HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS
What are the lessons of history for the study of international politics? Do
international relations scholars twist history? Are historians antiquarians?
This book is a major contribution to the debate about philosophy and method
in history and international relations. Thomas W.Smith draws on insights from
historiographic theory and analyzes international relations scholarship from
classical realism to structural, quantitative, and postmodernist work. The study
highlights often licentious historical methods in international relations, as well as
convergence between the disciplines in style, method, and paradigmatic focus.
Topics covered include:
• interpretation and the politics of history;
• anecdotalism, selection bias, and theoretical filtering;
• use and abuse of history in foreign policy;
• structural and quantitative history;
• postmodernist history and politics;
• historical skepticism and international relations theory.
Smith argues that much of international relations—in theory and practice —rests
on narrow and often deterministic readings of history. He shows how historical
construction and interpretation chip away at scientific renderings of international
politics. This skeptical view of history illuminates international relations as a realm
of contingency and moral choice.
Thomas W.Smith is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Koç
University, Istanbul.
ROUTLEDGE ADVANCES IN INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS AND POLITICS
1 FOREIGN POLICY AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
France, Britain and Europe
Henrik Larsen
2 AGENCY, STRUCTURE AND INTERNATIONAL POLITICS
From ontology to empirical enquiry
Gil Friedman and Harvey Starr
3 THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF REGIONAL COOPERATION IN THE
MIDDLE EAST
Ali Carkoglu, Mine Eder, Kemal Kirisci
4 PEACE MAINTENANCE
The evolution of international political authority
Jarat Chopra
5 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY
Breaking down boundaries
Stephen Hobden
6 EQUIVALENCE IN COMPARATIVE POLITICS
Edited by Jan W. van Deth
7 THE POLITICS OF CENTRAL BANKS
Robert Elgie and Helen Thompson
8 POLITICS IN A GLOBALIZED WORLD
Martin Shaw
9 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Thomas W.Smith
10 IDEALISM AND REALISM IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Robert M.A.Crawford
HISTORY AND
INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS
Thomas W.Smith
London and New York
First published 1999
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
© 1999 Thomas W.Smith
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Smith, Thomas W., 1962–
History and international relations/Thomas W.Smith
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. International relations. 2. History. I Title
JZ1242.S64 1999
327.1’ 01–dc21 98–51213CIP
ISBN 0-203-20124-8 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN
0-203-26580-7 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-17865-7 (Print Edition)
"To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge's
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk."
FOR MY PARENTS
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
2 The historical problem in international relations
3 History, contingency, and the roots of realism:
Reinhold Niebuhr and E.H.Carr
4 History, analogy, and policy realism:
Hans J.Morgenthau and George F.Kennan
5 The poverty of ahistoricism:
Kenneth N.Waltz and neorealist theory
6 “The importance of being scientific”:
J.David Singer and the correlates of war
7 Exit from history? Postmodern international relations
8 Conclusion: history, skepticism, and the recovery of theory
Notes
References
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish first to thank Kenneth W.Thompson, Michael Joseph Smith, David C.Jordan,
Norman A.Graebner, and Dante Germino for directing this study when it was my
doctoral thesis at the University of Virginia. I also wish to thank my friends and
colleagues for their help and support: Alice Ba, Stephen Calabrese, Andrew Clem,
Desmond Dewsnap, Cary Federman, Daniel Landis, Amy Nagle, Christopher
Sabatini, Thomas Sakats, Ilter Turan, Scott Waalkes, Helga Welsh, and Marshal
Zeringue. I would also like to thank James A. Smith, Jr. for his encouraging
comments on a draft of
; Paul W. Schroeder for his remarks on
J.David Singer, who took time from his busy schedule to discuss
with
me; and Patrick Yott, of the Alderman Library Social Science Data Center at the
University of Virginia, for his assistance, also with
. The errors and
infelicities that remain are my own. A special thanks is due Deniz Bingöl, my
research assistant at Koç University, whose hard work and good cheer were
invaluable in the final stages of this project.
I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Earhart Foundation, the
Institute for the Study of World Politics, the Miller Center of Public Affairs and
the Woodrow Wilson Department of Government and Foreign Affairs at the
University of Virginia, and the College of Administrative Sciences and Economics
at Koç University.
The discussion of Michael Oakeshott in
was originally published in
“Michael Oakeshott on History, Practice, and Political Theory,” History of Political
Thought, 17 (1996), pp. 591–614. Copyright ©, Imprint Academic, Exeter, United
Kingdom. The Reinhold Niebuhr material in
first appeared in “The Uses
of Tragedy: Reinhold Niebuhr’s Theory of History and International Ethics,” Ethics
and International Affairs, 9 (1995), pp. 171–91. Copyright ©, Carnegie Council on
Ethics and International Affairs, New York. The section in
devoted to
George Kennan was first published in “Historical Learning and the Setting of
Foreign Policy: The Case of George F. Kennan,” Miller Center Journal, 4 (1997), pp.
95–105. Copyright ©, Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia,
Charlottesville, Virginia. They are reprinted here with permission.
1
INTRODUCTION
Out of our conceptions of the past, we make a future.
Hobbes (1994:32)
“The past,” the great skeptic of British philosophy Michael Oakeshott once noted,
is “a field in which we exercise our moral and political opinions, like whippets in
a meadow on a Sunday afternoon” (Oakeshott 1962:166). Prompted by Oakeshott’s
critique of history-as-ideology, this study scrutinizes international relations theory
and research across the methodological spectrum from classical realism to
quantitative and postmodernist work. Perhaps because it is a child of history,
international relations, as it has developed, has tried to distance itself from historical
discourse, through methodological and theoretical innovations seeking general
knowledge about international and global politics. In this flight from the old ways
of history, researchers have tended to downplay the historical content of their own
work, and, at times, to embrace an easy historical empiricism. This uncritical view
of the past has contributed to an often licentious historical method, with history
serving less as an independent body of evidence than as a trove to be plundered,
and which in the discipline’s most scientific work saddles history with more
certainty than it can bear.
The historical problem is to some extent inherent in the material. As Hans
Morgenthau noted in an opening passage of Politics Among Nations (1948),
The most formidable difficulty facing a scientific inquiry into the nature and
ways of international politics is the ambiguity of the material with which the
observer has to deal.
… The first lesson the student of international politics
must learn and never forget is that the complexities of international affairs
make simple solutions and trustworthy prophecies impossible. It is here that
the scholar and the charlatan part company
… In every political situation
contradictory tendencies are at play
…which tendency actually will prevail is
anybody’s guess. The best the scholar can do, then, is to trace the different
tendencies which, as potentialities, are inherent in a certain international
situation.
(Morgenthau 1948:4–6)
Quincy Wright, an early advocate of the quantitative study of international politics
and one of the field’s greatest interdisciplinarians, had especially kind words for
history. He noted that “in their emphasis on contingency [historians] provide a
healthy antidote to the overenthusiastic social scientist,” and that an appreciation
of history lent the student of war
a balanced sense of continuity and change, of uniqueness and repetition, of
causation and contingency, and of choice and standards. He can better realize
the complexity and uncertainty of human affairs, the many factors to be
considered in making judgments, the dangers of abstraction, of dogmatism,
of prediction, of action, and of inaction. He can better understand the
abundance and variability of human values and the opportunities as well as
the insecurities of any situation.
(Wright 1955:87, 89)
Now more frequently cast in the mold of political science, students of international
politics have largely abandoned these earlier ideas about the nature of history and
the limits that history suggests for social science research. Today, “rigorous,” often
grand, historical models are the norm, as is routine disregard for the problems of
historical discourse.
The historical problem: an overview
In its most basic outline, the historical problem in the field of international
relations comprises epistemology, ideology, and sociology. Epistemologically,
history turns out to be an indispensable, but fickle, research partner. It is decidedly
not the independent body of evidence touted by Leopold von Ranke (1874: vii) as
history “as it really was” (wie es eigentlich gewesen ist). If getting history right is “like
nailing jelly to the wall,” as Peter Novick suggests in his highly controversial,
meticulously documented That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the
American Historical Profession (1988:1), then the use of history in social science is no
less challenging. Plunging into the historical literature, the researcher is quickly
enmeshed in lively debate over description and explanation. History turns out to
be not so much an archival puzzle, whose parts eventually fall neatly into place,
than a patchwork of often incongruous facts and more or less plausible inferences,
interpretations, and impressions. This is particularly the case as the historian moves
into the realm of meaning and causality. As Stanley Hoffmann has argued (1987:
455), “many different readings of the same reality are possible. Even if all historians
agreed on the facts, they would still disagree on the respective weight of those facts;
in the act of ‘imaginative reconstruction’ that any causal analysis performs,
assessments of motivation and causal efficiency vary considerably.”
Ideologically, history is ripe for partisan selection and interpretation. As the
theorist constructs and reconstructs histories, allying inquiry with one interpretive
2 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
school and carefully ignoring others, the findings risk being dictated or distorted
by individual ideological or intellectual commitments. In place of searching
historical inquiry, we get a lawyer’s brief that confuses evidence and advocacy. In
terms of sociology, the customs and conventions of international relations have
increasingly fostered a kind of heedlessness toward historical questions. It has
become standard practice to brandish easy anecdotes and analogies, pursue
ahistorical, stand-alone theory, or else to approach the “history” part of the
enterprise as merely a formal testing stage on the road to theory. This is symptomatic
of a broader affliction in the field. Yosef Lapid (1989:249–50) suggests that, for
many years, international relations has held “the dubious honor of being among
the least self-reflexive of the Western social sciences.” Most debate in the discipline
takes place within a“positivist” framework; it is assumed that rationally justified
assertions about the “essential” nature of politics can be scientifically verified by
observing its historical manifestations. Critics of theory and history generally
respond with theory and history of their own, in what often becomes an all-or-
nothing contest of evidence and ideas. Rarer are examinations of the field’s
underlying assumptions and methods, particularly regarding the historical evidence
itself, or the field’s roots in social science.
Most of the historical challenges described in this study fall within the following
categories:
Selection bias: as the title of Barbara Geddes’s article (1990) states, “the cases you
choose affect the answers you get.” This is the overarching problem in historical
usage across the social sciences. Selection bias can be systematic, resulting from
shoddy research; or it can be instrumental, aimed at promoting a particular
theoretical position. Partisan selection bias is usually accompanied by the sin of
omission of studiously avoiding unhelpful history. In all social science research,
potential alternative explanations often reside in sources not enlisted or data not
collected.
Anecdotalism generalizes from carefully chosen particulars. This is often more of
a didactic tool than a research method, as the theorist airily presents handpicked
events and narratives in order to corroborate his/her ideas. Analogies may be
anecdotal as well, as the scholar or policymaker sees current dilemmas closely
mirrored in the past. Although it is a sub-set of selection bias, the anecdotal fallacy
is so prevalent as to warrant special mention.
Ahistoricism promotes political theory emptied of content and context, often in
an effort to sidestep the idiosyncrasies of political choice and the processes of
change. Theorists may also be ahistorical in failing to recognize the impact of
moment et milieu on their own research, thus presenting historically contingent
constructs as timeless laws of politics. The field is ahistorical as well in its focus on
contemporary history and policy issues (Buzan and Little 1994:233–4), and in its
tendency to read the present back into the past.
Theoretical filtering interprets history through one’s theoretical lens. This practice
is to some degree unavoidable: history needs theory to lend it coherence. At the
extreme, theoretical filtering produces tautological research, undermining history’s
INTRODUCTION 3
role as an independent source of corroboration or falsification, as the case may be.
Theoretical filtering is related to the quantitative fallacy as well, which arises when
statistical methods propel research in a particular substantive direction. In
postmodern work, a fixation on diversity and difference may prove so fine a filter
that any similarities across historical periods or event are lost, thus walling off the
past from the present.
Cathedrals of clay: here one constructs theories of painstaking precision as though
the medium of research were Carrara marble rather than the softer stuff of history.
This fallacy is common among quantitative researchers, who assume a tight affinity
between historical data and history as it really was. Statistical methods allow for a
great deal of sophistication and precision in research and theory, yet this precision
may overstep the archival and historiographic evidence on which quantitative data
are based.
Bridging history and international relations
Three preliminary comments may be made about work that attempts to bridge the
disciplines of history and international relations. First, although some political
scientists are loath to admit it, historians, at their best, are the furthest thing from
antiquarians. Not only do historians interpret culture and politics with originality
and flair, they also bear the daunting task of dismantling myths and preserving the
past from ideology and oblivion. The adage goes that history can be written well
only in a free country. By the same token, historians are in no small way guardians
of the open society. “Why do ruling classes fear history?,” asks Harvey Kaye (1996).
Anyone who has read Orwell, Kundera, or Koestler, or who knows the story of
Picasso’s Guernica, understands that people in power invariably espouse a certain
view of history. Some dictators have literally turned history into fiction, creating
an “official story” out of whole cloth, or airbrushing politically inconvenient people
from its pages. More subtly, states propagate heroic historical myths about
themselves, viewing past wars, for example, as cleansing, redemptive struggles.
Political leaders may cultivate what A.D.Smith (1995:63) terms “ethnohistory,” an
amalgam of selective historical truth and idealization, in order to create and control
political identity (see also Hobsbawm 1993). In one way or another, ideological
history depicts the past merely as a sort of ante room opening onto the political
present. The free hand of the historian and the unencumbered hurly-burly of
historical argument are the surest safeguards against these abuses. It was not for
nothing that Khrushchev is reputed to have said, “Historians are dangerous, and
capable of turning everything topsyturvy. They have to be watched” (quoted in
Owen 1995:3). Warts and all, historical research and debate help to preserve integrity
in politics.
Second, it should come as no surprise that history is a dynamic enterprise,
constantly being rethought and rewritten. In the past few years alone, a flap erupted
over how the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC should represent, fifty
years on, the Enola Gay bombing of Hiroshima; Robert McNamara published an
4 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
apologia for his lies that had spurred on the war in Vietnam; rather more ambiguous
evidence has emerged concerning the Gulf War, undercutting what was at the time
a tightly scripted portrayal of events; emerging from their forced hibernation,
national historiographies are resurfacing in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet
republics; in Moscow, the Soviet archives were ceremoniously opened at the end of
the cold war, yet since that time access to the documents has been severely restricted;
the stock of past presidents and prime ministers rises and falls on the tides of
historical argument and evidence; under the pall of special prosecutors, state papers
in some countries are probably more sanitized than ever; even the venerable
American State Department series, Foreign Relations of the United States, has possibly
become the source of disinformation, its editors declaring that their own
government tampered with, and denied them, important evidence.
There is little reason to believe that the current state of historical evidence and
judgment is definitive or final. This itself would signal the end of history. Lately,
“historical revisionism” has become a pejorative term, used first in reaction to
Marxist interpretations of the origins of the cold war, and, more recently, in the
backlash against postmodern relativism in social and cultural studies (see
Windschuttle 1997). At times, revisionist history is plainly pernicious. Issue after
issue of the upright-sounding Journal of Historical Review, for example, carries
“debate” about the “Holocaust myth.” Presumably, the publication’s high-minded
banner (“bringing history into accord with the facts”) and its use of a sturdy, old-
fashioned type for its masthead, are supposed to lend plausibility to its vile
assertions. During the cold war, official Polish history had little to say about the
massacre of Polish officers in the forest near Katyn by the Soviets in 1940 “until a
joint Polish-Soviet commission charged with filling in historical ‘blank spots’
…
declared it to be history” (Blok 1992:122). For reasons related to state security and
national unity, many historians in Turkey have for decades denied that a separate
or overlapping Kurdish identity may exist within the country’s borders. Until only
very recently, Kurds were known euphemistically as “Mountain Turks.”
Historical revisionism is not always wrong, however. In many ways, revision is
the lifeblood of the historian’s craft, as old verities are revisited, beliefs change, new
documents and other artifacts are disclosed, and innovative inter pretive models
are employed (Gaddis 1997b: preface and Leffler 1995). This seems especially true
when it comes to recent and contemporary political history. There is a certain
timeliness and relevance attached to contemporary accounts, as historians attempt
to bring coherence to the chaos of current events. Nevertheless, there are perils as
well in passing historical judgment even as “the eggs are frying,” as Hemingway
once noted in one of his front-line dispatches during the Spanish Civil War.
Judgments will almost certainly change when viewed with the clarity and insight
that often come with historical distance and detachment.
Finally, when working at the intersection of politics and history it is helpful to
recall that the “disciplines” are contrived. Each represents a voice and method of
discourse that provide a coherent framework for making intelligible one facet of
experience. In their eagerness to erect academic walls, however, the disciplines risk
INTRODUCTION 5
isolating themselves, in effect shattering human experience. Fortunately, the social
sciences resist this tendency. As the great social science historian Fernand Braudel
notes (1980:25–6), “the social sciences force themselves on each other, each trying
to capture society as a whole, in its ‘totality.’ Each science encroaches on its
neighbors, all the while believing it is staying in its own domain.” Events in one
realm reverberate in others. Economics spills over into politics, and vice versa;
anthropology, psychology, and linguistics borrow and trade ideas; history adopts
insights and problems from its neighbors, and reflects them back again. This process
is, of course, congenial to liberal learning. This book traces the combative intimacy
of two disciplines having a great deal in common, yet struggling to maintain their
separate identities. I hope it will be clear just how much students of international
relations are indebted to historians, and vice versa, and how connected the two
disciplines are in method, style, and content, and in terms of the paradigms guiding
their ideas. In many ways, the similarities between the fields are more striking than
the differences.
My hope in this study is to elucidate in a single argument a central problem of
method and content across a very diverse discipline. The theories and research
explored here represent a wide range of approaches to history in international
politics, including philosophical, theological, inductive, policy-oriented, deductive,
quantitative, and postmodernist work. The theorists and projects under review are
also widely regarded as the finest exemplars of their respective method, thus
providing the most rigorous “defense” of each against the author’s skepticism. The
chapters flow chronologically. They also move, generally, from contingent views of
history toward nomothetic political science analysis, before lapsing into the
kaleidoscope histories of postmodernism. If any strand of international thought is
not represented here (and many important ones are not), it is for reasons of space
and because of the breadth of the field. Given the broad sweep of the study, some
of the approaches that are treated will no doubt be given short shrift. I ask the
reader’s indulgence for these shortcomings, as no slight is intended.
6 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
2
THE HISTORICAL PROBLEM IN
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Ian Lustick has encouraged students of politics to confront “the largely (now)
uncontested claim that the work of historians is not understood by historians to
be, and cannot legitimately be treated by others as, an unproblematic background
narrative from which theoretically neutral data can be elicited for the framing of
problems and testing of theories” (Lustick 1996:605). The problem, as Benedetto
Croce once noted, is that simple chronicle is but the “corpse of history,” il cadavere,
for “history without interpretation is history without the historical problem”
(quoted in Florovsky 1969:353–4). Because it rests on inference of things past,
historical thought is bound up in a web of prejudice and politics and honest
disputes over ambiguous evidence. The effect, most fundamentally, is that there are
histories, not history. While history is the only “empirical” evidence theorists of
international politics can exploit, a diversity of interpretations would seem to
support an array of theories, even contradictory ones.
This is a difficult notion for theorists and researchers in the discipline of
international relations, who have long turned to historical writings as a source of
insight and a field of evidence in which to test their ideas. James Bryce argued in
International Relations (1922: vi–vii), “It is history which, recording the events and
explaining the influences that have molded the minds of men, shows us how the
world of international politics has come to be what it is. History is the best—indeed
the only—guide to a comprehension of the facts as they stand.” Updating this idea,
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (1996: 53) notes that “For the social scientist the events
of history are a laboratory in which to test their claims about how variables are
associated with each other; to test their theoretical propositions about causation.”
As either political backdrop or behavioral laboratory, history is never far removed
from international theory and research. When theory is constructed from the
bottom up, history provides the building blocks. When theory is built from the
top down, history serves to test or falsify theoretical concepts. Case studies are
focused, comparative historical analyses. The learning and institutionalist literature
is explicitly historical and evolutionary. When quantitatively oriented researchers
speak of “events data” or “data-making,” they are referring to historical
representations abstracted from a welter of evidence. Normative theorists stress the
historical context of moral action. Marxist theorists seek to uncover the hidden
histories upon which international theory is founded, while postmodernists point
out privileged views of the past that have shaped the discipline. Marxists and
postmodernists criticize conventional interpretations of history, yet both are at
pains to use history against traditional theory to reveal its contingent character.
Formal theory, including game theory, is perhaps the most ahistorical of theoretical
approaches, yet increasingly it too is being put to the historical test.
Nor is the historical canon in international relations particularly slim. The
Victorian historian and politician John Seeley argued that history was “a school for
statesmen” on the claim that “History is past politics and politics present history”
(quoted in Stern 1973:199). This sentiment underpinned the alliance at the turn of
the century between diplomatic history and the emerging discipline of international
relations. Today, most students of international politics still turn to event-centered
military, diplomatic, or imperial history, such as those by Thucydides, Guicciardini,
Fénelon, Albrecht-Carrié, Gulick, Kagan, Howard, and Gaddis; or to the theory-rich
“world” histories of Toynbee, Dehio, McNeill, Kennedy, and others. A third
traditional focus is on the philosophical “histories” of Smith, Kant, Gibbon, Marx,
Spengler, Halle, Fukuyama and others. However, the emergence of new theories
and approaches has opened new realms of historiography beyond the standard
repertoire of “high” political history. Increasingly, researchers are drawn to the
“slow-time” history advocated by the Annales school, accounts of civilizations,
cultures, and other non-Westphalian (i.e. based on the European nation-state
model) polities, as well as many of the rapidly expanding universe of “new” social
and economic histories: of technology, trade, labor, demography, ethnicity,
institutions, ideas, popular culture, customs, norms, and so forth. Christopher Hill
(1985:141–2) notes of this eclecticism in historical usage, “in some respects
international relations in the United States tends to be closer to history than it is
in Britain, where the subject is generally thought to be ‘traditionalist,’ i.e., heavily
historical.”
History, theory, and epistemology
As Peter Burke (1992a: 1) has noted, the relation between history and social theory
is “deceptively simple.” To begin with, “history” is an ambiguous word. It refers to
the aggregate of past events in general, or to the train of events connected with a
particular place, person, culture, mentality, etc. But history also refers to attempts
to represent or re-create those pasts. History may take the form of chronicle, annals,
narrative, tale, story, or statistical analysis. The ancient Greeks thought of history
as a learning or knowing by inquiry, and believed that it could be either true or
imaginary. Today, history is generally taken to be true, even scientific, in its methods
and claims, yet it can also be seen as artistic or novelistic. It may center on events
or on broader social, cultural, or economic traces or trends. It may be presented
as happenstance or determined, as a seamless web or a series of discrete periods. It
may be didactic or belletristic. It may be politically engaged or value-free. Social
theory is only slightly less ambiguous. As Raymond Aron (1967:2) explains, theory
may be considered either as “contemplative knowledge, drawn from ideas or from
8 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
the basic order of the world
…the equivalent of philosophy,” or as “a hypothetical,
deductive system consisting of a group of hypotheses whose terms are strictly
defined and whose relationships between terms (or variables) are most often given
mathematical form.”
Thus, one should bear in mind that different kinds of historians turn to theory
for different reasons, just as different theorists use history for a variety of ends.
Even within the disciplines, assumptions, methods, and “needs” vary markedly.
However, it is interesting to note that across disciplines these differences often fade.
A diplomatic historian may have more in common with a realist theorist than with
an environmental historian. A postmodern theorist will identify more with a social
historian than a classical liberal theorist. Such methodological and ideological
differences probably divide social research more than any real or imagined
disciplinary walls. It is difficult to assign respective “roles” to social scientists and
historians because they so rarely stay within them. Certainly the dichotomies
customarily employed to distinguish history from political science—particular/
general, explanation/understanding, nomothetic/idiographic, narrative-based/
theory-based, presentist/antiquarian, policy-relevant/ivory towerish, active/con-
templative, theoretical/empirical, and so on—are belied by the diversity and overlap
of the fields.
Still, theory and history both have their limits, and here the fields stand to
complement each other:
Historians and social theorists have the opportunity to free each other from
different kinds of parochialism. Historians run the risk of parochialism in
an almost literal sense of the term. Specializing as they usually do in a
particular region, they may come to regard their “parish” as completely
unique, rather than a unique combination of elements each one of which has
parallels elsewhere. Social theorists display parochialism in a more
metaphorical sense, a parochialism of time rather than place, when they
generalize about “society” on the basis of contemporary experience alone, or
discuss social change without taking long-term processes into account.
(Burke 1992a:2)
Despite these converging interests, acrimony between the history and international
relations disciplines, in particular, seems to be the norm. Some theorists revel in
the belief that their craft was built upon the lifeless body of history. They see
historians as antiquarians lacking in any rigorous methodology, or worse, as
deceivers who conceal the assumptions and models guiding their narratives.
Alternatively, historians are thought simply to line up the facts. Political scientists
then step forward with their dynamic methods and put the facts to relevant use.
Some historians respond with disdain for the “baseless” designs of international
theory. Christopher Thorne, for one, mocks international relations’ loftier
abstractions as “super-rational exercises,” “divorced from the complexities provided
THE HISTORICAL PROBLEM IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 9
by historical evidence; riding high into a quasitheological stratosphere; delivered
in an unlovely tongue” (Thorne 1988:6–7).
Students of international politics have offered similar critiques of their own field.
Martin Wight (1966:32) notes:
It may seem puzzling that, while the acknowledged classics of political study
are the political philosophers, the only acknowledged counterpart in the
study of international relations is Thucydides, a work of history. And that
the quality of international politics, the preoccupations of diplomacy, are
embodied and communicated less in works of political or international
theory than in historical writings
… It is not simply that historical literature
is doing a different job from systems analysis. Historical literature at the same
time does the same job—the job of offering a coherent structure of hypotheses
that will provide a common explanation of phenomena; but it does the job
with more judiciousness and modesty, and with closer attention to the record
of international experience.
Writing in 1972, Hedley Bull maintained that the theoretical literature on
international politics “illuminates the subject more than the literature of diplomatic
history.” Yet, he added,
If we compare the historical with the theoretical study of international
relations it is clear that the literature of diplomatic history is still of more
evenly high quality, that the standards of the historian’s profession are more
clearly discernible, his canons of judgements less open to dispute, his territory
less encroached upon by the crank or the charlatan, the imparting of his
knowledge and techniques more clearly by itself an education.
(Bull 1972:32)
In recent years, several high profile cases have reinforced stereotypes about history
and theory. Francis Fukuyama’s (1992) “end of history” thesis and Samuel
Huntington’s (1996) “clash of civilizations” idea, for example, were met with a
stream of derision from historians (and many theorists) critical of their grand
claims about the past and future of world politics. These criticisms, like most clichés
about history and theory, tend to exaggerate tensions between the two fields.
