An Interview with Henry Rousso

Yale Journal of International Affairs: You were born in Cairo, Egypt and have had a long and varied academic career, with positions and postings in Europe and the United States. Overall, how would you describe the nature of your research, and what motivated you to select this area?

Rousso: I began to work on Vichy France and World War II in the mid-70s. Why I chose that field, well, that is the question! There are many reasons. First, I have been fascinated by these events since I was a kid. Even today, World War II is of major interest in part because you have so many stories to tell, so many different types of situations to analyze, so many things remaining to discover. It’s an example of the clash between “good and evil,” even though as a historian today I know it is difficult to identify what is good and what is evil. But anyway, this was my first motivation: I was fascinated by the magnitude of this war.

The second reason, one I didn’t really realize immediately, is to what extent the “past” of this war, and especially the question of the German occupation of France and much of the rest of Europe, was so “present” even in the 1970s. When I began I just had an intuition that this war was not completely over, and I wanted to explore that. Today we are living in the “age of memory;” people think they have a moral obligation to remember what happened in the recent past and why. They even think that we can repair the past with policies of reparation or apologies. It is the job of the historians not only to explain what happened but to provide the necessary distance between the past and the present as well. I must add that the interest for contemporary history as an academic field is rather recent in Europe. When I began to work on Vichy France, this was not considered at all fashionable; very few students were choosing to work on recent history. But the necessity to explore the dark episodes of the European national pasts was more powerful than the preventions against a kind of history considered as too recent, too hot, with not enough archives to deal with.

YJIA: One of your many responsibilities these days is to coordinate the research group, The European Network for Contemporary History. What can a study of history contribute to the field of international relations? 

Rousso: Well, this group is an attempt to create or form a kind of homogenization of the way historians are dealing with contemporary history. The main purpose was to engage with people on both sides of Europe, East and West, which of course now seems a bit like a banality, but when it was created many years ago it was groundbreaking. So what we’ve done is to try to establish a common ground, precisely to talk about something that is common in Europe. As just one example, if you’re talking about com- munism in Europe and you’re French, you’re British, you’re Italian, or you’re Polish, you’re not speaking about the same thing. Of course, we are students, we are scholars, we’re able to know what communism as a phenomenon is but coming from a French background, the idea of communism is still positive in many parts of the society. But then you talk to Polish citizens for whom Communism was one of the worst experiences of the twentieth century, so sometimes it’s hard to have common ground to establish common research. Today it’s banal to say it, but when we started ten years ago it was not so easy to do.

We have also worked on the question of what is the best scale to analyze some historical phenomenon— local, national, European, or global. Today everybody is talking about global as if doing global history was not questionable, but it is questionable. Global is an important level to understand some phenomenon. But if you want to understand others, the global perspective doesn’t tell you anything. So you have all the time to move from very narrow local level to a very global level, and that’s what we try to do.

Take, for example, the Cold War. You just can’t have only a “global perspective” if you want to understand the history of people, groups, and nations during this period. You have to move from global to local levels. For example, the Cold War in France was not seen as this global phenomenon, which is the usual way we are talking about the Cold War. For an average Frenchman living, let’s say, in Toulouse, being in the Cold War didn’t mean anything compared to the importance of the event at a political or international level, or compared to the situation of World War I and World War II, where all the society were mobilized or reached by the conflict. We know today that the Cold War was not so cold. But the majority of Westerners lived through this event without a clear conscience of the dangers. This is part of the picture we must take in account to analyze the event in a perspective of “global history,” in the sense of a multilevel approach. That’s one of the aims of this network.

We also work a lot on the question of memory. The comparison or the links be- tween Nazism and Communism, and moreover between the memory of Nazism, the Holocaust, and World War II on the one hand, and Communism and other non- democratic systems on the other hand, remains a big academic and political issue for the future, not just in Europe. Will there be a place for commemoration of the crimes committed during the Communist period in the future? Is it even possible to commemorate them? For us, today, it is obvious to commemorate the victims of the Nazis in France, Poland, or Germany. But it took a long time to accept it, because to commemorate these crimes meant to accept the role of national and non-German collaborators such as the question of Vichy France. With Communism, it is worse because the crimes were committed by regimes acting against their own people. So, to my opinion, the question of memory is not over in Europe.

