HISTORY LESSONS FOR THE BALKANS
By John Brady Kiesling

Spero News
April 12 2007

The goal of new elementary-school history textbooks for Balkan
countries is to downplay the inevitability of ethnic and religious
conflict in the Balkans. Greek nationalists burn the books in
Thessaloniki in protest.

The new Greek textbook seems a sensible attempt to match the teaching
ofhistory to current Greek reality. Among its goals is to downplay the
inevitability of national/racial/religious conflict in the Balkans,
to reduce the sense of Greek victimisation by hostile outsiders and
to weaken the myth that Greek national independence is a gift of
the church

Thousands of young Greek university graduates wait ten years on a
roster for appointment as a schoolteacher. The pay is miserable,
and they start their career in a remote village. If they looked more
carefully at the Greek history they aspire to teach, they might well
opt for another profession.

The Iraq on our television screens resembles late Ottoman Macedonia a
century ago. When Greek, Bulgarian or Vlach freedom fighters arrived
in the village in 1907, the schoolteacher was the first person they
murdered. Today, Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish militias, with equally
untidy beards but deadlier weapons, eliminate Iraqi teachers for the
same reason.

Murdering schoolteachers is a token of respect for how dangerous they
are. Winning the battle for Macedonia required persuading illiterate
peasants that they were not humble taxpayers of the Ottoman Empire
but rather patriotic sons of the Greek/Bulgarian Nation. The Nation,
however, was a recent import from Europe, one prudent peasants
viewed with alarm. To mobilise village children to kill and die for
politicians in Athens or Sofia required giving them a nationalist
education.

This is the context in which to understand the impulse of the Church of
Greece, the nationalist bullies of Chrysi Avgi and a few Thessaloniki
(ed. note: Salonica) politicians to burn the new sixth-grade Greek
history textbooks. Mystical nationalism was a successful ideology
for Northern Greece in the early 20th century.

Perhaps it will be again. At the moment, however, people do not
benefit when politicians and priests assure them that history proves
God smiles on their hatred of the neighbours.

This does not mean Greek schoolteachers should force their pupils to
memorise, for example, the 1821 massacre of Muslim and Jewish women
and children at Tripolitsa. The object of teaching history is not
to give our children nightmares or to harden them as future football
hooligans. But what history lessons will best form young Greeks into
good citizens of the society they will inherit?

Americans are not taught their debt to the USSR for victory in
World War II. No one tells Greeks they owe their independence to
the intercession of the Great Powers. There is tacit agreement that
ordinary citizens serve their country better when they believe its
security and prosperity depend entirely on their own efforts. Beyond
that, what constitutes good citizenship is a political debate.

Destiny is no more manifest in Greek history than it is in anyone
else’s. Who knows which of hundreds of contradictory lessons from
history will prove valid in twenty years?

Historical revisionism is thus an unending political process.

American secondary school graduates now benefit from reasonably
factual accounts of slavery, the destruction of the Native Americans
and the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Had they been armed
with equally sober accounts of the Vietnam War, they might not be
dying in Iraq today. Turks and Kurds would understand one another
better if they admitted their joint complicity in the destruction of
the Armenians. One Japanese government admitted the ugly truth about
"comfort women" and the Rape of Nanking as part of building a more open
Japanese society. Those textbooks were then rewritten by nationalists
preaching Japanese ethnic superiority. Now Japan’s relationship with
China is in crisis.

The new Greek textbook seems a sensible attempt to match the teaching
of history to current Greek reality. Among its goals is to downplay the
inevitability of national/racial/religious conflict in the Balkans,
to reduce the sense of Greek victimisation by hostile outsiders and
to weaken the myth that Greek national independence is a gift of the
church. In today’s secular EU context, these are good lessons.

In Thessaloniki, I twice visited the Centre for Democracy and
Reconciliation in Southeast Europe. This idealistic group has
an impressive list of donors that includes Greek foundations and
Thessaloniki businessmen as well as EU governments and the United
States. Its major initiative is the Joint History Project. A panel
of scholars, chaired by a Greek, prepared a set of four history
workbooks for simultaneous use in all the Balkan countries. Unlike
the sixth-grade textbook, this is a genuine effort at non-nationalist
history.

Greek and other education ministries are wavering on whether to approve
the CDRSEE workbooks for use in schools. Meanwhile, wild accusations
are flying that this is an American plot to "denationalise" Greeks
(along with Turks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Albanians, and Romanians) to
make them easier prey for US imperialism. The Thessaloniki business
community knows better. If national resentments can be transcended,
they calculate, Thessaloniki will become what it was in Ottoman times,
the port and business centre of a huge Balkan hinterland. Then they
will all be rich.

Few village schools in Macedonia had any history books to burn back
in 1907. I’m not sure the lack mattered. I remember nothing of my
sixth-grade textbook, but I remember my teacher vividly. Whether
students learn useful history or murderous myth depends more on their
teachers than on even the bravest drafting committee. I prefer to
live in a world that feels no duty to murder teachers at regular
intervals. Teachers should embrace these new textbooks in that
selfish spirit.

John Brady Kiesling is a former US diplomat and author of "Diplomacy
Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower".