Eurocentrism in European History and Memory 9789048550555

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Eurocentrism in European History and Memory

Eurocentrism in European History and Memory

Edited by Marjet Brolsma, Robin de Bruin, and Matthijs Lok

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: The tympanum of Amsterdam City Hall, as depicted on a 1724 frontispiece from David Fassmann, Der reisende Chineser, a serialized fictional travel account whose Chinese protagonist ‘Herophile’ describes his travels through Europe in letters to his emperor. The satirical use of the foreign visitor to describe Europe’s politics and culture was a typical device of Enlightenment literature. The image shows the world’s four continents bringing tribute to the Stedemaagd or ‘City Maiden’ of Amsterdam. Europe, the only crowned continent, is depicted as superior to Asia, Africa and America. Here, in contrast to the original tympanum, Europe is placed not on the all-important right of the City Maiden, indicating her seniority over the other continents, but on her left. Above the tympanum appears the mythological figure of Periclymenus, one of the Argonauts, who was granted the power of metamorphosis by his grandfather Poseidon. Source: Beeldbank Stadsarchief Amsterdam. See also: David Faßmann, Der auf Ordre und Kosten Seines Käysers reisende Chineser […], Part 2, fascicule 3 (Leipzig: Cornerischen Erben, 1724). The image is discussed by Michael Wintle, The Image of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 263. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 552 1 e-isbn 978 90 4855 055 5 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789463725521 686 / 694 nur © Marjet Brolsma, Robin de Bruin, and Matthijs Lok / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2019 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

A Collection of Essays in Honour of Michael Wintle



Table of Contents

Foreword

Joep Leerssen

1 Introduction

Marjet Brolsma, Robin de Bruin and Matthijs Lok

9 11

Part I  History & Historiography 2 The Past and Present of European Historiography

25

3 The Fragmented Continent

43

4 Eurocentrism in Research on Mass Violence

65

5 Muslim EuRossocentrism

79

Between Marginalization and Functionalization? Stefan Berger

The Invention of European Pluralism in History Writing from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-first Century Matthijs Lok

Uğur Ümit Üngör

Ismail Gasprinskii’s ‘Russian Islam’ (1881) Michael Kemper

Part II  Literature & Art 6 David’s Member, or Eurocentrism and Its Paintings in the Late Twentieth Century

105

7 Women Walking, Women Dancing

121

The Example of Vienna Wolfgang Schmale

Motion, Gender and Eurocentrism Joep Leerssen

8 Shakespeare, England, Europe and Eurocentrism

141

9 Being Eurocentric within Europe

157

10 The Elephant on the Doorstep?

179

Ton Hoenselaars

Nineteenth-century English and Dutch Literary Historiography and Oriental Spain Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez

East European Perspectives on Eurocentrism Alex Drace-Francis

Part III  EU & Memory 11 A Guided Tour into the Question of Europe

195

12 Constructing the European Cultural Space

223

Index

245

Jan Ifversen

A Matter of Eurocentrism? Claske Vos

List of Illustrations Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6 Figure 7 Figure 8

Maître Leherb, Europe (1981/1982) Left: The Gradiva relief. Right: Dancing Maenad Domenico Ghirlandaio, Birth of St John the Baptist (1486-1490) Panel no. 6 of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Bilderatlas Publicity photograph for La bayadère (Nationale Opera en Ballet, 2006) Panel from Hergé, Coke en stock Mata Hari performing (1905) Debra Paget in Das indische Grabmal (1959)

105 123 125 126 128 129 133 135

8 Shakespeare, England, Europe and Eurocentrism

141

9 Being Eurocentric within Europe

157

10 The Elephant on the Doorstep?

179

Ton Hoenselaars

Nineteenth-century English and Dutch Literary Historiography and Oriental Spain Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez

East European Perspectives on Eurocentrism Alex Drace-Francis

Part III  EU & Memory 11 A Guided Tour into the Question of Europe

195

12 Constructing the European Cultural Space

223

Index

245

Jan Ifversen

A Matter of Eurocentrism? Claske Vos

List of Illustrations Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6 Figure 7 Figure 8

Maître Leherb, Europe (1981/1982) Left: The Gradiva relief. Right: Dancing Maenad Domenico Ghirlandaio, Birth of St John the Baptist (1486-1490) Panel no. 6 of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Bilderatlas Publicity photograph for La bayadère (Nationale Opera en Ballet, 2006) Panel from Hergé, Coke en stock Mata Hari performing (1905) Debra Paget in Das indische Grabmal (1959)

105 123 125 126 128 129 133 135



Foreword Joep Leerssen

A discipline is a working community of specialists: academics who apply a specific method to a specific corpus. Disciplines are much less stringently def ined than specialisms. A discipline, as a working community, can bring very diverse types of specialists together. All they need to share, minimally, is a common f ield of interest, such as gender for women’s studies, language for linguists, the past for historians, or Europe for European studies. Unsurprisingly, such a working community with diverse specialisms will spend a lot of time trying to clarify and specify the nature of their common working ground. What is gender? What is language, and how does it work? What can we know, reliably and relevantly, about the past? And what does the ‘Europe’ in European studies stand for? Such self-questionings are the starting point of theory; all theories start in trying to explain what we think we are doing. Why do we consider certain things more important than others? What knowledge, what themes of interest, do we highlight or prioritize in our teaching programmes? But there is also something else that binds disciplines and academic working communities together, and that is the human factor. Working communities are precisely that – communities: groups happy to share information, groups eager to communicate, to exchange ideas, to deliberate together. Working communities are about people sharing, not just a field of interest, but also a certain esprit de corps. The very different specialists assembled in these pages share, not only a general interest in things European or transnational, but also specific sense of collegiality and sympathy around the person of Michael Wintle. Michael Wintle has for decades given guidance and leadership to the diverse, multispecialist discipline of European studies. Both within the departmental setting of Amsterdam and in the wider field, nationally and internationally, he has been a quiet, slightly reserved, but highly appreciated and authoritative f igure in our deliberations and in our tentative trajectory towards something like a theory. His study of cartography, of Eurocentrism, of the interplay between cultural representation and power politics, have given us fruitful (and what is more: workable and sensible) ideas on what the ‘Europe’ in European studies stands for. The fact that such diverse specialists are here gathered, in these pages, is a tribute to

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Joep Leerssen

Wintle’s role in uniting us into a working community, both through his sterling academic inspiration and through his capacity to inspire sympathy and collegiality. Libri amicorum, in the present publishing climate, are the sort of collected volumes that hardly dare to speak their name anymore. But a book this is; and friends we are.

1 Introduction1 Marjet Brolsma, Robin de Bruin and Matthijs Lok

The Theft of History In his polemical work The Theft of History (2006), Cambridge anthropologist and comparative sociologist Jack Goody fiercely critiques the – in his view – pervasive Eurocentric biases of much historical writing. Goody castigates the often implicit idea that the history of Europe is unique and different from other parts of the world. In his view, phenomena such as capitalism, democracy, individualism, feudalism, and even romantic love – often put forward as uniquely ‘European’ developments – are not present only in European history, but can be found in some form in different societies all over the world.2 Even the idea of uniqueness is not unique to the European continent – ‘a hidden ethnocentric risk is to be eurocentric about ethnocentricity’ – as ethnocentrism is a part of all societies and partly a condition of the personal and social identity of their members.3 A false ‘divergence’ between a ‘free Europe’ and a ‘despotic’ and unfree Orient was conceptualized in the age of antiquity.4 According to Goody, this Orientalist notion of difference was reinforced by the voyages of discovery and the return to classical antiquity in the Renaissance and nineteenthcentury industrialization and imperialism. Peter Burke has, for instance, questioned the unique character of the European Renaissance, pointing out 1 This edited volume would not have been possible without the commitment and enthusiasm of the European studies staff at the University of Amsterdam. We would like to express our deepest appreciation to Nienke Rentenaar, for her indispensable help in processing the manuscript, and to Boyd van Dijk, Alex Drace-Francis, Artemy Kalinovsky, Sudha Rajagopalan and Jamal Shahin, for their language corrections and valuable comments. 2 Goody, The Theft of History, 2. 3 Ibid., 5. 4 See also: Said, Orientalism.

Brolsma, Marjet, Robin de Bruin, and Matthijs Lok (eds): Eurocentrism in European History and Memory. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463725521_ch01

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that in many parts of the world some sort of a return to a lost cultural golden age can be observed.5 According to Goody, if a divergence exists between the ‘West’ and the ‘East’, both economically and intellectually, this could only have been a recent development that would prove to be temporary.6 Goody also deconstructs the notion of continuous and coherent ‘European history’ starting from the ‘Greek genius’ and the classical world and essentially culminating in the contemporary Western World.7 According to Goody, contemporary Europe has very little in common with the ancient world. In his view, ‘antiquity’ was appropriated and ‘invented’ by Europeans. (Early) modern Europeans projected their own image on the classical world, remodelling ‘antiquity’ as their own ideal. Instead, ancient Greece had been part of a larger Mediterranean world, the ancient Greeks had more in common with Africa and the Middle East than with modern Europe.8 Other forms of historiographical Eurocentrism can also be discerned next to the notion of the uniqueness as well as coherence and continuity of European history. Gerard Delanty, for instance, defines Eurocentrism as the ‘arguments or assumptions, implicit and explicit, that the West is superior to the rest of the world or the tendency to take Western experiences as the norm by which the rest of the world should be judged’.9 Consequently, a possible third bias of European historiography is its alleged universalizing claim. In the first global histories of the Enlightenment, European development begins to be regarded as the ‘model’ for all other histories. Exemplary in this regard is Voltaire’s famous Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations (Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations), which was written in the 1740s and 1750s, but published for the first time in 1756. Voltaire started his description with developments in China, as a criticism of Catholic universal histories which took the biblical creation as its starting point. However, the stadial development of Europa into a ‘modern’ commercial and urban society is seen by Voltaire as the horizon and end point of all human societies.10 European history became the ‘norm’, whereas development in

5 Burke, The European Renaissance; see also Wintle, The Image. 6 Goody, The Theft of History, 2. On the divergence: Pomeranz, The Great Divergence. 7 For instance: Arjakovsky, Histoire de la conscience européenne. 8 Goody, The Theft of History, 26-27. See also: Bernal, Black Athena. 9 Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination, 178. Cf. Amin, Eurocentrism; Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity; Blaut, The Coloniser’s Model of the World; ibid., Eight Eurocentric Historians; Latouch, The Westernisation of the World. 10 Lilti, ‘La civilisation’, 156; Asbach, Europa und die Moderne im Langen 18. Jahrhundert.

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Asia and Africa, were framed as ‘exceptional’.11 The history of Europe, and often more specifically – depending on the author’s nationality – national histories of France, England or Germany etc., is regarded as pars pro toto of a universal human development.12 In the nineteenth century ‘universal histories’ were even more Eurocentric than their enlightened predecessors. Europe was seen by leading historians such as François Guizot and Leopold von Ranke as the historical continent par excellence. Following Hegel’s lead, the dynamic and evolutionary nature of European history was contrasted by historians with the static or even declining development of non-European histories.13 After World War I, an increasing number of world histories were published which were mainly dealing almost exclusively with developments in Europe and seeing Europe as the route to modernity all other continents would eventually follow.14 A fourth form of historiographical Eurocentrism concerns the uses of categories. As European history was the norm for all other modern histories, the categories and periodization in which the history of the world was written were derived from European history. Global conceptions of time as well as space have followed from European definitions.15 In his Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty criticized the supposedly universal value of European historical concepts and their underlying imperial power structure: ‘[H]istoricism – and even the modern, European idea of history – one might say, came to non-European peoples in the nineteenth century as somebody’s way of saying “not yet” to somebody else.’16 In Chakrabarty’s view, therefore, European history needed to be intellectually ‘provincialized’. The criticism of the writing (and teaching) of modern history in general, and European historiography in particular, was met with a response. In his overview of European history, Europe: A History (1996), Norman Davies, for instance, conceded that European history should not be mistaken for universal or global history. For him, the ‘way forward’ was to pay more attention to the interaction of European and non-European peoples and 11 Goody, The Theft of History, 66. For a criticism of the enlightened (Anglo-Saxon) historiography of the Spanish New World, see: Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World. 12 See the chapter by Stefan Berger in this volume. 13 Guizot, Histoire; Schulin, ‘Leopold von Ranke’, 147; Pasture, Imagining European Unity; Pitts, A Turn to Empire. 14 Stuchtey and Fuchs, Writing World History. 15 ‘One major problem with the accumulation of knowledge has been that the very categories employed are largely European’ (Goody, The Theft of History, 23). 16 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 8; Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination, 179.

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to use non-European sources for the elucidation of European problems. However, according to Davies, ‘European history-writing cannot be accused of Eurocentrism simply for focusing its attention on European affairs.’17 Davies was above all critical of the exclusive emphasis on (north)western Europe in so-called histories of ‘Western Civilization’. The trend to exclude ‘Eastern’ Europe from the mainstream of European history started in the eighteenth century but was reinforced by World War II and the coming of the Cold War.18 Davies’ Europe: A History formed part of a larger wave of overviews of European history that have appeared in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 and that prioritize intra-European East-West historical relations.19 As Tony Judt has pointed out, the reconfiguration of the past was a key element of the political transitions that took place in Europe in 1990s: constructing a new historical order was part of the attempt to create a new political order.20 The new histories of Europe published in the 1990s and 2000s seem, above all, to be a conscious or unconscious attempt to heal the division of the western and eastern half and to construct a common past, in which the experience of communism is integrated in the wider narrative of European history.21 This also seems to been a main goal of the House of European History, erected in Brussels in 2017. The histories of Europe, written in the 1990s and early 2000s, could also be considered a reflection of the new dynamic in the process of European integration, leading to renewed attention to European history. The changes in the writing of European history since World War II are part of transformations of a wider social or political ‘European memory’.22 Memory scholars as well as historians, such as Judt, have described how the horrors of Auschwitz have become the key experience of European history, or even a ‘foundational past’ since 1945.23 The memory of World War II became the ‘European memory’ par excellence. However, some memory scholars have also warned that the exclusive focus on the uniqueness of the experience in 17 Davies, Europe, 16. 18 Ibid., 19-42. See also the chapters by Drace-Francis and by Rodríguez Pérez in this volume. 19 Some well-known examples are: Davies, Europe; Mazower, Dark Continent; Judt, Postwar. 20 Judt, ‘The Past Is Another Country’, 108; Müller, Memory and Power in Post-war Europe. 21 Ifversen, ‘Myth and History’. 22 On the contested and problematic notion of ‘European memory’ and history, see Assmann, ‘Europe’; Pakier and Stråth, A European Memory?; Leggewie, ‘Seven Circles’; Rigney, ‘Transforming Memory’; Pestel, Trimçev, Feindt and Krawatzek, ‘Promise’. 23 Judt, ‘The Past Is Another Country’; ibid., Postwar, 803-832: ‘Epilogue: From the House of the Dead: An Essay on Modern European Memory’; Confino, Foundational Pasts.

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World War II has brought to the fore a new kind of Eurocentrism. This new Eurocentrism is no longer underscoring the ‘unique qualities’ but instead the ‘unique evilness’ of Europe, and also its superior way of dealing with war crimes and trauma.24 This notion of a uniquely European evilness is also the main feature of ‘Occidentalism’, a dehumanizing picture of the West that, according to some, was born in Europe itself.25 Additionally, former communist countries in Central Europe, and to a lesser extent Southern European countries, felt that the exclusive focus on the memory of World War II and the victory over fascism by Western European countries as part of the Atlantic alliance, led further to the forgetting of the historical experience of other parts of Europe.26 Others have pointed out that the exclusive focus on the memory of the Holocaust has resulted in a Eurocentric forgetting of the colonial and imperial past and the ways in which European history is entangled in often violent ways with the other continents.27 As a result, European wars of colonization and decolonization of which no one was proud could be confined to a ‘memory hole’.28 This has hindered the view on ‘roads not taken’ after the decline of European empires, such as lasting federal relations between European metropoles and non-European overseas countries and territories.29 Furthermore, it has obstructed our understanding of the deep entanglement of nation-state formation in Europe and European integration with imperialism as a fundamentally European endeavour. Until recently, colonialism, neo-colonialism and postcolonial resentment were generally excluded from European integration history.30 However, for proponents of European unity such as Richard Count Coudenhove-Kalergi or Robert Schuman, their community extended far beyond the European continent.31 Increasingly, historians of all backgrounds (history and memory scholars, literature and art historians, and historically oriented cultural anthropologists and social scientists) turn to the study of global interconnectedness,32 24 Müller, ‘On European Memory’; See also the chapter by Üngör in this volume. 25 Buruma and Margalit, Occidentalism, 6. 26 Pakier and Stråth, A European Memory?, 1-14; D’Auria and Vermeiren, ‘Narrating Europe’. 27 Stoler, ‘Colonial Aphasia’; De Cesari and Rigney, Transnational Memory. On forgetting and memory, see Erll, Memory in Culture, 8-9. 28 Judt, Postwar, 281. 29 Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation. 30 Legêne, ‘The European Character’. 31 Mikkeli, Europe as an Idea and an Identity; Hansen and Jonsson, Eurafrica. 32 Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt, 13.

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inspired by researchers such as Christopher Bayly, who have emphasized that industrialization, urbanization, nationalism and the development of the state were not just Western export products, but the results of global exchange that reverberated throughout the world.33 In an attempt to overcome the geographical ‘compartmentalization of historical reality’34 and the tenacity of ‘banal’35 everyday representations of European superiority, historians of Europe now focus increasingly on processes of global interconnectedness, such as the interrelation of processes of decolonization with the post-war European integration project.36 National history, today, can also be described from a global perspective.37 Others, by contrast, have turned to local history or a transnational regional perspective to write about Europe’s past.38 As Gerard Delanty has remarked, avoiding the charge of Eurocentrism is not easy since the term lacks specificity and Eurocentrism is often an all-embracing category that covers virtually the entirety of scholarship.39 Nonetheless, partly thanks to the work of Michael Wintle and other historians of Eurocentrism, ‘European historians’ have become more aware of the often Eurocentric biases evident in the historical approach, of the foregrounding of select topics, and the essentially problematic nature of many currently used historiographical concepts.

Structure and Contents This book has been edited with two objectives in mind: first of all it provides a collection of essays in honour of Michael Wintle and his work. Secondly, this book offers a state of the art overview with regard to Eurocentrism that, for instance, would be useful as a textbook for students in European studies. Evidently, the volume does not claim to be in any way comprehensive or all-encompassing. Our goal in this volume is to explore and critically analyse manifestations of Eurocentrism in representations of the European past 33 Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World; Stanziani, Eurocentrism. 34 Conrad, What Is Global History?, 5. 35 Billig, Banal Nationalism. 36 Pasture, ‘The EC/EU’. For some critical remarks concerning the surge of ‘global historians’, see the chapter by Berger in this volume. 37 Hill, National History and the World of Nations. Cf. Moyn and Sartori, Global Intellectual History. 38 Mishkova, Stråth and Trencsényi, ‘Regional History’; Kaiser and McMahon, ‘Narrating European Integration’. 39 Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination, 178.

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across disciplines – history, literature, art, memory and cultural policy – as well as offer different geographical perspectives. We have looked, especially, at the role that imaginings of the European past since the eighteenth century played in the construction of a Europeanist worldview and at the ways in which ‘Europe’ was constructed in literature and art. The first part of the book, on history and historiography, opens with a chapter by Stefan Berger chronicling the history of European history in past centuries. At the end of his contribution, Berger discusses the danger of the marginalization of European history as a subdiscipline between global history and national history. In the next chapter, Matthijs Lok argues that the pluralist narrative of European history has a strong, but often implicit and overlooked, Eurocentric dimension, and should be examined more critically by historians of Europe. The subsequent chapter, by Uğur Ümit Üngör, discusses two strands of Eurocentrism in mass violence research: ‘Holocaust uniqueness’ and Orientalism. In the former approach, Europe is set as an example, albeit a negative one. In the second line of thought, the genocidal violence of non-European Others is constructed as cruel and inefficient. This first part of the volume on history and historiography is concluded by Michael Kemper, who shows how Ismail Gasprinskii, the founding father of Muslim cultural reform in Russia, successfully made use of clichés about European haughtiness and Islamic, especially Asian-Islamic, sincerity in his 1881 essay ‘Russian Muslimhood’. The second part of the book, on Eurocentrism in literature and art, opens with a critical analysis by Wolfgang Schmale of the depictions of the six continents by the Austrian painter Maître Leherb (1933-1997), who continued the tradition of the continent allegories, popular since the sixteenth century, in a contemporary way. Subsequently, Joep Leerssen argues in his chapter that part of the Eurocentric imagination of the Orient involves the phantasm of a world where (in sharp contrast to Western mores) religion and sensuality overlap. Located on that interstice are often the figures of dancing Oriental maidens, whose dancing is the sort of motion that is directionless. This type stands in contrast to the Western, Eurocentric heroine with a sense of purpose and directionality. In the third chapter of the second part, Ton Hoenselaars argues that four ways of interpretation of ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Europe’ should be distinguished, and that these together constitute the phenomenon of ‘Shakespeare as a European site of memory’. In their contributions, Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez and Alex Drace-Francis show that the term ‘Eurocentrism’ may also be considered to include West European discourses on sub-regions within Europe. Rodríguez Pérez identifies the construction of a strong North-South division in nineteenthcentury English and Dutch literary historiography. This polarity is further

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complicated by an association of the South with the Oriental Other. DraceFrancis shows that certain aspects of East European discourse on Europe may also be considered as a variant of Eurocentrism, as they foreground the centrality and symbolic power of something called ‘Europe’ while simultaneously often minimizing the role of ‘eastern’ influence in the region. The topic of the third part of the book is Eurocentrism in memory from institutional (EU and Council of Europe) perspectives. Jan Ifversen describes two different versions of Europe in two transnational museums: the Schuman House and the House of European History. The exhibition in the first museum is based on the myth that Europe exists to avoid conflict between nations, while the Europe exhibited in the latter is a Europe split between expansion and crisis, between unity and division, between peace and war, between democracy and dictatorship. European integration is not salvation as in the case of the Schuman House, but a project to tame the destructive forces that also belong to Europe. Finally, Claske Vos describes the ambiguity of EU intervention in the field of cultural policy. On the one hand EU intervention is hegemonic and the result of Western normativity; on the other, it provides a cultural space in which actors can freely manoeuvre.

Bibliography Amin, Samir, Eurocentrism (London: Zed, 1989). Arjakovsky, Antoine (ed.), Histoire de la conscience européenne (Paris: Salvator, 2016). Asbach, Olaf (ed.), Europa und die Moderne im Langen 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Wehrhahn, 2014). Assmann, Aleida, ‘Europe: A Community of Memory?’, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute in Washington (Spring 2007), 11-25. Bayly, Christopher, The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). Bernal, Martin, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation, Vol. I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985 (London: Free Association Books, 1987). Bhambra, Gurminder K., Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Billig, Michael, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995). Blaut, James, The Coloniser’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric Theory (New York: Guilford Press, 1993). Blaut, James, Eight Eurocentric Historians (New York: Guilford Press, 2000). Burke, Peter, The European Renaissance: Centres and Peripheries (London: Blackwell, 1998).

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Buruma, Ian, and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (New York: Penguin, 2004). Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Confino, Alon, Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Conrad, Sebastian, What Is Global History? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). Cooper, Frederick, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945-1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). D’Auria, Matthew, and Jan Vermeiren (eds), ‘Narrating Europe: Conceptions of European History and Identity in Historiography and Intellectual Thought’, special issue of History 103:3 (2018), 385-519. Davies, Norman, Europe: A History (London: Pimlico, 1997). De Cesari, Chiara, and Ann Rigney (eds), Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014). Delanty, Gerard, The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Erll, Astrid, Memory in Culture, trans. S. Young (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Goody, Jack, The Theft of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Guizot, François, Histoire de la civilisation en Europe, présenté par P. Rosanvallon (Paris: Hachette, 1985). Hansen, Peo, and Stefan Jonsson, Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). Hill, Christopher L., National History and the World of Nations: Capital, State and the Rhetoric of History in Japan, France and the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). Ifversen, Jan, ‘Myth and History in European Post-war History Writing’, in Menno Spiering and Michael Wintle (eds), European Identity and the Second World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 75-91. Judt, Tony, ‘The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe’, Daedalus 121:4 (1992), 83-118. Judt, Tony, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Penguin, 2005). Kaiser, Wolfram, and Richard McMahon, ‘Narrating European Integration: Transnational Actors and Stories’, National Identities 19:2 (2017), 149-160 Latouch, Serge, The Westernisation of the World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996). Legêne, Susan, ‘The European Character of the Intellectual History of Dutch Empire’, BMGN: Low Countries Historical Review 132:2 (2017), 110-120.

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Leggewie, Claus, ‘Seven Circles of European Memory’, in Peter Meusburger, Michael Heffernan and Edgar Wunder (eds), Cultural Memories: The Geographical Point of View (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 123-143. Lilti, Antoine, ‘La civilisation est-elle européenne? Ecrire l’histoire de l’Europe au XVIIIe siècle’, in idem and Céline Spector (eds), Penser l’Europe au XVIIIe siècle. Commerce, civilisation, empire (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2014), 139-166. Mazower, Mark, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Penguin, 1998). Mikkeli, Heikki, Europe as an Idea and an Identity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998). Mishkova, Diana, Bo Stråth and Balázs Trencsényi, ‘Regional History as a “Challenge” to National Frameworks of Historiography: The Case of Central, Southeast, and Northern Europe’, in Matthias Middell and Lluis Roura i Aulinas (eds), Transnational Challenges to National History Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 257-314. Moyn, Samuel, and Andrew Sartori (eds), Global Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). Müller, Jan-Werner, ‘On European Memory: Some Conceptual and Normative Remarks’, in Malgorzata Pakier and Bo Stråth (eds), A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 25-37. Müller, Jan-Werner (ed.), Memory and Power in Post-war Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Osterhammel, Jürgen, Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (München: Beck, 2009). Pakier, Malgorzata, and Bo Stråth (eds), A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance (New York: Berghahn, 2010). Pasture, Patrick, ‘The EC/EU between the Art of Forgetting and the Palimpsest of Empire’, European Review 26:3 (2018), 545-581. Pasture, Patrick, Imagining European Unity since 1000 AD (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Pestel, Friedemann, Rieke Trimçev, Gregor Feindt and Félix Krawatzek, ‘Promise and Challenge of European Memory’, European Review of History/Revue européenne d’histoire 24:4 (2017), 495-506. Pitts, Jennifer, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Liberal Imperialism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Pomeranz, Kenneth, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Rigney, Ann, ‘Transforming Memory and the European Project’, New Literary History 43:4 (2012), 607-628. Said, Edward, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin, 1978).

Introduc tion

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Schulin, Ernst, ‘Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886)’, in Heinz Durchhardt (ed.), EuropaHistoriker. Ein biographisches Handbuch, 3 vols (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), vol. I, 147. Stanziani, Alessandro, Eurocentrism and the Politics of Global History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Stoler, Ann Laura, ‘Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France’, Public Culture 23:1 (2011), 121-156. Stuchtey, Benedikt, and Eckhardt Fuchs (eds), Writing World History 1800-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Wintle, Michael, The Image of Europe: Visualizing Europe in Cartography and Iconography throughout the Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

About the Authors Marjet Brolsma, Assistant Professor of European Cultural History, University of Amsterdam [email protected] Robin de Bruin, Assistant Professor of Modern European History, University of Amsterdam [email protected] Matthijs Lok, Assistant Professor of Modern European History, University of Amsterdam [email protected]

2

The Past and Present of European Historiography Between Marginalization and Functionalization? Stefan Berger

Abstract This chapter reviews the fate and outlook of European history writing from the Enlightenment to the present day, highlighting its marginalization from the early nineteenth century onwards, as national history marginalized European perspectives and made them a niche interest in the history of history writing in Europe. Things only began to change after the end of World War II, when European history became popular again as an attempt to overcome the hypernationalism that characterized European historiographies in the interwar period. The nascent European Union was also influential in encouraging European perspectives in history writing. The chapter asks how Eurocentric and inward-looking this renewed emphasis on European history writing was, and it investigates whether we are about to sideline European perspectives for a second time. Keywords: historiography, Europe, Enlightenment, Romanticism, war, nationalism

Introduction At a time, when global history seems all the rage in history writing and chairs in global history are mushrooming around the globe, the writing of European history is perhaps in danger of being sidelined as a parochial and Eurocentric exercise. This chapter will review the fate and outlook of European history writing from the Enlightenment to the present day, highlighting its marginalization from the early nineteenth century onwards,

Brolsma, Marjet, Robin de Bruin, and Matthijs Lok (eds): Eurocentrism in European History and Memory. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463725521_ch02

26 Stefan Berger

as national history sidelined European perspectives and made them a niche interest in the history of history writing in Europe. Arguably things only began to change after the end of World War II, when European history became popular again as an attempt to overcome the hypernationalism that characterized European historiographies in the interwar period. The nascent European Union also was influential in encouraging European perspectives in history writing. How Eurocentric and inward-looking was this renewed emphasis on European history writing? And are we in danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water, if we sideline European perspectives for a second time? What kind of European history writing is appropriate for what Hayden White has termed ‘a practical past’ in contemporary Europe?1

European History before the Rise of the Nation State From European antiquity to the European Middle Ages, European history was constructed in contradistinction to Asian and African history, but, as Peter Burke has pointed out, the term ‘Europe’ was not widely used in the period 500-1500.2 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a discourse on Europe surfaces in particular in connection with the great power rivalry between Catholic France and Protestant Europe, especially England, thereby linking different visions of Europe with different confessions of Christianity.3 The Enlightenment not only widened the historical gaze to incorporate universal and global perspectives; it also intensified the discursive construction of Europe. Enlightenment historians by and large identified in European history the motor of universal progress. To be even more precise, they located this motor in Western Europe. Larry Wolff has shown how the West European Enlightenment Orientalized the eastern part of Europe, partly through history writing. It thus became the non-civilized, un-Enlightened ‘other’ of the West. 4 This is even more the case for non-European histories. The leading concept of Enlightenment historians was that of ‘civilization’. It allowed the widening of the historical gaze beyond national and European 1 White, The Practical Past. 2 Burke, ‘Did Europe Exist before 1700?’ 3 Schneidmüller, ‘Die mittelalterlichen Konstruktionen Europas’; Schulze, ‘Europa in der Frühen Neuzeit’. 4 Woolf, Inventing Eastern Europe.

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and towards global boundaries.5 A concern with great civilizations and their interconnectedness across time and space characterized many universal histories of the Enlightenment, which took their cue from Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), who had written about the age of discoveries as a wasted opportunity for mankind, as the European conquerors and travellers had allegedly failed to appreciate the civilizations they found before them.6 The huge compilation of knowledge about the colonization of the world which the French cleric Guillaume-Thomas Raynal and his anonymous co-authors published between 1770 and 1780 stands for this scholarly cosmopolitanism. It was entitled Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies). Raynal’s undertaking attempted nothing less than a history of the origins of European modernity, which focused on the globalization of commerce, economics, politics and culture, religion and warfare. European ideas and practices were becoming global and were crucial to an understanding of the development of ‘civilization’.7 Even where non-European civilizations were treated sympathetically, Enlightenment historians, such as Arnold Ludwig Heeren in the Germanspeaking lands, or François Guizot in France, rarely left a doubt that European developments and European civilization were superior.8 In Voltaire’s famous Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations (Essay on the Manners and the Spirit of Nations, written in the 1740s and 1750s but published only in 1756 and 1769), universal history is the history of a succession of peoples and nations all fostering progress in history. Voltaire extends his gaze well beyond European history, including Persia, China, India and the Arab world. Whilst Voltaire was capable of positively evaluating non-European peoples, his history left the reader in no doubt that human reason had its home in Europe and particularly France. Historians committed to Enlightenment ideals emulated Voltaire and emphasized time and again that one could not hope to understand part of the world without understanding the whole.9 Yet only the main peoples (Hauptvölker) were the proper subject for universal history, and these were to be found, above all, in Europe. Thus the famous Universal History, from 5 Eckert, ‘Area Studies’. 6 Rousseau, ‘Discourse’. 7 Lüsebrink and Strugnell, L’histoire des deux Indes. 8 Becker-Schaum, Arnold Herrmann Ludwig Heeren. 9 Schlözer, Vorstellung, 18f.

28 Stefan Berger

the Earliest Accounts to the Present Time, published in London from 1747 onwards,10 privileged European over non-European history, and it organized universal history along national lines. The ideas of Enlightenment historians were civility and progress, but they were invariably highly Eurocentric and nation-centric.

The Nationalization of Historical Writing and its Marginalization of European History The Eurocentric universalism of the Enlightenment was heavily nationally inflected.11 In the course of the long nineteenth century European history increasingly became the history of nationally specific paths. The nationalization of history writing lost the Eurocentric universal aspiration that still characterized Enlightenment historiography. The latter’s lead concept of a universal civilization was thus replaced by the lead concept of nationally specific trajectories. Concepts, such as culture, ethnicity, race, religion and class were nationalized to such an extent that their potential transnational relevance was largely lost in historical writing.12 And yet, the idea of Europe kept creeping into the now dominant form of national history writing. National histories sometimes constructed not just national but European missions for their respective nation states. Among them, the mission of being Europe’s shield against invading non-European forces, especially those of Muslims, was a particularly strong storyline in several national histories, from Spain to Poland and Hungary to Russia.13 Highlighting the special worth of one’s own nation could mean comparing it to others, opening up again the horizon towards European history. Thus, Jules Michelet argued that it was precisely because France had established most profoundly the European idea of freedom that it deserved the highest place among the nations of Europe. England, by contrast, was not so much the home of freedom but of materialism and class egotism, whereas Germany, for Michelet, was ‘Europe’s India, a country of thought, not of action’.14 But not only the special worth justif ied a comparative look beyond national borders towards developments elsewhere in Europe. The same was 10 11 12 13 14

Van der Zande, ‘August Ludwig Schlözer’. Berger with Conrad, The Past as History, ch. 3. Berger and Lorenz, ‘Introduction’. For Hungary, see Őze and Spannenberger, ‘“Hungaria”’. Cf. Crossley, French Historians and Romanticism, 201.

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true for those historians concerned with the backwardness of their respective country. Thus, for example, the so-called ‘generation of 98’ historians in Spain, following the loss of the last Spanish colonies, the Philippines, in 1898, were convinced that Spain needed to Europeanize in order to regenerate itself.15 If the increasing nationalization of historical writing during the first half of the nineteenth century marked a deep crisis for the Enlightenment interest in non-European civilizations, it was not the end of non-national history writing. One of the most widely read German historians of the pre-March era (Vormärz) was Friedrich Christoph Schlosser, whose work is not characterized by any narrowing to national and state fields of vision. And the curricula of most German-speaking universities demonstrated an ongoing commitment to regional history (Landesgeschichte) on the one hand, and empire (Reichsgeschichte), European and world history on the other.16 There were other remarkable exceptions to the rule of commitment to national history in nineteenth-century Europe. Georg Gottfried Gervinus’ multivolume Geschichte des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts seit den Wiener Verträgen (History of the Nineteenth Century from the Vienna Treaties), published in Leipzig between 1855 and 1866 was, for example, a truly remarkable European contemporary history. Conceptionalized as a counterblast to the prevailing Prussianism amongst north German historians, Gervinus’ history was deliberately pro-French, and Bismarck appeared primarily as reactionary, who had destroyed the ideas of 1848.17 In France, Guizot was not only an important national historian but gained prominence as a historian of European civilization. In a set of lectures on European civilization, delivered in 1828, he argued that Europe was built on three pillars: the Germanic notions of independence, the spirituality of Christianity and the Roman ideas of municipal freedoms mixed with imperial ambitions. These three pillars developed in different ways in different parts of Europe and fed into diverse national traditions. Yet such diversity was bound together by an underlying commonality: I say European civilisation because there is evidently so striking a uniformity (unité) in the civilisation of the different states of Europe, as fully to warrant this appellation. Civilisation has flowed to them all from sources 15 Pasamar, Apologia and Criticism, ch. 2; Menéndez Alzamora, La Generatión del 14, ch. 1 on Costa and his version of regeneracionismo. 16 Schleier, Geschichte, 33-255. 17 For Gervinus and his history, see Hübinger, Gelehrte, 29-45.

30 Stefan Berger

so much alike – it is so connected in them all, notwithstanding the great differences of time, of place, and circumstances, by the same principles, and it so tends in them all to bring about the same results that no one will doubt the fact of there being a civilisation essentially European.18

Contributing to an ongoing European discourse during the age of national history writing was also the question of who belonged to Europe and who did not. In Russian national history, for example, we encounter one of the biggest and longest-running historical debates focused on this very question of Russia’s position vis-à-vis Europe and the West.19 In an age of historiographical nationalism, an interest in transnational forms of history writing was also fostered by the ‘pan’ histories created by diverse ‘pan’ movements in nineteenth-century Europe. These movements sought to establish commonalities in regions consisting of more than one nation. The construction of such transnational macro-regions contributed to the spatial ordering of Europe. Macro-regions were often characterized by a high degree of linguistic compatibility, common heritage and geopolitical interests and social networking across imagined or real national borderlines.20 In the nineteenth century pan-Slavism, pan-Turanism, Iberianism, Scandinavianism and pan-Germanism were all expressions of attempts to contribute to a spatial reordering of Europe on the basis of perceived commonalities of transnational regions. Some of the most prominent nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century national historians combined their keen interest in shaping the national master narrative with a pronounced interest in transnational forms of history writing. Historiographic nationalism in Europe could also go hand in hand with European and universal sentiments. If we take the example of Nicolae Iorga in Romania, his writing fostered traditional Romanian nationalism, but he saw no juxtaposition between national and universal history. A humanism-inspired universality connected all the nations and their peoples. National characters and national missions stood in constant exchange with one another. As the history of mankind could not be adequately understood without analysing those exchanges, Iorga became an early champion of transnational and comparative history. In line with the mainstream of European historiography, his conception of universal history was entirely Eurocentric. And yet it differed from West European conceptions in that he 18 Guizot, General History, 13. 19 Nolte, ‘Russia’. 20 Troebst, ‘Geschichtsregionen’.

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stressed the importance of Byzantium for the foundation of a unified Europe. West European historians, he argued, often forgot about Eastern Europe or saw it in terms of backwardness. But it had produced in Byzantium one of the foundation stones of European civilization which was not adequately recognized in the West.21 To some extent, then, in an age of national history writing, historians found it difficult to escape ‘the shadow of European history [which was] […] always looming over the shoulders of the writers of national histories’.22 After all, the modern historical profession emerged as a European endeavour and the way of writing (national) history was therefore a way which emerged within a European dialogue. National history and European history were closely interrelated in that all national history strove to demonstrate belonging to Europe, setting the benchmarks for Europe, being in the vanguard of European developments or explaining some sort of ‘not yet’ belonging or lack of Europeanness. Like in the Enlightenment, the notion of Europeanness remained the benchmark of a positive development towards modernity, in national, European, imperial and global forms of history writing. If the European horizon of history writing remained somewhat of a haunting spectre in the nationalized historiography of the long nineteenth century, it was pushed more to the sidelines by the outburst of historiographical nationalism during World War I. The historiographical struggles regarding the war guilt question did nothing to alleviate this situation in the interwar period.23 And the foundation of several new nation states after the collapse of empires in Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the war produced, above all, new version of historiographical nationalism. Yet even in the period between 1914 and 1945 we find glimpses of a European perspective. Thus, in the middle of World War I Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) highlighted the contribution of German idealist philosophy to the progress of mankind, endorsing the unity of European civilization.24 Franz Schnabel (1887-1966), himself stationed as a soldier in Cambrai during World War I, continued to believe in a united European culture which encompassed all of the belligerent nations.25 Informed by a sense of an impending threat to European civilization in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution, a range of historians from Oswald Spengler, 21 Maner, ‘Die Aufhebung’. 22 Liakos, ‘The Canon of European History’. 23 Wilson, Forging the Collective Memory. 24 Rizi, Benedetto Croce. 25 Hertfelder, Franz Schnabel, 126-140.

32 Stefan Berger

Arnold Toynbee, José Ortega y Gasset and H.G. Wells to Christopher Dawson, Henri Berr and Cesare Cantú reviewed the history of mankind from the ancient high civilizations to the contemporary world. Many of them sought to present world history as the linear rise from the ancient civilizations to the contemporary Western world, which was presented as the latest successor to the civilizational mantle of world history.26 Mikhail Pokrovsky, who became the undisputed leader of Soviet Marxist historiography in the 1920s,27 also had a strong European perspective in his own historical writing. He gave early Soviet historiography an internationalist orientation, abhorred Russian nationalism and was adamant that it was important for Marxist historians to look beyond the narrow confines of national history. Pokrovsky described Russian historical development as essentially following the same trajectory as that of Western Europe. He insisted on universal patterns of historical development and was highly critical of all ideas of Russian exceptionalism. By assimilating Russian history to the West European model, Pokrovsky gave historical explanation and justification to the Russian Revolution of 1917. A European horizon of history writing did not only emerge in the early Soviet Union. In France the early Annales school also championed forms of transnational and comparative history writing pointing to a European horizon. Thus, Marc Bloch’s synthesis on medieval society, which he put under the conceptual heading of ‘feudalism’, allowed him to treat the countries of Europe together and to develop both their internal dynamics and the external power relations between them. Lucien Febvre’s history of the Rhine was also an attempt to open up transnational horizons in history writing.28 Finally, if the emergence of right-wing authoritarian and fascist regimes in the interwar period and World War II did not bode well for European perspectives in historical writing, for some historians opposed to the right, we also find that Europe could be a counterprogramme to the fascist present. Thus, the young Franco Venturi (1914-1994), for example, chose to focus on the European Enlightenment, because it was, for him, the counterprogramme to the fascist barbarity that he had experienced. The idea of freedom, as symbolized by Enlightenment thought, was contrasted to the nationalist hubris and the oppression of fascist Italy.29 26 Stuchtey and Fuchs, Writing World History. 27 Enteen, The Soviet Scholar-Bureaucrat. 28 Burke, The French Historical Revolution, 13-35. 29 Tortarolo, ‘Historians in Exile’.

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Europeanization and the Renewed Interest in European History Writing after 1945 If the European horizon of history writing had not been entirely eclipsed by the high point of historiographical nationalism in the interwar period, the post-1945 concern with re-establishing traditional national master narratives in Western Europe and with painting national histories red in Eastern Europe were difficult preconditions for establishing the writing of European history. And yet the ‘monde braudélien’ after 1945 continued, under the concept of ‘civilization’, the transnationalization and Europeanization of historical writing, even if it shied away overwhelmingly from the modern period of history.30 In Britain, Eric Hobsbawm, also deeply influenced by Braudel and the Annales, championed a strongly European and global form of history writing under Marxist social history perspectives.31 During the Cold War, attempts by West European historians to defend ‘the West’ against ‘the East’ through the construction of the concept of an ‘Atlantic civilization’ encompassing both North America and Western Europe, also gave transnational and European histories a new purpose. Other historians emphasized constructions of the past, in which the West had always defended the Occident against a barbarous East. Democratic anti-communism merged with traditional anti-Slav and anti-Russian prejudices. An altogether different Christian discourse on the Occident (Abendland), held up after 1945 by historians, such as Franz Schnabel, shared the anti-Eastern, anti-Slav and ultimately anti-communist predilections. Christianity, antiquity and humanism became the defining features of Europe, and the Soviet Union and much of Eastern Europe were decidedly not part of it.32 There were exceptions to the rule, such as Geoffrey Barraclough in England, whose volume Eastern and Western Europe in the Middle Ages (1970) deliberately attempted to discuss the political, economic, intellectual and cultural interrelationships between Eastern and Western Europe which, to him, marked the common foundations of Europe as a whole.33 The rise of European history was, by and large, a rise of West European history. It became characteristic of national historiographies in Western 30 Hexter, ‘Fernand Braudel’. 31 Evans, Eric Hobsbawm. 32 Hertfelder, Franz Schnabel. 33 Cf. Stuchtey, ‘Geoffrey Barraclough’.

34 Stefan Berger

Europe that they all stressed their contribution and belonging to a Western community of values, rooted in ideals of liberty, democracy and freedom. Post-war works, dealing with Europe, from Frederico Chabod, Oskar Halecki and Christopher Dawson to Otto Brunner, all defined ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’ as the antithesis to Bolshevism. References to humanistic culture, religion and progress were added to varying degrees to the above-mentioned trinity of liberty, democracy and freedom.34 Powerful American foundations, such as the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, encouraged research which gave legitimacy to this alleged Atlantic Western community of values.35 Increasingly, European history was no longer written predominantly in Europe. North America became a prime location for formulating master narratives of European history. The European Union itself became an increasingly active participant in these debates surrounding European history and identity. The EU and its advocates sought to recruit history in order to strengthen European identity. As early as 1952 the Council of Europe assembled a group of well-known historians in order to discuss the framing of a European historical master narrative. Whilst the Council urged the historians to concentrate on the core Europe of the emerging EU, the historians found it difficult to imagine a European history without Eastern Europe or the Iberian peninsula.36 In practice, however, much European history writing during the Cold War failed to overcome the national-container type of European history, which divided Europe into its nation states, thus returning to national history by the backdoor. The identification of Europe with colonialism and imperialism during the 1960s introduced a more self-critical and negative tinge to notions of a European civilization. The impact of anti-imperialist critiques, such as Frantz Fanon’s (1925-1961) The Wretched of the Earth, first published in 1963, slowly made itself felt in history writing.37 The powerful anti-imperialist critiques of the 1960s and 1970s spurned the writing of history in the colonies, where historians began to free themselves from the burden of an older colonialist history and began to critique its Eurocentrism.38 With the critical concept of ‘Orientalism’, Edward Said spurned a whole school of criticism of the Western gaze onto the colonial world,39 Dipesh Chakrabarty’s postcolonial 34 Fellner, ‘Nationales’. 35 Many examples are given in MacDonald, The Ford Foundation; Fosdick, The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation, 192ff. 36 For an account of one of the participants, see Beloff, Europe and the Europeans. 37 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; on Fanon, see Cherki, Frantz Fanon. 38 For Indian historiography, see Bayly, ‘Modern Indian Historiography’. 39 Said, Orientalism.

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critique of Eurocentrism postulated the inadequacy of European concepts in understanding the non-European world, whilst at the same time admitting the indispensability of such European concepts. 40

The Rise of Global History in the Post-Cold War World and the Threat of a Renewed Marginalization of European History Writing The end of the Cold War was accompanied by another wave of globalization that also benefitted more global perspectives in historical writing. This, however, was by no means, an uncontested trend. Thus, where new nation states appeared within the post-Soviet, post-Yugoslav and postCzechoslovak space, and where existing nation states searched for new post-communist histories, nationalist history writing often rose to new heights and left little space for global or even European perspectives. Not only did some historians link their nationalist histories effortlessly to the ‘red nationalism’ discussed above, many also harked back to very traditional (pre-communist) national master narratives. 41 Despite the best efforts of the Central European University in Budapest to historicize the understanding of nationalism and imperialism in East-Central and Eastern Europe, historiographical nationalism remained vastly popular in the post-communist world. At the same time, however, European history as a form of transnational history also became more and more popular and was encouraged by a historiographical trend towards more comparative and transnational approaches in historical writing. 42 It was not just the prospect of EU money given by the EU in an attempt to provide the cultural foundations of Europe,43 which led historians to do European history, it was also an attempt to understand the history of the ‘dark continent’ after the collapse of communism. 44 European histories of the twentieth century have as central ingredients notions of breakdown, rebirth and progress, all of them hinged on the date of 1945. World War II thus becomes, next to 1989, the vanishing 40 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. 41 On post-communist East-Central and East European historiography, see generally Antohi, Trencsényi and Apor, Narratives Unbound. 42 Kaelble, ‘Vergleichende’. For a concise introduction in English, see Berger, ‘Comparative History’. 43 Shore, Building Europe. 44 Mazower, Dark Continent.

36 Stefan Berger

point of twentieth-century European history.45 And not only World War II, but perhaps even more importantly, the history of the Holocaust has become, in many parts of Europe, the Central European narrative. 46 Following Stuart Woolf, historians have begun to think about themes structuring comparative European history from above and from below that would be more than its national histories writ large. 47 Yet, in whatever form or shape, the Europeanization of history writing has not been a one-way street. Anxieties over the increasing powers of the European Union sometimes encouraged a return to more traditional national histories that were meant to strengthen national feeling, maintain national sovereignty and mobilize national sentiment against a perceived threat of Europeanization. Claus Leggewie (b. 1950) has recently attempted to delineate the forms of transnational memory that could form the basis of European identity. He insisted on not just memorializing the success story of the European Union, but also including the contested, difficult, even traumatic memory of past conflicts, including the Holocaust, Stalinism, ethnic cleansing, enforced as well as voluntary migration, and, finally, colonialism and imperialism. 48 Initiatives such as Eustory or Euroclio also are motivated by the attempt to use history to bring Europeans together, prevent conflict and build a common European home on a common understanding of the past or at least an acceptance of different understandings of the past. 49 The end of the Cold War brought the historic opportunity to integrate Eastern Europe into conceptions of Europe. However, in many of the new East European EU member states, ideas of Europe were prominent which combined their alleged centuries-old belonging to the West with the exclusion of Russia as non-European East. Hence East-West dichotomies have not been superseded in the post-Cold War histories of Europe – their borders have just been shifted further to the East. As European narratives have been increasingly circling around issues of constructing a European identity, they have also become the target of an ascendant global history criticizing the Eurocentric perspectives of European historians. Rising to prominence since the 1990s, global historians have questioned traditional spatial entities, such as nations 45 Ifversen, ‘Myths’. 46 Olschowsky, ‘Erinnerungslandschaft’. 47 Woolf, ‘Europe and Its Historians’. 48 Leggewie with Lang, Der Kampf. 49 On Eustory, see: http://www.eustory.eu; on Euroclio, see: http://www.euroclio.eu (both accessed 15 October 2010).

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or Europe.50 World history, by focusing on themes such as migration, mobility, trade, diaspora, travelling and communication, has highlighted the hybridity, nomadism and cultural transfer which mark out a good part of the modern human existence. At the beginning of the twentyf irst century we are, in the words of Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, ‘losing our capacity for narrating our histories in conventional ways, outward from one region, but gaining the ability to think world history, pragmatically and realistically, as the interstices of integrating circuits of globalising networks of power and proliferating sites of localising politics’.51 It was only in the 1990s that empire returned to national history writing with a vengeance. Historians produced spectacular books of the colonial state’s responsibility for unspeakable atrocities and crimes. Benjamin Stora and the French war in Algeria as well as Caroline Elkins and the British suppression of the Mau Mau are examples of the way in which the colonial experience came to haunt public debates in two of the foremost former colonial powers in Western Europe.52 The legacy of one of Europe’s nineteenth-century empires, the Ottoman Empire, continues to challenge one of the underlying and frequently unquestioned tenets of European historical consciousness, namely that of a Christian Europe. Recent discussions surrounding Turkey’s entry into the European Union have only strengthened the perception that Europe’s Muslim past had been largely ignored and was in need of rediscovery. Much of the current research into Muslim Europe is informed by a desire to write Muslims back into the history of the continent. Given the many millions of Muslims who nowadays live and work across Europe, this is not a historiographical project but one which has profound implications for the identity of Europe.53

Conclusion: which European History for which Political Future of Europe? It remains unlikely that the Europeanization of historical consciousness can be achieved along the parameters set by the nineteenth-century nation 50 51 52 53

Dirlik, ‘Performing the World’, quote from 18f. Geyer and Bright, ‘World History in a Global Age’, 1058. Aldrich and Ward, ‘Ends of Empire’. Berger and Tekin, History and Belonging.

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state. For a start, particularistic history and national memory is what divides Europeans, not what unites them.54 Attempts to build a common European historical consciousness on the classical tradition (ancient Greece and Rome), on Christianity, on humanism, on the Enlightenment, or on the Holocaust have all been problematic in one way or another.55 Whilst historians should acknowledge common historical experiences and developments, they also have to recognize that European history has been far from harmonious.56 Patrick Pasture has recently reminded us in a powerful essay that the history of European unification cannot be written as a teleological success story concentrating on EU history and Eurocentric visions of peace, prosperity and democracy.57 Putting the difficulties of constructing European historical consciousness to one side, it is an altogether different question whether one should actually mourn those difficulties and seek to overcome them, or whether one should be relieved that Europe is unlikely to develop a strong collective identity. We would like to plead for a celebration of weak collective European identity for a variety of reasons. First of all, Europe is not a nation state.58 It will remain, for the foreseeable future, a mixture between a federation and a confederation of nation states, which have decided to transfer parts of their sovereignty to the European Union because they perceive mutual national benefits in doing so. Europe is not seeking to promote itself as a territory of one particular ethnic group. It does not speak one language, nor is it characterized by adherence to one particular religion. All of the non-spatial collective identities, which formed such powerful bonds with the national paradigm in the nineteenth century, cannot form these bonds with the European paradigm. Hence European paradigms of writing history as an identitarian exercise are hopefully bound to fail (although there may be no shortage of attempts), whilst Europe may be condemned to pursuing the path of a critical approach to its own past, in order to emerge stronger not because of history but despite history.

Bibliography Aldrich, Robert, and Stuart Ward, ‘Ends of Empire: Decolonising the Nation in British and French Historiography’, in Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (eds), 54 Judt, Postwar, 803-832: ‘Epilogue: From the House of the Dead: An Essay on Modern European Memory’. 55 Berger, ‘History and Forms’. 56 Frevert, ‘European Identifications’. 57 Pasture, Imagining European Unity. 58 Kaelble, ‘Un espace public Européen? ’

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Nationalizing the Past: Historians as Nation-Builders in Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 259-281. Antohi, Sorin, Balázs Trencsényi and Péter Apor (eds), Narratives Unbound: Historical Studies in Post-Communist Eastern Europe (Budapest: CEU Press, 2007). Bayly, Christopher A., ‘Modern Indian Historiography’, in Michael Bentley (ed.), Companion to Historiography (London: Routledge, 1997), 677-691. Becker-Schaum, Christoph, Arnold Herrmann Ludwig Heeren: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Geschichtswissenschaft zwischen Aufklärung und Historismus (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1993). Beloff, Max, Europe and the Europeans: An International Discussion (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957). Berger, Stefan, ‘Comparative History’, in idem, Heiko Feldner and Kevin Passmore (eds), Writing History: Theory and Practice (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 187-208. Berger, Stefan, ‘History and Forms of Collective Identity in Europe: Why Europe Cannot and Should Not Be Built on History’, in Laura Rorato and Anna Saunders (eds), The Essence and the Margin: National Identities and Collective Memories in Contemporary European Culture (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 21-36. Berger, Stefan, and Caner Tekin (eds), History and Belonging: Representations of the Past in Contemporary European Politics (Oxford: Berghahn, 2018). Berger, Stefan, and Chris Lorenz, ‘Introduction: National History-Writing in Europe in a Global Age’, in idem (eds), The Contested Nation: Ethnicity, Class, Religion and Gender in National Histories (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 24-59. Berger, Stefan, with Christoph Conrad, The Past as History: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Burke, Peter, ‘Did Europe Exist before 1700?’, History of European Ideas 1 (1980), 21-29. Burke, Peter, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929-2014 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015). Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Cherki, Alice, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). Crossley, Ceri, French Historians and Romanticism: Thierry, Guizot, the SaintSimonians, Quinet, Michelet (London: Routledge, 1993). Dirlik, Arif, ‘Performing the World: Reality and Representation in the Making of World History(ies)’, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute (Washington, DC) 37 (2005), 9-27. Eckert, Andreas, ‘Area Studies and the Writing of Non-European History in Europe’, in Matthias Middell and Lluis Roura i Aulinas (eds), Transnational Challenges to National History Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 140-163.