YJIA: You also served on the Commission on Racism and Holocaust Deniers. What do you think motivates prominent and outspoken individuals like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to deny or at least downplay the Holocaust? What advice would you give to policy makers who have to deal with individuals of this mindset? 

Rousso: Holocaust denial is a very difficult phenomenon, and it is a rather new one in history. You have many examples in recent history or remote history about revisionism, of course. You have many myths and conspiracy theories, and others who try to completely revise the narrative on a specific event. The Holocaust deniers are different because they deny, on foolish bases and only for ideological and political reasons, one of the most important events in human history. Most of the deniers were not Nazis, they were coming from either the far left or the far right, and they use the denial of the Holocaust, or part of the Holocaust like the gas chambers, as an instrument for other things. The legacy of the Nazi crimes and especially the Holocaust was so unbearable, so threatening to any kind of revival of a nationalist, racist political movement that in order to revive the movement in the 50s or 60s, you have to deny the crimes that were committed on its behalf. You have to go through this step in order to move forward in rehabilitating the idea of extreme nationalism or racism. This was the case of the French National Front until very recently. Now it is a “respectable” party; it doesn’t need anymore such a lie. But this was useful to rebuild a neo-fascist movement after the collapse of Collaborationist parties in 1945.

Since the very beginning, Holocaust deniers have been instrumentalizing the topic for political issues. It’s not like a scholar who could say, “Oh my God, I just discovered that it didn’t happen!” It’s ridiculous. Most of these people, including the scholars who shared and propagate these views are neo-Nazis or anti-Semites. And they got a kind of a success since the 80s in Europe, in the USA, in Muslim countries from different traditions (Iran or Egypt) mainly because of the question of Israel. For most of the deniers, denying the Holocaust helps to delegitimize the creation of Israel using a kind of a narrative like the following: “Israel has been created because of the Holocaust. The Holocaust did not happen; therefore, Israel is completely illegitimate.” Apart the lie on the Holocaust, there are here historical mistakes that are shared by many people, including those who are not anti-Semites. First, Israel was not created because of the Holocaust. Israel would have been created with or without the Holocaust, probably.

The real grounds of the state of Israel happened before the Holocaust. And when it was created, it was the result of a long process which began in 1917, even before. The Holocaust was of course one of the elements which fostered the creation of a new nation, but it was far from the only one. Second, the relationships between Israel and the legacy of the Holocaust are much more complex than the idea that Israel has always used the past only for current political purposes. As we saw it with the Eichmann trial, the Holocaust was not much of an issue in Israel before the early 1960s. After 1948, the new state didn’t want to refer too much to the tragedy of the European Jewry, preferring emphasizing its ability to create a “new” kind of a Jew. The Holocaust and its memories became a permanent reference in Israeli national identity in the 1970s onwards, not without much internal opposition.

As I said, Holocaust-denying is the new form of anti-Semitism, even if it’s copying the same structures as the one of the nineteenth century. In a certain sense, it is using the same rhetorical figures: the Jews are lying, they organized a “global plot” against the international peace, they are not the victims, but the perpetrators, with this structural and willing confusion between Jews, Israelis, the state of Israel, and the policies of its governments, which characterized part of the modern anti-semitism, which hides itself behind a so-called “anti-Zionism.” The context has changed, but the patterns of the prejudices are the same.

So how do you deal with them? In France, for example, the reaction of historians was to not discuss with deniers. An academic exchange is possible if you share with your contradictor a minimum of common ground; this is the basis of any scientific discus- sion. But if you don’t have this basis, and if you are talking with people whose only object is to instrumentalize for political reasons a lie which is obviously a lie, to discuss with them is to legitimize them, and that is what they have been looking for in France since the early 1980s.

