivity than in the past. I believe, however, that we should not lose sight of the fact that despite the attempt of scholars to study the phenomenon within a postnational context, certain identities as they become accepted and integrated into the mainstream might become convenient elements for the elaboration of a new hegemonic discourse that will eventually appear to be as hierarchical as the previous one, always relying on power relations, albeit dominated by new divisions. For instance, nowadays one can easily imagine a government official taking part in the commemoration of the hardships that the exchangees suffered as a result of state policies. The same would be out of the question for a ceremony commemorating the hardships of the Armenians. There is, of course, the crucial element of difference that can still be accommodated among us, as in the case of the exchangees, as opposed to the one which cannot, as in the case of the Armenians.
The Armenian question References to the murder of the Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in 2007, which, apart from the shock it triggered internationally, was a dark chapter of the controversy that has tormented public opinion more than anything else in the last past decade, are quite common. The Armenian question for decades had been forgotten. Then it reappeared in the 1980s as a byproduct of the civil war in Lebanon. The militant Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) based there propelled the issue back onto the international agenda through carrying out a series of assassinations of Turkish diplomats. As it could be expected, this infuriated Turkish public opinion and the already dormant prejudice against non-Muslims and especially Armenians resurfaced as open hostility. It was within this atmosphere that the debate on the Armenian genocide was generated. Turkish public opinion was caught by surprise. It was totally preposterous for Armenians to have the nerve to claim to be victims of Turkish atrocities when actually it was Turks who were assassinated by them and for no obvious reason, it was thought. Decades of thick silence about anything regarding the treatment of non-Muslims during the dramatic decade before the foundation of the republic did not allow for a dispassionate debate. In the last decade, there has been a lot of passion and resentment involved in this debate on both sides, but the issue has also expanded far beyond the level of political controversy. It is true that politics is always at the centre. For instance, every year, as April 24, internationally recognised as Armenian “Genocide Remembrance Day”, approaches, Turkish authorities as well as public opinion are on the alert to prevent the US president from using the term “genocide”. The same is true for Armenians, especially of the American diaspora, who try to push the US government into recognising the genocide. For the latter, these efforts are much older. Already in the 1960s, Armenian communities, disenchanted by the attitude of the Turkish state, were trying to push local parliaments into making resolutions. However, the first dramatic instance that shook Turkish public opinion was in 2000 when Bill Clinton intervened to convince the House of Representatives to postpone the vote on a similar resolution on the grounds that at such a precarious moment – it was the beginning of the second Intifada – it would not be expedient to alienate Turkey, 110
a strategic ally in the region. Ever since, with mounting tension, a similar scenario is repeated every year. Not only regular newspaper columnists, but also diplomats,58 academics,59 and even businessmen have been mobilised in the international arena to support denialist views.60 Most interesting was the reactions triggered by the use in 2009 by President Barack Obama of the term Yerz Megern, which the Armenians themselves use to describe the genocide. It was a very controversial decision as it was apparently thought of as a face-saving measure. Before he was elected, Obama had explicitly declared that he endorsed the view that the 1915 events were a genocide. He had also stated in the Turkish parliament, during his first visit to a Muslim country, that he had not changed his views. Therefore, this was a way to avoid disappointing either side. The result was, of course, that neither was really satisfied.
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What is more important for our purpose here is that in recent years, another perspective has emerged, supported by academics, intellectuals and journalists, leftists and liberal democrats.61 Let me briefly describe the arguments of both sides. Fatma Müge Göçek, who has studied Turkish historiography regarding the Armenian question, distinguishes three periods: the Ottoman investigative narrative (1910s), the republican defensive narrative (1953 onwards) and the postnationalist critical narrative (1990s onwards).62 According to the defensive thesis, which has been dominant until recently, despite certain internal divisions, clashes had already broken out by the late nineteenth century when armed bands, under the guidance of the Armenian Hunchak and Dashnaksutiun organisations, terrorised not only the Ottoman authorities but also the native Muslim populations. The argument, therefore, is that Armenian separatists were first to begin exterminating Muslims and then simply faced the consequences of their actions. During the First World War, a large segment of Armenians living in the provinces bordering the Russian Empire collaborated with the advancing Russian troops against the Armenians’ own homeland. For this reason, and as a preventive measure of military security, it was decided that the entire Armenian population of a large area would be “relocated” and resettled in safer territories. In the process, it is claimed, miscalculations may have been made; certain cadres of the security forces or the army may have proved overzealous; and, along the way, the deportees may have fallen victim to attacks by Kurds enraged by the criminal activities of Armenian separatists. Be that as it may, the central government had – as much as possible, especially considering wartime conditions – taken measures for the safe transport and resettlement of the population. In any event, the archives are open and whoever wishes can study the relevant documents. Everything else is wild speculation. Today, those who oppose Turkey’s accession to the European Union are proceeding to exploit a series of obstacles that will finally force Turkey’s political leadership into exhausting its compliance and abandon its effort. The “Armenian genocide” stands as a major issue, which, among other things, swells a sense on the part of Turks of being unfairly treated because they are not Christians. As for the opposition to these views, and despite internal divisions, there is an agreement that the separatist activity of the Armenians never took on the mass character attributed to it, while their aim was not independence but rather the implementation of reforms and certain rights of self-government. The decision for expulsion described by the Turkish word tehcirr (relocation) did not refer only to strategically sensitive areas. Armenian populations were also expelled from the regions of İzmit and Edirne (in present northwestern Turkey), which were very far from any 111
From Oblivion to Obsession war zone. Armenians were expelled to the Syrian deserts where survival was impossible and, therefore, expulsion equalled death. Moreover, as early as the Balkan Wars, the Young Turks had put together a secret group, the Special Organisation (Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa), a precursor of today’s National Intelligence Organisation (Milli İstihbarat Teşkilatı, MİT), which was in charge of “security” and undertook all sorts of “special operations”. These measures were deemed necessary as reprisals for the violent uprooting of hundreds of thousands of Muslims during the Balkan Wars. But the First World War gave the Young Turks the opportunity they sought to do away with the Armenians, as they eventually did with Greeks and Assyrians as well. It is well known that there are cases of military commanders who refused to collaborate in these activities because they felt that these actions would tarnish the honour of the Ottoman army. The crimes against the Armenians were acknowledged in the trials against the Young Turks following the empire’s defeat and collapse. Furthermore, when the leadership set out to win the support of the local elders of Anatolia’s vilayets during Turkey’s war of independence, one of the first things they had to pledge was that seized Armenian fortunes would henceforth belong by right to those who had seized them. An interesting aspect has to do with the accountability of modern Turkey. Although the latter has utterly appropriated the Ottoman past, the fact is that all these events occurred within the context of an empire that was breathing its last and against which the Turks themselves finally won their independence. Therefore, political leaders and the academic world should express their regrets over these tragic events, but that should be the end of it. More important would be denouncing the mentality that led to these crimes, contributed to the repression of minorities and even today prevents the full democratisation of Turkish society. As regards the term “genocide”, there is no unanimity. Many refuse to use it while others claim that it does not really matter as long as everyone agrees on the magnitude of the disaster. There is, however, a very strong legal aspect to the issue. Recognition of the events of 1915 as a “genocide” would pave the way to reparation claims. This is the purpose of certain parts of the Armenian diaspora. The more radical ones go as far as claiming back land, as they have never recognised Turkish sovereignty over the eastern provinces, which they still describe as Western Armenia.63 A first landmark in the process of enhancing a new awareness in Turkish society on this issue was the conference that took place in late September 2005 entitled “Ottoman Armenians during the Decline of the Empire: Issues of Scientific Responsibility and Democracy”. The event had been postponed from the previous May, when nationalist associations as well as government officials had chastised and overtly threatened the organisers, who were going to hold it at Boğaziçi University. Now again, two days before the conference, Istanbul’s fourth administrative court ruled in favour of an appeal submitted by the Great Jurists’ Association,64 which summoned the organisers to account both for their sources of funding and the participants’ academic credentials. The conference eventually took place, this time with the support of the government which was afraid of the damage that such ridicule would entail for Turkey’s European profile. For the two days that the conference lasted, it was the lead story on most television news bulletins, which featured extensive reporting and interviews on it. In this broad coverage, the interest centred not so much on what was being discussed as on what was taking place outside the meeting venue: protest marches, fiery speeches, slogans, eggs, tomatoes, threats from the extreme right 112
or from organisations such as the Great Jurists’ Association that were clearly linked to them. But these groups could no longer mobilise large crowds. As for the content of the conference, it suffices to say that for three days, the entire community of dissident academics, journalists and intellectuals engaged themselves in a dialogue of historic dimensions. I will only refer to the admittedly most influential intervention, that of the journalist and publisher Hrant Dink.
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As the publisher for ten years of the bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos, he had inspired many Turks and Armenians with his writing, but had also annoyed the Turkish political establishment. Indeed, he had been a short time before subjected to a kangaroo court trial for an article that allegedly “insulted” the Turkish people and their “national identity”, and given a six-month suspended sentence, just a few weeks before the conference. At the conference, he argued that, regardless of the term used to describe the tragedy of 1915–1916, nothing changed in the end, because those who had experienced it and transmitted their memory to the coming generations were not going to alter their feelings because of a particular word. But the climax in Dink’s address came when he recounted the story of an aged Armenian woman who had visited her birthplace somewhere in Anatolia and breathed her last there. Local people asked that she would be buried as one of their own, in a Muslim cemetery. Dink concluded: “They’re afraid that if the genocide is recognised, we shall have our eye on compensation and the return of land. Well, yes, we do have our eye on that land, but not to have it returned; rather, to be buried deep within it.”65 Hrant Dink was assassinated on 19 January 2007, in front of the building housing his newspaper’s offices, by a teenager carefully chosen by his instigators for his age so that he would face a lower punishment.66 For Turks, Armenians and others in Turkey and abroad, Dink’s assassination marked a turning point in their lives. Many saw in it the absolute failure of Turkish society to transform itself into a really democratic, plural one. Many, on the contrary, saw in the crowd of hundreds of thousands that followed his funeral the renewed hope and the possibility of change even at a grassroots level of public culture. The black banners these people carried at the funeral were inscribed with messages such as “We are all Armenians”, “We are all Hrant Dink”, “For Hrant, for justice”, etc., in Turkish, Armenian but also in Kurdish, Greek and English.67 Since his killing, several events have been organised to honour his memory and several publications have appeared related to his powerful personality. The most recent controversy with regard to the Armenian question has been the apology campaign. In December 2008, a group of intellectuals, including Ahmet İnsel, Ali Bayramoğlu, Baskın Oran and Cengiz Aktar, initiated a campaign with the following text: “My conscience does not accept the insensitivity shown to and the denial of the Great Catastrophe that the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915. I reject this injustice and for my share, I empathise with the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers and sisters. I apologise to them.” The text was published in several languages and within few months it was signed by more than 30,000 people, all over Turkey.68 This initiative is related to an international conjuncture. In February 2008, the Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, apologised to the Aborigines for the stolen generations, followed by his Canadian counterpart, Stephen Harper, in June of the same year, for the Indian residential school 113
From Oblivion to Obsession system. Another example is the US government’s apology and financial reparations for the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. This is the example taken up by Marc Mamigonian, who criticised the apology campaign.69 The author puts forth two arguments. He first points out that the declaration is not an official or state-sanctioned apology. This is true and, therefore, it cannot be compared to the above-mentioned apologies. Yet, it is interesting that among the authorities, the campaign triggered different reactions. On the one hand, the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, denounced the campaign outright, claiming that his ancestors had done nothing that he should be ashamed of. Then, the newly elected state president, Abdullah Gül, commented that that was a step towards reconciliation. In a very interesting turn of events, though, Canan Arıtman, opposition CHP MP for Izmir and a well-known Kemalist, who would prove herself a racist as well, accused the president for taking such a favourable position because he himself was partly Armenian.70 In his turn, Gül, instead of using the opportunity to chastise the MP for racism and give a message of civic patriotism which would not make any distinction between ethnicities, sought to prove that there was no Armenian blood in his family and he even filed a complaint against Arıtman, demanding compensation of one lira for moral damage.71 In general, very few politicians welcomed the campaign. Only the members of the Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) supported it72 as well as the independent leftist MP Ufuk Uras. The support on the part of the Kurds becomes all the more important, as one of the alternatives of denialism has been to put the blame on the Kurdish tribes for the extermination of the Armenians, whitewashing thus the involvement of the state administration and the army. On the other hand, though, there is a strong sentiment among many Kurds that they helped the state in this dirty business only to find themselves, eventually, having the same fate.73 At any rate, the involvement of the political elites was very telling of certain, more general attitudes. The other issue that Mamigonian points out in his article regards the terminology employed.74 On the one hand, there is no indication of the perpetrator, someone to be held responsible for these events. There is also no call for action, such as urging, for instance, the Turkish state to recognise the genocide. Instead, the entire discussion remains at the level of conscience. Even more important than that is the use of the term “genocide”. Turkish intellectuals use the term Medz Yeghern (literally “great catastrophe”) in order, according to the author and the vast majority of Armenian diaspora, to avoid the G-word. To dismiss the criticism, one of the initiators of the campaign, Cengiz Aktar, argued that the decision to exterminate the Armenians had a devastating impact not only on the Armenians, for whom the term “genocide” would be appropriate, but on the region as a whole, including most certainly its Muslim populations: “In this sense, the Armenian genocide is a common tragedy of Anatolia, and even today what is uttered in the villages of Anatolia as part of the old stories is the tally of an unprecedented catastrophe.”75 There are more practical and material aspects to this debate as well. One is the issue of property, more precisely what is described as Emval-i Metruke (abandoned property). This is a term used to describe all the property that was left behind when Armenians, but also others such as Greeks and Assyrians, were deported or massacred. Therefore, it is a euphemism to conceal the fact that this property was not deliberately abandoned. Actually, one way or another, this property was taken over by Muslims, mostly local notables but in some cases by the common people, who thus built a new future for themselves.76 114
The other issue regards the survivors of the genocide. Recently, a human and tragic aspect of the genocide has dominated part of the public debate. In the midst of despair in the long, lethal marches, many women left their children, infants or toddlers to the care of local Muslims. Many of these children were taken into orphanages by missionaries and relief workers and some managed later to reunite with their families.77 Many others, though, and girls in particular, were adopted by Muslims families, converted to Islam and lived among Turks or Kurds for the rest of their lives. Many of them were still alive until recently, alive but silent. In some cases, their families knew. In others, some might have trusted their grandchildren enough to tell them the truth in their final years. In the early 2000s, such stories started to surface for the first time. Ayşe Gül Altınay and Yektan Türkyılmaz have studied both historical and literary accounts related to the women survivors of the genocide. Their departure point is Fethiye Çetin’s memoir Annaannem (My grandmother), as well as İbrahim Ethem Atnur’s study Türkiye’de Ermeni kadınları ve çocukları meselesi (1915–1923) (The issue of Armenian women and children in Turkey), both published in 2005 and which broke the silence on the matter.78 Conversion was a way for Armenians to escape death already before 1915,79 but it turned to a widespread phenomenon in the following years. The discourse on the “merciful” and “humanitarian” dimension of the Turkish people, the authors conclude, ignores the traumatic experience of Armenian women who had to adopt a new identity, lived always in the fear of the possibility that the old one might be revealed, even though they were considered to be “dead” in both Turkish and Armenian historiography.
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I first came to learn of these stories in September 2005, at the conference on the Armenians mentioned earlier. In two papers, the lawyer Fethiye Çetin, author of the novel mentioned above, which became a bestseller in Turkey, and the medical doctor İrfan Palalı, author of the novel Tehcir Çocukları (The children of deportation) narrated the story of their grandmothers, who had converted to Islam, as had thousands of others: children in the vortex of the disaster.80 It is interesting that in the days following the conference, similar stories sprang up constantly in the newspapers. One had the impression that Turkish society had begun to realise the self-evident: that all those Christians who were not privileged enough to emigrate to a country with a population of their coreligionists, as it was the case of Greece for the Greek Orthodox, but managed to escape the slaughter and hardship, were perforce incorporated into Turkish society, changing their religion and identity. Contrary to the narrations of survivors from the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey, though, in these instances of postnational reappropriation of identities there is a very strong gender aspect. Out of this wave of personal confessions, especially of women who contacted Çetin, the latter, together with the anthropologist Ayşe Gül Altınay, carried out interviews with 25 of them and published the results in a book that really shook public opinion in Turkey. As the editors put it, “this book, more than being about 1915, is, in Hrant Dink’s words, a book about not being able to get out ‘of a 1915-metre deep well’”. It is a book following the deep traces that the human disaster of 1915 has left today to those who live in these lands.”81 This shift was also mirrored in literature. Elif Şafak, a young prolific writer, with an acute sensitivity on issues of suppressed identities, published, in 2006, her novel Baba ve Piçç (Father and bastard), which is based on a survival story. An American Armenian family and a Turkish Muslim one discover their common great-grandmother, an Armenian by the name of Shushan, who escaped the 1915 massacre, converted to Islam, married a Turkish man and lived ever after as Shermin. Şafak’s heroes from both families meet in Istanbul to trace the common origins.82 115
From Oblivion to Obsession From oblivion to obsession The narratives that have surfaced recently have not replaced the older ones, yet they have created a space of innovative contention. Why, at this particular juncture, have scholars, politicians and common people decided to adopt these narratives, at a high risk in cases, is a question that can only partly be addressed by this paper. The 1990s witnessed a growing increase in interest for the past in Turkey, as elsewhere. Political changes, social developments and demographic reshuffling have led broader layers of the literate public to become engaged in the study of the past, not only out of curiosity or as a source of legitimacy for the existing order. New images and concepts came to dominate the media and the by then sophisticated channels of communication. Whether as a result of a instinctive reaction to the failures of modernisation, or, on the contrary, of an emerging civil society which was the outcome of such modernisation, individuals and groups started tracing their stories back to the founding years of the republic and asking questions about their origins as well as the role of their revered forefathers in the painful experiences that marked the transformation of the empire into a nation-state. In this respect, individual memories regenerated connections and reshuffled what is perceived as public culture. As a result, gradually, the state and its elites, the academic elites among them, began to lose their monopoly over the legitimacy to organise and interpret the past. As this past was transformed into experience, different groups, each with its own agenda, were given the chance to join the festivity of claiming their own individual origins which, they hoped, would alter their place in the genealogy of Turkish society, shattering thus the notion of its homogeneity. It is clear that claiming a new identity is always a risky endeavour. It entails ruptures, psychological dislocation and even violence. It was not an easy task for the descendants of the exchange of populations to opt to claim their difference as a people, whose origins can be found in long-lost lands and whose ethnicity, hence, has been placed under scrutiny. It is even harder for those of Armenian descent to publicly claim such origins, let alone take a step further to “correct” the historical injustice by converting back to Armenianness. There are quite a number of such cases and they have occasionally made the headlines. There is, however, an element of serendipity which alleviates the pain and the risk. Even for societies where democracy and human rights are still put frequently to the test, difference and particularity have lost their totally negative connotations. In a lecture she gave at Princeton in March 2011, Judith Butler recalled her short stay for a lecture in Ankara, where she saw demonstrators calling for the recognition of the Armenian genocide march next to transsexuals, all of them protesting against an authoritarian state. Yet, this serendipity should not blind us to the fact that there are levels of accepted difference. These and similar cases, of course, have been studied intensively by anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists. It has often happened, however, that in relevant accounts, the role of historicity as such is instrumentalised, is considered a strategy and thus lost in the name of shedding light on identity politics stricto sensu. I hope that this article has contributed to demonstrating that references to history, far from being a mechanism of legitimation, have become an arena where the present and the future, the private and the public, and fear and hope confront each other. This has resulted in new spaces of imagination, hitherto unthinkable, that have “redeemed” entire social or ethnic groups from collective stigma and allow them, after having successfully achieved what they believe amounts to awareness, to claim with a new confidence their place in society and the world. This dynamic process, however, is not independent of the efforts of newly emerging 116
elites to undermine the authority of older ones and, in the process, establish their own hegemony. Thus, the new spaces in public culture can be integrated into the mainstream in ways that are time bound, politics oriented and eventually equally contingent to circumstances as the notion of the past they claim to refute.
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NOTES *
I would like to thank Antonis Liakos for inviting me to contribute to this special issue. I am also grateful to Oktay Özel for his very useful comments and suggestions. Moreover, it is clear to me that I would not have been able to write this article were it not for the hospitality and support of the Program in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University, as a Stanley J Seeger Visiting Research Fellow, during spring 2011. Finally, this article owes a lot to the two anonymous referees, even if I did not feel compelled to integrate all their comments.
1
Fatih Altaylı, a popular but controversial journalist, often hosts mainstream figures such as the well– known historian and director of the Topkapı Museum, İlber Ortaylı. On that occasion, “Ortaylı” answered that the sultan used to drink wine, of the best kind imported from the islands. The same was argued by Murat Bardakçı, another popular figure who has his own history programme on the same channel, Habertürk, called Tarihin Arka Odası [History’s backroom], and also publishes his own popular history journal, Tarih dergisii [History journal]. See www.haberturk.com/yazarlar/fatih-altayli/589315-verilmedi-sinirlandi, accessed 21 Jul 2011. It is interesting that Süleyman”s son Selim II (reign 1566–1574) became known as Selim mest (Selim the Drunkard) or Sarı Selim (Selim the Blond).
2
Ümit Kıvanç, a famous documentarist and columnist at Taraf,f mocks the picture of the sultan who spent his time praying and fighting and would unwillingly accept to spend some time with a lady only for the purpose of maintaining the dynasty. Ümit Kıvanç “Sultan şöyleydi, böyleydi. Nah öyleydi!” [The sultan was like this, the sultan was like that. You bet he wasn’t], Taraf,f 10 Jan 2011, available at www.taraf.com.tr/ umit-kivanc/makale-sultan-soyleydi-boyleydi-nah-oyleydi.htm, accessed 21 Jul 2011. In 1999, on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of the establishment of the Ottoman state, one of the state-sponsored institutions that contributed to the glorification of that period, the Osmanlı Araştırmaları Vakfı (Ottoman Research Foundation), published the study 700. yılında bilinmeyen Osmanlı (The unknown Ottoman on the 700th anniversary), by Ahmed Akgündüz and Said Öztürk. The book is in the form of questions and answers. Interestingly, the largest entries are the ones referring to the harem and alcohol.
3
It is important for the record to point out that İnalcık is the doyen of Ottoman history, totally devoted to promoting the glory of Turkish history. Orhan Turan, “Muhteşem Rezalet”, Yeni Şafak, 31 Dec 2010. Available at yenisafak.com.tr/Gundem/?t=31.12.2010&i=295412, accessed 21 Jul 2011.
4
This obsession with morality is not only pertinent to Islamist circles but also secularist ones. Mustafa (2008), the most controversial of a number of films on Atatürk, by the acclaimed journalist and documentarist Can Dündar, takes a certain distance from the official narrative. Throughout the movie, the hero is also attributed with human weaknesses. He drinks a lot, smokes, is a womaniser, maintains correspondence with a French girlfriend while fighting at Çanakkale, the battle that made him famous. The purpose of the film was obviously to present a sympathetic figure, behind the austere leader. Interestingly, however, it enraged diehard Kemalists. It also came as a surprise to the state. Official support 117
From Oblivion to Obsession for the film was withdrawn and complaints were filed against the director, for insulting the memory of Atatürk. See Nora Fisher Onar, “Confronting the Ottoman Legacy In Turkey and Beyond: Towards a Comparative Framework”, unpublished paper presented at the Mediterranean Research Meeting of the European University Institute (EUI), Montecatini, Italy, 26–28 Mar 2010. 5
In the very same weeks that these discussions were taking place, the government publicised its intention to pass a law that would prohibit any transaction or commercial related to tobacco and alcohol on television and on the internet. Available at www.radikal.com.tr/Radikal.aspx?aType=RadikalDetayV3& ArticleID=1033850&Date=24.12.2010& CategoryID=80, accessed 21 Jul 2011.
6
Referring also to recent films on the life of Atatürk and the reactions among Atatürkists who were offended, Altay made the ambiguous statement that: “As long as it does not insult anyone, it is fine.” Available at www.haber7.com/haber/20110114/CHPden-Muhtesem-Yuzyila-destek.php, accessed 21 Jul 2011.
7
See Nora Fisher Onar, “Echoes of a Universalism Lost: Rival Representations of the Ottomans in Today’s Turkey”, Middle Eastern Studies 45/2 (2009), 229–241.
8
Uğur Vardan, “Hür Adam’ın üç sahnesi çok konuşulacak” [Three scenes from the Free Man will be discussed a lot], Radikal, 30 Dec 2010, available at www.radikal.com.tr/Radikal.aspx?aType=RadikalEkler DetayV3&ArticleID=1034477&Date=30.12.2010&CategoryID=41, accessed 21 Jul 2011.
9
“Said-i Nursi filmine protesto” [Protest against the movie Said-i Nursi], 5 Jan 2011, available at haber. mynet.com/detay/guncel/said-i-nursi-filmine-protesto/549316, accessed 21 Jul 2011.
10 Okan İşbecer, “Hür Adam’ın hüsranı” [Free Man’s frustration], 24 Jan 2011, available at www.kemalistgencler.com/hur-adamin-husrani, accessed 21 Jul 2011. 11 Kürsat Oğuz, “Biz hep Mustafa Kemal’in posta koymasına alışmıştık” [We had been used only to Mustafa Kemal chastising others], 29 Dec 201, available at www.haberturk.com/kultur-sanat/haber/586300biz-hep-mustafa-kemalin-posta-koymasina-alismistik, accessed 21 Jul 2011. 12 “Kültür ve Turizm Bakanı Ertuğrul Günay, Hür Adam filmi için ne dedi?” [What did the Culture and Tourism Minister Ertuğrul Günay say about the film Free Man?], 11 Jan 2011, available at www.internethaber.com/bakan-gunay-hur-adam-icin-ne-dedi-320537h.htm, accessed 21 Jul 2011. 13 Esra Özyürek (ed.), The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey, Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2007, 6. Özyürek discusses the use of the terms social and cultural memory against which she opts for the term public memory, inspired by Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge’s use of the term public culture on the grounds that it is “less embedded in western dichotomies like high versus low, elite versus mass, or popular versus classical”. Ibid., 8. 14 Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005. 15 Meltem Ahıska, “Occidentalism: The Historical Fantasy of the Modern”, The South Atlantic Quarterly 102/2-3 (2003), 351–379, 353. 16 Nilufer Göle, “Global Expectations, Local Experiences: Non-Western Modernities”, in Wil Arts (ed.), Through a Glass, Darkly: Blurred Images of Cultural Tradition and Modernity over Distance and Time, Boston: Brill, 2000, 48. 17 Ahıska, 355. 18 Ibid., 360. 19 With respect to Greece, for instance, see Kostas Kostis, “The Formation of the State in Greece”, in Faruk 118
Birtek and Thalia Dragonas (eds), Citizenship and the Nation-state in Greece and Turkey, Routledge: London and New York, 2005, 18–36. 20 Selim Deringil, “‘They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery’: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post-Colonial Debate”, Society for Comparative Study of Society and Historyy 45 (2003), 311–342; Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism”, The American Historical Review w 107/3 (2002), 768–796.
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21 See Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, London: I.B. Tauris, 2004. 22 Büşra Ersanlı Behar, İktidar ve tarih: Türkiye’de “resmi tarih” tezinin oluşumu [Political power and history: the creation of “official history” in Turkey], 1929–1937, Istanbul: AFA Yayıncılık, 1992. 23 Çağlar Keyder, “The Consequences of the Exchange of Populations for Turkey”, in Renée Hirschon (ed.), Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey, New York: Berghahn, 2003, 39–52, 43 24 Reşat Kasaba, “Economic Foundations of a Civil Society: Greeks in the Trade of Western Anatolia, 1840– 1876”, in Dimitri Gondicas and Charles Issawi (eds), Ottoman Greeks in the Age of Nationalism: Politics, Economy, and Society in the Nineteenth Century, Princeton UP, 1999. 25 See Uğur Ümit Üngör’s pathbreaking The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. 26 Keyder, “The Consequences”, 45. 27 Weiner Myron and Michael S. Teitelbaum, Political Demography, Demographic Engineering, New York: Berghahn, 2001. 28 Barbara E. Harrell-Bond and Effie Voutira, “Anthropology and the Study of Refugees”, Anthropology Todayy 8/4 (1992), 6–12; Anne Norton, Reflections on Political Identity, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988. 29 Effie Voutira, “Population Transfers and Resettlement Policies in Inter-war Europe: The Case of Asia Minor Refugees in Macedonia from an International and National Perspective”, in Peter Mackridge and Eleni Yannakakis (eds), Ourselves and Others: The Development of a Greek Macedonian Cultural Identity since 1912, Oxford: Berg, 1997, 113. 30 See for instance Alexandre Toumarkine, Les migrations des populations musulmanes balkaniques en Anatolie (1876–1913), Istanbul: Isis, 1995, and Alexandre Popovic, L’Islam Balkanique: Les musulmans sud-est européen dans la période post-ottomane, Weisbaden: Osteuropa-Institut of the Free University of Berlin, 1986. 31 Ahmet Yıldız, Ne mutlu türküm diyebilene: Türk ulusal kimliğinin etno-seküler sınırları (1919–1938) [How happy to be able to say I am a Turk: the ethnosecular limits of Turkish national identity], İstanbul: İletişim, 2004. 32 Barbaros Tanc, “Where Local trumps National: Christian Orthodox and Muslim Refugees since Lausanne”, Balkanologie 5/1–2 (2001), available at balkanologie.revues.org/index732.html#ftn1, accessed 21 Jul 2011. 33 Aslı Iğsız, “Documenting the Past and Publicizing Personal Stories: Sensescapes and the 1923 Greco– Turkish Population Exchange in Contemporary Turkey”, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 26 (2008), 451–487. 34 Fikret Adanır, “The Greco–Turkish Exchange of Populations in Turkish Historiography”, in Marina Cattaruzza, Marco Dogo and Raoul Pupo (eds), Esodi: Transfertimenti forzati di popolazioni nei due dopoguer119
From Oblivion to Obsession ra: Europa centro-orientale, regione balcanico-egea, regione istro-dalmata [Exodus: forced population transfers in twentieth century Europe], Turin: Edizioni Scientifice Italiano, 2000. 35 Kemal Arı, Büyük Mübadele, Türkiye’ye zorunlu göçç [The great exchange of population: forced migration in Turkey], 1923–25, Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yayınları, 1995. 36 Mehmet Ali Gökaçtı, Nüfus Mübadelesi: Kayıp Bir Kuşağın Öyküsü, İstanbul: İletişim, 2003. 37 Ayhan Aktar, Türk milliyetçiliği, gayrimüslimler ve ekonomik dönüşüm [Turkish nationalism, non-Muslims and economic transformation], İstanbul: İletişim, 2006. 38 Zeki Ergas, Savaş yıllarında Balkanlardan Anadolu’ya bir ailenin öyküsü [The story of a family in the war years from the Balkans to Anatolia], 1912–22, İstanbul: Gözlem Gazetecilik Basın ve Yayın, 2003. 39 Tolga Köker and Leyla Keskiner, “Lessons in Refugeehood: The Reformulation of Ethnic Identity in an Aegean Community”, in Hirschon (ed.), Crossing the Aegean, 193–208. 40 Asli Comu, The Transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic and the Exchange of Populations: The Cases of Ayvalik, Mersin and Trabzon, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2010. See also her recently published MA dissertation: Aslı Emine Çomu, The Exchange of Populations and Adana, 1830–1927, Istanbul: Libra, 2011. 41 Tutku Vardağlı, “In Search of New Genres in the Lausanne Population Exchange Literature”, paper presented in May 2010 at the workshop Conflicting Historiographies at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. 42 İskender Özsoy, İki Vatan Yorgunları: mübadele acısını yaşayanlar anlatıyor, İstanbul: Bağlam Yayınları, 2003. Emin Akdağ, Şahitlerin Dilinden Unutulan Büyük Göç, İstanbul: Zaman Kitap, 2005. 43 Herkül Millas, “The Exchange of Populations in Turkish Literature”, in Hirschon (ed.), Crossing the Aegean, 221–231, 228. The intellectual impact in Turkey of Millas himself, a Greek of Istanbul, who spends his life between Greece and Turkey, mirrors the clear shift in this country with respect to the perception of postnational identities. 44 Ibid., 230. 45 Iğsız, “Documenting the Past”, 453. Apart from being selective – the same nostalgia is not publicly performed for Armenians, for instance, whose remembrance, as we will see, remains problematic – it also occasionally becomes part of a racist discourse. I have been told by old Istanbuliots how sad they feel that their ancestors chased out the Greeks, who although they were a minority were very well integrated and of a high culture, and they now feel themselves a minority under siege from an uneducated mob from Anatolia with whom they have nothing in common. 46 Ibid. See also, by the same author, “Polyphon and Geographic Kinship in Anatolia: Framing the Turkish Greek Compulsory Population Exchange”, in Esra Özyürek (ed.), The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey, Syracuse UP, 2007, 162–190. There, Iğsız discusses the way that specific private initiatives and cultural institutions, such as Belge publishing house that launched the Mare Nostrum (Our sea) series, with translations of authors from Mediterranean countries, most notably Greece, and the Kalan music company, which has published a score of albums with ethnic music of the deported populations of Anatolia, create a new vocabulary that translates all past sufferings into current terms and “transforms the rhetoric of
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Anatolia from a homogeneous nation-state territory into a homeland and a mother”, ibid., 186. 47 Iğsız, “Documenting the Past”, 453. 48 Esra Bulut, “The Role of Religion in Turkish Reactions to Balkan Conflicts”, Turkish Policy Quarterlyy 3/1 (2004).
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49 Sylvia Gangloff, “The Impact of the Ottoman Legacy on Turkish Policy in the Balkans (1991–1999)”, CERI working paper, Nov 2005. Available at www.ceri-sciencespo.com/archive/nov05/artsg.pdf,f accessed 21 Jul 2011. 50 Ibid. 51 See, for instance, Ayşe Parla, “Remembering across the Border: Postsocialist Nostalgia among Turkish Immigrants from Bulgaria”, American Ethnologistt 36/4 (2009), 750–767, and Zeynep Ülker Kaşlı and Ayşe Parla, “Broken Lines of Il/Legality and the Reproduction of State Sovereignty: The Impact of Visa Policies on Immigrants to Turkey from Bulgaria”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Politicall 34/2 (2009), 203–227. 52 See the organisation’s website at www.lozanmubadilleri.org.tr. “Let these sufferings never again be experienced” is the association’s motto. 53 In order to deal with this issue, Sefer Güvenç, for many years the secretary-general of the foundation, edited recently an important bilingual reference book entitled Kuzey Yunanistan Yer Adları Atlası: Mübadele Öncesi ve Sonrası Eski ve Yeni Adları [Atlas of old and new toponyms of northern Greece before and after the population exchange], Istanbul: LMV, 2010. 54 Mimari Mirasın Korunması ile ilgili Yerel Bilincin Geliştirilmesi Projesi “Ortak Kültürel Mirasımız – Birlikte Koruyalım!”” [“Our common heritage – Let us protect it together:” A project of developing awareness relevant to the protection of architectural heritage]. The proceedings were published in the trilingual edition Κοινή πολιτιστική κληρονομιά: ας την προστατέψουμε μαζί – Ortak Kültürel Mirasımız: Birlikte Koruyalım – Common Cultural Heritage, Istanbul: Lozan Mübadilleri Vakfı, 2005. More recently, in December 2010, in the context of Istanbul 2010: European Capital of Culture, the LMV organised an exhibition entitled Hasretim İstanbull (Istanbul: my nostalgia), where the life stories of Greek Orthodox (Rum) inhabitants of the city who had been deported or compelled to leave under different circumstances were portrayed. The material for the exhibition and the book published on the occasion derived from interviews recorded as part of an oral history project carried out by foundation members. 55 Deniz Madanoğlu, “Gelen servettir, giden nimettir” [Those who come is wealth, those who leave are blessing], Birgün gazetesi, 30 Jan 2011. She quotes from Ayhan Aktar, Varlık vergisi ve “Türkleştirme” politikaları, İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2000. 56 İki Türkiye ve Cumhurbaşkanlığı seçimi, Yeni Şafak, 21 Mar 2007, available at yenisafak.com.tr/ Yorum/?i=36163, accessed 21 Jul 2011. 57 Father Andrea Santoro, an Italian Catholic priest, was shot dead in a church in Trabzon, northern Turkey, in February 2006. In July 2006, a Catholic French cleric was stabbed in Samsun, northern Turkey, as well. Three Protestant missionaries, including a German citizen who operated a Christian publishing house, were killed in April 2007. Italian bishop Luigi Padovese was killed in June 2010 by his driver,
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From Oblivion to Obsession who presumably was suffering from a psychological disorder. 58 Retired diplomats constitute a really interesting case. Figures such as the late Gündüz Aktan and Şükrü Elekdağ, eventually became MPs on a MHP and CHP ticket, respectively. Having built most of their careers during the Cold War era, more recently, either motivated by patriotic feelings or their failure to understand the changes around them, they have offered lip service to promoting understanding and reconciliation in their country. 59 The Turkish government founded the Institute for Armenian Research in 2001, which started publishing its quarterly Ermeni Araştırmaları Dergisii [Journal of Armenian Studies], aiming to support the official Turkish thesis. A series of volumes have been also published. See Ara Sanjian in his “Review Article: Öke’s Armenian Question Re-examined”, Middle Eastern Studies 42/5 (2006), 831–839, here 832. 60 Ibid., 831. 61 The first relevant work that appeared in Turkish was Taner Akçam, Türk ulusal kimliği ve Ermeni sorunu [Turkish national identity and the Armenian question], İstanbul: İletişim, 1993. Since then the same author has published several books, the more acclaimed being: From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide, New York: Zed, 2004; A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, trans. Paul Bessemer, New York: Metropolitan, 2006. We should also mention Fuat Dündar, Crime of Numbers: The Role of Statistics in the Armenian Question, 1878–1918, New Brunswick: Transaction, 2010, and Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Gökçe and Norman Naimark (eds), A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. The last one is the product of the Workshop for Armenian Turkish Scholarship (WATS), which, including its first in Chicago in 2000, has had seven meetings to date. Two of the initiators of WATS, Göçek and Suny, won the 2005 academic freedom award of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) for their contribution. 62 Fatma Müge Göçek, “Reading Genocide: Turkish Historiography on the Armenian Deportations and Massacres of 1915”, in Israel Gershoni, Amy Singer and Hakan Erdem (eds), Middle East Historiographies: Narrating the Twentieth Century, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006, 101–127. 63 See Vangelis Kechriotis, “The Historian, the Philologist, the Minister, and the Traitors: Thoughts from Turkey on a Historical Conference”, 26 Dec 2005 (available at www.greekworks.com/content/index.php/ weblog/extended/the_historian_the_philologist_the_minister_and_the_traitors_thoughts_from_t/),and / “The Jurists, the Laws, and the Outlaws: Thoughts from Turkey on a Conference that Finally Took Place”, 22 Mar 2006 (available at www.greekworks.com/content/index.php/weblog/extended/the_jurists_the_laws_and_the_outlaws_thoughts from_turkey_on_a_conference_t/). / Both accessed on 21 Jul 2011. The two articles are translations into English by Mary Kitroeff of earlier versions that had been published in Synchrona Themata 90 (2005) and 91 (2005). 64 The head of the militant association Büyük Hukukçular Birliği, Kemal Kerinçsiz, was behind the complaints filed against more than 40 Turkish journalists and authors, including Orhan Pamuk, Elif Şafak and the late Hrant Dink, for “insulting Turkishness”. In January 2008, he was arrested and remains in custody in the context of the Ergenekon plot investigation. 65 The proceedings of the conferεnce were recently published as İmparatorluğun çöküş döneminde Osmanlı Ermenileri, Bilimsel Sorumluluk ve Demokrasi Sorunları, İstanbul: Bilgi Yayınları, 2011. 66 Indeed, a court recently sentenced the perpetrator, Ögün Samast, to 22 years’ imprisonment whereas
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two of his accomplices were sentenced to life. 67 See Vangelis Kechriotis, “Hrant Dink ou L’«Intellectuel» post-mortem”, in Le petit théâtre intellectuel Labyrinthe atelier interdisciplinaire 32/1 (2009), 69–75. 68 See the website Özür diliyorum (I apologise), at www.ozurdiliyoruz.com. It is significant that the text was signed by people from all over Turkey as well as all walks of life.
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69 Marc Mamigonian, “Commentary on the Turkish Apology Campaign”, The Armenian Weekly, April 2009, special issue on the Armenian genocide, 19–24 (20). 70 Murat Yetkin, “Ermeni meselesi, imza kampanyası ve Gül” [The Armenian Question, the petition campaign and Gül], Radikal, 18 Dec 2008. Available at www.radikal.com.tr/Default.aspx?aType=YazarYazisi&ArticleI D=913369&Yazar=MURAT%20YETK%C4%B0N&Date=19.12.2008&CategoryID=98, accessed 22 Jul 2011. 71 “Cumhurbaşkanı Gül’den Arıtman’a dava” [A complaint by President Gül to Arıtman], 22 Dec 2008. Available at atarsiv.ntvmsnbc.com/news/469808.asp, accessed 22 Jul 2011. 72 Selahattin Demirtaş, the leader of the parliamentary group of the Democratic Society Party (Demokratik Toplum Partisi, DTP) and, after the banning of the latter in December 2009, of the new Peace and Democracy Party (Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi, BDP), was among the signatories. His party was the only one that supported the signing of the protocol of understanding between Turkey and Armenia: “Türkiye–Ermenistan Protokolü Meclis’te Tartışıldı” [Turkey–Armenia protocol discussed in parliament], 21 Oct 2009. Available at www.bianet.org/bianet/diger/117773-turkiye-ermenistan-protokolu-meclistetartisildi, accessed 22 Jul 2011. 73 See for instance, Orhan Miroğlu, Barışa Dair Bir Hikayemiz Olsun [Let it be our story regarding peace], Istanbul: Agora Kitapliği, 2007. The author, prolific also in studies on Turkish literature, is a regular columnist at the daily Taraf,f where he frequently writes on the Kurdish question. 74 Mamigonian, 21. 75 Cengiz Aktar, “Beyond Genocide: The Great Catastrophe”, Hürriyet Daily News, 24 Feb 2009, available at www.hurriyet.com.tr/english/opinion/11068921.asp?yazarid=292&gid=260, accessed 22 Jul 2011. 76 Mehmet Polatel, “İttihat Terakki’den Kemalist Döneme Ermeni Malları” [Armenian properties From the Union and Progress to the Kemalist periods], Toplum ve Kuram 3 (2010), 113–152; Nevzat Onaran, Emvali Metruke Olayı: Osmanlı’da ve Cumhuriyette Ermeni ve Rum Mallarının Türkleştirilmesii [The issue of abandoned properties: The Turkification of Armenian and Greek Orthodox properties in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic], Istanbul: Belge Yayınları, 2010. 77 Regarding similar cases, see D.E. Miller and L.T. Miller, Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. 78 Ayşe Gül Altınay and Yektan Türkyılmaz, “Unraveling Layers of Gendered Silencing: Converted Armenian Survivors of the 1915 Catastrophe”, in Amy Singer, Christoph K. Neumann and Selçuk Akşin Somel (eds), Untold Histories of the Middle East: Recovering Voices from the 19th and 20th Centuries, London: Routledge, 2011, 25–53. As the authors argue, already in the first years of the republic, one can come across narratives on the fate of Armenian women and children during the deportations. This category, albeit very blurred, pops up in later historiographical works, as well. See, for instance, their lengthy discussion of Kamuran Gürün, Ermeni Dosyası, Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1983 (translated into English as The Armenian File: The Myth of Innocence Exposed, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1985), 123
From Oblivion to Obsession which has been extensively used by the denialist camp, where it becomes clear that the state itself instructed the local Muslims to adopt children by offering them a measure of financial support. 79 Selim Deringil, “‘The Armenian Question is Finally Closed’: Mass Conversions of Armenians in Anatolia during the Hamidian Massacres of 1895–1897”, Comparative Studies in Society and Historyy 51/2 (2009), 344–71. 80 That very same year witnessed the publication of the memoir “M.K.” Adlı Çocuğun Tehçir anıları: 1915 ve Sonrası [The memoirs from the deportation of the child called “M.K.”: 1915 and its aftermath], İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2005, prepared for publication by Baskın Oran, an influential scholar and activist. This is the story of an Armenian, who, after wandering for ten years, eventually managed to escape to Australia. The author of the memoir discloses only his initials. In 2005, again, the Bir zamanlar yayıncılık publishing house in Istanbul published Kemal Yalçın’s Sarı gelin-Sari Gyalin. The first part of the title is Turkish and means “yellow/blonde bride”, while the second part Armenian and means “bride from the mountains”. What is more important is that the same publishing house published, in 2006, Yalçın’s earlier novel Seninle Güler Yüreğim [My heart laughs thanks to you], whose first publication by Doğan Yayıncılık in 2000 had been banned and the copies destroyed. All this information has been compiled by Altınay and Türkyılmaz, “Unraveling Layers”, 50. 81 Ayşe Gül Altınay and Fethiye Çetin, Torunlar, Istanbul: Metis, 2009, 11. 82 A lawsuit filed that same year against both the author and her publisher Semih Sökmen for “denigrating Turkishness” ended up in their acquittal in the first trial. The book was also published in English under the title The Bastard of Istanbull in 2007.
