The European Experience: A Multi-Perspective History of Modern Europe, 1500-2000

Today, an email by one of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin’s coordinators of the project Teaching European History in the 21st Century (2019-2022) reminded the contributors from Berlin of the project’s main result: the textbook The European Experience: A Multi-Perspective History of Modern Europe, 1500-2000, funded by the European Commission, is out. It was published very recently, in 2023, by Open Book Publisher (OBP), a „leading independent open access academic press that publishes peer-reviewed, award-winning monographs, edited collections, textbooks, critical translations and more“ (according to OBP’s website).

What a journey this was: co-authoring four chapters, together with colleagues from Germany, Spain, Czech Republic, Hungary, the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands (including copy-editors and proofreaders). Seen from today, it was an instructive way to bridge the unique pandemic oddity — which was so characteristic for most of the project’s time span. Working on the textbook meant a lot of time in video chats, on collaborative platforms (like Framapad), understanding and commenting others‘ ways of writing and structuring thoughts and arguments, finally puzzling together a conjoint piece of text — and what not. The reasons why I will post the four co-authored chapters of The European Experience here on this Science Blog (below), under the categories Neostory and Open Science, are twofold:

First, the whole project to write a textbook on European History from an approach that the editors, in their introduction, fittingly called ‚multi-perspectivity‘, can probably best be classified a mixed form of evidence-driven, significance-driven, and value-driven, fact-based revision of European history and historiography — as in Aviezer Tucker’s typology. According to the project’s description at the homepage, the textbook

reflects the multiperspectivity of European history, covering transnational developments and networks in early modern, modern and contemporary history. The chapters are written collaboratively by international teams of authors from the participating academic partner institutions to ensure a truly European perspective.

https://teh21.sites.uu.nl/

Accordingly, the introduction opens with the question What is European History? And — who writes it? The project challenges the established authorship (and perhaps, one may add: authority) of the singular historian, which

implies that writing history is a solitary endeavour, the imprinting of one mind onto the page.

Jan Hansen; Jochen Hung; Jaroslav Ira; Judit Klement; Sylvain Lesage; Juan Luis Simal; Andrew Tompkins: Introduction. Chapter of: The European Experience: A Multi-Perspective History of Modern Europe, 1500–2000 (pp. xv–xx), p. xv.

This is precisely what the chapters of the textbook are not:

Nothing could be further from the development process of the present handbook of European history. It is a collaborative effort of nearly a hundred historians from seventeen European universities and research institutions, each individual with their own ideas about European history shaped by their personal backgrounds, national contexts and academic traditions. The resulting muddle is our answer to the question about the nature of European history: it is complicated, polyvocal (sometimes in harmony, often not), multi-layered and complex.

Jan Hansen; Jochen Hung; Jaroslav Ira; Judit Klement; Sylvain Lesage; Juan Luis Simal; Andrew Tompkins: Introduction. Chapter of: The European Experience: A Multi-Perspective History of Modern Europe, 1500–2000 (pp. xv–xx), p. xv.

In other words, the approach of this textbook can be seen as the inverse of methodological nationalism. Therefore, it matches well with this project’s (Neopopulismus.de) general approach to revision — not to be confused with historical revisionism, as populists would have it.

Second, this textbook is a concrete and practical example of how Open Access and Open Science can work. There is no convincing reason left why anyone in the humanities or social sciences — or any other scientific discipline — should produce publications for a privileged readership with access to libraries (often taken for granted) or fee charged journals, which still work with the dated, anachronistic concept of a paywall. If anyone, after Aaron Swartz’s and other Open Access activists‘ achievements, was still in need of an argument why Open Access should be the norm — the Covid-19 pandemic’s lockdowns should have given more than convincing answers. Last but not least, the rampant and increasing abuse of historical topics by neopopulist revisionists across Europe is the most important argument for the importance of Open Science, public history, and joint, corss-border efforts.

In that sense, I am glad that I could contribute to another Open Science project in the field of history and historiography, which is, like many other aspects of public opinion production in the age of neopopulism, across Europe and globally, battered by narrowmindedness.

Please do have a look at the publication site of Open Book Publishers, where you can read or download either the whole book, or single chapters. For more information on the other project outcomes — online lectures, a collection of primary sources, a best-practice and teaching guide — please also visit the project’s sub-homepage at Utrecht University’s homepage.

And here are the four chapters which I have co-authored (please find the link to the text download at the end of each reference):

• Gábor Koloh, Jakub Rákosník, and Thomas Schad: 2.1.3 Demographic Change in Contemporary History (ca. 1900–2000), in: Jan Hansen, Jochen Hung, Jaroslav Ira, Judit Klement, Sylvain Lesage, Juan Luis Simal and Andrew Tompkins (Eds)(2023), The European Experience: A Multi-Perspective History of Modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0323, S. 155-163. [LINK]
• Jaroslav Ira, Thomas Schad, and Erika Szívós: 2.2.3 Interethnic Relations in Contemporary History (ca. 1900–2000), in: Jan Hansen, Jochen Hung, Jaroslav Ira, Judit Klement, Sylvain Lesage, Juan Luis Simal and Andrew Tompkins (Eds)(2023), The European Experience: A Multi-Perspective History of Modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0323, S. 189-197 [LINK]
• Laszlo Csorba, Sylvain Lesage, and Thomas Schad: 6.1.2 Religions in Modern History (ca. 1800–1900), in: Jan Hansen, Jochen Hung, Jaroslav Ira, Judit Klement, Sylvain Lesage, Juan Luis Simal and Andrew Tompkins (Eds)(2023), The European Experience: A Multi-Perspective History of Modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0323, S. 705-713. [LINK]
• Laszlo Csorba, Sylvain Lesage, Ángela Pérez del Puerto, and Thomas Schad: 6.1.3 Religions in Modern History (ca. 1900–2000), in: Jan Hansen, Jochen Hung, Jaroslav Ira, Judit Klement, Sylvain Lesage, Juan Luis Simal and Andrew Tompkins (Eds)(2023), The European Experience: A Multi-Perspective History of Modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0323, S. 715-724. [LINK]