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Correspondence An International Review of Culture and Society

I n T h i s I s s u e

Hist or y RevisedThe Querelle Over Cultural History 2

Gulag Denial 3

History for Sale 4

The War That Will Not Thaw 5

Post-Zionism & the Myths of Memory 6

The Two Italies 7Historians Under National Socialism 9

The Greek Civil War in Retrospect 10

Revising Roger Garaudy 12

America the Radical? 13

Hist ory an d Hist or ia nsHistory Goes Pop: Two Views 15

Hungarian Women’s History 16

A New Kind of History 17

Fr ont ier s of Science

Icelandic Genes 18Left Darwinism 19

Peter Singer 19

Justice for Neanderthals! 20

Out of Africa? 20

EssaysFractures of Modern Civilization 21

The Resumption of History 39

(continued on next page)

History Revised

Nothing stimulates the writing of history more than the end of history.This is one conclusion that might be drawn from the geyser of freshhistorical work that has burst forth over the past decade. The books

that have received the most attention in recent years are devoted to revivifying“public memory,” as it is now called. Among these the most famous have beencommitted to returning all that has been “repressed” to the official record of ourbloody century. Such works are useful and can be morally admirable, especiallywhen they challenge the many new forms of historical revisionism that wouldlike to shape historical memory for some questionable contemporary purpose.

Yet there are other, more productive and interesting revisions also taking placein the field of history today, and it is these which we have chosen to highlight inthis issue of Correspondence. The first such revision is the active reexamination of the national myths that grew up in the decades following World War II and haveshaped our political experience since. These myths have come under increasingscholarly scrutiny in many countries recently. In Greece and Italy, for example,the standard historical accounts of the internal political conflicts that raged overCommunism, Fascism, and liberal democracy are all being rewritten, as politicalscientists Stathis Kalyvas and Nadia Urbinati report. In Israel, by contrast, a con-tentious debate has broken out over what journalist Gadi Taub here calls the“founding myths of Zionism,” whether in relation to the declaration of the State of Israel in 1948, the wars that followed, ethnic tensions between Sephardic andAshkenazi Jews, and misunderstandings between the Orthodox and secular pop-ulations. In all three cases the fact that national history is finally open to such pub-lic controversy is a hopeful sign of political maturity and confidence in the future.

Quite different sorts of revision are taking place within the history professionitself. As Michael Becker reports, German historians are currently disputing thepurposes to which certain founders of the most important postwar schools of research put their work during the war years. Elsewhere the debates are lesspolitically charged and more concerned with the aims and methods of the histo-rian writing today. As Daniel Gordon writes in our pages, the controversy overhistorical method has long been centered in France, where for years the domi-nant approaches focused on language, culture, and social transformations whiledownplaying the importance of purely political phenomena. Now political his-tory may be staging a comeback there. Another discussion has taken place

among Anglo-American historians over the current vogue of “popular history,”some of which is simply standard work aimed at reaching a broader audience,while the rest uses different narrative techniques to escape the limits of tradi-tional scholarship. We here consider several views of these developments andpublish an original contribution to the question by historian Anthony Grafton.

The most important contemporary myth in need of revision may be that of the“end of history” itself. As Daniel Bell writes in his essay for this issue, recentevents in the Balkans demonstrate that history is resuming, fueled by all thehatreds and passions—especially religious passions—that have always driven it.If he is correct, we can probably expect history as a form of intellectual inquiryto become more difficult yet all the more necessary. x

—Mark Lilla

Issue No. 4 Spr ing /Summer 1999

A n I n t e r n a t i o n a l P r o j e c t s po n s o r e d b y t h e Su n t o r y Fo u n d a t i on (Ja pa n ) ,t h e W is se n s c h a f t s ko l l e g zu Be r l i n a n d t h e A me r i ca n Aca d e my o f A r t s a n d Sc ie n c e s



(continued from previous page)

Japanese EconomyJapan & the Global Financial System 23

The Philosophy of Money 24

Ja pa nese Melt ing PotMultiethnic Japan 25

Buraku Liberation Movement 26

Views of JapanJapan, Made in U.S.A. 27

Korean-Japanese Reconciliation? 27

Responsibi li ty of Intel lectuals 28

Wor d & Ima ge in Japa nIn the Beginning Was the Word… 29

The Kanji Cultural Sphere 29

Plea for the New Japonisme 30

Repor t s fr om Eur opeThe “Forgotten” Germans 31

The New Right in Jacket and Tie 33

Rhetoric of Social Cohesion 34

Tintinitis 35

First Lady of Feminism 36

Iran Between Tradition & Modernity 36

Swedish Brain Drain 37

Régis Debray’s Excellent Adventure 38

The Faceless Euro 38NecrologyBuñuel’s Regret 41

Louis Dumont 41

Jean Malaquais 41

Giulio Einaudi 42

MiscellanyNoblesse in Distress 14

Arendt and Heidegger 22

Sentimental Education in Senegal 34

The Mother Tongue 40

Dewy Decimas 42

Letras Libres 43

List of Cont r ibut or s 43

A Repor t t o Our Rea der s 44

The Querelle Over Cultural History

From 1945 to the late 1970s, European and North American scholars debated passionately the relative merits of social and political history. Sincthe 1980s, the old dualism has been subsumed under the social and polit

cal rubric of “culture.” A long historical deadlock has been b roken by a thirparty: cultural history.

Or has it? The new cultural history has created a confusing set of choices owhat to study. Intellectual history or popular practices? National history omicrohistory? Conscious actions or behavior-inducing institutions? Rapichange or immobile structures? So many choices abound that the impulse trestore a happy and orderly dilemma is already evident. The old dualism is reemerging, as a recent exchange between philosopher Marcel Gauchet and historian Roger Chartier superbly illustrates.

Chartier is a leading scholar of early-modern Europe and a prolific essayist onmethodology. In his latest meditations, On The Edge of the Cliff: History, Languageand Practices (Johns Hopkins, 1997), he has tried to synthesize the cultural turand social history, rejecting economic determinism and emphasizing the “negotated” character of all relations. He insists that ideas are not the byproducts of clasinterests, but the very stuff of individual and group identities. Yet, paradoxically

he repeatedly uses the term “social” to posit a layer of reality that explains culturand politics: “discourse,” he declares, “is itself socially determined;” historianshould focus on “the social configurations that make...political forms possible.”The word “social” crops up everywhere—“social science,” “social world,“social actors,” “social differences”—a mantra freed from linguistic analysis as it were an assured reality, not a rhetorical item with its own intellectual history.

In a long examination of Chartier’s book in Le Débat (Jan.-Feb. 1999) , Gauchefaults him for this contradiction. Gauchet is a political philosopher and historianof modern democracy and the major heir to François Furet’s revisionist interpretation of history, which stresses the autonomous play of rhetoric in the politicasphere. While questioning Chart ier’s notion of the social, Gauchet advocates political mode of cultural history he calls “reflexive history,” one that includethe traditional terms of political analysis in its subject matter. A historian of partconflict in modern France, for example, would not casually invoke “Left” an“Right” but make the emergence of those very concepts a key part of the story.

Gauchet, unlike Chartier, deftly illustrates his methodological claims, especially his most provocative one that reflexive political history envelops sociahistory. Class conflict, he argues, is political, not socio-economic. During th1789 revolution it was the idea of the rights of man that created intergrouhatreds. In the nineteenth century, the working class in England could not havarisen without the preexisting idea of shared nationality.

Chartier responds to Gauchet’s criticism, but the social methodologist appearno match for t he political theorist. They end in a stalemate. While Gauchetexamples of the primacy of the political are fascinating, the notion of “the political” is imprecise. What makes both the rights of man and the nation-state exam

ples of a “political” rather than a “social” configuration? What is the global definition of “political?” At one point Gauchet defines “political history” as thstudy of “the political dimension” of history. Chart ier notes th is tautology anGauchet’s yoking everything into his concept of “reflexive political history”—everything, that is, except the concept of politics itself.

Thus, each criticizes the other for being insufficiently self-conscious of h icategories and for exempting his methodological terms from the h istory of ideologies. The impasse suggests that while history is enriched by self-conscioustudy of language, it cannot easily relinquish its traditional scientific aims. Evenas theorists of language, historians cannot stop searching for a nonsub jectivmethod and causal forces independent of the imagination. x

— Daniel Gordon

Hist or y Revised



Hist or y Revised

ground heaved and rippled in distinctive patterns. In thewake of the failed coup attempt in 1991, euphoric crowdsdescended on Lubyanka Square, the most notorious addressof Russia’s secret police, and dismantled the statute of FeliksDzerzhinsky, t he confederate of Lenin who created the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-revolution and Sabotage in December1917. They did not destroy the statuebut moved it a few miles to a sculpture

park by the banks of the Moscow River.Nowadays, it seems Russia has come

full circle. Last December 2, the StateDuma, the lower house of parliament,voted overwhelmingly to restore Dzer-zhinsky’s statue to its former site. That isunlikely to happen, for several reasons—some of which demonstrate the extent of Russia’s rejection of its totalitarian past.But the vote genuinely reflected a funda-mental shift in recent Russian politics.Eight years ago the apologists for the So-viet system’s crimes were on the defen-sive. Defying firm evidence of millions of murders, they could only duck and dodge. Today denial is infashion, as readers of Zyuganov’s Veryu V Rossiyu [I Believe in Russia] and the newspaper Sovietskaya Rossiya can attest.

The ranks of the deniers include people like SergeiFeliksovich, a forty-one-year-old professor who lives sur-rounded by photos of Castro and Stalin in a dingy room in acommunal apartment. He claims, interestingly, to despise manyof the gray-faced members of the modern-day CommunistParty of the Russian Federation (CPRF). When it comes tosocialism, he is a self-acknowledged snob whose preferredmodel is a dictatorial “republic of scholars.” Yet he is no dilet-

tante. Colleagues credit him with keeping the youth organiza-tion of the old Soviet CP alive in the underground dur ing theban on communist activity after 1991. Like most deniers, hedoesn’t claim that everything was sweetness and light; he con-cedes that “repressions” took place under Stalin. But hebelieves, first, that they were justified (by the greater good of the revolutionary masses who weren’t repressed) and, second,that they weren’t as bad as all that. “According to the InteriorMinistry, there were 643,000 deaths between 1921 and 1953,”says Sergei Feliksovich. “Perestroika scholars agreed with thatestimate.” It is hard to know which scholars he is talking about.Most self-respecting h istorians assume Soviet-era death tolls

(collectivization, purges, Gulag) run into double-digit millions.The late-1990s techniques here can be encountered from

park bench to parliamentary record. Unlike Holocaustdeniers, most Gulag revisionists concede that there were vic-tims; but very much like their German counterparts, the apol-ogists of Soviet terror use a variety of strategies to reduce the

death toll to an “acceptable” minimum.And the justifications are extremely

diverse, from the open rationalization of

revolutionary terror, as in the case of Sergei Feliksovich to the b lurring of the juridical definition of “criminal.” In aninterview with national radio last fall,Communist Duma deputy Vassily Shan-dybin remarked, “Yes, truly, a certainnumber of people suffered. They in-formed on each other: stool pigeons didtheir best, they informed, these peoplewere arrested. They confessed, and theywere sent away to certain p laces. For thisreason I don’t agree when people say thatwe had political prisoners in the SovietUnion.” Shandybin was merely repeating

arguments he had made in a Duma debate a week earlier, tellingabout a minor amendment to a law on “the rehabilitation of thevictims of political repressions.” The ambitious original law hadpassed without a peep in the post-putsch euphoria of fall 1991.But when it came around to voting on a miniscule, essentiallysymbolic improvement in pension benefits for a small class of victims, it was roundly rejected by the Duma.

Russian society still remains deeply divided over the coun-try’s past, and the resulting calculations of realpolitik haveintensified the climate of denial. The anniversary of the GreatOctober Revolution of 1917 is still celebrated as a holiday in

Russia by its opponents as well as its enthusiasts—but it’s nowknown as the “Day of Harmony and Reconciliation,” a compro-mise formula ironically demonstrating how far from those idealsRussia remains. The most recent Russian secondary-school his-tory textbooks fudge the issue of Soviet terror: a 1998 officialtext for eleventh-grade students gives no total figures for those“repressed” under Stalin; on the Great Terror of the 1930s itcounts only the army officers shot in 1937-38 (“more than40,000”) and victims of “conflicts within the repressiveorgans”(“several tens of thousands”). Otherwise, the text bendsover backward to stress the “constructive” aspects of what onechapter heading calls “Stalinist modernization.” Meanwhile,

Gulag “Denial”

A

t the beginning of this decade, it looked as though Russians were finally facing up to thenightmares of seventy years of totalitarian rule. Not a day went by, it seemed, without somenew revelation about the past. Every newspaper, every magazine, every serious television

show probed the wound. Official commissions rehabilitated survivors as well as the dead; unofficialcuriosity-seekers quite literally stumbled upon the skeletons of the past in fields where the abandoned



Hist or y Revised

while the Moscow city government has erected huge monu-ments to Peter the Great and other Russian patriotic heroes athigh-profile sites, to date, the capital has only two monumentsto the victims of Stalinism, both virtually invisible andunknown. In a capital of 10 million, there is only one smallmuseum dedicated to the horrors of the Gulag, and it is a sub-ordinate part of the privately funded Sakharov Museum.

Across town at the state-funded KGB Museum, the only men-tion of the Gulag comes in the context of heroic Soviet intelli-gence agents who landed there after their recall to the home-land at the height of Stalinist paranoia. “The end of the 1930swas our most difficult period,” the guide will tell you, “20,000of our members died.” The tragedy, it seems, was one primarilyfor the security police who were swallowed up by the terror.

In Russia, public arguments over the meaning of the past havealways been dictated less by criteria of scholarship and politi-cal morals than by brute political expediency. Perestroika lib-erals were quite open about the usefulness of history as a toolin the struggle against their authoritarian opponents. Neverwas this clearer than in the 1996 presidential elections, when

Yeltsin’s campaign managers rediscovered the emotive force of historical Communist terror—a long-neglected subject whichwould be abandoned again as soon as the elections were over.By December 1997, Yeltsin sent fulsome congratulations to thesecurity police on the eightieth anniversary of Dzerzhinsky’sCheka—not exactly what one would expect from the anti-Com-munist “democrat” to whom the voters had given their bless-ing a year earlier. But Yeltsin, battered by poor health and plum-meting popularity, reckoned that having the security police onboard outweighed the concerns of his erstwhile supporters.

This points to an additional problem: the continuity of Russia’s political elite. Whatever their current political affilia-tions, virtually all of the country’s ruling class consists of for-mer leading members of the CPSU. Fence-sitting is the ruleamong most of them. The two leading candidates in Russia’spresidential race, Yevgeni Primakov or Moscow Mayor YuriLuzhkov, won’t praise the Gulag. But neither will they addressthe tragedy of “Soviet terror.” Luzhkov clucks disapprovinglyabout “excessive criticism” of the Soviet past. Primakov, the for-mer spymaster, has recently proposed vacating the prisons tomake room for “economic criminals.” Similarly, he has advocatedmaking prison regimes so tough that inmates would considerthemselves “better off dead” (which has reminded some ob-servers of Stalin’s famous speech in July 1938 when he claimedthat imprisoned enemies of the people were enjoying “holiday

camp” conditions and demanded a tougher prison regime).Politicians will be politicians, of course. They could neverget away with such talk were it not for public apathy on thesubject. The days of joyous taboo-breaking are long gone inRussia. Economic troubles and the chaos caused by abort ivereforms have also compromised the moral authority of the lib-eral idea. (Characteristically, Russian communists nowadaysparry mentions of the Great Terror by referring to the “geno-cide” of falling population figures under Yeltsin.) A recentpoll asked ordinary Russians to name the best of their leadersthis century. The answer of the majority: Leonid Brezhnev.x

— Christian Caryl

History for Sale

How is historical research to be paid for? History hasalways been “sponsored,” first by rulers hoping toglorify their realms, later by private and ecclesias-

tical patrons hoping to glorify themselves, and most re-cently by universities, government, and non-profit founda-

tions hoping to contribute to the historical profession. Ashistorian Michael Pinto-Duschinsky recently wrote, the riseof corporate sponsorship of research, mainly focused onWorld War II, may mean creating collective memory “onbehalf of those with the deepest pockets or…those with thestrongest motives to purvey their side of the story.”

Pinto-Duschinsky is commenting on the current disputeover whether German companies owe compensation totheir slave laborers, and European banks to Jews whoseassets they acquired. Several corporations, includingDaimler-Benz, Volkswagen, and Deutsche Bank, have hiredhistorians to write about their wart ime records. The mostcontroversial research was a book on Volkswagen workers

dur ing the Third Reich by the widely respected historianHans Mommsen. Pinto-Duschinsky considers such bookstainted, a charge vehemently denied by Mommsen andother historians who have written them.

The immediate effect of corporations’ sponsorship of research on t hemselves, apart from apparent bias, is theclosing of archives and files to other researchers and thepub lic at large. Another p roblem has been over-relianceon corporate documents, which are often incomplete andself-serving. Finally, the protocols of the researchers andtheir relations with the corporations remain private.

These problems are not unique to corporate sponsorship.Large budgets always affect research. Pinto-Duschinskycites the European Commission’s investment in researchpromoting the European Union, a p rogram that includes409 Jean Monnet professorships, hundreds of sponsoreduniversity courses, and a “Europaeum” linking Oxford tocontinental universities. Euro-skeptics are unlikely to gainsuch funding. Just as Cold War government sponsorshipdecisively shaped Western universities, today there is “theacademic equivalent of an arms race between Arab andIsraeli interests” in American and English universities—whereas East European studies remains an impoverishedfield, despite the largesse of George Soros.

Pinto-Duschinsky is convinced that “foreign funding and

corporate sponsorships are here to stay,” and that “prop-erly managed, they add to the pluralism and prosperity of academic life.” But safeguards must ensure the intellectualresearchers’ independence. He suggests that scholars dis-close the sources of their funding and that a code of con-duct limit exclusive access to documents and guarantee thatevidence can be checked. Only then can the history profes-sion protect itself against the charge that it is for sale.

—MLSource: Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, “Selling th e Past,” Times

Literary Supplement, October 23, 1998.



Hist or y Revised

The bipolar struggle between the United States and theSoviet Union, though it ended a decade ago, still castsa lengthening shadow over America’s political and

intellectual culture. Documents recently declassified by intel-

ligence agencies in the United States and the Soviet Union aretransforming our understanding of the Cold War. AllenWeinstein and Alexander Vassiliev’s The Haunted Wood (Random House,1999), based on KGB materials, includesclinching evidence that Alger Hiss and Julius and EthelRosenberg—defendants in the most celebrated Cold War spytrials—were guilty as charged, along with others named dur-ing the Red hunts that catapultedRichard Nixon and Joseph Mc-Carthy to fame. Another book,published this spring, examinesthe fruits of the Venona Project, atop-secret code-breaking program

inaugurated during World War IIby U.S. military intelligence. Theeffort ultimately identified some350 Americans “who had a covertrelationship with Soviet intelli-gence,” write John Earl Haynes andHarvey Klehr in Venona: DecodingSoviet Espionage in America (YaleUniversity Press, 1999).

How will future historians grap-ple with unimpeachable evidencethat Hiss, Harry Dexter White,and Laurence Duggan, to nameonly three, all rose to senior posi-tions under President Roosevelteven as they reported to Soviethandlers and furnished them withconfidential reports and papers?For the moment t hese revelations are renewing a long-stand-ing debate, less about American Communism (never morethan a marginal feature of the nation’s political life), thanabout anti-Communism, the ideology that shaped foreign pol-icy in the United States from 1945 to 1989, the very years inwhich the nation consolidated its position as the world’s pre-eminent superpower.

In We Now Know: Rethinking American Cold W ar History(Oxford, 1998), John Lewis Gaddis draws on a wide range of archival documents to argue that the architects of Americanforeign policy accurately appraised Stalin as an ideologue benton global expansion of the Soviet state in th e middle to late1940s. Contrar ily, in h er recent study Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Little, Brown, 1998), Ellen Schreck-er concedes that Soviet espionage was a reality but judges anti-Communism the greater menace to American democracy anddisparages Cold War liberals who, though opposed toMcCarthyism, were also critical of the American CommunistParty. The most vocal skeptics come from the populous ranks

of “revisionists,” who, having maintained since the 1960s thatCold War policy was disastrously shaped by an exaggerated,even paranoid, fear of world communism, are not giving upthe fight. A letter signed by nineteen historians, academi-

cians, and journalists, and published in the New York Reviewof Books (April 8, 1999) in response to my January 14 reviewof Schrecker, “The Red Scare,” protests that the smug spirit of “tr iumphalism” has infected recent studies of the Cold Warand that revelations from intelligence archives, however star-tling, do not “exculpate U.S. misconduct in Iran, Guatemala,Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua and elsewhere” or “sett le broader

debates over responsibility for thedivision of Germany or Europe,the d uration of the Cold War, thelength, intensity, and dangers of the nuclear arms race, the cause of the Soviet collapse, and many

other issues.”The debate has also spilled over

into cultural zones. In his latestnovel, I Married a Communist(Houghton Mifflin, 1998), PhilipRoth examines the competing hys-terias and self-delusions of the1950s and its campaign againstSoviet subversion. On the oppositeend of the political spectrum,William F. Buckley, Jr., whostaunchly defended Joseph Mc-Carthy in a book published in1954, revisits the subject in hisforthcoming novel The Redhunter ,which offers a surprisingly nu-anced portrait of the most effec-tive demagogue of the postwar era.

The latest flare-up came when the film director Elia Kazan,an ex-Communist, was given an Academy Award for “lifetimeachievement” despite having yielded up the names of Commu-nists to a congressional committee in 1952. Kazan, who turnsninety this year, was freshly denounced in numerous journalsand newspapers, though he found a defender in one of the best-known Cold War liberals, Arthur Schlesinger, who pointed out

in the New York Times that Kazan’s harshest critics includemany who remain cur iously forgiving of the Stalinist movementhe repudiated. When Kazan came on stage to receive his award,presented by Martin Scorsese, some in the audience rose toapplaud (including Warren Beatty, well-known for his liberalpolitics) while the actors Nick Nolte and Ed Harris, among oth-ers, sat by silent and grim. Thus do yesterday’s ideological dis-putes endure into the contentious present. American liberalsseem unwilling to concede that t he United States did, afterall, defeat its archr ival, while conservatives seem unable todeclare victory and turn to new struggles. x

— Sam Tanenhaus

The War That Will Not Thaw



Hist or y Revised

Over the past decade the debate over “Post-Zionism”has captured the public imagination of Israel’s elites.Spearheaded by “New Historians,” “critical sociolo-

gists,” and other new-style radicals, Post-Zionism gradually

became the popular label for an all-out ideological assault onthe Zionist idea. Rather than a Jewish national revival, theneo-radicals claimed, Zionism was yet another instance of Western colonialism. It enforced European “hegemony” onoriental Jews through the melting-pot ideology; it underwrote“patriarchy” through a militaristic ethos; it erected powerstructures to support the elite; and so forth.

The book that first sparked the public debate, long before aflood of postmodern “radicalism” took the lead, was surpris-ingly conservative in its methodology. Benny Morris’ s The

Birth of the Palesti-nian Refugee Prob-lem, 1947-1949, pub-

lished in England in1988 and translatedinto Hebrew in 1991,is a carefully docu-mented research of archives aimed at un-covering what Morrissees as the truth a-

bout Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. Although he first setout to show that Zionist leaders had a comprehensive plan toexpel the Arab population of Palestine, he found that the mas-sive exodus of Arabs was a result of the war: partly a hastyflight from war zones, partly a failure of Arab leadership, andpart ly an ad hoc policy of deportation that stemmed from mili-tary considerations. The book managed to br ing to the forewhat lay dormant in Israel’s collective memory: the scale of expulsions and the atrocities of the 1948 war. It downplayed,however, the fact that the war was imposed on Israel.

