Ler História 41/2001
Dossier Bilingue / Bilingual dossier
Histórias Nacionais: entre o Passado e o Futuro
National Histories: between the Past and the Future
Elenco dos Colaboradores / List of Contributors
Carlos Maurício e Magda Pinheiro
Apresentação
PresentationMaurice Agulhon
Os Historiadores Franceses e a Ideia da França desde 1918
Les Historiens Français et l'idée de la France depuis 1918Thomas Bender
Escrever a História Americana numa Era Global
Writing American History in a Global AgePrasenjit Duara
Historiadores: entre o Passado e o Futuro das Nações
Historians between the Past and the Future of NationsGérard Noiriel
Repensar o Estado-Nação. Elementos para uma análise sócio-histórica
Repenser l'Etat-Nation. Eléments pour une analyse socio-historiqueGyan Prakash
A Vida Incerta da Nação Moderna na Ásia Meridional
The Incertain Life of the Modern Nation in South AsiaPedro Ruiz Torres
O Ressurgir da História Nacional em Espanha
The Revival of National History in SpainChristopher Saunders
História e Nação na África do Sul
History and the Nation: South African AspectsHenk Van Dijk
A Caminho de uma História Europeia
Towards a European History
Estudos
Maria Manuela Rocha
"Entre nós basta a palavra": as práticas informais de crédito na investigação históricaJoão Lourenço Roque
O "Mundo do Trabalho" e o Associativismo em Coimbra no Século XIX (1850-1870)Rafael Durán Muñoz
Multidimensionalidade do Estado: trabalhadores mobilizados na "Revolução dos cravos"
Materiais da Memória
Magda Pinheiro
Associações para a História dos Caminhos de Ferro, Fundações, Arquivos, Museus e História Ferroviária: uma coordenação europeia em perspectiva
Recensões
Ler História 41 / 2001
Dossier Bilingue
National Histories: Between the Past and the Future
Carlos Maurício e
Magda Pinheiro
Introduction
Fifty years ago, in the western academic circles,
the discipline of History and the Nation-State were conceived as the natural
outcome of two tight processes. The rest of the world, we can expect,
will progressively access this ultimate stage in both domains.
Nowadays we are aware of the nation-state and the modern historiography
as social constructions, related to the modernizing process experienced
in the West, but not necessary in all world, and both overlap one another.
Neither the epistemological and institutional acquisitions of western
historical discipline, in the last two centuries, can be separate from
the rising and strengthening of the nation-state, nor the way this last
legitimises itself can be understood without the help of the teaching
of national history, now provided with a “scientific method”.
In the West, national history reached its apex during the period starting
with the liberal revolutions in Europe and the independence wars in the
Americas. It began its decline with the Second World War and worldwide
de-colonization. Some core beliefs transverse this period. From this point
forward, the collective body of the nation – and not the realm –
becomes the real subject of history. Only with the formation of the nation-state,
which provided the nation with the most legitimate form of government,
did the nation come into its fullest proportions. And so history, by way
then of the production of a meta-narrative, comes to legitimise this vision.
At the same time, it also becomes a constitutive element of national identity
and cohesion.
After World War II the national histories register a disparate evolution.
While in Europe and North America they lose general importance, in Latin
America they maintain it. It is in Asia and Africa, however, that national
histories have a period of vibrant affirmation in the wake of the numerous
cases of new independence.
In western political and academic circles, nationalism, with its essentialist
conception of the nation, came to be seen as the propagator of hatred
between peoples and the cause of recent catastrophes. The only exceptions
were the views coming from peripheral nationalities and authoritarian
national regimes. Given this climate, the new social history - with its
emphasis on economic, demographic, social and cultural structures, and
its campaign against political, military and diplomatic history - brought
about an epistemological relativization of the national framework.
In the mean time, in the recently formed Asiatic and African states, anti-colonial
nationalistic histories flourished. The new nations vindicated their own
national pasts, justifying independence, while putting history to work
reinforcing patriotic sentiments and aiding in the search for identity
and a place in the world.
But as was the case in the West, in Asia and Africa as well, strongly
nationalistic histories started to decrease in the 1970s. This decline
must be perceived as the result of either the exhaustion of certain post-independence
nationalistic models or the dissemination of a historiographical approach
focused on social groups (classes, castes) and concerned with an history
seen from below. This decline did not means, however, that the national
community and the nation-state ceased to be self-evident units for study
by historians the world over. It is the ideology of the nation-state –
even when not conscious of this – which leads great number of them
to value phenomena like the strengthening of the state and national unification.
It also contributes to the positive evaluation of economic modernization
and, very often, of the consolidation of citizenship.
In the last decades the nation-state has been subjected to many challenges
and transformations. We need only to recall: 1) the development of the
international organizations – such as, the International Monetary
Fund, the World Trade Organization, the North Atlantic Treatise Organization
- leading to significant changes in the decision making structure of world
politics, 2) the reconfiguration of national sovereignties in trans-national
projects like the European Union, 3) the restructuring of the capitalist
system under globalisation, 4) the secessionist claims of ethnic, religious
or peripheral groups the world over, and, 5) the de-identification of
sub-cultures (based on ethnics, religion or gender) with official nationality.