Though sometimes marching in different methodological directions, history and
international relations remain cognate disci plines. Indeed, across a vast middle,
students of history and politics are doing much the same thing: trying to explain
and/or understand events and their underlying causes, often with an eye toward
the future. Also, one cannot help but notice the parallel development of
international relations and international history since mid-century: from unit-level
analyses of foreign policies to the study of international systems; from a focus on
great powers to the effects of revolutions and popular movements; from narrative
to economic and statistical emphases, and back to narrative; from discrete studies
10 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
of domestic and foreign politics to synthesis of the two; from statist approaches to
global ones; to a growing interest in the social underpinnings of politics.
Along the way theorists have been steady—if sometimes selective—consumers of
historiography, at times doing their own archival work and historical construction.
Conversely, diplomatic historians, but also historians of culture, civilization, and
globalization, have profited from international relations theory. Gordon Craig
(1983:9) acknowledges a debt to theorists for encouraging historians to seek
correlations and comparisons across cases with an eye toward prediction. John Lewis
Gaddis (1990:422) advocates and practices what he calls interdisciplinary
“bumping,” of ideas and criticisms. Melvyn Leffler (1995:179) does not shackle his
work to any single model, but nevertheless professes to be “more and more
impressed with the utility of theory,” noting how different theories “illuminate
prospective causal relationships and interactions” that might otherwise have been
left unexplored.
The epistemology gap
What has not bridged the disciplines, however, is concern about the nature and
uses of historical knowledge itself. Philosophers of history do attempt to address
the limits of historical claims. In international relations, however, the historical
problem is often glossed over or ignored. This book should make clear the extent
to which mainstream theorists strip history of its thorny dilemmas, and essentially
treat ambiguous historical evidence unambiguously. The laboratory idea of history,
in particular, seems rooted in the positivist philosophy of society associated with
Hume, Condorcet, Saint-Simon, Spencer, and, above all, Auguste Comte. Comte
argued that we “have to contemplate social phenomena as susceptible of prevision,
like all other classes, within the limits of exactness compatible with their higher
complexity.” Social scientists must “abandon the region of metaphysical idealities,
to assume the ground of observed realities by a systematic subordination of
imagination to observation,” on grounds that “there is no chance of order and
agreement but in subjecting social phenomena, like all others, to invariable natural
laws.” Ultimately for Comte, the task of social science was to “introduc[e] into the
study of social phenomena the same positive spirit which has regenerated every
other branch of human speculation” (quoted in Gee 1950:161–2).
Perhaps because international relations has developed along generally positivist
lines, problems of historiography and the validity of its use by theorists have been
neglected in favor of more tractable questions regarding research method and
design. As Nevil Johnson notes in The Limits of Political Science (1989:29), in the
midst of this preoccupation with method, history has too often served merely as a
“dignified background” to an outwardly scientific methodology, yet that
epistemologically the whole project “hangs in the air.” Debate about history often
centers on how best to tease out the laws, patterns, tendencies, trends, and
probabilities of political behavior, how large a sample of historical evidence is
adequate to test a hypothesis, the choice of case studies and the fit of analogies,
THE HISTORICAL PROBLEM IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 11
even the finer points of coding The New York Times (Puchala 1990). Several chapter
titles in Richard Neustadt and Ernest May’s Thinking in Time (1986) typify this
attitude: “Dodging bothersome analogues,” “Inspecting issue history,” “Finding
history that fits,” “Noticing patterns.” Despite its pivotal role in building and
testing theory, historiography is quite often treated as given, with causality fixed,
and disputes over evidence and interpretation resolved. “History” becomes bedrock
of knowledge to be quarried and applied. The theorist seems mainly concerned with
locating the richest vein, choosing his picks and shovels, and exhibiting the gems
he selects to greatest advantage.
This methodological veneer obscures a raft of crucial questions. Is history, as
Edmund Burke (1989:155) said, “a great volume
…unrolled for our instruction?”
Or is it “not so much a series of events as a magic mirror where everyone sees what
he wants?” (Thorne 1983:123). What does it mean to ground theory in history? How
autonomously do theorists treat historical knowledge? Is the theorist’s evidence
rigged? Are facts subordinated to ideology? How strictly do readings of history
govern theory’s causal, predictive, and normative tasks? One study of
historiography concludes that our understanding of the past is dominated by a
complacent, Anglo-centered view of history as “the progress of natural rights and
democratic governance” (Appleby et al. 1994:107–16). Is international relations an
accomplice here?
A broader problem lies in the tension between historical understanding and
social science explanation. The historian’s concern is thought to be with the
particulars of specific events, with adherence to milieu et moment, while theoretical
pronouncements are seen to point to general explanations and predictions of world
politics. How does the theorist wrap his mind around a class of phenomena without
doing violence to the differences inherent in the material? Another problem is
simply interpretive. As one scholar notes,
No matter how detailed and thorough an historical inquiry may be, it
certainly cannot leave us with a unique correlation between the various
empirical variables which will force all observers to make identical inferences
and conclusions. Instead the available evidence allows for a number of more
or less plausible interpretations.
(Njølstad 1990:223)
History—like politics—elicits more than its fair share of criticism. Aristotle believed
that poetry was more philosophical and of higher value than history. Goethe called
meaning and direction history “the most absurd of all things,” a “web of nonsense
for the higher thinker” (quoted in Löwith 1949: 53). The OED cites Matthew
Arnold’s reference to that “huge Mississippi of falsehood called history.” Oscar
Wilde once remarked that the only duty we have to history is to rewrite it.
The skepticism underpinning this study is meant to be constructive. To be sure,
history is an imperfect craft. As Paul Veyne points out (1984:3–14), history can be
12 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
a “true” account, but ultimately that account is based on “mutilated knowledge,”
on more or less pronounced “traces” of the past. Ernst Cassirer described in The
Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1962) the eighteenth-century transformation of
scientific inquiry from the Cartesian esprit de système, which sought to resolve
fundamental problems of existence and epistemology through abstract reason, to
a more modest esprit systématique, which in place of unequivocal answers held out a
methodology of hypothesis, testing, and inference. Some of historiography’s most
ardent critics, particularly postmodern ones, set historical study beside a Cartesian
ideal in place of the more humble modern standards. An extreme Foucauldian view
holds that the historian is absolutely shackled by politics and prejudice, that history
is an exercise in power and domination. This is a forceful, but probably minority
view, even among postmodernists. Yet, as Carlo Ginzburg has noted, rather than
treating artifacts as a potential “window,” however imperfect, on the past, some
critics turn historical evidence into “a wall which by definition precludes any access
to reality.” Holding history to an absolutist scientific standard amounts to a sort
of “inverted positivism” employed to repudiate all historical understanding
(Ginzburg 1991:83).
Avenues to history: correspondence and construction
A brief tour d’horizon of the historical problem in international relations behind
us, this section sets out two ways of understanding history: Ranke’s formulation of
history “as it really was,” and Michael Oakeshott’s constructionist theory of history.
These two approaches to history and their respective interpreters are considered
seminal by historical epistemologists. The section is foundational to my overall
argument in that it frames a debate about the nature of historical knowledge from
which international theorists, judging from their often naive use of history, have
too often been sheltered.
Ranke and correspondence
Almost every major debate in contemporary historiographic theory takes as its
starting point Leopold von Ranke’s “critical method” of sophisticated archival
technique and non-judgmental style. Ranke advocated above all else the autonomy
of historical inquiry from moral and political values. In the preface to his first
book, History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations From 1494 to 1514 (1887) he wrote:
“History has had assigned to it the office of judging the past and of instructing the
present for the benefit of future ages. To such high offices the present work does
not presume; it seeks only to show history as it really was” (wie es eigentlich gewesen ist).
History “as it really was.” This is probably the most quoted phrase about
historiography. The statement is generally seen as a manifesto for a positivist or
scientific approach to history. Called by one biographer (Krieger 1977:3) the
“Copernicus” of historical knowledge, Ranke envisioned the historian’s task as that
of dispassionately presenting the “objective nature of the great facts
…free from the
THE HISTORICAL PROBLEM IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 13
mutual accusations of the contemporaries and the often restricted view of their
posterity” (Iggers and Moltke 1973:150). This “strict representation” of the facts,
“be it ever so narrow and unpoetical, is, beyond doubt, the first law” (Ranke 1887:
vi). Apart from this, the historian would banish himself from his books. As Ranke
wrote in his History of England (1875), in it he had tried “to extinguish my own self.
to let the things speak and the mighty forces appear which have arisen in the course
of the centuries” (Krieger 1977:5).
Ranke aspired to a method that sharply separated subject and object, fact and
value, history and fiction. For Ranke, the historian was no mere compiler or collator
of data, but in weaving a narrative the historian was thought literally to re-create
the past. Ranke saw historiography as corresponding to a series of actual past events
that exist independent of historical thought and writing. As he noted in one essay,
“We should be satisfied with simple information—satisfied that it merely
corresponds to the object” (Iggers and Moltke 1973:39–40). The appendix to History
of the Latin and Teutonic Nations, “In Criticism of Modern Historians,” made Ranke’s
reputation as an historiographic theorist. In it, Ranke reproached historians for
writing histories cobbled together from other histories. He catalogued a number of
errors, plagiarisms, and deceptions in the works of Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and
other Renaissance historians and memoirists (the latter more likely to engage in
self-acquittal and score-settling than balanced reporting), and suggested that the
reliance of latter-day historians on such contemporary accounts had perpetuated
myths and misstatements from the Renaissance. Ranke taught that the critical
historian must instead focus on the primary sources, testing and vetting historical
accounts against the facts as embodied in the documents. The result of these
researches would be “essential” history, concrete, and value-free (Unparteilichkeit).
Ranke believed that this plain narrative, with its close attention to “authorities”
and careful scholarly apparatus, constituted history’s claim to autonomy; abstract
causal explanation was best left to philosophers.
Yet, even Ranke was no Rankean. He meant history to be critical and colorless,
but as Wilhelm Dilthey remarked, “In Ranke all the forces of the nine teenth
century come alive” (quoted in Wines 1981:2). Most of all, Ranke was a Romantic;
his idea of “essential” history extended beyond facts, into the realm of the spirit.
The ultimate task of the historian was not merely to describe, but to intuit the
sweeping ideas of history as embodied in individual events and actors. “After
criticism, intuition is necessary. The result is a sympathetic comprehension of the
universe” as a realm of cultural creativity and spiritual development embodied in
the lives of nations (Wines 1981). Ranke wrote in “The Great Powers” (1833) that
“Out of the clash of opposing forces, in the crucial moments of danger—collapse,
resurgence, liberation—the most decisive developments are born” (p. 97). He
concluded:
World history does not present such a chaotic tumult, warring, and planless
succession of states and peoples as appear at first sight. Nor is the often-
dubious advancement of civilization its only significance. There are forces
14 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
and indeed spiritual, life-giving, creative forces, nay life itself, and there are
moral energies, whose development we see. They cannot be defined or put in
abstract terms
… They unfold, capture the world, appear in manifold
expressions, dispute with and check and overpower one another. In their
interaction and succession, in their life, in their decline or rejuvenation,
which then encompasses an ever greater fullness, higher importance, and
wider extent, lies the secret of world history.
(in Iggers and Moltke 1973:100)
Herbert Butterfield (1969:100) has noted that “Great historians
…have to be rescued
from the cages into which their
…successors try to confine them.” This is the case
with Ranke. Translated into the idiom of Anglo-American empiricism, Ranke’s
historicism was stripped of this Romanticism, leaving only the empirical method.
With the notable exceptions of Macaulay and Carlyle, nineteenth-century British
historiography adhered to a mildly Rankean positivism. E.H.Carr points (1961:15),
perhaps too stridently, to the era’s “fetishism for facts” and its treatment of
documents as the historian’s “Ark of the Covenant”: “The reverent historian
approached them with bowed head and spoke of them in awed tones. If you find
it in the documents, it is so.” Butterfield, however, notes (1969:108) an appreciation
of the duality of Ranke, who “on the one hand opened in the modern field the era
of scientific research is the man who on the other hand stood as the supreme apostle
of ‘general history.’” Arthur Marwick reports some resistance at the universities in
Britain (“Research! Research! A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved, and
never will achieve, any results of the slightest value!”
), yet the critical method took
root. Lord Acton, who had commended the “fidelity” of Ranke’s “miniature-
painting” yet faulted him for lacking the “breadth of touch requisite to do justice
to great popular and national movements,” nevertheless set the task for contributors
to The Cambridge Modern History (1902–10), as “meet[ing] the scientific demand for
completeness and certainty
…as we approach the final stage in historical learning”;
“Our Waterloo,” he wrote “must be one that satisfies French and English, Germans
and Dutch alike” (Acton 1973:247, 249). In his 1896 report to the syndics of
Cambridge University Press, Acton prophesied, with more confidence than Ranke
ever had, that advances in technique would yield “ultimate history.” “All
information is within reach and every problem has become capable of solution”
(Acton 1907:12). Similarly, when J.B.Bury proclaimed, in 1902, that history was
“simply a science, no less and no more,” he meant that history was concrete and
ultimately knowable (quoted in Marwick 1970:62).
With the rise of the historical profession in the United States, Ranke’s historicism
was most earnestly misinterpreted and made the creed of the guild. The “scientific
school” of the late nineteenth century claimed Ranke as its archetype, a
misidentification Georg Iggers (1962:20) suggests may be rooted in the difference
between the German conception of “science” (Wissenschaft), which denotes any sort
of systematic research, and the more exacting canons of American natural science.
Herbert Baxter Adams noted of Ranke: he “determined to hold strictly to the facts
THE HISTORICAL PROBLEM IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 15
of history, to preach no sermon, to point no moral, to adorn no tale, but to tell
the simple historic truth” (quoted in Iggers 1968:63–4). Frederick Jackson Turner
declared that, thanks to the German historian, “That inductive study of phenomena
which has worked a revolution in our knowledge of the external world was applied
to history” (quoted in Novick 1988:28–9). Harvard’s Ephraim Emerton called
Ranke the founder of “the doctrine of true historical method,” adding, “If one
must choose between a school of history whose main characteristic is the spirit,
and one which rests upon the greatest number of recorded facts, we cannot long
hesitate
…Training has taken the place of brilliance and the whole world is today
reaping the benefit” (quoted in Iggers 1968:64). Ranke was designated the first
honorary member of the American Historical Association, and, after his death in
1886, the history department at Syracuse University acquired his papers along with
his desk, chairs, and writing utensils, which were displayed like a shrine.
The devout state-centeredness of Ranke’s analysis and his insistence on the
primacy of foreign policy (Primat der Aussenpolitik) has resonated especially with
students of diplomatic history. This branch of historiography, which traditionally
has focused on event-centered history as implied in state documents and other
“high” political artifacts, comes closest to Ranke’s own work. Ranke’s international
history was also his most controversial. Like Thucydides, whose political thought
he analyzed in his dissertation at the University of Leipzig, Ranke saw the balance
of power as a fundamental mechanism of inter-state politics. The two shared a sense
of how crucial were the spiritual aspects of power and conflict. Yet while there is a
tragic cast to Thucydides’ grasp of power and ethics, Ranke romanticized conflict:
“Victory falls wherever the greatest energy, the most vital concentration of force,
lies. What we describe as material force has in itself a higher significance, for the
greatest possible unfolding of the rule of the spirit reveals itself among the most
resolute.” Elsewhere he speaks of the “supreme law” of national independence
“requir[ing] that the state mobilize all its inner resources for the goal of self-
preservation” (Wines 1981:256, 257).
The pitfalls of this triple alliance—a glorified state, a spiritual view of power, and
total moral commitment to the struggle—are not hard to find. Werner Stark remarks
that “Behind the radiant Ranke looms the sinister Bismarck” (ibid.: 12). Pieter Geyl
(1958:28) wonders if Hitler may loom there as well. Geyl points to the dangers of
“objective” narrative that acknowledges no extra-historical standards in interpreting
history. He acquits Ranke of this, but argues that it is nonetheless an attitude
promoted by the critical method and that in lesser minds may have abetted the rise
of National Socialism. Even Nietzsche condemns the German historical school for
inculcating “that admiration for the ‘power of history’ which in practice transforms
every moment into a naked admiration for success and leads to an idolatry of the
factual” (quoted in Callinicos 1995:10). It is instructive that Ranke did claim
autonomy for his historical narrative, refusing to parrot the “political” historians
whose partisan and teleological scholarship aimed to propel Germany toward
unification. The most jingoistic of German historians—Droysen, Sybel, Treitschke
and others—faulted Ranke, despite his great-nation views, for what they saw as an
16 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
excessive and unpatriotic objectivity (Gay 1974:75–6). This is perhaps more an
ethical problem than an epistemological one, but like most modern realists, Ranke,
especially in the connection between balance-of-power history and his sanction of
the state’s war footing, drew a clear connection between history “as it really was”
and realpolitik beliefs and practices.
Oakeshott and constructionism
Vying with this scientized version of Rankeanism as correspondence and
representation is the idea of history as an interpretive construction. Toward the
close of the nineteenth century, Dilthey, Croce, F.H.Bradley, and others challenged
Ranke’s empirical method from the perspective of philosophical idealism.
Oakeshott, Collingwood, Becker, Robinson, and Beard refined the constructionist
view in the twentieth century, where it remains a staple of pragmatic historical
thought. Constructionism does not presume that history can or should correspond
to actual past events, nor does it claim to divorce the historian from the object of
his inquiry. History is not a transparent set of positive facts to be mastered by the
historian or applied by the student of politics. The past as an actual series of
historical events or as a causal lineup of historical actors is considered unknowable
in any strict sense. Rather, history is the “ideate,” spoken, or written understanding
of that past. As Michael Oakeshott (1990:99) puts it, “History is the historian’s
experience. It is ‘made’ by nobody save the historian; to write history is the only
way of making it.”
Historical constructionism is rooted in the experience-centered skepticism of
idealist epistemology. Knowledge, it is said, does not exist independent of
experience. At least it is impossible to discern the “essence” of things apart from
how they are apprehended. As Diderot (1963:35) wrote in his Lettre sur les Aveugles
(1749), “On appelle Idéalistes ces Philosophes qui, n’ayant conscience que de leur
existence et des sensations qui se succèdent au dedans d’eux-mêmes, n’admettent
pas autre chose.” Oakeshott traces this attitude to Hobbes’s skepticism and to his
contention in the Leviathan (1651) that understanding must begin with experience,
“for there is no conception in a man’s mind, which hath not at first, totally, or by
parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense” (Hobbes 1947:xxiii).
In the idealist construction of knowledge, the mind is said to transform a jumble
of perceptions into meaningful and coherent worlds of knowledge —history,
politics, science, art, etc. These Oakeshott calls “modes” of experience: they are
“arrests” or abstractions of the whole of experience. A mode is not arbitrarily drawn,
but is authentic so far as it offers “an autonomous manner of understanding,
specifiable in terms of exact conditions, which is logically incapable of denying or
confirming the conclusions of any other mode” (Oakeshott 1983:2). By precisely
describing a mode’s governing logic, idealists seek above all to avoid the problem
of ignoratio elenchi, the irrelevance engendered when argument or inference passes
from one mode of discourse to another. (Gilbert Ryle calls this a “category
mistake.”) Modalists would argue, for example, that countering poetry with science
THE HISTORICAL PROBLEM IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 17
or philosophy with literature does not advance understanding. For this reason,
Oakeshott insisted that history can support no practical conclusions. The historical
past, he wrote, “is a complicated world, without unity of feeling or clear outline:
in it events have no over-all pattern or purpose, lead nowhere, point to no favoured
condition of the world” (Oakeshott 1962:166). This, surely, is an overstatement of
the incommensurability of historical and practical knowledge, but in it is a great
truth, namely that non-historical interests constantly encroach upon history.
At work here is a constructionist rather than a correspondence logic. As
Oakeshott (1990:108) argues, “To pursue ‘what really happened’ as distinct from
simply ‘what the evidence obliges us to believe,’ is to pursue a phantom. And the
shortest way of disposing of history altogether is to suppose that what is known in
history is a fixed, finished and independent past. A form of experience wedded to
this purpose is infatuated with the impossible and joined with the contradictory.”
For Oakeshott, historical inference demanded single-minded engagement with the
evidence. It was sparked exclusively by artifacts from bygone times that had survived
more or less intact to the historian’s day. The Gospel according to St. Mark, the
score of Figaro, Hobbes’s Leviathan, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Fountains Abbey,
a parish register of marriages: these are the historian’s materials. He or she
“understands” the past via these artifacts alone, not by way of hearsay or intuition
or any perceived non-historical need. These footprints of the past provoke and
sustain historical inquiry, but they are not in themselves “historical.” The record
does not speak for itself; historical events and actors are never simply observable
“data.” The historian takes the evidence and transforms it into history, aiming to
understand “men and events more profoundly than they were understood when
they lived and happened” (Oakeshott 1950/1951: 350). Ultimately, Oakeshott (1990:
93) argues, “The historian’s business is not to discover, to recapture, or even to
interpret; it is to create and construct.” History is not a branch of scientific
“discovery,” nor is it an imperfect representation of anything. The historical past
has not survived; rather, it is a novel creation based on the artifacts.
Because this process is bound up in the historian’s mind, prejudice in selection
and interpretation is inescapable. Oakeshott (ibid.: 99–100) argues, “There is no
fact in history which is not a judgement, no event which is not an inference.” Half-
skeptics have distinguished between evidence and interpretation, claiming to be
“scientific” in their research, yet admittedly narrative and subjective in their writing.
Yet constructionists can be skeptical even of the “facts,” which at the extreme are
said not to exist until the historian creates them. As against orthodox American
historiography, Carl Becker noted in 1910 that however unassailable the sources,
“the historical fact is a wonderfully elusive thing after all, very difficult to fix, almost
impossible to distinguish from ‘theory,’ to which it is commonly supposed to be
so completely antithetical.” Instead of the historian “‘sticking to the facts,’ the facts
stick to him” (Snyder 1958:10, 24). E.H.Carr’s selectivity thesis likewise aims to
unsettle the distinction between fact and value, calling a “preposterous fallacy” the
belief in a “hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of
the interpretation of the historian.” Carr suggested that the historian approaches
18 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
“the facts” like “fish on a fishmonger’s slab.” The historian “collects them, takes
them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him” (Carr
1961:10, 6).
Constructionists are especially wary of ideological abuses of history. Even when
the historian is devoted to his or her craft, there is still room for skepticism. As
Charles Beard put it in his famous essay against objectivity, “That Noble Dream”
(1935), “Beyond doubt, scholars of competence can agree on many particular truths
and on large bodies of established facts.” But it “denies philosophy” to believe that
it is “possible for men to divest themselves of all race, sex, class, political, social,
and religious predilections and tell the truth of history as it actually was” (Beard
1935:76–7). Oakeshott’s concerns about treating history as a treasure house have
been mentioned. He insisted that “history is thinking about the past for the sake
of the past; it is a way of thinking about the past free from all extraneous interests”
(Oakeshott 1936: 78). He contended that to interpret the evidence with some
practical or moral end in mind was, by definition, to descend into ideology. He
tagged historical ideologists as “vulgar rag-pickers,” in whose hands artifacts are
“transformed from being resonant, ambiguous circumstantial survivals of bygone
human life into emblematic actions and utterances
…entirely divorced from their
circumstances.” “A record reputed to be a mine of prophetic utterances may be
consulted at random, after the manner of the sortes Vergilianae,” he argued,
and here the yield is not advice but an alleged unavoidable destiny and the
courage to accept it. The Old Testament, its character as the recorded past of
the ancient Hebrew people ignored and belief in its alleged divine authorship
suspended, has long been known as an unequalled collection of exemplars
of human character and situation and a rich vocabulary of verbal and
situational images, of parables and analogies, in terms of which to
understand, express and respond to current situations.
(Oakeshott 1983:58)
For Oakeshott, history was not the handmaiden for any other branch of knowledge,
or for any political creed. Nor was history to be interpreted in terms of any imposed
contrivance of teleology, evolution, or development. “We shall not find unity in
history unless we have first constructed history on a principle of unity,” he declares
(Oakeshott 1990:142).
In order to preserve the integrity of his story, the teleologist-
historian must either ignore as “non-events” whatever does not fit within his
straitjacket plot, or he must sculpt events to make them fit. Oakeshott sanctioned
historical periodization, although he discouraged overburdening these
conceptualizations—“the Carolingian Empire,” “the Protestant Reformation,”
“European Liberalism,” etc.—with categorical finality. Only the “flimsiest partition”
distinguishes one historical event from another, as “there is nothing solid or
absolute in their character” (ibid.: 122). We should not, therefore, confuse the
historian’s “tentative, multiform historical identities” with the “stark, monolithic
THE HISTORICAL PROBLEM IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 19
products” of facile classifications and ideological constructions (Oakeshott 1983:
117–18).
Oakeshott (ibid.: 58) defined history constructed within these strictures as an
“argued invitation to imagine the intricacies and the coherence of a condition of
human circumstance which has not survived.” History remained a modest
construct, with historical truth tied to an obligation to the evidence and centered
on the coherence of the story. When the historian is successful, i.e., when events
are understood independent of subsequent events or contemporary desires, the past
exhibits at most “a peculiarly tentative and intermediate kind of intelligibility”
(Oakeshott 1962:159). The image of historical construction Oakeshott evokes in
On History (1983) is that of a country “dry wall,” whose stones are held together
not by mortar, but by their roughly interlocking shapes. If this wall should totter
or rifts appear, these eccentricities are seen not as defects, but as characteristics of
history.
Historians may prefer not to dwell on the soundness of their constructions.
Hayden White claims (1966:112) that since the mid-nineteenth century, most
historians have affected a kind of “willful methodological naiveté,” that there is
“resistance throughout the entire profession to almost any kind of critical self-
analysis.” Peter Novick (1988:15, 593) suggests that “reflecting on epistemology” is
“what historians do worst, or at least badly,” either out of “utter indifference” to
epistemological questions or in “tacit recognition that the issues involved [are] too
hot to handle.” While White and Novick are probably not representative spokesmen
for the historical profession, no serious historiographic theory today denies the
impact of presentism and bias on historical thought. The historian may seek what
Jakob Burckhardt described as the “Archimedean point outside events” where
objective judgments are possible, knowing, however, it will not be found. As Hans-
Georg Gadamer (1992:18) once put it, “We stand at the end of our own reflections.”
No historian is divorced from non-historical interests. The real question is the
extent to which these extracurricular engagements color his/her history. We now
take up this problem as it relates to social science theory.
