H-Net
H-Diplo State of the Field Essay- “The Problems and
Prospects of Diplomatic/International History” [discussion]
H-Diplo Essay
No. 126
An H-Diplo State
of the Field Essay
Published on 10
April 2015 to the H-Net Commons, and accurate as of that date
The Problems and
Prospects of Diplomatic/International History[1]
URL: http://tiny.cc/E126
Essay by William R.
Keylor, Boston University
When the editors of
H-Diplo asked me to write an essay on the “state of the field” for this list,
they included with the invitation a link to an article that Marc Trachtenberg
had written on the same subject for e-International Relations and was later
published on H-Diplo.[2] On reading Trachtenberg’s piece I
found myself agreeing with most of what he had to say on the subject. So in
order to avoid a tedious repetition of the points made in his excellent article,
I asked, and was granted permission, to approach the topic from a slightly
different angle: that of a latecomer to the sub-discipline of diplomatic
history from another corner of the historical profession. While Trachtenberg’s
article mainly deals with the present and future state of the profession, I
concentrate on the transformation of the profession in the past four decades or
so.
Unlike most of the
academic members of this list, I was trained in graduate school not in American
diplomatic history but rather in the history of European thought and culture,
with particular emphasis on France. After receiving my doctorate from Columbia
University, I joined the history department at Boston University to teach
modern European history in general, and modern French history in particular. In
the meantime I had begun to pursue my ‘side’ interest in diplomatic history
that had been sparked by a course I took in graduate school given by Professor
Arno Mayer of Princeton. I began to read widely in this new sub-discipline and
developed a new undergraduate lecture course on the subject. While
striving to establish my scholarly credentials in modern French intellectual
history (publishing a couple of books and a number of articles in that field in
the course of the 1970s), I continued to read widely in the scholarly
literature of my recently adopted field. I eventually decided that the time had
come to try my hand at something new.
Once I had resolved
to pursue intensively this long-standing professional avocation, I selected a
topic for my maiden effort at original research -- a study of Franco-American
relations after the First World War --, obtained the necessary funding, and
went off to Washington, Paris, and several other sites of archival repositories
with a feeling of exhilaration at embarking on what for me was an exciting new
intellectual endeavor. After a year of research in the primary sources
(which eventually yielded a journal article and a book chapter), I accepted a
publisher’s invitation to write a general history of twentieth-century
international relations based on my extensive reading of the scholarly
literature in that field.
My intention in
recording the minutiae of this professional odyssey has been not only to convey
the sense of genuine intellectual excitement that such a shift in scholarly
orientation entailed. An additional purpose is to set the stage for what was to
become a rude awakening as I plunged headlong into my new scholarly endeavor
with the unabashed enthusiasm of a novice. Simply put, what I encountered was a
sub-discipline under siege from a number of quarters within and beyond the
historical profession as well as a hardy group of practitioners struggling to
affirm the validity of their craft amid this increasingly inhospitable
intellectual environment.
At the risk of
taxing the patience of the reader already weary of references to the
first-person singular in this essay, I cannot resist broaching the topic of the
challenges that confronted the subfield of diplomatic history in the 1970s and
1980s with three anecdotes from personal experience as I revealed to colleagues
my plans for a career change. The first anecdote is a brief one: “You’re
what!?” exclaimed a social historian acquaintance at a professional conference
of French historians, with a glare of absolute incredulity I shall never
forget. “History from the top down, huh?”
The second anecdote
concerns an amiable colleague in the political science department of Boston
University who was doing excellent work on the theory of international
relations. In the course of a lunch conversation it became apparent that he and
I shared an interest in the role of Germany in the international system. Toward
the end of a lengthy description of his current attempts to develop heuristic
models of interstate conflict in Europe ‘over time’ (as they say in his
profession), I interjected a reference to one of German Chancellor Otto von
Bismarck’s foreign-policy initiatives as a prime historical example of one of
the generalizations my interlocutor was striving to validate. ‘Bismarck?” he
replied. “I don’t give a damn what Bismarck said, thought, or did.”
The third and final
incident from personal experience occurred during my participation in something
called the ‘Scholar-Diplomat Program,’ which annually invited a dozen academic
specialists in international relations to Washington for a week-long sojourn at
the State Department. The dual purpose of the undertaking was supposedly to
give the invited scholars practical experience in observing at first hand the
operation of the government’s foreign-policymaking apparatus while affording
the host diplomats access to academic specialists whose research bore on their
own particular area of responsibility. The fact that I was the sole historian
in a group otherwise composed of political scientists should have alerted me to
the disappointment I was soon to experience: None of the unfailingly courteous
officials in the various branches of the State Department bureaucracy—including
the genial officer at the French desk whose daily activities I was allowed to
observe--evinced the slightest interest in the historical background of the
contemporary problems with which they were required to grapple on a daily
basis. For them, the record of what had happened earlier seemed to be not only
‘past’ but ‘passed,’ filed away for deposit in the archives, where it would sit
unnoticed for decades before being declassified, resurrected by the Historical
Office of the Department, and published in the Foreign Relations of the
United States series primarily for the edification of the diplomatic
historian rather than the policymaker.
