The Undivided Past (9 page)

To be sure, there has been an integrated schooling movement in Ulster since the early 1970s, entitled
All Children Together—a valiant but largely vain attempt to open up a conversation across the hitherto mostly impermeable boundaries of educationally conditioned religious identity.
¹³¹
It draws its membership from across the spectrum of religious and nonreligious groupings, though they are (perhaps unsurprisingly) generally liberal, middle-class, and committed (but tolerant) Christians. In 1978, All Children Together helped bring about the passage of the
Education (Northern Ireland) Act, permitting the establishment of multidenominational schools where desired by sufficient numbers of parents. But the legislation did not affect the existing segregated system, and alternative schools had to be self-funding until they had signed up enough pupils—a serious challenge since Northern Ireland opinion generally supports denominational education.
¹³²
So while many Catholic and Protestant politicians and clergy increasingly urge interfaith dialogue and cooperation, and although the integrated schools movement grows steadily, these institutions serve at present less than 5 percent of the attending population, which means that even in the more placid and prosperous Ulster of the early twenty-first century, these conversations are still pitifully few among young people across these still powerfully institutionalized sectarian identities.
¹³³

As the unhappy experience of Northern Ireland suggests, this is what happens, and this is what can go wrong, when a religious identity is officially imposed and promoted as the only one that matters. For obviously these Ulster schoolchildren cannot possibly be described wholly and exclusively in terms of their religious beliefs and identities: they are also boys and girls, working-class and middle-class, straight and gay, and so on. As the historian
Marianne Elliott rightly notes, having investigated both Protestant Ireland and Catholic Ireland, it is “absurd to think that religious … identities take primacy over others in deciding human behaviour,” be that behavior individual or collective.
¹³⁴
But instead of encouraging young people to think about their many
and varied identities, faith-based schools ghettoize them, so that the only contemporaries they are likely to encounter are also their coreligionists, the purpose of their education being in significant part to reinforce their sense not only of collective religious identity, but also of collective religious superiority. Thus can schooling fail at what must surely count as one of its essential purposes in a pluralistic world, namely to foster an understanding of who other people are, and of what one might oneself become. For as has often been recognized, it is better to be kind to strangers than to embrace the bigotry and intolerance of militant
Manicheanism, and this in turn means that the twenty-fifth chapter of the
Gospel according to Matthew needs to be read with considerable care.
¹³⁵

THE FIRST VOLUME OF
General
Charles de Gaulle’s peacetime memoirs begins with his return to power in
France in 1958, and offers an eloquent and emotional evocation of
national history, geography, “genius,” and identity. “France,” de Gaulle writes, “has emerged from the depths of the past. She is a living entity. She responds to the call of the centuries. Yet she remains herself through time.” Accordingly, although somewhat paradoxically, “her boundaries may alter, but not the contours, the climate, the rivers and seas that are her eternal imprint.” For, he insists, “her land is inhabited by people who, in the course of history, have undergone the most diverse experiences, but whom destiny and circumstance, exploited by politics, have unceasingly moulded into a single nation,” which “comprises a past, a present and a future that are indissoluble.” As a result, “the state, which is answerable for France, is in charge at one and the same time of yesterday’s heritage, today’s interests and tomorrow’s hopes.” Across a millennium and a half, de Gaulle believed, these obligations had been discharged in the name of the French people by the
Merovingians, the Carolingians, the Capetians, the Bonapartes, and the Third Republic, whereupon he himself was twice invested with “supreme authority” as he sought to “lead the country to salvation” by offering his compatriots “no other goal” but that of the summit and “no other road but that of endeavour.” Such, for de Gaulle, was the uniquely “enduring character” of the French nation, embracing “countless generations” of the dead, the living, and the as yet unborn: the ultimate embodiment of the most significant and long-lasting form of collective human solidarity.
¹

Charles de Gaulle was born in 1890 and died in 1970, and his life virtually coincided with what has often been described (and sometimes deplored) as “the apotheosis of the
nation state.”
²
From the signing of the Peace of
Westphalia of 1648, so this argument runs, the religious identities (and antagonisms) of faith were gradually superseded by the
secular identities (and antagonisms) of “the nation.” Hence the Great Powers that dominated Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; hence the creation of the United States as “a new nation,” soon followed by the Latin American republics to the south; hence the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars that unleashed across Europe the pent‑up forces of romantic
nationalism; hence the “nation-making” that characterized the continent across the nineteenth century, culminating in the
First World War; hence the
Treaty of Versailles, which reorganized Europe according to the principle of “national self-determination”; hence the
Second World War, when nations in Europe, Asia, and North America went into battle with each other all over again; hence postwar decolonization, when new,
independent countries were created across the globe as the European empires were dismantled; and hence, two decades after de Gaulle’s death, the collapse of the
Soviet Union and the emergence (or reemergence) of many old-new nations in eastern Europe and in Asia.
³
From this perspective, it seems clear that initially across Europe and subsequently around the world, people have increasingly thought of themselves as, and organized themselves in, “nationalities.” The result, according to the Australian transnational historian
Ian Tyrrell, is that in modern times collective human identities, “though multiple,” have become “primarily national ones.”
⁴