History, theory, and social science
Historians are themselves divided over the relation of their craft to other realms of
social inquiry. (See, for example, Marwick 1970, Hofstadter 1973, Dunn 1978, Fogel
and Elton 1983, and Appleby et al. 1994.) History’s affinity for social science is
generally seen to turn on questions of objectivity and on the possibility of deriving
historical trends, patterns, or laws from the available evidence. This possibility rests
in turn on the notion that knowledge exists objectively and independently of
apprehension and interpretation. However, even if objectively understood, is each
past event sui generis, and thus resistant to inclusion in scientific constructs? Are
there timeless historical and political precepts, or are social studies purely
contextual? Can there be what Carl Hempel (1942) calls, in the locus classicus of
the deductive historical method, a “function of general laws in history”? Does
20 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Oakeshott (1936:78) overstep in his insistence on the “absolute impossibility of
deriving from history any generalizations of the kind which belong to a social
science,” and that anyone who attempts to wed history and social science is
“ignorant of the nature of either and careless of the interests of both”?
Inference versus observation
In its relation with social science, history is torn between inference and observation
on one hand, and idiography and nomothesis on the other. As we have seen, the
inference—observation question is at the center of the Ranke—Oakeshott debate,
with Ranke claiming to “observe” events via the documents, and Oakeshott creating
historical inferences based on the artifacts. This “inside—outside” dilemma parallels
Dilthey’s famous distinction between the sciences and the humanities. According
to Dilthey, the humanities were an inward experience (Erlebnis) where, in the case
of history, the historian grapples imaginatively with evidence of the past with the
aim of understanding the motivations and beliefs behind events and actions. The
aim of scientific knowledge, on the other hand, was to explain (begreifen) phenomena
presented as outward spectacles. (See Collingwood 1956: 171–6.) Dilthey found it
appropriate, then, that students of the natural sciences use the language of causality,
and that students of the humanities speak the language of experience.
This distinction is also a factor of the sociology of knowledge and of scientific
discovery. All knowledge is conditioned in some way, although critical theories
most commonly regard truth as defined by power and interests, as with Marx,
Mannheim, Lukács, Foucault, and others. E.H.Carr was arguably the field’s first
critical theorist in his contention that ethical and theoretical commitments, “far
from being the expression of absolute and a priori principles, are historically
conditioned, being both products of circumstances and interests and weapons
framed for the furtherance of interests” (Carr 1946: 68). As we will see in our
discussion of postmodernism in
, the discipline has, in this critical sense,
come full circle.
Thomas Kuhn’s idea of the ambiguity of paradigms in science has had a similar
effect on more formal research programs. Kuhn argued in The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (1962) that paradigms structure otherwise haphazard research, but they
also impose boundaries on inquiry. This is why paradigmatic “normal science”
persists even as anomalies mount. Scientific (including historical) knowledge does
not steadily accumulate in a way that can be rationally reconstructed. Rather, only
with a broader upheaval in the ethos of scientific discovery does one paradigm
supplant another. Kuhn maintained that paradigms were doubly problematic in
their relation to history. Not only did paradigmatic orthodoxies blinker the
scientist’s interpretation of the historical evidence, but also scientific logic was itself
innately Whiggish, that is to say, unequivocally linear, cumulative, and present-
centered about its own disciplinary history (Kuhn 1962:137). The problem with
any such contentions about the relativity of knowledge is that the critic must claim
to have achieved some privileged position from which to make a critique. What is
THE HISTORICAL PROBLEM IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 21
unassailable in any case is that the social scientist is part of the history from which
his/her knowledge is constructed, and at any moment that knowledge may have to
be amended or abandoned altogether.
Moreover, as Alan Ryan (1970:19) and others have argued, historical description
and explanation can be self-fulfilling. For instance, the vision of a zerosum cold
war held by President Truman’s National Security Council appears (with Soviet
help) to have produced exactly that: its initial assumptions were “confirmed” by
the actions that flowed from those assumptions. This is not to suggest that we
merely re-imagine the history of international relations in terms of some peaceable
kingdom, nor need it lead to total skepticism about our socially conditioned
constructs. We can say, however, that the social dimensions of theory and policy
blur the divide between belief and knowledge.
Caution seems especially apt as we venture onto the boggy ground of ascribing
meanings to historical events. As Max Weber, himself primarily an historian
interested in generalization, nevertheless made clear, the shortcoming of historical
discourse is that it can only ever provide a self-centered meaning to events, that the
broadest “theoretical” patterns in history are as much the products of
conceptualization as of actual observation:
The fate of an epoch which has eaten of the tree of knowledge is that it must
know that we cannot learn the meaning of the world from the results of its
analysis, be it ever so perfect; it must rather be in a position to create this
meaning itself. It must recognize that general views of life and the universe
can never be the products of increasing empirical knowledge.
(Weber 1949:57)
Idiography versus nomothesis
A second axis of tension in history and theory is that between “idiography”
(particular-description), and “nomothesis” (law-generation, with attendant “if x
then y” causal claims). It is here, really, that history and the social sciences,
depending on one’s view, either meet or diverge. On this point, the anthropologist
Margaret Mead once wisecracked that historians study “the unique event in all its
uniqueness” (quoted in Thorne 1988:36). The environmental historian E.L. Jones
has noted that if the “uniqueness problem” is “carried to the extreme of ignoring
all regularities, the very possibility of social science is denied and historians are
reduced to the aimlessness of balladeers” (quoted in King et al. 1994:43).
Particularists such as Oakeshott defend the differentia specifica of historical events
and actors, insisting that “where comparison begins, as a method of generalization,
history ends.” “Liberalism felled the Berlin Wall,” or “democracies are pacific,” are
not, then, historical statements. Oakeshott claims that “the relation between events
is always other events.” The implication is that historical understanding requires
no “theory,” but rather lies in “a greater and more complete detail
…a world of
events in which no lacuna is tolerated” (Oakeshott 1990:166, 141). Thus, we can
22 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
never know history with any scientific rigor, since to do so requires strict causal
links (necessary and sufficient) between events. Oakeshott (1983:75–6) insists that
strict causality is a standard of science not of history, and attempting to bridge this
“unresolvable categorical distinction” is to engage in a “pretentious muddle.”
On the nomothetic front is Carl Hempel’s path-breaking use of the deductive
method in historical interpretation. “The methodological unity of empirical
science,” Hempel argues, demands that “general laws have quite analogous
functions in history and in the natural sciences” (Hempel 1942: 48, 35). Hempel
employs what has variously been called “the regularity model,” the “covering
model,” or the “deductive” method of “prediction and control.” Under whatever
rubric, historical interpretations are deduced from general assumptions that appear
to “cover” it and similar cases. Hempel suggests that history has always been
“scientific,” that causality is implicit in all historical writing. Linking actions with
events with terms like “causes,” “outcomes,” “origins,” “influence,” “development,”
“growth,” and “decline,” suggests that the relationship between events is not one
of happenstance, but that the outcome stated was a necessary consequence of the
action depicted. The idea is that general causal assumptions can be “scientifically”
confirmed or disconfirmed, as Hempel put it, “by suitable empirical findings”
(ibid.: 35).
Writ large, this is essentially the tension between history and theory. The “ideal
type” of historian emphasizes meaning, difference, content, context, and
complexity. His theorist counterpart focuses on regularities, generalization, and
economical explanation. Set Kenneth Waltz’s (1979) universal guide for explaining
war—the military structure of the international environment —beside Geoffrey
Blainey’s (1973) thirty-three different conditions and caveats on war, and the
contrast between the disciplines is clear.
In several ways, however, this is a false distinction. In either discipline, “facts”
do not simply exist waiting to be incorporated into research. Historians as well as
theorists rely on generalizations, models, and concepts. These are indispensable to
historical writing; without some sort of framework, evidence and ideas lack meaning
or coherence. “Facts may be facts,” Hugh Stretton wrote, “but theories order them
and explanations select them.” Stretton continues: “by historians
…and by many
other social scientists whether or not they admit it, explanations have to be chosen
by some principle of value, fashion or chance; no ‘scientific’ principle can replace
them” (Stretton 1969: v, 60). The historian always works according to some
hypothesis. The real task is to derive a premise that “will neither lead him into the
systematic error of interpretation according to a general principle unsupported by
evidence or insufficiently comprehensive, nor leave him with disiecta membra which
cannot be brought into any intelligible relations with the actualities of human life”
(Introduction to Herodotus 1947: xii). Moreover, in ways that are rarely
acknowledged, the logic of most historical explanation (though not of Oakeshott’s)
mirrors that of scientific explanation. The burden of much of history is to show
that events were to be expected, given certain antecedent conditions. As Hempel
points out, there is a causal claim here. There is also a suggestion, at least, that in
THE HISTORICAL PROBLEM IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 23
the future one might expect similar consequences under similar conditions. In a
crude manner, this is what it means to possess a “sense of history.”
When confronted with historical skepticism, an historian may plead that the
story is being told as well as possible, given personal limitations and those of the
evidence. When a theorist encounters “historical” concerns, he or she is apt to seek
refuge in the canons of social science. A common rejoinder is that theory cannot
be bounded by specific historical events. Theory is a model, a roadmap, or a lens
with which to make sense of the history. Theory should be elegant and
parsimonious. Its function is not to struggle with the facts, but to illuminate the
general trends or tectonics of international politics.
Granted, theoretical statements are abstracted from a far richer historical context,
and precisely because the theorist is given to generalization, there is perhaps more
chance of interpretive recklessness than with an historian. Less convincing, however,
is the theorist’s contention that his compact causal model transcends interpretive
questions. Let us retire the idea that the historical problem has little bearing on
international relations theory. Theory is not a license to twist history or to fudge
questions of causality, periodization, or intent. It is a tool for understanding, not
a creed to be defended at any cost. And even if we consider international relations
a theoretical science on the methodological grounds proposed by Morton Kaplan
(1961:24)— “the science of the discipline does not lie in absolute certainty but in
reasonable belief, in definite canons of procedure and investigation, and in the
attempt to permit confirmation or falsification even though of an imprecise
order”— historical testing, with all its attendant problems, remains the sine qua non
for international relations as a progressive stream of knowledge.
Traditionalists versus scientists
This question has been muddled in the debate in international relations between
“traditionalists” and “scientists,” the former concerned with more or less
“historical” judgments, the latter with value-free generalizations and predictions.
Traditionalists contend that because political scientists have cut “themselves off
from history and philosophy,” they hold a “callow and brash” view of international
studies (Bull 1969a: 37). Some claim that historical interpretation is the crux of the
study of international affairs. As Martin Wight (1966:33) formulaically suggested,
“Politics: International Politics=Political Theory: Historical Interpretation.”
Behavioral political scientists typically respond that historical interpretation has
no place in scientific abstraction, that it is impossible to “squeeze juice from the
historian’s turnip” (Meehan 1968:108–9). Historical interpretation is theoretically
unstructured, intuitive, anecdotal, idiosyncratic, and irreproducible—in short,
unscientific.
This division is over-simple, and does violence to the achievements of both
camps. In fact, there is constant tension in theory—and history—between
generalization and historical content. As A.H.Birch (1969) and Richard Little (1991,
1995) have argued, history and social science cannot be distinguished in terms of
24 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
epistemology and method, but only by the kind of research questions asked. Little
notes:
This tug between the desire to understand both the particular and the general
is not
…peculiar to the “classical approach.” It is an endemic feature of the
social sciences. The failure to appreciate this point has led to a false
dichotomy between “classical” and “scientific” approaches and the odd
notion, propagated by some historians who have lacked any self-conscious
awareness of their own methods, that history is concerned with unique events
whereas social science is concerned with a search for general laws. Social
scientists and historians have no option but to rely on methods which ensure
that some link is maintained between understanding the particular and
explaining the general.
(Little 1995:15)
How does one draw a line between history and abstraction and still maintain this
link? The “scientific” reply is most often tied to the quest for a “general,” usually
“systems,” theory of international politics, and aims to balance theoretical
simplicity and depth of explanation. Yet, as Weber again argued, “for the knowledge
of historical phenomena in their concreteness, the most general laws, because they
are most devoid of content are also the least valuable. The more comprehensive the
validity—or scope—of a term, the more it leads us away from the richness of reality”
(Weber 1949:80). Indeed, in international relations, the quest for parsimony has
sparked something of a race to the bottom in terms of historical content. This seems
counterproductive in such a complex field as international politics. Instead of
trying to understand events, causal models may simply assume that the way things
turned out was foreordained. It is easy to forget that in politics the interplay between
necessity and choice can be intense and often indeterminate. Process is no less
important than structure. For these reasons, theorists should perhaps build outward
from historical understandings. In doing so, they should attach, as Martin Wight
once counseled (1966:32), a liberal dose of “judiciousness and modesty” to their
historical claims.
“Using” history: proof or plunder?
According to Benedetto Croce’s (1941:19) famous slogan, all history is
contemporary history. “The practical requirements which underlie every historical
judgment give to all history the character of ‘contemporary history,’ because,
however remote in time events thus recounted may seem to be, the history in reality
refers to present needs and present situations wherein those events vibrate.” If
history is malleable in the historian’s hands, the whole notion of using history in
other pursuits begs added skepticism. As the theorist constructs and reconstructs
histories, there is danger that the creation will be dictated or distorted by personal
ideological or intellectual commitments. This practice can reduce the “archive” of
THE HISTORICAL PROBLEM IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 25
international relations to little more than “self-fulfilling hindsight” (Booth 1995:
332–3). The argument developed here is that abuses of history are tied to the rigidity
of theory and to the extravagance of the theorist’s claims on history.
The ambiguities of historical evidence seem lost on many international relations
scholars. It has been suggested that the discipline’s mainstream has hewed to an
uncomplicated Rankeanism vis-à-vis history, which is neither uncomplicated nor
Rankean. This has not always been so. Writing in 1959, Kenneth Waltz remarked
that theory itself was chiefly responsible for the mutability of historical evidence.
“The idea we entertain becomes a filter through which we pass our data,” he noted.
“If the filter is good or the data selected carefully, they will pass like milk through
cheesecloth. The recalcitrance of the data may cause us to change one filter for
another, to modify or scrap the theory we hold—or it may produce ever more
ingenious selections and interpretations of the data.” Waltz concluded that it was
impossible to resolve theoretical dilemmas “historically.” Since the “evidence” is
easily tailored to meet expectations, historical argument tends merely to reproduce
the logic of the arguer (Waltz 1959b: 60).
We shall see in
that Waltz later tempered his skepticism, and in Theory
of International Politics (1979) advocated rigorously deductive theory, which he
believed could be confirmed if derivative hypotheses withstood testing against
“hard” historical cases. This about-face notwithstanding, doubts linger about the
firm findings of international relations research that hinges on history. If one is at
all ambivalent about historical evidence, two or three contrary cases ought not to
overturn a theory; but then neither should a selected handful of consistent ones
confirm it. Currently the consensus among “theory—hypothesis—testing”
researchers is against the low falsification threshold associated with Karl Popper
(1959, 1965), and in favor of Imre Lakatos’s “sophisticated methodological
falsification,” which tests theory not only against the “facts,” but against other
theories as well (Lakatos 1970). Again, this may be a case of political science
outpacing the material. We shall see as well that Lakatos himself had grave doubts
about “scientifically”— oriented social science methodology, wondering if it was
not merely “pseudo-intellectual garbage.”
Climbing the pyramids of antiquity
Researchers will bicker over methodology, but often skepticism about history is
simply trampled in a rush of aggressive conclusions promoting a particular
intellectual stance. One is reminded of Nietzsche’s (1965:225) critique of those
“curious tourists and laborious beetle-hunters climbing up the great pyramids of
antiquity.” Critics charge that theorists rummage through history books seeking
“authorities” for their theoretical views. Indeed, the more distant an historical
example or analogy, the more easily it seems to pass into evidence.
Such criticism has remained at the margin of international relations scholarship,
raised most often by historians familiar with theory. A general objection is that
theorists make cavalier use of historical narrative, designing what Collingwood
26 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
(1956:257–61) called “scissors-and-paste” history, a jerrybuilt pastiche of “events.”
A more specific indictment is that theorists jettison historical particularism,
essentially forcing history to lie in the Procrustean bed of political inquiry.
Christopher Hill (1985:142), for example, notes a tendency, especially among
American theorists, to “play fast and loose with the historian’s concerns with
particularity and context.” Paul Schroeder (1994a: 148) worries that researchers will
“go at history like a looter at an archeological site, indifferent to context and deeper
meaning, concerned only with taking what can be immediately used or sold.” Not
altogether whimsically, Christopher Thorne (1983:123) offers the metaphor of
“Clio as callgirl,” and cites a parallel in Jean Genet’s The Balcony, in which Madam
Irma, keeper of the brothel she calls her “House of Illusions,” finds that each patron,
“when he rings the bell and enters, brings his own scenario, perfectly thought out.”
A case in point is the treatment of Kant’s idea of a “pacific federation” composed
of constitutional republics. The Königsberg philosopher’s thesis has been translated
into contemporary debate in the hypothesis that democratic states do not go to war
with each other, and is a standard premise of liberal international theory. The
proposition seems straightforward enough and appears amenable to empirical-
historical testing. However, a recent flurry of “historical” scrutiny has only clouded
the issue. Consider two articles, one by John Owen, the other by Christopher Layne,
in a 1994 issue of International Security. The writers each probe four historical cases.
In fact, they address two of the same cases—Anglo-Union acrimony during the
American Civil War, and Anglo-American tensions in 1895–6 in connection with
the Venezuela—British Guyana boundary dispute—and in doing so rely heavily on
the same history books. In the articles, each author rallies historiographic evidence
in support of his argument, yet the conclusions drawn from that evidence are at
loggerheads. Owen (1994:124) finds that “The liberal commitment to individual
freedom gives rise to foreign policy ideology and governmental institutions that
work together to produce democratic peace.” Layne (1994:49) resolves that “the
world remains what it always has been: international politics continues to occur in
an anarchic, competitive, self-help realm.”
The disjunction lies in the history—or, more precisely, in the selection and
interpretation of historiography. Both articles are well within the norms and
conventions of historical usage in international relations, yet both authors draw
selectively on the historical record. They are either unaware of the conditional and
competing nature of the relevant facts, or else they are acutely aware of this problem
and have deliberately spotlighted helpful citations and obscured contrary claims,
but without then qualifying their “historical” and theoretical conclusions. In
discussion of the Trent Affair in 1861, for example, Layne (1994:19) quotes a
bellicose Prime Minister Palmerston as threatening “to inflict a severe blow upon,
and read a lesson to the United States which will not soon be forgotten.” Owen
(1994:113), on the other hand, quotes Palmerston’s reluctance to use force, due to
the “Shackles of Principle and of Right & Wrong on these Matters.” A more
judicious reading of the evidence might be that the Prime Minister was ambivalent
about starting a war with the Union. Instead, the researchers proceed based on
THE HISTORICAL PROBLEM IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 27
evidence consonant with their initial assumptions, and extrapolate in a manner
probably unintended by the historians whom they cite. And lest we think the
interpretive problem is overcome through quantitative “coding” of historiography
in place of narrative evidence, that approach, as will be clear in
, also
warrants robust skepticism. Quantitative scrutiny of the democratic peace premise
has bogged down in definitional squabbles about what constitutes a democracy,
and about the relationship between wars and “near misses.” Critics argue that the
direction of causality may be reversed, the correlation may hold only for the cold
war years, or that some unexplored factor may better account for the liberal peace.
The quality of diplomacy is neglected, minor wars and major conflicts are weighted
equally, and ultimate calculations are deemed statistically insignificant (see Spiro
1994, and Farber and Gowa 1995).
Flagrant history spinning is easily exposed by fuller historiographic reference.
More interesting for our purposes are good-faith disputes over interpretation, where
even-handed analysis does not necessarily defuse interpretive clashes. At heart, the
dilemma is one of indeterminacy in evidence and interpretation. The problem is
especially pronounced in history and affects the gamut of international studies.
Even when “what happened” is not in dispute, how or why a particular event
happened—causal links that many consider it theory’s task to provide—often is. Was
Hitler’s rise to power the result of one man’s cunning or of the collapse of the
political and economic institutions of “respectable” Germany, or some other
amalgam of causes? Were the Vietcong promoting Asian nationalism or abetting
Communist expansion? Did dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
end the war? When addressing such questions, engaging the historical record is
imperative, but the answers given remain highly interpretive and frequently
polemical. Following the recent (perhaps selective) de-classification of Soviet and
Chinese archival materials on the Korean War, for example, what happened seems
resolved, but the motivations and intentions of the actors, as well as the broader
meaning of the war, are more hotly contested than ever.
The problem of interpretation and indeterminacy is likely to worsen with time.
Ankersmit (1994:167–72) argues that due to the fecundity of historians (there have
been more historians working since 1960 than in all previous time back to
Herodotus), the field is burdened with riches. New theories lead to a cascade of new
historiography, old problems are revisited, and revisionist accounts accumulate.
Selection and interpretation become even more necessary, not because there is too
little information, but because there is too much.
Presentism and statecraft
A further interpretive challenge lies in the historicity of theory itself. Like a work
of history, theory may reveal as much about the author and his/her world than
about the subject under scrutiny. Those who look to theory for anything resembling
consistent “laws” or patterns of international behavior will be discouraged by how
markedly theories parallel contemporary political problems and structures. This is
28 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
a recurrent meta-theoretical critique in the field. In Twenty Years’ Crisis (1946),
E.H.Carr held that inter-war “idealist” philosophies of international politics were
shaped by a “harmony-of-interests” ideology rooted in the Victorian laissez-faire
economic regime. Less stridently, Stanley Hoffmann has described how
international relations emerged as a distinctly “American” social science in the
context of peculiar circumstances, and bears all the marks of its milieu.
Morgenthau’s balance-of-power theory, while broadly applicable, was also bound
up in the emerging cold war: Morgenthau meant to be apropos. Waltz’s structural
interpretation of world history mirrors the “mature” bipolar world in which he was
theorizing—a world that expired unexpectedly. Postmodern theory reflects many of
the dislocations of globalization alongside the resurgence of nativist and nationalist
politics.
As Charles Reynolds (1973:113–14) has argued, “‘Significance’ and ‘meaning’ in
historical interpretation are
…intimately related to the present. While historical
anachronisms should be avoided in reconstructing the past, the reconstruction itself
will always be influenced by, and relative to, the historian’s present. The historian
is concerned not only with explaining present traces of the past, but also with his
own experience in relation to this.” Ludwig Dehio’s Precarious Balance (1963), for
example, traces the hegemonic designs made on Europe by men from Carlos V to
Hitler, yet the book’s silent central character is Stalin. Peter Fleiss’s Thucydides and
the Politics of Bipolarity (1966) recasts the Peloponnesian War in a distinctly twentieth-
century matrix. Paul Kennedy’s excellent Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987)
reflects many of the insecurities of Western economic and military might in the
late twentieth century.
More critically, Butterfield (1931:31) warned that “The study of the past with
one eye
…on the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history.” He
feared that history would be commandeered to affirm prevailing circumstances and
commitments. Yet, even in the absence of ideology, a certain degree of presentism
seems inescapable. This is particularly true of international relations, where the
tension between academic detachment and meeting current crises is so acute.
Whatever the setting, we should probe the past for edifying parallels. Historical
analogies and immediately applicable “lessons” are preferable to careening from
one crisis to the next. However, we should accept that the lessons drawn may not
be strictly “historical.”
In terms of “using” history in setting foreign policy as opposed to detached
political research, Jack Levy makes an important distinction between actual
“learning” from history, and the “instrumental” use of the past to buttress
preexisting policy preferences. As A.J.P.Taylor once put it, “Men use the past to
prop up their prejudices” (Levy 1994a: 306). The results are disheartening in both
cases. Organizational psychologists have argued that learning is “myopic,
incremental, and ignorant,” shaped “less by history than by the frames applied to
that history” (ibid.: 283). Robert Jervis contends that “People pay more attention
to what happened than to why it has happened. Thus learning is superficial,
overgeneralized, and based on post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning. As a result, the
THE HISTORICAL PROBLEM IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 29
lessons learned will be applied to a wide variety of situations without a careful effort
to determine whether the cases are similar on crucial distinctions” (ibid.: 29–4).
Similarly, Ernest May’s “Lessons” of the Past (1973) argues that analogic reasoning
in statecraft has been misguided because it rests on surface similarities and draws
on a shallow pool of examples. May’s chief epistemological point is that through
“cognitive dissonance” statesmen shape information to fit expectations,
pigeonholing events into a handful of hackneyed “historical” models. A meatier
study of the psychology involved here is Yuen Foong Khong’s Analogies at War
(1992). Khong confirms that historical analogies are crucial in the political tasks
of advocacy and justification, but he contends that they also undergird the
“knowledge structures” guiding policy. He finds that decisionmakers continue to
cling to analogies even after it becomes clear that the analogy does not hold. All
these studies agree that the “lessons” learned are often contradictory or simply
wrong, and in any case are skewed toward the present crisis (see also Vertzberger
1986).
Beyond the cold war
Theorists, it seems, are in a double bind. If drawn uncritically, distant historical
analogies are strained. Yet research focused on recent or contemporary history
suffers from the “parochialism of time,” still too much “with us” for meaningful
analysis. Theorists, for example, had a history-spinning field day with the end of
the cold war, gleaning remarkably diverse historical and theoretical “lessons” from
that important snapshot event. We find vindication of classical realism (Kennan
1994), indeed of “Thucydidean” thinking (Bagby 1994); nostalgia for bipolar
stability (Mearsheimer 1990); support for contingency-based theory (Gaddis 1992/
1993); justification for neo conservativism (Muravchik 1991) and neo-
Wilsonianism (Gusterson 1993); and credit to the European peace movement
(Kaldor 1995). Kenneth Waltz (1993) has even managed a post mortem that fits
neorealist theory. Of course, at work here is what Nevil Johnson (1989:45) calls the
“fallacy of misplaced history,” where the theorist “speculate[s] like a political
journalist” on the contemporary “passing show,” without the benefit of depth of
understanding or of hindsight. The smuggest cold war obituaries now founder in
a mire of bloody ethnicism, new tides of human migration, nuclear proliferation,
and a checkered record of multilateral diplomacy and peacekeeping.
Perhaps a better way of contending with the end of the cold war is to see it as a
time of uncertainty and imagination. The cold war was a most dramatic example
of what the Annalistes call a “matrix-event” (événement-matrice), which structures
historical interpretation and meaning. What lies ahead is uncertain. The novelist
Malcolm Bradbury notes (1990:21) that “for 50 years imagination and intelligence
have been imprisoned in a world laid down by the Iron Curtain set across Europe.
