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An Even Briefer History of the Past
Reflections from Davos
"History is forcibly selective. We don't know what Julius Caesar did after he woke up in the morning before he was killed in the Senate, and we consider it irrelevant." - Umberto Eco, during a panel on the uses of history
"I was at a meeting where a Hungarian historian gave a paper quite critical of Hungarian history. In the audience was a very nationalist Hungarian who came up and berated him afterward. 'Your talk was outrageous!' he said. 'You should be more optimistic about the past.'" - Timothy Garton Ash, Fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford University
From an interview with Francis Fukuyama, Professor of Public Policy, George Mason University:
TIME: Prof. Fukuyama, it's just over 10 years since you predicted the end of history. Since then, the Berlin Wall collapsed, the Balkans imploded, genocide bloodied Rwanda and peace broke out in Northern Ireland. Did you get it wrong?
Fukuyama: No. My argument was not that things would not happen, but that there was really only one economic and political model for countries that wanted to advance. Nothing that has happened has changed that. Not every country wants to be Serbia. The model is still democracy and capitalism.
"When an American says 'That's history,' he means that's irrelevant. In Europe, 'That's history,' means that's the most important thing of all ... There is such a thing as too much history if that means you have too much bad history--a distorted, manipulated, mythopoeic version of history that feeds ethnic conflict, selective remembering and selective forgetting. The answer is to have more history but better history: accurate, factual history that addresses the crimes committed by your own people ... I would plead for a tolerance based on deep knowledge." - Timothy Garton Ash
"There are upsides to the historical naivete of Americans. In the Balkans, people are obsessed with their history to the point of saying, 'My ancestors were slaughtered here five centuries ago, and damned if I'm not going to be slaughtered here in the same place.' That kind of rootedness and relationship to ancestors is absent in the U.S. So the kinds of ethnic conflicts that have touched the Old World have not taken hold in the New World ... Other societies are going to have to lose their ethnic consciousness. It is cultural rootedness that is the biggest obstacle Europeans have to face." - Francis Fukuyama
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