Forget 'memory laws'
By Timothy Garton Ash
October 16, 2008
It is not the business of any political authority to define historical truth.
Among the ways in which freedom is being chipped away in Europe, one of the less obvious is the legislation of memory. More and more countries have laws saying you must remember and describe this or that historical event in a certain way.
The wrong way depends on where you are. In Switzerland, you get prosecuted for saying that the terrible thing that happened to the Armenians in the last years of the Ottoman empire was not a genocide. In Turkey, you get prosecuted for saying it was. What is state-ordained truth in the Alps is state-ordained falsehood in Anatolia.
Of all the countries in Europe, France has the most intense and tortuous recent experience with "memory laws." It began rather uncontroversially in 1990, when denial of the Nazi Holocaust of the European Jews, along with other crimes against humanity defined by the 1945 Nuremberg Tribunal, was made punishable by law. In 1995, historian Bernard Lewis was convicted by a French court for arguing that, on the available evidence, what happened to the Armenians might not correctly be described as genocide according to the definition in international law.
A further law, passed in 2001, says the French Republic recognizes slavery as a crime against humanity and that this must be given its "consequential place" in teaching and research. A group representing some overseas French citizens subsequently brought a case against the author of a study of the African slave trade, Olivier Petre-Grenouilleau, on the charge of "denial of a crime against humanity." Meanwhile, yet another law was passed, from a very different point of view, prescribing that school curricula should recognize the "positive role" played by the French presence overseas, "especially in North Africa."
Fortunately, at this point a wave of indignation gave birth to a movement called Liberty for History. The case against Petre-Grenouilleau was dropped and the "positive role" clause nullified. But it remains incredible that such a proposal ever made it to the statute book in one of the world's great democracies and homelands of historical scholarship.
This kind of nonsense is all the more dangerous when it wears the mask of virtue. A perfect example is a directive drafted by the European Union in the name of "combating racism and xenophobia." The proposed rule suggests that "publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivializing crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes" should be "punishable by criminal penalties of a maximum of at least between one and three years imprisonment."
Some countries with a strong free-speech tradition, including Britain, objected to this, so the proposed agreement now also says that "member states may choose to punish only conduct which is either carried out in a manner likely to disturb public order or which is threatening, abusive or insulting." So in practice, countries will continue to do things their own way.
Despite its manifold flaws, this proposed directive was approved by the European Parliament in November 2007, but it has not been brought back to the Justice and Home Affairs Council for final approval. I e-mailed the relevant representative of the current French presidency of the EU to ask why, and just received this cryptic but encouraging reply: "...It is suspended to some outstanding parliamentary reservations." Merci, Madame Liberte.
Let me be clear. It is very important that nations, states and peoples face up, solemnly and publicly, to the bad things done by them or in their name. The West German leader Willy Brandt's falling silently to his knees in Warsaw, before a monument to the victims and heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto, is, for me, one of the noblest images of postwar European history. To face up to these things, people have to know about them in the first place. So they must be taught in schools as well as publicly commemorated.
But before they are taught, they must be researched. The evidence must be uncovered, checked and sifted. It's this process of historical research and debate that requires complete freedom -- subject only to tightly drawn laws of libel and slander.
This week, a group of historians and writers to which I belong pushed back against these kinds of dangerous memory laws. In an article published in Le Monde last weekend, we stated that in a free country, "it is not the business of any political authority to define historical truth and to restrict the liberty of the historian by penal sanctions."
The historian's equivalent of a natural scientist's experiment is to test the evidence against all possible hypotheses, however extreme, and then submit his most convincing interpretation for criticism by professional colleagues and for public debate. This is how we get as near as one ever can to truth about the past. How, for example, do you refute the absurd conspiracy theory, which apparently still has some currency in parts of the Arab world, that "the Jews" were behind 9/11? By forbidding anyone from saying that, on pain of imprisonment? No. You refute it by refuting it. By mustering all the available evidence, in free and open debate. This is not just the best way to get at the facts; ultimately, it's the best way to combat racism and xenophobia too.
Timothy Garton Ash, a contributing editor to the Opinion pages, is a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and professor of European studies at Oxford University.
