The Uses and Abuses of History

by Margaret MacMillan

  My students used to tell me how lucky I was to be teaching history. Once you have got a period or the events of a war straight, so they assumed, you don’t have to think about them again. It must be so nice, they would say, not to redo your lecture notes. The past, after all, is the past. It cannot be changed. History, they seemed to say, is no more demanding than digging a stone out of the ground. It can be fun to do but not really necessary. What does it matter what happened then? This is now.

  When the Cold War abruptly ended in 1989 with the collapse of the Soviet Empire in Europe, the world enjoyed a brief, much too brief, period of optimism. We failed to recognize that the certainties of the post-1945 years had been replaced by a more complicated international order. Instead we assumed that, as the remaining superpower, the United States would surely become a benevolent hegemon. Societies would benefit from a “peace dividend” because there would be no more need to spend huge amounts on the military. Liberal democracy had triumphed and Marxism itself had gone into the dustbin. History, as Francis Fukuyama put it, had come to an end, and a contented, prosperous, and peaceful world was moving into the next millennium.

  In fact, many of the old conflicts and tensions remained, frozen into place just under the surface of the Cold War. The end of that great struggle brought a thaw, and long-suppressed dreams and hatreds bubbled to the surface again. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait, basing its claims on dubious history. We discovered that it mattered that Serbs and Croats had many historical reasons to fear and hate each other, and that there were peoples within the Soviet Union who had their own proud histories and who wanted their independence. Many of us had to learn who the Serbs and Croats were and where Armenia or Georgia lay on the map. In the words of the title of Misha Glenny’s book on Central Europe, we witnessed the rebirth of history. Of course, as so often happens, some of us went too far the other way and blamed everything that was going wrong in the Balkans in the 1990s, to take one of the most egregious cases, on “age-old hatreds.” That conveniently overlooked the wickedness of Slobodan Milosĕvić, then the president, and his ilk who were doing their best to destroy Yugoslavia and dismember Bosnia. Such an attitude allowed outside powers to stand by wringing their hands helplessly for far too long.

  The last two decades have been troubled and bewildering ones and, not surprisingly, many people have turned to history to try to understand what is going on. Books on the history of the Balkans sold well as Yugoslavia fell to pieces. Today, publishers are rushing to commission histories of Iraq or to reissue older works. T.E. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which describes the Arab struggle against Turkey for independence, is a bestseller again, and particularly popular with American soldiers serving in Iraq. My own book, on the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, where so much of the foundation of the modern world was laid, could not find a publisher in the 1980s. As one publisher said, no one wanted to read about a bunch of dead white men sitting around talking about long-forgotten peace settlements. By the 1990s, the subject seemed a lot more relevant.

  Today’s world is far removed from the stasis of the Cold War. It looks more like that of the decade before 1914 and the outbreak of World War I or the world of the 1920s. In those days, as the British Empire started to weaken and other powers, from Germany to Japan to the United States, challenged it for hegemony, the international system became unstable. Today, the United States still towers over the other powers but not as much as it once did. It has been badly damaged by its involvement in Iraq, and it faces challenges from the rising Asian powers of China and India and its old rival, Russia. Economic troubles bring, as they brought in the past, domestic pressures for protection and trade barriers. Ideologies—then fascism and communism, now religious fundamentalisms—challenge the assumptions of liberal internationalism and wage war on powers they see standing in their way. And we still have, as the world had in the first half of the twentieth century, the unreasoning forces of ethnic nationalism.

  Dealing with uncertainty is not easy, and it is not surprising that we seize on whatever might help us—including history. The uses and abuses of history in decision making is something I will come to later but, for the present, I want to look at why history can be at once so reassuring and so appealing.

  To begin with, it can offer simplicity when the present seems bewildering and chaotic.

  Over the years, historians have tried to discern grand patterns, perhaps one grand pattern, that explain everything. For some religions, history provides evidence of the working out of a divine purpose. For the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, it demonstrated the manifestation of the infinite spirit (Geist) on earth. Karl Marx built on Hegel to produce his “scientific” history, which purported to show that history was moving inexorably toward its destined end of full Communism. To Johann Gottfried von Herder, the influential German thinker of the late eighteenth century, history showed that an organic German nation had existed for centuries, although in political terms it had not yet reached its full potential. For imperialists like Sir Charles Dilke, the study of the past confirmed the superiority of the British race. Arnold Toynbee, whose work is largely neglected now, saw a pattern of challenge and response as civilizations grew great in overcoming obstacles and then failed as they turned soft and lazy. The Chinese, unlike most Western thinkers, did not see history as a linear process at all. Their scholars talked in terms of a dynastic cycle where dynasties came and went in an unending repetition, following the unchanging pattern of birth, maturity, and death, all under the aegis of heaven.

  History, and perhaps that is the case today, can also be an escape from the present. When the world is complicated and changing rapidly, not necessarily for the better, it is no surprise that we look back to what we mistakenly think was a simpler and clearer world. Conservatives dream of small towns painted by Norman Rockwell, where children played innocently in their gardens with no grown-up predators to disturb them, where men and women were comfortable in their roles, and where the sun shone on day after day of happiness. Leftists hearken back to the glory days when the union movement was strong and the bosses were on the run.

  Behind much of the current fascination with World War II lies the feeling, certainly on the Allied side, that it was the last morally unambiguous good war. German Nazis, Italian Fascists, and Japanese militarists were so clearly bad people who had to be defeated. (The fact that we were allied with one of the greatest tyrants of the twentieth century in Joseph Stalin is something to be overlooked.) The wars since have not been as clear-cut. The Korean War, true, was necessary to defeat Soviet expansionism, but General MacArthur’s attempt to turn it into a crusade against Chinese Communism divided Americans among themselves and against their allies. Vietnam was a catastrophe for the United States, and now the occupation of Iraq is looking like another.

  We are also short of heroes today—or too aware of our leaders’ shortcomings—which may help to explain the cult of Winston Churchill, a cult which is perhaps even more pronounced in North America than it is in the United Kingdom. The British, after all, have had direct experience of Churchill in other roles than that of the great World War II leader. They are more likely to remember his long political career with its share of mistakes and failures. In North America, the Churchill who is remembered is largely the towering figure who fought on alone against the Axis and who helped craft the Allied victory, not the author of the disastrous Gallipoli landings in World War I or the ailing prime minister who stayed too long in office in the 1950s. President George W. Bush is, not surprisingly, fond of comparing himself to the first Churchill, not the second.

  Political leaders have always known the value of comparing themselves to great figures from the past. It helps to give them stature and legitimacy as the heirs to the nation’s traditions. In comparing himself to Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, Stalin was taking on their mantle as builders of a greater Russia. Saddam Hussein in turn compared himself to Stalin or, drawing on the Islamic and
Iraqi past, to Saladin. The last shah of Iran tried to draw a line down through the centuries from Cyrus and Darius to his own dynasty. Mao Zedong liked to point to the parallels between himself and the Qin Emperor who created China in 221 B.C.

  Our present longing for heroes is more than political expediency. We are anxious to get the testimony of our war veterans before they die, for example, because we feel they have lessons to teach us. And we worry about how to commemorate them properly. As the last, very old, veterans of World War I are dying off, a number of countries have considered holding a state funeral, usually given only for heads of state or extraordinary figures like Churchill himself, for the last soldier to die. The discussions have been macabre, about, for example, how to determine who is really the last. Do veterans who have lived all their lives in other countries count? What if a government gives a funeral and then another veteran is discovered? In 2006, in France, two more ancient veterans appeared out of obscurity.

