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 fijictional 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 fijigure 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
e-isbn
doi
nur
978 94 6372 552 1
978 90 4855 055 5 (pdf)
10.5117/9789463725521
686 / 694
© 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 efffort 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
9
Joep Leerssen
1 Introduction
11
Marjet Brolsma, Robin de Bruin and Matthijs Lok
Part I History & Historiography
2 The Past and Present of European Historiography
25
Between Marginalization and Functionalization?
Stefan Berger
3 The Fragmented Continent
43
The Invention of European Pluralism in History Writing from the
Eighteenth to the Twenty-fijirst Century
Matthijs Lok
4 Eurocentrism in Research on Mass Violence
65
Uğur Ümit Üngör
5 Muslim EuRossocentrism
79
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
The Example of Vienna
Wolfgang Schmale
7 Women Walking, Women Dancing
Motion, Gender and Eurocentrism
Joep Leerssen
121
8 Shakespeare, England, Europe and Eurocentrism
141
Ton Hoenselaars
9 Being Eurocentric within Europe
157
Nineteenth-century English and Dutch Literary Historiography and
Oriental Spain
Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez
10 The Elephant on the Doorstep?
179
East European Perspectives on Eurocentrism
Alex Drace-Francis
Part III EU & Memory
11 A Guided Tour into the Question of Europe
195
Jan Ifversen
12 Constructing the European Cultural Space
223
A Matter of Eurocentrism?
Claske Vos
Index
245
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
specifijic method to a specifijic corpus. Disciplines are much less stringently
defij 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 fij 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 fijield of
interest, but also a certain esprit de corps. The very diffferent specialists assembled in these pages share, not only a general interest in things European
or transnational, but also specifijic 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 fijield, nationally and
internationally, he has been a quiet, slightly reserved, but highly appreciated and authoritative fij 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
10
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 fijiercely 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 diffferent
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 diffferent 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 diffference 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 stafff 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
12
MAR JE T BROLSMA, ROBIN DE BRUIN AND MAT THIJS LOK
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, defijines 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 fijirst 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 fijirst 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.
INTRODUC TION
13
Asia and Africa, were framed as ‘exceptional’.11 The history of Europe, and
often more specifijically – 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 defijinitions.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.
14
MAR JE T BROLSMA, ROBIN DE BRUIN AND MAT THIJS LOK
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 afffairs.’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 reconfijiguration 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’; Confijino, Foundational Pasts.
INTRODUC TION
15
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
confijined 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.
16
MAR JE T BROLSMA, ROBIN DE BRUIN AND MAT THIJS LOK
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 specifijicity 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: fijirst of all it provides
a collection of essays in honour of Michael Wintle and his work. Secondly,
this book offfers 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.
INTRODUC TION
17
across disciplines – history, literature, art, memory and cultural policy – as
well as offfer diffferent 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 fijirst 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 inefffijicient. This fijirst 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 fijigures 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
identifijies the construction of a strong North-South division in nineteenthcentury English and Dutch literary historiography. This polarity is further
18
MAR JE T BROLSMA, ROBIN DE BRUIN AND MAT THIJS LOK
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 diffferent versions of Europe in two transnational museums:
the Schuman House and the House of European History. The exhibition in
the fijirst 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 fijield 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.
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INTRODUC TION
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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.
20
MAR JE T BROLSMA, ROBIN DE BRUIN AND MAT THIJS LOK
Leggewie, Claus, ‘Seven Circles of European Memory’, in Peter Meusburger, Michael
Hefffernan 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.
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(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
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Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Rigney, Ann, ‘Transforming Memory and the European Project’, New Literary
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Said, Edward, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin,
1978).
INTRODUC TION
21
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).
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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
M.Brolsma@uva.nl
Robin de Bruin, Assistant Professor of Modern European History, University
of Amsterdam
R.J.deBruin@uva.nl
Matthijs Lok, Assistant Professor of Modern European History, University
of Amsterdam
M.M.Lok@uva.nl
Part I
History & Historiography
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 diffferent visions of Europe with diffferent confessions of Christianity.3 The Enlightenment not only widened the historical
gaze to incorporate universal and global perspectives; it also intensifijied
the discursive construction of Europe. Enlightenment historians by and
large identifijied in European history the motor of universal progress. To
be even more precise, they located this motor in Western Europe. Larry
Wolfff 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.
THE PAST AND PRESENT OF EUROPEAN HISTORIOGR APHY
27
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
6
7
8
9
Eckert, ‘Area Studies’.
Rousseau, ‘Discourse’.
Lüsebrink and Strugnell, L’histoire des deux Indes.
Becker-Schaum, Arnold Herrmann Ludwig Heeren.
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 specifijic 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
specifijic 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 justifij 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.
THE PAST AND PRESENT OF EUROPEAN HISTORIOGR APHY
29
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 fijirst
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 fijields 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 diffferent ways in
diffferent 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 diffferent 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
diffferences 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 difffered from West European conceptions in that he
18 Guizot, General History, 13.
19 Nolte, ‘Russia’.
20 Troebst, ‘Geschichtsregionen’.
THE PAST AND PRESENT OF EUROPEAN HISTORIOGR APHY
31
stressed the importance of Byzantium for the foundation of a unifijied 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 difffijicult 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 fijind 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
22
23
24
25
Maner, ‘Die Aufhebung’.
Liakos, ‘The Canon of European History’.
Wilson, Forging the Collective Memory.
Rizi, Benedetto Croce.
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 confijines
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 justifijication 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 fijind 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
27
28
29
Stuchtey and Fuchs, Writing World History.
Enteen, The Soviet Scholar-Bureaucrat.
Burke, The French Historical Revolution, 13-35.
Tortarolo, ‘Historians in Exile’.
THE PAST AND PRESENT OF EUROPEAN HISTORIOGR APHY
33
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 difffijicult 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 diffferent 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 defij ining
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
31
32
33
Hexter, ‘Fernand Braudel’.
Evans, Eric Hobsbawm.
Hertfelder, Franz Schnabel.
Cf. Stuchtey, ‘Geofffrey 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 defijined ‘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 difffijicult 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 identifijication 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, fijirst 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, 192fff.
36 For an account of one of the participants, see Belofff, 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.
THE PAST AND PRESENT OF EUROPEAN HISTORIOGR APHY
35
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 benefijitted 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 efffortlessly
to the ‘red nationalism’ discussed above, many also harked back to very
traditional (pre-communist) national master narratives. 41 Despite the
best effforts 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, difffijicult, even traumatic memory of past
conflicts, including the Holocaust, Stalinism, ethnic cleansing, enforced as
well as voluntary migration, and, fijinally, 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 diffferent 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).
THE PAST AND PRESENT OF EUROPEAN HISTORIOGR APHY
37
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 twentyfij 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.