Yet more largely, it has lived in an historical interpretation divided between two
massive 20th century ideologies.” As we venture into realism in the next chapters
it will be clear just how much that conflict has structured political theory and
30 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
historical interpretation. The end of the cold war is now a decade behind us, yet
we still live in a time, as Bradbury noted, of “rising uncertainties
…developing hopes
and estranging fears, above all in a world that will not stay still.” Amid such hope
and fear, it is not clear that a revolution is needed in our understanding of history
and politics, but a reappraisal certainly is.
THE HISTORICAL PROBLEM IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 31
32
3
HISTORY, CONTINGENCY, AND THE
ROOTS OF REALISM
Reinhold Niebuhr and E.H.Carr
The historical problem goes to the heart of the realist approach to the theory and
practice of international relations. As Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (1966:
12–13) note of the realists, “Their point of view has on the whole been historical.
They have tended to suppose that the continuities in international relations are
more important than the innovations; that statecraft is an historical deposit of
practical wisdom growing very slowly
…and that it is a useful enterprise to explore
the corpus of diplomatic and military experience in order to reformulate its lessons
in relation to contemporary needs.” Realists regard history as an indispensable
source of insight because it provides a vehicle for piercing the fog of the present
and gaining a wider perspective from which to judge events. Just as one steps back
from an impressionist painting or a church facade in order to bring its patterns
and motifs into focus, only at an historical remove do the otherwise disconnected
features of political life exhibit a certain symmetry and structure.
This chapter explores the roots of realism in the ideas of Reinhold Niebuhr, an
American theologian, and E.H.Carr, an English Marxist. The chapter first examines
the intellectual origins, in Thucydides and Machiavelli, of the realist effort to bridge
history and theory. The chapter then turns to Niebuhr’s theory of history as it
underpins his views on tragedy, the ethics of statecraft, and the possibilities of
political science. Included is a critique of Niebuhr’s most “empirical” historical
investigation, The Structure of Nations and Empires (1959). In its discussion of Carr,
the chapter explores the “sociology of knowledge” and the progressivist
interpretation of history and the impact of both on Carr’s realism. The section also
includes a discussion of the problem of power and historical judgment. Both of
these theorists offered a complex and contingent view of history, fluid in process
and open-ended in its possibilities. Neither considered history to be amenable to
scientific explanations free of interest and prejudice. Political choice was not simply
the product of “necessity” or historical laws. The discussion presented here is
foundational to
, which is devoted to the “policy realism” of Hans
J.Morgenthau and George F.Kennan; and to
, which examines the
structural or “neorealist” theory of Kenneth N.Waltz. In those chapters, we will see
the contingent view lose ground to necessity as the science of international relations
develops.
Philosophical and historical roots
As an approach to international relations, realism represents a philosophical world
view, a framework for interpreting history, and a body of normative thought.
Realism is informed by classical writings, by Judeo-Christian anthropology and
ethics, by modern secular thought, by historical reference, and by the particulars
of given problems. Thucydides, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes,
Hume, Rousseau, Burke, and Weber are the prominent stations on this journey,
and this distinguished heritage is reflected in the paradigm’s range and depth (see
Smith 1986).
Realists embrace several fundamental premises concerning international politics.
First, realists share a pessimistic view of human nature. Human nature is the prime
mover. It propels history, yet remains untouched by historical reforms and progress.
Second, sovereign states are the main actors in the international arena, where they
seek to maximize power and/or security, and to pursue their interests in
competition with other states. Third, the international realm is anarchic, i.e., no
supra-national authorities or norms effectively govern state behavior. Fourth, moral
choice is important in international politics, yet it must be considered in light of
the foregoing assumptions. Many realists see international politics and domestic
politics as separate ethical spheres.
These characteristics apply, for the most part, to both “classical” realists —i.e.,
the first “wave” of realist thinkers including Niebuhr, Carr, Butterfield, Wight,
Georg Schwarzenberger, Nicholas Spykman, Louis Halle, John Herz, Morgenthau,
Aron, Arnold Wolfers, Kennan, and Henry Kissinger—as well as their more
“scientific” successors, known as “neorealists,” and led by Kenneth Waltz. The
classical approach is in some ways a broader enterprise than orthodox political
science. Classical realists rely openly on the exercise of values and judgment, and
believe that, if subjected to strict standards of proof, they can say little of
significance about international politics (see Bull 1969a).
Neorealists have
nevertheless attempted to develop an elegant, deductive theory of international
politics, disposing of human nature, political personalities, and the character of
individual states in favor of ahistorical explanations of political behavior derived
from ideas about the structure of the international environment.
Largely on its historical credentials, realism became the leading approach to
international politics in the postwar years. If, as Martin Wight (1966:32–3) once
suggested, international theory implies at most “the kind of rumination about
human destiny to which we give the unsatisfactory name of philos ophy of history,”
then realists see history, in its most basic outline, as a great and tragic cycle. It
represents an unending struggle for power and interests, where conflict is at times
unavoidable. Realism arose in reaction to idyllic assumptions—largely about history
—of nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury thought on international politics. All
of the classical realists watched the peace of Versailles collapse into the chaos and
ideological virulence of the 1930s. All had the memory of Hitler’s appeasement at
Munich seared onto their psyches. Many realist thinkers fled the war in Europe,
34 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
bringing with them to the United States and Britain deep-seated convictions about
continental realpolitik and its failings. Realists, moreover, seem comfortable with
history, moving easily between historical description and theoretical
pronouncements. Many—Butterfield, Wight, Halle, Kennan, Carr—were trained in
history or were practicing historians.
Modern realists follow in particular two of their doctrinal forebears— Thucydides
and Machiavelli—in their attitude toward history. Herodotus gave us the Greek
term, histori , originally meaning research, investigation, or wisdom, from which
the word “history” is derived. However, this did not stop “the father of history”
from being, by Rankean standards, a notoriously unreliable chronicler, as likely to
attribute causality to the intervention of the gods as to more mundane forces.
Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (c. 400 BC) set a new norm for historical
investigation. Thucydides was a great defender of rigorous methodology, and
offered devastating critiques of the standards of evidence employed by his
predecessor. Yet, even Thucydides claimed that it was impossible for historians to
write accurately about the past. He presented his own methods and proofs as
appropriate only for contemporary accounts, a sort of classical journalism, and
even then did not name his “eye-witnesses,” whom, he cautioned, “gave different
accounts of the same events, speaking out of partiality for one side or the other or
else from imperfect memories” (Thucydides 1972:48). Nor did his attention to
method prevent him from lacing his History with “theoretical” assertions, and
heightening its effect through that famous classical device, reconstructed oratory.
Thucydides’ introduction to the History is a touchstone for modern realists:
It may well be that my history will be less easy to read because of the absence
of a romantic [mythic] element. It will be enough for me, however, if these
words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the
events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it
is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the
future. My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an
immediate public, but was done to last forever.
(ibid.: 48)
The Athenian’s great work has proved remarkably enduring, in no small way
molding the matrix of modern thought on war. Thomas Hobbes’s first publication,
in 1629, was a translation of the History. Hobbes prefaced the edition by noting
that it was “the principle and proper work of history
…to instruct and enable men,
by the knowledge of actions past, to bear themselves prudently in the present and
providently towards the future.” He judged Thucydides to be “the most politic
historiographer that ever writ [who] may from the narrations draw out lessons to
himself, and of himself be able to trace the drifts and counsels of the actors to their
seat” (quoted in Rahe 1995/1996:111). To this day, realists read Thucydides for his
insights into human nature, national character, the clash of cultures, the problems
HISTORY, CONTINGENCY, AND THE ROOTS OF REALISM 35
ē
of power, the quality of leadership, and the importance of political rhetoric.
Thucydides’ most profound insights concern the moral tragedy of war. His Melian
Dialogue, perhaps the sharpest juxtaposition of ethical appeal and the strong arm
of authority ever depicted, is set at the heart of the narrative, and many classicists
consider it the centerpiece of the book.
On a more “empirical” level, realists cleave to Thucydides’ archetypal logic that
“what made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which
this caused in Sparta” (Thucydides 1972:49). The key to the phrase is the term
anank which is usually translated as “necessity” or “compulsion,” and suggests
that the Spartans had little or no choice but to go to war. This statement is frequently
cited as a pristine expression of what realists call the security—power dilemma. This
is the idea that the measures deemed necessary to protect a state inherently clash
with the security imperatives of its neighbors. By many accounts, this is the central
problem of international politics. It is also easy to see why Thucydides’ tale of
politics, diplomacy, and war in a bipolar world, would ring so clearly with students
and statesmen during the cold war. Secretary of State George C.Marshall, in a 1947
speech at Princeton University, doubted “whether a man can think with full wisdom
and with deep convictions regarding certain of the basic international issues today
who has not at least reviewed in his mind the period of the Peloponnesian War
and the Fall of Athens” (quoted in Connor 1984: 3). Michael Howard, writing in
1984, suggested that a thousand years thence, historians may conclude of the late
twentieth century: “What made war inevitable was the growth of Soviet power and
the fear which this caused in the United States” (Howard 1984:102). Robert Gilpin
(1988:15) is typical of more recent readers. He notes that “Thucydides’ theory of
hegemonic war constitutes one of the central organizing ideas for the [modern-day]
study of International Relations.” Gilpin adds (1981:7) that the great work, “is as
meaningful a guide to the behavior of states today as when it was written in the
fifth century BC.”
The way that political scientists and historians respectively have treated
Thucydides’ “inevitability” assertion about the circle of power, fear, and violence
is emblematic of a “great debate” between the two disciplines which will figure
throughout this study. Abandoning the obvious and embracing a single cause or
type of cause, Thucydides took a crucial step in the direction of science. For here
was the suggestion that a consistent underlying phenomenon produced the war.
Thucydides suggested that the “truest cause” did not lie in the individual offenses
and grievances that preceded the conflicts, indeed the real reason would be “most
likely to be disguised by such an argument” (Thucydides 1972:49). Yet while students
of international politics have been quick to recognize the political scientist in
Thucydides, his talk of inevitabilities warming the cockles of their hearts, historians
have been intrigued that the Athenian in his new-found rigor should insist on a
single truest cause for the war. Why the parsimony? By viewing all twenty-seven
years of conflict as a single war, was Thucydides barred from assigning different
causes to different parts of it? Is his pronouncement unhistorical in its
reductionism? “Is this a statement of social psychology, or an assertion of
36 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
ē
inevitability?,” asks one historian. “Where does it leave responsibility for the war?”
(Murray 1986:194). Other factors were at work: Thucydides enumerated several
lesser causes. However, the “theory” he settled on, and which realists echo, is that
the war was caused by the imbalance of classical power.
After Thucydides, no thinker influenced the realists more than Machiavelli did.
The Florentine’s notorious “how-to” for rulers, The Prince (1532), is sometimes cited
as having sparked the realists’ love affair with power as well as their devilish ethics.
More importantly, Machiavelli invented a way of thinking about the
interconnectedness of history, reality, and “policy,” which remains at the core of
modern realism. Machiavelli was concerned with la verità effetuale (things as they
really are). He was going for reality, and not for its shadows. In what may have been
a barb at Plato, he noted, “many writers have imagined for themselves republics
and principalities that have never been seen nor known to exist in reality; for there
is such a gap between how one lives and how one ought to live that anyone who
abandons what is done for what ought to be done learns his ruin rather than his
preservation” (Machiavelli 1979:126–7). Well-ordered states (stati bene ordinati) were
to be fashioned not on transcendent principles or a paradigm laid down in heaven,
but on experience. Machiavelli thus became the first political theorist deliberately
to ground his ideas in discourse on the nature of history and historical events.
Where did Machiavelli’s ideas come from? In short, they were derived from the
classics as read in the dim light of a murderous and coup-ridden fifteenth-century
Florence. This was the cusp of the Renaissance. Emerging from the long Medieval
night, Machiavelli pored over the “histories” of Polybius, Xenophon, Tacitus, and
Livy, reaping their lessons and rendering them in contemporary form. Thus, while
Machiavelli’s Prince was more a mythical work, his Discourses on Livy (1531) was a
compendium of inductive historical gleanings designed to be useful. Indeed, he
claimed that Italy’s ailments stemmed in large part from
not possessing a proper knowledge of histories, for in reading them we do
not draw out of them that sense or taste that flavor which they have in
themselves
… Wishing, therefore, to free men of this erroneous way of
thinking, I deemed it necessary to write about all those books by Livy which
the malignity of time has not taken from us
…to draw from them that
practical knowledge one should seek from an acquaintance with history
books.
(Machiavelli 1979:170–1)
In this, Machiavelli was nothing if not modern. Indeed, he likened his own
discoveries in politics to the discovery of the New World. Enlivened by the budding
Renaissance focus on man’s role in controlling and shaping the world around him,
his quarrying of the past was a case of active rather than contemplative history.
Machiavelli’s methods were secular, scientific, and empirical, concerned with causes
and effects and aimed at setting out the means to assigned ends. Machiavelli
expressed his modern ideas in a new vocabulary of action and science. The prince
HISTORY, CONTINGENCY, AND THE ROOTS OF REALISM 37
was the “new prince,” who had seized power rather than inherited it. He pitted his
virtù—courage, masculinity, skill, excellence, ability, audacity, ingenuity—against the
fickle forces of what Machiavelli called fortuna, which we might think of today as
the contingent and accidental in history. These modern ideas were nevertheless to
be accompanied by reverence for the ancient customs. Machiavelli found it
expedient to mythologize classical honor and glory, and set them against the
decadence and corruption of the present, a type of moralism or nostalgia not
unknown in modern realism.
The most important concept in Machiavelli is that of necessità, or political
necessity. For Machiavelli, history was in constant, recurrent motion. Politics
involved ceaseless struggle, with no lasting repose, and no prince would succeed
who did not respond with cunning and vigor. The idea of necessity has developed
into the general “realist” principle that the nature of international politics sharply
limits the range of statesmen’s moral and practical choices, and that when the
survival of the state is deemed to be in jeopardy, choice all but disappears. For this,
Machiavelli has been cited as the originator of the doctrine of raison d’état, which
holds that because the state is supreme in the hierarchy of ethics, whatever means
are necessary to protect the well-being of the state are ipso facto justified (see Smith
1986: 10–12).
Machiavelli’s reason-of-state argument was not simply a moral apology for power,
however, but was propelled by a germ of Italian nationalism (italianità), this too
being a new idea. In a passage from The Prince, titled “An Exhortation to Liberate
Italy from the Barbarians,” he quoted from Livy, “Here justice is great: Only those
wars that are necessary are just, and arms are sacred when there is not hope except
through arms” (Machiavelli 1979:163). Livy’s words, written fourteen centuries
earlier in the defense of Rome, were thus extended to the plight of Machiavelli’s
own beloved Italy, caught unprotected in the midst of the ultramontane wars. In
this way, classical ideas bubbled up through the centuries. Taken together,
Machiavelli’s historical inferences represent an important strand of civic thought
on the autonomy of politics, political order and balance, liberty, law,
constitutionalism, and nationalism. Individual leaders are important appendages
to this body of ideas, but the state and its preservation are at its heart. In this,
Machiavelli’s use of the classics affirms what Petrarch had said: “What is any history
but the praise of Rome?” (quoted in Whitfield 1971:73).
These early ideas about history, tragedy, and necessity have worked their way
deep into modern realist thought. As Martin Wight (1966:26) summed up the realist
“historical” disposition: “international politics is the realm of recurrence and
repetition; it is the field in which political action is most regularly necessitous.” At
this juncture, we will simply note that realists’ reading of history and their focus
on recurrence and necessity have provoked sharp objections. One critic has noted
that “realist historical credentials have led something of a charmed life within the
discipline” (Rosenberg 1994:60). Another suggests that realists “did not believe in
the future
… They look back over twenty-five centuries of unbroken struggle and
shake hands with Thucydides” (Booth 1995:332). Francis Fukuyama, whose own
38 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
“end of history” thesis was informed by recent headlines, asserts that “realists talk
as if history did not exist” (Fukuyama 1992:246).
The uses of tragedy: Reinhold Niebuhr’s theology of history
Contemporary research in international relations is largely concerned with
generating good “data,” developing new models, and testing “scientific” hypotheses.
Why, then, study the philosophy of history of an American heartland theologian
with whom most students in the field are barely, if at all, acquainted? The answer
is this: in Niebuhr, we find a view of history and of human nature from which even
the most “empirical” renderings of political realism are derived. Niebuhr’s
philosophy points toward realism’s choice of variables, the distinction between
domestic and international affairs, the chasm between individual and collective
ethics, the resistance of international problems to quick fixes, the role of tragedy,
the problem of the contingent in history, and the perils of historical complacency.
This section, then, will provide a clear sense of where realism came from. It will
also begin to suggest where and why Niebuhr’s more scientific descendants may
have gone astray.
Niebuhr’s sweeping philosophy has, it is true, left an ambiguous legacy. Paul
Scherer, Niebuhr’s colleague at Union Theological Seminary, noted, “[Niebuhr’s]
metier is to work not with miniatures but with murals
…with the spread of some
vast engagements on many fronts, with the impact of worlds, with the panorama
of a civilization, with maps of centuries and continents in high relief” (Scherer 1984:
398). Similarly, the editors of Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics (Davis and Good 1960)
described the theologian’s writings as fluid, complex, and full of “dialectical
cantilevers.” “By whatever label,” they profess, “it would be very unNiebuhrian to
understand Niebuhr’s thought as a fixed system. He warns against too confident
and closed a science of politics
… To freeze these understandings into a rigid,
completely coherent system would do violence to their spirit” (Davis and Good
1960:x–xi).
Niebuhr’s greatest legacy, however, may be his political ethic, a manner of moral
reasoning anchored in theology but alive to the complexities and contingencies of
history. This ethic—at once prophetic and pragmatic, progressive but decidedly un-
idealist, humane while cognizant of moral ambiguities—rests on a paradoxical
conception of history as a realm of perennial conflict, but one nonetheless open
to contingency and change. At the nucleus of Niebuhr’s ethic is an appreciation of
tragedy. In politics, he argued, tragedy “is constituted of conscious choices of evil
for the sake of good. If men or nations do evil in a good cause; if they cover
themselves with guilt in order to fulfill some high responsibility; or if they sacrifice
some high value for a higher or equal one they make a tragic choice” (Niebuhr
1952:vii). Tragedy must profit from the tension between what Niebuhr called the
“impossible possibility” of the absolute love ethic of the Gospel and the practical
demands of governance. He observed, “We know that we cannot purge ourselves
of the sin and guilt in which we are involved by the moral ambiguities of politics
HISTORY, CONTINGENCY, AND THE ROOTS OF REALISM 39
without also disavowing responsibility for the creative possibilities of justice”
(Niebuhr 1943:284). Thus, like St. Augustine, Niebuhr offered no escape from the
problems of history, but neither did he view history as inevitably tragic. Precisely
because Niebuhr maintained the ethical tensions inherent in statecraft, his
sensibility remains a lively corrective to triumphalism in international affairs, and
to shallow thoughts on the novelty of our time.
Human nature and historical contingency
Niebuhr’s political theory rests on a contingent view of history. This view of history
calls to mind Machiavelli’s account of the jousting of princely virtù with the swollen-
river forces of fortuna. History was not subject to inevitabilities, laws, or wooden
structure, and implied at best only crude cycles, patterns, and “lessons.” It conveyed
no inherent logic or Aristotelian kernel that predestined its development. What
mattered were the uniqueness of human experience and the endless and untold
effects that one historical event had on others. As Benedetto Croce (1941:90) put
it, “Every act stands altogether in relation to itself and altogether in relation to
something else; it is both a point of repose and a stepping stone; and if it were not
so it would be impossible to conceive the self-surpassing growth of history.”
For Niebuhr, then, there were “no ‘essences’ in history because every historical
configuration represents an amalgam of natural necessity and human freedom”
(Niebuhr 1959:288). This duel between determinism and volun tarism flowed from
Niebuhr’s wedding of the Pauline doctrine of grace and the Augustinian doctrine
of sin, and the contradictions that resulted were central to Niebuhr’s anthropology.
Humanity was a dual vessel: proud, selfish, brutish, lustful of power, destructive
and parochial; but also bright, rational, generous, creative and spirited. The result
was moral contradictions and ambiguities from the individual to the societal level.
Hence, ideas about history which favored human rational potential were refuted
by the darker side of humanity, while those which saw life as driven merely by
necessity and greed were contradicted by humanity’s spirited and creative side. An
effective theory of politics would embrace both facets of human nature, the
indeterminate interplay of the two demanding a “dynamic interpretation of the
social process,” and of social ethics in particular (Niebuhr 1943:245).
This was, in broad outline, the aim of Niebuhr’s Gifford Lectures given at the
University of Edinburgh in the spring and fall of 1939, and published as Human
Nature (1941) and Human Destiny (1943). Niebuhr set out to unite sin-centered
Reformation thought with more humane Renaissance concepts, hinted at in
Machiavelli, which reflected the desire for the fulfillment of life in history. Niebuhr
welcomed this leaven since strict Reformation thought regarded the problem of
justice as wholly insoluble by reason of human sin, and hence failed to illuminate
“the possibilities and limits of realizing increasing truth and goodness in every
conceivable historic and social situation” (Niebuhr 1943:204–5). Together, the two
series of lectures represent the full symmetry of Niebuhr’s thought. They yield a
bright, yet realistic, picture of humanity and delineate the tragic tensions of the
40 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
human condition. “Life in history,” he wrote, “must be recognized as filled with
indeterminate possibilities. There is no individual or interior spiritual situation,
no cultural or scientific task, and no social or political problem in which men do
not face new possibilities of the good and the obligation to realize them” (ibid.: 207).
Niebuhr was distinctly agnostic about developments within history. Scrutiny of
historiography might yield insight into contemporary problems, but experience
remained a singular mix of perennial and novel events, and only the “imagination
can piece together the multifarious and kaleidoscopic configurations which make
up the ‘raw stuff’ of history” (Niebuhr 1963:18). Likewise, complex causality and
the intrusion of the contingent undermined the predictive possibilities of social
theory. “In both nature and history,” he insisted, “each new thing is only one of
an infinite number of possibilities which might have emerged at that particular
juncture
… We can trace a series of causes in retrospect, but we can never predict
the future with accuracy” (Niebuhr 1945:4). He reminded readers that only one
nineteenth-century historian, Jacob Burckhardt, had foretold the sophisticated
political tyrannies of the twentieth century.
As part of his broader critique of utopianism, Niebuhr rejected the notion of
“redemptive history”—history as the record of unequivocal progress, marching
toward an idyllic historical end. True, progress occurred in the accumulation of
knowledge, the perfection of technology, the mastery of the environment, and
expanding economic and political cooperation. However, Niebuhr insisted that
such progress in “technics” did not connote moral progress. Niebuhr spent much
of his life thundering against liberal culture and its reluctance to recognize the
residual strength of power and self-interest across history. “The actual achievements
of man in history,” he argued, “are always corrupted by the twin evils of the
tyrannical subordination of life to life and the anarchic conflict of life with life.
There is therefore no pure ethical norm in history; nor any hope of history gradually
purifying itself so that it will achieve this norm” (Niebuhr 1943:81). Niebuhr was
also critical of the positivist idea of “mastering” history by translating the methods
of the natural sciences into the social realm. Niebuhr saw this fond dream of
modernity as deeply flawed. To sever politics from its roots in the humanities and
plant it among the “pure” sciences was to perpetrate an epistemological charade
that ultimately “obscures the grand tragic outlines of contemporary history, and
offers vapid solutions for profound problems” (Niebuhr 1952:60).
Niebuhr’s well-known critique of Christian pacifism was also rooted in this
tension between religious ideals and political demands. Following St. Augustine’s
notion of the “mournful warrior,” he believed that the assumption that nothing
was worth dirty hands was both foolish and cynical. War could not be dismissed
outright, but had to be weighed in terms of power, interests, and norms. The more
thoroughgoing Reformation hope of such theologians as H.Richard Niebuhr
(Niebuhr’s brother), Karl Barth, and Adolf Bultmann for an exclusively
transcendent kingdom bred, Reinhold argued, a radical vertical dialectic between
history and heaven, the absolute nature of which tended to spawn aloofness and
defeatism. Niebuhr believed that such deference to providence constituted a total
HISTORY, CONTINGENCY, AND THE ROOTS OF REALISM 41
denial of political necessity, thus “destroy[ing] the tension between the final
demands of God upon the conscience and all the relative possibilities for realizing
the good in history” (Niebuhr 1943:195).
Still, Niebuhr avoided medievalism and fatalism in his views. History was not
fixed; it was an amalgam of contingency, diversity, and unity, full of possibilities.
Niebuhr’s historical hopes were evident in the importance he accorded leadership,
the role of ideas, and broad-based political activism. According to Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr., Niebuhr fashioned “liberal conclusions from Augustinian
premises,” achieving in a generation a “revolution in the bases of American liberal
political thought” (Schlesinger 1984:221, 214). The possibilities of history
challenged us morally, giving substance (and ambiguity) to moral life.
Tragedy as historical motif
Niebuhr’s Augustinian leaning is the bleakest and best-known feature of his realism.
As he concluded, “Where there is history at all there is freedom, where there is
freedom there is sin” (Niebuhr 1943:80). Niebuhr’s philosophy emerged in an age
of disenchantment, as the First World War upended the rosy assumptions about
political life that had flourished in the nineteenth century. The day before the
British entered the war, Henry James wrote a friend: “The plunge of civilization
into this abyss of blood and darkness
… is a thing that so gives away the whole long
age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement,
gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years
were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for words” (quoted
in Fussell 1975:8). Niebuhr was similarly affected. The First World War, he wrote,
“made me a child of the age of disillusionment. When the war started I was a young
man trying to be an optimist without falling into sentimentality. When it ended
and the full tragedy of its fratricides had been revealed, I had become a realist trying
to save myself from cynicism” (Niebuhr 1928:1161). The tragic ironies of that
period would shadow the whole course of his thought.
Niebuhr’s view of tragedy was rooted equally in an understanding of human
nature and human freedom. In this, his philosophy was distinctly at odds with the
leading streams of American social thought in the 1920s and 1930s: Walter
Rauschenbusch’s sanguine Social Gospel and John Dewey’s scientistic pragmatism.
