Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History

by Margaret MacMillan

  The cumulative result was to create an unreal yet influential version of how nations formed. While it could not be denied that different peoples, from Goths to Slavs, had moved into and across Europe, mingling as they did so with peoples already there, such a view assumed that at some point, generally in the Middle Ages, the music had stopped. The dancing pieces had fallen into their chairs, one for the French, another for the Germans, and yet another for the Poles. And there history had fixed them as “nations.” German historians, for example, could depict an ancient German nation whose ancestors had lived happily in their forests from before the time of the Roman Empire and which at some time, probably in the first century A.D., had become recognizably “German.” So—and this was the dangerous question—what was properly the German nation’s land? Or the land of any other “nation”? Was it where the people now lived, where they had lived at the time of their emergence in history, or both?

  Would the scholars have gone on with their speculations if they could have seen what they were preparing the way for? The bloody wars that created Italy and Germany? The passions and hatred that tore apart the old multinational Austria-Hungary? The claims, on historical grounds, by new and old nations after World War I for the same pieces of territory? The hideous regimes of Hitler and Mussolini with their elevation of the nation and the race to the supreme good and their breathtaking demands for the lands of others?

  A paradox, as the British historian Eric Hobsbawm put it, is that “nationalism is modern but it invents for itself history and traditions.” The histories that fed and still feed into nationalism draw on what already exists rather than inventing new facts. They often contain much that is true, but they are slanted to confirm the existence of the nation through time, and to encourage the hope that it will continue. They help to create symbols of victory or defeat—Waterloo, Dunkirk, Stalingrad, Gettysburg, or, for Canadians, Vimy Ridge. They highlight the deeds of past leaders—Charles Martel defeating the Moors at Tours; Elizabeth I at Plymouth Hoe facing the Spanish Armada; Horatio Nelson destroying the French fleet at Trafalgar; George Washington refusing to lie about his cherry tree. Often nationalism borrows from the trappings of religious identity. Think of the war memorials that resemble martyrs or Christ on the cross, or the elaborate rituals on days such as November 11.

  Many of what the present age thinks of as age-old symbols and ceremonies are often newly minted, as each generation looks through the past and finds what suits its present needs. In 1953, all around the world those who had televisions watched, with awe and fascination, the ancient coronation rituals—the monarch’s ride through London in the gilded state coach, the solemn procession into Westminster Abbey, the music, the decorations, the archbishop of Canterbury in his magnificent robes, the elaborate ceremony of crowning. As a schoolchild in Canada, I was given a booklet that explained it all. What most of us did not know was that much of what we watched with such respect was a creation of the nineteenth century. Earlier coronations had been slipshod, even embarrassing affairs. When a hugely fat George IV was crowned in 1820, his estranged queen, Caroline, hammered on the door. At Queen Victoria’s coronation in 1837, the clergy stumbled through the service, and the archbishop of Canterbury had trouble with the ring, which was much too big for her finger. By the end of the century, the monarchy was more important as the symbol of a much more powerful Britain. Royal occasions became grander and were much better rehearsed. New ones were added: David Lloyd George, the radical prime minister from Wales, found it useful to have a formal ceremony within the ancient walls of Caernarfon Castle to install the later Edward VIII as Prince of Wales.

  One of the most famous of national symbols is the Battle of Kosovo, where Serbian forces were defeated by the Ottoman Turks in 1389. In Serbian nationalist lore, this was both an earthly and a spiritual defeat that contains within it, however, the promise of resurrection. For Serbian nationalists, the story is tragically clear. The Christian Serbs were defeated, through treachery, by the Muslim Ottomans. The night before the battle, Prince Lazar, the Serbian leader, had a vision in which he was promised that he could have either the kingdom of heaven or one on earth. A good Christian, he chose the former, but the implicit promise was that one day the Serbian nation would be resurrected on earth. Spiritual salvation or earthly? Lazar died on the battlefield, after he was betrayed by a Judas, a fellow Serb. His people, true to their faith, remembered the defeat and the promise and longed for a restored Serbian state for the next four hundred years.

  The only problem with the story is that not only is it much too simple but parts of it are not supported by the sketchy records from the time. Prince Lazar was not the ruler of all the Serbs but merely one among the several princes who were scrambling for power in the wreckage of the Serbian empire built by Prince Dusan. Some had already made their peace with the Ottomans and as vassals of the sultan had sent troops to fight against Lazar. It is not clear that the battle was an overwhelming defeat for the Serbs; at the time, reports in fact called it a victory. It may equally as well have been a draw because neither side resumed hostilities for a time. And an independent Serbian state lingered on for decades.

  Lazar’s widow and Orthodox monks began the process of turning the dead prince into a martyr for the Serbs, curiously at the same time as his son was fighting as a vassal for the Turks. For centuries, though, Lazar and Kosovo were symbols more of Serbs as Orthodox Christians and a people who had a common language than of an independent Serbian nation-state. The story was kept alive in the monasteries, along with much other Serbian culture, and in the great epic poems which were passed down through the generations. It was only in the nineteenth century, with the awakening of nationalism throughout Europe, that that story became so central in mobilizing Serbs to fight for independence against a declining and incompetent Ottoman Empire.

