Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era

How WILL HISTORIANS ANALYZE THE CENTURY that has just concluded? What narratives or interpretations will they construct to make sense of the last hundred years? A century of world wars, of political violence, of modernization? Will the twentieth century cohere as a historical epoch? For historians and the reading public alike, centuries provide a ready-made chronological framework for largescale history. Nevertheless, I believe that the idea of twentieth-century history will serve us as a temporal framework only in very selective ways. It may remain as the shorthand designation for what I discuss below as one or another "moral narratives." It will not, though, serve us as well for demarcating economic development or large-scale institutional change, what we can call "structural narratives."1 These structural narratives, this essay will argue, involve trends that have unfolded in a tempo independent of the twentieth century. What follows is an effort to juxtapose these two chronological perspectives-structural and moral narratives, and of one structural narrative in particular-with their respective claims about historical significance and historical periodization. The problems that a twentieth-century history presents do not arise just because of ragged beginning and end points, such that 1914 and 1989, rather than 1900 and 2000, are envisaged as opening and closing the political story, at least of Western history. Neither does the difficulty result from the fact that internal caesuraswhether, above all, the defeat of fascism and the end of the world wars in the case of the European narrative or the achievement of decolonization with respect to the Asian, Middle Eastern, and African history-are so profound that the 1900s as a whole retain little "structural" unity. Instead, I would urge, to focus on the "twentieth century" as such obscures one of the most encompassing or fundamental sociopolitical trends of modern world development, namely the emergence, ascendancy, and subsequent crisis of what is best labeled "territoriality." Making the case for the significance of territoriality is a principal objective here. Insofar as the case