Because their anthropology was simplistic and their politics unidimensional,
neither one, Niebuhr argued, reckoned with tragedy. During his Marxist period,
Niebuhr had entertained the possibility of egalitarian ideals inspiring collective
virtue, but by 1939, he had grown skeptical of collective ethics, seeing wise self-
interest as the height of group morality. Through its Weberian apparatuses, the
state coerces allegiance to its ends, or it may turn to the more deft methods of
propaganda, symbolism, and nationalist pieties. By whatever means, the state
achieved a bogus “independent centre of moral life,” before which even the moral
individual bent the knee because the political order was also the source of his
security (Niebuhr 1943:208). Without voices of dissent to bridle its excesses—what
42 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Niebuhr called the “prophetic minority”—the state would collapse into cupidity
and self-righteousness.
This natural tragedy was dramatically compounded in politics, a realm marked
by moral ambivalence and competing values. As A.C.Bradley notes (1950:70),
It will be agreed that in all tragedy there is some sort of conflict —conflict of
feelings, modes of thought, desires, wills, purpose; conflict of persons with
one another, or with circumstances, or with themselves
… The essential tragic
fact is the self-division and intestinal warfare of the ethical substance, not so
much the war of good with evil as the war of good with good.
If politics were not tragic they would involve no conscience-wrenching decisions,
no balancing of Jeffersonian “great goods,” no moral reasoning. Antimonious
goods bid for political precedence: sovereignty and multilateralism, principle and
interest, order and justice, liberty and community.
It seems less strange, then, that Niebuhr should have advocated tragedy in
political life. He argued that great leaders had always made tragic choices among
competing principles, and suggested that when statecraft was stripped of tragedy it
turned sentimental and faddish. The conduct of foreign affairs was at heightened
risk. While the ambiguities of domestic political decisions were perhaps more
immediately apparent, with distance and ignorance came a dangerous moral clarity
which issued in simplism, abstraction, and ideology. This “sloganization” of foreign
policy demonized foreign leaders or entire political systems, while at the same time
falsely inflating a nation’s own virtue.
In his tragic realism, Niebuhr cleaved to the Augustinian adage: “The peace of
the world is based on strife.” The persistence of power and conflict across political
history was both a source of tragedy and a point of paradox. Power could be
harnessed and beguiled, but never fully eliminated from communal life. As he
observed, “Society merely cumulates the egoism of individuals and transmutes their
individual altruism into collective egoism so that the egoism of the group has a
double force. For this reason no group acts from purely unselfish or even mutual
intent and politics is therefore bound to be a contest of power” (Niebuhr 1953:363).
Against this backdrop, Niebuhr viewed the balance of power, that archetypal tragic
construct, as an irreplaceable international strategy. In contrast to the natural order,
which entailed an organic balance, in history this equilibrium could only be a tragic
human artifice. This view sets Niebuhr apart from the more scientific and structural
realists who succeeded him. The balance was nonetheless fraught with ambiguities,
and hinged on historical contingencies. It was “a principle of justice in so far as it
prevents domination and enslavement; but it is a principle of anarchy and conflict
in so far as its tensions, if unresolved, result in overt conflict” (Niebuhr 1943:266).
Order was given priority, but the balance was not an end in itself. Rather, the balance
was the sine qua non underpinning the higher good of justice: “There has never been
a scheme of justice in history which did not have a balance of power at its
foundation” (Niebuhr 1940:104).
HISTORY, CONTINGENCY, AND THE ROOTS OF REALISM 43
Although he accepted this tragic side of the quest for justice, Niebuhr vowed to
temper its pursuit. In “speaking truth to power,” he stressed power’s dark ironies
and illusions, warning that a nation, however virtuous, may become the mirror
image of its foe if it crudely opposed power with power. In The Irony of American
History (1952) he quoted from a letter John Adams wrote to Jefferson: “Power always
thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak;
and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all His laws. Our passions,
ambitions, avarice, love and resentment, etc., possess so much metaphysical subtlety
and so much overpowering eloquence that they insinuate themselves into the
understanding and the conscience and convert both to their party” (Niebuhr 1952:
21). Niebuhr echoed Lord Acton’s warnings about the seductive sway of power.
While only power could mitigate abuses of power, this mitigation could never be
exercised with easy conscience. It was perhaps for this reason that Niebuhr so
seldom spoke of just war, which might too easily rationalize killing.
Consider Niebuhr’s translation of this ethic into the nuclear age, a time, as
Stanley Hoffmann (1987:449) notes, when “tragedy may blot out meaning.”
Characteristically, Niebuhr referred to the nuclear dilemma as “the ‘balance of
terror’ by the grace of which we have a precarious peace” (quoted in Bennett 1982:
93). He expressed grave moral doubts about nuclear weapons, noting that “if we
ever made first use of such a bomb we would annihilate our civilization morally
in the process of defending it physically,” but had little political timidity about
their possession (Niebuhr 1950a: 7). Tragedy and irony buttressed an orthodox
deterrence ethic: build atomic weapons but foreswear their first use. Underlying
that ethic, however, was a rare understanding of atomic weaponry, namely, that the
West’s nuclear foreign policy was no less morally ambiguous by virtue of its relative
justice vis-à-vis the Soviets. Indeed, that an “innocent” nation had become steeped
in nuclear guilt was for Niebuhr one of the great ironies of the American experience.
Niebuhr’s realism arguably deepened in the face of absolute power. While it is
true that Niebuhr consistently criticized as naive movement toward unilateral
disarmament and a non-nuclear foreign policy, by 1950 he was convinced that
however distasteful, a long-term modus vivendi with the Soviets had become a tragic
necessity. With time, and with Stalin’s death, Niebuhr would temper his anti-
communism and turn an ironic eye on American cold war politics and culture. He
was critical of US leaders who were blind to the necessary precariousness of
coexistence, and was outraged by John Foster Dulles’s hypocritical moralism, which
he saw as a monstrous twisting of the Christian tradition. He also criticized the
imprudence of Dulles’s “brinkmanship,” and excoriated considerations of
preventive nuclear war, insisting that nuclear war was inconceivable and that the
superpowers shared a common responsibility for averting disaster. He was sharply
critical as well of Henry Kissinger’s apparently serious consideration, in a volume
published by the Council on Foreign Relations, of a “tactical” nuclear war in
Europe. Niebuhr almost certainly would have denounced, perhaps on grounds of
both economic justice and strategic prudence, more recent American policies of
“multiplying” nuclear deterrence.
44 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
The fallacy of historical determinism
Despite its recurrence in history, tragedy was not inevitable. Niebuhr’s critique of
determinism in history prefaced Isaiah Berlin’s famous denunciation of historical
inevitability. The turn to determinism, Berlin (1959:77–8) wrote, “springs from a
desire to resign our responsibility, to cease from judging provided we be not judged
and above all be not compelled to judge ourselves, from a desire to flee for refuge
to some vast amoral, impersonal whole of nature or history.” While essentially
agreeing with Berlin, Niebuhr nonetheless challenged the Oxford philosopher’s
failure to move beyond the negative task of confronting deterministic presumptions
(see Niebuhr 1955: 24). Lest it be seen as irrevocably pessimistic, Niebuhr
distinguished his view of tragedy from tragic determinism, as a too consistent
reliance on the “tragedy” of things could degenerate into cynicism and violence.
Most importantly, every form of historical determinism, including the idea of
political necessity, robbed people of moral responsibility. As Niebuhr wrote in a
1950 article in World Politics:
Even when the historic situation is as tragic as our contemporary one, and
when a careful estimation of historic probabilities is bound to lead to more
pessimistic than optimistic conclusions, we have no right to speak of
“inevitabilities” in history. Men are always agents, and not merely the stuff,
in the historical process. If modern culture has been inclined, at times, to
overestimate the power of the human will over historical destiny, there is yet
no reason we should abdicate the responsibility of that will in this tragic hour.
(Niebuhr 1950b: 338–9)
The furthest irony of Niebuhrian tragedy was that, from a theological perspective,
history both was and was not tragic: “Life remains self-contradictory in its sin, no
matter how high human culture rises; that the highest expression of human
spirituality, therefore, contains also the subtlest form of human sin. The failure to
recognise this fact, and nothing more, is to reduce history to simple tragedy. But
the basic message of Christian faith is a message of hope in tragedy” (Niebuhr 1937:
18–19). This was the leaven in Niebuhr’s realism, and it was here that he clashed
with more thoroughgoing realists, whom he accused of underappreciating the
resilience of the human spirit, even under the strain of necessity. “I do not think
we will sacrifice any value in the ‘realist’ approach to the political order,” Niebuhr
wrote (1962: 102) in a perhaps too strong rejoinder to Hans Morgenthau, “if we
define [it] in terms which do not rob it of moral content.”
The Structure of Nations and Empires
In his final and in some ways most ambitious book, The Structure of Nations and
Empires (1959), Niebuhr attempted through a sweeping view of history “to describe
the historical constants and variables in the dominion of nations and empires” (p.
HISTORY, CONTINGENCY, AND THE ROOTS OF REALISM 45
8). Several observations may be made about the volume, as Niebuhr’s inquiry
demonstrates the link between his broader philosophy and his “empirical”
historical views. Niebuhr’s stated purpose was to edify a “young nation suddenly
flung to a position of world responsibility by its great power,” and specifically to
demonstrate that neither Soviet imperialism nor its connection to the secular creed
of communism was without precedent (p. ix). He argued that Soviet empire-builders
shared a great deal in common with imperial rulers from Babylon, Persia, Pagan
and Christian Rome, medieval Islam, the Spanish and British empires, the
Egyptians, and the Aztecs. In each case, imperial authority rested not simply on the
rational application of power, but was fused with the prestige and “majesty” derived
from the identification of political order with divine order.
Niebuhr found recurrent tensions between order and justice, between the desire
to conquer and coerce, and the craving for the equality and liberty of a true political
community. He saw a pattern of the “integral” community, whether city-state or
nation, giving way to the larger structure of dominion, the empire. However, he
also claimed that the growth of freedom imparted a “forward movement” to history
—it, too, was fraught with ambiguities, chiefly the “permanent moral
embarrassment” of pretension and excess in maintaining any political order (p. 2).
The contingent view prevailed. To the annoyance of philosophers of history as well
as political scientists, Niebuhr’s historical patterns—mirroring his portrayal of social
life in general—were in fact streams of contradiction and indeterminacy, of history
as a mix of contrivance and tradition, the universal and the particular. “History,”
he wrote, “is a realm in which human freedom and natural necessity are curiously
intermingled. Man’s freedom constantly creates the most curious and unexpected
and unpredictable emergences and emergencies in history. All efforts to discern
patterns of recurrence, after the manner of Spengler and Toynbee, or patterns of
development, in the fashion of Hegel, Spencer, or Comte, must do violence to the
infinite variety in the strange configurations of history” (p. 7).
Niebuhr was skeptical of the Marxist interpretation of history, built as it was
atop the French physiocratic theory that nature and history were equally subject to
absolute laws. Such “idealism” could be its own worst enemy. Pursued with
sufficient purpose and force, the dream of an earthly paradise would almost
certainly turn into a nightmare. Niebuhr also clashed with the liberalism of Locke,
Smith, and Kant. He argued that Lockean liberalism was less a rationally calculated
design than the product of traditional loyalties and patterns of conduct. This made
it a dubious imprint for the rest of the world. Some of Niebuhr’s most caustic
remarks were reserved for those “bland fanatics” who saw the “highly contingent”
achievements of Western civilization as “the final form and norm of human
existence” (p. 298). He argued that the Western version of the “open society” was
unique, and that outside of a historic liberal framework, “free elections”—that
mantra of democratic-liberalism—would be an empty phrase. As for Smith and
Kant, Niebuhr argued that the anatomy of sovereignty hindered the emergence of
economically, morally, and politically autonomous individuals. People remained
bound to, and by, political groups.
46 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Similarly, this was not a scientific treatise on imperialism. With the exception
of Britain’s relatively benign “missionary motive,” Niebuhr centered on the
consequences and expressions of dominion, rather than on why empires rise and
fall. Perhaps overly sensitive to the communist indictment of Western capitalism
as inherently imperialistic, Niebuhr downplayed the economic impetus, and his
discussions of colonialism in Latin America, Africa, and Ireland are not his most
perceptive. He was clearly convinced of “the moral superiority of British
imperialism,” not least because the British eventually departed, leaving behind a
sound administrative structure and maintaining commonwealth ties. In terms of
the causes of imperialism, Niebuhr maintained that motives were always mixed.
Religion, economics, and glory were important inducements to empire, although
not in any fixed proportions or under any specified conditions. The British, for
example, had wed Milton’s conception of “God’s Englishman” to an eye for profit,
but “manners” entered into it as well. As that mouthpiece of imperialism, Sir
Thomas Raffles, put it: “Britain leads the fashion and gives the law” (p. 206).
However, the main burden of Structures of Nations and Empires was to shed light
on contemporary Russian imperialism. On this point, the book is a good example
of the pitfalls of relying too consistently on historical analogies, or, put more
sharply, of working backward from present-day opinion to historical analogue.
Niebuhr held that all empires had been buttressed by ideology. He noted how
Cicero had extolled the protection (patrocinium) the Roman empire afforded; how
Seneca had falsified facts in lauding Nero; how the Chinese empire rested on a
“Confucian monarchy”; how the Christian empire under Constantine had “combin
[ed] the genius of the Caesars with the spirit of Christ,” and used religion to mask
its crimes and exalt its rule; how Eusebius of Caesarea, Constantine’s chief apologist,
had turned the ruler’s enemies into the “enemies of truth,” for which Burckhardt
pronounced him “the most consistently dishonest historian of antiquity” (pp. 93–
5); how even Thomas Aquinas had been flexible in his moral estimation of the
papal empire in the thirteenth century, and had projected the idolatry of the Church
onto the secular empire. Niebuhr painted these apologists and dissemblers as the
forerunners of the early Soviet ideologists—Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky,
Stalin, and Sokol’nikov.
Niebuhr found a strict monotheistic faith to be the best imperial cement. Ideally,
the ruler held both the keys to power and the keys to heaven. Whereas religiously
pluralistic or polytheistic empires had to rely on their own imperial structures as
the ultimate arbiter of authority, under monotheism, power and authority were
indivisible. The emperor invokes the direct mandate of one true god. In his sprint
through imperial history, Niebuhr lingered longest on the great medieval empire
of Islam, stretching from Córdoba to Baghdad. He found the analogy to
contemporary communism striking. He linked up Islamic fanaticism with the priest-
kings of “Holy Russia,” and Muscovy as the seat of Orthodox Christianity with
Mecca. “Communism,” Niebuhr noted, “is a religion within the framework of a
modern secular culture in which the ‘logic of history’ takes the place of Allah as
the absolute source of meaning, and the writings of Marx and Lenin become the
HISTORY, CONTINGENCY, AND THE ROOTS OF REALISM 47
sacred texts, analogous to the Koran” (p. 117). Both systems, Niebuhr argued,
mingled religious zeal and military prowess. Both converted conquered peoples to
the faith and integrated them into a “theocratic” state. Both were totalitarian. As
Schumpeter had noted, Islam “determined daily conduct, shaped the whole world
outlook
…permeated the mentality of the believer, made him someone who was
characteristically different from all other men, [and] opened up an unbridgeable
gulf between him and the infidel, turning the latter into the arch enemy with whom
there could be no true peace.” Niebuhr determined that in communism, as in
medieval Islam, this totalitarian impulse produced “an almost demonic historical
dynamism” (p. 117).
Of course, the Soviet government was nothing if not a gang of mullahs, steeped
in dogma and canonical texts. However, communism remained an elitist creed that
did not easily displace or insinuate itself into local religions and myths. Given the
coercive nature of Russian rule, the idea that the denizens of the Soviet Republics
were “converts” to communism seems far-fetched. The parallel with Islamic history
invested the Soviet Union with a false vitality, pumping up the achievements of
militant communism, and transforming the Red Army into a sea of jihad warriors.
With the luxury of hindsight, it is clear that Niebuhr credited Soviet policies with
more consistency than they deserved. He overstated the success of the Russification
of the Soviet Republics. He was particularly impressed that Moscow’s tentacles had
reached as far as the Islamic schools of Tashkent, which had fallen under communist
administration. He claimed that “the Russian bloc is certainly more cohesive than
our own,” without considering the fragility that might imply (p. 28). His focus on
the majesty of the state and the grandeur of dogma also led him to overestimate
the awe with which the Third World held the Soviet Union. He insisted that “the
Russians have all the immediate advantages in the Middle East and in Asia and
Africa” (p. 281). Generally, Niebuhr’s surface history issued in surface
pronouncements about the contemporary scene, conferring greater credence on
ideology than was warranted, and exaggerating the Russian appetite for war. We
shall see in the next chapter that Hans Morgenthau more coolly assessed the Soviet
creed as a way of veiling oldfashioned power, while George Kennan’s profound
understandings of the Russian experience prompted him to emphasize the historic
burdens of empire as opposed to its vitality.
Structures of Nations and Empires ends on a note of sober optimism. In keeping
with his open-ended view of history, Niebuhr wonders whether independent centers
of Russian power would not emerge; whether the Central Committee of the
Communist Party would not ultimately check the power of the Executive, much
as the Whig lords had done in England in the eighteenth century; whether the
Soviet success in the realm of education might turn the citizenry against the regime.
The nuclear age underscored how history had not resolved the problem of political
order, but rather had enlarged it. “Our best hope,” Niebuhr wrote, “rests upon our
ability to observe the limits of human freedom even while we responsibly exploit
its creative possibilities” (p. 299).
48 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Niebuhr assessed
Even in these words, it is clear that Niebuhr offered no precise science of politics
or paradigmatic moral method. Both science and ethics would have to contend
with the inconclusive character of history. Niebuhr’s historical “rumination” was
distinctly paradoxical. Although he sought in religion what Burckhardt calls the
“Archimedean point outside events,” from which the meaning of history might be
discerned, he maintained that history was stubbornly enigmatic, that “no ultimate
sense of the meaning of life is rationally compelling” (Niebuhr 1984:17). History
revealed flashes of coherence and moral meaning, but no clear pattern. Politics did
not constitute a series of rational calculations. Nor could political ideas be
entombed in doctrine. Niebuhr’s moral and historical judgment represented a sort
of “prophetic pragmatism,” a dialectical approach to politics whose two faces
paralleled the respective theses of the Human Nature and Human Destiny Gifford
Lectures. His philosophy comprised human frailty, collective excess, state-centered
foreign affairs, the tendency of states to trumpet parochial aims as universal norms,
and the ideological cloaking of the pursuit of national interests, and at its most
strident characterized social life as “a perpetual state of war” (Niebuhr 1932:19).
Alongside these “realist” precepts, Niebuhr invoked a traditional normative
theory that transcended interests and conflict in the name of justice. Taken together,
these contradictory impulses represented an ethical sensibility animated by specific
problems in the context of historical contingency and change. Ultimately,
relativism was the authentic political experience. “The trials and tribulations of
history are sometimes better schoolmasters than any amount of moral precept,”
Niebuhr noted (1942:1). Other times, presumably, they were not. Distilling a formal
ethical stance from this historical mix of power, interests, ideals, and ambiguities
required a prudential judgment cognizant of the moral and strategic complexities
of statecraft, but which nonetheless transcended satisfaction with the status quo.
As Niebuhr concluded (1932:4), “Politics will, to the end of history, be an area
where conscience and power meet, where the ethical and coercive factors of human
life will interpenetrate and work out their tentative and uneasy compromises.”
As you like it: E.H.Carr and historical relativism
The English historian and diplomat E.H.Carr carried forward this relative and
contingent view of history and politics. Carr wrote biographies of Dostoevsky,
Marx, and Bakunin, works on nationalism, socialism, and revolution, and a 10-
volume history of Soviet Russia. The focus here will be on two other works of Carr’s:
Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (1939; 2nd ed. 1946), a strikingly original analysis
of international power and morality, and What Is History? (1961), a seminal
statement on historical philosophy and method. Carr stands apart from the other
realists for his “sociology of knowledge.” This is the idea, derived from Karl Marx’s
German Ideology (1846), that man is a product of his surroundings, and that
ultimately all knowledge, including historical knowledge, is contingent upon social
HISTORY, CONTINGENCY, AND THE ROOTS OF REALISM 49
and economic forces. Carr’s sociology and general irreverence make him perhaps
the field’s sharpest observer of power and ideology masquerading as truth. Political
beliefs did not correspond to absolute and a priori principles, but were “the product
of circumstances and interests and weapons framed for the furtherance of interests”
(Carr 1946:68). Carr was bold enough to suggest that realism could not monopolize
truth either. Realism, he wrote, “often turns out in practice to be just as much
conditioned as any other mode of thought. In politics, the belief that certain facts
are unalterable or certain trends irresistible commonly reflects a lack of desire or
lack of interest to change or resist them” (ibid.: 89).
Twenty Years’ Crisis borrowed liberally from Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral
Society. Carr wished to see “utopianism penetrate the citadel of realism,” a problem
he said that Niebuhr had analyzed “with almost cynical clearsightedness” (ibid.:
91). He cited from Moral Man: “Without the ultrarational hopes and passions of
religion, no society will have the courage to conquer despair and attempt the
impossible; for the vision of a just society is an impossible one, which can be
approximated only by those who do not regard it as impossible. The truest visions
of religion are illusions, which may be partly realised by being resolutely believed”
(ibid.: 91). This passage mirrored Carr’s own outlook. Unlike Niebuhr, however,
Carr’s values were to be found in history and not outside of history. His theology
was the idea of progress. He saw history as linear rather than cyclical, and it was
this belief that unleashed his hopes for a fundamental restructuring of the
international system. “Cliché for cliché” he noted of the maxims surrounding the
historian’s craft, “I should prefer the one about freeing oneself from ‘the dead hand
of the past’” (Carr 1961:29).
Twenty Years’ Crisis: sociology of knowledge and the utopian
critique
Carr’s critique of inter-war idealism rested on the theories of Karl Mannheim.
Mannheim had attempted to transform the Marxist idea of the “false
consciousness” of the defenders of the status quo into a general tool of social
analysis. He argued that knowledge was never disinterested and detached. One’s
ideas were the product of one’s place in the social and historical fabric. The task
of critical theory was to unmask this “sociology of knowledge,” and thus arrive at
a clearer understanding of the relation between interests and ideas. As Mannheim
asserted in Ideology and Utopia (1936), critical “political discussion, is from the very
first
…the tearing off of disguises” (quoted in Buzan et al. 1993:176).
This is an apt metaphor for Carr’s Twenty Years’ Crisis, which set out to unmask
the chief creed of nineteenth-century international politics, namely the harmony
of interests. The book argued brilliantly that ideology followed interest. In a world
of haves and have nots, the haves make the laws and fix the principles. Carr saw
the doctrine of the harmony of interests arising from Jeremy Bentham’s “felicific
calculus” of “the greatest happiness good for the greatest number,” wedded to Adam
Smith’s laissez-faire faith that an “invisible hand” directed selfish interests to the
50 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
common good. In politics, this issued in several cardinal beliefs: by pursuing their
own interests, states thereby furthered the interests of the international community;
all nations shared an interest in peace; conquest did not pay; right thinking would
lead to right action; any clash of interests was the result of wrong calculation. As
Norman Angell had argued in The Great Illusion (1914), war was simply a “failure
of understanding” (p. 25). Carr noted that it was also a common tactic of the
privileged to “throw moral discredit on the under-privileged by depicting them as
disturbers of the peace.” He quoted Arnold Toynbee on a particular crisis:
“International law and order
…were in the true interests of the whole of mankind…
whereas the desire to perpetuate the region of violence in international affairs was
an anti-social desire which was not even in the ultimate interests of the citizens of
the handful of states that officially professed this benighted and anachronistic
creed” (p. 83).
Carr protested that the harmony of interests was not an absolute verity, but was
an ideology that had served to buttress the competitive capitalism and colonial rule
of Victorian England. It was “an ingenious moral device invoked, in perfect
sincerity, by privileged groups in order to justify and maintain their dominant
position” (p. 80). Carr extended this critique of the “adjustment of thought to
purpose” to the general tendency of states to couch parochial pursuits in universalist
dogma. The sanctity of treaties, the primacy of peace, the obligations of the
Covenant of the League of Nations: these were not eternal principles but reflected
the entrenched interests of the Goliath powers. “Free trade” was the paradise of the
economically strong, “solidarity” and “internationalism” the rhetoric of empire,
and “peace through law” the cty of satisfied states. As Carr noted, these principles
were “but the unconscious reflexions of national policy based on a particular
interpretation of national interest at a particular time” (p. 87). While adherents of
“utopian internationalism” accepted the nostrums of nineteenth-century politics
as universal, Carr retorted that they were bankrupt and dangerously nostalgic. With
the emergence of regional power centers and autarkic states these principles no
longer applied. Yet, international studies remained encumbered by this ideological
hangover from the Victorian Age. After 1914, Carr explained, “men’s minds
naturally fumbled their way back, in search of a new utopia, to those apparently
firm foundations of nineteenth-century peace and security” (p. 26).
The prism of progress
Carr’s sociology of knowledge led him to discern history as it was not understood
at the time. Twenty Years’ Crisis illustrates the unwitting nature of interwar principles
and pronouncements: they were in fact the products of power, economics, and
collective psychology. Carr apparently seemed to follow an orthodox “realist”
approach to using history in political science. He was explicit about the importance
of grounding theory in history: “The utopian, fixing his eyes on the future, thinks
in terms of creative spontaneity: the realist, rooted in the past, in terms of causality”
(p. 11). He cited Machiavelli’s verità effetuale as one of the “foundation-stones” of
HISTORY, CONTINGENCY, AND THE ROOTS OF REALISM 51
the realist method, suggesting that the Florentine was the first thinker to view
“history [as] a sequence of cause and effect, whose course can be analysed and
understood by intellectual effort, but not (as the utopians believe) directed by
‘imagination’” (p. 63). Nevertheless, Carr argued that the whole enterprise of
political science sprang from Seeley’s aphorism that “history is past politics, and
politics present history.” Carr would later note of this approach:
All this implies, of course, a somewhat old-fashioned belief in the lessons of
history. Everyone knows the quip that “one learns nothing from history
except that one learns nothing from history”; and we have all heard of the
generals and admirals who were busy fighting the previous war. It is inherent
in the human condition that lessons are sometimes wrongly learnt, or the
wrong lessons learnt. The positivist notion of a cast-iron structure of facts
clamped down on the passive and disembodied observer will not withstand
scrutiny, and has been discarded both by the historian and by the scientist.
The writing of history, like any other form of human inquiry is a process of
selection and interpretation intimately bound up with the preoccupations,
preconceptions, and prejudices—what is more politely called the ideology—of
the investigator. Ideology is the point where history and politics meet.
