In its relations with Japan, China has made great use of the past, in particular the Japanese invasion and occupation between 1937 and 1945 and the well-documented atrocities, such as the rape of Nanjing by Japanese troops, which accompanied it. Japan’s behavior in China and its role in provoking World War II in Asia have been the subjects of painful debate within Japan, but the Chinese government has chosen to believe that Japan continues to deny its culpability. In the 1990s, as the Communist Party started the Patriotic Education campaign to bolster its own authority, attacks on Japan and its reputed amnesia grew. Painting modern Japan as the unrepentant successor to the militaristic country of World War II was a convenient way of justifying China’s own claims to leadership in Asia and undermining Japan’s claims for a seat on an expanded UN Security Council. In the spring of 2005, under the benevolent eye of the authorities, and perhaps with their direct encouragement, young Chinese attacked Japanese businesses in several of China’s big cities on the grounds that Japanese textbooks were omitting all references to the sack of Nanjing. When the disturbances spread, however, and the targets widened to include the failings of the Chinese government in such areas as the environment, the Party decided enough was enough. The nationalist outbursts stopped. The emotions they were tapping into remain, though, and the Party continues to be tempted to play the dangerous game of using nationalism to bolster its declining ideological authority.
Sometimes the present is called in to effect changes in the past. To take one example which has been much in the news lately: Armenian groups around the world argue that Turkey should not be allowed into the European Union until it has admitted that it conducted genocide more than ninety years ago. It is absolutely true that a dreadful thing was done to the Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Turks during World War I. As Russian armies advanced on Turkey, the Turkish government feared that the Armenians would offer support to the invaders. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were forcibly uprooted from their homes in the northeast of Turkey and sent south. Many did not survive the trek. They were harried by local Muslims, often Kurds, and the Turkish authorities either watched with indifference or actively encouraged the killing. In countries such as the United States, Canada, and France, Armenians and their supporters have persuaded legislators to define the murders as genocide, arguing that it was official Turkish policy to exterminate the Armenians, and to demand that the Turkish government of today make a full apology. The Turks have dug in their heels, arguing that today’s Turkey should not bear the responsibility for what was done in the past by a very different regime. They deny, moreover, that what occurred was genocide. The issue has further complicated the vexed question of Turkey’s admission to the European Union.
In the aftermath of World War I, the Germans used history as a weapon in another way, to undermine the legitimacy of the Treaty of Versailles, which they had signed with the victorious Allies. Military defeat—and there is no doubt that it was that—came as a terrible shock to the German civilian government and to ordinary Germans, both of whom had been kept in the dark by the supreme command. From 1918 on, the army did its best to avoid responsibility for defeat by sedulously fostering the myth of the stab in the back: Germany had been defeated not on the battlefield but by the activities of traitors at home, whether socialists, pacifists, Jews, or a combination of all three. The fact that the Allies decided, partly for reasons of their own war weariness, not to invade and occupy Germany (apart from a small slice on the west side of the Rhine) gave the myth more credibility among the German people. The sense that Germany ought not to be treated as a defeated nation was also enhanced by the circumstances of its surrender. Its government had exchanged notes with the American president, Woodrow Wilson, in which he had talked of a peace without recrimination or vengeance. As far as the Germans were concerned, the armistice with the Allies had been made on the basis of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which painted a picture of a new and peaceable world based on justice and respect for the rights of peoples. Surely that meant that the Allies would not seek to slice off great pieces of German territory, inhabited by Germans, or demand heavy reparations? In any event, to strengthen Germany’s case for gentle treatment, the country argued that it was a different Germany. The kaiser had fled, and the monarchy had vanished. Germany was now a republic, and why should it pay for the sins of its predecessor? When Germans discovered the terms of the Treaty of Versailles in the spring of 1919, their reaction was one of shock and a conviction that they had been betrayed. And when they found out that there were to be no serious negotiations but merely a deadline for signing, they denounced the treaty as the “Diktat”.
In the 1920s, hostility to the treaty went right across the political spectrum within Germany. The terms were seen as punitive and illegitimate, and there was widespread if unspoken agreement that they should be circumvented wherever possible. What was particularly galling was Article 231, which assigned Germany responsibility for starting the war. The “war guilt” clause, as it came misleadingly to be known, was intended both to convey the Allies’ moral disapprobation and, perhaps even more important, to provide a legal basis for demanding reparations. The leader of the German delegation which received the terms made a conscious decision to attack Article 231, and back in Germany the Foreign Ministry set up a special unit to continue his work. The events of July 1914 came in for particular scrutiny. Selected documents were released or shown to sympathetic historians to create a picture of a Europe stumbling toward war. The catastrophe was no one’s and everyone’s fault. Germany bore no more responsibility than any another country.
Within Germany, such views of the past were immensely influential in fueling both a deep sense of grievance against the Allies (and indeed against the German government, largely made up of Socialists, which had signed the treaty) and a strong desire to burst the “chains” of the Versailles Treaty. As he started to gather support among disgruntled veterans, extreme right-wingers, and the floating population of the Munich beer halls in the early 1920s, Adolf Hitler hammered on the themes of the stab in the back and the unjust peace. As he gained a hearing among the respectable middle classes, it was that appeal to a frustrated German nationalism that helped him to gain legitimacy. Unfortunately for the peace of the world, the rewriting of history made an impact outside Germany as well, particularly in the English-speaking countries. Increasingly, the leaders and publics in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States took the view that Germany had indeed been unfairly treated and that it was quite right to demand a revision of the Treaty of Versailles. The distortion and misuse of history served Hitler well in two ways: by bringing him supporters and by feeding the appeasement policies of his potential opponents.
In the past two centuries, history has become important in another way—as a basis for claiming land, both within countries and between them. This is partly because, where there are no clear records transferring land from one group of people to another, as is the case with much Native land in Canada, evidence of possession in the past helps to support arguments that the transfer was illegal. Furthermore, we no longer regard treaties and agreements signed when one side does not have the slightest idea of what the words mean as valid. When Henry Stanley traveled up the Congo River getting local chiefs to put their marks on what were to them meaningless bits of paper, he acquired for King Leopold of Belgium a vast territory. And the great powers acquiesced. They were, after all, doing much the same thing themselves. Today we would treat such sharp dealing as fraud.
Nor, unless we are religious fanatics, do we believe that promises from the gods are a sound basis for claiming territory. Other traditional grounds for claiming territory are equally unacceptable today. Marriage, for example. When Charles II of Britain married Catherine of Braganza, she brought Bombay with her as part of her dowry. Today if Prince Charles wished to give the Duchy of Cornwall to his new wife, it would be simply unthinkable. Monarchs no longer can swap pieces of territory as they did for so many centuries. N
apoleon could sell a huge chunk of the New World to the United States in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase; President Nicolas Sarkozy would not be able to sell even the smallest piece of France—the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, for example—today. At the Congress of Vienna, which ended the Napoleonic Wars, kingdoms, duchies, counties, and cities were bartered among the powers in a great game of Monopoly, and no one saw anything wrong in it. A century later, at the conclusion of World War I, the Paris Peace Conference spent much time and effort trying to determine the wishes of the inhabitants—or at the very least their ethnicity—of the territories it found at its disposal.
Ways of thinking change, and what seemed perfectly normal two centuries ago now is literally unthinkable. War and conquest used to be quite standard ways of shifting boundaries about. If you lost a war, you could expect to give up money, art treasures, territory, weapons, and anything else the victor demanded. The spread of ideas about popular sovereignty, democracy, citizenship, and nationalism has meant that even the most ruthless of rulers had to pay at least lip service to the notion that peoples have a right to self-determination. When Hitler moved east into the Soviet Union, he claimed to be following the natural and historical path of the German race. When Stalin scooped Eastern Europe into his empire at the end of World War II, his cover story was that the Soviet Union was responding to the will of the local peoples or that it was simply restoring its historic boundaries. When Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait in 1990, he tried to justify his actions with unconvincing references to Kuwait recognizing Iraqi suzerainty in the eighteenth century, long, of course, before either country existed. History has become ever more necessary to provide legitimacy to claims to land as most other grounds, whether marriage or conquest, have fallen away.
After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, which resulted in a humiliating defeat for France and the birth of the new Germany, the German generals insisted on claiming the two French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, partly as spoils of war, partly to provide a defensive barrier against future French attacks. German nationalists obligingly cast their demands in newer, more acceptable clothes. In the past, Alsace and part of Lorraine had been part of the Holy Roman Empire and for much of their history had had German rulers. Louis XIV had seized Alsace and Louis XV Lorraine, but the time had come to restore them to their natural home. No matter if many of their inhabitants did not speak German or preferred to remain with France. Heinrich von Treitschke, one of Germany’s leading historians, said the German nation knew what was best for “these unfortunates” who had so sadly fallen under French influence. “We shall restore them to their true selves against their will.” A German newspaper recommended the nineteenth-century version of tough love. “We must begin with the rod,” it declared. “Love will follow the disciplining, and it will make them Germans again.”
In 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, which marked the end of World War I, justification for claims to territory assumed huge importance because there was so much to be divided up and so many competing claims. The defeat of Germany, the collapse of Russia and the Russian Empire, and the disintegration of Austria-Hungary and of the Ottoman Empire meant that borders all over Europe and the Middle East were in a state of flux. Old nations, such as Poland, saw the chance to put themselves on the map again, and new ones, such as Czechoslovakia, had their chance to be born. Woodrow Wilson’s speeches and the talk of self-determination that was in the air everywhere encouraged dozens of groups to make their way to Paris to lay their cases before the great powers.
Their arguments fell into three main categories: strategic, that possession of a particular piece of territory was necessary for a country’s safety or for its economy; ethnographic, that the peoples on the ground belonged to the petitioning nation through language, customs, or religion; and finally, and this was often considered the clincher, by historical right. Strategic or economic arguments did not always work, because neighboring countries could make the same case. Ethnography was also tricky where, as was the case in the center of Europe, populations were so mixed. History seemed to speak with authority—or did it? Europe, and it is true of the Middle East as well, has far too much history, as Winston Churchill memorably quipped about the Balkans, than it can consume. Empires and states, rulers and peoples, had come and gone. You could almost always find a basis for your claims in the past if you looked hard enough. Italy claimed much of the Dalmatian coast, partly to defend its own Adriatic coast, partly on the grounds that Italian civilization was superior to that of the largely Slavic inhabitants, but also because Venice had once ruled it. And human nature being what it is, when the petitioners at the peace conference ransacked history, those who spoke for emerging nations did not go back to a time when their putative forerunners had occupied a small piece of territory. Many Poles, including Roman Dmowski, leader of the Polish delegation to Paris, wanted at least to reestablish the borders of 1772, when Poland ruled over today’s Lithuania and Belarus and much of Ukraine. “When Dmowski related the claims of Poland,” said an American expert, “he began at eleven o’clock in the morning and in the fourteenth century, and could reach the year 1919 and the pressing problems of the moment only as late as four o’clock in the afternoon.” The Serbs longed for the boundaries of the fourteenth century, when King Stephen’s kingdom stretched from the Aegean up to the Danube. The Bulgarians preferred the tenth-century map, when their king Simeon had ruled over much of the same territory.
“Each one of the Central European nationalities,” the same American expert complained wearily, “had its own bagful of statistical and cartographical tricks. When statistics failed, use was made of maps in color. It would take a huge monograph to contain an analysis of all the types of map forgeries that the war and the peace conference called forth.” Or the abuses of history. The records of the conference are full of sweeping claims buttressed by shaky histories which skip lightly over the centuries, the coming and going of states, the unending movements of peoples across the face of Europe, and all other inconvenient facts, and which purport to show that such and such a piece of land was always Polish or Italian. When Serbia and Romania both claimed the Banat, which lies between them, for example, they reached back to the Middle Ages for evidence to support their claims. Look, said the Serbian representative, at the monasteries in the Banat, which had always been Serbian. That, replied the Romanian, was because Slavs were more naturally pious than Romanians.
