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Historisk tidskrift 130:3 • 2010

Innehåll (Contents) 2010:3

Uppsatser (Articles)

Att integrera nivåer. Nya krav på en internationaliserande historieskrivning

Av Ragnar Björk

 

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Summary

Integrating levels: new imperatives for an internationalizing historical writing

The article delineates some consequences for historical writing of recent imperatives in the field of world history and sketches some pressing tasks for historians working in the field. In the first place there is a need to integrate different levels of analysis: the national (e.g. Swedish) with the regional (e.g. the Nordic or the Baltic) and the regional with the continental (e.g. the European). In order to do so it is necessary to identify the research that has been done at these various levels. Are there received views or existing canons that can be used? An overall ambition could be to make a historical region (Geschichtsregion) correspond to a historiographical region.

Such a strategy would be one way to overcome the often re-appearing constraints of the so called national paradigm and a first step towards transnational or global history. Since the end of the 19th century historians have, overall, increased their international co-operation, but this process has had its ups and downs. Five phases of the historical dynamics of internationalization, of the relation between national historical writing, and some institutionalized efforts of operating on supranational levels, including the congresses of the International Committee of Historical Sciences (ICHS), are identified.

Two implicit premises of the recently ended NHIST (Representations of the Past: The Writing of National Histories in Europe) program on the writing of national histories in Europe were the existence of an elaborated European canon of history and that each national historiographic tradition was in constant dialogue with this canon. The extent to which national historiographical traditions identify such a canon has varied significantly, however. In their national historiographies the trajectories of smaller nations are often touched by the canon only occasionally, whereas large nations are often presented as exceptions to the canon.

In general, continental canons are rudimentary in European national historiographies. In contrast (and perhaps ironically) formerly colonized nations have for some time operated with double canons: one national and one imperial. Former European great powers have contributed more to these imperial, or commonwealth, canons than they have to a European canon.

Keywords

historiography, historiographical regions, world history, European canon, International Committee of Historical Sciences, level integration, small states.