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It has recently been suggested that the “social question” and a “liberal” social history, leaning towards social democracy early in the twentieth century, would have been able to successfully claim a role in national historiography only in cases where the nation-state could already look back on a long, continuous history, and where the state had remained uncontested in its geographical boundaries. This may have prepared the ground for a more tolerant atmosphere within the discipline of history.1 However, if we consider Europe’s northern periphery, especially Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish historiographies at the turn of the twentieth century, we seem to find a rather opposite case.2 In Sweden, which had a long history as one of the great powers in Europe, the state continued to be the focus of attention, and the “social question” was mostly discussed outside the discipline of history. In Norway, however, which had an interrupted, discontinuous state history and in Finland, which had only limited political independence before 1917, academic historians were more receptive early on to alternatives to the dominant paradigm of individualistic, state-centric political history, and were eager to study such ideas as the German historian Karl Lamprecht’s (1856–1915) Kulturgeschichte.3 The aim of this article is to discuss the early twentieth-century Finnish reception of Kulturgeschichte, with special reference to its domestic and foreign policy-related dimensions. The discussion is based on a conception of politics where “politics” is viewed as an activity arising from conditions of diver-
Kulturgeschichte as a Political Tool: The Finnish Case
Marja Jalava University of Helsinki
Kulturgeschichte as a Political Tool sity in which different groups press different claims and express different views concerning the supposed common good.4 Thus, in this case, “political history” is not limited to the field of academic history, which focuses on formal political processes, military actions and diplomatic manoeuvrings. Indeed, in principle, almost all phenomena in historiography can be politicised, in other words, reinterpreted from a political point of view, if historians and/or their audience choose to use history for the creation of something new, in possible opposition to some generally accepted “truths” and “givens”.5 Closely related to the use of historical research as a political tool is its ideological utilisation to attain or maintain a particular social or political order. This notion of ideology, which Karl Mannheim called the “particular” conception of ideology, refers here to a collection of ideas which, typically, contains certain notions about what it considers to be the best form of government and the best economic system.6 For instance, in the case of the early “liberal-minded” social historians, the interest in economic and social structures was clearly connected to a favourable attitude towards the democratisation of the political system. Although an ideology is often pejoratively identified with a mere illusion, unreality or “false consciousness”, the term is used here in a relatively neutral sense to emphasise the fact that history is never the past but always about the past; it is a translation of the past into the historian’s own time and place, an act of interpretation in which representations and values as well as narrative and conceptual structures in language inevitably shape the very same subject he or she represents. Thus, while I am describing the Lamprechtian Kulturgeschichte as an ideological and political tool of certain Finnish historians, I am not suggesting a distinction between supposedly value-free academic history “proper” and some other schools of thought, such as Kulturgeschichte, as false ideologies. On the contrary, I consider all historical research to be positioned and positioning, for due to our corporeal being-in-the-world, there is no possibility of an unpositioned site.7 This was acknowledged by the Finnish Lamprechtians, too. To cite the social historian Väinö Voionmaa (1869–1947): “The emerging new conception of society unavoidably has an effect on the understanding of the past, for one has to seek the initial roots of the new development from the past.”8
The political role of history in an ‘unhistorical’ nation From a cross-European comparative perspective, the case of nation-building in Finland differed from most European small nations, such as the Czechs and the Catalans who were fighting for a separate state or autonomous status, for the Finnish state as a political unit (the Grand Duchy of Finland) was established in 1809 as an unintended, unasked consequence of the Napoleonic Wars. Among the educated elites of this former eastern province of the Swedish Empire, the new political situation gave rise to an identity crisis, since by and large they had considered themselves to be Swedes with the same rights and duties as subjects living west of the Gulf of Bothnia.9 While the 600-year-old ties with Sweden were broken once and for all, the issue of uppermost importance for the Finns as a nation and as individuals was “to become aware of the national individuality of Finland, to gain the self-knowledge of our inner state, and to develop our definite national character”, as Johan Jakob Tengström (1787–1858), professor of philosophy at the Im126
perial Alexander University of Finland (the present University of Helsinki), put it in the earliest public discussion on the matter, published in 1817–1818.10 However, as Tengström, a supporter of Hegelian philosophy, knew all too well, the constitution of a sovereign state was considered by G.W.F. Hegel a precondition for the existence of a people in the full historical sense of the word. Because of the lack of an independent political history before 1809, the Finns were in danger of becoming classified as an “unhistorical” nation, thereby not deserving of self-determination.11
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In order to legitimise the autonomy of Finland both from Sweden and Russia, similarly to other subaltern regions of Europe the Finnish nation-builders found the solution in an eclectic combination of Hegel and Herder. On the one hand, the nationally minded historians introduced the concepts of “Sweden–Finland” and “the period of Swedish rule”, the former suggesting that the realm had actually been a dual monarchy, and the latter implying that Finland as a political unit had already existed before “the Swedish conquest”. In both cases, one could extend the scope of the state-centric political history of Finland to the ancient past.12 On the other hand, however, much more importantly, Herder’s cultural nationalism offered the axiom of ethnicity as the categorical starting point for the agenda of national emancipation. As the historian Frederick M. Barnard has emphasised, Herder’s focus on a distinctive matrix of language and social culture as well as the ordinary people as the true foundations on which nationhood and statehood could be built did nott involve a shift from the political to the nonpolitical or apolitical but rather a redefinition of the politicall itself and a radical reappraisal of its bases of legitimacy. Here national culture emerged as something not only potentially relevant to politics but as something indispensably necessary, which authorised a Kulturnation to stake a claim for its becoming a sovereign state.13 Thus, Johan Vilhelm Snellman (1806–1881), styled “the national philosopher of Finland” because of his role as the ideological leader of the emerging Finnish nationalist movement, argued in his major sociopolitical work Läran om staten [The study of the state, 1842] that a nation which had grown to self-awareness and was acting in accordance with the demands of its national spirit had reached a higher developmental stage than a sovereign state, such as multiethnic, multilingual Switzerland, where the national spirit as well as the inhabitants were “completely lethargic”.14 In order to achieve this qualitative leap, the nation had to have a history of its own. In 1844 Snellman therefore insisted that Finnish historians inaugurate studies on social and cultural phenomena because the inner continuity of genuine Finnish history was, in his opinion, mainly to be found in the past of the Finnish people and not within governmental and administrative institutions. In Snellman’s eyes, “the Finnish people” was not only or even primarily a folkloristic item, and instead he was especially interested in the history of the working classes (de arbetande klasserna), in other words, those tradespeople, industrialists and the proletariat that were formed by the emerging modern capitalist system and its accompanying civil liberties (medborgerlig frihet).15 Although the industrial revolution in Finland seemed to be an issue for the future, the examples of the most developed European countries (for Snellman, these included Britain, France and Germany) had proved to him that the problem of national unity had to be considered in a socioeconomic light.16 When applied to the prevailing conditions of the Grand Duchy of Finland, however, the nationalist programme based on the principle of ethnicity faced considerable challenges. Not only was 127
Kulturgeschichte as a Political Tool Finland a part of the multiethnic Russian Empire but it also had indigenous ethnic minorities (the Sámi people and the Romani people) and the bilingual majority population, divided into the Finnish- and the Swedish-speakers (at the end of the nineteenth century, some 85 percent and 15 percent, respectively). While the indigenous ethnic minorities were without any political or economic influence, and the ethnic immigrant groups from Russia (Jews, Tatars) extremely small, the harsh power struggle for the cultural and, therefore, political leading position was carried out by the Finnish-language camp, the Fennomans, and the Swedish-language camp, the Svecomans. The language struggle was fuelled by the fact that Swedish was the mother tongue of the upper echelons of society, whereas the huge majority of the Finnish-speaking common people were without political rights until the 1906 parliamentary reform. Therefore the Fennomans, many of whom were originally native Swedish-speakers belonging to the emerging educated middle classes, insisted that the unification of Finns as a “real nation with one language and one mind”, able to withstand Russian pressure, was possible only if the educated classes chose to change their linguistic and cultural identity from Swedish to Finnish. By finnicising their identity, the Fennoman activists also aimed at establishing themselves as the mouthpieces of “the will of the people” and its “natural” leaders, thus politicising the concept of “the people” (kansa, folk). The process resulted in the ethnogenesis of Finnish nationalism, in which the Fennomans and the Svecomans started to understand themselves as ethnically distinct from each other, divided into the Finnish-speaking Finno-Ugrians and the Swedish-speaking Germanic nation. Moreover, the process tended towards the nationalisation and ethnicisation of class conflicts, intensified by the social turmoil of the first globalisation period of the modern capitalist economy from the 1870s onwards.17
The Lamprechtian Kulturgeschichte in Finland In the light of the above-mentioned cultural and political struggle, it presumably comes as no surprise that the early interest in social history and mass phenomena in Finland arose among those historians whose ideological background was in the Fennoman movement. For them, Karl Lamprecht’s Kulturgeschichte, with its nomothetic approach focused on the substratum of economy, society and culture, was nothing new. On the contrary, this “total history” fitted in well with the existing idea of the Kulturnation founded on language, society and culture. Furthermore, it seemed to offer the means to gain knowledge that could be used as a basis for social policy reforms, central to the Fennoman politicians who legitimised their power position by acting as the representatives of “the Finnish people”. While almost all leading historians, similar to many other European countries, were politically active, the boundaries between government machinery, the academe and civil society were blurred, and the same persons busied themselves in all sectors. An example was the Finnish Society of National Economics (Kansantaloudellinen Yhdistys), founded in 1884 on the model of the German Verein für Socialpolitik (1873). It was led by professors of history who also served as senators in the senate of Finland, the grand duchy’s highest governing body. Moreover, because of the undifferentiated character of the Finnish academic world and the academic disciplines in general, the same persons smoothly crossed the borders of various disciplines, such as history, sociology, social policy, national economics and political sciences. For instance, the Lamprechtian historians K.R. Brotherus (1880–1949) and 128
Ernst Nevanlinna (1873–1932) later became professors of political science and national economics, respectively.18 Of the first generation of Finnish Lamprechtians, Gunnar Suolahti (formerly Palander, 1876– 1933) and Väinö Voionmaa (formerly Wallin, 1869–1949) made a lifelong career in history.19 Suolahti specialised in the social history of the “Finnish” gentry in the early modern period,20 focusing on its socioeconomic stratification, social mobility, livelihood, interests and mentality, understood as a sort of “social psyche” shaped by the social milieu in its totality. For him, of special interest was the question of the emergence of modern individuality, somewhat paradoxically considered as a collective phenomenon, out of the constraints created by traditional society.21 Voionmaa, for his part, was more interested in the rural population and the formation of the Finnish working class by the spread of waged labour and capitalist industrialism, which for him was intimately linked with the process of democratisation. According to Voionmaa, the basic tension of modern capitalist society was the conflict between class division and the principle of equality, in other words, plutocracy versus democracy.22 Although neither Suolahti nor Voionmaa was an uncritical follower of Lamprecht, the collectivist approach was something that they both had in common. Thus, instead of great leaders, political events and administrative decision-making, they concentrated on long-term social, economic and cultural structures and changes. As Suolahti put it in 1905, in this type of history writing, the individual was merely seen as “a fragment of the oscillating life of his/her time, emerging from it and merging into it; a result of temporal development – and nothing else”.23
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It might be an exaggeration to say that there was such a thing as “the Finnish Methodenstreit”, for due to the influence of the Fennoman movement a significant group of historians greeted Lamprechtian impulses with a favourable response. This does not mean, however, that it was unanimously praised. Firstly, Lamprechtian collectivism was connected to a broader debate on the philosophy of history, focused on the relation of particularity to universality, and, as its political dimension, on the ongoing struggle between the idealistic and materialist conceptions of history. According to the idealistic critics of Lamprechtianism, many of them philosophers or literary scholars, the collectivist approach, which explained behaviour by means of socioeconomic structures, left no room for human uniqueness (“the soul”) or free will. Thereby it ultimately made individual ethical responsibility impossible. Similarly to other “dangerous” currents of the time, such as Nietzschean cultural radicalism and Marxist socialism, it was blamed for leading to unrestricted relativism without a horizon of transcendental, absolute values.24 Secondly, Lamprechtianism was rejected by the Swedish-speaking Svecoman historians. In this case, the controversy was inherently related to the debate about which area of historiography should be accorded the central place in explaining historical events, and which spheres should be considered structurally and causally fundamental. In the eyes of the Svecoman camp, the Finnish Lamprechtians’ dismissal of political actors, military leaders and other great individuals was politically, not scholarly, motivated, for it allowed the masses of ordinary Finnish-speaking people to step forward into the limelight of historical interest as actors of the utmost importance. Therefore, it seemed to sanctify the teleological conception of Finnish history, in which the progress of Fennoman ethnic nationalism became inevitable, dictated by irresistible histori129
Kulturgeschichte as a Political Tool cal forces. As a counterreaction, the Svecomans emphasised Finland’s historical relation to the Swedish Empire, insisting that there was no separate “history of Finland” before 1809. Moreover, as the defence of scientific objectivity against the ethnicisation of Finnish history, in which the Swedish-speaking elites were described as “unnational foreigners”, they laid stress on the minutiae of archival scholarship, based on a positivist craftsman’s ideology of historical research with little room for questions on the ontology, epistemology or metatheories of history and society.25 On reflection, however, their descriptive studies on state actions, institutions and influential personalities were also ideologically biased, even the reformist Svecoman perspective was predominantly a “top–down” one, and ordinary people merely played the role of passive objects. Similarly, historiography gave full historical agency only to the upper echelons of society, and thus implicitly reinforced the ordinary people’s prevailing subalternity.26 Finally, the battle line between the Fennomans and the Svecomans was blurred by the fact that there was also a group of ardent Fennoman historians who, nevertheless, objected to the collectivist approach. The leader of this fraction was the historian Arno Rafael Cederberg (1885–1948), the first professor of Estonian and Nordic history at the University of Tartu, Estonia, in 1919. In Cederberg’s case, the objection to Lamprechtianism had developed into a strong personal dislike for Gunnar Suolahti, which in its intensity came close to the German assault against Karl Lamprecht.27 According to Cederberg, Suolahti, in his position as university professor, had nearly ruined a whole generation of future Finnish historians by encouraging them to make “irresponsible generalisations” and to focus on typical, large-scale social phenomena, thus neglecting the factual accuracy and the detailed reflection of first-hand sources. For Cederberg, the motor of historical development was located in the great personalities through whom history made progress. In his case, however, contrary to the Svecoman camp, the emphasis on individuals did not necessarily lead to an elitist perspective, for he was also fascinated by courageous, heroic common men of the past.28 To sum up, while the Lamprechtian historians emphasised the power of the masses, Cederberg wanted to elevate prominent ethnically Finnish persons to crucial positions in the national history, regardless of their social class.
The ideological and political role of Lamprechtianism In the Finnish history of historiography, early Lamprechtian social historians have often been acclaimed as bold reformers who successfully challenged the narrowly factual positivist approach and the antidemocratic political bias of the established historical scholarship, thus contributing to the advancement of the historical discipline and the democratisation of Finnish society.29 In the following discussion, it is not my intention to deny this conception, for there is no reason to contest the groundbreaking role of the Lamprechtians. This, however, does not undo the fact that there were also other dimensions in their work that cannot be unambiguously considered as “progressive” and “democratic”. I will, therefore, at the end of this article, briefly discuss some of these ideological and political features which, from a crossnational comparative perspective, can be considered typical of national narratives trying to come to terms with the potentially contradictory concepts of “class”, “people” and “nation”.30 Moreover, they also suggest how intimately the formation of national narratives and nation-building in Europe was connected with 130
imperialism and colonial rule.31 As an example, I will use Väinö Voionmaa’s works that clearly illustrate the case. In Finland, Voionmaa’s three-volume study (1903–1910) on the history of the city of Tampere, the major industrial town of the country, was the first extensive historiographical study that aimed at analysing the breakthrough of the modern industrial capitalist system from the viewpoint of the social classes and their mutual relations. For Voionmaa, the history of Tampere provided an opportunity to study the formation of the modern working class, its historical emergence from certain groups of manual labourers and craftsmen, and their gradual transformation into modern wageworkers and the proletariat. In this work, similar to his edited two-volume work on the history of social democracy in Europe (1906, 1909), he promoted the Marxist-based idea that in modern industrial society, the emancipation of the working class was inevitable because of the new mode of production and the intensifying struggle between labour and capital caused by this mode. “The working class movement had to advance, socialism had to be born,” Voionmaa stated in 1909.32
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However, despite his Marxist-based conception of class and society and his openly leftist political sympathies, Voionmaa joined the Finnish Social Democratic Party only in 1918, when after the devastating Finnish Civil War the party had clearly rejected the doctrine of Marxist class struggle and adopted the reformist, revisionist conception of socialism. For him, socialism was, above all, a movement pleading the case of inner self-formation (in Finnish, sivistys, in German, Bildung),33 and social ethics that were based on the principles of equality and justice. Emblematic of this thinking was the fact that he had initially become acquainted with working-class activists in the temperance movement where the (self-) educational dimension of popular mobilisation was strongly emphasised.34 It is thus no surprise to notice that in the case of Voionmaa, social class clearly played the role of a subdiscourse to the national master narrative rather than that of a counterdiscourse which, with an international revolutionary content, could have threatened the Finnish nation’s integrity. The concepts of “the working class” and “the people” thus became interchangeable, the main issue being the integration of the working class into the Finnish nation.35 In this respect, the scholarly focus on the long-term changes in socioeconomic structures can be interpreted as having had an ideological role, for it implicitly suggested the beneficent consequences and historical importance of continuous evolution in contrast to radical ruptures, discontinuity and revolution. Indeed, the stronger the pressure from Russia (from 1917 onwards, Bolshevik Soviet Russia) and the Marxist working-class movement on the national unity of Finland, the stronger the academic historians’ emphasis on the necessity of a “proper” historical worldview, based on an idea of steady, evolutionary continuity.36 When one takes into account that at the beginning of the twentieth century some 75 percent of the students who took their master’s degree from the arts faculty of the University of Helsinki had history as a major or minor subject,37 historical knowledge could be efficiently used in legitimating a certain political order among the whole age group of the future cultural elite. As an example of the explicitly political use of historiography, one can take Voionmaa’s Suomen uusi asema [The new position of Finland], published in 1919 after the collapse of the Russian 131
Kulturgeschichte as a Political Tool Empire but before the signing of the Treaty of Tartu (1920) that confirmed the border between Finland and Soviet Russia. In this book, aimed at popular enlightenment, Voionmaa utilised the Lamprechtian perspective of socioeconomic “total history” and the geopolitical ideas of the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), Lamprecht’s colleague and scientific inspiration, in his discussion on territorial politics. On the one hand, Voionmaa admitted that the borders had always been contested and shifting, because from the European perspective, Finland belonged to “the precarious zone” between the East and the West which ran from the Balkan Peninsula along the Danube and the Vistula all the way to the Baltic countries, Lapland and the Arctic Ocean. On the other hand, however, according to Voionmaa, the Finnic peoples38 themselves comprised an ethnic mesoregion, a totality of economic, social, cultural and geographic characteristics which taken together defined “Finland’s natural borders”. At the core of this discussion was Eastern Karelia, the peripheral borderland between Finland and Soviet Russia, which, for the most part of its written history, had been a part of the Russian Empire but which, in the light of these “clear-cut natural borders”, actually belonged to “Greater Finland”, cherished by the preSecond World War pan-Finnicism. With Voionmaa’s discussion on the justified expansion of Finland, one is brought back to the political dimension of the Herderian Kulturnation, for in his case, Finnish expansionism was legitimatised by the concept of “sivistys” (Bildung), a crucial concept in Herder’s philosophy, too. In Voionmaa’s vision, among the Finnic peoples, the Finns had achieved the highest level in the process of self-formation (Bildungsprozeß), which entitled them to incorporate Eastern Karelia into the independent state of Finland in order to elevate the Karelians into a Kulturnation. Similar to his conception of socialism, he emphasised here the replacement of force by culture. As neighbours to the powerful Soviet Russia, the Finnic peoples could, he assumed, defend their right to existence only by peaceful means and inner civilisational strength.39 Nevertheless, and typically for the colonialist rhetoric of the time, the Finnish conquest of Eastern Karelia was presented as the benevolent development of that peripheral, backward “dark corner” of Europe in order to guarantee it the civilisational achievements already reached by Western Europe. In all, this rhetoric manifested the power of colonialist thinking in the postimperial European small-states among the reformers who, as in the case of the Finnish Lamprechtians, merely saw themselves as the victims of colonial oppression by the old empires of Eurasia.
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NOTES 1
Gina Deneckere and Thomas Welskopp, “The ‘Nation’ and ‘Class’: European National Master Narratives and Their Social ‘Other’”, in Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (eds), The Contested Nation: Ethnicity, Class, Religion and Gender in National Histories, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, 150.
2
See also Peter Aronsson, Narve Fulsås, Pertti Haapala and Bernard Eric Jensen, “Nordic National Histories”, in Berger and Lorenz (eds), The Contested Nation, 256–282.
3
In terms of present academic subfields of history, Lamprechtian Kulturgeschichte mostly covers the fields of cultural history, social history and economic history. In this article, the German concept of Kulturgeschichte is used to refer specifically to Karl Lamprecht’s sociocultural history school.
4
In the context of national culture and nation-building, see, for example, Frederik M. Barnard, “National Culture and Political Legitimacy: Herder and Rousseau”, Journal of the History of Ideas 44/2 (1983), 249.
5
For the conceptions of “politics” and “politicisation”, see Kari Palonen, “Introduction: From Policy and Polity to Politicking and Politicization”, in Kari Palonen and Tuija Parvikko (eds), Reading the Political: Exploring the Margins of Politics, Helsinki: The Finnish Political Science Association, 1993, 11–13.
6
For the conception of ideology, see Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1936; Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, London: Fontana, 1983, 153–157; see also Peter Burke, History and Social Theory, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Polity, 2005, 98–99.
7
On a theoretical level, see, for example, Bo Stråth, “Historiography, Social Sciences, and the Master Narratives”, in Q. Edward Wang and Franz L. Fillafer (eds), The Many Faces of Clio: Cross-cultural Approaches to Historiography, New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2007, 128–129, 135–136; Keith Jenkins, Re-thinking History, London and New York: Routledge, 2003, 82–83.
8
Väinö Voionmaa, “Tampereen kaupungin historia: Tuloksia ja kokemuksia” [The history of the city of Tampere: Some results and experiences], Historiallinen Aikakauskirja 5 (1911), 349–350. All citations from Finnish into English have been translated by the author.
9
Max Engman, “National Conceptions of History in Finland”, in Erik Lönnroth, Karl Molin and Ragnar Björk (eds), Conceptions of National History, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1994, 49–51.
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10 Johan Jakob Tengström, “Om några Hinder för Finlands Litteratur och Cultur I–II” [About some constraints on Finland’s literature and culture I–II], in Aura, first part in 1817, second part in 1818, 72–73. 11 Johan Jakob Tengström, ”Paragrapher ur Finlands Forntid” [Paragraphs about Finland’s antiquity], Helsingfors Morgonbladd 71–74 (1835); Zachris Topelius, “Äger finska folket en historie?” [Do the Finnish people have a history?] Joukahainen 2 (1845), 189–247; see also Matti Viikari, “Die Tradition der finnischen Geschichtsschreibung und Karl Lamprecht”, Storia della storiografia 6 (1984), 35–37. 12 See, for example, Engman, 50–53. 13 Barnard, 245–246, 250–251; see also Joep Leerssen, “Nation and Ethnicity”, in Berger and Lorenz (eds), 75–103. 14 Johan Vilhelm Snellman, Samlade arbeten III, Helsingfors: Statsrådets kansli, 1993, 491. 15 Johan Vilhelm Snellman, Samlade arbeten IV, Helsingfors: Statsrådets kansli, 1994, 16–18, 32–33. 16 See, for example, Marja Jalava, Minä ja maailmanhenki: Moderni subjekti kristillis-idealistisessa kansallisajattelussa ja Rolf Lagerborgin kulttuuriradikalismissa n. 1800–1914 [Self and the spirit: The modern subject in Christian idealistic nationalism and Rolf Lagerborg’s cultural radicalism in Finland, 133
Kulturgeschichte as a Political Tool c. 1800–1914], (= Bibliotheca Historica 98), Helsinki: SKS, 2005, 156–157. 17 For the language struggle in Finland, see, for example, Engman, 49–50; Ilkka Liikanen, “The Ironies of People’s Power”, in Lars-Folke Landgrén and Pirkko Hautamäki (eds), People, Citizen, Nation, Helsinki: Renvall Institute, 2005, 74–89; for the ethnicisation of class concepts in the western borderlands of the Russian Empire, see Anna Veronika Wendland, “The Russian Empire and its Western Borderlands: National Historiographies and Their ‘Others’ in Russia, the Baltics and the Ukraine”, in Berger and Lorenz (eds), 418. 18 Leo Harmaja, Kansantaloudellinen Yhdistys 1884–1934 [The Society of National Economics, 1884– 1934], Helsinki: Otava, 1934, 51–52, 144–146; Pertti Haapala, ”Muotia vai ei? – Suomalaisen sosiaalihistorian muuttuvat näkökulmat.” [Fashion or not? The changing viewpoints of Finnish social history], in Kyösti Kiuasmaa et al. (eds), Yksilö ja yhteiskunnan muutos [Individual and social change], (= Acta Universitatis Tamperensis Ser A 202), Tampere: Tampereen yliopisto, 1986, 265–267. 19 In order to emphasise their linguistic and cultural Finnish identity, Suolahti and Voionmaa finnicised their previously Swedish surnames in 1906. 20 In this context, the word “Finnish” refers to that part of the Swedish gentry who had lived in the area of the future Finland. 21 See, for example, Gunnar Palander (Suolahti), “Valistuskauden sielunelämää” [On mental life during the Age of Enlightenment], Historiallinen Aikakauskirja 1 (1905), 15–22 and 5 (1905), 160–169. 22 For example, Väinö Voionmaa, Tampereen kaupungin historia, III osa: Tampereen historia viime vuosikymmeninä (1856–1905) [The history of the city of Tampere, part 3: The history of Tampere during the latest decades, 1856–1905], Tampere: Tampereen kaupunki, 1907–1910. 23 Gunnar Palander (Suolahti), “Historiallista kirjallisuutta” [Historical literature], Historiallinen Aikakauskirja 6 (1905), 225. 24 See, for example, the Records of the Philosophical Society of Finland, 21 Nov 1903 onwards. Published in Juha Manninen and Ilkka Niiniluoto (eds), Ajatuksen laboratorio: Filosofisen Yhdistyksen pöytäkirjat 1873–19255 [The laboratory of thought: The records of the Philosophical Society, 1878–1925], Helsinki: Suomen Filosofinen Yhdistys, 1996. 25 For example, Engman, 55–56; Pekka Ahtiainen and Jukka Tervonen, Menneisyyden tutkijat ja metodien vartijat: Matka suomalaiseen historiankirjoitukseen [Researchers of the past and guardians of the methods: A journey into Finnish historiography], Helsinki: SHS, 1996, 226–228. 26 On a general level, see Eric Hobsbawm, On History, London: Abacus, 1997, 267–268. 27 Cf. Roger Chickering, Karl Lamprecht: A German Academic Life (1856–1915), New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993. 28 See Eija Juujärvi, “Historian uupumaton työmies A.R. Cederberg – historiantutkija, arkistomatkaaja ja isänmaanystävä” [The tireless workman of history A.R. Cederberg: historian, archival voyager, and patriot], in Ari Vallius (ed.), Arno Rafael Cederberg, Joensuu: Pohjois-Karjalan Historiallinen Yhdistys, 1997, 54–64, 83–93. 29 See, for example, Ahtiainen and Tervonen, 163–165, 226–229. 30 Cf. Deneckere and Welskopp. 31 For the trajectory of the Eurasian old empires (the Habsburg, Ottoman and Romanov) into nation134
states, see, for example, Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005, 153–158. 32 Väinö Voionmaa, Sosialidemokratian vuosisata II osa [The century of social democracy, part 2], Porvoo: WSOY, 1909, 525. 33 Sivistys (in German, Bildung) is a specifically German coinage used in the Lutheran-dominated, culturally German-influenced regions of northern Europe, including the Nordic countries. While it is extremely difficult to find an equivalent for it in English, it should be understood as a processual state of mind that constantly and actively changes through self-reflexivity. It is a metaconcept, referring to the never-ending process of self-formation in which the goal is included in the process itself (Bildungsprozeß); see Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2002, 170–207.
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34 Aimo Halila, Väinö Voionmaa, Helsinki: Tammi, 1969, 50–59. 35 Cf. Deneckere and Welskopp; see also Haapala, 266–267. 36 See, for example, Oskari Mantere, “Historian kirjoituksen ja opetuksen kysymyksiä” [Questions on history writing and teaching], Historiallinen Aikakauskirja 4 (1911), 293–294; Arvi Korhonen, “Vallankumouksellisesta ja historiallisesta katsomustavasta” [About revolutionary and historical viewpoints], Historiallinen Aikakauskirja 1 (1922), 1–39. 37 Päiviö Tommila, Suomen historiankirjoitus, Helsinki: WSOY, 1989, 99. 38 The ethnographic term “Finnic peoples” commonly includes Finns, Karelians, Estonians, Ingrians and Kvens, who are all considered to be ethnically related. 39 Väinö Voionmaa, Suomen uusi asema [The new position of Finland], Helsinki: WSOY, 1919, 370–399.
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Puzzles of the Past: Silences, Omissions and Unexplored Topics in History This section presents new and original research that examines historical topics that for various reasons have not received much scholarly attention. There are in all historiographies silences, omissions and gaps. Sometimes they are purposeful, part of a collective, selective forgetting about parts of the historical record considered not worthy of being preserved as sites of memory. Other times they are caused by the belief that the source materials needed to write about a topic are not available or are inaccessible. And at still other times, they occur because the political climate in a given place at a specific time make writing about certain historical topics extremely difficult. For whatever reasons, then, gaps, lacunae and selective silences occur in the historical record. The articles to be published in this section of Historein speak to those silences, erase those lacunae and explore the hitherto uncharted topics of the past. The first article in this series is “Women, Crime and the Courts in the Ionian Islands during the Nineteenth Century” by Thomas W. Gallant. Social historians trying to write the history of nonelite women, even during the very recent past, face a formidable obstacle: the sources. Due to a lack of education and the rigours of their daily lives, nonelite women did not produce the types of documents, letters, journals or memoirs, for example, that historians often use to write social history. Where there are literary accounts about women in the past, they are mostly written by men, who thus inscribe onto women an androcentric view of their lives. Official documents are not much more help. Unfortunately, for all too many women the only traces they left in the official record were the records of their birth, marriage and death. There is one type of primary source, however, that can provide historians with insights into nonelite women’s lives, and those are the records of the legal and criminal justice systems. Nonelite women, both urban and rural, encountered the legal and criminal justice systems in many and varied ways: as litigants in civil suits, as witnesses in police investigations and trials, as victims and perpetrators of crimes and misdemeanours. Consequently, there has developed a very large and rich body of historical scholarship on women, crime and the courts in early modern Europe and modern Europe and North America. But there is a glaring gap in this historiography: we know very little about the social history of women and crime in Greece, the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire. Gallant’s article is a first step towards filling this gap. Using police and court records from the Ionian Islands during the nineteenth century, his study gives us insights into the social world of women in one part of the Greek world. In addition, because there are a large number of studies on the topic from elsewhere in Europe during the nineteenth century, he is able to contextualise his study to show what was similar and what was different about the experience of women in the Ionian Islands. He ends with a call for more research from elsewhere in the region so we can begin to write the social history of Greek women.
John Jolly, chief of the Ionian police on the island of Zakynthos, arrived in the mountain village of Volimes late on Wednesday morning, 27 May 1863. He was confronted with a grizzly scene. The previous night someone had shot Maria Pagnopoulou through the head while she was sleeping and then set her body on fire. Jolly had received Ioannis Mirros’1 report that morning and, after informing the public prosecutor, he set out with a contingent of constables to investigate the crime. Some policemen started interviewing people in Volimes, while others made the short trip to Schinari, a nearby village where the deceased’s family lived. Jolly and his chief detective, Ioannis Markoussas, personally interrogated Yiorgos Todassis, the deceased’s husband, his brothers Dionysios and Lambrinos Todassis, and Angeliki Pagnopoulou, Maria’s sister. Yiorgos had a horrible story to tell. The previous evening he and his young bride – they had been married only a few months – went to bed in the loft bedroom of their house. A gunshot woke him from his slumbers and he beheld beside him Maria, dead with her hair on fire. Bolting upright, he saw a spectre flee down the stairs. He ran out of his house screaming, and his cries aroused his brothers, who lived nearby. Others quickly joined them. Some helped extinguish the fire, while others set off in futile pursuit of the murderer. The distraught husband told Mirros that he recognised the villain, and it was none other than Angeliki. Assuming that she had fled to her father’s house, Mirros dispatched some men to seize her and to bring her back to Volimes to await the arrival of the police. In a show of fraternal solidarity, Dionysios
Women, Crime and the Courts in the Ionian Islands during the Nineteenth Century
Thomas W. Gallant University of California, San Diego
Interventions and Lambrinos corroborated their brother’s story, while the distraught Angeliki professed her innocence. The police, however, smelled a rat. Their suspicions aroused, the police carefully inspected the crime scene and vigorously questioned people from the area. As Jolly related in his detailed report to the inquiring magistrate, the next day, he had Yiorgos Todassis brought before him, and he confronted the grieving husband with some questions. First, could Yiorgos explain how it was that someone could sneak through his house, climb two sets of stairs, enter his bedroom and shoot his wife, who was sleeping beside him against the wall, without waking him? Second, Jolly noted that Todassis had said that he saw his wife’s hair on fire, but an inspection of the body indicated that only her legs and abdomen had been burnt and not her head. How did this happen? Third, how did he escape the flames unscathed? Fourth, was it true that his father was planning on disinheriting him because he had eloped with Maria, a girl from a poor family? Fifth, was it true that Maria was six months pregnant? And how would his father view the birth? The noose was tightening around Todassis’ neck. Then, Inspector Markoussas laid a stack of papers on the table. Pointing to them, Jolly asked Todassis to explain how it was that five witnesses, whose sworn affidavits he had before him, claimed to have seen Angeliki in Schinari at the time that the murder took place. Unlike in television or the movies, the murderer did not crack and blurt out his guilt. But the jig was up. Yiorgos Todassis was arrested, tried and convicted of his wife’s murder. He was sentenced to fifteen years at hard labour.2 This case reflects two realities that the Greek police knew well, and that historical research has corroborated: first, that women rarely committed murder, let alone the murder of a kinswoman, and second, that when women were killed, it was almost always by a kinsman. As we shall see, during the nineteenth century in the Ionian Islands, as in much of Europe, women committed very few felonious crimes. This does not mean that women are absent from criminal justice records or that women did not interact with police and judicial authorities frequently and in important ways. They did, but, differently than men and in a very gendered way. And an examination of the history of women and crime can reveal a great deal about nineteenth-century Greek society. In a provocative article published in the early 1990s, Malcolm Feeley and Deborah Little argued that in England over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries women largely disappeared from the criminal courts. They proposed that the reason for the “vanishing female felon” was the development of an industrial, modern society.3 The implication of their assertion, of course, is that women appeared prominently in the criminal courts in preindustrial, traditional societies. Their provocative study gave added momentum to a trend that had begun during the 1980s, and that was the historical study of women, violence and crime. To be sure, the study of women and crime among sociologists and criminologists had been going on for some time.4 But among historians, it was only when the concept of gender was an introduced as an important category of historical research that the study of women, crime and criminal justice took off. This led to the publication of a number of studies that examined the history of women and crime in Europe.5 Two points became very clear from these studies; first, that women were largely absent from the criminal records in the past and, second, that men and women were the perpetrators and victims of different types of crimes. Historians have frequently focused on 138
the main categories of female crimes, such as infanticide6 and prostitution.7 The literature on those topics has continued to grow and we know a great deal about women and crime across much of Europe – with one notable exception: the Mediterranean world. Very few studies have been conducted on the history of women and crime in Spain, Italy, Greece or the Ottoman Empire, for example.8 This article, then, contributes to the existing literature by presenting a study of the engagement between women and the criminal justice system in the Mediterranean during the nineteenth century.
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The system For centuries the Ionian Islands had been part of the Venetian Empire. These “flowers of the Levant”, as they were often called, provided Venice with a source of revenue. More importantly, they formed a barrier against the expansionist Muslim Ottoman Empire. During the Napoleonic wars, rule over the island passed back and forth between the Ottomans, France, Britain and Russia. However, their disposition was not clear-cut at the war’s end. All of the Great Powers wanted them but none wanted any of the others to get them. After heated negotiations, it was agreed that the islands would be granted their independence as the United States of the Ionian Islands, but that they would be placed under the protection of the British crown. The result was that by 1817 the British had added the Ionian Islands to their empire in the Mediterranean. The task of crafting the institutions of imperial control in the islands fell to one man, General Sir Thomas Maitland. The situation that confronted Maitland and his fellow colonial officers was somewhat different than elsewhere in the empire. Categorically, the Ionian Islands were unlike the other British colonial possessions. They were not settler colonies, dominions controlled by private companies or distant lands held by right of conquest. In addition, the culture they encountered in the islands defied easy categorisation. Ionian Greeks were white, Christian (Orthodox) and European. The British created two identities for the Greeks, one as the Irish of the Mediterranean and the other as Europe’s aborigines.9 There was a sense in which the Ionian Islands were areas of the world that, by and large, were closer to Britain than other parts of the empire. I suggest that this made the task of crafting a system of colonial rule different. In his correspondence with the British Colonial Office and with his staff, Maitland made it absolutely clear that the law was to be the linchpin of both the system of government they were establishing and the element that legitimised British rule. A legacy of bad laws and corrupt administration under the Venetians accounted for the “debased” condition of the Greeks. Maitland made it perfectly clear that he would not uphold the unjust laws of Venice. He resolved then to provide the islands with a new law code and with new institutions to adjudicate disputes and punish offenders that would be fair, impartial and which would “bring justice to the peasants’ own door”. Law, then, was the key to colonial rule in these islands.10 The criminal code divided offences into three categories based on their severity: delitti, offenzi and contravenzionii – essentially equivalent to felonies, misdemeanours and citable offences. The structure of the judicial system was divided into three branches: commercial, civil and criminal. 139
Interventions The official languages of the courts were initially English and Italian; Greek replaced Italian in 1843. Structurally, the lowest rung of the criminal justice system was the tribunalii of the judicial police. These police magistrates were always locals and they had jurisdiction over contraventions; they could render summary judgments and mete out minor punishments. They also transmitted more serious offences to the next level of the system, the criminal court. The police magistrate would bind over a defendant and the case would then be given to the advocate fiscale, who, acting in an inquisitorial role would investigate the crime, compile the evidence and then act as prosecutor at the formal hearing. Two judges heard criminal cases and they rendered the verdict. Juries played no role in the criminal justice system at any level. Above the criminal court was the Supreme Council of Justice (Supreme Consiglio di Guistiza). This body consisted of four judges, two British and two Greek, and a president, who had to be British and whom the Lord High Commissioner appointed. The supreme court’s task was to hear appeals of only the most serious criminal offences. The president was also called on to cast the deciding vote in cases where the two lower court judges could not agree. Lastly, there was the police. The police forces were a branch of the Ionian civil government and so did not fall under the control of the Colonial Office; though the two often cooperated closely. The structure and organisation of the police changed over time, as various models of policing were adopted. For most of the nineteenth century the structure was as follows and was the same on each island. There was a director, or chief, of police. Under him were two or three inspectors/detectives and then a body of constables, who constituted the executive police. They patrolled the urban areas and investigated crimes. Assisting them in the countryside were rural guardsmen and village primates. Ionian Greeks, Albanians, Corsicans, Maltese and Britons staffed the police forces. These were the men who patrolled the streets, investigated crimes and forwarded cases for criminal prosecutions. The criminal justice system in the islands generated a huge volume of documents and records, and fortunately many of these have survived and are housed in the archives in Corfu, Argostoli and London. Unfortunately, the ravages of time and earthquakes have not been so kind to the archives on Lefkada and Zakynthos, and so we have less material from them. Among historians of crime there has been an ongoing and at times fierce debate about how we measure crime. There are problems with almost every possible criminal category.11 If one counts criminal indictments, for example, is that really telling us about the numbers of crimes committed or about the willingness of people to bring their disputes to the police? As I have argued elsewhere,12 most Greek men chose not to involve the authorities in solving their disputes but instead preferred to settle them on their own, usually with violence. Arrest statistics can be very valuable but do they reveal more about how the police operated or about the actual incidence of crime? Also, do we count as a crime an arrest or an indictment, even if it was an episode in which the accused was later acquitted? For that reason, some have suggested that criminal convictions provide us with the best yardstick. But do convictions really inform us about actual crimes or about how a criminal judicial system operated in a given place at a specific time? Each one of these measures has its proponents and its detractors.13 Not long ago, two excellent studies appeared that studied homicide, both quantitatively and qualitatively, using data culled from newspapers;14 they could adopt this approach because they studied two of the world’s largest cities, Chicago and 140
New York, respectively. Finally, there are those who argue that alll crime statistics are flawed in one way or another15 and they have been joined by others who argue for a reorientation in the study of crime. They want to shift our focus away from the study of crime statistics to focus our attention instead on crime narratives.16 This study bridges both approaches. Mindful of the drawbacks with any type of crime measurement, I have created a statistical database in which I have recorded every type of crime or episodes that could be considered criminal. So, I recorded arrests, indictments and convictions, as reported in the police and court records. But I have also included data from coroners’ reports, police logbooks and registers, the notes that policemen submitted after each patrol, and episodes mentioned in correspondence between judicial officials. I used a stratified random sampling strategy whereby I selected 16 years distributed over the 50 years of British rule. Using the registers kept by the office of the chiefs of police in the islands of Corfu and Kefalonia, I recorded aggregate data for 17,375 criminal indictments; five percent of these were randomly selected for detailed examination, and for the purpose of this paper, that amounted a data set of 695 cases. I recorded aggregate data on 17,075 criminal trials and once again selected a sample of five percent (683) for more detailed examination. These were augmented by an additional 220 cases, the information on which derived from other sources. Thus, my discussion of women and crime is based on a data set of 1,598 cases.