38
STEFAN BERGER
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 unifijication cannot be written as a teleological success story concentrating
on EU history and Eurocentric visions of peace, prosperity and democracy.57
Putting the difffijiculties of constructing European historical consciousness
to one side, it is an altogether diffferent question whether one should actually
mourn those difffijiculties 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 benefijits 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.
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55 Berger, ‘History and Forms’.
56 Frevert, ‘European Identifijications’.
57 Pasture, Imagining European Unity.
58 Kaelble, ‘Un espace public Européen? ’
THE PAST AND PRESENT OF EUROPEAN HISTORIOGR APHY
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About the Author
Stefan Berger, Full Professor of Social History, Ruhr-University Bochum
Stefan.Berger@rub.de
3
The Fragmented Continent
The Invention of European Pluralism in History Writing
from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-fijirst 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
diffferences 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
44
MAT THIJS LOK
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 afffairs 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 defijining characteristic of the European order
[…] yet although it was comprehensible as a single civilisation, Europe
never had a single governance, or a united, fijixed identity.3
A diffferent 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.
THE FR AGMENTED CONTINENT
45
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 diffferently: eventually, between 1000 and 1800, Europe
moved from its backward position to the forefront. In what way was Europe
diffferent from its eminent predecessors [Mongols, Muslim sultanates and
the Chinese empire]? The most important diffference 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.
46
MAT THIJS LOK
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 diffferent 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 diffferent
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
THE FR AGMENTED CONTINENT
47
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 fijirst 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 fijirst 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 diffferent
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
48
MAT THIJS LOK
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 diffferent 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 fijind 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 fijind in the people as a whole. Hume’s fijirst
observation is that the arts can only flourish among people that enjoy a free
government: ‘[T]hese refijinements 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 benefijicial 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.
THE FR AGMENTED CONTINENT
49
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 offf this yoke (of the
church) afffairs 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.
50
MAT THIJS LOK
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 infijinite
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.
THE FR AGMENTED CONTINENT
51
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 confijined 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 difffered, 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
52
MAT THIJS LOK
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 superfijicial French aesthetics. Schlegel also fell back on the dichotomy
between the Orient, defijined 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 artifijicial 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 signifijicant 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’.
THE FR AGMENTED CONTINENT
53
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 fij 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 defijined 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 signifijicant 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 offfijicial 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.
54
MAT THIJS LOK
vornehmlich im sechzehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhundert (French History
Mainly in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, fijive 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 diffferent
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.
THE FR AGMENTED CONTINENT
55
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 diffferent 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 diversifijication’ (Ortega y Gasset, De Opstand, 13;
my translation from the Dutch version).
56
MAT THIJS LOK
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 unifijication of Europe. For example, the
Christian poet and literary critic T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), in an essay published
in his Notes towards the Defijinition of Culture (1948), emphasized the theme of
unity in diversity: ‘I have already afffijirmed 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 unifijication, which he opposed.
50
51
52
53
Röβner, Geschichte.
See, for instance, Gollwitzer, Europabild.
Goetz, ‘Die Einheit’.
Eliot, ‘The Unity’, 120.
THE FR AGMENTED CONTINENT
57
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 twentyfijirst-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’ offfered
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-offfijicial process, the result of a contest involving
80,000 students from the union’s fijifteen 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 diffferent 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 offfijicial 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.
58
MAT THIJS LOK
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 diffferent varieties
of the pluralism narrative can, furthermore, be located in the sources, as
we have seen. At least three diffferent, but related, manifestations were
discussed in this chapter: fijirstly, 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
THE FR AGMENTED CONTINENT
59
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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About the Author
Matthijs Lok, Assistant Professor of Modern European History, University
of Amsterdam
M.M.Lok@uva.nl
4
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-fijirst-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 defijined 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-fijirst 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 signifijicant 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
66
UĞUR ÜMIT ÜNGÖR
of the afffected 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 justifijiably 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 diffferent 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
EUROCENTRISM IN RESEARCH ON MASS VIOLENCE
67
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 efffect’ 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 difffering 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 fijindings of earlier research into a synthesis that respects the
1
2
Araújo and Rodríguez Maeso, The Contours, 30.
Stone, ‘The Historiography’, 130.
68
UĞUR ÜMIT ÜNGÖR
extremity of the Holocaust, but also the specifijicities 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 fijigure 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-fijirst 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
signifijiers of the argument. Whereas Reinhard Heydrich (1904-1942), the
Nazi offfijicer 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
4
5
6
Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine; Jisheng, Tombstone.
Ewans, European Atrocity.
Gerwarth, Hitler’s Hangman, 37.
Knight, Beria.
EUROCENTRISM IN RESEARCH ON MASS VIOLENCE
69
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 fijive 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 offfijicers and
offfijicials developed and perfected technologies of mass violence against
civilians in various ways: Al-Majid was a major (if not the fijirst) political
actor who utilized aerial bombing with chemical weapons in a genocide,
Bizimana was exceptionally efffijicient 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 diffferent 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’.
70
UĞUR ÜMIT ÜNGÖR
before Hitler’.10 The scholarship on the Rwandan genocide, too, sufffered
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 battlefijield 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 efffort 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 fijield
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 sufffijicient analytical
10
11
12
13
De Mul, ‘The Holocaust’.
Chrétien, ‘Un “nazisme tropical”’.
Prunier, Africa’s World War, 359, 459.
Bouwknegt, Cross-examining the Past, 126-247.
EUROCENTRISM IN RESEARCH ON MASS VIOLENCE
71
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 fijifty 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 fijigured as faceless killers, undiffferentiated and unexplained,
‘tribesmen’ or ‘Trawniki men’, appearing in the Anatolian or Galician killing
fijields ex nihilo to murder people for little apparent reason other than innate
cruelty. A rich literature exists on the racialized Pacifijic 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 battlefijields.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.
72
UĞUR ÜMIT ÜNGÖR
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 fijirst 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 diffferences 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 fijirst half of the twentieth century of
course offfers 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 defijines 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.
EUROCENTRISM IN RESEARCH ON MASS VIOLENCE
73
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 fijilms 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 afffected 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 diffferent 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 Salafiji beards that were the immutable objects of Otherness. The
widespread mystifij 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).
74
UĞUR ÜMIT ÜNGÖR
seems almost no coincidence that ISIS performs Western stereotypes of
Islamists: with their bloodshot, wide-open eyes and scrufffy 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 offfijicers, 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 defij 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 benefij 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.
EUROCENTRISM IN RESEARCH ON MASS VIOLENCE
75
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 diffferent
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, inefffij 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 efffective 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.
76
UĞUR ÜMIT ÜNGÖR
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Methodological Rationales and Cross-Regional Applications (Oxford: Oxford
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special issue of Critical Studies in Media Communication 35:1 (2018), 1-135.
