How history becomes a cross-border matter: death foretold of a French–German–Swiss textbook

Abstract

The middle of the 1990s saw the creation of a French–German–Swiss history textbook supported by the European Commission. Disseminated to school instructors in the Upper Rhine, it received generally positive reviews, but ended up on the dusty shelves of school libraries. This result was due to several factors, which are analysed in this article. This acknowledgement of failure leads to the argument that European cross-border cooperation is constrained by a key paradox, referred to as ‘low gravity’, i.e. the attraction of small projects toward the local and regional levels, while major projects are pushed up to the national level.

Keywords:

• cross-border cooperation
• European Union
• history and geography textbook
• interreg
• multi-level governance
• Upper Rhine

Acknowledgements

I am deeply indebted to Cameron Gertzen who offered crucial suggestions in order to shape the final version of this article. Also, I gratefully acknowledge the fruitful comments offered by Herman Bakvis, Delphine Boisselier, Mélissa Dalleau, Rod Dobell, Pierre Eckly, Phil Handrick, Evert Lindquist, Canna Sprungk and an anonymous referee. Nevertheless, any errors in fact or interpretation remain mine.

Notes

1. About the Upper Rhine Euro-region see, for example, Keller (1998), Kanga (2002) and Reich (2003) as well as Dupeyron (2003, 2008).

2. One could also refer to extremely popular symbolic French representations in art, for instance Emmanuel Brenner's paintings, ‘La perte de l'Alsace-Lorraine’ or Adolphe Braun's photographs, i.e. personifications of Alsace and Lorraine as young girls in regional costumes (see Ballerini 2002).

3. The interreg Community Initiative includes three different aspects or ‘strands’: ‘strand a’ encompasses cross-border cooperation stricto sensu, i.e. ‘between neighbouring authorities’; ‘strand b’ includes transnational cooperation, through ‘a higher degree of territorial integration across large groupings of European regions' and ‘strand c’ interregional cooperation, ‘through networking’ (European Commission 2000, 6–8). Our research is limited to strand a. interreg i a programme was implemented from 1991 to 1993, interreg ii a from 1994 to 1999 and interreg iii a from 2000 to 2006. The textbook operation was implemented between 1995 and 2001, during interreg ii a.

4. The first level is, according to Woolf (2003, 336–7), a history of the Upper Rhine Valley ‘from above’, in which state formation is a dominant issue; the second point of entry is ‘a comparative history of Europe seen from below’, in which the differences across regions would be a main framework of analysis; a last historiographical perspective would be related to ‘the social experiences of Europe lived subjectively by individuals and groups'.

5. Interviews with adira representatives and schoolteachers.

6. The first key is defined by the financial weight between pamina and urcs, respectively 31 per cent and 69 per cent; on this proportional basis, one-third of textbooks are intended for pamina and two-thirds for urcs. A second distribution key is negotiated with a strong political perspective: although the number of pupils is drastically different in Baden-Württemberg and Alsace, the amount of textbooks should be the same (see Table 2). The third and last distribution key is externalised to the educational authorities: they were to distribute the textbooks in the 3000 Rhineland schools, where more than 300,000 pupils aged eight to fifteen are registered.

7. They teach in French-German ‘AbiBac’ classes, where students do not learn history and geography in their mother tongue in order to get both the German Abitur and French Baccalauréat at the end of high school.