This week, Michael Gove, the education secretary, has issued the final draft of his national curriculum, including a heavily revised version of the programme for teaching history to school pupils aged five to 14, a few months after his first attempt to introduce a new history curriculum met with near-universal derision from the entire historical profession.

The history element in the national curriculum has, Gove admits, experienced "a more extensive rewrite than any other". After the kind of consultation conspicuously lacking in the initial redrafting of the curriculum, his department has come up with some major improvements. While his earlier effort offered little more than a superficial gallop through the centuries, Gove has conceded that "there should be room for a greater degree of depth of study". The new version of the curriculum has abandoned the first draft's chronological approach. It loops back to the Middle Ages at the end, and includes themes such as crime and punishment through the ages, as well as in-depth studies of local history and, for primary school pupils, imaginative comparisons of individuals across the centuries, inviting them to look, for instance, at Christopher Columbus alongside Neil Armstrong, or William Caxton alongside Tim Berners-Lee.

Even more welcome is the slimming-down of the syllabus in the new draft, after teachers complained about the overloading of the old one with endless facts and dates; far too many to teach in the time available in schools. The new draft is less prescriptive than the old, leaving teachers more scope to use their own initiative and imagination. Topics are suggested now, not prescribed; they are more general; there are far fewer of them; and the curriculum, unlike the previous draft, does not lay down which interpretations are to be followed. Children in primary schools are no longer required to study topics more suited to older pupils with a more sophisticated understanding of history. Social, economic and cultural history re-enter the syllabus alongside political history, which monopolised the earlier draft. Where Gove originally wanted children just to learn facts and dates, the new curriculum includes a focus on analytical skills and historical understanding.

All this is to the good. The government has listened to its critics and responded to their concerns. The new curriculum has abandoned Gove's original intention of using history teaching in our schools to impart a patriotic sense of national identity through the uncritical hero-worship of great men and women from the British past. Gone is the triumphalist celebration of victories such as the Spanish Armada or the Battle of Waterloo. One survey after another, including the 2011 Ofsted report History for All, has shown that one of the things school pupils most like about history as a subject is that it gives them the opportunity to study the arguments and facts and make up their own minds about issues and personalities in the past. If we want to help young people to develop a sense of citizenship, they have to be able and willing to think for themselves. The study of history does this. It recognises that children are not empty vessels to be filled with patriotic myths. History isn't a myth-making discipline, it's a myth-busting discipline, and it needs to be taught as such in our schools.

Time and again, the critics of the existing national curriculum insisted on what they saw as the need to present the history of Britain as a "coherent, chronological narrative". Yet you can't have a coherent, chronological narrative of British history "from the earliest times" because the historical development of Scotland, Ireland – and, up to a point, Wales too – was in many ways different from that of England up to the 17th century and in some respects well beyond it. Gove originally got round this awkward fact essentially by ignoring the history of other parts of these isles and focusing on English history. In the new curriculum, by contrast, we have a fair amount of Scotland and Ireland, from the religious conflicts of the 16th and 17th century to the European Renaissance and Reformation as influences on the development of church, state and society in Britain. The new history curriculum represents a victory for the opponents of Gove's tub-thumping English nationalism all along the line.

The existing curriculum was criticised by Gove and his allies for its supposed failure to create a British national identity through a celebratory romp through the heroes and triumphs of English history. Martin Kettle, writing in this newspaper on 13 December 2012, complained that "the ties that bind the British are loosening in part because in England the national narrative has been sorely neglected." What was this national narrative? Kettle's complaint began by deploring the fact that one of his children knew "almost nothing about the English civil war". But for years now, historians have been in broad agreement that the civil wars of the 17th century were not English civil wars at all: a crucial, indeed pivotal role was played by the Scots Covenanters, who kicked the whole thing off. At least the new curriculum has got it right here, with its mention of "the causes and events of the civil wars throughout Britain". The "national narrative" must surely give due recognition not just to the interconnectedness of past events in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland but to their relative autonomy too. Britain in this sense has always been a multicultural society, and we should celebrate that fact. In complaining of general ignorance about the "English civil war", Kettle unwittingly provided proof of his claim later in the article that "the English mind is … increasingly oblivious to Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and to Europe".

