In today’s world, which seems to change at an increasing pace every day, we should remember that there are two permanent things which will not change: history and geography.

In today’s world where geopolitics – that is the study of how physical geography, natural resources, and demographics influence international relations, foreign policy, and power dynamics between states - is very much in vogue, the importance of geography is recognized and to some extent even overemphasized. And even geography is not completely immutable as digging a canal here or building a bridge there may have geopolitical consequences. And of course, distances are shrinking all the time with technological innovations so that distance has become almost irrelevant as far as communications are concerned.

History however is immutable and what has happened in the past cannot be changed. But our understanding and interpretations of history do change constantly with new discoveries and revelations about the past being uncovered and as our changing needs and circumstances affect our view of history.

History is of course always present and exerts its influence on us, whether or not we are aware of it. I have a long time already identified what I believe is a general trend not only in my own country Finland but almost everywhere in the world. I am referring to how historical knowledge and awareness is diminishing and eroding, how the learning of history has been reduced in school curricula and how general knowledge about our past is neglected to the extent that one can graduate from almost any university without being able to answer correctly to the question which countries were fighting each other in World Wars I and II.

Ignorance concerning history is also evident in high places of which the most prominent example are the many absurd statements turning history upside-down coming from the mouth of President Trump. While neither the American or Russian president´s comments on history can be trusted here is a huge difference in the way the presidents use history, with Putin providing the example of the use of more willful and skillful distortions of history. His infamous article” On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians“ was published just seven months before he launched his war on Ukraine.

In an environment where people know less and less about from where and how we have arrived at where we are today this kind of misuse of history can have some success. People living in our ahistorical times are easy prey for those peddling historical myths to further their aims, which can include presenting justification for war to correct the perceived wrongs of history.

To assert that those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it may or may not be true, but ignorance will always increase the risk of becoming an unconscious prisoner of history and prey to the machinations of politicians seeking to exploit history for their own ends.

History and politics have always been intertwined, even if the links have not always been recognized. These links and the use – and abuse – of history for political ends are much older than the concept of Politics of History, for which there is still no commonly agreed definition. One could give precedence for the concept to Germany, where the roots for the Politics of History lead. Research into the Politics of History seeks to delve into history debates and is interested in everything that comes under the concept of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. There are very few languages in addition to Finnish into which this is easily translated with a single word. It does not mean the management of History in the sense of manipulating it, but rather refers to addressing one’s history honestly with an open mind and coming to terms with it, warts and all.

In this respect Germany provides the best model for dealing openly with the most challenging and awful periods of its own history. The German Duden lexicon defines Vergagenheitsbewältigung  as "public debate within a country on a problematic period of its recent history—in Germany on National Socialism, in particular"— referring to the traumatic events that raise sensitive questions of collective culpability.

In Germany, the word originally referred to anger and remorse about the war crimes of the Wehrmacht and Nazi organisations, the Holocaust, and related events of the early and mid-20th century, including World War II. After the incorporation of the former German Democratic Republic in 1990 into the Federal Republic of Germany) and the fall of the Soviet Union in 991, Vergangenheitsbewältigung also referred to coming to terms with East German Communism.

A challenging discourse has begun in Germany about its alleged complicity in the violations of international law and the crimes committed against the Palestinians by Israel. Germany has as part of its Verganheitsbewältigung not only acknowledged its responsibility for the holocaust and paid significant reparations to Israel but also made it a point not to join in any criticism of Israel´s conduct, which is always justified as Israel’s right to defend itself. This is an issue that shows the limits and constraints that have influenced German Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

Of course, the process of Verganheitsbewältigung was never easy or straightforward in Germany. The first post-war phase was dominated by the question of how to deal with and integrate into the democratic process of the Federal Republic the millions of former Nazi-party members many of which, notwithstanding the entnazifierungs processes instigated by the Allied powers, remained in their former positions, as judges, civils servants, professors etc. The Wehrmact was disbanded along with all Nazi organisations, and many soldiers together with high Nazi officials were tried and incarcerated for their part in crimes committed. For many years the question of amnesty for these indictees remained central. Many Germans saw themselves as victims, not as participants in criminal activities.

The passing of time and emergence of new generation with no direct memory of or involvement in the third Reich facilitated the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung.  In addition to historians also writers, film-makers, educators, politicians and different generations of students and the public all played a role. It has also to be noted that it is and will always be an ongoing process with no clear finalité as new generations will leave their imprint on it. Even so and notwithstanding the many different interpretations for the concept, it has nevertheless become to a great extent the standard against which progress in other countries in dealing with their history is measured.

