‘It’s about who “we” are’ by Loizos Kapsalis
Reflection of “History Wars and Why they Matter”.
In early June 2020, a group of demonstrators toppled the statue of Edward Colston, the prominent 17th century philanthropist and notorious slave trader (what a contradiction in terms!) from atop its plinth in Bristol. After rolling it through the town’s streets, they dumped it in the waters of the city’s harbour nearby. This was a symbolic act, commemorating the deaths at sea of all those people enslaved and traded by Colston and other British merchants like him.
The demonstration was part of a wave of protests around the world against racially motivated violence inflicted on black people sparked by the killing of George Floyd in the USA. It also took place in the context of a growing cultural and political rift in the UK, in the development of which the history of Britain and its Empire plays a central role. The events in Bristol contributed to the intensification of efforts by the British government to “protect” history from what some commentators have called “woke” revisionism. These efforts have, in turn, attracted criticism from some historians and other academics who argue that the government is seeking to “brush history under the carpet” and have labelled these as “a conservative attack on pluralistic values.”
As a Cypriot living in London, I felt that this vehement public contest about researching, teaching and remembering the past was painfully familiar. Anyone who has lived in Cyprus for even a small period of time knows that the past is constantly in the spotlight on the island: it is recounted, revisited, relived, reenacted, and perpetually fought over. Since the early 2000s, this contest about the past has largely focused on the “official” historical narrative(s), with an increasing number of educators and social scientists on both sides of the divide calling for a revision of school books and the overhauling of the teaching of history in public schools. Their proposals have met with resistance time and time again.
Perhaps because of this “overwhelming presence and influence of history” in Cypriot society, it is sometimes easy to feel that this obsession with the past and the seemingly monolithic, unchanging and somehow always contradicting historical narratives are a unique feature of Cyprus, or places “like Cyprus” – that is, societies where a recent history of political turmoil and violence fuels division and conflict in the present.
This is precisely the misconception that Maria Georgiou addresses in her talk titled “What are ‘History Wars’ and Why they Matter.” In the inaugural episode of the first series of the Bαhçές webinars, Georgiou takes the audience on a virtual tour through Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean to explore a series of “history wars” in places like the UK, the Netherlands, Greece, Lebanon and, finally, Cyprus. These, Georgiou notes, are only a small fraction of similar contests that have taken place around the world.
Through Georgiou’s discussion of the various local case-studies, we come to understand that, despite its (perhaps deliberately) provocative name, “history wars” is a rather narrow term, used to describe debates about the “official” historical narrative of a community – often that account of the past that is found in school curricula, taught to history students in public schools, and commemorated in official ceremonies. And yet, as Tony Taylor and Robert Guyver remind us, what seems “at first glance a largely intellectual process that… seems to engage a mere smattering of politicians, educators and broadsheet media commentators, with not many fatal casualties” often sparks or sustains violent conflict. Georgiou shows that history wars commonly take place in the context of broader contests around the meaning of community, dominant values/practices, belonging and rights (sometimes referred to as “culture wars”) that permeate all aspects of life. These, as the last few months have shown, can have very real consequences.
The ubiquity of “history wars” globally reveals the centrality of history in the construction of national identity. Drawing on the work of theorists Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner, Georgiou argues that “official” histories are highly selective narratives of the past that seek to define and set the boundaries of the “imagined” community (to use Anderson’s now famous phrase). They do so by telling a compelling story about who “we” are and about “our” (supposedly collective) culture, values and aspirations.
So, why are history wars important? Georgiou suggests that “history wars” tend to erupt when established notions of collective identity are challenged and where membership in a community needs to be re-negotiated. As such, they bring to light dominant ideas about, in Georgiou’s words, “who deserves to be in and who needs to get out.” It may be useful, in this respect, to view on-going “history wars” in the context of the intensification of global migrations (economic as well as forced), the rise of new social movements, as well as years of economic austerity and perceptions of supra-national organizations challenging national sovereignty over borders and the economy.
As a historian interested in the development of social relations over time, I find that there is another reason why “history wars” matter (and Georgiou hints at this during her presentation). It is that history wars make plain the prevailing relations of power in a society at a given time. Quoting Anderson, Georgiou notes that “official” histories allow nations to be imagined as communities, “because regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.” In practice, however, “official” histories establish internal hierarchies by under-representing, mis-representing or completely omitting from the narrative particular social groups including (but not limited to) workers, women and members of the LGBTQ+ community. In this way, “official” histories become the stories through which the dominant groups in society seek to legitimize and maintain their position and power.
Ultimately, “history wars” offer us an opportunity to think about the function of history in our society and to rethink how we research, write and teach the past. At the moment, history seems to operate as a tool for what Arthur Chapman has called “national identity management:” It comprises a set of facts stringed together in an arbitrary narrative that individuals must learn and remember in order to prove their worth as “good”/worthy members of the national community. It could be much more. We could, for example, see history as a set of skills that allows individuals to critically engage with the past in order to better understand it, while at the same time trusting these individuals to come to the past with their own set of questions. This does not involve replacing one group of “facts” we don’t particularly like with one we like better. It also does not involve teaching others to behave in a way we find more agreeable. Rather, it is about empowering individuals to acquire the capacity to navigate an ever-increasing body of evidence about the past, as well as a complex corpus of others’ interpretations of this evidence in order to reach a more nuanced understanding of themselves, their culture and their society.
Loizos Kapsalis is a social and cultural historian specializing in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Cyprus. He received his PhD in Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies from King’s College London in 2019. His research looks at practices of social reform and moral regulation between the Tanzimat and the First World War (1860-1914). He is a founding member and editor for Bαhçές Histories* of Cyprus.
Twitter: @Loizos.Kapsalis