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Crime by the numbers The first general conclusion of note is that women are largely absent from the criminal justice system. Women were named either as victims or as the accused in only 266, or sixteen percent, of 1,598 cases that I examined. In order to test the accuracy of his observation, i.e., to be sure that there was not a quirk in the dataset, I employed a few other measures. And they support the conclusion that women do not appear prominently in the records of the criminal justice system. Table 1 shows the ratio of men to women incarcerated in Corfu’s prisons and jails:
Year ending
Men
Women
31 December 1836
261 (99%)
3 (1%)
31 December 1837
254 (98%)
6 (2%)
31 December 1838
274 (97%)
7 (3%)
31 December 1843
323 (97%)
9 (3%)
The very small number of women in prison might be a reflection of the courts’ reluctance to imprison them. But the same picture appears if we examine another measure that might better capture the engagement of women with the police. After each shift, police officers had to hand in their notebooks in which they had recorded what had happened during their rounds and to list the persons to whom they had issued citations, tickets as it were, for minor offences such 141
Interventions as public drunkenness, disorderly conduct, insubordination or disturbing the peace. In the city of Corfu in November 1858, the police issued 89 such citations, 85 (95 percent) to men and 4 (5 percent) to women. As in other nineteenth societies, then, women were largely absent from the records of the criminal justice system. I should note that I omitted from this calculation all cases involving criminal slander. As I have discussed elsewhere, slander was the crime that brought more women before the bar than any other. But it was also a crime for which tens of thousands of men were also involved.17 The inclusion of slander, then, would not alter the observation that women are largely absent from the criminal justice system and that men committed the overwhelming majority of crimes. Nonetheless it is instructive to analyse what crimes were committed against and by women. I begin with the former.
Crimes against women Let us begin by looking at those episodes in which women were the victims of a crime. The relevant data are presented in Table 2. Table 2. Cases where women were the victims of crime Person No.
%
Property No.
%
Male accused
83
76
27
71
Female accused
36
24
11
29
Totals
119
100
38
100
Totals (in %)
76
24
159 100
When a woman was the victim of violence, three-quarters of the time the assailant was a man. By almost the same percentage this was the case when she was the victim of a property crime. As suggested earlier, the numbers are important but even more significant is knowing exactly what the nature of the crimes committed against women was, i.e., what was the story behind the numbers. I begin with violent crime (Table 3). When women were murdered, the killer was almost always a man to whom she was related. Ionian men killed twenty-nine women and in all but one, they killed a kinswoman. The causes of the disputes that led to the killings fall into two clear and distinct categories, that themselves are nicely paralleled in the incidences of male-on-male violence. A number of women were killed in the heat of the moment during an argument or a dispute. Take the case of Eleni Martino from the village of Spartia on Kefalonia. One balmy November day in 1834, she approached her husband, Andreas, who was hard at work pruning their vines. She began berating him, though the cause of her ire remains unknown. The coroner, however, recorded in gruesome detail the result of their argument. With his axe, Martinos struck his wife above her left eye with such force as to almost “lift the top of her skull off”.18 On the morning of 2 September 1840, Spyros Stamatellos and his wife Angelina left their village of Kambothekera on the island of Kefalonia to work in 142
their vineyard. In preparation for the imminent grape harvest, Spyros was levelling a parcel of land that would be used as the drying ground to turn the grapes into raisins. While working, he and his much younger wife – he was 55 and she was 29 – got into an argument. Unable to contain his temper, he struck her in the head with his hoe and killed her.19 Table 3. Violent crime against women by men Non-kin
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Total
No.
%
No.
%
No.
%
Homicide
18
95
1
5
19
23
Attempted homicide
10
100
0
0
10
12
Rape
4
25
12
75
16
19
Assault
8
23
28
77
36
43
Battery
1
50
1
50
2
2
Total
41
42
Total (%)
49
51
83 100
These murders are amply paralleled by similar slayings perpetrated by men on other men. My recent study of masculine violence found that men killed for the most trivial of reasons.20 Arguments that arose from chance encounters and utterly banal disputes ended with someone being killed or critically wounded. There was neither premeditation nor a specific intent to kill. Take the following example, which is also one of the two cases where a non-kinsman put a woman in fear of her live. On 8 December 1853, Dimitrios Bousianos struck over the head with a stick a girl he found stealing olives from his grove. Her condition was grave and she was being treated for a life-threatening contusion. Bousianos was arrested and detained in the public jail on the charge of assault. The inquiring magistrate monitored the child’s condition to determine what crime Bousianos would be charged with – assault, attempted murder or murder. Given the absence of premeditation, he was leaning toward showing leniency to the accused.21 Episodes like this one account for the majority of attacks I categorised as attempted homicides. Many women, then, died from wounds inflicted by men in the heat of the moment. The majority of lethal attacks against women were premeditated, were committed by kinsmen, like the one with which I opened this chapter, and many were honour crimes. Every Greek man, like men in many other cultures, knew that there existed an unwritten law, which stipulated that a man who caught his wife in an adulterous affair could kill both her and her lover. Spyridon Metaxas Laskaratos from Kefalonia in his affidavit to the public prosecutor made it clear that he knew that “he had the right to act violently against the adulterous [and the adulterer] in that very moment that caught them in deed”.22 As Jeffrey Adler has noted, the unwritten law “permitted and arguably encouraged a man to kill his wife’s paramour or any libertine who seduced his daughter or sister”.23 In the Ionian Islands, women who committed adultery or premarital fornication were also supposed to die, and some did.24 143
Interventions On 3 January 1864, the body of 30-year-old Kateria Rapsomarikis was found in a well, close to the village of Katastari on Zakynthos. The police arrested her four brothers, Yiorgos, Evstathis, Arvanitakis and Dimi, and Andreas Rapsomarikis, her husband. It took the police only a few minutes to learn what everyone in the village seemed to know: Katerina had committed adultery. She had brought dishonour on her husband and her family. Because of the extended period of time that the body had been submerged, the police surgeon was unable to determine whether they had killed her and then dumped her body in the well or had been thrown in the well while still alive.25 But as hinted at in the passage from Adler, above, the focus of lethal violence was directed mainly at the libertines and less so on the women. There are a number of other examples where women were killed for honour, and they constitute approximately one-third of female murders. But to be sure, their number pale in comparison to the number of men who were men killed on account of seduction and sexual impropriety.26 In the one case in where a woman was killed by a nonkinsman, it was, at least in the view of the murderer, a crime of honour. Katerina Yianouli lived in the village of Piskopianio on Corfu and she was the object of affection of Dimos Kessinos from the nearby village of Strongilli. A match had been arranged between the two, and when she broke off the engagement, Dimos was humiliated. As he told anyone who would listen, she had dishonoured him and he would make her pay. At 11.30pm on Tuesday night, 9 March 1847, he approached her. She was standing in the doorway of her family’s house talking with her brothers. At point blank range, he shot her in the head. The brothers gave chase but the killer escaped.27 Both in terms of the overall numbers of homicides committed against women and the reasons why they were killed, the situation in the Ionian Islands resembles closely that which transpired in many other parts of Europe and the United States.28 The same is the true when we examine other categories of violent crime. I recorded sixteen sexual assaults, and they accounted for 19 percent of the violent crimes against women. Every historian who has endeavoured to study rape has commented on the difficulties they encountered and the paucity of cases they found.29 This was due partly to women being reluctant to report sexual assaults to the police and partly to the authorities being less than vigorous in prosecuting them. Of the sixteen cases that I found, only four came from crimes investigated and prosecuted by the authorities. Twelve of the rapes I recorded derived from criminal investigations of a homicide in which the deceased had been slain by a man whose kinswoman had been sexually assaulted. The man killed, of course, was the rapist, or suspected rapist. I begin, though, by examining the relationship between the victims and their assailants. In twenty-five percent of the cases, the rapist was related to the victim: once it was a cousin and in the other three it was a brother-in-law. In all of these cases, violence accompanied the rape. The case of Christina Kirigiotis is typical of this kind of attack. She was a sixteen-year-old, unmarried girl living in the village of Lakones (Kefalonia). Her sister’s fiancée, Stathis Varellis, had come to her village to help with the wedding preparations. It was late in the afternoon. And while most of villagers were going for their customary walk around the village square, the accused followed Kristina, who was going to get water at a spring some ways away from the village near the chapel of Agios Ioannis. He approached her and asked if he could help her carry the water 144
buckets back to the house. She refused and told him to go away because she was ashamed at being at being seen on her own with a man. He knocked her to the ground and raped her. She screamed. Konstantinos Giris Stamatello heard her cries and came running. Stathis took off. The cry went up in the village. Ilias Vrigavis and two others caught him and brought him back to the village. Kristina’s father and brothers, with knives drawn and blood burning, tried to get at him but were restrained by the district constable, Vassilis Phanos, who happened to be making his rounds at the precise moment of the crime. The constable immediately sent for a detachment from the British garrison at Agios Yiorgos to come and escort Stathis to Argostoli because he feared that the victim’s kinsmen would kill the rapist and maybe even himself if help did not arrive soon.30 The constable was right to be worried.
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When women were sexually assaulted by men to whom they were not related, the stories are different. In some of the cases, we are dealing with a consensual union. In a couple of them, for example, what happened was that the master of a great house filed rape charges against one of his male servants or field workers who had taken up with one of his domestic servants. In both cases, in fact, the women had already run off with the men.31 In the other cases, the victims were women who were especially vulnerable, like the widow Elena Coeno. Coeno had moved to Corfu from Malta with her husband Martin. There they established a dry goods store, which she continued to operate after her husband’s death. At 2.30pm in the afternoon on 19 December 1843, Periklis Monopolis entered her store to buy some dry goods – beans and the like. She went into a back room to get some salt from a sack. He followed her and raped her on the floor. He claimed that she was a prostitute and that he went there not to buy food but to “do man’s business”. People from the neighbourhood gave evidence, the gist of which was that Coeno was an “honourable woman” and that Monopolis was a “disreputable character”. The presiding magistrate of the tribunal of the judicial police, Antonio Zen, bound Monopolis over for trial in the criminal court.32 Her case, as I noted earlier, was one of the few that made it into the courts. Most sexual assaults were never reported to the police and knowledge about them comes only through the investigations of homicide cases, like the following. While pasturing her family’s cattle in a field, Katerina Vlassis was assaulted by Nikolaos Sabatis. When she returned to her village without her “girdle”, her brother armed himself with two pistols and a knife and swore not to return until blood had been spilt. He was home in time for dinner and Sabatis’ body was found in a field with a bullet in his heart.33 The sexual assault against Katerina Vlassis was never reported to the authorities, and we only have a record of it because of her brother’s action. Rape, like seduction, mandated that a man was owed blood and so ideally he should slay the person who assaulted his kinswoman, and in studying such murders we can learn about sexual assaults against women. An examination of assaults and batteries committed against women shows that this type of violence differed sharply from murder or sexual assault. First, there were more of them: 43 percent of violence against women were assaults, and second, 77 percent of the time the assailant was not a relative. Here are some typical examples. The prostitute Tasoula Baltzos swore out an arrest warrant against two soldiers from the British Royal Artillery regiment for having assaulted her. The police physician’s report indicated that she had been severely beaten. She could 145
Interventions identify the men but did not know their names.34 While on patrol in the Plaka district in Argsotoli on 18 April 1859, Constable Andreas Panagouplos heard a row in the wine shop owned by Andreas Bachio. A British soldier had assaulted Penelopi Bilirakis; he had punched her in the face. The constable detained the soldier while the barman went to the police station and informed the desk sergeant. Soon thereafter two military police arrived from the British garrison and took the soldier into custody.35 In like vein, Constable Andreas Zepatos responded to cries of distress from the wineshop run by Panagis Gerondini. When he entered he found Nina Makris bleeding profusely from a cut on her face inflicted by Tomaseo Lazarinas. He arrested him and the case was forwarded to the police magistrate.36 Dionysia Chikirais from Mandouka on Corfu assaulted Konstantina Konderas by hitting her in the head with her shoe after they had become embroiled in an argument while drunk.37 Cases of assault, then, fit into a very clear pattern. Women, usually working women, were beaten sometimes by men and sometimes by other woman, and almost invariably, the attack occurred in a public place where alcohol was being consumed. Completely absent from the criminal justice records are cases of wife-beating. Unless Greece was completely different from many other places in Europe,38 domestic assaults probably occurred but I have found neither records nor mention of them.
Crimes committed by women Turning now to an examination of crimes committed by women, the first point of importance to note is that there were relatively few of them. In the database I compiled, women committed only seven percent of the total number of recorded crimes. Table 4 shows the distribution of those cases. Table 4. Criminal indictments or citations issued against women
No.
%
No.
%
No.
%
Public order No
19
52
5
45
0
0
0
0
24
22
Person
Female
Property
Adultery
Total %
No.
%
Male
7
19
6
55
10
100
0
0
23
21
Infant
10
27
0
0
0
0
0
0
10
9
State
0
0
0
0
0
0
52
100
52
48
Total
36
11
10
52
% of total
34
10
9
47
109
Almost half of the crimes committed by women were contraventions of public order statutes for which the police gave them citations. The second largest category was violent crimes against other people, and I begin with the most serious of these: murder. 146
When women killed, it was always with premeditation and it was invariably against family members. I begin with two cases that exemplify noninfanticide murders. The village of Beloussis on Corfu was all a buzz on the night of 18 September 1861. The body of nine-year-old Angelina Kresia had been found in a small, exposed well located a considerable distance from the village. The primate sent a boy to the rural guard’s station to report the discovery of the body. A magistrate and the police physician were sent to examine the body. The doctor found traces of violence. After asking questions in the village, the magistrate started to have suspicions about the girl’s 21-year-old stepmother, Katerini Tourbanou. She had told her husband when he returned from town that she had sent the girl to her grandmother’s house. Many villagers told the investigators that Tourbanou had never liked the stepdaughter and that she resented her presence in the house. The magistrate decided that Tourbanou had motive, means and opportunity and so he ordered her arrest. The case was forwarded to the public prosecutor with a request that he proceed to a trial in the criminal court.39
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At 11pm, on 19 March 1839, the body of Margariti Perdikomattis was found behind a wall in the fields near the village of Kouramades on Corfu. According to the police physician’s report, Perdikomattis had been brutally slain, sustaining at least 16 stab wounds – six in the head, five in the ribs, one on the left hand and one in the throat; he concluded further that four of the wounds could have been the cause of death. Police inspector Antonios Zervos led the investigation of the murder. He learned that the body had been found after the village primate had ordered a search. He said that he did so because the deceased man’s wife, Maria Perdikomatti, had reported to him that her husband was missing. The police thought that something was amiss because Maria manifested a remarkable sangfroid demeanour when they questioned her, leading them to conclude that “her manner and behaviour . . . looked very suspicious”. Village gossip disclosed a rumour that she was having an affair with Yiorgios Chytiris from the village of Trileno. Taking this information seriously, the police raided and searched the house of Chytiris’ mother, with whom he lived. And they found hidden in a pile of logs a pair of men’s breaches, covered in blood. Concluding that the circumstantial evidence was sufficient to sustain a charge of murder against Chytiris, they arrested him, and deducing that the wounds could only have been inflicted by two assailants, they arrested Maria. The pair was convicted of murder; he was executed and she was sentenced to four years in prison. The criminal court judges explained that the discrepancy in the sentences was due to the fact that, while they were sure that Maria was involved in the killing, they could not determine what exactly she did. So they gave her as severe a sentence as they thought warranted by the evidence.40 The most common type of murder woman committed was infanticide. So much so that whenever the body of an infant was discovered, the police immediately suspected the mother. But, as was often the case with infanticides, the police faced real difficulties in investigating the deaths of babies, beginning with determining the cause of death. The typical narrative reads like this: a body was found, usually in the fields near a settlement, and the village headman would report the finding to the police, who would begin an investigation. The body would be sent to the police physician for examination.41 The police would start interviewing villagers about their women – trolling for gossip, as it were. If the coroner reported that the baby had been killed by human action, then almost invariably the mother was arrested. 147
Interventions On the evening of 2 June 1859, a dead infant was found outside of the church in the village of Gaitani (Zakynthos). The baby’s mother, Zoja Pastra, was arrested and charged with infanticide. Her case went before the criminal tribunal. She maintained her innocence. And, absent a confession, the prosecution had a very hard time making the case. There were no witnesses to the death. The medical evidence was inclusive: the baby may have been stillborn, as the mother maintained. Plus, her explanation that she had left the body at the church so that it would be closer to God and that she did not report the death to the authorities out of fear sounded plausible. She was acquitted.42 In many cases, however, woman who killed their babies broke down and confessed. Paraskevi Havouri, the wife of Spyridon, admitted to strangling her baby boy out of a wish “to hide her dishonour”. The baby was not her husband’s child. She had been married for only five months. Instead the child belonged to Ioannis Kounepianos, a peasant from an adjacent village. One wonders, however, if she would have confessed if Stamatis Rodittis, a peasant from her same village, had not told the police that he had helped her bury the child. She had told him that the baby had been stillborn. She was convicted of murdering her baby and sentenced to five months in prison.43 I found only one case of infanticide that deviated from this stock narrative. And that was the case of Katernia Livathinos from the city of Zakynthos. She was married to a ship captain named Dionysos Livathinos. He had been away at sea for three years. He returned to the island five months before, stayed for a few days and then went off to sea again.44 “During the interval [between his visits home] his wife was delivered of a child born in its ninth month, which he said was not his own, as he had only been five months in Zakynthos – the woman, however, said that she had miscarried in her fifth month, and thus buried the child. I transmitted the affair to the inquiring magistrate, and it results from medical faith, that the child was born in its ninth month, but it could not be proved if it was born alive, or dead, as it was found in a putrefied state”.45 Lacking clear evidence that the baby was maliciously killed rather than being born dead, the case was dismissed. There is no record as to what Captain Livathinos did when he learned the news. One option that he could have chosen was to charge his wife with adultery, an offence under the Ionian criminal code. Adultery constituted nineteen percent of the crimes committed by women. But, and it is a very important qualification, I learned of the majority of them not from arrest records or from criminal indictments for adultery but from investigations of homicides. In fact, in only one-quarter of the episodes where a woman’s adultery was discovered was she charged with a crime, and all of them fit the same pattern. In all the instances where a man swore out a criminal complaint against his wife for adultery, he was from the middle class. Take the case of Dr Nikolaos Rasin, for example. He was a member of the Kefalonian gentry and was married to a much younger woman named Konstantina. When he discovered that she was having an affair with a police constable, Dimitrios Menegatos, he swore out criminal complaints against both of them on the charge of adultery. Mengatos was dismissed from the Ionian police force; what happened to her is unknown.46 Spyridon Metaxas Laskaratos, when he discovered his wife’s adultery, instead of invoking the unwritten law as discussed earlier, charged her with adultery.47 Most men, however, held the unwritten law near and dear to their hearts. One of the most common causes of revenge killing was sexually inappropriate behaviour by women, in particular a 148
wife’s adultery or a daughter’s sexual indiscretion. Panayiotis Plarinos had been conducting an illicit affair with his cousin’s wife. Few were surprised, therefore, when on the night of 15 June 1859 the cuckolded husband and his wife’s brother gunned him down.48 The involvement of men from both families made the act even socially more appropriate because her actions had brought shame to both families. In other words, affinal kinsmen often cooperated in taking action to cleanse with blood a stain on their honour. We learn, then, about the majority of adulteries not because someone was charged with that crime but from homicide cases in which one of the adulterers, usually the man, had been slain. So while adultery was not too uncommon, prosecuting women for it was.
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Women rarely committed crimes against property (10 percent), and almost all of these offences were petty thefts committed by domestic servants. The following case is typical. Ioannis Anninos Stavrou filed charges against his domestic servant, Elia de Saterno, for theft. He accused her of stealing some of his wife’s jewellery from his house.49 The only case that differs significantly from the rest involved a woman who might be considered a nineteenth-century con artist. Mrs Theresa Makris ran the following scam in Corfu. She would petition for public assistance because she was indigent. “Friends” in the government would give her monies, totalling $1,239. She would then lend the money out on bottomry loans. Eventually the misappropriation of funds was discovered and the conspiracy revealed. She was sentenced to three days in jail and ordered to repay the money she stole, plus court costs.50 The activity that more than any other brought women into contact with the police was prostitution. Their crime was not prostitution per se, as that was legal but regulated. The regulations in the Ionian Islands, for example, mandated that all prostitutes had to register with the police the day they arrived in a municipality and inform them if they intended to move. At the beginning of each year, they had to report to the police to verify their registration. The women’s activities and physical conditions were carefully monitored. Women could only work out of a residence, usually a hotel or a wine shop, in one of the neighbourhoods approved of by the police. Once a month all prostitutes had to undergo a physical examination by a physician appointed by the chief of police and to undergo mandatory treatment if they were suffering from a venereal disease.51 Because the women had to register with the police and had to undergo periodic examinations by medical officials, records were kept about them, and these provide us with our best sources for studying prostitution. And when women who were prostitutes or who worked in ancillary occupations fell afoul of the law, it was usually for activities carried out in the places and in the social milieu where prostitution flourished.52 Forty-eight percent of criminal indictments or criminal citations issued against women were for offences against public order, and almost all of them involved women behaving badly in public places such as brothels or bars. On 25 November 1858, Loli Anantho was cited for solicitation in a restricted area. She was soliciting clients in front of Corfu’s public theatre.53 Zambi Limbrakia, Floria Alambourou and Maria Gramilina were just a few of the women who received citations for public insubordination, a catch-all category used to punish people who failed to obey the police or who insulted officers who were on duty. At 1pm on the Via Pozretto in Corfu, Maria Condon, wife of Guglielmo Condon, was found sitting on the ground with her two children, 149
Interventions aged one and six years old. Maria was quite drunk. The officers helped her to her feet and told her to return to her apartment. She resisted and cursed them. After she had calmed down, she promised to take the children home. The officers gave her a citation and warned her to keep the peace. But shortly thereafter the officers found her and the children at the Spianada. In their reports, the constables noted that both she and the children were in very poor health. They also emphasised that she was a public nuisance, whom the police had found being disruptive in public on numerous occasions.54 Women who made a nuisance of themselves too frequently were subjected to special treatment by the police. Since their crimes were not delicts or offences but only contraventions, they were not punishable by incarceration. And so the police adopted other measures to deal with them. Stamatella Giolana55 and Anastassia Valsamachi,56 for example, were two such women and they were locked up in the lunatic asylum until the police determined that they had calmed down.57 So far women appear to be largely passive in their dealings with the police. They were acted upon rather than being actors in their own right. I want to examine one final area where women interacted with the criminal justice system and that was the practice of women appealing to the police and judicial authorities to act on their behalf. The following examples capture the essence of women’s petitions. In some case, they appealed to the authorities to protect them, to act in loco virens or as their husband or father should. On 8 July 1820, Katerina Strongilliou, a resident of Corfu town, wrote to Captain Michael Krumm, the chief of police. She solicited his help. She was an “indigiente” woman and her landlord was threatening to throw her out into the street. She was a widow and had no one to protect her. Would he please help her and make the landlord leave her in peace?58 Angela Venier had Antonis Romanos write a letter on her behalf to Spyros Sarlis, deputy chief of police on Zakynthos, requesting his help. Her husband had abandoned her and migrated abroad. Now his creditors were seeking payment from her. Manolis Kassarachis, in particular, had been harassing her, demanding that she pay him the 100 jars of olive oil that her husband owed him. She complained that Kassarchis had made her life miserable and she demanded that Sarlis and the police make him stop.59 On other occasions, women launched appeals on behalf of others, usually kinsmen. Anna, the wife of Gerasimos Kondoyiannis, for example, appealed to the supreme court to have her husband, who was in jail for debt, transferred to their village so that he could oversee the disposal of property which would provide them with the funds to pay off their debts.60 Ilia Manolato appealed to the supreme court for mercy for her son, Panayiotis. She was poor and had only him to support her. So she pleaded to the justices please to release him so that he could support her.61 These petitions and the hundreds like them show us women taking their grievances to the highest levels of the criminal justice system – the chiefs of police and the supreme court – to intervene on their behalf to right a wrong or to assist a loved one. In other words, they endeavoured to deploy a system that usually excluded them to work on their behalf. Unfortunately, the sources do not often allow us to know how the system responded. But occasionally it did favourably. Pencilled in the margin of Ilia Manolato’s letter was a recommendation by the chief clerk of the supreme court that the young man in question be released and transported from the prison on Zakynthos to one on Corfu because he was of good character and was in jail for a minor offence. 150
Hopefully he took care of his mother.
❖ This study of gender and the criminal justice system in the Ionian Islands during the nineteenth century, which is still in its early stages, by and large buttresses the current orthodox view regarding women and the criminal justice system in Europe. Women in traditional, patriarchal rural societies, for the most part, had little engagement with the police and the courts. Outside of a narrow range of “female offences”, women seldom came before the bar as criminal offenders. In a society dominated by a cultural ethos that prized masculine aggression and in which honour and the vendetta defined manliness, when women were the victims of violence, it was male kinsmen and not the courts and the police that meted out justice and retribution. And so while the aggregate picture I have sketched out in this paper largely supports our current understanding, there are four areas where the situation in the Ionian Islands differs from elsewhere in Europe.
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1 The female homicide rate is higher than other places; in other words proportionally more women were murdered in the Ionian Islands than in other regions of Europe. 2 The number of reported cases of sexual assault is exceedingly low compared to elsewhere. 3 The assault and battery rates, especially the reported rate of domestic violence, are substantially lower. 4 The rate for property crimes committed by women is lower as well. The explanation for the first two points, I suspect, is rooted in the male-dominated ethos of selfhelp. As I have discussed in a recent piece on masculine violence, for much of the nineteenth century Ionian men chose to handle disputes in a very aggressive, often violent manner and on their own rather than turning to the authorities. This behaviour began to change from mid-century onwards but the older pattern of behaviour persisted until well into the twentieth century. As we have seen, men killed women for a variety of reasons but the vast majority of them were in confrontations that touched on masculine identity. The low number of reported sexual assaults can be accounted for similarly; men chose to deal with rapists personally and violently rather than involving the courts and the police. The “rules” of masculinity mandated it. And so very few sexual assaults were reported; though, as we have seen, there were many murders where the police knew or strongly suspected that a man had been slain because he had sexually assaulted someone. The paucity of reports of repeated, nonlethal domestic violence is more difficult to explain. I suggest tentatively that men might not have routinely beat their wives out of fear that doing so might incur the wrath of her kinsmen. Another, and not mutually exclusive, explanation is that, once again, people opted to deal with domestic issues privately rather than involving public authorities, and thereby airing the family’s dirty laundry. Lastly, regarding the very low rate of crimes against property committed by women, I suspect that it is part of a broader cultural pattern in that overall the rate of property crimes is lower in the Ionian Islands than in the rest of Europe. But accounting for that cultural pattern requires much more research and more studies from elsewhere in Greece. 151
Interventions This brings me to my last point. We have very few histories of crime and criminal justice in Greece or the Ottoman Empire and so, while it is possible to place the case of the Ionian Islands in a broader western European context, we cannot yet do so for a Balkan or southeastern European or even eastern Mediterranean context. To what extent and in what ways – if at all – does the story in the Ionian Islands differ from elsewhere in Greece or in Greek communities in the Ottoman Empire? In a more multicultural context, like the Ottoman Empire, do the patterns of criminal behaviour, both male and female, differ between the various ethnic and religious groups? Only when we have more detailed social historical studies of gender and crime empirically grounded in this part of the world can we identify similarities and differences in the ways that men and women dealt with the disputes that arose in their daily lives and the role that law and criminal justice played in dealing with them. Ironically, then, while we can place case studies, like this one, into a broader European context, we cannot situate it into a narrower Greek context. And that needs to change.
NOTES
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1
Mirros was the primate or headman of the village and as such it was his duty to report to the police any illegal activities in his jurisdiction.
2
The documents used in this study come from three archives: the British National Archives, and documents from it are cited as The National Archives (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO) Colonial Office (CO) 136; the General State Archives (GAK) Corfu; and the General State Archives (GAK) Kefalonia. Here, TNA: PRO CO 136/952/1, encls 22–25; 136/954/2, encl. 8.
3
Malcolm Feeley and Deborah L. Little, “The Vanishing Female Felon: The Decline of Women in the Criminal Process, 1687–1912”, Law and Society Review 25/4 (1991): 719–757.
4
See Frida Adler, Sisters in Crime: The Rise of the New Female Criminal, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975. Dorie Klein, “The Etiology of Female Crime: A Review of the Literature”, Issues in Criminology 8 (1973): 3–30; Dorie Klein and June Kress, “Any Woman’s Blues: A Critical Overview of Women, Crime and the Criminal Justice System”, Crime and Social Justice 5 (1976): 34–49; Rita J. Simon, Women and Crime, Lexington, MA.: D.C. Heath, 1975.
5
See, for example, the pioneering works of Anna Clark, Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770–1845, New York: Pandora, 1987; Lucia Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody in Victorian England, New York: Oxford UP, 1991; Caroline Conley, The Unwritten Law: Criminal Justice in Victorian Kent, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991, Maria Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1995 and more recently studies such as those by Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and the Social Order in Early Modern England, New York: Cambridge UP, 2003; Jennine Hurl-Eamon, Gender and Petty Violence in London, 1680–1720, Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2005; Deirdre Palk, Gender, Crime and Judicial Discretion, 1780–1830, Woodbridge: Boydell Press/Royal Historical Society, 2006, – to name but a few.
6
James M. Donovan, “Infanticide and the Juries in France, 1825–1913”, Journal of Family History 16/2 (1991): 157–176; Ann R. Higginbotham, “‘Sin of the Age’: Infanticide and Illegitimacy in Victorian London”, Victorian Studies 32/3 (1989): 319–337; Robert W. Malcolmson, “Infanticide in the Eighteenth Century”, in J.S. Cockburn (ed.), Crime in England, 1550–1800, London: Heineman, 1977, 187–209; Lionel
Rose, Massacre of the Innocents: Infanticide in Great Britain, 1800–1939, London: Routledge, 1986; Regina, Schulte, “Infanticide in Bavaria in the Nineteenth Century”, in Hans Medick and David Warren Sabean (eds), Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship, New York: Cambridge UP, 1986, 77–102; Otto Ulbricht, “Infanticide in Eighteenth Century Germany”, in Richard J. Evans (ed.), The German Underworld: Deviants and Outcasts in German History, New York: Routledge, 1988, 108–140; Stephen Wilson, “Infanticide, Child Abandonment, and Female Honor in Nineteenth-Century Corsica”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 30 (1988): 762–783. 7
Lynn Abrams, “Whores, Whore-Chasers, and Swine: The Regulation of Sexuality and the Restoration of Order in the Nineteenth Century German Divorce Court”, Journal of Family History 21/3 (1996): 267– 280; Alain Corbin, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990; Barbara A. Engel, “St. Petersburg Prostitutes in the Late Nineteenth Century: a Personal and Social Profile”, The Russian Review 48/1 (1989): 21–44 (24); Laura Engelstein, “Gender and the Juridical Subject: Prostitution and Rape in Nineteenth-century Russian Criminal Codes”, The Journal of Modern History 60/3 (1988): 458–495; Mary Gibson, Prostitution and the State in Italy, 1860–1915, New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1986, and Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution in Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980.
8
There are, of course, a small number of works on certain aspects on female criminality: Mary Gibson’s Prostitution and the State in Italy or Thomas Drikos’ book on it in Greece: Η πορνεία στην Ερμούπολη το 19ο αιώνα [Prostitution in Ermoupoli in the nineteenth century], Athens: Elliniki Grammata, 2002. Efi Avdela has published an excellent study of homicide in Greece, including crimes against women (“Διά λόγους τιμής”: Βία, συναισθήματα και αξίες στη μετεμφυλιακή Ελλάδα [“For reasons of honour”: Violence, emotions and values in post-civil-war Greece], Athens: Nefeli, 2002) but her study concentrates on the 1950s and 1960s. What stands out is that works like theirs are among the very few publications.
9
Thomas W. Gallant, Experiencing Dominion: Culture, Identity and Power in the British Mediterranean, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002, 15–55.
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10 For an extended discussion of the criminal justice system that the British Colonial Office established on the islands, see Thomas W. Gallant, “‘When Men of Honor’ Met ‘Men of Law’: Violence, the Unwritten Law and Modern Justice”, in Efi Avdela, Shani d’Cruze and Judith Rowbotham (eds), Crime, Violence and the Modern State, 1780–2000, London: Edwin Mellen, 2010, 69–92. 11 Bruno Aubusson de Cavarlay, “Can Criminal Statistics Still be of Scientific Use? The French Criminal Justice System, 1831–1981”, Historical Methods 26/2 (1993): 69–84; A. Keith Bottomley and Clive A. Coleman, “Criminal Statistics: The Police Role in the Discovery and Detection of Crime”, International Journal of Criminology and Penology 4 (1976): 33–58. Peter C. Hoffer, “Counting Crime in Premodern England and America: A Review Essay”, Historical Methods 14/4 (1981): 187–193: Neal Alone, “Evaluating Court Statistics as a Data Source for Studying Nineteenth Century Crime”, Historical Methods 26/2 (1993), 85–93; Howard Taylor, “The Politics of the Rising Crime Statistics of England and Wales, 1914–1960”, Crime, History & Societies 2/1 (1998): 5–28; Howard Taylor, “Rationing Crime: The Political Economy of Criminal Statistics since the 1850s”, Economic History Review 51/3 (1998): 569–590. 12 Thomas W. Gallant, “Honor, Masculinity, and Ritual Knife-fighting in Nineteenth Century Greece”, American Historical Review 105/2 (2000): 359–382, and Gallant, “‘When Men of Honor’”. 13 Cockburn, Crime in England; Ted R. Gurr, “Crime Trends in Modern Democracies Since 1947”, International Annals of Criminology 16 (1977): 41–85; Idem, “Historical Trends in Violent Crime: A Critical 153
Interventions Review of the Evidence”, Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research 3 (1981): 295–353; Idem, “Historical Trends in Violent Crime: Europe and the United States”, in Violence in America: Volume 1; The History of Crime, Newbury Park: Sage, 1989; Roger Lane, “Crime and the Industrial Revolution: British and American Views”, Journal of Social History 7 (1974): 287–303; Lawrence Stone, “Interpersonal Violence in English Society, 1300–1980”, Past & Present 101 (1983): 22–33; Robert D. Storch, “Policing Rural Southern Before the Police: Opinion and Practice, 1830–1856”, in Douglas Hay and Francis D Snyder (eds), Policing and Prosecution in Britain, 1750–1850, Oxford: Clarendon, 1989; Howard Zehr. “The Modernization of Crime in Germany and France, 1830–1913”, Journal of Social History 8 (1974): 117–141. 14 Jeffrey S. Adler, First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt: Homicide in Chicago, 1875–1920, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard UP, 2006; Eric H. Monkkonen, Murder in New York City, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 15 Manuel Eisner, “Modernization, Self-Control and Lethal Violence: The Long-term Dynamics of European Homicide Rates in Theoretical Perspective”, The British Journal of Criminology 41 (2001): 618–638 and Idem, “Long-term Historical Trends in Violent Crime”, Crime and Justice 30 (2003): 83–142. 16 Stuart Carroll, “Introduction”, in idem (ed.), Cultures of Violence: Interpersonal Violence in Historical Perspective, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 1–46, and idem (ed.), Cultures of Violence: Interpersonal Violence in Historical Perspective, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Amy Gilman Srebnick and René Lévy, Crime and Culture: an Historical Perspective, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005; and J. Carter Wood, Violence and Crime in Nineteenth-century England: The Shadow of Our Refinement, New York: Routledge, 2004, and idem, “Conceptualizing Cultures of Violence and Cultural Change”, in Stuart Carroll (ed.), Cultures of Violence: Interpersonal Violence in Historical Perspective, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 79–98. 17 Gallant, Experiencing Dominion, 155–8. 18 TNA: PRO CO 136/121/5, encl. 18. 19 GAK Kefalonia 121: bound correspondence, 1840–1845, encl. 17. 20 Gallant, “‘When Men of Honor’”, 8–9. 21 TNA: PRO CO 136/817/1, encl. 18. 22 TNA: PRO CO 136/1306, encl. 2. The twist in this case is that he did not exercise his right. Instead of choosing the unwritten law, he filed for divorce from his wife and swore out a criminal complaint against the lover for adultery. 23 Adler, First in Violence, 108–9. He also noted that many US states had laws that recognised such killings as justifiable homicides, and in one case, that of Texas, the law was not changed until 1973 (314, note 78). See also Conley, The Unwritten Law. 24 For a crosscultural, comparative study of female homicides in the name of honour, see Nancy. V. Baker, Peter R. Gregware and Margery A. Cassidy, “Family Killing Fields: Honor Rationales in the Murder of Women”, Violence Against Women 5/2 (1999): 164–184. 25 TNA: PRO CO 136/979. 26 Gallant, “‘When Men of Honor’”, 79–80. 27 TNA: PRO CO 136/748/5, encl. 32. 154
28 Adler, First in Violence, 45–20; Clark, Women’s Silence; Conley, The Unwritten Law; D’Cruze 1998; Robert M. Ireland, “The Libertine Must Die: Sexual Dishonor and the Unwritten Law in the Nineteenthcentury United States”, Journal of Social History 23/1 (1989): 27–45; Joachim Kersten, “Culture, Masculinities and Violence against Women”, British Journal of Criminology 36/3 (1996): 381–395; Eric A. Johnson, “Women as Victims and Criminals: Female Homicide and Criminality in Imperial Germany, 1873–1914”, Criminal Justice History 6 (1985): 151–175; Kenneth Polk, “Masculinity, Honour, and Confrontational Homicide”, in Kathleen Daly and Lisa Maher (eds), Criminology at the Crossroads: Feminist Readings in Crime and Justice, New York: Oxford UP, 1998, 188–205; Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody; Elicka S.L. Peterson, “Murder as Self-Help: Women and Intimate Partner Homicide”, Homicide Studies 3/1 (1999): 30–46.
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29 Clark, Women’s Silence; Conley, The Unwritten Law; Shani D’Cruze, Crimes of Outrage: Sex, Violence and Victorian Working Women, London: UCL Press, 1998; Karen Dubinsky, Improper Advances: Rape and Heterosexual Conflict in Ontario, 1880–1929, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993; Engelstein, “Gender”; Manon van der Heijden, “Women as Victims of Sexual and Domestic Violence in Seventeenth-century Holland: Criminal Cases of Rape, Incest, and Maltreatment in Rotterdam and Delft”, Journal of Social History 33/3 (2000): 623–644; Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody. 30 GAK Kefalonia 121: police correspondence, 1836, dispatches 19–21. 31 TNA: PRO CO 136/345, encl. 18, 12 Aug 1845; GAK Corfu EA 61, indictment no. 18, 12 Oct 1858. 32 GAK Corfu EA 301, indictment no. 34. 33 TNA: PRO CO 136/683/15, 27 Sept 1837. 34 TNA: PRO CO 136/868/15, encl. 86., 12 Aug 1859. 35 GAK Kefalonia, sergeant’s logbook, 1859. 36 GAK Kefalonia, police correspondence, 1832–1833. 37 GAK Corfu EA 121, case 11, 8 Nov 1834. 38 Ann-Louise Shapiro, Breaking the Codes: Female Criminality in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996; Maeve E. Doggett, Marriage, Wife-beating, and the Law in Victorian England, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1993; Anna Clark, “Domesticity and the Problem of Wifebeating in Nineteenth-century Britain: Working-class Culture, Law and Politics”, in Shani D’Cruze (ed.), Everyday Violence in Britain, 1850–1950: Gender and Class, New York: Longman, 2000, 27–40; John E. Archer, “‘Men Behaving Badly’?: Masculinity and the Use of Violence, 1850–1900”, in D’Cruze (ed.), Everyday Violence, 41–54. 39 GAK Corfu EA 468/172. 40 TNA: PRO CO 136/672, encl. 21. 41 TNA: PRO CO 136/1292, 27 May 1847. 42 TNA: PRO CO 136/877, no. 9580, 24 Jun 1859. 43 TNA: PRO CO 136/870, no. 9580, 10 Aug 1859. Paraskevi Havouri did have another option. She could have surrendered her baby to the island’s foundling hospital, see Thomas W. Gallant, “Agency, Structure and Explanation in Social History: The Case of the Foundling Home on Kephallenia, Greece, during the 1830s”, Social Science History 15/4 (1991): 479–508.
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Interventions 44 This was very common. Numerous Ionian islanders worked abroad for extended periods of time and returned home infrequently. They nonetheless married local woman and maintained a home in their natal community. On this practice, see Thomas W. Gallant, “Tales from the Dark Side: Transnational Migration, the Underworld and the ‘Other’ Greeks of the Diaspora”, in Dimitris Tziovas (ed.), Diaspora and Migration: Otherness, Identity and Movement In and Out of Greece, London: Ashgate, 2009, 17–31. 45 GAK Corfu EA 468/163, report by police chief Edward Barr, 10 Sept 1861. 46 GAK Corfu 1829, 31 Jul 1848. 47 TNA: PRO CO 136/1306, encl. 2. 48 TNA: PRO CO 136/868/15, 17 Jun 1859. 49 TNA: PRO CO 136/1292, 25 May 1847. 50 TNA: PRO CO 136/1270, 5 Feb 1817. 51 Gallant, Experiencing Dominion, 65–66; idem, “Tales from the Dark Side”, 12–14; see also Drikos, Η πορνεία στην Ερμούπολη, 79–83. 52 For a more detailed discussion of prostitution on Corfu, see Gallant, “Tales from the Dark Side.” 53 GAK Corfu EA 1594. 54 TNA: PRO CO 136/727/15, encl. 77, 24 Oct 1845. 55 TNA: PRO CO 136/672, encl. 68, 29 Aug 1839. 56 TNA: PRO CO 136/1292, encl. 12, 26 Jan 1847. 57 Throughout the nineteenth century, the police and the judiciary wrestled with the problem of how and where to incarcerate women. I address this issue in another article. 58 GAK Corfu 88–1820. 59 GAK Corfu 123, 20 Apr 1842. There are cases in that were tried in the civil court where women sued or were sued over episodes like this one. I have, however, omitted all civil litigation from this study. 60 TNA: PRO CO 136/1275, 21 Sept 1821. 61 TNA: PRO CO 13/1283, 5 Dec 1838.
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In the summer of 2011 Athens was the site of fierce confrontations between Greeks and their political leadership (this curious envoy from the “cast of self-protective elites”, in Perry Anderson’s phrase, that has taken over the micromanagement of life in Europe); but also between Greeks’ chronic delusions about their place in the world today and financial “reality” making Greece the unlikely epicentre of global economic instability. Greece’s relations with the world have always been dynamic and fraught, but the uneasy way in which the country has recently come back again to be the sticking point of global attention has surprised many. The opening of two exhibitions in Athens, The Last Grand Tour and Polyglossia, which throw light on the highly intensive traffic between Greece and the western world, reminds us how tricky this contact has always been at the cultural level.1 This traffic has been crucial for both ends of the itinerary: the Greek diaspora – Greeks living abroad – has been an inextricable part of Greece’s emergence as a state right from its modern inception;2 and equally, Europe’s collective identity as a cultural area was for long shaped through contact – i.e., travel, scholarly study, classical and anticlassical taste – with Italy and Greece.
In-N-Out Greece: Cultural Tourism in the Age of Diasporic Cultures
Aris Sarafianos University of Ioannina
The Last Grand Tour traces the physical trajectories as well as the cultural projections of western art travellers in twentieth-century Greece, while Polyglossia aspires to give us a slice of what it means to be a Greek living artist working in the West today. These exhibitions are only two examples of a growing interest in the notions of travel, mobility, nomadic and diasporic existence, deterritorialisation and global migration, and their role 157
Interventions in cultural practice and identity formation. And they both evince a strong sense of presentness, bringing these phenomena as close as possible to the contemporary world. However, the Last Grand Tour is a complex project with solid documentation and a specific historical and critical framework, while Polyglossia, which boasts of its “liberation” from history, seems to waver between a survey, which is explicitly not, and a thematic exhibition, which it does not want to be. Collectively, these exhibitions work to show the extensive networks of in-and-out mobility that, for better or worse, lie at the very root of Greece’s historical formation like perhaps in no other western example. And they also, each in their own way, serve as a reminder that this country has long been and will continue to be so strangely passionate about openness to the world as well as about itself and its identity. A deeply rooted introversion and a well-concealed shyness go hand in hand in this country with an equally deep affection for otherness, producing an effect of almost dazzling opacity that has yet to be seriously studied.
The Last Grand Tour
“Tis Greece, but living Greece No more!” — Lord Byron, The Giaour, r 1813
The Byronic epigram heading Jessica Morgan’s introduction to the catalogue of The Last Grand Tour is a curious signpost. It encapsulates what the show’s curator tried to avoid – yet another historical exhibition about the romantics’ fascination with antiquity marked by the absence of any meaningful “confrontation with the contemporary situation”. But it also throws into relief what it strives to achieve, namely, a chart of the various “responses to the country” expressed by artists who “have lived and worked in Greece” during the twentieth century. The exhibition indeed explores how the country has “continued to be a source for artistic innovation”. And yet when the surface of this notion of “country” is scratched, we again bump into the romantic fixation with its “long cultural history” or “geographic characteristics”, and not exactly with the “living Greece” of the present.3 The confusion of aims and intentions regarding the larger question of the relations of contemporary culture with the ancient past, and, by extension, Greece, is encapsulated in the introduction’s closing paragraph. This is where the exhibition purports, on the one hand, to show “how the role of ancient culture [has] changed in contemporary art” while, on the other, presuming quite the opposite, i.e., “the abandonment of classical heritage” (whose effects on “our future artistic surroundings” we are urged to consider). The confusion continues as the curator wonders “at what point did artists cease to travel to Greece for extended periods of time”, although the show clearly proves they have not. Readers become even more perplexed as they learn, in the next sentence, that the show aims to bring “to light the striking shift in contemporary culture that has seemingly witnessed an end to the traditional ‘Grand Tour’”.4 Whether this shift is “striking” (i.e., real and impressive) or “seeming” (virtual and misleading) cannot be resolved by sloppy formulations of this kind. Has it happened or not? Is it happening? Will it happen? Does it seem to be happening but never actually has? What is happening here? Let’s take things one at a time, and first, the critical question of how the show is framed by its poignant title. Strictly speaking, the tour in Greece was never part of the historical formation of 158
the Grand Tour, which was predominantly an Italian phenomenon. This is something that the organisers seem to accept without, nevertheless, exploiting the significance of the many differences between the two types of cultural travel.5 As a growing number of recent publications on the sociology and cultural history of the Grand Tour indicates, the association of the Grand Tour with eighteenth-century Italy is not a phenomenon that can be, as the show implies, narrowed down to artists travelling to Italy in pursuit of artistic education or classical models.6 To a large extent, artists thronged to Italy as part of a crucial career step preconditioned by the presence of an influential network of collectors, art patrons, aristocrats, diplomats, dilettanti and connoisseurs of every description as well as art and antiquities dealers and archaeologists. In this context, Italy was for artists the ideal marketplace: liaising with art dealers, seeking lucrative clienteles and all types of employment (from archaeological excavations or conservation projects to art commissions) as well as setting up networks of polite patronage useful back in their countries of origin – Britain most frequently. The Grand Tour was also an experience, a stratified experience of rarefied sensations, tasteful contact with classical art precisely in the land where it had been produced, as well as being the vehicle of wilder and more sensual pleasures. From John Brewer’s work – The Pleasures of the Imagination, most conspicuously – to numerous recent publications, scholars have looked into tons of private correspondence in order to describe the role of libertinism, sexual innuendo or ritualised debauchery in processes of male bonding among the Grand Tour elites and artists as well as analysing the political, social and professional implications of such interactions.7 Horace Walpole was expressing a common sentiment when he asserted that, as far as membership to the influential Society of Dilettanti was concerned, “the nominal qualification is having been in Italy, and the real one being drunk”.8 The Grand Tour was a sensual as well as aesthetic, and predominantly a professional, social and political experience.
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In all of these ways, the Grand Tour in its eighteenth-century Italian version was a centrally placed and heavily centralised experience with more or less solid structures, itineraries, networks, expectations and returns. It was power-driven and owned a crucial position in the commerce of power both for artists and their patrons. What does all this tell us about the Greek Tour towards the late eighteenth century and later? Certainly that it cannot be treated as a simple inclusion, extension or addition to the “traditional Grand Tour”. The place was off the beaten track and it lacked the firm social networks, the internationalised power structures but also the polish, the chic and the rarefied ways of life associated with the Italian Grand Tour. Greece was no meeting point for social climbers either; it was a place for outsiders, as well as pioneers and adventurers of the elite, not exactly for connoisseurs and hangers-on in pursuit of vertu and good life; even less so, for artists in pursuit of polite patronage. It comes as no surprise that the Greek “Grand Tour” did not attract the likes of Anton Raphael Mengs, Gavin Hamilton, Jean-Dominique Ingres or Benjamin West: not even the young J.M.W. Turner thought it useful to follow Lord Elgin down to the Parthenon despite the latter’s invitation. It was such characters as Feodor Ivanovitch (the Calmuck) and Giovanni Battista Lusieri, another outsider from Italy, who finally became Lord Elgin’s “irregular” artists.9 Greece was a sober destination, and it is no coincidence that its symbolic entry into the Grand Tour is associated with the time when the members of the Society of Dilettanti finally decided to sober up a bit, lift their social profile and find a serious purpose for their “infamous” club: already on the lookout for a proper scientific project to associate themselves with, they grabbed the opportunity presented by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s 159
Interventions proposal for an archaeological expedition to the Parthenon – and testament to the success of the venture, they held on to similar projects in the area for decades to come.10 Again Greece was a place outside of the European public sphere, a place where one could hide, escape or die heroically, collect ethnographic curiosities or come back with rare pieces of authentic antiquities and antique experiences (Lord Elgin), but not a place exactly for networking and varnished lifestyles. Such a historical framing of the discussion seems to be useful because it tells us something significant about the period and the group of art travellers relevant to the exhibition at hand. In other words, the historical notion of the Grand Tour may help draw a crucial distinction here between cultural travel as such (Greece) and cultural mobility as part of an established career structure for artists and others (Italy). Moreover, many of the artists included in the show sought in modern Greece a type of alienation, loss and abandon similar to that implied, in the minds of “romantic” visitors, by the ancient ruins, the frugality and the hardships of Ottoman and postOttoman Greece. There is a residual yet persistent “romanticism” in recent art travel to Greece, whose resilience throws more effectively into relief the radical transformations which it has in the meantime undergone. What I mean is that in spite of the melancholy discernible in some of the most impressive work on display, this postmodern “romanticism” about Greece is an inverted and rather brutal romanticism at that. When Johann Joachim Winckelmann, for example, mourned the irretrievable loss
Fig. 1. Jannis Kounellis, Untitled, 1979, drawing on wall, plaster, flowers, courtesy Galleria Christian Stein, Milan. Photo Dimitris Tamviscos. Courtesy the artist and Bernier/Eliades Gallery, Athens 160
of antiquity through the figure of a tearful lover gazing at her “departing sweetheart” on a ship – who, like antiquity, left behind him nothing more than “a shadowy outline of the subject of our desires” – he had in mind a range of solid compensations and rewards for this loss. For Winckelmann, the loss of antiquity “arouses so much the greater longing for what is lost” and stimulates “greater attention” and study to retrieve and reconstruct it than “if we were in full possession” of it.11 No such productive nostalgia today: the artists on the show seem to revel in the sheer fact of the “lover’s” departure. But make no mistake: their delight does not imply a simple “good riddance” to antiquity. Rather, their stance marks secret pleasures which have become the grand narrative of our postmodern times: delight in dispersals, disseminations, lacunae, evacuations, blockages and irretrievable absences.
Fig. 2. Martin Kippenberger, METRO-Net World Connection, 1997, CAD print, designed by Lukas Baumewerd, 93 x 58cm. Estate Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne. Photo © Estate Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne
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The works by Jannis Kounellis and Martin Kippenbergerr selected for the show emblematise best, in my opinion, this curiously inverted nostalgia characteristic of the postmodern condition, namely a nostalgia for nostalgia, or, better still, the impossibility of being nostalgic anymore. Kounellis’s Untitledd (Fig. 1) consists of a wall drawing depicting the original gallery floor of the Bernier/ Eliades Gallery in which it was first shown in 1979, a classical sculptural head and underneath it a wreath of fresh anemones. The theme looks like an illustration of Winckelmann’s words: according to the myth, anemones sprang 161
Interventions from Aphrodite’s tears as she mourned the death of Adonis. The utter minimalism of the empty gallery sketch drawn against the blank wall, together with the few classical symbols of mourning at beauty’s death, construct a real chain of losses. In spite of the severe, classical simplicity of the whole – almost worthy of a low relief or a drawing by John Flaxman – Kounellis’ evacuated signs of antiquity departing seem to signal the irretrievability of antiquity’s disappearance. Unlike Winckelmann’s tears which flooded, with fantasies of ideal beauty, hundreds of pages and thousands of feet of gallery spaces for two centuries, Aphrodite’s tears are incapable of filling or supplementing the gap and absence they mourn. The documents (drawings, models and posters) from Kippenberger’s mock projects – MOMAS (Museum of Modern Art Syros) and Metro-Net (Syros) – invite similar readings: modern Greece serving as the workshop of an artist “working in the face of a ‘perceived death of painting’”.12 Somehow the idea of placing in Syros the most lively among postmodern notions, that of the death of painting as well as the death of the author – both terms around which Kippenberger’s work was built – is very poignant. For Kippenberger, contemporary art is motherless (with neither a geographical nor intellectual centre) and fatherless (with no authorial coherence or originality). What would then be the most rightful place to celebrate these fatal losses than the assumed birthplace of the arts itself? Syros/Greece thus becomes the location for an unlikely MOMA franchise in a derelict building in an empty plot of land, as well as being the site for the lonely entrance to an impossible global underground network that takes no one anywhere (Fig. 2). This is the most Greekless work done in Greece present in the show. Kippenberger’s mode of engagement with Greece is pure topography (Syros): no traces, no Greece-related motifs, themes, experiences or classicising titles. Greece is the ideal place for a process of evacuation of cultural signs whose radicalism was announced decades ago as the technique par excellence of radical practice13 – in this case, the emptying out of the sign of “art”. Though I strongly doubt how relevant for a truly subversive cultural practice Roland Barthes’s proposal may still be, there is much to be admired in Kippenberger’s cold, ruthless, joyous and self-generating ironies. Even more ironically, Kippenberger’s gay science of dissemination highlights once again how fine the line between the sublime and the ridiculous may actually be: its uneasy proximity in the show to the facile ironies of Juergen Teller and Manfred Pernice underscores again how difficult it is to keep irony and deconstruction from sliding into silliness. Yet perhaps the centre of gravity of the exhibition is Cy Twombly’s work, as it is perfectly placed in the show to mark the passage from an older generation of art travellers with their own humanist responses to Greece as a postclassical site, to the work of contemporary artists, reviewed above. Twombly’s Delian Odes series reveals the same savage stroke-play and scruffiness of markmaking, the same palsied but highly recognisable graphic and writing style for which he became known. But it also reveals a “wish to expose himself to the world as it happens, as it impinges on the passive senses” and an “aesthetic intensity [which] is bound up with haphazardness”, with precarious and faltering encounters with the world. With the world, d and “not with painting”, “the aleatory or the uncentred or the il n’y pas de hors-texte – or any such big idea” as T.J. Clark explained in his most recent review of Twombly’s show at the Dulwich Gallery which coincided with the artist’s death in July 2011.14 Twombly’s work signals, for Clark, the return to the pressure and teeth of the senses, and his double interpretation is very apt in the context of the present show, insofar 162
as it also seems to play with the idea that there may be two different approaches to Greece which are coextensive with larger shifts in art languages over the last 80 years. In other words, for Barbara Hepworth, John Craxton or even Ben Nicholson – an earlier generation of artists who came to Greece in pursuit of a revitalised classical tradition more in tune with modernist innovations – the Enlightenment languages of sympathy and sensibility were still alive. Their sensuous experience of the Greek landscape belongs to a long tradition of experiment and experience, for which aesthetics was tied up with aesthesis understood as a material and sensorial engagement with the environment. And their work on display reminds us that Greece had also been the site for a high-minded dilettantism of everyday life, and for a smart tourism of refined sensibilities. Coexisting uneasily with the anxieties of postmodernist criticism, this tradition is not dead yet. The show aptly includes the work of a younger generation of artists equally hungry for site-specific affects and sensorial particulars (forms, colours, sensations collected from their immediate surroundings). Brice Marden’s marble paintings – pieces of broken stone with oil and graphite patterning – represent a successful example of what contemporary art can do with the legacy of sensibility on ancient grounds (Fig. 3). The rough edges and subtle surface textures of Marden’s broken stones initiate a gentle dialogue between soft and hard matter, artist’s body and nature’s stones, animate and inanimate orders of sensibility, which is very entertaining. Addressing a rather different section in the spectrum of sensations and emotions, Helmut Middendorf’s A2 acquires a particular resonance in Greece: this dark response to the dystopian cityscape of Athens dominated by a sprawling knitwork of tightly woven concrete structures offers a humbling retort to the classical utopia of order symbolised by the architecture of ancient Athens. Marden and Middendorf together revive a notion of the artist as a sensitive medium between the corporeal reality of the sensorium and the materiality of the artwork, an ideal that Twombly never lost sight of. The organisers must have good yet undisclosed reasons for the inclusion in this show of three artists of the Greek diaspora. A Grand Tour around one’s own country, which amounts to being a tourist in one’s own “homeland”, is not inconceivable – more than half of the Greek population, packed in two metropolitan areas as they have been for decades, are strangers in their own country and conceivably deserve the name of tourists as much, if not more, as anybody else. But still in terms of identity – social, ethnic as well as professional – there are many meaningful ways in which a Greek art tourist in Greece, and especially those of the Greek diaspora with their own very complex baggage of
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Fig. 3. Brice Marden, Marble #13, 1981–83, oil and graphite on marble, 25 x 17 x 3cm. © Brice Marden/Artists’ Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York. Photo Bill Jacobson 163
Interventions suspended memories, regurgitated emotions and persisting associations, could be more advantageously distinguished from other cultural tourists. The inclusion of Lucas Samaras, in particular, will have to remain an enigma: the artist’s photographic self-portraits, entirely taken and manipulated in Samaras’ apartment in New York, do not exactly constitute travel in Greece except in the overly metaphorical sense of “a personal journey” back to his Greek roots. In the same sense, Samaras’ project fits much better the quite different remit of how a Greek travelling abroadd negotiates his unresolved sense of self, ethnic identity and memory – admittedly an interesting discussion that belongs to another exhibition like Polyglossia, which should have started it but never did. Daniel Spoerri is the real star of the entire show and the organisers rightly let his work assume a vital place as it draws together the many different possibilities of representing Greece revealed by the exhibition. The show includes 20 out of a group of 25 “archaeological objects” which constitute his “magic à la noix” x series15 made during his stay on Symi in 1966–67. These objects are bricolages and assemblages made out of flotsam, stones, dried plants, animal bones, local junk and cooking leftovers in combinations adjusted together by hundreds of feet of wire, cord and rope. The inclusion in the exhibition catalogue of a 76-page booklet – a facsimile reproduction of an extract from Spoerri’s book Mythological Travels (1970) where the artist explains the quirky yet precise biography of each of the objects on display – is a real treat.16 This supplement is necessary documentation – wrongly missing from other works, especially Iannis Xenakis’ multidisciplinary work which was unfortunately treated as another multimedia piece of visual art. For Spoerri, the precise biography of his objects, i.e., the stories and descriptions about the circumstances of their discovery and the memories or affects they elicit, are as important as the works themselves: narratives wind around the objects like the actual cords and strings with which they are ceaselessly wrapped. To be sure, Spoerri’s method takes into account the visual and material details of the different pieces to be joined together into the final art objects: form, colour and consistency, or “such and such a crack or curve, this colour or that surface [which] demands to be joined to another” (38). But the pieces are held together by dint of “the relations which attach to them”, namely, through webs of interlacing thoughts, stories, memories, free associations and experiences. Both processes (which he called his “magic à la noix” method) aim to make his objects “unique”, they are both processes of isolation and singularisation of the quotidian: if in the former process uniqueness is dependent on sensorial singularity, in the latter an object “becomes unique because of its history” (38–39). This is what the booklet supplies – and much more besides: the life-stories of objects. Interestingly enough, this historical process is also seen by Spoerri as a process of “concretising an emotion” which he also eloquently calls “psychological and affective” (5, 38). The important novelty of Spoerri’s histories of objects is that they redefine history as a field filled with affects, emotive memory, chance encounters, accumulations of concrete materials as well as ceaseless miracles of discovery – you bump into history, you don’t exactly look for it, or, history finds you in a way always astonishing, unpredictable and yet unavoidable. Spoerri’s “archaeological museum of Symi” hits on something equally interesting for archaeology too: long before talk of whether we have ever been modern, or how ancient moderns truly are, had become fashionable in history of science circles, Spoerri reversed and problematised the all too “modern” polarity of antiquity versus modernity.17 Together with another artist, Fran164
cis Bacon, he would ascertain that “these times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not those which we account ancient ordine retrogrado, by a computation backward from ourselves”. But, at the same time, he would defend the modernity of his “archaeological museum” comparing it to “real archaeological museums” on the grounds that they are both “just as full of refuse from the garbage cans of the modern times of ancient times that an accident of magic à la noixx caused to be discovered” (76, 69). Accordingly, his Neolithic Colt (object 24) (Fig. 4), a long and thick bone from an ass readjusted into a weapon, is more modern than the Colt Jesse James used to kill his victims by virtue of the sheer fact that it is ancient, and every antiquity has its own immanent and still more powerful modernity embedded in it.
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Fig. 4. Daniel Spoerri, Object 24, Objects de magie à la noix, 1966–67, 20 objects, mixed media, variable dimensions. Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen. Photo Dr. Ingo Werner 165
Interventions In the booklet, oscillation between such polarities is a grand theme: Spoerri’s objects are continually tangled up in philosophical meditations about the antitheses of inside/outside, container and the contained, form and content, or left and right, viewer and spectacle, or artist and viewer, height and weight, two-dimensional canvas and three-dimensional space, and, ultimately, present and past. What is even more fascinating, though, is that Spoerri himself placed his Symi experience at the very centre of his prolonged struggles with the nagging notion of contradictions. This raises an issue most relevant to the show’s theme: the place of Greece in Spoerri’s objects. The exhilarating thing about a question like this is that for once it doesn’t seem to emerge as an external, reductive or projected concern of scholars or artists obsessed with common topoi and fixed ideas about Greece. If there is something culturally meaningful about Spoerri’s artistic involvement with Greece, this is inherent in it, especially insofar as his art objects emerge at the point where the biography of the artist – as a cumulative and uncontrollable experience of purposeless searches and past memories – intersects with the space, soil, matter and junk of his place of work. It is in the nature of Spoerri’s archaeological-cum-historical objects, as a condition of their making and circulation, to be site-specific, vernacular, singular and quotidian, that is, to emerge out of and carry with them the spatial and temporal marks of their chance occurrence. These objects are made singular and unique as a consequence of being off the place in the most literal of all senses, packed as they are with the local experience of time and space: they are dug out of the soil or collected from the place’s most “historical” of spots (piles of debris, garbage cans, derelict houses, etc). Junk objects like those collected by Spoerri are historical and contextridden markers of a new haphard sense of age-value – bearing in their cracks, erosions, scars and other damage the accumulation, usage, messiness and vicissitudes of the passage of time. Unsurprisingly, therefore, there is, in Spoerri’s narration, a perpetual exchange between his art practices and the island. Symi, for Spoerri, is like the objects he produces, wrapped and warped with endless cords of affective associations. Moreover, there is a slippage at work between the island and the country: object 25, a handful of earth from the “Paradise” of Symi, is “enshrined in a can stamped ‘Greece’” (74). The “grand object” Symi/Greece makes several appearances in Spoerri’s descriptions of his 25 smaller objects worth further attention. Firstly, Symi supplied Spoerri with “a brutal and extreme nature” (6) where stories of cruelty abound. Spoerri’s object biographies go back regularly to his personal sadistic fascination with the admittedly savage processes involved in the preparation and cooking of lobsters as well as to the Symians’ collective propensity to cruelty, best expressed in the viciously slow killing of rats by locals (35, 21). But stories of primordial bliss and prehistoric beauty also recur in Spoerri’s Symi chronicle, evoking a certain pastorall and sentimental interpretation of the place (42–43, 46). Symi features as a kind of “paradise”, part of “the cycle of nature”, “the kingdom of the naïve”, full of natives unappreciative of Spoerri’s art. Indeed, there is often a recognisable tone of haughtiness and cultural arrogance in Spoerri’s accounts, which rises sometimes to the point of being irritating. The same arrogance transpires from Spoerri’s stance towards the historical reality around him (20). To put it briefly, Symi/Greece resembles equally the primitivist utopia of a sadist and the blissful paradise of a snob. Notwithstanding such guises, Spoerri’s Symi/Greece remains a place radically removed from the metropolitan West. Some may be inclined to use such blanket terms as “exoticism” or “escapism”, or even “orientalism” to describe similar kinds of stance. The real point, however, is 166
that, in Spoerri’s case, Greece emerges not just like a place of the periphery but something like a peripheral spot which is simultaneously the antipodean site and the ancient black hole, where the “centre” (the West) and its fashionable modernities are swallowed and thrown up again in unpredictably creative ways. It is fascinating, for example, that Spoerri arrived at Symi with specific expectations about the potential role the island could play in the development of his art. As he contends in the introduction to his book, he “came to the island of Symi” so that here, “on paths trodden only by donkeys”, he would “be able to think” his magic à la noix method more advantageously (6–7). As he explains, it was “here at Symi, [that] I thought I was ready” for the “experience” of “expressing [myself] in two dimensions”; namely, of regressing back to painting and reclaiming the canvas (the “flat surface”) as a field of expression. More importantly, however, it was “here at Symi” again that he did not only give up for good this “regressive” idea that had “always troubled” him, but also transformed it into something sufficiently new (19–20). Object 6 is the head of a spiny lobster wrapped with a square of linen which is precisely the canvas on which he never painted. In this sense, Symi/Greece seems to be the ideal ground for the dramatisation of contradiction, encouraging both the expression of primordial fears and their sweeping overcoming in an art object which held a special position in the evolution of Spoerri’s technique: as he confessed, Symi was the place “where I wrapped up, until it was invisible, the first object that filled me with fear, the needle swallowed by a goat, causing its death, which I found while cutting a slice of liver [object 5], as well as the head of a goat that I had seen while it was still alive [object 4], and the tail of a rat guillotined in a trap [object 11]” (6). Spoerri here described his almost compulsive technique of covering and preserving objects in hundreds of metres of cord. In short, the primitive brutality of Symi/Greece gave birth to an irresistible fear which then led to a grateful compulsion with artistic implications – wire trappings and wrappings ad infinitum.
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Trouble in paradise, indeed. Spoerri supplies another version of a quotidian, visceral and chthonic “Et in Arcadia Ego”, digging from the opposite direction to meet Cy Twombly’s Delian and other artistic “Arcadias”. Furthermore, as already intimated, Spoerri also placed Symi/Greece at the centre of his important confrontations with the nature of contradictions. Spoerri’s Symi/Greece is indeed the site where the persistence of contradictions becomes both more inevitable and clearer; where contradictions surface to consciousness more pressingly but also with the lucidity necessary to question traditional perceptions about them. His Symi experience features high in his attempt to question the banality of western dualism – dualistic philosophies of good and evil, of heaven and hell, of right and left, etc. Object 14, another assemblage of shoe, wire and bones, seeks to overcome this dualism by imagining a uniped bodily existence (one leg, one shoe, one arm) to go beyond all schisms (Fig. 5). In Spoerri’s criticism of dualism there is a deep acceptance of contradiction as an engine of affect and knowledge, an attitude to it which, as I have elsewhere shown, far predates his reflections and forms the basis of modern definitions of the sublime.18 This is how Spoerri explained the critical contribution of Symi/Greece in his own theory of contradiction aptly expressed in object 14: “And why are we condemned to cast these agreeable traditions [of contradiction] in doubt on a garbage dump on a forgotten, rock-bound Greek island? Because it is precisely there that we lose contact with the indispensable extreme that makes a left shoe a left, and a right a right. There . . . I love odd shoes” (27). Meaning? That, in Spoerri’s 167
Interventions Fig. 5. Daniel Spoerri, Object 14, Objects de magie à la noix, 1966–67, 20 objects, mixed media, variable dimensions. Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen. Photo Dr. Ingo Werner
Symi, we are not anymore, according to the logic of dualism, obliged to identify with either this or the other side of a given polarity. Rather, what matters now is the bipolar passage across the antithetical extremes. In fact, his Symi/Greece discovery of the cord-wrapping technique mentioned above was placed in the same context of overcoming dualistic perceptions of the contradiction between form and content: “it is between the poles of the inseparability of the two that my anxiety at not finding a definite solution will oscillate, which could be interpreted positively as the desire for instability and change” (7). His cord-and-wire-covered objects reincorporate contradiction by re-enacting the ultimate proximity and rapid oscillation between the extremes of container (cord) and contained (the pieces of which his objects consist). No dialectics and no closure, no resolution and, of course, no dualism here: just a perpetual endorsement of states of aggravated motion between opposites – contradiction at its most sublime. To conclude: Spoerri’s work hits at the centre of a long alternative tradition of representations of Greece which he upgraded in fascinating ways. This is a Greece fantasised but also experienced as a marginal space, a place of violent, stimulating and productive insulation existing in meaningful contrast with more refined destinations of western travellers as Italy.19 But again there is also a radical distinction to be drawn between different attitudes of alienation, which this show also implies. There is, for example, something naïve about Leonard Cohen’s escapism or even Craxton’s pastorals also included in the exhibition: the latter came to Greece because he “sought for an alien land [to] see if my talent would stand it”, while Cohen got gradually more depressed in Hydra because it could not anymore sustain his delusions that he would be “able to escape after all” from “civilisation”.20 168
As I have sought to show, Spoerri’s arrogant quirkiness rests on but, simultaneously, goes far beyond such easy fantasies and pleasures of alienation. Further still, it is through his odd method of “magic à la noix” that a certain concrete relation to a sense of cultural environment is most paradoxically re-established, embedding art practice into a contextt which is still alive. Alive in the sense that this context is about living, eating, dying and discovering in a specific place with a distinct yet undeterminable affective and sensory footprint.
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Oddly, it is such material, microhistorical and unpredictable engagements with the context of artistic production that are spectacularly missing in another show in Athens, where one would normally expect to find such engagements in abundance.
Polyglossia
HAMLET QUEEN
Madam, how like you this play? The lady doth protest too much, methinks. — Hamlet, Act 3, scene 2, 222–230
Polyglossia deals with the work of Greek artists who have lived the greatest part of their lives abroad. Such an angle could bring into focus not just the creative implications of travelling surveyed by the Last Grand Tour, but actually what it also means, culturally speaking, to live and workk abroad as an artist. And yet, for the organisers of Polyglossia, it seems that such long-term residence obliterates instead of increases the urgency to situate art production in the cultural and social environments in which they are embedded. Comparing the approaches adopted by the two exhibitions, Spoerri’s six-month stay in Greece is revealed to be somehow more relevant to his art than Chryssa’s life-long existence in the US. History, context, identity, subjectivity, ethnicity and gender – all concerns which are at the very forefront of every study examining the influential notion of diaspora in contemporary art practices – are proudly waived aside. The catalogue introduction is a list of denials: the organisers insist that they were interested in providing neither a complete survey of Greeks abroad nor any basis for a discussion of the phenomenon of diaspora in historical terms. Even more surprisingly, critical engagement with questions of ethnicity features as a taboo, immersed in the organisers’ worry that they may in this way be stirring up the admittedly worn-out theme of seeking the elemental Greekness in the work of Greek artists abroad!21 This is a seminal example of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, if there could ever be one – especially insofar as the field of diaspora studies is concerned. First of all, this is just an unconvincing way of doing cosmopolitanism today – evidently the organisers’ precious wish. As I have shown on another occasion, cosmopolitanism, historically, draws its force and persuasion from its serious engagements with the ideas (and affects) of nationhood and ethnicity.22 Secondly, such an approach to a show whose, perhaps, most visible theme is the life and circumstances of artists living abroad demonstrates an unenviable ignorance of how similar studies are conducted today in the broader field of academic writing. The kind of historico-critical method cultivated successfully in recent art biographies such as Caroline Jones’ book about the life of the New York art critic Clement Greenberg seems like a distant future for this type of art curating.23 Although art biography is being reinvented as a genre of microhistory pertaining directly 169
Interventions to the study of the crucial role that everyday sensory input plays in re-programming (aesthetic) subjectivities, Polyglossia refuses to engage. This would all be less irritating if such a shift to diluted forms of cultural theory was accompanied by some rigorous outcomes. By contrast, the result frequently defeats itself as in the case of Greekness which, in spite of the said protestations, is actually at the heart of the show. The organisers indeed developed the idea of the present display of Greek diaspora artists as a result of the intention of the board of trustees of the Onassis Foundation to promote the work of primarily Greek artists. Greek nationality or Greek origins are acceptable, but not the study of Greekness as a force field of memories, affects, real and imagined ties. The Spoerrian – unpredictable, associative and historical – Greekness of many of these Greeks abroad becomes just “Greek”; namely, a brand, a mark, an institutional inscription as culturally empty as any entry of citizenship in a passport. Of course, the introduction declares a tokenist interest in investigating the processes of international osmosis or interaction between the Greek origins of artists and “the different cultural conditions, impressions and experiences gained in the different countries of their choice”.24 But such declarations are nowhere actually pursued in the show or the specific catalogue entries of the works on display. In order to observe processes of interaction, you normally need both an acting agent (a new country and a new cultural system), as well as a clear notion of that which is acted upon (the “Greek” in question); but both are spectacularly missing from the show. Polyglossia’s actual enemy is history, specificity and context, namely, the particulars of language, thought, feeling, speaking, acting and, ultimately, the minutiae of change and permutation. To be sure, the cities and countries of the world where the Greek diaspora found its artistic home are equally suspended in a context-free vacuum. Places and cities are floating signs or digits, empty signifiers seeking a meaningful identity like the empty shell of the notion of “Greek”. Leafing through the catalogue in pursuit of the exhibition’s point, it struck me suddenly that the message of the whole thing may be precisely hidden in a digital code, where 0 is Paris (P) and 1 perhaps New York (NY), with certain pauses and interferences represented by other city “bytes”: Berlin (B), London (L), Amsterdam (A) and others. The following sequence, which replicates the order in which each artist appeared in the catalogue combined with their places of residence, is perhaps the closest the show got to offering visitors a platform for further reflection: NY – P – P – P – NY – P – P – NY – [Rome] – NY – [Washington] – NY – NY – P – L – NY – NY – [Rotterdam] – L – B – L – P – B – B – B – B – [Palo Alto] – A – A Or alternatively, one can go away, if they prefer, with the following equally vacuous tautology: different Greeks of the diaspora spoke different languages and produced variable work according to the varying conditions of the different countries they lived in. . . The same mystifying discrepancy recurs also between the catalogue essays and the material on display. The essays by themselves are very entertaining, selected purposefully to give a veneer of multidisciplinarity to the whole venture. The writers did their best, but the fact that no firm relation is established between the essays and the show does not seem to be their fault. The star 170
of the collection and perhaps the friendlier to the message of the exhibition is the little poem/ story The Other Babell told by the famous children’s book writer Eugene Trivizas. The rest of the essays occasionally reveal a certain anxiety about the basic admissions and guiding principles of the show’s curators. This adds substantially to their interest.25 Perhaps, Konstantinos Arvanitakis’ psychoanalytical genealogy of art epitomises best the show’s unfulfilled potential. Not only does he return to the questions of subjectivity which the curators avoided, but he pinpoints the critical importance of processes of identity formation specific to diasporic subjectivities, which the show has failed to acknowledge:
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In his attempt to tame, or in other words, heal [the ontological trauma] the artist represents it (mimesis). In those cases where reality itself enacts in dramatic fashion and in a most tangible manner the primal ontological break, as for example in those cases where an artist has lived in two (or more) different cultures, this ontological break is more visible, its weight considerable and its role in the formation of an artist’s creativity much more critical.26 Such useful cues are never pursued in the art-related section of the catalogue, and the absence of art historians from the line-up of contributors to the catalogue is indeed stunning. The entries next to each of the works reproduced in the catalogue do not deal with the specific concatenations of places and practitioners in each of the cases involved, unless they are occasionally written by the artists themselves. This material as well as artists’ statements and interviews quoted in the press coverage of the exhibition frequently show that the questions of ethnicity, hybridity, locality and exchange are very relevant to them. The very useful biographical notes at the back of the catalogue raise similar connections and reveal that the artists themselves, as living subjects of diasporic lives but also as smart manufacturers of their hybrid identities, are extremely sensitive to similar questions. In fact, I believe that this is where the catalogue as well as the whole exhibition should have started from. This is because here emerge regularities and divergences which, at last, can be clustered into meaningful groups. I will close by giving a hint of the research possibilities opened at this juncture. The artists’ bios reveal, for example, multiple relations to cultural Space: different places of birth, variable places of education and art training, and numerous places of artistic residence. There is, for example, those who were born and raised abroad with the fantasy of their local community’s Greekness (Lynda Benglis or Steve Giannakos), those for whom Greece was a childhood memory broken by early immigration to the US or elsewhere (Stephen Antonakos or Lucas Samaras), or again those who were raised in this country but trained and matured professionally in the West (Chryssa, Athena Tacha, Tzeni Marketou). However, the most numerous group of artists in the show was born, raised, educated and trained in the Greek public university system before they built successful careers abroad. This must certainly be another timely reminder of the much reviled failures of Greek academia. . . This diversity of place can also be further explored in relation to different generational patterns: various types of historical pressures led different generations of artists to different types of immigration abroad with distinct types of diasporic existence. This is the kind of meaningful multiplicity that needs to be studied as to its probable artistic implications. Further still, such plurality is further enriched by the parameter of Time, the temporal patterns cutting across such trajectories of spatial dissemination of artists. The length of residence 171
Interventions abroad matters as much as the mode of its interruptions. Moreover, patterns of return to Greece, or oscillation between countries, are as important as the various degrees of temporal/spatial distance that each artist decided to take from his/her past. The variability in this respect is indeed exciting and very promising. And this brings us to the even more intricate question of Relations. By this term, I mean the whole economy of cultural references in the work of diaspora artists, or, in other words, the complex distribution of their attention across the split spheres of their experience. Diaspora artists fold in themselves and their productions different relations to the complex experiences of ethnic memory and cultural identity. And in a world of increasingly nomadic and deterritorialised lives, such concerns have become among the trendiest fields of artistic practice, as artists continuously reclaim, repackage and remarket; enrich, hybridise and politicise; or again challenge, block, or even transcend their ethnic and cultural predeterminations. Other kinds of concerns also matter: what are, for example, the variable channels of communication, or the aspirations and the investments implicit in the decision by a Greek collection or a Greek gallery – private or public – to feature and promote work from an artist of the Greek diaspora? The catalogue’s bios trace singular and complex patterns of synergy between diasporic artists and the Greek art market which, in a period of increasing public and academic interest in the workings and the history of art collecting and display, offer rewarding lines of further research. It is such working frameworks that may allow the cultural study of the Greek diaspora to reclaim its lost richness, historically meaningful sense of specificity and its paradigmatic value; or, in a language that Polyglossia management might better understand, its much-neglected comparative advantage over other research agendas in the highly competitive international markets of knowledge.
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NOTES 1
The Last Grand Tour, exhibition curated by Jessica Morgan, Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, 15 April–10 October 2011, and Polyglossia, exhibition curated by Marilena B. Karra, Onassis Cultural Centre, March– June 2011. Important catalogues have also been issued to accompany the shows: The Last Grand Tour, exhibition catalogue, Athens: Museum of Cycladic Art – Nicholas and Dolly Goulandris Foundation, 2011, and Polyglossia, exhibition catalogue, Athens: Onassis Cultural Centre, 2011.
2
A small group of historians of modern Greece have produced pioneering studies in this direction. See, for example, George Dertilis, Ιστορία του Ελληνικού Κράτουςς 1830–1920 [The history of the Greek state, 1830–1920], 2 vols, Athens: Estia, 2009, 5th ed., 79–147, and Anna Mandylara, “Ελληνική Διασπορά και Ιστοριογραφική Διασπορά: Διαδρομές, Αδιέξοδα, Επανεκτιμήσεις” [Greek diaspora and historiographical diaspora: trajectories, deadlocks, revaluations], Mnimon 22 (2000), 239–246. However, cultural and especially art historians in Greece have been largely absent from this discussion.
3
The Last Grand Tour, 14–17, esp. 14.
4
Ibid., 17.
5
Interest in the Grand Tour was rekindled by Ilaria Bignamini’s historic exhibition at the Tate – see the exhibition’s catalogue: Andrew Wilton and Ilaria Bignamini (eds), Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century, London: Tate Gallery, 1996 – and culminated right before her premature death with the impressive study of art commerce in Italy, in Ilaria Bignamini and Clare Hornsby, Digging and Dealing in Eighteenth Century Rome, 2 vols, New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2010.
6
Viccy Coltman, Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain, 1760–1800, Chicago: Chicago UP, 2006.
7
John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997; Viccy Coltman, Classical Sculpture and Culture of Collecting in Britain since 1760, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009, esp. chaps 5 (“The Lecture on Venus’s Arse”) and 7 (“Casting a Lustful Eye”). The Getty Villa exhibition, Grecian Taste and Roman Spirit: The Society of Dilettanti (7 Aug–27 Oct 2008) co-curated by Bruce Redford, was an impressive study of the irreverent aspects of the taste for the antique. See Bruce Redford, Dilettanti: The Antic and the Antique in Eighteenth-Century England, d Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum and Getty Research Institute, 2008. See also Jason M. Kelly, The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment, New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2009.
8
Walpole to Horace Mann, 14 Apr 1743, Walpole Correspondence, vol. 18, ed. W. S. Lewis, New Haven: Yale UP, 1980, 211.
9
William St Clair, Lord Elgin and the Marbles, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998, 24–27. For Lord Elgin’s bizarre entourage of artists and their patchy yet fascinating output of architectural drawings, see also Luciana Gallo, Lord Elgin and Ancient Greek Architecture: The Elgin Drawings at the British Museum, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009, esp. 18–51. Ivanovitch’s extended corpus of sculptural sketches and drawings from his sojourn at Athens, especially of the Parthenon Sculptures, is held at the British Museum and still remains to be fully and independently assessed.
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10 Kelly, Dilettanti, 145–71. For the Ionian expedition, see 172–194 11 Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, intro. Alex Potts, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave, Los Angeles: Getty, 2006, 351. 12 The Last Grand Tour, 40. 13 Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect”, in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard, Oxford: Black173
Interventions well, 1986, 141–148. 14 T. J. Clark, “At Dulwich”, London Review of Books, 25 Aug 2011, 24–25. 15 In referring to Spoerri’s “Magie a la noix”, I followed the English translation of the term by his friend, the American poet Emmet Williams. His choice is very convincingly explained in a footnote (see p. 5 of the booklet). 16 The booklet is titled Preserves of Magic a la Noix: 25 Archaeological objects of and by Daniel Spoerrii and page numbers in the text follow the numbering of the facsimile. 17 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Harlow: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. See also the interesting discussion of the topic in Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004, 143–46. 18 Aris Sarafianos, “The Contractility of Burke’s Sublime and Heterodoxies in Medicine and Art”, Journal of the History of Ideas 69/1 (2008), 23–48. 19 It is true that, throughout the nineteenth century, Italy frequently became the site of negative projections, or various anxieties and degrees of disillusionment, expressed by British travellers. However, it continued to serve as the sophisticated playground of various cosmopolitan communities of expatriate artists and men of sensibility and education, as well as offering to British liberal elites the modern grounds for strong cultural and political identification (the cult of the Risorgimento). See Maurizio Isabella, “Interlocking Patriotisms: Italy and England in the Long Nineteenth Century”, Colin Harrison and Christopher Newall (eds), **The Pre-Raphaelites and Italy**, Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2010, 36-40. 20 The Last Grand Tour, 32 and 28. 21 Polyglossia, 11. 22 Aris Sarafianos, “The Diaspora of Greek Painting in the Nineteenth Century: Christou’s Model and the Case Marie Spartali-Stillman”, Historein 6 (2006), 150–169. 23 Caroline Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratisation of the Senses, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005. See also my review “Sensory Politics and Art History: Formalism and Modern Ways of Life”, Art Historyy 33/1 (2010), 192–197. 24 Polyglossia, 10–11. 25 Ibid., 16–21, esp. 20. 26 In my translation I render as “reality” Arvanitakis’ post-Lacanian term “the Real”. Ibid., 27–28.