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Enteen, George Michael, The Soviet Scholar-Bureaucrat: M.N. Pokrovskii and the Society of Marxist Historians (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978). Euroclio website, at: http://www.euroclio.eu (accessed 15 October 2010). Eustory website, at: http://www.eustory.eu (accessed 15 October 2010). Evans, Richard J., Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (New York, 2019). Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin, 1963). Fellner, Fritz, ‘Nationales und europäisch-atlantisches Geschichtsbild in der Bundesrepublik und im Westen in den Jahren nach Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges’, in Ernst Schulin and Elisabeth Müller-Luckner (eds), Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (1945-1965) (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1989), 213-226. Fosdick, Raymond B., The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1989). Frevert, Ute, ‘European Identifications: What European History Can and Cannot Contribute’, European Studies Forum 38:1 (2008), 12-21. Geyer, Michael, and Charles Bright, ‘World History in a Global Age’, American Historical Review 100 (1995), 1034-1060. Guizot, François, General History of Civilisation in Europe [1828] (Charleston: BiblioLife, 2009). Hertfelder, Thomas, Franz Schnabel und die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998). Hexter, Jack H., ‘Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudélien’, Journal of Modern History 44 (1972), 480-539. Hübinger, Gangolf, Gelehrte, Politik und Őffentlichkeit. Eine Intellektuellengeschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006). Ifversen, Jan, ‘Myths in Writing European History’, in Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (eds), Nationalizing the Past: Historians as Nation-Builders in Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 452-479. Judt, Tony, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005). Kaelble, Hartmut, ‘Un espace public Européen? La Perspective Historique’, in Robert Frank and Rosalind Greenstein (eds), Gouvernance et identités en Europe (Brussels: Bruylant, 2004), 159-173. Kaelble, Hartmut, ‘Vergleichende Sozialgeschichte im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Forschungen europäischer Historiker’, Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte 1 (1993), 173-200. Leggewie, Claus, with Anne Lang, Der Kampf um die europäische Erinnerung. Ein Schlachtfeld wird besichtigt (Munich: Beck, 2011). Liakos, Antonis, ‘The Canon of European History and the Conceptual Framework of National Historiographies’, in Matthias Middell and Lluis Roura i Aulinas (eds),

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Transnational Challenges to National History Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 315-342. Lüsebrink, Hans-Jürgen, and Anthony Strugnell (eds), L’histoire des deux Indes (Paris: Voltaire Foundation, 1995). MacDonald, Dwight, The Ford Foundation: The Men and the Millions (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1989). Maner, Hans-Christian, ‘Die Aufhebung des Nationalen im Universalen oder die Nation als das Mass aller Dinge? Zum historiographischen Konzept Nicolae Iorgas im südost- und ostmitteleuropäischen Rahmen’, in Markus Krzoska and Hans-Christian Maner (eds), Beruf und Berufung. Geschichtswissenschaft und Nationsbildung in Ostmittel- und Südosteuropa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Münster: LIT, 2005), 239-263. Mazower, Mark, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Penguin, 1998). Menéndez Alzamora, Manuel, La Generación del 14: una aventura intelectual (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2006). Nolte, Hans-Heinrich, ‘Russia in Russian Writing of World History’, Storia della Storiografia 35 (1999), 63-74. Olschowsky, Burkhard, ‘Erinnerungslandschaft mit Brüchen. Das “Europäische Netzwerk Erinnerung und Solidarität” und die Traumata des alten Kontinents’, Transit 35 (2008), 23-49. Őze, Sándor, and Norbert Spannenberger, ‘“Hungaria vulgo appellatur propugnaculum Christianitatis”. Zur politischen Instrumentalisierung eines Topos in Ungarn’, in Markus Krzoska and Hans-Christian Maner (eds), Beruf und Berufung. Geschichtswissenschaft und Nationsbildung in Ostmittel- und Südosteuropa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Münster: LIT, 2005), 19-39. Pasamar, Gonzalo, Apologia and Criticism: Historians and the History of Spain, 1500-2000 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010). Pasture, Patrick, Imagining European Unity since 1000 AD (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Rizi, Fabio Fernando, Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). Rousseau, Jean Jacques, ‘Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men’ [1755], in Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (eds), The Collected Writings of Rousseau, 13 vols (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1990-2010), vol. III, 84-86. Said, Edward, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Pantheon, 1978). Schleier, Hans, Geschichte der deutschen Kulturgeschichtsschreibung, Band 1: Vom Ende des 18. bis zum Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts (Waltrop: Spenner, 2003). Schlözer, August Ludwig, Vorstellung seiner Universalhistorie [1772], new ed., ed. Horst-Walter Blanke (Waltrop: Spenner, 1997).

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Schneidmüller, Bernd, ‘Die mittelalterlichen Konstruktionen Europas. Konvergenz und Differenzierung’, in Heinz Duchhardt and Andreas Kunz (eds), ‘Europäische Geschichte’ als historiographisches Problem (Mainz: Von Zabern, 1997), 5-24. Schulze, Winfried, ‘Europa in der Frühen Neuzeit – begriffsgeschichtliche Befunde’, in Heinz Duchhardt and Andreas Kunz (eds), ‘Europäische Geschichte’ als historiographisches Problem (Mainz: Von Zabern, 1997), 35-66. Shore, Cris, Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration (London: Routledge, 2000). Stuchtey, Benedikt, ‘Geoffrey Barraclough (1908-1984)’, in Heinz Duchhardt, Małgorzata Morawiec, Wolfgang Schmale and Winfried Schulze (eds), EuropaHistoriker. Ein biographisches Handbuch, 3 vols (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), vol. I, 253. Stuchtey, Benedikt, and Eckhardt Fuchs (eds), Writing World History 1800-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Tortarolo, Edoardo, ‘Historians in Exile: Franco Venturi in Paris in the 1930s’, in David Keith Adams and Maurizio Vaudagna (eds), Transatlantic Encounters: Public Uses and Misuses of History in Europe and the United States (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2000), 89-118. Troebst, Stefan (ed.), ‘Geschichtsregionen: Concept and Critique’, special issue of European Review of History 10:2 (2003). Van der Zande, Johan, ‘August Ludwig Schlözer and the English Universal History’, in Stefan Berger, Peter Lambert and Peter Schumann (eds), Historikerdialoge: Geschichte, Mythos und Gedächtnis im deutsch-britischen kulturellen Austausch 1750-2000 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 136f. White, Hayden, The Practical Past (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014). Wilson, Keith (ed.), Forging the Collective Memory: Government and International Historians through Two World Wars (Oxford: Berghahn, 1996). Woolf, Larry, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilisation on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). Woolf, Stuart, ‘Europe and Its Historians’, Contemporary European History 12:3 (2003), 323-337.

About the Author Stefan Berger, Full Professor of Social History, Ruhr-University Bochum [email protected]

3

The Fragmented Continent The Invention of European Pluralism in History Writing from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-first Century Matthijs Lok Abstract This chapter argues that the language of European pluralism, understood here as the idea that Europe’s essence is the lack of (political, economic, religious and cultural) unity, is not a mere descriptive discourse, but has a strong prescriptive character. European pluralism became part of a comprehensive historical narrative of Europe during the Enlightenment. In the view of nineteenth-century historians of Europe, it was precisely the lack of unity and consequent internal struggle that had resulted in Europe’s extraordinary cultural, economic and political dynamism and progress. These ideas were rediscovered during and after World War I and World War II, as part of the attempt to politically and morally reconstruct the European order against both American capitalism and Soviet communism. After the end of the Cold War, the pluralist narrative even gained new prominence in the post-1989 surge in histories of Europe and student textbooks. The pluralist idea of Europe did not exclude a Eurocentrist worldview but, on the contrary, often formed an important basis for ideas of Europe’s superiority and uniqueness. Keywords: pluralism, Enlightenment, historiography, narratives, Cold War

The Fragmented Continent ‘Europe is the smallest continent. […] But in the intensity of its internal differences and contrasts, Europe is unique.’1 This general characterization 1 Judt, Postwar, vii.

Brolsma, Marjet, Robin de Bruin, and Matthijs Lok (eds): Eurocentrism in European History and Memory. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463725521_ch03

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of Europe and European history was given by the English-American historian Tony Judt (1948-2010) in the introduction to his seminal book Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (2005). According to this eminent historian, ‘Europe’ presented an exception in global perspective as it is a geopolitical entity above all characterized by contrasts instead of unity. This idea of Europe’s ‘unique contrasting nature’ can be found in most other histories of Europe, published by academics, politicians and bestselling authors after 1989. Norman Davies, for instance, has written: ‘[S]ince Europe has been never been politically united, diversity has evidently provided one of its most enduring characteristics. […] There is lasting diversity in the national states and cultures which persist within European civilisations as whole.’2 The conception of European history as essentially ‘fragmentary’ has also been picked up by the controversial politician and historian Henry Kissinger in his book World Order (2014). In this book, Kissinger analyses the current state of international affairs from a long-term historical perspective. Characteristic for the European development is what he terms the ‘pluralistic’ nature of European history after the fall of the Roman Empire: In China and Islam, political contests were fought for control of an established framework of order. Dynasties changed, but each new ruling group portrayed itself as restoring a legitimate system that had fallen into disrepair. In Europe, no such evolution took hold. With the end of Roman rule, pluralism became the defining characteristic of the European order […] yet although it was comprehensible as a single civilisation, Europe never had a single governance, or a united, fixed identity.3

A different example of the historical narrative pointing to the alleged relationship between Europe’s long-term development and lack of a political unitary structure is the work of the prominent Belgian historian of medieval Europe, Wim Blockmans. 4 In his introduction to his handbook History of Medieval Europe (2007), co-authored with Peter Hoppenbrouwers, he regarded Europe’s fragmentation as the main explanation of – what he saw as – the extraordinary development of the small continent from a peripheral part of the world around 1000, to the ‘forefront’ of the planet in 1800: 2 Davies, Europe, 16. 3 Kissinger, World Order, 11. For a similar contrast between a diverse Europe and a more unitary Middle East, India and China, see Bartlett, Making, 1. 4 Blockmans also published an overview of European history: Blockmans, History. Dutch original: Blockmans, Geschiedenis.

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No clairvoyant making a prediction in 1400 about which part of the world would dominate in the future would ever have mentioned Europe. […] Yet things turned out differently: eventually, between 1000 and 1800, Europe moved from its backward position to the forefront. In what way was Europe different from its eminent predecessors [Mongols, Muslim sultanates and the Chinese empire]? The most important difference between Europe, China and all the other highly developed regions of the world lies in the fact that there was no unitary authoritative structure in Europe.5

Blockmans somewhat triumphantly argued that the absence of a political, economic as well as religious centre was the main explanation for the extraordinary development of the small European continent into the imperial ruler of most of the world in 1900 and the world leader in technological and economic advancement. This emphasis on the relationship between ‘fragmentation’ and ‘development’ can also be found in Jared Diamond’s bestseller Guns, Germs and Steel (1997). According to Diamond: ‘Europe’s fragmentation did, and China’s unity didn’t, foster the advance of technology, science, and capitalism by fostering competition between states and providing innovators with alternative sources of support and havens of persecution.’ Many more recent examples of historians linking Europe’s lack of unity and supposedly unique development could be given.6 In this chapter, I study the notion of ‘European pluralism’ not as a given, but as a historical, and especially historiographical, construction and narrative.7 Historiography of course is not a neutral representation of the past, but reflects to a large extent the historical context and political agenda of the authors. Europe’s history is not regarded as a given, but above all as a conscious or less conscious political construction.8 Historiography is therefore an excellent way to study the idea of Europe at a certain moment in time. ‘Pluralism’ or ‘diversity’ is understood here as the idea of political, economic and cultural fragmentation as a unique and enduring hallmark 5 Blockmans and Hoppenbrouwers, Introduction, 7. 6 Diamond, Guns, 458. Another example is: Jones, The European Miracle. 7 Although many books have been published in the last decades on the history of the idea of Europe, to my knowledge no monograph has yet been devoted to the topic of the history of the idea of European pluralism. Relevant studies are Wintle, ‘Introduction’; Wintle, The Image; Delanty, ‘Europe’. Delanty only focuses on contemporary political discourse and does not trace the long-term genealogy of the idea. 8 For a ‘constructivist perspective’ of European history, see Roobol, ‘Europe’; Hartog, Régimes; Woolf, ‘Europe’; Schmale, Geschichte; Ifversen, ‘Myth and History’; Berger with Conrad, The Past as History.

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of European history.9 It would, evidently, be a Eurocentric fallacy, to regard the historical language of pluralism as uniquely European: the notion of ‘unity in diversity’ can also be found in different formulations in the national historical discourses of India and the US, among other examples.10 The pluralist interpretation of Europe’s past is evidently not the only European historical narrative. Often this narrative coexisted – or contrasted – with other ‘counter-narratives’, such as the notion of Europe as technological progress, Enlightened civilization, or the idea of Europe as imperial and Christian unity.11 As it is clearly impossible to provide a complete overview of the history of the idea of European pluralism and its intellectual and political context in this chapter, I will briefly discuss a few case studies from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century to give an indication of the long-term historical development. I will not suggest, however, that one single, coherent and continent-wide discourse existed over the past centuries. In the conclusion I will argue that the pluralist narrative of European history has a strong, but often implicit and overlooked, Eurocentric dimension, and should be examined more critically by historians of Europe.12 In terms of methodology, I am inspired by the ‘serial contextualization’ approach pioneered by Harvard historian David Armitage. Combining the contextual approach of the Cambridge school with a long-term perspective, serial contextualization implies the study of concepts, such as the idea of European pluralism, over an extended time frame, jointly with carefully selected in-depth case studies.13

Enlightenment Narratives: Freedom and Progress The eighteenth century is the starting point of this study as this century marked the true beginning of the construction of a comprehensive historical narrative of European pluralism.14 John Pocock, Karen O’Brien, Céline 9 I have used the words ‘pluralism’ and ‘diversity’ here interchangeably. On the different interpretation of ‘pluralism’ and ‘diversity’ in the European context, see Delanty, ‘Europe’, 36. 10 Delanty, ‘Europe’, 27n5 and 37. Delanty, however, regards the idea of ‘unity in diversity’ in a Eurocentric vein as a ‘uniquely European discourse’. On Europe and the Other, see Stråth, Europe; Wintle, ‘Europe’. 11 On European historical narratives, see D’Auria and Vermeiren, ‘Narrating Europe’, 385-400. 12 For the concept of ‘eurocentrism’, I refer to the introduction of this volume. 13 Armitage, ‘What’s the Big Idea?’ 14 The fragmented nature of Europe was already expressed in treatises on the ‘balance of Europe’ from the sixteenth century onwards, by, among others, Machiavelli (Kaeber, Idee). The theme can also incidentally be found in humanistic writings: Jan Amos Komensky, also known as Comenius, wrote in his A Generell Table of Europe of 1666: ‘[A]nd if for the vastness of single

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Spector and Antoine Lilti have convincingly argued that during the Enlightenment a comprehensive European historical narrative was formulated.15 In short: Europe was invented as a historical continent around the middle of the eighteenth century by a new canon of historians of Europe consisting of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Robertson, Gibbon, Hume and the Göttingen historians in Germany.16 Also lesser known ‘histories of modern Europe’ were for the first time published in the late eighteenth century by authors such as Nicholas de Bonneville (1760-1828) and William Russell (1741-1793).17 The famous work of Montesquieu, L’esprit des lois (1748, The Spirit of the Laws), was, according to Spector and Lilti, the ‘matrix of reflection on Europe in the eighteenth century’ and one of the founding texts of the European historical narrative.18 In the tradition of classical republicanism, Montesquieu (1689-1755) argued that freedom is best guaranteed in small- and medium-sized states, such as existed in Western and Central Europe. Empires inevitably lead to corruption and the rise of despotism. Large empires strive for uniformity in the state apparatus controlled by one despot, whereas in moderate states there are several powers which counterbalance one another. Montesquieu applied these general principles to the concrete case of ‘Europe’ by using his method of comparison and contrast.19 First of all, Montesquieu equated Europe with freedom and moderation and Asia with despotism and an extreme exercise of power. Due to, among other factors, climate and geography, Europe was characterized by small republics and medium-sized monarchies, and it is this that made freedom in this part of the world possible. In the large plains of Central Asia, large empires were the norm and therefore Asia in the eyes of Montesquieu was a continent characterized by despotism.20 empire, and treasure and dependencies thereon, she cannot come into competition with the times of the Roman Greatness, yet take her divided, and all her parts together, and she far exceeds them. And by how much her Empire since has been disposed into diverse hands; by so much have her several parts been more puissant and flourishing’ (Drace-Francis, European Identity, 41). 15 Lilti and Spector, Penser; O’Brien, Narratives; Pocock, Barbarism. 16 Voltaire published his Essai sur les moeurs in its entirety for the first time in 1756 to provide an alternative to Bossuet’s providential Catholic Histoire universelle of 1681. On the one hand, Voltaire gives a more cosmopolitan and less Eurocentric account than Bossuet by starting his universal history with ancient China instead of Genesis. On the other hand, Voltaire’s universal history is above all an account of the progress and development of Europe through the ages. Like Bossuet, he emphasised the uniqueness of the European experience only using different arguments: progress instead of providence (Lilti, ‘La civilisation’, 144-154). 17 Lok, ‘A Revolutionary Narrative’. 18 Lilti and Spector, ‘Introduction’, 9. 19 Spector, Montesquieu; Postigliola and Palumbo, L’Europe de Montesquieu. 20 ‘In Asia one has always seen great empires; in Europe they were never able to continue to exist. This is because the Asia we know has broader plains; it is cut into larger parts by seas; and as it is more to the South, its streams dry up more easily, its mountains are less covered with

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Montesquieu discerned a second dichotomy between the Roman Empire and the Germanic tribes that invaded Europe in the early Middle Ages. The Roman Empire had lost its freedom as a result of the imperial conquests. The Germanic tribes, no doubt less developed than the Romans, had, by contrast, retained their freedom and independence by experimenting with an early form of representative institutions. A third strand was the hostility expressed by Montesquieu towards the idea of an ‘universal monarchy’. Montesquieu believed Europe’s climate and topographical circumstances precluded the formation of a unitary authoritative structure. This did not mean that pluralism is always self-evident and that Europe is immune from despotism.21 A different expression of the Enlightened idea of European pluralism can be found in the historical essays by the British philosopher and man of letters David Hume (1711-1766).22 In his essay ‘Of the rise and progress of the arts and sciences’ (1742), Hume tried to find general explanations for the development of the arts and sciences, which could not only be explained solely through the exceptional talents of a few men, but by ‘general causes and principles’ that could be find in the people as a whole. Hume’s first observation is that the arts can only flourish among people that enjoy a free government: ‘[T]hese refinements require curiosity, security and law not to be found in despotic governments.’ In his second observations he stated that a system of smaller states is more beneficial to the flourishing of the arts than a large state as it creates an atmosphere of cultural competition: The next observation, which I shall make on this head, is that nothing is more favourable to the rise of politeness and learning, than a number of neighbouring and independent states, connected together by commerce and policy. The emulation which naturally arises among those neighbouring states, is an obvious source of improvement.23

Ancient Greece was a good example of this mechanism. According to Hume: ‘Greece was a cluster of principalities, which soon became republics; and being united by their near neighbourhood, and by the ties of the same language and interest, they entered in the closed intercourse of commerce and learning. […] Their contention and debates sharpened the wits of men.’24 snow, and its smaller rivers form slighter barriers. Therefore power should always be despotic in Asia. For if servitude there were not extreme, there would immediately be a division that the nature of the country cannot endure’ (Montesquieu, Spirit, 283). 21 Montesquieu, Spirit, 136. 22 Harris, Hume. 23 Hume, ‘Of the Rise’, 119. 24 Ibid., 120.

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The rise of Christianity ended this Greek pluralism by imposing uniformity. The Catholic Church in the eyes of Hume could be regarded as ‘one large state’ or empire. The result of the end of political fragmentation was the decline of the arts and sciences, as well as freedom. However, modern Europe was described a Hume a new Greece on a much larger scale: ‘[M]ankind having at length thrown off this yoke (of the church) affairs are now returned nearly to the same station as before, and Europe is at present a copy at large, of what Greece was formerly a pattern in miniature.’25 The competition and lack of a central authority in Europe resulted in the flourishing of arts. Newton and Descartes were revered in their own countries, but heavily criticized in others. So Hume took a positive view of competition of ideas which was the result of the political division in Europe. Politically divided ancient Greece was in this case not a negative but a positive example.

Nineteenth-Century Narratives: Struggle and Dynamism The post-revolutionary decades formed a period in which several histories of Europe were published as part of the attempt to make sense of the rupture of the revolution and the Napoleonic experience. The Restoration era (1814-1830/1848) saw a flowering not only of national, but, often at the same time, also of Europeanist history writing.26 Usually this Europeanist historiography was written with a conservative or liberal agenda in mind. Even in the Restoration period, European history was not created ex nihilo, but reacted to an even older tradition of Enlightenment historiography. In many ways, a diverse group of prominent post-revolutionary historians of modern Europe – including Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), François Guizot (1787-1874) and Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) – to a large extent derived their works from their enlightened predecessors.27 The most influential of the Restoration histories of Europe, especially in the early nineteenth century, was Francois Guizot’s Histoire générale de la civilization en Europe (1828, The History of Civilization in Europe).28 In this history, Guizot was countering the narrative of the French restoration monarchy that the French revolution had presented a rupture with French 25 Ibid., 121. 26 The combination of Europeanism and nationalism can, for instance, be found in the works of Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872): Recchia and Urbinati, Cosmopolitanism. 27 On Restoration historiography, see Berger with Conrad, The Past as History, 80-139. 28 Guizot, Histoire; Rosanvallon, Le moment Guizot.

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history. Instead Guizot, like other French liberal historians, argued that liberty had been present in European history from the invasions of the Germanic peoples and the fall of the Roman Empire. For the moderate liberal Guizot, it was the royal absolutism and church despotism that formed a rupture with the European tradition. The revolution therefore was in line with European traditions, not the French absolutist monarchy. Although Guizot’s book was described as a ‘history of Europe’, France was considered the centre stage of Europe and European history in Guizot’s view was to a large extent an extension of French national history. But the Histoire générale de la civilization en Europe is more than just a French national history, but also contains a vision of what Europe is and should be. In his second lecture, he stated that pluralism is the essential hallmark of European civilization: the lack of a single ‘dominant principle’ sets it apart from other civilizations, ancient and contemporary: When we regard the civilizations which have preceded that of modern Europe, whether in Asia or elsewhere, including even Greek and Roman civilization, it is impossible to help being struck with the unity which pervades them. They seem to have emanated from a single fact, from a single idea; one might say that society has attached itself to a solitary dominant principle, which has determined its institutions, its customs, its creeds, in one word, all of its developments. […] It has been wholly otherwise with the civilisation of modern Europe. Without entering into details, look upon it, gather together your recollections; it will immediately appear to you varied, confused, stormy; all forms, all principles of social organisation co-exist therein; powers spiritual and temporal; elements theocratic, monarchical, aristocratic, democratic; all orders, all social arrangements mingle and press upon one another; there are infinite degrees of liberty, wealth, and influence. These various forces are in a state of continual struggle among themselves, yet no one succeeds in stifling the others, and taking possession of society.29

To a certain extent, Guizot echoed eighteenth-century enlightened narratives, but he also added new elements, partly derived from German idealist philosophy.30 Guizot’s interpretation of European history was consequently adopted by influential nineteenth-century liberals, among them notably John Stuart Mill. Mill, partly building on Guizot, developed the idea of ‘principle 29 Guizot, History, 15. 30 Lilti, ‘La civilisation’, 165-166.

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of systematic antagonism’, allegedly unique for the European experience.31 The liberal pluralist view of Europe was used to enhance feelings of European superiority and even to legitimate imperial and colonial dominion by Europe over other parts of the world.32 Pluralism is here equated by liberal historians with modernity as well as the idea of European freedom.33 Pluralism, however, was not confined to liberal histories of Europe. It was also an element in the construction of a conservative view of European history after the French revolution.34 This conservative understanding of European pluralism differed, however, from the liberal version as the defence of Europe’s cultural diversity and variety was usually framed within a common Christian tradition. Authors such as the Catholic Joseph de Maistre, the orthodox Alexandre Stourdza (1791-1854) and the Dutch counterrevolutionary Protestant Groen van Prinsterer (1801-1876) defended Europe’s historically grown cultural and political variety against the supposedly uniform tendencies of an ahistorical Enlightenment and the universalist ideals of the French Revolution.35

In Praise of Antagonism: A German Perspective French, Spanish, British, Dutch and Belgians of the nineteenth century have often regarded their own country’s history as the embodiment of the European ‘unity in diversity’ theme.36 Pluralist notions of Europe, however have traditionally been particularly dominant in German historical thought. German authors regarded the Holy Roman Empire as the quintessentially European state due to its federal and non-centralized character.37 In his famous lecture on universal history of 1789 Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), for example, emphasized the unique contrasts which can be found in Europe.38 31 Varouxakis, ‘Guizot’s Historical Works’. 32 Pitts, A Turn to Empire. 33 Delanty, Formations; Asbach, Europa; Lok, ‘La construction’. 34 Lok, ‘Congress’. 35 Ghervas, Réinventer; Armenteros, The French Idea; Bijl, Europese antirevolutionair. 36 Berger with Conrad, The Past as History, 95-101. 37 See Vogt, Über die Europäische Republik; Durchhardt, ‘Niklas Vogt’. 38 ‘Welche Mannigfaltigkeit in Gebräuchen, Verfassungen und Sitten! Welcher rasche Wechsel von Finsternis und Licht, von Anarchie und Ordnung, von Glückseligkeit und Elend, wenn wir den Menschen auch nur in dem kleinen Weltteil Europa aufsuchen! Frei an der Themse, und für diese Freiheit sein eigener Schuldner; hier unbezwingbar zwischen seinen Alpen, dort zwischen seine Kunstflüssen und Sümpfen un-überwunden. An der Weichsel kraftlos und elend durch seine Zwietracht; jenseits der Pyrenäen durch seine Ruhe kraftlos und elend. Wohlhabend und

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Even more exemplary is the journal Europa, edited in Paris by Friedrich Schlegel between 1803 and 1805. The goal of this cultural journal was to contribute to the regeneration of European culture and letters that was regarded by the editors as decadent and in decline. Literature and the arts would be instrumental in the spiritual reawakening of Europe. Partly building on Herder’s criticism of French philosophes, the authors of the journal argued that Germany, and not France, should take a leading role in European culture. Germany was more suitable as European cultural guiding star as German culture was based on the principle of diversity, whereas French culture always strove to create one homogenous and centrally controlled culture in Europe, or so the German authors argued. Germany’s moral qualities made her culturally superior in comparison with the superficial French aesthetics. Schlegel also fell back on the dichotomy between the Orient, defined by the principle of unity, whereas ‘division’ (Trennung, Zwiespalt) was the essential quality of Europe.39 The topos of European pluralism was also pervasive in the most influential of all nineteenth-century historians, Leopold von Ranke. Although Ranke is traditionally regarded as the ‘father of modern (national) historiography’, since the 1980s scholars have argued that that idea of the ‘modern’ Ranke is essentially a projection of a later era. 40 German historian Ernst Schulin has furthermore interpreted Ranke not as a German or Prussian national historian but primarily as a historian above all interested in the problem of gesegnet in Amsterdam ohne Ernte: dürftig und unglücklich an des Ebro unbenutztem Paradiese’ (Schiller, ‘Was heiβt’‚ 91). Trans.: ‘What a multitude of customs, constitutions, and manners! What a rapid alternation between darkness and light, between anarchy and order, bliss and misery, even when we meet people only in this small part of the world, Europe! Free at the Thames, and for this freedom his own debtor; here, unconquerable between the Alps, somewhere else invincible between his artificial rivers and swamps. At the River Vistula, without energy and miserable in his discord; on the other side of the Pyrenees, without energy and miserable in his calmness. Wealthy and blessed in Amsterdam without harvest; poor and unhappy in the unused paradise of the Ebro’ (Schiller, ‘What Is’, 263). 39 ‘Eine solche auch climatische Entgegengesetztheid, eine innrer organischer Zwiespalt scheint mir – physitalisch und historisch genommen, und beides soltte nie getrennt seyn – dem character Europa’s wesentlich. Das im Oriente alles in Einem mit ungeteilter Kraft aus der Quelle springt, das sollte hier sich mannichfach theilen’ (Europa. Eine Zeitschrift, 31-32). My translation: ‘Such climatic contradictions, an inner organic conflict, seem to me to be – both in physical and historical respect – the essential character of Europe. Everything that in the Orient is one and springs with a unitary strength from the source, will divide itself into many parts here [in Europe].’ 40 According to Iggers and Powell (Ranke, 14), ‘it is significant that [Ranke], who was born in 1795 and whose work spanned much of the nineteenth century, had deeps roots in the religious and intellectual world of the eighteenth century’.

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the development of ‘modern Europe’. Schulin has argued that the foundation of Ranke’s historical framework was the idea model of Europa as ‘unity in diversity’ (Einheit in der Vielvalt). 41 Ranke’s f irst major work on European history is his Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514 (Histories of the Latin and Teutonic Nations from 1494 to 1514), published in 1824. In this early work, Ranke explicitly defined Europe in a narrow sense as the union of the Latin and the Germanic peoples, excluding for instance the Slavic and Russian peoples, but also Magyars and Arabs. The Latin peoples contributed religion and civilization, the Germanic peoples energy and dynamism. The years around 1500 are especially crucial as then the European system of the ‘balance of power’ or Gleichgewicht came into being, meaning that Europe would not have an imperial political order but a dynamic system consisting of several competing and collaborating political powers. The fact that the bond between the Germanic and the Latin peoples did not form a complete union, but is characterized by ‘mutual antagonisms’, Ranke regarded as something which should be valued positively. Echoing French, English and German Enlightenment historiography, Ranke argues that it is precisely the tensions and antagonism which drives the development of Europe: ‘the life of Europe consists of the energy of significant contrasts’.42 As he contemplated the start of the long Franco-Spanish rivalry in Italy, he sighed: ‘[I]t is the life and fortune of the Germanic-Latin nations that they never attained unity.’43 In the 1840s under the influence of the revolutionary turmoil, Ranke became more conservative and as official historian of Prussia after 1841 increasingly expressed sympathy for Prussia and Prussian-German national history in his writings. Nonetheless even in his later works, Ranke continued to uphold the view of European history as unity in diversity. On the one hand, he emphasized the essential coherence of European history: ‘[F]rom time immemorial there was a profound internal coherence in European life: movements of apparent local origins export their analogues to distant regions, […], everything was mutually conditioned, everything hung together; over the vast arena one idea prevailed and it embraced the world.’ On the other, he explained Europe’s development in his Französische Geschichte, 41 Schulin, ‘Leopold von Ranke’. 42 ‘Das Leben von Europa besteht in der Energie der groβen Gegensätze’; ‘Der antagonismus bildet sich aus, welcher die Europäische Welt seitdem beherscht hat’, Ranke wrote in his postscript to the edition of 1874 (Ranke, Geschichten, 323). Trans.: ‘The life of Europe consists in the energy evolved by the great contrasts it presents. […] The antagonism which has since controlled the European world was becoming developed’ (Ranke, History, 387). 43 Krieger, Ranke, 111-112.

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vornehmlich im sechzehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhundert (French History Mainly in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, five vols., 1852-1861) by pointing to its lack of unity as salient feature: ‘[T]he European world is composed of elements of original diversity from whose inner opposition and struggle the changes in the historical epochs develop.’44

Twentieth-century Narratives: Individualism and Integration The periods after 1918 and 1945 can, with respect to the production of histories of Europe, be compared to the period after 1815: the post-revolutionary Restoration era. In all three periods a strong sense of crisis prevailed after devastating continent-wide wars, but also a strong urge to renew European civilization by looking at its past. 45 After 1918 and 1945, just as after 1815, writers turned to Europe’s history as a source of inspiration and orientation in a time when all established order and belief seemed to have disappeared. According to Susan Röβner, the European histories published after World War I and World War II, as well as after the fall of communism, were written to make sense of the cataclysmic events, resulting in a general perception of a crisis of European civilization by putting these events in a larger perspective. 46 Moreover, the histories of Europe were meant to provide inspiration for the present and future regeneration of Europe. Early-nineteenth-century ideas of Europe and European historical narratives, which had come to be forgotten or neglected in the late nineteenth century dominated by national historical narratives, were rediscovered after the cataclysmic events of the two world wars. 44 Cited in Krieger, Ranke, 250. Another mid-nineteenth-century German pluralist interpretation of European history is Gervinus, Geschichte. See the chapter by Stefan Berger in this volume. 45 Lok, ‘Congress’; Thompson, ‘Ideas’; Röβner, Geschichte; Spiering and Wintle, Ideas. On the comparison of European reconstruction in 1814-1815, 1918-1919 and 1945-1951, see Stråth, Europe’s Utopias. 46 Röβner, Geschichte, 82-99. Although Röβners book is very valuable, it also presents certain problems. By selecting Dutch, German and British sources, she omits, for instance, important historiographical traditions such as those of France and Italy which may be entirely different from their Germanic counterparts. A more important shortcoming is in my view the fact that the author sees the European historical narratives above all as a twentieth-century phenomenon. In many ways the historical narratives of post-war Europe were derived from older histories of Europe written in the late eighteenth and above all early nineteenth century. The European past, constructed during earlier continent-wide crises, was recycled and given a new use. This reuse of older historical European notions does not receive a prominent role in this otherwise very valuable book.

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Most of the interwar histories, especially the German ones, regarded the Middle Ages as a golden era of European spiritual and cultural unity. German historians also saw the Middle Ages as the heyday of a German-led Europe. The Renaissance was regarded by them as the end of this epoch of unity and marked the coming of the deplored modernity. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the French Revolution were described as paving the way for the events of the twentieth century. Most of these conservative historians were defending a fundamentally Christian Europe and lamented the loss of unity after 1500. But next to the idea of a historical Christian unity, a language of European pluralist exceptionalism can also be discerned. This more dynamic view of European history is often combined with the narrative of Europe as a Christian continent. 47 The interwar theme of Europe’s unique combination of unity and was not only a German idea. For instance, in 1922, the French poet and philosopher Paul Valéry (1871-1945) described Europe as a marketplace of ideas and goods from all over the world, determined by exchange as well as competition. He wrote: ‘Europe […] was born of the exchange of all things spiritual and material, born of the voluntary and involuntary co-operation of many races, of the competition between different religions, political systems and business interests, all within a very limited territory.’48 The Spanish intellectual José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), furthermore, was inspired by François Guizot’s pluralist interpretation of European history when writing his influential Revolt of the Masses (1930). 49 In the decade after World War II, the language of European pluralism was once again revived in an attempt to reconstruct European identity after the catastrophe of the war. Intellectuals and politicians could build on European ideas formulated in the interbellum but also on older lateeighteenth-century and especially early-nineteenth-century concepts. However, the pluralist ‘unity in diversity’ theme was once again conceptualized in a new context: European diversity is now explicitly contrasted 47 Röβner, Geschichte, 218-334. 48 Paul Valéry, ‘European Man’ (1922), cited in Drace-Francis, European Identity, 185-186. Ifversen, ‘The Crisis’. 49 Ortega y Gasset argued that ‘the swarm of Western peoples, which has started its flight over history since the collapse of the ancient world, has been characterized by a twofold life form. It so happened that when [these peoples] developed their unique character, at the same time between and above them a common culture of thoughts, practices and beliefs arose. […] The homogeneity of the [Western] peoples never impaired their diversity. On the contrary, every new uniform principle stimulated the diversification’ (Ortega y Gasset, De Opstand, 13; my translation from the Dutch version).

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with the supposedly totalitarian Nazi empire and the Soviet Union, the twentieth-century equivalent of the universal empires or Asian despotism so feared in the eighteenth century. To a lesser extent European cultural pluralism was propagated by intellectuals as an alternative to American capitalist and homogenous mass culture.50 Whereas both the US and the USSR represented political and cultural monolithic systems, Europe stood for federalism, individual freedom and pluriformity. For German post-war historians in particular, the idea of a unique European historical pluralism provided a way to reintegrate a defeated Germany in a larger European historical context.51 As in 1815, after 1945 the language of European diversity enabled intellectuals and historians to propagate a European worldview, while at the same time defend the continued role of nation states in the post-war world. In an essay on the unity of the Abendland published in the Schweizer Monatsheft in the late 1940s, German historian Walter Goetz (1867-1958) argued optimistically that Europe consisted of a tradition that was capable of eternally renewing itself. Even the Reformation and the rise of national states had not been able to fundamentally undermine European unity. It was precisely the lack of unity and the existence of national diversity, evidence of European ‘individualism’, that made the continent unique in the world, according to Goetz. The bipolarity of European culture, at once national as well as universal, prevented the dominance of a one-sided intellectual sphere (einseitigen Gedankenwelt).52 In this essay, he explicitly referred to his nineteenth-century predecessor Ranke as a source of inspiration. Interestingly, although many post-war historians and intellectuals extolled the virtues of a common European culture, overall they did not support the project of political unification of Europe. For example, the Christian poet and literary critic T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), in an essay published in his Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948), emphasized the theme of unity in diversity: ‘I have already affirmed that there can be no “European” culture if the several countries are isolated from each other: I add now that there can be no European culture if these countries are reduced to [one] identity. We need variety in unity and not the unity of organisation, but the unity of nature.’53 Eliot, however, saw the narrative of ‘cultural unity in diversity’ as an alternative to political unification, which he opposed. 50 Röβner, Geschichte. 51 See, for instance, Gollwitzer, Europabild. 52 Goetz, ‘Die Einheit’. 53 Eliot, ‘The Unity’, 120.

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As we have seen in the introduction, in the 1980s and 1990s the historical narrative of European pluralism was, by contrast, increasingly used to legitimate a closer European political and cultural union. This twentyfirst-century historiographical emphasis on Europe’s supposedly unique fragmentation likewise reflects wider European political developments. ‘Pluralism’ and the closely related concept of ‘diversity’ seem to have become the main contemporary political European narrative after alternatives such as ‘Christianity’, ‘eternal peace’ and ‘market liberalization’ are now no longer generally accepted and to a certain extent discredited. The idea forms currently one of the most influential ways of understanding ‘Europe’ and ‘European history’, as is demonstrated by the exhibition in the House of European History in Brussels.54 According to Gerard Delanty, the notion of ‘unity in diversity’ offered an ‘escape’ from the EU dilemma of universalism and particularism.55 In 2000, the European Parliament adopted the English-language motto ‘Unity in Diversity’ through a non-official process, the result of a contest involving 80,000 students from the union’s fifteen countries. The theme of ‘Unity in Diversity’ has been criticized as being meaningless, and some critics even point out the less tolerant aspects of this pluralist EU narrative – it’s a ‘thinly veiled renewed Eurocentric triumphalism,’ according to Shore.56 It has even been regarded as a defensive stance, which tends to go back to national identities as its primary model.57

Conclusion: Pluralism and Eurocentrism I have attempted here to briefly trace this narrative of European exceptional fragmentation by examining the idea of European pluralism from an intellectual historical perspective, researching especially historiographical sources. I have argued that the idea of European pluralism was ‘invented’ 54 ‘The House of European History is dedicated to the understanding of the shared past and diverse experiences of European people. It’s a place where you can discover different points of view and common ground in European history’ (House of European History, ‘Mission & Vision’). 55 Delanty, ‘Europe’, 35; ibid., The Cosmopolitan Imagination, 200-202. 56 Sassatelli, Becoming Europeans, 36. According to Monica Sassatelli, ‘the unity in diversity formula at the level of official discourse is an attempt to combine the two (collective-corporatist identity of the 1970s and the individual-liberal identity of the 1980s), maintaining the focus on individual liberties, but also trying to reintegrate the social dimension, as well as the more obvious recognition of local, regional and national ‘levels’ as building blocks of the European dimension’ (p. 42). 57 Delanty, ‘Europe’, 38.

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around the middle of the eighteenth century: during the Enlightenment European pluralism became part of a comprehensive historical narrative of European civilization and regarded as the main explanation for the extraordinary development and progress as well as the allegedly unique political freedom of the European continent, contrasting with Roman, as well as Asian, despotism. After the French Revolution, these enlightened historical narratives were reused and adapted by (self-described) Restoration conservatives as well as liberals. In the view of nineteenth-century historians of Europe, it was precisely the lack of unity and consequent internal struggle that had resulted in Europe’s extraordinary cultural, economic and political dynamism and progress. Usually, a contrast was drawn between Europe (a ‘historical continent’, shaped by centuries of development and conflict) and the rest of the world (non-historical and stagnant). Ranke’s antagonistic interpretations of European history, as well as those of other nineteenth-century historians, were rediscovered during and after World War I and World War II, as part of the attempt to politically and morally reconstruct the European order against both American capitalism and Soviet communism. After the end of the Cold War, the pluralist narrative even gained uncritical new prominence in the post-1989 surge in histories of Europe and student text books, reflecting the dynamic of European integration in the 1990s and early 2000s, as demonstrated by the Brussels House of History. Obviously, the pluralist narrative does not present one pan-European homogeneous tradition. Authors developed these ideas in part independently from each other and often in a national context, although transnational reuse of the older ideas can certainly also be found. Many different varieties of the pluralism narrative can, furthermore, be located in the sources, as we have seen. At least three different, but related, manifestations were discussed in this chapter: firstly, the political juxtaposition between a polycentric Europe, the guarantee of freedom, and a despotic universal monarchy typical of Asia and the rest world. Secondly, there is the liberal cultural language of Europe, essentially characterized by paradoxes and duality instead of homogeneity. Thirdly, there is the related idea that a dynamic and evolving Europe is determined by competition and struggle. My aim in this chapter, to conclude, has been to illustrate that the language of European pluralism, understood here as the idea that Europe’s essence is the lack of (political, economic, religious and cultural) unity, is not a mere descriptive discourse, but has a strong prescriptive and essentialist character. I have not argued here that ‘pluralism’ is characteristic of modernity, only that pluralism was a hallmark attributed by Enlightenment thinkers and

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their successors to their concept of ‘modern Europe’ and valued positively. This positive assessment of the supposed pluralist nature of modern Europe does not necessarily entail a more tolerant or relativistic general outlook. A division was made from the eighteenth century onwards between a historical and developing pluralist Europe versus a stagnant, non-historical homogeneous rest of the world, which was increasingly omitted from universal history textbooks and the subject of imperial domination. The pluralist idea of Europe did not exclude a Eurocentrist worldview but, on the contrary, often formed an important basis for ideas of Europe’s superiority and uniqueness, providing, for instance, a legitimation for the right to rule other parts of the world. As was demonstrated by the examples mentioned in the introduction, this narrative still persists, in new articulations, to this very day.

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and by the Rest of the World, in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2008), 23-48. Wintle, Michael, The Image of Europe: Visualizing Europe in Cartography and Iconography throughout the Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Wintle, Michael, ‘Introduction: Cultural Diversity and Identity in Europe’, in idem (ed.), Culture and Identity in Europe (Aldershot: Avebur, 1996), 1-8. Woolf, Stuart, ‘Europe and Its Historians’, Contemporary European History 12:3 (2003), 323-337.

About the Author Matthijs Lok, Assistant Professor of Modern European History, University of Amsterdam [email protected]

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Eurocentrism in Research on Mass Violence Uğur Ümit Üngör

Abstract This chapter examines Eurocentrism in mass violence research, by focusing on two themes relevant to it: Holocaust uniqueness and Orientalism. Holocaust uniqueness is a moral position that privileges European perpetrators and victims over other, similarly destructive genocides. The chapter discusses how proportionality in scholarship and representation can rectify some of these imbalances. Orientalism in mass violence research manifests itself in Islamophobic biases against the violence of Islamist militants, especially in the twenty-first-century conflicts in Iraq and Syria. Both phenomena have deeply influenced research on mass violence, and both are critically examined in the broader context of Eurocentrism. Keywords: mass violence, Holocaust, Orientalism

Introduction Genocide can be defined as a complex process of systematic persecution and annihilation of a group of people by a government. In the twentieth century, approximately 40 to 60 million defenceless people became victims of deliberate genocidal policies. The twenty-first century has not begun much better, with genocidal episodes flaring up in Darfur, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, and Syria. I understand genocide as the persecution and destruction of human beings on the basis of their presumed or imputed membership in a group, rather than on their individual properties or participation in certain acts. Although it makes little sense to quantify genocide, it is clear that a genocidal process always concerns a society at large, and that genocide often destroys a significant and often critical part

Brolsma, Marjet, Robin de Bruin, and Matthijs Lok (eds): Eurocentrism in European History and Memory. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463725521_ch04

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of the affected communities. It also does not make much sense to discriminate between the types of groups that are being targeted: ethnic, religious, regional, political, sexual, etc. It can be argued that genocidal processes are particularly malicious and destructive because they are directed against all members of a group, mostly innocent and defenceless people who are persecuted and killed regardless of their behaviour. Genocide always denotes a colossal and brutal collective criminality. For this reason, genocide is a phenomenon that is distinct from other forms of mass violence such as war, civil war, or massacre. Genocide is a complex process through and through. First of all, it can be approached from at least three analytical perspectives: macro (international), meso (domestic), and micro (local/individual). The macro level refers to the external, international context: interstate structures and the context of geopolitical power relations that could lead to war. The meso level consists of all intrastate developments relevant to the genesis of the political crisis and, later, the genocide: the ideological self-hypnosis of political elites, complex decision-making processes, the necessity and logic of a division of labour, the emergence of paramilitary troops, and any mass mobilization for the segregation and destruction of the victim group. The micro level, then, is about the lowest level: How do individuals become involved in the genocidal process, either as perpetrators, victims, or third parties? Viewed in its coherence, these three contextual layers are not simply piled on top of each other, but the largest contexts are often preconditions for the smallest ones. Without the macro context of interstate crisis, there cannot be an internal radicalization of the political elites; and without that radicalization, violent measures against the victims would not have been taken and countless individual perpetrators would not have murdered innumerable individual victims in micro situations of killing. In other words, aside from the complexity of each level in itself, we must also bear in mind the relevant connections between the three levels. Second, the temporal complexity of genocide is justifiably a major concern in genocide studies. How do genocidal processes begin, develop, and end? Mass violence of the scale that unfolds in genocidal societies generally develops through three fairly distinct phases: the pre-violent phase, the phase of mass political violence, and the post-violence phase. This is an explicitly historicizing approach in which genocides are seen, fundamentally, as processes with a beginning, development, and end. How that process has functioned in different genocides should be one of our top priorities. Considering this model, the meso level has been most persistently occupying me, i.e. the perpetrating elites and agencies, the culture and practice of

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perpetrating mass murder. How do otherwise neutral and technocratic institutions, organizations, and agencies in a given state and society collaborate in genocide? How do otherwise apolitical families make decisions, conduct business, and comport themselves in a genocidal process? How do coexisting villages and neighbourhoods turn on each other? How are city administrations taken over and steered towards genocidal destruction of some of their fellow citizens? And, of course: How can we better understand the changing sociological relationships between perpetrator group and victim group? This chapter is not an exhaustive examination of Eurocentrism and mass violence research, but discusses two topics relevant to it: Holocaust uniqueness and Orientalism. Both phenomena have deeply influenced research on mass violence, and both need to be critically examined in the broader context of Eurocentrism.

Holocaust Uniqueness as Eurocentrism One major way in which Eurocentrism manifests itself in mass violence research is Holocaust uniqueness. This began, in a way, with Hannah Arendt’s famous ‘boomerang effect’ theory of imperialism, whereby dehumanizing attitudes and genocidal policies in the imperial periphery returned to influence and even dominate the European metropolis. Practices that had been experienced and even normalized in, for example, the Congo Free State or Tasmania, began to be noticed only when it came to haunt the European centre.1 Uniqueness proponents include survivor-activists like Elie Wiesel, but also scholars like Deborah Lipstadt, Lucy Dawidowicz, and Steven Katz. In differing positions on the Holocaust, two common denominators among much of this scholarship are the maximalist (and ostensibly unique) intent of the Nazis to obliterate every single Jew down to the last person, and the false paradox that European civilization produced the most thorough and comprehensive genocide in modern history, and therefore stands out from entirely expectable genocides in supposedly barbaric areas. Dan Stone critiques this notion of Holocaust uniqueness as ‘the genuinely Eurocentric position that perversely implies that “our” genocide was better than yours’.2 He also notices that a new generation of genocide scholarship that incorporates the findings of earlier research into a synthesis that respects the 1 2

Araújo and Rodríguez Maeso, The Contours, 30. Stone, ‘The Historiography’, 130.

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extremity of the Holocaust, but also the specificities of other genocides in a much more equitable way. Stone’s critique is buttressed by recent empirical research on the scope and magnitude of modern genocides. For example, recent research on the human toll of the Great Leap Forward in Maoist China converges on a death toll of roughly 35 to 40 million civilians in the time span of a few years.3 The violence of European colonialism did not limit itself to indigenous genocide on the American continent. The Belgian king Leopold II, for example, killed roughly half the population of the Congo during period of his ‘Free State’, i.e. 10 million Congolese. 4 At the heart of this problem lies a distorted comparison. If every human life has equal worth, then indeed some genocides have received much less attention in academic life than they should have. If we use a simple arithmetic: the number of Nazi genocide victims divided by the global number of books and conferences on the Holocaust, then that figure is much higher than the same ratio for mass murder in the Soviet Union, let alone China. This could have been caused by cultural bias, level of development of the perpetrator and victim societies, availability of sources, and continuity of perpetrator regimes. A more equitable production and distribution of knowledge is not only needed for moral fairness, but also for substantial grounds: comparative genocide research cannot disproportionately rely on well-documented and thoroughly studied genocides only. Violent episodes in Guatemala, Indonesia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, and many other countries must be taken into account more for an examination of cultural circumstances – a task for the third generation of genocide scholars. Mass murder itself is catching up and continuously providing food for thought for its scholars. The cataclysms in Syria and Iraq and the cruel civil wars of the twenty-first century are bitter reminders of this. If we follow this logic to its end, it is inadequate to simply point out the quantitative inequities; instead, we should also develop qualitative signifiers of the argument. Whereas Reinhard Heydrich (1904-1942), the Nazi officer responsible for the coordination of the Holocaust,5 has come to be seen as an icon of evil, and at least four movies have been made about his life, few other high-level perpetrators have received even a modicum of that attention. There is a biography of Lavrentiy Beria (1899-1953), Stalin’s NKVD boss and top Soviet perpetrator,6 but none, for example, of Saddam 3 Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine; Jisheng, Tombstone. 4 Ewans, European Atrocity. 5 Gerwarth, Hitler’s Hangman, 37. 6 Knight, Beria.

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Hussein’s right-hand man Ali Hassan al-Majid (1941-2010), chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, who was responsible for the genocidal Anfal campaign against the Iraqi Kurds. Al-Majid was indicted and received five death sentences for genocide and crimes against humanity by the Iraq Special Tribunal. Similar architects of genocide, such as Augustin Bizimana (b. 1954), Minister of Defense in the Hutu-nationalist Rwandan government from April to mid-July 1994 and as second in command responsible for the coordination of the genocide, remain relatively obscure. So too in the Darfur genocide, when the Sudanese government deployed the Janjaweed,7 whose main leader, Musa Hilal (b. 1961), maintained close personal ties with the Sudanese Interior Ministry.8 All of these relatively unknown officers and officials developed and perfected technologies of mass violence against civilians in various ways: Al-Majid was a major (if not the first) political actor who utilized aerial bombing with chemical weapons in a genocide, Bizimana was exceptionally efficient in the arming of the Hutu civilian population to exterminate Tutsis, and Hilal perfected the art of outsourcing illegitimate political violence in order to maintain plausible deniability for the government authorities. Holocaust uniqueness is not only historically problematic, but also sets a research agenda that privileges European victims and European perpetrators. A separate but related problem of influence is the extent to which the Holocaust has become a guide or model for extra-European genocides. Genocides in culturally and politically different societies are viewed, interpreted, and analysed through the lens of the Shoah. For example, veteran Armenian genocide expert Vahakn Dadrian has distortedly shoehorned the Armenian genocide into a Holocaust template, by downplaying dissimilar aspects, and amplifying similar ones. He regularly portrayed the 1911 Committee of Union and Progress conference in Salonica as the Ottoman equivalent of the Wannsee Conference, suggested that in Trabzon Armenians were killed in bathhouses that were like gas chambers, and alleged that Turkish doctors were prominent in killing Armenians during the genocide.9 The aforementioned genocide in the Congo Free State has too often been viewed as an African Holocaust and King Leopold II as ‘Hitler 7 The Janjaweed are a special paramilitary organization, which committed massive violence against Darfuri civilians, including massacres, destruction of villages, expulsions, sexual violence, torture and property crimes. According to reliable estimates, at least 250,000 civilians were killed in the Darfur genocide. Prunier, Darfur; Totten, An Oral and Documentary History. 8 Rolandsen, ‘Sudan’. 9 Dadrian, ‘The Role’; ibid., ‘The Secret’.

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before Hitler’.10 The scholarship on the Rwandan genocide, too, suffered from obvious piggybacking to the Holocaust, through similar discursive practices. The Hutu perpetrators of the genocide were seen as ‘tropical Nazis’, whose methods were allegedly similar and propaganda ostensibly was so important that it structured and shaped the Rwandan genocide more than anything else – despite convincing research to the contrary.11 Western powers rallied to the cause of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, whose leader, General Paul Kagame, was seen as ‘an African Adenauer who would commit the tropical Nazis to oblivion’. Indeed: The Rwandese génocidaires were ceaselessly described as ‘tropical Nazis’ and their evil was assigned the same founding role in the supposed new African episteme as the German Nazis had for the Western world. Just as post-Nazi Europe had been the victorious battlefield of democracy, post-Rwanda genocide (and postapartheid Africa) was going to usher in a new era for the continent.12

Eurocentrism also shaped a lack of imagination of postcolonial societies: any process of state-orchestrated mass murder could only be seen through the Holocaust prism, because little effort was made to gain reliable knowledge on colonial and postcolonial societies.13 As a result of the Holocaust prism, some major sub-themes in the vast field of genocide research still need to be mapped on a fairly elementary level, for some genocides are well-studied in some aspects, but not so in others. We know a lot about the Rwandan perpetrators, but much less about the Sudanese ones; we have lots of bureaucratic documentation on the Soviet Union, but much less on Indonesia; and compared to other genocides, we still know next to nothing about Saddam Hussein’s violence against Iraqi society. When perpetrating regimes stay in power, we have much less critical detail, such as in Turkey, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Sudan. The disparities should be addressed. Another gap in genocide studies is that between specialist local knowledge and broader theoretical syntheses. Speaking out of personal experience: everywhere I travelled, from Belgrade to Manila, and Ankara to Kigali, I have met local colleagues working with close access to the sources and familiarity with the society, but often without a sufficient analytical 10 De Mul, ‘The Holocaust’. 11 Chrétien, ‘Un “nazisme tropical”’. 12 Prunier, Africa’s World War, 359, 459. 13 Bouwknegt, Cross-examining the Past, 126-247.

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framework or conceptual grasp. As genocide scholars we must develop closer working relations with these colleagues.14 In other words, the gap between theoretical debates and empirical evidence has to be bridged.

