The Return of History to the Present

Pierre de Boissieu, former secretary-general of the European Council, recently stated, ‘the events of 1989 may have led us in Europe to believe that it was over, that we were at peace, but in reality, what took place was a great disarmament. Military disarmament, of course, but above all a disarmament of our linguistic weapons to define ourselves, to describe ourselves as Europeans.’¹

For over thirty years, the End of History thesis has led Europeans to consider war on their continent as a relic of the past. No wonder then that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been experienced as a ‘Return of History’. Political leaders from Warsaw to Paris and Berlin to Helsinki are currently taking decisions to deal with a new strategic situation. Rearmament, in the military sense, is the order of the day.

However, confronted with History’s return, there is also a need to re-equip ourselves mentally and intellectually, to refill our linguistic toolbox so that we can make sense of unfolding events and situate ourselves in time.

Just as we remember (or learned at school) that the Cold War ended in 1989-91, we are having to come to terms with the fact that the ensuing post-Cold War era has emphatically finished. There is a vague realization that we are entering a new historical era. Accompanying it, however, is a general feeling of disorientation.

To compensate for spatial disorientation, we use a compass; to compensate for temporal disorientation, we can use a sense of history. We need to know where we have come from, where we are now and where we are going – as well as how to relate to this ‘we’. A story, or history, anchors us and carries us forward.

This makes it urgent, when reflecting on the ‘return of history’ in the present, to embrace all three meanings of the term. History as (1) a stream of events; (2) a scholarly discipline; and (3) as a political story. All are inextricably interwoven.

A stream of events

The fact that history in the first sense has gained a new urgency is probably the easiest to grasp. 

Of course, it is only in Europe, the most ‘post-historical’ of continents, that recent turbulence and disruptive events came as a true shock. Nowhere else held the post-1989 notion of a singular historical end goal so dear, in which the whole planet, according to Fukuyama’s tale, was on its way to free markets and liberal democracy. The European Union itself – refounded in 1991, just months after the Soviet Union’s collapse – placed a strategic bet on the End of History, in the hope of accelerating it, first on the European continent (‘enlargement’) and then by exporting it globally (‘international multilateral order’).

It is no surprise, then, that Russia’s refusal to play according to this script is what has signalled this change of era to European leaders. Their assessments of the exact turning point differ, however. Did it occur in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea? Donald Tusk at that point officially asserted that ‘History is back’.² Or was it in 2022, with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine? That was the moment when Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz officially declared a ‘Zeitenwende’, a turn of the times.

Of course, non-European states and audiences see other timelines and evolutions at play since 1989. But when reflecting on the global state of great power politics, the calendar looks somewhat similar. The post-Cold War détente came to an end a decade or so ago, with the People’s Republic of China now in the role formerly played by Soviet Russia as the US’s main strategic rival. Future historians will discuss the exact caesura, but probably all will agree that the tides turned somewhere between 2008 and 2016 – that is, between the Global Financial Crisis, when the economic and social mess the West created for itself emboldened Beijing, and the US election of 2016, when Trump won the White House for the first time on his promise to roll back globalization and take on China. Xi Jinping’s rise to the presidency took place in 2013, midway between these geopolitical bookends.

What should we call this era? Some have proposed ‘post-post-Cold War’, a notion which does not get us much further. Others already speak of a ‘Cold War 2.0’, which is perhaps a bit premature. Reserving judgement, for now we can call it the Xi-Trump era.

The dual ‘return’ of historical spectres – Russia’s direct territorial aggression and the new global superpower rivalry – not only forces Europeans to protect ourselves better, but also invites us to re-engage with history as scholarly discipline. When the Florentine politician-in-exile Niccolò Machiavelli was confronted with the wars and disasters befalling the lands of Italy following the French invasion of 1492, he spent time with ancient Roman historians, notably drawing lessons and examples for his contemporaries from Livy in his masterful Discorsi (1513). Similarly, now that we Europeans have been experiencing our own ‘Machiavellian moment’ – to use the term coined by the historian J.G.A. Pocock for the moment when a political order experiences its vulnerability in the stream of events from which it can also derive a new strength and will to survive – we should make the same ‘historic turn’.³

A scholarly discipline

The great historian Hajo Holborn, who fled Nazi Germany for America, wrote as early 1951; ‘A constructive treatment of Europe’s present-day problems calls for historical thinking, which is something more than mere historical knowledge.’⁴

This statement is as powerful and as relevant today as when he wrote it. Holborn distinguishes two aspects of history as a discipline.

First, it is about establishing facts, true facts. This is presumably what he refers to as historical knowledge. What happened, when? Who said what? What came first, what came later? In contemporary parlance, it is the verified Wikipedia variant of historiography.

Second, there is historical thinking, the art that provides us with a compass in time. Of course, time connects past, present and future for everyone, but the historian always wants to know: what is new here, what has changed, what offers continuity? Not to mention what seems new but started some time ago, what are its causes and consequences, what seems to be over but in fact continues underground? 

To some extent, we urgently need both knowledge and thinking. In an age of disinformation and propaganda, it does not hurt to get the facts straight, to be able to tell truth from lies. The search for historical knowledge is indispensable. Naiveté is to be avoided, though. It would be wrong to characterize this as always being truth versus lies, as often it is a battle between interpretations, between stories. Even without the propaganda, Ukraine and Russia will still have different views of the past, any interpretation of that story is a political act. Even if you get all the facts right, you can still tell two different stories from different perspectives.

This is where historical thinking comes in, of which there are five characteristics. 