Academic historians were not entirely surprised by whatMorris exhumed from newly opened archives. Most of this wasknown, although never before given such thorough documen-tation. The more profound influence of the book lay in the chal-lenge to the popular perception of Zionism. Its readability andthe explosion of public relations around it were all aimed atreversing the myth of a just Jewish David triumphant over an

evil Arab Goliath. All this landed on fertile emotional ground.Thirty years of occupation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bankhad tarnished Zionism’s righteous self-image. But Post-Zionistsdid not offer a new, more sober view of Israel’s history. Bypainting the picture in the colors of the 1967 occupations, theycreated a negative image of the old popular one: the Palesti-nians, in their current state of oppression, were projected backin history to 1948, and a confident Western Goliath in the guiseof Zionism stormed back through time to the cradle of theirtragedy, in the process overrunning women, oriental Jews, Ho-locaust survivors, ultra-orthodox Jews, and other minorities.

In a programmatic essay in Tikkun (Nov./Dec. 1988), Morr is

coined the name “New Historians,” and from then on all whrefused the image of Zionism as thoroughly evil were dubbe“old historians.” As the debate spilled out from the history othe ’48 war into other subjects and popular media, it becam

complex. But complex descriptions of history d id not stand chance against Post-Zionist provocations. On top of Morris’conservative historiography, a fashionable intellectual arsenawas deployed by the New Historians: Edward Said’s theorieof colonialism and orientalism, postmodern relativism, radcal feminism, multiculturalism, etc. All contributed to the further radicalization of the arguments. New Historian IlaPappe, for example, accused Morris of being trapped in t hconfines of the “Zionist Paradigm.” It is not enough, hargued, to point to atrocities. One must first discard the notioof truth, for “t ruth” is the invention of “hegemony” designeto suppress a plurality of “narrat ives.” Along with “criticasociologists”—Uri Ram, Baruch Kimmerling, and other

—Pappe set out to show that Zionism, viewed outside its owparadigm through “neutral” eyes, is clearly a part of the colonial movement. Under the paradigm of colonialism, immigration too appeared in a new, not entirely neutral, light. Rathethan refugees from the ashes of death camps seeking sheltein the forming Jewish state, Holocaust survivors were portrayed as cannon fodder for David Ben-Gurion’s imperialismSimultaneously Ben-Gurion was accused of abandoninEuropean Jewry to Nazi death camps: having placed th“negation of the Diaspora” at the heart of its official ideologyZionism became indifferent to non-Zionist Diaspora Jews, anfinally indulged a systematic negation of all “others.”

The new interpretation of oriental immigration also struca deeply emotional chord. The traumatic immigration of Jewfrom Muslim countries in the fifties, the shock of abrupt transition from a traditional to a modern society, is still a bleedinsocial wound. The arrogance of Israel’s leadership towarthese people only added insult t o the original injury. Sociologists Shelomoh Svirski and Yehoud a Shenhav blamed thhardships of assimilation on deliberate racial discriminationAccording to Svirski, the ruling elite created a system of education designed at d irecting oriental Jewry to proletarian jobThe melting pot, “critical sociologists” said, was a deliberatattempt to rob these Jews of identity and heritage, to enforcWestern hegemony. Argument soon assumed a tautologica

form: those who assimilated were depicted more or less as trators to their heritage, while those who did not remained living testimony to discrimination.

What emerged from all these new forms of criticism wasdenial of the strong national sentiment that animated Zionismand made it a mass movement. The new interpretations replacea social force from below with manipulation of elites fromabove. Since conspiratorial world-views have their own dynamics of radicalization, soon nothing was what it seemed: the Oslpeace accord, Post-Zionism declared, was a continuation of thoccupation by other means; the peace with Jordan a scheme tsuffocate the Palestinians. Some even denounced human right

Post-Zionism and the Myths of Memory

A confident WesternGoliath in the guise of zionism stormed back through time…



Hist or y Revised

organizations for “duplicating” the “language of occupation”by promoting the “illusion” of objective description.

At a rather late point in the debate, as provocation becameroutine and Zionism-as-evil a standard assumption in the high-brow press, Zeev Sternhell sought to reformulate the anti-Zionist sentiment in a more traditional Marxist vein. The rootof evil is, according to his The Founding Myths of Israel

(Princeton, 1998), that labor-Zionism was really nationalism inthe guise of a socialist project. The discovery of nationalismapparently offered Sternhell an indisputable, final proof of the“falseness” of the socialist rhetoric. While Post-Zionists rejected this emphasis on nationalism, the most devastating cri-tique of the book arrived from outside Post-Zionist circles.Respected historian Anita Shapira wrote a sarcastic, somewhatamused essay entitled “Sternhell’s Complaint.” Sternhell, shesaid, is an expert on French Fascism and so tends to find FrenchFascism wherever he looks. His socialism was more in keepingwith t he Marxism of the British Museum Library than withpolitical reality. Where, except in books, she asked, did weever see a successful non-national socialist government?

Caught in the crossfire, Sternhell’s ill-informed book failed todraw from Israelis the attention it received abroad and soonsank into oblivion amid the uproar of the Post-Zionist debate.

Recently, as arguments for and against Zionism seemed togrow more and more predictable, Daniel Gutwein of theUniversity of Haifa, in an essay on “‘New Historiography’ orthe Privatization of Memory,”advanced a new interpretationof the debate with a more sophisticated Marxist twist. He firstpointed out that the important arena of debate was not theacademy but the media. What seemed at the start like a schol-arly assault on established historiography turned out to be anideological assault on the authority of academic research. Thesuccess of this att ack is accordingly not to be exp lained onacademic grounds, in Gutwein’s view. The Post-Zionists them-selves attributed their emergence to the decline of the heroicmentality of young Israel and the maturing of a civil societynow able to tolerate a critical look at its past. But that, accord-ing to Gutwein, is at best a part ial explanation. Rather, thegrowth of this neo-radicalism from within the heart of the eliteacademic institut ion is more comprehensible against the largersocio-economic background: the general privatization of Is-raeli society and the rise of the new professional and financialelites. The gradual disintegration of the welfare state, and itsreplacement by a free market economy, came up against theobstacle of old Israel’s cultural heritage. They clashed with

the old collective memory and its emphasis on social cohesionand mutual responsibility. The “privatization” of memory, the“celebration” of a multiplicity of “narratives” and identities,is progressively diminishing solidarity and is therefore pavingthe way for the ongoing rise of the managerial class. Ratherthan a campaign for th e socially marginalized, Gutwein ar-gued, Post-Zionism is better understood as a party in the con-flict between the old and the new elites. By “privatizing mem-ory,” by tearing the old cultural fabric th at formerly boundIsraelis together, it furnishes “the ideological basis for anethos of privatization in its struggle for hegemony.” x

—Gadi Taub

The Two Italies

In Rome in 1942 a clandestine anti-Fascist party called theParty of Action [Partito d’azione] was formed. It had sev-eral different currents–republican, liberal, liberal-social-

ist–yet was held together by its admiration for two importantfigures in Italian politics: Piero Gobetti and Carlo Rosselli.

Gobetti (1901-1926) was the first to suggest that ever since theRisorgimento there were “two Italies:” one enlightened andmodern, but small and weak, the other premodern, tradi-tional, and dominant. Writing in the years Fascism tookpower, Gobetti was convinced that Italy’s hostility to liberal-ism could only be overcome if a “change in the national cul-ture,” or cultural revolution, first took place. Although heendorsed a radical liberalism, he also believed that theCommunists could p lay a crucial role in democratizing Italyby helping to develop a secular cultu re. He died in Paris in1926 of a heart attack a few weeks after escaping from Turin,where he had suffered a physical assault by local Fascists.Rosselli (1899-1937) was founder of the clandestine anti-fas-

cist movement Justice and Liberty [Giustizia e Libertà] andalso believed that socialism, once stripped of its statist ten-dencies and Marxist roots, could contribute to liberalismbecause it was a coherent interpretation of liberalism. Rosselliparticipated in the Spanish civil war and was assassinated byMussolini’s hired killers. Like Gobetti, Rosselli was a militantideologue and victim of fascism, which added to the charis-matic appeal of the Party of Action.

The Party of Action disappeared almost immediately afterthe war, during the first democratic elections of 1946. It wasknown unofficially as “The Party of the Intellectuals,” a partyof commanders without an army, as Communist Party leaderPalmiro Togliatti sarcastically called it. The Action Partyattracted the best minds of the anti-fascist culture—historianFranco Venturi, political thinker Guido De Ruggiero, philoso-pher Norberto Bobbio, economist Luigi Einaudi—yet wasunable to att ract t he Italian people. As Bobbio explained inhis Autobiography, the defeat was unexpected because theleaders of the party were sure they were on the side of theangels and were working toward establishing a “real andmature” Italian democracy. They interpreted their d efeat astestimony to the fact that the majority of the Italians were notsufficiently mature: Italy preferred the programs of the newChurches, that is to say, of the Christian Democrats and theCommunists to the clear and reasonable program of the Party

of Action. The “other” Italy, the enlightened Italy, had onceagain been abandoned by a hopelessly backward, premodern,and illiberal Italy.

Until recently this short episode in modern Italian politicsremained in the shadows of other, more dramatic historicalevents. But since the end of the Cold War, a heated polemichas arisen over what t he failure of the Party of Action—orazionismo—really meant. On the one hand, it has played a partin a general reassessment of Italian postwar h istory and therelation between Italian fascism and the Resistance. On theother, it has re-ignited an older debate about whether modernliberalism can ever grow in Italian soil.



Hist or y Revised

Even before the end of the Cold War, questions were raisedabout atrocities committed by partisans of the Italian Resist-ance in the waning days of World War II. As the history of theperiod began to be rewritten, the standard account of theResistance seemed an ideological construction, and soon it wasargued that the Resistance had not pur sued a war of libera-tion but a civil war. This was a quite radical revision of his-

tory because it also changed perceptions of fascism and ant i-fascism. The Italians who fought on the “right” side–mainlythe Communists–had never called the Resistance a “civil war;”only the Fascists did. What finally broke that canonical tradi-tion was the publication in 1991 of Una guerra civile: Saggiostorico sulla moralità della Resistenza [A civil war: historicalessay on the morality of the Resistance] by Claudio Pavone, ahighly respected historian and anti-Fascist. Pavone arguedthat three wars had been fought during the Resistance: adomestic war between Fascists and anti-Fascists; a war of lib-eration against the Nazis, who after the armistice of 1943 werea de facto occupation army; and, finally, a class war, which wasfought by the Communists with the intention of overturning

capitalism and instituting a Communist regime. These threewars, Pavone concluded, could be defined as moments of abroad civil war because in all three the enemies were Italians.

Why has this interpretation of the Resistance as a civil warbeen so explosive? Because, as Norberto Bobbio has ex-plained, in international law a civil war is one considered justby both parties and does not allow for clear moral judgment.If the Resistance was a civil war, then each Fascist was legiti-mately an enemy of each Communist and anti-Fascist, and viceversa. And that would mean that the Resistance was not aforce of unity against a foreign enemy but a source of divisionamong Italians. Contrary to what both the anti-Fascists andthe Communists have claimed, Italy lost its unity preciselyduring the Resistance.

In a p rovocative book, La morte della patria [The death of the fatherland] (1997), the political scientist Ernesto Galli dellaLoggia used th is reasoning in order to denounce the role of azionismo in the making of postwar Italy. In his view, Italy infact had a unitary identity before the collapse of Fascism. Ithad a patria that was identified with the state and could haveresisted the German occupation had the government not aban-doned Rome to the German army in September 1943. The statedissolved at the precise moment it was needed, forcing Italiansto guard their life and liberty and leaving them in the handsof the Communist partisans or the Fascists. The Resistance

then deepened the fracture between the state and the nationby dividing Italian society into tribal ideologies. Thus, con-trary to the leftist common wisdom, the Resistance did notcontribute to making the state legitimate, but rather made thestate an object of conquest by factional interests and encour-aged citizens to ident ify themselves with parties instead of the Italian Constitution. This determined the political charac-ter of Italy until the early 1990s.

According to Galli della Loggia, the only possibility forpolitical redemption could have come from the liberals.However, Italy did not in fact have a strong liberal party, nor,above all, a liberal culture. The Party of Action, then, the only

liberal party, might have played a role here but proved incapable of being tru ly neutral between Fascists and CommunistIts radicalism, its lack of moderation, its ant i-Fascist originmade it a de facto pro-Communist party.

The intellectuals who have led the polemic on azionismo irecent years have insisted on the intolerant and Jacobin character of the Party of Action and its myth of “the two Italies

This is part of what the philosopher Augusto Del Noce calle“the Italian ideology” in a series of books he published in th1970s, and which have now inspired a young generation ointellectuals writing for periodicals like Liberal and newspapers like Corriere della Sera. Del Noce (1910-1989) taught at thCatholic University of Milan for many years and was known aa sharp critic of the modern age. In his view, it was the rejection of transcendence and the ensuing divinization of the individual that inspired the negative utopias of modernity. Withouexternal and superior values capable of limiting the individuawill to power, all values—even the liberal values of liberty anequality—could be turned upside down. For Del Noce, azionismo was the most mature political form of a rationalism tha

descends into nihilism. In fact, he argued, the leaders of thParty of Action were even more radical than their opponentsince they rejected any form of religiosity or communitariabelonging. The anti-fascism of the azionisti was as destructivas that of the Communists while sharing a certain nihilism witfascism. The belief that azionismo was the expression of “thother Italy” only reflected what Del Noce called the “absolutsolipsism” of “the Italian ideology,” the dogmatic belief imodernity that cannot tolerate any mediation or compromise“The Italian ideology” could only breed denial and division, athe war of Resistance has shown.

Galli della Loggia translates Del Noce’s theory into a politcal argument against t he presumed modernity of azionismoWhereas Del Noce criticized modernity in all its facets, Galdella Loggia instead accused “the Italian ideology” of havinremoved the country from modernity by having identified thmodern age with the Enlightenment and political JacobinismItaly lacked a moderate liberalism because its intellectualregarded France, not England or America, as their modeRather than simply aiming to build a liberal state, thewanted, with ironically Jacobin rigidity, to forge a new manalbeit a liberal one. And in this they failed.

Yet polemics about azionismo cannot but bring to minthose of the Cold War. And in t his sense it can be said thathe intellectuals engaged in them are no less Jacobin tha

their predecessors. x—Nadia Urbinati



Hist or y Revised

the historical profession during the 1930s. Both were amongthe most prominent members of their discipline, dominatingpersonalities, innovators, and influential teachers from the1950s on, and both became later Presidents of the GermanHistorians’ Association. Conze founded the Working Circle forModern Social History in Heidelberg and initiated research onsocial history, especially on the industr ial work force, when thiswas still unusual terrain. He also co-edited—with Otto Brunnerand Reinhard Koselleck—the great dictionary for Geschichtliche

Grundbegriffe [Basic Historical Concepts], still the touchstonefor conceptual history in Germany. Schieder was editor of the Historische Zeitschrift , the country’s leading historical journal.He introduced comparative study of the modern nation-state,made contemporary history a more accepted field, and greatlybroadened the scope of social history.

In the fifties and sixties both Conze and Schieder led at-tempts to establish a new approach to social history in Germany.The real breakthrough only occurred in the late sixties andearly seventies through efforts of a younger generation. Its mainrepresentatives were Schieder’s student Hans Ulrich Wehler,and Jürgen Kocka; together they established what was latercalled the Bielefeld School of social history. Until then the vastmajority of German historians viewed history mainly from thestandpoint of politics and were politically conservative.Starting in the early seventies the Bielefeld School provided thefirst visible alternative to a political history approach by focus-ing on society. They did not ignore politics and events, but theyfelt that socio-economic factors, long-term trends, and classconflict had not received due attention. They borrowed freelyfrom the methodologies of the social sciences, especially sociol-ogy and economics, and kept abreast of historiographic devel-opments abroad. The School called its approach ”HistoricalSocial Science,“ and founded its own journal, Geschichte und Gesellschaft [History and Society], in 1975.

One achievement of the Bielefeld School was to have rede-fined the relation of historical studies to the present, drawingon responses to National Socialism. They saw history as cri-tique, with a practical dimension and public function. It wascrucial to them never to lose sight of 1933 in studying theGerman past. Politically, the School flourished in the periodof the first coalition government of liberals and social democ-rats, when Willy Brandt was redefining German foreign pol-icy, and the student movement was in full swing. Their workepitomizes many of the sentiments of the period.

Today the Bielefeld School is part of the academic historicalestablishment, but not predominant. Many historians still

work along more traditional lines. And since the 1990s ayoung new third generation of postwar historians have turnedfrom social-history approaches to cultural studies, gender his-tory, micro-history, and other new trends in history, withthemes they consider to have been neglected in the work of the older political, social, and economic historians. In posingtheir questions they have also turned to new kinds of sourcesand new methodological approaches. Being further removedfrom the war than older historians were and are, some of them

have also raised their own questions about it.Today the older distractions of the Cold War have all but

disappeared, to be replaced by a widely felt need to redefinepolicies of remembrance and memory under new political cir-cumstances. One fru itful new area of investigation is the his-tory of academic research under National Socialism, and itspartial integration of research activities into the war effortsand the Holocaust. There have been studies of organizationslike the Forschungsgemeinschaften (“research communities”)which had been largely ignored. And we now know muchmore about the involvement of certain fields like eugenics,geography, or population studies in the planning and ideolog-ical justification of the war of destruct ion in the East. And,finally, all this has led to new explorations into historical workunder National Socialism.

Early studies in this area suggested that the National Social-ist views of history had mainly penetrated a few institut ions,leaving the rest of the profession relatively untouched. Thegeneral view was that the historical profession had been veryconservative and mainly not averse to National Socialism, butthat this had not radically affected historical research between1933 and 1945.

This image changed radically when the work of some acad-emic historians in the 1930s came under closer scrutiny. Newinvestigations by the younger historians in the 1990s altered

the image of several historians who became prominent in the1950s and 1960s, and first met with a mixed reception fromthe older generation of the 1990s. Although some of thesestudies were reviewed in the national press there was no pub-lic reaction to them until the annual convention of the GermanHistorians’ Association, when the panel on this subject over-shadowed all other meetings and events there.

The public debate revolved around the cases of Conze andSchieder, and their relations with the Volksgeschichte (People’sHistory) school of the thirties, based largely in Königsberg,which some have seen as heavily involved in National Socialistideology. According to Wehler’s summary of others’ recent

Historians under National Socialism

A

major controversy flared up at the annual meeting of the German Historians’ Associationlast autumn. It divided the profession, scandalized the general public, and rages on in thecultural sections of the German national press. Basically, it concerns the Nazi past of German

historians, in particular that of Werner Conze (1910-1986) and Theodor Schieder (1908-1984). But italso involved a conflict between generations and between historical schools. Oonze and Schieder entered



Hist or y Revised

research, the Volksgeschichte school attracted young h istori-ans who, disappointed by the state, turned to study of “thepeople” as a more reliable source of historical cont inuity. Tothis end they introduced statistical and demographic methodsand other innovations into historical research. This was intel-lectually more attractive than following the common paths of mainstream political history. Later, of course, the social ro-

manticism of this concept of “the people” later turned into aracist conception under the influence of National Socialism.

For example, the research methods of Volksgeschichtewereused in 1939 when the Nazis began planning large forcedmigrations in Eastern Central Europe, with the aim of ethniccleansing. Two of the historians involved were Conze andSchieder. Their plans for such population shifts were couchedin an anti-Semitic language that seems to blur any differencebetween forced deport ation and physical annihilation. Thispart of the story has been told by the journalist and historianGötz Aly and others, who unearthed a series of shocking quo-tations that jarred with the existing image of Conze andSchieder. Many of these quotations came from unpublished

memoranda found in archives, though hints of their viewscould also be found in their publications.

Reactions to these discoveries varied. For Götz Aly, thedemographic strategies Conze and Schieder proposed areintermediary steps to the Holocaust. Aly’s critics see him as amuckraker pulling quotations out of context, without analyz-ing the character, function, and institutional background of their sources or their real effects on the bureaucratic decision-making processes. In fact, they say, we still know very littleabout the interactions between Volksgeschichte, National So-cialist ideology, and the planning and decision-makingprocesses of World War II. While these rebuttals may damageAly’s interpretational framework, they leave the power of histelling quotations untouched. In an effort to reconcile thesequotations with Conze’s and Schieder’s postwar work it hasbeen argued that the two should be credited with havingundergone a “learning process.” This has raised the objectionthat a true learning process would have broken the silenceboth Conze and Schieder preserved with regard to their past.For some in this controversy, silence is the real scandal.

And some of the more accusatory younger h istorians usethe scandal to implicate the Bielefeld School in this silence.Did Conze and Schieder enter into a conspiracy of silence withtheir students? Did their students press them hard enoughwith questions about their past, or shy away for their own rea-

sons? Why have these stories come to light only now? Fromlack of active interest, or fear of what one might find?Ultimately, these overlapping conflicts of interpretation,

generation, and schools of thought raise the deeper question:Are intellectual and moral achievements naturally linked? x

— Michael Becker

Sources:Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “In den Fußstapfen der KämpfendenWissenschaft” [In the footprints of a warring discipline], Frankfurter

Allgemeine Zeitung, January 4, 1999.Jürgen Kocka, “Die Zukunft hat erst begonnen” [The future’s just

begun], in Paul Nolte, ed., Perspektiven der Gesellschaftsgeschichte,München, 1999.

The Greek Civil Warin Retrospect

T

he Greek civil war, one of the three major contemporary European civil wars (along with the Spanish anRussian ones), was fought on and off between 194

and 1949. It began during the joint German-Italian-Bulgariaoccupation of the country following Greece’s defeat in 1941.Athe occupation shattered old structures and loyalties, a powerful Communist-controlled resistance movement emergedEAM (the Greek acronym for National Liberation Front). I1943, EAM eliminated almost all non-Communist resistancmovements. The same year, the occupation authorities formea collaborationist army, generically known as “SecuritBattalions.” In 1944, fighting between ELAS (EAM’s partisaarmy, the National Popular Liberation Army), and the SecuritBattalions evolved into a full-fledged civil war that createthousands of victims and long-lasting hatreds—along witthe political identities that still inform Greek politics

Following the Germans’ departure in October 1944, the entircountry with the exception of Athens came under EAM control. In mass reprisals, the partisans massacred thousands oSecurity Battalionists.

When the government-in-exile, supported by Britainreturned to Athens and established its authority, a wave obloody retaliation against EAM members, often led by formeSecurity Battalionists, took place. Eventually, right-wing anleft-wing irregular bands fought each other (with civilianbeing the primary target) in 1945 and 1946. In 1947, thCommunist Party decided to fight an all-out war which lasteunt il 1949 and is often referred t o as “the Greek civil warThe implementation of the Truman Doctrine, the unwillingness of the Soviet Union to enter the fray, and the Tito-Stalifallout all contr ibuted to the u ltimate and total defeat of thCommunist Party, which was to remain out lawed until 1974Thousands of its supporters left Greece for the Soviet bloc inthe wake of the defeat—a sizeable part of them ending up far as Uzbekistan. Suspected Communist sympathizers werharassed and discriminated against. Overall, about 600,00Greeks died of various causes between 1940 and 1949—in country popu lated by less than seven million. Hundreds othousands became refugees.

The historical literature that emerged right after the end othe civil war was consistent with the adage that history i

writt en by the winners. The main thesis was that EAM wano more than a cover used by the Communists to win poweeither peacefully, or, if this proved impossible, violentlyTerror was widely used by EAM, and its dominant positiowithin the Greek resistance was the result of the systematidestruction of nationalist resistance organizations. In such circumstances collaboration with the occupiers could be excusesince the prospect of long-term communism was a biggethreat than short-term fascist occupation. Having failed to wipower in 1944, the Communist Party then planned a newinsurrection in 1947, helped by the Soviet Union and its satellites—in partial exchange for which it accepted the country’



Hist or y Revised

partition through the transfer of Greek Macedonia to Greece’snorthern neighbors.

Most of the work produced during this period took theform of popular pamphlets, rich in references to the v iolenceand the “un-Greekness” of the Left, but rather short on facts.The emphasis was placed more on the last phase of the civilwar than on the period of the occupation. The most useful

part of this otherwise forgettable production are memoirspub lished by p rominent military leaders of the governmentarmy and a series of publications of military history pub-lished by the Historical Service of the army. For years, thebasic source on the per iod of occupation remained the mem-oirs of the British agents who worked with the partisans.During this per iod historical works sympathetic to the Leftwere only published outside Greece.

