European History Quarterly Review: Politics, Democracy, and Historiography

Overview and Editorial Approach

The European History Quarterly, at least if its first three issues of 2002 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, the articles focus on the range of events within the historical sphere that is generally referred to as the modern world. The articles in these three issues are somewhat more inclined to discuss politics within a 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 historiography. There is a definite avoidance of description that serves no other end than simply to provide details about past great men and women or important events. The articles have, overall, a clear tendency toward 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.

The tone and content of this journal can be understood more clearly by examining the three issues in 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 aided 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 less chauvinistic approach.

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

Historiography and the Journal's Analytical Framework

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 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, and it could not be otherwise unless it were entirely objective — and in part because of the changing state of knowledge about the past. A newly discovered telegram, diary, or cache 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 lacks an ideological perspective. That perspective might be described as thoughtfully left of center. It is not ideological in the sense that the word is often used 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 receives a fair hearing. Rather, it is ideological — and leftist — in the sense that the authors and editors clearly believe 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 are quite willing to criticize progressive governments but are even more likely than those on the left to overlook mistakes made by their own.

Stefan Berger's "Democracy and Social Democracy" is an excellent example of the kind of article the journal specializes in. It examines the power structures of a number of European nations beginning in the late nineteenth 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 differing local economic conditions — coalescing in what Berger refers to as the "golden age" of social democracy during the 1940s through the 1960s.

Articles on Democracy, Gender, and Governance

Of particular interest 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 taking power. Even as he identifies these failures, he reaffirms the enduring strengths of the movement, strengths that have helped the ideals of social democracy begin to reestablish themselves in at least some contemporary European governments. The article is analytic and pan-European in its approach, offering 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 analytical tool through which to view the association of gender and democracy. Reynolds argues that it is fundamentally misleading to assess countries as more or less democratic — with respect to gender, at least — by looking only at the year in which women in those countries gained suffrage rights.

While Reynolds is certainly not arguing that enfranchisement does not matter, the historian makes the valid and all-too-often overlooked point that voting rights are not the only, nor perhaps even the best, way 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 for measuring the democratic character of a society. While this might seem an ordinary observation, it is in fact an important paradigm shift in the way 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 easily have been overlooked. 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 not emerge from a narrower national focus.

Martin Conway's "Democracy in Postwar Western Europe: The Triumph of a Political Model" also demonstrates the journal's focus 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 one another. Conway argues that these similarities are the major reason there has been relatively widespread and stable democratic governance across the western half of the continent during the past three generations.

This democratic stability was shaped, he argues, to some extent 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 industrialization and then the shift to post-industrialization across the continent. While there were important differences among the nations, he argues, the 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. In the United States, we tend to decry the depoliticization of society because this process is linked in our minds with declining voter participation rates and generalized apathy. This may be equally concerning in European nations — Conway's article does not make this entirely clear — but Conway provides a thoughtful analysis of the advantages of depoliticizing society that we might not otherwise have considered. While many Americans believe that the problems in American governance arise from apathy, Europeans remember all too well that terrible results may follow from over-involvement in political ideals on the part of the citizenry. Conway's article suggests that we might interpret events in Germany in the 1930s in the reverse of the usual sense: if people had not been so eager to engage in the political process and had stayed away from National Socialism, the history of the century might have been a great deal brighter.