History: overview and development

¶ … European History Quarterly, at least if its last three issues are an accurate guide, is a well-edited and well-written journal that focuses on a wide range of political and historical issues in Europe and the United Kingdom from the beginnings of the Renaissance through the present. (That is to say, the articles focus on the range of events within the historical sphere that is generally referred to as the modern world.) The articles in the first three issues of 2002 are somewhat more inclined to discuss politics within an historical context rather than history per se - although one may argue that this is simply the way in which history should be discussed.

Certainly, the editorial cast to these articles is very much within the model of new history - or new historiography. There is a definite avoidance of description that serves no other ends than simply to provide details about past great men and women or important events. The articles have, overall, a clear tendency towards both analysis (seeking to find underlying and recurring motivations of human behavior) as well as toward synthesis (as the scholars seek to understand a wide range of factors within a given society at a particular time. In other words, the bent of this journal is an attempt (usually quite successful) to combine the best aspects of both scientific and humanistic discourse.

When reading the articles in these three issues of the journal, one is reminded of the central lesson of historiography (which is the philosophical and scholarly examination of the ways in which history is written and used). We must remember, when we are reading any work of history, that that work actually describes to us as the reader two (often dramatically) different historical moments. That is because every historical text reveals to the reader something of the currently known and accepted facts of what happened at a particular moment in time. But each historical text also reveals to the reader a great deal about the historical era in which the work was written.

Each historian must consider from the context of his or her own time what is sufficiently important about another historical moment to focus upon, which events must be considered to be causative and which extraneous, which events are linked to others and which are coincidental. These assessments vary over time, in part because of changes in bias and perspective (for all history is written through a particular perspective - it could not be otherwise unless it were written by machines) and in part because of the changing knowledge of the past. A newly discovered telegram or diary or stash of letters may change the way we see a great many things and cause us to rewrite history.

The scholars writing for this journal along with its editorial board seem highly attuned to such historiographic concerns, which makes these articles a pleasure to read: They are very attentive to nuance in both the historical period about which they are writing and our own times.

This is not to say that the journal does not have an ideological perspective. That perspective might be described as thoughtfully left of center. It is not ideological in the sense that people often use this word to mean dramatically skewed to the left or right, nor is it ideological in the sense that only one side of political and cultural debates is given a fair summation.

Rather, it is ideological (and leftist) in the sense that the authors and editors of the journal clearly believe that it is important to consider the nature of the power structure of societies. This insistence on bringing a keen analytical focus to bear on those in power in any given society (whether those in power are themselves on the left or the right) is more commonly found among progressive than conservative critics, the latter of whom are quite happy to criticize progressive governments but even more likely than those on the left to ignore mistakes by their own.

The tone and content of this journal can be even more clearly understood by examining the three issues at hand in much greater detail to determine how the articles - as well as reviews and other supplementary material - contribute to the overall sense of a thoughtful, analytical, progressive historical publication. The nuanced and intelligent approach to modern European history is helped by the fact that both the editorial board members and the contributing scholars come from a variety of nations, thus helping to ensure a more diverse (and so less chauvinistic) approach.

Stefan Berger's "Democracy and Social Democracy" is an excellent example of the kind of article that the journal specialized in because it is an examination of the power structure of a number of European nations beginning with the late 19th century and running through the present. The focus of the article is primarily on the ways in which ideas about democratic structure and governance developed at different rates and in different ways throughout Europe (in large measure because of different local economic conditions), coalescing in what he refers to as the "golden age" of social democracy during the 1940s and 1960s.

Of particular interest in this article is his examination of the ways in which social democratic ideals (especially the pro-labor element of social democracy) began to fail in the face of the rising power of the New Right during the 1980s. Although the author's sympathies appear to lie with the advocates of social democracy (with its concerns for creating a society that is both diverse and fundamentally just), he provides a trenchant analysis of the failures of social democracy (especially the tendency of social democratic leaders to become out of touch with their core constituencies after being in power in the government) even as he reaffirms the enduring strengths of the movement that have helped the ideals of social democracy to begin to reestablish themselves in at least some contemporary European governments.

The article is analytic and pan-European in its approach, providing us with a good sense of the range of changes in left-of-center political ideals and strategies over the past century.

Sian Reynolds's "Lateness, Amnesia and Unfinished Business: Gender and Democracy in Twentieth-Century Europe" provides a fascinating new analytic tool through which to view the association of gender and democracy. Reynolds argues that it is fundamentally misleading to consider countries more or less democratic (vis-a-vis gender at least) by looking only at what year women in those countries gained suffrage rights.

While Reynolds is certainly not arguing that enfranchisement does not matter, the historian is making the valid (and all-too-often overlooked point) that voting rights are not the only nor perhaps even the best ways in which to judge the degree to which women are included in the democratic process. Reynolds argues that parity in governance may well be a better tool to measure the democractic-ness of a society.

While this might seem to be a very ordinary observation to make, in fact it is an important paradigm shift in the way that many historians view democracy and gender. Without a broad perspective that examines more than one country, such a new method of analyzing gender inclusiveness could well have been missed. Reynolds's article is an excellent example of how the journal's support of pan-European (or at least regional) analysis can allow for insights that might well not occur if the historian were focusing more narrowly.

Martin Conway's "Democracy in Postwar Western Europe: The Triumph of a Political Model" also demonstrates the ways in which the journal focuses on broad European trends especially in the arena of power and governance.

This article explores the post-World War II governments of European nations as being in many ways fundamentally similar to each other. Conway argues that these similarities are the major reason that there has been relatively widespread and relatively stable democratic governments across the western half of the continent during the past three generations.