The list of countries who have achieved anything close to the kind of frankness Germany has achieved with their own history is very short compared to the long list of countries where this has not been possible and where any attempts to do so have been rejected. A positive example could be Post-Apartheid South Africa with its Truth and reconciliation Commission, although the Commission´s work and methods have also been criticized. But it is already a completely different case with Austria which shares to a great extent its 20th century history with neighbouring Germany and which initially after the war, with a little help from Hollywood (Sound of Music), been able to make itself into a victim of National-Socialism and avoid confronting its own past.

The list of bad and even frightening examples is long. The worst example of this is present-day Russia. The phenomenon is nothing new in the country, where both Czarist and Bolshevik leaders have always used officially sanctioned versions of the country’s history to justify their actions and policies.

Bad and mendacious historiography is distasteful and should be vigorously criticized, but it reaches totally new dimensions when any dissent from it is policed and controlled by legislative and administrative measures where any critique can lead to severe punitive consequences. And still worse is using distorted history as an excuse for making war.

Among the new amendments to the Russian constitution is one criminalizing diminishing the accomplishments of the "defenders of the fatherland" and their role in World War II. This vague wording plus a host of lesser legislation is sufficient to give the authorities wide powers to imprison anyone who engages criticism of the officially approved Putinist version of Russian history.

Although not new this kind of abuse of history has not always been predominant. After the fall of the Soviet Union there was a brief period when the Russian government was ready to openly admit Soviet responsibility for the mass murders in Katyn and was ready to honour the victims of Stalinism in a joint commemoration with Polish leaders.

This was an important and real breakthrough for building historical understanding across borders, which because of the tragic death of the President of Poland in the Smolensk air crash on his way to the commemoration became an even stronger instrument for reconciliation. But some Poles soon borrowed a leaf from the Putin handbook and started spreading conspiracy theories blaming Russia for the tragic accident.

Thus, Russia is not the sole perpetrator engaging in the misuse of history for twisted ends, even if it is certainly the most notorious and dangerous one. And neither do all the countries we regard as liberal democracies pass critical scrutiny without remarks. This can be said of the United Kingdom, France and of former colonial powers in general, which still have difficulties in openly addressing the dark corners of the colonial wars in Algeria, Kenya and elsewhere. Colonialism is also a difficult subject for those European countries, which did not have colonies of their own, but were nevertheless indirectly parties to the abuses and benefits of colonialism. A new challenge is how to teach about colonial history in European schools now that a growing proportion of the pupils in our schools will be coming from families originating from former European colonies.

France and other countries occupied by Nazi Germany during WW II also still experience difficulties in dealing with the issues with the different narratives of those in the resistance and those who collaborated with the occupiers. After the collapse of communism dealing with the history of the communist period in East and Central European countries is a similar challenge.

The Balkans, a region which according to the well-known adage (falsely attributed to Winston Churchill) “produces more history than it can consume”, has been and continues to be a region where even very old history – think of the battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389 – and just as old forgeries and falsifications continue to play a political role in fostering conflicts. History continues to provide fuel for cross-border History Wars, as is evident from the disputes between Croatia and Serbia, or from how the myths surrounding the battle of Kosovo Polje continue to poison Kosovar-Serb relations.

Even Germany itself, notwithstanding the praise it has earned for its Vergangenheitsbewältigung, still has stones to turn about its own colonial history. But it has to be added, that this has not in these countries lead to serious restrictions on revisionist and critical historiography of the kind we have seen in Russia and other states where governments are actively engaged in history denial.

This said, given the precarious situation in the United States where the Trump administrations seeks to impose its views and interpretations of history on the country’s universities, it has to be recognized that we need also to follow critically how independent historiography fares in the US. As the adherence to the concept of “American exceptionalism” has left its enduring mark on how American historians have dealt with their own history, and with the ongoing upheaval in American academia, the outlook for historians deviating from this mainstream and interested in any kind of American Vergangenheitsbewältigung is not promising. But of course, it is not as if American exceptionalism is exceptional, there is a tendency in almost every country to refer to its own “exceptionalism”, such as 中国例外主义 in China, Sonderwäg in Germany or how many nations regard themselves as “chosen people”.

There are also many challenges in dealing with the use of history in Asia, where relations between China, Vietnam, Japan and the Republic of Korea are still burdened by different historiographical interpretations of events prior to and during the Second World War.

