Ireland is in crisis at the moment. An economic crisis which gathered pace over the past two years came to a head in December, and the current political mess is a direct consequence. It has proven virtually impossible to avoid the sense of impending doom in the media over the past few months and the idea that we are living in historic times. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
The media have also frequently repeated the idea that our leaders, be they in Ireland, Britain, Continental Europe, or America, need to ‘learn the lessons of history’, especially when it comes to economic issues. Superficially, this makes sense. Don’t do what Europe’s leaders did in the late 1920s (cut spending and retreat behind protectionist barriers) and avoid a similar cataclysmic depression. If only it were that simple.
I’m not an economist, and while I’ve tried my best to become fluent in the issues, I still have a basic (at best) grasp on the technicalities of what is happening in Ireland at the moment. However, I am a historian, and this constant invocation of the ‘lessons of history’, is, I feel, both something of a burden and a red herring.
When people try to invoke the lessons of history there seems to be an implication or assumption that these lessons are clear cut. It assumes that historical actors were always decisive figures, who followed clear paths to certain goals, and did so with conviction. It also assumes that a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’ decision could have been made at any point in history.
I also find the idea that the ‘lessons of history’ can be clearly identified and applied to the present to be burdensome. Is there a clear lesson in everything that I read? If I can’t identify it, does that somehow undermine the quality of my own historical interpretations? I think (or rather hope) that the answer to these questions is no. There is far more contingency in history than in ascribing simple binary oppositions to the course of events.
Three recent pieces of unrelated recent reading have reassured me on these points.
Just before Christmas I became aware of the book by Adam Fergusson entitled When Money Dies. This book tells the story of the hyper-inflation which took place in Germany and Austria in 1922 and 1923. For a piece of economic history it is eminently readable: while it does go into quite a bit of detail on economic technicalities, it makes a strong argument about the social impact of these policies and relates the financial crisis to everyday life. The book ticks along at a good pace and is an entertaining read.
The book itself has had an interesting history. It was originally published in 1975 with Kimber, a small publishing house in London, and did not reach a mass audience. In 2010, it was picked up and championed by some on the conservative right and second hand copies began selling online for up to $1500. The irony of those traders who sought the answer to the bursting of one bubble by creating another seems to have been lost on many.
When Money Dies was presented as evidence in favour of mass spending cuts. The author is himself a Conservative MEP and has championed this view. The reality is much more complicated. Fergusson tells a story of vacillation, wavering, political instability, and often contradictory policies in different regions at different times. In short, there is no clear message to draw from the book other than that inflation of this nature can have an utterly paralytic impact upon entire societies.
I also recently read Frank Friedel’s biography of FDR. Roosevelt has also been presented in recent years as a decisive leader who’s vision and decisiveness during the Great Depression is an example to mimic. New Deal policies envisaged a new, interventionist place for the state and ultimately set America back to work. Those to the left of centre in current times would invoke Roosevelt as an example of why cuts and lower taxes do not work. State investment is the answer.
This is true, to an extent. However, I was again taken aback by the lack of decisiveness which Friedel presented in his biography. FDR was anything but the crusader who is often portrayed in the press. He was a pragmatist who had to work with a hostile Congress to get legislation passed. More to the point, his views on the economy and the state evolved and changed bore a streak of conservatism at many different stages in his career. He was not the single minded visionary whom we are often encouraged to invoke. He wavered and faltered, and, for all that, he was a Great President.
Finally, we come to someone who history has not remembered as a great leader, and that is André Tardieu, three times Prime Minister of France at the height of the Great Depression. I was recently in France looking at Tardieu’s papers from the First World War, but stumbled across some interesting material from the early 1930s. Specifically, I encountered a number of memoranda which he wrote (to no specific audience) about abstract concepts, such as confidence. What was confidence? How did people get confidence in their institutions, their representatives, their nation? How did the markets acquire confidence, and people confidence in the markets? Tardieu briefly pondered all of these questions, without coming to a firm conclusion about any of them. He was as perplexed and inquisitive as many observers of current events in Ireland.
The point is this: the idea that there are clear and obvious lessons to be learned from history which can act as a panacea to all contemporary ills is an erroneous one, in all but a few cases. In ascribing ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ courses of action in a historical context, one loses sight of the most important and heartening element of history: contingency. It is historical contingency which should give us hope that current problems can be resolved in a satisfactory manner. Thankfully, the future is not preordained.