On the basis of
these three encounters I began to get the hint: the craft of diplomatic history
had become the object either of derision or disinterest beyond the restricted
circle of its practitioners. As I waded into the historiographical literature
of the sub-discipline, I soon discovered there abundant confirmation of the
impressionistic evidence gathered from personal experience as illustrated in
the aforementioned anecdotes. In 1970 Alexander DeConde had sounded the alarm
in the newsletter of the recently established organization of American
diplomatic historians, the Society for Historians of American Foreign
Relations (SHAFR).[3] Ernest May, already on his way to
becoming one of the leading historians of American foreign relations, chimed in
the next year with a much longer lament.[4] In 1980, a volume assessing the
current state of historical scholarship in the United States included
contributions from eminent historians celebrating the path-breaking work in a
wide range of sub-fields during the past decade. In the chapter devoted
to diplomatic history, May’s Harvard colleague Charles Maier announced that
diplomatic history had achieved so little in the way of important scholarship
in the 1970s that it had become a “stepchild” of the historical profession.
Diplomatic history was “marking time,” while the other subfields of the
historical profession were advancing in leaps and bounds with innovative and
creative work.[5]
How to account for
the cacophony of complaints about the genre of history that once enjoyed an
honorable place in the profession? Clues to this question had already appeared
in my three encounters described above. First, there was the objection from
social historians to the very subject matter that diplomatic historians
customarily address in their work. Second, there was the widespread
dissatisfaction with the methodology—or should I say lack of it?—of diplomatic
history expressed by political scientists concerned with the theory of
international relations. Third, there was the lack of interest on the part of
practitioners of diplomacy, who seemed to dismiss the lessons of diplomatic
history as irrelevant to the pressing concerns of the policymaker in the ‘real’
world of the present.
1. The State as
Autonomous Actor in the Conduct of Foreign Relations: The Critique from the
“New Social History”
For many years
diplomatic history obviously took as its primary point of reference the
traditional concept of the nation-state (as opposed to the broader concept of
‘society’ employed by social historians). More specifically, it concentrated on
the relations between a particular nation-state and its counterparts in the
international arena. Because of this preoccupation with the state and its
relations with others of its kind, diplomatic historians inevitably focused
most of their attention on the select group of individuals within a particular
society that constituted the foreign-policymaking elite of its government. The
composition of this elite might vary widely according to the extent of
democratization and popular participation in the affairs of the country. As
A.J.P. Taylor remarked, in reference to the great powers in nineteenth-century
Europe: “[M]ost citizens of the country concerned knew little of its foreign
policy or cared even less.” Terms like “the French” or “the Germans” meant no
more than “those particular Frenchmen or Germans who happened to shape policy
at that particular moment ... Sometimes they were literally two or three
men--an emperor, his foreign minister, and some less official adviser;
sometimes the permanent staff of the foreign service; sometimes the leaders in
a parliamentary assembly and the principal writers on foreign affairs;
sometimes [he added, almost as an afterthought] public opinion in the wider
sense.”[6]
But even that “public opinion in a wider sense” in a democratic society such as
the United States, an early student of the subject asserted, has never exceeded
fifteen percent of the population. And it is usually much smaller than that.[7]
In short, according
to this traditionalist view, the subject of the diplomatic historian’s research
is a very thin layer of social reality. It was usually a self-enclosed,
self-perpetuating oligarchy that maintained its distance from the rest of
society and preserved its privileged position through various markers of
distinction: the right schools, the right clubs, the right social circles. As a
consequence, the primary-source data on which the diplomatic historian had to
rely for an accurate reconstruction of a country’s record in foreign affairs
were the communications among the members of this exclusive coterie: official
telegrams between foreign office and embassies abroad, private letters,
diaries, and memoirs of policymakers, and the like. It was this dependence on
the historical evidence left behind by professional diplomats, who were
hermetically insulated within the sanctity of their bureaus from the larger
society whose interests they were employed to protect, that gave rise to G. M.
Young’s oft-repeated indictment of diplomatic history as “little more than the
record of what one clerk said to another clerk.”[8]
Throughout the 1960s
and 1970s the elitist biases that underlay most of what had passed for
diplomatic history were sharply challenged by the proponents of the ‘new social
history.’ The watchword of this school was ‘history from the bottom up,’ by
which was meant the study of social groups that collectively constitute the
vast mass of humanity customarily ignored by traditional historians. It is
beyond dispute that no branch of the historical discipline has been more
inclined to practice ‘history from the top down’ than the traditional type of
diplomatic history represented by the Taylor quotation above. This was not
necessarily so because of any temperamental or ideological preferences of its
practitioners for ‘the classes’ as against ‘the masses.’ Indeed, even those diplomatic
historians who considered themselves political radicals were as dependent as
their more conservative colleagues on the evidence available. And, as noted
above, that evidence came largely from the wielders of power in the society.[9]
Whether they liked it or not, diplomatic historians of whatever political
persuasion accepted as axiomatic that the governing elite, rather than the
‘common people outside the political arena’ so dear to the social historians,
shaped and executed the foreign policies of states, usually in as much secrecy
and with as little accountability to the public it served that it could get
away with. What this meant in concrete terms was the widespread conception of
the state as an autonomous entity in the conduct of its foreign relations.
Recognition of the
state’s autonomy in the matters of foreign policy is by no means confined to
the study of hierarchical, authoritarian societies. The chief executives of
parliamentary democracies in Western Europe, whose authority in domestic affairs
has been severely circumscribed by the countervailing power of parliament,
press, and public interest groups, have traditionally enjoyed wide latitude in
the conduct of diplomacy. The Official Secrets Act of the United Kingdom
confers on the prime minister virtual immunity from public scrutiny when
affairs of state (usually meaning relations with foreign powers) are concerned.