During the years between the death of Charles de Gaulle and the breakup of the
Soviet Empire, his compatriot
Fernand Braudel began a multivolume work,
The Identity of France
, that aimed to uncover, explore, and celebrate a nation whose “entire history” was that of “the process of creating or recreating itself.” Combining mysticism, exceptionalism, and nationalism in an elegiac, epic narrative, Braudel’s last work, left incomplete, was a Gaullist account of the French national past, beginning in “the mists of time” and ending with a disparagement of the Vichy regime and homage to the wartime Resistance.
⁵
“I have never ceased,” the author wrote in his introduction, “to think of a France buried deep inside itself, a France flowing along the contours of its own age-long history, destined to continue, come what may.” Inspired by a sense of civic duty and a long-pent‑up patriotism, this enterprise was Braudel’s belated declaration of his love for France, which he admitted was “a demanding and complicated passion.” And in writing this “age-long history” of the nation he understood “almost instinctively,” Braudel defined his subject in the familiar appositional terms essential to the formation and articulation of any collective identity: it was France against the world, “
nous vis-à-vis
the others, a bit like the sportscaster of an international match unable to conceal in myriad small ways his predilection for his nation’s team.” Here was a history of France’s national identity that was also intended to reinforce its present and future sense of itself, for “to define France’s past,” Braudel explained, “is to place the French people within their own existence.”
⁶

Yet Braudel’s extended, unfinished love letter to the identity and exceptionalism of France represented the late-life endeavor and declaration (or, alternatively, the misguided recantation and apostasy) of a scholar who had made his reputation by denouncing and transcending what he once disparaged as “the usual framework of national
histories, in which every historian worthy of the name has long ceased to believe.”
⁷
Inspired by such innovative
Annaliste
scholars as
Marc Bloch and
Lucien Febvre, Braudel had spent most of his career proclaiming that history should no longer be written along exclusively national lines, and in his most famous book,
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II
, he furnished a pioneering and bravura example of how to
approach the past in a very different way, in deliberate opposition to the “frankly traditional historiography” of nationalist historians such as
Leopold von Ranke. For Braudel was convinced that the bounded territorialities, parochial differences, and petty quarrels
of nation-states were too narrow a field and too constrained a subject; he dismissed them as “l’histoire événementielle,” the flotsam and jetsam of superficial happenings and transient episodes, insignificant compared to the more deep-rooted patterns, trends, and developments concerning the environment, climate, demography, production, and consumption, which formed “the essentials of man’s past.”
⁸
From this very different viewpoint, history was not the pious handmaid of national identity, but its implacable enemy, for “nations per se were abstractions if not accidents, radically disjointed and epitomized versions of an infinitely more complex whole.”
⁹

The zeal, energy, commitment, and self-contradiction of Fernand Braudel’s move from one position to its polar opposite suggests both the strengths and the weaknesses, the attractions and the limitations of regarding “the nation” as the most significant focus and resonant form of collective identity (and hostility) in the secular, Great Power world that allegedly came into being in the aftermath of the Peace of
Westphalia. In his earlier, iconoclastic days, Braudel was not only reacting against the prevailing belief in the nation as the ultimate unit of historical action and group awareness, but was also signaling his hostility to the role of historians, past and present, in the deliberate creation of these often adversarial national identities.
¹⁰
Indeed, by refusing to analyze the past in what he regarded as such parochial and chauvinistic terms, Braudel was suggesting that national identity was not the only form of collective
human solidarity that mattered, nor even was it necessarily the most significant. Yet in his later and more traditional phases, Braudel
did
argue that national identity was a more important and long-lived phenomenon than had been claimed by those who argued it had only begun in 1648 (or in 1789 or even later); by then, he seemed to imply that the nation-state, and national identities, were the most important form of collective association, indeed the culmination of all human history. The
late-life conversion of so strong and unconventional an historian as Braudel to this commonplace and highly sentimentalized perspective on “the nation” well attests to the seductive power of its claim to being the preeminent category of human identity; but it also opens the way to seeing the contradictions, limitations, and ambiguities of that claim.

As in the case of
Charles de Gaulle, most recent attempts to define national identities focus on the history,
geography,
territoriality, and language of collective allegiances and antagonisms, and on the alignment of a national culture and the nation-state; but they have also been conceived to fit and describe what is believed to be the rise of nation-building (and national confrontation) that took place in Europe from the eighteenth century onward, and that since then has spread across the world.
¹¹
In the last twenty years or so, this “modernist” interpretation of national identity has received new impetus following the collapse of the
Soviet Empire into many separate nations, and it has been persuasively and influentially advanced by such scholars as
Benedict Anderson,
John Breuilly,
Ernst Gellner, and
Eric Hobsbawm.
¹²
All of them sought to treat the subject in historical terms, but they have done so over a relatively circumscribed time span, and as none of them were friendly to the idea of national identity, they all treated it as though it were a recent and ephemeral phenomenon already on the wane.
¹³
Yet such a view of the nation as an upstart and transient focus of human identity and conflict is not necessarily correct, and in recent years, historians of the medieval and early
modern periods have insisted that it is mistaken to associate “national identity” only with “modernity.” Indeed, one scholar has gone so far as to urge that it is “the similarities between medieval and modern expressions of national identity that are fundamental, and the differences that are peripheral.”
¹⁴
That may be overstating it, but the “fundamental similarities” between the solidarities of national identity, and also as regards the limitations to those solidarities, are well worth investigating.