Narrating European History: Progress or Regress? Celebration or Condemnation?

[originally published on History Survey on 6/24/2007]

History intersects not only with social sciences such as sociology, anthropology, or political science, but also with story-telling and those humanities that analyze narratives. These latter disciplines include comparative literature and English. History is narrative, and every history or piece of historical analysis one writes is informed by a particular plot line.

Students and even professional historians tend to unwittingly fall into one or more narrative traps when they write. First, there is the question of progress. Can we narrate history as the triumphant forward march of progress? To some extent the developments in thought and culture that led to the Enlightenment invite us to write the history of early modern thought as a story of progress. But how do we explain the spike in witchcraft persecutions from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries? Did these interrogations, trials, and executions represent some kind of "progress" over medieval "superstition"?

If we look at developments in warfare in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is possible to see progress in the ability of states to mobilize their resources in order to destroy those of enemy states. Technological, economic, and political modernization helped to promote a path towards the total wars of the twentieth century. We can extend this story to include the threat of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War. But the threat of Armageddon has receded from the list of things most humans fear as immanent. So what happens to the plot? The answer depends on one's focus as well as on the start and end points of one's story.

Slavery, imperialism, the World Wars, and Cold War politics all tend to invite students to narrate the history of the modern West as one long tale of depraved destruction and exploitation. But what about the history of our Western human rights discourse? European history can be told neither exclusively as a story of triumph nor of horror. Like most other things in the human experience, the history of Europe is filled with ambiguity and paradox. The best work of students and historians implicitly acknowledges this circumstance.