Li Teng (Department of World History, Shanghai Normal University)
The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe, by Patrick Gere, translated by Lü Zhao and Yang Guang, Guangxi Normal University Press, February 2022
In the twenty-first century, the world that was once on the road to globalization has suddenly reversed, and the specter of nationalism has once again enveloped Europe, and similar currents of thought can be seen all over the world. Although the leaders of human society have never been able to learn the lessons of history, historians have always paid attention to the development of the current world with vigilant eyes.
As a well-known contemporary historian, Patrick Gerry should be no stranger to Chinese readers. In 2016, Professor Gere was invited to visit Peking University and gave several keynote speeches on ethnic issues in early medieval Europe. Gere's research focuses on the early Middle Ages, including before France and Germany (1988) and Living with the Dead in Middle Ages (1994), as well as internationally renowned professional scholarship, as well as writing for the masses, notably the 2002 issue of The Myths of Nations: Medieval Origins in Europe Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe) is the most influential.
Gerry has a very strong identity as a "public Intellectuals," and his research focuses almost constantly on Europe, where cracks have emerged in the late twentieth and early twentieth centuries. At the beginning of The Myth of the Nation, Gehrig criticizes the so-called "European Community" as "unworthy of its name" and essentially nothing more than the original Western European Community plus Greece. In this system constructed by politicians, the borders of Europe are the borders of the Warsaw Pact. At the time of writing this book, all Gerry saw was a gloomy scene: nationalism, national superiority, racism, and other ghosts that had been considered expulsion from Europe, reappeared in a more aggressive posture, and the series of wars, conflicts, and chaos after the upheavals in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe worried him deeply.
The cover of the English edition of "The Myth of the Nation" shows the baptism of the legendary Frankish king Clovis in the background.
In Gerry's view, the rhetoric of nationalist leaders is false imagination, and this error is rooted in a "misreading" of European history from 400 to 1000 AD. In the interpretation of the nation-state, the interpretation of the disintegration of the Roman Empire and the "Great Migration of barbarians" became an important part of the political discourse that underpinned Europe. Grim maintains the dispassionate attitude of an objective historian, trying to show that there is no real consistency between the "ethnic groups" of the early Middle Ages and the "ethnic groups" of Europe today. Since the 1990s, large numbers of people from eastern Europe, northern Africa, and elsewhere have poured into Western Europe with their religions, cultures, political traditions, and lifestyles, a sight that many locals see as a reenactment of the fall of the Roman Empire. Nationalists are not only trying to find ways to save Europe from history, but also trying to prove the unquestionable ancient rights of their own groups to their homeland. In the main chapter of The Myth of the Nation, Gerry chooses to focus on the process of great migration and integration of peoples since the late Roman Empire, arguing that the so-called nations of Europe are nothing more than a "myth" formed in the early European Middle Ages, a constructed myth. However, Gerry also regrettably realized that, as an invention of the human will, the status of the idea of ethnicity or nationalism could not be shaken by the critique of pure reason.
The national construction of the early Middle Ages in Europe
Gere's narrative focuses primarily on Europe since the fourth century AD, but when it comes to western knowledge and understanding of nations, it still has to go back to ancient Greek times. Herodotus is regarded as the first ethnographic writer, and his approach to understanding and depicting the world still influences us today. What are the basic conditions for the formation of a nation? Language, territory and the unique culture that has been formed. Taking Greek culture as an example, Herodotus clearly stated in the History: "All of us Greeks have a common blood, a common language, a common temple and rituals, and a common way of life." Herodotus also realized that populations could both arise and disappear, and believed that many ethnic groups were characterized by geographical factors rather than genetic factors. This is very similar to Hippocrates' understanding of why Asians were weak. Hippocrates believed that people living in Asia and Europe were very different in physique and physique, and that Asians were not as warlike as Europeans, lacking energy and courage, because the weather in Asia did not change significantly. But Hippocrates also believed that the more important reason for the weakness of Asians lay in institutional practices, because people there lived under the rule of an authoritarian monarch, and even those who were born brave and determined would become cowardly under such a system. Here, classical writers have sketched out some of the criteria for dividing nations, including blood, language, religion, way of life, and institutions.
The real foundation of the European concept of nationality dates back to the Roman era, from which the various peoples began to develop a sense of identity, which was gradually strengthened in historical development. For the Romans, only the people of Populus Romanus had a history, and this history is the story of how a group of people who accepted the same law became "Romans.". In this sense, the "unity" of Rome has nothing to do with blood, geography, culture, language, or fictional traditions. As long as they agree with Roman law and can practice it without hindrance, anyone can be admitted as a Roman citizen, and Roman citizenship is theoretically open to all. In the Roman world, the most important thing was the distinction between slaves and free men, and there was also a huge gap between elite groups and the general public, which was a common condition for most civilizations throughout the ages and the present. By the third century, as almost all of the inhabitants of the empire had become Roman citizens, they were likely to develop a stronger sense of belonging to class, occupation, and the city. This is actually laying the groundwork for the subsequent development of European history.