While all of these like most other countries also have disputes concerning the writing and teaching of their own national histories it is China where the nationalist approach in addressing its own history is most worrying as the central government has paramount authority in (re)writing national history, and its interpretation is promoted through various channels to shape people's national identity. Over the past two decades the ruling party and government have promoted a nationalistic history to promote a Han-dominant Chinese identity

A similarly strong nationalist trend is evident in other countries as well, but even in party-ruled Vietnam historians have told me that they have no problems when discussing their troubled common history with French or American historians, but not with Chinese.

History also had a central role when Finland’s national awareness and state institutions were constructed in the 19th century. It also led to conflict with Russia in which different interpretations of history also played a role. We have also had internal disputes concerning the history of our Civil War in 1918, which left deep wounds in our society and took a long time to heal. Our role in the second world war, first as a victim of Russian aggression in the Winter War and later in the Continuation War as de facto allies of Nazi Germany seeking to redress the wrongs we felt we had suffered, was also initially a difficult issue to deal with. So was the period during the Cold War when Finland in the eyes of many western observes had to adjust to the new realities with what critics called “Finlandization”.

By the turn of the Millenium Finland had more or less reached the happy state where we no longer had any history battles to wage neither internally nor with our neighbours. But after the Russian attack on Ukraine and our accession to NATO some Russians adhering to the official line have started to rekindle old historical myths and falsifications of history. While the Finns as occupiers in East Karelia during the second world war were also guilty of improper behaviour, this was openly admitted and dealt with after the war, leaving no reason or factual grounds for the kind of shameful Russian attempts to present the victims of Stalin’s purges lying in mass graves as victims of the Finnish occupiers.

Those in Russia who oppose and expose this kind of blatant falsification of history have also been victimized. One of them is Yury Dmitriyev, the head of the Karelian branch of the now banned organization Memorial, who was after a long-drawn-out process sentenced to 15 years in prison on fabricated charges of child sex but in reality, for his work locating and exhuming mass graves of people killed during Stalin's rule.

The Role of Politics and Politicians

The title of my presentation “Governance, Memory and History” calls for finding asnwers to the question of what the role of politics and politicians vis-à-vis history should be. It is easier to start with what it should NOT be; Historical truths and interpretations of history should not be made into legislative issues. While Russia today may be the worst example of this, we could also question the way in which Holocaust-denial has been criminalized in some countries.

As desirable as it is that politicians should have an adequate knowledge and understanding of history so as to be able to address historical issues, they should not do it by resorting to legislation. Their task is to see to it, that historical research is adequately resourced and that it can be carried out freely without governmental guidance. This does not rule out politics identifying issues and items where research is needed, nor establishing and funding specific research projects. A good example of this is the project carried out in Finland on all our war deaths between 1914 and 1922, which produced valuable information and enhanced understanding.

Governments should also see to it, that historians have unlimited and open access to all historical archives, documents and other sources.

I have warned about politicians who abuse history for different purposes in a way which uphold and deepen confrontations or even hostilities between peoples and countries. Unfortunately, there is nothing that would a priori exclude the possibility that historians, like any other professional group, would not lend their knowledge and expertise to abusive purposes. Examples abound of historians who have been party to this kind of abuse either as initiators or when pandering to the powers-that-be. I will not exhaust you with a long list of examples of this.

There are also plenty of examples of different historical interpretations being party to creating and fostering conflicts. The differences between Turkey and Armenia on the interpretation of the events in 1915 are far from the worst case, and the historical roots for many others of these conflicts may go back for five centuries or more. More recent events also call for a dismantlement of the traumas of the past in an open and honest manner. When this succeeds it can have a directly therapeutic value as the fragments of national identity embedded in the nation´s memory are pieced together again.

One could go on listing such examples at length. We can with good reason criticize the many countries and their leaders as well as those historians who lend themselves to the nationalist and confrontation-seeking use of history. These historians are a minority, but the works of any historian can be quoted and misused. This is why it is extremely important to engage in dialogue with all historians as researches with the aim of encouraging and supporting the possibilities for independent and critical historical research transcending borders, so that historians could also be contributors to conflict prevention and resolution.

Such work does not finish with peace agreements putting an end to conflicts. Neglect of post-conflict aftercare leads easily to a renewal of the conflict. Aftercare also calls for writing the history of the conflict in a way which all parties to it can live with. We can well imagine how challenging this is for example writing a common history for Cyprus, not to mention how to write Middle Eastern history if and when a lasting peace can be made between Israel and Palestine.

