Nationalism in history textbooks

Fiction over fact Pseudohistory

How it didn't happen

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Nationalism in history textbooks is common in many countries and is used to instill devotion to a nation-state, as well as hostile attitudes towards foreign countries or ethnic groups. Diligent school-pupils who have worked hard to memorize dates and historical "facts" in the classroom may find it difficult to accommodate various historiographical trends or outright historical revisionism. If so, the history textbooks have done their job.

Common themes in nationalist historiography[edit]

Ethnocentrism[edit]

Nationalist history textbooks will often go into great detail about the history of "our nation", including its brave exploits and achievements (whether real or imagined), while diverting attention from the country's ethnic minorities or other nations in the vicinity.^[3] This paints a picture where the history of the country is disproportionately similar to that of the dominant ethnic group, with minorities neglected, ignored or treated as unwelcome intruders. A student taking such a textbook at its word is left with the impression that their own nation represents the pinnacle of all that is best in the world, with other nations' contributions to human culture diminished, denied, or labeled undesirable or even oppressive.^[4]

For example in the UK, there was an outcry when then-education secretary Michael Gove attempted to launch a schools history curriculum that focused exclusively on British history. Under widespread outrage it was later revised so there would be less focus on British leaders like Winston Churchill and British cultural figures like 19th century English poet Christina Rossetti, and teachers were eventually given the option to teach about great non-Britons like Rosa Parks and Neil Armstrong.^[5][6]

The Bulwark myth[edit]

History textbooks often promote an Antemurale myth, the idea that a certain nation is the bulwark against some religion or group. For instance, the official historiographies of several Balkan nations (such as Serbia, Hungary, Croatia, Albania, and Romania) promote the idea that they are the Antemurale Christianitatis (Bulwark of Christianity), without whom all of Europe would have been taken over by the Ottomans and (in the case of the non-Albanian narratives) Islamized.^[4][8] Similarly, during the Cold War Americans were encouraged to consider the United States a bulwark against Communism, which would engulf the entire world if the country wavered from its steadfast opposition to Socialism and Communism in all its forms.

The myth of victimhood[edit]

The nation is often presented as an immaculate entity that has rarely, if ever, done harm to anyone; wrongs "we" have committed are often stifled, revised, or outright ignored.^[10] Wrongs of which "we" are on the receiving end, however, are frequently emphasized, embellished, and may even be fabricated.^[4] This caricature of a saintly victim engaged against malicious, oppressive Others^{[note 1]} tends to promote a siege mentality which leads to suspicion, mistrust, and hatred directed towards other nations, groups, and individuals.^[10] Such an attitude can favor xenophobic oppression, which is portrayed as justified vengeance for historic wrongs^{[note 2][11]} (regardless of how large, oppressive, or imperialist the "wronged" nation may be in the present) or preemptive defense against the predations of the Other, as noted by Leo Tolstoy:^[12][13]

Extreme nationalism may be used as a justification for irredentism as well. Since "we" are a peace-loving people who would never dream of oppressing anyone (or at least anyone who matters), it is preferable that "our" country be as large as possible. Such an attitude also works in favor of assimilation and oppression of minorities; as "our" nation is universally superior, the world would be objectively better off if it contained only "our" nation and "our" kind of people.^[10]

Primordialism[edit]

Nationalist historians may attempt to show that their nation is the only one that has the "right" to live in a certain region by emphasizing or creating myths of ancient origins and common descent, according to which the nation has homogeneous ancestry and inhabited its current territory before all others. This idea that "we were here first" can be used to delegitimize the rights of ethnic minorities, which supposedly "came later", and to promote an ideal of the nation-state as being ethnically homogeneous, as it supposedly was in the good old days. Often, this is accomplished by claiming the nation in question is "descended" from some ethnic group that in antiquity inhabited the territory they claim is "rightfully theirs". This can be seen in the phenomena of Slavomacedonians claiming to be descended from the Ancient Macedonians, with Alexander the Great being considered a Macedonian national hero,^[15][16] the French claiming to be descended from Gauls, the Romanians claiming to be descended from the Dacians^{[17][note 3]}, the Bulgarians claiming to be descended from Thracians, and the claims of some Slovenians that the Slovenians are descended from the Veneti. On the other hand, one (small) saving grace to settler societies like the United States having occupied land well known to have previously been occupied by other people is that they can't get away with this sort of sophistry, though they may try to make up for it in other ways. Some groups within the country may make convoluted attempts to claim "their kind of people" were there before, somehow, but few pay those claims much attention.