In Gerry's view, the harm caused by barbarian invasion of the empire is simply not worth mentioning compared with the casualties and attrition caused by the Roman army crossing the Rhine and Danube to conquer the barbarians. The real threat of barbarian invasion was the arrival of the Huns. At the same time, he saw that such a nomadic alliance based on military victory could not afford to lose, and that the entire alliance would quickly disintegrate in the event of a major military setback or the death of a military leader. Moreover, the interests within the Roman Empire were not the same. The emergence and development of these barbarian armies was in some respects in line with the interests of the local nobility, so the nobles were happy to see the barbarian tribes settle in the western part of the empire. This shift triggered dramatic changes in the social identity and ethnic identity of the western part of the empire, and even formed a unique barbarian tradition. As history moved into the early Middle Ages, the structure of Roman heritage and barbarian traditions gave the Franks of the sixth century a powerful fusion force. The disintegration of the Western Empire and the juxtaposition of kingdoms not only affected the course of history, but also invalidated the criteria originally used to distinguish between the Goths and romans. From a grand perspective, the Saxons replaced the Franks and Alamani in the western part of the Roman Empire, while the Avars replaced the Goths and Huns in the eastern part of the empire. The rapid disappearance of the Avar alliance in eastern Austria and Hungary played an important role in the rapid and complete Slavization of Central and Eastern Europe. By the eighth century, "Romans" was more of a regional term, and by the ninth century it referred specifically to the people in the city of Rome. Gerry wrote a cautionary note: "When the barbarians disappeared from the empire, the Romans disappeared." ”
This famous mural depicts the Pope meeting attila outside the city with Attila, the leader of the Union of Hungarian Armies.
Through an analysis of the conflict and integration of peoples in the early Middle Ages, Gerry points out that the labels used to describe ethnic groups have not been used continuously in history, nor have they developed linearly, and it is impossible to evaluate the "pure and single" blood ties to communicate between ancient and modern. In many cases, people have simply stolen some traditions that have disappeared, while at the same time inventing some new traditions, creating and even fabricating the sacred genealogy of the royal family, choosing some battles and heroes as examples of great significance, forming a national historical imagination. According to Gerry, the contemporary nationalist view of history is static, while the real history of the development of European ethnic groups from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages is continuous. Many names and expressions handed down from history have been misappropriated and tampered with with ulterior motives, shaping the current interpretation of history and even affecting future historical narratives. Gere has always emphasized that centuries of social, political, and cultural change cannot be reduced to a single, eternal moment, the goals, identities, etc. of the community and its members are constantly changing, and the history of ethnic groups on all continents of the world is undergoing a process of constant shaping and reshaping.
As an American, he consciously looks at European history and civilization from the perspective of the "other," but Gerry argues that "we historians must be ashamed of the creation of myths of the perpetuation of ethnic groups that are both stubborn and dangerous." At the end of The Myth of the Nation, Geri borrows the history of the Zulu people in South Africa written by the European missionary Bryant, saying that he uses the well-known model of the origin of the nation as a model, and then uses the Zulu legend as a raw material, so that the history of the nation has become "artist assembling mosaics". According to Gerry, this way of writing is to reconstruct the history of ethnic groups on the basis of "the politics and culture that the author cares about" in response to the concerns of the author's own time. The purpose of Writing The Myth of the Nation is to break the phenomenon of such a myth, but to some extent, it also embodies the thinking and mode of such a myth. Of course, in the eyes of Gerry and his supporters, this is to counter the false propaganda of history, and even more because this propaganda of history poses great danger. The two political leaders targeted by Geri are Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the French National Front (renamed the "National Union" in June 2018) and former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. In the book, Gerry repeatedly accuses the two of using history for political service, primarily for the anniversary of Clovis's baptism and for manipulating the anniversary of the Kosovo War. Grei strives to present a work that depicts the historical truth as much as possible from an objective standpoint, but also based on the reality he observes and is concerned about, and has a clear political tendency and position. When he criticizes the "misinterpretation" of history by contemporary "far-right" scholars and politicians with "real history", he seems to have fallen into a similar situation to some extent.