Historians without Borders

The use and abuse of history is an issue which I had discussed already for many years as Minister for Foreign Affairs with historians, scholars of international relations, diplomats and politicians in Finland and countless other countries. My vision for how international cooperation between historians could actively and systematically be used for conflict prevention, resolution and mediation and peacebuilding has been met everywhere positively.

 

Encouraged by this reception in June 2015 a large number of Finnish historians responded positively to an invitation to a meeting to discuss the issue. At the end of the discussion, we decided to establish an NGO called Historians without Borders in Finland.

According to the statutes of Historians without Borders the aim of the organisation is to

– promote and deepen general and comprehensive knowledge and understanding of history;
– promote open and free access to historical material and archives;
– promote interactive dialogue between different views and interpretations of history to bring closer diverging views of the course of historical events;
– support efforts to impede the abuse of history to foster conflicts or to sustain enemy-images and distorted myths, and to contribute to the use of history in defusing conflicts and in conflict-resolution.

We wanted to make this an international project and together with the University of Helsinki, The Finnish Institute for International Affairs and other partners arranged an international conference on The Use and Abuse of History in Conflicts at the University of Helsinki and published a collection of articles with the same title.  At the end of the conference the several hundred participants from all over the world agreed on a declaration establishing the International Network of Historians without Borders.

It is not yet an international organization, but a network with an international coordinating committee and with our Finnish NGO acting as its secretariat. Our network can easily be accessed and joined through accessing out website at historianswithoutborders.fi.

 

In our work at HWB we have sought to defuse the misuse of history in conflicts by bringing together historians from parties to a conflict in a dialogue with each other on how to understand their common history.

Aside from many meetings and discussion events with historians not only in Europe but also in Africa, Asia and North America we have i.a. also arranged a conference on Colonial History in South Africa and a Conference with historians from all the Nordic countries and Belarus in Sweden.

We have also managed twice before Russia´s full scale attack against Ukraine to bring together Ukrainian and Russian historians in Helsinki in closed seminars. While the participants did not agree on very much, they on both sides wanted us to continue facilitating this kind of dialogue. For obvious reasons this is not possible at present, but we have received indications from both sides that they would want us to continue this exercise once it again becomes possible.

The two occasion on which I have earlier had the opportunity to address historians at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow and tell them about the principles and work of Historians without Borders left me with the clear impression that the majority of the profession in Russia share our aims. But we are all aware of how the honest and open study and teaching of history is not, to put it mildly, encouraged in Russia today; on the contrary it can seriously imperil the health and freedom of those historians who would want to continue practicing it in Russia.

This has led to the situation where Russian historians are increasingly opting for exile in other European countries, some with official refugee status and others in de facto the same position. We should as historians in the countries hosting them engage them in dialogues for laying the groundwork for an open and honest Russian Vergangenheitsbewältigung process once it one day becomes possible in Russia itself.

This is the background for the History in Exile: Dialogue on Russian Memory and History Politics in the Nordic and Baltic Countries project which Historians without Borders in Finland has launched as a project to promote dialogue between historians and history teachers in the Nordic and Baltic countries as well as the public. The focus is on Russian memory and history politics and its implications for historical research in Russian society. For this project we have received funding from the Nordic Council of Ministers. 

The History in Exile project with meetings and public events in 2024, 2025 and 2026 also aims to highlight the experiences of historians and history teachers of Russian background on the challenges of researching and teaching history in Russia. The project contributes to networking among all historians and history teachers working at the intersection of history, memory, policy-making and Russian and Eastern European studies. While we are primarily engaged with historians in the Nordic and Baltic countries, we also welcome the participation in the project of both Russian and other historians focusing on Russian history in other countries.

The project will promote critical discussions on the use and misuse of historical narratives in authoritarian regimes, particularly in Russia, while fostering open research and knowledge sharing among historians and educators with Russian backgrounds. It will also explore how neglecting sensitive historical issues in democratic societies can lead to memory policy abuse or the creation of enemy images.

The project also aims at laying the groundwork for future cooperation between Russian and international historians, encouraging open and honest appraisals of Russia’s history and its relations with other countries. By promoting dialogue between Russian and non-Russian historians, we aim to create the conditions for a shared view of history.