The dynamics of change. On the one hand, history teaches us that change can sometimes happen quickly. Just as the pace of certain revolutionary events overwhelmed people in the past – yesterday you lived in a century-old monarchy, today in a republic – we, too, may at some point in the future experience transformations that are currently inconceivable. The opposite, however, is also true: sometimes attrition prevails rather than abrupt change, with the stubborn continuation of old forms that refuse to yield, old wounds that never heal, ancient grief or resentment that resurfaces with unexpected vitriol. Historical thinking arms us mentally against both the veneration of the status quo and the hubris of the clean slate, bidding us to seek a path between old and new.

The nature of time. Time takes two forms, defined by the Greeks as Chronos and Kairos. Chronos is the forward march of time in nature, measured by clocks and calendars, shaped by the earth’s circuit around the sun and on its own axis. Whereas Kairos, the opportune time, refers to the right moment to act, lending a subjective sense to time. When a historian speaks of ‘history accelerating’, it does not mean that the clock is speeding up, but rather that the pace of events is increasing, the Wheel of Fortune starting to spin – a time when many hold their breath, while others try to ‘seize the moment’.

Irony and surprise. The discipline of history highlights the importance of chance and unpredictability. It revels in tales of missed opportunities and accidental encounters, which lead down one path leaving another untaken. It teaches how small causes can be of great consequence – causes that previously escaped even the most prescient observers. Sometimes every actor wants the same thing (all leaders want peace, all investors want to profit on the stock market) but something that is wished by no one happens (a war, or a financial crash). This is why irony is the figure of speech dear to many historians, professionally keen to underline the twists and turns of the historical process that they alone, with the benefit of hindsight, truly understand.

Tragedy. Fourthly, the most sensitive historians – perhaps closer in this respect to poets or novelists – convey an awareness of tragedy. The human world contains many forms and possibilities, many conflicting desires and interests. The tragedy, in essence, is that not everything is possible at once, that in the real world it is not only ‘good’ against ‘evil’ but sometimes also ‘good’ against ‘good’ as the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin brilliantly opined – peace against justice, freedom against equality. In this respect, acknowledging a return of history (or of geopolitics) is to acknowledge that we live in a broken world.⁵

Freedom. Finally, the breathtaking spectacle of change in the history of humanity may seem humbling at times, but it is at heart empowering. Change is possible. Notwithstanding the weight and constraints of the past, we have the capacity for ‘new beginnings’ (as Hannah Arendt termed them), the power of human action to break apparent necessity and to open up paths as yet untrodden. The consequences of such action may be unpredictable (per the irony above), but the space to exercise our individual or collective freedom exists and defines us.

Once again, for Europe and the European Union in particular, this historical worldview is potentially transformative. While its post-1945 founders profoundly believed in the possibility of ‘new beginnings’, they underestimated the weight of the past. In a way, the EU was built to lay the world-historical drama of Kairos to rest. It relied on time to be just Chronos, the measured time of bureaucracy and regulation. 

The same Hajo Holborn wrote in 1962, ‘From this unforeseen novelty of the present European situation it has also been inferred that we could forget its history altogether. But such an inference could lead to … serious blunders. … Yet, though the self-contained European political system has broken down and Europe finds itself under the shadow of two world rivals, her nations are not dead.’⁶

Tellingly, to understand the post-1945 European Communities, whether in Brussels, Strasbourg or Luxembourg, for a long time you had to be a lawyer. These were after all products of new treaties, rules and regulations, all supervised by Courts. Then entered the political scientists, as political life germinated with the Parliamentary Assemblies in Strasbourg, and as national democratic arenas started waking up to the consequences of these new realities. Then, in the years of the single European market and single currency, economics was of course added to the mix, and with it its share of macro- and microeconomists.

These fields provided the tools to understand Europe as a political, economic and social entity. Meanwhile, however, not least in crises around the EU’s currency and its borders, the limits of technocracy and bureaucracy – the reins controlled by the lawyers and economists – have made themselves felt. To understand Europe in the turmoil of our times, we also need a historical awareness and thinking.

The return of history as story

History is always political. It starts with the choice of a protagonist – for instance, a State, a nation, a social group – a deeply political act that defines a ‘we’. It is about locating the protagonist in time. In what present do we live, between which future and what past. In what era, on what scale? 

Political leaders do not have the historian’s luxury of judging after the fact. They have to act, decide and shape the facts right now – at the risk of being outwitted by History’s irony. 

Since time immemorial all geopolitical players have had a story for their people about their relationship to history. It is no coincidence that Vladimir Putin wrote a quasi-scientific essay about the causes of the outbreak of World War Two in the summer before the Ukraine invasion. Nor is it a coincidence that Xi Jinping himself designed the storyboard in the immense History Museum at Tiananmen Square in Beijing (he put the 1860 looting of the Emperor’s Summer Palace by British and French soldiers centre-stage).

Saying ‘We Europeans’ is not something we do easily, torn as we are between a universal yearning and, oftentimes, a national belonging. Helping Europe to build a narrative in which it recognizes itself and which will enable it to act more strategically is a central mission for the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics.

History is all about writing the story of our past. This writing is political. Geopolitically minded leaders have taken up the pen as historians, from Julius Caesar to Charles De Gaulle and Winston Churchill (who once quipped ‘History will be kind to me, as I intend to write it’). With events unfolding on many fronts, it is now up to Europeans to find the right tone in the midst of tragic, angry, pastoral, pamphleteering, lyrical or ironic writing. If we do not, others will write and decide that story for us.