Marina Le Pen, the leader of the French "National Union", conducts an electoral campaign in front of the statue of Joan of Arc, and the elderly man sitting on the right is her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Nationalism in the academic history of the nineteenth century
Where did this nationalist historical narrative in Europe come from? Gerry found the "culprit" in the academic development of the nineteenth century. He argues that the romantic political philosophies of Rousseau and Hegel, combined with the combination of Indo-European literature and the history of science, together created ethnic nationalism. He even argues that modern historiography, born in the nineteenth century, was "conceived and developed" as an instrument of European nationalism, and that nineteenth-century scholars, statesmen, and poets adopted new methods of studying using legends, written documents, and myths, with the ultimate aim of constructing a political unity and political autonomy.
Gerry emphasized that in the nineteenth century many European countries were particularly ruthless in suppressing the language, cultural traditions and different memories of history of minorities in order to shape a unified nation with the same text, the same language, and the same context. The spread of this phenomenon is mainly due to the fascination of the European intellectual elite with ancient society, which led them not to study or recognize the history of a people, but to "invent" the people they studied. This trend is most pronounced in France and Germany. Both France and Germany have pursued ambitious national education programmes, strongly advocating the unification of languages and the unity of national languages as a necessary guarantee for the unity of national groups. This "patriotic" measure stems to a large extent from the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century and the war between the "German" and "French" countries in the early nineteenth century. At a critical juncture of war and severe social upheaval, cultural nationalism is most easily politicized and can be quickly transformed into a powerful tool for political mobilization. In terms of academic research, in the nineteenth century, Germany, France, Britain and other European countries began to collect ancient texts on a large scale and establish their own national literature. One of the most important projects is the Collection of Important Germanic Historical Documents (or "German Historical Documents Integration", MGH). The early participants in the project believed that the literature written in the areas settled or ruled by the Germanic-speaking peoples should be regarded as important documents of the Germanic or German communities, so that important documents from southern Italy to northwestern France, from the Balkans to the southern danish territory, were included in the "Germanic". To this day, this collection of documents is an indispensable core source for the study of the Middle Ages, especially the history of the early Middle Ages.
The home page of the MGH website
Language is the concrete expression of national identity, and education is the main way to perpetuate and strengthen people's love of national heritage. Literature analysis and linguistic analysis became two tools of German nationalism, shaping the history of the "Germans" and spreading rapidly throughout Europe through German-style seminars and textual criticism. Both French and British academics have been deeply influenced, with the addition of a large number of professorial seats in philology and history to universities across Europe. In contrast to Germany, French scholars emphasized the role of French culture as the mainstay of the medieval period. As a reaction against the "historiography of reason" in the Age of Enlightenment, they enthusiastically praised the romanticization of the Middle Ages, most notably Jean-Jacques Ampère (1800-1864) and Émile Gebhart (1839-1908). Ampère believes that french dialects first appeared during the first (Carolingian) Renaissance during the reign of Charlemagne, gradually formed a complete writing system in the second (twelfth century) Renaissance of the eleventh to twelfth centuries, and eventually formed modern French during the Renaissance in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Italy). By juxtaposing French culture with the process of European history, French scholars have highlighted France's pivotal position in the development of european medieval culture, infiltrating the concept of nationalism into the macroscopic interpretation of history, which still influences our academic research and historical thinking to this day. Even on the other side of the ocean, early medieval historians in the United States, especially Herbert Baxter Adams (1850-1901) and Charles Homer Haskins (1870-1937), were influenced by these methodologies and constructed the early American medieval research context. Thus, our study of the Middle Ages today remains a follower of nineteenth-century historiography in many respects, especially in the documentary material.
Gerry's Language and Power in the Early Middle Ages has been translated and published by Professor Liu Linhai of Beijing Normal University
In Language and Power in the Early Middle Ages, Gere also refutes these views of national languages. He argues that the rise of local dialects in the Middle Ages and their written language were fundamentally due to the functioning of religious and political power, not to create national languages, and much less to national identity. The emergence and written interpretation of the dialects of various regions in the heyday of the Middle Ages as the product of national consciousness and national identity is a serious distortion of history by modern nationalist trends. Thus, Gehrig has always emphasized that modern historiography, born in the nineteenth century, is essentially an instrument of nationalist ideology, and that although it has achieved great success in writing the history of the peoples of Europe, this success has "stuffed the poison of ethnic nationalism" into the understanding of the past by the masses. In the history of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the study of history, archaeology, and linguistics has often been used to support political claims and even to "encourage modern states to claim sovereignty over the territories of neighboring countries." Germany repeatedly demanded that its neighbors divide part of their territory, because it was "once the original homeland of the Germans", and these splintered areas were taken for granted as "a 'return' to their homeland rather than an 'invasion' of others". Twenty-first-century Europe is not fundamentally different from nineteenth-century Europe in many respects, and aggressors often seek "reasonable evidence of legitimacy" from history before waging war. In a way, this is precisely the example of the great success of the nationalist historical concept since the nineteenth century.
