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Decentering European History from the Margins
Plural Visions of a Fragmented Modernity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 September 2022
Abstract
The article considers the global historiography of Europe from two angles. First it outlines the difficulties, both historical and epistemological, that Europe poses as an object of study, especially after the historiographical transformations prompted by the events of 1989, the rise of postcolonial studies, the growing critique of Eurocentrism, and, most recently, the “global turn.” The conceptions of Europe that emerge from these currents have often been based on a rather homogenized vision of the continent, centered on the great nation-states of western Europe and their imperial policies. They also perpetuate, even as they criticize it, the legacy of a conception of modernity that positions Europe as both its historical center and the agent of its expansion on a global scale. The second part of the paper proposes to limit the blind spots inherent in this kind of vision by shifting our gaze to the eastern and Balkan margins of Europe, where the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires intersected over the “long” nineteenth century. This change of perspective displaces the history of Europe’s connection to modernity, revealing the great diversity of local actors, the importance of multicultural and pluriethnic societies, and the particular role of transnational populations such as Jews, who, while negotiating their own relationship to a European modernity, escaped the grip of national movements.
Résumé
L’article aborde la question d’une historiographie globale de l’Europe à partir de deux angles. Dans un premier temps, il s’attache aux difficultés, tant historiques qu’épistémologiques, à saisir l’objet Europe, notamment après les transformations historiographiques induites par 1989, l’affirmation des études postcoloniales, l’émergence progressive de la critique de l’eurocentrisme et, enfin, aujourd’hui, l’invitation à prendre le « tournant global ». Les conceptions de l’Europe qui se dégagent de ces propositions ont l’inconvénient de se fonder sur une vision de l’Europe plutôt homogénéisée, centrée sur les grands États-nations de l’Europe occidentale et leurs politiques impériales. Elles véhiculent également, tout en la critiquant, l’idée d’une modernité dont l’Europe aurait été à la fois le foyer historique et l’agent d’expansion à l’échelle mondiale. Dans un second temps, afin de circonscrire les taches aveugles inhérentes à ce genre de visions, l’article propose un déplacement du regard, en fixant le poste d’observation dans les confins orientaux et balkaniques de l’Europe, à l’intersection des trois empires austro-hongrois, ottoman et russe, pour une période équivalant au « long » xixe siècle. Ce changement de perspective fait apparaître non seulement une grande diversité de vues des acteurs locaux, mais aussi le déplacement qui s’opère dans la conception du lien entre Europe et modernité, l’importance des sociétés locales multiculturelles et pluriethniques ainsi que le rôle particulier de populations transnationales qui, comme les juifs, tout en négociant leur rapport propre à une modernité européenne, échappent à l’emprise des mouvements nationaux.
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- Research Article
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- © Éditions de l’EHESS 2022
Footnotes
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* I would like to thank Antonella Romano for her careful reading and insightful comments, which were of enormous help in completing this article.
References
1 Gérard Lenclud, “Qu’est que la tradition ?” in Transcrire les mythologies. Tradition, écriture, historicité, ed. Marcel Détienne (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), 25–44, here pp. 25 sq.
2 See, among others, Michel Espagne et al., “Forum II. How to Write Modern European History Today? Statements to Jörn Leonhard’s JMEH Forum,” Journal of Modern European History 14, no. 4 (2016): 465–91; Laurence Cole and Philipp Ther, eds., “Writing European History Today,” special issue, European History Quarterly 40, no. 4 (2010); and Jean-Frédéric Schaub, L’Europe a-t-elle une histoire ? (Paris: Albin Michel, 2008). See also the projects of the research center “Écrire une histoire nouvelle de l’Europe” (LabEx EHNE), which, since 2015, has brought together researchers from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Sorbonne Université.
3 In particular, Contemporary European History (founded in 1992); the European Review of History/Revue européenne d’histoire (founded in 1993); the Journal of Contemporary European Studies (since 2003), preceded by the Journal of European Area Studies (1998–2002); the Journal of Modern European History (founded in 2003); and Eurostudia. Revue transatlantique de recherches sur l’Europe (founded in 2005).
4 See Camille Mazé, La fabrique de l’identité européenne. Une visite dans les coulisses des musées de l’Europe (Paris: Belin, 2014); Krzysztof Pomian, “Sur le musée de l’Europe,” in Temps croisés, ed. Duanmu Mai and Hughes Tertrais (Paris: Éd. de la MSH, 2010), 1:155–68; Pomian, “Le musée de l’Europe face à la question des migrations,” Hommes & Migrations 1255 (2005): 63–71; Elizabeth Buettner, “What – and Who – Is ‘European’ in the Postcolonial EU? Inclusions and Exclusions in the European Parliament’s House of European History,” BMGN: Low Countries Historical Review 133, no. 4 (2018): 132–48.