YJIA: Much of your research has involved the study of events which, if they occurred today, might be referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for prosecution. The United States is not a participant in the ICC; do you think this should change? 

Rousso: Well, it should! Yes, this is my opinion. It should for many reasons. The U.S. is a leading country in the world; the U.S. is involved in one way or other in most of the major conflicts in the world, so yes it should. I think it could be a tremendous progress if a major nation like the U.S., so attached as many others—as all the others—to the issue of sovereignty, if they would accept a little bit to promote something else. Civilization began when societies accepted to overcome only individual interests. This is still the same idea but at another level. And, I think, the more that states are open to submit their foreign decisions to international rules, including criminal laws, the more it could at least limit wars or limit the effects of a war. The existence of international criminal courts whatever are their efficiency, played at least a symbolic role by recalling that waging a war, including against terrorism, including against non-state organizations, required some respect for fundamental rights. It could even give more legitimacy to the use of violence abroad because this violence will be more or less under the eyes of an international community that can react or recall the limits.

Even the worst totalitarian states or violent organizations have taken more or less in account in the last decades the idea that they will be accountable for what they are doing on the ground, especially if they are seeking a kind of international recognition. For instance, in Srebrenica in 1995, Serbs from Bosnia committed one of the worst crimes against humanity in Europe after World War II, killing about seven thousand disarmed people. Knowing that they could be prosecuted by an international court— what will actually happen—they anticipated a possible investigation, and they scattered the corpses in many places. Of course, the threat of possible justice didn’t prevent the crime, but a least it was something present on the ground. And now we know that most of the major perpetrators for this mass murder have been arrested and sued. Then, I think the ICC could change in a long-term perspective the way to conduct a war. And it’s difficult to imagine one of the most important military powers like the U.S. staying outside this evolution.

On this point, like on others, I think that the U.S. should take the example of France or other former colonial powers. Half a century ago, France would have refused any abandon- ment of sovereignty—my country didn’t even sign the 1968 UN agreement on the absence of statute of limitations for war crimes (but accepted it for crimes against humanity) because of the possible consequences of French officers involved in practices of torture in the Algerian war. A few decades afterwards, France became a strong supporter of an international criminal court. Things change. They can change. They must change.

YJIA: What advice might you offer to President Obama or the leaders of the EU with regard to preventing war crimes or prosecuting their perpetrators? 

Rousso: The first is to be extremely severe with the behavior of their own armies. I know it’s not possible all the time, but many people here or elsewhere were shocked at the idea that torture could be legalized. The idea that torture, which is a basic war crime, could be an element to improve the fight against terrorism, is a very old idea, and we know thanks to many historical studies that it doesn’t really work. Like in Algeria. France accepted torture at the highest level to fight against the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), but it didn’t prevent the defeat, and the moral price to pay for such an abandonment of its fundamental values. Still today, despite the political defeat, despite the loss of its main colony, despite the fact that the Algerians on the other side committed many war crimes as well, including against their own people, the consequences for France of having accepted to commit war crimes are still vivid. This is because it’s simply unbearable to accept such a behavior from a democratic country.

One may distinguish between the legitimacy of a war—the Algerians were fighting for their independence—from the means used within a war. This is the very reason why, in the nineteenth century, the main powers accepted to regulate the use of weapons, the faith of prisoners of wars, the question of the wounded in a battlefield. In a certain sense, it meant that the faith of human beings could be more important than other considerations. Fighting today against terrorists, in Afghanistan or in Mali, is defending this very basis of modern human rights. If those who conduct the fight do not themselves respect their own principles, by torturing prisoners or putting them in a camp without any international protection, they are simply fighting against themselves. They even can give the impression that they don’t fight for moral or political values but for other kind of interests. How can you be credible saying you’re fighting the enemies of human rights if you consider that you’re not obliged yourself to follow these principles? This is exactly the trap set by modern Islamist terrorism which is prizing extreme violence and death not as means used in a war, but as war aims, as supreme values. We have to resist it. Human beings are more important than nations, more important than sovereignty, which were concepts created to protect the individuals and not the contrary.