The British government’s astonishing ability to keep the secret of ‘Ultra’ --a
cipher machine capable of decoding German radio messages that gave the Royal
Air Force advance knowledge of the Luftwaffe’s targeting schedule during the
Blitz--for almost thirty years after the end of World War II must have provoked
the envy of publicity-averse dictatorships everywhere.[10] Under the Third
French Republic in the last decade of the nineteenth century, governments were
toppled with comical regularity by shifting parliamentary coalitions, usually
for reasons of domestic politics. Yet amid this environment of acute
ministerial instability, a succession of shaky political coalitions in Paris
was able to negotiate a military alliance with the Russian Empire between 1891
and 1894. The precise contents of that agreement were known to no one beyond
the half-dozen diplomats, statesmen, and military officials who had been party
to the talks; it was never submitted for legislative ratification in spite of
its fateful provisions obligating France to mobilize its armed forces against
the signatories of the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy) if
any of them mobilized against France’s new eastern ally.[11] The notorious
‘secret treaties’ of World War I stipulating the redistribution of the Ottoman
spoils among the European allies, the ‘percentages agreement’ between Churchill
and Stalin concerning the partition of the Balkans into Soviet and
Anglo-American spheres of influence during World War II, successive plans by
the United States government for top-secret ‘covert operations’ to topple
regimes in disfavor[12]--all of these attest to the
persistence of the presumption (in democratic and authoritarian regimes alike)
that in matters of foreign policy, governments are seldom answerable to anyone
but themselves.
Expressions of
distrust of foreign-policymaking elites and their exercise of almost unlimited
power have a long pedigree. In the United States they appeared in the 1920s and
1930s amid the popular revulsion against World War I and its consequences. Many
critics on this side of the Atlantic blamed Europe’s slide into that catastrophe
on the clandestine plotting of statesmen and diplomats. After the Second World
War, Senator Joseph McCarthy had a brief but spectacular career indicting the
‘cookie-pushers’ and ‘Ivy-Leaguers’ of the State Department for ‘losing’ China
and Eastern Europe to Communism. The antagonism on the part of a large section
of the American public toward the ‘Best and the Brightest’ in the
Kennedy-Johnson foreign-policymaking elite who dragged the United States into
the Indochina quagmire during the sixties merely revived in a different form
and with a different cast of demons the anti-elitist, populist sentiments of
earlier eras. The consequences of this periodic resurgence of anti-elitism have
been deleterious for the discipline of diplomatic history. By studying the
state and the handful of individuals who controlled and managed its
foreign-policy apparatus, scholarly specialists in the history of international
relations have been put in the uncomfortable position of tacitly acquiescing in
that oligarchic conception of the foreign-policymaking process—even if they
express trenchant criticism of many of the policies themselves.
Partly in response
to this anti-elitist critique, a new school of diplomatic historians extended
the scope of its definition of the foreign-policymaking public beyond the
narrow confines of the state to include identifiable nongovernmental
elites and interest groups that operate outside the political process. In so
doing, these scholars implicitly discarded the traditional conception of the state
as an autonomous actor in history--long the underlying assumption of most
traditional diplomatic history--in favor of a redefinition of the state as a
political entity that is organically and inextricably linked to the larger
society over which it exercises authority. The school that proposed this more
inclusive approach to diplomatic history-- one is tempted to call it the
‘social history of diplomacy’--derived much of its original inspiration from
the long-neglected writings of the Weimar German historian Eckart Kehr, which
were resurrected by Hans-Ulrich Wehler in the 1960s and thereafter exercised an
important influence on several diplomatic historians in the United States.[13]
According to Kehr,
the domestic political system (Innenpolitik), far from being irrelevant
to the refined world of diplomacy (Aussenpolitik), as traditional
diplomatic historians had believed, has had an important influence on the
formulation and execution of foreign policy. The diplomatic historian was put
on notice that she must devote a great deal of attention to the social,
economic, political, and cultural processes within a particular society in
order to grasp the dynamics of that society’s relations with the outside world.[14]
An early application of the Kehrian doctrine of the Primat der Innenpolitik
was Arno Mayer’s two-volume study of the latter stage of the First World War
and the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Instead of rehashing the old debates
based on the official records of the major states involved, Mayer concentrated
on the activities of radical political movements, labor organizations, and
other groups outside the political arena. It is scarcely surprising, in light
of the type of data on which he relied, that Mayer’s conclusions contradicted
the conventional wisdom on the subject: In Mayer’s analysis, considerations of
national interest and balance of power, traditionally thought to preoccupy
foreign-policy makers in times of crisis, recede far into the background.