5 To echo the title of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s famous volume Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). In a recent review of the French translation, however, Romain Bertrand has demonstrated that this phrase is much more complex than some of its advocates assume: Romain Bertrand, review of Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincialiser l’Europe. La pensée postcoloniale et la différence historique [2000], trans. Olivier Ruchet and Nicolas Viellescazes (Paris: Éditions d’Amsterdam, 2020), in Annales HSS 75, no. 3/4 (2020): 821–26.
6 Jean-Frédéric Schaub and Silvia Sebastiani, Race et histoire dans les sociétés occidentales (xve–xviiie siècle) (Paris: Albin Michel, 2021).
7 However, this is not specific to Europe, and is doubtless also the case in other regions of the world.
8 See Michael Lackner and Michael Werner, Der “Cultural Turn” in den Humanwissenschaften. Area Studies im Auf- oder Abwind des Kulturalismus? (Bad Homburg: Programmbeirat der Werner Reimers Konferenzen, 1999).
9 See Johannes Fabian, Anthropology with an Attitude: Critical Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), as well as, among many others, Naoki Sakai, “Positions and Positionalities: After Two Decades,” Positions: Asia Critique 20, no. 1 (2012): 67–94.
10 See Christoph Conrad, ed., “Mental Maps,” special issue, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28, no. 3 (2002).
11 See, for example, the respective chapters in Diana Mishkova and Balázs Trencsényi, eds., European Regions and Boundaries: A Conceptual History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017).
12 Friedrich Naumann, Mitteleuropa (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1915).
13 See Jacques Le Rider, ed., “Europe centrale/Mitteleuropa,” special issue, Revue germanique internationale 1 (1994), in particular Krzysztof Pomian, “L’Europe centrale : essai de définition,” 11–23.
14 Mark Mazower, The Balkans (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2000); Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); “Europe du Sud-Est : histoire, concepts, frontières,” special issue, Balkanologie. Revue d’études pluridisciplinaires 3, no. 2 (1999), particularly the introduction by Wendy Bracewell and Alex Drace-Francis, “South-Eastern Europe: History, Concepts, Boundaries,” 1–16. For another perspective, see Diana Mishkova, “What Is in Balkan History? Spaces and Scales in the Tradition of Southeast-European Studies,” Southeastern Europe 34, no. 1 (2010): 55–86.
15 Philipp Ther, “Von Ostmitteleuropa nach Zentraleuropa. Kulturgeschichte als Area Studies,” Themenportal Europäische Geschichte, 2006, https://www.europa.clio-online.de/essay/id/fdae-1377. See also the forum, “Ostmitteleuropaforschung II. Reaktionen auf die Kritik an der ‘deutschen Nischenforschung,’” Journal of Modern European History 16, no. 3 (2018): 295–320, in particular Peter Haslinger, “East Central European History: Still a Strategically Important Field of Research,” 295–300. See also the special issues “Borders and Frontiers in Global and Transnational History,” Journal of Modern European History 14, no. 1 (2016), and “Space, Borders, Maps,” Journal of Modern European History 9, no. 1 (2011).
16 “L’Europe médiane. Carrefours et connexions,” thematic dossier, Monde(s). Histoire, espaces, relations 14, no. 2 (2018), in particular the introduction by Paul Gradvohl and Antoine Marès, “Enjeux historiques de l’approche de l’Europe médiane,” 7–30.
17 See Larry Wolff’s seminal volume, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
18 Stefan Wiederkehr, Die eurasische Bewegung. Wissenschaft und Politik in der russischen Emigration der Zwischenkriegszeit und im postsowjetischen Russland (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2007).
19 On the models of temporality at work, see François Hartog, Régime d’historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2003); Hartog, Chronos. L’Occident aux prises avec le temps (Paris: Gallimard, 2020).
20 Karl Jaspers, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (Munich: R. Piper, 1949), as well as the new take on the question by Jan Assmann, Achsenzeit. Eine Archäologie der Moderne (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2018).
21 Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities (Leiden: Brill, 2003).