David Starkey claimed at a conference I attended in 2011 that outside London, people in these isles lived in a "white monoculture". This is patently untrue, and what's more, skin colour has nothing to do with it. My own parents were unquestionably white, but they grew up in a part of Britain where they first learned English at school, and spoke another language entirely in everyday conversation. They were, as it happens, Welsh. The fact that they attended Welsh-language services at a Calvinistic Methodist chapel and not the English-language Church of England did not alter their British identity one bit, any more than did the fact that they read Dafydd ap Gwilym and the Mabinogion as well as Shakespeare and Dickens. British history should not be confused with English history, and by and large the new curriculum manages to avoid this pitfall, though one could still wish that its medieval coverage didn't focus its gaze so exclusively east of Offa's Dyke and south of Hadrian's Wall.

Neglect of Europe

More problematic, however, is the new curriculum's relative neglect of Europe. Strikingly, the curriculum repeatedly refers to "British, local and world history", but does not once mention "European history". The Greeks and Romans and their influence put in an appearance, as do "Renaissance and Reformation in Europe", "the rise of the dictators", "Russian empires c1800-1989" and "the Holocaust", but there's no French revolution, no imperial Germany, no Russian revolution, no Habsburg empire; suggested topics include the civilisations of Islam, Baghdad, the Mayans, Benin, Mughal India, Qing China, 20th-century America, but not continental Europe except insofar as it has influenced the history of Britain. It's good that the new curriculum recognises that we live in a globalised world, but it might have given some consideration to the fact that we also live in Europe.

The Battle of Waterloo. Photograph: UIG/Getty Images

The patriotic British – or for the most part English – historical narrative, envisions mainland Europe largely as the scene of British triumphs over evil foreigners. Eurosceptics have been particularly enraged by the government's proposals for the commemoration of the centenary of the start of the first world war and the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo, where the broad and inclusive attitude of the culture secretary, Maria Miller, has been in strong contrast to the narrow, tub-thumping jingoism of Gove and his allies in their earlier attempts to reframe the teaching of history in our schools. In consequence, it has aroused vehement criticism from the Tory right.

Particular outrage has been caused by the fact that the UK government has refused to provide official support for the commemoration of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, when, according to Ian Drury in the Daily Mail, "led by the Duke of Wellington, UK troops routed Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, a triumph ushering in almost a century of peace and stability in Europe". The reason? Apparently the government does not want to offend the French. And yet, to any historian who knows about the battle, Drury's fury is wrong on any number of counts. To begin with, Wellington did not lead just "UK troops" but a coalition of 25,000 British, 26,000 German and 17,000 Dutch troops, so the British were actually in a minority in his army, though you would not guess it from most popular accounts. And while Wellington's generalship and the courage of his motley collection of soldiers held Napoleon's 72,000 men at bay through the day, it was only the arrival of more than 45,000 Prussian troops under Marshal Blücher that turned the tide and drove the French from the field. So with 71,000 German and 42,000 non-German troops in the Allied army, Waterloo was more of a German victory than a British one.

Given the pivotal role of the Dutch and Germans in the victory, we could actually celebrate the collaboration it marked with our European allies rather than claiming it for the cause of Euroscepticism. Yet triumphalism would in some respects be out of place, for Napoleon wasn't simply a destructive figure; on the contrary, for all the havoc wrought by his never-ending wars, he also introduced modern administrative and legal institutions into large parts of Europe, sweeping away inequalities and injustices in one semi-feudal region after another. That's precisely why his legacy has been so disputed, a debate that ought to be engaged in more generally when we come to mark the bicentenary in 2015.

Similar criticisms have been aimed at the government's proposals for the commemoration of the centenary of the first world war. Extensive funding has been promised for a range of events and programmes from September 2014 to November 2018. The plans involve local initiatives, school trips to the battlefields, and much more besides. But they have been roundly condemned by professional military historians as "conceptually empty". This is because, as Hew Strachan, Oxford's Chichele professor of the history of war, says, the government's plans fail to mention the fact that "the country went to war for good reasons" and "the outcome must be seen as a victory".

Photograph: Winfried Rothermel/AP

Max Hastings, another military historian, has suggested that David Cameron is "determined to say and do nothing that might upset Germany, our modern EU partner, so he will not celebrate the war as a victory". "Sucking up to the Germans is no way to remember our Great War heroes, Mr Cameron", was how the headline of his article in the Daily Mail put it. In Hastings's view, there was little difference between the Kaiser's war and Hitler's, except that in the former case "there was no genocidal programme against the Jews". The commemorations, he says, "should seek to explain to a new generation that World War I was critical to the freedom of western Europe". Another military historian, Gary Sheffield, says that "most modern scholarship" agrees that Britain's war aims in 1914 were the same as in 1939: "to prevent an authoritarian, militarist, expansionist enemy achieving hegemony in Europe … If the allies had lost", he says, "it would have meant the end of liberal democracy on mainland Europe".