  The veterans themselves and their families have shown little enthusiasm for the pomp and circumstance. When the then-president of France Jacques Chirac announced in 2005 that the last veteran would be buried in a special spot, perhaps the Pantheon itself, he had a cool response. Lazare Ponticelli, one of France’s last World War I veterans, said firmly, “If I turn out to be the last survivor, I say no. It would be an insult to all those who died before me and were not given any honours at all.” He wanted, and got, a simple memorial service, because, he said, he did not think the nation’s attention should be directed at one person when so many hundreds of thousands suffered and died. Chirac hastily backtracked, and his government talked in vague terms about making any obsequies an occasion to symbolize European reconciliation.

  In Canada, the Dominion Institute, which has shown great entrepreneurial talent for making Canadians feel guilty about how little they know about their own past, launched a petition to give the last Canadian veteran a state funeral. The government, which was initially noncommittal, bowed in the face of what looked like a groundswell of public opinion and allowed a vote in the House of Commons. Not surprisingly, no member dared vote no on such an emotive issue. Again, the families of the veterans themselves were unenthusiastic. What also made it awkward was that one of the two surviving Canadian veterans at the time of the vote in 2007, John Babcock, a lively old man who told interviewers about his attempts to lose his virginity during the war, had lived in the United States since the early 1920s.

  Often the desire to hold a state funeral reflects the concerns of the living. The then British Conservative leader, Iain Duncan Smith, argued, with one eye on the voters, that it would be a way of commemorating the whole generation that was there at the start of “the century of the common man.” When the Italian government buried the last Italian veteran with full state honours, the president, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, described the commemoration as “living and precious testimony to the sacrifice of the boys who fought … to make our country great, free, and united.” In Canada, Rudyard Griffiths, head of the Dominion Institute, said, “If there ever was a time for Canada and Canadians to be bold and generous in commemoration of our history, in commemoration of our shared values, surely the passing of the last Great War veteran is that moment.”

  We call on the past to help us with our values at least in part because we no longer trust the authorities of today. We suspect our politicians of being self-seeking placeholders. Too many heads of companies have turned out to be cooking the books or giving themselves lavish emoluments. The craze for gossip fills the pages of Hello magazine or Vanity Fair, but it also leaves us with the uneasy sense that there are no good and honest people left. We know too much, whether it is about President Bill Clinton’s sex life or Britney Spears’s drug problems. We read of doctors making mistakes or schoolteachers telling lies. All this happened in the past, of course, but not under the intense spotlights that the media and the internet provide today. History comforts us even though, paradoxically, we know less and less about it.

  In a secular world, which is what most of us in Europe and North America live in, history takes on the role of showing us good and evil, virtues and vices. Religion no longer plays as important a part as it once did in setting moral standards and transmitting values. Congregations at the old mainstream churches have declined sharply. It is true that there are huge evangelical churches out there, but they are as much about entertainment and socializing as religion. The millions who describe themselves as born-again Christians often have, according to surveys, the sketchiest of ideas about what it is they are adhering to. And even those who continue to have faith in a divine being may wonder how he or she can allow such evils as the twentieth century witnessed. History with a capital H is being called in to fill the void. It restores a sense, not necessarily of a divine being, but of something above and beyond human beings. It is our authority: It can vindicate us and judge us, and damn those who oppose us.

  President Bush has, according to news stories, been reading a lot of history lately, and in it he has apparently found some comfort as his presidency stumbles toward its end and he sinks ever lower in the opinion polls. He has taken to comparing himself to President Harry Truman, the untried vice-president who found himself in office when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in 1945. Truman, who came to office singularly ill-prepared, thanks to FDR’s propensity to keep important matters to himself, was frequently written off at the time as the haberdasher from Missouri. During his tenure, his ratings were often as low as Bush’s are today. “To err is Truman,” said one wit.