This democratic stability, he argues, was to some extent shaped by a common opposition to the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War as well as a common response to the economic changes brought about by first the industrialization and then the shift to post-industrialization across the continent. While there were important differences among the nations, he argues, these similarities are probably more important.

Also contributing to the general level of stable, democratic governance was the rise across Europe of a relatively depoliticized population. We in the United States tend to decry the depoliticization of society because this process is linked in our own minds with declining voter participation rates and generalized apathy. This may also be of equal concern in European nations (it is not clear if it is so or not from Conway's article) but Conway provides a clear analysis of the advantages of depoliticizing society that we might not have thought of before.

While we (at least most of us) believe that many of the problems in American governance arise from apathy, Europeans remember all too well that terrible results may occur from over-involvement in political ideals on the part of the citizenry. We in the United States tend to see the tragedy of Nazism as a refusal of Germans to become engaged and to acknowledge what was happening in their societies. However, Conway's article suggests that we might interpret the events in Germany in the 1930s and 1950s in the reverse sense: If people had not been so eager to become involved in the political process and had stayed away from National Socialism, the history of the century would have been a great deal brighter.

Eric Storm's "The Rise of the Intellectual Around 1900: Spain and France" is perhaps the best article of all of those in these three issues of the journal because he most successfully manages what appear to be the twin goals of the journal: piercing analysis with a humanistic turn toward the synthetic. In other words, he provides both a very good sense of the broad picture while also providing with key details that back up and illuminate the general statements that he makes. This seems to be what the journal is striving for overall. It is perhaps easier to accomplish when writing intellectual history, which is perhaps why it is so especially successful in this article.

It may also be that Storm is so successful in this article because his subject is one that mirrors the editorial tone of the journal. His subject is, as the title suggests, the rise of a self-consciously intellectual in Spain and France during the previous fin-de-siecle period. An essential part of the process of becoming an intellectual in that time and place was, according to Storm, the intentional looking beyond regional concerns and issues to nationalistic ones.

One could argue that this is in fact exactly what the journal itself is doing - attempting to move away from a parochial, nationalistic view of history to a Continental or at least regional one - even as Iberian intellectuals had to broaden their allegiance from the local to the national.

Paul Mazgaj's "Engagement and the French Nationalist Right: The Case of the Jeune Droit" is an excellent example of the way that the journal covers political movements and power structures that are to the right of the general editorial tone of the journal. One might expect that the sympathies of the scholars in this journal would lead them to be overly critical of right-leaning movements, but in fact the tone in this article is extremely even-handed.

Mazgaj focuses on a number of the same issues that Storm takes up in terms of the ways in which intellectuals self-consciously create themselves. (This is another strength of the journal, although of course not unique to it: While not slavishly adhering to a single, narrowly defined theme, the articles in each issue do relate to each other in complex and intelligent ways.) He argues that while the idea of an ecrivain engage - a writer engaged as actively in the political life of the nation as in its artistic life - is generally considered to be the province of the left (at least in France) in fact there was a parallel movement of conservative writers beginning in the 1930s who created for themselves a nationalist and conservative model of the engaged writer.

Marzgaj argues - and it is in such arguments that one appreciates the even-handed tone of the journal as regards those whose politics are to the right - that both left-leaning and right-leaning writers who wished to immerse themselves in the political life of their times found themselves equally constrained by the political pan-European polarization between Communism and Fascism. Caught in the middle of this titanic ideological struggle, neither writers on the left nor writers on the right had much room for personal expression or much power to try to bring people together to create governments that might be honestly receptive to those of different ideologies.

Edward Ross Dickinson's "Until the Stubborn Will is Broken': Crisis and Reform in Prussian Reformatory Education, 1900-34" is, like Reynolds's article on democracy and gender, an excellent analysis of something that many of us know a fair amount about - an analysis that makes us question accepted wisdom.

Dickinson examines the problems faced by Prussian reformatory schools in the first third of the 20th century, arguing that the schools were facing an existential crisis because the administrators were far more conservative than the students and their families. The schools tended to respond to this cultural gap (which resulted in students who would not be reformed according to the standards of the schools) in two ways. The first was to create eugenic theories that explained (at least to themselves) why it was that their policies were failing (these eugenic models often suggested terrible punishments for those who could not conform).

This was clearly the path down which the National Socialists would take the country, and is a model of Prussian culture and power structures with which we are familiar.

However, other schools and other administrators responded quite differently, attempting to create child welfare programs designed to prevent behavioral problems to begin with. This is a surprising revelation about Prussian educational structure, given its clear liberal bias and its inclination toward the ideals that would be central to the progressive welfare state.

Maria Jesus Gonzalez's "Neither God Nor Monster': Antonio Maura and the Failure of Conservative Reformism in Restoration Spain (1893-1923)" is one of the more narrowly focused articles in these three issues and because of this one of the less interesting. (Of course, it would be interesting if this were one's area of expertise, but it lacks the larger synthetic qualities of other articles in the journal.)

However, it does feature the evenhandedness that is one of the hallmarks of the journal in its analysis of Maura. Gonzalez does not demonize Maura but rather seeks to allow us to understand that those interested in conservative political, economic, and cultural reform in Spain at the beginning of the last century were not only interested in social control - as they are often represented to have been. Rather, while many were interested in social control at least to some extent, others were interested in creating a form of governance that was based in social consensus. While there are certainly still problematic issues in such a form of governance, they are fewer than those associated with straightforward social control models.