Instead, he insisted that internal social, economic, and political
developments within the major belligerent states—notably conflicts that raised
the prospect of a Europe-wide insurrection mounted by working-class movements
inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia—decisively influenced the policies
of the warmakers of 1917-1918 and the peacemakers of 1919.[15] N. Gordon
Levin’s revisionist study of Wilsonian foreign policy reached a similar
conclusion, emphasizing the domestic pressures on an American leader intent on
shoring up the deteriorating liberal capitalist order in the world amid the
twin menaces of Bolshevism and Imperialism.[16]
Whereas Mayer and
Levin underscored the domestic political determinants of foreign policy,
the opening of the private papers of various businesspeople and bankers in
later years resulted in a number of studies that emphasized the economic
wellsprings of diplomacy. Stephen A. Schuker’s exhaustive study of the origins
of the Dawes Plan drew heavily on the private papers of the Morgan partners
Thomas Lamont and Dwight Morrow, Montagu Norman (governor of the Bank of
England), as well as the Krupp and Thyssen collections.[17] Charles Maier’s
celebrated analysis of social and economic stabilization in Western Europe
after World War I exploited private business archives such as those of the Compagnie
de Saint-Gobain-Pont-à-Mousson in France.[18] Thomas Karnes’s monograph on the
Standard Fruit Company’s ventures in Latin America,[19] Dan Morgan’s
historical treatment of the international grain cartel,[20] and Anthony Sampson’s
and Daniel Yergin’s studies of the seven multinational petroleum companies all
focus on the foreign-policy consequences of the activities of organizations in
the private sector that operated entirely apart from their governments.[21]
Akira Iriye called attention to the important role played by international
non-governmental organizations on the global stage and urged diplomatic
historians to pay more attention to their activities.[22] Tony Smith
chronicled the influence of ethnic and religious groups within the United
States on behalf of foreign states, as did John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt in
their controversial study of the Israel lobby.[23] During his brief career, Charles De
Benedetti enriched our understanding of the activities of American pressure
groups promoting the cause of world peace and their impact of their
government’s foreign policies.[24]
This increasing
attention to the influence of non-governmental organizations on foreign policy
represents a powerful affirmation of the close connection between foreign
policy and domestic politics. These and other works in this genre treat the
state not as an entity unto itself, with its own interests and means of
pursuing them, but rather as a reflection of the interests of its various constituencies
within the broader social order. It is worth recording the caveat that this new
sensitivity to the domestic sources of foreign policy does not entirely dispose
of the social historians’ objection to the ‘elitist’ assumptions of diplomatic
history. This ‘new diplomatic history’ did not emulate the ‘new social history’
by directing its attention to ‘the common man or woman,’ who, by no stretch of
the imagination could be thought to exercise an important influence on foreign
policy. It merely substituted non-governmental elites (bankers, businesspeople,
trade union leaders, professional revolutionaries, spokespersons of ethnic or
religious groups, officials in organizations dedicated to peace,
environmentalism, and advocacy for special interest groups) for the traditional
foreign-policymaking elites in government. This neo-corporatist conception of
international relations, which emphasizes the constraints imposed on foreign
offices by organized interest groups or influential individuals in the private
sector cannot be very comforting to the devotees of a genuinely egalitarian
approach to diplomatic history. It is certainly a far cry from ‘history from
the bottom up’ as exemplified by the influential work of my late colleague
Howard Zinn.[25]
Another indication
of the movement away from the state-centered type of diplomatic history that
prevailed for so long has been the increasing attention devoted by diplomatic
historians to the role of culture in the interaction among nations. In
the late 1970s Lawrence Kaplan, Morell Heald, and Akira Iriye were already
pressing diplomatic historians to take note of the cultural setting of United
States foreign policy and to pay close attention to the interaction of
‘cultural systems’ in the world.[26] It is important to note that this
new interest in the cultural basis of international relations has tended to
focus more on ‘popular’ rather than ‘high’ culture. Such a predilection made
this type of diplomatic history much more acceptable to cultural historians who,
like their social historian peers, strive to address their subject from below
rather than from on high. The flagship journal of the profession has published
a number of articles with popular culture as their centerpiece. Michael
Hunt has hailed the proliferation of studies based on this new cultural
approach to the history of the relations among states as a welcome sign that
“The Long Crisis in U.S. Diplomatic History” is finally “Coming to Closure.”[27]
Although they may
not satisfy the stringent criteria of the most demanding social and cultural
historians, the trends in diplomatic history sketched above demonstrate how far
the sub-discipline has traveled in the last several decades. The time is long
overdue, therefor, for scholars outside the sub-discipline—particularly those
laboring in the vineyards of social and cultural history--to discard their
outmoded notions of what diplomatic historians have been up to. They ought to
recognize that most practitioners of the craft are no longer content to record
“what one clerk said to another clerk,” but rather have been probing the wider
world of society and culture to explain the ways in which states conduct their
relations with other states in the world arena.
2. The Absence of
Methodological Rigor?: The Critique from the Theorists of International
Relations
For many years
diplomatic historians and international relations theorists formed a single
field of scholarly inquiry. The classic texts of international-relations theory
were written by political scientists who were fully conversant in the language
of diplomatic history. Hans Morgenthau,[28] Raymond Aron,[29] Henry
Kissinger,[30]
and others freely acknowledged their extensive reliance on historical data in
the formulation of their theories of international politics.
International-relations theorists such as Robert Art, Zbigniew Brzezinski,
Stanley Hoffmann, Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Jack Snyder, among
others, have been unapologetic in their insistence that theory can and should
be informed by historical knowledge. But during the 1960s and 1970s a
significant group of theorists effectively turned its back on the lessons of
diplomatic history to form a sub-discipline of political science that seemed to
repudiate all connections with the field of historical scholarship. For many
years thereafter, these two sub-disciplines, which had previously shared a
common interest in probing the operation of the international order and
mutually profited from intellectual interchange, went their own separate ways
with little regard for the work being done in the other field. It is no
exaggeration to say that most diplomatic historians and international relations
theorists had little to say to one another.
The principal source
of this professional parting of ways was a sharp disagreement over methodology.
The political scientists accused the diplomatic historians of producing
essentially worthless studies of isolated international events that could be
ignored by the theorist intent on establishing scientifically verifiable
generalizations about the relations among states. The accusation is a familiar
one to all historians and is by no means applicable solely to the
sub-discipline of diplomatic history: The historical approach treats each past
event as unique, unrepeatable, and therefore incomparable to any other event
before or since. The business of the traditional historian—diplomatic or
otherwise--is narration and description rather than analysis. Her goal is to produce,
on the basis of exhaustive research in the surviving records of the past, an
accurate and comprehensive rendition of what actually transpired in a
particular time and place.