By Timothy Garton Ash
October 16, 2008
It is not the business of any political authority to define historical truth.
Among the ways in which freedom is being chipped away in Europe, one of the less obvious is the legislation of memory. More and more countries have laws saying you must remember and describe this or that historical event in a certain way.
The wrong way depends on where you are. In Switzerland, you get prosecuted for saying that the terrible thing that happened to the Armenians in the last years of the Ottoman empire was not a genocide. In Turkey, you get prosecuted for saying it was. What is state-ordained truth in the Alps is state-ordained falsehood in Anatolia.
Of all the countries in Europe, France has the most intense and tortuous recent experience with "memory laws." It began rather uncontroversially in 1990, when denial of the Nazi Holocaust of the European Jews, along with other crimes against humanity defined by the 1945 Nuremberg Tribunal, was made punishable by law. In 1995, historian Bernard Lewis was convicted by a French court for arguing that, on the available evidence, what happened to the Armenians might not correctly be described as genocide according to the definition in international law.
A further law, passed in 2001, says the French Republic recognizes slavery as a crime against humanity and that this must be given its "consequential place" in teaching and research. A group representing some overseas French citizens subsequently brought a case against the author of a study of the African slave trade, Olivier Petre-Grenouilleau, on the charge of "denial of a crime against humanity." Meanwhile, yet another law was passed, from a very different point of view, prescribing that school curricula should recognize the "positive role" played by the French presence overseas, "especially in North Africa."
Fortunately, at this point a wave of indignation gave birth to a movement called Liberty for History. The case against Petre-Grenouilleau was dropped and the "positive role" clause nullified. But it remains incredible that such a proposal ever made it to the statute book in one of the world's great democracies and homelands of historical scholarship.
This kind of nonsense is all the more dangerous when it wears the mask of virtue. A perfect example is a directive drafted by the European Union in the name of "combating racism and xenophobia." The proposed rule suggests that "publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivializing crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes" should be "punishable by criminal penalties of a maximum of at least between one and three years imprisonment."
Some countries with a strong free-speech tradition, including Britain, objected to this, so the proposed agreement now also says that "member states may choose to punish only conduct which is either carried out in a manner likely to disturb public order or which is threatening, abusive or insulting." So in practice, countries will continue to do things their own way.
Despite its manifold flaws, this proposed directive was approved by the European Parliament in November 2007, but it has not been brought back to the Justice and Home Affairs Council for final approval. I e-mailed the relevant representative of the current French presidency of the EU to ask why, and just received this cryptic but encouraging reply: "...It is suspended to some outstanding parliamentary reservations." Merci, Madame Liberte.
Let me be clear. It is very important that nations, states and peoples face up, solemnly and publicly, to the bad things done by them or in their name. The West German leader Willy Brandt's falling silently to his knees in Warsaw, before a monument to the victims and heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto, is, for me, one of the noblest images of postwar European history. To face up to these things, people have to know about them in the first place. So they must be taught in schools as well as publicly commemorated.
But before they are taught, they must be researched. The evidence must be uncovered, checked and sifted. It's this process of historical research and debate that requires complete freedom -- subject only to tightly drawn laws of libel and slander.
This week, a group of historians and writers to which I belong pushed back against these kinds of dangerous memory laws. In an article published in Le Monde last weekend, we stated that in a free country, "it is not the business of any political authority to define historical truth and to restrict the liberty of the historian by penal sanctions."
The historian's equivalent of a natural scientist's experiment is to test the evidence against all possible hypotheses, however extreme, and then submit his most convincing interpretation for criticism by professional colleagues and for public debate. This is how we get as near as one ever can to truth about the past. How, for example, do you refute the absurd conspiracy theory, which apparently still has some currency in parts of the Arab world, that "the Jews" were behind 9/11? By forbidding anyone from saying that, on pain of imprisonment? No. You refute it by refuting it. By mustering all the available evidence, in free and open debate. This is not just the best way to get at the facts; ultimately, it's the best way to combat racism and xenophobia too.
Timothy Garton Ash, a contributing editor to the Opinion pages, is a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and professor of European studies at Oxford University.