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BOOK REVIEWS
John Seed
Marx: A Guide for the Perplexed Continuum: London, 2010. 191 pp. Eleni Andriakaina Panteion University “In our cheerful discourses, better than in the formal reasoning of the schools, is true wisdom to be found.” — David Hume, The Epicurean
“Alas! Another book on Marx!” I jabbered, wresting John Seed’s book Marx: A Guide for the Perplexedd from the selves of Foyles bookshop at Charing Cross, London, while most of the customers were rushing to the second floor to attend a concert of a young violin virtuoso. Since the 1960s, studies on Marx and Marxism have been booming. What might a new title offer to the existing wide assortment of books, interpretations, conferences and articles in the field of Marxian studies? Owing more to the perversion of the collector rather than the interest of the scholar, I left Foyles holding my fetish firmly in my hand while the virtuoso’s violin was agonising over Donizetti’s Una Furtiva Lagrima.
❖ Teaching Marx today is not an easy task. How it is possible to familiarise university students with a thinker whose philosophical, political and sociological writings marked the history
of modernity and postmodernity in East and West? How is it possible to teach Marx without trying to normalise the tensions inherent in the double project not only to interpret the world but to change it as well? In what ways should a university teacher handle the polarised attitudes of his/her students to Marx’s thought – ideological and dogmatic attitudes often ranging from total and unconditional approval to strong opposition? Is it feasible to teach Marx ignoring, omitting and skipping the various and often contradictory interpretations of his texts by subsequent scholars without sacrificing the fruitfulness of its contradictions and falling into the trap of a quasireligious search for its real, final meaning? In John Seed’s book one may find not only a precious companion for an intellectual journey through Marx’s major works but also a lucid and comprehensive accompaniment for the teaching of contemporary, modern or postmodern, interpretations of Marxian thought. The author is an English historian. His main interests are in social history, public memory and politics in the eighteenth century and he currently works on the history of migrants in London. In a 191-page book, he traces the development of Marx’s thought and maps out the interconnections and tensions between its layers – philosophical, political and scientific. Armed with an acute reflexive awareness, the product of a long practical experience as an academic teacher and a historian, Seed decides to limit the breadth of his subject by focusing on “what Marx himself prioritised” (11). The book shows the relevance of political intervention for historical understanding, 175
Book Reviews of practice for critical theory, of lived experience for philosophical reflection as it focuses selectively on some key texts: Grundrisse and Capital, The Class Struggles in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire, The Critique of Gotha Programme along with various newspaper articles and polemics written with the purpose of guiding the politics of the working-class movement. The aim of the study is stated loud and clear: “to return to the texts of Marx and to explore ways of making sense of them” (6), not with a view to manufacture yet one more final interpretation of Marx but rather “to indicate how different and equally productive readings are often possible” (13). And indeed, this laconic statement conveys the purpose of a book that doesn’t claim to be a revealing new “truth” about Marx or adding some new arguments to Marxology and to the vast literature on Marx. Yet, I think that the contribution of the book lies less in whatt Seed writes about Marx and more on how w he writes – how w he approaches, reads and interprets the Marxian texts. It seems to me that the primary value of the book lies in its specific historical outlook on the exposition and the interpretation of Marx’s ideas – a mode of thinking, reading and interpreting texts that especially suits the historian’s craft. The readings of Marx’s texts that Seed’s book provides are distinguished by historical sensitivity – a sensitivity very different to the kinds of contextualisation of theory that especially characterise the sociology of knowledge. Although the book situates Marx’s ideas in their social, cultural and intellectual context, it doesn’t slide into any kind of sociological reductionism. Marx: A Guide for the Perplexedd tones down arguments about a “seamless web” connecting thought and society, as it traces the process through which a student of philosophy, a German youth of bourgeois origins, turned out to be a revolu176
tionary intellectual who came to talk of abolishing philosophy and of overthrowing the bourgeoisie! Social being determines social thoughtt but this determination isn’t automatic. It is always mediated by imagination, experience, interpretations and dreams. In a similar vein, Seed is equally distanced from historicist and “presentist” approaches, keeping instead a balanced critical view that permits him to shift between two levels of analysis: on the one hand, the author highlights the utility and the continuing relevance of Marxian writings for the present. In doing so, he shows their value for analysing the problems of contemporary societies today without falling prey to the fallacy of anachronism. On the other hand, he reads Marx’s texts for their own sake; namely, with an aesthetic and historical sensitivity to the plurality of Marx’s voices and demands. In other words, I think that Seed’s study helps us comprehend the creative inconsistencies, contradictions and tensions in Marx’s various writings. These tensions were, to a great extent, the product of Marx’s creative genius: his desire to appeal to heterogeneous audiences, to connect scholarship and partisanship, to overcome the contradictions that marked his own life-history, the fragmented nature of modernity and the positivistic distinction between abstract theorising and concrete empirical analysis. The merits of Seed’s approach are best exemplified in two chapters of the volume: chapter 3, entitled “Materialist histories”, and chapter 4, named “Political economy and the history of capitalism”. Here the presentation follows the distinction between the two levels of analysis – the abstract and the concrete, the theoretical and empirical historical analysis – in order to show how Marx succeeds in overcoming these sterile oppositions. As
Seed comments, the theoretical schema of “historical materialism” could not be conjured out of the air by thinking that is abstracted from careful empirical research: The importance of empirical research and historical specificity was something Marx and Engels insisted on throughout their career. “Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production,” The German Ideologyy had stated. This was a point that Engels was forced to repeat again and again in the years after Marx’s death as increasing numbers of young disciples seized on “the economic interpretation of history” as the magic key which opened the door to an understanding of the past (65). By misusing the distinction between theoretical reflection and concrete analysis, “a rigid and mechanistic Marxism reduces complex realities to simple abstractions” (72). But for Marx “in any historical situation attention has to be paid to the historically specific characteristics of an entity such as the petite bourgeoisie which make it always a unique reality” (71). On the other hand, Seed shows the dialectic between theory and experience, stressing Marx’s sensitivity and critical attitude towards both the rationalistic and the empiricist fallacies. As he puts it, “it is impossible to deduce the concrete either from concepts or from empirical data” (76). Contrary to what common sense might suggest, Seed shows that for Marx abstract deductive analysis is necessary insofar as everyday experience and the knowledge we acquire from it is also incomplete – namely, it is itself an abstraction.
avoiding dogmatism, determinism, reductionism and excessive abstraction in favour of a flexible, concrete approach to Marxian writings. He therefore manages to provide us with a precious guide to the thought of Marx, a guide that could be used in order to introduce university students to the various subsequent interpretations of his theory.
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Yet, the expert scholar familiar with the literature on Marx may note an absence in this concise Guide for the Perplexed. Although the book is written in the light of the subsequent interpretations of Marx’s writings, it doesn’t enter into a direct dialogue with the existing literature on Marx. Should one consider this “absence” as a defect? I don’t think so. Sometimes, in seeking in a study an answer to a question that the author doesn’t seek to explore, one runs the risk of missing the target. Seed reads Marx’s texts fully aware of the controversies over their interpretation and this enables him to bring out their complexity without sacrificing their heterogeneity. As he puts it, “the heterogeneity of Marx’s texts . . . destabilises the position of the reader who must constantly submit himself, herself to revision and re-reading” (14). The purpose of the book (which appears in the Guides for the Perplexed series, published by Continuum) is to provide us with a guide to reading Marx’s key texts and to make these more accessible. In Seed’s Guide, university teachers and students may discover not a perplexing study of Marx but a clear path through the perplexity of reading and teaching Marx today.
Thanks to this balanced and discriminating approach, John Seed’s book succeeds in 177
Book Reviews
Yannis Voularis and Loudovikos Kotsonopoulos (eds)
Στα μονοπάτια του Αντόνιο Γκράμσι: Πολιτική και πολιτισμός από το έθνος-κράτος στην παγκοσμιοποίηση [Along the pathways of Antonio Gramsci: Politics and culture from the nationstate to globalisation] Athens: Themelio, 2010. 214 pp. Seraphim Seferiades Panteion University/University of Cambridge That Gramsci’s work is open to multiple readings is both a blessing and a curse. For the student (and active citizen) the challenge is, of course, to navigate through the resultant complexities in a progressive spirit – à la Lakatos’ progressive research programme: not to phobically shy away from recognising the work’s perplexing variety of meanings and theoretical trajectories, but, rather, to do so in a manner that pays respect (and promotes) its constitutive theoretical core. In case one fails to take into account permutations (and even ambiguities) in the corpus, the predictable outcome is premature closure: mistakenly assuming the corpus to be unidimensional, one impoverishes it. The opposite danger, of course, is theoretical deformation: failing to engage in an immanent reading of the work and its evolution results in perverse and ultimately faulty interpretations. This 178
volume, edited by Yannis Voulgaris and Loudovikos Kotsonopoulos, takes on precisely such a difficult and important task: to judiciously navigate through the “Gramscian pathway” (as the volume’s title appropriately declares). In tracing the historical-epistemic conditions in which the Gramscian corpus was produced and appropriated, Voulgaris notes an expansive progression from the national to the European, and then to the global. This is both factual, reflecting the actual thematic foci of Gramsci’s work, and – perhaps more crucially – “subjective”: regarding the ways in which the work was interpreted and appropriated. Voulgaris suggests that Gramsci was first seen as a theorist contributing a novel reading of Italian unification; subsequently as proponent of the distinctiveness of European socialism; lastly as someone shedding new light to the ever-present link between the national and the global. Underlying each and every phase were of course a variety of profound political (and scholarly) preconditions and implications: for example, the twentieth congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the several varieties of “western Marxism”, the emergence of new social movements (some of them with an ostensibly postmaterial outlook) and, finally, globalisation. Voulgaris claims that key Gramscian concepts, such as “hegemony” and the “passive revolution”, retain a lasting significance and need to be recast in light of the new global environment. Especially nowadays, no hegemonic project is possible unless it has an international horizon and what may be construed as democratic embeddedness: functional democratic institutions. This is all well, but the question remains: will the democracy envisioned (as an institutional form) be capable of transcending the narrow confines of the capitalist state? If not, the hegemony will not be Gramscian but the exact opposite, some new variety of reorganised capitalism: a direct negation of Gramsci’s constitutive theoretical core.
These are, of course, thorny questions of the utmost theoretical (and practical-political) importance appearing in the problèmatique of several chapters, and encompassing at least three key areas of modern social and political theory: the nature of the capitalist state, the question of democracy, and socialist strategy. Examining the impact that Gramsci’s work had on cultural studies, Myrsini Zorba’s chapter, for example, stresses the autonomous significance of “superstructures” (entailing the complexity of domination and the need to undertake resistance at the level of “civil society” via a contentious popular culture); hence, the importance of a democratic ethos (what she dubs “the possibility of society’s democratic reform versus . . . revolutionary violence” (39); and the ubiquitous nature of power (à la Foucault). This is undeniably so, lest we forget: that the “democracy” we are talking about – hypostatised and super/a-historically absolute – is but bourgeois parliamentarism, a capitalist state form Marxists (including Gramsci, of course) sought to overthrow; that culture (i.e., battles of signification) was a resource to be mobilised precisely for that purpose; and that multifaceted power was a problem revolutionariess had to grapple with. The volume is ambivalent on that count. Indeed, sometimes Gramsci is portrayed as a Second International scholar (even its contemporary utterly reactionary incarnations) on the pretext that he recognised the importance of culture, civil society and the not necessarily violent nature of socialist struggle. These themes are all inextricably linked. Hypostatising “democracy”, castigating “revolutionary violence” and reducing counterhegemonic culture-work to civil society banalities is exceedingly facile, but does it reflect Gramsci’s endeavour? “Socialism will be democratic or it will not be at all,” exclaimed Poulantzas in State, Power, Socialism, but at a time of an all-out bourgeois-democratic implosion (incidentally, not historically unprecedented), is it not
an imperative to exclaim also the obverse? That democracy will be socialist or it will not be at all? To wit, it is about time we revisit a notion unceremoniously lost in several post-Gramscian treatises: that democracy qua bourgeois democracy is still a structure constituted for the purpose of maintaining and reproducing systemic domination, with no scruples regarding the use of coercive violence when actors seeking democritic deepening encroach on its sacrosanct code of practice: the private appropriation of socially produced surplus. Relatedly, easy as may be (indeed painfully obvious) to castigate “revolutionary violence”, how is one to respond to state violence against actors seeking socialism? One may well opt for rejecting socialism, of course, but this is definitely not Gramsci’s option: directly or indirectly espousing it seriously distorts his overall concerns and the theoretical medium res informing his argument.
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This general thrust of depoliticising Gramsci, of approaching his writings as if produced in a political vacuum, has resulted in a number of false antinomies (unscrupulously utilised for political – rather than merely research – purposes): identity vs. strategy; state vs. civil society; finally, war of movement vs. war of position. These are all issues meticulously aired in the fine chapters by Marilena Simiti and co-editor Loudovikos Kotsonopoulos. Ironically, the rift between identity and strategy (identity devoid of strategy or identity as an end in itself), for instance, entails accepting existing dominations at best as irrelevant and at worst as unproblematic. Not all new social movements adopted this line of thinking, of course. But that we ended perceiving them through the lenses of an undifferentiated, classless “civil society” facing an – equally classless – state reflects precisely an instance of the hegemony Gramsci sought to expose. Similarly ironic has been the trajectory of that concept as well: while “civil society” was initially perceived as area of domination 179
Book Reviews and resistance, argues Simiti, via the “governance” discourse, it progressively became part and parcel precisely of the dominant hegemonic discourse Gramsci wrote against. And so was the case with the intra-institutional “war of position”, diligently analysed by Kotsonopoulos. Scholars have, of course, noticed the conceptual difference between it and its corollary concept of the “war of movement”. What they have tended to miss is the corollary nature of the relationship: that “war of position” was so conceived and named (“position” to do what?) as prefatory for waging the “war of movement” – intended to overthrow capitalism. These issues and the reading here offered are, of course, controversial. But the debate is long overdue and the volume offers an excellent opportunity to (re-)open it. The volume is impressive in the broad variety of themes it brings to focus. Effi Gazi’s chapter on the way Gramsci influenced the original notion, and subsequent emergence, of a “subaltern history” (with all the ensuing historiographical controversies); Georgios Giannakopoulos’ examination of the link between the concept of hegemony and Saidian Orientalism (and, via that, postcolonial studies in general); Maria Tzevelekou’s highlighting of Gramsci’s typically neglected attention to language (and his many key contributions to modern linguistics); finally, Yiannis Papatheodorou’s theoretical chapter on the complex relationship between Gramsci, Machiavelli and Althusser. Equally impressive, indeed impeccable, is the scholarship of the volume. All the chapters are meticulously researched and drafted, in a language that is engaging and dense, yet straightforward. This, of course, brings us back to the book’s political significance and ramifications. This is a collection of essays on an important subject, which deserves to be critically studied and debated on both counts: its scholarship and its underlying politics. 180
Anna Frangoudaki ağlar Keyder (eds) and ²ağ
Ελλάδα και Τουρκία: Πορείες εκσυγχρονισμού. Οι αμφίσημες σχέσεις τους με την Ευρώπη, 1850–1950 [Greece and Turkey: ways to modernity; the encounters with Europe, 1850–1950] Athens: Alexandria, 2008. 397 pp. Foti Benlisoy Istanbul It is well known that the domination of Europe over non-European areas was legitimised and understood through a specific vocabulary that represents a dichotomous perception of social reality. According to this Eurocentric modernisation paradigm, western history is cast as the privileged domain of dynamic social change, prosperous economic development and a developed civil society as well as circumscribed state power and the rule of law. On the contrary, non-western societies are portrayed as geographies characterised by a despotic state, limited economic development (or prolonged stagnation), a weak civil society and the absence of the rule of law. Thus, the history of non-western societies is conceptualised through a narrative of lacks and absences, where modernisation is understood as an imitation and replica of institutions and practices belonging to the so-called
western world. Therefore, such a historical account perceives modernity mostly as an institutional and legal set of practices with distinct cultural artefacts that were shaped within the European context and subsequently exported to the non-western world. While this Eurocentric conception has been criticised harshly and has lost ground in the past two decades, we cannot underestimate its pervasive legacy, which has infiltrated almost all aspects of Ottoman and Middle Eastern historiography. This volume is a collection of articles edited by Anna Frangoudaki and Çağlar Keyder. Instead of relying on a self-evident and dichotomous conception of West and East, this volume brings together different studies aiming to illustrate how these terms were historically constructed and contested. In their coauthored introduction, Frangoudaki and Keyder identify the common thread binding the different contributions as “the theme of experiencing, reacting to and producing modernity”, pointing out the common focus on the right balance between “tradition and imported modernity” (12). In that respect, the authors claim that in both Greece and Turkey nationalism has come to the forefront as a saviour: “It was discovered as the perfect solution which permitted the building of a modernity on a reconstructed bed of tradition” (ibid). Thus, there emerges a distinct articulation of a particular kind of modernity with a reinterpreted or reinvented tradition. Many of the contributors to the volume deal with various aspects of that articulation, from different points of views. Ioannis Tassopoulos’ contribution (“Constitutionalism and the ideological conversion to national unity under the Greek constitution of 1864”) deals with the “paradox of progressive liberal constitutionalism and regressive liberal ideology” in Greece. Although from the last quarter of the nineteenth century Greece saw a
remarkable consolidation and growth towards the maturity of parliamentary democracy, on the other hand there was a “gradual ideological conversion of Greek life, from the philosophy of political liberalism and enlightenment to national messianism, ethno-centrism and intolerance” (22). However, this paradox, according to Tassopoulos, did not led to a confrontation between these two but rather “the Romanticist takeover took the form of conversion rather than transformation”. In order to grasp this conversion, Tassopoulos points to the development of constitutionalism in relation to the social structure of Greece during the second half of the nineteenth century. He claims that in the absence of social conflicts, the transition from absolutism to democracy was associated with national aspirations. In conclusion, “the critical dialectic between liberalism and democracy, individual rights and participation, which set the dynamics of constitutional development in Europe, never fully worked out in Greece and the distinction between liberalism and democracy remained rather blurred and confused” (40–41). Tassopoulos’ conclusion that the synthesis between liberalism and democracy that occurred in Europe failed to take place in Greece until the late twentieth century is a reminder of the conventional evaluation of modernisation at the periphery as a history of absences. However, in the past two decades revisionist approaches in British and German historiography have demystified the conception of a liberal-democratic West essentially characterised by a weak state and a strong civil society. In that respect, one can argue, on the contrary, that this synthesis between liberalism and democracy occurred in Western Europe only after the end of the Second World War.
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Haris Exertzoglou’s article, “Metaphors of change: ‘tradition’ and the East/West discourse in the late Ottoman Empire”, examines how 181
Book Reviews modernist projects, such as education, were articulated in the language of “tradition”. Moreover, he provides many examples showing that in the educational affairs of the Greek Orthodox communities of the Ottoman Empire “tradition” was invoked constantly. The discourse on the restoration of the national tradition and, thus, national regeneration was a key feature of the modern education system. According to Exertzoglou, the articulation of education with the discourse on tradition and the constant reference to the restoration of tradition was not a conservative reaction to rapid social and cultural change but “was in fact a way of trying to come to terms with an inevitable but uncertain modernity whose long-term implications were unknown” (85). He underlines that this discourse specifically addressed the literate urban middle classes and allowed them to cope with a variety of novel problems such as the position of women, the management of the urban poor, etc. In fact, this tension between the experience of modernity and the evocation of tradition was a characteristic of nationalist discourse in general. Exertzoglou cites Partha Chatterjee in order to underline the “inherent contradiction of nationalist discourses between the defence of the national self, which presumably antedates modernity, and the claim for self-government through Western institutions” (91). Although, non-western nationalisms accepted the universal western models, they also stressed the particularity of their nations and their unique character. Exertzoglou notes that “nationalist discourses have attempted to embrace both modernisation and tradition, by separating form from principle in the case of the former, and by emphasising the historical roots of the latter”. Thus, while on the one hand the imitation of superficial western patterns was condemned, on the other modernisation was linked directly with the restoration of an imagined Greek national tradition. The Greek claim to find a place in the modern world of nations could only be 182
achieved by evoking and restoring the Greek tradition. Lastly, Exertzoglou also points out to the device of a parallel strategy by the Ottoman Muslim reformists, where reference to the restoration of “tradition” as a way of coping with rapid social change was common both for Greek nationalists and Muslim reformists. Angeliki Psara’s contribution, “A gift from the new world: Greek feminists between East and West, 1880–1930”, deals with the same issue of utilising national tradition as a mechanism for modernisation. She indicates that the emerging feminist movement sought to disassociate itself from its western counterpart while striving to ally itself with the Greek national cause. Psara underlines that Greek feminists “made every effort to purge their feminism of any western connotations, and present it in true Greek colours” (227). Similar to many other parts of the world, “patriotic feminism”, i.e., women’s preoccupation with national matters, was presented as the basic legitimising mechanism of their inclusion in the public sphere. Indeed, Greek feminists constantly tried to stress the “national” character of their project: “their systematic recourse to ancient Greek glory made up for all that was lacking in contemporary Greece, and allowed them to assume the role of mediator between women of the West and East” (229). Moreover, Greek feminists utilised the ancient Greek legacy as “the basic argument in support of the ‘distinction’ of modern Greece as compared to the ‘uncivilised’ neighbouring countries, ‘Balkan’ and ‘Eastern’” (237). This effort of the Greek women to disassociate themselves from Eastern or Muslim women, according to Psara, formed a “peculiar feminist orientalism” (237). In a similar vein, Zafer Yenal (“‘Cooking’ the nation: women, experiences of modernity, and the girls’ institutes in Turkey”) also stresses the construction of gender roles as a defining
feature of modernisation and nation-building processes in modern Turkey. By citing Chatterjee and Shakry, Yenal underlines that the anticolonial national movements in countries such as India and Egypt claimed modernisation only by “discovering tradition”: “In this process, while the material aspects of western civilisation in relation to science, technology, economic organisation and state administration were to be adopted without any hesitation, the spiritual domain had to be protected from encroachments” (293). In fact, the spiritual or “cultural” and not the former material aspect (“civilisation”) was the sphere where the nation could claim its superiority and distinctiveness. Obviously, the principal site for expressing this distinct cultural and spiritual quality of the national culture was the home, and it was the women’s responsibility to protect and nurture this aspect. However, according to Yenal, in the case of Turkey “the articulation between the place of women in society and the nationalist/modernising project is different” in that it applied a “wholesale Westernisation of the role of women not only in the public realm but also in the private sphere” (294). Yenal deals with the girls’ institutes in Turkey and indicates “the significantly transformative role that these institutions have played in the creation of a new normative order through women” (303). Through the girls’ institutes, which instructed young, middle-class women on issues such as appropriate table manners, rules of public conduct and the importance of hygiene, the state sought to transform the family and the private realm according to modern western norms. Contrary to the aforementioned, dominant scheme of imitation and replication, Biray Kolluoğlu-Kırlı (“Cityscapes and modernity: Smyrna morphing into İzmir”) argues that urban development in İzmir in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries “should not be bound to the framework of Tanzimat or European colonisation”. According to her, the urban devel-
opment of İzmir “was a locally induced process and an organic part of developments seen also in other Mediterranean ports” such as Beirut, Thessaloniki or Alexandria. According to Kolluğlu-Kırlı, the fire of Smyrna in 1922, which devastated a large area of the city, “presented an ideal opportunity for envisioning grandiose urban schemes. The reconstruction of Smyrna literally meant building a new and drastically different city” (329). This changed the character of urban development itself, in the sense that during the Ottoman period Smyrna’s urban management was locally induced, and therefore “nineteenth-century Smyrna did not have a Haussmann or an Anspach, nor grand schemes of urban planning” (335). However, this changed in the republican era when urban planning became a rule. In the 1930s, urban development followed the designs of the central government in Ankara rather than the will of local agencies. In that respect, Kolluoğlu-Kırlı concludes that during the republican era “urban development was geared towards a more totalitarian and nationalist interpretation of modernity” (352). This meant that “spatially, nineteenth-century Smyrna represented a fractured heterogeneity and an intense density, in contrast to the standardised homogeneity and apparent hollowness of the republican city” (352).
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Ioanna Petropoulou (“From West to East: the translation bridge; an approach from a western perspective”) comments on the translation of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century western novels into karamanlidika (Turkish written in Greek letters), used by the Turkish-speaking Christian Orthodox population of Asia Minor. She suggests that the translation of western literary products had important modernising effects, as evidenced by the secular content of the translated novels and by the introduction of modern methods for the production, distribution and consumption of books – modern individualistic patterns of reading: 183
Book Reviews “Foreign novels were conductors of modernity par excellence” (163). She insists on the role played by the Karamanli press in transmitting modern ideas and western publishing practices (le roman feuilleton). She especially underlines the role played by Evangelinos Misailidis (“This modernising figure, this anticlerical ‘press baron’, was a true intellectual, an ‘organic intellectual’ in the western sense”) and his Anatoli newspaper. However, this is a rather one-sided account of the role of the Karamanli press. Although Anatoli and its editor, Misailidis, were among the principal popularisers of the genre of the western novel among their readers through translations and publications of serialised novels, the same paper also harshly criticised the replacement of religious books in homes with western novels and condemned the harmful effects of this genre. Therefore, it can be said that the press served two contradictory purposes, amplifying once again the articulation of tradition with modernity. On the one hand, it served as one of the main channels for the dissemination of new and secular ideas in social, political, cultural and educational matters. On the other, it became the primary forum for the defence of religious and traditional values and practices in the sphere of education and culture. In sum, by addressing various aspects of convergent and divergent trajectories of modernisation in Greece and Turkey, the volume offers valuable information and analysis in order to think about modernisation beyond teleologicaldeterminist and Eurocentric schemes. However, one may notice that the critique of the Eurocentric modernisation paradigm should not lead us to culturalist approaches where modernity is conceived as multiple insofar as it is defined mainly in the context of civilisational or cultural referents. In contrast, we should conceive the plurality of modernisms as “coeval”, i.e., as sharing the same historical temporality of modernity found in other parts of the world. 184
Ada Dialla
Η Ρωσία απέναντι στα Βαλκάνια: Ιδεολογία και πολιτική στο δεύτερο μισό του 19ου αιώνα [Russia vis-à-vis the Balkans: ideology and politics in the second half of the 19th century] Athens: Alexandria, 2008. 399 pp. Nikolaos Chrissidis Southern Connecticut State University
Consider this question. Stripped from myths about the inscrutability of a supposed Russian “soul”, from stereotypes about the “big bear” friend or foe (depending on one’s viewpoint) and from contemporary or subsequent ideologically laden historiographical schemes (be they Marxist, liberal or otherwise), what were the views of Russian intellectuals and publicists on the Slavic question in the Balkans in the second half of the 19th century? This book is an attempt to provide an answer to this question. It is intellectual history at its best since it combines a highly sophisticated discussion of ideological trends in the Russian public sphere with a firm grasp of contemporary domestic policies and international entanglements. The book thus achieves what its subtitle suggests: an examination of ideas and policies on the Balkans as expressed and de-
bated in the Russian public sphere during a period of rapid and upsetting developments both domestically and internationally. Ada Dialla, the author, focuses on Russian nationalist discourse as it appeared in the “thick journals” (the variety periodicals that served as one of the mainstays of public speech at the time), newspapers, pamphlets, broadsheets as well as archival sources (from the Russian Archive of Foreign Policy) and other publications. By way of a thorough, critical and comparative reading of these sources, she highlights the various debates generated by Slavism and Panslavism with regard to the Balkans. Such debates took place more or less unhindered, especially after the Great Reforms of the 1860s relaxed censorship and until 1881 and the accession of Alexander III. Participants were historians and other university professors, military generals, literary authors, political scientists, legal scholars, former government ministers and public intellectuals. Dialla approaches the theme thematically and chronologically. Her chronological framework covers the period between the end of the Crimean War in 1856 and the century’s end. The book is divided into two parts. Part one covers the period between the Crimean War’s end and 1878. Here Dialla discusses the Russian defeat in the war and its repercussions. In particular, she illuminates Russian attempts to redefine enemy and friend and also to define Russianness through the “others”, whether these others were other Slavs, western Europeans, Eastern Orthodox peoples or Asians. The book’s second part focuses on the period between the Treaty of Berlin of 1878 and the century’s end. Here Dialla examines the various dimensions of the Eastern Question, Russian foreign policy and the discourses generated by the Eastern Question in the empire. In this part, Panslavism comes in for particular consideration. In a very welcome move, Dialla takes Panslavism
seriously and goes beyond its utopian and unfulfilled dreams to discuss those visions that transcended narrow national boundaries and extensive imperial ones in favour of federal solutions. The book closes with a consideration of Panslavism’s failure in the domestically and internationally charged circumstances of the 1880s and 1890s. Writing in clear and sophisticated prose, Dialla is commendably sensitive to the shades of terminology and language. The rich and up-to-date bibliography contains an annotated section on the various periodicals used, a feature which will be of particular use to readers unfamiliar with these materials.
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In a concise and informative introduction, Dialla lays out the empirical sources and the theoretical parameters of her study. She discusses orientalism, the “invention of eastern Europe”, imperialism both in the domestic and in the international front, as well as the construction of the “other” in the public sphere. Moreover, she challenges the paradigm of the specificity of Russia and instead seeks to consider the Russian nationalist discourse in the context of processes common in Europe rather than as an aberration of the “big bear” in the East. She does not necessarily subscribe to a particular theory of nationalism. Rather, she looks at the nation as a topos where various discourses came together and conversed among themselves. Therefore, what is a Russian and what is Russianness prove to be fluid, contested and, ultimately, never fully crystallised concepts, always in dispute among intellectuals and publicists. A further complicating factor was the fundamentally dynastic bent of official Russian ideology which allowed little room for national liberation struggles, emancipation of nations or other such nondynasty-oriented ventures and adventures. Dialla examines the issue of Russian identity not through some metaphysical concoctions (for example, the Russian soul) or a priori theoretical constructs (Russia as the 185
Book Reviews Orient of Europe); rather, she considers identity as a constantly changing concept that very much depended on the historical framework, and which crystallised more or less at certain points, but never became absolutely immutable or perennial. Thus, Dialla provides us with a theoretically informed but not theoretically dictated account. In her narrative, Slavism and Panslavism are complex phenomena that defy easy categorisation or categorical statements assigning them to liberal, conservative or any other ideological current. Chapter One covers the syndrome of insecurity which the Crimean War’s failure bequeathed to the Russians. The war’s trauma exposed the state’s weakness both internally and externally. After all, or so it appeared, Russia was a giant with glass legs. The defeat was seen as a national disgrace and resulted in a torrent of criticism against the government. Clamour for reforms, already loud in the mouths of Slavophiles and westernisers alike, intensified in both volume and in breadth. The concepts of nation and Russianness played a significant role in the relevant discussions, as did comparisons between Russia and western Europe. In these discussions, liberal and radical westernisers utilised a discourse that approximated that of political nationalism and aimed at a radical reform of the state along lines of participatory political structures. Conversely, Slavophiles countered with a cultural nationalism that exploited the concept of the narod (the common people) and their supposed pure Russianness in order to advance an agenda of moral return to the good old Russia that had been corrupted by Peter the Great’s westernising reforms. Although there was some convergence (on the need for certain liberties and freedoms, on the abolition of serfdom, on the need for reform), the two ideological camps did not shape common visions for the future. In the process of debate, mod186
ernisation, nationalism, social emancipation and relations with western Europe and the Balkans all came up for consideration. Running through these debates were two constant themes: that Russia needed to somehow define itself vis-à-vis the West and that it also needed to reform internally. Chapter Two traces this process of definition by looking at what the author calls the European ambivalence regarding Russia’s European credentials. In the relevant European portrayals, Russia occupied a middle position between the developed world (understood as western Europe) and the barbaric East, belonging fully to neither. Such portrayals emphasised invariably Russia’s arrested development, its brutality as the gendarme of Europe, its semibarbaric character, and last but not least, its long-term subjection to nomadic influences. In this context, the fact that the Russians were Christians was not of much help either, given that Eastern Orthodoxy was viewed at best as a schismatic and at worst as a ritualistic religion. With the growing decline of the Ottoman Empire, by the nineteenth century Russia had replaced it in the European collective imagination as Europe’s internal “other”. Coming on the heels of such ideas was Russophobia, most poignantly expressed in the international relations engendered by the Eastern Question. Thus, the cultural and civilisational barriers that had been developed in particular during the Napoleonic Wars by European authors (and were most vividly outlined in de Custine’s 1843 bestselling book) now acquired the additional dimension of a struggle between civilisation and barbarism on the chessboard of the Eastern Question. Such ideas were common among European thinkers of various political colourings. More importantly, these ideas formulated the backdrop and defined the terminological and conceptual framework within which the Russian counterdiscourses developed.
Chapter Three focuses on these counterdiscourses in all their imaginary and imaginative dimensions. For as much as western Europe was an imagined community of civilised nations, the Russians constructed an imagined community from an imperial framework. Despite the eventual differences, both Slavophiles and westernisers were influenced by the philosophical and intellectual currents of western Europe and even accepted that Russia had a place in Europe. The question was of course what kind of place and on what terms. Predictably, the answers varied. Romantic Slavophiles idealised a pre-Petrine (that is, before Peter the Great) past with its patrimonial bent, organic relations between the social classes and moral bonds fostered by Russian Orthodoxy. Conversely, westernisers emphasised that Russia could profit from emulating certain policies of European countries and learning from their example. Neither camp was fully integrated or united in its views, and included both moderate and extremist viewpoints. As an example of the more extreme thinkers, Dialla focuses on Nikolai Danilevskii, a scion of the service gentry and author of a book on Russia and Europe that became the catechism of Panslavism. First published in a series of articles in 1869, the work was reprinted as a book five times before 1895. Danilevskii denied the existence of common laws of historical development and emphasised the special character of the Slavic world. He thus placed at the basis of his examination the existence of historical-cultural types among peoples. As a biologist, he thought also in terms of development: each type underwent birth, growth and decline. In such a scheme, western Europe was on the decline, whereas the Slavic world was on the rise, since they were younger than the western Europeans. The future belonged to the Slavs, something that according to Danilevskii exacerbated the West’s innate Russophobia.
Despite its initial success, Danilevskii’s scheme came up for criticism, even from among Slavophiles who were unwilling to reject the existence of at least some common pan-European bonds. Still, the particular bonds among Slavs became the object of research and reflection among a variety of scholars and publicists. Chapter Four traces this process by focusing on the work of philologists, historians and public intellectuals within the framework of what Dialla calls the ideology of Slavism. In this context, thinkers emphasised the existence of a Slavic world while at the same time pointing out the elements of Russianness that (supposedly) permeated it. Research into Slavic history and philology proved the existence of a common Slavic world. Shared features also included a similar state formation trajectory, conciliarity (emphasis on the community) and, more controversially and awkwardly, Eastern Orthodoxy. Despite cultural and historical differences, the Slavs were fundamentally one big family. Russia in particular served as the Antemurale Europae because of its permeable borders in the East. Complementary to that was a mission civilizatricee of Russia in the East. Given the religious difference among the Slavs, thinkers sought to mollify them by emphasising the commonality of ecclesiastical language. Philology and comparative linguistics became the handmaidens in such efforts. Ultimately, however, most thinkers were forced to focus on the Orthodox South Slavs. The lonely voice of Konstantin Leontiev sought to emphasise the preponderance of Orthodoxy even at the expense of Slavic identity or national emancipation. Moderate and extremist Slavophiles battled it over whether scientific research should have the ultimate goal of proving the existence of common bonds, whether it should also point out differences and separateness, or whether it should seek to highlight the superiority of the Russian language. Hard on the heels of philologists were the Slavic benevolent societies
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Book Reviews who sought to spread the academic messages to a wider audience through public lectures, libraries and scholarships for Russians and other Slavs, always under the watchful eye of the Russian imperial government. In Chapter Five, Dialla shifts the focus on the Russian government and its policies in the context of the Eastern Question. Here Dialla provides a concise overview of Russian foreign policy towards the Ottoman Empire and highlights the government’s realism, its reluctance to appear to be upsetting the fragile equilibrium achieved by the Treaty of Paris (1856), and its efforts to undo the treaty’s restrictive stipulations regarding the Black Sea. In the internal debates among foreign policy circles two lines are clearly visible: the more realist, moderate one, led by foreign minister Gorchakov (in office from 1856 to 1882), who advocated caution and European cooperation in the Eastern Question and a more aggressive policy in Central Asia (according to him, the prime area of the mission civilizatrice of the Russians); the more antagonistic one, led by the Russian envoy in Constantinople, Ignatiev, who supported a more activist foreign policy in the Balkans, the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and its replacement with smaller Christian nations that would be under the protection and control of Russia. Gorchakov’s line carried the day in the 1860s and 1870s. Needless to say, Slavophiles supported Ignatiev’s plans, although, as Dialla notes, westernising intellectuals also accepted that Russia had a role to play in the Balkans. Chapter Six traces the public debates on the Eastern Question. Dialla analyses the ways in which conservative Slavophiles identified the Slavic Question with the Eastern Question by utilising the principle of national self-determination. Thinkers such as General Fadeev, Ivan Aksakov and Danilevskii were some the 188
most prominent advocates of this identification, although their focal points may have differed. Fadeev, in particular, posited an irrevocable geopolitical conflict between Russia and the West, while Danilevskii saw the Eastern Question through the lens of a cultural conflict. In such readings, the solution of the Eastern Question became the opportunity for the Slavs (read, the Russians) to create a new geopolitical situation and/or a new culture. To be sure, not all Slavophiles bought into such schemes. Some of them in fact preferred an emphasis on domestic activism on behalf of their wretched Russian brethren inside the empire. In debating Russian foreign policy, the Slavophiles were also debating whether the Russian state should become identical with the Russian nation given that, in their reading, the Eastern Question led to a redefinition of Russian identity. In their own formulation of the problem, on the other hand, liberal westernising intellectuals posited Russia’s European identity by emphasising the Ottoman Empire as the European other. In helping dismantle the Ottoman Empire, Russia would highlight its European credentials. This attitude of course rejected any identification of the Slavic with the Eastern Question. Both Slavophiles and westernisers, therefore, saw a mission for Russia in the Christian East, depending on their reading of the Russian past. Chapter Seven shows that the devil was in the details, and in the realism of the imperial government’s cautious approach. Russian slavophilic nationalism emphasised the principle of national self determination as a tool for the potential future unification of all Slavs under Russian hegemony. Alternative Panslavist schemes (not without criticism from liberals) proposed a union of all Slavs under the guise of a common language; or the subjection to a monarchical Russian state with Russia playing the role of Piedmont (as
Danilevskii saw it); or the creation of a sort of federation of small states around Russia that would provide protection against the West (as Fadeev suggested). In all such schemes, acceptance of Russian control would be voluntary and would come with a degree of internal autonomy. Such plans, of course, directly answered the issue of who would inherit the Ottoman Empire, including Constantinople. Here, the slavophilic discourse directly challenged the Greek pretensions to the Ottoman legacy. The Greeks were a small, weak people and, in any case, they had already played their role in history. But Constantinople would not automatically go to the Russians, either, at least in the long term: instead, the imperial city should become the capital of the Slavic federation. (Dostoyevskii was probably the only one who consistently advocated Russian control of it.) The end result would be an eastern Europe which, although focused primarily on a federation of Slavic peoples, could potentially also include non-Slavs such as the Greeks and the Romanians. Even some liberal thinkers supported similar schemes, as a way of reining in aggressive nationalism and replacing absolutist regimes. Then came the 1877–1878 Russo–Turkish War. Chapter Eight traces the enthusiasm the government’s decision to fight generated among the small slavophilic circles. It also highlights the disappointment engendered by the experiences the Russian volunteers encountered in the Balkans. Linguistic and cultural differences and suspicions regarding Russian plans led many Balkan Slavs to a guarded, if not negative, attitude towards those who volunteered to fight on their behalf. The annulment of the Treaty of San Stefano by the Treaty of Berlin gave slavophilic circles the ammunition to fire off a torrent of criticism against Russian foreign policymakers. The mutual disappointment between Russians
and Balkan Slavs turned Russian thinkers inwards: now the parameters of Russian identity were searched for internally. As Chapter Nine shows, a renegotiation of this Russian identity ensued, and it found its mainstay in support for Russian absolutism. Domestic developments and the rise of activist opposition against the government (and, of course, the murder of Alexander II in 1881) contributed to this reorientation. The result was that Russian nationalist discourse, as exemplified in slavophilic utterances, tended more and more to identify itself with the government’s policies. Dialla closes her account with a consideration of the reasons for Panslavism’s failure. She suggests four factors: the disappointment with Russian foreign policy failures and loss of Russian prestige, the absence of common Russian interests with the newly created Slavic states as a whole, better knowledge of the complexities and antinomies of the Slavic world, and, finally, the growing fear that Russian authenticity and originality might be lost in a sea of undifferentiated Slavism. Coupled with the general reluctance of the Russian imperial government to engage in activities that might undermine imperial regimes abroad, these factors contributed to a confluence of dynastic preferences and interests, on the one hand, and ideological imperatives and directions, on the other. By the 1890s, the turn to the East (that is, Russia’s East) seemed to be a more pressing and potentially more advantageous field for imperial policymakers and intellectuals alike.
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Throughout the book, Dialla emphasises that the Russian imperial government was averse to any theories that would privilege the nation over the dynastic or imperial principle, both for domestic and international policy reasons. As she repeatedly reminds the reader, the tsarist state was not a national but rather a dynastic one. In the mind of this reviewer, the following instance illustrates best the prevailing dynastic 189
Book Reviews principle: when in the first population census in 1897, Tsar Nicholas II filled the census form’s entry on occupation with the words khoziain russkoi zemli, what he emphasised was his role as, literally, the landlord, the head, the master, the father figure and ultimate authority of the Russian land, not of the Russians only as a people, but of the lands that were under the control of the Russians, ultimately of his patrimony (the term khoziain having the meaning of master, landlord, chief of a family, head of a household). Thus, the innate interests and the imperial priorities and realities of everyday governance dictated a guarded, if not openly hostile, attitude on the part of the Russian government to any nationalist overtures, even when they originated from the pen of stalwart royalist commentators with impeccable conservative credentials. The end result was, as Dialla concisely notes, that “Russian nationalism was at its basis loyal to the state” (32). Dialla is to be commended for digging deep into the shades of Slavism and Panslavism and providing a thorough, critical and comparative consideration of their various manifestations within the framework of Russian nationalist discourse. This is a theoretically informed but (it bears repeating) never theoretically overburdened book. Dialla knows well the literature on the topic and other related ones (for example, foreign policy, international relations, nationalism, etc.) in several languages. Thus, her book is in conversation with the latest directions in the historiography of the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its particular usefulness, however, lies in that it contributes substantially to the existing historiography by illuminating the Balkan dimension. It will be read with much profit by both specialist and generalist alike.
Basil C. Gounaris
Το μακεδονικό ζήτημα από τον 19ο έως τον 21ο αιώνα: Ιστοριογραφικές προσεγγίσεις [The Macedonian Question from the 19th to the 21st century: Historiographical approaches] Athens: Alexandria, 2010. 158 pp. Erik Sjöberg Umeå University Writing about the Macedonian Question has never been an enterprise entirely free from political concerns or personal bias, historian Basil C. Gounaris stated in a review of its historiography, written in 2000. With the Macedonian conflict of the 1990s still fresh in memory, he and his then coauthor Iakovos Michailidis claimed that there was a “story involving bribery, personal feelings, or political intrigues behind almost every book about the modern (or even the ancient) history of Macedonia”. With this context in mind, “even the preparation of a bibliography is itself a political act”. The politically charged atmosphere surrounding the scholarship on this issue is well known to students of the region. Nevertheless, Gounaris asserts, the history of Macedonia is far from a scholarly dead end. The present study is intended as an introduction to the study of Macedonia and the histo-
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riography about the region that has evolved since the late nineteenth century in, chiefly, four different national contexts: in Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and, later on, in Yugoslav Macedonia. In essence, it is an expanded and updated version of the above-cited paper, which appeared as a chapter in an English language monograph on the Macedonian Question.1 Gounaris’ study is divided into four major chapters and is supplemented with a selected bibliography and a chronology covering the period from 1861 to 2005. In the introductory chapter, bearing the title “Re-approach”, he sets out to define what the Macedonian Question is and has been for the past 150 years. Originally this question emerged as an offspring of the larger Eastern Question, which concerned the fate of the remaining Balkan – chiefly Macedonian – territories of the crumbling Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After 1913, when the wider Macedonian region was divided between Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia, the three rival bidders for the territory and the national loyalty of its inhabitants, the Macedonian Question endured through changing political contexts as a set of problems related to the legitimacy of national claims, ready to surface whenever the issue of border revision emerged again in the Balkans. The core of the issue has been the control of the Macedonian territory and the struggle to define the identity of the Macedonian population(s); what is (and whose is) Macedonia, or who are the Macedonians? Gounaris describes the issue in terms of “problem elements” and lists four such factors, which together have constituted the Macedonian Question and preserved it until today; the vagueness surrounding Macedonia’s geographical and economic boundaries; the social and economic antagonism between its inhabitants concerning access to arable land and the
exploitation of natural resources; the subsequent cultural division of labour, which essentially altered the social antagonisms into national conflicts and with the manifold practical and ideological problems of the construction and the modernisation of the Balkan states, including the Ottoman Empire. The fundamental problem, according to the author, is the “nonexistence of a concrete geographical and economic Macedonian territory”. A unanimously accepted definition does not exist. What is meant by Macedonia has varied according to the territorial claims of each nation state and changing political concerns. The problem was not limited to the Balkans. For western Europeans and Americans, Macedonia was initially all the troubled Ottoman Balkan provinces, including Kosovo, while it after 1945 tended to be solely identified with the Yugoslav federal republic carrying this denomination. “This distorted European perception has from the early twentieth century created its own tradition and bibliography,” which according to Gounaris is part of the current problems (16). One asks oneself how the “European” perception of the term “Macedonia” can be distorted if it is the case, as Gounaris states, that there has never existed a unanimously accepted definition of it. Here the author, perhaps unintentionally, slips into using the vocabulary of the biased parties.
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The major chapters, which make up the bulk of the book, are the two following. Chapter 2, entitled “150 years of historiography and cartography”, is a survey of the historiography on Macedonia as well as accounts of the region’s geography, ethnology and philology, from the mid-nineteenth century to the recent dissolution of Yugoslavia. Gounaris distinguishes roughly four phases in the evolution of the scholarly (and nonscholarly) production. The first one, before 1913, was marked by the attempts to justify, in the eyes of both domestic and international opinion, the one 191
Book Reviews or the other nation state’s claim towards the “unredeemed” lands and brethren under Ottoman rule, through defining the “natural” ethnological boundaries of each group. After the demographic changes in the wake of the Balkan Wars and the First World War, irredentism gave way for more domestic concerns – except for in Bulgaria, where bitter memories and old national aspirations were kept alive by (Slav) Macedonian refugee lobbies. In Greek historiography, this manifested itself in the ideological incorporation of the newly acquired territory, chiefly through the glorification of the Macedonian Struggle of 1904–1908. The turmoil of the 1940s ushered in a new phase of partisan scholarship in service of national claims, reflecting the anxieties concerning the Macedonian region’s uncertain future status, following the wartime Bulgarian occupation, the communist takeover in the north and the civil war in Greece. A fourth phase is finally found in the period between 1960 and 1990, when a new national school of historiography emerged in Skopje, as part of Yugoslav Macedonian nation building. This branch of historiography was largely dominated by Slav Macedonian political refugees from Greece; the country which in their output, together with Bulgaria, was projected as the gravediggers of Macedonian unity and independence. Apart from additional bibliographical references, not much is new here, compared to the earlier cited essay from 2000. Potentially of greater interest are chapters 3, “The new Macedonian Question”, and 4, entitled “Return to History”, in which Gounaris reviews the body of research which was written during or resulted from the Macedonian conflict from 1990 and onwards, and attempts to map out new directions for historical research. The debate of the 1990s actively engaged Gounaris and, as one could expect, his evaluation of the scholarly output of the time bears the mark of personally held convictions to a larger ex192
tent than in the previous chapters. At the heart of this debate, which Gounaris describes as a clash between historians and, more or less, informed social anthropologists, was the issue regarding the “true” identity of the Slav-speakers in Greece. The emergence of this issue was connected to the rise of an identity political movement in western (Greek) Macedonia during the 1980s, which called for the official recognition of this group as a distinctly Macedonian minority, entitled to cultural rights within Greek society. “Was however this group ‘ethnic’, as it asserted?” Gounaris rhetorically asks (106). Here he reiterates his criticism, developed in earlier publications, of social anthropologists Anastasia Karakasidou, Loring Danforth and Riki Van Boeschoten, who, in the author’s view, worked under the assumption that the Slav Macedonians indeed could be classified as an ethnic group, in the past as well as in the present. The core of this criticism is that the use of the label “ethnic” – by Gounaris understood along the lines of Anthony D. Smith’s definition of ethnie, i.e., a basically premodern identity woven around shared memories or myths of origins, and cultural traditions – in the case of Macedonia’s population groups in the late nineteenth century is misleading. According to Gounaris, the very concept of ethnicity, used with reference to the often multilingual population groups of the southern Balkans before the coming of nationalism, is anachronistic, since it projects the existence of what essentially is a modern national identity back into prenational times. The search for ethnic identities among the chiefly rural communities of Macedonia would thus be a misguided choice by the student of the Macedonian Question. The choice of national identity in the region at the turn of the last century was in reality a political choice to which various factors contributed, most of which were economic in nature rather than dictated by ethnic identity. According to Gounaris, this explains why
inhabitants of the Macedonian region could also change identities, sometimes as a result of their personal interests and on other occasions because of the pressure exercised by the armed bands sent into the area by the competing nation states. This view has been adopted by other Greek scholars, chiefly Gounaris’ colleagues at the Centre for Macedonian History and Documentation in Thessaloniki. However, it is difficult to see that this necessarily contradicts the assertion made by the Slav Macedonian minority activists in the question posed by the author on whether theirs “was” an ethnic group or not around 1990. Judging from Gounaris’ own remark that the repressive measures taken against Slav-speakers in Greek Macedonia during Metaxas’ dictatorship in the 1930s “created strong memories which became enduring, [turning into] symbols of the national repression of the Slav Macedonians in Greece” (122), it would seem as if the aboveoutlined criteria of ethnic identity were indeed met. However, the clash between disciplines was not just a conflict of terms, but also a disagreement with regard to methodology. Gounaris’ outlook is in this respect that of a traditional historian, suspicious of oral history and the “interdisciplinarity, which is considered mandatory in the approach to every question”, as well as of the influence of “extremely postmodern” views (105). Despite dismissive remarks about the contribution of social anthropologists and the whole identity issue as a dead end, it is evident from Gounaris’ text that the questions raised by them indeed have served to stimulate historical research. Attention has been brought to a number of previously unexamined issues in Greek historiography on Macedonia, such as the extent to which Slavic dialects were spoken in interwar Greek Macedonia, the diaspora of Macedonian Slav-speakers in the New World and its role in identity build-
ing, to mention a few. Gounaris predicts that this research will proceed to evolve in chiefly two directions. The first is located in traditional diplomatic history, which he anticipates will continue to attract doctoral research, as more archival material becomes accessible that can shed light on the diplomatic activities of the involved states after 1974. The second direction is the continued study on identity formation, chiefly within the transnational context earlier explored by Danforth. As for Greek Macedonia, Gounaris calls for more studies of the economic integration of the region into the Greek state, which can shed light on the motives and subsequent choices of local populations.
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A branch of historiography that Gounaris does not engage with is archaeology, despite its obvious impact on the new Macedonian Question. According to Gounaris, the Yugoslav Macedonian historians of refugee descent, which moulded the young nation’s historical past and identity, after independence appropriated elements of the ancient Macedonian heritage as a way of detaching it from the federal Yugoslav past, in order to meet new identity political demands. This process is however nowhere put in a comparative perspective with the similar process in Greece, manifested in and resulting from Manolis Andronikos’ findings at Vergina (and attempts at marketing Greek Macedonian tourism in the wake of this). This was not a negligible aspect of the Macedonian conflict in the 1990s. Perhaps Gounaris’ larger familiarity with the Macedonian Struggle makes him emphasise this historical period more than the many explicit references to the ancient past in the Greek national and historical argumentation. Here, attention to the role of museums and archaeology in nationalist imagination could have illuminated the discussion further. Nevertheless, Gounaris’ book provides a wellwritten and useful introduction to how the his193
Book Reviews toriography on the Macedonian Question has evolved and shaped it. Read with caution, it ought to interest students of Balkan nationalism.
NOTE 1
Basil C. Gounaris and Iakovos Michailidis, “The Pen and the Sword: Reviewing the Historiography of the Macedonian Question”, in Victor Roudometof (ed.), The Macedonian Question: Culture, Historiography, Politics, Boulder: East European Monographs, 2000, 99–141.
Dimitris D. Arvanitakis
Στον δρόμο για τις πατρίδες: Η Αpe italiana, a ο Ανδρέας Κάλβος, η Ιστορία [Towards the nations. The Ape Italiana, Andreas Kalvos, the history] Athens: Benaki Museum Library, 2010. 452 pp. David Ricks King’s College London “The Greeks neither deserved their independence nor acquired it themselves. The real significance of the event lies not in their character or achievement, but in the motives and the consequences of the European intervention.” Writing in March 1862, some months before the fall of King Otto, and while he was obsessed – even in the midst of the American Civil War – with the continuing Greek crisis, the greatest historical thinker of the nineteenth century, Acton, formulated the uncompromising view quoted above. Nothing, on the face of it, could seem further from the fervent conviction of Andreas Kalvos’ Greek odes of 1824–1826 – yet Kalvos, long resident once again in England, could have read Acton’s words, and with we know not what reflections of his own. There is always a danger that, not just historical developments, but also the nature of those writers who contributed to them, commemorated them, and are in turn commemorated today for their own contribution, may harden into received opinion, and that the flux of ideas may be simply and
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crassly monumentalised. The enigmatic figure of Kalvos has suffered more than most modern Greek authors from this tendency: in this patient and deeply researched study, Dimitris Arvanitakis, by contrast, takes an unexpected and illuminating route into the circles, of men as well as ideas, that formed the young Kalvos and his motives. All readers will endorse the praise given to this book in the preface by the pioneering Kalvos scholar, Mario Vitti: the present review seeks, while broadly accepting Arvanitakis’ picture, to point to a number of additional aspects which might repay further study. The trigger for the book was something which would make the most hardened foes of technology think again: Arvanitakis lit upon what is perhaps the only surviving run of the shortlived periodical, L’Ape Italianaa (just twelve numbers, between 15 April–30 September 1819) through an internet link to Belton House, a provincial English country house now the property of the National Trust. It was a good scholarly instinct to suspect that, though no actual contributions by the young Kalvos appear in that periodical, it might yet supply some idea of what Hazlitt in 1825 was to popularise as The Spirit of the Age. What Arvanitakis has set out to do is to reopen the fashionable question of nation formation through an analysis, prosopographical and ideological, of the journal in question, as a contribution to the study of Kalvos in the formative years 1816– 1820. The bulk of the book, and its composite title, indicates that there are multiple agendas here, and this results in a certain awkwardness of structure; but one of its most salutary contributions is to remind us that there was a kind of Italian émigré circle rather different from (and, Arvanitakis concedes, less talented than) Foscolo’s more celebrated group. Of course, most Greek readers are likely to come to such a book in search of what it adds
to the Kalvos letters published by Vitti in 1963. The answer is, in an oblique way, a good deal. So much of the discussion of Kalvos has been of a romantic nature (whether that relates to his love life or to his peregrinations) that it is welcome to be plunged back into the mediocrity of his Italian circle in England. And that means that readers who skip straight to p. 149, at which point Kalvos first comes in for extended discussion, will be missing out on an ample and largely convincing contextualisation for his first English period.
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Arvanitakis’ decision to begin with the detailed analysis of L’Ape’s contributors, relegating general discussion of nation formation and the post-Napoleonic context till much later (217–63), has the merit of avoiding a long general discussion at the outset. It does not entirely avoid the problem of potted summary in the early discussion (notably 29–56): the back-story of English-Italian literary relations is rather more complex than presented here; and in particular key figures such as Thomas Gray, whose “The Progress of Poesy” was a key influence on Kalvos’ ode “To the Muses”, are absent from the discussion. Nor is there quite enough emphasis on the role of the only English poet whose Italian verse has been admired in Italy, Milton (who is absent from the discussion on pp. 209–10, where Kalvos’ metrical theory is discussed). Overall, the presentation of the English context here is rather less rich than that of the Italian, with more reliance on secondary sources, some not of the newest. (In one extreme case, reliance on Italian sources produces a nonexistent figure, a geologist “Carl Lyell” on p. 126.) By contrast, the reader learns much about the climate Kalvos worked in from the complex ideological vagaries of, especially, Filippo Pananti: these are treated with some sympathy and in a way which is genuinely illuminating about the younger man. Arvanitakis is, 195
Book Reviews again, careful not to identify L’Ape and its circle with the Carbonari or to insist on Kalvos’ membership at that stage – though his membership of a Masonic lodge seems probable. An important, and related, aspect, left hanging here – inevitably perhaps, given the lack of unambiguous documentation – is that of Kalvos’ adhesion to the Church of England (on p. 16 Vitti takes this as certain for a later period). I read this as perhaps as nominal as that of George Washington or other Deists of the time, and this is doubtless what Susan Ridout was seeking to probe in her letter quoted in translation on pp. 172–3 (where the word “proud” in “our proud desire of fathoming the Almighty” should read “alazonike” rather than “perephane”). The exploration here is intriguing, and might with profit have been linked to the term Foscolo later used of Kalvos, “Didimo Laico” (discussed on pp. 359– 60), for which the most natural interpretation is that Kalvos is an agonised Doubting Thomas when it comes to the Christian revelation. One important line of thought present in the book, especially in relation to Luigi Angeloni, relates to the Italian language question: here the Italian movement for purismo (see, in particular, 142, 243–4) may indeed have had greater relevance for the autodidact Kalvos as a rallying cry than the details of Korais’ linguistic programme. Arvanitakis re-emphasises, and rightly, that Kalvos came to London “as an ‘Italian’” (155). By the time we reach the open discussion of these questions in Chapter 5, we have a much more refined sense from this book of the formation of Kalvos, which rewards the reader who has persevered to this point: that being so, the attacks on the work of Dimiroulis add little to the discussion. For a work which dwells considerably and rightly on matters of close detail, this is a well196
written one. More repetition occurs in some of the discussion than is necessary (while, as mentioned above, some further contextualising of the English literary milieu would not have come amiss); and, as the book goes on, the reader can weary of the number of rhetorical or hypothetical questions which are being asked. (See, for example, the speculations on p. 129.) If, as is to be hoped, a second edition appears, the English of the references, which contain many errors of transcription or transliteration, will need to be corrected; and the lack of a full Roman-alphabet index makes the book hard to navigate at times. Such criticisms by no means undermine the value of this thoughtful, subtle and valuable book. It might of course, as readily have been given the title In the Footsteps of Napoleon as the forward-looking title it bears. Kalvos and his confrères, whatever their motives in 1819, had little inkling of how either Italian or Greek nationalism would play out – a point which this book richly establishes.
Andrekos Varnava
British Imperialism in Cyprus, 1878–1915: The Inconsequential Possession Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009. 321 pp. Thomas W. Gallant University of California, San Diego Given the vast amount of scholarly attention paid to the Cyprus issue generally and to the history of the British in Cyprus specifically, it would seem obvious that the former was always of immense importance to the latter. Not so, according to Andrekos Varnava in his excellent study of the earliest phase of British imperialism in Cyprus. Instead, what he argues is that very soon after the British took control of the island, they came to realise that it was largely an “inconsequential possession”. Far from being the strategic jewel of the Mediterranean, Cyprus quickly became an albacore around the empire’s neck, resulting in the British on more than one occasion trying to divest themselves of the island. Varnava’s study is by far the best book about the early decades of British rule on Cyprus. It engages and contributes to multiple historiographies, including the vast body of literature on European imperialism from 1871 to 1914. Unlike some recent works about Cyprus, this one is conversant with current trends in imperial historiography and explicitly adopts a broadly cultural history approach. This is refreshing in a field where even recently published works read like pieces whose writers
know nothing but the British sources and who write like its still the 1960s. This book, unlike those, deserves a wide readership and not just among Hellenists.
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Varnava sets out to answer two broad questions: first, why did the British seek to gain control over Cyprus and why did they so quickly become disillusioned with it? And, second, what can the story of the British in Cyprus tell us about the processes of imperial expansion in the age of neoimperialism? The author is more successful with the former than the latter, but he still makes an exceptionally contribution to the discussion of both. The book is divided into eight chapters and organised roughly chronologically. In his lengthy first chapter, Varnava conducts a masterful review of the literature and contextualises his study in it. As he points out, much of the scholarship on Cyprus and the British in the Mediterranean generally is inward looking and parochial; whereas in imperial historiography, scant is the discussion of the imperial encounter in Europe. One of his aims is to connect these two. He also does a nice job of contextualising his study in the broader literatures on Cyprus and imperialism. The second half of this chapter is devoted to situating the history of the British in Cyprus in its proper historical context during the era of neoimperialism. He ends by posing the central question that frames the rest of the book: how was it that Cyprus came to be such an inconsequential possession in the British Empire? He begins to answer this query by tracing the place that Cyprus occupied in the British cultural imaginary. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Romanticism linked the Holy Land, the Crusades, Richard the Lionheart and Cyprus together and enshrined them in popular culture as fundamental to 197
Book Reviews development of British identity. This “spiritual imperialism” (60) had a significant impact on the imagination of the young Benjamin Disraeli (later to become Lord Beaconsfield). While this might explain his interest in the Ottoman world and Cyprus, it is insufficient as an explanation as to why, when the opportunity presented itself, Beaconsfield and his Conservative government quickly moved to take possession of the island. Three sets of factors, evident in the years 1876–1878, help to account for that. One was the ceding of the Ionian Islands to the Kingdom of Greece in 1864 and the impact that that had on British geopolitical strategy in the Mediterranean. The second was the Eastern Question. The ongoing struggle between the Russian and Ottoman empires continued to shift the balance of power in the region toward the former and away from the latter. This contributed to Conservatives’ desire to strengthen Britain’s position in the eastern Mediterranean. And lastly, a report from the 1840s suggested that the place that would allow them to do this best was Cyprus, which could provide the empire with a military outpost that would hold “the key of Western Asia” (65). In Chapter 4, Varnava shows how during the first two critical years (1878–1880) of British possession of the island, the Conservatives endeavoured to show that Cyprus was the Mediterranean “Eldorado”; the Liberals countered with a discourse aimed at showing that the supposed jewel in the imperial crown was nothing more than Dizzy’s folly. As he shows in the next chapter, beginning in 1880, when Gladstone and the Liberals came to power, and continuing to 1912, regardless of which party was in office, Cyprus was a problem, a “mill-stone” around the imperial neck. It became evident that Famagusta harbour was ill-suited to serve as a major naval installation for the fleet; that the island was thus not 198
really the strategic asset that they hoped it would be; and that rather than being an economic boom to British economic interests in the region, the island was a financial bust. And so by 1912, they were ready to get rid of it, a story he returns to in Chapters 7 and 8. In these he shows how military planners and strategists came to the conclusion that Cyprus was pretty much useless as a strategic asset in the global scheme of things, and so when the opportunity presented itself in 1912, the Liberal government proposed ceding the island to Greece in exchange for the right to use the harbour of Argostoli, on the Ionian Island of Kefalonia, as a naval base. A deal that never was made. The intervening chapter (6) stands out from the others in being topical rather than chronological in focus. It is the most important chapter in the book and certainly the most controversial. Returning to the realm of culture, he explores two key issues: how did the place of Cyprus in the British imperial imaginary change during the period after they took possession of the island, and how did British rule on the island impact Cypriot culture and especially Cypriot identities? Through a careful and skilful analysis of a variety of sources – visual, literary, mass media, etc. – he tackles these two difficult issues. One way that British control of the island was legitimated was by linking Cyprus to the trope of philhellenism. This tapped into a well-known and widespread discourse that went like this: modern, western civilisation was founded on the ideas and ideals of ancient Greece; the Hellenes of the present-day were the descendants of the Greeks of antiquity; and so the West owed them a debt. Varnava shows how the British wrote Cyprus into this Hellenic metanarrative. Ancient history, if interpreted properly, and archaeology demonstrated that Cyprus was and always had been part of Hellenic civilisa-
tion. It was, after all, the birthplace of Aphrodite herself. And so bringing western civilisation back to the island was central to the empire’s civilising mission. But, this Hellenising discourse had unintended consequences. It contributed in many and important ways to the development of an explicitly Hellenic national identity among those who had previously conceptualised themselves primarily as Orthodox Christian Cypriots, as opposed to Muslim Cypriots, Latin Cypriots or Jewish Cypriots. In elevating a national identity over a religious one, he argues, British policies laid the foundation for sectarian divisions that exploded into violence on the island periodically throughout the first half of the twentieth century. This argument challenges the primordialist view dominant in Greek and GreekCypriot nationalist historiographies and in popular culture that Orthodox, Greek-speaking Cypriots had always possessed a Hellenic identity and that unification with Greece had been a long-held ambition. In his convincing argument, Varnava shows that there were other mechanisms and initiatives in play that contributed to the ascendancy of a Hellenic national identity over other ones based on religion or regionalism. But certainly British policies and practices were important contributing factors, even if one accepts that a Hellenic national consciousness would probably have developed among Orthodox Cypriots in any case. This chapter alone makes the book must reading.
a time, the era of neoimperialism, when European powers were gobbling up large parts of the world like hungry diners at a banquet, the story of the British in Cyprus complicates the picture of relentless, inexorably successful European imperial expansion. Filled with missteps, bad judgments, and wrong-headed polices that had unintended consequences, the British imperial encounter on Cyprus left them with a possession that served little purpose in the broader scheme of things, cost them money and resources, and so proved both in the short and the long term to be of little value strategically or economically. As told by Varnava, this is a fascinating and compelling tale. Very well-written, conceptually and methodologically sophisticated, this is by far the best book on the early years of the history of the British in Cyprus. It rightfully deserves a central place on the bookshelf of anyone interested in Cypriot, Ottoman, Greek, British or imperial histories.
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In the final analysis, does Varnava prove his assertion that very soon after its inclusion in the British Empire Cyprus became inconsequential? My assessment is that he does. But that is not the main contribution of the book. His study of the British in Cyprus makes an important contribution to both the historiography of British imperialism and to the broader study of European imperialism. At 199
Book Reviews
Niki Maroniti
Πολιτική εξουσία και εθνικό ζήτημα στην Ελλάδα 1880–1910 [Political authority and the national question in Greece, 1880–1910] Athens: Alexandria, 2009. 495 pp. Effi Gazi University of the Peloponnese As John Breuilly has pointed out, “nationalism is inconceivable without the state, and vice versa”. There is currently an important and very high quality production of scholarly works on nationalism and cultural imagination as well as on national identity in Greece. Hence, this emphasis on the ways nationalism frames the state has to a certain degree undermined research on how nationalism and national projects are shaped by state structures, political expressions and political initiatives. Niki Maroniti has turned her attention to this particular topic. In this book, a revision of her doctoral dissertation on politics and the “national question” in Greece (1895–1903), she meticulously explores state power and authority as key mechanisms in the evolution and trajectories of the “national question” in Greece from 1880 to 1910. In fact, the author is more interested in the critical period from 1890 to 1910, which was dominated by the turbulence arising from the Eastern Question, the 1897 Greek–Turkish War, the multidimensional national crisis following the Greek defeat in 200
that war and the sociopolitical unrest which led to the Goudi coup of 1909. Paradoxically, it is also a neglected period, somehow squeezed between the more “popular” first part of the nineteenth century and the following “Venizelos era” in conventional terms. The book combines a chronological and a thematic approach. The author is interested in the overlapping significance of “the national question, the constitutional question and the arising social question” (14) while she combines irredentism, reforms and modernisation processes in her definition of the “national question” (14). She is also sensitive to the overlapping temporalities of history, specifically the nineteenth-century longue durée, the 1890–1910 period and two particular moments: the Greek– Turkish War in 1897 and the Goudi coup and movement in 1909 (30). In this vein, the first part of the book focuses on the Eastern Question in the late nineteenth century, the Cretan uprising and the 1897 Greek–Turkish War in the domestic and foreign policy domains. The emphasis is put on national rhetoric and politics as formed by important political leaders of the era, including Charilaos Trikoupis, Theodoros Deliyiannis, Dimitrios Rallis, Georgios Theotokis and Alexandros Zaimis, but also on the particular roles of the army, the nationalist societies of Ellinismos (Hellenism) and Ethniki Etaireia (National Society), and the king. The aftermath of the 1897 war is the main background of the second part of the book, in which the management of the crisis after the Greek defeat, in particular with reference to anti-royalist sentiment, is central. The third part is devoted to the exploration of major reform plans and policies which took place at the turn of the century in the domains of the army, agriculture, education, justice and public administration. New orientations in foreign policy are also examined thoroughly in the light of the Macedonian Question. In the final part, the analysis turns to the thick
and turbulent period preceding the Goudi coup. National identity debates and confrontations, the constitutional issue, the tension between the king, leading politicians and major political forces are discussed while in the epilogue the author summarises the central developments which led to the Goudi coup. Maroniti does not only exhaust her analysis on the macroscopic level, which includes structures, major state policies, patronage and clientelism or the overall impact of nationalism. Rightly so, as the lack of research on the particularities and specificities of politics is noticeable in Greek historiography. Also, she does not limit her analysis to a narrow conception of political history which focuses on specific (and, quite often, leading) political figures, their actions and aims, and the causes and results of these. By bringing the power/authority nexus to the fore, the author is interested in the transformation of national projects as they become conceptualised, debated, implemented, constructed, negotiated or even refuted by various factors, including the political parties, the politicians, the king (and queen), the army, the economic and social elites, and even the foreign powers. This broad and flexible definition of the power–authority nexus allows the author to unravel different political and party rationalities, conflictual political rhetoric and languages and competing instrumentalisations of irredentism. The emphasis on contingency and a careful analysis of the particularities of each political debate offer a detailed, rich and multidimensional picture of the era. Another important merit of Maroniti’s work is that it does not present the “national question” as a homogeneous, singular entity but rather as an arena where different and quite often competing projects develop. In this vein, the analysis turns to the “nationalisation” of political rhetoric but also to the ways various politi-
cal interests and aims constantly reemploy and redefine “the national”. Moreover, this approach is linked to an inclusive analysis which does not only focus on irredentism or the politics of the Megali Idea (Great Idea) but also on major national reforms (i.e., in the army, education, public administration, etc.), modernisation processes and changes. In this way, the book also illustrates the constant interaction between national politics inside and outside the state.
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HISTOREIN
The book combines perspectives on politics with an interest in the impact of social, political and economic factors. The chapter on the Evangelika, the so-called Gospel riots of 1901, is indicative of the importance the author attributes to the thick fabrication of national politics, social attitudes and cultural practices and beliefs. In this respect, the work would definitely have enriched its perspective had it also presented how society was portrayed in the official national rhetoric and how social identities were forged, constituted, practiced and performed within the national state context. In this direction, the linkage between political processes, ideological currents and social attitudes would have proved quite intriguing. Even more so in the critical period following the Greek bankruptcy of 1893; the author’s analysis of this time not only deserves the reader’s attention but also invites further investigation of the topic (which definitely lies beyond the scope of Maroniti’s book). An index would have been very useful. In general, the book offers a coherent, well-documented, carefully presented and clearly argued view of a turbulent and critical era through the lens of organised politics, in particular in relation to the state and power. This is an important contribution to the study of modern Greek history and politics. It offers us most valuable insights into the varieties of the “national question” as well as in the perplexities of national politics. 201
Book Reviews
Vassilis Nitsiakos
Στο Σύνορο: ‘Μετανάστευση’, σύνορα και ταυτότητες στην αλβανο–ελληνική μεθόριο Odysseas, Athens, 2010. 472 pp.
On the Border: Transborder Mobility, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries on the Albanian–Greek Frontier Berlin: LIT, 2010. 504 pp. Vasileios Dalkavoukis Democritus University of Thrace
In the winter of 1990–1991, when the Greek– Albanian border controls collapsed, under the pressure of the mass “exodus” of people trapped within its spatial – and foremost political – limits, defined in various ways by a regime that claimed for itself the “communist truth”, Albania discovered the West and vice versa: in fact, both perceived each other as terra incognita, bound with myths, longings, propaganda and secrets. Alongside a desire to meet, both also sought to avoid the “Other”. It took a long time to undo the construction of a “lack of closeness” between Albania and the West – if it has been undone at all, 20 years later. The largest proportion of the so-called “Albanian exodus” towards the West remained in the country where it had initially headed, Greece, an “idiomorphic West”, a more “intimate” one in cultural rather than geographic terms, at least 202
before the imposed isolation of the Hoxha regime. But what changed in Albania in all these years? What remained of what we knew from the so decisive 1940s? How close or distanced is the new generation of people that live among us from the prewar “cultural intimacy”,1 that existed between Greeks and Albanians despite the establishment of borders? How did the prewar crossborder networks, roads and patterns function in the new era? And how were new ones constructed or invented, along with the new “borders” on both sides? Such questions – along with other more particular or nodal ones – have rendered Albania a preferential field of research for social anthropology, a discipline that was transformed, for this precise reason, into an “urgent discipline”: an “urgent anthropology” destined to expand knowledge and mutual understanding on both sides of the border. Vassilis Nitsiakos’ book On the Border: Transborder Mobility, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries on the Albanian–Greek Frontier holds a pride of place among the books2 that have tried to contribute towards the abovementioned direction. It presents the outcome of nearly twenty years’ of fieldwork in south Albania, the area that historically and culturally presents common elements with the Greek part of Epirus and which was characterised by Greeks as Northern Epirus for political and diplomatic reasons. Not only does the writer take a stance on the matter, but he also dedicates a whole chapter to the clarification of the term, which was constructed via diplomatic means and later used for political reasons in the context of Greek irredentism. He also underlines the contemporary reverse meaning of the term, which emerged after the opening of the border, when those arriving from Albania used it in order to achieve better treatment within the Greek framework, finding, however, that the host society viewed the “Northern Epirotes” with scepticism.
However, in order to understand the “reverse” of the meaning, one has to follow the central thread of the book from the beginning: Nitsiakos discusses the Greek–Albanian border within the context of “transborder mobility”, exploiting critically the contemporary theoretical arsenal of social anthropology on “transnationalism”.3 According to the author, such a theoretical approach can be defined thus: “in the new migration the migrants’ networks of social relations, their activities and patterns of live involve, on the whole, both host and home societies: a social field is being formed which links up the two countries, irrespective of borders and geographical conditions, while the new migrants live thus in between and form rather ‘hybrid’ identities” (20). Is this wording enough, however, in order to understand Albanian migration in Greece? Nitsiakos’ answer is negative: the adoption of the nation-state as an analytical category in the process of interpreting the “migratory phenomenon” is not enough, as it conceals a number of other factors that underline the complexity of the phenomenon (such as the ethnic identities on both sides of the border, local peculiarities, the prenation mobility of people in the wider region, the arbitrary drawing of the border which breached all kinds of bonds through the imposition of mobility barriers, etc.). In other words, the historical dimension of the “migration” cannot be ignored, since, in fact, it constitutes a multidimensional, crossborder mobility, in which people have always crossed the border both legally and illegally. The ethnographic material of the book, which proves the theoretical adjustment of the “migration” as “crossborder mobility”, is very rich. Through the personal routes of the informants and the piercing glance of the ethnographer, Nitsiakos successfully orders the huge amount of information he has gathered
throughout his research during the past twenty years. Issues such as the formation of Albanian identity through the indifference towards religion during the Hoxha regime, the contemporary revival of the pluralistic religious puzzle in Albania, the historical role of Greek education and Orthodoxy in the formation of a Greekoriented identity in the Albanian south, the role of ethnic groups such as the Vlachs in the formation of this kind of border mobility, the reunion of families that were split for decades due to the drawing of the border and Cold War isolation, as well as the “illegal” daily crossing of the borders for labour reasons, are some of the examples used to validate the need for a new analytical tool to interpret the phenomenon. From this point of view, the contribution of the book to the international discussion on migration is valuable, especially since it is also available in English translation.
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HISTOREIN
However, the most important contribution of this book is its ability to communicate with a broad audience. It could be characterised as a contemporary peregrination in southern Albania, through the viewpoint of an adequate observer, who eyes and records what the official discourse cannot comprehend – and therefore disregards – or avoids detecting for various reasons. The book is all what Vassilis Nitsiakos has taught us – both students and colleagues – to observe in the context of our research interaction in the Border Crossings Academic Network for the past ten years. Therefore, the dedication of the book constitutes a great honour for us all.
NOTES 1
For the term “cultural intimacy”, see Michael Hertzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State, New York: Routledge, 2005.
2
I mention at this point the indicative works 203
Book Reviews of Lois Lambrianidis and Antigoni Lymperaki, Αλβανοί μετανάστες στη Θεσσαλονίκη: Διαδρομές ευημερίας και παραδρομές δημόσιας εικόναςς [Albanian migrants in Thessaloniki: Routes of prosperity and lapsus of public image], Thessaloniki: Paratiritis, 2001; Charis Naxakis and Michalis Hletsos (eds), Μετανάστες και μετανάστευση: Οικονομικές, πολιτικές και κοινωνικές πτυχέςς [Migrants and migration: financial, political and social aspects], Athens: Patakis, 2001, and Miltos Pavlou and Dimitris Christopoulos (eds), Η Ελλάδα της μετανάστευσης: Κοινωνική συμμετοχή, δικαιώματα και ιδιότητα του πολίτη [Greece of Migration. Social participation, rights and citizenship], Athens: Kritiki, 2004. A more anthropological aspect is provided in the texts edited by Fotini Tsimpiridou (ed.), Μειονοτικές και μεταναστευτικές εμπειρίες: Βιώνοντας την «κουλτούρα του κράτους» [Minority and migratory experiences: experiencing the “state culture”], Athens: Kritiki, 2009. The texts of Vassilis Nitsiakos, Μαρτυρίες αλβανών μεταναστών [Testimonies of Albanian migrants], Athens: Odysseas, 2003 and Gazmend Kapllani, Μικρό ημερολόγιο συνόρων, Athens: Livani, 2006 (published in English as A Short Border Handbook, London: Portobello, 2009) are important for the testimonies they contain. Finally, Konstantina Evangelou has researched the issue of the migratory literature, providing an analytical ergography of the migrant literary production to the present. See “Αλβανική μεταναστευτική λογοτεχνία: σκέψεις πάνω στην έννοια του ‘Άλλου’ με αφορμή κείμενα αλβανών μεταναστών” [Albanian migratory literature: thoughts on the concept of the “Other” in the texts of Albanian migrants], Dia-keimena 8 (2006): 99–110, «. . . Η βαριά βαλίτσα, ο τσιγγάνος μελισσουργός, το μικρό ημερολόγιο συνόρων . . .: λέξεις και ποιητικές από τις γραφές της μετανάστευσης» [. . . the heavy suitcase, the gipsy apiarist, the small border diary. . .: words and poetics from the 204
writings of migration], Dia-keimena 11 (2009): 93–104 and «Η εμπειρία της μετανάστευσης στα λογοτεχνικά έργα αλβανών μεταναστών. Μια κειμενική προσέγγιση» [The experience of migration in the literature works of Albanian migrants: A text wise approach], in Tsimpiridou (ed.), Μειονοτικές και μεταναστευτικές εμπειρίες, 173–192. Some of the most characteristic literary works are: Tilemachos Kotsias, Το τελευταίο καναρίνι [The last canary], Athens: Kedros, 1995; Tilemachos Kotsias, Βροχή στο μνήμα [Rain at the grave], Athens: Kedros, 2000; Ferdinand Stavros Faras, Οι σημειώσεις του πρόσφυγα [The notes of the refugee], Athens: Kastaniotis, 1997; Ziko Kapourani, Δέντρο στα χιόνια [Tree in the snow], Thessaloniki: Diva, 2005. 3
For the emergence and the evolution of the term as an analytical tool, see Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch and Cristina Szanton Blanc, Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity and Nationalism Reconsidered, New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1992, and Thomas Faist, The Volume and Dynamics of International Migration and Transnational Social Spaces, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.
Daniel T. Lochman, Maritere López and Lorna Hutson (eds)
Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700 Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. xiv + 275 pp. Androniki Dialeti University of Thessaly This collection of essays is a welcome addition to the scholarship on friendship in early modern Europe which has been increasingly flourishing since the early 1990s. This book originated in a panel on early modern friendship at the Sixteenth-Century Studies Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2005. As the title itself suggests, most contributors predominantly employ literary theory as their basic mode of analysis, with a focus on literary texts – letters, treatises, fictions, poetry and drama – rather than archival material. The book comprises thirteen essays plus an introduction and an afterword, and ranges over both Protestant and Catholic Europe, although early modern Britain figures more prominently. Building on earlier scholarship, the collection pays particular attention to early modern reconceptualisations of GrecoRoman and medieval notions of ideal friendship, the divergence between ideals and lived experience, and friendship as a political or religious bond. Configurations of friendship in the works of well-known male authors, such as Vives, Erasmus, More, Sidney, Shakespeare and Milton, are discussed in detail. However, challenging conventional notions of friendship as an exclu-
sively male-dominated terrain, several essays examine how early modern women redefined traditional models of friendship to meet their own ends and fit their own experience.
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HISTOREIN
The volume is thoughtfully introduced by two of the editors, Daniel T. Lochman and Maritere López. They delineate ancient and medieval concepts of friendship with emphasis on Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics and Cicero’s De amicitiaa and De officiis. The influence of classical models on early modern discourses of friendship is variously readdressed throughout the volume. Furthermore, the introduction offers a brief review of recent scholarly debates on early modern friendship. Finally, the editors informatively introduce the reader to the main themes and questions to be discussed in each section of the volume. The first section of the book focuses on early modern reshapings of conventional discourses of friendship. Constance M. Furey discusses sixteenth-century humanists’ revisions of the classical ideal of friendship as an exclusively homosocial bond between men, and as an alternative to marriage. In Juan Luis Vives’ and Desiderius Erasmus’ treatises, Furey detects the emergence of a new narrative model of companionate marriage, largely informed by reform ideals, which called for a “corporeal” and “spiritual” friendship between husband and wife, without, however, calling in question marriage as a primarily patriarchal unit. The marriage/friendship question also features in Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski’s intriguing essay on Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). According to Wojciehowski, the central place of family in More’s ideal commonwealth denotes the author’s anxieties towards male homosocial bonds. Focusing on the wellknown friendship among More, Peter Giles and Erasmus, the essay challenges the often idealised image of humanist friendship and suggests that such relationships were often complicated 205
Book Reviews by tense, and often homoerotic, emotions, rivalries and frustrations. Male identity and repressed homoeroticism are further analysed in the last essay of this section, in which Daniel T. Lochman discusses how Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia (1590) departs from the established notion, drawn from Greco-Roman and medieval traditions, that passion jeopardises male friendship. According to Lochman, Sidney’s rhetorical departure from the traditional narrative must be seen in relation to the popularisation of Galenic medical theories in early modern England that tended to blur the rigid divisions between the “rational” mind and the “emotional” body. Thus, the body comes at the heart of the friendship discussion here. The second section of the volume is dedicated to alternative or marginalised forms of friendship, with an emphasis on female configurations. The section opens with Donald Gilbert-Santamaría’s exploration of friendship rhetoric in Mateo Alemán’s picaresque novel Guzmán de Alfarache (1599). Reordering the classical ideal of friendship as a selfless bond between virtuous men, Alemán’s novel narrates the morally ambivalent companionship between two picaros, which is articulated in terms of common experience and the need for solidarity in a world dominated by deceit, crime and deception. Maritere López skilfully transfers us from the devious universe of the picaros to the sinful world of courtesans in Renaissance Florence. Examining their correspondence, López argues that well-known courtesans, such as Camilla Pisana and Tullia d’Aragona, attempted to erase the stigma of their trade and strengthen their participation as poets in the contemporary male-dominated intellectual milieu by fashioning bonds of friendship with their male patrons. In Pisana’s and D’Aragona’s discursive strategies, basic principles of classical perfect friendship, such as equality, similitude and selflessness, were renegotiated to fit the patron–client relationship. In a similar vein, Allison Johnson discusses Is206
abella Whitney’s strategies in A Sweet Nosgay (1573) to present herself as a virtuous member of the male-dominated intellectual world. As a single woman, Whitney had to shape her relations with men exclusively in terms of friendship so as to claim a public position without putting her reputation at stake. Thus, male–female friendship is presented in Whitney’s poetics as an alternative to marriage, sexuality and female domesticity. This section concludes with Penelope Anderson’s moderately documented essay on friendship and politics in the royalist Katherine Philips’ poetics during the English Civil War. Departing from tradition, Philips employed the trope of multiple and failed female friendships to reject the theory of political patriarchalism and suggest a reshaped notion of political power as a continuous process. A final set of essays explores friendship in ethics and politics. Special emphasis is given on the divergence between idealised representations of friendship and social efficacy. In the first essay, Sheila T. Cavanagh examines Lady Mary Wroth’s departure from the classical ideals of similitude and equality as reliable foundational principles of friendship. In Uraniaa (1621), set in the royal environment, friendship among social equals – kin, lovers or political allies – is often depicted as a necessary system of protection, a utilitarian bond constantly open to betrayal. Similarly, Marc D. Schachter’s essay treats friendship as a disguise for utilitarian and selfinterest exchange in Novella 12 of Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron (1558). De Navarre’s disillusion towards true friendship reflects the broader evangelical critique of faith in human relationships. The usefulness of friendship as a social and political instrument, the perils of false friendship and the contradiction between tyrannical power and virtuous friendship also feature in William Shakespeare’s King Learr (1608). According to Wendy Olmsted, friendship in Shakespeare is a “risk-taking adventure in which cir-
cumstances can be deceiving and truth can only be discerned gradually through time” (192). Male tyranny encounters female friendship and political solidarity in Christopher Marlow’s analysis of William Cartwright’s The Lady-Errant (1651). Cypriot women’s utopian commonwealth in Cartwright’s platonic drama challenges patriarchy by identifying heterosexual love with tyranny and women’s affectionate friendship with egalitarianism. Returning to the incompatibility between friendship as a classical ideal and tyrannical order, Gregory Chaplin traces the configuration of the male political subject in John Milton’s rhetoric. Drawing on Cicero, Milton’s republican political theory legitimised fraternal communities to revolt against absolutism, which here is identified with an effeminate and denatured political order. The last essay of the section discusses friendship language in Anabaptist communities. Thomas Heilke argues that in contrast to the Lutheran and Calvinist rhetoric, which did not employ friendship as a central element in the organisation of church communities, the Swiss Anabaptist movement gradually articulated a Christian friendship discourse with which communal unity and practices were invested. The volume concludes with an afterword by coeditor Lorna Hutson, author of The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fiction of Women in Sixteenth-Century Englandd (1994). Even though not all papers are equally innovative and well documented, they all contribute to our understanding of the rich variety and complexity of early modern discourses and representations of friendship either as an individual interaction or as a political necessity and civil virtue. Although some of the essays are highly specialised and literary in their approach so that the broader historical context is sometimes missing, the book has a good deal to offer to cultural historians, literary critics and students of the Renaissance. Those interested in gender will also find some interesting essays.