(Carr 1975:246)
Carr’s skepticism was rooted in the idealist epistemological tradition of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like Dilthey, Croce, Collingwood, Beard,
Oakeshott, and Becker, Carr held that “the social sciences— and history among them
—cannot accommodate themselves to a theory of knowledge which puts subject and
object asunder, and enforces a rigid separation between the observer and the thing
observed” (Carr 1961:158). Knowledge was not merely given, discoverable with
increased effort or superior training. It was the product of shifting social
circumstances. Carr was likewise concerned with supplanting the “fact fetishism”
of the Rankean school. He insisted that “the historian is necessarily selective. The
belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of
the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy, but one which it is very
hard to eradicate” (ibid.: 10). His likening of historical facts to fish on a
fishmonger’s slab was noted earlier.
Nonetheless, Carr believed that the historian’s task was to “master and
understand [the past] as the key to the understanding of the present” (ibid.: 29).
The rigorous historian would build hypotheses, search for historical laws, and
develop analogies. He or she would consider a “multiplicity of causes” yet “work
through the simplification, as well as through the multiplication, of causes” (ibid.:
116–18). He did not believe, however, that Rankean objectivity was possible. Instead,
he subscribed to what Mannheim termed “relational objectivity.” As Carr describes
it: “the facts of history cannot be purely objective, since they become facts of history
only in virtue of the significance attached to them by the historian. Objectivity in
history—if we are still to use the conventional term—cannot be an objectivity of fact,
52 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
but only of relation, of the relations between fact and interpretation, between past,
present, and future” (ibid.: 159). Hence, “objective” history required first, frank
recognition of the relativity of knowledge teamed with the imagination to surpass
these limits. Carr (ibid.: 163) required the historian to “rise above the limited vision
of [one’s] own situation in society and in history.” Histories proved important and
enduring to the degree that their author succeeded in this. Second, the “objective”
historian must have the capacity to project his vision into the future. Carr argued
that the historian’s standards of significance and relevance will be validated or
invalidated teleologically, for history was a “progressive science” which moved
toward broader and deeper insights into the course of events.
Like Hegel and Marx—indeed, like many of the utopians he skewered Carr settled
on the idea of progress as the principle upon which history was to be based. In
What Is History? he approvingly quoted Acton that progress is “the scientific
hypothesis on which history is to be written.” “History properly so-called,” Carr
wrote, “can be written only by those who find and accept a sense of direction in
history itself. The belief that we have come from somewhere is closely linked with
the belief that we are going somewhere. A society which has lost belief in its capacity
to progress in the future will quickly cease to concern itself with its progress in the
past.” He added that modern historiography could not survive without faith in
progress, “since it is this belief which provides it with its standard of significance,
its touchstone for distinguishing between the real and the accidental” (ibid.: 176,
165).
In this, we are to believe that Carr had discovered a point within events from
which to judge history. He essentially recasts Niebuhr in a secular mold:
The absolute in history is not something in the past from which we start; it
is not something in the present, since all present thinking is necessarily
relative. It is something still incomplete and in process of becoming—
something in the future towards which we move, which in the light of which,
as we move forward, we gradually shape our interpretation of the past. This
is the secular truth behind the religious myth that the meaning of history
will be revealed in the day of judgment.
(ibid.: 160–1)
In short, the historian’s task was to fit past events into a pattern of progress. Carr
never shrank from defending the idea of progress against bloodless skeptics and
political scientists. He ended What Is History? affirmatively:
Sir Lewis Namier warns me to eschew programmes and ideals, and Professor
Oakeshott tells me that we are going nowhere in particular and that all that
matters is to see that nobody rocks the boat, and Professor Popper wants to
keep that dear old T-model on the road by dint of a little piecemeal
engineering, and Professor TrevorRoper knocks screaming radicals on the
nose, and Professor Morison pleads for history written in a sane conservative
HISTORY, CONTINGENCY, AND THE ROOTS OF REALISM 53
spirit. I shall look out on a world in tumult and a world in travail, and shall
answer in the well-worn words of a great scientist: “And yet—it moves.”
(ibid.: 208–9)
In Twenty Years’ Crisis, history also moves, in dialectical fashion. This should not
be unexpected. As Carr argues,
The political process does not consist, as the realist believes, purely in a
succession of phenomena governed by mechanical laws of causation; nor does
it consist, as the utopian believes, purely in the application to practice of
certain theoretical truths evolved out of their inner consciousness by wise
and far-seeing people. Political science must be based on a recognition of the
interdependence of theory and practice, which can be attained only through
a combination of utopia and reality.
(p. 13)
Pressing the point, Carr starkly juxtaposed different historical and ideological
models: utopia and reality, purpose and fact, freedom and necessity, theory and
practice, intellectuals and bureaucrats, Left and Right, ethics and politics. Given
his emphasis on the conditions of knowledge, Carr’s “evidence” is drawn chiefly
from the history of political thought and expression, presumably the best barometer
of the “realities” of the time. On the utopian side, he mocked the “idealist”
statesmen, noting, for example, how Robert Cecil had assured the Assembly of the
League of Nations in 1931 that “there has scarcely ever been a period in the world’s
history when war seemed less likely than it does at the present” (p. 36); how Norman
Angell had moralized about “muddled thinking” as the barrier to world order (p.
39); how Sir John Simon had appealed to the power of public opinion during the
Manchurian crisis. Simon told the House of Commons, “when public opinion,
world opinion, is sufficiently unanimous to pronounce a firm moral
condemnation, sanctions are not needed” (p. 36). Carr noted derisively that
“Woodrow Wilson’s ‘plain men throughout the world,’ the spokesmen of ‘the
common purpose of enlightened mankind,’ had somehow transformed themselves
into a disorderly mob emitting incoherent and unhelpful noises” (p. 38). Carr then
interpreted: “The simplicity of these explanations seemed almost ludicrously
disproportionate to the intensity and complexity of the international crisis
… The
breakdown of the nineteen-thirties was too overwhelming to be explained merely
in terms of individual action or inaction. Its downfall involved the bankruptcy of
the postulates on which it was based” (p. 40).
Carr contrasted idealism with an extreme realism, which he identified with
Thrasymachus and the Athenian generals (“justice is the right of the stronger”), and
with the stance, derived from a pedestrian reading of Machiavelli, that “morality
is the product of power
…ethics become, in the last analysis, the study of reality”
(pp. 63–5). Carr’s realism also enlisted Jean Bodin, Hobbes, Francis Bacon, Baruch
Spinoza, Hegel, Oswald Spengler, and the German Geopolitik historical school,
54 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
probably a reference to Ranke, Kjellen, Treitschke, and others. Lenin’s realism is
cited: “politics
…have their own objective logic independent of the prescriptions of
this or that individual or party” (p. 66); as is Engels’ dictum that “without force
and iron ruthlessness nothing is achieved in history” (p. 102). Carr suggests that
Schopenhauer had aptly summed up the realist view of history as “consist[ing] of
the insight that, throughout the jumble of all these ceaseless changes, we have ever
before our eyes the same unchanging being, pursuing the same course to-day,
yesterday, and forever.” “Realism,” in short, was an overly determined and
pessimistic mode of thought, devoid of any spur to purposive or meaningful action,
and “plainly repugnant to the most deep-seated belief of man about himself” (p. 92).
As Hedley Bull once pointed out (1969b:628), Carr’s lively method bears all the
characteristic defects of a polemical essay. Carr’s fund of historical illustrations
vastly overstates ideological and pragmatic divisions. He drives theorists and
statesmen into two opposed camps, in the process trampling historical ambiguities
and subtleties of thought. History “as it really was” could never have been so neatly
apportioned. Nevertheless, Carr hoped that the realist and the utopian would meet,
and that international politics would evolve by way of breakthroughs set around
concession and compro mise. Invoking the logic of management—labor relations
in Twenty Years’ Crisis, he pointed to the notion of force majeure as a principle of
peaceful change. “A successful foreign policy,” he argues, “must oscillate between
the apparently opposite poles of force and appeasement” (p. 223).
Carr offers remarkably few historical examples of this fine-tuned dialectical
internationalism. He points to the shifts in Franco-German power relations and
resultant Locarno Treaty as “a simple and revealing illustration of the working of
power politics.” He argues that by 1925, “the Ruhr invasion had brought little profit
to France, and had left her perplexed as to the next step. Germany might one day
be powerful again. Germany, on the other hand, still feared the military supremacy
of France, and hankered after a guarantee. It was the psychological moment when
French fear of Germany was about equally balanced by Germany’s fear of France;
and a treaty which had not been possible two years before, and would not have
been possible five years later, was now welcome to both” (pp. 105–6). There was, of
course, no utopianism involved here. Carr’s analysis rests solely on the “objective”
power positions of France and Germany, and employs a somewhat uncomplicated
view of power.
Carr did, however, describe the Anglo-Irish pact of 1921 as a
“striking success” in peaceful change based on a mixture of “yielding to threats of
force,” and the “necessary moral foundation” of a “stock of common feeling” about
what was “just and reasonable” in relations between the two countries, and in the
readiness of both “to make sacrifices in the interest of conciliation” (pp. 220–1).
Power politics and historical judgment
Another of Carr’s paradigms for a successful foreign policy was the Munich
settlement of 1938. Munich is now widely considered the nadir of European
diplomacy in the twentieth century. Under threat from Hitler, the great powers
HISTORY, CONTINGENCY, AND THE ROOTS OF REALISM 55
presided over the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia according to ethnic
composition, with the Sudetenland to be ceded to Germany and other regions to
go to Poland and Hungary. At the time, however, many people in Britain, France,
and Germany warmly received the agreement, believing it had averted war in
Europe. Carr, too, welcomed the compromise. The first edition of Twenty Years’
Crisis (1939), written in 1938 and 1939, and dedicated “to the makers of the coming
peace,” contained a detailed strategic and moral justification for the settlement with
“Herr Hitler.” (A.J.P.Taylor called Carr’s essay “a brilliant argument for
appeasement” (quoted in Smith 1986:85).) The book was in page proof on 1
September 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland.
In the preface to the book’s second, 1946, edition, Carr noted that what he had
done was “to recast phrases
…to modify a few sentences which have invited
misunderstanding, and to remove two or three passages relating to current
controversies which have been eclipsed or put into a different perspective by the
lapse of time” (Carr 1946:vii). The most notorious passage which did not find its
way into the 1946 edition stated:
If the power relations of Europe in 1938 made it inevitable that Czecho-
Slovakia should lose part of her territory, and eventually her independence,
it was preferable (quite apart from any question of justice or injustice) that
this should come about as the result of discussion round a table in Munich
rather than as the result either of a war between the Great Powers or of a local
war between Germany and Czecho-Slovakia.
(Smith 1986:83)
Carr went on to defend the ethics of the Munich settlement as “the nearest approach
in recent years to the settlement of a major international issue by a procedure of
peaceful change,” which blended power politics with “the element of morality
…in
the form of the common recognition by the Powers, who effectively decided the
issue, of a criterion applicable to the dispute: the principle of self-determination”
(quoted in Smith 1986:84).
Hedley Bull (1969b:627) cautioned against dwelling, “with the disadvantage of
hindsight,” on Carr’s appalling misreading of Munich. The question turns on
whether or not the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia was inevitable, given the fact
of German power. Carr’s phrasing on this is cryptic, but his stance can perhaps be
traced to a philosophy that attached a belief in the “relative and pragmatic character
of thought itself” to a preoccupation with power (Carr 1946:67–8). Twenty Years’
Crisis was written “with the deliberate aim of counteracting the glaring and
dangerous defect of nearly all thinking, both academic and popular, about
international politics in Englishspeaking countries from 1919 to 1939—the almost
total neglect of the factor of power” (ibid.: vii). Overcompensating for this defect,
Carr was left without much of an anchor outside of power. This led Morgenthau
(1962b: 43) to observe of Carr: “It is a dangerous thing to be a Machiavelli. It is a
disastrous thing to be a Machiavelli without virtù.” Still, Carr was not alone among
56 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
the realists in recognizing the relative standards of judgment and action. Moreover,
Carr’s faith in progress, though impossible to reconcile with his insistence on power
politics, cannot be dismissed. It lends a melancholy air to his conclusion that
“Power goes far to create the morality convenient to itself, and coercion is a fruitful
source of consent” (Carr 1946:236). Like Niebuhr, Carr never satisfactorily
synthesized power and morality, but Carr did grasp how the tension between the
two accounted for “the complexity, the fascination and the tragedy of all political
life” (ibid.: 93).
It is perhaps ironic that Carr’s sharpest critique of realism (based, as described
above, on a polemical depiction of the tradition from Athens to Lenin), rested on
its acceptance, without moral comment, of whatever history had in store:
On the “scientific” hypothesis of the realists, reality is thus identified with
the whole course of historical evolution, whose laws it is the business of the
philosopher to investigate and reveal. There can be no reality outside the
historical process
… Condemning the past on ethical grounds has no
meaning; for in Hegel’s words, “philosophy transfigures the real which
appears unjust into the rational.” What was, is right. History cannot be judged
except by historical standards. It is significant that our historical judgments,
except those relating to a past which we can ourselves remember as the present,
always appear to start from the presupposition that things could not have
turned out otherwise than they did
… If the American War of Independence
had ended in disaster, the Founding Fathers of the United States would be
briefly recorded in history as a gang of turbulent and unscrupulous fanatics.
Nothing succeeds like success. “World history,” in the famous phrase which
Hegel borrowed from Schiller, “is the world court.”
(ibid.: 66–7)
It would be wrong to accuse Carr of harboring such an amoral view of history.
True, he did not foresee the elimination of power from political life. After all,
political ideas—all ideas—were shaped by power. However, this did not determine
the actual direction that history would take. Carr hoped that in the future power
would be staked to broader aims rather than sovereign territories. “Few things are
permanent in history,” he offered, “and it would be rash to think that the territorial
unit of power is one of them” (ibid.: 229). In Nationalism and After (1945), Carr
had history marching through a sequence of historical periods toward international
cooperation, and overcoming “the catastrophic growth of nationalism and
bankruptcy of internationalism,” which he believed was the chief reason for the
collapse of world politics (Carr 1945:17). In the final chapter of Twenty Years’ Crisis,
“Prospects for a New International Order,” Carr conceded that “it is easy to read
past history as a gradual development leading up, with occasional relapses, to [the]
consummation [of the nation-state],” and yet that “there is a clearly marked trend
towards integration and the formation of ever larger political and economic units”
HISTORY, CONTINGENCY, AND THE ROOTS OF REALISM 57
(Carr 1946:228–9). This is not the tragic cycle generally associated with realist
history.
Although embarking on the “hard ruthless analysis of reality which is the
hallmark of science,” Carr’s assertion that social thought and action, including
individual ethics, were determined by power was simply unhistorical in its
reductionism (ibid.: 10). Carr captured brilliantly the grinding weight of the status
quo. For this, his critique remains important and provocative, especially in this
neoliberal age, where “democratization,” economic integration, and the new laissez-
faire rarely receive much reflection. Still, one wonders if Carr’s insights do justice
to history or theory. His relativism led him, in the Munich case, into a moral
morass, but it also fueled a certain political naïveté. In The Soviet Impact on the
Western World (1947:3), for example, Carr touted Soviet pluralism and command
economics as the wave of the future, that “the missionary role which had been filled
in the first world war by American democracy and Woodrow Wilson had passed
in the second world war to Soviet democracy and Marshall Stalin.” No one would
deny that intellectual activity is free of the taint of interest and conviction. Ideology
may well be the point where history and politics meet, but some critical distance
is both necessary and possible.
Conclusion
In its origins, international relations theory adhered to a complex and contingent
view of history. Niebuhr and Carr expressed divergent views about human nature,
the historical process, and the standards of historical judgment, yet each, through
his own faith, underscores the possibilities of history. If by ‘science’ is meant a body
of systematically verified beliefs that is able to transcend interest and prejudice,
neither Niebuhr nor Carr was very accommodating. Niebuhr saw history as a mass
of contradiction and contingency. The gravamen of Carr’s grievance against
“realism,” ever since its classical wellsprings, was its determinism. In the next
chapters, we will see the subtleties, paradoxes, dualisms, and contradictions inherent
in early realism be eroded precisely because they are antithetical to political science.
The idea that prejudice and circumstance could affect one’s views of history and
historical process will be dismissed as a vestige of pre-scientific thinking. With the
advent of policy realism, historical laws will begin to be erected in place of
contingency, while in structural and quantitative analysis the contingent view will
fade from sight.
58 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
4
HISTORY, ANALOGY, AND POLICY
REALISM
Hans J.Morgenthau and George F.Kennan
It was noted at the beginning of the previous chapter that the policy-oriented
approach to history is at least as old as Machiavelli, whose Discourses on Livy argued
for a new activism in politics guided by “the powerful examples which history shows
us” (Machiavelli 1979:170). Like Machiavelli, the realists discussed in this chapter—
Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan—viewed history in a political context. Social
scientists may survey a large number of historical cases in the search for correlates
and causes that offer generic explanations for international behavior. These
practical theorists, however, set their sights on history that would be relevant to
America’s burgeoning global role and the demands of the cold war. Policy realism
was in this sense more a matter of prudence than of science.
My task in this chapter is to trace this relationship between history, theory, and
practice. I suggest that while classical realism is rich in historical detail, its portrayal
of history is inseparable from the realist philosophy we have explored thus far. As
Oakeshott observed, “philosophy is the world reflected in the mirror of the
philosophic eye, each image the representation of a fresh object, but each
determined by the character of the mirror itself” (introduction to Hobbes 1947:
xix). The chapter first explores Hans Morgenthau’s method of distinguishing
historical contingency from historical law, the latter being the godmother of
political science. Second, I shall look at Morgenthau’s conception of the balance
of power. In contrast to Niebuhr’s tragic conception, as a “scientific” theory it
foreshortens historical discussion and downplays political process. It is further
suggested that the appalling failures of balance-ofpower politics in the twentieth
century perhaps prompted realists to idealize the attainments of the balance in past
centuries. Third, the discussion takes up the problem of transforming ideas about
history into political practice, focusing on the historical foundations of George
Kennan’s theory of containment. Finally, the chapter revisits the tension in realist
thought between science and philosophy.
Between contingency and science: Hans J.Morgenthau and
realist history
Niebuhr and Carr toppled the idealist edifice by exposing the flaws of moral
certainty and laissez-faire, but it was Hans Morgenthau who erected a systematic
realist theory to take its place. A refugee from Hitler’s Germany, Morgenthau
conceived of politics in terms of power and interests, and was skeptical that law,
ethics, or reason could resolve political dilemmas. “The truth of political science,”
he wrote, “is the truth about power, its manifestations, its configurations, its
limitations, its implications, its laws” (Morgenthau 1962a: 37). At the same time,
Morgenthau recognized the “ineluctable tension” between ethical commands and
political necessity, and deemed the moral evaluation of power the indispensable
task of political theory. Transplanted to the gentler soil of America, tapping into
a deep realist vein instilled in the American polity by the Federalists, and evolving
symbiotically with the new internationalism of American postwar foreign policy,
this tempered realpolitik thrived. Morgenthau became the doyen of realists. It was
he, explains John Vasquez, who best “expressed, promulgated and synthesized” the
approach, becoming the “single most important vehicle for establishing the
dominance of the realist paradigm within the field” (quoted in Ferguson and
Mansbach 1988:97–8).
Scientific Man vs. Power Politics
Morgenthau’s influence on international relations originated with his treatise on
political philosophy and method, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (1946). The book
was emphatically at odds with the surging tide of behavioral social science. Begun
late in the summer of 1940, a time when Morgenthau recalls being shaken by the
fall of France, it stands alongside Oakeshott’s “Rationalism in Politics” (1962) as
one of the great dissents against the scientific-rationalist framework for political
theory and practice. Echoing Carr’s critique of scientific utopianism, Morgenthau
argued that the rationalist approach had embraced the Enlightenment belief in the
power of science, and tried to make it into an instrument of social redemption.
Political history was thus transformed into a succession of problems amenable to
scientific solutions. On the international front, it was assumed that the problem
of war would yield to refinements in international organization, legal rules, and
economic union. Morgenthau contended that this “dogmatic scientism” in political
planning and prediction was wrong-headed. “The principles of scientific reason are
always simple, consistent, and abstract; the social world is always complicated,
incongruous, and concrete.” Politics was an art and not a science. Sound governance
required “not the rationality of the engineer but the wisdom and moral strength
of the statesman” (p. 10).
Morgenthau insisted that a realistic political philosophy must reject the canons
of science, and adopt instead the quite different proposition that all politics were
power politics. He argued that human nature was multifaceted, yet that one element,
the animus dominandi, or lust for power, predominated in politics. “Power politics,
rooted in the lust for power which is common to all men [is] inseparable from
social life itself,” he contended (p. 9). At core, political acts were always aimed at
keeping, increasing, or demonstrating power. The lust for power could be
constrained and controlled, but never eliminated from politics. Morgenthau
60 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
considered it folly to view the struggle for power, as “democratic peace” proponents
did, as a phase coinciding with autocratic government, which was bound to wither
away with the democratization of foreign policy. War was neither an historical
accident nor an “aristocratic pastime or totalitarian atavism,” but was a recurrent
human tragedy (p. 47). He believed that nations were peace-loving under certain
external conditions and warlike under others, and hence was skeptical of the
Kantian position, but also of a number of historical interpretations claiming that
monarchy was the most peaceful form of government (pp. 65–7). Nor could war
be vanquished Leviathan-style by subordinating political action to a central
authority or a general body of law. Woodrow Wilson, the realists’ barn side of a
target, had told Congress in 1917, “We are at the beginning of an age in which it
will be insisted that the same standards of conduct and of responsibility for wrong
done shall be observed among nations and their governments that are observed
among the individual citizens of civilized states” (pp. 43–4). Morgenthau considered
this the “soothing logic of a specious concord” (p. 203).
Morgenthau produced as evidence of the bankruptcy of scientific rationalism a
litany of simplistic and shortsighted blueprints for international peace that had
“failed to stand the trial of history” (p. 39). Coming in for criticism are the Abbé
de Saint-Pierre’s Project for Perpetual Peace in Europe (1713–17); other philosophes and
physiocrats; Kant and Comte; Marxist formula followers; free-trading liberals; social-
engineering positivists; inter-war idealists; French planners; Wilsonian promoters
of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations; advocates of a benign
Leviathan “coordinate state”; perfectionists, moralists, and every other stripe of
internationalist, uninitiated in the “obstinate realities” of the international scene.
All of these schemes, according to Morgenthau, suffered from historical myopia.
Each “deduced from the limited experience of a certain age universal laws which
were found wanting when applied to conditions different from those under which
they were originally developed” (p. 85). He warned that such historical naïveté
courted catastrophe in an anarchic world, the inevitable analogy in 1946 being the
failure of the liberal democracies to recognize the problem of power and ally against
Hitler before it was too late.
Curiously, in the midst of Scientific Man’s assault on applied political science,
Morgenthau was signaling the way toward a rational science of international
politics. He was careful to maintain that beneath the chaos and contingency of
history there were certain perennial forces that shaped social life. These, he said,
were “the general causes of which particular events are but the outward
manifestations” (p. v). Morgenthau recognized, however, that social science was not
a detached and omniscient enterprise, but was largely socially constructed and
conditioned. Hence, “the historic relativity of all political philosophy” (p. 20).
Abstract reason was a mirage. “In the social sciences, the social conditions determine
not only the ulterior purpose but also the object of inquiry, the investigator’s
relation to it, his assumptions, methods, and immediate aims” (p. 162).
Developments in science were “carried by the irrational forces of interest and
emotion to where those forces want it to move” (p. 155). Moreover, social engineers
HISTORY, ANALOGY, AND POLICY REALISM 61
failed to grasp that political values were beyond the reach of science. Whoever
believed that science alone could reveal the mysteries of politics was the “true
dogmatist who universalizes cognitive principles of limited validity and applies
them to realms not accessible to them” (p. 220). This sphere of Morgenthau’s
thought had more in common with the sociology of knowledge we saw in
Mannheim and Carr than it has with present-day “scientific realists.” “Rational
reconstructions” of the paradigm wrongly regard Morgenthau’s work as a crude
prototype, whose scientific shortcomings have been bred out over the decades (see,
for example, Tellis 1995).
Politics Among Nations
Morgenthau made his theory explicit in the landmark work, Politics Among Nations:
The Struggle for Power and Peace, first published in 1948. Downplaying the
contingency and social construction of Scientific Man, the great text very nearly
founded the scientific study of international relations in the United States. Whereas
the field had traditionally centered on institutions, norms, current events, and
diplomatic history, Morgenthau formulated a nomothetic, or law-based, approach
to political understanding and action. His method, like Plato’s, was architectonic,
building outward from a conception of human nature to the character of the state,
the nature of the international system, and the necessary tasks of statecraft. The
design was positivist in that it sought, within limits, to detect “those elemental bio-
psychological drives” of society “that determine political relations among nations
and to comprehend the ways in which those forces act upon each other and upon
international political relations and institutions” (pp. 39, 18). The volume is rich
in historical allusion, yet, as Michael Joseph Smith (1986:141) points out, “the main
message of the book is that the crucial features of the international landscape have
remained remarkably constant over history.” Tolstoy, Thucydides, and the Dead
Sea Scrolls all attest to the ubiquity of the struggle for power.
Politics Among Nations was intended as a guidebook for the student and the
statesman alike. What Niebuhr had said in 1932 was more appropriate than ever
in the immediate postwar years: “The political situation and problem of America
in world affairs can be put in one sentence: America is at once the most powerful
and politically the most ignorant of modern nations” (quoted in Rosenthal 1991:
38). The period found US leaders sitting atop a new world order and casting about
for principles of understanding and action. Morgenthau’s book furnished both. It
offered a framework for aligning America’s great power status with a great power
foreign policy. Although Keynes once noted that every policy initiative had its
origins in the scribblings of some academic, it is impossible to trace with certainty
the intellectual promptings of particular policies. Morgenthau’s ideas, expressed in
his books, in a flood of essays in outlets from Encounter and Commentary to The
New Leader and The New York Review of Books, and in many public forums (it is
said he never turned down an invitation to lecture), helped set the tone, though
not always the content, of American statecraft. At the same time, Morgenthau
62 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
sought to make realism a public philosophy. He considered this a crucial task in a
democracy, which, as de Tocqueville observed, may be the worst form of
government when it came to conducting foreign relations. Particularly in the
United States, the constitutional separation of powers, partisan politics, regional
differences, and the various international affinities and affections of a nation of
immigrants, could fuel a cacophonous foreign policy. Morgenthau, like all the
realists, believed in the adage that politics should end at the water’s edge.
The thesis of Politics Among Nations was readily accessible. Morgenthau’s bedrock
belief, though not stated explicitly in the book’s first edition, was that politics were
governed by “objective laws that have their roots in human nature” (p. 4). It was
possible, therefore, to develop a rational theory of politics that reflected those laws.
