La fin de l'histoire, une discussion sans fin...

Voici deux articles tirés du Monde qui me faisait refléchir encore une fois sur les discussions interminables sur la fin de l'histoire. Le premier est une revue des deux livres les plus reconnues des années 90, Francis Fukuyama's La Fin de l'Histoire et le dernier homme et Samuel Huntington's Le Choc des civilisations. Malhereusement, ce sont parfois des livres qu'on discute beaucoup plus qu'on les lise. Ceci est pourquoi cette revue merite d'etre lue, lorsque je crois que l'auteur, Daniel Vernet -editorialiste du Monde- donne une point de vue qui respecte la profondeur de l'ouvrage de Fukuyama, trop souvent mal interpreté, voire caricaturisé. Alors, je partage effectivement sa conclusion que "si l'on suit Fukuyama, le scénario-catastrophe d'Huntington n'est peut-être qu'un de ces "détours" de l'histoire passant à cheval sous les fenêtres de Hegel."

Mais cette discussion devient même plus intéressant quand on le regarde dans la lumière de cet article sur la pensée de Locke. Or, il est remarquable de noter que tandis que la philosophie qui a émané de la Révolution française marque, selon Fukuyama, la fin de l'histoire, ce sont les pays Anglo-Saxons "Lockéen" qui sont a l'avant-garde de l'Occident et qui incarnent les valeurs démocratique libérale. Ironiquement, la France est parmi les pays le plus critique a l'égard de ces valeurs. Alors, comment peut-on reconcilier les heritages de Rousseau et de Locke? Sont-ils contradictoires par nature, ou consitutuent-ils les deux faces d'une même médaille? Est-ce les conclusions qu'on en tire, ont-ils des conséquences pour la manière dont on regarde les théories de Huntington? Si la théorie de Locke est plutôt conservateur et modéree en comparaison avec celle de Rousseau, pourquoi en 2003, les États-Unis (fondé sur les idées de Locke) ont tenté de propager ces valeurs par l'epée, pendant que la France se penchait plutôt sur le droit international paisible?

Big history back on the shelves

A recent article in Foreign Affairs by Yale historian Paul Kennedy reviews three books in the "world history" genre. The first book is by William Bernstein called A Splendid Exchange, which discusses on how trade and politico-military power have coincided "from ancient Sumer to the present day", but with a focus on classical antiquity and the Renaissance era. The second book, The Great Experiment by Strobe Talbott, is a kind of diplomatic history-cum-memoir which comes off quite nicely, at least according to Kennedy. The last is Days of Empire by Amy Chua, a up-and-coming law professor (or is she already there?) at Yale University. It's a classic chronology about "the rise and fall of empires", strung together around the thesis that a policy of inclusiveness, which she calls 'toleration' is a (the?) key to maintaining empires. Perhaps it is a sign of the times that our era of uncertainty engenders the publication of big-canvass books. As Kennedy says, "In an age of sound bites and the awful daily vision of human beings chattering into their cell phones as they hustle down the street, it is deeply satisfying that a small number of people still take the time to ponder and make connections between events over centuries."

On the same topic of Israeli history, here's an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, the premier US periodical on academic life, on the difficulties of engaging in historiographical research among Israeli historians. One of the things it highlights is how historical facts can continue to remain contested, even in the face of credible documentary or other evidence. On such sensitive topics, will it ever be possible to actually arrive at an unbiased position on issues? How can historians ever distance themselves enough from their political inclinations, or, even more importantly, avoid being pushed in one corner or another on the basis of alleged political agendas? Any thoughts on these issues are more than welcome...

Israel at sixty: a time to celebrate or to commemorate?

In the coming days, world leaders will be descending into Ben-Gurion airport to assist in some formal celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the state of Israel. Understandably, the event is receiving quite a bit of attention in the newspapers and elsewhere. Yet while the general consensus today is that Israel is economically the most developed and sophisticated country in the region, many worry whether the country as such will continue to exist ten, twenty, fifty years down the line. While the most obvious reasons for such anxiety may be the threat of a regional war or perhaps even a nuclear attack, it seems that the most important factor -and possibly the key to a peace settlement- concerns shifts in the demographic composition of the inhabitants of historical Palestine (Gaza + Israel + West Bank). As the Financial Times suggests in an article, if the objective is to maintain the Jewish character of the country, the two-state solution appears the only viable one, and continuing the illegal building of settlements in the West Bank will therefore be only to the detriment of Israel in the long run.