  In the first half of the nineteenth century, with history as their inspiration, the Serbs moved toward first autonomy within the Ottoman Empire and then full independence. The highly influential Serbian scholar of the early nineteenth century Vuk Karadžić standardized a modern Serbian written language and collected the epic poems. He also left a poisoned legacy by arguing that those peoples such as Croats and Bosnian Muslims who spoke virtually the same language were also Serbs. Ilija Garašanin, the statesman who did so much to shape Serbian nationalism and to build the structures for the new Serbian state, drew on history to point his fellow Serbs toward their destiny. The Serbian Empire had been destroyed by the Ottoman Turks, but now the time had come to restore it. We are, he said in a document that remained secret until the start of the twentieth century, the “true heirs of our great forefathers.” Serbian nationalism was not something new or, heaven forbid, revolutionary but the flowering of ancient roots. Again, it was a dangerous vision because it assumed that the Croats and Bosnians were a natural part of the empire.

  It is easy to challenge such views of the past but not to shake the faith of those who wish to believe in them. In the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1980s and 1990s, the old historical myths came to the forefront again. Yet again, the Serbs were fighting on alone in a hostile world. In 1986, a memorandum from the Serbian Academy of Sciences warned that all the gains the Serbs had made since they first rebelled against the Ottomans in 1804 were going to be lost. Croats were terrorizing the Serbs in Croatia, and Albanians were forcing Serbs to flee the province of Kosovo. In 1989, Slobodan Milošević went to Kosovo on the six-hundredth anniversary of the battle and declared, “The Kosovo heroism does not allow us to forget that, at one time, we were brave and dignified and one of the few who went into battle undefeated.” At the same time, in Croatia, nationalists were looking back into their past to argue that a greater Croatia, incorporating hundreds of thousands of Serbs, was historically necessary. History did not destroy Yugoslavia or lead to the horrors that accompanied that destruction, but its skillful manipulation by men such as Milošević and, in Croatia, Franjo Tudjman helped to mobilize their followers and intimidat
e the uncommitted.

  The Balkans have had, in Winston Churchill’s marvelous phrase, more history than they can consume. New nations have worried that they do not have enough. When Israel came into existence in 1948, it was, despite the long connection of Jews with Palestine, a new state. With immigrants from all over Europe, and, increasingly, by the 1950s from the Middle East, building a strong national identity was essential if Israel itself were to survive. It was difficult to identify shared customs and culture. What did a Jew from Egypt have in common with one from Poland? Nor was religion a sufficient basis; many Zionists were resolutely nonreligious. Although Hebrew was reviving, it had not yet produced a national literature. That gave history particular significance as a glue. In its Declaration of Independence, Israel called on the past to justify its existence. The land was the historic birthplace of the Jewish people: “After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration of their political freedom.” More recent history became part of the story, too. The Jews had managed to return in great numbers: “They made deserts bloom, revived the Hebrew language, built villages and towns, and created a thriving community, controlling its own economy and culture, loving peace but knowing how to defend itself, bringing the blessings of progress to all the country’s inhabitants, and aspiring towards independent nationhood.”

  In 1953, the Israeli Knesset passed the State Education Law and a law (Yad Vashem) to commemorate the Holocaust. The laws’ author was the minister of education and culture, Ben-Zion Dinur, who had been active as a Zionist educator and politician long before Israel’s independence. His view of history was rooted in the need to build an Israeli consciousness. “The ego of a nation,” he declared in the Knesset, “exists only to the extent that it has a memory, to the extent that the nation knows how to combine its past experiences into a single entity.” For Dinur and those who supported him (and many on both the Left and the Right did not), that meant teaching Israelis that there was and always had been an Israeli nation, that it had survived the long centuries of exile, and that it had always been focused on getting back to its lost lands. Israel therefore was the heir and the culmination of a long historical process. Dinur’s view has been much criticized for leaving out religion, for example, in the definition of Jewishness and for presenting an oversimplified view of Jewish history, but it has been very influential in Israeli schools. A study of textbooks used between 1900 and 1984 found that increasingly as time went on, Jewish history was presented in terms of the establishment of Israel, that among Jews in exile the Zionist dream of a Jewish state was “the strongest and oldest” movement.

  Nationalism has far from run its course, and new nations keep appearing—and they, too, find history important in defining themselves. In the 1960s, Wolfgang Feuerstein, a young German scholar, came upon a people inhabiting a remote valley on the south coast of the Black Sea near the Turkish port of Trabzon The approximately 250,000 Lazi were Muslim, like the great majority of Turks, but had their own language, customs, and myths. It seemed to the young German that they must have once been Christian. He started to study them, this anomaly left behind by history, and, to help record their stories, he devised a written language for them. The Lazi began to take an interest in their own past and culture, and the Turkish authorities, who have enough trouble with the demands of their other minorities, such as the Kurds, became concerned. Feuerstein was arrested, beaten, and deported, but from his exile he has sent texts with Lazi stories and poetry back to the unofficial schools which are now being run surreptitiously. As the Lazi develop a sense of themselves and their past, they are becoming a nation. In 1999, a Laz Party was established to push for a “Lazistan” within Turkey. Its manifesto talks of fostering the Laz language and culture and encouraging the study of history from a Laz point of view. And, if I am not mistaken, they will use that history to present a bill of claims one day.