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1912-1938; Vol. II: Annihilation: The European Rimlands, 1939-1953 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014).
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vijesti/al-assad-if-europe-wants-to-protect-itself-at-this-stage-it-should-fijirststop-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).
EUROCENTRISM IN RESEARCH ON MASS VIOLENCE
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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).
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Bøås (ed.), African Guerrillas: Raging against the Machine (Boulder: Rienner,
2007), 151-170.
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Competition’, Rethinking History 8:1 (2004), 127-142.
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Samuel Totten (ed.), Advancing Genocide Studies: Personal Accounts and Insights
from Scholars in the Field (Piscataway: Transaction Publishers, 2015), 35-53.
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Amsterdam University Press, 2016).
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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
U.U.Ungor@uu.nl
5
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 Russifijication 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 fijigure; 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’.
Brolsma, Marjet, Robin de Bruin, and Matthijs Lok (eds): Eurocentrism in European History and
Memory. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2019
doi: 10.5117/9789463725521_ch05
80
MICHAEL KEMPER
fijikirde, 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
fijirst 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 fijifth 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 fijirst
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 fijinancial 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 fijirst 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’.
MUSLIM EUROSSOCENTRISM
81
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 difffijicult 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 fijirst
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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MICHAEL KEMPER
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 fijind 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 fijinancial
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 offfijice 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 offfijice in the municipality that he
fijirst 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 fijirst 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 fijirst came under the Russian title Zakon (Law), reflecting
its role as an offfij icial herald. One such offfij icial 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.
MUSLIM EUROSSOCENTRISM
83
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 fijifth 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 fijirst 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 fijirst
decades, the Tarjuman offfered 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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MICHAEL KEMPER
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 fijirst 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 Sufiji 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
fij 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.
MUSLIM EUROSSOCENTRISM
85
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 befijitting 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 (pacifijied 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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MICHAEL KEMPER
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 benefijicial unifijication 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 afffairs] isolates [Russia’s Muslims] completely from the
general course of human culture [obshchechelovecheskaia kul’tura]. Russian Muslimhood is vegetating in the narrow, sufffocating atmosphere of its
old concepts and prejudices, as if it was cut offf 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
21
22
23
24
Bougarel, ‘Bosnian Islam’.
Gasprinskii, Russkoe musul’manstvo, 7, 13.
Ibid., 3-4.
Ibid., 4. All translations of quotations are by the author except when noted otherwise.
Ibid., 8.
MUSLIM EUROSSOCENTRISM
87
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-sufffijicient.
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 afffijirmative action policy towards Muslims. Enforced
Russifijication 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 effforts 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 inefffective: they just concentrated on the teaching of the empire’s
offfij 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
26
27
28
29
Ibid., 21, 22.
Gammer, Muslim Resistance.
Gasprinskii, Russkoe musul’manstvo, 25-27.
Ibid., 16-19.
Ibid., 34.
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MICHAEL KEMPER
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 benefijits 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 offfijicials often
employed the term [sblizhenie] as a polite way of discussing assimilation’,
in particular of Russia’s Jews.31 Gasprinskii however defijined 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 unifijication (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
31
32
33
34
Ibid., 12, 14, 22, 43.
Meyer, Turks across Empires, 41n119.
Gasprinskii, Russkoe musul’manstvo, 34.
Ibid., 37.
Tuna, Imperial Russia’s Muslims, 146-154.
MUSLIM EUROSSOCENTRISM
89
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 mufffled
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 exemplifijied in the spread of science and
technology, the latter bring about ‘a vitalization of the spiritual and moral life’.
But Europe also sufffers 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 refijined politeness
that they encounter there – or perhaps exactly because of it. The sons of
Asia feel the artifijiciality, 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 classifijication 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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MICHAEL KEMPER
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 defijined 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 perfijidious 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 scientifijic basis. Unfortunately, these
persons are mostly lost for a benefijicial 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 fijighting 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.
MUSLIM EUROSSOCENTRISM
91
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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MICHAEL KEMPER
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 specifijic
character of [Tatar] overlordship that enabled Russia to develop the idea
of her unity – an idea that for the fijirst time appeared on the battlefijield
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 benefijicial 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 sufffocate, 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.
MUSLIM EUROSSOCENTRISM
93
be assured, we will want to fijill your gymnasiums and universities, in order
to work at your side on the fijield 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 fijind 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 fij 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 fijight 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 fijirst 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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MICHAEL KEMPER
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 offfijices: ‘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 benefijicial circumstances they managed to
prevent the emergence of ‘harems’ [garemy]. Today it is difffijicult to fijind
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.
MUSLIM EUROSSOCENTRISM
95
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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MICHAEL KEMPER
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 offfer 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 fijirework
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 efffects (if it lacks the scientifijic 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 efffijiciency (as a
loyal Muslim newspaper would improve the state’s outreach). Another goal
54 Ibid., 44-45.
MUSLIM EUROSSOCENTRISM
97
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 afffijirmative 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 scientifijic 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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MICHAEL KEMPER
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 benefijicial 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 fijirst place an overconfijident 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 Russifijication
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 Salafijism’.
56 This Tatarocentrism is most prominent in Gasprinskii’s later writings on Central Asia. See
Hofmeister, ‘Ein Krimtatare’; Lazzerini, ‘From Bakhchisarai’.
MUSLIM EUROSSOCENTRISM
99
traditionalists. This competition would shape the cultural history of Russia’s
Islam in the fijive 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
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of Islam in Europe (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009).
Avrutin, Eugene M., ‘Racial Categories and the Politics of (Jewish) Diffference 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 Efffijie 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’.
100
MICHAEL KEMPER
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).
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und Nationalbewegung bei Tataren und Baschkiren, 1861-1917 (Stuttgart: Franz
Steiner, 2000).
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[parallel Russian title: Ismail Gasprinskii: istoriko-dokumental’nyi sbornik]
(Kazan: Dzhïen, 2006).
Shikhaliev, Shamil, and Michael Kemper, ‘Sayfallāh-Qāḍī Bashlarov: Sufiji 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 Salafijism 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).
MUSLIM EUROSSOCENTRISM
101
About the Author
Michael Kemper, Full Professor of East European Studies at the University
of Amsterdam
M.Kemper@uva.nl
Part II
Literature & Art
6
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
106
WOLFGANG SCHMALE
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 fijigure of the European image is the naked David by
Michelangelo, repeated three times, each with signifijicant variations.
Michelangelo’s David (created between 1501 and 1504) is made of Carrara
marble, and symbolizes, like no other sculpture and fijigure, 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 defijined 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 fijive 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.
EUROCENTRISM AND ITS PAINTINGS IN THE L ATE T WENTIE TH CENTURY
107
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-fijirst 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.
108
WOLFGANG SCHMALE
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 fijind 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 fijigures 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 fijigure 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.