Intimately associated with the destiny of the nation-state, we can expect
national history to reflect these challenges and transformations as well.
In addition, being the academic discipline most centred on the national
community, its internationalisation confronts history with problems non-existent
for the natural sciences and felt less in the other social sciences. Finally,
since the historiographical occidental pattern has developed in intimate
articulation with the nation-state, the scientific rationality, a secular
worldview and an ideology of progress, this pattern begins to be perceived
as an informal mode of legitimisation for the superiority of the West.
The present dossier is the first outcome of a research project which will
lead to an international meeting, hold by the Centro de Estudos de História
Contemporânea Portuguesa / ISCTE in the next future. Defined in
its general terms the set of problems posed by this dossier, we sent invitations
to 36 historians of the entire world (10 Africans, 7 Americans, 5 Asians,
and 14 Europeans). More precisely: 29 male historians and 7 female historians.
Not all of them answered our invitation, and from the 15 who have done
it, not all could send in time a final text. The global society that the
new technologies of information seemed to place to our reach it is so
seized by the past as pressured by the present. We are not always predisposed
to answer solicitations coming from the other side of the globe. On the
other way, submitted to increasing pressures to produce, we often fail
the commitments we took.
Despite the gap between the former project and the final result, the set
of papers we now publish is really valuable. It shows, in its diversity,
some shared beliefs of the modern historians. The concern not to be the
transmission vehicles of a new “usable past” (in Christopher
Saunders’ words) is explicit in some of the papers and inherent to
almost all.
Nevertheless, their reflections relate to different problems according
to the contexts in which they have been produced. That doesn’t exclude,
naturally, the existence of similar phenomena in countries with quite
different traditions. Several historians refer the nationalistic concern
with the “ignorance” of national history, sometimes enhanced
by the alarm towards the lack of knowledge of the national anthem. Henk
van Dijk even considers that, being periodical this practice seems to
have some ritual function.
Not excluding generation related factors, which will make an analysis
of the existing historiography more relevant than the perspectives of
the future, the national context reveals all its significance in the texts
now published. National context continues stressing the diversity of the
struggles for history. Naturally, the times of national history are different
in Europe, America, Africa or Asia, but they begin to get closer by the
shared crisis and by the multiple bridges built by the globalisation.
Maurice Agulhon leads us through the idea of France and its history in
the last century. France as a person, France as a land of exception, France
as a very old nation is leading lines of his paper. The 1914-18 War does
not appear as a turning point as much important as it looked at the beginning.
All the great historians before II World War considered positive the role
of France and justified its influence in the World. Consensus used to
spread from left to right and to the vulgarisation literature. Only the
transformations after the II World War – decolonisation, American
cultural hegemony, etc. – changed that perception. Nation began to
be seen as an endangered masterpiece. Histories of France multiplied after
the 50’s. In the 80’s, historiography historians begin the radical
demystification of national history. History of France is now focused
as a construction, an intellectual object that can be critically analysed.
And national mythology emerges as study object. An exemple: Astérix
comics. An invincible Astérix, untameable, that resists to the
roman world. A nation that sees itself as anti-imperial when hasn’t
no longer the means to be it. A mix of resistance to globalisation.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Thomas Bender acknowledges as premature
the vision of a post-national world. His essay shows, however, that USA
historiography has deepened, in the last decades, the study of several
subcultures in the realm of the nation and, more recently, is seeking
to widen the space-time context of the national past. The affirmation
of a multicultural history, in the 80’s, alarmed the liberal nationalists
that feared a “balkanisation” of American history and fed debates
in scientific reviews. The reconstitution of an historic narrative able
to connect times and contexts, determining their relative importance is,
for Bender, the essential of the present historic struggle. History of
the national environment, of the migration, of the borders, of labour
and of the American cultural influence abroad emerged as new research
fields. And increase the need of the USA historiography to break the previous
isolation through a comparative perspective. The author ends with a question:
Who will subsidise a cosmopolitan history?
Prasenjit Duara distinguishes three tendencies, or temporalities, in the
world historiography of the last half-century. In Western countries, with
an ancient academic tradition, there is a deconstruction of national history.
In emancipated countries after II World War, there is a resistance to
that deconstruction. These tendencies are, nowadays, under the growing
impact of globalisation. The controversies around textbooks are an answer
to the perception that multicultural appropriations occur at the expense
of loyalties to the nation. However, the revival of nationalist reactions
has another meaning. The globalisation of the capital tends to place South
and North in a common temporality under its dominance. The most observable
answer is an intense adherence to nationalistic myths. The volatility
of these feelings is enormous, easily de-territorializing in broader feelings
like Hindu nationalism or Great China. This new nationalism, says Duara,
will go on requiring history as main means to produce identity. Aware
of this inevitability, historians must deepen the critical comprehension
of their job.