Ethnic nationalist claims of "primordial ancestry" such as those described above are often very dubious. Linguistically, they can be highly tenuous. For instance, the French claim to be descended from Gauls, yet their language is not derived from Gaulish; indeed, France has had a history of persecuting Celts.^[18] Additionally, all individuals have ancestors from countless different ethnic groups, so to claim one or a few of these many groups alone as being "our ancestors" is absurd and misrepresents human history. All ethnic groups have cultural influences from a wide variety of sources, and while certain influences are often stronger or weaker than others, it is illogical to focus exclusively on one of these sources while actively denying all others.

Indeed, ideologies regarding national ancestries are often a matter of selective picking and choosing rather than objective reality. One review^[19] of the history book Neglected Barbarians, which is about lesser-studied ancient ethnic groups, contains the statement: "Even barbarians with persistent and documented identities may fall into neglect, however, if the particular group has failed to be claimed as part of a modern nationalist-historical narrative." In other words, nationalist myths of ancestry are selective; they are based on claiming one or more historical ethnic groups while ignoring others. This subjectivity and often arbitrariness means that these myths are fluid and can change over time, so that today's hated enemy or ignored no-name may be tomorrow's beloved ancestor, or vice versa. Nevertheless, regardless of whether a particular such claim of antecedence is true or not, to use it as a bludgeon with which to discriminate against minorities is nothing less than bigotry.

Irredentism[edit]

One cause of irredentism, both presently and historically, has been educational systems. Education is often used as a means of instilling nationalism, xenophobia, exclusionary ethnic loyalty, irredentist attitudes, and the idea that only one ethnic group has the "right" to live in a certain area. This was noted by Franz Boas in his 1915 essay Race and Nationality (emphasis added):

"See this tiny speck over here? When you're a grown-up, it's your job to die so that the glorious French government (may the blessings of Vercingetorix be upon it) can own it again — after all, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.^{Do You Believe That?} The sole purpose of your otherwise meaningless lives is the restoration of this very important imaginary line on a map. And remember: Germans are sneaky bastards who have to be shot on sight. Any questions? No? Good. Class dismissed."

Leo Tolstoy, in his 1894 essay Christianity and Patriotism, cites a French textbook advocating irredentism and militarism:

In response to such nationalism, the writer Rafael Barret had a hypothetical Frenchman say, in his essay El antipatriotismo:

A third-grade Bulgarian textbook published in 1920, objecting to the 1913 annexation of Southern Dobruja by Romania in the Second Balkan War, contained the verses, "A thieving Wallach, in the most cowardly way, / Came in our country / He found houses where the master was gone / Loot on the head of the brigand and thief."^[20] Numerous history textbooks in Serbia, Romania, and Macedonia promote the ideas of Greater Serbia, Romania, and Macedonia, respectively; they promote a persecution complex characteristic of nationalism according to which the ethnicity in question is beyond reproach and has always been victimized by everyone else, with territorial expansion being portrayed as a necessary and justified righting of past wrongs.^{[15][21][16][3][8][4]} Irredentism was also promoted in Hungarian textbooks after the Treaty of Trianon of 1920:^[22]

“”In the interwar years, irredentism was elevated to a national cult marked by annual memorials. Budapest's centrally located Szabadség tér was fashioned into a pantheon for the cause, sporting allegorical monuments to the lost territories, laden in romantic imagery, as well as a 'Statue of Hungarian Grief'. It was integrated into the school curriculum and children were taught to recite the 'Hungarian Credo' (the winning entry of a patriotic poetry competition in 1920): 'I believe in one God, I believe in one Homeland, I believe in one divine eternal justice, I believe in the resurrection of Hungary. Amen'. Constantly promoted through popular print, in particular the conservative journal Magyar Szemle [Hungarian Review], irredentism permeated popular culture, becoming a staple of banal nationalism.