Again, the lust for power, “universal in time and space,” was his focus (p. 38). As
he later explained, the concept provided “a kind of rational outline of politics, a
map of the political scene. Such a map does not provide a complete description of
the political landscape as it is in a particular period of history. It rather provides
the timeless features of its geography distinct from their ever changing historic
setting” (Morgenthau 1962a:48).
The power motive was more than a theoretical prop. Morgenthau also considered
it the constitutive principle of politics as a distinct sphere of human activity. By
definition, all politics were power politics. International behavior that hinged on
another variable was walled off from the political realm. Economic, cultural, or
environmental concerns, for example, were not “political” relations inasmuch as
they did not involve power. The boundaries of politics and power thus coincided
neatly—probably too neatly. We shall see in
the subtle bonds between political power and other state and societal functions.
Morgenthau’s view of power was noteworthy for its catholicity, however. By power,
he referred not to brute force or political violence, but to the psychological leverage
of “man’s control over the minds and actions of other men” (p. 32). Those weary
of material-realist recitals of tanks, warheads, and men at arms will appreciate
Morgenthau’s inclusion of geography, industry, natural resources, including “the
power of oil,” military preparedness, population, national morale and character,
effective institutions, and diplomatic competence. These myriad forms of power,
complicated by “all the contingencies of history and nature” ensured that evaluating
national power would always be an imperfect art (pp. 172–4).
Morgenthau married this belief in the ubiquity of power to the pursuit of state
interests. The result was his famous formulation of “interest defined in terms of
power.” Here was an organizing principle for a discipline adrift:
We assume that statesmen think and act in terms of interest defined as power,
and the evidence of history bears that assumption out. That assumption
allows us to retrace and anticipate, as it were, the steps a statesman—past,
present, or future—has taken or will take on the political scene. We look over
his shoulder when he writes his dispatches; we listen in on his conversation
with other statesmen; we read and anticipate his very thoughts. Thinking in
HISTORY, ANALOGY, AND POLICY REALISM 63
terms of interest defined as power, we think as he does, and as disinterested
observers we understand his thoughts and actions perhaps better than he, the
actor on the political scene, does himself.
(p. 5)
Following these guideposts of power and interests, researchers would not be misled
by professed motivations or purported ideological preferences. Hypocrisy between
diplomatic thought and practice was the rule. Morgenthau regarded ideas and
ideology as “pretexts and false fronts behind which the element of power, inherent
in all politics, can be concealed” (p. 103). Ideology was a palliative that rendered
involvement in power politics psychologically and morally acceptable to leaders
and their constituents. Morgenthau encouraged students of politics to be skeptical
of the “official” rationale for diplomatic decisions, but also to distrust the rationale
that the diplomat himself believed he was fulfilling. Unswerving research would
sever the knot of ideology, and assign causes to political acts based on realist
assumptions. This was the essence of Morgenthau’s “empirical” method: skeptical
toward science as a means of social salvation, yet supportive of a modest science of
realism.
One caveat before we move on to Morgenthau’s views on the relationship
between history and theory: although Morgenthau subscribed to a bleak view of
history and human nature, it would be wrong to depict him as international
relations’ dark prince. Describing politics in the hard-boiled terms of power and
interests was not equivalent to approving of this condition. As Georg
Schwarzenberger (1951:3) observed, “It may be ‘Machiavellian’ to indulge in power
politics but it would be too much honour to describe in such terms scientists whose
questionable privilege it is to analyse such relations. As a type they are not
sufficiently demoniac to warrant the description of professors of international
immorality.” Realists believe that recognizing the role of power is the first step
toward addressing the problem of war. Likewise, setting the national interest as a
normative standard is not an invitation to excess. Realists believe that there are
limits to interests, and that this renders the principle a source of moderation and
restraint.
History and theory
Morgenthau’s approach was deeply “grounded in history.” He insisted that political
argument and understanding conform to “the historical processes as they actually
take place,” he hewed to a Burkean predominance of historical precedent over
abstract principle, and he adduced abundant historical evidence in support of his
positions (Morgenthau 1985:4). As was mentioned earlier, Morgenthau also
adopted a nomothetic outlook on history. He contended that “objective laws” or
the “static essence” of politics could be sifted from the chaos of historical
contingencies.
64 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
On this last point, Morgenthau’s method broke with previous approaches to the
study of international politics. As we have seen, earlier theorists focused more on
the storminess and unpredictability of the international sphere, and less on the laws
that might govern state behavior under these conditions. Morgenthau formalized
his predecessors’ attention to human nature, making it into the linchpin of realist
science. He argued (ibid.: 20) that “the events [political analysts] must try to
understand are, on the one hand, unique occurrences. They happened in this way
only once and never before or since. On the other hand, they are similar, for they
are manifestations of social forces. Social forces are the product of human nature
in action.” He also believed that history revealed a repetitiveness and constancy in
certain “rational” political choices that made politics susceptible to theoretical
analysis—although he conceded that the persistence of “irrational” behavior worked
against the elaboration of theory.
Morgenthau’s method entailed two steps. The first was inductive and intuitive,
involving philosophical thought on history and human nature. Although derived
by way of historical reflection, this insight, once attained, was supra-historical: it
tapped into a “store of objective, general truths” that transcended time and space
(Morgenthau 1962a: 45). Whereas the natural scientist discovered laws through
observed uniformities in nature, discerning social laws required a leap from history
to philosophy. The result was knowledge, not of “single facts but of the eternal laws
by which man moves in the social world.” As Morgenthau (1946:219–20) put it,
“The Aristotelian truth that man is a political animal is true forever; the truths of
the natural sciences are true only until other truths have supplanted them.”
Reflecting on the perennial problems of government, “more-than-scientific man”
became “the representative of true reason,” the “true realist” who “does justice to
the true nature of things.”
Obversely, a defective philosophy imposed a false logic on history. Morgenthau
believed this had been the case with the rational-scientists, whom history had
provided with “false analogies but had taught
…nothing.” Rationalists
misconstrued history as a struggle between reason and unreason, and detected in
the historical record only “confirmation of, or a deviation from, the rational scheme
with which they approach the political reality.” “What Carl L.Becker has said of
the eighteenth-century philosophers is true of their nineteenth- and twentieth-
century heirs: ‘The eighteenth-century Philosophers, like the medieval scholastics,
held fast to a revealed body of knowledge, and they were unwilling and unable to
learn anything from history which could not
…be reconciled with their faith” (ibid.:
37–8).
The second step of Morgenthau’s approach involved deduction and empirical
testing, as philosophical propositions were plunged back into history. It was this
experimentation with “rational hypotheses” which gave “theoretical meaning to the
facts of international politics,” and made the scientific writing of political history
possible (Morgenthau 1985:5). Again, value-free political inquiry was a phantom.
Empirical claims stemmed from general principles—often unacknowledged—about
humanity and society. Hence, Morgenthau sought to combine philosophy and
HISTORY, ANALOGY, AND POLICY REALISM 65
science into a coherent understanding of politics. He argued that due to an academic
rift, particularly deep in the United States, between philosophy and science, political
philosophy had grown sterile and irrelevant to the issues of the day; political science,
severed from the history of political thought, had grown intellectually starved. The
political philosophers he most admired—Aristotle, Kautilya, Hobbes, Machiavelli,
Weber, perhaps Nietzsche—were also, in Morgenthau’s estimation, great political
scientists, who “deriv[ed] concrete, empirically verifiable propositions from abstract
philosophical ones” (Morgenthau 1962a:41).
Thus, an amalgam of science and philosophy carried Morgenthau from history
to theory and back into history. At the same time, Morgenthau believed that the
uncertainties of history signaled the limits of political science. Although the
purpose of political science was to understand politics in a theoretical manner, this
was an inherently tentative enterprise. Political science could “indicate certain
trends and
…state the possible conditions under which one of those trends is most
likely to materialize in the future.” It could go no further without “losing itself in
unscientific speculation” (Morgenthau 1946: 134–7). Here the scholar and the
charlatan parted ways. It was in this context that he claimed (1967:211) that modern
theorists and researchers in international relations were “repelled by history; for
history is the realm of the accidental, the contingent, the unpredictable.” History,
which had embodied the ambiguities of situations and actors, had been replaced
by historical “data.” Quantitative researchers, systems analysts, and other
sophisticated research strategists went about scaling the peaks of science without
looking to see how solid the rock was in which they were planting their pitons.
This conceit of method left modern theorists with no historical sense of the
uncertainties of politics and the intractability of the human condition.
This kind of bald empiricism was also profoundly anti-theoretical. Again,
Morgenthau believed that theory stood apart from history; it transcended mere
facts to capture timeless features of the social landscape. In history too, Morgenthau
believed that a divide between theory and fact was untenable. History, he said,
echoing Seeley, was “philosophy learned from examples” (Morgenthau 1962a:328).
Great historical narratives sought out the nexus between individual events and
perennial human concerns. Thucydides and Ranke, for instance, were deeply
philosophical historians, for whom theory was “like the skeleton which, invisible
to the naked eye, gives form and function to the body” (ibid.: 65). Morgenthau also
commended Arnold Toynbee’s work as an antidote to the “unproblematic poverty
of scientific historiography,” and claimed that the English historian had “awakened
the historic imagination from its dogmatic slumber,” and had reached a plane of
comprehension “beyond the ken of empirical verification.” At this high level,
Morgenthau considered the difference between history and international relations
as one of form rather than substance. According to Morgenthau (1962b:55–6), the
historian “presents his theory in the form of a historical recital using the
chronological sequence to events as demonstration of his theory. The theoretician,
dispensing with the historical recital, makes the theory explicit and uses historic
facts in bits and pieces to demonstrate his theory.”
66 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Policy history
This is essentially how Morgenthau used history. He did not refer theory to the
historical record in a rigorous way, through either formal case studies or large n
analyses. He was skeptical that worthwhile quantitative work, at least, was possible.
Rather, he carefully selected historical vignettes that illustrated realist principles:
The League of Nations’ niggling retort to the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939
showed the futility of legalism; Richard Cobden’s Victorian speeches brought home
the folly of commercial liberalism; the protracted “great game” between Britain and
Russia for control of Central Asia demonstrated the competitive balance of power;
quibbling about the design of the negotiating table at the Paris peace talks on
Vietnam illustrated the policy of prestige; Japan’s euphemistic Asian “co-prosperity
zone” exemplified the ideology of imperialism.
On larger policy questions, Morgenthau developed more elaborate historical
reference. Consider his approach to two issues in American foreign policy: the war
in Vietnam and US foreign aid. Morgenthau argued that the Vietnam debate was
typical of a revolutionary age: How should a country respond to a hostile political
movement that transcended national boundaries? What bearing did a universal
political creed have on national interests? How to deal with revolutions that might
be hijacked by true believers? Morgenthau (1965:20) noted that “twice before in
modern history, these questions had to be answered.” First, there was the example
of Britain’s posture toward Revolutionary France, a great power which, like the
Soviet Union, seemed to be the fountainhead of a worldwide political religion.
Morgenthau broached possible diplomatic avenues by sketching out the debate
among Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox, and William Pitt, then British Prime
Minister. Fox, apparently, had argued that England was not threatened by France,
or, for that matter, by the principles the Revolution espoused. Burke held,
conversely, that the Revolution subverted the very “order of things, under which
our part of the world has so long flourished
…We are at war with a principle…of
which there is no shutting out by fortresses or excluding by territorial limits. No
lines of demarcation can bound the Jacobin empire. It must be extirpated in the
place of its origin, or it will not be confined to that place” (ibid.: 20). It was left to
Pitt to apply the standard of the national interest. What was at stake, said the Prime
Minister, was “security—security against a danger, the greatest that ever threatened
the world—security against a danger which never existed in any past period of
society
…We saw that it was to be resisted no less by arms abroad, than by precaution
at home; that we were to look for protection no less to the courage of our forces
than to the wisdom of our councils; no less to military effort than to legislative
enactment” (ibid.: 20).
Morgenthau’s second precedent for Vietnam was British Foreign Minister
Castlereagh’s discriminating diplomacy in the 1820s. At the time, the absolute
monarchs of Europe were terrified of the various liberal and nationalist movements
afoot on the continent. Russia, in particular, seemed to be using antagonism toward
liberalism in order to mask its own imperial ambitions. Amid this aristocratic
HISTORY, ANALOGY, AND POLICY REALISM 67
hysteria, Castlereagh was the picture of restraint. He opposed Russian expansion,
but refused to identify liberalism per se as the enemy of Britain. As he reportedly
admonished the Russian ambassador in 1820, “It is proposed now to overcome the
revolution; but so long as this revolution does not appear in more distinct shape,
so long as this general principle is only translated into events like those of Spain,
Naples and Portugal —which, strictly speaking, are only reforms, or at the most
domestic upsets, and do not attack materially any other State—England is not ready
to combat it” (ibid.: 21). At the same time Castlereagh wrote to his brother: “It is
not possible for the British Government to take the field in fruitlessly denouncing
by a sweeping joint declaration the revolutionary dangers of the present day.”
British leaders could “not regard mere declarations as of any real or solid value
independent of some practical measure actually resolved upon; and what that
measure is which can be generally and universally adopted against bad principles
overturning feeble and ill-administered governments, they have never yet been able
to divine” (ibid.: 21). Strategic choices were to be driven by interests and considered
in context.
On foreign aid, Morgenthau argued that behind the label of “economic
development” was a process in the nature of the time-honored practice of political
bribery. The main difference was that the “elaborate machinery” of government aid
—legions of economists and development experts—was less effective than old-
fashioned diplomats in achieving political goals. Recognizing this, states should
adopt a more rational scheme of apportioning aid. Morgenthau noted that in the
past it had been “proper and common” for governments to pay a pension—a bribe
—to foreign ministers and ambassadors from other countries. Sir Henry Wooten,
Britain’s eminent ambassador to Venice in the seventeenth century, received such
a tribute. The Elizabethan representative to Madrid, Lord Robert Cecil, secured a
pension from the Spanish court. In the decades before the Revolution, French
officials had plied Austrian statesmen with lavish subsidies. Diplomats were also
paid for their cooperation in concluding treaties. At the signing of the Treaty of
Basel of 1795, by virtue of which Prussia agreed to withdraw from the war against
France, the French government gave 30,000 francs to Prussian Minister Hardenberg,
who complained of the meagerness of the sum. In 1801, the Margrave of Baden
earmarked 500,000 francs for “diplomatic presents,” of which French Foreign
Minister Talleyrand received 150,000. Morgenthau reported that “it was originally
intended to give him only 100,000, but the amount was increased after it had
become known that he had received from Prussia a snuffbox worth 66,000 francs
as well as 100,000 francs in cash” (Morgenthau 1962b: 256–7). The point was that
what appeared to modern eyes as scandal and graft, in fact represented what had
traditionally been a forthright way of securing political advantage.
These are examples of policy history: a way of illustrating historically the
principles and direction of statecraft. The method is more prudential than
empirical. “What happened” was less critical than the “moral” or “lesson” derived
from events, which was generally at the expense of the historical process, and often
devoid of actual policy content. The moral on Vietnam was that interests were not
68 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
infinite. Statesmen should not drag crusades into the political realm, where interests
should predominate. Having made this point, whether or not the cases chosen were
analogous to Vietnam was not, in the end, terribly significant. The lesson on foreign
aid had to do with the primacy of politics. International aid should be part of a
coherent foreign policy firmly under political control. Morgenthau’s “pristine”
examples of political money helped cut through the tangle of ideology to reveal
the political nature of foreign aid. That past statesmen may have placed personal
interests ahead of national ones, or that the documents on French subsidies to
Austria were released by the revolutionary council as evidence of the corruption of
the ancien régime, was, again, of marginal importance.
The method is very effective. Analogies are clearly stated, doubts are dispelled,
and the logic advanced seems inescapable. Yet, for all its richness, the approach is
selective and anecdotal, apparently driven by the realist world view. Although
Morgenthau is generally considered an inductivist, in these instances the principles
precede the history. Rather than plunging theory into history, this is more a case
of using history to confirm propositions that have already been established
philosophically. The principles being argued might be sound, but it is debatable
how “scientific” they are. At the first, intuitive, step of Morgenthau’s method,
understandably no historical protocols or “rules of evidence” are offered; but none
is posed at the “empirical” stage either. Without knowing if the cases are
representative, one cannot uphold in any rigorous way the general validity of the
theory.
To Morgenthau, this line of criticism would presume more certainty than social
science can provide. As Aristotle said, any inquiry could only be as precise as the
subject matter allowed. Throughout his work, starting with the disclaimers of
Scientific Man, Morgenthau maintained that there were no absolutes in politics.
Hence, his “modest expectations of a circumspect theory” (Morgenthau 1966:65).
This skepticism did not, however, deter him from making strong historical claims:
that “no nation has ever been completely immune” from “that iron law of
international politics, that legal obligations must yield to the national interest”
(Morgenthau 1951:144); that attempts to avert war through collective action,
disarmament, or institutions were “doomed to failure”; that misjudging national
power was the definitive reason that states declined. Morgenthau’s strongest
“historical” arguments were more axiomatic than empirical. The principles invoked
may reside, with Toynbee’s ideas, beyond the ken of empirical verification. This
begs a crucial question for classical realists: how does one translate historical
“wisdom”—which surely exists; there is a difference in historical awareness between
the statesman and the public administrator—into defensible political understanding
and action? We take up this question now in regard to the balance of power, and
below, in our discussion of George Kennan’s historical approach to containment.
HISTORY, ANALOGY, AND POLICY REALISM 69
History and the balance of power
Realists view the balance of power as one of the mainsprings of international
politics. International laws and norms are important, but the balance of power is
the surest curb on the untrammeled exercise of state power. Indeed, the balance
makes possible the existence of a diverse community of states. Perhaps inevitably,
realists projected this image back into history, emphasizing events that
demonstrated the balance and privileging early advocates of the approach.
Although the balance of power idea enjoys wide currency, its meaning and
significance have been bandied about for three centuries. The anonymous author
of Europe’s Catechism (1741) called the balance “an equal Distribution of Power
among the Princes of Europe, as makes it impractical for the one to disturb the
Repose of the other” (quoted in Sheehan 1996:2). Burke was ambivalent toward the
practice. He believed strongly that it preserved the independence of weak nations,
yet he also believed that balance of power policies and the web of alliances they
produced in fact spread conflict. The strategy, he wrote, had “been the original of
innumerable and fruitless wars
… The foreign ambassadors constantly residing in
all courts, the negotiations incessantly carrying on, spread both confederacies and
quarrels so wide, that whenever hostilities commence, the theater of war is always
of a prodigious extent” (quoted in Ferguson and Mansbach 1988:193). G.Lowes
Dickenson, a promoter of the League of Nations, contended in The International
Anarchy (1926) that no strategy had been more perilous, for “all history shows every
balance has ended in war” (quoted in Smith 1986:58). Butterfield (1966:133) notes
that “more than most of our basic political formulas, this one seems to come from
the modern world’s reflections on its own experience.” George Liska pointed to a
“misplaced desire for precision in a concept that is at once the dominant myth and
the fundamental law of interstate relations” (quoted in Sheehan 1996:2).
M.S.Anderson suggests that this slippery concept has too often served as a
“substitute for thought” (quoted in Schroeder 1994b: 6). The historian A.F.Pollard
summed up this conceptual riot: “Like ‘liberty,’ ‘independence,’ and ‘the freedom
of the seas’ or of the straits, the balance of power may mean almost anything; and
it is used not only in different senses by different people, or in different senses by
the same people at different times, but in different senses by the same person at the
same time” (quoted in Gulick 1967: v).
Morgenthau went a long way toward clearing up this confusion. He conceived
of the balance in two main ways. First, he saw it as “a universal social phenomenon”
signifying “stability within a system composed of a number of autonomous forces”
(Morgenthau 1985:188). In international politics, the balance acted as “arbiter” of
the two “basic patterns” of conduct—that of “status quo” states interested in
preserving the existing distribution of power, and that of “imperialist” states
interested in its revision or overthrow. If one assumed that states were concerned
with their power positions relative to other states, it was reasonable to expect that
efforts to keep pace with, or even outstrip, their competitors would ensue.
Morgenthau carried this logic a step further. Whereas Niebuhr had viewed the
70 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
balance as a deliberate human construct, Morgenthau saw it as “inevitable” and
“mechanistic.” “The aspiration for power on the part of several nations, each trying
either to maintain or overthrow the status-quo, leads of necessity to a configuration
that is called the balance of power and to policies that aim at preserving it.” The
balance conveyed the force of nature. Morgenthau pointed to parallels in the
“automatic stabilizing processes” of the human body and the “social homeostasis”
of society, and extended these analogies to the international sphere (ibid.: 187, 190).
Second, the balance provided a normative framework for political order. It was
a device for preserving the system and the diverse elements it comprised. One of
the earliest normative expressions of the balance of power, the Preamble to the
Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, which concluded the War of the Spanish Succession,
adopted an almost idealistic tone, noting that “a just Balance of Power
…is the best
and most solid foundation of mutual friendship and a lasting general concord”
(quoted in Sheehan 1996:16). For Morgenthau the virtues of the practice lay more
in the independent liberties it secured. Save for the balance, he argued, “one element
will gain ascendancy over the others, encroach upon their interests and rights, and
may ultimately destroy them” (Morgenthau 1985:189). Morgenthau found a robust
model in Federalist 51, one of the essays written by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay,
and James Madison and published pseudonymously in 1787 and 1788. Federalist
51 argued that “inventions of prudence” must be fashioned to check and balance
power:
This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better
motives, might be traced to the whole system of human affairs, private as
well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate
distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the
several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other—
that the private interests of every individual may be a sentinel over the public
rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the
distribution of the supreme powers of the state.
(ibid.: 189)
In a domestic setting, such as that envisioned by the Federalists, the need for the
balance was ameliorated by shared interests, common values, and, most of all, the
central authority of the state. The international sphere, where norms were erratic
and overarching authority nonexistent, relied more starkly on the balance for
political order.
The balance of power, then, was both a species of “natural history” and a
diplomatic institution, a fact as well as a norm. Morgenthau envisioned two ideal
types of international balance: direct opposition (bipolarity), and competitive
equilibrium (multipolarity). Historically, these configurations had comprised
interrelated sub-systems as well: in Central and Eastern Europe, Italy, the Balkans,
Korea, the Southern Cone of Latin America, and elsewhere according to the period.
The “balance” was, in fact, dynamic. As British Foreign Minister George Canning
HISTORY, ANALOGY, AND POLICY REALISM 71
had implied, “Is [the balance of power] not a standard perpetually varying, as
civilization advances, and as new nations spring up, and take their place among
established political communities?” (ibid.: 210–11).
As the expansion of the international system quickened in the nineteenth
century, the “main weights” of the balance migrated to the periphery. The Monroe
Doctrine reproduced old-world rivalries in the new. Colonialism extended the
system to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. By 1914, virtually no region of the
world was untouched by the “European” balance. For the first time in history, the
stage was set for world war. Amid the flux of the system and the regional rivalries
it contained, the balance dictated continuous interventions and adjustments. Here
the many faces of power gave way to more material ones, as balancing entailed
territorial compensations (whose “tidy mechanics” Edward Vose Gulick (1967:251)
called “quid pro quo with a measuring cup”), the partition of states (as in the Polish
case), arms build-ups (almost never disarmament), and the formation of alliances.
Particular responsibility fell to the “holder of the balance”—usually Britain acting
from its position of “splendid isolation”—to form and change alliances and
alignments as the balance required.
Alternative explanations
Balance-of-power theory has largely coincided with balance-of-power
historiography, particularly in regard to the European and Anglo-American
experience. The medievalist historian William Stubbs suggested in 1886 that the
balance was “the principle which gives unity to the political plot of European
history” (quoted in Sheehan 1996:169). A century earlier, Burke had extended this
logic outward. He observed that “If Europe does not conceive the independence
and the equilibrium of the empire to be in the very essence of the system of balance
of power in Europe
…all the politics of Europe for more than two centuries have
been miserably erroneous” (quoted in Morgenthau 1985:220). A formidable
historical school has grown up around the idea of the balance of power, including
Thucydides, Giovanni Rucellai, Francesco Guicciardini, François Fénelon, Ranke,
Edward Gibbon, AlbrechtCarrié, Ludwig Dehio, A.J.P.Taylor, Winston Churchill,
Gulick, and many others.
Paul Schroeder, however, has been a powerful revisionist in this regard. His work
deserves special mention. Schroeder claims that he cannot construct a history of
Europe from 1648 to 1945 around the principle Stubbs had proclaimed. Looking
at the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War, the First
World War, and the Second World War, Schroeder finds that most states (great and
small) when faced with crucial threats to their security and independence, responded
in other (less costly and less provocative) ways. These included bandwagoning (i.e.,
choosing to join “the stronger side for sake of protection and payoffs, even if this
meant insecurity vis-à-vis the protecting power and a certain sacrifice of
independence”), a practice “historically more common than balancing”; hiding
from and ignoring threats; declaring neutrality or adopting a defensive posture;
72 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
and attempting to transcend conflict through some institutional arrangement
(Schroeder 1994a: 116–18; see also Sheehan 1996:162–7).
Consider Schroeder’s views on the Napoleonic Wars and the Second World War.
He asserts that during the Napoleonic struggles “every major power in Europe
except Great Britain—Prussia, Austria, Russia, Spain— bandwagoned as France’s
active ally for a considerable period. Wars continued to break out mainly not
because European states tried to balance against France as a hegemonic power, but
because Napoleon’s ambition and lawless conduct frustrated their repeated efforts
to hide or bandwagon” (Schroeder 1994a: 121). Not until Napoleon’s signal defeat
at Leipzig in October 1813 did his coalition break up, with smaller states flocking
—bandwagoning—to the winning allied side. The pattern reemerged during the
Second World War, as Germany’s mounting power and militarism prompted
extensive hiding and bandwagoning across the continent. Belgium, Holland,
Denmark, and Norway chose neutrality, while at Munich, Chamberlain and
Daladier attempted a partnership for peace with Germany. Existing alliances that
might have checked Hitler collapsed rather than solidified. The FrenchCzech-
Russian compact had ceased to exist at Munich, and the Little Entente of
Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia was moot by 1935, when Yugoslavia
began colluding with Germany. Mussolini allied with Hitler in May 1939, and
Molotov and Ribbentrop affirmed their unholy pact that August. During the course
of the war, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Vichy France “sided” with Hitler.
Neutral Sweden, Turkey, Switzerland, Spain, and Argentina leaned toward Germany
as long as the war appeared to be going Berlin’s way.