The political liberalization of the 1960s was eventuallyreflected in the historiography of the Civil War. The first left-wing interpretations began to appear in Greece. The mainlines of the leftist thesis (which, of course, comes in many ver-sions) can be summarized as follows: EAM was a broad-based,

mostly non-communist mass movement, which expressed thepopular aspirations for liberation from foreign occupation anda more just social order. EAM would have come to power bypeaceful means had it not been stopped by the British whosupported the local oligarchy and sponsored mass violenceagainst it. Forced by the British to resort to arms in December1944 and 1947, this popular movement lost only because of foreign (British and, then, US) intervent ion. Those who foughtagainst Nazi Germany were executed or languished in prisonswhile former collaborationists became part of the postwarpower establishment.

After a seven-year hiatus du e to the military dictatorship(1967-1974), this literature all but erased former right-winginterpretations. A Greek-American journalist, Nicholas Gage,who visited Greece in 1977, describes a situation in which“posters, movies, books, popular songs and the youth organi-zations in the universities were united in celebrating the guer-rillas of the civil war as heroes. It seemed that the best talentsof Greece were busy rewriting the history of the war.” Whenthe same journalist published an autobiographical book in theearly 1980s about the execution of his mother by theCommunist guerillas in 1948, the intellectual establishmentand the majority of the media reacted in a vociferously nega-tive way; and when the Hollywood filmed version of the bookwas released soon after, the Communist youth organization

picketed movie theaters and harassed moviegoers. Around thesame time, when the renowned Greek philosopher CorneliusCastoriadis voiced a public criticism of leftist interpretationsof the civil war (he deemed them Stalinist), he was openly andvehemently insulted in the first page of the Athens newspa-per with the highest circulation. The victory of the Socialistparty (PASOK) in 1981 turned this version of the civil war intostate orthodoxy much along the same lines that the right hadwith its own in the 1950s. Following the long-awaited officialrecognition of EAM as a resistance organization in 1982 (in thecontext of a highly emotional debate in the National Assemblyduring which the opposition center-right New Democracy

party walked out in protest), the left-wing version of the civilwar became a staple of official discourse and schoolbooks.

Contrary to expectation, the end of the Cold War has hardlyaltered this situation. The last months of 1997 saw the succes-sive (and commercially successful) publication of a significantnumber of historical books, heavily biased in favor of the Left.A climate of ideological suspicion prevails. For instance, a

Greek journalist writing a book review in 1998 quipped thatthe political orientation of th e authors of books on the civilwar can be “sensed immediately and with certainty.” More-over, serious historical research has been impeded by the sadstate of the Greek archives, the non-availability of the largestpart of the archives of the Communist Party, and one of themost outrageous acts of destruction of a country’s collectivememory: the burning of millions of personal files (held by thepolice) and related state documents concerning both the civilwar and the postwar period in celebratory bonfires all overthe country during the summer of 1989. The intention was tocelebrate th e “national reconciliation” and th e “true end of the civil war” on the occasion of the formation of an extraor-

dinary coalition cabinet which included the Greek right anda leftist coalition containing the Communist party!

Yet despite these obstacles, a revisionist trend is slowly (andstill timidly) emerging. Recent work focuses more on theperiod of the occupation, takes into account social and eco-nomic factors, adopts a view “from the ground up” with astrong local bent, places Greek history in a wider comparativeperspective, and relies on unconventional material to make upfor the absence of archival sources, such as oral history, localstudies, personal memoirs. What emerges is a very complexand nuanced set of shifting and segmented loyalties, heavilyinformed by local considerations and conflicts, in which ter-ror was never the monopoly of a single camp. In addition, newgroundbreaking work examines the civil war in Macedonia,which appears to have been an exceedingly complex conflictblending ethnic and ideological conflict with such diverse par-ticipants as Slavophone Macedonians, Greek Macedonian Tur-kophone refugees from Asia Minor, Greek Macedonian refu-gees from Bulgaria and the Caucasus, and various groups of transient nomads—all speaking different dialects and lan-guages. We still know litt le about the multifaceted aspects of this conflict in which identities were so fluid. For example, aSlavophone peasant of Macedonia could be a self-professedBulgarian komitadji collaborating with the German occupationauthorities, a member of the Slavophone guerrillas of ELAS, a

member of Tito’s Macedonian partisans, or a right-wing Greeknationalist. The first findings to come out of this literatureundermine the perception of the civil war as a conflict betweentwo well-defined and entrenched ideological camps. In Greece,as elsewhere, a sensible understanding of civil war only seemsto emerge when its passions have subsided. x

—Stathis N. KalyvasSources: Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: the Experience of

Occupation, 1941-44, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.Giorgios Margarit is, Apo tin itta stin exegersi: Ellada, anixi 1941-

ft hinoporo 1942 [From defeat to insurrection: Greece, spring 1941-fall1942], Athens, Politis, 1993.



Hist or y Revised

Revising Roger Garaudy

In a narrow side street off the Rue Saint-Honoré in the firstarrondissement of Paris, lost amid the laundries and smallboutiques is an unremarkable green storefront with

drapes fastened shut. There is no sign or bell to be rung,

though the door is left unlocked. Were the curious flâneur tostir up h is courage and wander in, however, he would discovera small book shop crowded with publications and patrons. Itfeels like a pornographic bookstore, and in a sense it is one.For what is on offer is the political pornography of theEuropean radical right. There are books on European paganmythology, which one wing of theFrench radical right wants to revive;there are learned compendia of ancient pagan symbols, including theswastika; there are large tomesdefending the government of Vichy;there are books complaining about

immigration and the Maastrichttreaty; and there are souvenir itemsfor the younger set, including com-pact discs by right-wing skinheadbands, T-shirts emblazoned withWotan’s presumed image, and post-cards bearing t he port rait of Céline.And among all this paraphernaliathere is a long shelf of the works of Roger Garaudy.

This is a surprise. It was not toolong ago that Roger Garaudy was, if not a household name, certainly awell-known th inker on the Europeanleft whose books were t ranslated into dozens of languages.His book on Hegel, Dieu est mort [God Is Dead] (1962) is stillwidely cited, and his later books on Marx (1965) and Lénine(1968) were required reading for young radicals at the time.Having joined the Party’s political bureau in 1956, Garaudywas best known, however, as the chief ideologue of the FrenchCommunist Party when Maurice Thorez led it. He was aCommunist member of the national assembly from 1944 until1962, and even served two years as its vice president. His mainwork was intellectual, though, including a year spent as chief Moscow correspondent for L’Humanité , the French commu-

nist daily. He was eventually purged from the party in the1970s for opposing the invasion of Czechoslovakia and theleadership of Georges Marchais, yet he remained ideologicallyclose to it and even pub lished a defense of the Soviet experi-ence in 1994.

But it is not this Roger Garaudy who interests t he radicalright today; it is Garaudy the writer on religion. He was bornin Marseilles in 1913 into an atheistic working-class familybut at the age of fourteen converted to Protestantism, and atsome later stage to Catholicism. As a young man he befriendedRomain Rolland, Picasso, Matisse, Paul Éluard, and Le Corbu-sier, but also kept company with priests and theologians.

During the Second World War he spent thirty -three monthin a North African prison camp, and it was there that he firshad contact with Islam, which became a passion. In 1966 hpublished Grandeur et décadences de l’Islam and in 1981 Pro

messes de l’Islam. And in 1982 this ex-atheist, ex-Protestanex-Catholic, and ex-Communist became a Muslim, sometimeusing the name Rajaa Garaudy.

It quickly became apparent, however, that Garaudy’s relgious attraction to Islam was intimately connected with hipolitical antipathy toward Zionism and Israel. In the earl

eighties he made a violent publiintervention attacking the Israeinvasion of Lebanon, and by the timof the Gulf War in 1991, he had become a vocal and relentless critic oanything connected with Israel. Athat time he began circulating in th

far-right intellectual circles oGRECE [the Groupement de Recherchet d’Études pour la Civilisation Europeénne] and the Club de l’Horlogeand apparently took up Holocausnegationism through the works oRobert Faurisson, Paul Rassinier, anDavid Irving.

In 1995 Garaudy then published book called Les Mythes fondateurs dla politique israélienne [The foundinmyths of Israeli politics] that madreference to all this “scholarship,” noonly attacking Israeli foreign polic

but what he called the “myth” of the Holocaust. Garaudclaimed that evidence for the Shoah was inconclusive, thaestimates of the number of those murdered varied widely, thait was at most a “massacre,” bu t that, in the end, t he matteshould be left to historians to decide. He then went on tequate Zionism with colonialism, nationalism, and Nazism ithis book he called an “anthology of Zionist crimes.”

The reaction was swift and furious. Garaudy was attackefrom every side, including his former comrades at L’Humanité, and soon he was prosecuted under the 1990 Gayssot Lawwhich makes it illegal in France to deny crimes agains

humanity, to defame people on racial grounds, or to provokracial hatred and violence. The case quickly became a causcélèbre not least because Garaudy retained as his lawyer thnotorious Jacques Vergès, who had defended Klaus Barbie. Ialso received wide attention in the popular media wheGaraudy was defended by, of all people, the Abbé Pierre. ThAbbé was a very special figure in France and was sometimecalled the French Mother Teresa for h is ministry with factorworkers, the poor, and, most recently, the homeless of PariBut Abbé Pierre was also an old friend of Garaudy’s who feobliged to send h im a letter vouching for his character anmaking subt le allusions to the background of his accuser



Hist or y Revised

traditional monarchical society together.” In their place therevolutionary leadership tried to substitute new forms of social cohesion, based on benevolent dedication to the com-mon good, undertaken by citizen-freemen free of any politi-cal or economic reliance on other men. It was not, Wood wasquick to add, a democratic or commercial ideal, but a gentle-manly, gentry ideal, suspicious of money-making for its own

sake, eager to promote men of cultivation as well as talent topolitical power. But by eradicating an entire social order (aswell as the political connection to England), the AmericanRevolution was, he writes, “as radical and social as any revo-lution in history.”

Yet ironically, Wood contends, the Revolut ion’s success alsopaved the way for the much more aggressively democratic andcommercially-oriented America that evolved in the early nine-teenth century. Emboldened by national independence andspurred by the promise of individual prosperity, vulgar, ordi-nary Americans refused to obey the high-minded strictureslaid down by the virtuous republican gentry. They agitatedfor widened access to capital; they formed (and joined) new

mass political parties; they celebrated the pursuit of individ-ual interest above and beyond the exercise of selfless virtue.And thanks to their overwhelming energy, they changedAmerica yet again, dashing the classical ideals of the revolu-tionary era and building what Wood calls “a new societyunlike any that had ever existed anywhere in the world,” themost egalitarian, democratic, commercially-minded—and, notcoincidentally, evangelical Christian—nation on earth.

Although widely praised as a landmark study graced withwhat the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jack Rakove calls“Tocquevillean power,” Wood’s account has not met with uni-versal assent. Much of his analysis, particularly on the shiftfrom republicanism to democracy, is based on developmentslimited to the northern states. While he notes how theRevolution’s ideology helped energize anti-slavery opinion,he says little about how and why a renaissance of slavery, andof pro-slavery ideology, also came in the aftermath of American independence. His account of republicanism’s erad-ication slights how republican ideas (sometimes in combina-tion with democratic ones) served as an abiding resource, invery different ways, for reactionary slaveholders and urbanradicals well into the nineteenth century. And by connectingdemocratization wholly to the efforts and social aspirations of aggressive entrepreneurs, he ignores how, especially after1815, democratic movements often found their chief followers

among embittered and indebted semi-subsistence farmers andworkingmen who viewed such hustlers with alarm.Still, Wood’s analysis has done a great deal to vindicate the

far-reaching radical implications of the American Revolu-tion—implications which political writers on both sides of theAtlantic recognized at the time. In doing so, he has helped his-torians rid t hemselves of the b linders imposed by what hadbecome traditional assumptions about modern revolutions.And, though he may not have intended it, he has written aninterpretation of his subject that is in harmony with a moregeneral post-Cold-War and post-socialist mood. x

— Sean Wilentz

Miscellany

Noblesse in Distress

If you’ve meant to help French aristocracy but won-dered how, the Association d’entraide de la noblesse française may have the answer. The ANF, claiming that

two-thirds of the 120,000 members of France’s noblesse

(0.2% of the population) live below the poverty level, pro-vides tuition and even clothing for t itled children “as needor rank demands.”

Which leaves unaccounted for not only elderly nobles, butthose driven increasingly to crime: the young duke jailed forcredit-card fraud, or the hitherto civic-minded count, asmall-town mayor who wrote himself a municipal check tomaintain a castle and grounds that were ru ining him.

Still, ANF aid means careful screening will protect yourgifts from going to “pseudo-nobles,” the two-thirds of Frenchmen with “de” names—some 15,000 families—who, like Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, by often excessive cor-rectness and traditionalism, make themselves “laughing-

stocks of ‘high society.’”Elsewhere in the European Community, one impover-

ished aristocratic both asserts and challenges the notionof noblesse. “HRH Prince” Michael James AlexanderStewart, a Belgian-raised and -accented, forty-one-year-old socialist, dclares himself true heir to James II (JamesVII of Scots, wrongfully deposed from the British thronein 1688), and thus, rightful king of Scotland. Havingrevived their parliament after three centuries, should theScots also crown this veritable anti-Windsor, who admiresthe ‘cycling monarchs’ of Scandinavia and the Netherlandsand views monarchy chiefly as the people’s mainstay“against the encroachments of the state?”

To crown Michael, the Scots need to overlook the manyhistorians who trace today’s Stuart line to Bavaria, andmost journalists, who find Michael’s genealogical and per-sonal claims preposterous. Bonnie Prince Charles’s “secretsecond marriage,” on which he rests his claim in his best-seller The Forgotten Monarchy of Scotland, is unsubstanti-ated. The book’s endorsed by dignitaries with titles“awarded by Pr ince Michael himself.” The th irty-three-nation European Council of Princes whose presidentMichael claims to be, eludes discovery. Alleged seizure of Michael’s royal passport by a “pro-Windsor conspiracy”reduces him to Michael Lafosse, who sold insurance in

Belgium and shortbread in Edinburgh.Such humility suits the infinitely higher lineage anotherbestseller, ‘Sir’ Laurence Gardner’s The Bloodline of the HolyGrail and Genesis of the Grail Kings, traces to Michael from—Jesus Christ, whose own secret marriage the book reveals....In the age of “empathetic post-Diana royalty,” asks TheGuardian, can the Scots be kept from proclaiming anothercompassionate lord by “the cold details of pedigree?”

—David JacobsonSources: Die Weltwoche (Zurich), January 7, 1999.The Guardian (London), March 24, 1999.



Hist ory an d Hist or ia ns

David Johnson

For the past fifty years, British h istorians have dominatedthe writing of Europe’s history. Or so argues Daniel

Johnson, an editor at the London Daily Telegraph, in a recentarticle in the monthly Prospect . The reason for this domina-

tion, in Johnson’sview, is that Britishhistorians managedto remain free fromthe continental fadsof Annales-school so-

cial history and alsop o s t m o d e r n i s m ,while still reachingout to a large, non-academic reading

public. History books sell well in Britain, are regularly serial-ized in newspapers and debated on television, and the obliga-tion of having to face “the jury of the educated pub lic” hasmeant that “the most reliable and readable books on Europeanhistory are often British.” Where would European history betoday, he asks, without the works of J. H. Elliott and HughThomas on Spain, Denis Mack Smith on Italy, Richard Cobbon France, Ian Kershaw on Germany, Robert Conquest on theSoviet Union, the Marxists Eric Hobsbawm and ChristopherHill, and many others?

Whether this superiority can be maintained is, however, anopen question. In his article Johnson traces the lineage of con-temporary British historical study from the prewar to thepostwar generation and then to recent decades. He notes therise in the 1980s of what have been called the “media dons”in Britain, most of them historians equally at home in thelibrary, the book pages, and on television. Mentioning Nor-man Stone, Roy Porter, and Simon Schama by name, Johnsonremarks that the “symbiotic nexus of press and professors hasrevealed a sinister aspect too,” and suggests that “if it is bad

for scholars to do nothing for the general public, it is also pos-sible to do too much.”While he heaps contempt on “the young stars of the

1990s…cold-bloodedly advancing their parallel careers whilemoving seamlessly from scholarship to ephemera and back,”Johnson offers grudging praise of the youngest of the bunch,the omnipresent Niall Ferguson. Ferguson, an Oxford-basedScot still in his thir ties, has already made his name as a seri-ous historian with learned works on German business in theearly twentieth-century (Paper and Iron, 1995), the Rothschildfamily (The House of Rothschild, 1998), and, most recently, astudy of 1914-18 called The Pity of W ar. But he has also en-

tered the media world of magazines and television. How thishas affected his history-writing can be seen in his collectionof essays, Virtual History, which explores a number of counter-factuals (what if Britain had stayed out of World WarI?) in a popular style that Johnson compares to that of “thrillers.” He is also at work on a study of the sexual exploita-tion of victims in the Nazi death camps, a book that “risks theaccusation of reducing history to pornography,” according toJohnson, and for which Ferguson has already received a siz-able advance.

Ferguson denies the charge of sensationalism but adds,

somewhat defensively, “It’s good news that history is boxoffice.” Here Johnson sees the expression less of blind ambi-tion than what he calls the “one common denominator amongvirtual historians of the 1990s”: “skepticism about the veryidea of a definitive work of history.” “Their subjectivism,” hewrites, “is sotto voce, but it is audible in their ostentatiousself-awareness, and in the final elision of any distinctionbetween history and journalism.” Ferguson obviously be-lieves in the craft and standards of academic history, but thetest will be whether his less talented contemporaries seek tobe anything more than “ flâneurs of the fin de siècle.”

Simon Schama

Adefense of popular history comes from Simon Schama of Columbia University. In a recent lecture Schama notes

what he calls the “schizophrenia” of American attitudestoward the study of history. The cable-only History Channelis hugely successfulwith roughly 50 mil-lion subscribers. InAmerican schools,however, history hasbeen almost entirely

replaced by “social studies,” which is taught with enormous(and expensive) textbooks aimed mainly at what Schama calls“identity-group therapy.” They are filled with bureacraticprose about the American present, glossy pictures of histori-cal figures bearing no clear relation to the text, and preciouslittle historical narrative. What has happened? he wonders.

Schama notes correctly that Americans for much of this cen-tury have been in the grip of a pedagogical idea promoted byJohn Dewey, who held that “knowledge of the past and itsheritage is of great importance when it enters the present, butnot otherwise.” The notion of history as a repository of chas-tening, complicated knowledge about the past has itself come

History Goes Pop: Two Views

For several decades the academic historical profession has been in a sort of identity crisis, wondering what its aims are and how toreach them. Yet at the same t ime, popular history – reflected in television documentaries, in movies, in glossy special-interest magazines, and history books – has never seemed more vigorous. Are these facts related? If so, what do they tell us about the prospects for history in the decade to come? We offer two views on the subject, from journalist Daniel Johnson, a critic of over-popularization, and

Simon Schama, one of the most distinguished practitioners of both genres of historical writing.

Perfect history is “acompound of poetryand philosophy.”

British historiansmanaged to remain

free from the conti-nental fads…




to seem lost in the past. First-year high school students in thetown where Schama lives are required to take a “GlobalStudies” course, though up unt il that point they have neverbeen taught any history, whether of the United States or othercountries. What can such courses teach, he wonders, beyondplatitudes about intercultural understanding?

The popularity of history on television obviously reflects a

deep desire for and interest in historical narrative that theschools no longer satisfy. But it also reflects problems with aca-demic history. As Schama explains, professional historians havewillingly abandoned a crucial feature of successful narrative totelevision, and that is the power of images. Images are not onlycreated through photographs and film. The greatest images inhistorical writing, he suggests, have always been createdthrough prose. To prove his point, he quotes a short passagefrom Tacitus’s Annals, which he remembers being struck by asa young boy. “In the plain…were whitening bones, scatteredor in little heaps, as the men had fallen fleeing or standing fast.Hard by lay splintered spears and limbs of horses.” Here Taci-tus proves himself the equal of Eisenstein or Kurosawa.

There are, of course, ancient and medieval examples of his-torical chronicles that took purely visual form, such as Trajan’sColumn or the Bayeux Tapestry. But the great historical visu-alizers have always been writers, especially in t he nineteenthcentury, when novelists like Walter Scott and Victor Hugoshowed professionals how to weave the threads of historicalevidence into a compelling story with haunting images. Whatis needed, Schama suggests, is fresh confirmation of Mac-aulay’s dictum, that perfect history is “a compound of poetryand philosophy.” He suggests that graduate students in his-tory be encouraged to consider writing popular history, itspossibilities and pitfalls. He has himself been working steadilyover the past few years on a sixteen-part television series onBritish history for the BBC. As Macaulay also understood, his-tory must be “received by the imagination as well as reason,”and there is no reason why the new technologies that excitethe imagination should not also serve the muse Clio. x

—MLSources: Daniel Johnson, “The Pop Historians,” Prospect (London),

November 1998.Simon Schama, “Visualizing History,” Culturefront (New York

Council for the Humanities) , Winter 1998-99.

Hungarian Women’s History

Acamera obscura is a device for projecting the imagof distant objects with the help of a darkened rooma screen, and a prism. After being invented by astro

nomers for scientific purposes it was used from the eighteentcentury on to entertain the general public by showing th

view of towns, with the prism rotating above the spectatorsheads. This simple but ingenious apparatus was based on elementary principles of optics and delighted not only lay people but p rofessionals as well, since the grinding of the lenrequired a high degree of theoretical and manual skill.

Andrea Peto’s new book on the changing role of Hungariawomen and their organizations in the crucial postwar years oreconstruct ion and Communist takeover works like just suca camera obscura. The work is based on sound archival material critically used, and consciously addresses a wide audiencwithout a compromise of scholarly quality. It invites threader and critic to see the landscape of Hungarian h istorfrom a different standpoint.

In Nohistóriák Peto investigates the historical roles of thinstitutionalized women’s movements, from traditional femnist and religious organizations to the women’s section in thSocial Democratic Party and the communists’ DemocratiUnion of Hungarian Women. Each chapter employs a different historical method, from analyzing police reports and poliical speeches to studying the narrative constructions of personal memoirs about beloved male partners. Each describes different facet of the wor ld of women’s movement, from threvival of Jewish women’s organizations to the recruitment owomen into the police force. But essentially the book is a sociahistory that draws on archival sources recently made availablin Hungary, such as reports and minutes of the InterioMinistry of the Communist Party.

The chilling story of how the Communist Party expandeits influence over every aspect of Hungarian life after 194has been the subject of several scholarly investigation, especially after 1989. The perspective of women, however, habeen missing from the story so far. The surpr ising fact thaninety-three women’s organizations existed between 1945 an1951, and that all fell victim to the Communist Party’s missioof dominating the civic body, is a prime example of the politicization of society. The real importance of Nohistóriák lieelsewhere, however. Peto, fluent in the methodology anvocabulary of women’s history and equipped with a thorough

up-to-date knowledge of its literature, escapes one typicamistake of East European scholars educated in the West whuse the overly sophisticated, linguistically d istorted jargothat alienates the audience in their home count ry. It is to bhoped that Nohistóriák will help to establish a new approacto history writing in Hungary, and that an English versiowill be forthcoming so that it can also make a useful contribution to the international field of women’s history. x

—Borbála JuhászSources: Andrea Peto, Nohistóriák—A politizáló magyar no

történetébol (1945-1951) [Women’s Histories—From the history o Hungarian women in politics (1945-1951)], Budapest: Seneca, 1998.




Sea (1996), t racing the multiple social and civil h istories thathave intersected by its shores; Janet Malcolm, in The Silent Woman (1994), comparing and confronting the biographersof Sylvia Plath .

Each of these books has a formal and stylistic distinctionrarely found in the work of professional historians. Each of them reflects the widespread belief that historical research israrely objective, that historians always have an agenda, andthat sources, when closely inspected, always present obsta-

cles and reveal gaps. Each of them dramatizes the author’sown research difficulties, fromthe problems involved in inter-viewing a contemporary to thoseposed by the interpretation of ancient or foreign texts andobjects. And each of them shows

how different scholarly commu-nities—depending on the stand-points they begin from—mayview the same place or person indiametrically opposed ways. TheBlack Sea may be center orperiphery, depending on whe-ther one looks at it from Rome orfrom Odessa; Sylvia Plath maybe victim or aggressor, creator orexploiter. Each author has clear-ly read and pondered recentworks by professionals that havefurthered, or been used to fur-ther, the belief that history is allconstruction. But none of thempostures or despairs; instead,they intercalate the story they

wish to tell and the story of their own and others’ research.All of these writers criticize some versions of the past for

being less consistent with the documents. All of them showthat historical error and distortion can have disastroushuman consequences at both the individual and the collec-tive level. All of them have a lively sense of paradox. And ,in a way more reminiscent of the great historians of the early

nineteenth century than of the fashionable Deep Thinkers of the late twentieth, they see how present and past are con-nected and how a whole tolerant civilization may depend onthat correction.

