Towards a European History of Concepts: an Introduction

Towards a European History of Concepts: an Introduction Karin Tilmans (European University Institute, Florence) The Dutch conceptual history project has been generously received by academic critics, who have praised it for charting a territory in Dutch history that had so far remained largely unexplored. Yet several reviewers of the first volumes of the project, stressed the need to further explore and develop the international and comparative dimensions of Dutch conceptual history. This suggestion is entirely justified and could be further extended to include other existing projects in conceptual history, for they all tend to write the history of concepts primarily in a national context. The intention of the current special issue, "Towards a European History of Concepts", is to begin to remedy this situation by placing the findings to date of the Dutch project in a European context. Such a publication not only benefits Dutch conceptual history, but also the conceptual history research being currently carried out in other European countries. There are, it would seem, two main ways to attempt to transcend the hitherto dominant national framework in the study of the history of concepts, both of which will be explored in the internationalization project here proposed. The first and most obvious one is systematically to compare the history of various key concepts in different European countries, over a longer period of time, in order to highlight the parallels and differences in national conceptual development. For example, by comparing the history of the Dutch concept of citizenship to the history of that same concept in Germany, England and France, important insights into both national peculiarities and common patterns of conceptual development may be gained. Crucially important as such cross-border comparisons may be, they do not tell the whole story of the international dimensions of conceptual development. To bring that out in all its richness and complexity, it is necessary to go beyond the comparison of various national patterns of conceptual development and to attempt to study the process of international interaction in the development of concepts. Thus, for instance, the radical redefinition of the concept of liberty during the later part of the eighteenth century took place in a way that clearly defied national borders and that can only be studied as an international conceptual dialogue. The exploration of this latter aspect of conceptual development could and should eventually lead to the formulation of a wide- ranging research project on the European history of concepts. The current issue, however, is intended to be a first exploration of the various 1 comparative and international dimensions of conceptual history, taking Dutch conceptual history as its starting point and central focus and applying the two approaches of international comparison and international interaction to the Dutch case. In order to do so fruitfully, the project here limits itself to the three political concepts of fatherland, liberty and citizenship, both because political concepts have been the main focus of the first volumes of the Dutch project and because the history of these concepts has been thoroughly researched in the case of other relevant European countries. The exploration of the comparative dimension and the international interaction of these concepts is, moreover, limited to the three major and most important European countries surrounding the Dutch Republic, that is England, France and Germany or, to be precise, the Holy Roman Empire, and focuses on the early-modern period from 1550 till 1850. As Peter Burke, Lazio Kontler and others have argued, the majority in European society was not mono-lingual, but multi-lingual at least up to the late 18th century, and in some countries like Finland for example, even longer. Cities in particular (ports, trading centres) were multi-lingual places. Latin as an administrative language was in use everywhere on the Continent, except in England and France, up to the 15th century. As an academic language its influence lasted much longer, even in England, and especially so in the smaller European countries. On the European continent, from the 17th century onwards, French took the role of the dominant elite language in political and academic matters, as well as in polite conversation. Even at the height of the war against the French, continental European elites spoke and wrote to each other in French (for example Hardenberg, Stein and Tzar Alexander during the Napoleonic wars). In Eastern and Northern Europe during the 18th and early 19th centuries, German tended to be a second or third elite language, alongside French. From the late Enlightenment onwards, and even more so after the Revolution, French political and legal concepts were either directly relevant to people's everyday lives in large parts of the European continent, as during Napoleonic rule, or they constituted a positive or negative (especially in the English case) norm against which a `national' political language was more or less consciously 2 developed. Generally, the 19th century may be regarded as a period of `nationalisation' of political languages, including concepts like `nation', fatherland' and `people'. The concepts of `patrie', Vaterland', `vaderland' and their English equivalents (not 'fatherland' which was considered an alien concept in Britain) were associated with supposed particular French, German, Dutch, English/British values and qualities. They were imbued with emotion and their semantic entourage became nation specific. Three articles in this journal issue deal with Britain and the concepts of fatherland, liberty and citizenship, two with France and the concepts of nation and citizenship and two with the Holy Roman Empire and the concepts of fatherland and citizenship. For studies of conceptual history the multilingual character of most early modern European societies (with the exception of England and France) has to be taken into account. This means that asymmetrical conceptual transfers and translation processes, not only between countries but also within countries, were typical features up to at least the early 19th century. Elites frequently had to switch between a 'foreign' or old lingua franca (Latin, French) and popular/vernacular languages (German, Dutch, Polish etc.). These ongoing translation processes, like frequent irritations, brought about a great fluidity in the meaning of terms in the vernacular languages (meaning understood here in the sense of reference to concepts and/or 'realities', as well as in the sense of use patterns). Everywhere in Europe, with the exception of France and England, the early modern period is a period of extreme conceptual instability due to continuous flows in translation. It took some time until stable translations between the 'foreign' or old (French, Latin) elite terms and their possible meanings in the vernacular/popular languages were established. Translation flows were asymmetrical. During the early modern period and up to the mid-19th century, France was the great exporter of political, legal and social concepts, whereas conceptual imports into France were relatively rare. England too, up 3 to the early 19th century, was no great importer of concepts, but it did not export much either, except of course to America and other parts of the non- European world. Thus, French and English political, legal and social languages acquired a relative self-sufficiency early on, whereas everywhere else in Europe 'national' languages became more self-referential only during the mid- or later 19th century. To take the concept of 'fatherland' as a test case, another question, related to the issue of having a subject or object role, concerns the grammatical position of `vaderland' and the equivalent English, French and German terms in sentences. When, where, and why does `vaderland' appear only in the object position? When, where, and why does it move into the subject position? And if the term appears as a subject, is it constructed as 'doing' something (demanding, protecting, nourishing, fighting ..., like a person) or does it just 'have' something, for example certain qualities (like any anonymous being)? What is the `vaderland' in spatial terms, where is it located in space, what is the object of patriotism in spatial terms? In France, to begin with the easiest case, the answer seems to be relatively unproblematic. In most utterances in which the term `patrie' appears, `la patrie' as a space is identical with the state/territory called France. Smaller units (Bretagne, Provence, Normandie etc.) were probably never addressed as `patrie' by speakers, at least not in the early modern and contemporary periods (although this may have to be checked). However, there may be occasional uses of `la patrie' alluding to a larger 'idea of la France', even in spatial terms; for example for de Gaulle in his combat against Petain's Vichy regime. For Petain, `la patrie' was identical with ‘l’Etat francais'; for de Gaulle, it had to be something else, either an imagined territorial France in the past or future, or the French Empire. But in general, `la patrie', territorialy speaking, was `la France', and vice versa. For England/Britain the answer is less obvious and becomes more complicated from the 18th century onwards. The object of patriotism in spatial terms could be England, Great Britain (England, Wales and Scotland), the British Isles (the former with Ireland 4 and other islands), or the British Empire, perhaps even in some exceptional cases the English speaking peoples or an imagined English race. Most writers would leave undecided exactly what territory they had in mind when they spoke/wrote of the 'nation' or 'their country' in the abstract. However, England as a whole (not Cornwall or Yorkshire etc.) would in any case be the smallest possible territorial unit to which the term 'nation' could be applied. In Germany, it was even more unclear what Vaterland' meant in spatial terms, and this remained so even after the establishment of the Kaiserreich, during the Weimar Republic, the Nazi regime and up to 1990.

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