22 Antoine Lilti, L’héritage des Lumières. Ambivalences de la modernité (Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS/Gallimard/Éd. du Seuil, 2019), passim, in particular pp. 80–84.
23 Marcel Mauss, “Civilizations: Elements and Forms” [1929], in Classical Readings in Civilization and Culture, ed. John Rundell and Stephen Mennell (London: Routledge, 1993), 155–59.
24 See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
25 On the overlaps and interferences between an imperial history and a national history of Europe, notably in the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman Empires, see the stimulating article by Jörn Leonhard, “Comparison, Transfer, Entanglement, or: How to Write Modern European History Today?” Journal of Modern European History 14, no. 2 (2016): 149–63.
26 Rusçuk/Roustchouk/Rustschuk was the official denomination of the city until 1878, when part of Bulgaria became an autonomous principality.
27 Elias Canetti, Die gerettete Zunge. Geschichte einer Jugend (Munich: C. Hanser, 1977), 11.
28 Claudio Magris, Danube [1986], trans. Patrick Creagh (London: Harvill Press, 1989), 355.
29 Canetti, Die gerettete Zunge, 10.
30 Ibid., 14.
31 Pomian, “L’Europe centrale : essai de définition,” 21.
32 See, amongst the extensive literature on the subject, François Georgeon, “L’Empire ottoman et l’Europe au xixe siècle. De la question d’Orient à la question d’Occident,” Confluences Méditerranée 52, no. 1 (2005): 29–39.
33 Adam Mestyan, “A Muslim Dualism? Inter-Imperial History and Austria-Hungary in Ottoman Thought, 1867–1921,” in “European–Middle Eastern Relations: Continuities and Changes from the Time of Empires to the Cold War,” special issue, Contemporary European History 30, no. 4 (2021): 478–96, and its rich bibliography.
34 On photography, see Zeynip Çelek and Edhem Eldem, eds., Camera Ottomana: Photography and Modernity in the Ottoman Empire, 1840–1914 (Istanbul: Koç University Press, 2015), as well as Edhem Eldem, “The Search for an Ottoman Vernacular Photography,” in The Indigenous Lens: Early Photography in the Near and Middle East, ed. Markus Ritter and Staci G. Scheiwiller (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 4–30. On multilingual publishing, see Johann Strauss, “Le livre français d’Istanbul, 1730–1908,” Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée 87/88 (1999): 277–301.
35 On musical life in Smyrna during the same period, see Basma Zerouali, “La part ‘ottomane’ dans les pratiques musicales des Grecs de Smyrne,” Cahiers balkaniques 33 (2004), https://doi.org/10.4000/ceb.4518. On the importance and specific role of music in transregional cultural exchanges, see Jin-Ah Kim, “Musik und Kulturtransfer. Ideen zu einem musikwissenschaftlichen Forschungsbereich,” in Entgrenzte Welt? Musik und Kulturtransfer, ed. Jin-Ah Kim and Nepomuk Riva (Berlin: Ries & Erler, 2014), 9–56, as well as Kim, “European Music outside Europe? Musical Entangling and Intercrossing in the Case of Korea’s Modern History,” in Studies on a Global History of Music: A Balzan Musicology Project, ed. Reinhard Strohm (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 177–97.
36 Nabila Oulebsir and Mercedes Volait, eds., L’orientalisme architectural. Entre imaginaires et savoirs (Paris: CNRS Éditions/Picard, 2009). The issues around the tradition/modernity dichotomy also emerge in turn-of-the-century discussions on architecture and the esthetics of ornamentation in Vienna, Budapest, Prague, and Paris. See Michael Werner, “Medievalism and Modernity: Architectural Appropriations of the Middle Ages in Germany (1890–1920),” in Manufacturing Middle Ages: Entangled History of Medievalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Patrick J. Geary and Gábor Klaniczay (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 239–55.
37 Zeynep Çelik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World’s Fairs (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992).
38 Ivan Davidson Kalmar, “Moorish Style: Orientalism, the Jews, and Synagogue Architecture,” Jewish Social Studies 7, no. 3 (2001): 68–100.
39 Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).
40 Ibid., 123–36.
41 Ibid., 175–87.
42 Balázs Trencsényi et al., A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe, vol. 1, Negotiating Modernity in the “Long Nineteenth Century” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
43 Leyla Amzi-Erdogdular, “Alternative Muslim Modernities: Bosnian Intellectuals in the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 59, no. 4 (2017): 912–41.
44 Ibid., 920.
45 Lilti, L’héritage des Lumières, 383–91.