By contrast, the
theoretician of international relations displays an interest in specific
historical developments only insofar as they can be related to comparable
developments in different times and places in order to yield eternally and
universally valid generalizations about the interaction of states in the
international system.[31] Although the late neo-realist
theorist Kenneth Waltz paid attention to historical developments, he
constructed general theories of interstate relations that did not engage the
findings of diplomatic historians.[32] To return to the earlier anecdote
about my encounter with an advocate of this position: What Bismarck said,
thought, or did is of no interest whatsoever to the theorist of international
relations, whatever entertainment value it may hold for the antiquarian or the
devotee of history-as-literature.
It is important to
recognize that the crucial distinction between these two approaches is not, as
is often alleged, that the former is descriptive and the latter analytical. The
diplomatic historian worth her salt is no mere chronicler of past events. Her
obligation is not only to recount what actually happened but also to explain
why it happened in the way that it did. Such an explanation requires the
identification of the causal connections between the events that she describes.
This attention to causality belies the theorist’s attempt to portray the
traditional historian as a mere storyteller.[33] Instead, the difference is to be
found in the type of analysis that the diplomatic historian undertakes.
He is content to offer an analytical explanation of a specific historical
development (say, the formation of the Anglo-Japanese alliance in 1902) by
identifying the chain of causality linking that event to preceding ones: the
conclusion of a military alliance between France and Russia in 1894; Russia’s
subsequent rivalry with Japan in Korea and Manchuria; Japan’s desire for Great
Britain’s assistance in keeping France neutral in case the competition with
Russia in the Far East were to result in war between the two; Germany’s
decision to construct a navy; Great Britain’s consequent desire to transfer
much of its naval power from the Western Pacific to the North Sea in order to
counter the impending German buildup there; Great Britain’s decision to rely on
Japan to balance Russian naval power in the Western Pacific after the
aforementioned reduction of its own naval power in the region; etc.
The theorist of
international relations could not care less about the exposition of the causal
relationship among the discrete historical events sketched above, for its sole
contribution to knowledge is the explanation of why these two unlikely
candidates for an alliance proceeded to form one. Its scope is restricted to
the specific historical period and geographical space in which the events under
discussion unfolded. It contributes nothing to a general theory of alliance
formation, deterrence, the operation of the balance of power, naval
competition, or any other category of universal applicability. In short, the
diplomatic historian is concerned with explaining important developments in the
past as a self-enclosed chain of cause and effect. The theorist of
international relations insists on treating such supposedly unique cases as
members of a class of phenomena that recur regularly throughout history and
therefore can be analyzed systematically in an effort to discover correlations
among all members of the class. The ultimate objective goes far beyond the
modest goal of the diplomatic historian, which is to describe and explain what
has happened in a particular time and place. It is to elaborate a general
theory of international behavior that will yield predictions of how nations can
be expected to act in the future.[34]
The specific methods
employed by the theorist to attain the twin goals of generalization and
prediction vary according to the particular school to which he subscribes. A
mere recitation of the labels conventionally applied to some of the schools and
sub-schools of international-relations theory-- behaviorism, systems analysis,
game theory, cybernetic theory of decision-making, content analysis,
transnationalism, functionalism, bureaucratic politics theory, operational
codes theory, realism, constructivism, liberalism, world systems theory, among
others--indicates the extraordinary variety of methodological approaches
available. But however they may differ among themselves, what they all share in
common is a marked disinterest in the type of research conducted by traditional
diplomatic historians. Each of these theoretical approaches, whether acknowledged
or not, is modeled on the procedures and methodology of the natural sciences.
Topics for investigation are chosen not on the basis of intrinsic interest but
rather according to the specific requirements of a carefully prepared research
design. The mode of inquiry is frequently collaborative in nature, with a
research ‘team’ assembled at some institution of higher learning or think tank.
The means of verification are typically statistical, marked by attempts to
determine the standard deviation from ‘mean’ activity (to the social scientist,
that term signifies a quantity having a value intermediate between the values
of other quantities, rather than something that is ‘nasty’).
The esoteric
language employed to describe the results of such macroscopic studies is likely
to exasperate the diplomatic historian. A cursory perusal of the premier
journals of international relations theory—The Journal of Conflict
Resolution, The Journal of Peace Research, International Studies
Quarterly, International Organization, and World Politics--reveals
that such ahistorical research has come to dominate the field. The American
Political Science Review often publishes articles on international affairs,
but not ones that would be of interest or use to diplomatic historians. A
comparison of such studies with those appearing in journals such as Diplomatic
History, The International History Review, Diplomacy and
Statecraft, Relations internationales, La Revue d’histoire
diplomatique and the occasional article on diplomatic history—very
occasional--in the American Historical Review, confirms that the two
groups inhabit entirely different intellectual universes.
Is the yawning chasm
between international-relations theory and diplomatic history bridgeable? For
many years the theorists apparently thought it was, so long as the historians
stuck to the drudgery of gathering quantifiable evidence of international
behavior that could be fed into the data bases for use in subsequent
large-scale studies. Much time and effort is saved if the project director can
readily determine from some historical monograph precisely how many Zulus
perished in the war of 1879 or how many square kilometers of territory were
ceded by Germany in 1919. But the historian who resisted accepting such a subservient
role in the pursuit of knowledge was hard put to define areas of common
interest with his brethren in political science. The few genuine attempts by
theorists to bridge the gap -- such as Alexander George’s “Structured, Focused
Comparison” approach failed to stimulate much interest among diplomatic
historians.[35]
Another valiant effort by diplomatic historians and international relations
theorists to find common ground at the turn of the twenty-first century does
not seem to have had much resonance in either field.[36] As a lot,
diplomatic historians seemed more resistant than most members of the historical
profession to the intrusion of quantification, model-building, and all the
other accoutrements of the behavioral sciences. Two notable exceptions to the
rule are the journals International Security and Ethics and
International Affairs, which publish articles of theorists and historians,
proving that détente is possible in the longstanding Cold War between the two
approaches.