EUROCENTRISM AND ITS PAINTINGS IN THE L ATE T WENTIE TH CENTURY
109
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 fijirst edition of his
Iconologia (1593). In Ortelius’ work the fijigure of Europe towers over the other;
she wears a crown. The hierarchy between the fijigures is clear: Europe, then
Asia and Africa, and fijinally 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, offfered as terracotta and later as porcelain fijigurines.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 fijind on the web by searching for ‘Bourse de commerce Paris’.
Schmale, ‘La représentation’; ibid., ‘Europa’.
110
WOLFGANG SCHMALE
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 fijigures, 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 fijigures 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 identifijied 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 fijigures
made in eighteenth-century Naples.
EUROCENTRISM AND ITS PAINTINGS IN THE L ATE T WENTIE TH CENTURY
111
century, this fijigure 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 fijirst ‘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,
diffferent 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’.
112
WOLFGANG SCHMALE
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 fijirst floor and look at the pictures from the connecting
corridors. In short: it requires the visitor’s efffort 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 fijind any defijinitive 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.
EUROCENTRISM AND ITS PAINTINGS IN THE L ATE T WENTIE TH CENTURY
113
As early as 2013, Christian Kravagna and Carola Dertnig offfered 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. Stafff 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 fijirst 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.
114
WOLFGANG SCHMALE
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 difffij 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 fijigure 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 fijind 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.
EUROCENTRISM AND ITS PAINTINGS IN THE L ATE T WENTIE TH CENTURY
115
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 fijigures were used as an alternative to
female allegories. The fact that Leherb chose the male fijigure 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 fijigure 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 fijigures 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 fijigures 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 fijive 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
fijigure 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’.
116
WOLFGANG SCHMALE
nature, but the three female fijigures imply a story: the naked, caged fijigure
in the left front, which signifijies 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 fijigure 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 fijilled
with clichés. The classifijication 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 fijirst 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 fijigure of David in Florentine history is linked to the
EUROCENTRISM AND ITS PAINTINGS IN THE L ATE T WENTIE TH CENTURY
117
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, specifijically 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 confijirms through his image of Europe, albeit probably unknowingly or at least unreflectingly, the interpretation of European civilization
as essentially male. In a sense, this ‘fijitted’ 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’.
118
WOLFGANG SCHMALE
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 efffective 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 fijigure – ‘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 fijigure 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
EUROCENTRISM AND ITS PAINTINGS IN THE L ATE T WENTIE TH CENTURY
119
and destruction than the other three images. The contrast with Maître
Leherb could not be bigger.
Unintentionally, Monkman addresses a dilemma that also afffects 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 diffferent way. ‘To
see diffferently’ means to ‘provincialize’ Europe.31
Bibliography
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Diffference (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 (Ostfijildern: 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.
120
WOLFGANG SCHMALE
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 Identifijizierung 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 Defijinition 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
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Iconography through the Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
About the Author
Wolfgang Schmale, Full Professor of Modern and Contemporary History,
Vienna University
Wolfgang.Schmale@univie.ac.at
7
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 specifijic connotation of gracefully focused, directional
energy, predicated on women in the aftermath of fijirst-wave feminism.
The trope is widely difffused 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 exemplifijied by Wilhelm
Jensen’s (1837-1911) novella Gradiva (1903) and German art historian and
cultural theorist Aby Warburg’s (1866-1929) fijiguration 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’, specifijically 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 stifffness, 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
122
JOEP LEERSSEN
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 fijictional
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 efffected 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 confijident composure, and the flight-like poise, combined
with a fijirm 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 fijigure flitting across his fijield
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 fijigure 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 fijigure 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.
WOMEN WALKING, WOMEN DANCING
123
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 fijigured as an
allusion or a fijigure 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 sufffused 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 signifij ies 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’.
124
JOEP LEERSSEN
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 offfspring 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’ fijigurine, 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 fijin 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 fijigure 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 fijigure walks ahead of two other nymph
fijigures, damaged. He identifijied the procession of maidens as Horae fijigures:
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 fijirst
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’.
WOMEN WALKING, WOMEN DANCING
125
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 fij ictional character in Jensen’s novella and Freud’s
psychoanalytic fij iguration. Critics like Mary Jacobus (‘Is There a Woman
in this Text?’) Rachel Bowlby (‘One Foot in the Grave: Freud on Jensen’s
Gradiva’) and, specifij ically, Elizabeth Wright (Psychoanalytic Criticism)
have thrown fresh light from a diffferent 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 fijiguration of the ‘female walker’ has great imagological interest.
Walking women, once identifijied 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.
126
JOEP LEERSSEN
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
fijilm 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 afffect the fijigure 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’.
WOMEN WALKING, WOMEN DANCING
127
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 specifijically, 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 fijigure 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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JOEP LEERSSEN
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 offf 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?!’
WOMEN WALKING, WOMEN DANCING
129
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 fijigure 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 diffferent 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 Castafijiore (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, fijin de siècle word bayadère.
No wonder it stuck in the mind. Bayadère. The word has a whifff 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
sufffused 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
(fijirst 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.
WOMEN WALKING, WOMEN DANCING
131
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 fijin 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. Sufffijice it to say
that there is a lot of steamy pagan sensuality before the fijinal triumph of
Christian virtue in the last scene. Belly dancing, specifijically, 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 commodifijication 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 fijilm version of A
Passage to India (1984). Lean follows the novel fairly closely, with one notable
exception: a scene which momentarily reunites the local offfijicial Ronny
with his troubled fijiancée, Adela Quested. In the book, the incident involves
a wild pig suddenly crossing the road in front of the car they drive. In the
fijilm, Adela sets offf 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 fijirmly 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 fijit the emotional arc that
will lead to the fijilm’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.
WOMEN WALKING, WOMEN DANCING
133
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
specifijically, 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 fijilm 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, fijigures 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 (specifijically, by
learning from him the knowledge of managing fijire – 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 sherifff,
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 fijilm 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 fijilms and M.
WOMEN WALKING, WOMEN DANCING
135
Figure 8 Debra Paget in Das indische Grabmal (1959)
Source: screenshot from author’s DVD copy
Lang made the Eschnapur fijilms 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 fijilm, 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 fijilm’s narrative.
The fijilm’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 fijilm 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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JOEP LEERSSEN
or ‘Westerners’).18 That is remarkable because by that time Orientalism had
become a global, rather than European thing: from the Hollywood fijilm
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 fijigure 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
signifijicantly 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 fijiancé, 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 diffferences, in the 1938 version.
19 It may not even be a binary opposition. In post-1930 American popular culture, specifijically
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.
WOMEN WALKING, WOMEN DANCING
137
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, magnifijied 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-afffijirming, while dancing is identity-dissolving; for, as
W.B. Yeats asked, ‘How can we tell the dancer from the dance?’
