Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era
Author(s)
Maier, Charles S.
Abstract
Charles S. Maier asks whether the twentieth century represents anything more than a conventional period of one hundred years. After analyzing periodization as a critical tool of historical analysis, he discusses alternative narrative approaches to the question. First, Maier explains that “structural” narratives would use institutional changes to demarcate the era by focusing on trajectories of political, social, and economic development through time. But he concludes that current political and social histories do not fit easily into the span of the twentieth century. Second, he contends that the rise and fall of “territoriality” between the 1850s and the 1970s would be a far more compelling narrative approach. By territoriality, he means the organization of human institutions into bounded spatial units in which the reinforcement of boundaries and frontiers and the control of space at home and then abroad provided decisive political resources. Modern territoriality, he argues, arose nearly everywhere as nation-states were centralized and class coalitions came to dominate their politics with the participation of industrial, financial, and professional groups. It began to dissolve due to globalization and the advent of computer technology.
But even though the era of territoriality did not coincide with the twentieth century in any neat fashion, Maier goes on to acknowledge, it is not easy to discard centuries as units of history, because they offer the traditional chronological framework for what he terms moral narratives. And he admits these already exist for the twentieth century in narratives that focus on the world wars, totalitarian regimes, and genocide. Yet, he notes, differences exist between Western moral narratives that focus on the Holocaust and/or the Gulag and those in the former colonial world that stress the human costs of imperialism. Although Western intellectuals continue to respond to the first narrative, he contends that the trends that accompany globalization seem to endow the imperialist narrative with renewed relevance. Maier concludes by examining the political implications of choosing among these periodization narratives.
