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History Newsletter
Summer 2016
Editor: Beth Jamieson
What to watch out for this semester:
Forthcoming Public Lectures
The History Programme at Edge Hill is delighted to welcome the following guest lectures:
Dr Thomas Beaumont (Liverpool John Moores University)
Workers Of The World: International Communism in Interwar France
Friday 28 October, 2-3 pm in CE207
All welcome. This lecture is compulsory for students on The Clash of Left and Right: France 1936-1968 and will be a useful taster for students considering taking either Introduction to Contemporary French History, or Communism in Eastern and Central Europe After 1945, in future.
Dr Eleanor Davey (Manchester University)
French Humanitarianism, the Third World and the Far Left
Tuesday 22 November, 3-5pm in M48
All welcome. This lecture and discussion is compulsory for students on the Special Subject 1968 And All That: Protest in Western Europe, and will be a useful taster for students considering taking this module in future.
Introduction:
Roger Spalding, Head of History
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The Edge Hill History programme starts the year in a strong position. In the National Student Survey (NSS), an independently organised survey open to all third year students in all universities, we scored very highly. In the North-West the Edge Hill History programme had the highest overall satisfaction rating, nationally our position was seventh. These results meant that our degree programme out-performed many much larger institutions, often with higher public profiles than our own.
Our BA results in 2016 were also strong, six of our students achieved first class honours. Overall, more than half of our third year students achieved either firsts or upper seconds (2.1s), higher than the national average in British universities.
One of our colleagues, James Renton, was awarded a Jean Monnet fellowship. Named after one of the founding figures of the European Community, these fellowships are awarded to a handful of academics from all over Europe. James will spend the coming academic year in Florence making contributions to the work of the university there, but mainly concentrating on completing his most recent book. His success in achieving this honour is testimony to the quality and the importance of his work as a Middle Eastern specialist. We have been very fortunate to secure Sarah Irving, someone with great experience of the Middle Eastern region, in particular Israel/Palestine, to cover James’s work while he is in Florence.
Like James, the entire History Team publish books and articles on their particular areas of expertise. For students this means that tutors have a high level of engagement with the work they present: often they will use hitherto unused primary sources, they will bring an engaged knowledge of current historical debates, and they bring a wealth of experience as active researchers.
At the beginning of the academic year as a fresh cohort of students joins us it is important to bear all the above points in mind, because what they indicate is that at Edge Hill we offer a very high quality academic experience in classroom and out of it, in the wide range of extra-curricular activities that we offer. To be successful, though, each of you must embrace in an active way the teaching and the other opportunities that are presented to you. As a reluctant Sunday School pupil – I have not proved their most successful product on the spiritual front – I was struck by the beauty, and the aptness of passages from the King James Bible; particularly apt for all of you for your time at Edge Hill, and indeed, for the rest of your life is the following:
...for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he allow reap...
Galatians Chapter 6 Verses 7 -9
Put more simply: the benefits you derive from an experience have a direct relationship to the effort and commitment that you make to it.
Welcome back to all of you. I hope that you have a successful and happy academic year.
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Your History Degree in Political Context:
Why Study European History After Brexit?
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No student of History can fail to have noticed Britain's extraordinary summer of political upheaval. Whichever way they voted on 23 June, the History student who wishes to keep abreast of where things are headed might worry that now the dust has settled and 'Brexit means Brexit', they risk irrelevance by studying European history. Surely they should now turn their attention to matters British, American, or the wider world beyond Europe, and spurn opportunities to take European history modules, study in other European countries, or study European languages? The purpose of this article is to persuade you that this is far from being the case. On the contrary, Brexit makes studying European history more relevant than ever to understanding who we are and where we are going.
For the great paradox is that Brexit is itself a classically European political trauma, and to understand its true significance you need to place it in the wider context of comparative European history. The minority of historians who supported Brexit - Historians for Britain, led by David Abulafia of Cambridge University - did so on the basis of a narrative of British exceptionalism. Britain is different from the rest of Europe, so goes the argument, because it has been largely immune from the violent upheavals and traumatic instability that have marked the modern history of a continent marked by political extremism of right and left. Unlike, say, France, where change comes about through revolution, change in Britain comes about through piecemeal reform. So whereas countries with a recent history of communism or fascism might need the institutions of the EU as a moderating force, Britain is free to go it alone. On the other side of the debate, Abulafia's view was contested by a larger group of historians - Historians for Britain in Europe - who argued, in for example a response to Abulafia by Emile Chabal and Stephan Malinowski of Edinburgh University, that British exceptionalism presents a mythologised version of the past, at odds with much recent historiography. For Chabal and Malinowski, while British elites may have experienced an unusual degree of apparent stability over time (they have never, unlike their counterparts in some European states within living memory, had to face the prospect of being put up against a wall and shot), such serene continuity scarcely describes the historical experiences of either working people in Britain, or the inhabitants of Britain's colonies in Africa or Asia.