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About the Author
Joep Leerssen, Professor of Modern European Literature, University of
Amsterdam
J.T.Leerssen@uva.nl
8
Shakespeare, England, Europe and
Eurocentrism
Ton Hoenselaars
Abstract
This chapter seeks to defijine 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
fijigures, but among these fijigures 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 fij 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.
SHAKESPEARE, ENGL AND, EUROPE AND EUROCENTRISM
143
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 fijirst
half of the twentieth century to boost the tourist industry. At Helsingør the
afijicionado 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 fijish 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
fijind 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 defijined until 1492. It further testifijies 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 signifijicant 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 specifijic 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
4
Minogue, Nationalism.
Leerssen and Rigney, ‘Introduction’; Assmann, ‘Der Kampf’.
SHAKESPEARE, ENGL AND, EUROPE AND EUROCENTRISM
145
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 defijining 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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fijinally, 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 fijield 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 efffijigies. 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 fijirst 400 years of Shakespeare’s emergence
as a European site of memory.
7 Dobson, The Making, 219.
SHAKESPEARE, ENGL AND, EUROPE AND EUROCENTRISM
147
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 fijirst 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 afffair 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 fijights 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 Alfijieri) 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 prefijiguring 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 indefijinitely.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 identifijication specifijically 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.
SHAKESPEARE, ENGL AND, EUROPE AND EUROCENTRISM
149
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 sufffered any signifijicant 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 afffected 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 afffected 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,’ fijirst 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.
SHAKESPEARE, ENGL AND, EUROPE AND EUROCENTRISM
151
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 fijifteen 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 pacifijist 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 offfijicer 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. Signifijicantly, 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 offfijicer 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
specifijically 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 offfijicial 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 fijigaro, 29 June 2016) was defijined 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.
SHAKESPEARE, ENGL AND, EUROPE AND EUROCENTRISM
153
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 specifijic 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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TON HOENSEL A ARS
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 afffijirmative
answer – we catch an outside-in glimpse of Europe where Shakespeare is
a frame of reference. In this instance, the self-identifijication of the speaker
with a Shakespearean character, and in English, is considered the most
efffective 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, offfijicially 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
afffair. After almost twenty-fijive 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).
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Walk Together: A Syrian Family’s Journey to the Heart of Europe’, The Guardian,
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sep/10/we-walk-together-a-syrian-familys-journey-to-the-heart-of-europe-video
(accessed 3 November 2016).
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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.
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in Ton Hoenselaars (ed.), Shakespeare’s History Plays: Performance, Translation
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Hoenselaars, Ton, ‘Quotations at War: The First and Second World Wars’, in Julie
Maxwell and Kate Rumbell (eds), Shakespeare and Quotation (Cambridge:
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Hoenselaars, Ton, ‘The Pierre Fournier Shakespeare Statue in the City of Paris,
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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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TON HOENSEL A ARS
Hoenselaars, Ton, ‘Towards a European History of Henry V’, in Marta Gibinska
and Agnieszka Romanowska (eds), Shakespeare in Europe: History and Memory
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2016), vol. II, 1064-1070.
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About the Author
Ton Hoenselaars, Full Professor of Early Modern English Literature, University of Utrecht
A.J.Hoenselaars@uu.nl
9
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 fijind their roots in
a long-existing narrative that divides Europe along diffferent 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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YOL ANDA RODRÍGUEZ PÉREZ
rather, of a prosaic notion such as that of the ‘two-speed’ Europe. Although at
fijirst sight it may seem a purely practical policy or strategy to accommodate
diffferences 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 diffferent 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 defijinition makes a distinction in ‘development’ within the ‘core’ of
Europe. A diffference 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.
BEING EUROCENTRIC WITHIN EUROPE
159
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 fijirst global empire, offfers 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 fijirst 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 diffferent 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
6
7
8
Ibid., 12.
Dainotto, Europe (in Theory), 273.
Ibid., 4.
I have borrowed this terminology from Araújo and Rodríguez Maeso, Eurocentrism, 3.
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YOL ANDA RODRÍGUEZ PÉREZ
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 diffferent 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 defijine 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.
BEING EUROCENTRIC WITHIN EUROPE
161
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 sufffers 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 identifijied 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 defij 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 defijinition – 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 defijinitive
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 diffferent 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
diffferent European literary traditions with a diffferent 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 Scientifijic Research). Members of the
team are Rena Bood and Sabine Waasdorp.
22 Leerssen, ‘Imagology’, 25.
BEING EUROCENTRIC WITHIN EUROPE
163
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 difffered 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 fijigure: prolifijic 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 undefijined 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 fijirst 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 defijining 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 diffferent 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 fijirst
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).
BEING EUROCENTRIC WITHIN EUROPE
165
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 diffferences, 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 afffectation 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.
166
YOL ANDA RODRÍGUEZ PÉREZ
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
diffferent 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 identifijied both.
Oriental Spain within English Literary Historiography
In his A Complete History of the English Stage (composition date around 17981800), Charles Dibdin defijined 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 fijirst 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 afffected 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 diffferent 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.
BEING EUROCENTRIC WITHIN EUROPE
167
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 difffused. 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 fijirst 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 specifijied. ‘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.
168
YOL ANDA RODRÍGUEZ PÉREZ
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 fij 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 diffferences. 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 clarifijication 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 diffferences
with qualifijications 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.
BEING EUROCENTRIC WITHIN EUROPE
169
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 offfence 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 diffference 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 signifijicance 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.
170
YOL ANDA RODRÍGUEZ PÉREZ
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 refijinement 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).
BEING EUROCENTRIC WITHIN EUROPE
171
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 fijight 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 diffferent 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 fijight against
the Moors as the defijining factor in the development of Spanish culture and
literature: ‘It was the prolonged fijight 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
56
57
58
59
60
61
De Vries, Proeve eener geschiedenis, 389.
Van Limburg Brouwer, Verhandeling.
Ibid., 4.
Ibid., 152.
Ibid., 151.
Ibid., 12.
Ibid.
172
YOL ANDA RODRÍGUEZ PÉREZ
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 fijighting 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.
BEING EUROCENTRIC WITHIN EUROPE
173
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) fijind their roots in a long-existing narrative
that divides Europe along diffferent 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 confijirmation of an Oriental character, linked to its Muslim past,
Spanish literature was viewed as exotically diffferent 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.
174
YOL ANDA RODRÍGUEZ PÉREZ
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 diffferent 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 specifijically 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 efffect 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.
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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).
BEING EUROCENTRIC WITHIN EUROPE
177
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),
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volkskarakter en de vroegere Spaansche letterkunde’, De Gids 2 (1838), 161-175.
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About the Author
Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez, Associate Professor of Modern European Literature, University of Amsterdam
Y.RodriguezPerez@uva.nl
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 signifijier;
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 defijined 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 fijield to
avoid the trap of reproducing the Eurocentric terms of the debate.