The contribution of Geral Noiriel is of a different kind. It is the proposal
of an research program on the topic of the nation-state building itself,
a research field that would gather all the social practices developed
by the individuals while members of the same sovereign community. That
investigation would focus on the material proceedings required to the
creation of links among the citizens. The proceedings of nationalisation
of societies should be faced in their different aspects, gathering interest,
oppression and belonging feelings. Therefore, national groups would be
produced by the state they produce themselves. National history would
be part of this process through education, but the belonging to the state
would not abolish other identity elements such as gender, profession,
etc.
Gyan Prakash begins facing British India history at the light of the imperialist
imposition of a national space inhabited by a “people”. However,
nationalists also had to face India’s history as a statement of difference
to colonial domination. Therefore, until the 70’s, identities based
on castes, religion or language have been silenced in benefit of the national
emancipation and in the name of its modernisation. The crisis of the modernising
programs, destroying the compromises in which they rely on, go with the
emergence of the Subaltern Studies, centred on gender, castes, language
and culture. This generated a criticism to nationalism and national history
that made historians able to have a larger critical distance towards realities
taken for granted before in the West. For Prakash, globalisation brings
a challenge to historiography but, outside Europe, writing a post-national
history will not be a totally new attempt.
Pedro Ruiz Torres chose to focus his study in history teaching in Spain,
Here, the critic of nationalist history, after having contributed to the
fall of Franquism gave way to a multiplication of perspectives subject
to permanent revisionism. Either the peripheral nationalist movements
or the central State struggled for the control of a chronological history
teaching, based on great figures and significant facts. They only changed
the entities on focus. In contrast with this perspective, the author proposes
a social micro-history that would help to promote an historical view in
an era in which, quoting Ryszard Kapuscinski, it would be possible “to
find the global world in each village”.
Racial segregation until 1994 in South Africa had, according to Christopher
Saunders, evident consequences in history writing. Since the 20’s
racial perspective has been criticised by liberal historians writing in
English. However, these historians didn’t use the concept of nation
and preferred that of common society. Since mid-60’s a tendency to
an history seen from below raised in South-African historiography, valuing
class problems instead of racial ones. ANC had shared this vision while
a new black conscience was emerging with consequent projection of a black
past. Contrarily to what happened in other African countries, in post-apartheid
South Africa it didn’t emerge a new nationalist history. If the crisis
of the profession took proportions that brought to closure the South African
Historical Journal, the government, on the other hand, has underlined
the need of history learning as the best way for the youngsters get appropriate
values. Nevertheless, Christopher Saunders questions the value of an “usable
history”.
In his approach to the historical production of the last century, Henk
van Dijk names some predecessors, like Burckhardt or Huizinga that, in
the specific domain of cultural history, went further than the national
framework. However, even Huizinga valued the representation of Holland
as a tolerant and humanist country. Hardly historians could avoid the
role of priests, teachers and guides of the Nation. The crisis of this
discipline, evident on the lack of its university influence, which went
with the debates about nation, may be recovered, they say, through comparative
perspective.
Progressive adoption of this perspective requires a serious methodological
analysis. Under apparent uniformity, coming from the fact that much of
the data and documents had been produced in a national perspective, many
geographical and social dissymmetries are hidden.
Articles
"Between us, word is enough": the practices of informal credit in the historical researchThis article underlines the importance of informal credit as an area justifying further research. In clarifying the notion of informal credit, it is suggested that the central feature in its definition has to do with the nature of the word given by the participants in this process, which represents a clear sign of the quality of the social relationships existing between them. Based on what has been written about informal credit and through an analysis of credit practices in Lisbon between 1770 and 1830, the essential characteristics of this type of credit are presented: the importance of interpersonal trust; the risks and fragility of this credit system; the nature of the social, economic and political links between creditors and debtors; the functions performed by informal credit.
The "Working World" and the associativism in Coimbra in the XX century (1850-1870)The focus of the present paper is greater Coimbra, a city whose scholarly dimension had important repercussions on the economic, social and cultural landscape. This was a "dual" landscape, where the prominence of the "service" sector combined with the crafts to give rise to a plurality of social and professional activities. A picture is presented here in which two kinds of images emerge against a changing background: the working word, oscillating between the bourgeois and the proletarian (or even "marginal") condition; and "associativism". As to the latter, a special emphasis is given to mutual help societies, , which aimed at alleviating workers' lack of protection while pressing for new values behaviours and solidarities. The "associativism" alluded to refers both to men and women, as is the case of the pioneering Coimbra Association for the Female Sex.
The State multidimensionality: workers mobilized in the "Revolution of the Carnations"The State is a complex actor to be taken into account in analysing both social mobilizations and regime changes. Perceptions of the State's willingness and capacity to act matter on those regards. As this study states, the State's multidimensional character is a crucial factor determining the nature of collective action during transition processes. Portuguese workers' forms of demand and protest between April 25, 1974, and November 25, 1975, illustrate such an argument in this paper.