The decline of history
Nothing under the great sun is new to man. That is why history is always the best guide in strategically challenging times. We have only forgotten to be its students.
Politicians, intellectuals and journalists in Europe no longer have a historical horizon. In the West, people live exclusively in the present. The only connection to the past is the use of the past as a means of legitimization, of elevating oneself above others, but not of gaining wisdom from it.
Many state actors subliminally believe that they are wiser than history and its actors and that they can solve historical problems in the blink of an eye. But they fail to see that every historical actor - like themselves today - had to maneuver in a multitude of complex circumstances. They see how decisions were made, but they never see how many opportunities they had to decide. But what is history? What can it do better than all other human sciences?
The essence of history
“History is always the history of thought.” This is how the great philosopher of history R.G. Collingwood summed up the essence of history. Because every action is sometimes preceded by a thought. Knowing what the respective actors were thinking when they set an event in motion that became history means knowing the story behind it.
History is not dead, it is encapsulated in the present and lives on in it, because it is nothing other than the accumulation of thoughts, decisions and actions from the past under certain circumstances that shape the present. It breathes in the present, it is active and it is connected to the practical problems of life.
For diplomats, politicians and people who have to make strategic decisions, there is no better subject to understand how the future can look and take shape. For history is nothing other than a future that has manifested itself from a multitude of futures before it has become history.
The advantages of history over all other human sciences
Historians are experts in interconnections. They are best able to establish cause-and-effect relationships. They can recognize patterns between the past, present and future and predict trends. Social scientists and economists believe that their models are better than history, but they are not, because we cannot include all factors, all variables in a model to predict the future.
If that were the case, we would have a model to predict future history, the future, which we don't have. Scientists are aware of the weakness of models, but the general public prefers to rely on hard numbers rather than the most astute argument.
But figures offer us no strategic insight and they can be interpreted in all directions. How often have social scientists and economists argued that Russia's close gas connection with Germany and its monetary dependence on it could no longer lead to war breaking out in Europe?
Then it happened, and then it was the same people who proved the opposite with the same figures, namely that the war had to come because people had made themselves so dependent beforehand. The general public has more faith in juggling with numbers than in what once was, because it is not so concrete and therefore inspires more confidence, even if history had more to tell us here. If academics had been more concerned with national self-image, Russian history or European history, they would not have made these serious strategic mistakes because they would always have been on their guard. After all, history as the past future is the only source of information about what works and what doesn't; we have nothing else to fall back on. Critics of historical science rightly point out that history does not repeat itself. Therefore, no lessons can be learned from it. That is correct. “History is not a cookbook with ready-made recipes,” the American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once said. It offers no instructions, no rules for one's own actions that can be followed with absolute certainty. History is unpredictable. Because it is, there are also no laws, no rules that can be drawn up and definitively determine what must be done in a particular case. But you can draw conclusions from it, develop a sense of history. It promotes insight and wisdom that cannot be gained in any other way.
A musical feeling for history and its application
The subject of history encourages students to develop a musical feeling for history. Historians are able to break down hypotheses and problems into their component parts because they are accustomed to studying human nature in its entirety and in an organized form. History is a collection of examples. They do not repeat themselves exactly, but they are similar. Since human nature is unchanging, it inevitably follows a similar pattern over the centuries. When Europe lay shattered after the Second World War, the rivalry between France and Germany did not cease. Only with great help from the United States of America was it possible to find a peaceful balance that led to European cooperation. Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer sought solutions to steer this rivalry in a constructive direction. He found an example with a similar background in history, which he explained in an interview:
„Question: Assuming that you see a union between Germany and France as the cornerstone of a United States of Europe and the first step in a new direction, I would like to know what you think could be done immediately to bring about such a union.
