PURPLE PATCH: HISTORY AND NATIONALISM
E J Hobsbawm
Daily Times, Pakistan
Oct 8 2007
History is the raw material for nationalist or ethnic or fundamentalist
ideologies, as poppies are the raw material for heroin addiction. The
past is an essential element, perhaps the essential element, in
these ideologies. If there is no suitable past, it can always be
invented. Indeed, in the nature of things there is usually no entirely
suitable past, because the phenomenon that these ideologies claim
to justify is not ancient or eternal but historically novel. This
applies both to religious fundamentalism in its current versions –
the Ayatollah Khomeini’s version of an Islamic state is no older
than the early 1970s- and to contemporary nationalism. The past
legitimises. The past gives a more glorious background to a present
that doesn’t have much to celebrate. I recall seeing somewhere a
study of the ancient civilisation of the cities of the Indus valley
with the title Five Thousand Years of Pakistan.
Pakistan was not even thought of before 1932-3, when the name was
invented by some students. It did not become a serious political
demand till 1940. As a state it has existed only since 1947. There is
no evidence of any more connection between the civilisation of Mohenjo
Daro and the current rulers of Islamabad than there is of a connection
between the Trojan War and the government in Ankara, which is at
present claiming the return, if only for the first public exhibition,
of Schliemann’s treasure of King Priam of Troy. But 5,000 years of
Pakistan somehow sounds better than forty-six years of Pakistan.
In this situation historians find themselves in that unexpected
role of political actors. I used to think that the profession of
history, unlike that of, say, nuclear physics, could at least do no
harm. Now I know it can. Our studies can turn into bomb factories
like the workshops in which the IRA has learned to transform chemical
fertiliser into an explosive. This state of affairs affects us in two
ways. We have a responsibility to historical facts in general, and for
criticising the politico-ideological abuse of history in particular.
I need say little about the first of these responsibilities. I would
not have to say anything, but for two developments. One is the current
fashion for novelists to base their plots on recorded reality rather
than inventing them, thus fudging the border between historical fact
and fiction. The other is the rise of ‘postmodernist’ intellectual
fashions in Western universities, particularly in departments of
literature and anthropology, which imply that all ‘facts’ claiming
objective existence are simply intellectual constructions – in short,
that there is no clear difference between fact and fiction. But there
is, and for historians, even for the most militantly anti-positivist
ones among us, the ability to distinguish between the two is absolutely
fundamental. We cannot invent our facts. Either Elvis Presley is
dead or he isn’t. The question can be answered unambiguously on the
basis of evidence, insofar as reliable evidence is available, which
is sometimes the case. Either the present Turkish government, which
denies the attempted genocide of the Armenians in 1915, is right or
it is not. Most of us would dismiss any denial of this massacre from
serious historical discourse, although there is no equally unambiguous
way to choose between different ways of interpreting the phenomenon or
fitting it into the wider context of history. Recently, Hindu zealots
destroyed a mosque in Aodhya, ostensibly on the grounds that the
mosque had been imposed by the Muslim Moghul conqueror Babur on the
Hindus in a particularly sacred location which marked the birthplace
of the god Rama. My colleagues and friends in the Indian universities
published a study showing (a) that nobody until the nineteenth century
had suggested that Aodhya was the birthplace of Rama and (b) that the
mosque was almost certainly not built in the time of Babur. I wish
I could say that this has had much effect on the rise of the Hindu
party which provoked the incident, but at least they did their duty
as historians, for the benefit of those who can read and are exposed
to the propaganda of intolerance now and in the future. Let us do ours.
Few of the ideologies of intolerance are based on simple lies or
fictions for which no evidence exists. After all, there was a battle
of Kosovo in 1389, the Serb warriors and their allies were defeated by
the Turks, and this did leave deep scars on the popular memory of the
Serbs, although it does not follow that this justifies the oppression
of the Albanians, who now form 90 per cent of the region’s population,
or the Serb claim that the land is essentially theirs.
Denmark does not claim the large part of eastern England which
was settled and ruled by Danes before the eleventh century, which
continued to be known as the Danelaw and whose village names are
still philologically Danish.
The most usual ideological abuse of history is based on anachronism
rather than lies. Greek nationalism refused Macedonia even the
right to its name on the grounds that all Macedonia is essentially
Greek and part of a Greek nation-state, presumably ever since the
father of Alexander the Great, King of Macedonia, became the ruler
of the Greek lands on the Balkan peninsula. Like everything about
Macedonia, this is a far from purely academic matter, but it takes
a lot of courage for a Greek intellectual to say that, historically
speaking, it is nonsense. There was no Greek nation-state or any other
single political entity for the Greeks in the fourth century BC,
the Macedonian Empire was nothing like a Greek or any other modern
nation-state, and in any case it is highly probable that the ancient
Greeks regarded the Macedonian rulers, as they did their later Roman
rulers, as barbarians and not as Greeks, though they were doubtless
too polite or cautious to say so.
These and many other attempts to replace history by myth and invention
are not merely bad intellectual jokes. After all, they can determine
what goes into schoolbooks, as the Japanese authorities knew, when they
insisted on a sanitised version of the Japanese war in China for use in
Japanese classrooms. Myth and invention are essential to the politics
of identity by which groups of people today, defining themselves by
ethnicity, religion or the past or present borders of states, try to
find some certainty in an uncertain and shaking world by saying, ‘We
are different from and better than the Others.’ They are our concern
in the universities because the people who formulate those myths and
inventions are educated people: schoolteachers lay and clerical,
professors (not many, I hope), journalists, television and radio
producers. Today most of them will have gone to some university. Make
no mistake about it. History is not ancestral memory or collective
tradition. It is what people learned from priests, schoolmasters,
the writers of history books and the compilers of magazine articles
and television programmes. It is very important for historians to
remember their responsibility, which is, above all to stand aside from
the passions of identity politics – even if we feel them also. After
all, we are human beings, too.
However, we cannot wait for the generations to pass. We must resist
the formation of national, ethnic and other myths, as they are being
formed. It will not make us popular. Thomas Masaryk, founder of the
Czechoslovak Republic, was not popular when he entered politics as
the man who proved, with regret but without hesitation, that the
medieval manuscripts on which much of the Czech national myth was
based were fakes. But it has to be done, and I hope those of you who
are historians will do it.
Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm (born 1917) is a British historian and
author. This is an excerpt from a paper given as a lecture opening the
academic year 1993-4 at the Central European University in Budapest. It
was addressed to a body of students essentially drawn from the formerly
communist countries in Europe and the former USSR