World View: 'History is still armed in Europe today," Gabriele Woidelko told a recent meeting of the European Cultural Parliament (ECP). "We can use history to build bridges between peoples, but only if we disarm it first." Woidelko is the director of Eustory, a remarkable network of young historians which sets up projects to enable students in different European countries, and from different communities within those countries, to share - and thus broaden - their historical perspectives. There is, of course, no universal textbook of European history, and it is not surprising that these perspectives often differ very sharply.
The following statement of Estonia's divisions, by Marju Veevo (19), is a contribution to one of Eustory's many projects, in which 90,000 people have now taken part: "Nowadays in Estonia, we have problems between Russians and Estonians. We have [ a] different understanding of history. For example some older Russians, living in Estonia, say that the Soviet Union was the liberator and built up our culture. The Estonians, instead, see the Soviet time as an era of occupation and deportation, affected by permanent fear. And we believe that censorship, which was established by the Soviets, destroyed our culture. Two sides of a story."
"Simply ask teenagers from several states to draw maps," says Woidelko, "and you will see straight away that they draw different boundaries." Similar shifts in social and political vision were often reflected in exchanges between the adult members of the ECP, which was meeting in the Romanian city of Sibiu, an architectural treasure-house in Transylvania, and currently European Cultural Capital.
The ECP (www.kulturparlament.com/index.php) is not formally linked to the European Union or the Council of Europe, although it seeks funds and inspiration from both. Its title is a little misleading, because it is self-selecting rather than elected.
It aims "to strengthen the role of cultural and artistic ideas in the debate on the future of Europe. The Parliament will stand for common values, cultural identity and diversity as well as tolerance and will promote bridge-building with other cultures."
Transylvania's own troubled history provides many examples of just how tricky this apparently banal task remains today. Sibiu was established as a Saxon city (Hermanstadt) in the 14th century, and is deeply marked by German culture. But now the region's German historic community has plummeted from 20 per cent to 1 per cent, since the fall of Ceausescu permitted a voluntary exodus to Germany. Tensions have also flared up periodically with Romania's large Hungarian minority, and multilingual education remains a hot issue. Like much of eastern Europe, Romania is arguably less multicultural now than it was under the Soviet system, and certainly much less so than for many centuries before that empire was invented.
The themes for this year's ECP session were "intercultural dialogue" and "communicating Europe". Radical gaps in perception between eastern and western members were evident in discussions on both themes.
Members from the West talked about dialogue with new "cultural others" like Muslims and immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa. For members from the East, however, the "others" were often European ethnic minorities resident in their countries for long periods, or old enemies from beyond their borders - sometimes both at once, as in the case of the Russians and Estonians.
So can fine phrases like "intercultural dialogue" really be put into meaningful practice on the ground throughout contemporary Europe? The presentations from Eustory permitted at least a glimmer of hope.
Demonstrating innovative and often courageous methods for education and communication, these young historians explored and confronted divergences in historical perspective between our education systems and cultural attitudes.
They are drawn from national prize-winners in history research competitions, who then participate in international projects, mainly with secondary students, for "transborder dialogue about history".
Last year, three of them set up exchanges between high school classes in Germany, the Czech Republic and Russia. The students were asked to research the events leading to the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the way they were reported in each country. They were asked to imagine how those events had been viewed in the other participating countries.
The accounts they exchanged were instructive. The young Czechs initially shocked the Germans, because the Czechs believed that the Russian "enemy" was, broadly speaking, responsible for everything bad that had happened to their country. Brought up to be more critical of their own national past, the Germans tended to have a broader view. The Russians, however, were baffled that the Czechs gave them no credit for liberating them from the Nazis.
Such projects are easier to organise in some countries than others, and national perspectives are often jealously guarded. Eustory found the individual Russian teachers they approached were at first deeply suspicious, and they did not even attempt to engage in dialogue with the Russian ministry of education. Other countries with recent authoritarian pasts, such as Spain, have also been less than eager to participate. It is rather more surprising - at first sight - that Eustory still has no French partners, nor any Irish ones.
As the Czech co-ordinator, Petra Novotná, put it in another context, "History is like a book, but many people seem to prefer to simply rip pages out of it." Despite such difficulties, it is perhaps through such networks and direct contacts between young people on painful issues that a sense of shared European past, and a clearer sense of a common European future, may finally grow.
And it is probably only in efforts to grasp the multicultural nature of so many of our national origins that we will be able to confidently build a new European identity, while celebrating the diversity of our cultures, old and new.
Paddy Woodworth has just published The Basque Country: A Cultural History, Oxford University Press, 2007