The project partners in Sweden and Estonia are Swedish Historical Society and Estonian History and Civics Teachers’ Association. Other partners include the Aleksanteri Institute of the University of Helsinki and EuroClio – European Association of History Educators.

To deal openly and honestly with a country’s history is never easy, and sometimes and in some places impossible. Even when governments do not seek to guide how history should be written, it is still true that each country has strong built-in propensity to look at its own history from a very nationalistic viewpoint. Vergangeheitsbewältigung, to be credibly and leave sustainable results, has to be the work of historians, media, politicians, educators, writers and artists in each country and they have to have the ownership of the process. Of course, the process can and needs to be supported by historians and others in neighbouring and other countries. Initiatives to begin with and help with the process can come from the country concerned or from abroad, but no one from the outside can impose the process or presume to dictate its results.

The limits of history

Finally, a word of warning on the limits to what we can learn from history. While they are countless lessons to be learnt from both successes to be followed and mistakes to be avoided as well as about wrongs which need to be corrected, we must recognize that we have never before lived in a world like this.

Population growth must to be mentioned first. 6,000 years ago, there were not even ten million people in the world, and at the beginning of our era there were no more than 170 million of us in the whole world. The one billion mark was not crossed until the early 19th century and the two billion marks in the 1920s. At the end of World War II, the number was 2.3 billion, after which it has more than quadrupled in the past eighty years to the current 8.3 billion.

One obvious conclusion is that we can have no historical knowledge or experience, on the one hand, of how the relationships between people and the communities, nations and states they form, will be organized in a world of increasing interdependence inhabited by such a large population, nor, on the other, of how this number of people will affect how we organize our relationship with the natural environment.

Since the Industrial Revolution, humankind has developed increasingly efficient ways of extracting natural resources from our environment, transforming them into products for our use and in doing so, leaving an ever-increasing amount of waste, emissions, and toxins in the environment. We have only become aware of the unsustainability of this development relatively late. Now, in the best-case scenario, we may have at most a few decades to adapt all human activities on Earth to the requirements of ecologically, socially, and economically sustainable development.

Can we do this? Our answer would only a few decades ago have been more certain about a positive answer than today. Optimistic belief in the future has now mostly eroded. We are living in times time when we no longer share the belief that tomorrow will inevitably be better than yesterday.

There have always been doomsday prophets preaching the coming end of the world, but in our time, the global consequences of population growth, climate change, loss of biodiversity and weapons of mass destruction have made it possible to present quite plausible scientific scenarios for how life on earth can end than those which in history have been based solely on divine revelation.

If one, as a historian, tries to see what is going on in a sufficiently long arch, one can say that this is a story about the rise and decline of the belief in progress. The belief in progress, the idea that the course of history is inexorably moving towards better times began to replace the static or cyclical concept of time, and became dominant at the beginning of the so-called modern era. It is especially associated with the breakthrough of the Enlightenment philosophy of the 18th century. The belief in progress was not a uniform idea and it the belief in a better future could be shared by both Adam Smith and Karl Marx, as well as later liberals, capitalists and communists. They differed, of course, on what this better future entailed and how it would be brought about.

The decline in belief in progress is not directly related to how the world has developed, and it is not explained by the perception that the world has become worse or more dangerous – there are significant items where we see undeniable progress worldwide, such as, for example, falling infant mortality, lengthening life expectancy and how the probability of famine has receded.

But at the same time our uncertainty of about what the future entails has grown. We cannot have any certain knowledge about whether the world is going for the better or for the worse, or whether it is even going to destroy itself. Living in such a world of uncertainty is not easy. However, it does not have to and must not mean surrendering to hopelessness and despair.

Could history be an antidote to this hopelessness and despair? One consequence of the lack of history in our time, that is, the weakening awareness and understanding of how people have come to where we are today, is that this lack of awareness also makes it difficult to see and take control of the future, feeds the short-sightedness of postmodernity, here and now, and increases the chances of becoming prisoners of history and tools for the aspirations of politicians who abuse it.

Governance, Memory and History all are conjoined in the way historical interpretation and collective memory actively shape the conduct of states, the formation of trust and the management of conflict within the international system. In international relations, competing understandings of the past influence perceptions of legitimacy, security and responsibility, often structuring both cooperation and tension between actors. Cultural diplomacy functions as the practical arena in which these historical narratives are communicated, questioned and, where possible, reconciled through dialogue, exchange and institutional engagement

History has made us into what we are but we should not be satisfied with remaining passive victims of history but take on the role of active makers of history.