  Anyone who has ever had an argument and said, “You always do that” or “I trusted you” or “You owe me one,” is using history to gain an advantage in the present. And almost all of us, from heads of countries to private citizens, do it. We spin the events of the past to show that we always tend to behave well and our opponents badly or that we are normally right and others wrong Therefore, it goes almost without saying, we are in the right again this time.

  When the troubles started in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, all sides called on history to justify what they were doing. The Serbs portrayed themselves as the historic defenders of Christianity against the Muslim onslaught and as the liberators of other southern Slavs such as the Croats and the Slovenes. The Croats saw a very different past. Croatia had always been part of the West, of the great Austrian Empire, and of Catholic civilization, while Serbia came out of the backward and superstitious world of Orthodoxy. The government in Serbia started to refer to Croats as Ustasha—the name of Fascist forces of World War II that had massacred Serbs and Jews. Serbian television repeatedly showed documentaries about the Ustasha, with the obvious implied warning that this could happen again. Croatia’s president, Franjo Tudjman, like Milošević another Communist turned nationalist, responded with scorn The Ustasha certainly had committed crimes, but it was nevertheless “an expression of the Croatian nation’s historic desire for an independent homeland.”

  When Serbian forces started to attack Bosnian Muslims, they tried to justify their unprovoked aggression by telling the world that they were yet again defending the Christian West against the fanatical East. The fact that Bosnian Muslims were not only largely secular but mostly descended from Serbs or Croats was not allowed to stand in the way. Serbian nationalists insisted on referring to them as Turks or traitors to the Serbs and the Serbian Orthodox Church. Croatians, of course, preferred to see the Bosnian Muslims as apostate Croatian Catholics. (Ironically, the effect of the war has been to make many Muslims in Bosnia much more devout.)

  Using history to label or diminish your opponents has always been a useful tool. The Left shouts “Fascist!” at the Right while conservatives throw around the Stalinist and Communist labels. When Ariel Sharon, then prime minister of Israel, visited New York in 2005, he faced protesters who shouted “Auschwitz” and “Nazi” because he had dismantled illegal Jewish settlements in the Gaza. In January 2006, as Hillary Clinton was opening her campaign for the presidency, she attacked the House of Representatives, then dominated by the Republicans. “When you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run,” she told a predominantly black audience in Harlem, “it has been run like a plantation and you know what I am talking about.” They did, and so did the Republicans who accused her of trying to play the race card.

  Countries also use episodes from the past to shame and put pressure on others. China, for example, repeatedly refers to the Century of Humiliation, which started with the first Opium War in 1839 and ended with the triumph of the Communists in 1949. The Chinese have a long list of grievances: defeat at the hands of foreign powers, from Britain to Japan; the 1860 burning of the Summer Palace in Beijing by British and French troops; foreign concession areas where foreign nationals made fortunes and lived under their own laws; unequal treaties that undermined China’s autonomy; and, of course, the famous “Dogs and Chinese Not Admitted” sign. When the United States sells weapons to Taiwan, China reminds it of American support for the Communists’ enemies in the past. When Henry Kissinger made his first secret trip to China in the summer of 1972, he had to sit through repeated reminders by the then prime minister, Zhou Enlai, of past American sins, including the famous occasion at the Geneva conference in 1954 when John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state, refused to shake Zhou’s hand. In 1981, China’s then leader, Deng Xiaoping, complained to the United States about its reluctance to sell China advanced technology: “Perhaps the problem is one of how the U.S. treats China. I wonder whether the U.S. is still not treating China as a hostile country.”


  In the Chinese Communist Party’s history, China is the eternal victim, and so it can do no wrong. It has been a peaceful power throughout its long history, never trying to conquer other peoples or grab territory, unlike the Western powers or Japan. When China receives worldwide criticism for its support of dreadful regimes like the ones in Burma and Sudan, yet again it is being unfairly treated. Foreign powers, in the Chinese view, cynically use talk of human rights abuses to attack China and to interfere in its internal affairs. The Dalai Lama, supported by wicked and self-serving forces in the West, puts out false stories about Tibet when, according to the official Chinese line, what had been a backward and priest-ridden society is rapidly modernizing with China’s unstinting help. In any case, say the Chinese, Westerners have no moral authority to criticize them when the West’s own history includes imperialism, slavery, and the Holocaust. When the Canadian government recently made inquiries about the fate of the Canadian citizen Huseyin Celil, who is being held in a Chinese prison, the Chinese countered with charges that, yet again, foreigners were trying to humiliate China but that China would stand firm. An interesting variant on the use of history to justify present-day behavior surfaced during the 2008 summer Olympics. When foreign critics pointed out that the Chinese authorities were not, as they had apparently promised the International Olympic Committee, respecting human rights, the response by China’s defenders was that foreigners had no authority to criticize China since they did not know its long history.