The historian's dilemma
Historians have always been in a dilemma. They had to reconstruct and even imagine what had been the case using written documents or artifacts handed down from antiquity, even if they themselves were always skeptical of the materials on which they depended. Greg received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1974, and his period of academic growth and development was accompanied by the rise of postmodern ideas and the so-called "linguistic shift", in which he himself was deeply involved. Whether in the study of the history of the early Middle Ages or in the commentary on the history of nineteenth-century historiography, his feelings and reactions to everything around him are permeated by the words. Since the early 1990s, Gerry argues, political leaders have found that ancient myths such as retelling the history of heroes, the origins of nations, and early frontiers have a special appeal to the masses. People are always willing to accept a simple linear narrative and distinguish between good and evil.
The historian's dilemma doesn't stop there. Even when modern technologies such as DNA are incorporated into historical research, it is difficult to completely destroy the deep-rooted national myths. Even if we today could prove through archaeological, historical, and even technological means that the Dorians could never be descendants of Hercules, and that their tribal identity was rather crude, the Greeks at the time were convinced of these claims. From this point of view, the myth of this nation, this imaginary community, is a real existence in the social environment and history of the time.
As an important symbol of ethnic division, ethnic kinship can be manifested through external physical characteristics, while cultural identity and language as mother tongue are more hidden and more important. Ancient Greece once paid special attention to kinship, and over time this criterion of blood relations has become more and more diluted. In the development of human history, it is a common trend that culture has replaced kinship as the main criterion of ethnic identity. Chen Yinke, in his discussion of the history of the Northern Dynasty, pointed out that the so-called "Hu-Han division" is in culture rather than race. The use of appearance, lifestyle and language as a sign of distinguishing ethnic groups is also found in Chinese civilization. The Book of Rites and The Royal System describes the differences between the Eastern Yi and the Western Rong, the Southern Barbarians, and the Northern Di, most of which focus on the characteristics of appearance and lifestyle, such as "tattooed", "clothing and feather cave dwelling", "no fire food", "no grain food", etc., in the final analysis, it is "the people of the five directions, the language is not the same, the appetite is different", and the language and lifestyle have become the symbols that distinguish each other.
As the most famous historian of the twentieth century, Toynbee constructed his own view of cultural history, believing that culture was in decline due to mixing, and the admiration for the purity and unity of national culture is still visible to bibi. The complexity of Europe is that, in addition to the question of kinship, there is also the question of religion, and even religion and the culture in which it is formed is more important than the so-called issue of race or kinship. In medieval Western Europe, religious and political identities gradually replaced the connecting role of language and descent. Since Gere's research focuses primarily on the fourth to ninth centuries from the collapse of the Roman Empire to the rise of Carolingians, there is no in-depth discussion of the development of Europe in the following centuries. This is partly to counter the "cult of origins" and "cult of migration", and it is also a more targeted "historical logic" aimed at contemporary right-wing politicians. But for The National Identity of Europe, perhaps the eleventh to thirteenth centuries were the more important period of development, because the nationalist historiography based on the nineteenth century was precisely the study of this period as the central axis.
As the two translators said in the afterword, their teachers and classmates showed great anger and concern about Le Pen's ability to play against Macron in the general election. One year after the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo for "blasphemy", Le Pen declared that "I am not Charlie, I am Charlie Matt", and directly used the "European savior" who defeated the Muslim army in the Pyrenees to show his political position of "French first". Gerry's worries are becoming a clearer reality. Since the european refugee crisis, the public opinion in countries such as Britain, France and Germany has begun to undergo major changes. In the north-west of England, I also witnessed the historical moment of the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union, and saw all kinds of English medieval hero worship and British particularity propaganda. It is precisely because these nationalist currents of thought and their influence are so great that we should also recognize that a nation's national memory and national identity and sense of belonging are not only motivated by personal emotional needs, but also as a need for social bonds, and even a spiritual kinship. These emotional needs of individuals and societies cannot be rationally persuaded through objective historical research. The created nation may not be absolutely historically true, but once created, the nation is understood and even believed to be real. As Cantorovich shows in The Two Bodies of the King, the concept of the political body of the king as a legal fiction is not objectively real, but once created, it cannot be avoided. From this point of view, historians' construction, deconstruction and interpretation of the origin and development of the nation cannot truly and completely destroy people's sense of national belonging and vigilance against others. The study of history in the 19th century has only given a more complete form to the interpretation of nationalism, and even if the myth of the national historical narrative is deliberately or unintentionally constructed, these "persistent diseases" may not be completely eliminated during the existence of human society. In other words, this may be precisely the trait shared by human beings as a multi-ethnic whole.
Editor-in-Charge: Yu Shujuan
Proofreader: Yijia Xu