JHP Athens Conference

New Europe:
The changing politics of teaching history

Rebetica music is the Greek blues, songs of the refugees expelled from Turkey in the early twentieth century. The words are Greek, the themes are Greek suffering but the music clearly bears the imprint of Turkey - and dancers in Albania and Bulgaria have no trouble in keeping step. Suggest that to a Greek nationalist though and you could start a fight.

But it's not surprising that music should cross national boundaries, most Balkan borders have existed for less than a century. Before then, the region shared many things. Large parts were ruled by the Ottoman empire and before it the Byzantines. Traders did business across the whole region and migrants moved from place to place. The legacy is a patchwork of cultures and long-standing links between them.

For most people, whether inside or outside the Balkans, history usually means the stories of people like Mustafa Kemal Ataturk the founder of modern Turkey. Great figures who led their people to freedom or other people into misery - depending on your point of view. And that, according to Dr Christina Koulouri of the Democritus University of Thrace, is the way it's generally taught to schoolchildren too.

"In most Balkan textbooks there are negative stereotypes against Turks because of the common Ottoman past and the process of reation of nation-states against the Ottoman Empire. In all countries there is an ethno-centric approach, in some countries this is also nationalistic."

Learning about oppression
So generations of children across southeast Europe still grow up learning about the oppression wrought upon them by their neighbours or how their country was stripped of its rightful territories. Bulgarians learn that Macedonia belongs to them and Macedonians learn that Byzantines, meaning Greeks, were the enemies of the Slavs. It's hardly a sound basis for future peace and co-operation, and that's the point of it - according to Costas Carras, of the Centre for Democracy and Reconciliation in Southeast Europe.

"It was the nation-state that said our young children must learn history and at the back or the front of their minds they had 'they must learn history to be loyal citizens of this nation-state'. And that's the way that history teaching was introduced in a wide sense to the whole of society. It's very often that people argue in terms of the history of the past when what is at stake is really the future."

Of course history is always a selection - it's impossible to know every fact or to put them into a perfect framework. Historians have to decide what to include and what to leave out. And this says Neven Budak, Professor of medieval history at Zagreb University in Croatia, can never be a neutral process.

"I would say that definitely history is always written for a purpose, the question is what purpose. I would say they are always to some extent ideological but what we should try to avoid is to put ideology before science. Every scientist follows some ideology and this ideology always has an impact on their work but the really good scientists try to avoid this influence on their work whereas there are others who believe that their ideology is their main reason for writing history."

Intellectual foundation of the modern nation state
And there's nothing special about Balkan historians in this respect. From its beginnings as a Western European academic discipline in the nineteenth century, 'History' has been the intellectual foundation of the modern nation state - argues Halil Berktay, Professor of History at Sabanci University in Istanbul.

"In Germany which in fact invented the new so-called scientific history in the first place, all major scholarly projects were related to discovering the origins of the nation in history. Taking nation as a category as far back in history as it might go. Not recognising it as a very new-fangled phenomenon but postulating it as almost eternal and naturalising it in the process."

And that perspective still underlies most school textbooks - whether they're dealing with the middle ages or the twentieth century. Children in divided Cyprus for example learn entirely different versions of such events as the civil conflict in nineteen sixty three and four. Greeks learn that their government responded to Turks 'rebelling against the state' .

Turks learn about an onslaught by Greek barbarians - and a fifth form Turkish Cypriot text book includes this passage about a captured Greek soldier....
- Your name?
- Captain Spiro Lalyotis.
- Now, tell us the details!
- We had attacked the Turks. My unit was all destroyed. Then I was captured. But never mind, it's honour to be captured by the Turks...

In the same way Croats learn that while Yugoslavia was under Communist rule, attacks on the Catholic Church were, "meant to suppress the strength of the Croatian people".

- Serb children, though, learn that, "the Catholic Church and its fanatic believers have been constantly struggling against Orthodoxy and the Serbs".

That may have been acceptable under nationalist governments, but a new generation of teachers has had enough, among them Aleksandar Glavnik, who teaches history in Belgrade.