3. The Relevance
of the Past for the Present?: Benign Neglect from the Policymakers
As we have seen, the
theorist of international relations is inclined to devote at least cursory
attention to the fruits of historical scholarship, if only because they furnish
the raw data upon which analytical generalizations about the behavior of states
in the international system may be constructed. The social scientist may
condescendingly regard the diplomatic historian as a sort of fieldworker who
laboriously collects ‘the facts’ to be programmed into the computer by the
research team in quest of longitudinal patterns of aggregate behavior. But to
the policymaker and the policy-oriented social scientist who is sometimes
called upon to advise him, it seems that the discipline of diplomatic history
has almost entirely been neglected as a potential source of usable information
for the conduct of foreign policy.
Such was not always
the case. When the representatives of the victorious powers assembled in Paris
in 1919 to draft the peace treaties terminating the First World War, the
counsel of historians was eagerly solicited by the various delegations.
President Woodrow Wilson brought with him across the Atlantic a number of
scholars who tendered advice on matters pertaining to the territorial claims
based on historical boundaries of the Habsburg successor states.[37]
The British historians R.W. Seton Watson and Charles K. Webster attended the
conference and provided advice on a number of issues.[38] The French
delegation relied on the advice of its country’s most eminent historians, one
of whom, Ernest Lavisse, had headed the Comité d’études, the French
counterpart to Woodrow Wilson’s wartime committee of scholarly advisers called
‘The Inquiry.’[39]
This respect for the expertise of historians was revived during the Second
World War. ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, the swashbuckling chief of the newly created
Office of Strategic Services (OSS), looted American universities of scholars,
including such specialists in diplomatic history as William Langer, Raymond
Sontag, and Bernadotte Schmidt, for service as intelligence analysts,
presumably in the expectation that their historical knowledge would serve them
well in that capacity.[40]
Alas! We no longer
live in an age when the architects of foreign policy conceive of history (and
the historian) as a useful guide for present practice. The presumption that the
past record of diplomacy has little or no relation to the practical concerns of
the foreign-policymaker seems to be widespread, particularly in American
governmental circles. One senses not so much disinterest in the historical
background of current events as a preoccupation with a multitude of
fast-breaking crises that demand practical solutions now. In short, if the
social historian denounced diplomatic history as elitist and the theorist of
international relations dismissed it as methodologically unsophisticated, the
practitioner of diplomacy (in those rare moments when he has the time to give
it thought) rejects it as irrelevant or at least places it far down on the list
of priorities for the engagement of his sustained attention.
This indifference to
the scholarly literature of diplomatic history on the part of foreign-policy
makers doubtless stems from other considerations besides the constraints of
time. Surely another must be the pervasive conviction among government
officials as well as the public at large that historical understanding,
particularly when it involves the domain of world affairs, is not something
that belongs exclusively to a professional community. When economic matters
come before this or that agency of the government, the advice of academic
economists is frequently solicited. When questions of science policy are up for
discussion, the Cambridge-to-Washington shuttle is filled with MIT professors
summoned to the capital to give their views. But whenever government officials
feel the inclination to reflect on the historical context of particular
international developments in the present (which, as noted above, they apparently
seldom do), they are unlikely to tap the expertise of the appropriate
specialist in diplomatic history. Instead, they are probably inclined to rely
on whatever hazy memories they may retain from college history courses; or, as
in the case of John Kennedy’s thumbing through Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of
August during the hectic weeks of October 1962 for hints on how to prevent
the Cuban Missile Crisis from degenerating into what followed the Habsburg
assassination crisis of 1914, they may be expected to consult whatever
historical work happens to appear on the New York Times best-seller list at the
time.[41]
And such works are seldom produced by professional diplomatic historians.
Herein lies the
irony: the disinterest of public officials in the body of scholarship built up
by professional diplomatic historians is accompanied by an almost obsessive
propensity for employing ill-conceived historical arguments to address
contemporary problems or justify current policy. As Ernest May remarked,
foreign-policy makers “are often influenced by beliefs about what history
teaches and portends.” Unfortunately, as he demonstrated with considerable
persuasiveness, the policymaker’s knowledge of what happened in the past is
more often than not wildly inaccurate and a distorted version of historical
reality. As a consequence, the policymaker is prone to drawing the wrong
“lessons of the past” and likely to make choices for the future that are often unwise.[42]
The examples of such egregious misreading or misuse of history that May cites
may be supplemented by others. Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s constantly
reiterated contention during the Vietnam War that any negotiation with the
Hanoi regime would constitute a revival of the ‘spirit of Munich’ is perhaps
the most memorable case in point. (The Munich analogy has resurfaced recently
in the writings of those who oppose the negotiations with Iran over that
country’s nuclear program). During the Cold War, references to the ‘Yalta
sellout’ reverberated in the rhetoric of Republican politicians and
conservative media without any noticeable attempt to consult diplomatic
historians who had delved into the records of the Crimea conference to determine
what had actually transpired there. The current crises in Iraq and Syria
have produced innumerable references to the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 by
public officials and pundits who seem to have only the haziest understanding of
the complex set of issues surrounding that wartime understanding that
diplomatic historians have addressed.