Both more readable and more responsible than much of whatthe professionals have recently written, these three books andothers like them suggest one way that history might move inthe next twenty years—if the professionals can muster theindependent judgment, the controlled scepticism, and thecomplex expository skills that make these amateur historiesso rewarding. x

— Anthony Grafton

In Lawrence Durrell’s stories about British diplomats inSerbia—stories now so laden with ironies that theirhumor is hardly to be borne—more than one character

proves expert at what the narrator’s friend Antrobus calls

“Viewing with Alarm.” This exercise, once confined to pro-fessional diplomats, has become endemic in recent years incritical discussions of the discipline of history. Essay afteressay laments such features of recent historical work as thedisappearance of the footnote, the evident loss of interest inestablishing the truth about thepast, and the increasingly fre-quent claim that historians enjoya license to invent what theyneed to fill in what the sourceshave omitted.

Not only staunch conserva-tives, but innovative practition-

ers and open-minded observersof the historical scene like RogerChartier and Richard Evans seecontemporary historians as ca-reening along “the edge of thecliff,” to quote the title of arecent book by Chart ier. Threatsto objectivity abound, and evenresponsible historians seem tohave abandoned the belief thatall interpretations of the past areconstrained by evidence—ratherthan constrained simply by thestandards of the h istorical com-munity that exists at a giventime. Can postmodernism andhistory co-exist in a single intel-lectual space? Many spokesmenfor the former, and even some defenders of the latter, seem tothink they cannot—and there is genuine reason for concernwhen exper ienced historians, who have done distinguishedresearch in the past, maintain that no interpretation of histor-ical evidence is preferable on technical grounds to any other.

Chart ier and Evans draw attention to real absurdities andexaggerations. But both of them, in their concentration on the

history written by and for professionals, have failed to notewhat may be the emergence, outside the universities, of a his-tory which both treats historical evidence with genuinerespect and shows that historical narratives inevitably reveal,in their warp and woof, the standpoint of those who createthem. In the last twenty years, a group of journalists with con-siderable academic training have experimented more boldlyand productively with historical narrative than anyone work-ing within the Anglo-American academy. Consider only threeexamples: Amitav Ghosh, in his In an Ancient Land (1994),writing of how Arabs, Jews, and Europeans have interactedin the middle ages and in modernity; Neal Ascherson, in Black

A New Kind of History




genomics company, the Icelandic government, and enthusias-tic citizens; on the other, the Icelandic Medical Association,the Data Protect ion Commission, the former Director of PublicHealth, the Genetics Committee, three national ethics boards,various geneticists, physicians, members of parliament, and agrowing number of alarmed citizens.The controversy began in March1998, and continues as the Icelandichealth system is restructured for its

database future. The controversymainly centered on the abrogation of informed consent (data from the liv-ing will be included unless individu-als opt out, and data from the deadcannot be excluded), on freedom of research (the retainer of the exclusivedatabase licence stands to gain aunique advantage in medical andgenetics research), and possibleinfractions of the privacy of thecountry’s 270,000 inhabitants.

Ina Kjøgx Pedersen recently ob-served in the Danish newspaperWeekendavisen that Iceland may wellbecome the setting for the worldwidedebate over genetics. To understandPedersen’s prognosis it is important to understand the finerdetails of the story, especially how the aggressive and charis-matic Dr. Stefánsson managed to succeed. The advantages of such a project, he argued, were many. He trumpeted thepromise of controlling ru naway health costs and stemmingthe brain drain from Iceland by offering high-skill jobs. Healso appealed to the p ride of the local population by claim-ing that its health records were a natural resource akin to fish-

ing stock and hydroelectric and geothermal power. Finally,he sold gullible foreign investors and reporters on the mythof Icelandic genetic and racial homogeneity. The propagandahas been facilitated by uncritical reporting in foreign mediathat was lapped up by the Icelandic media and by the Feb-ruary 1988 signing of a five-year contract, potentially worth$200 million, between the Icelandic genomics company andHoffmann-La Roche, one of the world’s major pharmaceuti-cal companies.

Foreigners have had opportunities to sample the ut ter banal-ity of Dr. Stefánsson’s rhetoric. Weekendavisen quotes him assaying: “There is no evil knowledge, only evil administration

Icelandic Genes

of knowledge, and that I confidently leave to our politicianto handle.” This sanguine assessment stands in stark contrasto the inability and unwillingness of the government and ministerial bureaucracy to deal competently with the databasproject. The database law might actually be described as a

attempt to serve the interest of one company by dismantling regulatory structures that had evolved since the 1960when the Genetics Committee was estab

lished and funded by the U.S. AtomiEnergy Commission.

As an increasing number of Icelanderask to be kept out of the centralized database, the genetics company has resorteto advertisements in the count ry’s largesnewspaper, the Morgunbladid. The company appeals to citizens’ responsibilitto contribute to global improvements ohealth and help fight diseases by agreeing not to desert the database. ThIcelandic anthropologist Gísli Pálssoeven argues in Weekendavisen thaWestern post-Renaissance morality breassessed in light of biotechnologbreakthroughs. In t he New York Timehe claims that the database controvers

was resolved as a result of “a democratic process,” implyinthat it was a reasoned process, that the database project enjoybroad community support, and that the controversy is oveSimilar hubris led the current Director of Public Health tspeak in t he New Yorker of stepping into a new world, anseeing little reason to be bound by rules “that existed in a diferent era for a d ifferent world.” The database controvershighlights the need to protect hard-won human rights lik

informed consent and protect vulnerable cultures againsdatabank takeovers. What kind of human rights will be possble in the brave new genomic world? x

—Skúli Sigurdsson

Sources: Stur la Fridr iksson, “Erfda-audlind Íslendinga” [Genetinational resource of the Icelanders], Morgunbladid, December 121998.

Ina Kjøgx Pedersen, “Genetisk nationalisme,” WeekendavisenFebruary 26 - March 4, 1999.

Uta Wagenmann, “Island: Ein Volk wird abgespeichert [IcelandA People is being stored], Gen-ethischer Informationsdienst/GIDFebruary 1999.

I

celand att racted worldwide attention in 1998 due to a controversial parliamentary bill enablinthe creation of a centralized database containing health records of the whole population. Advocateof the database proposal claimed it would yield valuable information concerning public health

and preventive medicine. The media attention resulted from a clash between two forces. On the onside were the main promotors of the bill, Dr. Kári Stefánsson, Chief Executive Officer of a privat




Among the countless proposals for refounding theWestern left after the collapse of communism, one of the more astonishing has just been put forward by

Australian philosopher Peter Singer. Singer, who is both

famous and infamous for his wr itings on animal rights andeuthanasia (see box), maintains that the left can only have afuture if it learns to appropr iate the evolutionary discoveriesof Charles Darwin.

“It is time for the left to take seriously the fact that we haveevolved from other animals,” Singer announces. This hard lyseems a promising start for a left-wing political theory, andSinger admits that ever since the nineteenth century Darwin’sideas have mainly appealed to the right. But since Darwiniantheory is scientific theory, and science in Singer’s view is notpolitically determined, there is no reason why th ere cannotbe a Darwinian left as well. The Western left has failed to seethis in the past because of its belief in the infinite malleabil-

ity—and therefore perfectibility—of man. Darwin demon-strated the limits of this malleability by showing that thestruggle for existence is unending for all living creatures, andthat certain forms of behavior t herefore persist. Darwinismdoes not imply biological determinism, Singer insists; it sim-ply teaches us to distinguish between those features of humanlife that show great variability across cultures and those thatdo not. Economic structure, religious practices, and forms of government show great cultural variation; sexuality, concernfor kin, hierarchy, and gender roles show far less.

The lesson such a d istinction can teach the left, in Singer’sview, is that certain attempts to reform society may come at ahigh cost or will have unintended consequences. That thehierarchies of European hereditary aristocracy were replacedby new hierarchies based on wealth or military and policepower should not have surprised us. If the left wishes to abol-ish one hierarchy, it is obliged to consider which others mightreplace it. A left that hopes to banish human conflict or blamesall inequalities on oppression or ideology simply does notunderstand our natures.

Another lesson the left might draw from evolutionary the-ory is that while developed animals are self-interested, theyalso have an incent ive to cooperate with each other in soci-ety. Competition and “reciprocal altruism,” as Singer termsit, are both natural to us, and the latter can be cultivated

through correct social planning. Here he relies on the thriv-ing work in “game theory” inspired by the writings of polit-ical scientist Robert Axelrod, who has demonstrated throughcomputer simulations the rationality of cooperation. ADarwinian left would have to accept the fact that people willalways act competitively, but that under certain circum-stances they can be encouraged to engage in mutually bene-ficial forms of cooperation; it would then try to bring aboutthose circumstances.

Singer admits that he offers “a sharply deflated vision of theleft, its u topian ideas replaced by a coolly realistic view of what can be achieved.” But beneath his realism lurks a new

utopianism, based on the achievements of genetic engineer-ing. Appealing to Hegel, Singer seems to believe that we areapproaching a state of absolute knowledge about the humancondition, knowledge that will one day permit us to manipu-

late more fully our natures. “For the first time since lifeemerged from the primeval soup, there are beings who under-stand how they have come to be what they are.” This, hebelieves, may portend a new kind of freedom, “the freedomto shape our genes so that instead of living in societies con-strained by our evolutionary origins, we can build the kindof society we judge best.” How Darwinism can help us to judge what “best” means, Singer does not say. x

—MLSource: Peter Singer, “Darwin for the Left,” Prospect (London),

June 1998.

Left Darwinism?

Peter Singer

Peter Singer, who was born in Australia in 1946,recently came to the at tention of readers of the New York Times (April 10, 1999) due to the

controversy surround ing his appointment to a chairin b ioethics at Princeton University. Professor Singeris probably best known for his promotion of animalrights and as the author of the best-selling Animal Liberation (Avon, 1990). But he has also been widelyattacked for his promotion of euthanasia, includingthe decision to kill—and not merely “let die”—infants with severe disabilities such as spina bifidaand hemophilia. In a book written with Helga Kuhse,called Should the Baby Live? (Melbourne, 1985), andin his own Practical Ethics, second edition, (Cam-br idge University Press, 1993), and Rethinking Lifeand Death (St. Martin’s Press, 1996), Singer has putforward the moral case for making such decisionswith a view to “quality” rather than “sanctity” of life.

Over the years these views have earned him verbaland physical threats from two sorts of groups: conser-vative organizations opposed to abortion and euthana-sia, and radical left-wing groups who have portrayedSinger as a new Dr. Mengele. The debate has been par-

ticularly intense in Germany, where “anti-fascist”groups have established Web-sites about his work androutinely try to stop him from speaking in public. Agroup called Princeton Stud ents Against Infanticidehas now formed, established its own Web-site, andrecently staged a demonstration against the Singerappointment.

For an overview of the Singer debate, see Dale Jamieson,ed., Singer and his Critics, London:Blackwell, 1999.




Roughly thirty thousand years ago the last of theNeanderthals (homo sapiens neanderthalensis) disap-peared after flourishing for 200,000 years. From that

point on, the territory belonged to modern man’s direct ances-

tor, t he Cro-Magnon (homo sapiens sapiens). This transitiondid not take place overnight, obviously, so it is probable thatfor some period the Neanderthal and the Cro-Magnon cohab-ited. Archeologists and anthropologists have long tried toanswer the question of how long this cohabitation might havelasted and how it affected the two creatures.

This issue seems straightforwardly scientific, but in recentyears it has set off a bit ter, ideological dispute among a vari-ety of scientists. The status of the Neanderthals has beenrevised several times before in this century. Until recentlythey were considered retarded creatures with few accomplish-ments. Then, in the 1960s, it became fashionable among somearchaeologists and anthropologists to portray them as biologi-

cally and behaviorally quite close to modern humans. Thisrevisionist p osition came under attack on the basis of DNAresearch, which showed that the Cro-Magnon and Nean-derthal populations separated genetically quite early and thatthe modern creature probably arose out of Africa.

The question of cultural interaction between the populationsremains open, however, and highly charged. As Cambridge,U.K., archaeologist Paul Mellars reported in the October 8, 1998issue of Nature, evidence discovered in southern Spain suggeststhat the Neanderthals survived for five thousand to ten thou-sand years after the arrival of modern populations. What hap-pened during this period? The scientific consensus, Mellarswrites, is that this long cohabitation is probably owing to eco-logical peculiarities of the region, but there is no evidence thatthe Neanderthals ever adopted Cro-Magnon technologies orbehaviors there. Yet north of the Pyrenees one does see suchsimilarities: there Neanderthals produced bone tools and deco-rative objects. The question is whether these developmentsoccurred independently of contact with the Cro-Magnon pop-ulations or through simple copying.

The notion of independent behavioral development is sta-tistically unlikely, in Mellars’s view, yet it has become popu-lar with those who wish to raise the status of the Neanderthaland (presumably) lower that of the Cro-Magnon. A recentissue of the journal Current Anthropology was devoted to this

heated controversy. There, a group of European researchersargued that evidence from France points to independentNeanderthal development, and they reject any suggestion of “Neanderthal inferiority.” In their conclusion they claim that“archaeologists should turn their attention to the problemsposed by the cultural achievements of the late Neanderthals,”which would include “a reevaluation of Neanderthal cogni-tive abilities and a crit ique of biological determinism.” “Ourmain purpose,” they write, “has been to illustrate how anti-Neanderthal prejudice has been blocking a correct appraisalof the empirical data.” Yet as Mellars remarks about this lineof argument, “the eagerness of some scientists t o claim close

kinship with the Neanderthals could come close to denyinthat human evolution actually took place.” x

—MLSources: “Special Issue: The Neanderthal Problem and th

Evolution of Human Behavior,” Current Anthropology, June 1998.See the Web-site of the newly opened Neantherdal Museum

Dusseldorf, Germany: www.neanderthal.de

Justice for Neanderthals!

Out of Africa?

Genetic evidence made available by new techno-logies has complicated the controversy over humanorigins. For example, as Elizabeth Pennisi reports

in Science (March 19, 1999), a new analysis has cast doubton the popular notion that all modern humans descendedfrom a small population of ancient Africans. This “Out of Africa” thesis was itself the result of genetic studies which

pointed to a single group of sub-Saharan people that madethe final evolutionary leap and then migrated across theworld, replacing Neanderthal populations as it spread.

But now an American anthropologist and a populationgeneticist have thrown doubt on this theory by present-ing new evidence that there may have been two humanpopulations dating back at least 200,000 years, and thatboth have left their genetic legacy to modern peoples. Onegroup gave rise to modern Africans, the other to all non-Africans, t hey believe. This “multiregional” hypothesissuggests that human traits evolved in various populationsand then were spread around the world by small groupsof migrants who interbred with other populations.

The scientists supported this hypothesis by gatheringDNA from a diverse group of present-day humans, includ-ing French, Chinese, Vietnamese, Mongolians, Senegalese,Pygmies, Khosians (from Angola), and South AfricanBantus. They then compared different versions, or “hap-lotypes,” of a gene on the subjects’ X chromosome calledPDHA1 and developed an “evolutionary tree” for thegene. The tree showed that modern variants of the genego back to two ancestral haplotypes, one at the root of modern African variants, the other at the root of all othervariants. This is the first time such a fixed regional differ-ence has been found in human genes.

These results confirm earlier genetic research thatpointed towards the multiregional hypothesis, but theAmerican researchers stress that evidence for one gene can-not offer definitive proof of human origins and migrations.They also note that both groups with different PDHA1genes could have lived in Africa and interbred at an earlystage, so that the fundamental traits that distinguish mod-ern humans would have emerged in two groups. They callfor the study of more genes, especially so-called nucleargenes, to see if they follow the multiregional pattern.

—ML



Essay

Today, as worldwide media and computer networks cre-ate a single global pool of information and as the econ-omy—particularly finance—becomes increasingly

global and borderless, modern civilization is being split and

pulled in two different directions. The conflict between thedemands of the state and those of the market is painfully obvi-ous. This is paralleled, however, by emerging fault lineswithin both the nation and the marketplace, as well as withinour systems of knowledge. In these and other areas, one can-not avoid the impression that the union of reason and irra-tionality, of universality and plurality, that characterizes mod-ern civilization is facing a crisis in analogous ways.

The conflict between the state and the market is the con-flict between the natural distribution and the equitable redis-tribution of wealth, betweenindividual freedom and socialstability, between internation-

alism and traditional groupidentity. In the past the statecontrolled the market on thenational level and competed init on the international level. Butthe emergence of a global econ-omy has undermined the state’sability to function on eitherlevel. The free flow of capitalthreatens not only the state’sauthority to protect and regulate economic activity, but evenits autonomy with regard to taxation. On the other hand, thisflow unquestionably works to invigorate the global economyand force national governments to correct flawed economicpolicies. The decline of the state as market custodian and com-petitor seems to be an inexorable historical trend.

The market cannot implement either contemporaneousredistribution of wealth (through welfare) or redistribut ion tothe next generation (through conservation of resources andenvironmental protection). Nor does it have the power to pre-vent crime or otherwise maintain a safe and stable marketenvironment. All these things require the authority to imposetaxes and regulations. For the foreseeable futu re, the state,and federat ions of states, will remain the only organs with thisauthority. The reason is that for people to submit peacefully

to taxes and regulations, they must have confidence in theorgan imposing them, and the state, as an institution backedby tradition, is in the best position to foster such trust.Although the authority to impose taxes and regulations isexercised by means of rational systems, it is, paradoxically,sustained by irrational sentiment, namely, a native tendencyto identify with a community.

Ever since its inception, the modern nation-state has pos-sessed a dual nature. On the one hand, it is a rational system;on the other, a cultu ral community. It is at once an efficientadministrative organ based on universal law and a body thatfosters fellow feeling and a sense of belonging among its peo-

ple. However, as the market—a more universal and efficientforce—expands its power, people grow increasingly dissatis-fied with the state on both counts. Hence the widespreadopinion that the efficiency of government bureaucracy today

is inferior to private enterprise and to civic groups of varioustypes in providing commonality and a sense of belonging.Individuals who cherish freedom of economic activity seek aworld beyond the borders of the state, while people who pre-fer the stability and fellow feeling of the community look tointermediate institu tions of like-minded individuals, whetherthe objective is religion, hobbies and interests, service to soci-ety, or simply relating to other people.

Interestingly, though, the same kind of split is inherentwithin the market itself. Even as finance and the giant manu-

facturing industries becomeglobal and create a market thatoperates transparently and in

accordance with universal eco-nomic principles, consumers areseeking increasingly varied andindividualized services. Whenit comes to medical treatment,nursing, education, beauty andfashion, financial and legal con-sulting, and travel, as well asdining and other forms of entertainment and leisure, peo-

ple demand customized, individualized service. This need fos-ters close, ongoing, personal, extracontractual relationshipsbetween the provider and the customer, giving rise to count-less tiny opaque markets. These small markets represent sta-ble human relationships and thus serve the function of inter-mediate institutions, offering individuals a sense of groupidentity. This split threatens to undermine modern industry’sbasic marketing strategy of focusing its efforts on a singlebrand, which is periodically updated. As long as manufactur-ers rely on mass production, they will be hard pressed torespond to consumers’ demand for increasingly differentiatedand individualized products, no matter how often a brand isupdated. Yet, ironically, the globalization of many manufac-turing industries is predicated on mass-production and ever-increasing standardization.

But, in all likelihood, the most serious fracture is taking placein the realm of human intellectual endeavor. Knowledge, thepursuit of which has made such dramatic strides in the modernera, is both synthetic and active in nature. Today, however,knowledge is fracturing into information, which is dynamic butnot synthetic, and intuitive wisdom, which is synthetic but sta-tic. Our information age is not simply an era in which the mediahave made technological innovations but one in which societyis awash in, and places a high premium on, fragmentary, dis- jointed, and up-to-the-minute information: news, stock marketquotes, advertising, and so forth. Information does not comewith a value system that assigns significance to it. It is neutral

The Four Fractures of Modern Civilization



Ja pa n ese Econ omy

J apan is suffering from financial system uncertaintieswhile America is enjoying prosperity in the stock mar-ket. This is a curious contrast. Japan is in fact the world’s

largest creditor and America the largest debtor. While Japan,

through exports, has a trade surplus, it continues to investmoney back into the United States, yet sees little growth in itsdomestic economy. Meanwhile, the U.S. economic boom, sup-ported by foreign investment, is allowing Americans to con-sume ever more, which fuels even greater investment byJapanese and other foreigners. In a sense, the United States hasbecome dependent on foreign investment, making it poten-tially as vulnerable to speculation as Thailand or Indonesia.

In the United States, it is widely believed that the economicproblems facing Asian countries resulted from outmodedforms of capitalism there. While many Japan specialists rec-ognize that a type of backwardness existed in t he Japaneseand Asian financial markets, unstable exchange rates (in one

year the yen rose and fell against the dollar by almost 30 per-cent!) and financial panic have now given rise to a global fundmarket which is unreasonable and violent. This has had a b igimpact on the Japanese, who have been confident and proudabout keeping costs down in industrial production lines whileimproving quality. As a result of t he Asian financial crisis,interest in the overall international financial system has grownstronger in Japan. Once a specialty subject, articles on theinternational financial problem have been appearing regularlyin magazines and journals.

Economist Mototada Kikkawa has pointed out that the U.S.dollar’s dominance of the international financial market is theorigin of the problem. No matter how large a deficit the UnitedStates runs with its trading partners, as long as the dollar is thekey currency, the U. S. can finance its economy with dollarsfrom abroad. The U. S., for example, can easily put pressure onits trading partners when a trade problem emerges if it simply“talks down” the dollar. In other words, as long as the dollar isthe key currency of the world’s economy, the United States isnot only free from international balance of payments discipline,but also enjoys the privilege of placing the risks of exchangerate fluctuations on its t rading partners. Kikkawa argues thatAmerica, despite being the largest debtor nation, leads theworld because of the structure of the financial system.

On the other hand, as a creditor nation Japan has strangely

neglected to develop the yen as an international currency. Thedollar and the pound became recognized as international cur-rencies when England and America made their appearanceson the world stage. In the 1980s, rather than attempting tointernationalize the yen, Japan worked hard to support thedollar. Whenever the dollar fell, Japanese authorities encour-aged greater Japanese investment in the U.S. economy by low-ering interest rates and putting pressure on banks and lifeinsurance companies. Rather than expose itself to one-sidedrisks in the exchange rate fluctuations, Kikkawa argues, Japanshould strengthen its relationship with Europe to checkAmerica’s conduct in the international monetary system,

while liberalizing its financial markets and promoting theinternationalization of the yen.

Meanwhile, other articles in Japan have argued that theAsian financial crisis was not due to Asia’s inherent back-

wardness but rather to the extremely sensitive and sometimesreckless nature of today’s international financial system.Takatoshi Ito, a leading economist who worked for the Inter-nat ional Monetary Fund (IMF) and as an advisor to the ThaiGovernment, has argued that the IMF and America cannot bedepended on to solve the financial crisis in the Asian coun-tries, which must address the problem together. The Ame-rican response has been to pressure Asia to undertake apainful restructuring that has actually made the situationworse. Meanwhile, the U.S. has taken a softer approach to thecrises in Russia and Brazil and poured in large amounts of money, which Ito considers a double standard. Moreover,despite the United States having in actuality controlled finan-

cial aid to Asia through the IMF, the American contributionto the fund attracted strong opposition in the Congress.Although only Japan d isbursed rescue loans to Asian coun-tries during this time, President Clinton joined with Chinaduring his recent visit there in criticizing Japan, and theUnited States also buried a Japanese proposal for an AsianMonetary Fund requested by the ASEAN count ries. Becauseof this double standard, Ito argues, Japan should take the ini-tiative in creating an Asian Financial Stabilization Fund.