Keywords: Eurocentrism, Eastern Europe, discourse, Begrifffsgeschichte,
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 fijirst used – and also where, and how – still
requires clarifijication. Taking an approach from conceptual history, it is
possible to trawl through reference works and online digital tools to pinpoint
their birth and difffusion.
The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, identifijies the fijirst 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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ALEX DR ACE-FR ANCIS
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 specifijically 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 signifijicance’.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 fijind 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.
THE ELEPHANT ON THE DOORSTEP?
181
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 Scientifijic
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 fijirst 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 Scientifijic Lectures Association of Cologne in 1877). English translation: Du Bois-Reymond,
‘Science and Civilization’.
182
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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 diffferent 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 specifijic 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 defijined 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 defijined as having ‘a political culture quite diffferent
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 signifij icantly in 1994 with
the publication of Larry Wolfff’s landmark work Inventing Eastern Europe.
Wolfff, 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 fijirst 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.
THE ELEPHANT ON THE DOORSTEP?
183
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
Wolfff 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 fijield 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 diffferent terminology, anthropologist Susan Parman
has referred to the process of confijining defijinitions 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, Wolfff 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 Wolfff’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 Wolfff, 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 Wolfff, 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 fijirst 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”’.
THE ELEPHANT ON THE DOORSTEP?
185
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 fijirst 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 fijictional 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 fijine 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, superfijicial 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 ‘superfijicial 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 specifijically 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.
THE ELEPHANT ON THE DOORSTEP?
187
the fijirst 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 fijixed
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 affforded 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 offfijicial title of the treaty was, in fact, ‘Treaty for the Settlement of the Afffairs 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
Defijining 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 suffferings of his beleaguered people.38
Such variants on discourse which, through diffferent invocations and
modes of address, confijigures ‘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 diffferent 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 afffected all of Europe’; for the
Balkan intellectuals ‘had their eye on Europe as their natural hinterland’.39
In conclusion, however, Leerssen nevertheless identifijies ‘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
defijinitions 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.
THE ELEPHANT ON THE DOORSTEP?
189
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.
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About the Author
Alex Drace-Francis, Associate Professor, Literary and Cultural History of
Modern Europe, University of Amsterdam
A.J.Drace-Francis@uva.nl
Part III
EU & Memory
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 fijirst 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
Brolsma, Marjet, Robin de Bruin, and Matthijs Lok (eds): Eurocentrism in European History and
Memory. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2019
doi: 10.5117/9789463725521_ch11
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JAN IFVERSEN
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 fijirst 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 fijirst 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 afffijinities 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).
A GUIDED TOUR INTO THE QUESTION OF EUROPE
197
superiority completely forgetful of the devastating efffects 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 diffferent 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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JAN IFVERSEN
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
fijine-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, fijirst 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
A GUIDED TOUR INTO THE QUESTION OF EUROPE
199
offfijicial 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 fijiguring 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 fijirst 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 diffferent way. In my view, writing a European
history must proceed at three levels simultaneously. At the fijirst level, we
investigate the transnational commonalities that bind entities together – and
exclude others. We are in other words searching for the formation of diffferent
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 specifijically 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.
200
JAN IFVERSEN
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 diffferent
myths, illusions and ideologies of Europe. Historians of Europe address
the transnationality of the European space; they investigate the efffects 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,
fijirst 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 offfijicial commemoration of the dark European
past. A series of crises that began with the so-called fijinancial 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 effforts 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.
A GUIDED TOUR INTO THE QUESTION OF EUROPE
201
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 fijinally lost with decolonization. Colonialism, however,
has not yet been granted the status of a difffijicult 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 sufffered 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 offfer
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 fijirst 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.
202
JAN IFVERSEN
The European Myth
Identity politics rely on ideologies as well as myths to secure the basis for
a specifijic 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
diffferent 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 diffferent 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, infijinitely
and immediately.’18 They are invented stories and practices that explain
why a certain community is together in the fijirst place. Mythical thought
is, as Nancy says, ‘nothing other than the thought of a founding fijiction,
or as a foundation by fijiction’.19 This foundation not only explains why a
community exists; it also offfers 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. Diffferent ideologies have diffferent myths. Nationalists constructs a
fijiction of a primordial nation; communists link civilizational breakdown
18 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 50.
19 Ibid., 53.
20 Blumenberg, Work on Myth.
A GUIDED TOUR INTO THE QUESTION OF EUROPE
203
with a revolutionary moment; liberals invent the constitution. Diffferent
periods see diffferent 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 fijinal
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
22
23
24
Churchill, The Sinews of Peace.
‘Declaration of 9 May 1950’.
Conseil Général de la Moselle, La Maison.
Ibid.
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JAN IFVERSEN
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 efffijicient that they
managed to convince the regional authorities to acquire the house. The
fij irst efffort 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-profijit 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 diffferent 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 scientifijic committee of the
house.
29 Interview with Jean-François Thull at La Maison de Robert Schuman, 12 January 2011.
A GUIDED TOUR INTO THE QUESTION OF EUROPE
205
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 fijirst
serious work on the myth from more or less offfijicial 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
offfij icial Schuman and his connection to the grander regional, national
and European history is the dominating narrative holding the diffferent
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 offfers 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 effforts 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 scientifijic authority it requires. But it is also under the obligation of
fijilling 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 diffferent nature. It is presented fijirst as place
for the display of regional plants and only secondly as Schuman’s garden.
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JAN IFVERSEN
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 diffferent
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
afffairs – 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 fijirst floor. It is on
this floor that the private Schuman connects with the father of Europe.
Here we fijind 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
offfijicial – 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 unifijication 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.
A GUIDED TOUR INTO THE QUESTION OF EUROPE
207
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 fijill 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 fijirst 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 fijighting 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 fijinally 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 fijirst 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 defijinitely in a basilica.
The Association des amis de Robert Schuman refused the offfer 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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JAN IFVERSEN
or even more signifijicant 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 sacrifijiced 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 diffferent
function and a diffferent layout. It consists of two separate rooms. On the fijirst
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’.
A GUIDED TOUR INTO THE QUESTION OF EUROPE
209
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
confijirm 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 offfspring.
The permanent exhibition on the second floor is diffferent. 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 fijind 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 fijigure 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 diffferent 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
fijigure, 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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JAN IFVERSEN
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 magnifijicent 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 fijifteen 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;
fijirst 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 fijilm about
Schuman’s life in the turbulent twentieth century. As in the house and the
exhibition, the fijilm 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 fijilm director and comedian Jacques Tati in his fijilms);
on the other hand, the fijilm 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, sacrifijicing 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.’
A GUIDED TOUR INTO THE QUESTION OF EUROPE
211
which highlights the sacrifijice, the fijilm 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 fijirst 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 scientifijic 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 scientifijic
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 fijigure 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 efffective 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 efffort 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 diffferent 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 fijigure in the myth.