The sixty-year anniversary is also of course the occasion to remember the circumstances in which the country was born and what became of it thereafter. This is the subject of a new book called 1948 - A History of the First Arab-Israeli War by historian Benny Morris, which was recently reviewed in the New York Times. Not nearly enough is known about this important episode in the twentieth century, and if ever myths needed to be busted on any topic, the 1948 war is probably it. Here's a quote: “Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them?” he asked. “There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: We have come here and stolen their country.” This is none other than David Ben-Gurion, expressing a sentiment that is too rarely heard today, even in the Western media. In the past, many have tried to justify the founding of the jewish state in 1948 and/or even excused the atrocities perpetrated in the process (which Palestinians call the Nakba) by making reference to the Holocaust. Ghastly and unprecedented as that event was, it is hard to see why the inhabitants of Palestine had to pay the price for that. This is what Ben-Gurion meant, and it's become a question that has remained as nagging today as it was in 1948. According to this week's Economist, there are however solutions for a persecuted people, of which many live in exile and are treated in most of their host countries as less than full citizens (I am talking about the Palestinians today). Without a comprehensive peace deal, a one-off solution for the "right to return" issue seems nevertheless highly unlikely.

Incidentally, The Economist did a review this week of Tony Judt's new book (see previous post). Not all parts of the book are "worthy of George Orwell" in their opinion, but somehow I think it'll end up on the shelves of our library in the not too distant future...

...and here's another from the New York Times Book Review (Apr. 20, 2008), suggesting that Judt as a historian is almost as complex as the 20th century itself.

The Shadow of the Twentieth Century

After having finished a monumental volume on European history since 1945, Tony Judt shifted his focus to reflecting on the impact of the twentieth century on 21st-century politics and how it views the history of the past century. The central question he asks is: what have we learned, if anything, from the twentieth century? He reflects at length on this question in a soon-to-be-released book called Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century. In an essay in the current issue of the New York Review of Books (May 1st, 2008), he gives us a snapshot of his ideas.

One of his premises is that America and Europe (and, by extensions, the rest of the world) have differing views on the utility of war because of their very different experiences with it over the course of the 20th century. So, even if the US suffered or faced defeats in Vietnam and currently in Iraq, it has never experienced invasion from abroad or outright occupation. As a consequence, says Judt,

"...the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today. Politicians in the US surround themselves with the symbols and trappings of armed prowess; even in 2008 American commentators excoriate allies that hesitate to engage in armed conflict. I believe it is this contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies —seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance."

In turn, this experience (as a perspective on history and the role of war), combined with what Judt calls "the abstracting of foes and threats from their contexts" would make it all to easy to repeat the mistakes of the 20th century.

In an era in which, pace prof Hanhimaki, cold war studies are increasingly being seen as a "thing of the past" with little if anything to teach to a post-September 11 world, Tony Judt wants to demonstrate that the twentieth century has in fact much to teach us in the 21st, no matter how distant a memory the fall of the Berlin Wall is already becoming.

How do you look at this historiographical issue? Do you think Judt is right about the differences in impact that war has had both in America and Europe in the 20th century, and that seen from that perspective, it's the inhabitants of the 'Kantian paradise' (i.e, Europe, in Robert Kagan's words) who are more realist(ic) about the consequences and potential utility of warfare? And what about the link between an appetite for war and the use of anti-democratic means (such as torture of suspending habeas corpus) to wage the 'war on terror'? Is this indeed a consequence of the 'abstracting' of the enemy? Judt adds on this point that "if Osama bin Laden were truly comparable to Hitler or Stalin, would we really have responded to September 11 by invading...Baghdad?" So, if the lessons from twentieth-century history do not stop us from waging war on abstract nouns, can they at least help to prevent us from employing the same means as were used by some of the most vicious regimes of the past 100 years? If anything, the lessons to be drawn from the past century have not been exhausted in the least. And that's not even to talk about understanding and acting upon them...