Political History Today on Both Sides of the Atlantic

Political History All Over Again?

In November 2006, a symposium on political history was held at the École des hautes études en sciences in the same building that houses the editorial offices of Les Annales, a French journal known for its advocacy of social history and its dismissal of political history. The symposium focused on the recently published New Directions in American Political History, edited by Meg Jacobs, Peter Novak, and Julian Zelizer, and its relevance to political history in Europe.¹ The questions the symposium posed included: How is it possible to integrate workers, minorities, and women into the framework of political history?² Do the state and political institutions have the same meaning, purpose, and power today that they had in the nineteenth century?³ Is there room left for foreign policy in a political narrative that is still very much state-centered?⁴ In a time of crisis of epistemological models, after the failure of the Marxist model and the unconvincing linguistic turn in the profession, how is it possible to write a new political history in Europe that tries to revitalize the field without going back to the old narrative of the past?

If comparative history is often a useful strategy to avoid national stereotypes and has great heuristic power, one should not neglect the specific questions and debates of each national historiography.⁵ Nonetheless, even if historiography is unique to each country, what the countries share in common are expressions of politicization. Moreover, the writing of political history in Europe asks common sets of questions: Do political historians have to collaborate with other social scientists—among them especially political scientists, sociologists, or economists? What is the agency of historians in a field so influenced by battles around memory and political debates? To what extent is it possible to write a collective narrative without neglecting the work of social historians? Is it still relevant to work on a short span of time when so many historians believe in the longue durée framework?

The European Outlook on Political History

Political history in Europe is decidedly distinct from American political history. The reason for this difference is obvious: history. European political history in the twentieth century has been shaped by the trauma of two world wars, political and ideological experiments in communism and fascism that have been models and counter-models for most European countries. Such differences from the American experience have given rise to different historical debates in Europe. For example, the hypothesis of a European civil war in the interwar years is probably one of the most debated questions in European historiography.⁶ Furthermore, European countries also experienced a more rapid and extensive development of the welfare state, a larger expansion of the administrative state, and a dismantling of colonial empires. Such differences present a sharply different course than American political history.

The imposition of communist and fascist regimes in the Soviet Union and in Western and Eastern Europe poses for political historians myriad problems related to seismic regime change and the political and social consequences of rapid transformations within a nation. These changes include collective and individual suffering of ethnic and political groups and individual citizens. The variety of regime changes in European history presents scholars with rich opportunities for comparison, especially between the authoritarian regimes that have deeply transformed the Soviet Union (the “Great Experiment”), Italy, and Germany during the first half of the twentieth century. The military defeat or political collapse of these totalitarian regimes provides additional material for historians interested in regime change, as well as presenting sharp difference with American political history.

As well as confronting regime change, European historians inevitably contrast these violent political upheavals with the stability of democratic polities in England and France (excluding the four-year period of the Vichy regime). These issues of totalitarianism and democracy have created ideological division within European historical scholarship.

A Crowded Field where Historians and Nonhistorians Compete

Ideology has been an extremely propitious terrain for political history. History reflects in many cases competing ideologies, contemporary political debates, and...