Ironically, the very events of the referendum blew a hole in the assumptions about exceptionalism that implicitly underpinned the victorious Leave campaign. As I suggested in 'Boris Sarkozy and Nigel Le Pen: The Europe Of Our Nightmares?', an opinion piece I wrote for the French History Network Blog, comparing the Brexit referendum to the 2005 referendum in France on the proposed EU Constitution, British politics is becoming more 'French', in the sense of a society deeply divided by passionately held beliefs. Indeed the very idea of settling an issue through a yes/no referendum used to be dismissed by British politicans, Labour and Conservative alike, as a 'device of dictators and demagogues' (a phrase used by both Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher). By contrast, the Gaullist political tradition in France has positively favoured referenda: those of you who graduated from our History Fastrack access course for mature students this summer, and watched The Sorrow And The Pity, a classic documentary about collaboration and resistance in France during World War Two, will recall the wonderfully apposite reference in the film to the referendum called, and lost, by Charles De Gaulle, that precipitated his resignation as President in 1969. Whereas modern British political campaigning is traditionally thought of as characterised by robust but good-humoured jostling within the unwritten rules of a gentlemanly game, it is rarer for debates to be conducted in a way that fosters outright hatred, with each side seeing the other as actual enemies, whose victory would endanger the very survival of the national community - yet that sums up where many supporters of both Remain and Leave were in each others' eyes by 23 June. By that point, it seemed impossible to sit down in a pub and calmly discuss the referendum without first anxiously glancing round the table to check whether or not everyone was on the same side.
My point is that this gave the British electorate a rare taste of the sheer intensity of the political passions that would surprise less, say, a Ukrainian or Greek voter. As the EU referendum took on the air of a brawl in a pub car park, I was reminded of the late Harvard historian Stanley Hoffman's observation that the French political community circa 1936 was starting to resemble two armed camps preparing for a fight. The most dramatic illustration of this end of British exceptionalism was the murder of Jo Cox - the first political assassination of an MP unconnected to the Irish question since Spencer Perceval in 1812. The history of, for example, postwar Italy, where political assassinations have not been unknown, thus now looks less alien to us than it otherwise might.
With any historical comparison, we need to exercise caution, and understand both similarities and differences, as well as both continuity and change. The week after the referendum, Robert Gildea of Oxford University (a former guest speaker at Edge Hill), gave an after-dinner speech to the Society for the Study of French History's annual conference at Chichester University, in which he commented that historians of Europe had just experienced history crash into them. As Gildea put it, for pro-European Brits, 'Now we know how the French felt in 1940!': every political certainty that they had thought permanent was suddenly shattered by France's defeat at the hands of Nazi Germany. On the face of it, Gildea's analogy might seem a little over the top, but it gives us some insight into the unpredictable nature of historical change. It would be an exaggeration if some future historian were to extrapolate from the killing of Cox to claim that Britain in 2016 was heading for civil war. Yet, by the same token, we are therefore today in a good position to understand that, just because French politics in the 1930s was characterised by a great deal of rhetorical enmity, and sometimes real violence, does not necessarily mean that the collapse of the French Third Republic was inevitable before the German invasion of 1940.
Of course, it is now clear that Historians for Britain in Europe (whose 380 signatories included myself) failed, along with everyone else who attempted to campaign for Remain, to persuade a majority of our fellow citizens. In part the Remain camp's failure was to neglect the importance of emotion in shaping political outcomes. For example, David Cameron's strategy was characterised by something that Marxist historians are sometimes accused of: economic determinism, in assuming that the electorate would decide purely on the basis of economic self-interest. This was to underestimate not only the limits to the receptiveness of his message beyond the prosperous South-East, but also the emotionally seductive power of Leave's appeal to 'Take Back Control'. The moment when I realised that Leave really could win was when Boris Johnson provoked a standing ovation at the end of his final speech to the last TV debate by proclaiming 'This Thursday could be our Independence Day!', a classic example of the power of nationalism to engage the heart more than a thousand rational arguments can.