"We give the pupils the official version and then tell them 'OK this is the official version and now we will speak openly about what really happened in the past'. And I remember those lessons are always the best lessons when we speak openly and freely about all the sensitive issues in our history - for instance 1389 and mythology about Kosovo battle and WW2 relations between Partisans and Chetniks. One is based on the official version and the second is based on the other version based on facts and sources."

Embattled victim to part of Europe Serbian teachers will have a tough job overcoming years of official history teaching, but they have one major advantage - the support of their government. The overthrow of President Milosevic brought to power an opposition intent on changing the country's self-image from an embattled victim nation to a part of integrated Europe. Tinde Kovac-Cerovic, Deputy Minister of Education believes it can be done.

"Using the skills of deconstructing the historical constructions in other areas of history teaching so that when the kids arrive at the hyper-sensitive areas they already have the skills and the basic understanding that uh-oh wait, maybe this thing is also something which can be seen differently from different perspectives. There are also other professionals trying to do the same and joining somehow the forces of those who were trying to do peace education in schools with the forces of the history teachers will also enhance the process."

But in other countries ruling elites are less willing to change. Just as nationalist movements used a particular reading of history to justify their rebellions against oppressive empires, so governments still mobilise history in support of their current policies. Transylvania is a case in point: a region of Romania with a large Hungarian minority. Romanians argue they are the indigenous inhabitants and the Hungarians, later arrivals. Hungarians argue the Romanians are ALSO migrants - from other parts of the Balkans. Last September a textbook which tried to offer both points of view was effectively banned by the Romanian Ministry of Education, according to Mirela Murgescu a Professor of History at Bucharest University.

"For the politicians it was clear this other way of treating history was perceived as a threat to their own identity. After the scandal the textbooks were reviewed so all the main elements which represent Romanian identity in the common opinion were re-introduced in the textbooks. So the textbooks were cosmeticised and made more boring than at the beginning. Now the ministry has decided the textbooks can't be used without any explanation."

Given the extreme sensitivity of such topics, is there any chance that historians can agree on what happened in the past? Costas Carras, of the Centre for Democracy and Reconciliation in Southeast Europe believes a single unified history is impossible. But he argues that the process of re-examining received wisdom can help resolve long-standing disputes.

"What can exist is not an objective history, not a neutral history but a history written by someone who takes into account different points of view and tries to create something which is not arbitrary and is accurate as to the facts. But certainly we can do better than we have been doing - partly by giving greater emphasis to economic, social and cultural history which unites to a greater extent (not totally) than political history at least until after WW2. The second thing we can do is give due attention to the points of view of others."

New stories for new times
The process is more balanced, but here too history is being re-written for new purposes. Under the Centre's aegis, historians are trying to improve the quality and content of school and university curricula - with a view to reconciling people in the Balkans. And just as a hundred years ago, the new History is shaping and being shaped by powerful economic, social and political forces: new stories for new times, according to Professor Halil Berktay.

"There are profound dynamics at work in the world today - economic and social globalisation and Europeanisation and they are dynamics which are very hard to stop. Today too there are conservative forces of a kind of nation-state fundamentalism which want to wish globalisation away, but how long can this persist? Some parents may not like new fangled ideas, many other parents will be sick and tired of the old 'motherland above all' kind of discourse and many are likely to appreciate it when their children come home with new ideas."

Will these ideas be more true than the old ones, or just more useful? A revision of history which stresses unity and European integration fits the challenges of today, but Professor Neven Budak says historians must not lose sight of their professional responsibilities.

"I'm afraid this European myth is something which could replace the old national myths - of course the European myth is better than national myths, but at the end of the day it's the same thing. Instead we should teach children to become tolerant, democratic, critical, self-critical and that is what we should aim at. But I believe humanity can't function without myths."

All countries have national myths and many bare little relations to historical evidence - but that doesn't have to be a problem. Europe's history includes myths and stories of both unity and division and different groups have emphasised different aspects at different times. Historians may never be able to agree which stories are more true or less false - but unless they can freely debate them they'll remain a enduring source of division. Perhaps the Balkans don't need to escape their history but engage with it more deeply and critically and perhaps rediscover some shared heritage - musical and otherwise - along the way.