The European Parliament is plotting a “woke” re-working of history curriculums across the bloc, several leading academics have warned.
It comes after the body approved a resolution calling for the “European historical consciousness” to be overhauled to shift focus away from national identity and “towards European and global history… in order to allow for more emphasis on a supranational historical understanding”.
The resolution calls for increased focus on “crimes like colonialism” as well as Nazism and Communism, “that have played [a part] in shaping historical perceptions in Europe”, as well as the “marginalisation of women and other underrepresented societal groups in history”.
Parliamentarians also demanded that children be taught in detail about the “horrors of the past that serve as a ‘negative foundation myth’ and provide a strong sense of purpose for the European peace project”.
Speaking to Brussels Signal, prominent British history journalist and biographer Nigel Jones lambasted the document — which calls for a “multicultural and gender-sensitive approach in the teaching of history” — as “typical ‘Eurobullshit’.”
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“This EP draft seems to have added woke ideas about race, colonialism and gender to the artificial concept of Euro-consciousness which of course makes it even more out of touch with popular opinion throughout Europe,” the former reviews editor of BBC History said.
He added that the resolution appeared to be out of step with the attitudes of many normal Europeans, as evidenced by the increasing success of nationalist parties throughout the bloc.
“Indeed, national consciousness is growing rather than diminishing, as we see from such examples as Catalan separatism and, indeed, the Flemish nationalism in Belgium,” Jones explained.
“The liveliest ideas in Europe, as we shall see in the EP elections in June, is the rise of so-called ‘far-right’ parties such as the AfD [Alternative für Deutschland] and the RN [National Rally in France]”
“In short, Euro-consciousness is an artificial construction that exists in the corridors of Brussels and Strasbourg but nowhere else,” he concluded. “I think that any Euro-consciousness is confined to the tiny bureaucracy who run the EU and is not a living force within the peoples of Europe.”
Another British historian, Professor Jeremy Black of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, also slammed the motion, calling it “partisan”.
“Whatever the intellectual claims, the reality would be a further politicisation of the past and in a partisan fashion,” he said.
“I argue in my Brief History of History that such approaches are inherently flawed.”
Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, meanwhile said that the resolution’s attempt to conflate European colonialism with Nazism was a “travesty of history”.
“In the British case, imperial power was used to abolish slavery worldwide on the basis of the principle of the fundamental equality of all human beings regardless of race, and also to offer the only military resistance to the massively murderous racist regime in Hitler’s Berlin between May 1940 and June 1941, with the sole exception of Greece,” he told this website.
He also warned that the EP’s desire to reduce the emphasis on European history was unjustified, and would ultimately cause damage to EU democracy if enforced.
“The curricula of primary and secondary schools cannot cover everything,” he said. “And it is vitally important that their pupils learn about their immediate national and, within the EU, European contexts, so that they can become well-informed citizens and voters.”
“Once they reach higher education, they can choose to study Chinese language, Indian history, or African art, if they so wish. But before that, a national and Eurocentric focus is entirely justified,” Biggar concluded.