Oriental Violence: Same but Different? Victor Hugo famously said: ‘If a man is killed in Paris, it is a murder; the throats of fifty thousand people are cut in the East, and it is a question.’ Eurocentric Orientalism has left indelible marks on mass violence research. Genocide outside Europe has been trivialized as products of ‘brutal’ cultures. Modern, political crimes have been attributed to inherently evil men with large moustaches from exotic areas such as the Balkans or the Caucasus, representatives of ‘tribalism’ or ‘Oriental despotism’. In accounts of the Armenian Genocide or the Holocaust, Kurdish and Ukrainian perpetrators have too often figured as faceless killers, undifferentiated and unexplained, ‘tribesmen’ or ‘Trawniki men’, appearing in the Anatolian or Galician killing fields ex nihilo to murder people for little apparent reason other than innate cruelty. A rich literature exists on the racialized Pacific Ocean theatre of war in World War II, which saw deliberate campaigns of racist dehumanization of enemy combatants and civilians, leading to gratuitous cruelties not visited upon the European battlefields.15 Such images caricature the perpetrators and homogenize the experience of the victims. New lines of research, by contrast, take the perpetrators and the victims as agents in complex historical and political situations.16 Conventional approaches to understanding genocides outside Europe have been split: some have assumed that ‘Europeanization’ tended to civilize and quell the violent tendencies inherent in the wild frontiers; others have assumed that Europeanization was one of the causes of the conflicts. Although this is a Eurocentric approach, new research on genocide has circumvented and synthesized this conundrum by combining perspectives and weighing the evidence. An eminent example is Mark Levene’s sophisticated and exhaustive The Crisis of Genocide (2014), which argues that yes, the European-inspired nation-state system expanded onto the peripheries of the world, but much violence in the ‘rimlands’ (as he calls the borderlands of the great land empires) was the product of homemade 14 Üngör, ‘The Destruction’. 15 Dower, War without Mercy. 16 Üngör, Genocide.

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programmes of population politics.17 Levene sees the multiple cases of mass violence in those areas not as deviations but as integral, even intrinsic to the mainstream historical trajectory of global systems of neighbouring nation states. In the first half of the twentieth century, two world wars, two major dictatorships (Nazism and Stalinism), and many smaller nation states imposed such systems in the rimlands. This development was a directional, ‘blind’ process (Norbert Elias): no puppet master conspired to move the globe in a homogenizing direction, but nevertheless it did, both through interstate antagonism and cooperation, as well as through intra-state policies carried out by nationalist elites. In a way, Levene’s magnum opus follows the three basic approaches to genocide that have dominated the historiography: juxtaposition, diachronic comparison, and transnational transfer. The common approach of simply comparing through juxtaposition – essentially placing events next to each other for analysis – has been employed to highlight differences and similarities and more clearly focus on each instance’s peculiarities. Unfortunately, while this may lead to cross-pollination and sharpened understandings, it carries the risk of historical de-contextualization. The diachronic focus has helped historians elucidate why mass violence has occurred repeatedly within a single society. Germany in the first half of the twentieth century of course offers a compelling example. But a long-term perspective on societies such as Chechnya, Algeria, or Colombia also suggests that large-scale violence often repeat itself over decades. The third approach, ‘transnational transfer’, focuses on what political elites have learned from each other during and after periods of mass violence, directly and indirectly. For example, the violence of one crisis could travel across state borders to spark new violence either just across the frontier or at greater distance between antagonistic states. But it could also be indirect, when the international politics of forced population movements in the post-Ottoman and post-Romanov areas between 1912 and 1923 served as models for Eastern Europe expulsions and population exchanges between 1939 and 1946. In particular, the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923 inspired future powerful actors, such as Stalin, Churchill, and Beneš, towards mass transfers of human beings along ethnic lines. Orientalist approaches to violence made a spectacular comeback in the post-9/11 era, and especially with the violence of the Islamic State in Iraq 17 Levene, The Crisis of Genocide. Levene defines the ‘rimlands’ into three areas: the Balkans; a Caucasus-Black Sea-East Anatolia swath of territory; and the so-called ‘Land Between’, stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

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and Syria, which controlled a vast swath of territory in those two countries between 2013 and 2017. ISIS violence against civilians can be categorized into four elements: mass murder, forced conversion, vandalism, and sexual violence. First of all, ISIS committed mass murder of entire categories of civilians, including prisoners of war regardless of origin; professionals such as doctors, activists, technicians and journalists who did not want to conform; and complete ethnic and religious communities such as Shiites, Yazidis, Kakais, Shabaks, Sabians, Kurds, and Turkmens. ISIS committed several important massacres (such as the Camp Speicher massacre), but there was more to it than mere mass killing. The violence of ISIS focused on the destruction of abstract group identities and therefore was eminently genocidal. A second form of violence was forced conversion (for example, of the Yazidis). ISIS published choreographed propaganda films in which a group of anxious Yazidi men publicly distanced themselves from their own, ancient religion. A third type of violence was the broadly based destruction of material culture in Iraq and Syria. ISIS systematically blew up non-Sunni prayer houses under the guise of ‘purifying the earth from the temples of unbelieving Shiites’.18 These attacks cleared all traces of Shia identity, including its material culture and memory. Finally, there is sexual violence: ISIS organized a rape campaign aimed at providing their own warriors access to sex, as well as morally breaking the affected communities and enforcing accommodation and fear. It kidnapped hundreds of Yazidi women, of whom few were able to escape and survive. With its utopian vision of establishing a future, flawless society after the violent elimination of all social and political impurities, it was little different from other twentieth-century radical ideologies such as Nazism, Stalinism and ethnic nationalism. However, much Western media (and thereby public opinion), as well as the world of NGOs and think tanks, portrayed ISIS violence as particularly cruel and unimaginable. This time it was not the Balkan moustaches but the Salafi beards that were the immutable objects of Otherness. The widespread mystif ication of and morbid fascination with ISIS violence was an expression of unalloyed European prejudice: Bashar al-Assad, the clean-shaven, English-speaking president in his crisp Italian suits, presiding over a torture gulag, barrel bombs, and chemical weapons, did not receive half the censure even though he was responsible for 92% of all civilian deaths in Syria, amounting to 57 times more than ISIS.19 It 18 Weiss and Hassan, ISIS, 29. 19 See ‘ISIS beyond the Spectacle’. Also see the monitoring website: http://whoiskillingciviliansinsyria.org (accessed 10 June 2018).

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seems almost no coincidence that ISIS performs Western stereotypes of Islamists: with their bloodshot, wide-open eyes and scruffy black beards, the ISIS executioners cut the heads of their victims, some of whom were Westerners. But by no way were ISIS irrational fanatics; on the contrary, we were witnessing a calculated spectacle by technocrats of violence. The leadership of ISIS consisted of seasoned Saddamists with a long track record in the collective violence in Iraq: former secular officers, some veterans of the chemical genocide against the Kurds in 1988 (indeed, henchmen of Ali Hassan al-Majid), others of the mass murder of Shiites in 1991, again others of the devastating attacks on Shiite mosques in February and August 2006. ISIS violence was as much a legacy of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath regime in Iraq, as it was of al-Qaeda’s global jihadist ambitions, in the words of Christoph Reuter, ‘a Stasi Caliphate’.20 The refusal to face this reality can be attributed to the influence of a persistent Orientalist spectre. In other words: it was not (only) ISIS violence that captured the Western imagination, but the Western imagination that informed and structured ISIS violence. If Orientalism manifests itself through Islamophobic biases against the violence of the Islamists in the Syrian Civil War, the flipside of this bias is reflected in positive assessments of the Assad regime as ‘secular’, ‘stable’, and ‘sovereign’. These characterizations are supported from the far left to the far right, and rest upon the assumption that a secular dictatorship is preferable to a chaos with Islamist militias – disregarding that (1) those militias came into being precisely to topple the dictatorship, (2) Assad has colluded with them on many occasions, and (3) Assad’s regime is in no way secular by any def inition of the term. 21 As Assad is deeply aware of his Orientalist audiences in the West, he has employed that rhetoric on many occasions in his interviews, branding the rise of Islamism in both politics and militancy as the most dangerous threat to the Middle East and Europe. 22 Here too, like in the previous ISIS example, it is not only Middle Eastern violent actors that have influenced the Western imagination, but vice versa: the Western imagination has influenced how violent actors adopted, incorporated, manipulated that imagination to their own benef it. With the dire consequences of a red herring: undue attention to quantitatively and qualitatively less impactful political violence. 20 Reuter, Die schwarze Macht. 21 Yafai, ‘The Cult of Bashar Al Assad’. 22 See, e.g., List, Interview with Assad.

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Conclusion This chapter has discussed two strands of Eurocentrism in mass violence research: Holocaust uniqueness and Orientalism. Although both of these approaches can be broadly termed Eurocentric, they are different manifestations. In the former approach, Europe is set as an example, albeit a negative one: the Holocaust as the most important, even ‘best’ genocide in history. In the second line of thought, the genocidal violence of non-European Others (from the Balkans to Iraq and Syria) is constructed as cruel, ineff icient, or unimaginable. Another prominent thread in Eurocentrism is what Couze Venn called Europe’s ‘egocentric ontology of being’23: the West as the centre subject of whatever global crisis is occurring. From the disastrous intervention in Iraq to the ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015, to undue focus on the Western coalition intervention in Syria, Eurocentrism influences academic and public discussions of mass violence, precisely because it is a multifaceted phenomenon that transcends simplistic left/ right divisions. Decolonizing genocide studies speaks to ‘the ongoing need to open space for alternative epistemological and ontological frameworks with which to conceive and explain genocide’.24 An effective strategy of decolonization would entail balancing between a total ‘levelling’ of cases of genocide across the globe on the one hand, and the elevation of the Holocaust as the supremely supreme genocide on the other. In between these two extremes, there is a vast moral, scholarly, and public space to examine genocides in a way that is not zero-sum. Finally, it necessitates taking seriously the perpetration of genocide in the Global South quantitatively and qualitatively – and respecting the perpetrators as well as the victims on their own terms. Some of these problems naturally transcend mass violence research and reflect broader problems in disciplinary compartmentalization and area studies specialization. A comparative area studies perspective can help in avoiding the pitfalls of Eurocentrism by positing ‘that intensive regional research remains indispensable to the social sciences and that this research needs to employ comparative referents from other regions to demonstrate its broader relevance’.25 All in all, even though much progress has been made, in many ways genocide research is still in its infancy. 23 Venn, Occidentalism, 83. 24 Woolford and Benvenuto, Canada and Colonial Genocide, 12. 25 Ahram, Köllner and Sil, Comparative Area Studies.

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Bibliography Ahram, Ariel, Patrick Köllner and Rudra Sil (eds), Comparative Area Studies: Methodological Rationales and Cross-Regional Applications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Araújo, Marta, and Silvia Rodríguez Maeso, The Contours of Eurocentrism: Race, History, and Political Texts (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015). Bouwknegt, Thijs, Cross-examining the Past: Transitional Justice, Mass Atrocity Trials and History in Africa, PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam (2017). Chrétien, Jean-Pierre, ‘Un “nazisme tropical” au Rwanda? Image ou logique d’un genocide’, Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’histoire Année 48 (1995), 131-142. Dadrian, Vahakn N., ‘The Role of Turkish Physicians in the World War I Genocide of Ottoman Armenians’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1:2 (1986), 169-192. Dadrian, Vahakn N., ‘The Secret Young Turk Ittihadist Conference and the Decision for the World War I Genocide of the Armenians’, Journal of Political and Military Sociology 22:1 (1994), 173-201. De Mul, Sarah, ‘The Holocaust as a Paradigm for the Congo Atrocities: Adam Hochschild’s “King Leopold’s Ghost”’, Criticism 53:4 (2011), 587-606. Dikötter, Frank, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). Dower, John, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 1986). Ewans, Martin, European Atrocity, African Catastrophe: Leopold II, the Congo Free State and Its Aftermath (Richmond: Curzon, 2001). Gerwarth, Robert, Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). ‘ISIS beyond the Spectacle: Communication Media, Networked Publics, Terrorism’, special issue of Critical Studies in Media Communication 35:1 (2018), 1-135. Jisheng, Yang, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). Knight, Amy, Beria: Stalin’s First Lieutenant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). Levene, Mark, The Crisis of Genocide, Vol. I: Devastation: The European Rimlands 1912-1938; Vol. II: Annihilation: The European Rimlands, 1939-1953 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). List, Večernji, Interview with Assad on 3 April 2017, at: https://www.vecernji.hr/ vijesti/al-assad-if-europe-wants-to-protect-itself-at-this-stage-it-should-firststop-supporting-terrorists-in-syria-1161491 (accessed 10 June 2018). Prunier, Gérard, Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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Prunier, Gérard, Darfur: A 21st Century Genocide (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). Reuter, Christoph, Die schwarze Macht: Der ‘Islamische Staat’ und die Strategen des Terrors (München: DVA, 2015). Rolandsen, Øystein H., ‘Sudan: The Janjawiid and Government Militias’, in Morten Bøås (ed.), African Guerrillas: Raging against the Machine (Boulder: Rienner, 2007), 151-170. Stone, Dan, ‘The Historiography of Genocide: Beyond “Uniqueness” and Ethnic Competition’, Rethinking History 8:1 (2004), 127-142. Totten, Samuel, An Oral and Documentary History of the Darfur Genocide (Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2011). Üngör, Uğur Ümit, ‘The Destruction of the Other as the Validation of the Self’, in Samuel Totten (ed.), Advancing Genocide Studies: Personal Accounts and Insights from Scholars in the Field (Piscataway: Transaction Publishers, 2015), 35-53. Üngör, Uğur Ümit (ed.), Genocide: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016). Venn, Couze, Occidentalism: Modernity and Subjectivity (London: Sage, 2000). Weiss, Michael, and Hassan Hassan, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015). Who’s Killing Civilians in Syria? website, at: http://whoiskillingciviliansinsyria. org (accessed 10 June 2018). Woolford, Andrew, and Jeff Benvenuto (eds), Canada and Colonial Genocide (London: Routledge, 2018). Yafai, Faisal al, ‘The Cult of Bashar Al Assad Extends from the Far-right to the Far-left’, The National, 22 August 2017, at: https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/ the-cult-of-bashar-al-assad-extends-from-the-far-right-to-the-far-left-1.621909 (accessed 10 June 2018).

About the Author Uğur Ümit Üngör, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Utrecht, and Research Fellow, Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam [email protected]

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Muslim EuRossocentrism Ismail Gasprinskii’s ‘Russian Islam’ (1881) Michael Kemper Abstract What is the historical relation between the Tatar Muslims and the Russian Empire that they live in? These were the central questions that the Crimean Tatar Ismail Gasprinskii (1851-1914) posed in his 1881 essay ‘Russian Muslimhood’. Gasprinskii later became famous as the pioneer of Muslim educational reform and Tatar journalism in Russia; for many Russian, Soviet and Western authors he was a political ‘pan-Islamist’ oriented towards the Ottoman Empire. However, in his 1881 essay Gasprinskii posed as a Russian patriot. He projected a vision of the future of Russia’s Tatars that would draw them closer to the Russians – yet not by Russification but by a shared Europeanization. Using a language of ‘Orientalism’, Gasprinskii’s aim was to convince Russian administrators that Russia’s Muslims were not a threat to the tsarist empire but an asset. Keywords: Imperial Russia, Islam, Tatars, Europeanization, Jadidism, Golden Horde

In the history of Islam in late imperial Russia, the Crimean Tatar Ismail Gasprinskii (Gaspırali, 1851-1914) is a towering figure; he is seen as the founding father of Muslim cultural reform in Russia (Jadidism).1 Gasprinskii had a strong impact on Muslim intellectuals, in particular, among the Volga Tatars, who saw in him the pioneer of modern education among Russia’s Muslims. In Russian, Soviet, Tatar and Western historiography, Gasprinskii is mostly associated with the aim of uniting all Turkic Muslims of Russia, under the famous slogan ‘unity in language, thinking, and action’ (in Turkish: dilde, 1

On Jadidism, see Khalid, The Politics; Dudoignon, ‘Djadidisme’.

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fikirde, işde birlik). In his journalism and his novels he developed a ‘common’ Turkic literary language supposedly understandable to all Muslim Turks of Russia.2 For friends and critics, Gasprinskii stood at the cradle of political pan-Turkism in Russia but also prepared the ground for the emergence of particular national movements, including of the Crimean Tatars and the Volga (Kazan) Tatars. The present chapter is about Gasprinskii’s Russian-language essay ‘Russian Muslimhood: Thoughts, Annotations and Observations’ (1881).3 One of his first publications, Gasprinskii’s essay is not at all a pan-Turkist pamphlet. Rather, it discusses the situation of Tatar Muslims between Islam and Europe. Even more, the text is completely focused on the Russian context, and distances Russia’s Muslims from the Turks of the Ottoman Empire. In what follows I will explore how Gasprinskii navigates between Islam, Europe and Russia (Rossiia) – hence the catchword in the title of this chapter. In conclusion I discuss what each of these cultural and political points of orientation meant for him, and how they served his argument. As the occasion for writing this essay Gasprinskii chose the imperial celebration, in 1880, of the fifth centenary of the Battle of Kulikovo (1380), in which Muscovy beat the Khan of the Golden Horde and thereby liberated itself from the Tatar/Muslim overlordship that had started with the Mongol occupation of Kiev in 1240. Against the background of the historical relations between Russians and Tatars, in his 1881 essay Gasprinskii for the first time gave a systematic outline of his thoughts on a future Muslim school reform, and also suggested establishing a Muslim newspaper in Russia. For these projects he needed permission from the Russian authorities as well as financial support; the text ends with an estimation of the costs of his experimental school project and a forecast of the impact that it would have. Gasprinskii’s essay in many ways resembled a grant application in today’s academia. When we scholars apply for grants, we design strategies and employ rhetorical devices that we believe will entice the donor to identify with our project. Importantly, the format of grant applications requires a 2 Ertürk, ‘An Uncanny Turkic’. 3 Gasprinskii, Russkoe musul’manstvo: Mysli, zametki i nabliudeniia musul’manina, 45 pages. This text was first published as a sequel in issues 43 to 47 of Tavrida in 1881, under the pseudonym ‘Gench Molla’ (‘a young Muslim teacher/imam’). This 1881 essay has been republished several times in Russian and translated into Turkish. A slightly abridged German translation of Gasprinskii’s essay is supposed to appear soon in Frankfurter Zeitschrift für Islamisch-theologische Studien. Two similar essays by Gasprinskii, from 1896 and 1901, respectively, have been translated into English. See Gasprinskii, ‘Russo-Oriental Relations: Thoughts, Notes, and Desires’, and Gasprinskii, ‘Ǧadidism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’.

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considerable reduction of complexity; at the same time we are urged to link our proposals to the ‘big questions’ of our time and to established academic fashions, that is, to overarching discourses. Equally important are our publication strategies, as well as the ‘valorization’, as the Dutch say – the promise that our work will have societal impact. I argue that this was also the recipe that Gasprinskii followed, back in 1881. However, Gasprinskii was free to choose his own format; he embedded his grant application in a lengthy piece of historical philosophy, with a number of ethnographic excursions and many personal notes and anecdotes. In this mélange, his central strategy was to sell his Muslim educational reform as a contribution to Russia’s national interests, and in fact to state security. However, a second central element of his text is his constant reference to Europe; in the light of Russia’s difficult relationship with the West, I argue that the image of Europe in Gasprinskii’s text is purposefully ambiguous. 4 Finally, the essay also provides a new presentation of the third element in the equation, namely ‘Russian Islam’, a term that he shaped to encompass all Muslims of Russia but clearly with the Tatars as their vanguard. In what follows I will discuss Gasprinskii’s 1881 work as an entanglement of established discourses on Russia, Europe, Islam and the Tatars, as a mosaic that in fact created the ground for something new – the discourse of Jadidism. But first a few more words on the author himself.

Gasprinskii between Islam, Two Empires and Europe Gasprinskii was a Crimean Tatar member of the Russian nobility; he inherited this status from his father, who had served the tsar’s viceroy of the Caucasus, Prince M.S. Vorontsov, as a translator.5 After having received a traditional Muslim education in Bakhchisarai, the young Ismail studied at a Russian school in Akmechet’ (today Simferopol’), equally on the Crimean peninsula. He then continued his education at Russian military schools in Voronezh and, from 1864 to 1867,6 in Moscow. Aghast at the negative 4 For a discussion of Gasprinskii’s conscious employment of Orientalist notions, see Hofmeister, ‘Ein Krimtatare’. 5 If not indicated otherwise, the following account on Gasprinskii’s life follows Lazzerini, Ismail Bey Gasprinskii and Muslim Modernism in Russia, 1878-1914 (based above all on Gasprinskii’s own writings as well as on the Tatar-Turkish émigré historiography). See also Noack, Muslimischer Nationalismus, 144-178 and passim. 6 ‘Svidetel’stvo. 23 dekabria 1880 g.’ [a document of the Ninth Moscow Military Gymnazium testifying about Gasprinskii’s enrolment], in Räximov, Ismägïyl’ Gasprinskiy, 163.

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views on Islam and Muslims that he encountered there, Gasprinskii tried to escape to the Ottoman Empire, supposedly to serve in the Ottoman army; however, the Russian authorities in the port city of Odessa held him back. In the following years he served as a teacher of the Russian language at a Muslim secondary school (the Zinjirli madrasa) and at another school on primary level (the Dereköy maktab). Reportedly, at these schools he criticized the traditional teaching methods and did not shy away from conflicts with his superiors. From 1872 to 1874 we find Gasprinskii in Paris, where he sojourned in circles of intellectuals from Russia; it is said that in the French capital, he jobbed for an advertisement company, and for a while received financial support from the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev. He went to Marseilles and eventually to Istanbul, where he wanted to enrol at an Ottoman war college; while waiting for admission he travelled in Anatolia and made contacts with Ottoman journalists, educators and administrators. It seems that under pressure of the Russian authorities, he was sent back to the Crimea, where he again taught Russian at the Zinjirli madrasa. At this point Gasprinskii’s career took a surprising turn: he became mayor of the city of Bakhchisarai, an office that he held from 1879 to at least 1883.7 We must assume that he now enjoyed a certain degree of patronage in influential Russian circles. It is from his office in the municipality that he first applied, in 1879/1880, for permission to acquire a printing press, as he wrote, ‘to print administrative regulations, business cards, and price lists’.8 He then started applying for permission to issue a first regular ‘Muslim’ newspaper, in the Crimean Tatar language; as these applications were regularly rejected, the only thing he could do was to print one-time leaflets in the Tatar/Turkic language, under ever-changing titles.9 We must keep in mind that Gasprinskii’s career started in the liberal era of Tsar Alexander II, who abolished serfdom and introduced various administrative and judicial reforms. The period saw a flowering of liberal 7 ‘Raport politsmeistera g. Bakhchisaraia Tavricheskomu gubernatoru. 28 marta 1883 g.’ [a police report on Gasprinskii], in Räximov, Ismägïyl’ Gasprinskiy, 174. 8 ‘Svidetel’stvo-prisiaga I. Gasprinskogo. 10 marta 1879 g.’ [Gasprinskii’s oath that he would use the typographical equipment in a lawful manner], in Räximov, Ismägïyl’ Gasprinskiy, 168. 9 Among these titles were Tonguch (First-born child), Shafaq (Horizon), Qamar (Moon), Yoldiz (Star), Könäsh (Sun), Haqiqat (Truth). His Mir’at-i jadid (The new mirror) and Salnama-i Turki (Turkic calendar) took the form of almanacs with short essays on historical, geographical and medical topics. The newspaper project first came under the Russian title Zakon (Law), reflecting its role as an official herald. One such official herald in a Turkic language had already been established in Tashkent, in 1870. Private Muslim newspapers also came up in Russia’s South Caucasus but were short-lived.

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Europhile discourse in competition with Slavophilism/pan-Slavism, the Populist (Narodniki) movement, Russian Orthodox nationalism, and radical left movements. After Alexander II’s assassination in 1881, the political climate again changed to repressive modes of governance. In particular, Russian administrative and national discourses developed a growing ‘imperial paranoia’10 about what was then called pan-Islamism – the idea that all Muslims naturally aspire to a global Islamic state – and pan-Turkism – the fear that Russia’s Muslims are naturally a fifth column of the Ottoman Empire (against which Russia had waged a successful war in 1878-1879). Muslim intellectuals inspired by the idea of ‘progress’ were treated with suspicion in particular. It is against this background that Gasprinskii published ‘Russian Muslimhood’ in 1881, in which he brought his quest for a Tatar newspaper and a new system of Muslim education to a broader educated public. If we regard Gasprinskii’s essay as a grant application, we must conclude that it was unsuccessful in so far as it did not generate the direct state funding for a new type of Muslim school. However, it must have contributed to opening the doors: after numerous petitions to governors and ministers, in 1883 Gasprinskii eventually did obtain permission to establish a Muslim newspaper, the first of its kind, which must be seen as the second turning point in his career. This permission came in the context of another public ceremony, namely the centenary of Russia’s annexation of the Crimea in 1783. Symbolically called Tarjuman/Perevodchik (The translator), this project became the earliest Tatar newspaper in European Russia, and also the one with the longest life span (lasting until 1918). Tarjuman was an instrument for Gasprinskii’s self-promotion, but also became a platform for other aspiring Muslim journalists; it had a considerable circulation in Russia, and it was also read in Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Ottoman Empire. In the first decades, the Tarjuman offered each article both in Russian and in Tatar (in Arabic script); in 1905 (when the government was compelled to also allow other Tatar journals and newspapers to be published), Gasprinskii dropped the Russian content, and Tarjuman transformed from a being a ‘translator’ of Russian information to a daily, with the name Tarjuman-i ahval-i zaman, that is, ‘The interpreter of contemporary events’.11 One year after the start of Tarjuman, in 1884, Gasprinskii also must have received clearance to start his experimental school project, based on a Muslim primary school (maktab), in his hometown Bakhchisarai. It 10 Tuna, Imperial Russia’s Muslims, 195-216. 11 Lazzerini, ‘Ismail Bey Gasprinskii’s’.

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seems here the major innovation was that Gasprinskii taught basic literacy in Tatar (in Arabic script) by the phonetic method, that is, by confronting pupils from early on with letter combinations and whole words; this yielded quicker results than the traditional method of teaching Arabic letters first in isolation, and by their Arabic names, which distorts their phonetic values.12 Gasprinskii also introduced secular subjects, for which he and others produced easily understandable textbooks; these replaced the bulky Islamic tradition of learning by studying commentaries and glosses on medieval texts, many of which were in Arabic. His approach was copied by other Muslim teachers, who soon began to visit him in Bakhchisarai to learn from his experience. Gasprinskii’s ‘new method’ (usul-i jadid) gave the name to the Jadid movement of Muslim educational reform and cultural modernism. It soon branched out in various directions, including into Islamic theology, for influential Islamic scholars and Sufi masters (of the Naqshbandiyya and Shadhiliyya brotherhoods) understood the advantages of Gasprinskii’s pedagogy,13 and Tatar/Muslim journalism, which continued to expand.14 While many schools continued using the ‘old’ model of education, new Jadid schools (on both maktab and madrasa levels) sprang up in the Muslim neighbourhoods of cities such as Kazan, Ufa and Orenburg (in the Volga-Urals) as well as in Russia’s Central Asia, and eventually also in the North Caucasus. For the rest of his life, Gasprinskii travelled far and wide in Russia, the Caucasus, Central Asia and also in Ottoman Turkey to lobby for his programme, to win subscribers, and to organize f inancial support. Due to Gasprinskii’s relations to circles in the Ottoman Empire, James H. Meyer counts him among a group of ‘trans-imperial Muslims’, that is, cultural and political activists from Russia who navigated between the two empires, and most of whom ended up staying in Turkey.15 But Gasprinskii remained focused on Russia, which he never left for good. As Christian Noack observed, when after 1905 Muslim intellectuals with Jadid educational backgrounds began to assertively demand political forms of Muslim cultural or national autonomy in Russia, Gasprinskii cautioned them to not confront the Russian authorities by politicizing the movement for cultural reform.16 12 For the longevity of Jadid and Qadim teaching methods, see Kemper and Shikhaliev, ‘Qadimism’. 13 Shikhaliev and Kemper, ‘Sayfallāh-Qāḍī Bashlarov’. 14 Garipova, ‘The Protectors’. 15 Meyer, Turks across Empires, esp. 36-42. 16 Noack, Muslimischer Nationalismus, 242.

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There is thus good reason to assume that his 1881 journal articles on ‘Russian Islam’, and their reprint in book form, had a positive impact on the authorities, and inclined them to at least tolerate an incipient Muslim journalism among the Tatars. While his book was heavily criticized in Russian Orthodox circles,17 Gasprinskii’s project was supported by Vasilii D. Smirnov (1846-1922), an eminent Turkologist and historian of the Crimean Khanate who also served as imperial censor of Muslim publications in Russia; like Gasprinskii, Smirnov detested the traditional Islamic system of education.18 If we regard his 1881 book as a grant application, we have to assume that Gasprinskii took a calculated risk: he must have known that his ideas provoked opposition from both Russian Orthodox missionaries and traditional Islamic educators, but he put his faith in Russian administrators and Orientalists, and on a Russian educated public; these circles would be likely to understand Gasprinskii’s projects as befitting Russia’s broader interests. Let us therefore have a look at how Gasprinskii sold his agenda in ‘Russian Muslimhood’.

‘Russian Muslimhood’ and Sblizhenie By the time of writing, the Russian Empire encompassed perhaps some thirteen million Muslims, among them the Tatars and Bashkirs in the Volga-Urals (conquered by Russia in the second half of the sixteenth century), the Kazakhs and Noghays in the Steppes, the Tatars of the Crimea (annexed in 1783), Azeris in the South Caucasus (incorporated in the early nineteenth century), the Chechens, Daghestani peoples and other communities of the North Caucasus (pacified by 1863), and the Uzbeks, Kirgiz, Turkmen, Tajiks and other peoples of Central Asia (the conquest of which was in full swing, and ended in 1895). While most Muslims of Russia spoke languages belonging to the Turkic family, the various communities maintained a wide spectrum of Islamic traditions and orientations. In the light of this Islamic diversity in Russia it might be surprising that Gasprinskii spoke of one Russkoe musul’manstvo, one ‘Russian muslimhood’ or ‘Russian Islam’. This term is not meant to construct a ‘Russian Islam’, in the sense of Russifying the religion of Islam (as we observe today, when Muslim authorities in Russia try to construct a domesticated ‘Russian Islam’,19 or 17 Lazzerini, Ismail Bey Gasprinskii, 44; Noack, Muslimischer Nationalismus, 215. 18 Lazzerini, Ismail Bey Gasprinskii, 15-16. 19 Mukhetdinov, Rossiiskoe musul’manstvo.

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when Muslim intellectuals in Bosnia and the EU design their forms of ‘Euro-Islam’).20 Rather, Gasprinskii used this term as an ethnographic reality, as the communities that happen to live under Russian rule. For Gasprinskii, Russia’s Muslims formed a historical community because Providence brought them under imperial rule.21 Here his agenda was most clearly linked to imperial discourses; writing in 1881, he even expressed his expectation that Russia would soon conquer more Tatar/Muslim lands, namely Eastern Turkistan (present-day Xinjiang, in China); in his view, this would bring about a beneficial unification of all Turko-Tatars in a common Russian realm.22 Not without provocation he added that in the future, Russia would become ‘a major Muslim state’, without having to compromise her identity as a Christian empire.23 Although he acknowledged that ‘Russia’s Muslimhood’ emerged as a product of Russia’s imperial expansion, Gasprinskii emphasized that they were about to become a historical actor in their own right. The central problem, as he phrased it, was that Russia had no coherent policy on its Muslim subjects; sometimes it expelled them, or supported their emigration (as in the case of the Crimean Tatars), but most of the time the authorities simply ignored the Muslim populations. The result was a continued Muslim ignorance and self-isolation: Russian Muslimhood [Russkoe musul’manstvo] is not aware of the interests of the Russian state, does not feel them; it is almost completely ignorant of [Russia’s] pain and delight; it does not understand the overall endeavours of the Russian state, its ideas. As it does not know Russian; it is remote from the Russian national idea [russkaia mysl’] and from Russian literature. [This state of affairs] isolates [Russia’s Muslims] completely from the general course of human culture [obshchechelovecheskaia kul’tura]. Russian Muslimhood is vegetating in the narrow, suffocating atmosphere of its old concepts and prejudices, as if it was cut off from the rest of mankind, and it has no other worry than to hunt after its daily piece of bread; it has no other ideal than what the belly tells it.24

Gasprinskii maintained that for the enlightenment of Muslims, ‘Islam [islamizm] is no hindering factor at all’, since Islam commands obedience 20 Bougarel, ‘Bosnian Islam’. 21 Gasprinskii, Russkoe musul’manstvo, 7, 13. 22 Ibid., 3-4. 23 Ibid., 4. All translations of quotations are by the author except when noted otherwise. 24 Ibid., 8.

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to any government.25 This statement might have surprised many readers who still remembered the long jihad that Shamil, Imam of Daghestan and Chechnya (1834-1859), waged against the Russian intrusion in the North Caucasus.26 For Gasprinskii, the threat of Islam came not from its potential to organize military resistance; rather, it emanated from the ignorance that was fostered by the traditional Muslim communal system and tolerated by the state. As he argued, any mosque community in Russia was a ‘miniature state’ with its own laws, customs, and social order, and almost impenetrable for the Russian administration. As the authority of the community elders was based on the Quran, the Muslim communal system of his days was maintained by ‘the spirit of Islamism’. The imams were elected by the mosque community, and any male Muslim with some basic knowledge could perform the task of leading the prayer. Mosque schools were maintained by Islamic donations and waqfs (pious foundations), and thus self-sufficient. Raised in this system, Muslim children were immune to external stimuli. The state might at one point close down these schools, or even the mosques, or put a ban on Islamic book printing (which flowered in Kazan since the early nineteenth century); but this would have little impact on Muslim life, since Muslims can pray anywhere, and books continue to be produced and circulated in manuscript form.27 In order to break up this stagnant world, Gasprinskii argued for what we would today call an affirmative action policy towards Muslims. Enforced Russification would not work, as the author explained with the example of Poland, where repressive policies only enhanced resilience and resistance.28 A reorientation of Muslims from Mecca to St Petersburg could only be realized through educational efforts in their native language, on Muslim terms. However, the few state-supported Russian-Tatar schools that existed in Russia (and also the Zinjirli madrasa where Gasprinskii taught the Russian language to Crimean Tatar pupils) were not only unattractive but also highly ineffective: they just concentrated on the teaching of the empire’s off icial language and did nothing for the intellectual formation of the Muslim pupils.29 To get out of this impasse, Gasprinskii proposed to drop the tedious emphasis on Russian language teaching and instead to concentrate on the 25 Ibid., 21, 22. 26 Gammer, Muslim Resistance. 27 Gasprinskii, Russkoe musul’manstvo, 25-27. 28 Ibid., 16-19. 29 Ibid., 34.

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transmission of a broad array of modern subjects. If the Muslim youth of Russia had access to quality education in their native Tatar language, they would learn to appreciate the achievements of modern European civilization, and thereby also understand the benefits of living in Russia. In the terminology of our days, what he proposed was an indigenous programme for Muslim integration in a non-Muslim majority society. This integration Gasprinskii conceived of as sblizhenie, ‘drawing together’, bringing two elements close to each other.30 As Meyer reminds us, ‘tsarist officials often employed the term [sblizhenie] as a polite way of discussing assimilation’, in particular of Russia’s Jews.31 Gasprinskii however defined it as a mutual and even ethical (nravstvennoe) rapprochement; his sblizhenie required action from both ‘Russia’s Muslimhood’ and the state. Gasprinskii argued that the best instrument for achieving this sblizhenie were the existing Muslim schools of the secondary level, the madrasas, as they already enjoyed great respect among Russia’s Muslims. Here he spoke as a practitioner, as a pedagogue. Traditionally, these madrasas were the realm of Islamic scholars and students who followed an age-old curriculum of Islamic law, theology, and Arabic. Gasprinskii argues that if some of these Islamic schools were reformed according to modern pedagogy, and equipped with well-prepared teachers who had Tatar textbooks at their disposal, then they would quickly spread modern knowledge among the Muslim communities. Quite naturally Russia’s Muslims would then also start learning Russian. Revamping traditional Islamic seminaries into modern schools would of course mean that religious subjects were reduced in scope, and replaced by mathematics, history, ‘knowledge of the fatherland’ (otechestvovedenie) and other subjects.32 Only knowledge would bring about a unification (edinenie) of Tatars with the Russian Slavic world (s russkim slavianstvom).33

Europe: A Model and a Threat What Gasprinskii proposed was a self-civilizing project of Tatars embedded in the discourse of European progress (as rightly noted by historian Mustafa Tuna),34 but also of Russia’s civilizing mission. So far Russia had denied 30 Ibid., 12, 14, 22, 43. 31 Meyer, Turks across Empires, 41n119. 32 Gasprinskii, Russkoe musul’manstvo, 34. 33 Ibid., 37. 34 Tuna, Imperial Russia’s Muslims, 146-154.

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Muslims access to progress: ‘How deplorable it is that Russian rule does not lead the Muslims to progress and civilization [progress i tsivilizatsiia], and that it is not able to blow new life, new ideas and new goals into the Russian-Tatar dead body.’35 This progress and civilization radiated from Europe: Isn’t it astonishing that the Muslim societies in many Asian centres, such as Constantinople, Cairo, Damascus and Tunis, are running ahead of Russia’s Muslims in all respects? There one experiences Europe, a vitalization of the spiritual and moral life; it is there that one hears new ideas and ambitions that are not Asiatic at all; and this all while the state of [Muslims in] Bakhchisarai, Kazan, Kasimov and in other regions [of Russia] resembles more the material and spiritual images from the times of Ivan the Terrible, Yermak and Choban-Giray, with the muffled atmosphere of immobility and stagnation.36

Here the Muslims of Russia are juxtaposed not directly to Europe but to Europeanized Muslims in the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. Note that while Gasprinskii’s Europe is exemplified in the spread of science and technology, the latter bring about ‘a vitalization of the spiritual and moral life’. But Europe also suffers from a Eurocentric superiority complex that Muslims must not copy: I myself could observe that Arabs or Indians have a hard time in the educated societies of Paris and London, in spite of the refined politeness that they encounter there – or perhaps exactly because of it. The sons of Asia feel the artificiality, strained attitude and insulting indulgence that they are met with. This is what I was told by many Arabs of Algerian origin who are in service in Paris or conduct trade operations there. The same pride of their own tribe, and the same high opinion of themselves, I also observed among the Turks; in them these traits are even more prominent because they lack European courtesy.37

What we see here is a classification of groups according to racial/national (‘tribal’, in Gasprinskii’s terminology) categories, with a clear moral yardstick. His ‘sons of Asia’ encompass all ‘non-Europeans’, including Arab Muslims 35 Gasprinskii, Russkoe musul’manstvo, 8-9. 36 Ibid., 8; emphasis added. 37 Ibid., 9-10.

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from North Africa and the Tatars of European Russia. Gasprinskii used any opportunity to demonstrate that his loyalty belonged to the Russian Empire, not to the Ottomans: it is the Turks to whom he accorded the lowest position, for they just copied European haughtiness and lost their Asian sincerity. When confronted with Europeans, Asians must not lose their religious principles, and therefore their natural morality: Due to the simplicity and patriarchal structure of his way of life, and due to the purity of the religious-moral principles that he has been taught since childhood, the Muslim is alien to all cunning and hypocrisy, which he detests; he is an honest man. A Muslim with solid education enriches these good qualities of the common man with a broad, humane perspective on things. [European] sciences and knowledge must not shake his Muslim principles and sympathies; then they will freshen his views and make them humane [gumaniziruiut], and eliminate his prejudices and superstition.38

With his assertion that ‘the Muslim’ is honest and not hypocritical, Gasprinskii defined Russia’s Muslims in opposition to another isolated religious minority in Russia – the Jews, who since the mid-nineteenth century became stigmatized as having a ‘sly intellect, hidden morals, and perfidious heart’.39 As the Muslim/Asian is uneducated – naïve, perhaps dumb, but of good morals – he needs Europeanization through ‘science and knowledge’ to become a full human being; Europe is ‘humanization’. This education must, however, be based on the Asians’ continued adherence to their original morality, and to Islam. As Gasprinskii reminded his readers, some Muslims have taken over the external splendour of Europeanness [vneshnii losk evropeizma], but without a solid scientific basis. Unfortunately, these persons are mostly lost for a beneficial and active life. They lost the good qualities of their own tribe and embraced the bad characteristics of another. In their youth most of them have no high values, and serve Bacchus and Venus; as adults they turn into hypocrites who do their best to conceal the sins of their youth by fighting against any innovation, and against the light of true knowledge and progress. This deplorable type of Muslim I encountered in our lands, among Russia’s Muslims, but also among Arabs and in particular among the Turks. 40 38 Ibid., 38. 39 Avrutin, ‘Racial Categories’, 21. 40 Gasprinskii, Russkoe musul’manstvo, 38.

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Europeanization can thus also be a smokescreen to cover debauchery and a misplaced feeling of superiority. The Russians, as Gasprinskii was quick to add, lack this European selfcentredness. In his mind, they display a relaxed attitude towards their non-Russian, non-Christian compatriots: ‘The Russian man, whether he belongs to the simple class or to the intelligentsia, regards all who live with him under the same [Russian] law as his own people, and he does not profess any narrow love for his own tribe.’41 With this natural openness and sincerity, the Russians are obviously closer to Russia’s Muslims than to Europeans, as he explained with the example of how Russia in 1880 celebrated the memory of the Kulikovo victory over the Tatars: unlike the Germans and the French who ‘light much powder’ and ‘organize many symbolical processions and Fackelzüge [ fakel’tsugov]’ when they celebrate national holidays, the Russian man just ‘limits himself to a strong and cordial handshake, to a prayer in the chapel; or he takes down his hat and crosses himself’. 42 What Gasprinskii emphasizes here is the that Russian national character has maintained a strong primordial connection to the Orthodox faith, not dissimilar to how Gasprinskii describes the place of Islam in the life of Russia’s Muslims. Russians and Muslims are also in a similar position when encountering Europe: ‘Educated Muslims [from Russia] who had the opportunity to familiarize themselves with various European societies, behave [in their encounter with Europeans] just like Russians.’43 Taking the commemoration of the Battle of Kulikovo as the patriotic starting point of his essay also allowed Gasprinskii to draw historical parallels: It is widely known that this day [of 1380] symbolizes the turning point from which began the rebirth of Russia [Rus’] and the gradual decay of Tatar rule. […] In general, people say: Tatar rule brought Russia immeasurable plight, and it led to the standstill of [Russian] civilization for several centuries. That is absolutely true; but I believe that the long rule of such a powerful tribe [as the Tatars] over Russia could easily have led to Russia’s complete annihilation. Examples for such processes we see in the western frontier regions of the Slavic community [slavianstvo] [that is, where Slavic populations are being assimilated by Germans]. 44 Indeed, 41 Ibid., 9. 42 Ibid., 11. 43 Ibid., 10. 44 That the Germanization of the Poznan area is meant is clear from another reflection on page 18 of Russkoe musul’manstvo.

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as rulers the Tatars levied taxes; as children of Asia they also once in a while abducted beautiful girls. But beyond that they did not touch the everyday life and the religious sphere of Russia. I am not a historian, and I might be wrong, but I get the impression that when speaking about the Tatars one must also consider that [Tatar] rule perhaps protected Russia against even more powerful foreign influences; perhaps it was this specific character of [Tatar] overlordship that enabled Russia to develop the idea of her unity – an idea that for the first time appeared on the battlefield of Kulikovo. 45

Of course, the pernicious foreign influences against which the Tatars shielded Muscovy must have come from the West, from late medieval and Renaissance Europe, and in particular from Germany and Poland. This historical reflection allowed Gasprinskii to turn the tables, and to present a surprising new argument for his grant application: If we, as Tatars, have in this respect been beneficial to Russia, then we can today apply the old Russian saying that ‘A debt is good when it is being paid back.’ But we wish that the debt be paid back not in the old Asiatic coin but in the new, European coin, that is, by the spread of European sciences and knowledge among the Muslims of Russia, and not just by ruling and raising taxes. True, until recently the Russians themselves were [Europe’s] apprentices, but today they can be our teachers and educators. 46

Here Europeanness is again measured in knowledge and modern sciences – that is, not in inborn qualities of the ‘tribes’. This kind of ‘Europe’ can be everywhere, and becomes an item that can be traded by education: Light, give us light, o our elder brothers! Otherwise we suffocate, we fall apart and even infect those around us. We, the Muslims, are still children, therefore please act towards us as reasonable pedagogues would do; talk to us in a manner that we understand, not in a way that makes us speechless. Once we have learned to understand you, once we have, in our maktabs, acquired the fruits of your sciences and your knowledge, once we familiarized ourselves, through our Tatar books, with our homeland Russia, then,

45 Gasprinskii, Russkoe musul’manstvo, 11-12. 46 Ibid., 12.

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be assured, we will want to fill your gymnasiums and universities, in order to work at your side on the field of life and of science. 47

This kind of self-abasement might not be a good strategy for a contemporary grant application; in Gasprinskii’s case, it served the goal of appealing to the responsibility of Russians for the weak and ignorant children that Providence has put at their feet, as their ‘minor brothers’. Remarkably, here we also find an implicit threat scenario: if Russia does not ‘guide’ its Muslims to civilization, other subjects of the tsar – ‘those around us’ – might be ‘infected’ by the implosion of Russia’s agonizing Muslim society.

European Muslims in Russia? Remains to be asked how Gasprinskii explicated the f inal goal of the modernization programme that he propagated. Would Tatar/Muslim journalism and modern education not lead to the emancipation of Muslims from Russia, to European Muslims with a horizon stretching far beyond the empire, and with an own public sphere (today we would say: a strong civil society) that escapes Russian control? In order to dispel such fears Gasprinskii presented the Tatars of the utmost western parts of the Russian Empire as his model: A year ago we visited some provinces of Lithuania, in order to study the influence that European culture had on Asians; there we observed the life of Lithuanian Tatars in the countryside and in cities. We should keep in mind that the Lithuanian Muslims descend from the hordes of Tatar cavalrymen [ulany] whom the Lithuanian princes took into service for the fight against Poland, as courageous horsemen and faithful guardsmen. They were granted tax privileges and obtained the right to marry Lithuanian women. […] As the wives of these Tatar settlers knew no Tatar at all, the first generation of the Lithuanian Tatar women started to speak more in the language of the country, that is, Lithuanian, than they spoke Tatar; after a few generations the Tatar language was no longer in use, and the Lithuanian language became the national language [natsional’nyi iazyk] of the Tatars. 48

47 Ibid., 35. 48 Ibid., 27-28; emphasis added.

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Remarkably, this is one of the very few references to the concept of ‘nation’ (natsiia) in the whole essay; usually Gasprinskii employs the archaic ‘tribe’ (plemia), obviously because it sounds less threatening to imperial ears. The Lithuanian Tatars thus accepted a European language as their ‘national language’, but they fully preserved their Islamic faith: They have the same mosques, the same rituals as all other Muslims. It is correct that they have no maktabs and no madrasas, but they have mobile schools – in the person of the hojas [khodzha], who move from place to place in order to teach the rules of Islam. Each Tatar family possesses the necessary religious books, in which the Arabic text is translated into the Polish-Lithuanian language. […] My journey to Lithuania convinced me that Islam [islamizm] is almost invincible, and that apostasy occurs among the Lithuanian Tatars as rarely as it does for example among the Tatars of the Crimea. 49

Gasprinskii emphasized that the Lithuanian Tatars enjoyed a high level of education, and that many of them served in civil or military offices: ‘Muslim self-isolation [zatvornichestvo] does not exist among them.’ Obviously, women played a crucial role in this ‘domestication’ of Tatar Muslim warriors: Of course the Lithuanian women who married Tatars had to defend their freedom, but thanks to beneficial circumstances they managed to prevent the emergence of ‘harems’ [garemy]. Today it is difficult to find out whether a women is a Muslim or an autochthonous [korennaia] Polish or Lithuanian; only their names – Fatyma, Aisha, Meriem, Zelikha and so forth – reveal their Muslim origin. The Lithuanian Tatar men have Russian-Polish given names while their family names – like Akhmatovich, Asanovich and Selimovich – are of Tatar origin.50

Presenting the Lithuanian Tatars as a direct model for all Muslims of Russia, Gasprinskii again switches into the mode of a grant application: The Lithuanian Tatars are the best Tatars of Russia; they stand at the forefront of Russia’s Muslimhood in terms of culture and education. It would be very desirable to employ them for work among the other Muslims 49 Ibid., 28. 50 Ibid., 29.

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of Russia. For this service one could give them some privileges, in order to ease their work; for I believe that their cultural life would make a good example for many other Muslims.51

A Muslim minority whose Islam is reduced to the ritual, whose military prowess is fully at the disposal of the state, and who are completely integrated into non-Muslim society, even to the point of having abandoned their own language, and having accepted European names – Gasprinskii must have thought that this prospect would appeal to any Russian administrator. The example of the Lithuanian Tatars (who in fact spoke local Lithuanian, Polish or Belarusian idioms)52 is meant to prove that a far-reaching transformation of Muslim communities was indeed possible – and that Gasprinskii’s grant project is perfectly feasible. If Russia understands the potential of her Muslims, she can drag them out of their ignorance, their ‘dusted worldview’ (zatkhloe mirovozzrenie), and guide them towards a new role in the world: I would not spill one single drop of ink for these observations if I had even a moment’s doubt about the shining future of my Fatherland and its Muslimhood. The civilization was born in the farthermost East, and step by step it has spread to the West; but now, so it seems, it has taken a new course to the East, and it appears to me that the Russians and Russia’s Muslims are predestined to act as the best transmitters of this civilization. […] If it was the Romans and the Arabs who carried civilization into the West, then it is very possible that today Providence [Providenie] has decided to make the Russians and Tatars the carriers of Western civilization into the East.53

With access to European ideas and modern knowledge, Russia can awaken her apathetic Muslims to new life, with the result that the Muslim community will ‘become human’ (ochelovechitsia) again and identify with Russia. Needless to say, his own role Gasprinskii sees as the facilitator of this awakening. Gasprinskii’s essay is so much tailored to Russian interests that only in the very end of his essay he seemed to realize that his projects also required the support of Russia’s Muslims. In a few sentences he now addressed his 51 Ibid. 52 Suter, Alfurkan Tatarski; Akiner, Religious Language. 53 Gasprinskii, Russkoe musul’manstvo, 30-31.

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co-religionists; but he did so in a language that conformed to Russian expectations of how Muslims should be mobilized for establishing modern Muslim schools – namely through primitive references to Islam: O brothers, […] our religion teaches that there are three ways to do good: through work, through the word, and through donations – all three ways are pleasing to God [ugodno Bogu] and noble. […] I hope that in this holy undertaking [v etom sviatom dele] the educated muftis of the Crimea and of Kazan will offer you the necessary support. […] This, O brothers, will be honest and pious, and sooner or later the people will bless your names, keeping in mind the holy saying of the great Ali that ‘the ink of the scholar deserves as much respect as the blood of the martyr’.54

Conclusion: Combining Russo-, Euro-, Islamo- and Tatarocentrisms Gasprinskii’s 1881 essay is one of the earliest elaborate reflections about Europeanization composed by a Muslim author. At the same time ‘Russian Muslimhood’ is above all Russocentric: is comes as an impressive firework of grand patriotic narratives, and as a Muslim variation of Russia’s civilizing mission in the East. Gasprinskii emphasized (1) the historical entanglement of Russia and Islam, and the ensuing commonalities between Russians and Muslims; (2) the loyalty but passivity and self-isolation of Muslims; (3) the progress of Russia as coming through a careful Europeanization, the essence of which is the spread of science and knowledge. Gasprinskii furthermore argued (4) that this Europeanization could easily be coupled with authentic Islam, which he reduced to morality and ritual. Such a Europeanization would bring about a new spiritual and moral life, but it could also have negative effects (if it lacks the scientific approach and destroys Asian/ Islamic morality). Gasprinskii carefully designed his proposal as a contribution to several grand trends of Russian thought at the time; at face value, his project is very Russocentric. Gasprinskii fed into various imperial and colonial discourses, and presented himself as the ideal spokesperson of his fellow Muslims (who, he implied, were just waiting for deliverance from their misery), and as a loyal subject of the tsar who will increase administrative efficiency (as a loyal Muslim newspaper would improve the state’s outreach). Another goal 54 Ibid., 44-45.

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of his project was enhancing Russian state security by pre-empting Muslim solidarity with outside powers and averting a Muslim meltdown at home. There is even a concrete model that he proposed – the assimilated Lithuanian Tatars. Elements that spoke to Slavophiles – especially Gasprinskii’s flattering notes about the Russian national character, Russian religiosity, and about Russia’s historical mission as an imperial power – he easily combined with the goals of Russia’s Westernizers, namely Russia’s modernization in terms of education, administration, public life and literature. The grandeur of Russia would be augmented by affirmative action policies towards her Muslims; once enlightened, the Tatars would radiate Russia’s splendour further to the East. At the same time his programme was meant to give Muslims the voice that they so far lacked – as subordinates, or subalterns, but in their native language and in native institutions. Staunchly situated in the Russian context, and predicated upon Russian interests, Gasprinskii’s essay can also be read as an argument for Europeanization. But ‘Europe’ is reduced to a scientific attitude, to the production and dissemination of superior knowledge. As such, it is completely uncoupled from the cultural centres of Europe that he mentioned, such as Paris and London. In Gasprinskii’s eyes, the Russians accepted Europeanization only recently, but without losing their original moral compass; therefore, they were ideally suited to pass Europeanization on to their Muslims, with the help of Muslim intermediaries such as Gasprinskii himself. This RussoMuslim Europeanization would only strengthen Russia’s uniqueness, in conformity with her geopolitical interests; and it would block an alternative Europeanization emanating from Istanbul. In that sense, Gasprinskii’s Eurocentrism is in fact a kind of Eurocentrifugalism, a movement of European qualities away from Europe; the Jadids that followed him developed not only modern education and journalism but also charitable associations, a modern literature and theatre, the elaboration of ethnic nationalisms in historiography, and the struggle for the emancipation of women, all in their native languages and sponsored by a Muslim entrepreneurial class. After the October Revolution, the Muslims of Russia obtained ethno-national ‘autonomous’ republics such as Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, in the Bolshevik variant of European ideas about political representation. As Gasprinskii warned, with the Europeanization of Muslims and the break-up of their communal self-isolation comes the danger of moral corruption. Here Gasprinskii’s antidote was the preservation of communal coherence though Islamic morality, but also the promotion of a ‘tribal’ historical identity that can be racial (Turkic) or national (Tatar) at the

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same time. In fact, in his historical reflections he introduced an element of nativism that emancipated the Tatars from Russia, and Asia from Europe: employing European modes of historical reflection, he characterized Tatar rule as something beneficial for Russia – with Europe/the West depicted as a threat to Russia’s integrity. The idea of a Tatar/Golden Horde ‘service’ to Russia would be further pronounced by the Eurasianists of the 1920s, and by the neo-Eurasianists of our day. One could therefore regard Gasprinskii as a pioneer of ‘Muslim Eurasianism’ in Russia.55 Equally complex was Gasprinskii’s conception of Islam in Russia, his navigating between religious and ethnic/national essentialisms. While pretending to speak for Russia’s Muslims as a whole, it is clear that Russia’s ‘movement to the East’ was supposed to be led by the Tatars; other Muslim nationalities of the Russian Empire are not even mentioned in his essay.56 Likewise, Gasprinskii had very little to say about the various forms of Islam that existed in the empire; in this respect his essay resembled the writings of Russian historians and administrators whom he reproached for ‘ignoring’ Islam and Muslims in Russia. While repeating that the religion of Islam does not pose a political threat to Russia, Gasprinskii directed his enlightenment programme against the Islamocentrism that he observed among Russia’s Muslim communities, in education, communal self-administration, and in the construction of communal authority – while still employing Islam as a factor not only of moral but also of communal identity. This brings us to the conclusion that Gasprinskii’s programmatic text is in the first place an overconfident claim to intellectual authority in Russia’s Muslim society, hurled against the Islamic scholars and imams who so far dominated Muslim education, cultural life, and communal representation. In this sense it makes sense that when addressing Muslims, on the last pages of his essay, the author suddenly switched to the pedagogical language of a teacher. Just like he used Russian arguments against Russification policies, Gasprinskii employed Islamic symbols against the dominance of Muslim authorities. The essay was thereby a double provocation – with ambiguous references to Europeanization to underpin his claim that change was inevitable. Gasprinskii’s ‘Russian Muslimhood: Thoughts, Annotations and Observations’ (1881) is therefore also a founding document of Jadidism and a starting point for the intra-Muslim competition between Jadids and Muslim 55 Sibgatullina and Kemper, ‘Between Salafism’. 56 This Tatarocentrism is most prominent in Gasprinskii’s later writings on Central Asia. See Hofmeister, ‘Ein Krimtatare’; Lazzerini, ‘From Bakhchisarai’.

