Erdogan, Le Pen and historical responsibility

Sholto Byrnes asks: should we apologise for our forefathers' mistakes?

Marine Le Pen, leader of the French Front National. Marlene Awaad / Bloomberg

In July 1942, 13,152 Jews were rounded up by police in Paris under orders from the French prime minister, Pierre Laval. About half were held at a cycling track – known as the Vel d’Hiv – before being taken away in cattle lorries to be gassed at Auschwitz. Many children were among their number; the youngest was only 18 months old. The incident is one of the darkest in the country’s shaming period of collaboration with Nazi Germany.

Last weekend, however, the National Front’s leader, Marine Le Pen, caused consternation around the world by declaring: “If there was a responsibility, it was those who were in power at the time. It is not with France.”

Ms Le Pen has a point. The legality of the Vichy regime led by Marshal Philippe Petain, which agreed to the occupation and division of France during the Second World War, is hotly disputed, and rejected by most historians.

She argues that the Free French government led in exile by the later president Charles de Gaulle was the real French republic, and that once it was reconstituted after the German defeat it could not be held accountable for the sins of an illegitimate wartime administration.

Subsequent French governments concurred – not so surprising when one considers that leading post-war politicians, including the former president Francois Mitterand, had served in the Vichy regime. An example was made of men at the top, such as Laval and Petain. Both were convicted of treason, which could only be the case if their positions, and their government, were not legitimate. The “real” France passed judgment on a guilty imposter.

But from 1995, when Jacques Chirac made a public apology for the Vel d’Hiv roundup, the settled opinion was reversed. France, it came to be agreed, had to take responsibility for what happened during the Vichy period. That meant facing a history less glorious than the comforting pretence that most French people were in, or supported, the resistance; and hence the howls at Ms Le Pen’s attempted revisionism.

That, however, does not really settle anything, unless one is prepared to reduce former times to an over-simplistic monochrome. Quite clearly there are two versions of history here. Ms Le Pen is standing up for the version in which French children are taught to be proud of their past, as she puts it, rather than only seeing “its darkest historical aspects”.

This is far from being the only case in which two opposing historical narratives are vehemently defended. Later this month many will observe a memorial day dedicated to the 102nd anniversary of what is accepted by parts of the international community to have been a genocide of Armenians living in the then Ottoman Empire.

But Turkey, the empire’s successor state, bridles at this designation. Last year, Recep Tayyip Erdogan said such charges were “blackmail” that his country would “never” accept, and he recalled Ankara’s ambassador to Berlin after the German parliament voted to adopt the genocide label.

Turkey could, perhaps, take the Le Pen option: admit it happened, but blame it on a predecessor state. But that would fly in the face of decades, firstly of denial, and secondly of asserting that any Armenians who died were traitors intending to assist Russia, the empire’s enemy. It is, in any case, less likely than ever to happen under the neo-Ottoman inspired Mr Erdogan.

More broadly there is a question about the very notion of historical responsibility: who, or what, should shoulder the blame?

It does not seem contentious, for instance, that countries whose fortunes and First World status were built partly on slavery and the exploitation of other nations should maintain generous aid budgets. Those were unarguable historical wrongs, even if one concedes that many of those actions were acceptable by contemporary standards.

Does that mean, however, that young people in Britain, France and the Netherlands – to name a few – should be in a perpetual state of apology to the citizens of their former colonies? A state may be viewed as bearing a responsibility. But should the sins of the fathers forever be personally visited on their sons and the following generations?

In the case of a continuing historical injustice, such as the Israeli deprivation of the Palestinians of their land and sovereignty and the voting of Israelis for governments that perpetuate that injustice, the answer may be “yes”.

To take the German example, however, is it right that its people should be “crippled”, as one politician, Bjorn Hocke, recently put it, by a version of history in which “there were no German victims, only German perpetrators”? The far-right affiliation of Mr Hocke does not invalidate the question. Nor is this is to ignore the terrible devastation wreaked by two global conflagrations.

But German history contains many glories as well as the devastating stains of the 20th century. Do Germans who had nothing to do with Hitler have to wear his crimes around their necks indefinitely – are they constitutionally incapable of not starting another world war if their thoughts should stray occasionally to the literature of Goethe or the cantatas of Bach instead?

The idea seems absurd, just as it would be bizarre for me to hold the actions of my English forebears in the centuries-long repression of my Irish ancestors against anyone who holds a UK passport today. (Or do I owe myself an apology?)

It may well be, to quote Santayana’s famous phrase, that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. And whether it was “France” or French people who were responsible for the Vel d’Hiv, it is right that present generations are mindful of it. But those who cannot put some distance between themselves and their antecedents are taking on burdens that are not theirs. Only the perpetrators can truly apologise – and they are long gone.

Sholto Byrnes is a senior fellow at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia