In February of 2024, Vladimir Putin sat down with Tucker Carlson for a long-form interview.
This was billed as a titanic clash. After years of hearing about the Russian leader, now, Western audiences were to hear from him, shattering a taboo that had held since the outbreak of the Ukraine War.
The world waited to hear. And what we heard was… baffling. Boring.
With only his opening question, Carlson came up against a sheer wall of history. Suddenly, we were in the 10th century, in Kievan Rus, with Volodymyr the Great. Then Peter the Great. Catherine The Great. Knitting these nodes into a grand arc that proved to him that Ukraine was always part of Russia.
On and on, Putin propounded a view of the past that Westerners had never heard. Didn’t particularly care about, and on aggregate did not care for.
Many saw the interview as Putin throwing up a smokescreen. They dismissed it as cheap parlour games.
But some commentators saw something else.
They said that Putin was at least telling a history he had been told. And that if we were to understand why Russia fought, we should investigate the long view they held. In short, as much as an actual war, Putin was also on one side of a Culture War.
Perhaps most enlightened version of this thesis was that we had moved from the gentle world of history, into the hard turf of historiography.
History is to do with facts. Historiography, to do with how cultures interpret those facts. It’s often said that he who controls the past, controls the future.
But it is not so often said that we don’t always have control over the past. It emerges, from a collision of scholarship, national identities, and the vagaries of time itself.
Often, we lose sight of that dynamic. But historiography is all around us. Would we just see it.
For Danube Knowledge, Gavin Haynes is joined by two men who possess just such X-Ray vision. Dr Eric Hendriks. And Stefano Arroque. Both are fellows at the Danube Institute. Eric is a Dutch sociologist. Stefano is a Brazilian researcher, with a specialism in EU and European politics.
They’ve recently published a paper for the DI, along with our academic Daniel Farkas, which addressed the question of clashing narratives. But in the context of the intra-European culture wars. The war between liberal anti-nationalist interpretation of history and the anti-totalitarian nationalist one.
The paper is called: Why Europe Needs Historiographic Tolerance
They argue that if we want to make the European Union work, we have to acknowledge that there are different legitimate interpretations of the darkest chapters of 20th century history.
And that work started in one of the least historically dramatic of all Europe’s coves, but one that seems to hold the key to explaining Europe’s own culture war … Luxembourg.