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traditionalists. This competition would shape the cultural history of Russia’s Islam in the five subsequent decades – up to the full-scale elimination of the Islamic infrastructure, of the traditional imams and also of the Jadids, by Stalin’s terror machine. As scholars have noted, historians have in general been much more sympathetic towards the Jadids, who wrote in an easily accessible language and in concepts familiar to us, than towards the ‘traditionalists’, who continued to write in Arabic and in the terms of classical Islamic discourse.57 Seen as a grant application, we understand why Gasprinskii combined so many essentialist clichés about Russia, Europe and Islam – with considerable success.

Bibliography Akiner, Shirin, Religious Language of a Belarusian Tatar Kitab: A Cultural Monument of Islam in Europe (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009). Avrutin, Eugene M., ‘Racial Categories and the Politics of (Jewish) Difference in Late Imperial Russia’, Kritika 8:1 (2007), 13-40. Bougarel, Xavier, ‘Bosnian Islam as “European Islam”: Limits and Shifts of a Concept’, in Aziz Al-Azmeh and Effie Fokas (eds), Islam in Europe: Diversity, Identity and Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 96-124. DeWeese, Devin, ‘It Was a Dark and Stagnant Night (‘til the Jadids Brought the Light): Clichés, Biases, and False Dichotomies in the Intellectual History of Central Asia’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 59:1-2 (2016), 37-92. Dudoignon, Stéphane A., ‘Djadidisme, mirasisme, islamisme’, Cahiers du Monde Russe 37:1-2 (1996), 13-40. Ertürk, Nergis, ‘An Uncanny Turkic: İsmail Gasprinskii’s Language Lesson’, Middle Eastern Literatures 19:1 (2016), 34-55. Gammer, Moshe, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan (London: Cass, 1994). Garipova, Rozaliya, ‘The Protectors of Religion and Community: Traditionalist Muslim Scholars of the Volga-Ural Region at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 59:1-2 (2016), 126-165. Gasprinskii, Ismail, ‘Ǧadidism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: A View from Within’, trans. Edward J. Lazzerini, Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique 16:2 (1975), 245-277. Gasprinskii, Ismail, Russkoe musul’manstvo: Mysli, zametki i nabliudeniia musul’manina (Simferopol: Spiro, 1881). 57 DeWeese, ‘It was a Dark’.

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Gasprinskii, Ismail, ‘Russo-Oriental Relations: Thoughts, Notes, and Desires’, trans. Edward J. Lazzerini, in Edward Allworth (ed.), Tatars of the Crimea: Their Struggle for Survival (Durham: Duke University Press, 1988), 202-216. Hofmeister, Ulrich, ‘Ein Krimtatare in Zentralasien. Ismail Gasprinskii, der Orientalismus und das Zarenreich’, in idem and Kerstin S. Jobst (eds), ‘Krimtataren’, special issue of Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 28:1 (2017), 114-141. Kemper, Michael, and Shamil Shikhaliev, ‘Qadimism and Jadidism in TwentiethCentury Daghestan’, Asiatische Studien/Études Asiatiques 69:3 (2015), 593-624. Khalid, Adeeb, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Lazzerini, Edward J., ‘From Bakhchisarai to Bukhara in 1893: Ismail Bey Gasprinskii’s Journey to Central Asia’, Central Asian Survey 3:4 (1984), 77-88. Lazzerini, Edward J., Ismail Bey Gasprinskii and Muslim Modernism in Russia, 1878-1914, PhD dissertation, University of Washington (1973). Lazzerini, Edward J., ‘Ismail Bey Gasprinskii’s Perevodchik/Tercüman: A Clarion of Modernism’, in Hasan B. Paksoy (ed.), Central Asian Monuments (Istanbul: ISIS, 1992), 143-156. Meyer, James H., Turks across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the RussianOttoman Borderlands, 1856-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Mukhetdinov, Damir, Rossiiskoe musul’manstvo: Traditsii ummy v usloviiakh evraziiskoi tsivilizatsii (Moscow: Medina, 2016). Noack, Christian, Muslimischer Nationalismus im Russischen Reich: Nationsbildung und Nationalbewegung bei Tataren und Baschkiren, 1861-1917 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2000). Räximov, Söläyman (ed.), Ismägïyl’ Gasprinskiy: tarixi-dokumental’ dzhïentïk [parallel Russian title: Ismail Gasprinskii: istoriko-dokumental’nyi sbornik] (Kazan: Dzhïen, 2006). Shikhaliev, Shamil, and Michael Kemper, ‘Sayfallāh-Qāḍī Bashlarov: Sufi Networks between the North Caucasus and the Volga-Urals’, in Michael Kemper and Ralf Elger (eds), The Piety of Learning: Islamic Studies in Honor of Stefan Reichmuth (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 166-198. Sibgatullina, Gulnaz, and Michael Kemper, ‘Between Salafism and Eurasianism: Geidar Dzhemal and the Islamic Revolution in Russia’, Islam and ChristianMuslim Relations 28:2 (2017), 219-236. Suter, Paul, Alfurkan Tatarski. Der litauisch-tatarische Koran-Tefsir (Köln: Böhlau, 2004). Tuna, Mustafa, Imperial Russia’s Muslims: Islam, Empire and European Modernity, 1788-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

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About the Author Michael Kemper, Full Professor of East European Studies at the University of Amsterdam [email protected]

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David’s Member, or Eurocentrism and Its Paintings in the Late Twentieth Century The Example of Vienna Wolfgang Schmale

Abstract Between 1980 and 1992, the Austrian painter Maître Leherb (1933-1997) created six eight-by-eight-metre majolica paintings for the then new building of the Vienna University of Economics, depicting Australia, Asia, Europe, America, Africa and the Arctic/Antarctic. The chapter discusses these paintings against the background of the Eurocentric tradition of continental allegories. Keywords: Maître Leherb, continental allegories, Eurocentrism, Leni Riefenstahl, Vienna

Figure 1 Maître Leherb, Europe (1981/1982). Foyer of the former Vienna University of Economics (Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien), Vienna

Photograph: Wolfgang Schmale

Brolsma, Marjet, Robin de Bruin, and Matthijs Lok (eds): Eurocentrism in European History and Memory. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463725521_ch06

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Introduction Between 1980 and 1992, the Austrian painter Maître Leherb (= Helmut Leherbauer, 1933-1997) created six eight-by-eight-metre majolica paintings in Faenza, Italy, for the foyer of the then new building of the Vienna University of Economics (Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien). The images depict Australia, Asia, Europe, America, Africa and the Arctic/Antarctic.1 By portraying these six continents, the artist went beyond the classic group of four: Europe, Asia, Africa and America. Leherb continued the tradition of the continental allegories, popular since the sixteenth century, but partially diverged from such traditions. This is most obvious with the image of the continent of Europe. The central figure of the European image is the naked David by Michelangelo, repeated three times, each with significant variations. Michelangelo’s David (created between 1501 and 1504) is made of Carrara marble, and symbolizes, like no other sculpture and figure, an ideal image of the European. David also carries several positive traits attributed to the European. This is an appropriation or usurpation, since the biblical David was of course not a European – and the image was not intended as a reference to the Jewish roots of Europe, as has become more common in recent years. In addition, ‘the European’ was historically defined in the eighteenth century as a man. In that sense, the choice of naked David, whose member in the twentieth century and today was and continues to be the object of intense marketing, is to be understood as a strong reference to Europe as a male civilization.2 If one stands in front of this picture, one spontaneously thinks: ‘This is the peak of Eurocentrism!’ It is probably also surprising that in 1981/1982, when the picture was painted for the building, such a seemingly uncritical view of Europe was still feasible, and acceptable. A more detailed interpretation of this and of the images of the other five continents, which brings to light other aspects of Eurocentrism, is given below. Leherb was in his time a well-known surrealist and troublemaker, who deliberately sought controversy. In many ways he was a person who cultivated the opposite of a bourgeois lifestyle, whose lifestyle expressed an ‘I’m against’.3 A debate about these pictures started recently in Vienna. It is, as in many other European cities, a controversy about dealing with colonialism and its heritage in the form of monuments and commemorative plaques, which 1 The photos can bee seen on my weblog: https://wolfgangschmale.eu/maitre-leherb/ (accessed 6 May 2019). The blog entry is based on the unpublished German version of the present chapter. 2 For details, see Schmale, Gender and Eurocentrism. 3 See Maitre Leherb website.

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usually glorify the former colonial powers, in the form of works of art or literature. Leherb, who loved the ‘anti’, would probably be surprised to be accused of lacking critical distance regarding the painted content. Of course, this current criticism has a lot to do with the new Eurocentrism in the twenty-first century. After World War II, Europe had become a prosperous island in the world as a result of European integration. Although the threat of poverty has risen again in the last two to three decades, and the gap between rich and poor continues to widen, average prosperity is well above that of most regions of the world. The defence of this prosperity causes new European egoism or Eurocentrism. The rise of immigration from economically poor and war-torn regions in recent years has triggered a call to close borders in Europe. The willingness to allow non-Europeans who come to Europe to participate in social prosperity is decreasing, and there is a resentful talk of ‘asylum tourism’ and ‘welfare tourism’. Eurocentrism is making an ugly comeback. Critical considerations on Eurocentrism are not easy in this politically and propagandistically charged situation. It is therefore important to be critical of iconographic memories – images of the continents of the Earth or continent allegories are part of this. It should not go unmentioned that Michael Wintle has dealt with such images.4 These allegories represent just one of many possible art forms that can be studied in terms of Eurocentrism and its dissemination. It forms a genre that has been widely used, especially in Europe, for more than 400 years. Most recently, the Canadian artist Kent Monkman has dealt with the subject. He has reworked (2012-2016) Tiepolo’s famous continent images of 1752/1753 in the prince-bishop residence of Würzburg (Bavaria) in the light of colonialism in Canada.5 Tiepolo’s frescoes, executed by the famous eighteenth-century Italian artist with his two sons on the 600m² ceiling of the stairwell, are probably the most comprehensive images of the Earth. Scholars have for a long-time paid attention to these frescoes; Anglo-American researchers in particular have developed a taste for Tiepolo.6 In Vienna since the seventeenth century there have been buildings decorated with representations of the continents, for instance the 4 Wintle, The Image. 5 Monkman, The Four Continents. See also Mowry, ‘Kent Monkman’. I’m grateful to Dr Harald Tersch, director of the history department library at Vienna University, as Monkman’s book is out of print and inaccessible in Austria. He managed to buy a copy, which now enriches our library. 6 See as an example: Fulco, Exuberant apotheoses. For further research, see Schmale, ‘Gemalte Zivilisationsgeschichte’. A seminal work is Krückmann, Der Himmel.

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Niederösterreichisches Landhaus, the Old (Jesuit) University, several churches, the Liechtenstein Garden Palace, the Leeb Palace, the Elisabethinen pharmacy, etc.7 Most are frescoes, although in some cases there are sculptures, such as in the Natural History Museum (dating from the 1880s). At the main entrance Europe, America and Australia, created by Karl Kundmann, can be seen. At the back of the building on the Bellariastrasse we find Africa and Asia by Anton Paul Wagner.8 In Vienna, therefore, a tradition exists of depicting the continents from the seventeenth century to the end of the twentieth century, as well a tradition of being critical towards this cultural heritage. The majolica of Leherb in the former University of Economics contains the youngest depictions of the continents in Vienna. In technical terms, Leherb refers to ‘Delft tile painting’ from the late seventeenth century, which inspired him. In addition, the material use of ceramics and majolica in Vienna is closely linked to Viennese modernism. Before returning to Leherb’s portrayals of the continents and analysing them in more detail for their relevance to Eurocentrism, in this chapter I will briefly outline the European history of allegories and continental pictures since the sixteenth century and ask to what extent this topic expressed Eurocentrism, partly building on the works of Michael Wintle. This short overview is followed by a critical analysis of the majolica of Leherb. The aspect of gender plays an important role in this analysis.

European Expansion and the Genesis of the Depictions of the Earth In ancient times allegorical figures were used to visualize abstract phenomena such as ‘music’, ‘history’, ‘wind’, ‘time’ and so forth. Such allegories also existed for topographic places like cities. In the Middle Ages, these allegories did not disappear, but the allegories of the continents fell into oblivion. Only the figure of Europe was depicted, not as a continental allegory, but as the daughter of the Phoenician king Agenor from the Greek myth. There were exceptions to this general neglect: the Hildesheim candlestick from the twelfth century is often cited as an example of the use of the three continents of Europe, Asia and Africa in the high Middle Ages.9 7 See ‘Continentallegories.univie.ac.at’, a research project on continent allegories, directed by Wolfgang Schmale. 8 For a detailed description, see Huber, ‘Naturhistorisches Museum’. 9 Analysis by Oschema, Bilder, 499-502.

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It was not until the second half of the sixteenth century that the motive of the four continental allegories (Europe, Asia, Africa, America) emerged in response to the European expansion to America, Africa and Asia. A canon of continental depictions soon emerged, as can be observed in the frontispiece of Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570) by Abraham Ortelius. Cesare Ripa played an important role in the construction of the canon with the first edition of his Iconologia (1593). In Ortelius’ work the figure of Europe towers over the other; she wears a crown. The hierarchy between the figures is clear: Europe, then Asia and Africa, and finally America. Next to the American allegory, we see the bust of a woman on a low pedestal, which represents ‘Tierra del Fuego’. Clearly Europe is seen as the mistress of the world, accompanied by three globes. The globe next to her left arm is surmounted by the Christian cross, and one can see a watermark in the form of a rudder blade inserted into the body of the globe. The messages are clear: global governance, global trade, global Christianity all originate in Europe. The four continental allegories quickly became a popular subject for palaces, churches, monasteries and fountains. They decorated atlases and individual maps, and were distributed as woodcuts, copper prints and woven rugs, painted in oil, offered as terracotta and later as porcelain figurines.10 Around 1800, Europe temporarily lost interest in the continental allegories, but they were not forgotten. In the second half of the nineteenth century they experienced a renaissance in the context of world exhibitions. They adorned stock exchanges, railway stations, libraries and museums. In Utrecht, they decorated the Hoofdpostkantoor.11 There are examples in North America (New York, Montreal, etc.) and in Eastern Europe. The canon of the four continents has been partially expanded, as the example of the Bourse de Commerce (1889) in Paris shows.12 In many cases, the hierarchical order used by Ortelius was maintained, but that was by no means everywhere the case. Artists took a lot of liberties in their design of the subject. The four allegories were not always female; sometimes all four were made male, sometimes they were depicted as couples, sometimes only Europe was female, and at other times only Europe was male. In the eighteenth-century masculine continental allegories became especially popular.13 Examples of these masculine allegories can be found in Western and Southern Europe, England, Denmark, Central Europe (Old Reich, 10 11 12 13

See ‘Continentallegories.univie.ac.at’. I’m grateful to Michael Wintle who mentioned this example to me. Images are easy to find on the web by searching for ‘Bourse de commerce Paris’. Schmale, ‘La représentation’; ibid., ‘Europa’.

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Bohemia, Austria), and Poland. In the rest of East-Central Europe, the four continents in the early modern period can only be found in books or atlases. In the sixteenth-century Dutch printers and Italian artists were crucial for the dissemination of the subject, but from the late seventeenth century the four allegories enjoyed popularity in the southern half of the Old Reich. Uniquely for this region, the continental allegories were also as common feature in village churches. In this view, this Eurocentrist representation of the world also reached the common people.14 For practical reasons, it was not always possible to present the hierarchy between the continents outlined above directly: when painting festive rooms, library halls or even staircase ceilings, all four continents had to be painted on the same level, preferably in the four corners or on the four sides. The hierarchy in these cases was conveyed above all through the attributes of the figures, and the degree of clothing, from naked or almost naked in America and Africa to princely clothing made of precious fabrics in Europe and often Asia. The artists used engravings of continental allegories or the works of other artists they had seen. They got ideas in folk and anthropological books, in which people from all over the world were depicted. Illustrated accounts of travel and foreign expeditions were also rich treasure troves. A long tradition also exists in religious art containing representations of the ‘stranger’. The ‘Three Wise Men’ could serve as a model, especially when there was enough space to surround the kings with numerous cortèges. A good example is provided by the crib figures made in Naples in the eighteenth century; the ‘black king’ was given an extensive cortège.15 In the eighteenth century, representations of the continents greatly expanded in size whenever plenty of space was available, such as in the staircases of the baroque palaces in Pommersfelden and in Würzburg in the Old Reich. In these and other cases, we are dealing with depiction in painting of the ‘history of civilization’. The basic message was rather simple: Europe is the most advanced civilization in the world, while the other continents are identified with lower levels of civilizational development. Asia is always the second-most developed civilization, usually followed by Africa. The ‘discovered’ continent – America – was considered the ‘most primitive’ continent. Until the eighteenth century, America, imagined as a Native American woman, displayed the attributes of cannibalism; in the eighteenth 14 Continent allegories in village churches have been studied by Romberg, Die Welt. See also: ‘Continentallegories.univie.ac.at’. 15 The Bayerische Nationalmuseum in Munich has a very interesting collection of crib figures made in eighteenth-century Naples.

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century, this figure often became an African American. Apparently, the association of the Americas with the enslavement of Africans was put in the foreground in the representation of the New World. Understanding Europe as the most advanced civilization and the embodiment of human progress has been the central idea of the new historiographical genre of ‘civilizational history’, that broke with the ancient ‘universal history’ or salvation history. The ‘great men of history’ were considered the driving force behind the development of civilization and history. More generally, it was the ‘European’, a white and Christian man, who explored and conquered the world. These men possessed a uniquely hardened body and could endure heavy burdens. The bodies of Africans were dissected by anatomist and compared with the body of the Europeans by anthropologists to prove the superiority of Europeans. The emergence of a racist worldview in the late eighteenth century has been underscored by researchers. Also, the concept of civilization in the eighteenth century cannot be separated from contemporary views on gender, representations of which have been labelled ‘hegemonic masculinity’ or, as it has recently been called, ‘toxic masculinity’.16 In my book Gender and Eurocentrism I summarized this development in the eighteenth century as: ‘Eurocentrism is […] the “being male” of the […] civilization named Europe.’17

David’s Member, or Eurocentrism and Its Paintings in the Late Twentieth Century In the context of the Vienna World’s Fair of 1873, the first ‘Handels-Hochschule’ was founded, but it existed only until 1877. In 1898 the institution was refounded as ‘k.k. Exportakademie’, which became the ‘University of World Trade’ in 1919 and the ‘University of Economics’ in 1975. The Exportakademie received its own building in the nineteenth district, which opened in the middle of World War I in 1917. It is currently used by the University of Vienna. Outside the building are sculptures (masks) representing the continents, different countries and cities. Inside, the entrance hall shows paintings of several world harbours: Constantinople, New York, Hamburg, Trieste (which was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time).18 16 ‘Toxic masculinity’ is also debated by public media such as newspapers; search simply for ‘toxic masculinity’. 17 Schmale, Gender and Eurocentrism, 75. 18 The history of the buildings is briefly covered in Czeike, Historisches Lexikon, vol. V, Ru-Z, 666, right column, sub verbo ‘Wirtschaftsuniversität’.

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In the Viennese district Spittelau in the 1970s, a modern, several hundredmetre-long building complex was built for the University of Economics. To the east, facing the city centre, is the entrance of the Franz-Josefs-Bahnhof. The main entrance is on the side of Augasse. In the immediate vicinity of the building complex is the famous Vienna waste incineration plant, designed by Friedensreich Hundertwasser. As mentioned in the introduction, a commissioned work by the Austrian artist Maître Leherb was installed in the foyer of this building. It consists of six eight-by-eight-metre majolica paintings, which the artist created between 1980 and 1992 in Faenza. Leherb described the continental representations as ‘imaginary portraits’ of the continents. He portrayed six continents: Australia, Asia, Europe, America, Africa, Arctic/Antarctic. Leherb’s continental pictures are dated as follows: Europe 1981/1982; Asia 1981/1982; America 1982/1983; Arctic/Antarctic 1985; Africa 1992; Australia 1990-1992. This, in a sense, continued the tradition of the building of the former World Trade School in the nineteenth district at Währinger Park, where the continents were also shown. The visitor, who enters the foyer (= auditorium) from the Augasse through the main entrance, does not immediately see the pictures. First, you have to step right into the foyer to notice that these artworks exist. You do not look directly at it, but you must go to each picture and turn left or right to see it. You can also climb to the first floor and look at the pictures from the connecting corridors. In short: it requires the visitor’s effort to see these paintings. In his comments on his work, Leherb highlighted the artistic and technical challenges of his technique. From 1987 to about 1989 he had to take a break from his work, as he had inadvertently poisoned himself with manganese and cobalt – components of the colours he used in his art. (This seems to have contributed to his death in 1997 from a stroke.) He wrote little about the representations themselves that could help us better understand his intentions, instead focusing on the technical aspects of his art. There are short descriptive texts that were probably written by the artist himself, although I could not find any definitive proof of authorship.19 After the relocation of the University of Economics to the new campus in 2013, the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts was housed in this complex, as its building in the city centre on Schillerplatz was being thoroughly renovated. 19 The most important information can be found in a brochure from 1992: ‘Leherb. Die Universitätsfayencen’ (Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien, 1992). I used the copy held in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek. The content editor is Michael Fröschl, of the Außenisntitut of the University of Economics. About half of the brochure is based on a contribution by Leherb himself, entitled: ‘Attempt to Interpret the Works of “University Faience”’. However, Leherb deals primarily with process and production technology. The brochure is unpaginated.

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As early as 2013, Christian Kravagna and Carola Dertnig offered a seminar within the framework of the master’s programme on critical studies, in which, among other things, these works of art were critically examined.20 In January 2018, further critical activities took place in which the presumed Eurocentric perspective of the artist was also widely discussed. Quotations from Rabindranath Tagore (1918), Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (2015), Frank B. Wilderson III (2010), Toni Morrison (1992), Gloria E. Anzaldúa (1987), Edward W. Said (1978), Audre Lorde (1981) and Frantz Fanon (1961) have been added to the walls.21 It should be noted that by the time that Leherb created the majolica, a long tradition of criticism regarding colonialism and historical Eurocentrism had already existed and the artist was criticized for not engaging with these contemporaneous debates.22 Little is known about the assignment, the awarding of the contract, and the ideological foundations that guided the artist. Staff members of the Academy of Fine Arts have been unable to locate the relevant documents. Christian Kravagna, professor of postcolonial studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, said in a conversation in 2018 that Leherb, together with Friedensreich Hundertwasser and Ernst Fuchs, formed the Viennese School of ‘fantastic realism’ in which he recognized the ‘then favoured art patronised by the social democrats’.23 The following criticisms of Leherb’s art do not reflect on his expert craftsmanship or the high artistic and aesthetic quality of the works, which remain undisputed. The artist had to consider the space in which the six pictures were to be placed: an elongated, basically low hall, interrupted by two supply towers inside and several transverse bars halfway up the hall on the first floor, from which the pictures can also be viewed. The entrance hall, also known as the auditorium, of the former University of Economics is functional and impersonal, characterized by concrete and supply technology. Each picture is accompanied by a short interpretation that explains the most important elements. The artist explains his general idea for the six pictures as follows24: 20 ‘Das WU Projekt’. 21 Documentation of the citations in DERDIEDAS bildende, the journal of the Academy of Fine Arts. See ‘Kunst im Bau’, 3-11. 22 See: ‘Kunst im Bau’, 3-11. 23 ‘Nobody wants to ban something. The pictures are still there.’ Interview by Christa Benzer with Christian Kravagna and Martina Taig, in ‘Kunst im Bau’, 6-10, quotation 10, column left outside. 24 This explanation can be found with every picture on the wall and is taken from the cited brochure.

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After an intensive analytical inventory of the indirectly mental and optical phenomena of the continents, I created ‘imaginary portraits’ of the continents Asia, Europe, America and Africa by means of surrealist alienations and irrational associative images: over several years working on more than 2000 ceramic plates using the brittle and diff icult technique of faience majolica in the old Italian ceramic city Faenza. In terms of dimensions, the university panel paintings are the largest faience paintings of this century.

Why Leherb mentioned only the four ‘old’ continents, but not Arctic/Antarctic and Australia, which he also created, is unclear. ‘Surrealistic alienations’ are in the style of the painter, while the characterization as ‘irrational associative images’ does not really apply. The individual picture elements follow a very clear logic. Leherb is much less surrealist than he would have us believe. For Europe, Leherb chose the figure of the biblical David, as created by Michelangelo at the beginning of the sixteenth century for Florence. David is undoubtedly one of the most famous sculptures in the world and is suitable as a ‘shortcut’ for Europe. The question of why Leherb chose David is answered as follows25: Michelangelo’s David is not only one of the masterpieces of European culture, but a parable of the centuries-old, dynamic superiority of the ‘Old World’: Europe, whose diversity of people, spiritual power and history influenced and shaped the other parts of the world in size and extent as Goliath has dominated. This David rises from the Mediterranean to the measure of ancient Greek human conception, to become the blue-blazed hero, who is confronted with perhaps the most important intellectual-political knowledge of Europe, a realization in which centuries of humanistic tradition find revolutionary expression: ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’. In contact with this statement, the hero’s shimmering marble becomes perfused flesh, David becomes human, white doves fly – associative of peace, freedom and faith: the bullet for ‘perfection’ and between the unfolded ellipses ‘time and space’ the cognition of Relativity. Leherb has his signature of blue shades appear in Europe’s portrait.

Clearly, Leherb follows the civilizational ideas of the eighteenth century, demonstrating Europe’s unlimited self-esteem. The history of Europe is 25 This and the other descriptions cited below are posted besides the pictures and can also be found in the cited brochure.

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seen only positively, portrayed in an idealized manner, while the history of violence in Europe is not acknowledged. Europe is portrayed in an idealized way. Leherb used the three main epochs of European history that have been cited to date almost exclusively in terms of long-term achievements: Greek antiquity, humanism (including Michelangelo’s David) and the French Revolution. In the early modern period, male figures were used as an alternative to female allegories. The fact that Leherb chose the male figure of David, as well as a historical (and biblical) one, therefore stands in the art historical tradition of the image of this part of the Earth. In the Holy Roman Empire, for example, the figure of the emperor or even a certain emperor such as Francis I (Francis Stephen of Lorraine) was sometimes chosen instead of feminine depiction of Europe.26 Such figures and attributes characterize properties that are considered typical of Europe. Here it is especially the attributes of ‘science’, ‘peace’, ‘perfection’ that come to the fore in the architecture. Also, a message of the mastery of nature by the European can clearly be found in the depiction of water, clouds and the indicated mountains and the way nature is positioned in the background of David, i.e. of man, of the European. At the same time, the three figures of David stand for historical development. Leherb uses a cultural stereotype through which it is stated that European civilization, and only European civilization is essentially characterized by historicity. Hayden White has harshly criticized this assumption that only European civilization is characterized by historicity, some twenty years ago.27 In Leherb’s other five images of the continents, historicity as an essential component of civilization plays only a subordinate role. Arctic and Antarctic are characterized by ‘timelessness’. The image of America focuses on the consumption and the media society of the United States of the present, only an ancient revolver seems to refer to the nineteenth century and the conquest of the West. The African-American woman in the foreground on the right side points to the history of slavery and, of course, the slave trade, but she does not express it explicitly. One has only to compare the image to the perspective of the painting in the European picture, where David from antiquity to the French Revolution is getting larger and more present and dominant. The depth perspective is a perfect metaphor for ‘history’ – and historicity, because David remains David, but also develops. In the image of Asia, there is only a hint of history by means of the stone figure relief at the bottom of the picture. Australia is essentially made of 26 For details, see Schmale, ‘La représentation’; Schmale, ‘Europa’. 27 White, ‘The Discourse’.

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nature, but the three female figures imply a story: the naked, caged figure in the left front, which signifies the indigenous people, is standing with its left arm outstretched, meaning the continent is being colonized by deported convicts, on the right is contemporary Australia as part of the West. The cage with the figure of the aborigine indicates a critical view of the colonization of Australia. Africa appears to be mostly ahistorical. Pyramids can be seen in the background, however, which is a reference to Egyptian civilization. This civilization was mostly attributed to Asia in the historical images of the continents. But could this ancient civilization stand for Africa? Or does the fact that it is placed in the background rather emphasize the supposed absence of a history of civilization? The phone without connection suggests at least a disconnection. Africa is portrayed, quite critically, as a continent of economic exploitation, other attributes represent hunger. The Masai woman and the Nuba man are portrayed as proud people, but they are as naked as the Australian aborigines. Leherb seems to draw on iconography of the early modern period. The picture distributions can also be interpreted as meaning that Africa was expropriated from its people. Leherb’s view is by no means uncritical – but he is uncritical in relation to Europe, whose depiction, with all the originality of the composition, is ultimately filled with clichés. The classification of nudity corresponds to a European cliché and must therefore be an expression of a Eurocentric viewpoint: what is considered ‘naked’ in Europe does not necessarily have this meaning in other cultures. Nudity is always relational to the cultural context. Moreover, the global perspective that was used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and in the historiography of human history has disappeared. Of course, that has to do with the available space for the work of art, too. If one compares this with the Würzburg staircase, one notices how much the space contributes to the fragmentation of the perspective. In Würzburg, on the one hand, the ascent began at the foot of the main staircase, initially with America in view. The first platform turned in the other direction. With each additional stage that a visitor climbed, he or she can see more of Europe, the culmination of the complete work, but at the same time on the left and on the right Africa and Asia can be observed. Space and ceremony were perfectly related, the pictures joined together. In Vienna, on the other hand, visitors are forced to fragment their view of the world. That, too, is a message: an overarching view of the world has become impossible. Back to Europe and David. Michelangelo was commissioned to make David at a time when Florence was repeatedly threatened by tyrants like Cesare Borgia. In general, the figure of David in Florentine history is linked to the

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constitution of the Florentine Republic. David’s idealized nakedness stands for many virtues as well as the free individual, who was, of course, a free man in European history. During the Renaissance, David was regarded as a historical person, a great man of history. In any case, his manhood is literal. As a result, Leherb relies on the traditional gender construction which has long dominated the notion of Europe’s history. And so his picture of Europe illustrates my already quoted thesis that ‘Eurocentrism is the masculine depiction of the civilization named Europe’. This can also be deduced from Leherb’s other images of the Earth. In the African picture, the Nuba man appears dominant, but this is more due to his dark skin colour. He sits while the Masai woman stands beside him and is by no means subordinated to him. The two are in balance. Nonetheless, viewing the Nuba man is reminiscent of Leni Riefenstahl’s photo book on the Nuba, specifically the photo of Tukami, ‘one of the strongest wrestlers in Tadoro’.28 Riefenstahl undertook several photo expeditions to the Nuba between 1962 and 1977, but she was not the only one; the photographer George Rodger, whom she mentions herself, also photographed the Nuba as early as 194929 – the Nuba were a topic of the media and Rodger’s as well as Riefenstahl’s photobooks became international successes. The Masai were also an international topic of discussion going back to the late nineteenth century. It can be assumed – more than an assumption cannot be advanced now – that Maître Leherb has found enough inspiration here, without investigating the ideological background of such photos in detail. In the image of Asia, two monks are shown in monk’s cowls, but they do not dominate; the child and the woman as well as the stupa are in balance with the monks. Europe is out of the ordinary – there is neither a gender balance, nor a possible queer perspective, only the naked David, who, as I have shown in a contribution to the Viennese exhibition ‘Naked Men’ (2012),30 was part of the staging of masculinity in the public area through nudity. Maître Leherb confirms through his image of Europe, albeit probably unknowingly or at least unreflectingly, the interpretation of European civilization as essentially male. In a sense, this ‘fitted’ the University of Economics, where predominantly men studied to become managers or executives in the male-dominated economy. (The proportion of women among the students attending today is about 48%.) 28 Riefenstahl, Die Nuba, 57. 29 Rodger, Le village. 30 For details, see Schmale, ‘Nakedness’.

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Michelangelo used Carrara marble for his David. The sculpture is generally considered to be equal to the best works of Greek sculptors of antiquity, or even to surpass them. In his short description Leherb relates the sculpture of David to ancient Greece, but not to the Old Testament and Palestine. It gives the image of Europe an effective blue tone, however, the marble continues to evoke the ‘whiteness’ associated with European ‘races’. The colour white, more than any other colour, represents the ultimately racist manifestations of Eurocentrism. Since Winckelmann, it has been assigned to Greek antiquity and connected to the body ideal of ancient sculptors. The original colourfulness of the sculptures is documented in antiquity museums, but the attempts to change this cliché established in the eighteenth century have been met with moderate success.

Conclusion A critical view of the continent images of Maître Leherb tells a lot about the persistence and pervasiveness of Eurocentrism in modern times. Leherb himself did not have the explicit intention of promoting a Eurocentric worldview. Nevertheless, what he has collected from iconological, iconographic and aesthetic traditions, as well as ideological patterns of thought for the images has provided a mirror of the Eurocentric worldview. This Eurocentric worldview was clearly not overcome in the 1980s and 1990s, but shaped mainstream thinking in those decades. It is surprising to learn that the theme of the continental allegories has remained popular up to the present day. The Canadian painter Kent Monkman has already been mentioned: in recent years he has presented four new pictures based on the famous continental pictures of Tiepolo in Würzburg. He takes over the structure that Tiepolo has given to continental images: A female figure – ‘Miss America’, ‘Miss Africa’, ‘Miss Asia’, ‘Miss Europe’ – represents the continent and sits on an accompanying animal such as a bull for Europe. All around the female figure several scenes have been painted that depict statements about the supposed culture of the continent. Monkman, however, takes a critical historical perspective on these images, reflecting on the history of European expansion since the end of the Middle Ages, colonialism, and its consequences. His art also conveys a cultural content but it foregrounds violence, robbery and destruction. While all this was carried from Europe to Asia, Africa and America, no one has brought anything comparable to Europe: Europe has done it itself. Monkman’s European image is no less characterized by violence, robbery

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and destruction than the other three images. The contrast with Maître Leherb could not be bigger. Unintentionally, Monkman addresses a dilemma that also affects the sciences. The critique of Eurocentrism using only Eurocentric art reinforces it. This ‘law’ can only be overridden if one tries to see the history of civilizations and continents – if ‘continents’ have a history – in a different way. ‘To see differently’ means to ‘provincialize’ Europe.31

Bibliography Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). ‘Continentallegories.univie.ac.at’ database, at: http://erdteilallegorien.univie. ac.at/#/orte/W (accessed 26 April 2019). Czeike, Felix, Historisches Lexikon Wien in 6 Bänden (Vienna: Kremayr & Scheriau, 1992-1997). ‘Das WU Projekt’, Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, at: https://www.akbild. ac.at/Portal/organisation/aktuelles/vortraege-events/2013/akbild_event.201306-17.7410739335?set_language=de&cl=de (accessed 9 August 2018). Fulco, Daniel, Exuberant Apotheoses: Italian Frescoes in the Holy Roman Empire: Visual Culture and Princely Power in the Age of Enlightenment (Leiden: Brill, 2016). Huber, Sandra, ‘Naturhistorisches Museum’, at: http://erdteilallegorien.univie. ac.at/erdteilallegorien/wien-pb-wien-naturhistorisches-museum (accessed 26 April 2019). Krückmann, Peter (ed.), Der Himmel auf Erden: Tiepolo in Würzburg, 2 vols (München: Prestel, 1996). ‘Kunst im Bau’, special issue of DERDIEDAS bildende 6 (2018). Maitre Leherb website, at: http://www.maitre-leherb.at/surrealisto/ (accessed 16 July 2018). Monkman, Kent, The Four Continents (London: Black Dog Press, 2017). Mowry, Crystal, ‘Kent Monkman: Four Continents – Exhibit at KWAG’, at: https:// uwaterloo.ca/truth-and-reconciliation-response-projects/events/kent-monkmanfour-continents-exhibit-kwag (accessed 9 August 2018). Oschema, Klaus, Bilder von Europa im Mittelalter (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2013). Riefenstahl, Leni, Die Nuba. Menschen wie von einem anderen Stern (München: List, 1973), at: http://www.leni-riefenstahl.de/eng/dienuba/6_4.html (accessed 26 April 2019). 31 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.

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Rodger, George, Le village des Noubas (Paris: Delpire, 1955). Romberg, Marion, Die Welt im Dienst des Glaubens. Erdteilallegorien in Dorfkirchen auf dem Gebiet des Fürstbistums Augsburg im 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2017). Schmale, Wolfgang, ‘Europa – die männliche Form. Ein geschlechtergeschichtlicher Blick auf die Identifizierung Europas im 18. Jahrhundert als Zivilisation’, Mein Europa website, at: http://wolfgangschmale.eu/europa-die-maennliche-form (accessed 9 May 2018). Schmale, Wolfgang, ‘Gemalte Zivilisationsgeschichte, “das Fremde” und die Definition Europas im 18. Jahrhundert. Im Licht der Würzburger Tiepolo-Fresken’, in Mark Häberlein, Stefan Paulus and Gregor Weber (eds), Geschichte(n) des Wissens. Festschrift für Wolfgang E.J. Weber zum 65. Geburtstag. Unter Mitarbeit von Wolfgang Weber (Augsburg: Wißner, 2015), 443-455. Schmale, Wolfgang, Gender and Eurocentrism: A Conceptual Approach to European History, trans. B. Heise (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2016). Schmale, Wolfgang, ‘La représentation de l’humanité. Les allégories peintes al fresco des “quatre parties du monde” au XVIIIe siècle’, in Diciottesimo Secolo. Rivista della Società Italiana di Studi sul Secolo XVIII 3 (2018), 175-185. Schmale, Wolfgang, ‘Maitre Leherb: Kontinentbilder in der ehemaligen Wirtschaftsuniversität in Wien’, Mein Europa website, at: https://wolfgangschmale.eu/ maitre-leherb/ (accessed 6 May 2019). Schmale, Wolfgang, ‘Nakedness and Masculine Identity: Negotiations in the Public Space’, in Tobias G. Natter and Elisabeth Leopold (eds), Nude Men from 1800 to the Present Day: Exhibition Catalogue, Vienna Leopold Museum (München: Hirmer, 2012), 27-35. White, Hayden, ‘The Discourse of Europe and the Search for a European Identity’, in Bo Stråth (ed.), Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2000), 67-86. Wintle, Michael, The Image of Europe: Visualizing Europe in Cartography and Iconography through the Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

About the Author Wolfgang Schmale, Full Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, Vienna University [email protected]

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Women Walking, Women Dancing Motion, Gender and Eurocentrism Joep Leerssen Abstract In early-twentieth-century Europe, the representational trope of ‘walking women’ takes on a specific connotation of gracefully focused, directional energy, predicated on women in the aftermath of first-wave feminism. The trope is widely diffused and for that reason often ambient rather than salient, and liable to escape notice. This chapter focuses on the trope in the context of neo-classicist aestheticism, c. 1900, as exemplified by Wilhelm Jensen’s (1837-1911) novella Gradiva (1903) and German art historian and cultural theorist Aby Warburg’s (1866-1929) figuration of the nymph as Renaissance dynamism. As such it also becomes a marker of Eurocentrism. As a classicist-European auto-image, the trope becomes more salient when contrasted with its contemporaneous exoticist counterpart: the Orientalist mirage of the ‘dancing woman’, specifically the temple dancer or bayadère. Keywords: Eurocentrism, Europe, gender, Orientalism, Gradiva, bayadère [T]he girls whom I had noticed, with that mastery over their limbs which comes from perfect bodily condition and a sincere contempt for the rest of humanity, were advancing straight ahead, without hesitation or stiffness, performing exactly the movements that they wished to perform, each of their members in full independence of all the rest, the greater part of their bodies preserving that immobility which is so noticeable in a good waltzer. – Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove1

1 Proust, Within a Budding Grove, 122-123.

Brolsma, Marjet, Robin de Bruin, and Matthijs Lok (eds): Eurocentrism in European History and Memory. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463725521_ch07

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One of the classic texts of psychoanalytical literary criticism is Sigmund Freud’s ‘Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensens Gradiva’ (1907). It addresses, as one might guess, a novella entitled Gradiva (with the subtitle Ein pompejanisches Phantasiestück), which was published in 1903 by a German author called Wilhelm Jensen (1837-1911). Both the novella and its author have escaped oblivion largely thanks to Freud’s sustained critical tour de force. It is nothing less than a psychoanalysis of the novella’s fictional protagonist, the archaeologist Norbert Hanold. He is a withdrawn scholar, who keeps a plaster cast of an antique relief showing a walking woman (he nicknames her with the Latin epithet gradiva: she who strides forth) in his study. Something in her gait has a curious appeal for him: [T]he young woman […] possessed […] a realistic, simple, maidenly grace. […] This was effected chiefly by the movement represented in the picture. With her head bent forward a little, she held slightly raised in her left hand, so that her sandaled feet became visible, her garment which fell in exceedingly voluminous folds from her throat to her ankles. The left foot had advanced, and the right, about to follow, touched the ground only lightly with the tips of the toes, while the sole and heel were raised almost vertically. This movement produced a double impression of exceptional agility and of confident composure, and the flight-like poise, combined with a firm step, lent her the peculiar grace.2

In a slightly troubled state of mind, Hanold decides, impulsively, to revisit Pompeii. There he has visions of a nymph-like figure flitting across his field of vision, with the elegant gait he recognizes from the relief. He begins to wonder if he is witnessing ghostly apparitions from the classical past and is thrown into confusion and anxiety. The story has a rational dénouement, and a happy ending, when the spectral figure turns out to be a real woman; indeed, a former, forgotten childhood friend, Zoë Bertgang. It was her gait which Hanold was reminded of, without actually recognizing it as such, in the posture of the Gradiva relief. Freud’s analysis centres on Hanold’s various states of emotional confusion and quasi-visionary reveries that punctuate the narrative, and on Zoë’s sensitive way of coaxing Hanold back to emotional equilibrium. Ever since his essay, the Gradiva figure has become a cultural icon, signifying the point where the beloved hovers between a fantasy construct in the male mind (mythical object of desire, nostalgia for fetishized memories, or even 2

Freud and Jensen, Delusion and Dream, 14.

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Figure 2 Left: The Gradiva relief, plaster cast; original in the Chiaramonti Museum, Vatican. Right: Dancing Maenad; original in Palazzo Massimo Museum, Rome

Source: Wikimedia Commons

feet) and a real flesh-and-blood person. As such Gradiva has figured as an allusion or a figure in the work of surrealists like André Breton and others.3 More generally, Jensen’s fascination with Gradiva intersects with an aesthetic and iconographical interest in nymphs (both classical and in Renaissance painting) that suffused European art criticism towards the close of the nineteenth century, from Ruskin to Aby Warburg. For the German art historian and cultural theorist Warburg (1866-1929), in particular, the nympha in her loose, thin, flowing garments signifies the wind-blown dynamism and movement in flight, which set the Renaissance apart from the static, constricted art of the previous centuries (and which also, we may 3

Chadwick, ‘Masson’s Gradiva’.

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surmise, provided critics with a welcome contrast to the tight-laced ladies in the corsets and crinolines of the nineteenth century). A typical passage: The [sixteenth-century] ninfa was among the attractive offspring of a multiple conjunction of art and archaeology, such as only the Quattrocento could produce. As a boldly striding maiden, with flowing hair, skirts kilted up all’ antica and fluttering in the breeze, she appeared. […] It may be added that an artistic reflection of the nymph type can be found in the striding maiden, carrying a basket or pot on her head, who appears so often as a generalized ornamental motif. 4

It was an unconscious tribute to Warburg’s view that the Rolls-Royce factory channelled the Hellenistic Nike of Samothrace, the Winged Victory, in its ‘Spirit of Ecstasy’ figurine, as a classical icon of modern swiftness on the radiator of their automobiles.5 Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Birth of St John the Baptist gives a good sense of what Warburg was getting at: the juxtaposition of static, medieval garb and dynamically flowing classical veils. The striding nymph in the fin de siècle imagination may, then, stand for purpose, direction, and (to invoke another inflection of the Latin vocabulary for ‘marching on’) progress. These connotations were also connected with the Gradiva relief, which was launched into the European imaginaire by the art historian Friedrich Hauser around 1900. The figure as such is neo-Attic, a periodization coined by Hauser in his Die neu-attischen Reliefs (1889). In 1903 Hauser worked on a neo-Attic relief in the Vatican’s Chiaramonti Museum, in which the Gradiva figure walks ahead of two other nymph figures, damaged. He identified the procession of maidens as Horae figures: nymphs signifying or regulating the ordered passage of time. Jensen saw a plaster cast of this – what would come to be called the Gradiva relief – in a Munich museum in 1903.6 4 Warburg, ‘Kulturgeschichtliche Beiträge zum Quattrocento in Florenz’ (1929), quoted (in English) in Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 301-442 (p. 381); see also the comments by Kurt W. Forster in his introduction, ibid., 19-21. Besides the quoted passage, the locus classicus is Warburg’s evocation of nymphs’ movement and flight in his thesis on Botticelli’s ‘Birth of Venus’ and ‘Spring’ (1893). 5 This, ironically, controverted Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of 1909, which notoriously had proclaimed that a racing car held more beauty than the Nike of Samothrace (‘Un automobile ruggente, che sembra correre sulla mitraglia, è più bello della Vittoria di Samotracia’). The first designs by Charles Sykes for his ‘Spirit of Ecstasy’ were made in 1911. Cf. Bredekamp, Image Acts, 91-94; Manifesto del futurismo. 6 For more on the nexus of Freud/Hauser/Jensen, and the contemporary intellectual context, see Mayer, ‘Gradiva’s Gait’.

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Figure 3 Domenico Ghirlandaio, Birth of St John the Baptist (1486-1490). Santa Maria Novella, Florence

Source: www.artbible

In recent decades, feminist literary criticism has also dealt with Gradiva  – both the f ictional character in Jensen’s novella and Freud’s psychoanalytic figuration. Critics like Mary Jacobus (‘Is There a Woman in this Text?’) Rachel Bowlby (‘One Foot in the Grave: Freud on Jensen’s Gradiva’) and, specif ically, Elizabeth Wright (Psychoanalytic Criticism) have thrown fresh light from a different angle on this intriguing tangle of imagination and narrative.7 One thing that has become possible as a result is to see the female protagonist (be it as the ancient icon, the childhood memory, or the actual Zoë Bertgang), not in terms of what she means to male emotions, but what she does. And what she does is: she walks. That figuration of the ‘female walker’ has great imagological interest. Walking women, once identified as such, turn out to be a powerful literary/ visual trope, and imagologists can derive both fun and instruction from trying to inventorize the repertoire of texts activating that trope. The repertoire stretches all the way from Jeanie Deans, the purposeful, high-minded 7 Jacobus, ‘Is There a Woman’; again in ibid., Reading Woman, 83-109; Bowlby, ‘One Foot’; Wright, Psychoanalytic Criticism, esp. 31-32.

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Figure 4 Panel no. 6 of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Bilderatlas

Source: Warburg, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, in Martin Warnke (ed.), Gesammelte Schriften, 2 vols (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008), vol. II, 25

heroine of Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian, to the heroines of I Know Where I’m Going! (1945) and Lola Rennt (1998).8 More generally, the charm and allure of that combination of elegance and locomotion, so obvious in Gradiva, infuses French narratives from the evocations of Mme Swann on her promenade in the Bois de Boulogne to the opening scenes of Eric Rohmer’s La collectionneuse (1967).9 8 On Jeanie Deans, see Rigney, ‘Portable Monuments’. The title of the Powell/Pressburger film I Know Where I’m Going! is slightly ironic, in that the heroine is forced to reconsider her goal when shorebound in Scotland, en route to the Hebrides. Important as the irony is for the plotline, it does not affect the figure of the protagonist: feisty, stubborn, heading places. 9 Witness also the linear-progressive choreography of some of the Julie Andrews numbers in The Sound of Music, or of Kate Bush’s video clip ‘The Sensual World’.

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To some extent the allure comes from a more general Romantic interest in the act of walking,10 and of foot journeys, generally (‘I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree’), with the added interest of seeing that theme re-gendered into the feminine. Mobility, we may hazard, is a traditionally masculine trait – think Byron, Stevenson, John Buchan, cowboys riding into the sunset, road movies, Mad Max. Against that background, mobility in female protagonists is counterintuitive and somehow ‘cool’ – think Thelma and Louise (1991) or Catherine Deneuve in Elle s’en va (2013). More specifically, walking as evoked in the wake of the Jensen novella is a purposeful, targeted act, not just a stroll or an amble. Gradiva as a word was coined in the story by its protagonist, Hanold (possibly half-remembering that second syllable in the family name of his childhood friend Zoë) in analogy to Mars Gradivus: the war god Mars setting out to war. Gradivus is a focused ‘setting oneself in motion in order to get somewhere’ (as in the gradus ad Parnassum of academic notoriety). Gradiva means ‘she who is heading somewhere on foot’. When Warburg composed his famous ‘Mnemosyne’ mind-maps – icons illustrating the afterlife of antiquity – in the 1920s he included a figure quite similar to the Gradiva (to the left of the Laocoön group), but who represents, not a purposeful strider, but a wild, ecstatic, even orgiastic dancer: the Dancing Maenad from Rome’s Palazzo Massimo. It raises the question why these two forms of movement can be seen as so antithetical: walking and dancing.

Not Walking but Dancing A few years ago I found myself intrigued by a poster announcing the 2009 production of the ballet La bayadère by Het Nationale Ballet. The poster glossed the title as De tempeldanseres (The temple dancer). I had come across that strange word, bayadère, before: as a side-splitting brilliant term of insult hurled by that past master of invective, Tintin’s Captain Haddock, in the album Coke en stock (The Red Sea Sharks). The setting is the Middle East. Tintin and Captain Haddock are disguised as native women, wearing a niqab and balancing water jars 10 The literature is considerable, and includes Albrecht and Kertscher, Wanderzwang – Wanderlust; Solnit, Wanderlust; Gros, Marcher.

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Figure 5 Publicity photograph for La bayadère (Nationale Opera en Ballet, 2006)

Photographer: Wendelien Daan; dancer: Anna Tsygankova; concept: Martin Pyper

on their heads as they escape from a village past the communal well. A local woman, drawing water, accosts them in Arabic; our two heroes are dumbfounded. The woman becomes suspicious, tears off the captain’s niqab and exposes his bearded face. The captain, taken aback and cholerically reckless as usual, roars: ‘Pourriez pas parler français comme tout le monde, espèce de bayadère de carnaval?!’ – which would roughly translate as ‘Can’t you speak a normal language like everyone else, you fancy-dress belly dancer?!’

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Figure 6 Panel from Hergé, Coke en stock

Source: Scan of author’s copy

There’s Eurocentrism for you.11 Hergé undercuts it, of course, by imputing it to the volatile and slightly dim-witted Captain Haddock. The ironies are multiple and thickly stacked. The niqab is used, not – as contemporary anti-Islamicist attitudes would have it – to cover Muslim women in thrall to their religion, but to cover Westerners, male to boot, in need of disguise. The two exclamations following the démasqué are, respectively, a dog’s bark (‘Wouah!’), and a non sequitur – the very opposite of meaningful speech. The captain’s injunction ‘to speak a normal language (i.e. français) like everyone else’ is exposed for the self-contradictory nonsense it is: ‘tout le monde’ happens to be nowhere in sight, and the captain (who in his beard and niqab travesty cuts a ridiculous figure de carnaval anyway) is hardly a creditable authority on how to facilitate intercultural communication. And after all the démasqué is provoked by his, not her, linguistic incompetence. 11 Hergé, Coke en stock. The original edition of 1958 had a different imprecation: the less felicitous ‘espèce de Fatma de Prisunic’ (‘you dime-store Fatma’). That phrase, as well as other thoughtlessly ethnocentric features in the album, was indignantly denounced by Gabrielle Rolin (‘Tintin le “vertueux”’), leading Hergé to modify the album for the 1967 re-edition. Hergé had indeed started his career in a colonialist and racist mindset, of which the early album Tintin au Congo remains, despite similar changes since its 1930 appearance, an embarrassing reminder. In the course of his life, he moved to a far more enlightened stance, thanks in no small part to his friendship with a Chinese exchange student in Louvain, Zhang Chongren; the China-based album Le lotus bleu (1935) documents the beginning of this move from traditional Orientalism to informed political sympathy for China (then occupied by Japan) and the Chinese. The later albums, notably Les bijoux de la Castafiore (1962), tend to avoid and deconstruct ethnic prejudice. Cf. Sadoul, Tintin et moi.

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And on top of all that, there is the gloriously, extravagantly nonsensical ‘bayadère de carnaval’, which is at the same time misplaced, a non sequitur and an oxymoron. Misplaced, because the Muslim housewife in niqab is as far removed from a Hindu temple dancer as we can get; a non sequitur, because it is he, not the local woman, who is in fancy dress; and an oxymoron, yoking the down-to-earth ‘carnaval’ (meaning travestied and improvised hoopla in a messy, raucous, anything-goes sideshow) with the perfumed, languid, recherché, fin de siècle word bayadère. No wonder it stuck in the mind. Bayadère. The word has a whiff of Oriental sensuality about it, evoking pagan religion and thinly veiled female bodies swaying in the tropical half-light. The ballet (which is no doubt where Haddock and Hergé would have across the term) premiered in Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre in 1877, on a choreography from the great Marius Petipa, creator also of The Nutcracker, Giselle and Swan Lake. The libretto is the usual froth. Set in India, a dancing maiden in the service of a Hindu temple is caught up in a jealous love triangle; murder, opium-induced visions and supernatural incidents ensue. By this time, Russian Orientalism – following its imperial conquest of Islamic territories in the Caucasus and Central Asia – was as strong as that of the European colonial powers, and the Russian operas and ballets were suffused by it. Moreover, Petipa had experienced the repercussions of the ‘Oriental Renaissance’ which had so powerfully influenced the European Romantics following the translation of the Sanskrit classics, notably the Sakuntala tale.12 Théophile Gautier’s Sacountala: Ballet-pantomime en deux actes (1858) had in fact already been choreographed by Petipa. Within this general Orientalism, the storyline and the title of La bayadère are indebted to Goethe’s poem ‘Der Gott und die Bajadere’ (1815), which had been turned into an opera by Auber: Le Dieu et la bayadère (1830). All of which helps to explain how richly layered and inapposite Captain Haddock’s expletive is. The greatest irony is perhaps that bayadère, that word Eurocentrically shouted by a European man disguised, carnival-style, at an Oriental woman, is, ultimately, a European word: it is derived from the Portuguese bailadera, dancing woman. Hergé had it spot-on: Orientalism is a masque disguising Europeans. Exoticism is about us. 12 The Śakuntala is an ‘outtake’ episode of the Mahabharata epic, which had at an early stage (first century BC?) been turned into a stand-alone play. That play in turn had been translated by none other than Sir William Jones, and appeared in various English, German and French editions between 1790 and 1803. Writers and composers such as Salieri, Friedrich Schlegel, Schubert and Théophile Gautier attempted theatrical or operatic adaptations. Figueira, Translating the Orient.

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Women, Men, Subhumans But bayadère is more than just a word: it is a trope. The Oriental woman as performing dancer, links, in a very un-European way, religion with eroticism. That makes, I submit, the Oriental dancing woman the exoticist counterpart to the European walking woman; the pair emerge almost simultaneously as cultural tropes, arise in tandem. They are the opposite ends, the auto-image and the hetero-image, of a discourse that Eurocentrically sees women’s movements as directional in Europe, swirling in the Orient. She is present in many traditions, starting perhaps with the French discovery of Egyptian belly dancers following Napoleon’s Egyptian campaigns. In the encyclopaedic Description de toute l’Égypte, commissioned by the victorious Bonaparte to panoptically survey and encompass all landmarks, all material and cultural aspects of the conquered country, enticing dancing maidens (bare breasted) are part of the inventory. In the great tradition of French Orientalist painting of the mid-nineteenth century, when France also expands into Algeria, lascivious dances in harem-like settings are a predictably popular theme, by the likes of Eugène Giraud and the grand master of the genre, Jean Léon Gérôme. When France expanded its colonial empire into Indochina, the trope followed into that part of the world: Léo Delibes composed an opera Lakmé in 1883, based on Théodore Pavie’s story ‘Les babouches du Brahmane’ and the novel Le mariage de Loti by the popular writer of Orientalist tales, Pierre Loti. Sure enough, the heroines are temple maidens; and sure enough, as with all Parisian operas of the period, the second act has a lot of ballet. By the fin de siècle, the Oriental-religion-cum-sensual-dance trope is also projected back in history. Anatole France’s novel Thaïs (1890; turned into an opera by Jules Massenet, 1894), is about a fourth-century Egyptian courtesan and Venus devotee who converts to Christianity. Suffice it to say that there is a lot of steamy pagan sensuality before the final triumph of Christian virtue in the last scene. Belly dancing, specifically, was projected back into biblical times by the Symbolist obsession with Salomé, daughter of King Herod and everyone’s favourite femme fatale. As the biblical tale has it, she, having been scorned by John the Baptist, engineered his downfall by turning her father’s head with a dance performance and obtaining his promise to have John beheaded. Incestuous desire, female exhibitionism, and that most potent of mixed feelings, love and death: Salomé became an icon for the decadent generation of the turn of the last century. Painted by Gustave Moreau, drawn by Aubrey Beardsley, turned into a play by Oscar Wilde and by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and into an opera by Strauss, Salomé

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brings all of Europe together, and her lascivious ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ is the turning point of Strauss’ opera. That biblical historicism had a backwash into the modern commodification of sex. In the notorious Salomé performance by Maud Allan (banned, then wildly successful on postcard photographs) the opera may have spurred on the twentieth-century rise of the striptease and what in America is called the ‘exotic dancer’. It certainly influenced the Orientalist persona of Greta Zelle, from Leeuwarden, when she made a career for herself in Paris as a scantily dressed ‘exotic dancer’ and courtesan under the name of Mata Hari.13 Alongside, there is the British colonial tradition. ‘Nautch girls’ and Devadasi temple servants were a feature of the British colonial imaginaire and provided entertainment for British colonials at men-only gatherings; but Victorian values never allowed frivolous-erotic art to be produced on the theme in the style of Gérôme or Loti. At best there was the two-part comic opera by George Dance, The Nautch Girl, or, The Rajah of Chutneypore (1891), as well as many disapproving tracts by ladies’ societies.14 There is, however, an interesting ‘return of the repressed’ in a much later, unlikely instance. I refer to David Lean’s screenplay for his film version of A Passage to India (1984). Lean follows the novel fairly closely, with one notable exception: a scene which momentarily reunites the local official Ronny with his troubled fiancée, Adela Quested. In the book, the incident involves a wild pig suddenly crossing the road in front of the car they drive. In the film, Adela sets off alone on a bicycle trip, and ends up in an abandoned temple complex. Here she is bothered by the erotic sculptures and basreliefs – highlighting the Orientalist link between religion and eroticism, things so firmly kept apart in Western morality. Her sexual anxieties turn to fear, even panic, when she is attacked by the residents of the ruined temple: a pack of apes. It would be easy to see these apes as a manifestation of nature’s wild, bestial side of nature, chasing a frightened Adela away into what she hopes will be the comfort of a well-regulated marriage with a dependable and earnest husband; as such they fit the emotional arc that will lead to the film’s ambivalent catastrophe, her sexual panic (or rape?) at the Marabar Caves. But in introducing these apes, Lean also reactivates one of the most popular tropes in the British colonial imagination: Rudyard Kipling’s The 13 Kultermann, ‘The “Dance of the Seven Veils”’; Bentley, Sisters of Salome; Koritz, ‘Dancing the Orient’; Kolb, ‘Mata Hari’s Dance’. 14 Paxton, Writing under the Raj, esp. the chapter ‘The Temple Dancer: Eroticism and Religious Ecstasy’, 84-108; and cf. Roy, Civility and Empire, 196n16.

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Figure 7 Mata Hari performing (1905). Note the Orientalist trappings: headdress, veils, statue of Shiva Natajara

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Jungle Book (1894). The apes in the temple ruins are a straightforward echo of Kipling’s Bandar-log, the tribe of monkeys who are considered unruly wayward yahoos by the other jungle animals, veritable sub-humans. More specifically, the fact that Lean’s apes attack a solitary human as a pack and

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inhabit a ruined temple is a straightforward echo, not just of Kipling’s text, but of the Disney animated film version. Disney’s The Jungle Book had come out in 1967, the same year as the revised version of Coke en stock, when the civil rights movement was at its height. As ethnocentric as anything in Hergé, Disney’s King Louie and his band of apes are swinging hepcats (quite literally ‘swinging’, from tree to tree) playing a type of jungle music with jazz rhythms, figures of cheerful unruliness until they gang up on the solitary human. The apes’ musical style and swinging behaviour aligns them, in the Disney version, with African Americans. Sentient enough to be aware of their inferiority to the ‘man-cub’, they want to be like him (specifically, by learning from him the knowledge of managing fire – the thing that puts humans above animals in the traditional hierarchy of nature). King Louie sings and scats in a Louis Armstrong-esque delivery: Now I’m the king of the swingers, ooh / The jungle VIP I’ve reached the top and had to stop / And that what’s botherin’ me. I wanna be a man, man-cub / And stroll right into town And be just like the other men / I’m tired of monkeyin’ ‘round!

It amounts to a bestialization of the similar ambitions, voiced by African Americans in these very decades, to become ‘men’, resisting the appellation of ‘boy’.15 Lean’s introduction of a gang of anarchic apes in erotically ornamented temple ruins is, then, a type of cinematographic atavism – a backslide into a more primitive, Kiplingesque register. The subtle social satire of Foster’s novel is aligned with crude Eurocentric commonplaces, where the East is a place of the Freudian Id, and Europe provides the super-ego. A similar backsliding into crude stereotype can be observed in the work of the German director Fritz Lang; it involves, precisely, a temple dancer. I refer to his remarkable two-part fantasy Das indische Grabmal/Der Tiger von Eschnapur, based on a potboiler romance by Thea von Harbou (1918).16 15 This tradition reaches from Bo Diddley’s ‘I’m a Man’ (1955) to Sidney Poitier’s irate rejoinder ‘They call me MISTER Tibbs!’ (in response to the challenge by the Southern redneck sheriff, Virgil: ‘That’s a funny name for a nigger boy that comes from Philadelphia.… What do they call you up there?’). Poitier’s statement was made in In the Heat of the Night, a film that came out in 1967, during the racial tensions of the civil rights movement, and in the same year as Coke en stock and The Jungle Book. 16 She was Lang’s collaborator and, briefly, his wife; author of the novel Metropolis, she had helped Lang write the script for his Nibelungen films and M.

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Figure 8 Debra Paget in Das indische Grabmal (1959)

Source: screenshot from author’s DVD copy

Lang made the Eschnapur films twice, the one of 1959 (after his return to Germany) being a remake of Joe May’s 1921 version for which he had worked on the script. During Lang’s exile in the US, yet another version had been made in Germany, by Richard Eichberg; the 1959 version can be seen as an act of reappropriation by Lang, and also as a symptom of obsessive interest. In that last remake, a remarkably lubricious key scene was given to Debra Paget who, as the scantily clad temple dancer Sitha, must submit to trial by ordeal: by means of her dancing charm, and dressed in only the barest smidges of clothing she must subdue a giant, swollen, erect, swaying cobra. Paget had made her name for such set-pieces in an earlier film, Princess of the Nile (1954), a standard kasbah romance where she plays a medieval Egyptian princess who at night, incognito, entertains the regulars of the aptly named ‘Tambourine Tavern’; but the Eschnapur dance is no doubt the high point of voyeurism in a long tradition of cinematic Orientalism.17 What is more, the degree to which the temple dance is eroticized in Das indische Grabmal matches the degree of Eurocentrism in the film’s narrative. The film’s hero is a German engineer on a technical mission to India (from the outset opposing German technological know-how with the Orient), where he is beguiled by the elegance and opulence before being repelled by palace intrigue and the horrors of native custom and backwardness (leprosy). He, his superior, Dr Walter Rhode, and Rhode’s wife, Irene, repeatedly in the course of the film refer to themselves as Europäer (rather than ‘Germans’ 17 Online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL6W5ZuMB80; screenshot taken from that clip. Paget’s dance in Princess of the Nile is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiLYTVqU4NM (Both accessed 26 April 2019).

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or ‘Westerners’).18 That is remarkable because by that time Orientalism had become a global, rather than European thing: from the Hollywood film version of the Kipling-based Gunga Din (1939) and to Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Lang’s Tiger/Grabmal marks a stubbornly European element, and the temple dancer Sitha is a central part of that, as much as Petipa’s bayadère invoked by Captain Haddock.

Motion, Purpose, Ideology I trust the reader has got the point by now. Part of the Eurocentric imagination of the Orient involves the fascinated phantasm of a world where (in sharp contrast to Western mores) religion and sensuality overlap and interpenetrate. Located on that interstice is often the figure of a desirable young woman, who is both ‘cheap’ (displaying herself to onlookers) and sacred (a princess or priestess, or both). All such a person can do in such a liminal in-between space created by Western fantasy is dance: something that is both display and discipline, rhythm and ritual. As the imagologist knows, no hetero-image, image of the other, can exist except as the articulated counterpart of an implied auto-image, or self-image. Having surveyed many disparate elements of a cultural imaginaire in the preceding pages, I want to suggest a meaningful polarity in their register. The polarity is by no means black-and-white (there are maenads as well as walkers in the European auto-image19) but even so significantly distributed. The walking woman and the dancing woman, as evoked in male-gaze representations from the late nineteenth century onwards, are distributed on a European-Oriental axis. The dancing woman is Europe’s other, the walking woman classically European. The former’s movement is sensual, gyrating, directionless, the latter’s is purposeful, directed, linear. We could have guessed as much from the name of E.M. Forster’s character who came to grief in the Marabar Caves: Adela Quested. From the beginning of A Passage to India Adela is, indeed, on a quest: to see her fiancé, Ronny, who is in the colonial service; and, once there, to see ‘the real India’. Both 18 The same appellation is used, despite considerable plot differences, in the 1938 version. 19 It may not even be a binary opposition. In post-1930 American popular culture, specifically dance culture, the female dance is anything but cultic or fey, but, on the contrary, energetic and assertive – from Ginger Rogers to Dirty Dancing, Madonna and Beyoncé. This further comparative dimension can only be suggested in passing.

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quests lead, ironically, to muddles and disappointment (this is where Forster lifts his tale beyond the schemata of Eurocentrism). Ronny is a prig and the ‘real’ India is a locus of projections and misunderstandings, a void; most terribly so in the dark Marabar Caves, where all Adela encounters is her own sexual anxiety, magnified into a echoing, roaring, chaotic misunderstanding. But as a character, her Englishness is linked to her sense of purpose, her sense of direction. She is on the move, heading places – even if those places turn out to be a disenchantment. Quests and a sense of purposeful directionality are, of course, what narratologically distinguishes the protagonist of a tale. From Odysseus to Frodo Baggins, the movements of the character in space correspond to the purpose of his actions in the storyline. Protagonists have, if not a quest, then at least a sense of purpose. Conversely, the side characters have mere ‘walk-on’ parts that do not really go anywhere. And so the immobility and stasis of the Orient is linked to the fact that the Orient is a mere setting for Western protagonists in Eurocentric narratives. Dr Aziz, in A Passage to India, is such a character that ‘does not go anywhere’ (and this is where Forster’s tale fails to transcend the schemata of Eurocentrism). How women move is, in this scheme, a gendered inflection of Eurocentrism. The dancing of the Oriental maidens is the sort of motion that is directionless, does not head from A to B, movement turned in upon itself. This type stands in contrast to the Western, Eurocentric heroine with a sense of purpose and directionality. The contrast also involves a sense that walking is identity-affirming, while dancing is identity-dissolving; for, as W.B. Yeats asked, ‘How can we tell the dancer from the dance?’

Bibliography Albrecht, Wolfgang, and Hans-Joachim Kertscher (eds), Wanderzwang – Wanderlust: Formen der Raum- und Sozialerfahrung zwischen Aufklärung und Frühindustrialisierung (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999). Bentley, Toni, Sisters of Salome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). Bowlby, Rachel, ‘One Foot in the Grave: Freud on Jensen’s Gradiva’, in idem, Still Crazy after All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1984), 157-182. Bredekamp, Horst, Image Acts: A Systematic Approach to Visual Agency (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018). Chadwick, Whitney, ‘Masson’s Gradiva: The Metamorphosis of a Surrealist Myth’, Art Bulletin 52:4 (1970), 415-422.

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Figueira, Dorothy Matilda, Translating the Orient: The Reception of Sakuntala in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991). Freud, Sigmund, and Wilhelm Jensen, Delusion and Dream: An Interpretation in the Light of Psychoanalysis of Gradiva, trans. Helen M. Downey (New York: Moffat, Yard and Co., 1922). Gros, Frédéric, Marcher: Une philosophie (Paris, Nord, 2008). Hergé, Coke en stock (Tournai: Casterman, 1967 [1958]). Hergé, Le lotus bleu (Tournai: Casterman, 1946 [1935]). Hergé, Les bijoux de la Castafiore (Tournai: Casterman, 1963 [1962]). Hergé, Tintin au Congo (Tournai: Casterman, 1946 [1930]). Jacobus, Mary, ‘Is There a Woman in This Text?’, New Literary History 14:1 (1982), 117-141. Jacobus, Mary, Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Kolb, Alexandra, ‘Mata Hari’s Dance in the Context of Femininity and Exoticism’, Mandrágora 15 (2009), 58-79. Koritz, Amy, ‘Dancing the Orient for England: Maud Allan’s “The Vision of Salome”’, Theatre Journal 46:1 (1994), 63-78. Kultermann, Udo, ‘The “Dance of the Seven Veils”: Salome and Erotic Culture around 1900’, Artibus et Historiae 27:53 (2006), 187-215. Manifesto del futurismo (1909), Wikisource, at: https://it.wikisource.org/ wiki/I_Manifesti_del_futurismo/Fondazione_e_Manifesto_del_futurismo (accessed 6 May 2019). Mayer, Andreas, ‘Gradiva’s Gait: Tracing the Figure of a Walking Woman’, Critical Inquiry 38 (2012), 554-578. Paxton, Nancy, Writing under the Raj: Gender, Race and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999). Proust, Marcel, À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (Paris: Gallimard, 1919). Proust, Marcel, Within a Budding Grove, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957). Rigney, Ann, ‘Portable Monuments: Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans’, Poetics Today 25:2 (2004), 361-396. Rolin, Gabrielle, ‘Tintin le vertueux – l’oreille réactionnaire’, Jeune Afrique, January 1962. Roy, Anindyo, Civility and Empire: Literature and Culture in British India, 1821-1921 (London: Routledge, 2005). Sadoul, Numa, Tintin et moi: Entretiens avec Hergé (Tournai: Casterman, 1975). Schmale, Wolfgang, Gender and Eurocentrism: A Conceptual Approach to European History, trans. B. Heise (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2016). Solnit, Rebecca, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (London: Penguin, 2001).

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Urban, Bernd (ed.), Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensens ‘Gradiva’: Mit dem Text der Erzählung von Wilhelm Jensen und Sigmund Freuds Randbemerkungen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1995). Warburg, Aby, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999). Wright, Elizabeth, Psychoanalytic Criticism (London: Methuen, 1984).

About the Author Joep Leerssen, Professor of Modern European Literature, University of Amsterdam [email protected]

8

Shakespeare, England, Europe and Eurocentrism Ton Hoenselaars

Abstract This chapter seeks to define Shakespeare in ‘European’ terms. First, he is presented as an English and a British author, as perceived within the culture of his native island environment. Shakespeare is also brought into focus as a bilateral and a multilateral author, emphatically between the various nations that make up Europe. At the same time, Shakespeare is outlined as a writer who also tends to provide a joint, transnational frame of culture within such a European context. Finally, Shakespeare has been and is perceived as ‘European’ for his merits and demerits by non-European outsiders. This perspective from the outside brings into play issues involving the potential Eurocentrism of the man, his work, and the Shakespeare industry at large. Keywords: William Shakespeare, commemoration, appropriation, nationalism, World War I, World War II, postcolonialism, Brexit

Introduction – Shakespeare and European Authors During the past 400 years, and chiefly since the beginning of Romanticism in the late eighteenth century, most if not all countries of Europe have, in their attempt to fashion distinct cultural, ethnic and linguistic selfidentities, focused on native writers to represent the nation. Through a self-perpetuating process of celebration and commemoration, these writers have risen to pre-eminence as major representatives of their nation both by birth and by their perceived cultural and linguistic achievement. Thus, in the course of the centuries, England has come to embrace Shakespeare as its national poet, Portugal Camões, Spain Cervantes, Italy Dante, Germany both

Brolsma, Marjet, Robin de Bruin, and Matthijs Lok (eds): Eurocentrism in European History and Memory. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463725521_ch08

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Goethe and Schiller. France, particularly during the politically turbulent nineteenth century, pondered the merits of Corneille and Racine, as well as Molière. This handful of more or less canonical authors only represents the tip of the iceberg. The fame of these few – which may even be said to extend across the globe – tends to eclipse that of countless other poets in Europe whose names may well sound unfamiliar to non-natives to their particular region: Alberto Salvadó (Andorra), Hristo Botev and Ivan Vazov (Bulgaria), William Heinesen (Faroe Islands), George Métivier (Guernsey), and so on. The cultural history of Europe may record that all of its member states have a tradition of celebrating and commemorating their literary hero figures, but among these figures Shakespeare holds pride of place. The cult of commemoration around the man and his work in England dates from the early seventeenth century, which is considerably earlier than the practice with writers in other European countries. This early tradition around Shakespeare in England explains how the ‘foreign’ playwright and poet has also been considered a prototype or model for other nations, and that the modes of collaborative commemoration to which he had given rise, too, would be imitated. As Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney argue, the cultures of commemoration around other writers across Europe really began with and fanned out from Shakespeare.1 This process was largely unpredictable and could traverse many routes, but the original dynamic appears to have come from Stratford’s greatest son. It explains why Friedrich von Schiller has been dubbed ‘the German-language Shakespeare’, and why the early modern playwright Theodore Rodenburgh was known as ‘the Dutch Shakespeare’. Shakespeare here manifests himself as ‘a benchmark for canonicity itself’,2 the standard by which later writers have been measured. This model function explains why so many nations have also uniquely come to honour Shakespeare alongside that of their own countries’ literary hero f igures. The reputations of Cervantes and Shakespeare have long been closely connected. Since the early nineteenth century, Shakespeare has also been commemorated as the third German classic after Goethe and Schiller. And most countries of Europe also have their own special institutions to honour and study Shakespeare, in the form of independent associations, reading clubs, or, less visibly, as part of the local or regional Renaissance societies. Across Europe, references to Shakespeare’s work (serious, learned, but also opportunistic, incomplete, irreverent, or spurious) keep alive and circulate 1 2

Leerssen and Rigney, ‘Introduction’. Ibid., 2.

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the memory of the ‘original’ plays and poems. Indeed, one could safely argue that Shakespeare has changed the face of Europe. It is thanks to Shakespeare, that Verona remembers Romeo and Juliet, as well as their famous tragedy, which really took place in southern Italy. The Casa Giulietta has its charm, despite the un-Shakespearean balcony that was installed during the first half of the twentieth century to boost the tourist industry. At Helsingør the aficionado may pay his respects at Hamlet’s grave, but he may also visit a park that prides itself on the pool where Ophelia was drowned, and relax with a bowl of Ophelia fish soup for lunch. In many countries, Shakespeare has perhaps not become an integral part of the popular tourist industry, but commemorative statues, busts, plaques, images, street names and gardens may be found across the European continent. He graces the façade of the Semperoper in Dresden, and overlooks the entrance to the walk of fame at the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum. Shakespeare’s plays are performed more frequently in Europe than those of any native playwright, albeit in translation. Across the continent, replicas of Shakespearean theatres have been constructed to recreate even more accurately the original experience. The idea of constructing a replica of the Globe on London’s South Bank may lie well within the reach of anyone’s imagination, but something more collective seems to be at stake when we find copies of this same theatre also at Neuss am Rhein, in the ‘England’ section of Europa-Park at Rust in Baden, in the park of Villa Borghese in Rome, and in the Dutch town of Diever, where the local amateurs have been performing Shakespeare annually since 1946. The recent inauguration of the replica of a Blackfriars theatre in London and of the Fortune theatre in Gdansk demonstrates the popularity of such authentic practices, the marketability of the need to remember and return to ‘Shakespeare’. Shakespeare’s work is taught in nearly every school and university in Europe.

European Shakespeare The work of Shakespeare predominantly, though not exclusively, absorbs, reflects and engages with the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome, including the perception of Europe itself, while further engaging chiefly with British and continental European history and literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Shakespeare may briefly allude to China (Twelfth Night, The Merry Wives of Windsor), Asia Minor (Henry V), India (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Africa (Antony and Cleopatra, Othello), and the New World (The Tempest), but Europe is always the omphalos of a geographical world whose

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imaginary stretches from the Bay of Lisbon (As You Like It) and Muscovia (Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Winter’s Tale), to Iceland’s pedigree dogs (Henry V) as well as Ovid’s Castalian spring at the foot of Mt Olympus on the title page of Venus and Adonis. Shakespeare’s intrinsic geographical identity is an unmistakable manifestation of the ‘European’ Renaissance. It is part of that continent’s renewed preoccupation with its classical Greek and Roman heritage, following the rediscovery of fascinating artefacts and texts – once unimagined or deemed lost – that had been introduced to the West following the conquest of Constantinople (now Istanbul) by the Turks in 1453 as well as a unique movement of the Oriental peoples, their cultures and their cultural artefacts westward. Shakespeare’s work also partakes of the passionate early modern charting of a world that had expanded beyond the known limits tacitly accepted by many as strictly defined until 1492. It further testifies to a contemporary preoccupation with nations, their history, and their national character with an intensity that was at the time accelerated by newly developing trade relations but also by the complex religious divisions of the Reformation that marked the Continent from the beginning of the sixteenth century onwards. With Kenneth Minogue it is sensible to argue that the early modern brand of national self-awareness that is generally associated with the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and which speaks from the work of Shakespeare, should be recognized as a form of patriotism, distinct from the cultural nationalism that begins to spread across Europe from the eighteenth century onwards.3 Yet, a degree of continuity did exist between these two perceptions of nationhood, and, as Leerssen and Rigney as well as Assmann argue, the work of Shakespeare is likely to have played a significant role in establishing this. 4 With special reference to Shakespeare’s Henry V – and the king’s address before the battle of Agincourt, telling his men to imagine future ages in which they will be commemorated annually, much like the patron saints of the Medieval church calendar – they reason that this ‘self-reflexive historicism’ which is at the core of Shakespeare’s plays was conducive also to the memory cult of those plays and their writer. This unique, commemorative dynamic fuelled the British Shakespeare cult. However, curiously, this specific national slant of history plays like Henry V did not prevent them from becoming a collective frame of reference beyond the shores of Britain. Richard and Cosima Wagner had strong views 3 Minogue, Nationalism. 4 Leerssen and Rigney, ‘Introduction’; Assmann, ‘Der Kampf’.

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about the play, and when, on 8 August 1870, Friedrich Nietzsche informed the couple that he had resolved to join the Prussian army in the war against France, Cosima recorded in her diary that to cope with the situation she and her husband read Shakespeare: ‘Our one consolation […] we found in scenes from Henry V.’5 During World War I the rector of the University of Nancy cited from Henry V’s pre-Agincourt speech to support the Anglo-French alliance against Germany, whereas on the occasion of the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death in 1916, British troops stationed in Calais performed Henry V with the part of the French queen actually played by an actress from the French town.

Shakespeare: ‘European’ Site of Memory If English Shakespeare apparently enjoys a reputation of long standing, not just in Britain but also alongside the native hero writers in so many European countries, on which grounds may we call him a ‘European’ site of memory? What are its main defining traits? May we call Shakespeare’s canonicity ‘European’ because the author was born in England, a nation that is part of Europe? Alternatively, may we call him ‘European’ because his fame is not limited to England or Britain, but extends well beyond the Channel, to the furthest reaches of the geographical area that we call Europe? Moreover, if we realize that Shakespeare is not only a European site of memory, but also a world author and a global icon, we might wonder where these conceptions interlock or overlap. In order to properly appreciate the playwright and poet as a site of memory in his European contexts, we need a reasoned approach to both constituents of the ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Europe’ nexus. This chapter argues that ‘Shakespeare’ is best brought into focus as a ‘European’ site of memory by considering the multiple intrinsically geographical perspectives that admirers bring to the Bard and his work. We should approach him (1) as an English or a British author with a canonical position and a commemorative tradition within the culture of his native island environment. But we should also recognize him (2) as a bilateral or multilateral author emphatically between the nations of Europe, whether it concerns relations between Britain and individual member states of Europe, or more complex forms of international exchange. At the same time, Shakespeare should be recognized (3) as a writer providing a transnational frame of culture and a set of values within such a European context. And 5

Gregor-Dellin and Mack, Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, vol. I, 254.

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finally, we cannot ignore the phenomenon of (4) our iconic author perceived as ‘European’ for his merits and demerits by non-European outsiders. These four distinct ways of meaning by ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Europe’ together bring into focus the unique phenomenon in the field of literature and culture at large that we safely term ‘Shakespeare as a European site of memory’.6

Unilateral Shakespeare The story of Shakespeare’s ‘promotion from the status of archaic, rustic playwright to that of England’s timeless Bard’ has been told many times, perhaps never more convincingly than by Michael Dobson in The Making of the National Poet (1992). The account of Shakespeare’s rise to posthumous fame and his canonization around the middle of the eighteenth century is a rich tale of commemoration not simply by means of statues, monuments, and other effigies. We also witness the production of editions that conveniently standardize the text, as well as adaptations and rewritings of the plays and poems in ever more rapid succession. Performances of the plays, commemorative by their very nature, prepare the way for the practice – turned into a benchmark custom by David Garrick in the Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769 – of celebrating the author in festival form, with the dates of the events corresponding to the author’s biography, and increasingly also in terms of time and place interwoven in the history of the nation, its rulers, and its patron saint. At the same time the Shakespearean corpus was ‘nationalized’ during middle of the eighteenth century, the Romantic notion emerged of Shakespeare as the Bard, as the poet ‘directly inspired by Nature to voice the universal truths of humanity’.7 The perceived ‘universal’ relevance of Shakespeare granted his work and vision the centrifugal force that helps to explain the subsequent spread of Shakespeare across the continent of Europe. In the 1840s, Thomas Carlyle did not overstate the case when he noted that ‘perhaps the opinion one sometimes hears a little idolatrously expressed is, in fact, the right one; I think the best judgement not of this country [= Britain] only, but of Europe at large, is slowly pointing to the conclusion, That Shakespeare is the chief of all Poets hitherto; the greatest 6 This chapter does not venture beyond these four geographical perspectives, into the global perspective, since the global denotes not a geographical space, but primarily a mode of commerce-driven culture that tends to annihilate the very geographical distinctions that enable us to appreciate the cultural history of the first 400 years of Shakespeare’s emergence as a European site of memory. 7 Dobson, The Making, 219.

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intellect who, in our recorded world, has left record of himself in the way of Literature’.8 With these words – that were to become famous across Europe as part of his immensely popular and influential lecture series on ‘heroes and hero-worship’ – Carlyle was echoing the original, visionary association of Shakespeare and Europe by his great friend and rival Ben Jonson, expressed in a dedicatory poem to the First Folio of 1623. In his poem ‘To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author Master William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us’, Jonson had first of all alleged that Shakespeare ‘was not of an age, but for all time!’ Interestingly, though, he did not only measure Shakespeare’s fame in temporal terms, but also imagined a spatial, geographical dimension, as he envisioned the rural Stratford writer not merely as Britain’s greatest poet, but also the representative writer of the European continent: ‘Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show, / To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.’9 Shakespeare’s afterlife, as imagined and celebrated in Britain, was a multilayered affair from the beginning, a combination of national selfidentity and pride blended with intimations of the native son’s European fame. Predictably, perhaps, this dual perception was repeatedly to give rise to fights for ownership. This commemorative schizophrenia is foreshadowed in Charles Kelsall’s First Sitting of the Committee on the Proposed Monument to Shakespeare (1823). In this dialogue, Kelsall presents a vast number of international authors (Aristotle, Longinus, Aeschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plautus and Terence, Lope de Vega, Molière, Voltaire, Diderot and D’Alembert, Vittorio Alfieri) as well as members of the clergy and the acting profession, students, landowners, farmers, architects and builders, shopkeepers, schoolmasters, merchants and tourists from all over Britain and the rest of the world, who meet to decide on a way to honour the memory of Shakespeare (statue, monument, birthplace, museum, etc.), and where this should be done (London, Stratford, Scotland, Greece, or anywhere else). After a lengthy discussion – providing some astonishing insights into the early-nineteenth-century practice of commemoration in a European context, as well as prefiguring some of the less attractive stereotypes about the European Parliament, the members present at the meeting symbolically fail to reach a consensus, as individual or national interests continue to override a shared sense of how to commemorate the Bard. The meeting is suspended indefinitely.10 8 Carlyle, On Heroes, 118. 9 Wells and Taylor, The Oxford Shakespeare, lxxi, lines 41-42. 10 For a detailed discussion, see Hoenselaars, ‘Sculpted Shakespeare’, 285-289.

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Bilateral and Multilateral Shakespeare Charles Kelsall’s First Sitting of the Committee on the Proposed Monument to Shakespeare nicely foreshadows the bilateral and multilateral relations that involved the British writer and the rest of Europe. From the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, for example, Germany developed a complex nationalist cult around the man from Stratford, leading eventually to the conviction that Shakespeare ought to be recognized as a German author, ‘unser Shakespeare’.11 This tradition included Goethe’s famous commemorative essay, ‘Zum Schäkespears Tag’ (1771), as well as his plan with Friedrich Schiller to embrace the Histories as a model for a newly to be developed German stage genre that should eventually write the nation. This initiative also explains why during the foundational meeting in 1864 (the year that symbolically marked the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth) the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft actually considered that taking the Histories under its special protection ought to be its most important mission.12 Even Adolf Hitler discussed Shakespeare and the genre of the German history play from this perspective in his table talk: ‘The misfortune is that none of our great writers took his subjects from German imperial history. Our Schiller found nothing better to do than to glorify a Swiss cross-bowman! The English, for their part, had a Shakespeare – but the history of his country has supplied Shakespeare, as far as heroes are concerned, only with imbeciles and madmen.’13 Nineteenth-century nationalism also helped to develop the German practice of national identification specifically with the character of Hamlet, when, in 1844, the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath famously alleged that a politically impotent Germany bore a strong resemblance to the doubting and procrastinating Danish prince. There is a straight line from his observation to the strategy of Emperor Wilhelm II, who, on his entry into World War I, had his propaganda machine issue postcards carrying the motto: ‘Um sein oder nicht sein handelt es sich’ – ‘To be or not to be, that’s what it’s all about.’14 Intriguing about the imperial quotation practice in a European context is that Germany’s enemy, France, too, began to cite Shakespeare’s Hamlet by way of a self-defence, thus turning a bilateral phenomenon between England and Germany into multilateral one. As early as 11 August 1914 – barely over 11 Günther, Unser Shakespeare, 17-50. 12 Hoenselaars, ‘Introduction’, 22. 13 Trevor-Roper, Hitler’s Table Talk, 201. 14 Andreas Höfele has recently argued (in No Hamlets), that this particular ghost of Hamlet was laid to rest in 1989.

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a week into the war – the right-wing newspaper La croix devoted a short article to the German appropriation of ‘Être ou ne pas être.’ Apparently, the paper commented, the German emperor, ‘taking up arms against a world of enemies’, had found it necessary to quote from Hamlet. But should he not, instead, have quoted something like: ‘There’s something rotten in Germany; it is the German himself who has committed horror and barbarism’? This early French response to the emperor’s personal brand of Hamletism in 1914 was not the last. When the German army suffered any significant losses, the French media were sure to make the emperor eat even his Shakespearean words. Now, Wilhelm II was depicted as Hamlet, addressing a skull in a typical Prussian spike helmet, with the words: ‘Être ou ne plus être’ (‘To be or no longer to be?’). The illustration originally appeared on the front page of the Echo de Paris on 20 August 1915, and it was soon given wider and more lasting circulation by the popular reader’s digest journal Messidor.15 The war between France and Germany also directly affected the collective remembrance of Shakespeare at the tercentenary of his death in 1916. On 30 April 1916, Paris commemorated the tercentenary with a ceremony in front of the poet’s statue at 134 boulevard Haussmann. The president of the Société du Souvenir littéraire Camille Le Senne, addressing a considerable crowd, stated that in Shakespeare the ceremony wished to recognize Shakespeare as a trait d’union between England and France, who would continue to stand united as allies: ‘civilization, when threatened by barbarians, can never have too many energetic models’. Since it was wartime, however, not everything proved predictable, and towards the end of the ceremony, an unplanned event occurred: ‘At that moment a number of Russian, Italian, Serb soldiers came walking down the boulevard Haussmann. They joined the crowd of admirers of the great poet.’ The local press interpreted this collective gesture symbolically to represent an alliance between all civilized peoples hoping for ‘the triumph of civilisation against barbarism’.16 The commemoration elsewhere in Europe that year appears to have been altogether less antagonistic. German prisoners of war interned on the Isle of Man performed Shakespeare for their English guards, whereas the British civilian internees at Ruhleben Camp (Berlin) were granted permission to mount a festival of no less than a week to commemorate the Bard. In both cases, propaganda interests, though, seem to have affected the reports on which we must base ourselves.17 15 Hoenselaars, ‘Great War Shakespeare’; ibid., ‘Quotations at War’, 170-171. 16 Hoenselaars, ‘The Pierre Fournier Shakespeare’, 106. 17 Hoenselaars, ‘British Civilian Internees’, 61-65.

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Transnational Shakespeare The wars that mark the landscape of European history since the early modern period yield striking Shakespearean instances of collective, cross-border, bilateral and multilateral memory, often surprisingly connecting both friend and foe. But it is the post-war reflection on the past atrocities and the challenges that armed conflicts pose to the prevailing ideals of civilization which – particularly since the beginning of the twentieth century – has tended to produce an image of Shakespeare in transnational and explicitly European terms. The international career of Shakespeare, then, reveals a tendency to look beyond narrow rivalries and to consider the fate of the entire region. Shakespeare’s role in the complex European experience of remembrance and mourning of the twentieth century appears to have started with Paul Valéry’s essay on ‘The Crisis of the European Mind,’ first published in the London Athenaeum in 1919, where Valéry introduces ‘the Hamlet of Europe’: From an immense terrace of Elsinore which extends from Basle to Cologne, and touches the sands of Nieuport, the marshes of the Somme, the chalk of Champagne, and the granite of Alsace, the Hamlet of Europe now looks upon millions of ghosts. But he is an intellectual Hamlet. He meditates upon the life and death of truths. […] If he picks up a skull, it is a famous skull. […] Hamlet hardly knows what to do with all these skulls.

Valéry’s image of Hamlet stands at the beginning of a series of reflections on Europe, the bankruptcy of European philosophy, and the general decline of European culture after the Great War. Notable admirers have been T.S. Eliot, Ernst Robert Curtius, and Jacques Derrida. Interestingly, though, the influential image that Valéry put into the world has also been deconstructed by Heiner Müller, who adopted and adapted it during the Cold War. His Hamletmachine (1977) began with the words: ‘I was Hamlet. I stood at the shore and talked with the surf BLABLA, the ruins of Europe in back of me.’18 The echo here is not perfect. Where Paul Valéry described the ruins of ‘Europe’ stretching out to the sea ahead of him, the German playwright’s Hamlet faces the open the sea, and all of ‘Europe’ now lies in ruins behind him. Dare one read a direct or indirect comment in Müller on the earlier vision of Europe formulated by Paul Valéry? In any case, Müller’s alternative phrasing puts the reader in mind of the fact that Valéry may not really have been speaking of ‘Europe.’ The ‘Europe’ 18 Müller, ‘Hamletmachine’, 211.

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that he saw and described was only the territory located to the west of the Basle-Cologne line. It left out (Weimar) Germany, with the exception of the Rhineland (which would be occupied by Allies and Associated Powers for fifteen years), and it stereotypically marginalized Central and Eastern Europe. Valéry’s ‘Europe’ was a construction, because his focus was really on France. With hindsight it is ominous to realize that Valéry’s Hamletian speaker, for all his pacifist intentions, blocked from our view the very nations that were to determine most forcibly the political scene until nearly the end of the twentieth century, the nations on whose behalf Heiner Müller speaks. But Valéry also inspired Jacques Derrida’s influential Spectres of Marx, which wove the ‘ghost’ of Shakespeare’s Hamlet back into a new image of Europe. It was following the demise of Müller’s reviled communism in 1989, that Derrida reflected on ‘old Europe’, and took up the notion of the ‘ghost’ or ‘spectre’ of which Marx and Engels had spoken at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto (‘Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa – das Gespenst des Kommunismus’). With the knowledge that Marx was a great Shakespearean, Derrida toyed with the idea of continuity between Shakespeare, Marx, Valéry, and the ‘new Europe’ after 1989.19 Valéry’s is only one manifestation of Shakespeare transformed into a collective frame of reference for a continent in crisis. It is rarely noted that in his canonical World War II novella Le silence de la mer [translated as The Silence of the Sea and as Put out the Light], Vercors (= Jean Marc Bruller), also drew precisely on Shakespeare to depict the fate that threatened to destroy European culture at the time. In the novella, the German officer named Werner von Ebrennac is billeted with an elderly intellectual and his niece in the French countryside. Each night Von Ebrennac compulsively shares with them his views of culture. Initially, he manifests himself as a cosmopolitan admirer of literature and music, for whom the national origin of the works he reads or plays is secondary. Gradually, however, and particularly after his meeting with German friends in Paris, he changes into a militant defender of exclusively German values. Significantly, this process is conveyed by his use of quotations from Shakespeare, particularly in the second chapter of the novella which begins with the famous quotation from Othello about the irreversibility of murder and destruction: ‘Put out the light, and then put out the light.’20 In the chapter that follows, we encounter Von Ebrennac 19 Derrida, Specters of Marx. For a deft analysis of the phenomenon in context, see Wilson, Shakespeare in French Theory, 29-74. See also Bartolovich, Howard and Hillman, Marx and Freud. 20 Othello, 5.2.7, in Wells and Taylor, The Oxford Shakespeare.

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after his leave in Paris. He too is convinced now that the literary culture of France, which he had always admired, will have no place within the new political climate. The Germans, he tells his hosts, ‘are flattering your writers, but at the same time in Belgium, in Holland, in all the countries occupied by our troops, they already put the bars up. No French book can go through anymore. […] Not only your Péguy, your Proust, your Bergson. […] But all the others.’21 Adapting the quotation from Shakespeare’s Othello at the beginning of the second chapter, Von Ebrennac declares: ‘They will put the light out altogether. […] Never again will Europe be made bright by that glow.’22 As in this French novella about World War II, the dialogue between a German officer and a French intellectual about the future of European culture is articulated in the translated words of an author from a third nation, Britain. Shakespeare is granted prophetic transnational and specifically European reference and resonance. Since World War II, times have changed, but the role of Shakespeare in the transnational European imaginary has not. This became fully apparent in the course of 2016, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, but also year that witnessed the referendum about Britain’s membership of the European Union. At the same time Shakespeare’s death was commemorated worldwide, the writer proved to be much alive on the transnational European stage, certainly once Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, in a letter that marked the official beginning of the referendum, announced: ‘I deeply believe that our community of interests is much stronger than what divides us. To be, or not to be together, that is the question which must be answered not only by the British people in a referendum, but also by the other 27 members of the EU.’ Before the referendum that challenged the notion of European unity, the question was, ‘What Would the Bard Do?’ (The Australian). Wasn’t King John a Brexit play (The Guardian, 20 June 2016)? Or was it Henry V (The Guardian, 3 July 2016)? Apparently, it was a perfect coincidence that the Shakespeare-Theatre Neuss had scheduled a production of All’s Well That Ends Well on polling day (RP Online, 24 June 2016). The outcome of ‘Brexit or Not Brexit’ (Le figaro, 29 June 2016) was defined by some as ‘a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions’ (www.nickhunn.com, 28 June 2016). The power struggle that immediately followed among the Conservatives – with Michael Gove stage-managing the political exit of Boris Johnson – was interpreted in Germany as a scene from Julius Caesar (‘Ein Brutus steht vor Downing Street,’ Der Tagesspiegel, 2 July 2016), and 21 Vercors, Put Out the Light, 34-35. 22 Ibid., 35.

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by the London Evening Standard as a scene from Othello (‘Like Iago, he brought down the natural leader while also destroying himself,’ 8 July 2016). The nefarious role of Gove’s wife in the ‘Shakespeare-Tragödie nach Brexit’ led The Economist actually to rewrite an entire scene from Macbeth as The Tragedy of Michael and Sarah MacGove (1 July 2016). And the front page of the French Libération (1 July 2016) had a photograph of Johnson with the unambiguous headline: ‘Shakespeare en pire’ (‘Worse than Shakespeare’). But it was Shakespeare nevertheless as multiple nations sought to come to terms with a serious challenge to the prevailing conception of a united Europe.

Conclusion: Boomerang Shakespeare Given Shakespeare’s prominent status in the European imaginary from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, it comes as no surprise that traces of the man, his work and the multiple cults of commemoration, can also be found beyond the continent, in areas that were once its colonies under specific nations. Both in the heyday of colonialism and during the postcolonial era the empire has written back, and its rewriting of European classics, like Shakespeare, was a successful method, in British colonies, of course, but also elsewhere, in Latin America, Canada, and other French colonies. A case in point is Martinique writer Aimé Césaire who critically rewrote Shakespeare’s The Tempest as Une tempête, having the characters speak of Prospero’s island not in relation to England, Italy, or France, but explicitly to Europe, in a way that Shakespeare avoids. As he arrives on the island, Gonzalo notes: ‘On a bien raison de dire que ce sont des pays merveilleux. Rien de commun avec nos pays d’Europe.’23 The island’s original inhabitant, Caliban, is equally explicit in his rejection of Prospero: ‘Tu peux foutre le camp. Tu peux rentrer en Europe. Mais je t’en fous!’24 Not all extra-Europeans necessarily contribute to Shakespeare as a European site of memory in an equally divisive and dismissive manner. A video documentary produced by The Guardian records the march of a Syrian family to ‘to the heart of Europe’.25 At one stage, a male refugee is interviewed wearing small white sandals. Asked why he should be shod and walking in women’s shoes, the refugee answers cheerfully: ‘I have given my slippers to my wife ‘cause her feet are bleeding. My feet are bigger 23 Césaire, Une tempête, 16-17. 24 Ibid., 89. 25 Domokos et al., ‘We Walk Together’.

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than the shoes: What shall I do? To be, or not to be, that is the question. We will be.’ From the way in which the educated Syrian refugee responds to the reporter – Hamlet’s perennial question coupled with an affirmative answer – we catch an outside-in glimpse of Europe where Shakespeare is a frame of reference. In this instance, the self-identification of the speaker with a Shakespearean character, and in English, is considered the most effective visiting card to Europe. If anything, these examples bring into focus the need to acknowledge that our image of Shakespeare as a European site of memory is determined not only by Europe and Europeans, but also, historically, by non-European countries and their citizens. Failure to recognize this would be tantamount to an act of Eurocentrism. This has also been a major article of faith for the European Shakespeare Research Society (ESRA). This international academic network, officially founded in 2007, really came into being and started work at a time when momentous political events challenged traditional perceptions of national culture – the demise of communism and the birth of the New Europe (1989), the foundation of the European Union (1993), the Third Balkan War (1991-2001) and the Iraq War (2003-2011). The scholars who eventually founded ESRA conduct original research into the reception of Shakespeare in a federal Europe, and seek to further serious reflection on a possible sense of pan-European identity, past and present, around the memory of ‘Shakespeare.’ ESRA scholars who jointly investigate the constitutive role of Shakespeare in forging a sense of European self-identity principally object to fostering a spirit of self-complacent Eurocentrism or Europhilia. They argue that if Eurocentrism and Europhilia play a role in their research at all, it is as objects of study in their own right. The geographical and cultural focus of ESRA is on ‘Europe’ as much as it is on Shakespeare, but research into European Shakespeare is a worldwide affair. After almost twenty-five years of research in Shakespeare as a European site of memory, ESRA itself has become part of that same phenomenon.

Bibliography Assmann, Aleida, ‘Der Kampf der Erinnerungen in Shakespeare’, in Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (München: Beck, 1999), 62-88. Bartolovich, Crystal, Jean E. Howard and David Hillman (eds), Marx and Freud: Great Shakespeareans (London: Continuum, 2012). Carlyle, Thomas, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (Boston: Athenaeum, 1901).

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Césaire, Aimé, Une tempête. D’après ‘La Tempête’ de Shakespeare. Adaptation pour un théâtre nègre (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969). Delabastita, Dirk, Jozef de Vos and Paul Franssen (eds), Shakespeare and European Politics (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008). Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1993). Dobson, Michael, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). Domokos, John (dir.), Mustafa Khalili, Richard Sprenger and Noah Payne-Frank, ‘We Walk Together: A Syrian Family’s Journey to the Heart of Europe’, The Guardian, 10 September 2015, video clip, at: http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2015/ sep/10/we-walk-together-a-syrian-familys-journey-to-the-heart-of-europe-video (accessed 3 November 2016). Gregor-Dellin, Martin, and Dietrich Mack (eds), Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, trans. Geoffrey Skelton, 2 vols (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978). Günther, Frank, Unser Shakespeare: Einblicke in Shakespeares fremdverwandte Zeiten (München: DTV, 2014). Hoenselaars, Ton, ‘British Civilian Internees Commemorate Shakespeare in Ruhleben, Germany (1914-1918)’, Shakespeare-Jahrbuch 151 (2015), 51-67. Hoenselaars, Ton, ‘Great War Shakespeare: Somewhere in France, 1914-1919’, Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare 33 (2015), at: http://shakespeare. revues.org/2960 (accessed 26 April 2019). Hoenselaars, Ton, ‘Introduction: Shakespeare’s History Plays in Britain and Abroad’, in Ton Hoenselaars (ed.), Shakespeare’s History Plays: Performance, Translation and Adaptation in Britain and Abroad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 9-36. Hoenselaars, Ton, ‘Quotations at War: The First and Second World Wars’, in Julie Maxwell and Kate Rumbell (eds), Shakespeare and Quotation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 170-177. Hoenselaars, Ton, ‘The Pierre Fournier Shakespeare Statue in the City of Paris, 1888-1941. Reflections on Commemoration, Cosmopolitanism, and Urban Development during the Third Republic’, Shakespeare-Jahrbuch 147 (2011), 105-123. Hoenselaars, Ton, ‘Sculpted Shakespeare’, in Coppélia Kahn and Clara Calvo (eds), Celebrating Shakespeare: Commemoration and Cultural Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 279-300. Hoenselaars, Ton, ‘“A Tongue in Every Wound of Caesar”: Performing Julius Caesar behind Barbed Wire during the Second World War’, in Carla Dente and Sara Soncini (eds) Shakespeare and Conflict (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 222-236.

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Hoenselaars, Ton, ‘Towards a European History of Henry V’, in Marta Gibinska and Agnieszka Romanowska (eds), Shakespeare in Europe: History and Memory (Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2008), 9-32. Höfele, Andreas, No Hamlets: German Shakespeare from Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Leerssen, Joep, ‘National Shakespeare’, in Bruce Smith (ed.), Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), vol. II, 1064-1070. Leerssen, Joep, and Ann Rigney, ‘Introduction: Fanning out from Shakespeare’, in Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney (eds), Commemorating Writers in NineteenthCentury Europe: Nation-Building and Centenary Fever (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 1-23. Minogue, Kenneth, Nationalism (London: B.T. Batsford, 1967). Müller, Heiner, ‘Hamletmachine’, in Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier (eds), Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (London: Routledge, 2000), 208-214. Pujante, Angel Luis, and Ton Hoenselaars (eds), Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe. Foreword by Stanley Wells (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003). Schabert, Ina, ‘Shakespeare’, in Pim den Boer, Heinz Durchardt, Georg Kreis and Wolfgang Schmale (eds), Europäische Erinnerungsorte 2: Das Haus Europa (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2012), 211-220. Trevor-Roper, Hugh (ed.), Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations, trans. Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens (London: Enigma Books, 2000). Vercors, Put Out the Light, trans. Cyril Connolly (London: Macmillan & Co., 1944). Wells, Stanley, and Gary Taylor (eds), The Oxford Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005). Wilson, Richard, Shakespeare in French Theory: King of Shadows (Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 2006).

About the Author Ton Hoenselaars, Full Professor of Early Modern English Literature, University of Utrecht [email protected]

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Being Eurocentric within Europe Nineteenth-century English and Dutch Literary Historiography and Oriental Spain Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez Abstract Some current political notions of a ‘two-speed’ Europe find their roots in a long-existing narrative that divides Europe along different polarities, one of them being between North and South. This polarity is further complicated by an association of the South with the Oriental Other, creating a divide within Europe itself in an exercise of Eurocentrism within Europe’s own borders. Delving into the way nineteenth-century English and Dutch literary historiography dealt with the literary legacy of early modern Spain – when it was at the zenith of its political and cultural power – reveals how a new organization of the leading literatures and cultures from the eighteenth century onwards excluded or downplayed Spain’s role in Europe. However, the reason for this exclusion or downplaying within the English and Dutch discourse seems unrelated to the Oriental vision of Spain, as envisioned by Madame de Staël and others at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Keywords: Eurocentrism, Oriental Spain, Spanish Golden Age, nineteenth century, Dutch literary historiography, English literary historiography

Certain concepts within EU political discourse do not just come into existence in medias res or in a spontaneous self-generating manner. The thrilling thing about studying Europe, European culture and history, the roots, bonds and rivalries among its comprising nations and others beyond her borders, is the possibility of drawing on a rich reservoir of European – and transnational – interlocked narratives that can account for the origin and further evolution of certain notions, perceptions and prejudices. Think,

Brolsma, Marjet, Robin de Bruin, and Matthijs Lok (eds): Eurocentrism in European History and Memory. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463725521_ch09

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rather, of a prosaic notion such as that of the ‘two-speed’ Europe. Although at first sight it may seem a purely practical policy or strategy to accommodate differences within Europe with regard to pace and level in economic matters, on closer contemplation there is more to it than simply that. According to Italian economist Pasquale Luzio Scandizzo, this concept has two meanings: On the one hand, it is a statement of the fact that Europe is moving along at two different speeds: at the speed of the Eurozone and at the speed of the rest of Europe. However there is already a ‘two-speed’ model within the Eurozone itself: there are more developed countries like Germany and the Netherlands and there are countries which are experiencing certain economic hardships – France, Spain, Italy and others.1

This definition makes a distinction in ‘development’ within the ‘core’ of Europe. A difference that, roughly speaking, corresponds with the North and the South of Europe; and the phrase ‘roughly speaking’ is employed because Voltaire would most certainly turn in his grave if he suspected the slightest exclusion of his culturally pioneering nation from the modern and progressive heart of European hegemony. Under this well-known North-South polarity, as one of the oldest polarities within Europe (the other being centre-periphery and East-West),2 there is more to unearth when it comes to internal and long-standing European perceptions and discourses. As a matter of fact, in the eyes of some scholars there is still a clear ‘Orientalism of the South’ at work within this two-speed policy, which implies a southern vision ‘as an estranged fetish, crystallized in a chronic backwardness, arrested in a ruined present.’3 This binary way of thinking marginalizes the South and underscores the alleged supremacy of a certain northbound Europe. According to Roberto Dainotto, what we witness here is a process of ‘internalization’ of the South of Europe both as part of Europe and as her periphery or liminality. This is a decisive step in the formation of Eurocentrism. 4 In this chapter I would like to dwell on this internal process of Othering within Europe and in the way it links, according to Dussel, Dainotto and others, to Orientalism and the perception of the South, in particular Spain. 1 ‘“Two-Speed Europe”’. 2 For a compact exposition of these polarities, see the standard work: Beller and Leerssen, Imagology, 278-280, 315-318, 387-388. 3 Giuseppe, Cadmos cerca Europa, 66. 4 Carvalhao Buescu, ‘Europe between Old and New’, 11.

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The historical asymmetry within Europe obviously leans on national forms of ethnocentrism within its own borders and its existence helps to nuance Eurocentrism in its ‘totality’ and its historical continuity. What really stands for ‘Europe’ in the term ‘Eurocentrism’ is therefore not just a coherent and compact block, since the sheer idea of a liminal Europe, perceived from an inherent exclusionary perspective, concerns not only the South, but reaches out from the Balkans to Eastern Europe, and of course to the extreme North.5 From the early modern period and beyond we encounter multifarious examples of being Eurocentric within Europe, and Spain, because of its complex historical past linked to Muslim (Oriental) influence and heritage and its problematic role as the first global empire, offers us an excellent example of ex/inclusion processes in ‘a’ European narrative. Furthermore, historical reasons to detect similarities between Edward Said’s Orient and the European South are anything but scarce.6 Using Dainotto’s idea of a ‘genealogy of Eurocentrism’7 as a backdrop, I will focus on the way Spain and its cultural legacy is ‘re’-written, occluded or downplayed in nineteenth-century English and Dutch literary histories. In this century of cultural nationalism, the first literary histories played an essential role in cultural debates on the production and circulation of knowledge. The rising sense of national competition led nations to underscore national originality and the nation’s contributions to other literatures. Studies on the influence of literature A on literature B frequently devolved into a dialectical debate on the superiority of canonical works of one’s own nation. These literary histories operated further from a world perspective determined by the romantic theory of national literature as the genuine expression of the character of a nation. In this way the literature of certain nations reflected certain characteristics nobody wished to identify with, specially those that could be linked to backwardness or obscurantism. The study of literary historiography is particularly relevant since, through its distinctive canon formation, patterns of selection and organization, interpretations and evaluations of different literary traditions can be charted. Whose literature could be considered as influential and leading within Europe, and whose could not and why? Looking at nineteenth-century literary historiography in the context of Eurocentrism we can interrogate ‘the organization/order of knowledge’ and its ‘descriptive/prescriptive statements’.8 I shall therefore 5 Ibid., 12. 6 Dainotto, Europe (in Theory), 273. 7 Ibid., 4. 8 I have borrowed this terminology from Araújo and Rodríguez Maeso, Eurocentrism, 3.

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focus on a selection of English and Dutch literary histories that reflect on Spain’s literary production and its Oriental component and its legacy within Europe. We shall see that the attitude towards Spain is not straightforward since different discourses intermingle and create a vision of a country and its culture that it is not exclusively placed in a ‘subaltern’ position, typical for an exoticist discourse.

The Orient within Europe9 Within the discourse of a Eurocentric interpretation of the world, being part of Europe implies an idea of Europeanness that stands for tolerance, freedom, democracy, rule of law, inclusion and human rights. This perspective stresses a supposed contrast between a European ‘us’ and the barbarian ‘Other’, and it is exclusionary, among other aspects, in linking the starting point of modernity with intra-European phenomena.10 Europe’s alleged civilizational exceptionalism is further based on Max Weber’s theory that only Protestant countries could achieve economic progress, pushing Catholic nations into a marginal position.11 According to Roberto Dainotto’s genealogy of Eurocentrism, Europe did not only define itself against an ‘Oriental’ Other in premodern times. Montesquieu in his De l’esprit des lois (1748) had charted this opposition that strongly revolved around the liminal parts of the continent: its South, which happened to be tainted with Oriental traits. Montesquieu shaped the idea of a North-South divide and Hegel’s idea of ‘two Europes’ and Madame de Staël’s notion of two opposing literatures (a modern one from the North, and a premodern from the South) lent further to support to this divisive and exclusionary theory. Voltaire’s cosmopolitanism was obviously North-centric and it envisioned a French Europe in which literature was ordered in a hierarchy from the French to the ‘defective bottom’12 (the South). In the eighteenth century we witness a reorganization of the inherited cultural 9 Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Samir Amin’s Eurocentrism (1988), renowned critiques of Eurocentrism, concentrate on the production of Eurocentric knowledge through Europe’s construction of the Orient as distinct entity. Mignolo (‘Occidentalización’) points to the exclusion of the Latin American experience in this colonial divide between the Orient and the Occident. 10 According to Habermas ‘the key historical events from the creation of the principle of [modern] subjectivity are the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the French revolution.’ See: Dussel, ‘Europe’, 469. 11 Weber, Die protestantische Ethik. 12 Dainotto, Europe (in Theory), 114.

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canon that would come to question the Spanish legacy to European culture. With the eclipse of its imperial hegemony in the seventeenth century, Spain’s cultural role in the past and present was subsequently to be submitted to close scrutiny. France was then the nation setting the cultural standards of Europe’s modernity. A famous polemic took place at the beginning of the eighteenth century, in which mainly French – but also Italian – intellectuals discussed Spanish cultural influence until their current time. This long-standing polemic reached its zenith at the end of the century.13 In 1782, Nicolas Masson de Morvilliers published an entry on Spain in the famous Encyclopédie méthodique. His text unleashed a bitter international polemic on the contributions of Spain to European civilization. Morvelliers’ answer to the importance of the Spanish legacy is crystal clear: ‘Nothing at all.’ In the eyes of the Frenchman, Spain resembles those weak colonies who need the protective arm of a metropolis, it is a nation that suffers from incurable lethargy, and as juicy cherry on the cake: Spain is a ‘nation of pigmies’.14 A national polemic within Spain followed suit, with apologetic and anti-apologetic authors who also ridiculed the excessive indignation of some countrymen.15 This polemic is frequently identified by scholars as one of the links in the long chronology regarding the forging of the Black Legend of Spanish tyranny, one of the most pervasive and persistent Western narratives regarding the enemy, casting Spaniards or ‘Hispanic’ characters as cruel, bloodthirsty, fanatical, covetous, vindictive and tyrannical in nature.16 An important element in this derogatory perception of the Spaniards was the accusation that they were of miscegenated origin, with mixed blood in their veins, both Moorish and Jewish.17 This negative vision of Spain and the Spaniards in the early modern period coincides with the animosity inherent to great powers that be and the manner they are perceived by other nations or opponents; think of attitudes against the Roman Empire, or in our modern times of processes such as antiAmericanism or anti-Russianism as a form of imperophobia. In the Spanish 13 Garrido Palazón, ‘Translatio imperii’. 14 Masson de Morvilliers, ‘Espagne’, 565. 15 Cases, ‘La polémica’. 16 The term ‘Black Legend’ or ‘Leyenda negra’ was actually coined by nineteenth-century Spanish intellectuals to def ine the orchestrated propaganda campaign aimed to vilify the Spaniards worldwide that started to take shape in the sixteenth century but continued until their own time. Sánchez Jiménez, ‘La Leyenda’. 17 William of Orange, who can be considered an important contributor to the forging of the Black Legend narrative in the sixteenth-century Low Countries, clearly stressed the mixed origin of the Spanish ethnos, providing a reason for the untrustworthiness of the Spaniards (Rodríguez Pérez, ‘“Un laberinto”’, 152).

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case, North-South and centre-periphery polarities became further complicated by the existence of this Black Legend narrative, gradually developed as a form of Hispanophobia or anti-Hispanism from the early modern period onwards. Although paranoia is undesirable in an academic setting, it is a fact that the so-called ‘Prescott paradigm’18 was determinant in the explanation of Spanish history as a consequence of Spanish decadence and the despotic nature of Spanish Catholicism. This paradigm, named after the nineteenth-century American historian William H. Prescott, can also be considered as a latter-day version of the Black Legend19 and it implied banishing Spain to a liminal position of backwardness within Europe. As Saglia and Haywood state, ‘the country became a negative model, a site of anti- or non-Enlightenment, an “internal Other” of northbound Europe, and thus crucial for definition – a contrario – of modernity’.20 This marginality is also reflected in European discourses on the production and organization of knowledge, and especially on Spanish literary production as envisaged in the nineteenth century. What makes the interpretation of Spain within the context of ‘Orientalness’ especially intricate is the fact that the perception of Spain underwent a fairly positive transformation at the beginning of the nineteenth century as a result of the Napoleonic wars and Spain’s resistance to the French. The image of a positive ‘Romantic Spain’ had started to be forged, thanks to the German Romantics, from the end of the previous century onwards, resulting in a narrative that would integrate the Muslim past as a definitive and praiseworthy marker in the new vision of Spain. This positive image of Spain coalesced with a lingering Black Legend.21 As Joep Leerssen states: ‘Latency is always a default state for ethnotypes and prejudices.’22 For this chapter I shall focus on how two different groups of scholars (English and Dutch) engaged with Spanish literary legacy, specially regarding the Spanish Golden Age, the period that was singled out by foreign scholars as the perfect mirror of Spanishness. This geographical selection embodies two different European literary traditions with a different degree of canonicity in the nineteenth century. Whereas English literature was at the very centre 18 Kagan, ‘Prescott’s Paradigm’. 19 Burguera and Schmidt-Nowara, ‘Introduction’, 279. 20 Saglia and Haywood, ‘Introduction’, 3. 21 The transhistoric and transnational tension between these Hispanophilic and Hispanophobic narratives is the theme of my NWO-Vidi project, ‘Mixed Feelings: Literary Hispanophilia and Hispanophobia in England and the Netherlands in the Early Modern Period and in the Nineteenth Century’, funded by NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research). Members of the team are Rena Bood and Sabine Waasdorp. 22 Leerssen, ‘Imagology’, 25.

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of European/global literature, and William Shakespeare had been in the meantime canonized as the Golden Age English/European dramatist/writer par excellence, the Dutch were in comparison at the margins of European literature. This marginality was an obvious result of the linguistic limitations of Dutch literature abroad, but marginality, lack of quality, or the question of literary decline also played an important role within national borders. Would it be possible (and desirable) to reach again the former heights of Golden Age Dutch literature? And would this cultural elevation also reflect an elevation of the rather dormant and lethargic nation? Although they differed in respect of centrality and canonicity, what linked both English and Dutch literary historians was the relation to Spanish Golden Age literature, and drama in particular, as a great source of inspiration and influence in the early modern period.23 How do these scholars engage with the Spanish legacy, in particular as to the Oriental dimension of Spain? What is to be valued or criticized? And where, within the European canon, is Spanish literature to be placed as a result of it? Furthermore, both England and the Netherlands possessed a dominant Protestant culture with a Catholic cultural minority within their borders that determined a somewhat biased perspective. We will focus on Charles Dibdin and George H. Lewes on the English side, and on Petrus van Limburg Brouwer and Jacob van Walrée on the Dutch. Charles Dibdin (1745-1814) was a versatile figure: prolific author, actor, theatrical manager and one of the most popular English composers of the late eighteenth century. George Henry Lewes (1817-1878) was one of ‘the most interesting and engaging men of letters of his time’.24 He was a polyglot writer and a gifted literary critic. Van Limburg Brouwer was a professor of literature in Liège and Groningen. Jacob Pieter van Walrée was a lawyer and writer who was particularly interested in the language and literature of Southern Europe.

Oriental Spain and the Character of Spanish Literature It has been stated that the most prominent characteristics of Spanishness in the nineteenth century were a certain and undefined Orientalism, resulting 23 It has to be kept in mind that England and the Dutch Republic were two nations with overlapping histories regarding Spain during the early modern period. Think of their alliances during the Dutch Revolt and the Eighty Years’ War. 24 Ashton, ‘Lewes’.

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from the Spanish-Arab connection, a strong sense of chivalry and piety or religiousness.25 This focus on the Oriental character of Spanish literature was particularly propagated by Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismondi (1773-1842) in his famous De la littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813).26 This work is considered one of the first histories of Spanish literature, together with the pioneering work of the German philosopher and critic Friedrich Bouterwek, Geschichte der neuern Poesie und Beredsamkeit (twelve volumes, 1801-1819). According to Sismondi, the most defining element of Spanish literature was its Oriental component, which also distinguished it from other Romance languages. This Oriental essence translated into the importance of rhyme, the overwhelming imagination (origin of the strong baroque character of Spanish literature), its individuality and isolation, and a certain stagnation.27 The Spaniards had inherited different characteristics from the Moors within the context of literature, which were also reflected in their own national character: Les Espagnols avaient hérité des Maures l’amour de la recherche, de la pompe vaine et de l’enflure; ils s’étaient livrés avec ardeur, dès leurs premiers pas dans la littérature, à ce bel esprit oriental, leur caractère propre semblait même à cet égard se confondre avec celui des Arabes.28

The main elements in this Spanish essence were the love of invention and discovery of knowledge, as well as vain pomp and florid embellishment, all seasoned with the presence of ardour. What is more, this influence and the ‘absorbed’ characteristics were also present among Roman-Hispanic writers like Seneca and it would be passed onto prodigious writers, such as the celebrated Golden Age dramatist Félix Lope de Vega: car, avant la conquête de ceux-ci, tous les écrivains latins de l’Espagne ont eu, comme Sénèque, l’enflure et la prétention du bel esprit. Lope de Vega était lui-même fortement entaché de ces défauts. Dans sa prodigieuse fertilité, il trouvait plus facile d’orner ses poésies de concetti, d’images 25 Pérez Isasi, ‘The Limits’, 179. 26 Sismondi, De la littérature. 27 Andreu Miralles, El descubrimiento, 83. 28 Sismondi, De la littérature, vol. IV, 53. Trans.: ‘The Spaniards inherited from the Moors a forced, pompous, and inflated manner. They devoted themselves with ardour, from their first cultivation of letters, to the seductive style of the East, and their own character seemed in this respect to be confounded with that of the Asiatics [sic]’ (Sismondi, Historical View, vol.  II, 343).

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hasardées et extravagantes, que de mesurer ce qu’il devait dire, et de modérer son imagination par le goût et la raison.29

Although Sismondi stands within literary historiography on Spain as the scholar who most strongly emphasized this Spain/Arab/Muslim/Oriental connection, he actually was inspired by the work of eighteenth-century Spanish Jesuit Juan de Andrés, a sort of cosmopolitan scholar in exile in Mantua, and author of a comparative history of literature Dell’origine, progressi e stato attuale d’ogni letteratura (1782).30 This monumental literary history – in seven volumes – was also ambitious in its scope (‘in all times, in all nations’) and Andrés is considered by many as the founding father of comparative literature. According to his biographer, Sismondi committed plagiarism since many well-known passages from Sismondi’s De la littérature are literally copied from Andrés. However, Dainotto demonstrates that the Swiss critic actually embarks on a remarkable rewriting of Andrés’ work. In a clever manner, Sismondi instrumentalizes and alters Andrés’ narrative to illustrate and further underpin his ideas about the origins of literature in Europe and its intrinsic differences, in line with his friend Madame de Staël.31 The Spanish Jesuit argued that the Arabs had brought a totally novel idea of poetry into Europe: syllabic, rhymed, and about love. On his part, Sismondi acknowledges that Arab literature had certainly given a completely new impulse to literatures in Europe and that ‘modern Europe [was] formed at the Arab school and enriched by it’.32 However, Sismondi nuances the role of Arab (and by extension, Spanish) influence within these European origins. Although Arab culture was once glorious, it represented the last stage of the ancient world and embodied the past, not European progress or modernity. In contrast to Andrés, who saw a direct line and continuity between the discovery of modern literature by the Arabs, its introduction in Al-Andalus and then its dispersion through the whole of Europe, Sismondi saw literature in Europe not as a whole, but like De Staël, as two complete 29 Sismondi, De la littérature, vol. IV, 53-54. Trans.: ‘[F]or before the conquests of the latter, all the Latin writers in Spain had exhibited, like Seneca, an inflated style and great affectation of sentiment. Lope de Vega himself was deeply tainted with their defects. With his astonishing fertility of genius, he found it more easy to adorn his poetry with concetti, and with daring and extravagant images, than to reflect on the propriety of his expressions, and to temper his imagination by reason and good taste’ (Sismondi, Historical View, vol. II, 343). 30 His book was published between 1782 and 1799 and was translated into French in 1805 with a slightly diverging title. 31 De Staël, De la littérature. 32 Quoted in Dainotto, Europe (in Theory), 162.

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distinct literatures, a northern and a southern one, clearly distinguishable. The Arab tradition revitalized the South, whereas the northern one had evolved in a similar manner, but independently. For Sismondi the European troubadours developed rhyme like the Arabs, but independently from them.33 This train of thought brought Sismondi to limit Arab influence to the South, and to locate the essence of European literature in the North. In this way he rendered Spanish literature ‘Oriental’, and as belonging to a completely different world of ideas. Therefore: not European.34 With his rewriting of Andrés’ literary vision, the Swiss scholar shaped the idea that ‘Europe contained within itself its own Oriental Other’.35 It is remarkable that the oft-quoted fragment where Sismondi criticizes Arab poetry for its excessively daring metaphors, endless allegories and excessive hyperboles is almost literally taken from Andrés. Whereas Andrés criticized this over-the-top stylistic extravagance and did not identify Arab poetry with the Spanish one, Sismondi, in his assimilation process between both literary traditions, took a step further and identified both.

Oriental Spain within English Literary Historiography In his A Complete History of the English Stage (composition date around 17981800), Charles Dibdin defined Spaniards and their taste as being Oriental in their relation to the Moors. It is probable that Dibdin was somehow acquainted with Thomas Warton’s pioneering History of English Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century (1774-1781), considered to be the first narrative English literary history. Although focused on the study of English poetry, in his general analysis of the origins of poetry, Warton had pointed at its Arab roots and at the captivation felt by the Spaniards towards the Oriental books that had entered the peninsula. The Spaniards had then suddenly adopted an unusual pomp of style, and an affected elevation of diction: 33 Dainotto, Europe (in Theory), 163. The same holds for the development of European romance, with similarities to Arab storytelling but very different from the chivalric imagination. 34 Sismondi, De la littérature, vol. III, 100: ‘Les littératures dont nous nous sommes déjà occupés, celles que nous avons réservées pour un autre temps, sont européennes: celle-ci est orientale. Son esprit, sa pompe, le but qu’elle se propose, appartiennent à une autre sphère d’idées, à un autre monde.’ Trans.: ‘The literature of the nations upon which we have hitherto been employed, and of those of which we have yet to treat, was European: the literature of Spain, on the contrary, is decidedly oriental. Its spirit, its pomp, its object, all belong to another sphere of ideas – to another world’ (Sismondi, Historical View, vol. II, 87). 35 Dainotto, Europe (in Theory), 163.

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The ideal tales of these eastern invaders, recommended by a brilliancy of description, a variety of imagery, and an exuberance of invention, hitherto unknown and unfamiliar to the cold and barren conceptions of a western climate, were eagerly caught up, and universally diffused. From Spain, by the communications of a constant commercial intercourse through the ports of Toulon and Marseilles, they soon passed into France and Italy.36

Warton is less restrictive than Sismondi and openly presents a literary vision in which Oriental influence spread over the continent, without referring to a two-speed literature narrative, in line with his contemporary, Andrés. Dibdin, when writing his comparative study of several European literary traditions, also stressed the Oriental connection: ‘It must be allowed that no nation was ever so fertile in invention, or so wide of regularity as Spain: the reason is evident.’37 This reasoning refers to the fact that Spanish manners are derived originally from them ‘and are tinged with a sort of African taste, too wild and extravagant for the adoption of other nations, and which cannot accommodate itself to rule of precision’.38 Dibdin will refer in more occasions to the stylistic extravagance of Spanish literature, and despite the fact that Spanish manners or stylistic profusion could not suit the taste of other nations, he does not fail to mention that in the case of European drama Spanish influence is undeniable since Spanish plays ‘have served like a rich mine for the French, and, indeed, the English at second hand to dig in’.39 Nonetheless, he downplays this influence when adding that Spanish raw materials are ‘a useless mass of no intrinsic value till manufactured into literary merchandize by the ingenuity and labour of other countries’.40 In a previous passage, the author also refers to the role of the Arabs in the foundation of the first Castilian plays, stressing in this manner the early influence on Castilian/Spanish drama. 41

36 Warton, History of English Poetry. The digitised volume does not contain page numbers, therefore the title of the sections where information comes from will be specified. ‘Dissertation I: Of the Original of Romantic Fiction in Europe’. 37 Dibdin, A Complete History, vol. I, 141. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., vol. I, 131. For the related use of the term ‘luxuriance’ in relation to Spanish literature, see my contribution: ‘“Covering the Skeletons with Flesh and Blood of Their Own Creation”: Spanish Golden Age Theater in English and Dutch Nineteenth-Century Literary Histories’, to be published in Y. Rodríguez Pérez, Literary Hispanophilia and Hispanophobia in Britain and the Low Countries (1550-1850) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming 2020). 40 Dibdin, A Complete History, vol. I, 131. 41 Ibid., vol. I, 132.

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Spanish drama was a great source of inspiration for European theatre until the mid-seventeenth century, and its main exponent, playwright Félix Lope de Vega, was also evaluated and acknowledged according to its inherent Oriental character. Particularly illuminating is George Henry Lewes’ The Spanish Drama: Lope de Vega and Calderón (1846), 42 considered ‘the f irst full-length study of Spanish theatre in English’. 43 Lewes published his work almost forty years after Charles Dibdin, when the image of Romantic Spain had long been spread over the continent and the major literary histories dealing with Spain and its literature had already been published and translated. Lewes does not explicitly mention his fellow countrymen Thomas Warton or Charles Dibdin in his work, but he does extensively engage in a dialogue with leading Hispanists like Sismondi, Bouterwek and pioneers in the ‘rediscovery’ of Spanish drama at the end of the eighteenth century as the Brothers Schlegel. As a literary critic, a child of his time, he also echoes Madame de Staël’s intellectual legacy on North-South national and literary polarities and differences. As he states at the beginning of his chapter ‘Characteristics of the Spanish Drama’: ‘The Spanish Drama, inasmuch as it is national, is distinguished from that of other nations by certain characteristics which I will here endeavour to bring into view.’44 He therefore begins his narrative intertextually with a clarification of the ‘southern mind’ vs the ‘northern mind’ and their inherent objectivity versus subjectivity. He also speaks of the ‘southern character’ vs the ‘northern character’, adorning the differences with qualifications such as ‘sensuous’, ‘passionate’ and ‘plastic’ vs ‘reflective’, ‘dreamy’, ‘subjective’. In deploying his analysis of the national characteristics of Spanish drama he leans on Sismondi’s Oriental argumentation and he will further elaborate on it, especially when it comes to the Spaniards’ taste for Oriental pomp of language and their jealousy, which relates to Spanish honour.45 Furthermore, Lewes, a great admirer of Lope de Vega, also presents the playwright to his readers as an incarnation of the national genius in his Oriental prodigality. 46 One of the most remarkable peculiarities of Spanish drama in Lewes’ eyes is its (Oriental) rhetorical exuberance, with speeches ‘of a length unparalleled in the annals of drama’ that distance any other by hundreds of lines. In light despair, Lewes complains: ‘While the reader 42 The book expands and reworks a previous version in article form published his article in the Foreign Quarterly Review (1843). 43 Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre, 260. 44 Lewes, The Spanish Drama, 99. 45 Ibid., 100, 104. 46 Ibid., 108, 116, 74.

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is anxious to get a clue to the mystery of the plot, he has to wade through these terrible displays of rhetoric.’47 As to the existence of extreme jealousy, Lewes directly quotes a long passage from Sismondi, extending to one and a half pages. He starts with a reference to the extreme susceptibility of Spanish honour, by which the slightest offence can only be obliterated by blood: ‘This mad jealousy was communicated to the Spanish by the Arabians. Its existence amongst the latter, and indeed amongst all Oriental nations, may easily be accounted for, because it is in accordance with their national habits.’48 Although there is a clear difference in the way men in the Arab world relate to their women and how the Spaniards do it (driven by gallantry), Lewes cannot but conclude that boasted honour ‘is an absurd prejudice and not an ideal principle’.49 He does not further elaborate into what these attitudes imply for the role of women or the manner they are treated, contrary to Madame de Staël, who also used the relations between the sexes to further support her theory of the two Europes and the two opposing literary traditions. For her, people from the South had never known how to respect women, in stark contrast to the customs of the Germans.50 In this gender context and particularly in relation to the origins of love poetry in Europe, her chronology is quite surprising, since she locates its roots – in her northbound perspective – in the German tradition, whence it was passed to the Spaniards and these in their turn to the Andalusian Moors.51 Lewes is not just following Sismondi and others obsequiously; he was too critical and erudite for that. To give his readers an idea of the significance and originality of Lope de Vega he chooses the well-known Oriental backdrop. Lope de Vega was not just a playwright – he could capture everybody’s imagination. He had managed to charm and intoxicate the whole nation, Lewes says: 47 He also adds that these ‘terrible displays of rhetoric’ do actually form a repose from the rapidity of the action, which could be understood as an explanation of its functionality. 48 Lewes, The Spanish Drama, 115. 49 Ibid., 117. 50 De Staël, De la littérature, 310: ‘Les peuples septentrionaux, à en juger par les traditions qui nous restent et par les moeurs des Germains, ont eu de tout temps un respect pour les femmes, inconnu aux peuples du midi; elles jouissoient dans le nord de l’indépendence, tandis qu’on les condamnoit ailleurs à la servitude. C’est ancore une des principales causes de la stensibilité qui caractérise la litterature du nord.’ Trans.: ‘If we are to judge by the traditions in our possession, the southern [sic] nations had in all times a respect for women, which was entirely unknown to the people of the east: they seem to have enjoyed independence in the north, while in other parts of the world they were condemned to slavery: – this most probably is one of the principal causes of that sensibility which characterizes northern literature’ (De Staël, The Influence, 47). 51 Dainotto, Europe (in Theory), 159.

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He was the incarnation of the national genius in its Oriental prodigality. He threw gleams of sunny mirth into the dark countenances of the holy Inquisitors. He even charmed the sombre spirit of Philip the Second. He taught the hidalgos a refinement in the ingenuity of intrigue; and roused the joyous boisterous mirth of the common people. Those only who know the exuberance of the southern temperament – its vehemence of admiration or contempt – can understand the furor excited by Lope de Vega.52

The obvious admiration expressed in Lewes’s words reflects also the main objective of his book, where he forcefully states that Lope de Vega’s importance has been downplayed (‘written down’) in (foreign) literary history. The playwright deserves to be judged by his worthy literary qualities and not only with regard to his quick and fertile invention of plots and situations.53

Oriental Spain and the Dutch Historical and cultural relations between the Netherlands and Spain have not been straightforward since the early modern period. As a result of the Dutch Revolt and the ensuing Eighty Years’ War against their Spanish monarch, the Dutch Republic arose in the seventeenth century, becoming the base of the current Netherlands. The Dutch founding myth is therefore intimately interwoven with Spain and its role as the historical enemy, which implies that pervasive historical images about the Spaniards, their character and culture were instrumentalized during centuries to shape a constructed historical narrative of Dutch resistance and common struggle against a cruel foreign enemy. Nineteenth-century literary historians were very ambivalent as to what to do with that Spanish cultural legacy. This tension is particularly present when it comes to such a popular genre as Golden Age drama. Although early modern playwrights in the Low Countries have been greatly influenced by Spanish drama, this fact was frequently by-passed in Dutch literary histories of the time.54 In the narrative on the development of Dutch Golden Age culture an oft-repeated discourse connects the growth of the Dutch Republic to the war 52 Lewes, The Spanish Drama, 74. 53 Ibid., 88, 96. 54 It would not be before the end of the century, in 1881, when leading literary historian Jan te Winkel fully stressed the real close relation to Spanish literature, since its influence was not limited to translations, but to a ‘Spaansche geest’ (‘Spanish spirit’) present in many works (Te Winkel, ‘De invloed’, 113).

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with Spain. One of the main forefathers of Dutch literary history, Jeronimo de Vries, of Spanish origin himself, stated in 1810 that ‘the transition from Spanish oppression to Dutch freedom endowed all arts in our fatherland with a flexible elevation, especially in regards to poetry’.55 The importance of the national dimension and the relation to foreign influence to explore and chart how literary history was written is also present in Petrus van Limburg Brouwer (1795-1847), Verhandeling over de vraag: bezitten de Nederlanders een nationaal tooneel met betrekking tot het treurspel? (Treatise on the Question: Do the Dutch Possess a National Drama Regarding Tragedy?, 1823).56 Van Limburg Brouwer’s question was a relevant one since tragedy was rhetorically the highest form of drama and drama was intimately related to the reputation of a nation (‘roem eener natie’) since its artistic form was conceived to be represented in front of the eyes of the people.57 According to him, only the Greek, the Spanish and the English possess a national theatre: ‘[O] ther people, and especially the Italians and the German are like us: they actually do not have a national drama.’58 Van Limburg Brouwer, who had probably read Sismondi’s De la littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813), mentions the role of religious feeling, heroism, honour and love in Spanish drama and points further to the connection between Spanish national character, their long fight against the Moors, and the country’s southern position as a source of its lively, opulent and visual linguistic expression, all of which makes Spanish verse different from that of the rest of Europe.59 Here we encounter again the Oriental image of rich style as intimately linked to Spain. As to the origins of Spanish national drama, Van Limburg Brouwer characterized it by the abundance of images and similes ‘spread as by an Oriental mist’.60 Furthermore, he seems to be projecting the Dutch national narrative regarding its own struggle against Spain onto Spain’s fight against the Moors as the defining factor in the development of Spanish culture and literature: ‘It was the prolonged fight for cities and altars, the awakened feeling for religion and freedom – yes, the encounters with the barbarians themselves – that moved them; to all this is Spanish drama indebted.’61 The Spaniards seem to have fought against the Moors for religion and liberty, just like the Dutch did against Spain. The relation between Spaniards and Arabs 55 De Vries, Proeve eener geschiedenis, 389. 56 Van Limburg Brouwer, Verhandeling. 57 Ibid., 4. 58 Ibid., 152. 59 Ibid., 151. 60 Ibid., 12. 61 Ibid.

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is further located in a foe-friend framework, but they are not just assimilated as being one and the same group. Further, Van Limburg Brouwer’s Oriental characterization of Spain does not sound derogatory and it does not imply that Spaniards are excluded from a ‘European’ dimension. Jacob Pieter van Walrée, a scholar interested in Southern literature, would delve some years later, in 1838, into the connection between the Spanish volkskarakter (national character) and its early literature in his ‘Proeven van het verband tusschen het Spaansche volkskarakter en de vroegere Spaansche letterkunde’ (‘Proofs of the connection between Spanish national character and early Spanish literature’.62 Although his treatise starts with references to Romantic perceptions of Spain as an exceptional and antimodern nation in the nineteenth century, Van Walrée presents Spain and its literary production as being quite devoid of negative prejudices. The most important aspect in his appraisal of Spain is its unanimous resistance to foreign oppressors, be they the Muslim conquerors or Napoleon’s invasion. As in the case of Van Limburg Brouwer, it seems that the evaluation and appreciation for Spanish literary production is placed against the background of a narrative of historical oppression, reminiscent of the Dutch Revolt itself. Thanks to the Napoleonic Wars and the French enemy, the Spaniards had the chance to be viewed as the rebellious party fighting a stronger power, for a change. Van Walrée is well informed about the influence of Spanish literature on the French, especially as far as drama is concerned, and openly refers to it.63 Furthermore, in Van Walrée’s view, Spanish character is marked by religious intensity, strong feelings of independence and respect for honour, for their monarchs and for the feminine sex. Van Walrée, as a child of his time, cannot help but to let slip some old prejudices regarding Spain, mainly regarding well-known Black Legend traits, such as religious bigotry, or very en passant cruelty in the Spanish colonies in the Americas, but he remains positive in his main discourse. All these Spanish national traits could be interpreted in a negative light, if placed against the Dutch Revolt narrative, but he refrains from doing this.64 With regard to how the Spanish treat women, Van Walrée did not agree with Madame de Staël’s take on the matter, and seeming to lean towards Sismondi’s idea of Spanish gallantry rather than seeing it as the oppression of women in an Oriental setting. 62 Van Walrée, ‘Proeven van het verband’. 63 Ibid., 168. He especially refers to Spanish drama and adaptation/re-elaboration of Spanish plays about El Cid, like the one by Corneille. 64 Ibid., 161.

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The most remarkable aspect in the way Van Walrée deals with Spain’s Oriental past and its literary production is that he views the development of Spanish character and literature as a contrast to the character of the Moors. Spanish knightly spirit, for instance, is awakened and further strengthened precisely because of Spain’s long struggle with them. El Cid, the Christian hero and epitome of the Spanish Reconquista, embodies the Spanish virtues of courage and perseverance.65 The Dutch scholar does not resort to a stylistic analysis of Spanish literature or excessive linguistic profusion or abundance, as French and English literary historiographers have observed. Neither does Van Limburg Brouwer. These Dutch authors’ work does not foreground the connection between Spain and its Oriental legacy or essence.

Final Remarks Eurocentrism has not lost its relevance as a topic, although its external forms may have adopted multifarious guises. Its profound legacy plays out in a long historical continuity where debates on the production and circulation of knowledge are instrumental. Some current political notions (such as the two-speed Europe) find their roots in a long-existing narrative that divides Europe along different polarities, one of them being between North and South. This polarity is further complicated by an association of the South with the Oriental Other, creating a divide within Europe itself in an exercise of Eurocentrism within the own borders. Delving into the way nineteenth-century English and Dutch literary historiography dealt with Spain’s literary legacy of the early modern period when it was at the zenith of its political and cultural might reveals how a new organization of the leading literatures and cultures from the eighteenth century onwards excluded or downplayed Spain’s role in Europe. Through textual, stylistic and also national confirmation of an Oriental character, linked to its Muslim past, Spanish literature was viewed as exotically different and not belonging to the ‘northbound’ (French and German) literary modern norm. Interestingly enough, none of the English and Dutch authors analysed here connected Spain and the Orient in the same manner as leading scholars such as Madame de Staël or Sismondi, who believed in two tracks of European literature. The English author Dibdin (who wrote before them) is critical about Spanish literature, but also appreciative of its role, especially with regard to European drama. Lewes echoes the North-South division of his predecessors and also 65 Ibid., 164, 166, 172.

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links Spain to excessive Oriental proliferation that can be rather exhausting; yet, at the same time, he wants to highlight the legacy of Spanish Golden Age drama and the exceptional role of playwright Lope de Vega, who has been unjustly ‘written-down’. Dutch literary authors, on their part, did engage with the Spanish Oriental past in a different way. Seemingly determined by their own national historical narrative of resistance to foreign oppressors, they also viewed Spanish relations with the Muslims in the same light. Their opposition to this external Oriental Other has made Spaniards what they are, shaping specifically their religious sensibilities and chivalric and heroic character. The lively and opulent Spanish linguistic expression is also referred to, but not in an overwhelmingly negative sense. These Dutch authors did not adopt a ‘two-speed’ literary vision of the European world, maybe because they did not share the perception that they were the best example of modernity and progress at the time. Both English and Dutch authors seem to engage in their own national manner with this Oriental discourse on Spain. Their national visions on Spanish literature may exclude or downplay Spain, creating a comparable divisive effect from within Europe. However, the reason for this exclusion or downplaying seems unrelated to the Oriental vision of Spain, as envisioned by De Staël and Sismondi at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, the latter’s dual vision of Europe, at two speeds, proved to be the more historically resilient.

Bibliography Primary Sources Andrés, Giovanni [Juan de], Dell’origine, progressi e stato attuale d’ogni letteratura, 7 vols (Parma: Stamperia Reale, 1782-1799). De Staël, Madame, De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (Paris: Chez Maradan, 1800). De Staël, Madame, The Influence of Literature upon Society (New York: William Pearson & Co., 1835) De Vries, Jeronimo, Proeve eener geschiedenis der Nederduitsche dichtkunde (Amsterdam: Johannes Allart, 1810). Dibdin, Charles, A Complete History of the English Stage, Introduced by a Comparative and Comprehensive Review of the Asiatic, the Grecian, the Roman, the Spanish, the Italian, the Portuguese, the German, the French and Other Theatres, and Involving Biographical Tracts and Anecdotes, Instructive and Amusing, Concerning

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a Prodigious Number of Author, Composers, Painters, Actors, Singers and Patrons of Dramatic Productions in All Countries, 5 vols (London: The author, 1800). Dibdin, Charles, The Professional Life of Mr. Dibdin, Written by Himself. Together with the Words of Six Hundred Songs Selected from His Works. Interspersed with Many Humorous and Entertaining Anecdotes Incidental to the Public Character, 4 vols (London: the author, 1803). Lewes, George Henry, The Spanish Drama: Lope de Vega and Calderón (London: Charles Knight & Co., 1846). Masson de Morvilliers, Nicolás, ‘Espagne’, in Encyclopédie méthodique ou par ordre des matières. Géographie moderne, I (Paris: Panckoucke, 1782). Sismondi, Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de, De la littérature du midi de l’Europe, 4 vols (Paris: Treutel et Würtz, 1813), at: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001357234 (accessed 26 April 2019). Sismondi, Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de, Historical View of the Literature in South Europe, trans. Thomas Roscoe, 2 vols (London: George Bell and Sons, 1877). Van Limburg Brouwer, Petrus, Verhandeling over de vraag: bezitten de Nederlanders een nationaal tooneel met betrekking tot het treurspel? Zoo ja, welk is deszelfs karakter? Zoo neen, welke zijn de beste middelen om het te doen ontstaan? Is het in het laatste geval noodzakelijk eene reeds bestaande school te volgen, en welke redenen zouden eene keus hierin moeten bepalen? (Rotterdam, 1823). Warton, Thomas, History of English Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century (London: J. Dodsley et al., 1774-1781).

Secondary Sources Amin, Samir, Eurocentrism: Modernity, Religion, and Democracy, 2nd ed. (Cape Town: Pam Bazuka Press, 2011). Andreu Miralles, Xavier, El descubrimiento de España. Mito romántico e identidad nacional (Barcelona: Penguin Random House, 2016). Araújo, Marta, and Silvia Rodríguez Maeso (eds), Eurocentrism, Racism and Knowledge: Debates on History and Power in Europe and the Americas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Ashton, Rosemary, ‘Lewes, George Henry (1817-1878)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Bibliography, at: https://doi-org.proxy.uba.uva.nl:2443/10.1093/ref:odnb/16562 (accessed 14 September 2018). Beller, Manfred, and Joep Leerssen (eds), Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters: A Critical Survey (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007). Booth, Michael R., Victorian Spectacular Theatre 1850-1910 (Oxford: Routledge, 1981).

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Burguera, Mónica, and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, ‘Introduction: Backwardness and Its Discontents’, Social History 29:3 (2004), 279-283. Cases, Victor, ‘La polémica España de Masson de Morvilliers’, in Nicolás Masson de Morvilliers, La España de la Encyclopédie méthodique de 1782. 2. La versión española de 1792 del polémico artículo de Masson de Morvilliers, ed. Víctor Cases Martínez (Murcia: Biblioteca Saavedra Fajardo, 2010), i-v. Carvalhao Buescu, Hester, ‘Europe between Old and New: Cosmopolitanism Reconsidered’, in César Domínguez and Theo D’Haen (eds), Cosmopolitanism and the Postnational: Literature and the New Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 11-26. Checa Beltrán, José (ed.), Lecturas del legado español en la Europa ilustrada (Madrid/ Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2012). Dainotto, Roberto, Europe (in Theory) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). Dussel, Enrique, ‘Europe, Modernity and Eurocentrism’, Nepantla: Views from the South 1:3 (2000), 465-478. Garrido Palazón, Manuel, ‘“Translatio imperii, translatio studii”: el gusto español en la polémica clasicista italofrancesa del primer siglo XVIII’, in José Checa Beltrán (ed.), Lecturas del legado español en la Europa ilustrada (Madrid/Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2012), 41-66. Giuseppe, Gofreddo, Cadmos cerca Europa: Il sud fra il Mediterraneo e l’Europa (Milan: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000). Kagan, Richard, ‘Prescott’s Paradigm: American Historical Scholarship and the Decline of Spain’, American Historical Review 101 (1996), 423-446. Leerssen, Joep, ‘Imagology: On Using Ethnicity to Make Sense of the World’, Iberic@l, Revue d’études ibériques et ibéro-américaines 10 (2016), 13-31. Mignolo, Walter, ‘Occidentalización, imperialismo, globalización: herencias coloniales y teorías postcoloniales’, in David William Foster and Daniel Altamiranda (eds), Theoretical Debates in Spanish American Literature (New York: Garland, 1997), 69-82. Pérez Isasi, Santiago, ‘The Limits of “Spanishness” in Nineteenth-Century Spanish Literary History’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 90:2 (2013), 167-188. Rodríguez Pérez, Yolanda, ‘“Un laberinto más engañoso que el de Creta”: leyenda negra y memoria en la Antiapología de Pedro Cornejo (1581) contra Guillermo de Orange’, in Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez, Antonio Sánchez Jiménez and Harm den Boer (eds), España ante sus críticos: Claves de la leyenda negra (Madrid/ Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2015), 139-162. Saglia, Diego, and Ian Haywood, ‘Introduction: Spain and British Romanticism’, in idem (eds), Spain in British Romanticism 1800-1840 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 1-16. Said, Edward, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

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Sánchez Jiménez, Antonio, ‘La Leyenda negra: para un estado de la cuestión’, in Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez, Antonio Sánchez Jiménez and Harm den Boer (eds), España ante sus críticos: Claves de la leyenda negra (Madrid/Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2015), 23-44. Te Winkel, Jan, ‘De invloed der Spaansche letterkunde op de Nederlandsche in de zeventiende eeuw’, Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde 1 (1881), 60-114. ‘“Two-Speed Europe”: The End of the European Dream?’, 16 March 2017, at: https:// sputniknews.com/europe/201703161051635068-two-speed-europe/ (accessed 5 July 2018). Van Walrée, Jacob Pieter, ‘Proeven van het verband tusschen het Spaansche volkskarakter en de vroegere Spaansche letterkunde’, De Gids 2 (1838), 161-175. Weber, Max, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus. Archiv für Sozialwissenschaften und Sozialpolitik, XX and XXI (1904-1905).

About the Author Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez, Associate Professor of Modern European Literature, University of Amsterdam [email protected]

10 The Elephant on the Doorstep? East European Perspectives on Eurocentrism Alex Drace-Francis Abstract In this chapter I explore two interrelated questions: What is the Eurocentric nature of the discourse on Eurocentrism? and What is the relevance of (so-called) East European discourses on Europe to the study of Eurocentrism? On the one hand, any focus on ‘Europe’ from an East European source may be considered to prioritize Europe as a signifier; on the other, there are many examples of discourses within Europe that do not necessarily identify with, and in fact seek to challenge, norms of Europeanness as defined in mainstream Western Europe. This chapter attempts a preliminary gathering of relevant evidence and perspectives that complicate the study of Eurocentrism and perhaps help the field to avoid the trap of reproducing the Eurocentric terms of the debate. Keywords: Eurocentrism, Eastern Europe, discourse, Begriffsgeschichte, symbolic geography

Is ‘Eurocentrism’ a Eurocentric Term? The terms ‘Eurocentric’ and ‘Eurocentrism’, now widely used and discussed in history and cultural theory, are themselves of Western European origin. The question of when they were first used – and also where, and how – still requires clarification. Taking an approach from conceptual history, it is possible to trawl through reference works and online digital tools to pinpoint their birth and diffusion. The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, identifies the first usage of the term – in the earlier form ‘Europocentric’ – in Processes of History by the Irish-born American historian and social scientist Frederick J. Teggart,

Brolsma, Marjet, Robin de Bruin, and Matthijs Lok (eds): Eurocentrism in European History and Memory. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463725521_ch10

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published by Yale University Press in 1918. In this all-but-forgotten book, Teggart argued that ‘human history is not unitary but pluralistic; that what we are given is not one history but many and especially that the concept of “progress” is arrived at by the maintenance of a Europocentric tradition and the elimination from consideration of the activities of all peoples whose civilization does not at once appear as contributory to our own’.1 That the term came to be used in a work on ‘the processes of history’ in the wake of World War I is in many ways to be expected. At this time, conceptions of European progress were coming under scrutiny in many countries both within Europe and without.2 However, Teggart was perhaps unique among his contemporaries in observing not just that the attribution to Europe of notions such as superiority and progress was empirically questionable, but that their general uncritical acceptance was specifically owing to the quality of narrative. He criticized as ‘inadmissible’ the ‘methodological assumption upon which the work of the historian is based’, namely that we can arrive at meaningful understanding of the world merely through ‘the narrative statement of the past’. Instead of reflecting on their methods, historians ‘have constructed a narrative by selecting parts or periods of the history of one European country after another which seem to us of special or peculiar significance’.3 By making these points, Teggart’s observations can be said not only to be synchronous with the general questioning of essentialist narratives of European superiority around that time, but also to anticipate constructivist, narrativist critiques of historical argumentation which only came into vogue in the 1960s and 1970s, usually associated with the work of Hayden White. 4 Looking at traditions and approaches in other West European languages, one can find similar antecedents to the critique of Eurocentrism. For instance in 1907, in his important theoretical work Abstraktion und Einfühlung (Abstraction and Empathy), German art critic and theorist Wilhelm Worringer criticized the ‘Europacentric and materialistic [europazentrisch und materialistisch]’ outlooks and prejudices that had impeded the appreciation of Byzantine art in Western Europe.5 In his next work, Formprobleme der Gotik (1911), Worringer bemoaned the fact that ‘the method of approach in art history was made subjective in consonance with the modern one-sided 1 Teggart, The Processes, 24. Cf. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘Europocentric’. 2 For some general perspectives, see Hewitson and D’Auria, Europe in Crisis. 3 Teggart, The Processes, 24. 4 White, Metahistory. 5 Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung, 95. I thank Patrick Bahners for drawing my attention to this usage.

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European scheme’ which had impeded an appreciation of the Gothic tradition.6 Worringer himself acknowledged the influence of an earlier German philosopher of art, Robert Vischer, and particularly of his 1886 work ‘Kritik der mittelalterlichen Kunst’, which had played an important role in popularizing the term ‘empathy’ and encouraged the evaluation of art in its sociocultural context rather than on the basis of (questionably) universalist criteria.7 A discussion of the relationship between conceptualizations of empathy and critiques of Eurocentrism in art history and aesthetics would be a valuable enterprise and would probably have to be traced back to the German late Enlightenment.8 Elsewhere in the German-speaking world, the concept of ‘Euro[po] centrism’ can be found in still earlier sources. For example, in an address on ‘Cultural History and Natural History’ delivered before the Scientific Lecturers Association in Cologne in March 1877, the German physiologist Emile du Bois-Reymond outlined a brief history of intellectual developments in science and civilization. He saw the triumph of modernity as represented by the use of the inductive method which, he argued, was essential both for the natural sciences but also for understandings of historical development. While acknowledging that, to many people, the idea of progress might be an illusion – that ‘the lesson taught by history seems to be this, that history teaches no lesson’ – Du Bois-Reymond argued that real progress consisted in the ability to adopt a perspective outside that of one’s own, what he call the ‘Archimedean’ or Galilean view of science, as opposed to the self-centred ‘anthropocentric’ worldview, from which the workings of the universe can not be truly understood.9 In the course of his demonstration, Du Bois-Reymond used not only the term ‘anthropocentric’ but also ‘Europocentric’. Ironically, elsewhere in the article he showed himself to be not just Eurocentric – the conclusion is dedicated to methods of repulsing the peril of ‘Americanization’ in Europe – but also Germanocentric, emphasizing the superiority of the German education system to that of France and other European countries. Nevertheless, his use of the term appears to be the first in German published 6 Worringer, Formprobleme der Gotik, 9. English version in Worringer, Form Problems of the Gothic, 23. 7 Vischer, ‘Zur Kritik’. 8 Antecedents for the ideas of Vischer and Worringer may be found, for example, in Herder’s critique of Winckelmann’s universalist admiration of the classical models in art. 9 Du Bois-Reymond, ‘Kulturgeschichte und Naturwissenschaft’ (an address delivered before the Scientific Lectures Association of Cologne in 1877). English translation: Du Bois-Reymond, ‘Science and Civilization’.

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sources; moreover its translation into English in 1878 meant that the term ‘Europocentric’ also appeared in English in this year.10

Eurocentrism from the East? So much for the West European, possibly Eurocentric, origins of the concept of Eurocentrism, at least as far as English and German sources go. Turning to a different vantage point, we can also look at the question of discourses about Europe which were still produced within Europe, but in that part commonly referred to as ‘Eastern Europe’. To what extent are such discourses ‘Eurocentric’ if they evince an obsession with Europe but do not particularly talk about Europe from the point of view of a ‘self’, situating it rather as an external object, whether of admiration or critique? The question of East European geocultural discourses on Europe has been widely discussed by scholars in recent years but has rarely been placed in specific relation with the question of Eurocentrism. The question of the nature of ‘Eastern Europe’ was at one time taken for granted by historians and geographers, who both believed in the objective existence of the category and defined it in terms of negative characteristics, against West European norms. According to British historian Robin Okey, in the introduction to a standard textbook published in 1982, ‘Eastern Europe’ was ‘characterized by ‘underdevelopment and dependence’.11 In another standard work published a decade later, Philip Longworth stated that the region may be defined as having ‘a political culture quite different from any in the West’.12 Around the same time, the editors of a Companion to East European Literature suggested that the chief cultural characteristic of the literature of the region was a sense that Europe, understood as an intellectual construct, is somehow elsewhere.13 The historiographical landscape changed signif icantly in 1994 with the publication of Larry Wolff’s landmark work Inventing Eastern Europe. Wolff, drawing on the paradigms of Said’s Orientalism and Foucauldian archaeology of knowledge, showed that the concept of ‘Eastern Europe’ has much older roots than the Cold War period, and were to be found, he 10 Du Bois-Reymond, ‘Kulturgeschichte und Naturwissenchaft’, 288. Du Bois-Reymond’s biographer, Gabriel Finkelstein, has pointed out to me that this constitutes the first usage of the term Amerikanisierung in German. See Finkelstein, Emile du Bois-Reymond. 11 Okey, Eastern Europe, preface. 12 Longworth, The Making of Eastern Europe, 6. 13 Pynsent and Kanikova, ‘Preface’, vii.

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argued, in the ‘map of civilization’ of Enlightenment thinkers who cast Eastern Europe as a barbarous region awaiting the civilizing mission of the West.14 Wolff himself did not use the terms ‘Eurocentric’ or ‘Eurocentrism’ in his book. As Maria Todorova remarked in an article of the same year, the fact that ‘Eastern Europe’ and the Balkans are geographically inextricable from Europe has tended to inhibit scholars from making the connection between such discourses and those of Eurocentrism.15 More recently, however, it was posited by Wendy Bracewell that the Enlightenment arrogation of the concept of Europe to a particular part of it, as well as contestation of the Europeanness of those on the periphery, can be considered ‘Eurocentrism of a particular sort’.16 In similar vein, Wolfgang Schmale has argued that discourses on ‘Eastern Europe’ were not a particularly distinct field of intellectual ‘othering’ but rather ‘part of the performative act of Eurocentrism […] part of the same general European hypertext’.17 In a related critique, but using slightly different terminology, anthropologist Susan Parman has referred to the process of confining definitions of Europe to Western Europe in anthropological discourse using the term ‘Occidentalizing Europe’.18 However, while scholars adopting the ‘Orientalism’ paradigm to discourse on Eastern Europe and the Balkans have made these connections, it has also been pointed out by Jürgen Osterhammel that such approaches may themselves have a degree of Eurocentrism built into their methodology, concentrating as they do on the attitudes to be found in West European sources.19 For instance, Wolff accorded little attention in his book to the question of East European discourses on Europe and the West, although he did mention it in his conclusion as a fruitful research direction.20 However, since Wolff’s work, a number of publications have given considerable attention to the problem of ‘decentring’ discourse-based approaches. While some of these collections showcase philosophical and political discourses 14 Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe. For a recent overview of historiographical debates over the concept, see Schenk, ‘Eastern Europe’. 15 Todorova, ‘The Balkans’, 455. There were nevertheless some critiques of ‘the old Eurocentrism’ in Balkan historiography dating back to the 1970s. See Mishkova, Beyond Balkanism, 164, citing Berza, ‘Les études’, 6-7. 16 Bracewell, ‘The Limits’, 94. 17 Schmale, Gender and Eurocentrism, 78. Schmale also cites Kochanek, Die Vorstellung. 18 Parman, ‘The Meaning’, 172. 19 Osterhammel, Die Entzauberung Asiens, postface to second edition, 405. 20 Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 272-273.

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from the region,21 others focus on concrete encounters with Europe through personal accounts.22 In what follows I will attempt to draw briefly on some of this scholarship on East European attitudes to Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and then consider its potential relevance to students of Eurocentrism. It is of course impossible to present all sides of the problem in such a short chapter. Moreover, my intention is not to try to provide a unitary account of either the content or function of so-called ‘East European’ discourses on Europe. However, I believe a selective survey and analysis of such discourses does raise questions which have hitherto been treated only intermittently in the scholarly literature on Eurocentrism.

Geographies of Enlightenment The appearance among East European authors of an intellectual curiosity about Europe, and/or a generally pro-European orientation, is most commonly ascribed to the eighteenth century. But there are some earlier roots. If ‘the establishment of Europe as a political expression’ could be dated to developments in northwestern Europe in the late seventeenth century, 23 so could similar discourses be traced elsewhere. In the late Middle Ages, writers had on occasion formulated a sense of their countries and societies as contributing to the defence of Christendom, for example through the self-ascribed trope of the ‘bulwark of Christendom’ (antemurale Christianitatis).24 In some seventeenth-century texts, such as the charming travel account Europica varietas (1620) by the Hungarian Protestant priest and author Márton Szepsi Csombor, which was one of the first vernacular prose narratives in Hungarian, one can see the use of ‘Europe’ as a generalized term, albeit without much cultural theorizing about what it meant.25 By the eighteenth century, East European writers often referred to ‘Europe’ as a cultural and intellectual centre to be admired. This phenomenon was 21 See especially the collections Discourses of Collective Identity in East-Central and South-East Europe and Delaperrière, Lory and Marès, Europe médiane. More recent expository works include Trencsényi et al., A History of Political Thought; Mishkova and Trencsényi, Conceptual History; Jalava, Nygård and Strang, Decentering. 22 See, especially, Bracewell, Orientations. 23 Schmidt, ‘The Establishment’; Malettke, ‘Europabewusstsein’. 24 Srodecki, Antemurale Christianitatis. 25 Szepsi Csombor, Europica varietas. On discourses about Europe in Csombor and other seventeenth-century Hungarian sources, see Murdock, ‘“They Are Laughing at Us”’.

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of great importance for the development of national identities in the region, and in many cases indicated an orientation away from older transnational and imperial identities.26 But it is not clear that intellectuals from the region always invoked ‘Europe’ as a space to which they themselves belonged.27 In not dissimilar terms, enlightened priests and scholars from the Balkans, such as the Greek Iosipos Moisiodax or the Serb Dositej Obradović, also explicitly pointed their respective peoples towards Europe. In their case, however, the discourse suggests that they did not see their own nation as fully included within the conception. Writing in 1761, in a preface to his Greek translation of Italian Enlightenment philosopher Ludovico Muratori’s Ethics, Moisiodax explicitly called for Greek youth to move away from the traditions of their own antiquity and turn to ‘Europe’, which ‘at present, in part due to proper administration and in part due to the polite inclination towards the arts and sciences, surpasses in wisdom even ancient Greece’.28 Obradović, for his part, published a memoir of his Life and Adventures in Leipzig in 1788, which was one of the first extensive narratives in modern Serbian and recounted his travels both in Eastern and Western European intellectual centres. In this work, Obradović encouraged his people to follow the model of ‘fortunate Europe’, and warned that ‘nations who merely cling to old opinions and customs must needs lie in eternal and hopeless darkness and stupidity, like all the nations of Asia and Africa’.29 So in Eastern Europe as well as in Western Europe, the invocation of European culture and Enlightenment was simultaneously invoking negative tropes of non-European barbarism. To some extent, this discourse can also be considered ‘Eurocentric’, insofar as it consolidates and internalizes a general conception of ‘Europe’ associated with progress and civilization, irrespective of whether the producers of such discourse included themselves and their audience in the Europe whereof they spoke. But while such a discourse may be said to be prominent in ‘East European’ texts, this does not mean that it is uniquely ‘East European’. For instance, some early-nineteenth-century Arabic discourses on Europe 26 Historian Traian Stoianovich went so far as to compare the Balkan ‘discovery of Europe’ in the Enlightenment with the introduction of Christianity in the region several centuries earlier. See Stoianovich, ‘Dialogic Introduction’, xxvi. 27 Schmale, Gender and Eurocentrism, 84, cites the Ukrainian patriot Hryhorii Skovoroda as saying, ‘We are Europeans!’ However, Skovoroda’s original text is a philosophical dialogue in which these words are ascribed to a fictional traveller to India, i.e. they are not a declaration of Ukraine’s ‘European membership’. See Skovoroda, ‘Kil’tse’, 360. 28 See Moisiodax, ‘Greece needs Europe’, 75. 29 Obradović, Life and Adventures, English excerpt in Bracewell, Orientations, 92-96. See also the commentary in Bracewell, ‘The Limits of Europe’, 89-92.

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adopted very much the same posture of formal admiration from a distance of European intellectual and technological achievements.30 Other East European authors were keen to stress that their homeland was situated ‘in Europe’, but not that they were obliged to subordinate themselves to West European ideas. The Romanian monk Gregory of Râmnic, for example, wrote in the preface to a prayer book published in Bucharest in 1798 that [T]he Rumanian land […] is located in a select part of Europe, has a healthy and fine air, and neighbours upon peoples who pride themselves on and rejoice in the philosophical sciences, all these being easy means to bring up the sons of this our own Fatherland to the high standards of the other Europeans in many sciences. But even so, the Romanian inhabitants of this God-protected land did not often spend time in those [countries]. They, since receiving the light of Orthodoxy, have busied themselves rather with the establishment of the faith in their own land […] they have so little dependence upon, or need for, superficial intelligence, in order to attain the qualities attributed by geographers to Europe; but are always supported by the undefeated arm of Holy care.31

In this text, Gregory both insisted on the situation of his fatherland in ‘Europe’, and on its intellectual autonomy from the universalizing pretensions of the republic of letters. This is a fascinating early example of what might be called anti-Eurocentrism avant la lettre: geographically, the ‘Europeanness’ of the Romanian lands is insisted upon, while on the other, it would be possible to attain ‘the qualities attributed by geographers to Europe’ without being dependent upon the ‘superficial intelligence’ of the West European Enlightenment. In the nineteenth century, the concept of political Europe was institutionalized in international relations, beginning with the Concert of Europe established at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and continuing with such international agreements such at the Treaty of Paris (1856), which nominally brought the Ottoman Empire into the Concert.32 Interestingly, some of 30 See, for example, Arab reformer Al-Tahtawi’s views about Europe in An Imam in Paris; cf. Woltering, ‘Arab Windows on Europe’. 31 Archimandrite Gregory, ‘Preface’ to Triod (Bucharest, 1798), cited in Drace-Francis, The Traditions of Invention, 139. The term Ţara Românească, translated here literally as ‘the Romanian Land’, refers specifically to the province of Wallachia. 32 On the international law aspects and the ‘Europeanness’ of the Ottoman Empire and the Balkan countries, see, most recently, Pitts, Boundaries, 28-67.

