What if the heir to the Habsburg throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, had not been assassinated in the summer of 1914? Would the world have been spared much of the misery that characterised the first half of the 20th century?
Counterfactual questions such as these currently underpin some of the most popular history books and televisions shows. Yet the public appetite for alternative versions of the past can only partly be explained by a natural human curiosity about what might have happened in our own lives, or in history more generally, if certain events had not occurred or certain decisions had not been made.
Before the 1990s counterfactual history was on the margins of historical writing and was often ridiculed by professional historians. Over the past two decades, however, more "what if" stories have appeared in the English-speaking world than in all the previous centuries put together. This trend is not confined to novels – among them Robert Harris's international bestseller Fatherland (1992), a fictitious crime story set in a victorious Nazi Germany – but also informs the works of professional historians such as Niall Ferguson, whose pioneering 1997 collection Virtual History set the tone for many similar books engaging with alternative pasts.
In Altered Pasts Sir Richard Evans, one of the most important and prolific historians of our time, analyses the genre of counterfactual history and explains the timing of its emergence as one of the most popular forms of historical writing today. Communisim-shaped hole The imaginative turn to counterfactualism since 1990, he suggests, was partly prompted by the heightened sense of historical disorientation (or sense of boundless historical possibilities) that followed the demise of communism as the last of the great ideologies that had shaped the 20th century. History, Evans writes, "became open-ended, freeing up a space for speculation about the courses it might have taken".
History, as a discipline, was further challenged by postmodernist theories, notably by their emphasis on the subjectivity of the historian and the futility of a scientific search for objectivity and “fact”.
Evans, who rejects postmodernist theories of history in his 1997 classic In Defence of History, now offers an engaging, insightful and highly critical introduction to counterfactualism. The result will not please those who engage in it.
First, Evans fears that counterfactual history will undermine our interest in what actually happened in the past by giving the false impression that history could have been completely changed by a series of small coincidences.
Second, he is concerned about the political purpose counterfactual history covertly seems to serve. Evans sees a hidden political agenda behind the entire subdiscipline, maintaining that right-wing historians such as Ferguson and other conservative writers, especially British Eurosceptics, use counterfactual approaches “to rewrite history according to their present-day political purposes and prejudices”.
The current debates surrounding the centenary of the Great War illustrate Evans’s points well. Instead of trying to understand, without the nationalist passions that have clouded the subject for too long, what caused the war, much of the public debate in Britain revolves around the question of whether it was “right” or “wrong” to join a continental war.
In his recent BBC programme, The Pity of War (based on the book of the same title published in 1998), Ferguson argues that British neutrality would have led to a German victory and the survival of the British Empire, while the victorious Germans would have created something rather like the European Union (but without British membership, of course).
Yet such arguments tell us a lot more about the wishful thinking of conservative British Eurosceptics than about the dynamics that unfolded in the summer of 1914. Precisely because the point of counterfactualism is to construct an alternative past that would better suit current political aims, such debates do not improve our understanding of history in any meaningful way.
Another major criticism articulated by Evans relates to the self-proclaimed ambition of counterfactual historians to open up debate about the past by demonstrating its potential open-endedness, thus freeing history from the “straitjacket of determinism”.
Evans acknowledges that many historians frequently use short-term counterfactuals to analyse historical events, most obviously to weigh the decisions of leaders at key turning points. If, for example, Hitler had decided in late 1942 to evacuate the recently conquered city of Stalingrad rather than to hold it at any cost, the Wehrmacht and Germany's allies could have retreated before the encirclement by the Red Army was complete. Yet few serious historians would argue that the final outcome of the war would have been any different as a result of this decision. Infinite chances The methodological assumption that Evans criticises is the belief of many counterfactual historians that one tiny change in the timeline can lead to a series of much larger changes, sometimes stretching to the present day. What such an argument ignores are the infinite number of chances that might have deflected the predicted course of events along the way: if Franz Ferdinand had survived the assassination attempt of 1914, he might have been killed by another radical Bosnian nationalist. To assume that history hinges on a number of highly personalised coincidences significantly reduces the complexity of the past.
A further related issue identified by Evans is that counterfactual history is actually far more old-fashioned than its proponents are willing to admit. In the past, what-ifs were almost invariably applied to political, military and diplomatic history. They are therefore tied to an outdated view of history in which “great men” and generals are privileged while the enormous impact of cultural, social and economic factors is rarely discussed. To follow this kind of historical methodology is to regress into a view of history that the historical profession abandoned decades ago.
Altered Pasts provides much food for thought, not only for professional historians but also for general readers interested in how and why history is written in certain ways. Intelligent, lucid and engaging throughout, this book will be enjoyed by many – though perhaps not by those currently writing counterfactual history.
