As of September last year pupils in their final year at school in both France and Germany have been able to use a common history textbook. The idea came from a Franco-German "youth parliament" in 2003, was endorsed by political leaders in both countries, and then a team of historians worked to produce an agreed text.

Mark Whitaker finds an illustration of what's at stake in history textbooks in Bosnia Herzegovina, where the country's delicate ethnic and religious balance is at risk from the fact that the Serb, Croat and Bosniac communities are reluctant to renounce their own ethnic takes on the past – with each one tending to identify the others as "the enemy". Mark reports from schools where two separate ethnic history curricula are taught under one roof and hears from the author of a new textbook that has been withdrawn because Bosniac veterans objected to its lack of condemnation of Serbs.

Mark also hears from historians involved in a pan-European research project looking into the close relationship between the nation state and the profession of academic history as they voice their concerns over the new emphasis on "Britishness" in our own national curriculum.