Answer: Let me remind you for a moment of Germany at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. At that time, there were a myriad of small, independent German states. Each kept to itself, had its own customs borders, its own currency, its own army, etc. This situation was overcome by the formation of a German customs union and the establishment of a customs parliament, which ensured the free exchange of goods between many states. The customs union and the customs parliament were the beginning of German unification. I am thinking of a similar approach to bring about the formation of a union between France and Germany. One should assume a gradual merging of the two countries in terms of customs and economy. The tool for such a union could be a joint economic parliament, whose members would be elected from the legislative bodies of both countries. The two governments could in turn appoint a body that would be jointly responsible with the economic parliament. The tasks of the economic parliament and the government representation could expand over time in order to gradually bring about the unification of the two countries. The Saar Conventions provide an example of how two countries can be merged.“
Adenauer had learned from the history of Prussia how to bind the surrounding German states to himself without coming into confrontation with them. Collingwood compared this musical sense of history to a hiker in the jungle: “‘There are only trees and grass here’, thinks the wanderer and continues on his way. 'Look, there's a tiger in the grass', we come back to the tiger in the grass. Can we be sure that what we are watching is actually a tiger in the bushes? What if it finally steps out of the bushes and is actually a child? says the hunter. The historian's task is to reveal the less obvious features that are hidden from the inattentive eye in the present situation. What history can contribute to the moral and political life of the present is a sharpened eye for the situation in which we must act.“
It is about recognizing the historical patterns and nuances and deriving the shape of the future from them in order to intervene at the right time in the interests of the cause. If history teaches us anything in concrete terms, it is humility. The statesman, the individual, however brilliant he may be, his life's work and he himself will sooner or later be swept away by the tide of history. Radical plans or good intentions and the resulting deeds have often had the opposite effect. This is because the individual cannot accurately predict the unintended consequences of history. If history has a wisdom to offer that others do not, why has it been largely pushed out of the media, politics and even the economy?
Laziness and the rise of social and economic sciences
One reason for this is that in order to understand and comprehend history, you have to read a lot. You can only draw wisdom from historical knowledge if you have read a lot about it. This is not the case with all other human sciences. You have technical methods at your disposal and are able to apply them without much prior knowledge. This is not possible in history, which is why it is much more difficult to penetrate problems historically. However, hardly anyone in the DACH region considers this necessary.
In politics, the subject of history is dead in the truest sense of the word. I don't know how you can solve current problems when you're sitting opposite Chinese or Russian representatives without knowing all the details and nuances of their history. This is better understood in the Anglo-Saxon world than here in German-speaking countries. In addition, historiography has changed its status in recent decades. Respect for it and its representatives has been lost. It is no longer seen as politically relevant by large sections of the public. One reason for this is that historians have, through their own fault, retreated into niches that are only accessible to a few hundred academics and no longer reach the general public. On the other hand, there has been an offensive by the social sciences and economics, which have deliberately attempted to displace historical studies and have ultimately succeeded in doing so.
The common argument is that history does not repeat itself and that history cannot be grasped well enough empirically. Situations are not exactly the same and analogies would only distort things. It must be rejected precisely because history is not human mathematics. History as a discipline has been successfully suppressed because it is not measurable, although the economic and social sciences have not delivered any better results with their mathematical models. This development has also had an impact on the number of students and the quality of studies. In Switzerland, the number of history students has fallen by 40 percent in the last 15 years. This is a disaster for the subject. The trend over the last few decades is clear. It is moving from the qualitative to the quantitative, from text-based to data-based sciences, where student numbers are exploding. Away from the search for wisdom in history for the future, towards calculating the future. The quality of historians cannot be measured by quantity alone. According to the Federal Statistical Office, 27,270 young people studied history in 1998; by 2022, the figure will be 35,018 - a significant increase. But where is the problem in practice? It is the change in the way universities teach. In the past, when the German-speaking world still produced important historians and published interesting books, the focus was on what was important in history. University teaching has become more niche and professors now live in ivory towers.
If you look at the course catalogs of some German universities over the last 30 years, you will notice something. In 2023, there will be exercises and lectures in the Master's program such as “Hephaestus in Petropolis: The invention of imperial identity from the spirit of the Russian muse” or “Sexual reforms in the 19th and 20th centuries” or “History of sexualities in the early modern period”. A few decades ago, things were different because the focus was on what had significantly shaped Europe and the world, such as British, French, German, European and American history. So as not to be misunderstood: Sexual reforms are also important and must be taught, but they will not be more important than the invention of printing, the French Revolution, industrialization, German unification under Bismarck, the First or the Second World War.
We will have no choice but to study more history if we want to think strategically again in Europe. Artificial intelligence will not be able to make strategic decisions for us. We humans will have to make these decisions ourselves. If there is one thing that can best prepare us for this, it is not role models, but the similar experiences that people have had over the last few centuries. We should not pretend that we are wiser than the dead. We are not.
Muamer Bećirović researches the history of diplomacy and international politics. In April 2024, he published a biography of the Austrian diplomat and statesman of the post-Napoleonic era, Prince Klemens von Metternich.
This article was first published in the Berliner Zeitung on 20.06.2023.