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JAN IFVERSEN
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 offfijicial 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 difffijicult circles of European memory. It is a daring choice, not
least because it challenges more traditional understandings within the fijield
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
A GUIDED TOUR INTO THE QUESTION OF EUROPE
213
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 fijive 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 fijigures 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 fijive floors is
an iPad containing huge amounts of information (in all European languages)
about each artefact. At the diffferent 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 diffferent 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 fijirst maps drawn. Europe is
thus fijirst 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 confijigured
as a rather explicit afffij 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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JAN IFVERSEN
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 fijirst 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 fij 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 diffferent
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, fij ilm). Behind the
45 House of European History, Guidebook, 11.
A GUIDED TOUR INTO THE QUESTION OF EUROPE
215
grilles, we fijind 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 cofffee and colonizing Europeans being greeted by the natives.
The guidebook emphasizes colonial expansion and the scientifijic racism
that went along with it: ‘European colonists used various theories to
justify colonialism and ideas of racial diffference.’47 We also see paintings
of hard-working labourers opposed to the new bourgeoisie and of some
of the fij 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 defijicit 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 fijirst
a name that has to be fijilled out by diffferent 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.
216
JAN IFVERSEN
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 fijind artefacts adding to this particular story of European integration.
Next to the pillars we fijind 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 diffferent
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 fijirst effforts 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
A GUIDED TOUR INTO THE QUESTION OF EUROPE
217
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 diffferent from
history. It is still there, while history passes on.
We return to history again in section fijive on the next floor. Under the
heading of ‘Shattering Certainties’ we are brought to the present. The
main narrative takes us to diffferent 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 diffferent 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 fijinally the fijinancial 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 fijind 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 fijind
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 diffferent
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’.
218
JAN IFVERSEN
We have to add a fijinal 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 diffferent 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 diffferent 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 difffijicult pasts and effforts
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.
A GUIDED TOUR INTO THE QUESTION OF EUROPE
219
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 confijined 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 difffijicult 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 fijind 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 defijined 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 fijirst case, the
other is recognized as being here, but is still another (the eternal transitory
fijigure 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.
220
JAN IFVERSEN
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About the Author
Jan Ifversen, Associate Professor of European Studies, Aarhus University.
Jif@cas.au.dk
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 diffferent ‘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 fijinal interpretation.
Keywords: Eurocentrism, European Union, cultural policy, European
cultural space, governmentalization
Introduction
From the 1970s onwards, the diffferent 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
224
CL ASKE VOS
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 afffijiliation to the European cultural space. If the Commission
directly and indirectly imposes approaches to culture in- and outside its
political confijines and considers these as more suitable than other approaches,
how does this impact on the ways in which diffferent 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 fijirst 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 diffferent ‘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 diffferent 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 fijirst investments in culture were made on a European
level. Closely following UNESCO, the Council of Europe adopted its fijirst
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
CONSTRUC TING THE EUROPEAN CULTUR AL SPACE
225
cultural heritage.1 International cooperation in the fijield 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 fijield of culture, was taken up by the EU at a later stage.
When the fijirst 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 sufffering
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
diffferent 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
fijirst 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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CL ASKE VOS
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 Scientifijic
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 fijield of culture, the emphasis was put on the benefijits 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 fijield
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 identifijication and, on the other
hand, to the economic and social potential of Europe’s cultural sector.12
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Shore, ‘“In uno plures” (?)’, 18.
Delanty, Inventing Europe, 111; Pieterse, ‘Fictions of Europe’, 4.
Commission of the European Union, ‘A Community of Cultures’, 3.
Staiger, ‘The European Capitals’.
Yúdice, The Expedience of Culture.
O’Brien, Cultural Policy.
Littoz-Monnet, ‘Agenda-setting’, 508.
CONSTRUC TING THE EUROPEAN CULTUR AL SPACE
227
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 offfijicials. 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
identifij 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 efffort 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” (?)’.
228
CL ASKE VOS
in the fijield 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
fijinancial capacity of the state. Through diffferent 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
diffferent 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 fijield of culture used by
the EU is the creation of various funding schemes. These funding schemes
ask for adherence to specifijic 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 fijield. 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 diffferent 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.
CONSTRUC TING THE EUROPEAN CULTUR AL SPACE
229
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 efffectively. 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 fijinancial 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 fijield 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 fijinal 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
diffferent 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 fijield is the open
method of coordination (OMC).22 In the fijield of culture OMC means that
working groups have been established consisting of experts, civil servants
and representatives of the governments from diffferent EU member states.
In these working groups European priorities in the fijield 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
defijinition 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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CL ASKE VOS
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 difffer 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 afffair. Finally, they
must enter partnerships which influences the ways in which these projects
evolve. On the one hand, it means fijinding the best candidates to set up
projects, co-constructing European culture and establishing the best balance between resources in terms of knowledge, fijinances and experienced
people. On the other hand, it means accepting inequality, as it is a playfijield
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 fijield generally perceived
as confijined 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.
CONSTRUC TING THE EUROPEAN CULTUR AL SPACE
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Regarding the efffects of the EU interventions in the fijield of culture, three
expressions of friction can be distinguished that have diffferent 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 defijine
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 fijirst instance of friction is the outcome of the spatial diffferences 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 fijield, 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 diffferent ideas about how to organize cultural
policy converge, clash or become negotiated in transnational EU-funded
initiatives. Particularly for those countries that use diffferent policy models
26 See Littoz-Monnet, ‘Agenda-setting’; Staiger, ‘The European Capitals’.
232
CL ASKE VOS
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 diffference between forerunners and those lagging
behind in the fijield concerning the possibilities to obtain EU funding for
cultural projects. When comparing the diffferent 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 fijinancial resources to guarantee the sustainability of the
programmes. Here, the countries display their procedural capacity. What we
see is that new power fijields 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 fijields 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 diffferent levels that participate in the EU-funded cultural initiatives
and their ideas difffer 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 fijield 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
diffferent 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 Afffairs, ‘The Economy’, 66).
29 Vos, ‘European Integration’.
CONSTRUC TING THE EUROPEAN CULTUR AL SPACE
233
the implementation of the funded projects. For example, the structural
funds provide regions and municipalities with responsibilities in the fijield
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 fijields of
cultural action. Mediators between the European Commission and national
governments such as the so-called Creative Europe desks and European
integration offfijices 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
diffferent 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 diffferent 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 diffferently’, 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 sufffijicient state support,
their resources are scarce, and the diverging strategies used in the fijield of
cultural policy makes long-term investments complicated. Taking part in
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CL ASKE VOS
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 confijirmation 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 efffect 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
31
32
33
Ibid.
Blagojević, Knowledge Production, 99.
