Why Europe Needs Historiographic Tolerance

Europe’s Culture War revolves around competing understandings of democracy, divergent visions of EU cooperation, and, crucially, contested historical narratives. Historiography maps itself across the continent. Western European liberals tend to draw an anti-nationalist lesson from the darkest chapters of the twentieth century, while thinkers in the Visegrád countries and former East Germany align more closely with a national-conservative, anti-totalitarian, and anti-imperial reading. As political scientist Philip Manow notes with biting irony, the lesson drawn by the other is deemed worthless, nonexistent, even dangerous. “The enemy is now also the one who comes from a different history, someone who, as a result, appears not to understand history correctly, or refuses to understand it correctly and to draw the proper political conclusions from it.” The other, in this logic, is no true democrat, no good European. But having different historical views is intrinsic to democracy on a continental scale. And to love Europe is to love its plurality. What we need now is a modest measure of historiographical tolerance, if only to keep our European Culture War within bounds.