Our Research Theme:

References to ‘Historical Justice’ in International Relations,

Or, History in/for/as Politics

Dmytro Ishchenko

In 2014, Russia occupied Crimea, and this unexpected usurpation revealed a wide array of baffling challenges for international law. That includes the policy of praising a blatant land-grab as ‘the restoration of historical fairness’. In the shadow of such rhetoric, one may wonder how the existing system of multilateral diplomacy can withstand such a peculiar style of legitimization.

While searching for the desired answer, let us keep in mind that the idea of ‘correcting the wrongs’ or ‘making the country great again’ has been around for quite some time. The agenda of restorative justice has brought about war, destruction, and the subjugation of entire nations since earliest antiquity.

The mythological tradition of Ancient Greece, to take one instance, labelled the Dorian invasion of the Peloponnese as the ‘Return of the Heracleidae’.

The descendants of legendary Heracles, according to the story, took possession of the peninsula on the pretext that their glorious progenitor had ruled there in his time.

Painting on a Spartan vase. 
The Spartans were descended from the Dorians, who, as the ‘grand-children’ of Heracles, reduced the local inhabitants of Laconia to serfdom.

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons).

In 1066, the Normans produced a very similar argument to justify the Conquest of England. The kingdom’s crown, they claimed, had been promised to William, ducal sovereign of Normandy, because he, along with his barons and knights, had every right to rule the invaded land.

Such entitlement, in addition to other notions, was explained by the duke’s and his people’s descent from the ancient Trojans. The legends of the medieval epoch heralded that the monarchical polity of Britain had been founded by a band of Trojan drifters.

Their leader and the first king of the Britons, as this fabula tells us, was a noble prince by the name of Brutus – the grandson of the famous Aeneas. At the end of the 10th century, Normandy’s court historians concocted a genealogy that was to represent the dukedom’s population as the progeny of Antenor – another prince of the Trojan House.

The dynasty of William the Conqueror and its Plantagenet successors (1154-1485) used the said lineage to portray the 1066 debellatio as the Trojans’ return to the Trojan country.

The Bayeux Tapestry. Scenes depicting the Battle of Hastings.

Commissioned after the Conquest of 1066, this extensive decorative cloth is known as one of the brightest products of medieval propaganda. Employing magnificent artistic imagery in a style reminiscent of comics or documentary storytelling, it portrays William’s enthronement in England as a fully legitimate and historically inevitable event.

 (Image source: Wikimedia Commons).

England’s Edward I (1239-1307) invoked the same patrimonial roots to vindicate his Scottish affair.

The king’s ‘wise men’ composed voluminous documents ‘demonstrating’ that Scotland had been nothing more than a province of Brutus’s original kingdom. The central part of the latter, as this ‘historical’ doctrine emphasized, was a precise match of medieval Anglia — both in geographical and political senses.

From Edward’s perspective, such ‘strong evidence’ clearly meant that the entire Scottish realm was to be subjected to him and to his offshoots.

King Edward I of England, ‘the Hammer of the Scots’. Line engraving, mid 17th century. 
Edward’s ambition to rule Scotland as the ‘true heir’ of the Isle’s Trojan scepter culminated in the Anglo-Scottish wars of 1286-1371.

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons).

In 1453, the Ottoman Turks, eager to legitimize the capture of Constantinople, proclaimed their Trojan ancestry as well.

According to the happy victors, the ‘Greeks’ of the Byzantine Empire were merely driven off the lands that the Greeks of pre-Homeric times had brutally stolen from the rightful owners.

Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror (1432-1481). 
In his letters to the rulers of Europe, Mehmed referred to the ‘history’ of Troy and, in particular, to the ‘fact’ that the Turks descended from one of the brunches of the Trojan people. That ‘meant’ that the Ottomans were related to the French, the English, and the Italians – the nations, which had been proudly associating themselves with the Trojans since the Early Middle Ages.

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons).

About three hundred years earlier, an almost identical idea inspired the crusaders – the other claimants to the Trojan bloodline.

The surviving defenders of Troy, as many texts of the era pontificated, had been forced to flee the ancient Middle East for Europe. Based on this logic, the crusading Christians simply set out to reclaim the old homeland in the name of their god.

A 14th-century depiction of the crusaders’ capture of Antioch from a manuscript in the care of the National Library of the Netherlands. 

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons).

Either tacitly or ostentatiously, the concept of ‘historical justice’ was embedded in the ideologies of medieval and early modern elites. Members of privileged groups explained their social and political dominance by appealing to the ‘primeval order of things’.

The nobility in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, ad exemplum, regarded itself as a race of Sarmatian origin. The Sarmatians, as the official story went, had conquered the local Slavs, whose children, grandchildren, and further offspring were to obey the breed of the bellicose vanquishers.

The nobles in France, in a parallel fashion, saw themselves as the scions of the Franks who, after the downfall of the Roman Empire, had supposedly subdued the Romanized Gauls. The latter were thought to have been the ancestors of the ‘non-noble’ or ‘servile’ classes — in other words, the peasantry and the bourgeoisie.

The 17th century depiction of a Polish noble of allegedly Sarmatian descent.
(Image source: www.budujemydwor.pl)

In the same early modern period, Western Europe’s societies sought to exonerate the enslavement of Africans by pointing to one of the Old Testament’s most popular stories.

The Book of Genesis, with which both Catholic and Protestant audiences were broadly familiar, recounted the curse imposed by the biblical patriarch Noah upon his second son, Ham. The descendants of this unlucky figure were doomed to serve the descendants of the other two sons, Shem and Japheth.

Europeans of the time insisted that they had sprung from Japheth’s loins, whereas the peoples of Africa had originated from Ham.

Noah’s Curse. Illustration from the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493).
Although no racial differences were mentioned in the story, Europeans regarded Ham as the progenitor of the enslaved Africans.

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons).

In the 19th and 20th centuries, governments and other political actors learned to allude to ‘historical truth’ on a vastly larger scale. Hitler and his propaganda machine appear to have held absolute leadership in this regard, while Putin’s Russia, in the domain of history-focused disinformation, may have already surpassed the sinister achievements of the Third Reich.

Discourses on ‘History’ — politicized and inevitably pompous — have constituted a commonplace pathology of all pushy regimes. States with seemingly good reputations, more often than not, weren’t immune to it either.

As the case of Crimea (and subsequent Russian aggression) has proven, the situation today is no different at all, and it will be up to us to deal with it in one way or another.

To disaccustom every country’s political class from abusing the stories of ‘Glorious Past’ or ‘Great Forefathers’ could be a good remedy — one which the present-day international community must consider in a most thorough and comprehensive manner.

This article was first published on Hromadske International