Today, China uses history to recast its invasion and occupation of Tibet as not anything of the sort. In the view of the Chinese government, it simply reasserted its historical rights, which had been established over the centuries. Taiwan, at least to the Chinese, presents a similar case. As Zhou Enlai said to Henry Kissinger in 1972, “History also proves that Taiwan has belonged to China for more than a thousand years—a longer period than Long Island has been part of the U.S.” In fact, history proves no such thing. In the case of Tibet, it is true that Dalai Lamas from time to time recognized the mandate of heaven of the emperor in far-off China, but for most of the time the remote mountain land was left to its own devices. Taiwan has had even looser ties with China. It was too far across the sea for most Chinese dynasties to bother with. Only the last dynasty, the Qing, tried to assert some control, partly because the island had become a refuge for pirates and rebels.
History takes on particular importance when land is under dispute. In Canada, aboriginals use printed records such as treaties and dispatches as well as oral histories and archaeology to claim back what they argue are their ancestral lands. Romanians claim, as they did in Paris in 1919, that the rich prize of Transylvania should be theirs because they are the descendants of Roman legions and therefore have been there much longer than their Hungarian opponents, who only arrived in the ninth century. Albanians claim that Kosovo is theirs because they are descendants of ancient Illyrians, who were known in classical Greek times, while the Serbs only came in the eleventh century. Serbs counter with the argument that most of the Albania
ns in Kosovo are new arrivals, part of the wave that came in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In one of the most difficult and dangerous disputes in the present, Israelis and Palestinians argue over possession of the small piece of land that was once Palestine in the Ottoman Empire. Every aspect of their joint history is disputed. Did Palestine really have a population of 90 percent Palestinian Arabs and 10 percent Jews at the time of World War I? Did the Palestinians turn down chance after chance to cooperate with the Jews? Or did the Jews increasingly exclude them from the economy and from power? Is it really possible to speak of a “Palestinian people”? (Golda Meir and David Ben-Gurion both thought not.) Was 1948, when the state of Israel was proclaimed, a triumph or a catastrophe? Did the Palestinian refugees leave willingly because they thought they would be coming back with victorious Arab armies, or were they pushed out? Has a tiny Israel always been circled by an iron ring of implacable Arab enemies? Was its survival a miracle or because it had a lot of advantages on its side? Did the Palestinians support the Axis in World War II? Is Zionism another version of Western colonialism?
It is almost impossible for the two sides to find common answers to such questions because history lies at the heart of both their identity and their claims to Palestine. Israeli history was for a long time very much what the founding fathers such as Ben-Zion Dinur had hoped it would become—an inspiring story to weld Israelis into a nation determined to survive. Israel belongs in Palestine because there has been a continuous Jewish presence there since the Romans conquered the last independent Jewish state. The Arabs, the argument went, were relative newcomers, drifting in over the centuries from elsewhere. Moreover, so political figures like Golda Meir insisted, they did not constitute a separate nation called Palestinians. In the 1980s, an American writer named Joan Peters went still further, attempting to show, unsuccessfully, that there had been virtually no Arabs at all in Palestine when the Zionist settlers started to arrive at the end of the nineteenth century; attracted by the prosperity the Zionists were creating, so she claimed, they moved in. Modern Israel was born in adversity yet managed to triumph over its massed Arab enemies. In the years after 1948, it was attacked repeatedly by its neighbors and forced into three defensive wars, in 1956, 1967, and 1973. It hangs on to the occupied territories of Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights to ensure its safety. Israel, so this version says, would like peace, but the Arabs have been intransigent right from the start.
Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History Page 9