Perhaps it is
unrealistic to believe that policymakers can be induced to resist the
temptation of amateurish historical analysis and to pay closer attention to the
findings of professional historians who devote entire careers to the
interpretation of past events. The tradition of ‘everyman his own historian’ is
deeply rooted in a society that would be horrified at the thought of ‘everyman
his own brain surgeon.’ The remedy for this propensity for faulty historical
understanding that May suggests is one that should please the diplomatic
historian who is insecure about the ‘relevance’ of his work to the problems of
the here and now: Let governments consult eminent historians on a regular basis
when a historical analogy or precedent for a current policy issue presents
itself, just as they are accustomed to consulting molecular biologists or
specialists in air pollution when matters within their competence are raised as
questions of public policy.[43]
Conclusion: The
Promising Prospects of the “New International History”
In the course of
this essay, which has recounted the widespread dissatisfaction with diplomatic
history on the part of social historians, theorists of international relations,
and practitioners of diplomacy in earlier decades, I have tried to indicate how
the field has undergone a fundamental transformation that has removed much of
the justification for such criticism. By displaying a concern for the broader context
of international relations, diplomatic historians in the past two decades or so
have begun to repair the broken bridge to the world of the social historian by
examining the role of organizations and groups that had previously been
ignored. By remaining open to the potential application of
international-relations theory to diplomatic history, diplomatic historians
have opened long-clogged channels of communication to a small group of scholars
of international relations in political science departments.[44]
The one disappointment has been in the failure to persuade policymakers of the
relevance of diplomatic history scholarship to provide appropriate ‘lessons’
for the conduct of diplomacy in the modern world.
To take account of
these notable advances in professional diplomatic history, I would reissue a
modest proposal that I have unsuccessfully pitched to colleagues in the
profession for many years. It involves a simple semantic change that would
accurately reflect the methodological and substantive strides that the
discipline of diplomatic history has taken in recent decades. As we have seen,
practitioners of the craft can no longer be justly accused of confining their
scholarly attention to the messages between diplomats. They are increasingly
attentive to the entire context–economic, social, and cultural, as well as
political and military—of the relations among nations in the world. Why not
consider adopting ‘international history’ as a new label for the type of
scholarly work and teaching that “diplomatic” historians have been doing. That
term has existed in the United Kingdom as the title of a scholarly journal to
which diplomatic historians regularly contribute. It is the title of the
division of the history department in the London School of Economics and
Political Science in which diplomatic historians reside.
Lest anyone think
that this modest proposal for a name change is in any way original, I will
conclude with a declaration by the late Ernest May that was issued at the very
beginning of the period addressed in this essay: “Diplomatic history as such
has entered a decline. It may be approaching demise. The field gradually taking
its place—perhaps best termed…international history—is new. Its nature and
contours are just beginning to become perceptible. It promises, however, to be
one of the rich areas of future historical scholarship.” [45] Of course, even
such a radical semantic change—which would require a renaming of the flagship
journal and the flagship H-Net list of the profession-- would not satisfy those
who have come to believe that the term ‘international’ itself is inappropriate
and anachronistic in a globalized, borderless world in which the nation-state
is on the way out. But that is another story for another time.
William R. Keylor is Professor of history and international
relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. He is
the author of A World of Nations: The International Order since 1945 (2nd
edition, 2009), The Twentieth-Century World: An International History since
1900 (6th edition, 2011), “The United Nations’ Record as
the Guardian of Global Cooperative Security” in Vojtech Mastny and Zhu Liqun,
eds.,The Legacy of the Cold War: Perspectives on Security, Cooperation, and
Conflict (New York, 2014), pp. 81-122 and, most recently, “The Second Cold
War in Europe: The Paradoxes of a Turbulent Time,” in Lorenz Lüthi, ed., The
Regional Cold Wars in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East (2015),
141-174. He is a proud member of the Editorial Board of H-Diplo.
© 2015 The
Author.
This work is
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0
United States License
Notes
[1]
This is a radically expanded and revised version of remarks I presented to the
International Security Studies Program at Yale University and to the Sorbonne
course of Professor Georges-Henri Soutou. In addition to my gratitude to many
people in those audiences for their comments, I want to express my appreciation
to my friend, colleague, and neighbor David Mayers for recently reading the
penultimate version of this piece and offering his usual constructive
criticism. (It is worth mentioning, in the context of the construction of
bridges between diplomatic history and political science discussed in this
essay, that this esteemed diplomatic historian will soon become chair of the
department of political science department of Boston University, a post he held
in earlier years).
[2] http://www.e-ir.info/2013/03/09/the-state-of-international-history/;
https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/pages/33862/h-diplo-state-field-essays
[3]
Alexander De Conde, “What’s Wrong with American Diplomatic History?,” Society
for Historians of American Foreign Relations Newsletter, Vol. 1, No. 2 (May
1970). 1-16.
[4]
Ernest R. May, “The Decline of Diplomatic History,” in George Athan Billias and
Gerald R. Grab, eds., American History: Retrospect and Prospect (New
York, 1971, 399-430.
[5]
Charles Maier, “Marking Time: The Historiography of International Relations,”
in Michael Kammen, The Past before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in
the United States (Ithaca, 1980), 355-382.
[6]
A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1918 (London,
1957), xxi.
[7]
V.O. Key, Public Opinion and American Democracy (New York, 1961), 173,
174.
[8]
G.M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (London. 1953), 103.
[9]
See, for example, William A. Williams, Roots of the Modern American Empire
(New York, 1969) ; Carl Parrini, Heir to Empire: United States Economic
Diplomacy, 1916-1923 (Pittsburgh, 1969); Gar Alperovitz, Atomic
Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (New York, 1965).
[10]
When the British government ban was lifted in 1974, one of the participants in
the decoding operation revealed its existence. F.W. Winterbotham, The
Ultra Secret (London, 1974).
