Alternative history or counterfactual history is a lot of fun. Questions such as, what if the Twentieth Maine had not held at Little Round Top or what if that Confederate messenger had not lost Lee’s orders just before Antietam, are fascinating things to think about.
But for counterfactual history to be more than just a flight of fantasy, it has to involve a realistic possibility. An alternate history involving George McGovern beating Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential race is not realistic. Al Gore winning the presidency in 2000 definitely is.
Another way of looking at this is in terms of "contingency". In his great Civil War history, Battle Cry of Freedom, James McPherson talks of "contingency – the recognition that at numerous critical points during the war things might have gone altogether differently." (p. 858)
Timothy Garton Ash talks about the same thing: "Every writer on 1989 wrestles with an almost unavoidable human proclivity that psychologists have christened ‘hindsight bias’ – the tendency, that is, to regard actual historical outcomes as more probable than alternatives that seemed real at that time …. What actually happened looks as if it somehow had to happen. Henri Bergson talked of ‘the illusions of retrospective determinism.’"
In this light, consider how these counterfactuals or contingencies might have affected what happened in 1989:
- Günter Schabowski does not flub his lines during his press conference on November 9. (See here.)
- East German police and army troops use violence to break up the march in Leipzig on Monday, October 9.
- In West Germany the Free Democrats do not abandon their coalition with Helmut Schmidt’s Social Democratic Party in 1982 to join a new coalition with Helmut Kohl and the CDU/CSU. The Christian Democrats lose the next election in 1984, and Helmut Kohl is removed as CDU leader.
- John Hinckley’s bullet goes one inch farther, and Ronald Reagan dies on March 30, 1981.
- Pope John Paul I does not die of a heart attack on September 29, 1978, and his papacy continues for another fifteen years.
And finally: What if Don Zimmer had brought Mitch Williams in to pitch to Robby Thompson instead of letting Mike Bielecki pitch to one more batter?
Comments