The 2000 book Historia de las Relaciones Exteriores Argentinas^[23] (History of Argentinian External Relations) goes into some detail about the fact that the educational textbooks and official historiographies of many South American countries emphasize territories "lost" to their neighbors.^{[note 4]} It quotes a passage from the 1988 Bolivian textbook El Mar Boliviano (The Bolivian Sea):

Indeed, Bolivia even has an irredentist national holiday, the Día del Mar (Day of the Sea), dedicated to commemorating and reversing the loss of its coastal territories to Chile in the War of the Pacific.^[24] The Historia also notes that irredentism is non-existent in Western Europe:

While such an absence of irredentism in Western Europe is somewhat true, if one looks at mainstream politics, there are still fringe groups who seek to shift borders and bring supposedly fellow countrymen back to the motherland or undoing what they see as historical wrongs done to their country. However, the main venues for discussing border/minority issues tend to be more sedate and work for cooperation across current borders, as well as certain rights for those minorities that are left on the “wrong” side of said borders.

Glossing over atrocities / genocide[edit]

A lot of countries have been involved in genocide or other types of atrocities during their history but usually it is glossed over or not talked about at all. If talking about it cannot be avoided, things are presented in a different light with common themes being "the victims had it coming", "it was war and chaos" or "but other nations were even worse". Even the poster child of "dealing with the past" – Germany – is guilty of this. While the Holocaust is anything but glossed over, atrocities like the Herero and Namaqua genocide in Namibia are hardly to be found in textbooks of any level, even though German colonies are a known historical fact among the general public and are a subject of history classes.

Solving the problem of nationalist bias[edit]

There have been a number of initiatives aimed at creating history textbooks that present history in a way that does not encourage or promote xenophobia or irredentism. These include projects involving historians from multiple nations collaborating to produce a text intended to be free of the ethnocentrism so often found in history textbooks, such as Histoire/Geschichte (France and Germany), The Contemporary and Modern History of Three East Asian Countries (China, Korea, and Japan),^[26] and The Balkan Wars (Balkan countries).^[27]

See also[edit]

• Lies My Teacher Told Me
• Armenian Genocide denial
• Dialect continuum
• Nationalist pseudohistory
• Turkish nationalism

External links[edit]

• History and national identity: why they should remain divorced
• Textbook cases, Chapter 10, The Economist
• 1066 and all that, New Statesman
• World War I History Divides Balkan Schoolchildren, Balkaninsight.com
• See the Wikipedia article on Historiography and nationalism.
• "Our Ancestors the Gauls": Archaeology, Ethnic Nationalism, and the Manipulation of Celtic Identity in Modern Europe, Michael Dietler
• Speak Out Against the Hindutva Assault on California's History Textbooks, Friends of South Asia
• The Hindutva Movement and Reinventing of History – by Nobel Laureate Dr. Amartya Sen, Friends of South Asia
• Brokering nationalism & multiculturalism through history textbooks: the Hindu textbook campaign of 2005
• The Hindutva View of History, Rewriting Textbooks in India and the United States
• The Politics of Hindutva and the NCERT Textbooks, Atishi Marlena
• Hindutva Abroad, The California Textbook Controversy, Purnima Bose
• The Antagonistic Complicity of Nationalisms--On Nationalist Phenomenology in East Asian History Textbooks, Lim Jie-Hyun
• See the Wikipedia article on Japanese history textbook controversies.
• « Nos ancêtres gaulois », une invention du XIXe siècle

Notes[edit]

References[edit]