In Europe, History Is Up Close and Personal--and Keeps Conflicts Alive : Warfare: The Balkans are but one region where ancient hatreds fuel present-day enmity. That’s why some observers feel pessimistic about Bosnia.

JASTREBARSKO, Croatia —  Let’s face it: For the majority of Americans, history is dull, abstract and tough to make relevant.

“History is bunk,” industrialist Henry Ford once commented dismissively. Indeed, in the United States, the very expression “That’s history” is synonymous with irrelevance--a fact that may help explain the frequent studies charting the appalling lack of awareness of the subject among American youth.

Europeans should be so lucky. Here, history is in your face, and it’s usually not pleasant.

In troubled parts of the Old World, such as the Balkans, it is also intense and personal--a family affair, woven so tightly into the here and now that distinguishing past from present frequently becomes impossible.

But whether in areas of full-scale war, sites of sputtering civil strife such as Northern Ireland or places of less visible tension, history all too often becomes the midwife of hate.

As the peace implementation force led by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization begins its work in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the weight and intensity of the region’s turbulent past lead those who know the Balkans well to believe that the Dayton, Ohio, accords have little chance of breaking the cycle of violence.

Here, it is history as much as culture and religion that divides neighbor from neighbor, romanticizes the call of nationalism and nurtures the lust for revenge.

“For war, you need symbols to mobilize people, and for us nothing is better than history,” commented Vesna Pusic, a sociologist at Zagreb University in the Croatian capital. “It is very convenient.”

Historian Milorad Ekmecic, a Bosnian Serb intellectual who now lives in Belgrade, the Serbian and Yugoslav capital, put it more starkly: “The history of nationalism starts as a children’s fairy tale and finishes with Frankenstein monsters. This war wasn’t designed--it was unleashed.”

While Ekmecic has been vilified by anti-war activists in Serbia as one of those who helped build the nationalist foundations for the conflict, he maintains that he was merely relaying the lessons of history--lessons he believes have sentenced Bosnia to an indefinite period of religious conflict.

In this small Croatian market town, the principal of the local high school, Josip Saban, stresses that, while history is taught to his 15- to 18-year-olds with a definite Croatian spin, it is also approached as a serious science.

But he is quick to add that the first history lessons do not come in school at all. They come at home, and they are certainly not objective.

“That’s true just about everywhere,” he said.

“My grandmother told me hundreds of stories about the war,” said Drajo Roksandic, a Serbian academician who chose to remain in Croatia. “There were stories about those who came to plunder, how they hid themselves from the Ustasha [Croatian fascists]. But along with these stories, she always talked of a need for tolerance. She was unusual, and I’m grateful for that.”

Under a variety of flags and causes, the peoples of the Balkans have faced off against each other countless times along this important fault line of European history, a region where for centuries the frontiers of Roman Catholic Europe have mixed with those of Orthodox Christianity, the Ottoman Turks and their Muslim successors.

“I have counted 14 uprisings, revolutions and other forms of war in Bosnia from 1805 to the end of World War II,” Ekmecic noted. “Some are bigger, some are small. Not all of them are in the textbooks, but they teach us that Bosnia-Herzegovina cannot stand.”

The power of history is far from unique to the Balkans.

In the staunchly Roman Catholic Bogside district of Londonderry, Northern Ireland’s second-largest city, children are raised on tales of Irish Republican Army heroes who fought British rule.

“We learned at our mother’s knee that Christ died for the human race and Patrick Pearse for the Irish section of it,” said Eamon McCann, a leader of the civil rights movement in the early 1970s. Pearse was a leader of the 1916 Irish uprising against the British.

Paul Arthur, a political scientist at the University of Ulster near Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, says he is sure it was the power of these oral histories that helped transform the Irish Republican Army at the end of the 1960s from a dormant organization into a potent force. The transformation took mere months when the latest challenge to British control erupted in the province.

“It was tales from an older generation that inspired the younger ones, that told them how it happened then and how they should do it now,” Arthur said.

In a long conversation with an American reporter at the height of Northern Ireland’s most recent cycle of “the troubles,” a Roman Catholic farmer west of Belfast nodded toward a spot a few hundred yards down a lane and talked of the Protestant who had taken his land. The reporter, uncertain about the timing of the incident, questioned when it had happened. Was it a matter of months, or was it five or even 10 years ago?

“Oh no,” came the answer. “This was 1690.”

In other parts of Europe, the effects of history may be harder to see, but they remain not far below the surface.

Tiny Belgium, a nation divided between 4.2 million French-speaking Walloons and 5.8 million Dutch-speaking Flemings, is just one example. There, a mixture of historical fact and myth complicates efforts to ease relations between the groups and helps feed nationalist tendencies.

Formally, children of the two communities receive different histories of their country.

Flemish children are taught the virtues of the immediate post-Napoleonic period between 1815 and 1830, when Belgium was united under Dutch rule. Their French-speaking counterparts celebrate the 1830 revolution that ended the Dutch period and brought an independent Belgium, one dominated by a French-speaking aristocracy.

The ensuing era of French dominance as the language of court, of the church and of the educated classes spawned endless stories of injustice often told today in Flemish homes--tales of innocent Flemings convicted because they were unable to understand the charges against them and of Flemish soldiers who died in the trenches of World War I because they were unable to understand the orders of their French-speaking officers.

Such stories help fuel sentiments among a Flemish arch-nationalist minority pressing for an independent Flanders.

But the influence of history in Europe is not always negative.

The 15-nation European Union and the unprecedented level of cooperation it has achieved among its member states grew directly from the ashes of World War II, nurtured by a succession of French and German leaders determined that the horrors of their past conflicts never be repeated.

This commitment to the idea of Franco-German reconciliation helped forge one of the unlikeliest and closest relationships among post-World War II European leaders, that between the lumbering, outspoken Conservative German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his intellectual Socialist French counterpart, former President Francois Mitterrand.

Their common bond: the horrors of World War II, in which Mitterrand was a prisoner of war and Kohl helped pull bodies from the rubble of his hometown of Ludwigshafen.

Sometimes history can even be invoked as a way out of a tight spot, as was shown by the touch-and-go drama this month that surrounded the release of two French fighter pilots shot down in August during raids on Bosnian Serb targets.

According to one account, the way French Gen. Philippe Douin persuaded Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic to turn over the pilots was to dwell on the French-Serbian friendship stemming from the Napoleonic era.

The same account, however, noted that Douin first had to endure a prolonged diatribe from Mladic on the debt all Europeans owe the Serbs for defending Christian civilization for centuries against the Ottoman Empire.

Now, as the war in Bosnia winds down, some intellectuals in the Balkan region have begun looking beyond their own history--to the United States--for new, more positive messages.

The independent Zagreb think tank Erasmus Guild, devoted to strengthening democratic institutions, recently featured Abraham Lincoln on the cover of its magazine and reprinted in Croatian the 1863 Gettysburg Address.

“It’s a message of reconciliation,” explained Pusic, the sociologist who also acts as publisher of the guild’s magazine. “We need to know that such things are possible.”