The frustration with the international monetary system ledby America and dominated by the dollar shapes the back-ground to the above discussion. Masayuki Tadokoro, an inter-national political scientist (and one of the directors of the CICproject), points out a brighter side to the Asian currency cri-sis. He notes that it has led to the strengthening of coopera-tive networks for solving currency problems between Japanand other countries in Asia, and has also contributed to thedevelopment of regionalism more generally in Asia. Moreover,while strongly supporting Japan’s involvement in buildinginstitutions in international finance, Tadokoro also warns of the dangers of over-politicizing th is issue. While Japanesefrustration is high over America’s criticism of and pressure onJapan’s economic policies, expectations among most Asiancountries that Japan seize the initiative are stronger than everbefore. Caught between America’s pushing and Asia’s pulling,

Japan’s monetary diplomacy could unnecessarily find itself ina confrontational relationship with the United States. Instead,Tadokoro argues that Japan should appeal to America in itsown interests to help stabilize the global financial system. x

—Masayuki Tadokoro

Sources: Mototada Kikkawa, Mane Haisei [Defeat in a money war],Tokyo: Bungei Shunju, 1998.

Takatoshi Ito, “Ajia Kinyu Anteika Kikin no Teisho” [A proposalfor an Asian financial stability fund], Toyo Keizai [The OrientalEconomy], October10, 1998.

Masayuki Tadokoro, “Guroburo Jidai no En to Doru” [The yenand the dollar in a global age], Asteion, April 1999.

Japan and the Global Financial System



Japa n ese Econ omy

work Han keizaigaku [Anti-economics], offering three examples of how th is works in practice. He cites the behavior othe banker, the corporate executive, and the consumer. Thbanker seeks to fulfill personal and inst itut ional responsibi

ity by avoiding bankruptcy at all costs, which means cuttinback on lending. The result of this behavior in the aggregatis a credit crunch. The corporate executive seeks to act responsibly by implementing restructur ing. But repeated by otheexecutives, this produces fears that lead to a deflationary spral on a national level. And the consumer, fearing unemployment and determined to avoid personal bankruptcy, saves amuch money as possible, which on a national level causeeffective demand to decline. What we see here is the “fallacof composition”—that is, behavior that is rat ional on the mcroeconomic level producing something qualitatively different at the macro level.

Why does aggregate supply exceed aggregate demand

Yoshiyasu Ono in h is book Fukyo no keizaigaku [The economics of recession] offers an explanation. According to Ono, thdemand shortfall occurs because people hold on to monefor its own sake. Ordinarily people have money so that thecan buy things, and even if they hold on to it for speculative purposes, eventually they use their profits to purchasgoods. According to this conventional view, the level of thmoney supply is proportional to the amount of goods produced, and, over the long term, aggregate supply andemand for goods and money will reach equ ilibrium anunemployment will be eliminated. But if people hold on ttheir money indefinitely, the excess of money supply ovedemand will persist.

I believe that t he reason people hold on to money dur ing recession is fear. In Japan’s case, fear about the future coursof the economy has aggravated the downturn. And why doefear make people want to hold on to money? That is a question that falls into a field we might call “the philosophy omoney,” and it does not lend itself to an easy answer. But along as this behavior persists, a deflationary spiral will be awork attempting to adjust prices to bring supply and demaninto balance.

Terms like “laissez-faire,” “self-responsibility,” and “deregulation” provided key concepts for understand ing the markets of the nineteenth century, which centered on the rea

economy. But the twentieth-century economy that JohMaynard Keynes observed requires a philosophy of moneand cannot be adequately explained with the above conceptWe should review the century that is now ending with a reexamination of the conclusions reached by Keynes. x

—Ryuichiro MatsubaraSources:Ryuichiro Matsubara, “Keinzu saiko” [Reconsideration o

Keynesian economics], Asteion, Spring 1999.Masaru Kaneko, Han keizaigaku [Anti-economics], Tokyo

Shinshokan, 1999.Yoshiyasu Ono, Fukyo no keizaigaku [The economics of recession

Tokyo: Nihonkeizai Shimbunsha, 1994.

As Japan’s recession drags on, the country’s economiccommentators appear to have been reduced to astate of advanced confusion. The same people will

at one point preach laissez-faire as the prescription for the

economy’s ills, and at another point call for intervention inthe market. The lack of consistency is pronounced, but thereis a reason.

According to the textbook interpretation of Keynesian eco-nomics, over time prices and wages will rise or fall until thelabor market reaches equilibrium. If one focuses on this ele-ment, it appears necessary to deregulate and refrain frommarket intervention so as to increase the elasticity of pr icesin the long run. But because of the short -term rigidity of wages, unemployment appears. This makes it necessary tointervene in the market with fiscal and monetary policy mea-sures. The contradiction in policy p rescriptions arises fromthe difference between short-term and long-term views of

the economy.Recently, however, some economists have disputed this

interpretation. They assert that the contradictions arise froma flaw in Keynesian theory itself. After all, Japan’s economicslowdown over the past ten years can hard ly be considered“short-term,” which is why extraordinary fiscal and financialmeasures to stimulate the economy have been taken. TheKeynesians do, of course, have a counterargument. When theview takes hold that prices will continue to decline in thefuture, they say, would-be buyers of real estate and homespostpone their purchases in hopes of better bargains to come;this exacerbates the shortfall in aggregate demand and pro-duces a “deflationary spiral.” According to this Keynesianview, stabilization policy measures thus become necessaryeven over the long term when deflationary expectations havebecome established.

But the situation we are in may well be different from whatthe Keynesians suggest. People who want to buy real estatefor their own residential use may harbor hopes for deflationbecause they want to get the best possible deal on their pur-chases. But in today’s Japan, personal consumption is laggingbecause people are reducing their everyday spending out of ageneralized fear about the future that reflects everything from job insecurity to uncertainties about an unreliable pensionsystem. This fear about future uncertainties appears to be

affecting not just asset markets bu t t he ent ire economy. Inother words, the deflationary spiral has occurred not becausedeflationary expectations have become established but be-cause consumers have become gripped by fear. If th is is thecase, even induced inflation will not conquer the recession aslong as the fear persists.

If aggregate supply is running in excess of aggregatedemand, th en we are told that we should deregulate so thatprices and wages can qu ickly shift to produce equilibrium.But moving to deregulate and require self-responsibility islikely to produce not equilibrium bu t an ongoing deflation-ary spiral. Masaru Kaneko explains this point in his recent

The Philosophy of Money



worked as a midwife at a hospital in Osaka before studying atOsaka University and Tokyo University, where she took a doc-torate in public health.

Japan is usually portrayed as a homogeneous country withalmost no non-Japanese residents, but the reality is now muchdifferent. Today the presence of foreigners is considerable inpart s of Tokyo and other big cities. Traditionally the greatmajority of the foreign nationals living in Japan were Koreans,with a sprink ling of Chinese. But starting in t he late 1980s,

newcomers from the Philippines and Brazil as well as theUnited States and other Western countries have dramaticallyaltered the composition of the foreign popu lation in Japan.With more foreigners living in Tokyo, the number of childrenwith foreign parents is also increasing dramatically; theJapanese birth rate, meanwhile, is in steep decline. In Tokyoand Osaka, more than 7 percent of total marriages performedin 1996 were international. As a result, 2.7 percent of thebabies born in Japan today have at least one foreigner for aparent. In Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward, the figure is a startling 12.2percent. Japan is experiencing both the benefits and chal-lenges of multiethnicity.

One of the trickiest problems is language. Except for Kore-ans who have lived in Japan for many years, it is still rare forforeign mothers to speak Japanese, and it is even more unusualto find Japanese who can speak Tagalog or Portuguese. Localauthorities and health-care providers started tackling thesedifficulties by introducing multilingual services, organizing“mother groups” who speak the same languages, or introduc-ing translation machines. The Japanese medical services alsoface challenges because many of the newcomers are not cov-ered by medical insurance. Since all Japanese nationals arecovered by some medical in-surance program, doctors tendto give treatment without d is-

cussing the costs involved,which can create trouble in thecase of foreigners. The way thatJapanese doctors handle infor-mation also tends to lead toconflict with their Westernpatients, who tend to prefer amore forthright approach.

Grade-school children aregenerally better at adoptingthe Japanese lifestyle thantheir parents. But the relatively

stringent school rules and distinctive customs traditionallyaccepted by Japanese parents sometimes confuse foreign par-ents. For example, female students are usually forbidden todye their hair or paint their nails in Japanese schools.

Part of the problem is quite simply that Japanese schools arenot designed to teach students who do not speak the Japaneselanguage. Starting in the 1970s, however, the Japanese educa-tion system found itself confronting a new problem: Japanesechildren whose fathers had been assigned to jobs abroad were

returning to the homeland with little or no formal instructionin their native language. Since then, special Japanese languageclasses have been established in some schools. Even thoughthe linguistic problems children with foreign parents face aremuch greater, of course, this experience of the 1970s meansthat Japanese schools have not been caught entirely unawaresby the multicultural dilemma.

An even more difficult problem is how to keep the Ja-panese-speaking children of foreigners from losing theirnative tongue. Children who speak only Japanese could facea serious handicap on their return to their native count ries.If they stay in Japan, however, other communications prob-lems may grow out of the gap between the Japanese-speak-ing younger generation and their non-Japanese-speakingparents. Moreover, if initial reports are any indication, thesechildren can expect to run into a serious identity crisis asthey get older. In a count ry b ased on th e assumption th ateverybody speaks only one language and shares the samecultural background, children who have foreign parents butcan speak only Japanese are bound to discover something“non-Japanese” in themselves. At some point, inevitably,they begin to wonder who they “really” are. Some local

authorities have set up classesfor local students in Spanishand Portuguese, but this is a

cosmetic effort at best. WhatJapan ultimately needs is asociety better equipped to copewith people of different ethnicbackgrounds. x

—MT

Source: Lee Setsuko, ed. , Zainichigaikokyjin no Boshikenko [Publichealth services for foreign mothersand children], Tokyo: Igaku Shoin,1998.

Ja pa nese Melt ing Pot

Multiethnic Japan

T

he growing size of the foreign population in Japan poses new challenges to the Japanese wel-fare system, which is based upon the assumption that all children and parents speak Japanese,share Japanese customs, and eat Japanese food. Setsuko Lee, an associate professor at Tokyo

Women’s Medical University, has edited a book that examines the health and welfare of children withforeign parents in light of their legal status and access to medical services and education. Professor Lee



The idea that Japan is an ethnic monolith withoutminorities, and therefore without ethnic d iscrimina-tion, is of course a myth. The country has a substan-

tial population of resident Koreans, and the large northern

island of Hokkaido is home to an indigenous people knownas the Ainu. But the largest minority subject to d iscrimina-tion in Japan is the Burakumin, or Buraku people. ( Buraku isa Japanese word meaning “village” or “hamlet”; min means“people.”)

According to a 1993 government survey, there were about1.2 million Buraku people living in4,442 Buraku communities nation-wide. These people are not a racial orethnic minority, but a caste-likeminority among the ethnic Japanese.They are generally thought to bedescendants of outcaste populations

from feudal times. Outcastes wereassigned such social functions asslaughtering animals and executingcriminals, which the general publicperceived as “unclean” acts accord-ing to Buddhist and Shinto tenets.

The organized movement to liber-ate the Burakumin started in the firsthalf of the twentieth century, but itwas only in 1969 that a law wasenacted to eliminate the discrimina-tion against them. Since then the gov-ernment has budgeted some ¥13 tril-lion to improve material conditionsfor people in Buraku communities,and it has worked at including anti-discrimination education as part of the compulsory-educationcurr iculum. Also, the Buraku Liberation League has been con-ducting a vigorous campaign against discrimination. As aresult, while certain forms of social discrimination persist inthe everyday lives of the Burakumin, affecting their marriageand employment opportunities, for example, their living stan-dards have clearly improved, and open discrimination againstthem has receded.

While recognizing the advances that the antidiscrimina-

tion movement has achieved, Tsutomu Yamashita of theBuraku Liberation League and Keiichi Fujita, a researcherspecializing in Buraku affairs, have noted some new prob-lems. Many of the younger generation of Burakumin have aless clear sense of their Buraku identity; also, with the highmobility of people in Japan t oday, many have moved awayfrom their native communities and refrain from revealingtheir Buraku origins to others. This has caused participationin the movement to weaken.

Another problem is that the movement has come to be seenby many as overly aggressive, and the idea has taken hold thatit is virtually impossible even to argue with its adherents. This

has led to a backlash of sorts arising from the judgment thathe movement is no more than a self-interested lobby of people asserting their own victimization as a means of gainineconomic benefits. Yamashita and Fujita believe that the move

ment has in this way abetted a quiet regeneration of discrimnatory sentiment. They also recognize that it has been indifferent to the issues of discrimination against other groupssuch as Koreans and the physically handicapped.

Quoting an American black act ivist, Yamashita argues thathe Buraku movement needs to free itself from the psychol

ogy of victimization and turn itselinto a movement t o promote a sharing of diverse identities and cultureHe also calls for a change in the excessive emphasis on lobbying anprotest activities directed at locagovernments, which have perversel

made the movement overdependenon the government.

Behind this change of thinking lisome changes that have taken place irecent years in the approach tBuraku history. Previously the discrimination against Burakumin waseen as having originated in the feudal class system consolidated in t hseventeenth century, and the prevaiing view blamed its persistence othe incompleteness of Japan’s nineteenth-century modernization process, which left the monarchy iplace. Also, scholars influenced bMarxist thinking attempted to inter

pret discrimination against Buraku people in terms of classtruggle. But more recently the trend among scholars oBuraku history has been to insist that the discrimination originated with ordinary people, not with some special politicaforce, and that its roots are not feudal but modern, arising ouof the concept of the nation-state. This new current in Burakhistory has produced revelations of cooperation by Burakactivists in Japan ‘s march to war starting in the 1930s, and ihas also led to the emergence of assertions of Buraku discrim

ination against other groups, such as women and Koreans.In short, people involved in the Buraku movement havcome to th e realization that discrimination cannot be elimnated simply through the passage of laws or t he exercise opolitical power. x

— MT

Sources: Keiichi Fujita, “Buraku kaiho undo no genzai” [ThBuraku Liberat ion Movement today], Gendai Shiso, March 1999.

Tsutomu Yamashita, “21 seiki wo mokuzen ni shite fushime mukaeta buraku kaiho undo no genjo” [The current state of thBuraku Liberation Movement, on the eve of the 21st CenturyGendai Shiso, March 1999.

Ja pa nese Melt ing Pot

The Buraku Liberation Movement



Japan, Made in U.S.A.

The Japanese public has a good deal of faith in the pressgenerally and views leading Western publications likethe New York Times with special respect. As a result,

the Tokyo correspondents of foreign papers tend to enjoyready access to Japanese information sources, both politicians

and bureaucrats, despite the fact that the correspondents,with few exceptions, speak very little Japanese. One reasonthe Western media hold such sway is that Japanese intellectu-als have vaguely thought of major American publications as amodel for the free flow of information in a prosperous democ-ratic society. But a bigger reason for officials’ readiness to talkto Western journalists is that their publications are read andquoted all over the world, unlike the Japanese media, whichhave virtually no int ernational reach. Even among Japan’sAsian neighbors, intellectuals get much of their informationabout Japan through the American media.

But the New York Times, the flagship of America’s authori-tative media, transmits a very distorted image of Japan. That is

the central assertion of Japan, Made in U.S.A., a book puttogether by a group of eleven Japanese people living in NewYork who have found much that is questionable in the paper’scoverage of their country. The group, which calls itself Zipangu(which was Marco Polo’s name for Japan), assesses problematicaspects of specific articles, and bolsters its thesis by includingshort essays by and interviews with American and Japanesescholars and journalists. The book even contains an interviewwith Nicholas Kristof, chief of the Tokyo news bureau of theTimes and writer of some of the articles that the group deemedproblematic. Japan, Made in U.S.A. is a bilingual publicationin Japanese and English, and published simultaneously inJapan and the United States.

The compilers contend t hat Japan-related coverage in the New York Times focuses on events and phenomena at theperiphery of Japanese society, such as loveless marriages,rush-hour sub way mashers, and comic books full of depic-tions of rape. By presenting these isolated cases as the norm,the authors say, Times journalists exaggerate the eccentricityand otherness of Japan. The journalists invariably attr ibutethese phenomena to Japan’s “backwardness,” as exemplifiedby feudal tradition, a herd mentality, sexual inequality, and abureaucratic mind-set. Japan, Made in U.S.A. clearly demon-strates the frequency of such art icles. One of the contributorsis Charles Burress, an American journalist who decries the

heavy use of war metaphors in Times articles about Japan,including references to Japanese investment in the UnitedStates as an “invasion.” He says articles often present Japan asa monolith, which is a caricature far removed from reality, andoften portray Japanese citizens and leaders in condescendingterms. He also notes a lack of real effort to present the Japaneseposition in coverage of trade and other issues on which Japanand the United States have differences.

The portrait of the American press that emerges from theseobservations is not a flattering one. Rather than challengepeople’s preconcept ions, the American media peddle an imagethat appeals to the market by playing up stereotypes. And so

Korean-JapaneseReconciliation?

J apan and South Korea have never been good neighborsin modern t imes. Despite the fact that more than fiftyyears have passed since colonial rule ended, and that

the two industrial democracies share security, political, andeconomic interests in the region, the darkness of history hascontinued to sour their relations. Kim Dae Jung, who was

elected President of the Korean republic in December 1997,is trying to change that. Even the Japanese recognize that heis taking a more conciliatory approach than his predecessors,who focused on issues of history and territory (there is a dis-pute over a small island in the Sea of Japan, or East Sea, asKoreans call it). Shortly before President Kim’s official visitto Japan, which left a highly positive impression there, theJapanese monthly Sekai printed an interview with h im in itsOctober 1998 issue.

Given strong popular Korean sentiment against Japan, Kimdid not fail to comment on the history question. But t he toneof his comments was moderate and constructive. “In comingto terms with the past, t he most important thing to under-stand is that it is really meaningless for other countries todemand that Japan do so or tell it how it should do so. It is,rather, a problem of how the Japanese people themselves andthe Japanese government reflect upon and come to terms withthe past…. The Korean people do n ot harbor feelings of re-venge toward Japan. It is incorrect to say that Koreans persistin bringing up the past. Yet there is a strong fear that becauseJapan’s own efforts to come to terms with its past are still lack-ing, in the future Koreans may be victimized again. Out of thisfear, Korea always feels the need to mention the past to Japan.In turn, I think, Japan gets tired of hearing the same thingover and over, and a vicious circle occurs. Because of this

recurring pattern, the Korean people focus only on the pastand do not know enough about some of the positive sides thatJapan has shown in the postwar period, such as fifty years of successful democracy, the renunciation of war, the PeaceConstitu tion, as well as its being the largest aid donor to devel-oping countries.”

What is the reason for Kim’s move toward reconciliation? Itmay be his philosophical commitment to democratic values,which are shared by contemporary Japan and may outweighconcerns about the past. Instead of portraying the two coun-tries as aggressor and victim, Kim made clear that both coun-tries share problems which they should overcome together.

Views o f Ja pa n

the American picture of Japan as peculiar and backwardremains unchanged. But as noted by Carol Gluck, a scholarinterviewed in this book, the idea that Japan is singularly dif-ferent holds wide currency even among Japanese journalistsand commentators, and these perceptions on both sides tendto feed each other. x

— MT

Source: Zipangu, ed. Japan, Made in U.S.A., New York: Zipangu ,1998.



On democracy he remarked: “Lee Kwan Yu has said that inAsia, the tr aditions and fundamental philosophy of democ-racy do not exist and as such, it is unreasonable to call fordemocracy in Asia. I do not th ink that is true and would arguein response that there are numerous examples of democraticthinking and traditions in Asia…. If we had truly applieddemocracy to Korea,” he continued, “and not permitted

bribery or collusion between business and politics, andallowed only internationally competitive enterprises to thrive,I think Korea’s economy would not be in its present terriblestate.” Kim concluded, “I th ink it is necessary in Japan andKorea that the two principles of democracy and a market econ-omy develop in parallel.”

Another important factor in reconciling the two countriesmay be a positive role played by Japan in helping South Koreaovercome the recent economic crisis. With unusual directnessKim expressed gratitude toward its richer neighbor and,instead of expressing concern about Japan’s economic ‘impe-rialism,’ he called for its leadership. “The Japanese govern-ment and financial groups truly and faithfully cooperated dur-

ing the recent crisis in Korea, and our people and governmentthank Japan…. As President of Korea, I hope from the bottomof my heart that the Japanese economy improves. In Asia,Japan is the largest economic power, and no one can deny thatJapan leads in the Asian economy. Japan’s economy is essen-tially strong and I hope that it moves toward stabilization assoon as possible.”

Are these expressions of goodwill merely diplomatic, or dothey reflect deeper and more meaningful changes in relationsbetween the two countries? The latter view looks more plausi-ble when one considers that Kim took several other concretemeasures to change the mood of relations. One was to encour-age the gradual introduction of Japanese culture into Korea,including Japanese movies and music, which had beenbanned. Moreover, Japan-Korea cultural exchange festivals areto be held annually until 2002, heralding all sorts of otherlarge-scale exchanges. “In efforts to become friends,” PresidentKim remarked, “exchanges are most fruitful: exchange of writ-ers, artists, laborers, scholars, and students. I read recently thatof Japanese high school students that travel abroad on classtrips, seventy percent now go to Korea. That type of activitywill add to understanding in both countries.” x

— MT

Views o f Japa n

The Responsibilityof Intellectuals

I

f one had looked at Japan’s leading magazines in the prewar period, one would have thought Japan was turnininto a socialist country. The country had no tradition i

the social sciences until the latter half of the nineteenth century, so intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth centurwere enthralled by Marxism’s “scientific” explanations opoverty and war. As militarism and repression increased, beginning in the 1930s, many Marxists “converted” and cooperated in the war effort. But after Japan’s defeat and the war’end in 1945, these Marxists and “empty, idealistic pacifistswho had contempt for militarism and fascism, came to domnate Japan’s intellectual world.

Inoki Masamichi, who was born in 1914, has criticized botMarxism and irresponsible pacifism throughout his life. Hstudied at Tokyo University before the war, and afterwarmoved to Kyoto University, where he would teach some o

Japan’s leading scholars; and he served later as president othe National Defense Academy, outside Tokyo. Now 85, Inokcontinues to spend his days researching and writing. In recent interview, Inoki reflected on some of Japan’s contemporary intellectuals.

Japan’s postwar intellectuals, he explained, were unable taccept any criticism directed against Stalinism or Communism. (A good example was the out standing scholar Maruyama Masao, whose obituary appeared in Issue No. 1 of thCIC Newsletter ). In Inoki’s view, Japanese progressive intelectuals did not try to understand the true nature of Stalinismbecause they were situated in Asia, far from the civil war iSpain or the uprising in Hungary. And the reason for theistrong attachment to “idealistic pacifism” was the shock thacame with defeat in a reckless and unjustified war, as well aJapan’s dependence on the United States for its postwar security. Moreover, Inoki suggests, because the political culturwhich brings concrete policy alternatives into the nationadebate d id not establish itself in Japanese parliamentary poitics, Japanese intellectuals got into the habit of repeatinbeautiful but empty ideals, without a sense of politicaresponsibility.

On the other h and, Inoki was also critical of the attemptby ultra-conservative politicians like pr ime ministers KishNobusuke and Hatoyama Ichiro to amend the so-called Peac

Constitu tion created by t he American occupation forces ithe postwar era. (The Peace Constitution, wh ich has a clausthat , t aken literally, forbids Japan from possessing any armaments, has become a sacred p illar of “idealistic pacifists.”Now that t he remnants of militarism have all but disappearedInoki warns that Japan cannot expect to earn the respect ointernational society if it does not play a responsible role iworld affairs. x

— MT Source: Masamichi Inoki, “Watashi ga Tatakatta Kusoteki-Heiw

Shugisha Tachi” [The idealistic pacifists with whom I struggledThis Is Yomiuri, March 1999.