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the first international political institutions to bear the name ‘European’ proceeded from the latter treaty and were located in Eastern Europe, notably the European Commission for the Danube, established with its headquarters in Sulina in 1856.33 The 1878 Treaty of Berlin, which actually granted national independence to new states in the Balkans (Serbia, Romania, Montenegro and an autonomous Bulgaria), proceeded from a stated ‘desire to regulate in the spirit of European order, the questions raised in the Orient by the events of recent years’. According to this mode of geopolitical rhetoric, ‘European order’ was the answer to an Oriental ‘question’.34 In this political context, it is unsurprising that East European authors did not merely invoke ‘Europe’ in their cultural writings, but also appeared to address Europe as the recipient of their political questions and demands. For example, the insurgents who led the Greek revolt of 1821, and also Wallachian revolutionaries in 1848, told their peoples that ‘Europe has its eyes fixed upon us’, implying thereby that they themselves were not part of the seeing agent invoked.35 This too may be considered a form of Eurocentrism, even as Europe is envisaged in the third person and in absentia – the elephant on the doorstep of the East European room. As Diana Mishkova has argued in respect of the general paradigm of modernization applied to Balkan nation-building, ‘evolutionism, Eurocentrism, and teleological thinking were intrinsic to such conceptualizations’.36 Another set of coordinates of agency seems to be envisaged in the type of discourse where ‘Europe’ is invoked by Balkan writers in a critical way, and admonished for being ‘ungrateful’ to the East European nations who have in fact worked to defend it against perceived external threats. An example of this would be Romanian poet Vasile Alecsandri’s conception of ‘ungrateful Europe’ (Europa ingrată), adumbrated in his 1848 article on ‘The Popular Poetry of the Romanians’, which referred indignantly to the lack of recognition afforded by ‘Europe’ to the role of small nations in defending the continent’s centre: Europe seems not to want to acknowledge all this blood spilt in its defence. Little does she care about this country weakened by so many wars and misfortunes! Little does she care about the nationality of this Romanian 33 Ardeleanu, ‘The European Commission’; Gatejel, ‘International Cooperation’. 34 The official title of the treaty was, in fact, ‘Treaty for the Settlement of the Affairs of the East’. French text: Albin, Les grands traités politiques, 204-205; English text: ‘Treaty between Great Britain’. 35 For more details on this theme, see Drace-Francis, The Making, 28, 38n1, 95. 36 Mishkova, Beyond Balkanism, 164.

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people who desires now to emerge from her decline and take up once again the position which God himself appointed her to! This people, this country, do they not deserve to attract the attention of the West?37

Defining the Romanian lands as ‘the boulevard of civilization and the graveyard of the barbarians’, Alecsandri drew a line between his own country and ‘the West’. In similar vein, the Serbian Romantic poet Đjura Jakšić bemoaned, in a poem published in 1872, the ‘proud disdain’ of ‘haughty Europe’ who ignored the sufferings of his beleaguered people.38 Such variants on discourse which, through different invocations and modes of address, configures ‘Europe’ as a subject or agent deserving of the greatest attention of the East European peoples, can of course be found throughout the twentieth century, and across many different nations. But according to Joep Leerssen, ‘Europe was, for the emerging intelligentsia of the Balkans, a sounding board; by no means an Other. […] [T]he nationbuilding process in the Balkans was made possible by, and took place in the context of, a modernization process which affected all of Europe’; for the Balkan intellectuals ‘had their eye on Europe as their natural hinterland’.39 In conclusion, however, Leerssen nevertheless identifies ‘a vertiginous cognitive mismatch, which continued well into the 1990s: the Balkans sees itself as part of Europe, while Europe persistently exoticises it’. 40 In other words, the question of the relationship between ‘Europe’ and ‘the Balkans’ as overlapping or opposing categories of subject and object not only varies over time, but also depends on the respective parties’ perspectives and definitions of these changing categories. In conclusion, while most of the emphasis in theoretical-historical discussion of Eurocentrism has been on the Eurocentrism of West European perspectives on the non-European world, the term may also be considered to include West European discourses on sub-regions within Europe such as Eastern Europe or the Balkans, including the very ‘invention’ or ‘imagining’ of these regional concepts. At the same time, certain aspects of East European discourse on Europe may also be considered as a variant of Eurocentrism, insofar as they foreground the centrality and symbolic power of something called ‘Europe’ while simultaneously often minimizing 37 Vasile Alecsandri, ‘Românii şi poezia lor’ [1848], my translation from the French version by A. Roman, in Delaperrière, Lory and Marès, Europe médiane, 454. 38 Đjura Jakšić, ‘Evropi’ [1872], my translation from the French version by M. Ibrovac, in Delaperrière, Lory and Marès, Europe médiane, 457-458. 39 Leerssen, ‘Europe from the Balkans’, quotations from pp. 115, 118-119. 40 Ibid., 120.

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the role of ‘Eastern’ (usually Ottoman, Russian or Soviet) influence in the region. At the time of the 2004 accession of East-Central European countries to the EU, Slovene cultural theorist Mitja Velikonja labelled his country’s obsessively optimistic public discourse on Europe (or ‘EUrosis’) as a form of ‘new Eurocentrism’.41 As this chapter has briefly shown, however, Velikonja’s ‘new Eurocentrism’ has a prehistory in cultural discourses within Eastern Europe, further study of which may show the ambiguities of such positionings but also the agency of the periphery in constructing notions of Europe across the centuries. In that sense, East European ideas about Europe may be considered ‘the elephant on the doorstep’ of the study of Europeanism and Eurocentrism alike.

Bibliography Albin, Pierre (ed.), Les grands traités politiques. Recueil des principaux textes diplomatiques (Paris: Alcan, 1912). Al-Tahtawi, Rifa’a, An Imam in Paris, intro. and trans. Daniel L. Newman (London: SAQI, 2004). Ardeleanu, Constantin, ‘The European Commission of the Danube, 1856-1914’, International Journal of Maritime History 23:1 (2011), 73-94. Berza, Mihai, ‘Les études du Sud-Est européen, leur rôle et leur place dans l’ensemble des sciences humaines’, Revue des études sud-est européennes 13:1 (1975), 5-14. Bracewell, Wendy, ‘The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing’, in eadem and Alex Drace-Francis (eds), Under Eastern Eyes: A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe (Budapest: CEU Press, 2008), 61-120. Bracewell, Wendy (ed.), Orientations: An Anthology of East European Travel Writing on Europe (Budapest: CEU Press, 2009). Delaperrière, Maria, Bernard Lory and Antoine Marès (eds), Europe médiane. Aux sources des identités nationales (Paris: Institut d’Etudes Slaves, 2005). Discourses of Collective Identity in East-Central and South-East Europe, 4 vols, various editors (Budapest: CEU Press, 2006-2010). Drace-Francis, Alex, The Making of Modern Romanian Culture (London: Tauris Academic, 2006). Drace-Francis, Alex, The Traditions of Invention: Romanian Ethnic and Social Stereotypes in Historical Context (Leiden: Brill, 2013). Du Bois-Reymond, Emile, ‘Kulturgeschichte und Naturwissenschaft’ [1877], in idem, Reden, 2 vols (Leipzig: Veit & Co., 1886-1887), vol. I, 240-306. 41 Velikonja, EUrosis.

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Du Bois-Reymond, Emile, ‘Science and Civilization’, trans. J. Fitzgerald, Popular Science Monthly 13 (July-August-September 1878), 257-275, 385-396. Finkelstein, Gabriel, Emile du Bois-Reymond: Neuroscience, Self and Society in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014). Gatejel, Luminiţa, ‘International Cooperation at the Margins of Europe: The European Commission of the Danube, 1856-65’, European Review of History 24:5 (2017), 781-800. Hewitson, Mark, and Matthew D’Auria (eds), Europe in Crisis: Intellectuals and the European Idea (New York: Berghahn, 2012). Jalava, Marja, Stefan Nygård and Johan Strang (eds), Decentering European Intellectual Space (Leiden: Brill, 2018). Kochanek, Piotr, Die Vorstellung vom Norden und der Eurozentrismus (Mainz: Von Zabern, 2004). Leerssen, Joep, ‘Europe from the Balkans’, in Michael Wintle (ed.), Imagining Europe: Europe and European Civilisation as Seen from Its Margins and by the Rest of the World, in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2008), 105-120. Longworth, Philip, The Making of Eastern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992). Malettke, Klaus, ‘Europabewusstsein und europäische Friedenspläne im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert’, Francia 21:2 (1994), 61-93. Mishkova, Diana, Beyond Balkanism: The Scholarly Politics of Region-Making (London: Routledge, 2018). Mishkova, Diana, and Balázs Trencsényi (eds), Conceptual History of European Regions (New York: Berghahn, 2017). Moisiodax, Iosipos, ‘Greece Needs Europe’ [1761], trans. N. Yakovaki, in Alex DraceFrancis (ed.), European Identity: A Historical Reader (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 74-77. Murdock, Graeme, ‘“They Are Laughing at Us”: Hungarian Travellers and Early Modern European Identity’, in Wendy Bracewell and Alex Drace-Francis (eds), Under Eastern Eyes: A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe (Budapest: CEU Press, 2008), 121-145. Obradović, Dositej, Life and Adventures [1788], English excerpt in Wendy Bracewell (ed.), Orientations: An Anthology of East European Travel Writing on Europe (Budapest: CEU Press, 2009), 92-96. Okey, Robin, Eastern Europe, 1740-1980: Feudalism to Communism (London: Hutchinson, 1982). Osterhammel, Jürgen, Die Entzauberung Asiens. Europa und die asiatischen Reiche im 18. Jahrhundert, 2nd ed. (München: Beck, 2010). Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press), online edition: www. oed.com (accessed 1 October 2018).

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Parman, Susan, ‘The Meaning of “Europe” in the American Anthropologist’, in eadem (ed.) Europe in the Anthropological Imagination (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1998), 169-196. Pitts, Jennifer, Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). Pynsent, Robert, and Sonia Kanikova, ‘Preface’, in eadem (eds), The Everyman Companion to East European Literature (London: Dent, 1993). Schenk, Benjamin, ‘Eastern Europe’, in Diana Mishkova and Balázs Trencsényi (eds), Conceptual History of European Regions (New York: Berghahn, 2017). Schmale, Wolfgang, Gender and Eurocentrism: A Conceptual Approach to European History, trans. B. Heise (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2016). Schmidt, H.D., ‘The Establishment of “Europe” as a Political Expression’, Historical Journal 9:2 (1966), 172-178. Skovoroda, Hryhorii, ‘Kil’tse. Druzhnaia rozmova pro dushevnii mir’ [The ring: A friendly conversation about the spiritual world, c. 1774], in idem, Tvory, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1994), vol. I, 360-412. Srodecki, Paul, Antemurale Christianitatis. Zur Genese der Bollwerksrhetorik im östlichen Mitteleuropa an der Schwelle vom Mittelalter zur Frühen Neuzeit (Husum: Mattheisen, 2015). Stoianovich, Traian, ‘A Dialogic Introduction by Traian Stoianovich (1999)’, in L.S. Stavrianos, The Balkans since 1453, 2nd ed. (London: Hurst, 2000), xxi-xxxii. Szepsi Csombor, Márton, Europica varietas [1620], trans. B. Adams (Budapest: Corvina, 2014). Teggart, Frederick J. The Processes of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1918). Todorova, Maria, ‘The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention’, Slavic Review 53:2 (1994), 453-482. ‘Treaty between Great Britain, Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Russia, and Turkey for the Settlement of Affairs in the East: Signed at Berlin, July 13, 1878’, American Journal of International Law 2:4 (1908), 401-424 Trencsényi, Balázs, Maciej Janowski, Monika Baár, Maria Falina and Michal Kopeček, A History of Political Thought in East-Central Europe, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016-2018). Velikonja, Mitja, EUrosis: A Critique of the New Eurocentrism, trans. O. Vuković (Ljubljana: Mediawatch, 2005). Vischer, Robert, ‘Zur Kritik mittelalterlicher Kunst’, in Studien zur Kunstegeschichte (Stuttgart: A. Bonz, 1886), 1-58. White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). Wolff, Larry, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).

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Woltering, Robbert, ‘Arab Windows on Europe’, in Michael Wintle (ed.), Imagining Europe: Europe and European Civilisation as Seen from Its Margins and by the Rest of the World, in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2008), 177-195. Worringer, Wilhelm, Abstraktion und Einfühlung. Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie (Neuwied: Hauser, 1907). Worringer, Wilhelm, Formprobleme der Gotik, 2nd ed. (München: Piper, 1912). Worringer, Wilhelm, Form Problems of the Gothic (New York: Stechert, 1912).

About the Author Alex Drace-Francis, Associate Professor, Literary and Cultural History of Modern Europe, University of Amsterdam [email protected]

11

A Guided Tour into the Question of Europe Jan Ifversen

Abstract This chapter revisits the European question. Whenever ‘Europe’ is approached as something other than a continent, we ask this question. Europe might be a culture, a common feeling, an identity, a union, a memory and/ or a history. To deal with Europe is to navigate between diversity, transnationalism and Eurocentrism. It is to investigate myth, memory, heritage and identity politics. It is to write histories of Europe or exhibit Europe in museums. This chapter takes the readers on a guided tour through two European museums, or rather two houses, La Maison de Robert Schuman and the House of European History. The first presents a mythical narrative of the founding father who saved Europe from chaos, while the second lays out a more complicated route between history, memory, heritage and identity. Keywords: Europe, identity politics, Eurocentrism, memory, heritage, colonialism, diversity More extraordinary, perhaps, is the almost unbelievable resurgence in the pride in the European model, in European civilization. – Michael Wintle, ‘Visualizing Europe from 1900 to the 1950s’1

The Question of Europe In this small chapter, I intend to investigate perceptions of Europe as they are presented to the public.2 The question of Europe is typically framed 1 Wintle, ‘Visualizing Europe’, 223. 2 These thoughts on the European questions has been developed within the research project ECHOES (European Colonial Heritage Modalities in Entangled Cities). This project has received

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within a discourse on identity.3 To evaluate the impact of Europe is to search for a European identity. This European identity discourse derives from the template of the nation state that acquires its legitimacy through references to language, culture, tradition and history. Nationalism is the first and the most powerful form of identity politics in Europe. Due to the growing role of European integration, the question of Europe is, however, also framed within a trans- or supranational discourse. Even if European identity was only formulated as a necessary component of European integration in the Copenhagen Declaration of December 1973, the idea of European commonality as the driver of the project can be found all the way back to first post-war discussions on a united Europe. Contrary to what more functionalist and institutionalist approaches are claiming, the history of European integration cannot be explained without pointing to the role of identity politics. The ideology of the ever-closer union feeds on the claim of a European identity whether in symbols, in policy areas of culture and heritage, in the strongly loaded armature of citizenry, and in the free movement of people. The process from the rather imaginary 1973 Declaration on European Identity to the establishment of the European Union with the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 was a giant leap in terms of identity politics. European identity became an answer to the question of Europe (unless you completely denounced this question). 4 In order to avoid getting meshed up in identity politics, scholars took great lengths to broaden the concept of identity. Some have chosen to speak of a broader cultural identity, which points to affinities between Europeans rather than to a strict engagement with a political project. Others, such as Jürgen Habermas and Ulrich Beck, distinguish between a broader cosmopolitan identity linked to universal values of European provenance, which is separate from a more narrow and inward-looking sphere of culture. Habermas and Beck were criticized for turning this European identity into a spearhead for a Eurocentric endorsement of a renewed European funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 770248. 3 European history is full of big questions. Before the question of Europe, Europeans tried to answer the Jewish question, the social question, the national question and the German question. 4 The question can be denounced in a variety of ways. One can for instance state that identity is always and add-on or even an illusion covering interests, or one can completely dismiss the term as inappropriate because only real cultures can have identities. The latter claim was made by the famous scholar on nationalism Anthony Smith as early as 1995: ‘Compared with the vibrancy and tangibility of French, Scots, Catalan, Polish or Greek cultures and ethnic traditions, a “European identity” has seemed vacuous and nondescript, a rather lifeless summation of all the peoples and cultures on the continent adding little to what already exists’ (Smith, Nations, 131).

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superiority completely forgetful of the devastating effects of European – or at least West European – colonialism.5 In the 1980s and 1990s, a small group of historians, including Michael Wintle, began examining how the European question was formulated in the past. They began writing a history of Europe that took Europe seriously as a historical factor. In this new approach, Europe is not simply a scene for events and actions among different political entities over time; it is not just a geography needed for a narrative, as has been common among traditional history writing under the heading of Europe. In the words of Wintle, Europe is a general feeling based on a cultural sense and a shared heritage.6 While feeling is not a term that made much sense in the political realm until quite late, it meant far more than simply being a geographical term. It is this feeling and heritage that became the departure for a new way of writing histories of Europe, which directly challenged both the teleology of civilizational history and the methodological nationalism of former histories of Europe.7 In a sense, these historians partook in opening a new transnational approach to history, together with colleagues interested in world history, global history and postcolonial history. ‘Europe’ is therefore not just a concept for exchanges between a variety of entities or of commonalities between groups of people; it is also a methodological concept that leads history writing towards the transnational, the intercultural, the hybrid and the flexible. When writing histories of Europe, there is always a risk of just moving from an essentialist view of the nation (as the primary entity for human action) to an essentialist view of a Europe as just a macro-nation with its own cultural borders and its core values. Such a view would simply mirror the fortress Europe that is so prominent in contemporary political rhetoric.

Eurocentrism and the European Question As pointed out by several historians, the concept of Europe is historically loaded with a Eurocentrism that does not question the pretended universalism of European values or the brutal expansionism of European powers in the name of European civilization. A history of the European question is also a critical history of Eurocentrism. Scholars drawing on postcolonial 5 Bhambra, ‘Whither Europe?’ 6 Wintle, The Image. 7 To be mentioned among many contributions is Norman Davies, Robert Bartlett, Krysztof Pomian, John Hale, Wolfgang Schmale and obviously Michael Wintle’s opus magnum, The Image of Europe.

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theory have succinctly shown how even the European catastrophe of 1945 has not eliminated Eurocentrism from writings of European history. While this catastrophe is certainly recognized as part of European history, there is also a tendency to imagine a Europe born anew and cleansed of prior misfortunes. In a discussion of the forgotten or silenced legacy of European imperialism, Onuf and Nicolaïdis aptly speak of European history written as a virgin birth: ‘Meanwhile, Europeans have managed to create and fine-tune their Union over the past 50 years in a fascinating kind of “virgin birth” – as if the new entity had nothing to do with the past of its most powerful Member States.’8 The history of the question of Europe is also a history of tensions between a transnational Europe and an imperialist Europe. Transnationalism has been used positively to favour Europeanism – an ideology strongly articulated immediately after World War II and particularly around the establishment of the Council of Europe – rid of the exclusionist and aggressive tendencies of nationalism. Imperialism, on the other hand, is based on the idea of a superior, European civilization that has the right to intervene everywhere. After World War II, first the Holocaust – and consequently the German question – could be Europeanized and incorporated into European heritage, and then – after 1989 – also communism. Scholars of European memory, seem to agree that the Holocaust has been turned into a negative founding myth of Europe.9 I will return to the role of myth below. For now, it is enough to state that the Holocaust is made an integral part of post-war European identity. The breakdown of communism in 1989/1991 and the big bang enlargement of the EU in 2004, which introduced seven new members from Central and Eastern Europe, paved the way for adding the atrocities of communism to European heritage.10 Both the Holocaust and communism have been included as necessary elements of post-war European heritage.11 Their commemoration is part of 8 Onar and Nicolaïdis, ‘The Decentring Agenda’, 284. 9 Leggewie, ‘Seven Circles’; Assmann, ‘Europe’s Divided Memory’. 10 Discussions about the place of communism in European heritage was raised in the 1990s within the countries formerly in the Soviet bloc, but was only discussed more broadly as a European question after the 2004 enlargement. Being closer in time to this event, Leggewie and Assmann both highlight the asymmetries between a Holocaust that is accepted as part of European memory, and communism, which is less accepted. While communism has not gained the same uncontroversial status within European heritage as the Holocaust, most scholars agrees on the increasing ‘Europeanization’ of communism. See Zombory, ‘The Birth’; Perchoc, ‘European Memory’. 11 I am well aware that there are huge theoretical debates about the meaning and value of the two concepts – heritage and memory – that I tend to use interchangeably here. On the one

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official identity politics within Europe (the Holocaust Remembrance Day established in 2002; The European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism established in 2008). They have also been appointed crucial events in the writing of post-war European history. In one of the most impressive histories of contemporary Europe ever written, Tony Judt’s Postwar, the legacy of World War II formed Europe’s history until 1989, when ‘an era was over and a new Europe was being born’.12 Judt thus opens his narrative by announcing the end of post-war Europe in 1989. In his rendering, post-war Europe is a history of living in the shadows of the two world wars, while at the same time claiming to have recovered from the catastrophe of 1945. This idea of recovery is a myth in the two senses of the word. It is figuring a story of a Europe reborn – the virgin birth – after the catastrophe, but it is also an illusion since Europe was still trapped in the post-war era. Judt needed the myth as a point of departure for a Europe after the catastrophe, and the illusion was equally necessary to forget or disclose the shadows. With the breakup of communist Europe from 1989 to 1991, European history stepped out of both the shadows and the illusions. The result was that 1945 – the Holocaust and communism – could be incorporated in European heritage. As Judt elegantly puts it: ‘The first post-war Europe was built upon deliberate mismemory – upon forgetting as a way of life. Since 1989, Europe has been constructed instead upon a compensatory surplus of memory.’13 For Judt, memory is, however, compensatory; it is mainly a tool in identity politics. History, on the other hand, thrives on disenchantment, he claims; on busting myths and uncovering illusions, we could perhaps say. I would address this tension between heritage/memory, identity and history (writing) in a slightly different way. In my view, writing a European history must proceed at three levels simultaneously. At the first level, we investigate the transnational commonalities that bind entities together – and exclude others. We are in other words searching for the formation of different European spaces. At a second level, we target the language and more broadly the symbols through which the concepts of Europe has been formulated. Here the investigating circulates around a feeling of Europeanness or a European identity. At a third level, we focus specifically on identity politics hand, the concept of memory seems to be more oriented towards temporal representations (the past lives on in our memory), whereas heritage at least partly links representation to materiality and space (in objects displaced). On the other hand, the lines are also blurred, as when we talk about memory places (lieux de mémoire) and heritage as simply the past. Among many, many reflections I prefer the one developed by Sharon Macdonald in Memorylands. 12 Judt, Postwar, 1. 13 Ibid., 289.

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and address the question of how Europe has been used in constructions of political and ideological projects. We thus move from the feeling of Europe in a cultural sense to a political sense. At this level, we encounter different myths, illusions and ideologies of Europe. Historians of Europe address the transnationality of the European space; they investigate the effects of exchanges within this space for European identity; and they search for the myths and the ideologies sustaining identity politics. As shown by Judt, the latter has much to do with the construction of European pasts. Historians are partaking in constructing pasts, but they are not politicians of identity. Their mission is to both narrate and be critical of narration. They select from the unending archive of the past, appoint events and explain changes. They relate their histories to other uses of the past, to other narratives in order to add new moments and disclose silences. For Judt as well as for many others, 1989 becomes the moment where ‘the other Europe’ becomes part of European history. It is, furthermore, the moment that opens up forgotten or silenced chapters in the history and the heritage of Europe, first the Holocaust and then communism. Judt’s book was published in 2005 in a climate of Europhoria. The period from 1989 to 2008 saw the collapse of communism, the creation of the European Union, the enlargement of the EU to 27 members (Croatia, the 28th member, joined in 2013), the introduction of a European currency, the discussion of a European constitution, the creation of a European neighbourhood, the strengthening of European foreign policy and not least the official commemoration of the dark European past. A series of crises that began with the so-called financial crisis soon to become the European debt crisis in 2008 dramatically changed this mood. As the sharp-eyed historian he was, Judt had an eye for changes to come: [A]bove all since the fall of the Soviet Union and the enlargement of the EU, Europe is facing a multicultural future. Between them refugees; guest workers; the denizens of Europe’s former colonies drawn back to the imperial metropole by the prospect of jobs and freedom; and the voluntary and involuntary migrants from failed or repressive states at Europe’s margins have turned London, Paris, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Berlin, Milan and dozen other places into cosmopolitan world cities whether they like it or not.14

Europe was always transnational and multicultural, but efforts to create borders around (a version of) Europe through a Eurocentrist ideology is certainly also part of the European question. Judt wrote an additional chapter 14 Ibid., 9.

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on ‘the lost illusions’ that decolonization created for the ideology of European civilization, but he did not see postcoloniality as constitutive of European identity. The adding of the Holocaust and communism to European heritage emphasized the idea of a united Europe. Empire, stayed – in the words of Judt – an illusion that was finally lost with decolonization. Colonialism, however, has not yet been granted the status of a difficult European, heritage. In his Dantesque drawing of European memory in seven circles, Leggewie includes colonialism and transnational migration, but also states that ‘Europe has done little in comparison to its reactions to the consequences of wars and genocides in Europe’.15 More has been done in the seven years since Leggewie wrote this.16 But the historian Elisabeth Buettner, who has produced impressive research on the public debates on colonial heritage in former colonial powers in Europe, concludes her study from 2016 by saying that the ‘Nazi past and the genocide suffered by Europe’s racialized internal others, Jews above all, demanded transnational memorial atonement; colonized external others exploited and repressed on other continents required banishment from the collective memory’.17 The so-called migrant crises from 2015 that supplemented the dystopian crisis scenario of European identity politics did not make it easier to include colonialism and migration in the dark heritage of Europe.

The European Question Exhibited European identity and heritage appears in many forms and genres. In my career as a historian of the European question, I have looked at both institutional texts emanating from the EU as well as European history writing. More recently, I have taken an interest in museums on European identity and heritage. Even if the majority of museums in Europe are framed within a national perspective, they often project their collections and their narratives into a larger European canon (of art, of history, of culture). Only a few museums are explicitly European in a transnational sense. I will offer a guided tour into two museums and show what kind of European identity and heritage they construct of Europe. Both museums operate at the three levels mentioned above. But the first museum puts more weight on identity politics, the second on European memory and history. 15 Leggewie, ‘Seven Circles’, 156. 16 For an impressive overview of the public debates on colonial heritage in former colonial powers in Europe, see Buettner, Europe after Empire. 17 Ibid., 502.

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The European Myth Identity politics rely on ideologies as well as myths to secure the basis for a specific collective identity. Ideologies are future-oriented and provides identity with a normative and temporal rationality. Since ideologies are often conceptualized as -isms, we might speak of a Europeanism, the purpose of which is to explain and justify why a supranational project (based on a common market and semi-federal political institutions) will make a better future for the European nation states. While Europeanism was shaped by different seemingly incompatible perceptions of inter- and transnational cooperation (nationalism, federalism, functionalism and intergovernmentalism), it had to rely on common, basic arguments. These arguments were provided by the myth. The form and function of myths have typically been studied in societies or communities quite different from the large and complex modern societies discussed here. I will claim, however, that myths – and the rituals that follow – are part of the ideological armature of modern politics. Political scientists have dealt with political myths as the necessary emotional glue or the dominant master narratives holding a community together. However, they are more than that. As formulated by Jean-Luc Nancy: ‘Myth arises only from a community and for it: they engender one another, infinitely and immediately.’18 They are invented stories and practices that explain why a certain community is together in the first place. Mythical thought is, as Nancy says, ‘nothing other than the thought of a founding fiction, or as a foundation by fiction’.19 This foundation not only explains why a community exists; it also offers a moral compass that guides it by constantly reminding the members of its core values. Logically, the foundational event characterizes a moment before history and a condition for history. In whatever way a community continues the story – in the form of history, heritage or memory – it has to refer to the foundations for legitimacy. As Blumenberg so poignantly pointed out, the work of a myth is a work on the myth.20 Myths are sustained by a constant process of interpretation in which they are exposed to new events. These interpretations can be more or less ritualized within institutions. Modern, secularized societies have linked myth closely to political ideology. Different ideologies have different myths. Nationalists constructs a fiction of a primordial nation; communists link civilizational breakdown 18 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 50. 19 Ibid., 53. 20 Blumenberg, Work on Myth.

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with a revolutionary moment; liberals invent the constitution. Different periods see different political myths. In 1945, Europeanism needed a myth of a virgin birth for Europe; a Europe emerging out of the existential chaos (zero hour) of 1945. Myths tend to appear in situations characterized by chaos and moral breakdown. Both federalists, communists and many more traditionally oriented Europeans were working on the myth. They agreed with Churchill that a United Europe would be the only way to avoid ‘the final doom’ of Europe.21 Since visions of a federal Europe – with a constitutional foundation – were soon abandoned, the myth was worked out systematically from declarations and treaties to symbols and artefacts. The famous Schuman declaration that reopened European integration in 1950 began by stating that ‘a united Europe was not achieved and we had war’.22 At the core of the myth is peace. Later works on the myths added founding fathers such as Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet, the return to Europe of Central and Eastern Europe, and even later the negative founding myths of the Holocaust and communism.

The Myth at Work: La Maison de Robert Schuman Schuman’s house is located in the small commune Scy-Chazelles about seven kilometres west of Metz. To reach it, you cross the Moselle River and drive up the Saint Quentin hill. The house is nicely placed on a slope overlooking the river. Opposite the house is a small square named Place de l’Europe. The pavement is decorated with the twelve stars. A wall facing the medieval Church of Saint Quentin – which we will return to in a moment – is engraved with the flags of the EU member states. The house itself is accessed through a small iron gate flanked by two identical posters with a picture of Schuman in blue and purple tones and a title saying ‘La Maison de Robert Schuman – Père de l’Europe’. The same picture is used on the frontispiece of the leaflets presenting the museum.23 The house is part of a myth: the construction of the father of Europe.24 A plaquette commemorates the opening of a museum building annexed to the gardener’s house in 2009 in the name of four partners, the Moselle department, the French Republic, the Fondation Robert Schuman and the European Union. 21 Churchill, The Sinews of Peace. 22 ‘Declaration of 9 May 1950’. 23 Conseil Général de la Moselle, La Maison. 24 Ibid.

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Robert Schuman acquired the house in Scy-Chazelles in 1926 and used it as a second residence until his retirement as president of the European Parliamentary Assembly in 1960.25 He spent the last years of his life in the house and died there in 1963. Schuman never married and lived in the house with his housekeeper, Marie Kelle, whom he employed in 1919. Some years after his death the house was bought by the regional authorities at the instigation of the Association des amis de Robert Schuman, founded in 1964 by his friends and former collaborators.26 The association had a strong regional anchoring and certainly also worked to have Schuman commemorated as a man of the region. This proved so efficient that they managed to convince the regional authorities to acquire the house. The f irst effort in turning the house into a lieu de mémoire was, in 1966, to have Schuman’s tomb removed from the local cemetery to the interior of the newly renovated Church of Saint Quentin just opposite his house. The church now functions as a kind of mausoleum for Schuman. It took longer to establish a museum. Some of Schuman’s possessions were bought by the association at auctions in 1965, 1966 and 1968. The property was acquired by the Conseil Général de Moselle in 1968.27 For many years, the association was responsible for running the place. In 2000, a new non-profit association, the Centre Européen Robert Schuman, was created with the purpose of developing pedagogical tools to inform young Europeans about the history of European integration. Funding comes from the Conseil Général, from the French state, the European Commission and the European Parliament.28 The museum in its present form was opened to the public in 2000. Schuman’s house underwent a thorough renovation in 2004, and in 2009 a brand new two-storey exhibition and conference building (‘l’espace museographique’) was added to the house. Today the site consists of the house, the garden, the exhibition hall and the church. The centre and the house see their function as communicating the importance of Robert Schuman for European integration. According to the director of the museum, Jean-François Thull, the name of father is used to give directions and transmit history and values.29 Presenting the house 25 Roth, Robert Schuman. 26 Cornelia Constantin has shown how the various associations of friends played an important role as ‘memorial entrepreneurs’ in promoting the different fathers of Europe. Constantin, ‘Du particularisme’. 27 Information given by Jean-François Thull in an email to the author. 28 La Fondation Robert Schuman based in Paris is member of the scientific committee of the house. 29 Interview with Jean-François Thull at La Maison de Robert Schuman, 12 January 2011.

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was not only a question of keeping the memory of Schuman alive; according to Thull, it also served the purpose of informing people about the values and the actuality of the project Schuman gave birth to. Within European identity politics, the construction of fathers of Europe represented the first serious work on the myth from more or less official mythmakers.30 In a way, the Schuman House rather directly buys into this.31 The link between Schuman’s personal biography and his role in the greater European history is thus presented as the organizing principle of the site. This principle is displayed most clearly inside the house.32 Although the permanent exhibition in the exhibition building also displays artefacts from Schuman’s personal life (school diploma, glasses) it is clear that the off icial Schuman and his connection to the grander regional, national and European history is the dominating narrative holding the different parts together. The church with its monumental interior design only indirectly hints at Schuman’s religiosity. A small brochure available inside the church stresses his faith and offers quotes from his writing in which he praises God. Visitors do not enter the house through the front door, but through the kitchen. The house is only accessible on guided tours. As our guide explains, due to the small size of the house and the open access to all rooms, there are strict limits to how many visitors at a time can visit the house. The carefully displayed artefacts give the impression of an interior left untouched since the death of Schuman in 1963. There is no doubt that the organizers of the house put great pride in possessing as many original artefacts from Schuman’s home as possible. Some of his belongings – not least his books – were sold after his death and in building up the museum, industrious efforts were made to buy them back. Authenticity is an important principle in any museum, and the Schuman House takes pride in being a real museum with all the scientific authority it requires. But it is also under the obligation of filling the rooms. No room is left empty. That is why some rooms had to be furnished with copies of the original items or artefacts suitable to the period. The kitchen where are our tour begins is a case in point – it is a reconstruction of a typical kitchen from the 1950s. 30 For the construction of Europe’s founding fathers, see Forchtner and Kølvraa, ‘Peace and Unity’. 31 In their main leaflet, the house reiterates the conventional mistake (or mythical displacement) that Schuman was given the title ‘father of Europe’ by the European Parliamentary Assembly in 1960. 32 The fourth part of the site – the garden – is of a different nature. It is presented first as place for the display of regional plants and only secondly as Schuman’s garden.

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The kitchen belongs to the private Schuman. From the kitchen we come into the dining room. The table is laid for four with only bread and water. The message disseminated is clear. Modesty and simplicity were basic values for Schuman. The text in the brochure describing the different rooms in the house spells it out: ‘The dining room is surprisingly modest.’33 The surprise hinted at is probably that we would expect the father of Europe – or at least a former French prime minister and minister of foreign affairs – to live less modestly. On a photo displayed in the house we see an elderly, smiling Schuman casually dressed and standing in his doorway, the surrounding walls unpainted; more a nice grandfather than the father of Europe. The brochure is full of references to Schuman’s modesty and devotion to the spiritual side of life. The entrance hall, which we reach from the dining room, we learn in the brochure, illustrates Schuman’s lack of interest in decoration. A copy of the Figaro littéraire from 1963 is casually placed on a table in the hall to signal his intellectual interests. A photograph on the wall with Schuman and Pope Pius XII indicates his faith. Modesty, faith and intellectuality are the elements that undergird the narrative of Schuman. A staircase surrounded by bookcases brings us to the first floor. It is on this floor that the private Schuman connects with the father of Europe. Here we find his library and his study. The walls of the library are covered with bookcases full of multivolume works. Books on history and theology dominate. We are informed that theology books constituted almost half of his 8,000 books. Books on Europe are carefully posed on tables together with books on the region and on theology. We are left with the impression of an erudite man. Photos of foreign state leaders, monarchs and presidents hang on the wall or stand on tables. This Schuman – the important state official – is presented to us. We reach his study which, according to our guide, is the centre of the exhibition. On Schuman’s desk are placed books on Europe and the European Coal and Steel Community, a forerunner of the European Union, but most importantly a copy of the famous 1950 declaration with Schuman’s personal annotations. We are at the heart of the myth. As the text in the brochure emphasizes: ‘Here Robert Schuman must have prepared the famous declaration. […] This address gave a political footing to the study prepared by Jean Monnet and laid the foundations of the unification of Europe.’34 The route from the library to the study links the personal biography to the grander history in which Schuman is a leading 33 Conseil Général de la Moselle, La Maison. 34 Ibid.

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statesman and the father of Europe. His role as a politician on the domestic scene is hardly mentioned, however. References to politics would probably not go well with his symbolic status as father. Fathers do not strive for their position; it is given. The impression conveyed in the study is of an industrious man working in solitude on the great declaration. The only collaborator mentioned is Jean Monnet. From the study we come to Schuman’s bedroom. A small bed and some bookcases fill the room. Portraits of his father and mother hang on the wall. We are back in the private sphere for a moment. In entering the study we missed the bedroom of his loyal housekeeper, Marie Kelle. Both bedrooms, however, are just annexes to the centre, the study. The guided tour takes us back to the hall in the first floor. We enter a second bedroom, which was arranged for Schuman in 1961 due to his declining health. We learn that this was the room where he died on 4 September 1963. Above and beside the ‘death bed’ are religious artefacts (including a picture of the Virgin Mary with Jesus on the cross). With this room the museum almost adds a sacral dimension. Here the private Schuman died leaving us his oeuvre. To emphasize the latter, papers concerning European integration are dispersed on the table next to the bed. Among these papers is a letter from eight young people having attended a lecture he gave and thanking him for fighting for their future. The choice of displaying this letter is hardly incidental. Neither is the decision to end the guided tour in this room. The narrative conveyed is one in which the private Schuman agonizing in his bed turns into a father legating his project to future generations. The private and the public Schuman finally merge into the father of Europe. The guided tour does not quite end in this symbolic place. A small door takes us to the larder and to the garage in which a copy of Schuman’s modest Simca Aronde Étoile from 1960 is parked. We learn that this was identical to the car in which his last personal secretary took Schuman to Strasbourg, where the first European institutions were set up. The directions are given! From the house the guided tour goes to the neighbouring Church of Saint Quentin where Schuman was reburied in 1966. The interior of the church is entirely dedicated to the memory of Schuman. On the floor in front of the newly erected pulpit is a large bronze relief of Schuman. The European flag is hanging in a side nave. In the back of the main nave hang the flags of all the current member states. We are definitely in a basilica. The Association des amis de Robert Schuman refused the offer to have him moved to the Panthéon next to Jean Monnet in 1988 because they wanted to keep the attachment to his native Lorraine. But they certainly managed to erect a tomb and a lieu de mémoire of a symbolic status comparable to

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or even more significant than the Panthéon. In the latter, Monnet has to share symbolic space with heroes of the French Republic. In the Church of Saint Quentin, only Schuman is commemorated, and despite the regional arguments for keeping him there, all the symbols refer to his European status. On leaving the church we notice a small leaflet from the Institut Saint-Benoît Patron de Europe, an organization that lobbies the Vatican for the religious canonization of Schuman. It is thus interesting to note that there is a mythological competition between turning him into a saint or a father. Though not formally collaborating, both organizations combine Schuman’s religiosity with the European cause. In the narrative that is constructed by the route taken in the house, we are left with the impression of a man that lived only for the cause. He did not care for personal comfort; he worked hard in his study; he did not have a family. The strong display of his faith (the books, the religious artefacts; the church) only adds to the presentation of a man who sacrificed himself. As a museum, the house is bound to create the narrative from the artefacts collected and displayed. The house does not have any archival function, but holds a small number of documents.35 Since the museum is also a lieu de mémoire – the place where Schuman lived – the narrative derived from the artefacts has to start from his personal life. We learn about the European project that he founded through a presentation of his life or rather of its essence, his true character. To make sense of the father, the biography must be linked to the larger history, which is presented by artefacts (photos of statesmen, copies of important papers) and not least by the guides that accompanies the visitors. The new exhibition hall, which is the last part of the site, has a different function and a different layout. It consists of two separate rooms. On the first floor is space for the running exhibition and for small conferences. There is no exhibition taking place in the period we visit the house, but the website announces coming exhibitions with the following titles: ‘The European Union, History and Institutions’; ‘Europe, a History of the Future’; ‘The Life and Work of Robert Schuman, Father of Europe’; ‘Konrad Adenauer, the Builder of Europe’36; ‘Discover the Phases of the Enlargement of the European 35 Most of Schuman’s papers are in the Archive départementale and in the Fondation Jean Monnet in Lausanne. 36 It is noteworthy that the exhibition on Adenauer is entitled ‘Artisan de l’Europe’ and not ‘Father of Europe’. The Schuman House collaborates with the houses of Monnet, Adenauer and De Gasperi in a network called the ‘Museums of the Fathers of Europe’. But when displaced to the Schuman House, Adenauer only appears under the title of ‘artisan’.

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Union and Europe: Dream and Reality’.37 The temporary exhibitions allow the Schuman House to connect the narrative of Schuman to broader issues concerning European integration. Here the link to Schuman does not have to be direct. On the other hand, the temporary exhibitions function to confirm his role as the father of Europe. Later developments in European integration become linked to Schuman and his ideas. They are – to speak metaphorically – his offspring. The permanent exhibition on the second floor is different. It is more didactical in style and dominated by plates with only a few artefacts displayed in glass cases. The plates contain headings that divide the exhibition into sections. We have a plate concerning his childhood and youth with small texts about the basic facts. In the glass case is presented his school diploma, in another his glasses, his pen and his lawyer’s plate. The texts for each section open with small questions. The section entitled Schuman’s spirituality opens with the question: ‘What were Schuman’s religious beliefs?’ The young visitors are supposed to find the answer in the artefacts and documents displayed in the cases. The exhibition is divided into two main parts. The series of plates on the left side of the wall are structured by Schuman’s biography. More emphasis is put on his public life as politician, minister and builder of Europe than in the house. Caricatures and articles from the French press add to his presentation as a political figure facing opponents on the political scene of the French Fourth Republic. Monnet is introduced with a small biography and the well-known picture of Schuman and Monnet relaxing in deck chairs in Monnet’s garden at Houjarray. Although also structured around Schuman’s life, the series on the opposite wall follow a different narrative pattern. It begins with life in the region before 1914, but the main thread is to place Schuman’s European project in an even larger frame than European integration. In one section, the European idea is linked to Enlightenment thinkers like Kant, Rousseau and Voltaire. In accordance with the father figure, Schuman is presented as a great visionary and a thinker. To the description of the unfolding integration project on the plates, are added small plates with remarkable quotes from Schuman’s writings. Most of the plates on this side are devoted to European integration. Schuman is placed with the other fathers, who were involved from the beginning. True to the biographical thread, the grand history presented ends abruptly in 1963 with only one plate adding the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The visitors 37 The web page of the house is accessible at: http://www.centre-robert-schuman.org/cers/ maison-robert-schuman/maison-robert-schuman.php?lang=fr (accessed 23 August 2018).

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are left to guess what happened in-between, and how Schuman’s vision is connected with 1989. Perhaps we are expected to draw the conclusion that 1989 was a logical development of the project. The two series of plates meet in an apex in which a magnificent glass case displays the book Pour l’Europe that Schuman wrote at the end of his life. The glass case gives way to a window through which there is a splendid view of the garden and of a huge monument entitled La flamme de l’Europe. The marble monument consists of two intertwined pillars about seven metres high in which the twelve stars are inserted. Every fifteen seconds, one of the stars lightens up. In case this heavy symbolic marking of the link between Schuman’s oeuvre (literally in the shape of the book) and the European integration project goes unnoticed, a small poem dedicated to the European flame reminds the visitor of Schuman’s status: ‘Entendons cet appel de haut de Scy Chazelle / À deux pas de Schuman fondateur de l’espoir / Que ce trait lumineux embrasse sa chapelle / Schuman éveille-toi: C’est notre plus beau soir.’38 In this particular place the Schuman House turns into a monument. The monumental dimension is also emphasized by the symbolic construction running through the middle of the exhibition room and separating the two parts of the exhibition. The brochure tells us that this construction symbolizes a table which changes form according to the phases in Schuman’s life; first a broken table which then turns into an altar, a negotiation table and a desk to end with the glass case in which Schuman’s books are displayed. Just as in the house, the basic thread in the exhibition is Schuman’s life. We end our visit in a small cinema room placed in the basement of the compound. Here we are shown a seventeen-minute-long film about Schuman’s life in the turbulent twentieth century. As in the house and the exhibition, the film binds together the personal story of Schuman with the grander history, but this time with much pathos. Schuman’s humility and dedication is highlighted. On the one hand, he is presented as the typical Monsieur Hulot, the little man desperately trying to cope with modern life (as portrayed by the film director and comedian Jacques Tati in his films); on the other hand, the film ends with celebrating this man ‘with a face like a Christian Gandhi’. The same script is presented in the house: Monsieur Hulot in the picture taken of him smiling shyly in the doorway of his modest house and Gandhi in the death bed, sacrificing his life for the cause of European unity. Contrary to the exhibition, which turns monumental, and the house, 38 Translation editors: ‘Let’s hear this call from above from Scy-Chazelles / Two steps from Schuman Founder of Hope / May this luminous shaft of light envelop his chapel / Schuman wake up, this is our most beautiful evening.’

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which highlights the sacrifice, the film has a tragic tone. To be sure, we are told in the voice-over that he devoted his life to the cause, but also that the last period of his life was a time of hardship. De Gaulle is mentioned as the villain who abandoned Schuman and the European idea. This is the most outright mention of an opponent we meet in the whole site. The Schuman House is first of all a lieu de mémoire. Commemoration is a basic rationale for the site. But it is certainly not the only one. The place is also a museum, which presents the personal and the public life of Schuman through the authentic artefacts preserved in Schuman’s original house. As in a museum, the artefacts function to ground or document the narrative. In this case, two intertwined narratives are presented, Schuman’s personal life and the history of European integration. The eggs displayed in the larder are thus made important through this intertwining. Contrary to other museums there is, however, no scientific authorization connected to the singular artefacts. The most important criteria for collecting and showing them is that they belonged to (or could have belonged to) Schuman. The scientific dimension is reserved for activities (conferences, publications) that are only indirectly linked to the house. Furthermore, the principle for selecting the artefacts is derived from the narrative. The artefacts metonymically demonstrate the character of Schuman, and how this character led him to become the father of Europe. It is thus the father figure which in the end frames the whole collection. We commemorate the father of Europe when we visit the place. But the whole site is also involved in working on the myth in the sense that it institutionalizes and popularizes the whole idea of a foundational moment which gave birth to the current European project.39 Whether it is effective depends on the impact of the museum. There is no doubt that here in Scy-Chazelles we are not at the headquarters of a European history of politics, but we must admit that some effort has been put into promoting the image of Europe’s father.

House of European History The Schuman House was mythical. The narrative and the artefacts primarily had the function of creating the myth. The new House of European History in Brussels has an entirely different approach to the relation 39 The fact that the four museum houses of Schuman, Monnet, Adenauer and De Gasperi work together under the heading of the ‘Museums of the Fathers of Europe’ demonstrates the transnational importance of the father figure in the myth.

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between myth, identity and history. The museum opened 6 May 2017, in the completely renovated Eastman Building located in Leopold Park next to the main EU institutions in Brussels’ European quarter. The building that is named after its donor, the founder of the Kodak empire, George Eastman, hosted a dental clinic for many years. Since 1985, it has been used for a number of EU institutions and services. 40 The Parliament and the advisory committee established to help create a museum consecrated to a history of Europe decided to change the name from ‘Museum of European History’ to ‘House of European History’. This metaphor is advantageous. It was used when Gorbachev addressed the European parliament during an official visit to Strasbourg in 1989. 41 ‘House’, no doubt, carries broader connotations than ‘museum’. It is less institutional and more related to identity (‘home’). The academic project team advising members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and curators, expressed some scepticism in conceiving of the house in terms of European identity. This led to the choice of focusing on memory. According to Taja Vovk van Gaal, the leader of the academic project team and present director of the House of European History, memory has a critical potential that identity might be missing. As she stated: ‘Memory is at the same time what divides and what unites Europe. This notion has a strong critical potential, which can be used to promote a dynamic dialogue with the visitors.’42 With memory, the focus shifts from the more political or more glorifying and mythic that we encountered at Schuman’s house towards a moral obligation. The critical potential must be understood as an obligation towards the difficult circles of European memory. It is a daring choice, not least because it challenges more traditional understandings within the field of history about how to narrate history. 43 At the same time, the memory 40 The idea of establishing a museum for Europe goes back to the early 2000s, but gained ground when the European Parliament in 2007 discussed a proposal for creating a museum that could strengthen a European identity. Several scholars have examined the long process that eventually led to the creation of the House of European History. Most of these scholars have been critical of the linkage they have observed between identity politics and history. They have both criticized the idea that EU should have its own museum and the process for being too exclusive; see, for instance, Kaiser, ‘The Limits’; Settele, ‘Including Exclusion’. 41 Chilton and Ilyin, ‘Metaphor’. 42 Vovk van Gaal and Dupont, ‘The House’, 48. 43 Despite the fact that the museum has only been open for a little more than a year, it has already met criticism from the academic community for a biased approach to European history with too much focus on some parts and too little on other parts of European history. According to Wolfram Kaiser, the exhibition and the narrative puts far too much weight on Eastern Europe. He speaks of an East Europeanization of the entire project at the expense of European integration

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approach creates a distance to the mythical approach that characterizes the museums of the founding fathers. Entering the House With the annex added to the original Eastman Building, the exhibition extends over five floors. Every floor is a chapter – with its own headings – in the narrative that visitors are taken through. The curators have elegantly included the building in the design of the exhibition. A huge artwork named Vortex of History and created by Boris Micka and the Todomuta studio in Spain runs through the staircases that separate the floors. The artwork consists of quotes from historical figures like Masaryk, Truman, De Gaulle and Hitler, famous artists like Ferdinand Léger and Ernst Jünger, declarations and statements by contemporary scholars like Tony Judt, Julia Kristeva and Timothy Garton Ash. 44 The quotes are presented in their original language and twist around the aluminium band that runs through the building. As with any exhibition, there are many ways to appreciate and evaluate this one. We can choose to focus on the artefacts, the museum design or the narrative that frames European history. Our guide through the five floors is an iPad containing huge amounts of information (in all European languages) about each artefact. At the different floors, we are taken through a number of sections each with separate lightning, many vitrines containing huge artefacts on the ground and presentations on the walls. My tour through the house is structured by at least four different perspectives: the overture, the memory, the history and the artefacts. Overture The exhibition begins at the second floor with an overture called ‘Shaping Europe’. We are presented with the history of the name from the ancient Greek myth of Europa and the Bull and from the first maps drawn. Europe is thus first a name of a mythical character (a kidnapped Phoenician princess), which is then used to map places. We learn that mapping Europe is a symbolic caused by the lobbying of politicians and experts from East and Central Europe (Kaiser, ‘The Limits’). Sandbjerg and Melchoir, on the other hand, claim that the exhibition is configured as a rather explicit aff irmation of EU’s motto (Unity in diversity) and thus of the dominant identity politics (Sandbjerg and Melchior, ‘House of European History’). Veronika Settele, who has analysed the conceptual work prior to the current exhibition, is critical of the exclusion of migrants and more largely of Europe’s colonial past (Settele, ‘Including Exclusion’). 44 For more information of the artwork and a list of all the quotes, see House of European History, ‘Curator’s Notes’.

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operation, nicely matching the ornaments that surround the medieval maps on display. Maps are also, however, perspectives. They reveal the position from where the world is seen. In the first section, we are presented with the challenge of Eurocentrism. As the authors of the guidebook to the exhibition prosaically write, ‘[o]ur view is usually determined by where we live’. 45 Small artefacts like an African statue of a European sailor or ‘discoverer’ (made in Benin in the sixteenth century) tell us how the Europeans moved to other continents. The guidebook frames these ‘discoveries’ as an example of the four centuries of European colonization. The overture does not provide us with a starting point for the narrative. It rather operates at a meta-level, where Europe is a myth (made by non-Europeans) and a symbol (the map) that is used to create order of the world. We are introduced to the question of identity – for instance, in the form of a lock carrying a name for a child given away. What is in the name of Europe? Memory is one way to f ill in the name, heritage another. We choose to invest in a certain past through memories. Heritage is produced by institutions that select the past worth preserving. In the guidebook, the curators directly address the question whether Europe is also a culture with a heritage. The house opens with many questions about what Europe could be. We learn that there are some fundamental aspects to be called European. This takes us from the meta-level to something more. Moving into History On the third floor we enter a period of European history termed ‘Europe: A Global Power 1789 to 1914’. To speak of the global in this period is new, but the history of an expanding and growing Europe is well-known. This is surplus Europe, innovative Europe. We are pointed towards the different artefacts with new concepts such as rule of law, Enlightenment, democracy, capitalism, nation state, and colonialism. The period begins with the major political changes brought forward by revolutionary ideologies, goes on to the cardinal role of nationalism in forming Europe politically and the larger societal changes that followed from industrialization and expansion. A huge steam hammer stands in front of a tunnel that resembles a passage of grilles – an image of the famous shopping streets highlighted by Walter Benjamin in his Arcades Project – into the metropoles with their new commercial life and their new technologies of transportation (lightning, railways) and communication (telephone, f ilm). Behind the 45 House of European History, Guidebook, 11.

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grilles, we find the backside of progress in the form of the internally and externally excluded, the colonized, the emigrants and the workers. Death masks of people of other races – from Castor’s Panopticum in Berlin that from 1869 to 1922 exhibited strange people in the typically grotesque way of the European colonial exhibitions 46 – posters of cheering Africans advertising coffee and colonizing Europeans being greeted by the natives. The guidebook emphasizes colonial expansion and the scientific racism that went along with it: ‘European colonists used various theories to justify colonialism and ideas of racial difference.’47 We also see paintings of hard-working labourers opposed to the new bourgeoisie and of some of the f ifty million Europeans who became immigrants. As shown in the exhibition, global Europe is also a history of racism, exclusion and poverty. Surplus Europe is also deficit Europe. The second section tells us a history about a Europe driven by strong historical forces (nation states industrialization, class divides, colonialism, and migration), tensions and conflicts. The history of a growing and expanding Europe is also the history of a Europe divided in many ways (in classes, in races, in nations, in people staying and people leaving). The Europe that was named and mapped in the previous section is in a sense also being deconstructed. Europe might be given an identity, a heritage or a memory, but it is also a history of diversity, division and debacle. The double perspective of constructing and deconstructing Europe is set as a thread that structures the entire exhibition. This reveals an innovative approach chosen by the curators. Europe is first a name that has to be filled out by different historical actors, and, second, a historical space that can be described through events and historical forces. To this history, they add a meta-perspective where the question of history is confronted with other ways of relating to the past: as a symbol and an argument for identity, as tied to our memories, or as something, we can turn into heritage. Whatever way we choose, we are not simply being presented with a historical narrative. Furthermore, the artefacts do not only appear as simple add-ons to this narrative: they carry their own history (that can be chosen on the iPad). While we are drawn closer to the artefacts (and many of them are chosen for their attractive force), we are also confronted with a distancing and critical perspective in the form of the constant tension between a Europe that takes shape and a Europe that dissolves.

46 For a history of Castor’s Panopticum, see: Letkemann, ‘Das Berliner Panotikum’. 47 House of European History, Guidebook, 30.