David Rollison
VOLUME 11 (2011)
HISTOREIN
A Commonwealth of the People: Popular Politics and England’s Social Revolution, 1066–1649 Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 492 pp. Photini Danou University of Athens In A Commonwealth of the People, David Rollison addresses the issue of the emergence of the commonalty as a shaping force of English constitutional culture. By combining three different theoretical approaches, the Whiggish narrative of progress, the Marxist class-struggle reading of politics and an appreciation of the constitutive power of discourse influenced by the linguistic turn, Rollison investigates the longue durée of popular engagement in English medieval and early modern state politics. His purpose is to provide an explanatory model of modernity viewed as an epoch dominated “not only by strong states, but also by the politics of popular sovereignty” (6). Drawing evidence from a wide variety of sources, political treatises of populist and antipopulist thinkers, vernacular theology, popular political songs, rebel texts, constitutional documents, plays as well as publications on voyages of discovery, Rollison introduces the argument that from the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 to the execution of Charles I in the 1640s, a rev207
Book Reviews olution of commonalty took place in England that shifted the focal point of political discourse from theocratic and aristocratic ideals of obedience and hierarchy to more socially inclusive ideals of reciprocity and common good. This diversity of sources along with his interpretative pluralism enables Rollison to overcome the problem of attributing some kind of unity of thought to a heterogeneous “working class” (which lumps together the middle ranks and plebs, “those who had to work for a living”) by using the ideal of commonwealth1 as an “empty signifier” (208). The word “empty signifier”, in Ernesto Laclau’s terms, is a concept that acquires meaning through social signifying processes.2 According to discourse theory, abstract concepts such as Englishness, patriotism, democracy and, in our case, commonweal/th acquire meaning through social practices that take place within particular historical contexts. Rollison goes through several historical contexts, from the Norman conquest of England to the mid-seventeenth century, in an attempt to trace the ways a “populist vernacular movement”, as he suggests, ascribed meaning to the term commonweal/th so as to make it a unifying principle for the lower orders of English society in their struggle against a common enemy, the state. What he means by “populist vernacular movement” is, on the one hand, the rise of the “middle English” language as a medium in which common ideas and stories could circulate and, on the other, the rise of the nonelites as legitimate speakers on behalf of the “community of the land”. As the writer suggests, in a succession of a series of local or more extensive episodes of disobedience and resistance that took place in England on issues such as heavy taxation, the harsh behaviour of royal officials, corrupt 208
courts and arbitrary arrestment of villagers, seizure of lands by nobles, enclosure practices and forced labour,3 commonwealth ideology formed in opposition to existing government. At such times, the state and the ruling classes were forced to negotiate with and even to bow to a higher authority, the commonwealth. In 1649, however, commonwealth replaced the monarchical state and so it became what it had been fighting against for centuries (2). Hence, the words “commonwealth” and “commonweal” would continue to be key terms of elite political discourse and they would never again inspire popular resistance and rebellion (464). Rollison’s book is an ambitious work of new social history, the history of political thought and cultural theory that provides historians with a new look at the political role of the lower orders in premodern societies. Though he follows the traditional Marxist explanatory model of class struggle to explain politics, he breaks with the Marxist tradition on the issue of hegemony. In Gramscian terms, hegemony, as society’s superstructure, is the dominant ideology produced by the elites and forced down the social ladder through a combination of ideological domination and coercion in order to secure their political leadership and continue their economic coercion over the working class. On the contrary, in Rollison’s approach commonwealth ideology emerges as a product of the common people in their fight, over the centuries, for a better life. It therefore concerns a bottom–up constitutional process that gradually forced the governing elites, if only momentarily, to accept the commonwealth as something broader than and even superior to the monarchical state. On this issue, Rollison’s account also differs from John Walter’s treatment of commonwealth ideology as a “public transcript” created by the government to assert legitimacy, a notion drawn from the work of James Scott.4
Another point in Rollison’s book that draws our attention is the writer’s inclusion in his discussion of the question of industrial growth, overseas trade expansion and the affirmation of English imperialism as a remedy to poverty; in other words, as England’s way of becoming “the richest, happiest and hardest-working country in the world” (319). As Rollison points out, political economy considerations began not with Adam Smith and the Physiocrats in the eighteenth century but much earlier with Sir John Fortescue, William Tyndale, Sir Thomas Smith or the two Richard Hakluyts and their expansive disposition to conquer and colonise other parts of the world in order to secure domestic harmony and common prosperity. What was initiated with Fortescue and Smith, Rollison argues, was the acceptance of economic growth as a moral and political good in itself and a view of politics as the state management of economic activity (348–50). This development gave workers in manufacturing and merchants a crucial role in England’s capitalist growth and in the production of national wealth. In stressing this argument, however, the writer disregards the exclusionary effects of the growth of the secondary sector of the English economy for the poor peasants as well as the economic gap it created between the urban and rural economies. Not all members of the lower strata benefited from the expansive horizons of the English capitalist economy and, in any case, at the time this expansion took place, they surely would not be in a position to realise the macro-economic effects of this development, so as to incorporate it as a desirable prospect into their collective imaginary and political culture.
Another point of critique one could make to Rollison’s narrative of “England’s long social revolution” is that the writer is not particularly convincing in the way he presents the English Civil War in the 1640s as an effect of the same ideas and social dynamics that repeatedly brought England to a boiling point since the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. The crowd’s involvement in the civil war often pursued an independent agenda from parliamentarian or royalist priorities. Its actions ranged from rural riots in the 1640s, the antiwar clubmen mobilisation (1642–1651), the Leveller (1647) or the Digger (1649) movements later on.
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Finally, a third point of critique that could be raised is that Rollison overlooks the creative dimension of the interaction between rulers and ruled in the process of ascribing meaning to the nodal concept of commonwealth, as well as the effects of this interaction on the formation of English constitutional culture. Ethan Shagan’s discussion of the “points of contact” between the government and the governed in his Popular Politics and the English Reformation,5 in which he introduces a similar approach to what the sociologists would call “path dependence”, provides us with a useful insight into the way collaboration, along with opposition and resistance, structured English politics and constitutional culture. Rollison fails to take into consideration Shagan’s influential thesis, so this dimension of consent and collaboration is not integrated in his analysis. In conclusion, Rollison’s A Commonwealth of the People is a book designed to illuminate the long-term history of popular politics in medieval and early modern England; it provides readers with useful food for thought on the issue of how modern constitutionalism emerged out of premodern societies. It makes a strong case for the importance of the notion of commonwealth as a constitutive element of English po209
Book Reviews litical identity and culture. He conceptualises the process of ascribing meaning to the concept of commonwealth as a bottom–up course – an argument that readers may choose to accept or reject. In any case, this is a stimulating book that deserves a wider readership.
NOTES 1
2
3
Rollison uses the word “commonweal” to stand for various spellings and usages prior to 1520 and “commonwealth” to refer to those in use after that date. As he argues, this change also implied a shift of meaning from moral and spiritual to more materialist values (2, note 4). Ernesto Laclau, “Why do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?” in Emancipation(s), London and New York: Verso, 1996, 36–46.
Panagiota Tzivara
Βενετοκρατούμενη Ζάκυνθος (1588–1594): Η νομή και η διαχείριση της εξουσίας από το Συμβούλιο των 150 [Venetian Zakynthos, 1588– 1594: The allocation and management of power by the Council of 150] Enalios: Athens, 2009. 710 pp.
The Commons rebellion of 1381, Jack Cade’s rebellion of 1450, the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536, or Kett’s rebellion in 1549 are the most striking incidents with which Rollison is concerned.
Dimitris Arvanitakis
4
John Walter, “Public Transcripts, Popular Agency and the Politics of Subsistence in Early Modern England”, in Michael Braddick and John Walter (eds), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001; James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, Yale: Yale UP, 1990.
5
Ethan Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.
In many ways, the Ionian Sea is an advantageous area for historiographical research. Just to mention two reasons: firstly, as a “società di frontiera”, as a society with a discrete historical journey and therefore cultural singularity, it offers historians the opportunity to approach many issues in our modern history from very different points of view; secondly, because the region’s age-old historiographical tradition, along with the new concerns and trends in historiography, have led, both within and without Greece, to a significant resurgence of relevant research, such that has not been witnessed in any other Greek “local history” except for that of Crete, for similar reasons. This book proves this in the best possible way.
Historian, Benaki Museum, Athens
The Atti del Consiglio dei 150 della magnifica Communità della città di Zante (The records of the Council of 150 of the magnificent community of the city of Zakynthos), which extends 210
from 1 November 1587 to 11 August 1594, are published and discussed in this volume. The publication of this historical document, comprising the second part of the book (397–588), is preceded by part one (21–396), in which the author discusses issues such as the allocation and management of power on the island at the end of the sixteenth century, and provides an exceptionally useful, albeit incomplete, profiling of the members of the Council of 150 in this period. In the long introduction, the author utilises the contributions of the latest literature and clarifies the terminology and prosopography, while presenting the institutional context of the time, thus allowing the reader to more fully comprehend the published document.1 The issue at the core of this book is well known from the historiography of the past but has been more fully dealt with in recent research: it is perhaps the most critical period in the sixteenth century, in which the island’s powerful families endeavoured to entrench their power. We know of the general mechanism and the rationale of it and we are aware of the parallels between the local phenomenon and the rest of the Ionian, on Crete, in Venice and in Venice’s terra ferma. What remains for us is to transcend anecdotal cases and to comprehend the “particular”, the local expression of this mechanism within the framework of the specific island. The tendency of the island’s powerful families to keep the ruling nucleus pure and to prevent others from being included in the group of citizens (cittadini)i peaked approximately in the mid-sixteenth century. The main opponents of the citizens, as it emerges from the documents produced by the community, were the foreigners ((forestierii), coming mainly from Greece and Italy, and persons of manual work (arte meccanica). In the course of the century, it was not only powerful foreigners (mer-
chants of disparate origins, individuals from the military or civil hierarchy) who had taken permanent residence in the city but also individuals from more humble families (either of foreign origin or from the island’s countryside) who became more powerful through their economic activities, and this increased the numbers of those seeking the right to participate in the community. The fact that Venice had not defined, as in its other colonies, the exact criteria needed to acquire citizenship (and, of course, participation in the community council) complicated the problem. It is worth remembering that the constant renewal of the population and the opportunities to become a part of the hegemonic group of citizens brought about the need for constant renegotiation of the multilayered networks and, therefore, a constant upset to the equilibrium.
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The community, complaining constantly about the inclusion of “unworthy” candidates in the General Council (Consiglio Generale), endeavoured to put obstacles in the way of their admission, but without any substantial results. In 1542 the community was successful in having the Venetian Senate approve its demand that 150 citizens be elected annually by the General Council, who would constitute the Minor Council (Consiglio Minore), which, in turn, would elect the communal appointments (cariche): this was the first step in the path to entrench local power. In this manner, the powerful families neutralised the General Council, to an extent. Naturally, the “disordine” that reigned at meetings of this council continued, and faced with the refusal of the Senate (1576) to explicitly prevent the induction of candidates about whom there were suspicions of being engaged in manual work, in 1578 they deprived (without seeking permission) the General Council of its right to annually elect the 150, thus rendering it useless. From then on, the 150 members whose tenure was over would vote for the new members. 211
Book Reviews In 1582 and 1589, having acquired true power, the Council of 150 endeavoured to clarify who (foreigners or locals) had the right to take part in the proceedings of the General Council and therefore (and this is explicitly stated in the decision of 1589) who had the right to become a candidate for the 150: evidently because they believed that candidates would appear who were not even qualified to be included in the General Council. As the author rightly points out, the large number of votes in favour of the above decisions proves the widespread approval of the view that there was a need to limit citizenship and of the tendency for local power to be exercised by an ever diminishing number of families (55 and 59).2 The upset of 1578 lasted until 1595, and despite the fact that the local community neglected to ask the Senate’s permission, all the Venetian authorities on the island were clearly in agreement. No sooner had the local dispute come out into the open, with two different delegations (on behalf of the Council of 150 and on behalf of the many disgruntled citizens) being sent to Venice, than the latter did away with the decision (the “novità”) of 1578, reverting to the conditions of 1542, despite the vacillations of the current and previous Venetian officials of the island as it appears from their decisions – or perhaps because of them. It is this story – which this invaluable primary source tells us about – that Panagiota Tzivara has shed light on. The first to provide information, Ermanno Lunzi, had already implicitly suggested the context in which this was to be perceived: “There was a time during which the Council of 150 of Zakynthos, swept along by the oligarchic spirit, usurped its rights, with the decision of 15 June 1578.”3 One of the benefits of recent research and the renewal of questions is that today we can understand this act not as a “chance” moment but as a link in the chain in 212
the formation of the leadership consciousness of the dominant stratum on the island.4 The data in this primary source, along with other information, provides a fuller knowledge of the mechanism and how it differed in various cases. For example, if the tendency for the entrenchment of the nobility (nobiltà) can be observed in the city of Venice and the terra ferma,5 and in other regions of the Stato da Mar, why did it not occur in the same way everywhere – not even within the Ionian, where the reality of the islands (at first glance only) did not greatly differ. It appears, however, that it was exactly the local differences that brought about the variations. And it is worth contemplating a number of questions. If the sixteenth century was, to use Angelo Ventura’s words, “the century of the aristocracy’s triumph” (il secolo del trionfo dell’aristocrazia), that is, the reconfirmation of the ideals of the nobility, can one truly claim that “the Venetian overseas colonies partook in the aristocratic reaction of the citizens [sic]; in this case the citizens of the council of Zakynthos” (53)? Can the phenomenon that Ventura studied in the Venetian society of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries6 be identified with the question being researched, as Tzivara maintains? It remains to be examined, but I have the impression that, although this phenomenon of the reconfirmation of the nobility generally took place in same decades and was reinforced by the spirit of the times, there is a different meaning of its local expressions, produced by very different economic and social conditions. In trying to comprehend the local expressions of general mechanisms, the statistical analysis of the source’s data has allowed the author (85–91) to provide evidence of a clear picture of the local reality, but a more thorough examination is required. In the council elections from 1588 to 1594, it seems that out of the 150 members, 116 were elected year in, year out (100
were elected seven times, and 16 were elected six of the seven times), while only 34 seats changed hands. And out of this hardcore of 116, it seems that 56 were elected with 95 percent of the vote. There can be, therefore, no doubt that one must abandon the old historiographical concept of a homogeneous “class” as an interpretative tool: the very meaning of “class” has for some time now been under doubt and it remains for us to truly understand the forms and meanings of differences in the institutionalised order – which developed gradually – of the citizens.7 Therefore, I believe that the “number” of “individuals” is not the best way to understand (and to deal with) this problem. The basis of our interpretative viewpoint must be to understand the role of the family (extended or otherwise), as we know that only within the framework of the family can the behaviour and the choices of the “individual” be understood. It is evident that, for example, the opportunity for re-election, indeed time and time again, was linked to the size of the family, the kin or client relations, the economic standing of the family and concurrent success in other fields such as the administration or the military (81–84). The author rightly notes that it is a mistake to believe that those belonging to the 150, even in this critical period, constituted a “unified group, whose members did not come into conflict but supported each other” (97, see also 392).8 One need only recall the conflict between the Siguro and Mondino families or the Volterra and Balsamo families during these decades (92–100). But this indisputable fact, which brings us to the largely unexamined role of the family and networks in the context of the new “political/administrative” reality of Venetian power, gives rise to other questions that we have not fully dealt with. Central among these questions is that of the choices through which upward mobility took
place and was confirmed. What were the families’ strategies? How similar were they, and to what extent did they depend on the particular characteristics (origins, length of settlement on the island, economic activity, presence in the administration or military, number of members, etc.) of each family? The answers seem self-evident, but research is still pending. The Macri family (which had ten members in the council over a seven-year period) and the Siguro family (with seven members) gained many and important appointments (cariche) for their members; but the Gavrilopulo family, with a monopolistic presence in the management of the public finances and six members among the 150, also only managed to gain three appointments in seven years. What is the explanation for these differences? Changing the interpretative key would bring us closer to an explanation. Thus, one could understand in greater depth the “hardcore” of the Council of 150, as the arithmetical image of the “individuals” would be transformed into the historicised image of the family, a perspective more correct and substantive for those times.
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Yet another question arises in the same vein based on the data of the source and the material collected by the author: the study of the history of offices and appointments (offitii et cariche), of the mechanism by which administrative/bureaucratic staff was assembled; the role of the “offitii et cariche” in the formation of political education and their significance for the conception and organisation of power and of the state, would all prove to be critical in the eighteenth and mainly nineteenth centuries. The author deals extensively, in her introductory text (117–169), with the issue of the “offitii et cariche”, particularly the communal ones (distribution, management), and indeed with one very important facet: the use of the right to allocate (or vote for) the appointments by three loci of power (Venice, local Venetian officers 213
Book Reviews and the citizens’community) as a weapon in the political game. Not only do we know of the persistence with which the community sought for decades (see indicatively p. 121) from the local Venetian officers or the Venetian Senate to gain the right to vote for certain appointments, but we also know of the repeated and sometimes conflicting decisions of the Venetian organs, and of the protests of the community over the monopoly that the members of the community had over certain appointments, despite decisions to the contrary having been taken in Venice. A careful reading of the history of the “offitii et cariche”, a clear understanding of the duties (we still do not have critical data for many); an understanding of the local variations of “offitii et cariche” (noted by the author on p. 121); the fact that they multiplied; the distinction between honorary communal appointments (cariche di onore) and salaried appointments (cariche di lucro);9 the broadening or narrowing of jurisdictions; the extent to which they were pursued by powerful families; the significance of some of these for the bureaucratic career of the citizens, etc. All these are some of the questions that remain to be answered so that we can comprehend their precise importance and the exact manner in which they influenced local reality and the “political education” of the local (but not only of the local) citizens. The author extensively discusses the case of the Gavrilopulo family (244–253), which is well known from other researches. For over a century, this family monopolised the offices of the local public treasury (Camera Fiscale), despite at times a storm of reaction from the community itself. Was this a unique case, or just the most well known in terms of the literature and research that has been conducted? I believe the latter applies, but in any case there is a need to go beyond case studies and to under214
stand the wider picture; to deal with the question of the mechanism itself through an analysis that would include and go beyond individual cases. The need to record the lives of such persons whenever possible (“the Gavrilopulo case is truly one of the desiderata of research”, 251) must take second place to acquiring a fuller picture of broader groups and attitudes within a certain historical framework. Many questions can be posed. This extremely useful publication, combined with the framework provided by the author, must now be read along with all the other well-known literature on the era in light of contemporary questions. It will no doubt permit a better understanding of specific events, but mainly it will shed more light on the prosopography, and contribute to a more complete understanding of the meaning and manner in which social groups formed ideas and attitudes within the framework created in the Ionian Islands by the steady imposition of the ideological world, political language and institutional framework of the Serenissima Repubblica.
NOTES 1
However, in some cases (such as for example in Unit 7 of Chapter 4 (253–273) or Chapter 5 (283–305), I believe that the title and the issues discussed do not fully correspond.
2
The decisions of 1582 and 1589 are clearly a part of the dispute over who had the right to be included in the General Council (and therefore could become a candidate for the 150), although, particularly for the second case, the vagueness of the author’s translation (58–59) leaves room for misunderstanding. The decision refers to those who wished to be included in the General Council, and the process is defined (esser aprobati, introdoti, balotati), i while it is explicitly stated that this decision does not re-
verse that of 1582, which clearly stated the criteria for the candidature of foreigners. Furthermore, the final decision of the Senate (1595) to revert to the conditions of 1542 does not mention reversing the decisions of 1582 and 1589; therefore, the cautious and suspicious Senate did not identify the two. See the entire text: Archivio di Stato di Venezia (hereafter ASV), Senato Mar, r Registro 55, pp. 205v–206r (244v– 245r), 30 Nov 1595 and ASV, Senato Mar, r filza 129 (material attached to the decision). 3
Ermanno Lunzi, Della condizione politica delle isole ionie sotto il dominio Veneto (Greek edition), Athens: Nikolaidis Filadelfeos, 1856, 71.
4
See Dimitris Arvanitakis, Κοινωνικές αντιθέσεις στην πόλη της Ζακύνθου: Το ρεμπελιό των ποπολάρων (1628), Athens: Benaki Museum/Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive, 2001, 97–111.
5
The “serrata del Maggior Consiglio” (1297) and the “serrata cittadinesca” (1569). See Arvanitakis, Κοινωνικές αντιθέσεις, 67–74.
6
Angelo Ventura, Nobiltà e popolo nella società veneta del Quattrocento e Cinquecento, Milan: Edizioni Unicolpi, 1993.
7
For a synopsis of the argument, see Arvanitakis, Κοινωνικές αντιθέσεις, 35–46.
8
It is a term she uses, however, with some looseness (compare “the ‘permanently’ elected group of 116 people” [86] with “in this ‘powerful’ group” [85]). See the author’s observations directly afterwards. The use of the term “administrative oligarchy of 150” (392) to characterise the 150 who took the decision of 1589 is perhaps problematical.
9
The distinctions were not absolute and there are still many misunderstandings on this (133–134, 140–141).
Apostolos Lampropoulos and Antonis Balasopoulos (eds)
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Χώρες της θεωρίας: Ιστορία και γεωγραφία των κριτικών αφηγημάτων [States of theory: history and geography of critical narratives] Athens, Metaichmio, 2010. 584 pp. Alexandra Lianeri University of Thessaloniki The contemporary globalisation of scholarship in the human and social sciences has implied that the struggle with theoretical concepts has become a struggle over translation. As Dipesh Chakrabarty notes, there was a time when the diverse forms of understanding and practice were translated into universal categories of European origin, following a model of “rough” translation: one that was adequate to the task of comprehension. The ongoing challenge to this model is to pay attention to the very process of translation and the partly opaque relationship of difference it mediates.1 This volume, States of Theory, engages with this relationship by focusing on the question of “theory” in the Greek-speaking world. Its aim is to explore how the narratives of theory entail a pluralised history and geography, forcing us to speak not of a singular state of theory, but of many. Which forms of transfer, interaction, appropriation and reorientation sustain the key references of Greek-speaking theoretical contemplation? Is theory in Greece a peripheral 215
Book Reviews enterprise involving the mere transposition of concepts? Can we map and appraise the diversity of references and categories that comprise the realm of Greek theory? The book’s response to these questions is structured around five categories, which also mark the distinct sections of the volume. The first of these categories is the literary and its implications for theory: the role of (literary) reading in constructing concepts, the multiple connections between literature and theory, and the ensuing consideration of literature as a movement outside the limits of the self and towards a dialogue with the other. In this context, Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou’s semiautobiographical essay traces the question of history and historicisation at the intersections of literature and theory over the last 35 years. Moving from structuralism, through new historicism, to poststructuralism, she focuses on key debates surrounding the problem of literary and historical context in order to conclude that the historicisation of literature is both necessary and impossible. Lito Ioakimidou focuses on the challenges posed to traditional comparative literature by literary theory and cultural studies. She is especially interested in the way the latter fields approach the encounter with the foreign as a mode of constructing, sustaining or challenging the national self. The problematic arising from this confrontation is deemed to be crucial for both comparative literature and historical studies in Greece, as it can further a fundamental goal of comparative research: the advancement of a new humanism, which highlights the interconnection of traditions, while simultaneously stressing the historicity of these traditions and their irreducible specificity. Miltos Pechlivanos engages with the historical and geographical routes of the aesthetics of reception. He argues that the establishment of the field exemplifies a series of reception acts going back to the Ger216
man appropriation of French and Anglophone reception theory, which was in turn reformulated to become the foundation of new theoretical currents. The essay fruitfully expands this dialogue to comment on contradictions of the Greek reception of reception theory, in order to suggest that these contradictions attest to the difference underlying any form of theoretical transposition. The section ends with Sophie Iakovidou’s wide-ranging exploration of literary reception theory from the viewpoint of Bourdieu’s field theory and Alain Viala’s sociopoetics. The second section examines two intersecting objects of contemporary theory: the migration of words and the migration of people, as speakers and listeners. Here Ioanna Laliotou focuses on both Greek and other examples in order to argue that migration is inscribed in concepts and narratives of national history, which it serves to undermine and uproot from within. Konstantinos Kavoulakos engages with the inscription of migration in theoretical reflection. His study of Adorno, Horkheimer and Habermas explores the geographical and historical dislocations of the Frankfurt school to suggest that theory lacks attachment to a single place as is fundamentally utopian. Finally, Grigoris Paschalidis charts some of the interdisciplinary and geographical routes of cultural theory and cultural studies, from the re-evaluation of the opposition between cultural and civilisation attempted by the Birmingham school to the postcolonial attempts to challenge enclosure into either universal or local boundaries. The next theme is the theoretical reconfiguration of the polis and the political, and their intersections with the frames of historiography. Mina Karavanta’s essay opens this section with a wide-ranging problematic on communities lacking association with a predefined
political order, the illegal immigrants standing of the margins of the global cities of late capitalism. Following Balibar, Karavanta explores how these communities are brought together by a shared fate and asks how the reconsideration of the literary may posit anew the question of living together in a politeiaa that brings within it the global and the local without reducing the one to the other. Alexandros Kioupkiolis takes his cue from spontaneous demonstrations in Athens that followed the 2008 destruction of Parnitha by fire in order to debate considerations of metapolitics and metademocracy by Hardt and Negri, on the one hand, and by Laclau and Mouffe, on the other. The essay deploys the Athenian example in order to critically engage with the concepts of multitude and democracy, and argues for a definition of the political in terms of an uncertainty that challenges a given social order. Effi Gazi traces the turn of late twentieth-century historiography towards narrative as the centre of historical research. In a discussion ranging from Hayden White’s Metahistoryy to French structuralism and poststructuralism, and from Ankersmit and Ricoeur to Spivak and to Ginzburg’s debate with White, Gazi discusses narrativity as an attempt to contextualise historical research and to reflect on the historicity of history writing. Yiannis Papatheodorou continues the debate on narrativity by focusing on the challenge posed by the “rhetorical turn” to both the idealistic dissociation of language from the social world and the positivist appeal to transparent representation of the past. Moving from White through Foucault to Ricoeur, the essay argues that the turn to historical poetics arises not merely from a shift in historiographical paradigms but from the way those shifts relate to wider changes in social and cultural history. The topic of the next section is the plural lines of theory inscribed in disciplinary and national traditions and the various crossings, migra-
tions and translations involved in their constitution. Alexandros F. Lagopoulos examines the cross-disciplinary development of the fields of political economy, semiotics of space and literary theory by exploring some key debates about the notion of (human) space in human geography, human ecology, social anthropology and history after the 1950s. His multidirectional analysis leads to a holistic consideration of spatial categories and allows him to explore how space has been used to account for the writing and reception of literary works, and how the latter redefine, in turn, our understanding of space. Stephanos Stephanides focuses on translation theory, which he examines as central to the constitution of national literary and cultural traditions. Focusing on the tension between the promise of translation to transcend (national) boundaries and the fundamental impossibility of this transfer, the essay challenges the binary opposition between the cultural self and the cultural other, and stresses the hybrid and transcultural status of all evocations of literary “autonomy”. Eleni Hodolidou turns to crossings in the discipline of education in Greece. Her essay defends an interdisciplinary understanding of pedagogy by tracing shifts caused after the 1960s by the opening of the field to other disciplines, such as sociology and psychology, but also to the cross-disciplinary research of fields such as cultural studies, literary studies and media studies.
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The book concludes with the question of metatheory by which it designates the state of disenchantment with narratives of truth in the second part of the twentieth century, but also the recognition of this state as a theoretical enterprise that is itself linked to its historical moment. Maria Margaroni approaches this question by focusing on testimony as a text which occupies a marginal position in the languages of theory from which it acts to both shape and hinder theoretical reflection. Testimony, she ar217
Book Reviews gues, grounds theory in a quest for critique that remains aware of the conditions of its constitution and recognises that reflexivity passes through and simultaneously brings to light a moment of blindness, rather than a moment of truth. Antonis Balasopoulos focuses on the fundamental problem of the tension underlying the relationship between history and theory, which he defines in political terms as a relationship of domination. From Plato’s definition of chôraa as a frame that links theory to class domination, through the seventeenth-century English engagement with theory as central to the revolutionary subject, to De Man’s return to Plato to unravel a rhetoric of mastery, the tradition of theory utilises a rhetoric of domination but also acts to challenge this rhetoric and render it self-subverting. Apostolos Lampropoulos also engages with the relationship between history and theory, which he views from the perspective posed by the category of mourning. The proclaimed death of theory, he argues, must be viewed reflexively as language and practice associated with a certain historical time. Yet this historicity does not imply that the dialogue with theory is a dialogue with things past. Theory rather operates between death and birth, and between past and present. As such, it designates a chôraa that irrupts into the circle of mourning for “our” past: it fragments the categories of influence and identity, and acts instead to stress the heterogeneity and fragmentation of theoretical traditions. In the light of the last two essays, the term chôres in the book’s title acquires a complex meaning evoking at once the theoretical frames posed by the Greek linguistic, intellectual and academic communities, and the politics of time associated with these frames. The plural form is itself political as it aptly indicates the absence of unity within the space of Greek theoretical traditions. The book suggests – indeed, indicates by its very form – that Greek 218
theory has passed through different routes and crossings. The idioms of the volume attest to a diversity of languages, while the practice of translation deployed by the authors is made explicit through the evocation of debates and categories that stand beyond the limits of Greek theory. The articulation of these traditions in Greek terms and in relation to local disciplinary and wider sociocultural contexts constitutes the most central contribution of the volume. The book offers an innovative encounter with contemporary theory, which takes as its point of reference Greek intellectual and linguistic traditions. Such a move allows us to raise two questions with regard to our understanding of theory in Greek terms. The first relates to the distinctness of Greek engagements with the western European and American traditions designated by the term theory: do these engagements allow us to discern a relative unity of Greek theoretical languages? In other words, in what sense, if any, can we speak of “Greek” theory as a specific conceptual and disciplinary field? The second question arises from our assessment of this specificity. What are the gains and losses of this act of translation, and how could it move beyond the mere application of categories produced elsewhere? Can a language of the periphery, an idiom formulated through acts of translation and retranslation, act to challenge and affect, in turn, the languages it posits as originals?
NOTE 1
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000, 17.
Kostas Yannakopoulos and Yannis Yannitsiotis (eds)
Αμφισβητούμενοι χώροι στην πόλη: Χωρικές προσεγγίσεις του πολιτισμού [Contested spaces in the city: spatial approaches to culture] Athens: Alexandria and University of the Aegean, 2010. 380 pp. Dina Vaiou National Technical University of Athens This edited volume, Contested spaces in the city, is the outcome of a day-long conference organised by the Department of Social Anthropology and History of the University of the Aegean. It contains a long introduction and ten papers loosely articulated around issues to do with the social constitution of (urban) space and the different ways in which multiple spatialities in the city are continuously formed and contested. The papers broadly place their arguments in ethnographies of material culture and approach the city as a contested space from different perspectives. The majority of contributions are embedded in Anglophone debates, from which ample references are summoned to support the arguments put forward, while occasionally the Greek used reads like a “translation”. Stavros Stavrides briefly traverses two centuries of urban planning/design ideas to argue about the contested and negotiated character of urban public space, through a range of disparate examples. These examples bring to-
gether Haussmannian restructurings in Paris, fascist urban orderings in interwar Italy, the rationalistic schemes of Le Corbusier and the multitude of informal, spontaneous, sometimes illicit, microactions through which urban citizens appropriate public space, even provisionally, contest established uses and potentially contribute to the constitution of alternative forms of social relations.
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Leonidas Economou touches on processes of urbanisation of the urban fringe through the example of Voula, on the southeastern coast of Attica. The state, local politicians and activists and landowners’ associations emerge as the major agents in these processes, while the importance of ownership in the formation of community and the huge transfer of resources to individual owners emerges from the meticulous description of Voula. Voula, like any place, is in many ways particular but not at all unique, as it follows patterns common to a whole host of similar areas around the urban core of Athens in the interwar period. These patterns have been extensively studied and debated in other areas of scientific enquiry, with which Economou does not engage. Kostas Yannakopoulos discusses the constitution of identity/difference through the process of habitation and appropriation of space, drawing from fieldwork in the area of Metaxourgio– Keramikos–Gazi. The process he is concerned with is the settlement of new middle classes in run-down/devalued areas of central Athens, areas in which real estate agencies and contractors are already in action, foreseeing and/ or mobilising processes of gentrification. In the emerging urban landscape, respondents who identify as gay-lesbian-queer find in this area “a central neighbourhood the built environment of which is not already determined mainly as a space of familial normality” (132). For them, poor Greeks, different groups of migrants, gyp219
Book Reviews sies, Pomaks and others who form the mosaic of residents remain a distant scenery or an urban void – which is attractive as long as it remains contained within “decent” proportions. Dimitris Parsanoglou and Elektra Petrakou bring to the foreground of their argumentation young women and men of migrant origin and attempt to link ideas about social space, “second generation” and urban space as a site for the constitution of cultural identities. Aiming to avoid an analysis which places individuals in already established social categories, they study new forms of sociocultural expression in which the site of reference is the city and not the ethnic origin. They convincingly argue that the “spatial” or “local” constitution of identities is an open or indirect form of struggle for inclusion, not only in (urban) space but also in the commons.
220
never exclusively heterosexual; they are rather sites where sexuality is performed, gets exposed to the sight of “others” and excites reactions – all of which destabilise its supposedly “private” character. In this sense, “a kiss is never just a kiss” (218): “personal”/”private” desires made public force us to rethink the ways in which space is de- and recomposed through the performance of gendered identities.
Panos Panopoulos discusses the role of sound technology in the reconceptualisation of relations and experiences in (contested?) urban spaces, like streets and schools. He argues that devices like those studied in his paper (the Walkman and mobile phones) influence our perceptions of public/private space and time: sound privacy in public space, public exposure of private listening and communication. Our perceptions of the city cross over/through particular soundscapes, permitting users to operate in more than one space/s, creating spatial links and drawing attention to sensations other than visual ones.
Athena Athanasiou contributes yet another original and interesting piece based on her research with Women in Black in Belgrade. Her argument is organised around five themes which run through the entire paper: the politics of transgressive mourning and public feminist resistance to the dominant national politics of memory and oblivion; the transformation of the urban square (a site par excellence of national normativity and nation myth) into a space of intimacy and a public performance of estrangement; the transgression of public/private boundaries through the embodied, gendered, performative politics of “improper” mourning; the transformation of black clothing, a conventional symbol of patriarchal femininity, into a subversive practice; the ways in which different stories contest one another for a place in history. According to Athanasiou, Women in Black show how urban spaces linked to national memory may be recaptured as heterotopias of resistance, which lay open and amplify the space of national memory as political space and space of politics.
Venetia Kantsa approaches space from a gender and sexuality perspective, raising questions about the right to be “publicly” visible through “private” choices, thereby problematising analytically the distinction between public and private. Her fieldwork into lesbian spaces in Athens in the 1990s provides a coherent and interesting argument, both in theoretical and empirical terms, of how urban spaces are
Yannis Yannitsiotis presents the social confrontations around the localisation of an equestrian statue of Aris Velouchiotis in a central square of Lamia. He uses this as a starting point to discuss processes of memory formation, which take place in particular times and spaces and engage particular groups and individuals. Oppositional mythologies, left and right in this case, mobilise diverse disputes to do with re-
determinations of public memory in local society and point to the importance of visibility and location for the constitution of such memory. Pausanias Karathanasis locates his argument about contested spaces on the walls of buildings which are appropriated by graffitists. The analysis focuses on different types of graffiti and dominant perceptions about the walls of the city, summoning a Latourian approach, following which graffiti are thought to have agency, an assertion which is not persuasively analysed further. Karathanasis considers graffiti as a “classic case of transgressive behaviour in the city” (343), a case of “heretic geography” (343), a “result of a structured form of youth urban culture” (344) which promotes different perspectives and uses of space. Eleana Yalouri, finally, discusses the role of monuments in remembering and forgetting and the ways in which the past serves present priorities in this process. Although built monuments or monuments in space occupy a prominent position in her argument, other types of monuments are also mentioned (language, song, proverbs, narratives, etc.), as well as antimonuments (for the Holocaust, for example). Here monuments are thought to be agents, with biographies and social lives, in the sense that they influence people, raising feelings of joy, fear, anger, sadness – thereby affecting people’s social lives. Furthermore, they are not permanent or stable, but rather changing, multifaceted and subject to contestation, giving rise to dialogues between past and present. As already mentioned, the papers included in this volume loosely follow a linking thread set out by the editors, namely the “constitution of power and resistance through space and, conversely, the constitution of spatiality through power and resistance” (11). To engage with spaces of contestation and resistance, most
papers make extensive reference to Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, which takes different contents as it adjusts to different analyses. Furthermore, almost all contributors pay homage to Lefebvre’s conception of space as socially produced and as a critical part of social relations: the sociospatial dialectic strongly argued for by a number of prominent Anglophone Marxist and critical geographers since the 1970s and later rediscovered in other fields and disciplines. This conception, however, is subsequently lost or diluted in theoretical arguments which are drawn from other theorists and different analytical and explanatory frameworks. A case in point here is actor–network theory which attributes agency to nonhumans, thereby obfuscating, contra Lefebvre, structures of domination in the process of constitution and contestation of different spaces and spatialities.
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The papers develop interesting concepts and perspectives about the city, which open many areas of debate and comment. However, I would like to conclude this review by raising an issue which has to do with the constitution of a “scientific community” in Greece in the broad field of urban studies (or study of the urban). For historical reasons to do with the development of various fields and disciplines in this country, which are beyond the scope of this brief review, this field has been populated for many decades by scholars with a background in architecture and planning. A voluminous body of research has been formed and enriched over the years with contributions from younger generations of researchers who grapple with some of the issues approached also in this volume. The contributors to this volume, however, only marginally engage with these “Greek debates”, hence precluding fruitful cross-fertilisation of theoretical arguments and empirical findings. In my view, this is a significant limitation of the volume, despite the many positive aspects which make it a welcome addition to the Greek literature on the subject. 221
Book Reviews
Alexander Kitroeff
Ελλάς, Ευρώπη, Παναθηναϊκός! 100 χρόνια Ελληνικής Ιστορίας, 1908– 2008 [Greece, Europe, Panathinaikos! A century of Greek history, 1908–2008] New York: Greekworks.com, 2010. 344 pp. Pandelis Kiprianos University of Patras A professor of history and director of the Centre for Peace and Global Citizenship at Haveford College, Pennsylvania, Alexander Kitroeff is also a long-time fan of the Athenian football club Panathinaikos. The title of his book declares his intention: to construct a centennial social history of one of the most important and popular Greek sporting clubs, and, from this standpoint, to provide an insight into Greek history. Based on both primary (documents and interviews with some of the protagonists) and secondary sources, the book comprises eleven chapters, corresponding to the respective phases in the club’s history and the evolution of Greek football. As suggested by the title, the history of Panathinaikos, according to the author, is viewed through two frames of reference, the Greek and the European. In other words, Panathinaikos is a Greek club, playing 222
and acting in a given national context, while, at the same time, it defines itself as a European club, aiming to be considered among the best in Europe. After having outlined, in the first chapter, the first years of the existence of Panathinaikos and of sports in Greece, the author focuses, in the following two chapters, on the institutionalisation, initially, and the prevalence, thereafter, of football as the “king of sports”. In the fourth chapter, the author analyses the period from 1945 to 1959, during which football came of age. The sixth chapter covers the team’s six “golden” years, from 1960 to 1965, a period during which Panathinaikos dominated the Greek football league. The seventh chapter recounts one of the greatest, if not the greatest, moments in the history of Panathinaikos, the epic “playing at Wembley”, in the finals of the European Champion Clubs’ Cup. In the eighth chapter, Kitroeff deals with what he terms the “end of an epoch”, which means the years from Wembley to 1979, a period marked by the weakening of Panathinaikos and by the transition of Greek football – in 1979 – from a semiprofessional to a fully professional sport. The book can certainly be read chronologically, chapter by chapter, as a clear and pleasant narrative on the history of a club and its activities in a given national and international context, but it can also be seen as a portrait of interconnected issues concerning the whole of Greek society. We will, hence, focus on some of these topics, analysed by the author, which have not only marked football and sports but Greek society as a whole. The ideological orientations of sporting leaders until the eve of the Second World War mirrored their preference for classical athletics, which were considered as the Greek
sport par excellence. “And this”, Kitroeff says, “because classical athletics referred back to ancient Greece and served the ideology of the historical continuity of Hellenism from antiquity to the present. The use of classical athletics as an ideological tool led in 1934 to the failed attempt to revive them, through events tailored to the way the ancient Greeks competed” (83). This project was not adopted by the public, because football, especially after the Asia Minor Catastrophe, kept on winning fans, and consequently football ended up being, as noted in a sports newspaper in 1932, the “king of sports” in Greece. The appeal of football is also reflected in its political reception and use. We know that Nikolaos Plastiras, two days before handing over power to the Fourth National Assembly, made his last public appearance as leader of the revolution on Sunday, 30 December 1923, among the masses watching the football match between Athens and Piraeus at the velodrome in Neo Faliro.1 Since then, Kitroeff shows, the relationship between football and politics has remained complicated. Konstantinos Karamanlis appeared in May 1956 at the Cup game between Panathinaikos and Olympiakos, at the Alexandras Avenue grounds: “he cracked an Easter egg with the captains of the two teams and then immediately left” (85). Some years later, and after the period of the dictatorship of the Colonels, who invested in football in order to keep some balance, the relationship between football and politics became closer. It is also important to recall that at various times many prominent politicians (from Kostas Kotzias to George Rallis) served on the Panathinaikos board. Throughout the book, the author deals with a topical aspect of football. Opposing a somewhat romantic approach, which tends to idealise the past, Kitroeff shows that violence is
not a current phenomenon, although in recent years it has increased. Violent phenomena can be identified particularly in the early games between Panathinaikos and Olympiakos in the 1920s and 1930s. However, Kitroeff says, violence began to increase after 1945. Related to violence and sporting passions are two issues: the organisation of football and the role of supporters. We know that, over time, football lost its amateur character and became more and more professional, a fact which is reflected in the goals and practices of the parties involved. This development is reflected in the structure of the game, the publicity it enjoys, its rules, and, of course, the salaries of the players and their perception by society. The change has been so important that, if we follow Johan Huizinga’s argument,2 we could say that football is no longer a game.