Wor d a nd Ima ge in Ja pa n

In the Beginning Wasthe Word…

J

apanese art is fascinated with the word. Painted foldingscreens, scroll paintings, ukiyo-e prints, gold and silverlacquerwork, and other genres often incorporate kanji

ideograms and/or kana phonetic characters as a key part of thecomposition. In addition to explicating the theme of the pic-ture or suggesting the text inspiring it, these characters serveas decorative motifs and are integral to the overall composition.

The combination of word and image has generated master-pieces of European art as well, as seen in medieval books of hours and other illuminated manuscripts. But it takes muchmore intricate and d iverse forms in Japanese art, such as e-moji (also known as moji-e), which are pictures made uplargely of kanji and/or kana script, and paintings that blendwords and images. These forms were applied to an extremelywide range of genres: religious art, monogatari-e (pictorial ren-ditions of famous tales), furniture decoration, popular wood-

block prints, and so on.There are three reasons for th is love of blending word and

image in Japanese art. First, we can cite the complex Japanesewriting system, which combines kanji and kana. Because kanjiare stylized hieroglyphs or combinations thereof, they arecomplex and varied in form and are close to pictographs. This,too, is why the art of calligraphy developed to such an extentin both China and Japan. Kana, meanwhile, are derived fromthe cursive form of kanji (hiragana) or parts of block-stylekanji (katakana). The angular kanji and katakana and cursivehiragana add piquancy to Japan’s pictorial art.

Second, as indicated by the major place in the tradition of Japanese art of the widely loved genre of monogatari-e, litera-ture and art have enjoyed an especially close relationship inJapan. Waka (thirty-one-syllable poems divided into lines of 5, 7, 5, 7, and 7 syllables) are also closely bound up with paint-ing, witness the many uta-e (literally, “poem-pictures”) andbyobu-e (folding screen paint ings) combining poems and pic-tures. In the Heian period (794–1185) the court nobilityenjoyed the elegant artistic pastime of exchanging poems,often accompanied by paint ings, as a form of both social inter-course and the communication of sentiments.

Of course, to appreciate these paintings the recipient had tohave the knowledge to understand their textual background.Just as knowledge of the Greek and Roman classics was the

cultural legacy of cultivated Europeans, knowledge of suchfamous tales as the Genji monogatari [Tale of Genji], the wakain the imperial poetry anthologies, and the Buddh ist scrip-tures was the cultural currency in Japan. Thus, a br ief phrasefrom a poem brushed on a painting was enough to evoke theentire poem and enhanced appreciation of the painting. Overtime, this kind of textual knowledge also spread among th ecommon people.

Third is the spirit of play so prominent in Japanese litera-ture and art. This is epitomized by the riddling hanji-e, orrebus pictures, and ashide-e, depictions of nature made uplargely of characters (a kind of moji-e.)

Interestingly, the Japanese tradition of cleverly combiningword and image lives on today in poster art. Poster art is alsoa good example of the confluence of Japanese and Europeanculture. The poster originated in fin-de-siècle Paris as an atten-tion-getting medium conveying essential information amidthe city’s bustle. This was achieved through bold composi-tion, bright colors, caricature, and imaginative typography —

all elements admired by European artists in the Japanese artthat was so fashionable at the t ime, the heyday of japonisme.(The great innovator of poster art Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec,like his older contemporary Vincent van Gogh, was an afi-cionado of Japanese art.)

When poster art was introduced to Japan, then, it was hardlysurpr ising that Japanese artists not only saw the genre as epito-mizing European modernity but also instinctively felt its affin-ity with their own tradition. The word contributed as much toa poster’s compositional impact as color and form. And the play-ful sophistication of the Japanese has cultivated the harmoniousinterplay of word and image as expressive elements for cen-turies. This is why poster art flourishes in Japan today. x

—Kiyokazu W ashida Source: Shuji Takashina, “Dezain no seiki: Infomeshon ato no deji-

taru to anarogu” [The century of design: Digital and analog in infor-mation art], Tokyo: Suntory Museum Tenpozan, 1998.

The Kanji Cultural Sphere

For many centuries a so-called “kanji cultural sphere,”existed in East Asia, centered in China. It comprisedgroups of people who were able to communicate

through the medium of a specific script—Chinese ideograms,known as kanji in Japanese—and a specific syntactical struc-ture. This enabled them to surmount the barriers of nationand dynasty and differences in spoken language. As long asthere were people who had a knowledge of kanji and couldcompose Chinese prose (kanbun) and verse (kanshi), there wasalmost no need for t ranslation. Europe, too, was once a cul-tural sphere defined by the shared use of Latin, but the kanjisphere was vastly greater in historical duration and geograph-ical extent. Moreover, whereas Latin is now a dead language(except in the Vatican), kanji are still used on an everydaybasis by large numbers of people.

The development of a cultural sphere defined by kanji, andits effective functioning over a long st retch of t ime, had anincalculable effect on the formation and development of an

internat ional community in Asia. The reason peoples like theJapanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese, whose languages werecompletely different from Chinese, could use the writing sys-tem of the Han Chinese was that kanji are ideograms. Thusthey could be used for their semantic value alone, regardlessof their original phonetic value.

The erstwhile bond of the kanji cultural sphere no longerexists in East Asia, however. Only the Chinese and Japanesenow use kanji as their main medium of written language. Thereason is that after World War II kanbun stopped being taughtin most East Asian countr ies, and thus their people ceased toshare this cultural heritage. China, Japan, and Korea under-



Wor d a nd Imag e in Ja pa n

praised, is not drama or movies, nor documentaries or bookbut animation. Because the writer’s own personality istrongly reflected in the contents, anime can be said to be thsoftware that Japan can be most proud of.

This is not the first time that a subculture in Japan, whichas not received praise in its own country, was recognizeand highly valued abroad. In the Edo Era, ukiyo-e was looke

upon as artwork of the masses done on what seemed to bwrapping paper. However, when japonisme reached abroadukiyo-e became one of the major influences on the formatioof the French Impressionists. In learning the methods oukiyo-e, Western art expanded the scope of expression, finding a new form of expression.

In this sense, animation and comics can be said to representhe modern japonisme. What is really interesting is that jusin the same way that as ukiyo-e was able to respond to the siuation in which as it was being seen as a dying form of art inJapan it was also being praised in the West, so too in animation do we see the same trends. The reasons for this trend aras follows.

The reason that the animation industry in Japan grew ibecause it chose a path different from that of Walt Disney. Iorder to reduce both production costs and time, techniquewere used to reduce the characters’ movements.

In the era of low budgets, this technique, th e flow of thstory rath er th an th e movements, was emphasized. In th iway, expressions were deeper than in the family-type cartoons of Disney. Moreover, because Japan’s broadcast rulewere looser than those in America regarding references tand displays of sex and violence, the target age of its viewerwas increased and in turn this steadily created more demanfor anime.

In th is way the gold rush for animation began. Countr ielike Korea, China, Ind ia, and Canada are actively seeking tdevelop skilled people and expand the t echnology of animation by establishing courses at universities and national insttutes of research and high education in the hope that thecan dr ive a wedge in Japan’s near-domination of the industry. Japan, on th e other hand , du e to a lack of investmenhas gotten off to a late start in the technology revolutionspecifically the int roduction of digitalization. In one othepoint Japan is also seriously lagging—the development oqualified personnel. In Japan, for example, no universitiefor the development of such people exist, nor does Japaeven hold international animation events where people from

abroad can meet with their Japanese counterparts to exchange information. In order to break this worsening trendit may become necessary to use public funds to give opportunities to re-train animators as well as to pay for tax-breakfor small, new production companies which are actively trying to d igitalize. In any case, if trends continue as they arethe culture of Japanese anime will follow the same path thaukiyo-e did—the road to extinction. x

—KW Source: Hamano Yasuki, “Nihon Kokokuron” [A Plea on Behalf o

the New Japonisme], Chuo Koron, April 1999.

took various language and script reforms. Vocabularychanged, and abbreviated forms of characters were adopted,changing the very form of kanji. All this made cross-culturalcommunication via kanji difficult.

With the advent of the computer, however, things t ookanother major tur n. Today the Japanese use computers towrite t heir own language, which mixes kanji and the pho-

netic characters known as kana. It has also become common-place for people in China, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea,Vietnam, and ethnic Chinese communities in the UnitedStates to use computers to wr ite in kanji. Meanwhile, differ-ent countries and regions have created their own kanji codes.As a result, Japan, China, Taiwan, Singapore, and SouthKorea have different codes for the same kanji. There is anurgent need to rectify the problem of incompatible codes inthis age of instantaneous international information exchangevia the Internet.

The kanji cultural sphere steadily dismantled in the post-war period is about to be resurrected on a vastly wider scalein the age of electronic media. There is a certain irony in the

revival of a traditional Eastern culture sphere by means of state-of-the-art technology first developed in the West. Be thatas it may, with closer regional interchange via kanji once morebecoming possible, the existence of this shared script willundoubtedly contr ibute in no small measure to Asia’s futuredevelopment and stability. x

—Kiyokazu W ashidaSource: Tetsuji Atsuji, “Kanji bun kaken no kobo” [The rise and

fall of the Kanji cultural sphere], InterCommunication, Winter 1999.

Plea for the New Japonisme

Asked what anime is, a knowledgeable foreigner willalmost invariably refer to Japanese animation—which reflects the worldwide reput ation this Jap-

anese art form enjoys. Most good video shops in Europe andNorth America have a section devoted to Japanese animationvideos. More than 65 percent of the animation works in theworld are Japanese-made (as are an astonishing 90 percentof video games). It’s not just volume—the work itself ishighly regarded.

Within Japan, however, animation has been looked at as nomore than a type of subculture, and it would be hard to saythat anime has necessarily received the credit that it deserves.In examining the topics recently discussed in some of the

more popular animation, many titles reflect the undertakingof challenging and large themes, like problems between soci-ety, and t echnology, and the environment. For example, wesee this trend in Kaze no Tani no Naushika [Nausicaa of theValley of the Wind], which looks at the coexistence of sav-agery and mercy in nature; in Akira, about the revelations of life in the city of Tokyo; a look at the conflict of Japan’s infor-mation society in this high-tech country (Patolabor series);as well as an examination of the dark side of children’s hearts( Neon Genesis Evangelion).

In other words, the form of Japanese media that people theworld over are in most contact with and that is most highly



Repor t s fr om Eur ope

conditions under which they had to cope with new circum-stances. Accordingly, everyone of German descent was giventhe same legal rights and had a claim to German citizenshipand to the solidarity and support of those who were better off.In the 1950s German refugees formed special-interest groupswithin the major political parties and their own associationsto advance their interests, cultivate their traditions, and copewith the loss of their milieux de mémoire. Their presence influ-enced housing programs and town development. They hadstreets named after the regions they came from. Four to fivehundred memorials went up to commemorate their flight andexpulsion. State-funded cultural centers catered to their cul-tural needs, and large state-funded historical research projectsdocumented their specific fate. There even was a federal min-istry for refugees until it no longer fit into the Federal Repub-lic’s new foreign policy in the late sixties and early seventies.By the late eighties the fate of German refugees had almostfaded from public discourse and remembrance in the FederalRepublic, while in the former German Democratic Republicthey had always been a taboo.

After 1989, German minorities in Eastern Europe againbegan to migrate in large numbers to Germany. Their legal sta-tus was still based on laws from the 1950s. But the materialaid they received was now being reduced while other restric-tive measures tried to curb this new influx. Their rising num-

bers led to a controversy about ethnically privileged migra-tion and the limits of national solidarity which called intodoubt their claims to German citizenship and solidarity basedon descent. Their decision to emigrate—whatever possiblediscrimination they faced in the countries they came from—was increasingly viewed not as the result of shared victimiza-tion, bu t as a more voluntaristic step comparable to that of other migrant labor.

The victimization and rebuilding myth of the fifties hadbeen the first of three possible alternative reconstruction of anational identity. German migrants had been one of the subjects as well as one of the objects of its construction. The con-

Societies, according to Münz and Ohliger, live on histor-ical constructs, collective memories and myths. To someextent these adapt themselves to changing circum-

stances. At its founding in 1871, the German empire excludeda large number of Germans living in Austria-Hungary andRussia. In 1919 the Treaty of Versailles created a new politicalgeography with large German-speaking minorities in Poland,Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Belgium, France, andItaly, and a migration movement of 1.3 million people. In 1937,around 8.5 million Germans were living in countries east orsoutheast of Germany and Austr ia. Two million Germans hadto leave their traditional settlements during World War II.Another 11 to 12 million Germans migrated to Germany in thefirst four years after the war. In 1950 roughly 3.5 millionGermans were still living outside Germany in Eastern Europe.Within Germany every sixth German in the German FederalRepublic and every fifth German in the German DemocraticRepublic was a refugee. During the forty-year period before1989 the huge population movements of the past almost ebbedaway. After 1988 the tide rose, again bringing another 2.4 mil-lion German migrants to Germany. But in 1997 only everytwenty-fifth German citizen was a German migrant.

Refugees, expellees, and emigrants after the war—as wellas the 3.8 million Germans who moved from East Germany toWest Germany before the building of the Berlin Wall in

1961—were not exactly welcomed upon arrival but were inte-grated very quickly, the success story of rebuilding Germanycovering up social tensions and distribu tion stru ggles. Thefate of the refugees from the East was seen as part of the com-mon destiny of Germany. The idea of victimhood attached toGerman minorities in the East had in the past even provided apretext for international conflicts and war. Now Germans—refugees and non-refugees—saw themselves as victims of thewar without asking awkward questions about causality andguilt. Helping refugees was just one element in the commontask of rebuilding Germany.

This view determined the discourse about refugees and the

German Identity and the “Forgotten” Germans

Two connected stories, the demographer’s of the changing facts and perceptions of German migration movements, and the histo-rian’s of identity formation over German generations intertwine in an article by the demographer Rainer Münz and the historian Rainer Ohliger. If their thesis is correct, that over the last fifty years of German history a waning victimization myth gave way to avery different set of German identity constructs, then those new forms of identity differ significantly from those of other countries,

particularly in the wealthy, liberal West. Or so claims Ian Buruma in “The Joys and Perils of Victimhood” in the New York Reviewof Books (April 8, 1999), in which he deplores the increasing numbers of cultural, ethnic, religious, or national communities whobase their communal identities “almost entirely on the sentimental solidarity of remembered victimhood” as tradit ional distinctionsbetween communities “are becoming fuzzier all the time.” A half-century of secular, democratic, progressive change and globaliza-tion have led to a “disenchanted world of broken-down ideologies, religions, and national and cultural boundaries.” For some this hasmeant increasing emancipation, for others a “loss of the rich, old kitchen comforts of ethnicity.” In an increasingly Americanized world, almost any community can view itself as a minority. W hereas “memories, fictionalized or real, of shared victimhood” shaped so much of nineteenth-century nationalism, what is new today “is the extent to which so many minorities have come to define them-selves above all as historical victims. ” Identification with past trauma and suffering becomes one of the last tags of communal iden-tity, a false shortcut to historical roots, a pseudoreligion, an irrat ional, neo-Romantic union of kitsch and death. W hat Buruma’s, Münz’s and Ohliger’s cases all stress, however, is generational difference, an awareness of the long silence in which real survivorscontain their trauma or guilt, and attention to migrants, minorities, and processes of assimilation and integration.



or by a counter-tendency viewing all policies of ethnicacleansing as the enemy while pleading for the granting oGerman citizenship to everyone living in Germany continuously, irrespective of descent.

The third central topic in th e construction of a Germaidentity and a nat ional past has been the h istorical place othe Holocaust in German history. In the last twenty years

has become the object of intensified debates. Two generations of Germans coming of age in the sixties and ninetiehave broken the silence of the fifties by q uestioning theiparents and grandparents about the Holocaust. To them thShoah appears as more strange and foreign and is thereforall the more suitable for seeing themselves by contrast to ias completely different Germans. They have engraved thHolocaust into the predominant German image of historand defined it and the steps leading to it as something evercivilized state has to prevent.

As the numbers and public perception of German emigrantfrom the East have changed, these three elements of identitconstruct ion have gradually replaced the v ictimization myt

which in the 1990s did not seem to have much to offer t o Germany preoccupied with the themes of unification, thtransition from the Bonn to the Berlin republic, and the unemployment problem. The refugee organizations have largely lotheir political influence. The integration of refugees anmigrants has not resulted in increased appeals for repeatepublic recognition of their past traumas. On the contrarytheir living memory has almost b ecome a private affair, expressed through increased tourism to their former living habtats. According to Münz and Ohliger, the revival or attempteinstrumentalizations of past myths remains, however, a slighpossibility. x

—MBSource: Rainer Münz and Rainer Ohliger, “Vergessene Deutsche—

Erinnerte Deutsche: Flüchtlinge, Vertr iebene, Aussiedler” [ForgotteGermans—Remembered Germans: Refugees, Expellees, and Emgrants], Transit, Autumn 1999.


cept of a nat ion of victims, not actors or offenders (the Germanword Täter covers both translations), had originally allowedall Germans, migrants as well as others, to push supposed out-ward ascription of the role of offender into t he backgroundand to concentrate on the collective memory and traumas of misery, deprivation, and loss. The GDR had chosen the sec-ond alternative, antifascism without self-reflection. Seeing the

new socialist state as an inheritor and offspring of the tradi-tions of resistance to National Socialism, it incorporated in itsidentity and accepted cultural heritage only those selectedelements of the national past which it regarded as progressive.

The construction of the third alternative, a more critical,less selective, and self-reflective look at the national past, onlyset in during the sixties and seventies. As the images of war,destruction, and refugees began to recede first from realityand then from memory, the victimization myth no longermade sense and was gradually replaced by an actor’s mythconnected with three other central themes of the German pastand present which increasingly became main sources of iden-tity building and national memory.

According to Münz and Ohliger, one of these three centraltopics has been the German economy. Over the past fifty yearsGermans constructed for their “country of poets and thinkers”a new economic identity around their trust in the strength of their new export-oriented economy symbolized in the DM cur-rency. In the nineties this has taken the form of seeing Ger-many as paymaster and motor of the European Union.

Secondly, the role of the foreigner, in contradistinction towhom a German national identity has been constructed, haschanged. The construction of France as the traditional enemyof Germany in the nineteenth and early twentieth centurieshad been replaced by the anti-bolshevism and anti-Semitismof the Nazis, and then by t he ant i-communism of the West,and the anti-capitalism and anti-fascism of the GDR. Since1989 there has been a vacuum here. There are signs that it maybe filled either by the construction of a new enemy aroundIslam and foreign, especially Turkish, migrants in Germany,



When the leader of the French National Front (FN),Jean-Marie Le Pen, roughed up a political oppo-nent in a local election campaign last August, few

realized that the FN founder would end up sundering his own

party. This, however, has been precisely the dramatic result.For in a ruling upheld in a French appeals court last Novem-ber, Le Pen’s antics were deemed criminal assault; the FNfounder barred, as a consequence, from holding public officefor a year. With the June, 1999 elections to the EuropeanParliament fast approaching, Le Pen faced a critical decision.Who would head, in his absence, the FN’s electoral list in theupcoming campaign? Bypassing leading Front officials infavor of his wife “Jany” (inexperienced, vaguely glamorous,but by her own admission, completely uninterested in poli-tics), Le Pen set off a furor amongst FN militants, who inJanuary convened an emergency party congress in response.Openly challenging Le Pen’s leadership, they elected FN

General Delegate, Bruno Mégret, their new head. Suddenly,France was engaged in a two-Front war.

With the support of much of the party bureaucracy, half the1,700-member internal security force and even one of Le Pen’sown daughters, Mégret’s secession is more than simply a palacecoup. Rather, his challenge marks the eruption of a strategicdispute over the nature—and future—of the French right thathas smoldered in and around the party for some time.

Central to the struggle are competing visions of the Front’splace in the political constellation of France. At 49, over 20years Le Pen’s junior, Mégret came of age, intellectually, in thewake of 1968, and was formed in the current of thoughtknown broadly as the “New Right.” The New Right set out inthe 1970s to re-think and re-energize conservative ideologicalpositions mainly through two organizations that have servedthe FN, effectively, though not formally, as policy think tanks:GRECE (Groupement de Recherche et d’Études pour la Civilisa-tion Européenne) and the Club de l’Horloge. Deeply impressedby the Left’s intellectual sophistication, and by its ability toinsert radical concepts into the mainstream of public debate,Mégret and others fashioned in response what they termed a“Gramscism of the Right,” a reference to the Italian MarxistAntonio Gramsci’s belief that concrete political power is al-ways won first in the realm of ideas. Just as the New Left hadeffectively inverted the traditional Marxian hierarchy, mak-

ing intellectual innovation the motor of material change, theNew Right would similarly abandon discredited means fornovel methods, replacing brown shirts and street fights withwell-cut suits, administrative expertise, and carefully craftedop-ed pieces. By winning what Mégret calls the “vocabularybattle,” the semantic struggle to define the terms of estab-lished political discourse, the New Right would conquer theminds—and then the hearts—of the French people.

Closely associated with this notion is the conviction that theRight must offer a presentable face to the out side world, oneshorn of Nazi symbolism and the stubble of Vichy. It is reveal-ing in this regard that both Mégret and his closest FN allies,


Club de l’Horloge founders Yvan Blot and Jean-Yves Gallou, allfirst sought to carry out this battle from within the mainstreamRight. A product of the prestigious engineering school Ponts-et-Chaussées, and the University of California, Berkeley, Mé-

gret was actually a member of the Gaullist party’s (RPR) cen-tral committee from 1979 to 1981. Blot, for his part, is agraduate of the élite National School of Administration (ENA),and a former protégé of French president Jacques Chirac, whileGallou was active in the more centrist UDF party. Ultimatelyfrustrated by the constraints of the established conservativeparties, these so-called “moderns” entered the FN in the mid-1980s. And though in terms of intellectual formation and polit-ical background markedly different from the party Old Guard,the moderns nonetheless provided Le Pen with desperatelyneeded ideological vitality and technical sophistication.

For over a decade this fusion of old and new has been mutu-ally beneficial and extremely effective. Rapidly assuming

positions of responsibility within the party, the moderns tookhold of the FN’s various ideological strands and knit themtogether into a coherent whole. At the same time, they erecteda formidable apparatus of business organizations, youthgroups, think tanks, and other associational structuresdesigned to insinuate Front ideas into the heart of civil soci-ety. Mégret’s role has been crucial in th is task, and indeed itwas largely his early recognition that the demise of Marxismwould demand an intellectual reconfiguration of the Right, aswell as of the Left, that provided the Front’s main ideologicalimpetus of the 1990s. As he has emphasized in all three of hismost recent theoretical works, L’Alternative nationale (1996), La Troisième voie [The third way] (1997), and La NouvelleEurope (1998): “The opposition that once prevailed betweencapitalism and communism, between liberalism and socialism,has completely expired with the facts. The true cleavage todayis the one that separates the supporters of the national idealfrom those of globalism.” Globalism (mondialisme)—here wasa protean concept, one that could be slotted smoothly into thestealth arsenal of the New Right’s vocabulary battle. For thehydra of mondialisme stands for many things: the influx of immigrants who threaten French sanctity and security; theloss of national sovereignty to supra-national organizationssuch as the UN and the EU; the crushing competition of aglobal market that unfairly favors the United States; and the

demise of French culture before the horrible trinity of “Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Walt Disney.” Juxtaposedwith the need to preserve the purity and strength of theFrench nation, mondialisme has thus become a multivalent—and monolithic—concept within the FN lexicon.

By presenting a moderate face to the outside world, chang-ing the terms of public discourse, and pursuing strategiccoalitions with other part ies, t he FN can become a nat ionalpolitical player, Mégret argues. For Le Pen and the FN oldguard, however, such a turn in unacceptable. They pridethemselves on their incorruptibility and their staunch refusalto cooperate with the political mainstream. Conditioned in the

The New Right in Jacket and Tie




1950s and 1960s, when a lightning putsch was more conceiv-able than slow electoral ascendance, th ey have watched themoderns’ rise with circumspection, enjoying the FN’s success,but mindful of the dangers the moderns pose to the part y’sintegrity. For Mégret, such foot-dragging, coupled with LePen’s mercurial propensity to alienate potential supporterswith senseless sallies (Holocaust denial, gratu itous insults)

have kept the party down too long.Is the FN indivisibly linked to Le Pen, or will the movement

transcend the man? The outcome, of course, remains to be seen.If Le Pen’s history and charisma are assets that his diminutiverival lacks, Mégret’s youth, presentability, and political acumencannot be discounted. For the time being, the conventional wis-dom in France is that open dissent within the FN is a goodthing. But until the country comes to terms with the social con-ditions that have allowed the Front to flourish, it is probablywell to remember that many Germans thought much the samething at the time of the Night of the Long Knives. x

— Darrin McMahon

Sources: Bruno Mégret, La Flamme: les voies de la renaissance [The

flame: the paths of rebirth], Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, 1990.