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When we follow the path through the passage, we enter a new section and a new chapter entitled ‘Europe in Ruins’. At the end of the passage we are confronted with the Browning revolver that Gavrilo Princip used to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. This section takes us through the two world wars, mass destruction, death technologies, totalitarianism vs democracy, dictatorships, civil wars, starvation, mass terror, and genocide. The dark side of European history dominates with only small flashes of lightning, such as European modernism or thoughts about Coudenhove-Kalergi’s International Paneuropean Union. It ends with a gloomy presentation of Europe destroyed by air raids and mass killings on the ground. At the end of the dark corridor we are confronted with the famous Churchill quote that ‘there must be […] a blessed act of oblivion’ and a quote by Elie Wiesel speaking of the need for memory. The question is not simply about history, but about whether we need to forget or remember. To go to section four entitled ‘Rebuilding a Divided Continent’, we take the stairs to the fourth floor. The history from 1945 reintroduces a more traditional narrative with the post-war period and the Cold War as major threads, while decolonization, rising prosperity and the welfare state are smaller threads. The leading history is mainly political (Cold War, European integration), but artefacts such as cars, furniture, and food items bring us closer to the daily life of Europeans (consumption, housing, transportation). The history of European integration is literally squeezed between the grand narrative in the form of glass pillars marking main events of integration and surrounded by the parallel histories of the two blocs (and to a lesser degree the minor threads). In the glass pillars coloured in European blue and yellow we find artefacts adding to this particular story of European integration. Next to the pillars we find a sculptured shelf with round holes in which we see busts of the European architects (Monnet, Spaak, Adenauer), and items telling part of their personal story (e.g. Monnet’s brandy). There are different ways of interpreting this design. Is European integration what holds together a divided Europe and thus the main path to take? Or is it simply one of many histories of Europe? At the end of this section, we enter a separate room for the memory of Shoah with among other artefacts a work of art – Josef’s Coat by Ritula Fränkel – which is a direct sign of memory (the coat belonged to the artist’s father, a Holocaust survivor). The curating is daring. Memory is not, as in the case of European identity politics, turned into a foundational myth for a new post-war Europe and European integration; it is on the side. 48 48 In one of the first efforts to create a museum of Europe, the exhibition ‘C’est notre histoire!’ that took place in Brussels 2007-2008 and was organized by the company Tempora, the beginning

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Not ‘Holocaust’, but the Hebrew term of ‘Shoah’ is chosen; perhaps as a way of creating distance to the myth. Not inserted in the narrative, but left as a memory that sidelines history. Memory is here dealt with as different from history. It is still there, while history passes on. We return to history again in section five on the next floor. Under the heading of ‘Shattering Certainties’ we are brought to the present. The main narrative takes us to different scenario that shatters Europe and demands a ‘re-mapping’ (to use the guidebook’s terms) for the fall of the wall and the end of the Cold War. The metaphor of shattering is well chosen. Europe is shattered by crisis, by stagnation and by the breakdown of former dictatorships in the East and the South. The different revolutions in East and Central Europe are monitored closely. Europe is also shattered by protest movements (British miners, Polish workers, women, environmentalists). The milestones of European integration in the glass pillars take more of the scene with the European Union, the euro, the failed constitution, accelerated enlargement and finally the financial crisis. We encounter a remarkable work of art by the famous Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, which shows the 80,000 pages of EU law in real size. You find yourself standing in front of several metres of paper that you can turn. Is this to show how much the EU is influencing European societies, or is it an ironic hint at the bureaucracy that many Europeans see in Brussels? We are left in a limbo. After having followed the expanding history of European integration, we return to memory or to new layers of memory. To the Holocaust we can add communism, authoritarian dictatorships and civil wars, which find their way into European heritage. Moving out of History At the top floor we come to the last section, which is the place for accolades and criticism of European integration. We have now left history and turn into politics. Visitors can go to the library, sit together on a circular bench and watch the earth turning or play very didactic games. In a sense, we are somewhat out of place. The criticism that was built into the different perspectives within the narrative is explicitly reduced to pros and cons.

was marked by a work of art that showed lines of empty boots hanging over the floor as a representation of the boots marching towards the extermination camps and of the boots left by the people exterminated by the Third Reich, see C’est notre histoire! The designers had thus chosen a more mythical frame to begin the history of Europe. For the role of this exhibition in a larger history of exhibiting Europe, see Kaiser, ‘From Great Men’.

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We have to add a final dimension to the approach developed by the curators. Almost all the artefacts that are presented in the exhibition are borrowed from the reserves of European museums. The exhibition is thus also a mosaic of existing collections of heritage from different parts of Europe. The artefacts in themselves contain a message of having already been turned into heritage. The history and the heritage that the visitors meet at the House of European History is – so to speak – on loan. They can be changed and replaced by other artefacts. The curators not only navigate between history and heritage; they also work with an extra layer of de- and re-contextualization. Heritage is moved from a regional and national setting to a transnational frame and then returned. A Europe on loan is both collected from diverse parts of Europe and temporary. Artefacts have to be returned and replaced with other ones. Europe on loan is also a constantly changing Europe.

Conclusion Two transnational museums visited, two different versions of Europe exhibited. The Schuman House is based on the myth that Europe exists to avoid conflicting between nations. The foundational moment for this Europe is the catastrophe of World War II. The values of peace and collaboration are embodied in the few, enlightened persons who were able to think beyond nationalism, and the threats precisely come from those speaking on behalf of a Europe of the nations. The other museum has replaced myth with questions of identity, memory and heritage. The Europe exhibited in the other house, the House of European History, is a Europe split between expansion and crisis, between unity and division, between war and peace, between democracy and dictatorship. This Europe is both memory of difficult pasts and efforts towards overcoming these pasts. European integration is not salvation as in the case of the Schuman House, but a project, which runs as a thin line or – on a more positive note – as a mediating factor between conflicting forces. It is a Europe able to tame the destructive forces that also belong to Europe. The narratives of the two museums have been carved out of a large history. There exist other versions of Europe, just as there are others of Europe not addressed. More than twenty years ago, Jacques Derrida warned that Europe is always more than its heading, its identity. There is always ‘the other of the heading’. 49 The House of European History presents a narrative of Europe including and devaluing others. However, is does not tell a story 49 Derrida, The Other Heading, 15.

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of Europe as part of the other. Even if the exhibition highlights the brutality of colonialism and the racism of imperialism, the others are still viewed as captured, enslaved and mistreated, but not as part of Europe. Despite the strong focus on division, that lives on through memory and heritage, the illusion of a European identity is still lingering in the back, but as should be clear not least from the so-called refugee crisis – which is more and more turned into a migrant crisis – this identity is constantly questioned and deconstructed. What we might be tempted to call the migrant question simply widens the European question. People escaping across the Mediterranean are questioning the borders of Europe and dramatically exposing past entanglements again. ‘We are here, because you were there’, they might convincingly tell the designated Europeans. At the same time, they expose Europe as ‘a borderland’.50 Those migrants that made it into Europe from the South remain the other in a multicultural Europe that is limited to unity in diversity only among the designated Europeans. As long as the European question is reduced to divisions within confined borders to the South and to the East, the history of Europe will be a presented and exhibited as a history of expansion or crisis. Even if colonialism enters this history as a difficult past, it will hardly be related to the present. The House of European History has no room for postcoloniality in present and future Europe. As in most narratives, colonialism rose with imperialism and left again with so-called decolonization. We rarely find a narrative that underlines the importance of colonialism for the constitution of modern Europe. Very few European historians or museums embrace the forceful formulation of Enrique Dussel: ‘By controlling, conquering, and violating the Other, Europe defined itself as discoverer, conquistador, and colonizer of an alterity likewise constitutive of modernity. Europe never discovered (descubierto) this Other as Other but covered over (encubierto) the Other as part of the Same.’51 To deconstruct the Eurocentrist trap inscribed in European identity, narratives and exhibitions of Europe must discover this alterity at the centre. Museums of immigration or museums of common spaces point to a mobile Europe, which transgresses borders. In the first case, the other is recognized as being here, but is still another (the eternal transitory figure of the migrant); in the second case, we deal with borderlands at the fringes. To write or to exhibit a history of Europe that deconstruct centres and transgresses borders would be to work in a space of entanglement and pluriversality where ‘Europe’ is both moved and being moved. 50 Balibar, ‘Europe’. 51 Dussel, The Invention, 12.

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Bibliography Assmann, Aleida, ‘Europe’s Divided Memory’, in Uilleam Blacker, Alexander Etkind and Julie Fedor (eds), Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 25-42. Balibar, Etienne, ‘Europe: Vanishing Mediator’, Constellations 10:3 (2003), 312-333. Bhambra, Gurminder K., ‘Whither Europe?’, Interventions 18:2 (2016), 187-202. Blumenberg, Hans, Work on Myth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). Buettner, Elizabeth, Europe after Empire: Decolonization, Society and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) Centre Européen Robert Schuman. Maison de l’Europe Scy-Chazelles website, at: http://www.centre-robert-schuman.org/cers/maison-robert-schuman/maisonrobert-schuman.php?lang=fr (accessed 23 August 2018). C’est notre histoire! 50 ans d’aventure européenne (Brussels: Tempora, 2007). Chilton, Paul and Mikhail Ilyin, ‘Metaphor in Political Discourse: The Case of the “Common European House”’, Discourse & Society 4:1 (1993), 7-31. Churchill, Winston S., The Sinews of Peace: Post-war Speeches by Winston S. Churchill (London: Cassels, 1948). Conseil Général de la Moselle, La Maison de Robert Schuman: Père de l’Europe (n.d.). Constantin, Cornelia, ‘Du particularisme regional au particularisme mémoriel: Robert Schuman, Alcide De Gasperi et la mémoire historique des grands “hommes de frontière”’, in Sylvain Schirmann (ed.) Robert Schuman et les Pères de l’Europe: Cultures politiques et années de formation (Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2008), 269-284. ‘Declaration of 9 May 1950’, in Pascal Fontaine, A New Idea for Europe: The Schuman Declaration 1950-2000 (Luxembourg: Off icial Publications of the European Communities, 2000), 36-37. Declaration on European Identity (Copenhagen, 14 December 1973), Bulletin of the European Communities 12 (1973), 118-122. Delanty, Gerard, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995). Derrida, Jacques, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). Dussel, Enrique, The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of ‘the Other’ and the Myth of Modernity (New York: Continuum, 1995). Forchtner, Bernard, and Christoffer Kølvraa, ‘Peace and Unity: Imagining Europe in the Founding Fathers’ House Museums’, in Anna Reading and Tamar Katriel (eds), Cultural Memories of Nonviolent Struggle: Powerful Times (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) 128-146.

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Gowan, Peter, and Perry Anderson (eds), The Question of Europe (London: Verso, 1997). Heffernan, Michael, The Meaning of Europe: Geography and Geopolitics (London: Arnold, 1998). House of European History, ‘Curator’s Notes: The Vortex of History’, at: https:// historia-europa.ep.eu/en/focus/curators-notes-vortex-history (accessed 27 August 2018). House of European History, Guidebook: Permanent Exhibition: European Union (2017). Judt, Tony, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005). Kaiser, Wolfram, ‘From Great Men to Ordinary Citizens? The Biographical Approach to Narrating European Integration in Museums’, Culture Unbound 3 (2011), 385-400. Kaiser, Wolfram, ‘The Limits of Cultural Engineering: Actors and Narratives in the European Parliament’s House of European History Project’, JCMS 55:3 (2017), 518-534. Leggewie, Claus, ‘Seven Circles of European Memory’, in Peter Meusburger, Michael Heffernan and Edgar Wunder (eds), Cultural Memories: The Geographical Point of View (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 123-143. Letkemann, Peter, ‘Das Berliner Panotikum: Namen Häuser und Schicksale’, Mitteilungen des Vereins für die Geschichte Berlin 67-70 (1971-1974), 316-326. Macdonald, Sharon, Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today (London: Routledge, 2013). Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). Onar, Nora Fisher, and Kalypso Nicolaïdis, ‘The Decentring Agenda: Europe as a Post-colonial Power’, Cooperation and Conflict 48:2 (2013), 283-303. Pagden, Anthony (ed.), The Idea of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Perchoc, Philippe, ‘European Memory beyond the State: Baltic, Russian and European Memory Interactions (1991-2009)’, Memory Studies (2018), 1-22. Roth, François, Robert Schuman: Du Lorrain des frontières au père de l’Europe (Paris: Fayard, 2008). Sandbjerg, Marie, and Marie Riegels Melchior, ‘House of European History: mellem paneuropæisk og postnational erindringspraksis’, Kulturstudier 1 (2018), 140-166. Settele, Veronika, ‘Including Exclusion in European Memory? Politics of Remembrance at the House of European History’, Journal of Contemporary European Studies 23:3 (2015), 405-416. Shahin, Jamal, and Michael Wintle (eds), The Idea of a United Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).

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Smith, Anthony, Nations and Nationalisms in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). Van der Dussen, Jan, and Kevin Wilson (eds), The History of the Idea of Europe (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1993). Vovk van Gaal, Taja, and Christine Dupont, ‘The House of European History’, in Bodil Axelsson (ed.), Entering the Minefields: The Creation of New History Museums in Europe (Linköping: Linköping University Electronic Press, 2012), 43-53. Wintle, Michael, Culture and Identity in Europe: Perceptions of Divergence and Unity in Past and Present (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996). Wintle, Michael, The Image of Europe: Visualizing Europe in Cartography and Iconography throughout the Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Wintle, Michael, ‘Visualizing Europe from 1900 to the 1950s: Identity on the Move’, in Mark Hewitson and Matthew D’Auria (eds), Europe in Crisis (New York: Berghahn, 2012), 205-225. Zombory, Máté, ‘The Birth of the Memory of Communism: Memorial Museums in Europe’, Nationalities Papers 45:6 (2017), 1028-1046.

About the Author Jan Ifversen, Associate Professor of European Studies, Aarhus University. [email protected]

12 Constructing the European Cultural Space A Matter of Eurocentrism? Claske Vos

Abstract Since the 1970s and 1980s, the European Union (EU) has invested in culture to thicken European identity. Through different ‘technologies of power’ the EU has installed shared approaches to culture meant to facilitate the creation of a European cultural space. This chapter examines the repercussions of this Europeanization of culture and asks, Does the appearance of the European cultural space signify patterns of Eurocentrism? It will become clear that the answer is twofold. EU intervention in culture is, on the one hand, hegemonic, in the hands of a few, and seen through a Western normative lens. On the other hand, it provides a space in which actors can freely manoeuvre, strategically act, and be creative regarding its final interpretation. Keywords: Eurocentrism, European Union, cultural policy, European cultural space, governmentalization

Introduction From the 1970s onwards, the different institutions of the European Communities have striven for attention to culture as an equal feature of European integration, alongside the traditional economic and political characteristics. Since then, through various means such as the establishment of cultural programmes, European conventions and charters, Europe-wide research networks and other funding mechanisms, the groundwork has been laid for a European infrastructure of cultural production. Several initiatives

Brolsma, Marjet, Robin de Bruin, and Matthijs Lok (eds): Eurocentrism in European History and Memory. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789463725521_ch12

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have been launched by policymakers, organizations and intellectuals to promote a shared European cultural space in order to ‘thicken’ EU citizens’ rather weak European identity. Despite the insistence on subsidiarity, these initiatives increasingly reveal that by means of its supervisory role, the European Commission ‘governs at a distance’. Through adherence to funding criteria, insisting on the principle of shared management, and the obligation of transnational partnerships, the Commission directly and indirectly determines the form and content of the initiatives that are developed. This chapter exposes the ‘instances of friction’ that have emerged due to this governmentalization of culture and discusses the repercussions of that friction in terms of affiliation to the European cultural space. If the Commission directly and indirectly imposes approaches to culture in- and outside its political confines and considers these as more suitable than other approaches, how does this impact on the ways in which different countries relate to the European cultural space? To what extent does this display a continuing Eurocentrism in which the Commission operates in rather hegemonic ways and increasingly starts to marginalize other approaches to culture? Answers to these questions are provided by first of all focusing on the shifts that have taken place in European cultural policy from the 1950s to the current period. Why is the construction of a European cultural space considered relevant and what does it entail? The chapter then focuses on the different ‘technologies of power’ that the European Commission has used to influence European cultural initiatives. Finally, it examines the instances of friction that have emerged due to the interventions of the Commission and show how these instances have been both constraining as well as empowering for the different actors involved. It will become clear that Eurocentrism can only be partially related to European cultural policy, depending upon the ways in which participants position themselves in relation to the European cultural space.

European Cultural Policy: A Twofold Undertaking Since the 1950s the first investments in culture were made on a European level. Closely following UNESCO, the Council of Europe adopted its first Culture Convention in 1954, arguing that culture was a common good that needed to be protected and celebrated. Particularly in this period shortly after World War II the need for a reciprocal appreciation of Europe’s cultural diversity was stressed, combined with a need to safeguard European culture and to promote national contributions to Europe’s common

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cultural heritage.1 International cooperation in the field was emphasized to raise more awareness about the advantages of taking part of a larger, more encompassing cultural space that would transcend state borders. The idea behind the European cultural space has been to take further the notion of the national cultural space which has been (imagined as) given by a binary correspondence of space and culture, territoriality and peoplehood.2 European cultural policy urged for new ways to think of spatiality in its connection to culture and identity formation.3 This notion of a European cultural space, determined by transnational cooperation in the field of culture, was taken up by the EU at a later stage. When the first discussions about the role of culture in European integration emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, this had to do with growing desire to ‘thicken’ the identity of the European Communities. It had become increasingly clear that European integration would not emerge as a logical consequence of economic, legal and technical measures. At the time, there was a shared concern about the legitimacy of European integration. Europe was suffering from the Oil Crisis and the Cold War, and had to resolve disputes over enlargement. In these circumstances, those experts that were asked to map Europe’s situation agreed that the EU had to look for new means to deepen European integration. Slowly but surely, the representatives of the different member states expressed the thought that culture could play a role in this. As argued in the Adonnino Report (1985): ‘There was a need for a concrete manifestation of European solidarity in the daily lives of European citizens’4 – a manifestation of Europe that would go beyond the Europe that was held together by rules, institutions and agreements. Culture was presented as a way of doing this. These concerns about the legitimacy of European integration led to the first initiatives in the late 1980s and early 1990s that literally displayed the European Communities.5 Additionally, in 1985 the Directorate-General for Education and Culture (DG EAC) was established. These early cultural initiatives display an attempt to imitate traditional processes of nation state and community building. In terms of content, a rather Eurocentric 1 Council of Europe, ‘The European Cultural Convention’. 2 Calhoun, Social Theory. 3 Sassatelli, ‘European Cultural Space’, 226. 4 Commission of the European Communities, ‘Report from the Ad Hoc Committee’. 5 I.e. TV channel, a Euro lottery, a flag, an anthem, a currency, a driver’s license, a passport, sports events, European prizes, exchange projects, the launch of 9 May (Europe Day), the European Capital of Culture, European Heritage Days, and the establishment of European Cultural Routes.

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interpretation of European culture was presented, determined by traditional interpretations of Western civilization whose origins were located in ancient Greece, Rome, and Christendom. European history was portrayed as the unfolding of an evolutionary chain of events, starting in the Neolithic period, then moving forward in a march of progress from classical Greece and Rome, to Christianity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, European conquest and discovery, individualism, and the rise of liberal democracy.6 This EU historiography was both teleological and highly selective in what it included and excluded from this canon of elite references. The result was a Eurocentric construction of the past, which largely ignored the darker side of European modernity, such as Europe’s legacy of slavery, imperialism, and racism.7 Over the years, this Eurocentric approach to culture started to change. Culture became increasingly presented to display Europe’s unity in diversity. The idea was not to present the culture of the European people, but the many cultures that Europe accommodates. This focus on diversity would allow for the establishment of the so-called ‘Europe of the peoples’8 and in the programmes that followed, the focus gradually focused on citizen participation and the enhancement of European cultural and linguistic diversity.9 To stimulate such participation and to legitimize EU investment in the field of culture, the emphasis was put on the benefits to be gained. Additionally, in line with the adoption of the Lisbon Strategy in 1999, culture became increasingly seen as an asset, in terms of its potential to promote European growth and competitiveness and to facilitate other objectives of the EU such as cohesion, regional cooperation and stability. This turn to the ‘expedience’ of culture10 reflects more general trends in the field of cultural policy – nationally and internationally – in which ‘the main values that underpin cultural policy have become based on economics and managerial theory to measure performance, rather than seeing culture as a good in itself’.11 A dual rationale behind European investments in culture could since then be distinguished which, on the one hand, refers to the ways in which culture contributes to European identification and, on the other hand, to the economic and social potential of Europe’s cultural sector.12 6 Shore, ‘“In uno plures” (?)’, 18. 7 Delanty, Inventing Europe, 111; Pieterse, ‘Fictions of Europe’, 4. 8 Commission of the European Union, ‘A Community of Cultures’, 3. 9 Staiger, ‘The European Capitals’. 10 Yúdice, The Expedience of Culture. 11 O’Brien, Cultural Policy. 12 Littoz-Monnet, ‘Agenda-setting’, 508.

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This dual rationale is the outcome of an increasing need to legitimize investment in culture when budgets are generally tight. As such, a vocabulary is used that emphasizes European intercultural exchange, as expressed in notions of ‘European identity’, ‘tolerance’ and ‘cultural dialogue’, while also presenting a normative framework through which funding demands can be communicated to policymakers and officials. It acts as a prescription by politicians, called for by institutional necessity and sustained by a growing public discourse that is hard to challenge. 13 Due to these attempts to legitimize culture, the centre of gravity of this vocabulary increasingly started to move towards the more functional value of culture. Yet, the value of culture to stimulate European identif ication by cultural participation never vanished. It still plays a considerable role in many of the cultural initiatives that are developed, and particularly in terms of the general discourse used.14 In some cases, this discourse is still marked by rather Eurocentric interpretations. As illustrated in the current presentation of the European Heritage Label: ‘European Heritage sites are milestones in the creation of today’s Europe. Spanning from the dawn of civilisation to the Europe we see today, these sites celebrate and symbolize European ideals, values, history and integration.’15

Supervising Culture: The Governmentalization of Culture in Europe This dual rationale behind EU cultural initiatives has slowly but steadily started to become integrated in cultural programmes all over Europe despite the limited capacities of the EU to harmonize legislation and to directly impose its measures in its member states. In other words, the cultural sector in Europe has become gradually governmentalized.16 Governments have gradually started to change their institutional structure of cultural policy according to EU standards and regulations. Additionally, activist networks have been established that lobby for the formalized establishment of a European cultural policy, and there has been an increasing effort of civil society organizations to engage in international exchange and cooperation 13 14 15 16

Karaça, ‘The Art’, 131. Lähdismäki, ‘Rhetoric of Unity’. ‘European Heritage Label’. I.e. Barnett, ‘Culture’; McGuigan, Rethinking Cultural Policy; Shore ‘“In uno plures” (?)’.

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in the field and move away from national frameworks of action.17 What we see is that at least to a certain degree, the EU manages to supervise culture by means of its regulatory practices, and governs extended social and economic spaces without possessing the administrative apparatus or financial capacity of the state. Through different technologies of power – sometimes rather implicitly – the EU has installed shared approaches to culture with the principal aim of creating a space of cooperation in which different kinds of actors understand one another in terms of procedures, approaches and objectives.

Technologies of Power One of the most powerful regulatory practices in the field of culture used by the EU is the creation of various funding schemes. These funding schemes ask for adherence to specific criteria, insight in the current rationales behind policymaking, and acquaintance with the discourse and vocabulary used by international actors. In these funding schemes, the European Commission acts as gatekeeper in the allocation and monitoring of funding for projects and thus determines the accepted behaviour in the field. Even though participating states have taken up these projects voluntarily and are ultimately responsible for the implementation of these projects, they are requested to adhere to the rules and regulations attached to these funding schemes and might have to face consequences when they fail to comply with them. These funding schemes for culture are not only accommodated under the DG EAC. Investments in culture are organized horizontally, which means that most of the directorates-general of the European Commission reserve parts of their funding schemes for cultural projects.18 Depending on their overall aim – such as enlargement, agriculture, research and cohesion – the criteria for the funding schemes for cultural initiatives have been employed to achieve different kinds of objectives.19 Another technology of power of the European Commission – related to the above funding criteria – is the insistence on the principle of shared management. Shared management means that the Commission delegates 17 Karaça, ‘The Art’, 122. 18 As stated in paragraph 4 of Article 151 of the Maastricht Treaty: ‘The Community shall take cultural aspects into account in its action under other provisions of this Treaty, in particular in order to respect and to promote the diversity of its cultures’ (Commission of the European Communities, ‘Treaty on the European Union’). 19 See Vos, ‘European Integration’, 677-680.

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all responsibility for the allocation of funding to the eligible countries that have to make sure to set up management and control systems which have to comply with the requirements of the funding instruments, ensuring that the system functions effectively. The Commission plays a supervisory role making sure that the arrangements governing the management and control system are compliant.20 As supervisor, the Commission asks for regular reporting in the form of strategy papers, strategic frameworks and operational programmes. In these reports the conditions, priorities and targets for financial assistance are spelled out for the funding period of seven years. Based on these reports, the Commission reviews progress made towards delivering expected results with a focus on outputs and outcomes. Work in the field of culture has become considerably bureaucratized and harmonized as a result of these mechanisms. It involves regular paperwork, knowledge of EU templates and adherence to the objectives of the respective directorate-general. A final technology of power of the European Commission is its insistence on partnerships in the cultural initiatives that they fund. The directoratesgeneral insist that transnational cooperation leads to competition for different funding instruments, in which so-called ‘best practices’ become guiding templates for future activities. The expectation is that ‘learning by emulation’21 will take place. To increase chances for funding, examples of successful countries are followed which eventually leads to more convergence of EU goals. Another form of European partnership in the field is the open method of coordination (OMC).22 In the field of culture OMC means that working groups have been established consisting of experts, civil servants and representatives of the governments from different EU member states. In these working groups European priorities in the field of culture are discussed, resulting in reports that form the basis behind the Work Plan on Culture, which presents the national- and EU-level priorities and activities for the funding period of seven years. This exchange of good practice, the definition of priorities and the establishment of a shared discourse has led to a European framework shaping the conditions within which national policies and actors have to operate to become eligible for European funding. Whoever takes part in these partnerships, feeds EU cultural action.23 20 European Parliament and the Council, ‘Regulation’, 35. 21 Dolowitz and Marsh, ‘Learning from Abroad’. 22 This mode of governance was introduced at the Lisbon European Council in 2000 and meant to achieve greater convergence towards EU goals in those areas in which member states aimed to preserve a high amount of sovereignty. 23 Psychogiopoulou, ‘Introduction’, 4.

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Governing at Distance This governmentalization of culture which is the result of the above described technologies of power reveals an interesting dynamic in which policies which seem to be bottom-up in nature and grounded in the principle of subsidiarity end up being rather top-down.24 In their attempts to obtain EU funding the applying agents are asked to appropriate European discourses on identity, stress the expediency of culture and look for ways in which culture can contribute to wider EU objectives. So even though these agents voluntarily decide to participate in EU-funded cultural initiatives, they are at the same time urged to narrate the Europeanness of their projects in rather prescribed ways that differ from more common local approaches to culture. Additionally, the local agents have to be committed to the EU’s cultural politics and be willing to set up management and control systems which accordingly have to comply with the requirements of the funding instruments. They have no other option than to engage in the bureaucratization and harmonization of culture according to conventions provided by the EU even though implementation is still a local affair. Finally, they must enter partnerships which influences the ways in which these projects evolve. On the one hand, it means finding the best candidates to set up projects, co-constructing European culture and establishing the best balance between resources in terms of knowledge, finances and experienced people. On the other hand, it means accepting inequality, as it is a playfield of winners and losers in which many usual (and regular) suspects engage while others remain at the margins of the European cultural space. In its role as supervisor, the European Commission governs at a distance and challenges the frontiers of sovereignty in a policy field generally perceived as confined to the state.

Determining Friction: The Repercussions of EU Interventions in the Field of Culture This governing at a distance of the European Commission and EU intervention in local settings inevitably leads to what Anna Tsing has called ‘zones of awkward engagement’.25 These zones emerge due to the friction which occurs at those places where peoples, ideas, practices and policies meet. 24 Lähdesmäki, ‘The EU’s Explicit’, 411. 25 Tsing, Friction, ix.

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Regarding the effects of the EU interventions in the field of culture, three expressions of friction can be distinguished that have different repercussions in terms of the ways in which countries relate to the European cultural space and in terms of perceived Eurocentrism. Within the emerging ‘zones of awkward engagement’ some of the participants in the EU-funded initiatives feel drawn into the periphery, always being dependent on others that define the European cultural space. For them friction is constraining. Others feel that they operate at the centre of this space or at least move towards it and feel as if they actively co-construct the European cultural space. For them, friction is empowering. Yet others feel as being in-between – always moving in and out of the European cultural space, being near as well as far, participating while being restricted. These diverging repercussions reveal that participating in the European cultural space is not the same for each participant, and that Eurocentrism – in which the European cultural space is a space superior to other spaces and determined by power inequalities privileging some over others – holds valid for some, but is refuted by others.

Instances of Friction The first instance of friction is the outcome of the spatial differences that exist concerning the political organization of culture on the member state level. On one end of the scale, some states follow a liberal policy model and prefer limited state intervention in the cultural field, with delegated ‘arm’s-length’ arts funding systems and some reliance on free market forces. The UK and the Scandinavian countries are cases in point. On the other hand, France and the Mediterranean states are characterized by state interventionist traditions in the cultural sector, with a strong and often centralized public sector and pronounced political control over the market. Additionally, in most of the post-communist countries in East and Southeast Europe governmental intervention, particularly in language and nationality questions, has become increasingly common. Yet in federal countries such as Germany and Belgium, cultural sovereignty remains mostly with regional and local authorities, complicating the delegation of competencies to national or supranational level.26 These diverging policy models cause zones of awkward engagement as different ideas about how to organize cultural policy converge, clash or become negotiated in transnational EU-funded initiatives. Particularly for those countries that use different policy models 26 See Littoz-Monnet, ‘Agenda-setting’; Staiger, ‘The European Capitals’.

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than the liberal policy model represented in most EU initiatives, participating in EU-funded projects means a continuous adaptation to new systems. Another example of friction which is related to the diverging policy models, results from the difference between forerunners and those lagging behind in the field concerning the possibilities to obtain EU funding for cultural projects. When comparing the different projects funded by the Creative Europe Programme from 2014 onwards we see that countries like France, the UK, Germany and Italy are project leaders of most of the funded programmes.27 These countries have strong cultural and creative sectors28 and have proven skilful in complying to the criteria required by the Commission. In other words, they have proven their discursive capacity to align their positions with those of the European Commission. Additionally, they have the status as trustworthy partners in terms of being able to deal with the bureaucracy that EU funding imposes, as well as the availability of human and financial resources to guarantee the sustainability of the programmes. Here, the countries display their procedural capacity. What we see is that new power fields emerge which are determined by competence to adjust to EU standards in terms of content and procedures. For some, this means the opening of new windows of opportunity and having a real voice in the co-construction of the European cultural space. They set the agenda in terms of which kind of projects are launched. For others it means watching trends in the fields of culture from the sideline, always experiencing the need to catch up with the rest. For yet others it means indeed ‘learning by emulation’: leaving the burden of EU bureaucracy to others while being able to fully participate in the partnerships provided.29 Finally, a last expression of friction emerges due to the variety of actors on different levels that participate in the EU-funded cultural initiatives and their ideas differ regarding what they want to gain from participating in these initiatives. This variety of actors is a direct consequence of the technologies of power that the EU uses in the field of culture. The spread of funding mechanisms all over the EU demands that several directoratesgeneral present their policy objectives through culture and integrate these in their funding criteria. Additionally, the variety of funding schemes attracts different kinds of actors to apply for funding and take up responsibility for 27 See: https://eacea.ec.europa.eu/creative-europe/selection-results_en (accessed 1 October 2018). 28 The UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain ‘account for almost three quarters of the economy of the cultural and creative sector in Europe’ (KEA European Affairs, ‘The Economy’, 66). 29 Vos, ‘European Integration’.

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the implementation of the funded projects. For example, the structural funds provide regions and municipalities with responsibilities in the field of culture. In sectors such as the media, the many actors of the cultural industries steer projects in certain directions. Furthermore, several grassroots movements, lobby organizations, and cultural entrepreneurs set the agenda for European cultural policies in partnerships that transcend the boundaries of the member states. The fact that most EU funding schemes ask for co-funding provides national governments with a considerable role in the eventual interpretation and implementation of the programmes. Additionally, the demand for shared management and partnerships leads to new combination of actors and countries cooperating in new fields of cultural action. Mediators between the European Commission and national governments such as the so-called Creative Europe desks and European integration offices have become important actors who translate the aims and ambitions of all partners involved into well-functioning programmes. All these actors play a role in Europe’s cultural landscape. Their encounters and different ideas about how to use and interpret culture in Europe determine the constellation of the European cultural space.

The Repercussions of Friction The trends described above regarding the friction that has emerged as a result of the implementation of EU-funded cultural initiatives impact on the ways in which countries relate to the European cultural space and whether they perceive this space as a Eurocentric expression of the EU. Some participants feel drawn into the periphery and see themselves as largely excluded from the European cultural space. This particularly rings true for those countries that operate with different cultural models than those asked for by the EU, such as post-socialist countries and Southern/Mediterranean countries. Being a cultural actor in a country in which ‘things work differently’, the feeling dominates that participating in EU-funded projects means working as actors on the sidelines, which are still to a large extent dependent on what is happening at the ‘core’ of Europe. For participants from these kinds of settings, participation in EU-funded initiatives is regularly perceived as a burden instead of an added value. They have to introduce liberal approaches to cultural policy in centralist systems and create new consortia between public and private sectors. They often do not receive sufficient state support, their resources are scarce, and the diverging strategies used in the field of cultural policy makes long-term investments complicated. Taking part in

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the European cultural space is continuously delayed and obstructed and perceived as a distant prospect despite participation in these programmes. Sometimes this feeling of operating from the margins is literally felt. For example, candidate member states in Southeast Europe are allowed to participate in EU-funded cultural initiatives, but do this whilst not being part of the EU. For them, adherence to funding criteria has become perceived as an alternative form of conditionality, and a continuous reminder that the region is not yet capable in developing cultural initiatives.30 These countries experience EU funding criteria as attempts to help them adjust to the centre and speed up their modernization31 and thus as a confirmation that they are lagging behind. In other words: they feel drawn into the periphery. In the words of Darka Radosavljević, the director of the independent artistic association Remont in Belgrade, Serbia: A problem we are facing for many years regarding European cultural policy is that European standards are simply assumed. There is no attention for countries with alternative pathways to cultural policy. So, what happens is that we legally and formally participate in these projects while realistically, we cannot comply to the rules that are set. […] We are constantly lagging behind, and we will be lagging behind in the future as EU standards continue to proceed us. We will thus be constantly on the margins.32

These kinds of discrepancies in approaches to culture and the institutional organization of culture lead to asymmetries in which countries that do not match with the structures asked for by the EU are requested to change and ‘modernize’ their approaches to culture. The effect of this urge to meet EU requirements has been that many projects are developed that try to tick as many of the boxes imposed by the European Commission in terms of values, objectives, standards and organization. Several cultural initiatives are developed based on strict adherence to the formats asked for on the EU level. As a result, many of the cultural projects that are developed become what Gisela Welz has called ‘European products’: social constructions infused with EU values, standards and regulatory power.33 Parameters are set as to which priorities should be touched upon, how programmes 30 Ibid. 31 Blagojević, Knowledge Production, 99. 32 Interview with Darka Radosavljević, the director of Remont, Belgrade, August 2016. 33 Welz, European Products, 4-5.

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should be organized, and how policies should operate. It has led to the phenomenon of ‘Eurospeak’, an overly bureaucratic and ambiguous way of speaking characterized by an unwarranted use of complicated terms.34 As Elisabeth Niklasson observed in her research about EU cultural heritage projects, many projects are ‘trimmed to be EU projects’.35 The participating institutions have individual plans that they fit into an EU mould, but only in the sense that they are ‘designing an umbrella’ to make it look like an EU project.’36 Additionally, many actors decide not to participate in EU-funded projects and look for alternative routes. They make use of their pre-existing networks and try to find funding through other means. The European cultural space – as determined by EU funding – is just one of the options to develop projects, but definitely not the most relevant one. Alternative options might be more attractive. Another repercussion of the friction that occurs as a result of implementing EU-funded initiatives is that it offers tools to broaden local perspectives and facilitates a move towards the centre of the European cultural space. The fact that the EU insists on cooperation in European partnerships has for example helped in the establishment of and engagement in diplomatic networks. Even though these networks are often asymmetrical in nature in terms of access to resources and the political organization of culture, this is not always perceived as negative. Particularly in those states in which cultural policy is more centralized, in which resources are scarce and in which clear strategies in the field of culture are lacking, participation in partnerships means – in particular, for the non-governmental sector – engaging in projects that would otherwise have been impossible to execute. Additionally, cooperation in these partnerships is for many cultural workers an advantage as it provides opportunities to learn without dealing with all the administrative work. For these actors, the cultural governance of the Commission is not necessarily seen as negative, but as a means to change local approaches to culture. It provides an incentive for change which cannot be provided by many other actors or institutions. As illustrated by a local representative of an EU-funded cultural project:

34 The term, also called ‘eurojargon’, was coined by English native speakers to express their dislike of EU intervention. An EU homepage says the following about the topic: ‘People in the EU institutions […] are in the bad habit of using words and expressions that they alone understand. We call these words and expressions “eurojargon”’, at: http://collection.europarchive.org/ dnb/20070702132253/europa.eu/abc/eurojargon/index_sv.htm (accessed 1 October 2018). 35 Niklasson, Funding Matters, 148. 36 Ibid., 148-149.

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The introduction of European approaches to culture is a good thing. We need this to improve our cultural sector, strengthen cultural diplomacy and f ind new possibilities to fund cultural initiatives in the region. However, at present, local conditions hinder this process and structural change from happening.37

Additionally, in these settings local pioneers use the transnational partnerships to develop plans and ideas that are not supported by their national governments. EU partnerships are thus an opportunity to operate more independently from the state. This has become particularly visible in postsocialist countries where these pioneers formed a counterweight to the authoritarian regimes that emerged when the systems collapsed by means of the actions they initiated.38 These actors in the independent cultural scene have always relied on international funding. As such they are quite skilful in applying for funds and, due to their large networks, it is relatively easy for them to engage in European partnerships. EU-funded initiatives make bottom-up change possible and provide possibilities to counteract the continuous ‘lagging behind’ of the more official governmental actors in the field of culture. For some sectors the European cultural space has always been at the centre of their activities. Actors working in the field of theatre, contemporary dance and art traditionally rely on the existence of a European cultural space that crosses national state borders and see this space as their core. Residences and performances abroad are part of their yearly activities and a certain form of nomadism is what defines their work. Moreover, some countries have always been at the centre of the European cultural space. These countries often have a long history of cultural diplomacy being expressed in institutes such as the Goethe Institute, the British Council and the Alliance Française. They have a long history of international cooperation in the field, and a considerable availability of resources in the form of finances, staff, institutions and knowledge. The long-term presence and activity of these countries at the core of the European cultural space has provided them with the opportunity to use EU funding primarily for diplomatic purposes. They use the European cultural space to present their national interests abroad and find partners to fulfil these interests. The friction caused by transnational cooperation stimulated by EU funding in the field of culture is empowering (and not constraining) for the actors that are naturally manoeuvring within the European cultural space. 37 Interview with the director of the Kolarac Foundation, Belgrade, July 2016. 38 Dragičević-Šešić, ‘Cultural Policies’, 41.

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A final repercussion of the frictions emerging from participation in EU-funded cultural initiatives, is a general feeling of ambiguity of moving continuously in- and outside the European cultural space. This is particularly felt by the many mediators that manoeuvre between the state and the EU or by those actors in the field of culture that are also part of public institutions such as museums, universities and archives. These actors feel included as well as excluded, being in as well as out, as they continuously have to compromise local and European approaches to culture. This particularly rings true for the so-called ‘front-line workers’39 that act as EU representatives in local settings. Most important ‘front-line workers’ are the Creative Europe desks, the EU delegations, and the EU integration offices. These actors have to convey the requirements of the European Commission to local participants and are responsible for the interpretation and implementation of EU-funded initiatives on the state level. The fact that the EU tends to govern at a distance, complicates the work of these ‘front-line workers’. As an employee at SEIO explains this: Shared management means that the Commission leaves the responsibility for the funded projects in the hands of the target countries while not fully understanding the circumstances in local settings. This bring us in a rather difficult position. We have to mediate messages of the Commission and take responsibilities of funded projects which often clash with local conditions and have to do this while the Commission is hardly ever present. 40

This difficulty in implementing EU approaches in settings where other approaches prevail has also been observed by Jaka Primorac, Aleksandra Uzelac and Paško Bilić, who argue that a simple transfer of EU strategic goals and legislative measures often proves problematic as it creates unintended consequences in different national contexts in which many other explicit public policies influence the field of culture. 41 While there is a growing participation in the European cultural space in the form of ‘Eurospeak’, networks and transnational projects, many actors still feel utterly bound to the local, while the European Commission remains distant. 39 Clarke et al., Making Policy Move, 25-27. 40 Interview with the coordinator of the Department for Cross-Border and Transnational Cooperation Programmes, SEIO, Belgrade, July 2016. 41 Primorac, Uzelac and Bilić, ‘European Union’, 7.

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A final expression of this positioning of being sui generis in relation to the European cultural space is that there is a selectivity to be discerned in which actors strategically appropriate those aspects of EU-funded cultural initiatives that they consider beneficial while not drastically changing approaches to culture. The increasing governmentalization of culture through EU cultural initiatives does not lead to a wholesale adoption of EU norms by the participating countries, but a selective and strategic appropriation of some parts of the EU rhetoric, and the rejection of others. This relates to the earlier described ‘trimming of EU projects’ in which individual plans are shaped to fit into an EU cast. There is a wish to take part in the European cultural space, but only to a certain degree. 42 Additionally, once funding is granted, programmes often take their own course and are interpreted accordingly. Of course, the programmes are supervised and monitored by the European Commission, however, the Commission can only steer, not impose. Shared management provides frameworks of policymaking, but no guarantees regarding its eventual implementation. 43 So what we see is that even though EU approaches to culture have introduced new codes of conduct in Europe and new ways of ‘talking culture’ in Europe,44 there is also resistance and agency and the ability to freely move in- and outside of the European cultural space.

A Matter of Eurocentrism? Since the 1970s, the EU has tried to invest in culture to stimulate identif ication with the European unif ication project and to invest in the economic and social potential of Europe’s cultural sector. It has done so by means of different projects and programmes. At first, it primarily aimed to make the EU literally visible in the daily lives of European citizens through symbols, contests, rituals and the introduction of a passport closely following the classical model of nineteenth-century nation state building. Later on, it started to focus on the notion of unity and diversity, on citizen participation and on the more functional aspects of culture as a 42 This was also observed by Merje Kuus in her study of EU conditionality policy in East-Central Europe in which she argues that postsocialist transformations involve not a wholesale adoption of Western norms by the accession countries, but a highly selective and strategic appropriation of some parts of Western rhetoric, and the rejection of others, by specific groups in these states. Kuus, ‘Europe’s Eastern Expansion’, 478. 43 Vos, ‘European Integration’. 44 Karaça,’ Governance’, 125.

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means to stimulate more general integration processes, such as economic development, institution building and regional cooperation. Due to the investments made in the field of culture, a general governmentalization of culture has taken place across Europe. By means of several technologies of power such as funding mechanisms, the principle of shared management and partnerships, specific forms of knowledge and techniques have become introduced and have started to determine much of the approaches in the cultural field. This governmentalization of culture and the governing at a distance by the European Commission has never been a smooth process. It has led to several instances of friction caused by the encounter between multiple approaches to culture resulting from the interaction between different actors on different levels. These instances of friction display the existence of different political models used in the field of culture in which some of these models were better aligned to the approaches used in the EU programme. They revealed diverse disparities and hierarchies between the different European countries in which some were forerunners and other were lagging behind. Finally, they revealed the variety of partners that were engaging in these projects, with different ideas, backgrounds, objectives and positions in the field of European cultural policy. The repercussions of these expressions of friction are constraining as well as empowering. Some actors experience them as a confirmation that they are by no means part of the European cultural space and that they will always operate at the margins. From this perspective, the conclusion can easily be drawn that European cultural policy and the European cultural space it promotes is Eurocentric. It seems to be a space only reserved for some, while others remain on the sideline. Additionally, it seems to be a space which is primarily interpreted and hence dominated by a few powerful European actors who have shaped it in terms of form and content. Other actors can participate, but primarily as partners, not leaders, and in much harsher conditions than the core countries as their local circumstances do not match with the one promoted by the EU. As such it is a space marked by imbalance. However, this is one side of the coin. Other tendencies can also be distinguished which to an extent counteract the Eurocentrist inclination. Despite the increasing governmentalization of culture – which is considered hegemonic by many – there is still considerable room to resist these approaches as there are other means to engage in transnational projects in the field of culture. Additionally, many consider this increasing harmonization of culture as useful as it allows for new forms of cooperation that would not have been possible if certain standards were not set. It

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makes it possible to move from ‘state-centric’ approaches to culture and move forward by widening spaces for cooperation. Finally, even though the Commission supervises culture, its eventual power as a gatekeeper is limited. In the f inal interpretation of the programmes, many actors strategically select and appropriate some parts of the EU rhetoric and reject others. The participants in the EU-funded cultural initiatives follow the European requirements to a certain extent while eventually developing those aspects of the projects that they consider most relevant. So even though the European cultural space has hegemonic tendencies, it is also a space in which participants have quite some agency. In this case, the European cultural space is still seen as a space of cooperation and as a space which is co-constructed by many European actors in the field. It might be Eurocentric in the sense that it is still determined by a few and does not allow for other approaches, but this is not always perceived as negative. It is also a chance to move forward, to move away from national settings and a horizon for future development. Finally, it seems that for many participants the European cultural space is both near and far away. In terms of the governance of this space, the European Commission remains too distanced, and too far removed from the locales in which the cultural space takes shape. The space exists, but the presence and the role of the different actors that operate within this space is by no means clear. It seems that the European Commission primarily approaches the European cultural space as a ‘space of flows’ while for many, it is still a ‘space of places’. 45 Additionally, in terms of participation, there is a choice to participate in, or to operate outside of the confines of the European cultural space. There is thus also still an opportunity to choose to accept or reject the policy frameworks and requirements asked for by the European Commission. European cultural products might be developed in these programmes, but their eventual impact and resonance depends on a multitude of factors. From this perspective, Eurocentrism also has its limits or at least depends on the perspective taken by the participating actor and the level on which this actor operates. The European cultural space as determined by EU intervention is thus not only dual in its rationale, it is also dual in relation to Eurocentrism. On the one hand it is hegemonic, interpreted by a few core European actors and seen through a Western normative lens in terms of form and content. On the other hand, it is a space in which actors can freely manoeuvre, strategically act, and be creative regarding its final interpretation. 45 Castells, The Information Age.

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About the Author Claske Vos, Assistant Professor of European Governance, University of Amsterdam [email protected]

Index Aeschylus 147 Alecsandri, Vasile 187-188 Alexander II, tsar 82-83 Alfieri, Vittorio 147 Allan, Maud 132 Al-Assad, Bashar 73 Al-Majid, Ali Hassan 69, 74 Anzaldúa, Gloria Evangelina 113 Aristophanes  147 Aristotle 147 Armstrong, Louis 134 Barraclough, Geoffrey 33 Bayly, Christopher 16 Beardsley, Aubrey 131 Beck, Ulrich 196 Beneš, Edvard 72 Benjamin, Walter  214 Bergson, Henri 152 Beria, Lavrentiy 68 Berr, Henri 32 Bismarck, Otto von 29 Bizimana, Augustin 69 Bloch, Marc 32 Blockmans, Wim 44-45 Bonneville, Nicholas de 47 Borgia, Cesare 116 Botev, Hristo 142 Bouterwek, Friedrich 164, 168 Braudel, Fernand 33 Breton, André 123 Brunner, Otto 34 Buchan, John 127 Buettner, Elisabeth 201 Burke, Peter 11, 26 Byron, George Gordon, lord 127 Camões, Luís de 141 Cantú, Cesare 32 Carlyle, Thomas 146-147 Cervantes, Miguel de 141-142 Césaire, Aimé 153 Chabod, Frederico 34 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 13, 34 Churchill, Winston 72, 203, 216 Corneille, Pierre 142 Coudenhove-Kalergi, Richard 15, 216 Croce, Benedetto 31 Csombor, Márton Szepsi 184 D’Alembert, Jean Le Rond 147 D’Andrés, Juan 165-167 De Gaulle, Charles 211, 213 De Staël, Madame de 157, 160, 165, 168-169, 169n50, 172-174

Dainotto, Roberto 158, 165, 166n33 Dance, George 132 Dante Alighieri  141 Davies, Norman 13-14, 44, 197n7 Dawson, Christopher 32, 34 Delanty, Gerard 12, 16, 45n7, 46n10, 57 Delibes, Léo  131 Deneuve, Catherine 127 Descartes, René 49 Derrida, Jacques 150-151, 218 Diamond, Jared 45 Dibdin, Charles 163, 166-168, 173 Diderot, Denis 147 Du Bois-Reymond, Emile 181, 182n10 Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne 113 Dussel, Enrique 158, 219 Eichberg, Richard 135 Elias, Norbert 72 Eliot T.S. 56, 150 Engels, Friedrich 151 Euripides 147 Fanon, Frantz 34, 113 Febvre, Lucien 32 Forster, E.M. 136-137 France, Anatole  131 Francis I (Holy Roman Emperor) 115 Freiligrath, Ferdinand 148 Freud, Sigmund 122, 124n6, 125 Gandhi, Mahatma 210 Garrick, David 146 Gasprinskii, Ismail 17, 79-99, 80n3, 81n4-6, 82n8 Gautier, Théophile  130 Gérôme, Jean Léon  131-132 Gervinus, Georg Gottfried 29, 54n44 Ghirlandaio, Domenico 124, 125 (illustration) Gibbon, Edward 47 Giraud, Eugène  131 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 130, 142, 148, 236 Goetz, Walter 56 Goody, Jack 11-12 Gorbachev, Mikhail 212 Gove, Michael 152 Groen van Prinsterer, Guillaume 51 Guizot, François  13, 27, 29, 49-50, 55 Habermas, Jürgen 160n10, 196 Halecki, Oskar 34 Harbou, Thea von 134 Heeren, Arnold Ludwig 27 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 13, 160 Heinesen, William 142

246 

Eurocentrism in European History and Memory

Henry V, king 143-145, 152 Herder, Johann Gottfried 52, 181n8 Hergé (Georges Remi) 129-130, 129 (illustration), 129n11, 134 Hilal, Musa 69 Hitler, Adolf 69-70, 148, 213 Hobsbawm, Eric 33 Hugo, Victor 71 Hume, David 47-49 Hussein, Saddam 68-70, 74 Iorga, Nicolae 30 Jakŝić, Djura 188 Jensen, Wilhelm 121-125, 127 Johnson, Boris 152-153 Jonson, Ben 147 Judt, Tony 14, 44, 199-201, 213 Kagame, Paul 70 Kelsall, Charles 147-148 Kipling, Rudyard 132-134, 136 Kissinger, Henry 44 Koolhaas, Rem 217 Kravagna, Christian 113 Kundmann, Karl 108 Lang, Fritz 134, 134n16, 135 Le Senne, Camille 149 Lean, David 132 Leggewie, Claus 36, 198n10, 201 Leopold II, king 68-69 Levene, Mark 72, 72n17 Lewes, George Henry 163, 168-170, 173 Longinus  147 Longworth, Philip 182 Lope de Vega, Félix 147, 164, 165n29, 168-170, 174 Lorde, Audre 113 Loti, Pierre 131-132 Maistre, Joseph de  49, 51 Maître Leherb (Helmut Leherbauer) 17, 105 (illustration), 105-108, 112-119, 112n19 Marx, Karl 151 Massenet, Jules 131 Masson de Morvilliers, Nicolas 161 Mata Hari (Greta Zelle) 132, 133 (illustration) Métivier, George 142 Michelangelo 106, 114-116, 118 Michelet, Jules 28 Micka, Boris 213 Mill, Stuart 50 Mishkova, Diana 187 Moisiodax, Iosipos 185 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) 142, 147 Monkman, Kent 107, 107n5, 118-119 Monnet, Jean 203, 206-209, 208n36, 211n39, 216

Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de  47-48, 47-48n20, 160 Moreau, Gustave 131 Morrison, Toni 113 Müller, Heiner 150-151 Muratori, Ludovico 185 Napoleon, emperor 49, 131, 172 Nancy, Jean-Luc 202 Newton, Isaac 49 Niklasson, Elisabeth 235 Obradović, Dositej 185 Okey, Robin 182 Orange, William of  161n17 Ortega y Gasset, José 32, 55, 55n49 Ortelius, Abraham 109 Osterhammel, Jürgen 183 Paget, Debra 135, 135 (illustration) Parman, Susan 183 Pavie, Théodore 131 Péguy, Charles 152 Petipa, Marius 130, 136 Pius XII, pope 206 Plautus, Titus Maccius 147 Pokrovsky, Mikhail 32 Prescott, William H.  162 Princip, Gavrilo  216 Proust, Marcel 121, 152 Racine, Jean 142 Radosavljević, Darka 234 Râmnic, Gregory  186 Ranke, Leopold von 13, 49, 52, 52n40, 53, 53n42, 56, 58 Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas 27 Riefenstahl, Leni 105, 117 Ripa, Cesare 109 Robertson, William 47 Rodenburgh, Theodore 142 Rodger, George 117 Rohmer, Eric 126 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 27, 209 Ruskin, John 123 Russell, William 47 Said, Edward 34, 113, 159, 160n9, 182 Salvadó, Alberto 142 Scandizzo, Pasquale Luzio 158 Schiller, Friedrich 51-52, 142, 148 Schlegel, Friedrich 52, 130n12, 168 Schlosser, Friedrich Christoph 29 Schnabel, Franz 31, 33 Scott, Walter 126 Schuman, Robert 11, 15, 18, 195, 203-212, 205n31-32, 208n35-36, 211n39, 218 Shakespeare, William 17, 141-154, 163, 146n6

247

Index

Sismonde de Sismondi, Jean Charles 164-169, 164n28, 165n29, 166n34, 173-174 Smirnov, Vasilii Dmitrievich 85 Spengler, Oswald 31 Spielberg, Steven 136 Stalin, Joseph 72 Stevenson, Robert Louis 127 Stourdza, Alexandre 51 Strauss, Johann 131-132 Tagore, Rabindranth 113 Teggart, Frederick 179-180 Terence (Publius Terentius Afer) 147 Thull, Jean-François 204-205 Tiepolo, Giovanni Domenico 107, 118 Todorova, Maria 183 Toynbee, Arnold 32 Tusk, Donald 152 Turgenev, Ivan 82 Valéry, Paul 55, 150-151 Van Limburg Brouwer, Petrus 163, 171-173 Van Walrée, Jacob Pieter 163, 172-173 Vazov, Ivan 142 Velikonja, Mitja 189 Venturi, Franco 32

Vercors (Jean Marc Bruller) 151 Vischer, Robert 181, 181n8 Voltaire (François Marie Arouet) 12, 27, 47, 47n16, 147, 158, 160, 209 Vorontsov, Mikhail Semyonovich 81 Vovk van Gaal, Taja  212 Wagner, Cosima 144-145 Wagner, Anton Paul 108 Wagner, Richard 144 Warburg, Aby 121, 123-124, 124n4, 126 (illustration), 127 Warton, Thomas 166-168 Weber, Max 160 Wells H.G. 32 Welz, Gisela 234 White, Hayden 26, 115, 180 Wiesel, Elie 67, 216 Wilderson, Frank B. III 113 Wilhelm II, emperor 148-149 Wintle, Michael 9-10, 16, 107-108, 197 Wolff, Larry 26, 182-183 Worringer, Wilhelm 180-181 Yeats, William Butler 137