Yet modern historical scholarship says nothing of the kind. Hastings, Sheffield and their allies rely on the work of Fritz Fischer, a German historian who in 1961 published a justly celebrated book, based on painstaking research in the German archives, about Germany's aims in the first world war. Fischer showed that official German policy in September 1914 did indeed aim at subjugating a large part of Europe to the political and economic domination of the Reich. But nobody has ever been able to demonstrate convincingly that the German government went to war in August 1914 with these aims in mind.

Moreover, Fischer himself showed that there was widespread opposition to annexationist aims within Germany, and the opposition grew as the war went on. Far from being a ruthless dictator, the Kaiser, who changed his mind on an almost hourly basis in the runup to the war, was a flighty, indecisive leader who was quickly pushed aside by the generals once the war began. Wilhelm II was no Hitler. And Germany's largest political party, the Social Democrats, joined with the Catholic Centre, the second largest party, and the leftwing liberals while the war was still going well for the Reich to prepare for parliamentary democracy once the war was over; a democracy that the Kaiser, faced with growing internal dissent, was forced to concede in principle in his Easter message of 1917. Nobody can say with any certainty what would have happened had the Germans won the war, but it is safe to say that the rigid imposition of a monolithic dictatorship on Germany and the rest of Europe by the Kaiser would not have been on the cards.

Scholarship has also moved on in the half-century or more since Fischer's day. Nowadays, with few exceptions, historians take a more nuanced view. Christopher Clark has argued in his magnificent study of the war's origins, The Sleepwalkers, that it's time to get away from the blame game, and he is right. Every country had its strategic and ideological reasons for going to war in 1914; none was entirely without blame.

More important, the end of the war in 1918 was a victory for no one. The major issues were left unresolved until they were taken up again in 1939. Not without reason do historians nowadays refer to the whole period from 1914 to 1945 as "the Thirty Years War of the 20th Century". As for the first world war itself, modern scholarship regards it as the seminal catastrophe of the entire period, from which all the evils that plagued Europe in the following decades sprang: fascism, communism, racism, anti-semitism, dictatorship, extreme violence, mass murder, genocide and the wholesale abandonment of civilised values across the continent. Only from a narrowly British perspective, and in ignorance of modern scholarship on the period, is it possible to view the end of the war in 1918 as a victory for Britain. The men who enlisted may have thought they were fighting for civilisation, a better world, a war to end all wars, a war to defend freedom: they were wrong.

Propagating inaccurate myths about alleged British victories is no way to create a solid national identity. The current debate on English identity goes back to the 1990s, when the rise of Scottish and Welsh nationalism posed the question of who exactly the English are – a question tackled by many authors who published on the subject throughout the decade, from Jeremy Paxman to Roger Scruton. National identity isn't something that can be manufactured or imposed on a people by a government. It has to emerge organically, by popular consent. It can't be created by generating historical myths, if only because these will always be contested. What's more, nowadays historians are too numerous and too well trained to let myths pass uncommented on.

We also have to ask what kind of national identity we want. Do we want a narrow, partisan, isolationist national identity where foreigners and immigrants are regarded with hostility or suspicion, other countries treated as inferior, and triumphalist historical myths are drummed into our children? Or do we want the kind of national identity that presented itself in the London Olympics, a year ago? The Games, noted the Sun, marked "the reclaiming of a national identity not seen since millions packed the Mall in front of Buckingham Palace at the end of the Second World War". During the Games, the tabloid commented, "we have seen Great Britain reborn and at its best".

For many, this British rebirth was as a modern, multi-ethnic and multicultural nation. Among the most popular British athletes at the Games were Jessica Ennis, the daughter of a black Jamaican immigrant and a white British mother, and Mo Farah, who had fled from wartorn Somalia when he was nine. When he was asked by a journalist whether he would have preferred to have run for Somalia rather than Britain, he replied, in a much-quoted comment: "Look, mate, this is my country … when I put on the Great Britain vest, I feel proud – very proud."