The Rhetoric of SocialCohesion

W

hat keeps societies from falling apart? What preserves their inner unity? These are questions thaincreasingly preoccupy German politicians. Jo

hannes Rau, who was just voted in as president of the FederaRepublic of Germany, recently compared society to a houswhose mortar is gradually disappearing; Wolfgang Schäublethe opposition leader, speaks of the “lining” of society, or othe “habits of the heart.” But t hey all share the assumptiothat there is a resource that makes society cohere, and that thresource is being depleted. They express an anxiety that thdissolution of shared values and outlooks threatens publidiscourse about the common good.

According to Christian Geyer, such exaggerated organianalogies are anachronistic and unhelpful. They represenmisconceptions about how modern, functionally differentiated societies operate, without the need for a center or head

The tension created among different social spheres—politicseconomics, science, art—does not dissolve society, in Geyerview, but rather stabilizes it. The division of labor is not onlyan economically fruitful principle, but a cultural one tooDisintegration is both the norm and the hidden resource omodern society.

Communitarians, according to Geyer, place their trust ipreconceived conceptions of social wholeness instead of recognizing the steering and coordinating potential of decentraized bourgeois life. The tendency of orthodox communitarians like Alasdair MacIntyre to regard differences of opinioas polarizing society have borne political fruit in JohanneRau’s appeal to revitalize associations like political partieschurches, and sport clubs.

Geyer illustrates the risks of t his “rhetoric of social cohesion” by comparing it to the logical of demographers. Population studies today have come to the ‘scientific’ conclusiothat the liberal state would be well advised to resist multicuturalism on the grounds that it will threaten integration. Anif one defines the mortar of society ethnically, it follows that high b irthrate is necessary to keep society together. Demographers today tell us that if Germans do not develop a sensof the importance of reproduction, the German populatiowill shrink, and the dream of a common identity will evaporate. Sexual intercourse for reasons of state? Geyer quotes th

demographer Herwig Birg, who recently argued that if we dnot att ack the demographic problem, in fifty years time oudescendants will look back in horror at us, just as we look ihorror at earlier events in th is century. Such a comparison iobscene, according to Geyer, but not surprising. Anything ipossible once the question of social cohesion becomes primarin people’s minds. x

—MB

Source: Christian Geyer, “Wohin wir driften: Brav, nicht harmloDie Rhetorik des sozialen Zusammenhalts” [Where we are dr iftinto: Well behaved, not harmless: The rhetoric of social cohesionFrankfurter A llgemeine Zeitung, March 8, 1999.

Miscellany

Sentimental Education in Senegal

The Senegalese newspaper Sud Quotidien reportsthat Western romance forms the staple reading of young girls in that part of Africa. Dakar abounds

in used-book stands piled with Harlequin Romances andtheir French-language equivalents, photo-novellas inseries called Kiss, Color, Lucky or Riviera, and magazineslike Paris Match and Nous Deux. Fulfilling girls’ need forescape, such reading, according to some of its consumers(who often claim to outgrow it), puts girls on anotherwave-length from Senegalese boys, and lets them “forgetthe dull reality of daily existence.” In the view of oneauthor, romance writing provides ”answers, howeverstereotypical, to the questions young women pose aboutthe major events of existence, answers school and educa-tion don’t provide.”

Yet does this high-gloss sentimental education, for all itsapparent harmlessness, also pose a threat? PsychologistSerigne Mor Mbaye thinks so, underscoring the “absenceof identification” with dominant values such escapism

implies. While acknowledging the “pathetic banality” of this literature, he links girls’ “inter iorization and exag-gerated, unconscious imitation of a number of differentfeelings to the impressive rise” in the number of teenagegirls’ suicides in Senegal—a more than 60 percent increaseover the last decade.

—DJ Source: Alioune Badara Dieye, “Education sentimentale sur

papier glacé” [Sentimental education on glossy paper], Sud Quotidien (Dakar), in Courrier International, Dec. 10-16, 1998.




W hen a nation’s parliament devotes a day to determining the politics of a comic-book hero, some clarification is called for—especially for Americans, most of whom grow up without Tintinalbums. The February 3 debate of five deputies of France’s

National Assembly who are also members of the Club des par-lementaires tint inophiles was televised throughout Europe but also in Canada and Australia (one wonders if it aired in Russia,since Tintin’s “rehabilitation” by the French Communist Party for his counterrevolutionary behavior “in the land of the Soviets”in 1929). Seventy years aft er theamiable boy-reporter set out onadventures that would pit himagainst Soviet communism, U.S. free-market excesses, Africanslave-trading, Latin Americandictatorship, Asian drug traffic,and much more, French politicians

across the political spectrumclaimed Tintin for their own—Gaullist or centrist, “the perfect synthesis of the current Left coali-tion”—though ultimately found him to stand “to the right of the Left and the left of the Right.”

A strange concern to show a boynot French at all but Belgian-born,as his early adventures in theCongo attest. Hugely popular inhis homeland, he caught on inFrance particularly during the Oc-cupation, when French paper rationing allowed the Belgian dis-tributor of his creator “Hergé” to profit from sudden lack of competition. Indeed it is Hergé’s conduct in the war years, as revealed in recent biographies—his alleged Nazi sympathies and collabo-rationism, his anti-Semitic gags run in his far-Right newspaper strip but suppressed in later book versions—that first called intoquestion the political correctness of a character who is the first hero of many millions of children (or boys, at least). Since theFrench parliament examined the political record of Tintin him-self and not his maker, we asked our friend Rémi Brague to elu-cidate l’affaire Tintin through his lifelong familiarity with thebooks themselves.

In France, an entire postwar generation of children learned toread through Tintin comic books. We all knew the heroes of

these albums: Tintin himself, a round-faced, blond-tuftedteenage boy, inseparable from his dog Milou; Captain Haddock,the cranky sailor with a heart of gold, aficionado of exotic epi-thets; Professor Tournesol (“Sunflower”), the quintessentialabsent-minded professor; Dupont and Dupond, two sleuths asalike in appearance as they are in obtuseness. To say nothing of scores of other true-to-life minor characters.

More than teach us to read, though, Tintin taught us tosee the world. I sense a definite tendency in myself to view

the world as one big Tintin album, less successful than thereal ones, to be sure, but like them, colorful, nuanced, andfull of interesting characters good and bad. Nor, I fear, am Ialone in this, since the twenty-odd albums that make up the

Tintin series have been translated into some forty languagesand dialects.

The central hero first appeared exactly seventy years ago,to no great acclaim—in a badly drawn, badly narrated album.He would surely have been quickly forgotten if the quality of

the drawing and of the plots hadnot improved almost miracu-lously, reaching a pinnacle in thework of the 1950s and ‘60s.

And while the immense talentof Tintin’s creator, the Belgiandraftsman Georges Rémi, whosigned himself Hergé, has never

been in doubt , his personality isregularly called into question. It’sbeen dissected by sociologists andmined by psychoanalysts, who’veput both him and his characterson the couch. (Thus Captain Had-dock’s becoming the owner of acastle has been seen as compensa-tion for the author’s frustr ationover his illegitimate birth.)Certain historians (mainly ama-teurs ) have also pointed out thatHergé’s sensibilities are quite far

from contemporary: in Tintin au Congo, the second album, theblacks of what was then a Belgian colony are presented with apaternalism one can at best smile at: nice folk, of course—his-tory’s bad guys are the whites—but naïve and gullible. Othercritics have noted that, during the German occupation, Hergéwasn’t quite as brave as we know we would have been.

These attacks have only increased with the republication of Hergé’s very first Tintin album on the occasion on the hero’sseventieth anniversary. Criticism would be confined to itsstill-rudimentary technique if the story didn’t concernTintin’s adventures in the Land of Soviets [Tintin au pays dessoviets], which was first pub lished in 1929. Its port rayal of

the misery and oppression created by the Leninist regimecouldn’t be less subtle, nor could its unmasking of thatregime’s propaganda. In France, of course, a good many “intel-lectuals” bent over backwards for the Communist Party wellinto the late 1970s or, at t he very least, aligned t hemselveswith the USSR’s “globally positive” vision. Anti-Communistswere, in the lovely words of Jean-Paul Sartre, mere “dogs.”Even today, to cover over your silence for the murder of tensof millions of people, you need only sneer at a caricaturedHergé, who at least wasn’t trying to excuse the inexcusable,but to denounce it, albeit clumsily.

It’s also been remarked that, in a somewhat later album,

Tintinitis

from Hergé’s Les Aventures de Tintin au Pays des Soviets, (Casterman)



Hergé was hard on Japan for its occupation of China, and laidthe facts out in a part icularly harsh light: an intervent ion jus-tified by a faked coup. Unmasking its underlying ideology, heshows its “civilizing mission” to be a cover-up for sordid inter-ests, the control of the opium traffic.

To the charges leveled against Hergé, let me, however, addan observation that’s rarely been made, though it’s incredibly

obvious. I’m referring to the album Tintin en Amérique. In it,we glimpse a society in which a policeman winks at a dis-guised gangster who holds a smoking gun in one hand and awad of dollar b ills in the other. At the height of Prohibitionthe sheriff collapses dead-drunk so that he can’t rescue Tintin,who’s about to be lynched. Workers in a jam factory go onstrike because the management has decided to lower the priceof the dead rats they buy to make “hare pâté.” We see Indiansbeing evicted by the army from their reservation, where oil’s just been discovered. A low-angle shot shows a papoose beingwhisked off by his mother who, with a bundle on her shoul-der, is being chased down by a bayonet-wielding soldier. Thechild, in tears, drags a teddy bear that could have come

straight out of some riveting scene in The Third Man.The point is clear by now: I solemnly accuse Hergé of anti-

Americanism. But anti-Communism? Nonsense! If there’s any-one to accuse of that, it would be people like Ciliga, Orwell,Kravchenko, Milosz, or Solzhenitsyn. And everyth ing sug-gests they were just basely plagiarizing Hergé—outdoing himat that because, next to the way they present the reality of theSoviet Union, Tintin’s caricature seems almost mild.

Hergé’s real, unpardonable crime is his ant i-Americanism.So why is there no outcry against it? What is the governmentdoing? x

—Rémi BragueSources: Frédéric Potet, “Au Parlement, Tintin est à droite de la

gauche et à gauch e de la droite” [In Parliament, Tint in’s left of theRight and right to the Left], Le Monde, February 5, 1999.

Tim Judah, “‘Tintin in the Dock,” The Guardian (London),January 30, 1999.

First Lady of Feminism

Ever since the Ford presidency, it has been expected thatAmerican first ladies will also become authors. Begin-ning with Betty Ford’s Betty: A Glad Awakening, a new

genre was born which now includes Rosalynn Carter’s First Lady from Plains, Nancy Reagan’s My Turn: The Memoirs of

Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush’s Millie’s Book, and Hillary Rod-ham Clinton’s It Takes a Village and Dear Socks, Dear Buddy.Not to be outdone, Hannelore Kohl, the wife of former Germanchancellor Helmut Kohl, published A Culinary Voyage ThroughGermany a few years ago, which became something of a sensa-tion: a best-selling German cookbook translated into severallanguages, including English.

Perhaps out of pudeur the wives of male French politicianshave not been quick to contribute to this new literature. Yetlast year Sylviane Agacinski, the wife of French prime minis-ter Lionel Jospin, published a learned work on feminism thatwas greeted with great acclaim. Ms. Agacinski is, in fact, a


Iran Between Traditionand Modernity

Mohammad Khatami, President of Iran, recently published long article written exclusively for the Frankfurt er AllgemeinZeitung. This in itself is a remarkable event: voices from Iranwide spectrum of debate normally reach a German audience onlthrough journalistic or scholarly mediators from the West. Anat the moment, news from Iran is quite contradictory. Iran’s political system faces not only increasing social discontent, but all th problems inherent in a dual-sovereignty system. One aspect othis situation is the copresence of censorship with broad-rangindebate. Another is the ambivalent image of Khatami. Is he just more flexible defender of theocratic rule, or Iran’s only chance foa peaceful transition to modern democracy?

I

n this article Khatami speaks for himself, discussing hicountry’s relation to modernity and urging acceptancof the contradiction between Islamic tradition an

Western civilization rather than uncritical embrace of one othe other. Khatami writes that the th ree concepts preoccupying Iranian intellectuals today are tradition, modernity, andevelopment. When a new civilization and its cultures makother cultures obsolete, the latter become decadent and selfcontradictory. At the start of modern civilization Westersociety had to break with its own traditions before that civilization could conquer Europe and North America and begiinfluencing other countries. Iranian culture changed undethis Western influence but still partakes of a medievalrespect for God’s position in human works, thoughts, valueand feelings. Such medieval ideas and beliefs are still o

well-known philosophy professor in Paris who has also published on Kierkegaard and on architecture, as well as thCritique de l’égocentrisme [Critique of egocentrism], whicappeared in 1996. Her most recent work, Politique des sexe[Politics of the sexes] (Seuil) is a defense of “parity,” the principle that a fixed percentage of political offices should breserved for women.

The French debate over parity has been interesting for twreasons. First, it shows that although French feminism is noas militant (nor as suspicious of sexuality) as American femnism, it is far from dead. Second, the debate has split both thright and the left, so that defenders and opponents of the principle can be found all across the political spectrum. MsAgacinski’s position is that the question of gender should bseen as one more manifestation of human “d ifference” thachallenges Western notions of universal humanity. What d istinguishes gender, however, is that it is a universal form of diference—that is, everybody has one. Since that is the caseshe argues, there is no risk that taking gender into account ipolitics risks making it the special interest of a few. Once w

have, she then hopes we will become more comfortable witwhat she calls mixité in general, and less blindly attached tabstract notions of universal citizenship. x

— ML




importance to the majority of the Iranian people. Iraniansmust therefore accept the fact that the contradiction betweentheir culture and the West’s is one of the most importantsources of the crisis in their lives.

But Khatami also insists that it will not help to barricadeoneself behind tradition, since many elements of modern civ-ilization will inevitably enter traditional societies. The crisis

of traditional society only becomes more intense if this fact isignored. Yet u nqualifiedly embracing modernity is alsounhelpful. An uncritical attitude toward Western culture doesnot lead to understanding its foundations and ignores tradi-tions with deep roots in most peoples’ lives. Rather, traditionneeds to be analyzed and criticized.

Development is not a mechanical process; it needs to be con-sciously shaped. Western society does not b lock new ques-tions and needs, and therefore it will change, too. A civiliza-tion only continues to exist as long as it has the potentialwithin itself to answer new questions and satisfy new needs.Such curiosity lies at the very origins of modernity.

It is neither logical nor human to accept t he hegemony of

the West without reserve; but it is also impossible and unrea-sonable to rebel against certain aspects of it. Therefore onemust first get to know the West properly, but without care-lessly treating tradition, which is the source of a people’s his-torical and social identity. Hard as it is to part with any cus-toms, it is all the harder when when they are deemed holy andreligious ones.

In the long run, cultivating such customs may work to a cul-ture’s advantage. Tradition is, after all, as human and aschangeable as civilization. Shouldn’t one be armed with a cri-tique of both modernity and of tradition, Khatami asks.Wouldn’t this make possible a new civilization based on ourpast identity and the impressive achievements of modern civ-ilization? Such a dream cannot be realized by reactionaryreturn to the past, he concludes, but only by searching for asafer position from which to transcend the present and reacha future built on past and present. x

—MB

Source: Sejjed Mohammad Khatami, “Auch die Tradition ist nichtewig: Eine Gesellschaft, die nicht nachdenkt, ist verloren”[Tradition’s not eternal, either: A society that doesn’t think isdoomed], Frankfurter A llgemeine Zeitung, August 1, 1998.

Swedish Brain Drain

As if the flight of Swedish firms to foreign landsweren’t t roubling enough, it now appears that evermore young Swedes are leaving the country in search

of work as soon as they obtain their diplomas. Until recently,most would have hoped to pursue their careers in one of the

large multinationals based in Sweden. But as Marianne Björk-lund recently reported in the Stockholm paper Dagens Hyheter (see Courrier international, April 8-14, 1999), now they arelooking for work abroad.

What are they looking for? Mainly h igher salaries, a bettersocial climate, and lower taxes. Some also clearly enjoy thechallenge of making it abroad. In fact, the Swedish Central Of-fice of Statistics reports that, between 1992 and 1998, thenumber of students emigrating for work has nearly doubled,from 12,600 to 24,6000. The most likely to flee? According tothe Office, engineers and dentists between the ages of twenty-fice and thirty-five, with the preferred destinations beingNorway, the United States, and Great Britain.

Employers are clearly worried about this t rend. An officialat the Federation of Swedish Industries remarked, “We lackqualified people in Sweden, especially engineers and ad-vanced researchers. At present, one-quarter of them leave thecountry, and half of these never return. The p roblem is thatthese departures are not matched by new arrivals of foreign-ers with similar skills. It is good that people are mobile butthat means we need more young foreign workers to immigratehere. We need new blood.”

Why has attracting foreigners been so difficult? High taxesis one reason; another is the lack of good schools for their chil-dren. But businesses must also bear some responsibility forthis deficit: they simply don’t or won’t employ enough for-eign workers with degrees. A 1997 study by the Federation of Civil Engineers showed that 25 percent of unemployed white-collar workers in Sweden were foreigners.

As one official from the Federation put it, “For youngSwedes, learning about other cultures and establishing a net-work of foreign contacts is a good thing. But Sweden itself must show more openness, flexibility, and dynamism to keepits own graduates and attract new ones.” One barrier is thatthe diversity of employees’ training makes it difficult foremployers to know exactly what foreign workers can do. An-other is simply salary. A Swedish engineer who finds work inGermany can expect t o earn 50 percent more and pay fewer

taxes. In Denmark and Norway salaries are 30 to 40 percenthigher but the t ax level is roughly that of Sweden’s. Whenstudents at a Swedish business school were recently askedtheir v iews on emigration, 90 percent mentioned the salarydifferential as a main attraction.

All these might be considered “demand-side” problems. Butwhat about supply? Why doesn’t Sweden simply producemore graduates with advanced degrees? Clearly there are alsoproblems in the educational system, which are reflected inone astonishing statistic: only 60 percent of those who begintheir studies in professional school in Sweden actually finishtheir degrees. x




The Faceless Euro

On January 1, 1999, a new currency, the euro, waborn, and if all goes as planned it will be the onlyEuropean currency as of January 1, 2002. So wha

does this euro look like?In a scathing article published late last year, the Frenc

writer Régis Debray analyzed the new currency’s design, caling it “virtual” money for a “virtual” nation. The five-eurnote shows an antique aqueduct, the ten-euro b ill a Romaportal and br idge. And the 200-euro note shows only a glasdoor and a viaduct. In other words, on the new euro there inot a single human being—no Erasmus, Shakespeare, Newton, or Goethe. The ancient pillars and columns have no foundations, and there are no recognizable landscapes, either.

What does this imagery say about the new Europe? IDebray’s view, it represents “Euroland,” a no-man’s-lanwithout historical memory. Money is a kind of “collective IDcard” that tells people they b elong to a nation’s imaginarcommunity. The euro, on the other hand, looks like Monopol

money. And isn’t this the t ruth about Europe, Debray wonders. Given its continued dependence on the United States, is the dollar, with its strong and evocative imagery, tharemains the real lingua franca of the global economy, anEurope remains a vassal to American power. Post-MaastrichEurope is a land that has no founding event , no destiny, nbattle of independence—and thus no independence. The eurvisually represents a bitter political truth, that Europe has yeto mature and remains in its adolescence. x

—ML

Source: Régis Debray, “A Faceless Currency Representing a VirtuEurope,” International Herald-Tribune, November 28-29, 1998.

Régis Debray’sExcellent Adventure

R

égis Debray is a survivor. Well before the Latin Quarterclashes of May ‘68, the young Debray embraced revo-lutionary Marxism and sped to the Latin American

jungle to fight at Che Guevara’s side. Captured, he was jaileduntil 1970 in Bolivia, where his Revolution in the Revolution?(1967) and Strategy for Revolution (1970) made him famous.

Debray’s celebrity waned in the 1970s but revived in 1981with his appointment as President Mitterand’s special coun-selor, a position he held until 1989. In that period Debraywrote several acclaimed books on French intellectuals and onmilitary strategy, as well as essays and novels. He had also cometo be regarded as a leader of an important faction on the Frenchleft, the so-called republicans, who defend the integratingfunction of the French school system, admire De Gaulle (subject of another Debray book), and see the United States as thegreatest threat to French sovereignty. More recently Debray

has also founded, named, written books and edited journalson a new social science, “mediology.”

Debray is, if nothing else, unconventional. But the willfulnonconformist may undermine himself and make the com-monest, most predictable of errors. So Debray’s critics andmany ex-comrades interpret his controversial article in Le Monde (May 13, 1999) on his recent tr ip to ex-Yugoslavia. AsCorrespondence goes to press, French debate still rages aboutNATO’s Balkan air-war. But while many French contest thewar, everyone seems to concede that Serbia has committedatrocities in Kosovo. Everyone, that is, but Debray. Like 1930stravelers to the U.S.S.R., Michel Foucault in post-revolution-ary Iran, or, more recently, dramatist Peter Handke in Serbia,Debray has made a brief visit to the Balkans and discoveredsomething no other journalist, d iplomat, or aide-worker has:that nothing particularly wrong is happening there.

Debray’s article takes the form of a letter to French presidentJacques Chirac (old habits die hard), reporting on his sevendays in the Balkans, only four of which were spent in Kosovo.He boasts of employing his own translator, since, he says, thelocals are notoriously unreliable and sympathize with theKosovar army. He begins in Serbia and notes the schools andchildren’s theaters destroyed by NATO bombs, and factoriesturned to rubble, leaving thousands unemployed. Otherwise,he finds Belgrade a perfectly normal city, with cafés full of

vocal critics of the ruling party. Debray admits PresidentMilosevic is “an autocrat, a fraud, a manipulator,” but noteshe has still been reelected three times in free elections.

In Kosovo, Debray shows more prudence. Relying on reportsof western journalists (one of them of Serbian origin), he findsno evidence of crimes against humanity in the region. The exo-dus of hundreds of thousands of Kosovars he attributes entirelyto the NATO air campaign, aided by the cynical military strat-egy of the Kosovar army, itself guilty of atrocities. As for theKosovars, it is hard to ascertain now why they left: out of fear,to emigrate to the U.S. or Switzerland, who knows? We doknow the Serbs resisted the Nazis and have always been

philosemitic, while some Albanians formed SS units under thoccupation. Debray draws a final parallel between the wars iKosovo and Algeria, warning Chirac that France risks losing amuch in the Balkans today as it did in North Africa forty yearago. De Gaulle rightly pulled out then, and Chirac would bwise to pull out now—especially since NATO, as De Gaullonce defined it, is nothing bu t “an organization imposed o

the Atlantic alliance [for] the military and political subordination of Western Europe to the United States.”

“Adieu, Régis Debray” ran the headline over philosopheBernard-Henri Lévy’s article in Le Monde the next day. Lévcalls Debray’s art icle “the ‘live’ suicide of an intellectual,” anattacks him for vainly th inking his sprint could have taughhim more than the eye-witness accounts of hundreds of ouside observers in the region for eight years now. The same daAlain Joxe, a noted academic researcher, marvelled thaDebray’s article omitted any reference to recent Balkan history—Sarajevo, Srebrenica—and unskeptically accepted Serbia’s propaganda about Kosovo and its own regime. So the criticisms have mounted, day after day these past two week

—except in L’Humanité, the paper of the French CommunisParty, which praises Debray’s intellectual courage. It iunknown if Debray welcomes this support or not. x

— ML



The year 1989 represented the victory of “the past”over an imagined future. Socialism had promised aworld in which Prometheus would be unbound,where

man would be “equal, un classed, tr ibeless and nationless.”