Interview with Darka Radosavljević, the director of Remont, Belgrade, August 2016.
Welz, European Products, 4-5.
CONSTRUC TING THE EUROPEAN CULTUR AL SPACE
235
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 fijit 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 fijind funding through other means. The European
cultural space – as determined by EU funding – is just one of the options
to develop projects, but defijinitely 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 offfers 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 fijield 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.
236
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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 fij 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 offfijicial governmental actors in the fijield of culture.
For some sectors the European cultural space has always been at the
centre of their activities. Actors working in the fijield 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 defijines 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 fijield, and a considerable availability of resources in the form
of fij inances, stafff, 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 fijind partners to fulfijil these interests. The
friction caused by transnational cooperation stimulated by EU funding in
the fijield 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.
CONSTRUC TING THE EUROPEAN CULTUR AL SPACE
237
A fij inal 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 fijield 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 offfijices. 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 difffij icult 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 difffijiculty 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 diffferent national contexts in which many
other explicit public policies influence the fijield 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.
238
CL ASKE VOS
A fijinal 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 benefijicial 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 fijit 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 identifij ication with the European unifij ication project and to invest in the
economic and social potential of Europe’s cultural sector. It has done so by
means of diffferent projects and programmes. At fijirst, 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 specifijic groups in these states.
Kuus, ‘Europe’s Eastern Expansion’, 478.
43 Vos, ‘European Integration’.
44 Karaça,’ Governance’, 125.
CONSTRUC TING THE EUROPEAN CULTUR AL SPACE
239
means to stimulate more general integration processes, such as economic
development, institution building and regional cooperation. Due to the
investments made in the fijield 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, specifijic forms of knowledge and techniques have become
introduced and have started to determine much of the approaches in the
cultural fijield.
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 diffferent
actors on diffferent levels. These instances of friction display the existence of
diffferent political models used in the fijield 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 diffferent
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 diffferent ideas, backgrounds, objectives and positions in
the fijield of European cultural policy. The repercussions of these expressions
of friction are constraining as well as empowering. Some actors experience
them as a confijirmation 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 fijield 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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CL ASKE VOS
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 fij 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 fijield. 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 diffferent 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 confijines 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 fijinal interpretation.
45 Castells, The Information Age.
CONSTRUC TING THE EUROPEAN CULTUR AL SPACE
241
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About the Author
Claske Vos, Assistant Professor of European Governance, University of
Amsterdam
C.Vos@uva.nl
Index
Aeschylus 147
Alecsandri, Vasile 187-188
Alexander II, tsar 82-83
Alfijieri, 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, Geofffrey 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
Heinesen, William 142
13, 160
246
EUROCENTRISM IN EUROPEAN HISTORY AND MEMORY
Henry V, king 143-145, 152
Moreau, Gustave 131
Herder, Johann Gottfried 52, 181n8
Morrison, Toni 113
Hergé (Georges Remi) 129-130, 129 (illustration), Müller, Heiner 150-151
129n11, 134
Muratori, Ludovico 185
Hilal, Musa 69
Hitler, Adolf 69-70, 148, 213
Napoleon, emperor 49, 131, 172
Hobsbawm, Eric 33
Nancy, Jean-Luc 202
Hugo, Victor 71
Newton, Isaac 49
Hume, David 47-49
Niklasson, Elisabeth 235
Hussein, Saddam 68-70, 74
Obradović, Dositej 185
Iorga, Nicolae 30
Okey, Robin 182
Orange, William of 161n17
Jakŝić, Djura 188
Ortega y Gasset, José 32, 55, 55n49
Jensen, Wilhelm 121-125, 127
Ortelius, Abraham 109
Johnson, Boris 152-153
Osterhammel, Jürgen 183
Jonson, Ben 147
Judt, Tony 14, 44, 199-201, 213
Paget, Debra 135, 135 (illustration)
Parman, Susan 183
Kagame, Paul 70
Pavie, Théodore 131
Kelsall, Charles 147-148
Péguy, Charles 152
Kipling, Rudyard 132-134, 136
Petipa, Marius 130, 136
Kissinger, Henry 44
Pius XII, pope 206
Koolhaas, Rem 217
Plautus, Titus Maccius 147
Kravagna, Christian 113
Pokrovsky, Mikhail 32
Kundmann, Karl 108
Prescott, William H. 162
Princip, Gavrilo 216
Lang, Fritz 134, 134n16, 135
Proust, Marcel 121, 152
Le Senne, Camille 149
Lean, David 132
Racine, Jean 142
Leggewie, Claus 36, 198n10, 201
Radosavljević, Darka 234
Leopold II, king 68-69
Râmnic, Gregory 186
Levene, Mark 72, 72n17
Ranke, Leopold von 13, 49, 52, 52n40, 53, 53n42,
Lewes, George Henry 163, 168-170, 173
56, 58
Longinus 147
Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas 27
Longworth, Philip 182
Riefenstahl, Leni 105, 117
Lope de Vega, Félix 147, 164, 165n29, 168-170, 174 Ripa, Cesare 109
Lorde, Audre 113
Robertson, William 47
Loti, Pierre 131-132
Rodenburgh, Theodore 142
Rodger, George 117
Maistre, Joseph de 49, 51
Rohmer, Eric 126
Maître Leherb (Helmut Leherbauer) 17, 105
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 27, 209
(illustration), 105-108, 112-119, 112n19
Ruskin, John 123
Marx, Karl 151
Russell, William 47
Massenet, Jules 131
Masson de Morvilliers, Nicolas 161
Said, Edward 34, 113, 159, 160n9, 182
Mata Hari (Greta Zelle) 132, 133 (illustration) Salvadó, Alberto 142
Métivier, George 142
Scandizzo, Pasquale Luzio 158
Michelangelo 106, 114-116, 118
Schiller, Friedrich 51-52, 142, 148
Michelet, Jules 28
Schlegel, Friedrich 52, 130n12, 168
Micka, Boris 213
Schlosser, Friedrich Christoph 29
Mill, Stuart 50
Schnabel, Franz 31, 33
Mishkova, Diana 187
Scott, Walter 126
Moisiodax, Iosipos 185
Schuman, Robert 11, 15, 18, 195, 203-212,
Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) 142, 147
205n31-32, 208n35-36, 211n39, 218
Monkman, Kent 107, 107n5, 118-119
Shakespeare, William 17, 141-154, 163, 146n6
Monnet, Jean 203, 206-209, 208n36, 211n39, 216 Sismonde de Sismondi, Jean Charles 164-169,
Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat,
164n28, 165n29, 166n34, 173-174
baron de 47-48, 47-48n20, 160
Smirnov, Vasilii Dmitrievich 85
247
INDEX
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 Abraham
Samuel 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, Paul Anton 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
Wolfff, Larry 26, 182-183
Worringer, Wilhelm 180-181
Yeats, William Butler
137