[11]
George F. Kennan, The Fateful Alliance: France, Russia, and the Coming of
the First World War (New York, 1984).
[12]
Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to
Iraq (New York, 2007).
[13]
On The Bielefeld School founded by Wehler, see Roger Fletcher, “Recent
Developments in West German Historiography: the Bielefeld School and its
Critics.” German Studies Review 1984 7(3): 451-480.
[14]
See Eckart Kehr, Der Primat der Innenpolitik: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur
preussisch-deutschen Sozialgeschichte Im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans
U. Wehler, [Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission zu Berlin, 19]
(Berlin, 2012).
[15]
Arno J. Mayer, Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917-1918 (New Haven,
1959) and Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and
Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918-1919 (New York, 1967).
[16]
N. Gordon Levin, Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America’s Response to
War and Revolution (New York, 1968).
[17]
Stephen A. Schuker, The End of French Predominance in Europe: The Financial
Crisis of 1924 and the Origins of the Dawes Plan (Chapel Hill, 1976).
[18]
Charles A. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe (Princeton, 1975).
[19]
Thomas L. Karnes, Tropical Enterprise: The Standard Fruit and Steamship
Company in Latin America (New York, 1978).
[20]
Dan Morgan, Merchants of Grain (New York, 1980).
[21]
Anthony Samson, The Seven Sisters: The Great Oil Companies and the World
They Shaped (New York, 1975); Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest
for Oil, Money, and Power (New York, 2008).
[22]
Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in
the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley, 2002)
[23]
Tony Smith, Foreign Attachments: The Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making of
American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA, 2000); John J. Mearsheimer and
Steven M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York,
2008).
[24]
Charles DeBenedetti, Origins of the Modern American Peace Movement,
1915-1929 (Millwood, NY, 1978); The Peace Reform in American History (Bloomington,
1984).
[25]
Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York, 2005).
[26]
Morell Heald and Lawrence S. Kaplan, Culture and Diplomacy (Westport,
1977); Akira Iriye, “Culture and Power: International Relations as
Intercultural Relations,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 3, Issue 2 (April
1979), 115-128.
[27]
Michael Hunt, “The Long Crisis in U.S. Diplomatic History: Coming to Closure,” Diplomatic
History, Vol. 16, No.1 (Winter 1992), 115-140.
[28]
Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace
(New York, 1973).
[29]
Raymond Aron, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations (New
York, 1968).
[30]
Henry A. Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York, 1969).
[31]
An early articulation of this view may be found in E. Raymond Platig, International
Relations Research: Problem of Evaluation and Advancement (Santa Barbara,
1967), 95-103.
[32]
Kenneth Waltz, The Theory of International Politics (New York, 1979).
[33]
Theorists of postmodernism, of course, enthusiastically defend the historian’s
status as a teller of tales. The most lucid explication of the
postmodernist approach to diplomatic history may be found in the writings of
Frank Ninkovich. See, for example, his “Interests and Discourse in Diplomatic
History,” Diplomatic History 13, No. 2 (Spring 1989), 135-161; and his
“No Post-Mortems for Post-Modernism, Please,” Diplomatic History 22
(Summer 1998), 451-466. For a gentle critique of the postmodernist enterprise,
see the review essay by William R. Keylor, “Post-Mortems for the American Century,
Diplomatic History 25, No. 2 (Spring 2001), 317-327.
[35]
Alexander George, “Case Studies and Theory Development: The Method of
Structured, Focused Comparison,” in Paul Gordon Lauren, Diplomacy: History,
Theory, and Policy (New York, 1979), 43-68.
[36]
Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman, eds., Bridges and Boundaries:
Historians, Political Scientists, and the Study of International Relations
(Cambridge, MA, 2001). The theorist Jack S. Levy remarked that while graduate
students studying international relations in political science departments were
required to take courses on research design and statistics, history departments
rarely offered such courses to their students. He also observed that political
scientists were “troubled by the failure of historians to be explicit about
their theoretical assumptions and propositions.” Jack S. Levy,
“Explaining Events and Developing Theories: History, Political Science, and the
Analysis of International Relations,” in Ibid. 80-81.
[37]
The Harvard historian Charles Homer Haskins was the major adviser to Wilson
(his former colleague at Johns Hopkins) on territorial issues. William R.
Keylor, “Versailles and International Diplomacy,” in Manfred F. Boemeke, et
al., The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years (Cambridge,
U.K.: 1998), 492.
[38]
See Erik Goldstein, Winning the Peace: British Diplomatic Strategy, Peace
Planning, and the Paris Peace Conference, 1916-1920 (Oxford, 1991). Webster
was commissioned to prepare a handbook summarizing the diplomatic procedures of
the Congress of Vienna. Seton Watson also gave advice to the Czechoslovak
government.
[39]
Comité d’études. Travaux
(Paris, 1918).
[40]
Robin W. Winks, From Cloak & Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961
(New York, 1987), 495-97.
[41]
Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (New York: 1962).
[42]
Ernest R. May, “Lessons of the Past”: The Use and Misuse of History in
American Foreign Policy (New York and Oxford, 1975), ix.
[43]
May, “Lessons” of the Past, 172-190.
See also Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses
of History for Decision Makers (New York, 1988).
[44]
A recent example of the efforts of diplomatic historians to explore the
intellectual, cultural, and social context of international relations as well
as to take account of international-relations theory is Peter Jackson’s superb Beyond
the Balance of Power: France and the Politics of National Security in the Era
of the First World War (Cambridge, UK, 2014).
[45]
Ernest May “The Decline of Diplomatic History,” in Billias and Grob, American
History: Retrospect and Prospect, 430.
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