Soviet Marxism imposed a blanket over peoples, inflicting asingle creed that smothered historic allegiances. Yet the futurewas a chimera, as was the “end of history.” What we have beenwitnessing over the past decade is the “resumption of history”—with the political explosion of ethnicities and nationalism,the fragmentation of societies, and the re-assertion of primor-dial identities and loyalties.

In this respect, the twentieth-century was framed by twocritical events: the disbanding of empire (the historic charac-teristic of political rule) and the rise andfall of Soviet power. The end of WorldWar I saw the break-up of the Habsburg,Wilhelminian, and Romanov regimes, as

well as the Ottoman Empire that spannedAsia Minor. The end of World War II sawthe passing of European colonialism. Be-fore that time, 80 percent of the world’sland mass and 80 percent of the world’speoples had been under the control of Western powers. With a rapidity atwhich future historians will marvel, theBritish, French, Belgian, Dutch, and Por-tuguese empires were dismantled, andabout 120 new states were created. Yetmost of these states had no natural boun-daries or clear geographical or tribal uni-ties. India became divided, nominally on Hindu/Muslim lines,and Pakistan then broke in two, with Bangladesh emerging inthe East. Indonesia became a chain of a thousand islands madeup of disparate cultures, and claiming the territory of EastTimor. Sub-Saharan Africa became a messy patchwork of dozens of states with diverse clans and tribes overflowing each.

Only the Soviet Union enlarged its territory at t he end of World War II. Yet today its empire has crumbled, leaving inits wake a multiplicity of peoples, large entities and small, eachstruggling to define its own identity. From the old SovietUnion came the large republics in Central Asia, but also thesmall ethnic nat ionalities of Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Udmur-

tia, Bujryatia, Tuva, Komi, and Sakha-Yakutia—all of whomclaim, in their constitutions, a desire to secede or to achieve apreferential status in their republics. In fact, about 25 millionRussians now live in former Soviet states and have, de facto,second-class status.

The most salient political fact in the world today is that everynation on the globe is a plural society, a polysemous melangewith large admixtures of minority linguistic and ethnic groups,each clinging, however desperately, to some historic identityoutside the majority group. No nation in the world is stillhomogeneous, culturally or linguistically. Japan, which oncehad been, today has knots of Korean, Pakistani, and Chinese

groups occupying distinct enclaves in Tokyo. Sweden, once rel-atively homogeneous, t oday has groups of gypsies and Turkswho are not assimilable into the native population.And thenthere are the dispersed groups desperately seeking to become

a state, such as the Kurds who are spread across Turkey, Iraq,and Iran. (And there are even the Israeli Kurds, who think of themselves as a people but accept Israeli citizenship.)

Nationalism, according to Ernest Gellner, was a product of modernity. It followed from the logic of industry, whichdestroys local particularities and inculcates a common languageand common culture in a people. What is startling, and evenawesome in its intensity, is the resurgence of ethnic nationalismin the modern world—which had assumed that such passions

had been leached away by the cosmopoli-tan culture. Yet ethnic nat ionalism is pri-mordial, as against the inclusive culturesof the United States (and in a more modi-

fied form, of France) which unites diversepeoples under the banner of citizenship.

Ethnic nationalism is “pre-modern” andintegral to traditional societies. Commonunderstandings and obligations to kin aretransmitted from fathers to sons, clans areformed by bands of brothers, and emo-tional bonds are strengthened by religionand history. Ethnic nationalism claims acommon kin-folk, rooted in common ori-gins, common history, and a common fate—even when they derive from legendsand myth and become transformed into an

emotional identity. This is a phenomenon which contemporarysociology has forgotten. Today it drives events in areas such asthe Balkans or the former Soviet Union. The prime example, atthe moment, is Serbia.

The Serbs, a Slavic people, came to the Balkans in the sev-enth century and have remained in the area continuouslysince then.The defining moment came in 1389, when theOttoman Turks defeated the Serbs at Kosovo Poljie, the Fieldof Blackbirds, and beheaded the Serb leader, Prince Lazar. Hislegendary action—choosing death rather than surrender—became the founding myth of Serbian national consciousnessand pan-Slavic aspirations.

For centuries pan-Slavism has played a subterranean role inthe history of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, similar to theinchoate ideas of pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism. In nine-teenth-century Russia, Slavophiles such as Dostoevsky pro-claimed a mystical bond, l’âme slave, and the OrthodoxChurch to be the essence of Slavism.Territorially, there are theEast Slavs (Russia, the Ukraine, and Byelorussia), the WestSlavs (Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks), and the South Slavs (Serbia,Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, and Montenegro). Only the factof a South Slavic state came to tangled and fratricidal fru ition.

With the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire afterWorld War I, the Kingdom of Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia

Essay

The Resumption of History



Essay Miscellany

was created under th e rule of Peter I of Serbia. He was suc-ceeded by his son, Alexander I, who had been the army chief in the Balkan wars of 1912. But disorders multipled, andAlexander established a d ictatorship in 1929, renaming thecountry Yugoslavia. In October 1934 Croatian terrorists assas-sinated King Alexander in Paris.

The victory of Tito in 1945 brought an uneasy peace within

the region, but also the seeds of future trouble. The newYugoslavia was made up of six republics—Serbia, Croatia,Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Slovenia—and two autonomous regions, Kosovo and Vojvodina. Butwith in the divisions lay a contrad iction: Yugoslavia was notitself a single nation-state, and within it the distinctionbetween nation and state was blurred. Only in the case of Slovenia were the two coterminous. Yugoslavia was to be aunion of peoples, all under Communist rule. Yet t he factremained that out of a population of 20 million persons, fourmillion, or one out of five, had been displaced and movedaway from their original homeland.

A melancholy tale of terror, massacres, and deportation fol-

lowed. It has been said that the wars in the Balkans are not dueto ethnic hatreds but to the manipulation of evil men. That evilmen manipulate emotional feelings goes without saying. Yetone should not underestimate the seduction of the impulse tokill for revenge or the idea of dying for a cause, especiallywhen fueled by the power of nationalism and history. I think,for example, of Mihalo Markovic, a courageous dissident dur-ing the Tito regime and an editor of the liberal Marxist maga-zine Praxis, who taught at the University of Pennsylvania dur-ing the Tito period. Today he is the vice president of Milosevic’s Serbian Socialist Party and the ideologue of theregime, defending Serbian efforts to maintain Yugoslaviaagainst break-away republics by invoking Abraham Lincoln’sefforts to save the Union in the American Civil War.

Nor should one underestimate the role of religion. Through-out all the expulsions and migrations, what kept the Serbstogether, as Serbs, has been their religion. And here we returnto Prince Lazar of 1389, whose legends were written down bychurch scribes and canonized in repeated cycles of folk poetry.His body was laid to rest in Pristina, but then t ransferred in1401 or 1402 to a monastery Lazar had founded in Ravanica.His dried body was dressed in a coat adorned with lions ram-pant, clothes he reputedly wore in the battle where he met hisdeath. He was also covered with a shroud of red cloth embroi-dered in gold with the prayer of the nun Jefima: “Don’t forget

your beloved children, who need your help, O Martyr.” Overthe centuries the bones were moved from place to place untiltransferred to Belgrade, where they lay in the patriarchalchurch. As prelude to the commemoration of the 600thanniversary of the great battle, Lazar’s bones were taken in1989 for a tour around Serbia and Bosnia, from monastery tomonastery. Today they lie once more in Ravanica, and onSundays the coffin is opened, though only his brown and with-ered hands peek out from under the shroud.

There are no comedies in history, for there are no happyendings—or, for that matter, any endings. x

—Daniel Bell

The Mother Tongue

Till recently an intellectual debate over language was raging in continental Europe. The issue, put simply, wawhether language reflected and changed with the stat

of society, or whether it helped to shape society and determinits evolution. Two journalists’ reports on linguistic shifts i

Great Britain and Russia offer new answers to the question.In the Independent on Sunday British journalist John Morris

reports on the democratization of the English accent and howit’s been received. The British high-society accent, he suggests, is endangered because it is being abandoned both bthe shrinking upper-classes and overtaken by street languageThis so-called posh accent has grown so rare that the NationaSound Archives has commissioned actress Prunella Scales trecord a posh anthology to teach future drama students howto deliver the lines of Wilde, Coward, and Shaw.

Posh is a variant of what the British have for over a centurcalled “received pronunciation,” or RP. RP was first defined fopublic school use in 1869, though it dates, apparently, from th

sixteenth-century London court. Until recently, it existed iseveral forms. U-RP, for example, was the pronunciation of thupper-most class, the royal family; the BBC also used it througthe 1960s. Thereafter it adopted “modified RP” for news broadcasts, and still uses it—though only three percent of the Britispopulation can speak it. Instead, “estuary English,” the pronunciation of the area near the mouth of the Thames, now dominates the increasingly-democratic British society, from nonBBC disk jockies to the Spice Girls, who speak it perfectly.

A different sort of linguistic transformation is occurring iRussia, as Alexei Mitrofanov reports in Izvestia. Until 1989, was customary (if not obligatory) for Russians to address eacother as tovarich (comrade), avoiding the older term gospardi(sir). What to do now? Immediately following the RussiaRevolution, tovarich was reserved for the Communist Partelite and gospardin was used especially by those dissatisfiewith the revolution. “Comrade” was mainly a badge of honofor supporters of revolution, foreigners included. Mitrofanorecounts that dancer Isadora Duncan, staying in Moscow ithe early 1920s, would correct those who addressed her a MademoiselleDuncan with a brusk “Comrade Duncan!”

Over time, “comrade” won out, though not without somvery Russian hybrids popping up (“comrade little-father”With the Gorbachev era Russians grew embarrassed by thterm, yet gospardin had come to sound so ridiculous to Russia

ears, people hardly knew what to do. No solution’s been foundso Russians try to avoid situations requiring formal addresAdministrative letters generally omit a t itle, using only the family name of the person addressed. On buses and in the streetpeople are addressed impersonally, since no other option—comrade, sir, miss, madame, “hey, you”—makes sense.

Gospardin will return, Mitrofanov thinks, if only faute dmieux. Foreigners in Russia use this rather literary word unabashedly. Unlike tovarich, which already sounds archaic. x

— ML

Source: Both articles appeared in French translation iCourrier international, April 15-21, 1999.



Necrology

Louis Dumont

The most influential social science inthe English-speaking world is

undoubtedly economics. In twentieth-century France, economics has playedlittle role in intellectual or political life,

while anthropology has been absolutelycentral. And, after Claude Lévi-Strauss,surely the most important anthropologistin postwar France was Louis Dumont,who died last November at the age of 87.

Dumont first made his repu tation asan Indologist, publishing a now classicwork in the field, Homo hierarchicus, in1966. This book received little attentionwhen it first appeared, mainly due tothe fact that “structuralism”—whetherthat of Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, or

Michel Foucault—was all the rage. Yetits attentive readers saw that Dumont’sapproach to anthropology, which heclaimed had been inspired by Tocque-ville, offered a potentially powerful cri-tique and alternative to the variousstructuralisms then. In a famous preface

to that work, Dumont argued thatanthropology had foundered on theproblem of individualism. Old-fash-ioned anthropologists studied inequal-ity among individuals in societies wherethe very notion of the individual wasabsent; structuralists, on the otherhand, made the inverse mistake bytreating modern societies as thoughthey were “structured” like premodernones. Anthropologists saw individual-ism everywhere, or nowhere.

What Dumont learned from Tocque-

ville is that t here are two sorts of soci-eties in the world—holistic-hierarchicaland individualistic—and that they mustbe studied in different t erms. While hebegan his career studying the formertype, he devoted his mature years toanalyzing the modern world of democ-ratic individualism. As French intellec-tuals began moving away from Marxismand structuralism in the 1970s, Du-mont’s work on modern individualismbecame highly influential among philo-sophers, political theorists, sociologists,and even historians, among them Fran-çois Furet, who was also rediscoveringTocqueville in this same period.

Dumont’s later work, which he col-lected under the general title Homoaequalis, focused on the rise of the mod-ern West out of Christianity, the devel-opment of individualist ideology in eco-nomic and social thought, and, in hislater years, the development of racismand nationalism as a reaction to theprocess of individualization. The last

works focused on Germany, for morethan one reason. Dumont spent fiveyears in a German prisoner-of-warcamp, during which time he learnedSanskrit and reflected on the GermanSonderweg. As he reported in his lastbook translated into English, German Ideology: From France to Germany and Back (1995), these two apparently unre-lated research projects actually nour-ished each other. In the end they drovehim to the conclusion that the rise of

Jean Malaquais

Jean Malaquais, who d ied in Decem-ber at the age of 90, was a French

writer of a rare sort. He was, to beginwith, not French at all. Born WladimirMalacki in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1908,Malaquais ran away from home as ateenager and made h is way to France,where he worked as a miner, a deckhand, and a vegetable porter in the LesHalles Market of Paris. He also learned

French, and by 1938 had written hisfirst novel, Les Javanais, which de-scribes the life of foreign workers in the“Java” lead and silver mines of Pro-vence. This work made its way into thehands of André Gide, who admired itsrealistic style and epic grandeur, andarranged for its publication in 1939.Leon Trotsky immediately reviewed it,favorably, which helped it win the pres-tigious Prix Renaudot.

Malaquais received news of the prizewhile serving on the Maginot Line in1939, the beginning of a war that wouldchange his own destiny. He eventuallymade his way to the free zone in thesouth of France, where he befriended anumber of important émigrés, amongthem Heinrich Mann and Walter Ben- jamin. With the help of one of theunsung heroes of that period, VarianFry, Malaquais eventually got to Vene-zuela and Mexico where he spent thewar years writing his extraordinary journals, which appeared immediately

in English as War Diary (1944) butcould not be published in Vichy France.Malaquais spent the rest of his life writ-

ing in semi-oblivion, living for a while inthe United States, where he befriendedNorman Mailer, who wrote a preface forhis novel The Joker. Mailer wrote thatMalaquais “had more influence upon mymind than anyone I ever knew from thetime we had gotten well acquainted” andheld him up as the example of thedevoted writer. “How many friends can

individualism is fraught with dangers,not least of which is a nostalgia for aholistic world we can never return to.

Among his other works in English areFrom Mandeville to Marx (1977) andEssays on Individualism (1986).

—ML

Buñuel’s Regret

“As I drift toward my last sigh Ioften imagine a final joke. I convokearound the deathbed my friends who

are confirmed atheists, as I am. Thena priest, whom I have summoned,arrives; and to the horror of myfriends I make a confession, ask forabsolut ion for my sins, and receiveextreme unction. After which I turnover on my side and expire.

But will I have the strength to joke at that moment?

Only one regret. I hate to leavewhile t here’s so much going on. It’slike quitting in the middle of a ser-ial. I doubt there was so much

curiosity about the world afterdeath in the past, since in thosedays the world didn’t change quiteso rapidly or so much. Frankly,despite my horror of t he press, I’dlove to rise from the grave everyten years or so and go buy a fewnewspapers. Ghostly pale, slidingsilently along the walls, my papersunder my arm, I’d return to thecemetery and read about all thedisasters in the world beforefalling back to sleep, safe andsecure in my tomb.”

—Luis Buñuelfrom his memoir My Last Sigh



Necrology Miscel lany

Giulio Einaudi

Giulio Einaudi, one of the majorItalian publishers of this centur y,

died on April 5 at the age of 87. From itsfounding in 1933 his house, GiulioEinaudi Editore, combined remarkableliterary talent with a vanguard of polit-ical, social, and scient ific analysis. Thecatalog came to include many modernclassics, by political theorists Antonio

Gramsci and Norberto Bobbio andauthors Cesare Pavese, Carlo Levi, CarloEmilio Gadda, Eugenio Montale, NataliaGinzburg, Primo Levi, LeonardoSciascia, and Italo Calvino. Einaudi“deprovincialized” a still relativelybackwater culture at its potentiallymost insular moment; through whatPavese termed “the decade of transla-tions,” the house offered Italians contactwith a foreign literary modernismwhose liberties native writers underFascism could themselves scarcely takewith impunity. As Bobbio recently said,Einaudi Editore was “the house of anti-fascism,” all its founders directly activein t he Resistance, most—Giulio amongthem—imprisoned, and at least onemurdered, for their political beliefs.

Given their heroic origins, Einaudibooks could not help but lose much of their aura well before their publisher’sphysical death—particularly in 1994,when the “princely,” utterly cost-unconscious founder was forced into full

merger with Mondadori, a vast holdingin the media empire of future right-wingPrime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. In thewake of 1989 Giulio, son of liberal econ-omist Luigi Einaudi, Italy’s Presidentfrom 1947 to 1955, was accused of long-time Communist “sectarianism,” of hav-ing “forced” a Left hegemony on Italianculture. His defenders, Bobbio amongthem, point out that in fact he remainedloyal to his father’s economic liberalism,“wedding” Italian communist political

thought (the unorthodox Gramsci’s,above all) with the liberalism of themovement Giustizia e Libertà (see page7, “The Two Italies”); nor did he everneglect staunchly Catholic writers,though his Catholics were invariablyCommunist or left-wing. Launched with

a volume on America’s New Deal, theEinaudi list included the first publica-tion in the West (1957) of the USSR-banned Doctor Zhivago as well asKhrushchev’s speeches (1964); its social-science titles in psychoanalysis andethnography in particular belie thecharges of rigid adherence to ItalianCommunist Party dictates.

The vast and commercially successfulStoria d’Italia Einaudi launched in the1970s typifies its period’s mingling of aclass-oriented materialist approach with

a fashionably French-influenced stresson “total” social history and mentalités:it must, says one critic, be the onlymulti-volume social history that barelymentions the family, health, or thespread of welfare provisions, and thatonly gradually takes up Italy’s transfor-mation over the past century.

In recent years, despite its takeover,the house has seemed to meet harsh newmarket demands with a balance of oldstrengths and fine new writers. Lastyear’s publication of the Letters fromYouth by labor historian Vittorio Foaattested above all to Giulio Einaudi’spolitical and personal fidelity. Thoughpublished by Einaudi only from the1970s on, Foa had been arrested withhim in 1943, and these letters fromyouth, which were, more importantly,letters from prison, contained passagespolice censorship had made illegiblesince their delivery. In an act of “neces-sary reparation,” Einaudi had policelabs restore them through new forensic

technology. While the Einaudi catalogof over five thousand titles will doubt-less take on important new titles, itsglory is decidedly linked to a formerera, one of progressive aesthetics as wellas politics—when its elegantly white-clad, strikingly illustrated, durablepaperback volumes, paragons of post-war design, symbolized a fresh begin-ning for Italy, a newly European stature,a nat ional coming of age.

—DJ

Dewy Decimas

Today’s internat ional vogue for livaudience-vote poetry contests wa

partially inspired by the birth of thpoetry “slam” in the 1980—to be exacat the NYorican Café, on New York

Lower East Side. Evoking aggressivcollisions, early “slams” were neo-Beayet also contemporary with the psychoagons of daytime talk-shows; now, evea Dutch poetry festival announces itslam sections in the TLS.

This April a National Public Radirepor ter v isited the NYorican Café tcover a much different poetry contesTrue to its roots, the café hosted the decima competition of young U.S. PuertRicans. Thriving in Latin America, decima concursos are held across Puert

Rico every weekend. The island champion flown in to judge this meagerlattended, fledgling New York versioclaimed to have performed before aaudience of 100,000.

The decima is a venerable form frommedieval Spain. Its ten lines each contain eight syllables, in a rhyme schemof abbaaccddc. Backed now by a fourpiece band, the trovador improvisetoward a final, “forced” line, the p forzado, assigned, and usually composed, by the judge, who hands it to thcontestant on a folded slip of paper andeducts points for “sloppy rhyme(including repetitions) or thematic blur

Solemn or humorous, the form requires a skill often ignored in the moreclectic “slams,” where ‘attitude’ inearly all, and any improvisation is amost thematic. Perhaps, like rap lyrcists, young Hispanics will soon brhyming aloud in public—to master form whose closest analogue may bthose mandarin fugue improvisation

organists rarely attempt still on sighunseen themes one of their guildevises for the occasion. Bungling, sayone contestant, “feels like you’ve killesomeone.” But U.S. proficiency stivaries widely in this difficult genre Decima judge Arturo Santiago hides hart in wistfully concluding: “It’s something that comes out of you. And yolose it; it goes in the air.... Nobodwrites it down.” s

—DJ

one count on to set examples for a life?”he asked. Malaquais never attracted suchdevotees in France, though that maychange. In the last five years of his life Les Javanais was republished to muchacclaim, followed by his war journals.There are now plans to reissue the rest of

his long-neglected works.



T H E C O M M I T T E E O N

INTELLECTUAL CORRESPONDENCE

is an international project spon-sored by the Suntory Foundation(Japan), the Wissenschaftskolleg zuBerlin and the American Academyof Arts and Sciences.

Dir ec t or sDaniel BellWolf LepeniesMasakazu Yamazaki

Associat es

Michael BeckerMasayuki Tadokoro

Edit or

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Mana ging Edi t or

David Jacobson

Gra ph ic Designer

Glenna Lang

U.S. Address:

CORRESPONDENCE

c/o Council on Foreign Relations58 East 68th StreetNew York, New York 10021

Telephone: (212) 434-9574FAX: (212) 861-0432E-mail: [email protected]

The Committee on IntellectualCorrespondence acknowledges withgratitude the financial support of theSasakawa Peace Foundation of Japan.

A Repor t t o Our Rea der s

A Report to Our ReadersWith this issue the Newsletter of the Committee on Intellectual Correspondenc

acquires a new title. When the Committee was formed in 1997 by representatives othe Suntory Foundation, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and the AmericaAcademy of Arts and Sciences, our aspiration was somewhat grand. As we wrote ithe first issue, “we wish to contribute, if possible, to the renaissance of a cultura

milieu where intellectuals and serious teachers and writers, as well as curious scientists and public figures, can learn about the cultural and intellectual issues of othecountries.” But since our means were limited the decision was made to begin slowlwith a project that would be of immediate use to those interested in intellectual lifabroad. Our first project was to produce a low-budget newsletter that would reporon recent intellectual debates taking place in international publications, while giving our readers enough references to find the original articles or books in questionThe publication would be edited cooperatively in three countr ies, appear twiceyear, and be d istribut ed free-of-charge to leading figures in intellectual and cultural life in the Americas, Europe, and Asia.

Yet under the editorship of Daniel Bell, the Newsletter immediately became a morsubstantial and (in our view) more handsome publication, appearing as a forty-odpage, t ype-set review. The reaction of our readers and the international press ha

been so overwhelming that it was felt the publication’s title should more accuratelreflect what it had become. And so we present Correspondence: An Internationa Review of Culture and Society. The review will still appear twice yearly and continuto cover developments in Western Europe, the U.S., and Japan, though we hopsoon to be in a position to br ing news from Latin America, Africa, and EasterEurope. We are also planning to develop special sections on important themes, suchas the symposium on history in the current issue. Among the themes we hope tcover soon are religion and educational policy.

We would like to think we are succeeding in our efforts and are encouraged to learthat others think so, too. The German weekly newspaper Die Zeit (March 11, 1999recently devoted an enthusiastic article to the review which led to over five hundreinquiries to our offices from German readers alone. Keeping in mind that vanity goethbefore the fall, we have decided to share with you what Die Zeit had to say:

Usually anything we receive marked “newsletter” is some institution’s drearysheet of random information—anything but news of actual interest to an out -sider. Here is something completely different: the Newsletter of the Committeeon Intellectual Correspondence comes out twice a year and there’s hardly a dullmoment in its packed forty-eight pages.

This English-language publication manages quite charmingly to ignore stan-dard modern layout expectations—there are a few Grandville illustrations, andas much text as possible—a boon for readers, and particularly those readers whogrieve that they can’t read everything. The Newsletter presents news of whatused to be called “intellectual life.” The team scours periodicals, academic litera-ture and belles lettres from the world over, to inform its readership of the latestdevelopments in clear, comprehensible language. Today, everyone bandies about

the term “globalization,” but who really knows what’s on their neighbors’ mind?Daniel Bell writes: “Our intention was to overcome the cultural parochialismthat has walled off many countries from one another, and the specializationsthat have created hermetic discourses which isolate the disciplines “

In this particular issue, the subjects include the future of the publishing indus-try after digitalization, English culture policy after Blair, news of the Italian booktrade, Pierre Bourdieu’s radicalization, Latin-American novels after Magical