New patriotism

Patriotism became respectable again in the Olympics. But many felt it was a new kind of patriotism: support for a British identity that embraced diversity and was comfortable with an ethnic and cultural mix. The Olympics, said the actor and comedian Eddie Izzard, "redefined how Britain sees itself … People have understood what modern multicultural Britain is all about." Watching the Games on TV with Britons of Jamaican origin, Guardian writer Hugh Muir noted how they cheered both Jamaican and British athletes alike. "This reality of life in parts of 21st century Britain," he concluded, "would appear to be the very antithesis of Norman Tebbit's cricket test, which demanded that migrants abandon all previous baggage or be regarded as people who have failed to fully integrate." For Gove, the 21st century's Norman Tebbit, the Games might just as well never have happened. The 2012 Olympics as a vindication of people's ability to feel British patriotism while holding on to many of the customs, beliefs and values particular to minorities – the vision it imparted of a modern, 21st-century society at ease with its complex, multilayered sense of identity – seems to vanish from sight when British or English nationalists discuss the role of history in the creation of a national sense of belonging.

‘The reclaiming of a national identity’ … sports fans during last year’s Olympics. Photograph: Gary Wolstenholme/Redferns/Getty Images

Yet it is easy enough to find a view of British history that emphasises its open, tolerant, multicultural aspects. As the former Labour party immigration minister Barbara Roche said when contemplating the multiculturalism of the London Olympics, "the fact is that we are a country of migrants. Originally there was no one here. People have come and the only difference is how long ago." The distinguished archaeologist Barry Cunliffe has underscored this in his recent epic survey, Britain Begins: "The islanders," he says after surveying millennia of British history, "have always been a mongrel race and we are the stronger for it." Waves of immigrants, from the Celts through the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans to the Dutch in the 17th century, Germans in the 18th and 19th, Russian and German Jews fleeing persecution in the 1890s and 1930s, West Indians, Cypriots, Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis and many others coming to Britain during the disintegration of the empire, and many, many more, have all made their contribution to our multicultural identity. The new history curriculum indeed goes some way towards recognising this fact when it suggests that pupils study "the impact through time of the migration of people to, from and within the British Isles".

The ideal of multiculturalism was defined long ago, in 1966, by the then home secretary, Roy Jenkins, when he said that integration did not mean "the loss, by immigrants, of their own national characteristics and culture". Britain did not need to become a "'melting pot', which will turn everybody out in a common mould, as one of a series of carbon copies of someone's misplaced vision of the stereotyped Englishman".

Retreating from Scotland and Wales, where they have enjoyed almost no support for the last decade or more, and long since divorced from the unionists of Northern Ireland, Conservative little Englanders have taken refuge in an isolationist monocultural English nationalism, which regards mainland Europe with hostility, celebrates our supposed victories over continental powers, and writes history backwards according to a Eurosceptic agenda that justifies leaving the European Union on the grounds that we have never had anything to do with those who live on the other side of the Channel except have wars with them.

What is striking about the history wars of recent months, however, is that the jingoists have not in the end managed to impose their views on the coalition government. The new national history curriculum is a world away from Gove's original list of patriotic stocking-fillers. The government is remaining neutral on the questions of how to commemorate Waterloo and how to mark the centenary of the first world war. That, in the end, is as it should be: its role is surely to allow British people to think about these issues for themselves, not impose on them a particular reading of events.

And what of the Labour party? Adrift on the sea of ideas, it has weakly been pulled along in the wake of the Tory English nationalists. Spokesmen such as Tristram Hunt even welcomed Gove's original redraft of history teaching as a way of building national identity through a patriotic narrative, even if they criticised its inclusion of excessive and inappropriate material. In the face of popular passions about immigration and the European Union, the Labour party has bobbed and tacked without taking a clear line. It needs to assert the value to British society of membership of the EU instead of supinely abdicating all responsibility for the issue. It needs explicitly to endorse the teaching of history in our schools as a critical, sceptical discipline, situating the British past in its wider European and global context and recognising all its regional and national diversity. Above all, as the only political party that is strong in Scotland and Wales as well as in England, it needs to assert its unionist credentials: it needs to insist that British identity is more important than English, Scottish or Welsh identity. The only way to do this is to embrace the kind of multicultural ideal proclaimed by Roy Jenkins so many years ago. I for one hope that it does so.