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This progress, marked by several episodes, most prominent among them being the exclusion by the competent authorities of most of the international football players from the Greek national team in 1953, an incident that is the theme of Vasilis Georgiadis’ well-known film Κυριακάτικοι ήρωεςς (Aces of Football). This change continued through the creation, in 1959, of the national championship, which opened the way for “semiprofessionalism” and, twenty years later, in 1979, of professional football companies and the transition to professionalism. This development was not linear. A whole generation, incarnated by the emblematic figure of the former player and club president Apostolos Nikolaidis, attempted to salvage the values of amateurism and fair play. A result of this tradition, according the author, is the continuing interest shown by Panathinaikos in promoting a large number of sports other than football. Here too, perhaps, are the 223
Book Reviews origins of the epithet “vazeles”, a term for the team’s fans which dates from the 1950s. “The persistence in Panathinaikos,” Kitroeff writes, “of the bourgeois-based ideal of fair play and distance that this maintained to popular violence (and one version of masculinity, too) resulted in Panathinaikos supporters being called ‘Vaselines’, later ‘Vazeles’” (106). Parallel to the nationalisation and professionalisation of football, the process of organising supporters, particularly through the establishment of fan clubs, is worthy of consideration. This organisation of supporters played an influential role in the life of teams, especially the “big ones”. “Fan clubs,” Kitroeff writes, “existed since the beginning of the first division. They were basically local organisations in different areas of Athens which coordinated and had a relationship with the club” (152). The collective expression of feelings from the stands, he continues, “took a more coordinated form early in the 1966-1967 season when a group of supporters gathered at the stand’s Gate 13. In 1968, Gate 13 was founded as the first organised fan association in Greece, and it was the forerunner of the associations that followed and multiplied after 1981, when the Panhellenic Club of Panathinaikos Friends (PALEFIP) was established. I shall conclude with two critical issues, aptly analysed by Kitroeff, which have always beset both Greek football clubs and Greek society as a whole: the trust in institutions and the relationship with the surrounding world. The world of sports does not trust its own institutions. The distrust in football is paradigmatically reflected in “the lord of the match”, the referee, who should treat both teams fairly. For this reason, until 1967 well-known foreign referees were asked to ref major matches. While the referees have been Greek since then, the problem has not been solved; in224
deed, it could be said that it has worsened with the exposure of the “paragka” (literally “shack”), a term, the author notes, which is used to describe match-fixing (275). Greek athletics, and football in particular, are a mirror of the relations between Greeks and “foreigners”, westerners and easterners. The image is reflected in the performance of Greek teams at all levels, too. In the words of the author: “The world of Greek football stood in awe and respect in the face of the powerful countries and football teams of Europe. They were considered as standards and examples to be imitated. This attitude had to do more with a general view on the relationship between Greece and Western Europe, which constituted the ideal developmental and cultural model or, better, the source of different models that the country had to embrace. The dissidents to this view, for ideological reasons, considered the socialist countries of Eastern Europe as the key standards. In any case, in the international football industry there were no ideological differences which intersected the East–West axis: everyone admired the big names of Europe as a whole” (163). This picture is quite different from that of the political level, in which admiration for the West and particularly the European Union is overshadowed by its sceptical reception. This deviation can be read as an expression of the relative autonomy of sport from political ideologies. In any case, the participation of Greek teams in European cup competitions created new conditions for Greek sports and, especially, football. “Thus, the European orientation of the club,” Kitroeff concludes, referring to Panathinaikos, “found a new field of expression, especially with its first European successes and, of course, the crowning moment of its appearance in the Champi-
ons League final in 1971. Then, the successful course of the team over the coming decades has crystallised the view that Panathinaikos is predominantly a ‘European’ team, the praiseworthy ambassador of domestic football in Europe, in a period especially during which Greece was taking its place among the countries of the European Community.”
NOTES 1
2
Christos Hadziiossif, “Κοινοβούλιο και δικτατορία” [Parliament and dictatorship], in idem (ed.), Ιστορία της Ελλάδας του 20ού αιώνα: Ο μεσοπόλεμος 1922-1940 [The history of Greece in the twentieth century: the interwar years, 1922-1940], 2 vols, Athens: Vivliorama, 2003, vol 2/1:101. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, Boston: Beacon 1955 (1938).
Susan E. Alcock
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Αρχαιολογίες του ελληνικού παρελθόντος: Τοπία, μνημεία και αναμνήσεις Athens: Alexandria, 2011. 407 pp.
Archaeologies of the Greek Past: Landscapes, Monuments and Memories Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 222 pp. Dimitris Plantzos University of Ioannina
Susan Alcock’s Archaeologies of the Greek Past, first published in 2002 and now translated into Greek, revisits Greek archaeology in an effort to investigate how successive versions of the classical past – its earlier strata as it were – are “re-remembered” through material culture. Alcock’s endeavour was, back when the book was written, fuelled by more than a decade’s solid theoretical work on cultural memory and its collective manifestations, thus turning memory, hitherto deemed irrelevant to historical discourse and consequently banned from it, into a legitimate academic subject. Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory, for one, taught modern historians that memory – rather than merely being “an image bank of the past” – is dialectically related to history.1 Though Alcock does not seem to have consulted Samuel’s tour-de-force, she nonetheless subscribes 225
Book Reviews to his main premise, though by now in serious risk of sounding frightfully stereotypical, that remembering and forgetting the past is essential for the forging of individual and collective identities. As general interest in social remembering has been rising since the early 1990s, novel ways of assessing the past and its memory, especially within the nation framework, are constantly sought, “where the general and the particular, epochal and eventful, inform each other iteratively in scholarship as they do in life”.2 Alcock bases her research on Jan Assmann’s central thesis on cultural memory and what he termed the “memory culture” (Erinnerungskultur), r that is the ways in which a given society ensures cultural continuity through repetitious, quasi-ceremonial reference to the past, thus allowing later generations to reconstruct their collective cultural identity.3 Through successive revisitings, memory thus becomes the locus where the past takes its shape. Maintaining that social memory provides any given society with an image for its past and “a plan for [its] future” (21, Greek edition), Alcock embarks on her effort to reconstruct these images, plans and visions in the past itself,f that is an effort to reconstruct social memory through the material remains of the very culture by which such memory was entertained. Her conviction may be described as this: memory gains tactility through its traces on the material culture; since the artefacts left behind by an ancient society are themselves the products of cultural mnemonics, having been created as manifestations of a shared past in the first place, then they may stand as memory’s material self (49). Alcock is right to state that, although archaeologists have begun (at least back in 2002) to comprehend the power hiding in their data, social memory as a dynamic agent in ancient societies remains largely underes226
timated (50). She then proceeds to “push” the memory discourse back in time, as far back as the ancient Mediterranean. The author then begins her investigation of her chosen archaeologies, in the face of three case studies: the Roman province of Achaia, on the ambivalent encounter between classical Greece and classicising Rome, a game of imperial politics played on a seemingly vacant cultural landscape which was thoroughly reinvented in order to be exploited; Hellenistic and Roman Crete, a tale of two islands against the backdrop of their (revisited) Minoan past; and Messenia as the archaeological landscape of many an “imagined community”, ethnic and cultural. Alcock’s accounts are thorough, lucid and thought provoking. Archaeology – she maintains – is not merely the sum of our digs, nor even the sum of our fully documented, abundantly illustrated catalogues. According to Alcock, archaeologies ought to be meaningful accounts of the past in view of the viable considerations of the present. Archaeologies are in fact, the author contends, histories of landscapes, monuments and – beyond all that – memories, a systematic rethinking of our primary material sources. Inevitably, the study of social memory heralds for the classical archaeologists their (grossly overdue) loss of innocence (295), the rather exhilarating admission that the past lies beyond its material remains. And this is when Alcock seems to be somewhat missing the point. Some of her discussion in Archaeologies of the Greek Pastt derives from her earlier, seminal book Graecia Capta, published in 1993.4 There, Alcock used in exemplary fashion results obtained through territorial surveys of mostly rural Greek sites in order to suggest that “instead of a cultural haven, an imaginary world, or a museum locked in spiritual twilight, Greece
under Roman rule must be understood as a society in the process of change, adapting and assimilating itself to a new position within an imperial system” (230). These adaptations and assimilations are now retheorised, in Archaeologies, within the cultural memory discourse. This reviewer, however, cannot avoid the suspicion that, even though Alcock’s readings of material culture are indeed most perceptive, she takes cultural memory as yet another artefact available to her scrutiny, a material remain of the past to be excavated, classified and interpreted. Her archaeologies are indeed the by now well-familiar, modern archaeologies of a distant past, which we, as independent academics of an uninvolved era, are free to discuss, critique and illuminate. Alcock is obviously taking the point of an archaeology in the Foucauldian sense, focusing on the processes, conscious or unconscious, and the ideological strategies deployed by local communities in order to articulate their cultural identity along the collective memory/collective oblivion axis.5 Her discussion of rural and civic landscapes as dynamic fields of cultural diversity in her work proves as much. One is left, however, with the paradox of having – as a historian – to treat ancient memories as modern histories. It is indicative that whereas in chapter 1 of Archaeologies the author admits that – far from being agents of objective wisdom – archaeologists and historians alike are often responsible for the invention, the rewriting, or the erasure of monuments, landscapes or texts (73–74), the agency of the presentt archaeologist/historian is virtually absent from the detailed accounts that follow. As a matter of fact, the author begins her Cretan chapter with a critique, rather harsh, of a previous author – John Pendlebury (1904–1941), who compared, in his 1939 book The Archaeology of Crete,6 Roman Crete with its idolised Bronze Age precursor. The
accuracy of such a comparison notwithstanding, it would be rather interesting to have at this point an exploration of how Pendlebury might have forged his own Cretan cultural and sentimental involvement with the island and its past, or to what extent Cretan archaeologies were affected by the active presence of the Knossos curator who, as a British intelligence service agent, was executed by German troops during the Battle of Crete (he was taken captive but was shot because he was mistaken for a Greek partisan).
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While Alcock is right to talk, reflecting on previous literature, of a certain “memory industry” blossoming in interdisciplinary academia in recent few decades, I would have hoped, however, for a more in-depth account of how modern archaeologists “remember” what they know. This problem is far from resolved, and although we now know that the cultures we inhabit and the memories we inherit shape our archaeologies of the past – Greek or other – we are in no position to say exactly how this happens, and how it affects the integrity of our discourse. And this is a direction we ought to be taking.
NOTES 1
Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, vol. 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture, London and Lew York: Verso, 1994, x.
2
Jeffrey K. Olick, States of Memory: Continuities, Conflicts, and Transformations in National Retrospection, Durham and London: Duke UP, 2003, 5.
3
Chiefly, Jan Assmann, “Kollektives Gedächtnis und kulturelle Identität”, in Jan Assmann and Tonio Hölscher (eds), Kultur und Gedächtnis, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988, 9–19; Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen 227
Book Reviews Hochkulturen, Munich: Beck, 1992; Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”, New German Critique 65 (1995), 125–33. 4
Susan E. Alcock, Graecia Capta: The Landscapes of Roman Greece, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.
5
Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”, in Donald F. Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977, 139–64.
6
John D. Pendlebury, The Archaeology of Crete: An Introduction, London: Methuen, 1939, 365.
Polymeris Voglis
Η ελληνική κοινωνία στην Κατοχή 1941–1944 [Greek society during the occupation, 1941–1944] Athens: Alexandria, 2011. 182 pp. Nikos Tzafleris University of Athens Polymeris Voglis’ study fulfils the role of a comprehensive synopsis of the historiography on the turbulent years of the Second World War and the Axis occupation of Greece. His study, however, goes far beyond that to serve as a textbook for the university student and an introduction for the broader audience to the public discussion on that historical period. Rather, and above all, it serves as a solid basis for new research in the field since it incorporates much of the enormous body of contemporary bibliographic production – particularly since 1990 – on the subject, which Voglis critically utilises to summarise, chronologically and thematically, the most significant events of that complex period. Moreover, he emphasises the points where contemporary research surpasses or refutes older historiographical givens. Being himself part of a younger generation of historians, who, with no living memory of the past, enjoy the advantage of being at a safe distance from the facts, Voglis has dared to write a balanced analysis, away from the polemics, demagogy and extremes of past generations, who were bound by their political affiliation and their personal involvement in the events.
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The historiography of the last two decades are Voglis’ primary reservoir of sources and arguments. We may discern five basic axes in his narrative: the refuting of myths by utilising professional historiographical interpretations which are based more on primary sources than on political and ideological polemics; the placing of society and social history at the centre of his analysis; the incorporation of local dimensions into the wider historical framework, hence enriching the general picture; the comparison of how cities and the countryside experienced occupation; and the use of the concept of violence as a key interpretative tool in the historical appraisal of the period. Voglis demonstrates rather clearly that the embedded memory that is based more on myth and less on the study of the archival sources no longer suffices for the interpretation of history. In this new historiography, the Albanian epic (the victories of the Greek forces in the Albanian front against the invading Italians), was not only the result of the enthusiasm and heroism of the Greek soldiers but also the outcome of certain factors, such as the underpreparedness and faulty strategic choices of the Italian army; the particular morphology of the terrain and the harsh climate conditions that prevented the full development of large forces; and the numerical superiority of the Greek army after its full mobilisation in the first stages of the conflict. Moreover, society was quick to organise and mobilise itself, a fact that should partly be attributed to the mass participation in associations such as the National Youth Organisation (EON), built up in the interwar period under Metaxas’ authoritarian regime.1 The battle of Crete did not really delay the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Contemporary research focuses more on the unprecedented participation of the local population in this battle and on German retaliation against civilians. Moreover, Voglis explores recent research on the turbu-
lent relations of Greeks with the country’s minorities, which overturns the embellished view of the close relations between Jews and Christians, reveals a widespread anti-Semitism and the hostile behaviour in general against these unwanted compatriots.
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The very title of the book prepares the reader for the writer’s intentions. Society lies at the centre of the analysis. Voglis follows the most significant methodological turn in the historiography in the last two decades: the shift from political and military to social history. His aim is to focus on the developments within Greek society during the occupation which resulted from the special conditions of wartime and the social reality of interwar Greece. The hundreds of thousands of refugees from Asia Minor had not been fully integrated into Greek society while a number of minorities were still trying to find their place in the new environment of northern Greece. The military occupation by three totalitarian regimes, which occurred within the context of a global, multifrontal, totalitarian war, added to the social tensions of interwar Greece. Voglis’ chapter on the dismantling of the economy joins the debate within Greek historiography for a more complete study and evaluation of the economy of that period. In place of the once fragmented historiography of the wartime looting of the country, and the resulting famine, death and the black market, new studies have emerged on subjects such as forced labour inside Greece and on labour that was forced or went voluntarily to work in the the Reich, economic collaboration and the use of Greek industry to support the German war economy. Amid the dismantling of the economy and the deadly famine of the first winter under occupation (1941–1942), the situation within Greek society was explosive: the traditional civic political forces were locked in dispute over their political leverage in postwar Greece 229
Book Reviews and, like the collaborationist government, they seemed incapable of handling the situation.
which adopted the tactic of collective responsibility in response to partisan attacks.
It was at that time that new political forces came into the picture, the National Liberation Front (EAM) being the most important of all, placing resistance and national liberation at the forefront. The struggle for survival in the cities caused the first collective reactions against the occupiers (strikes, demonstrations and consumers’ cooperatives). The radical antifascist ideological character of the resistance organisations unified the masses and it was the ΕΑΜ that succeeded in uniting most of these forces and organising most of the resistance actions. Voglis attempts to interpret the resistance as a total social phenomenon, decisive for the developments within Greek society under occupation. He tries to explain the characteristics which made this movement so popular and massive by turning to the social basis of the power which helped it emerge. Lastly, he demonstrates the social, political and cultural changes that the EAM brought to wartime Greece.
The fate of the minorities during the occupation remained a taboo for earlier historical accounts. The occupation brought to the surface conflicts that had formed during the interwar period, when the Greek state implemented a policy of national homogenisation by hellenising the “new territories”, those regions in northern Greece annexed from the Ottoman Empire from 1912 onwards. During the occupation the unfortunate fate of the minorities was decided, with the exception of the Muslims of Thrace. On the initiative of the Germans and with the participation of the state, the majority of Greek Jews was exterminated, while the Chams (an Albanian-speaking minority in Greek Epirus) were persecuted by the National Republican Greek League (EDES). In the case of the Slavo-Macedonians, opposing forces within the minority led to some of its members to join EAM and others to participate in armed collaboration.
It is due to the social conditions of the occupation that, according to Voglis, EAM prevailed over other organisations but also met with the reaction of the anti-EAM forces. The collapse of state institutions expanded the EAM’s popular leverage as it succeeded to implement, within the regions it controlled and alongside the Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS), institutions that enabled the direct participation of the people in political affairs. These institutions introduced citizens to the idea of active participation in public affairs, with the result that local societies controlled – but were also controlled by – EAM. The relation of ELAS with local societies was one of codependence because it relied on them for supplies but also protected them from the occupiers. However, it was also a relationship that was often tested due to the retaliations of the occupation forces, 230
From 1990 onwards, there has been an abundance of studies analysing the social conditions at a local level under occupation. In his study, Voglis takes advantage of this and incorporates the local differences and particularities into the general historiographical picture of that period. This leads us to appreciate the complexity of the occupation, the special characteristics of every region of the country and, thus, helps us build a more comprehensive narrative. The historiographical interpretations based on local archives have revealed the different, indeed political, characteristics of the resistance movement in different parts of the country. This turn has reformed the historiographical context of the confrontation between resistance and the occupier, the conflict among resistance groups and the organisation of the armed collaborationist groups. For instance, EDES’ armed wing was organised
more on local kinship structures with each enjoying relative autonomy and less on a political power centre, as was the case with ELAS. Moreover, Voglis points to the scarcity of studies on Athens, which mainly cover the first period of the famine but have little to say about 1943–1944, when civil violence and conflict with the occupier moved from the mountains to the neighbourhoods of the capital. However, Voglis fails to incorporate recent research on the different economic characteristics of the occupation in different areas of the country.2 Another element of Voglis’ narrative is the parallel approach that he takes to unveil the difference between the city and the countryside. He distinguishes between guerrilla warfare in the mountains and resistance in the cities. The former took its characteristics from pillage and a “tradition of mutiny” in the countryside, but during the occupation it gradually acquired more political and ideological characteristics, when rebel groups were formed as military branches of the resistance organisations, gradually developing more political objectives. The latter was more conspiratory and emerged according to the special socioeconomic conditions in the occupied urban area, as previously mentioned. He stresses the famine among the working class and the impoverishment of the middle class as wealth moved from the city to the countryside through the extensive networks of the black market, especially in the first period of the occupation. Moreover, he underlines the massive flows of populations during the occupation and distinguishes between those that went from the cities to the villages through black-market networks during the first winter of the occupation and the flight from the countryside due to German retaliations, cleansing operations and scorched earth tactics, which were applied mostly after the spring–summer of 1943.
The concept of violence as an epistemological interpretive tool is central to Voglis’ analysis, as it is the case for the total of the historiography of the period. A society under occupation is a typically violent society; violence prevails as a total social phenomenon in every aspect of daily life and implicates society as a whole. In this context of violence, Voglis studies at the same time armed collaboration with the occupier, civil conflicts and German retaliations. The violence that arose from the socioeconomic conditions of the occupation, famine and disease brought about the violence of the resistance. German cleansing operations and the widespread retaliation against civilians as a direct result of resistance actions created high tensions between local communities and EAM/ELAS. The impressive growth of EAM/ELAS and its adoption of a hostile stance towards other resistance groups led to a violent clash between them and, then, the latter to collaborate with the Germans. The belief of some politicians and the collaborationist government – fuelled by the Germans – that EAM was planning to seize power after the war, resulted in the arming of the Security Battalions and several other anti-communist groups. Lastly, the purpose of civil violence between EAM and anti-EAM groups – which gradually implicated all levels of Greek society – was the political control of the country after liberation.
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In the last year of the occupation, Athens was the field of the most violent clashes between ΕΑΜ, the collaborationist anticommunist groups and the German forces. As liberation came closer, civil unrest increased, on the foot of accusations from each side about intentions of the other to seize power. After the German withdrawal, the British took over and, joined by the anti-EAM forces, faced EAM during the Battle of Athens, in which the latter was defeated. The events of December 1944 are a landmark in the history of the occupation. Not only do 231
Book Reviews they mark the defeat of the EAM coalition and the dissolution of ELAS, but they were also described in the official discourse as the “second round” of the civil conflict, purportedly caused by KKE in order to seize power by force (the “first round” was the civil conflict between EAM/ ELAS and other resistance groups and the “third round” was the 1946–1949 civil war). This concept resumed after 1989, when the communist Left was connected to totalitarianism and was virtually equated to fascism. In any case, as Voglis rightly puts it, this is an ideological interpretation of history which is not based on the historical context of that period or the special conditions of the occupation. NOTES
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1
Giorgos Margaritis, Από την ήττα στην εξέγερση: Ελλάδα Άνοιξη 1941–Φθινόπωρο 1942 [From defeat to uprising: Greece, Spring 1941–Autumn 1942], Athens: Politis, 1993, 31–47.
2
Until recently, the literature was focused on the case of Athens in order to explain phenomena such as the survival of the urban population through black-market networks, the role of Greek industry during the occupation, labour mobilisations, the sending of labour to the Reich and economic collaboration with the occupier. However, more recent research has tried to explore famine in the large urban centres of the country, the role and contribution of the industrial periphery to the Greek industry as a whole, the survival and resistance of the workers inside the factories and how the network of the economic collaboration with the occupiers and of the exploitation of the country’s resources by the Axis powers spread to other regions outside of Athens. Maria Kavala, Η Θεσσαλονίκη στη γερμανική κατοχή (1941–1944): κοινωνία, οικονομία, διωγμός Εβραίωνν [Thessaloniki under German occupation, 1941–1944: society, economy, persecution of the Jews], unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Crete, 2009; Nikos Tzafleris, Επιβίωση και αντίσταση στο Βόλο
την περίοδο της κατοχής (1941–1944) [Survival and resistance in Volos during the Axis occupation, 1941–1944], unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Thessaly, 2007.
Stratos Dordanas
Η γερμανική στολή στη ναφθαλίνη: Επιβιώσεις του δοσιλογισμού στη Μακεδονία 1945–1974 [The German uniform in mothballs: Collaborationism’s survival in Macedonia, 1945– 1974] Athens: Estia, 2011. 526 pp. Loukianos Hassiotis Aristotle University of Thessaloniki European collaboration with Nazi Germany has always been a prickly matter. The official postwar narrative in Western Europe was organised around the notions of “national resistance” against German occupation or/and the British and American contribution to the defeat of fascism, while in Eastern Europe dominant narratives combined the decisive role of the Red Army and the Soviet Union with (communist or “popular”) resistance against local “fascist” or “reactionary” regimes. Given that the governing elites in the West were mostly concerned with reconstruction, the continuity of the state apparatus, security and political stability, discussions about collaborationism and on the role of collaborationists in the Nazi “new order” or the Holocaust were considered counterproductive. On the other hand, in the new “people’s republics” ethnic cleansing and the seizure of power by communist parties actually promoted the punishment of either actual
or alleged collaborationists. However, even in this case, discussions about cooperation with the Nazis soon faded, in favour of a narrative stressing liberation by the Soviet Union.1
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It took more than two decades for a reappraisal of the issue of European collaboration. Undoubtedly, the spirit of the generation of 1968 played a significant role, since it was a generation that instinctively refused to accept their parents’ version of most things and of the Second World War in particular. It is probably not a coincidence that one of the forerunners of this reappraisal was an outsider, the American historian Robert Puxton: his book Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 represented a turning point in contemporary historiography of the Second World War, in the sense that it highlighted the domestic factors of collaborationism, while at the same time questioning de Gaulle’s argument that French cooperation with the Nazis was limited.2 Many more similar works followed, focusing not only on collaboration during the war, but also on the fate that awaited collaborationists in the postwar period. Historiographical interest in the issue has indeed risen in recent decades. After the end of the Cold War, a reappraisal of several neglected aspects of the Second World War gave rise to the revival of public debates over the experience and the challenges of the 1940s. Moreover, this interest, both scientific and public, reflects a tendency to review memories of the Second World War itself, as they were constructed afterwards in each individual country and in Europe as a whole. The reappraisal of the memory of the war also includes, obviously, the issue of collaboration, and it is often – albeit not always – free of older stereotypes, such as, for example, the quantitative and qualitative downgrading of cooperation with the enemy, or the concept of a “nationwide” resistance. Thus, over the last few years we have witnessed a relative increase in historical publications research233
Book Reviews ing the stories of Nazi collaborators and their subsequent fate, usually in the context of the domestic crisis that European societies experienced during the 1940s, and of the new balance of power that emerged with the Cold War.3 This tendency is also evident in Greece, although the respective historiographical production has been comparatively limited to date. Although we have witnessed an increase in the number of articles (as well as MA or PhD dissertations) dealing with collaborationism and the way in which postwar societies encountered it, monographs remain limited both in number and in scope. Two of them were published in the early 1980s (i.e., in the period when postwar leftwing narratives on occupation and resistance flourished, after decades of censorship and proscription), by ex-members of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS). The more recent books on the same issue were written by Stratos Dordanas and Tasos Kostopoulos.4 This relative lack of published work on the issue of collaborationism in Greece can been partly attributed to technical reasons such as the lack of relevant sources or the inability to access them. At the same time, it is generally accepted that it has to do with other factors as well, such as fear of reactions (or even complaints) as well as the strong emotional reactions and the polemic that continues to accompany the debate on this issue. Of course, these factors are by no means irrelevant to developments around the issue of collaborationism in postwar Greece, that is the general impunity of Nazi collaborators and, moreover, their integration into the postwar regime, in some cases in the forefront and in some in the rearguard of the anti-communist struggle. These developments, although by no means linear, actually prohibited public discussion on the issue of collaborationism until the collapse of the colonels’ dicta234
torship. Thus, as Dordanas accurately notes, the question became “an open wound in the body of Greek society” (409). The return to democracy made possible the historical reappraisal of collaborationism and of the fate of collaborationists, but the relevant discussion remained obscured for political or personal reasons. Dordanas’ book illuminates several aspects of the issue, focusing on the case of collaborationists who were active in Greek Macedonia. His major advantage is that he intercrosses important and generally inaccessible sources from judicial, diplomatic (Greek and foreign), military, prison, hospital or private archives as well as the press and other publications of the period under consideration. The first five chapters of the book examine the efforts to secure justice after liberation from foreign occupation, initially by the National Liberation Front (EAM) and later by the official state authorities, pointing to the problems and contradictions of such an enterprise. The writer describes how the civil war shifted the interest in the prosecution of the collaborationists, enabling them to exploit the circumstances in order to move, once more, against leftists, but also to win the support – or at least the tolerance – of those who were supposed to arrest and try them. Of particular significance is his reference to the “certification industry”, managed by ministers, deputies, military or police officers and other members of the national or local elites of the time, regarding the political and ideological beliefs of the accused collaborationists. These certifications are reminiscent of the public declarations of repentance or loyalty to the postwar regime, or even the letters of gratitude of minors to Queen Frederica. All of them, one could argue, represent common symbols of submission to the post-civil war state, while at the same time reflecting the kind of patron–client relationships that were
constructed during this period. The sixth chapter describes how such relationships permitted later ex-collaborationists (like, for example, Sotirios Gotzamanis, Theodoros Tourkovasilis, Konstantinos Papadopoulos or Dimitrios Theocharidis) to participate in the political landscape, besides giving them the possibility to appoint some of their supporters to the public sector. In this way, according to the writer, “the ethnikofron [national-minded] state closed up its ranks with new and willing anticommunists and pure patriots” (278). The following chapter narrates the exposure of this system in the mid-1960s, particularly in Greek Macedonia, after Grigoris Lambrakis’ murder, in which a number of excollaborationists were implicated. The question of collaboration with Nazi Germany was revived, albeit only temporarily, since the colonels’ dictatorship (chapter 8) tackled it in the way that best fitted its ideological principles, that is with the official recognition of ex-collaborationists as resistance fighters (against “foreign” and “interior” enemies of the nation). The relationship between collaborationists and the colonels remains a very intriguing question; indeed I believe that a specialised essay on the issue would give us very interesting data about the continuities in the Greek extreme rightwing political milieu since the Second World War. Finally, in the last chapter, the author attempts an approach to the construction of contemporary public memory regarding collaborationists. His case study refers to the ceremonies that take place in the town of Kilkis, where the memory of either biological or ideological descendants of those accused of or condemned as collaborationists clashes with the corresponding agents of the leftwing narrative. In short, the author manages to provide a convincing picture of the fate of the collaborationists in postwar Greece. Significant features in his work are his calm and methodical approach and his detached style that avoids denunciations
and does not seek to impress. His contribution, therefore, to the study of collaboration and of its memory is unequivocal; hopefully, his work will soon find followers among colleagues engaged in modern Greek and European history.
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NOTES 1
Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century, London, Penguin, 1998, 233–240; István Deák, Jan Tomasz Gross, Tony Judt (eds), The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and its Aftermath, Princeton UP, 2000, and Claudio Pavone, “The General Problem of the Continuity of the State and of the Legacy of Fascism”, in Jonathan Dunnage (ed.), After the War: Violence, Justice, Continuity and Renewal in Italian Society, Market Harborough, Troubador, 1999, 5–20.
2
Robert Puxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944, New York, Knopf, 1972.
3
For a brief synopsis of the postwar debate over collaboration and resistance, see the preface by Tony Judt in The Politics of Retribution in Europe, and in particular, vii–xii. For the French case, see the classic Henry Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy: De 1944 à nos jours, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1990.
4
Nikos Karkanis, Οι δωσίλογοι τηςς κατοχής: Δίκες παρωδία (ντοκουμένατα-αποκαλύψεις-μαρτυρίες) [Collaborationists during the occupation: mockery trials (documents–disclosures–testimonies)], Athens, Synchroni Epochi, 1981; Yannis K. Douatzis, Οι Ταγματασφαλήτες: Ντοκουμέντα από τα αρχεία τους που τεκμηριώνουν την εγκληματική τουςς δράση στην Εύβοια τα χρόνια της Κατοχής [The Security Battalions: documents from their archives proving their criminal activity in Evia during the occupation], Athens, Tolidis, 1983; Tasos Kostopoulos, Η αυτολογοκριμένη μνήμη: Τα Τάγματα Ασφαλείας και η μεταπολεμική εθνικοφροσύνη [The self-censored memory: the Security Battalions and postwar ethikofrosini], i Athens: Filistor, 2005; Stratos N. Dordanas, Έλληνες εναντίον 235
Book Reviews Ελλήνων: Ο κόσμος των Ταγμάτων Ασφαλείας στην κατοχική Θεσσαλονίκη, 1941–1944 [Greeks against Greeks: the Security Battalions’ world in occupied Thessaloniki,1941–1944], Thessaloniki: Epikentro, 2006. We should also add the collective volume by Iakovos Michailidis, Ilias Nikolakopoulos and Hagen Fleischer (eds), «Εχθρός» εντός των τειχών. Όψεις του δωσιλογισμού στην Ελλάδα της Κατοχής [‘Enemy’ within the gates: Aspects of collaboration in occupied Greece], Athens, Ellinika Grammata, 2006, as well as a couple of unpublished monographs: Eleni Haidia, Ο δωσιλογισμός στη Μακεδονία: Τα πρακτικά των δικών των δωσιλόγων, 1945–1946 (Collaborationism in Macedonia: The records of the collaborationists’ trials, 1945–1946), MA thesis, Thessaloniki, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 1995, and Dimitris Kasouris, Une épuration ordinaire (1944–1949): Histoire des procès des collaborateurs en Grèce, unpublished PhD thesis, Paris, L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2009.
Sotiris Walden
Παράταιροι εταίροι: Ελληνική δικτατορία, κομμουνιστικά καθεστώτα και Βαλκάνια 1967–1974 [Unseemly partners: The Greek dictatorship, communist regimes and the Balkans, 1967–1974] Athens: Polis, 2009. 800 pp. Yiorgos Stathakis University of Crete Sotiris Walden’s book has been much awaited, for two reasons. Firstly, because it refers to the period of the dictatorship in Greece, an underresearched period to which any fresh contribution is welcomed. Secondly, because it examines an issue, that is, the relations of the dictatorship with the communist world, which at the time raised a lot of debate among the political movements that were fighting the regime in Greece, and primarily among the Left-oriented student movement, which was inclined to favour the political and economic isolation of the country, both from Western and Eastern Europe. Political isolation from Western Europe had started to produce results, with the expulsion of Greece from the Council of Europe in late 1969. Economic relations, on the other hand, were not affected, despite the “freezing” of the association agreement with the Common Market. Until 1973, the Greek economy continued
236
to have an impressive growth pattern, which was based on investment and exports directed to the Western European market and tourism coming from the same market. The “opening to the East” of the Athens regime and the response of the communist bloc was of crucial importance in terms of breaking its political isolation, while in economic terms it was less certain, at the time, how important it was. Here then is an excellent study using practically most of the available diplomatic records and other sources to investigate the changing pattern of the relations of the regime in Athens with the communist Balkan and Central European countries, the USSR and China. It is a study on political and international relations, not on economic relations, which are obviously discussed, but in a separate chapter. There is also an extensive record of the bilateral relations of Greece with each and every country at the end of the book. Finally, there is a detailed account of certain areas of economic cooperation in fields such as energy, tourism, transport and some others. Yet the primary focus of the book is on the diplomatic and political relations and how the changing architecture of international relations affected the specific relations of the Athens regime with the communist world. The conclusion is, more or less, expected and well documented. There is nothing special about the economic relations of Greece with the Eastern bloc. Preexisting patterns continued, with some short intervals. Eastern Europe had been very important in the past as a market for specific agricultural products. Actually Greece had, in relative terms, among the Western European countries, by far the highest share of trade with the East. Trade was not done through free exchange, but through the restrictive clearing system. Thus, it had to be more or less balanced and a certain pattern of trade was already there, which continued with minor fluctuations that
were determined by politics. Yet, there is not much to be added. As the Greek economy was experiencing a boom period, in which most of the trade was developing with Western Europe, the relative role of Eastern Europe rather declined. The study is very certain and conclusive on this point. In economic terms there is no indication that there was either growth or a special development of any kind. In economic terms, relations developed practically after 1974.
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Economics is not the key in order to explain political relations. That is why and under what circumstances political initiatives were taken, what were the primary objectives of the dictatorship for such political “openings”, why did the communist world respond in specific ways and to what extent international factors influenced the changing pattern of these relations. The book provides a very extensive and detailed account of these relations, distinguishing three subperiods: the first two years, when many economic and political relations were “frozen”, followed by the period from 1970 to 1972, when there was an obvious “opening” of the dictatorship towards the communist world, and, finally, the last three years (1972–1974), which was a rather inconsistent phase. The international framework was full of major events of crucial importance. It was a period when the Cold War was undermined by a gradual shift towards peaceful coexistence. Yet, the ongoing conflicts were intense. The war in Vietnam, the two Arab–Israeli wars, the Soviet–Chinese conflict, the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia, the intervention in Chile and other political developments were of major importance. The opening of the US to China and the opening of China to the rest of the world were also crucial. Of primary importance in the Greek context was, of course, the Cyprus question, where the dictatorship was working on the removal of President Makarios. 237
Book Reviews The basic proposition of the book is the fact that the relations of the dictatorship with the communist world were determined primarily by the initiatives taken by the Greek side, rather than vice versa. The communist camp offered a rather constant response. It retained its polemic against the Greek regime, all the way through. Yet at the same time, it was positive to the idea of keeping normal economic relations in place and offered a positive response to specific common projects in energy, transport and other sectors. It also favoured the normalisation of political relations, which included cultural exchanges and other agreements. Thus, most of the explanation of the changes lies with the more systematic analysis of the changing perceptions and initiatives of the dictatorship. This is what the book does for each subperiod. Until the end of 1969, the Greek dictatorship did not question existing relations. It made assurances that political change was an internal matter for Greece, that it would keep its Nato obligations and would keep good relations with countries with a different political system. Yet anticommunism had been presented as the main reason for the army’s intervention and was the predominant element in the new regime’s ideology. Thus, in the first phase existing relations were affected. Companies with agreements with Eastern Europe were all viewed with suspicion and any economic relations were scrutinised as being potentially threatening to political stability. The same is also true for the other side. The communist bloc was very polemical against the dictatorship and its American patrons. It insisted that it had negatively affected economic relations, including tourism. Then, gradually, the regime stabilised its rule and the pressure from Western Europe increased. The 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia presented a whole range of problems for the Soviet bloc. Yugoslavia turned 238
completely to a Western orientation, Romania searched for an independent role and Albania left the Warsaw Pact altogether. Bulgaria was the only Balkan country to openly support the Soviet Union, but at a cost of being isolated. Within this disintegrating framework, all countries sought new “openings”, and the Mediterranean world was an obvious one. During 1969, this became evident. The Soviet Union was under pressure and the policy shift towards Greece was underway, as was the case with East Germany, which was among its closest allies and until then had no formal relations with Greece. There were concrete signs in favour of normalising relations with the Greek regime. Yet 1970 and 1971 became the period when the “opening to the East” of the Athens regime took place. It was in any case the peak period of the dictatorship. It strengthened its relations with Washington after its expulsion from the Council of Europe, improved its relations with Ankara and responded positively to China’s openings in the Balkans and the Mediterranean countries. Even more, peaceful coexistence was underway. From December 1969 to February 1970 the Western press talked about the “opening to the East” of the Greek Colonels, probably exaggerating the situation. This period was also marked by the official visit of the Bulgarian foreign minister in May 1970. Yet with regard to the Soviet Union, the warm period did not last. After the assassination attempt on Makarios in March, Soviet–Greek relations were again “frozen”. The relations with the Eastern bloc became primarily a Balkan affair. By 1971 there was a lot of mobility in the Balkans. Diplomatic relations were established for the first time with Albania. There were impor-
tant relations with Bulgaria, with mutual visits of foreign ministers. Romania became another country that received a visit during 1971 from the Greek foreign minister. At a point there was the idea of a Balkan cooperation project, but the idea never really took off. In effect this mobility had no real economic effect or any significant political outcome. However, it was successful as a form of political communication. The “opening to the East” was an issue taken with the support of Britain and the US and, likewise, the Soviet Union backed Bulgaria in its efforts. There is little doubt that the communist world in the Balkans was falling apart. Albania had a new relationship with China, Yugoslavia had moved towards the West, Romania had chosen a more independent stance within the Warsaw Pact and Bulgaria remained very proSoviet. Within this disintegrating atmosphere, the “opening” policy of the Colonels was a new political space, where no country, given the existing conflicts between them, would leave for the others. In the long, second part of the book, there is some excellent analysis of the relations with each and every country, of the successive changes of policy and the very specific type and areas of exchanges that were, in each case, important. In the third and final subperiod, there was a six-month term in 1972 when relations were not good because of the facilities provided to the US Navy in Athens, an event which produced a lot of tension. Then in the second half, until November 1973, relations became normal again. After the coming to power of Dimitris Ioannidis, things became more intense, reaching their worst point with the events in Cyprus. During the Ioannidis period, there was not a single political exchange. Economic relations were undermined as the agreements that had been reached in the previous period concerning important new projects were all
cancelled. In any case, the fact that Ioannidis was the strongman behind the scenes made the standard diplomatic processes less functional. During this last period, the whole of the communist bloc, including Yugoslavia, became very critical of the Athens regime.
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HISTOREIN
Another question refers to the Greek Left and the way it responded to the developing relations which undermined the isolation objective. The non-communist movement was very quick to criticise this approach, arguing for the independent, “third way” between the two superpowers. Yet, after some time they tended to view this “opening” as a trick on the part of the dictatorship, taken in order to counteract the political isolation imposed by Western Europe and to keep up American pressure on Western Europe for a softer political treatment. The Communist Party of Greece (KKE), already split in two, turned the issue into another area of ideological conflict. The eurocommunist KKE (Interior) was more critical of these relations. Although it was careful to support the processes of peaceful coexistence already underway, it insisted, however, on a stricter policy towards undemocratic regimes such as the one in Greece. The pro-Soviet KKE (Exterior) did not question the policies of the Soviet bloc, and at the same time it was very critical of the KKE (Interior) on this issue, as it thought that the latter was adopting double standards on the same subject. In addition, it viewed the development of such relations as a potential weapon against the official anti-communist ideology of the regime. The final question treated is this very foundation of the foreign policy of the dictatorship, given that most officers had little if any idea of or experience in such activities. To what extent can their foreign policy be taken seriously. The response to this question is the continuation 239
Book Reviews of the diplomatic service and the use of diplomats as acting foreign ministers, irrespective of which officer seemed be in charge. This explains part of the story, because the study of the Cypriot question, which was the main issue where the dictatorship developed its own ideas, was a tragedy. Yet this question requires a more comprehensive analysis of both Greek–Turkish and Greek–Cypriot relations. In conclusion, this excellent book provides the most comprehensive analysis of the subject under examination. It is guaranteed to remain a permanent reference for future research on the politics and economics of the dictatorship. And such research is very much needed.
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historein ιστορειν
2011
ISSN: 110 8 -3 4 4 1
11 2011
9 7 7 1 1 0 8 3 4 4 0 06
www.nnet.gr
NEFELI PUBLISHERS
Pierre Nora Jörn Rüsen Wolfgang Benz Luigi Cajani Antoon De Baets