As it turned out, many Remain supporters also became more emotionally engaged than might have been predicted from stereotypes of the British stiff upper lip, because they came to strongly identify the EU (rightly or wrongly) with ideas of tolerance, multiculturalism and anti-racism. Yet this was a phenomenon which seemed to peak after rather than before the referendum. I realised that something unusual was happening when I saw an image of a young woman marching through the streets of London the day after the referendum carrying a hand-painted banner proclaiming, 'I Am Not British I Am European'. Such tragic scenes of real enthusiasm, even when it was too late, for a European project for whom public enthusiasm had been conspicuously absent for most of the period of Britain's membership, were in some ways reminiscent of the collapse of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. People who had spent their entire lives taking for granted that they were part of a broader multinational federal union that would always be there - an especially comforting assumption if they were of mixed heritage - now suddenly felt their identity stolen from them by a dramatic and violent reassertion of ethnic nationalism. Faced with deciding whether they were ethnically Serbs or Croats, some responded by refusing to choose and instead mourning their old multinational identity. So, if you voted Remain on 23 June, now you might understand what it was to feel Yugoslav circa 1992, and if you voted Leave, now you might understand what it was to feel Serb or Croat.
The political atmosphere in Britain this summer also reminded me of when I was living in France in 2002. Young people responded to the shock of Jean-Marie Le Pen's second place in the first round of voting in the presidential election by descending into the streets en masse for a full two weeks of almost continual demonstrations. French youth sought to redeem what they labelled as France's national shame, in voting for a neo-fascist whose ideas recalled the darkest periods of modern European history, by voting massively against him in the second round of voting - just as some Remainers cling hopefully to the idea of a second referendum to redeem what they perceive as the national shame of a Leave victory shaped by lies and xenophobia.
So an understanding of modern European history really can help give our present experiences broader meaning. If the leaders of the Remain campaign had attended two guest lectures at Edge Hill last year, who knows, perhaps they might have had a surer grasp of what was happening? In October 2015, Paul Corthorn of Queens University Belfast delivered a lecture on Enoch Powell, whose ideas about the indivisible nature of British nationhood must surely rank among the foremost, if embarrassing to acknowledge, intellectual ancestors of Brexit. Then in March 2016 Ludivine Bantigny, of our Erasmus partner institution the University of Rouen, argued for the importance of studying the history of emotions in understanding political history. I could not at the time have predicted just how relevant these lectures would turn out to be. Guest lectures will continue to be a feature of the History programme in future, and I cannot predict what surprising relevance they may have for you.
At the time of writing what Brexit will actually mean remains unclear. Yet one thing that Leavers and Remainers might agree on is that leaving the EU does not mean leaving Europe. Britain will always be a mere 26 miles or so off the coast of mainland Europe and thus, as the ongoing refugee crisis in Calais demonstrates, hardly immune from the ramifications of wider European affairs. As the pro-Remain historian and commentator Timothy Garton Ash noted, 'Britain cannot leave Europe any more than Piccadilly Circus can leave London'. And as Boris Johnson himself put it, 'We cannot turn our backs on Europe. We are part of Europe, our children and our grandchildren will continue to have a wonderful future as Europeans, travelling to the continent, understanding the languages and the cultures that make up our common European civilisation, continuing to interact with the peoples of other countries in a way that is open and friendly and outward looking.' Thus even the most ardent Brexiteers have emphasised that the UK will retain not only vital economic links, but also strong cultural ones, with the rest of Europe. Whilst Johnson's comments need to be placed critically in the context of wishing to defuse the anger of Remainers after the vote, they reflect certain realities about the lives of the more internationally mobile elements of British society, among whom as future graduates you will be aspiring to take your place.
For it is no secret that universities are among the most pro-European places in Britain: it has been estimated that around 80% of students and 90% of academics voted Remain. It is very important to reaffirm that international students and staff are welcome here. Knowledge is by its very nature international, and universities in different European countries have interacted with one other for the best part of a millennium: Britain's most ancient university, Oxford, was founded by refugees from the University of Paris. International links between European scholars have survived revolutions, wars and dictatorships. So although they have been facilitated by the EU, they will survive Brexit. Even if we cannot predict precisely which form they will take, given that higher education is one of the UK's most successful export industries it seems unlikely that a government of buccaneering free-trade capitalists would seek to turn Britain into an isolated North Korea.
So the political context is changing, but then as historians we are used to that: we know that political arrangements come and go. Since the European question seems set to dominate British politics for years to come, those of us who professionally seek to understand our European neighbours will find our skills much in demand. Yet this does not mean we have to order our historical understanding along presentist lines. While the convention in the British education system has been to teach British history and European history separately, in reality the two are impossible to smoothly disentangle. Britain has interacted with France, for example, in all manner of intimate ways, friendly and unfriendly, for more than a thousand years - for much of which it made little sense to see either Britain or France as a unitary nation state. So studying the history of Britain's closest continental neighbour, as you have the opportunity to do when it comes to picking a second year option on Introduction to Contemporary French History, should remain a high priority, as will the issues examined from 2017 in the new second year module Migration and Mobility in Contemporary European History.