  History has been kinder and Truman is now generally rated by historians and pundits as one of the better American presidents of the twentieth century. He found himself facing an increasingly belligerent Soviet Union and a deteriorating situation on the ground in Europe and met the challenge head on. He and his administration took the decisions that laid the groundwork for the United States’s confrontation of the Soviet Union during the long Cold War. They adopted policies, including the Marshall Plan, unprecedented peacetime defence measures and the establishment of NATO, all of which probably saved Western Europe from Soviet domination. Moreover, Truman showed by his actions that the United States was prepared to contain the spread of Soviet influence. In 1948–49, the United States led the West in circumventing the Soviet blockade of the Western Zone in Berlin through a massive airlift. The next year, Truman sent American forces to Korea to beat back the attack from the Communist North on the South. The Truman administration, many would argue even today, made possible the long confrontation with the Soviet bloc and, ultimately, the triumph of the West in 1989.

  In the 2004 election campaign, Bush referred repeatedly and with admiration to Truman. As Bush grew more unpopular, the references to Truman grew more frequent. In December 2006 he told congressional leaders that, although Truman had not been popular at the time, history had shown that he was right. In another comparison to the Cold War, Bush has talked often about the struggle with terrorism and fundamentalist Islam as one which will last for generations. In a speech to the graduating class at West Point in May 2006, Bush compared himself, implicitly, to Truman who, he said, did what was right even though he was often criticized at the time: “By the actions he took, the institutions he built, the alliances he forged and the doctrines he set down, President Truman laid the foundations for America’s victory in the Cold War.” Bush did not mention the rather awkward fact that Truman was a Democrat. Nor did he refer to another significant point of difference: Truman worked through the United Nations rather than treating it with contempt. The differences were not missed by the press or the Democrats, but the White House tried to spin such inconvenient details away. Press secretary Tony Snow denied that Bush was comparing himself to Truman; rather, he was reminding Americans that, as in the Cold War, they faced an enemy motivated by ideology and global ambitions whose defeat would take a long time.

  If history is the judge to which we appeal, then it can also find against us. It can h
ighlight our mistakes by reminding us of those who, at other times, faced similar problems but who made different, perhaps better, decisions. President Bush refused to deal with Iran, even though it has huge influence in the Middle East and, in particular, in Iraq. His critics remembered when another American president faced a situation where the United States was bogged down in an unwinnable war and was losing much of its authority in the world. President Richard Nixon decided that he had to get the United States out of Vietnam and rebuild American prestige, and that the key to doing both lay in Beijing. Even though the United States and the People’s Republic were bitter enemies that had had virtually no contact with each other for decades, he boldly embarked on an initiative to bring about mutual recognition and, so he hoped, mutual help. When I was lecturing in the United States about Nixon in China, my book on the president’s 1972 trip to China, a question I was asked repeatedly was, if Nixon were president today, would he be going to Teheran for help in getting the United States out of Iraq?

  As a judge, history also undermines the claims of leaders to omniscience. Dictators, perhaps because they know their own lies so well, have usually realized the power of history. Consequently, they have tried to rewrite, deny, or destroy the past. Robespierre in revolutionary France and Pol Pot in 1970s Cambodia each set out to start society from the beginning again. Robespierre’s new calendar and Pol Pot’s Year Zero were designed to erase the past and its suggestions that there were alternative ways of organizing society. The founder of China, the Qin Emperor, reportedly destroyed all the earlier histories, buried the scholars who might remember them, and wrote his own history. Successive dynasties were not as brutal but they, too, wrote their own histories of China’s past. Mao went one better: He tried to destroy all memories and all artifacts that, by reminding the Chinese people of the past, might prevent him from remodelling them into the new Communist men and women. Stalin wrote his great rival Leon Trotsky out of the books and the photographs and the records until Trotsky became, in George Orwell’s chilling formulation, “an un-person.” The true record of Trotsky showed, after all, that Stalin was not the natural heir to Lenin, the revered founder of the Soviet Union, and that he had not played the crucial role in the victory of the Bolsheviks over their many enemies.