Europe’s Many Worlds and Their Global Interconnections
By Dirk Hoerder
Beihefte der Francia, No.62 (2006)
Map of Europe by Vincenzo Coronelli c 1690
Introduction: »European history« – the connotation of the conference theme implies a continent, a geographical image, or the bordered states of modern Europe, a political image!. The hidden mental maps and images of the World in which we live structure and define our analytical concepts. By »the World in which we live« I me an the whole of the socioeconomic arrangements, the power structures and participatory options, the imprints which our socialisation left on our minds, and the discourses in which we express ourselves and decipher what we experience. »Europe« is a shorthand term with many meanings.
When shorthand was still in use in offices, it went without saying that clerks without training could not decipher shorthand texts. When it comes to historical memory, in contrast, people born into a territory are assumed to be able to decipher such codes. From early infancy on, children’s minds are being inscribed in the trusted world of family and kin with encoded social and historic meanings. They are not trained in schools to expand the ciphers’ significations into a full text and unquestioningly pass them on to their children as »what actually happened«. Historians, too, are burdened by such socializations. Are we, as historians of migrant men and women, able to invoke 18th century or medieval maps of Europe’s social spaces, overlapping and multilayered ones?
Advertisement
Through manifold migrations, societies of the past incorporated peoples of different ethno-cultural, religious, craft and other belongings. Religion had been trans-European into the 16th century with borderlines drawn between Roman and Byzantine Christendom and within the Roman-European realm to local differing readings of the fundamental texts, so-called heresies. Europe’s states were ruled by trans-European dynasties and political regimes were conceptualised by trans-European political thinkers.
Within such »absolutist« states the multiplicity of religious groups, territorial entities of subjects, and in-migrants negotiated their particular status. With the emergence of »nation« as a constituent element of the state in the course of the 19th century, national culture became the absolute sign of belonging – far less negotiable than any absolutist structures. Cultural homogenisation came to be imposed on the many cultured residents as well as in -migrants in a territory. The trans-European intellectual elites transformed themselves into gatekeepers of particularities called »nations«. While from the Reformation, people had been defined and, perhaps, had defined themselves by a variant of the Christian Church, they now came to be defined by ethnic belonging, ethno-cultural or ethno-genetic. While the fundamentalists of religion had genera ted masses of refugee mi grants in the past, the fundamentalists of nationhood erected cultural borders to fence in minorities and to keep out cultural »others« from neighbouring or distant cultures…
In this essay, I propose differentiated maps. First, I will discuss the three Europes of the Middle Ages: the tri-continental Mediterranean-centred World, the Northern World originating in Scandinavia, and the intermediate Europe north of the Alpine mountains and south of the Baltic Sea. Second, I turn to the connectedness of Europe with cultures on other continents and resulting intra-European migrations. Third, I analyse the consequences of the change from dynastic to nation-state societies for cultural interaction and migrants. I then turn to the 19th and 20th century Atlantic labour and European refugee migrations and, in conclusion, discuss the problems historiography-imposed invisibility of migration and cultural interaction mean for policy making in the present and for strategies for the future.
Europe’s Many Worlds and Their Global Interconnections
By Dirk Hoerder
Beihefte der Francia, No.62 (2006)
Introduction: »European history« – the connotation of the conference theme implies a continent, a geographical image, or the bordered states of modern Europe, a political image!. The hidden mental maps and images of the World in which we live structure and define our analytical concepts. By »the World in which we live« I me an the whole of the socioeconomic arrangements, the power structures and participatory options, the imprints which our socialisation left on our minds, and the discourses in which we express ourselves and decipher what we experience. »Europe« is a shorthand term with many meanings.
When shorthand was still in use in offices, it went without saying that clerks without training could not decipher shorthand texts. When it comes to historical memory, in contrast, people born into a territory are assumed to be able to decipher such codes. From early infancy on, children’s minds are being inscribed in the trusted world of family and kin with encoded social and historic meanings. They are not trained in schools to expand the ciphers’ significations into a full text and unquestioningly pass them on to their children as »what actually happened«. Historians, too, are burdened by such socializations. Are we, as historians of migrant men and women, able to invoke 18th century or medieval maps of Europe’s social spaces, overlapping and multilayered ones?
Through manifold migrations, societies of the past incorporated peoples of different ethno-cultural, religious, craft and other belongings. Religion had been trans-European into the 16th century with borderlines drawn between Roman and Byzantine Christendom and within the Roman-European realm to local differing readings of the fundamental texts, so-called heresies. Europe’s states were ruled by trans-European dynasties and political regimes were conceptualised by trans-European political thinkers.
Within such »absolutist« states the multiplicity of religious groups, territorial entities of subjects, and in-migrants negotiated their particular status. With the emergence of »nation« as a constituent element of the state in the course of the 19th century, national culture became the absolute sign of belonging – far less negotiable than any absolutist structures. Cultural homogenisation came to be imposed on the many cultured residents as well as in -migrants in a territory. The trans-European intellectual elites transformed themselves into gatekeepers of particularities called »nations«. While from the Reformation, people had been defined and, perhaps, had defined themselves by a variant of the Christian Church, they now came to be defined by ethnic belonging, ethno-cultural or ethno-genetic. While the fundamentalists of religion had genera ted masses of refugee mi grants in the past, the fundamentalists of nationhood erected cultural borders to fence in minorities and to keep out cultural »others« from neighbouring or distant cultures…
In this essay, I propose differentiated maps. First, I will discuss the three Europes of the Middle Ages: the tri-continental Mediterranean-centred World, the Northern World originating in Scandinavia, and the intermediate Europe north of the Alpine mountains and south of the Baltic Sea. Second, I turn to the connectedness of Europe with cultures on other continents and resulting intra-European migrations. Third, I analyse the consequences of the change from dynastic to nation-state societies for cultural interaction and migrants. I then turn to the 19th and 20th century Atlantic labour and European refugee migrations and, in conclusion, discuss the problems historiography-imposed invisibility of migration and cultural interaction mean for policy making in the present and for strategies for the future.
Click here to read this article from Beihefte der Francia
Related Posts
Subscribe to Medievalverse