5 History Peter Calvert

70 DISCIPLINES 5 History peter calvert The main purpose of this chapter is to show how historians have contributed to our understanding of the processes of democratization. In the course of this the main focus will be on the different views historians have taken of alternative paths to democracy and particularly its early stages – the so-called ‘first wave’ (see Huntington 1991). To do this, however, we have first to take into account the ways in which different historians have approached the writing of history. Democratization here is taken to be a process by which popular participation is enhanced. It is not confined to periods of passage from authoritarian to popular government. It includes (but is not confined to): • the establishment of the principles of representative government, accountability and the rule of law; • the extension of participation, either by the formal widen- ing of the franchise, or by the informal empowerment of new social groups that have not previously participated, or both; and • the continued modification of modern systems to facil- itate popular understanding of and ability to participate in government. Such modifications are, in the United States the passage of the Freedom of Information Act, in France the end of the prefectoral tutelle, and in the United Kingdom the devolution of powers in the late 1990s to the Scots Parliament and the Welsh Assembly. While it is easy to say that understanding the present is helped by a knowledge of the past, in practice things are far more complicated. This is because historians do not and (more to the point) cannot agree on the past; when presenting Peter Calvert - 9781526137302 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/01/2021 11:36:57PM via free access HISTORY 71 their narratives they impose their own versions of rationality and orderly development. But, far from this implying that historical research only makes the challenge of making sense of recent democratization even more problematic, the main inference is that students of democratization in other disciplines, who constantly rely on historical works to fill out understanding, absorb the assumptions of history along with the content, and that they should therefore remain alert to this. Different approaches to the writing of history Perhaps the greatest contribution history can make, therefore, to the understanding of democratization is to enable us to understand better how historians’ questioning of the foundations of their own discipline can have implications for our understanding of accepted ‘facts’. The founder of modern historical scholarship, Leopold von Ranke, uninten- tionally pointed up the ambiguity between aspiration and actuality in his celebrated comment (which was meant only to apply to the specific work): ‘History has had assigned to it the task of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of ages to come. To such lofty functions this work does not aspire. Its aim is merely to show how things actually were (wie es eigentlich gewesen)’.1 The Rankean view that history based on original sources is definitive (fact) has long since been modified. It has, indeed, been wholly abandoned by the post-modernists; but the arguments of philosophers such as Richard Rorty and the historian Hayden White basically only amount to an assertion that nothing can ever be known for certain (see Jenkins 1995). Yet for a variety of practical reasons we need to have some agreement about what happened in the past – if only to try to plan for the future. However partial this ‘knowledge’ may be and however uncertain we may be that it does in fact constitute ‘knowledge’, the historian does not have the freedom of the poet or the novelist to dismiss certainty as impossible and leave it at that. A more crucial objection is posed by Ankersmit (1983), who argues that there can be no general descriptions in Peter Calvert - 9781526137302 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/01/2021 11:36:57PM via free access 72 DISCIPLINES history. Terms such as ‘the Enlightenment’, for Ankersmit, are simply ‘names given to the “images” or “pictures” of the past proposed by historians attempting to come to grips with the past’. If this were true, then this argument that ‘the past itself has no narrative pattern or structure’ would be equally valid for ‘democratization’ (Ankersmit 1983: 99, 110). McCullagh (1998) accepts that different historians will have different views about the past, and consequently that they will have different views about all such classific- atory terms and generalizations. However, as he points out, all such views do in fact have much in common. They may be unique in detail, but they can still be identified as referring to the same thing and be classified as belonging to the same family of descriptions. And, ‘once it is admitted that there are criteria for the application of most general terms in history, then the possibility of them being true becomes plain. A general description of the past is true if the criteria for its application are satisfied’ (see McCullagh 1998: 68). There is therefore still a discipline termed History, and it is distinguished by its methodology. Philosophy offers us one sort of understanding about the world we live in. Sci- ence and History each offer us alternative understandings. As it did for Ranke, History still involves the interrogation of written and other material from some time before the present in order to arrive at an understanding of the past. History depends on the existence of written sources, and without sources is not recognized as such (hence we have to talk of prehistory for the times before which written sources are available). Historians have almost unlimited freedom to dispute what meaning they should attach to their source material, and in recent years have shown a great deal of ingenuity in iden- tifying and interrogating material that was not previously consulted. What they cannot legitimately do is either to ignore evidence to the contrary of which they are aware, or to insert material for which they have no evidence what- soever. Speculation, up to a point, is perfectly permissible for the historian,2 but it must be labelled as such. In the twentieth century interrogation of the sources expanded, with (a) utilization of new sources (from account books to oral history); (b) new techniques for interrogation (statistics, Peter Calvert - 9781526137302 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/01/2021 11:36:57PM via free access HISTORY 73 scientific analysis of materials, radiocarbon dating, archae- ological research); and (c) ability to access and to store much larger quantities of data. Historians, however, remained suspicious of frameworks such as the ‘models’ employed by other social scientists that are specifically intended to present a selective picture of reality. The discipline’s main contribution to understanding also presents problems, which the post-modernists have been quick to claim support their pessimism. To be rendered intelligible to the reader, history has to be set out as narrative. But history as narrative imposes a sense of rationality and orderly development that is in some sense the creation of the historian. Take one example: the concept of a ‘century’. The long-held assumption that 1914 marks the true end of the long nineteenth century has been challenged for many years (Seaman 1966). And it already has been argued that the ‘short twentieth century’ began in 1914 and came to an end as early as 1989, presumably consigning the history of ‘third wave’ democratization to an equally elastic twenty- first century (Hobsbawm 1994). A more serious criticism has been made by various writers, notably the US historian, Hayden White (1966), that the narrative form in itself is misleading in its whole- ness. Though there is no real history for White, what people experience as history they do not see as a narrative – and necessarily so, since they do not have foreknowledge of what is to come. History cannot therefore constitute a log- ical progression towards the present, still less towards an ideal future state such as is implied by the term ‘democracy’ as it is currently used. In fact, in some complex situations, such as the French Revolution, narrative cannot easily cope with the complexity of events, and it is partly in con- sequence of this that successive generations of historians have needed to reinterpret it. We shall see how this has been done as we examine in turn the three main historical models of democratization. As was noted above, historians are rightly suspicious of models. Yet we can identify three streams of historical debate corresponding to three different models of the way in which the foundations of democracy were laid. These are: the myth of American exceptionalism, the Gladstonian view of British history, and the French Revolutionary tradition. Peter Calvert - 9781526137302 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/01/2021 11:36:57PM via free access 74 DISCIPLINES The myth of American exceptionalism We can begin with Gladstone’s apothegm that the US Con- stitution was ‘the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man’. One could challenge this judgement on many grounds. American historians have long since come to see the American Revolution not as a form of Constitutional debate but as the con- sequence of a deep-seated conflict of interest between Britain and its colonies – a view, moreover, with which Thomas Jefferson would undoubtedly have agreed. The Jeffersonians correctly saw the seat of popular will as lying in the States, but for some reason it has always been difficult to persuade British observers to interest themselves in the minutiae of state government. The US Federal Constitution deliberately limited the power of the people (as for example by the creation of the Electoral College), even while creating a structure designed to preclude any notion of a return to monarchy.

Load more