In a study of nineteenth-century Europe, Schroeder (1989) notes that the idea of
the balance of power seems “indispensable” in making sense of the Congress system,
yet he contends that such a balance was a rare bird in the diplomatic language (and
presumably thought) of the period. Statesmen were more given to explain and
justify policies in terms of preserving peace, observing treaties and legal rights,
upholding the social order, thwarting revolution, and satisfying national interests,
honor, or popular opinion. More importantly, Schroeder finds that this distinction
holds for diplomatic practice as well. The Congress countered threats not by
forming “blocking coalitions,” as a means of balancing power or threats, but by
attempting to incorporate the renegade state into a restraining alliance or
partnership. He calls this arrangement “political equilibrium”:
political equilibrium required that (1) the rights, influence and vital interests
claimed by individual states in the international system be somehow balanced
against the rights, influence and vital interests claimed by other states and
the general community, and (2) that a balance or harmony exist between the
goals pursued by individual states, the requirements of the system, and the
means used to promote one’s interests. Oversimplified, political equilibrium
meant a balance of satisfactions, a balance of rights and obligations and a
balance of performance and payoffs, rather than a balance of power.
(ibid.: 143)
HISTORY, ANALOGY, AND POLICY REALISM 73
Schroeder concludes that the statecraft undergirding Europe’s nineteenth-century
repose meshes better with an explanation based on norms, laws, and interests than
on a competitive balance of power. Indeed, he infers that “pure balance of power
politics destroys political equilibrium rather than sustains it” (ibid.: 135). He argues
that in the decade before 1914, the equilibrium was supplanted by a resurgent
competitive balance, which, especially by undermining the legitimacy of Austria,
set the stage for the conflagration that followed.
The fact that this is contested historiographic ground does not invalidate balance-
of-power theory. Bandwagoning, hiding, transcending, and equilibrium are, in
effect, competing concepts with which to explain state strategies. We will see in the
next chapter that bandwagoning is generally associated with weak states. A
distinction between short- and long-term outcomes would perhaps be illuminating
as well. Schroeder’s illustrations do suggest that in significant instances there were
a number of “rational” choices open to states —indeed, there were evidently times
when national interests were defined in ways that clashed with the balance of power.
The balance is perhaps a more ambivalent concept than many realists allow.
Schroeder hews to a more legalistic or associative view of state practices than most
realists do. However, fixity on realist theory can also close off harder-bitten
interpretations of history. As one student of Clausewitz notes, “The century 1815–
1914 is conveniently
…pictured as a century of comparative peace, stability, and
progress in Europe. Another way of seeing it, grimmer but per-haps more
instructive, is as an incubation period” (Anatol Rappoport in Clausewitz 1968:27).
Despite Morgenthau’s focus on the balance as “the very law of life” of a system
of independent states, he constantly conceded its failings: its historical unreality,
its uncertainty, and its inadequacy as a moral benchmark (Morgenthau 1962a: 330).
In its manifestations, the balance would only ever approximate its theoretical ideal.
The imprecision of gauging power led states to seek not just a margin of safety, but
an absolute superiority in power. States
must actually aim not at a balance—that is, equality—of power, but at
superiority of power in their own behalf
…since no nation can foresee how
large its miscalculations will turn out to be, all nations must ultimately seek
the maximum of power obtainable under the circumstances
… The limitless
aspiration for power, potentially always present
…in the power drives of
nations, finds in the balance of power a mighty incentive to transform itself
into an actuality.
(Morgenthau 1985:227–8)
The security dilemma obtained even in a balanced system, with power racing rather
than power balancing the rule. Policies aimed at maintaining the balance of power
were the same policies that destabilized the balance and led to war.
Morgenthau nevertheless insisted that the idea of the balance was sound: “The
instability of the international balance of power is due not to the faultiness of the
74 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
principle but to the particular conditions under which the principle must operate
in a society of sovereign nations” (ibid.: 187). The conditions that produced that
idea were unique: eighteenth-century Europe. That era represented “the golden age
of the balance of power in theory as well as in practice. It was during that period
that most of the literature on the balance of power was published and that the
princes of Europe looked to the balance of power as the supreme principle to guide
their conduct in foreign affairs” (ibid.: 209). At the time, European politics were
radically multipolar. Administratively, the continent was a patchwork of fiefdoms,
duchies, and principalities, with hundreds of sovereign “states” in Germany alone.
At the time as well, realpolitik truly was the “sport of kings,” with rulers abandoning
partners and embracing new ones with all the promiscuity of a masked ball. Back
home, rulers were free to commit blood and treasure to the cause, unencumbered
by domestic sentiment or, apparently, ethical concerns. When wars did occur, they
issued, as Gibbon said, in “temperate and undecisive contests” (ibid.: 234). The
result was a fluid international system marked by fickle loyalties, constant intrigue,
and endless permutations of force. Morgenthau contended that this blend of power
and suspicion constrained international actors. Since risks were so difficult to
calculate, states tended to be intensely risk averse, thus checking their own ambitions
and preserving the system. Like the chaos of Adam Smith’s competitive capitalism
from which order nevertheless emerged, here, too, swirling uncertainties gave rise
to a sort of order. (We will see in the next chapter that neorealists take the opposite
view, that the fewer the centers of power, the more stable the system.)
These conditions have receded ever since. The international system transformed
itself into what Morgenthau called the “new” balance of power. The number of
influential actors shrank from hundreds in the eighteenth century to scores in the
nineteenth, to less than a dozen at the outbreak of the First World War, to two at
the end of the Second World War. Militarism and propaganda overran the idea of
the balance. Nationalism became a driving force in politics. Entire populations and
economies were mobilized for war, bent on total victory. The magnitude of US and
Soviet power stripped Britain of its traditional balancing role. The “empty spaces”
of Asia and Africa, where the great powers had vented their lusts without destroying
the European core, became sovereign states. Eventually the “flexibility and
uncertainty” of the earlier balance gave way to the grinding impact of the cold war,
of “two giants eyeing each other with watchful suspicion” (ibid.: 379).
For Morgenthau, this mix of structure and ideology poisoned the rational
conduct of foreign policy. At times, Morgenthau was a fervent cold warrior. He
believed that the United States consistently underestimated Russian power and, on
the heels of the Soviet Union’s successful atomic tests in 1949, he urged the country
to embark, with “frantic speed,” on a crash program of rearmament as a “matter
not of political necessity but of national survival” (quoted in Smith 1986:150, 153).
More often, though, Morgenthau was a cold war critic. His detached analysis and
skepticism of ideology led him to a more circumspect view of Soviet intentions
than we saw, for example, with Niebuhr. He condemned the doctrinal mindset of
American strategists, and their inability to discriminate among interests abroad.
HISTORY, ANALOGY, AND POLICY REALISM 75
Echoing Burke, he decried the fettering network of alliances that American
“pactomania” had wrought. Nothing signaled the corruption of the balance of
power as clearly as the war in Vietnam. Since the mid-1950s, Morgenthau had
warned against military involvement in Indochina, and his growing frustration
with American policies—holding fast to what he called “the doctrine of war without
end” —is evident in his stream of essays as the war unfolded (1968).
The Vietnam
debacle even prompted Morgenthau, in the 1978 edition of Politics Among Nations,
to consider the possibilities of a “pathological,” or “countertheory” of international
relations centered on irrational choices.
Romanticizing international society
Perhaps the greatest differences between the old and new balance of power lay in
the concept’s normative underpinnings. Politics Among Nations can be read as a long
lament for the demise of “international society,” by which Morgenthau meant that
system of aristocratic mores that had governed the great dance of European
diplomacy. In Morgenthau’s stylized account of the era, the war of all against all
was mediated by a set of rules. Elite values were cosmopolitan; diplomats shared a
common language (French); they pursued a closely-held harmony of interests; and
their masters were less hampered than their twentieth-century counterparts by
domestic politics and plodding bureaucracies. Moreover, the legitimacy of power
politics was unquestioned. Morgenthau’s attachment to this period of “moral and
political unity of Europe” is extraordinary (Morgenthau 1985:236). It is a romantic
notion of a historic Europe united in interests and anchored by the balance of
power. Morgenthau cites the eighteenth-century legal theorist, Eméric Vattel:
Europe forms a political system, a body where the whole is connected by the
relations and different interests of nations inhabiting this part of the world.
It is not as anciently a confused heap of detached pieces, each of which
thought itself very little concerned in the fate of others, and seldom regarded
things which did not immediately relate to it. The confined attention of
sovereigns
…makes Europe a kind of republic, the members of which, though
independent, unite, through the ties of common interest, for the maintenance
of order and liberty.
(ibid.: 235)
This is, of course, a markedly different view of politics than the billiard ball model
Morgenthau depicts elsewhere in the book. In the European context at least,
Morgenthau’s normative findings call into question his structural ones. He
contended that the Westphalian system was premised not on “the balance of power,
but
…a number of elements, intellectual and moral in nature, upon which both the
balance of power and the stability of the modern state system repose” (ibid.: 237).
The balance was largely socially constructed. It reflected, Morgenthau noted, a
“social system of international intercourse within which for almost three centuries
76 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
nations lived together in constant rivalry, yet under the common roof of shared
values and universal standards of action” (ibid.: 359). Morgenthau argued that this
idea of Europe prevailed from 1648 to 1772 and from 1815 to 1933, though its
foundations eroded with the coming of the French Revolution, the upheavals of
1848, and the decline and collapse of the aristocratic internationale. Eventually, what
Castlereagh had called “the general system of Europe” fragmented into its national
parts, each raising its parochial norms to universal principles (ibid.: 236).
One can argue on the strength of Morgenthau’s evidence that the balance of
power, far from being a “natural” state of affairs, was an ideology or social construct
flowing from the peculiar circumstances of European history. Morgenthau made
clear that the normative and empirical premises of the balance no longer held.
“That common ‘system of arts, and laws, and manners,’ ‘the same level of politeness
and cultivation,’ and the ‘sense of honour and justice,’ which Gibbon had detected
in ‘the general manners of the times’ and which for Fénelon, Rousseau, and Vatel
were a lived and living reality, have today in the main become a historic
reminiscence, lingering on in learned treatises, utopian tracts, and diplomatic
documents, but no longer capable of moving men to action.” The supranational
ethic underpinning the system had become “rather like the feeble rays, barely visible
above the horizon of consciousness, of a sun which has already set” (ibid.: 273–4).
As a working principle of international order, then, the balance seems remote
from an international system where the preferred distribution of power has slipped
away, along with its determining rules and the élan, for a time, of its practice. The
advent of the nuclear age raised troubling moral and strategic questions about the
balance. While it is sometimes asserted that realists were merely justifying the cold
war, Morgenthau’s historical judgment, his affection for the aristocratic system,
seems to have embodied a reaction against the horrendous dysfunctions of the
balance of power in the twentieth century. From this standpoint, the machinations
of an elite clan sharing values and struggling for power perhaps seemed appealing.
Indeed, Morgenthau hoped that some of the practices of historic European
diplomacy could be rejuvenated. He often argued that diplomacy should be taken
out of parliamen-tary hands and removed from the public spotlight.
Yet, even in terms of that sliver of experience known as power politics, the “golden
age” of the balance was not always golden. The balance’s main reason for existence
—preserving the independence and integrity of all its members, especially weak ones
—was often violated. Under the rubric of the balance, Poland was partitioned (in
1772, 1793, and 1795) out of existence. Morgenthau deplored this most egregious
abuse of the balance, but the system’s failings were more general. Small states were
usually the first to be sacrificed. Gulick notes (1967:75–6) that while moderation
was an important principle of the balance, it was hardly an absolute standard:
“coalition wars cannot be called moderate, and the extinction of weak powers under
the plea of balance of power surely cannot be termed moderate. The fear, suspicion,
and rapid changes of policy
…do not by any stretch of the imagination appear to
have been moderate.” As for large states, Quincy Wright (1942:652–3) found that
in the years 1650–1900, France, Austria, Great Britain, Russia, Prussia, Spain,
HISTORY, ANALOGY, AND POLICY REALISM 77
Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Turkey, and Poland, each was enmeshed in war,
on rough average, four out of every ten years—nor were they necessarily mild
conflicts. Schroeder takes a dark view of Europe’s “international society”:
Seeking durable peace through a balance of power was futile first because
there never was or could be any general consensus on what a suitable balance
was; almost every individual state had a concept of a European balance which
contradicted the concepts envisioned and pursued by others. Secondly, the
assumptions, methods, and devices required by balance-of-power politics and
actually used to achieve and maintain the supposed desirable balance blocked
the peaceful resolution of conflicts except in temporary, unstable ways,
directly promoted conflict, and made the periodic escalation of particular
conflicts into general systemic war more likely. Thirdly, the size, structure,
power, and geographical position of the various European states virtually
guaranteed that the free play of competitive forces among them would not
result in a general stability, independence, and balance, but in destruction
for some, mutilation for others, dependence for still others, and hegemony,
if not outright empire, for one or two.
(Schroeder 1994b:10)
Two concluding points may be made about the balance of power. First, as fact or
norm, the concept lends a certain changelessness to history. Regardless of the
composition of the system, balances have always arisen and always will. In this,
the balance of power is no different from any other nomothetic account of
international politics in which a grasp of the “essential” or “recurrent” elements of
history comes at the expense of understanding historical change (see Hoffmann
1977:35). Morgenthau often wrote of the “dynamic quality” of international
relations, yet his theory more often soars from peak to peak, lighting on history’s
fixed landmarks. Second, in contrast to Niebuhr’s tragic conception of the balance,
as a scientific theory it represents a limited historical project, distant from process
and idealized in its historical depiction. This method is perhaps prompted by the
fear of “falling back into history”—i.e., that theorists must stand apart from what
their historian colleagues are doing—but one wonders if theoretical concepts simply
might not withstand rigorous historical scrutiny (see Rosenberg 1994:19).
Morgenthau’s own inquiry into the European balance paints an intricate web of
social and structural factors, peculiar to time, place, culture, and class. One could
even argue that the inevitability thesis is a rejection of history and of tragedy.
Weighing historical processes, as reflected in an account of D-Day or the Afghan
mujahedin, the Iwo Jima statue, or a Le Carré novel, one is hard pressed to defend
the automatic nature of the balance of power. Churchill promised blood, sweat,
and tears, not a mechanical balance. We will see in the next chapter that neorealists
carry this impulse to its logical ahistorical end.
78 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Morgenthau’s legacy
In form, Morgenthau’s approach is not unlike the scientific-rationalists he criticized
for having promoted a progressivist philosophy disguised as science. Morgenthau,
too, tried to square one of the West’s great intellectual traditions with a science of
history. Morgenthau’s philosophy may be superior and his science more plausible.
Still, one wonders if statecraft can be explained with reference to a set of laws.
Morgenthau walks a thin beam between the nomothetic and the contingent. He
makes a forceful historical claim that states follow their interests, while at the same
time exhorting statesmen to do just that. The same is true of the “scales” of the
balance of power alongside the concept’s normative justification. These are very
different conceptions of the same phenomena, one law-driven, the other the
outcome of choices made freely or under duress. It is difficult to reconcile
Morgenthau’s “objective laws” (which are purported to operate in spite of the actor’s
preferences) with a normative accent on tragic statecraft. If leaders acted as
predicted, the normative counsel would be redundant.
Indeed, Morgenthau would be the last person to suggest that we can take the
statecraft out of politics; necessity did not make statesmen into automatons. All
the same, that is where historical laws lead. As Niebuhr made plain, tragedy involved
deliberate decisions that went against the current of events. Ultimately,
Morgenthau, too, believed that character and discretion were crucial to sound
leadership. At a forum shortly before his death, he stressed the constraints that the
strategic environment imposed on presidential statecraft, but he left no doubt that
it was “essentially the character of the president which determines the outcomes of
the policy” (Morgenthau 1983:5). One of his last projects was a lengthy essay on
the impact that Lincoln’s religious faith had had on the great and tragic statesman’s
politics (Morgenthau and Hein 1983).
Morgenthau perhaps pioneered a science of politics that grew too scientific.
While he attempted to fit political science, glove over fist, atop a political
philosophy, his “scientific” successors would forego attempts to join the two,
indeed, would grow hostile toward any philosophical “intrusion” on their new-
found verities (see Thompson 1984). Moreover, while the forms of Morgenthau’s
theory are scientific, especially as set out in Politics Among Nations, the substance is
more prudential. It aims to cultivate wise statecraft rather than to defend strict
historical laws. The result is a philosophy of international relations, in the venerable
realist tradition, unmatched in its counsel of restraint, its frostiness toward
platitudes, and its eye for ideology. One is reminded of what Oakeshott said about
Hobbes having fused the art of history (“the ordered register of past experiences”)
and prudence (“the power to anticipate experience by means of the recollection of
what has gone before”) (introduction to Hobbes 1947: xxiii–iv). Morgenthau was
a profound and articulate voice in this great tradition; but it is a tradition of
philosophy, not of science.
HISTORY, ANALOGY, AND POLICY REALISM 79
George F.Kennan and the historical foundations of
containment
Realists are often accused of providing intellectual cover for America’s involvement
in the cold war.
Morgenthau, from his “inevitability” perspective, recalled this was
exactly what happened:
I had my first experience as a theoretician of international relations under
the Truman—Acheson administration of America’s foreign policy. Theory
then provided a theoretical justification for what the policy makers were
doing, you may say, instinctively—what they were doing pragmatically, on a
mere day-by-day basis
…the policy of containment was never officially
formulated. It grew as an almost instinctive reaction to the threat of Russian
imperialism
… There was no theory in support of these new policies. It was
only as an afterthought that theoreticians developed a doctrine in the form
of a theoretical framework which gave rational justification to the new
policies.
(Morgenthau 1962a:73–4)
Morgenthau’s point was that necessity had driven early cold war policies. Theory
had followed practice. John Lewis Gaddis has noted (1982:4) that containment of
the USSR was “much on the minds of Washington officials from 1941 on,” as the
Soviets went from ally to enemy. There was, however, a critical interlude in
American foreign policy at the close of the Second World War when troops were
withdrawn from Central Europe, forces were drawn down at home, military
spending plummeted from $81 billion in 1945 to $13 billion in 1947, and Europe
fell into despair. All this happened before containment. It was George Kennan,
above all, who “theorized” containment before it happened. He did so from a
uniquely historical perspective, and his case, which we now take up, suggests the
difficulties of rendering historical understandings, particularly subtle ones, into
foreign policy.
History and statecraft
One of Kennan’s more intriguing books is The Marquis de Custine and His “Russia
in 1839” (1971), in which Kennan recounts the French aristocrat’s travels through
Russia in the summer of that year and the controversy surrounding the publication,
in 1841, of the Marquis’s book, a searing, tabloidstyle critique of Russian political
culture and Czarist abuses during the reign of Nicholas I.Kennan judged that Russia
in 1839 was perhaps an unfair book about nineteenth-century Russia, but that it
was an excellent book, “probably the best of books,” about the Russia of Stalin and
Brezhnev and Kosygin. As Kennan saw it, in the Marquis’s depiction of Nicholas
I were all the seeds of Stalinism:
80 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
The absolute power of a single man; his power over thoughts as well as actions;
the indecent association of sycophancy upwards with brutality downwards;
the utter disenfranchisement and helplessness of the popular masses; the
nervous punishment of innocent people for the offenses they might be
considered capable of committing rather than one they had committed; the
neurotic relationship to the West; the frantic fear of foreign observation; the
obsession with espionage; the secrecy; the systematic mystification; the general
silence of intimidation; the preoccupation with appearances at the expense
of reality; the systematic cultivation of falsehood as a weapon of policy; the
tendency to rewrite the past.
(Kennan 1971:124–5)
This is the gist of Kennan’s approach to the past as a foundation for presentday
political analysis and diplomatic practice. There are no exact historical analogies
to today’s dilemmas, but understanding the past is imperative to understanding
the present. Whatever a regime’s current ideology or outward mask, continuity
matters more than change. Political culture, administra tive methods, national
character, the nature and scope of interests, all display persistent traces and patterns.
As Mark Twain said, history may not repeat itself; but it rhymes.
Kennan was a student of Russian language, literature, and culture. He studied
traditional Russian history (as opposed to “Sovietology”) under Otto Hoetsch and
Karl Stählin at the University of Berlin in the course of his Foreign Service training
in the late 1920s and early 1930s. As director of the policy planning staff of the
State Department from 1947 to 1949, and as ambassador to the Soviet Union and
later Yugoslavia, Kennan’s ideas about history were at the core of his vocation, most
famously in his elucidation of the idea of containment of the USSR. During a raft
of visiting fellowships and in his long tenure at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced
Study, Kennan produced monographs on Russian and American diplomacy,
histories of nineteenth-century Franco-Russian relations, a study of the origins of
the First World War, three volumes of memoirs, several more on statecraft in the
nuclear age, and, more recently, an unusual work of political philosophy, Around
the Cragged Hill (1993), and a collection of essays, At a Century’s Ending (1996).
Throughout, he has been a vigorous and literary sage.
Kennan’s affinity for history seems to rest as much on philosophical tenets as
on empirical methods. His “moral closeness” to history springs from an apparently
spiritual, more or less Burkean, traditionalism. He believes that “Wherever the
authority of the past is too suddenly and too drastically undermined—wherever the
past ceases to be the great and reliable reference book of human problems—wherever,
above all, the experience of the father becomes irrelevant to the trials and searchings
of the son—there the foundations of man’s inner health and stability begin to
crumble, insecurity and panic begin to take over, conduct becomes erratic and
aggressive” (Kennan 1954:34). This traditionalism should also seep into political
practice. Kennan suggests that the complete diplomat reads history closely, but also
grasps a received code of political conduct. In this fashion, broadly construed
HISTORY, ANALOGY, AND POLICY REALISM 81
“historical” knowledge is preserved and woven into everyday conduct. Still, when
Kennan exhorts us to forswear the “histrionics of moralism” (1985/ 1986:212)—to
shun a foreign policy aimed at defending our ethical sensibilities rather than our
national interests—his pronouncement issues from within a generally liberal
tradition.
History and containment
This traditional ethic surfaces repeatedly in Kennan’s bleak view of the destructive
messianism of Soviet communism—its claim to upend tradition and supplant
human nature, and its conceit of “creating truth” quite apart from “objective
reality.” Echoing Morgenthau, Kennan argued in his famous Long Telegram (1946),
that Soviet ideology was a tool of historic Russian interests, “borne along by deep
and powerful currents of Russian nationalism” (Kennan 1967:557). Fear of
capitalist encirclement was a hangover from old anxieties about being ringed by
hostile states. However, Kennan also argued that Russia’s history and societal
temperament fueled a special virulence and sophistication—almost a pathology—in
the ideological state. Even in Custine he found “the terrible, cynical, demeaning
contempt for the truth that seemed to pervade Russian government and society
…
the cultivation of a series of massive fictions—fictions not just subconsciously and
innocently appropriated into the minds of the bearers but deliberately conceived,
perpetuated, and enforced” (Kennan 1971:80).
In telling us how immoderate and un-Burkean Russian society can be, Kennan
engages in cultural or collective psychohistory. True, he gives us great swaths of
event-centered “political” history stretching back to the Grand Duchy of Muscovy
in the thirteenth century, through the rise and fall of czars, and the reach and recoil
of the Russian empire. But Kennan’s history extends as well to the psychological
machinations of Russian society, its congenital insecurity, mental fusion of
aggression and defense, “Oriental secretiveness,” conspiracy, “self-hypnotism,”
“savage class distinctions,” and xenophobia. As he wrote of his diplomatic tour in
Moscow in the 1930s: “Politically, I had to go back into Russian history and to
probe the origins of the traditional suspicion and diffidence on the part of the
Russian rulers, I had to weigh the effects of climate on character, the results of
century-long contact with Asiatic hordes, the influence of medieval Byzantium, the
national origins of the people, and the geographic characteristics of the country”
(Kennan 1967:74). Kennan’s “X” article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” (1947),
the cornerstone of containment, reads like Edward Gibbon’s sweeping cultural
commentary, though with only a trace of Gibbon’s moralism from the high ground
of reason. More than once, Kennan quotes the Enlightenment historian’s Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), as here, describing the earnest deceptions
and self-deceptions of the Bolsheviks: “From enthusiasm to imposture the step is
perilous and slippery; the Demon of Socrates affords a memorable instance how a
wise man may deceive himself, how a good man may deceive others, how the
82 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
conscience may slumber in a mixed and middle state between self-illusion and
voluntary fraud” (Kennan 1947:567).
Clearly, Kennan did not use a reproducible historical method to arrive at his
view of Russian politics. His ample survey of Russian culture and anthropology
was informed as much by Tolstoy and Gogol and Dostoevsky as by Klyuchevski’s
lectures on Russian history that Kennan read in Berlin. Kennan is interested in
more than political history, more than the balance of power, more, even, than
patterns of national interests. He says he is drawn instead to history’s personal
dramas, “the mystery of the individual personality—its ultimate autonomy of
decision—its interaction with the mass” (Kennan 1989:21). No doubt, his cultural
reading of Russian history eclipsed many individual dilemmas. Yet, even if not
systematically set out, this focus on Russia’s political personality reflects an era
when national character and civic resolve were regarded as critical in the East-West
struggle.
These subtleties of style and method may well have doomed Kennan’s historical
arguments. What befell his vision of containment is instructive in the difficulties
of transposing history into policy. Kennan was confident, based on his knowledge
of Russian history, that Soviet foreign policy was propelled by domestic factors.
The party line “is not based on any objective analysis of the situation beyond
Russia’s borders; that it has, indeed, little to do with conditions outside of Russia;
that it arises mainly from basic inner-Russian necessities” (Kennan 1967:549). Soviet
leaders would trump up threats and exploit traditional fears in order to solidify
their own tyranny. They would flatten domestic foes, perhaps smear them as agents
provocateurs in the pay of hostile powers. Nevertheless, hewing to the well-worn
tracks of historic Russian external relations, the Politburo would not be militarily
reckless or adventuristic. This would needlessly risk the Kremlin’s prestige. Most
importantly, Kennan assured the West that, behind a veil of vigor and industry,
the Soviet system contained the seeds of its own decay. The United States and its
allies might hasten the day, but the passage of time was certain to produce “either
the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power.” Until then, the policy
should be one of “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian
expansive tendencies” (Kennan 1947:582, 575).
Kennan meant containment to be a political instrument, marked by “cool and
collected” diplomacy, not “threats or blustering or superfluous gestures of outward
‘toughness’” (ibid.: 575). Yet, already in the spring of 1946 he foresaw that
containing his own colleagues might be the more difficult task. It would be hard
to “restrain the hot-heads and panic-mongers and keep policy on a firm and even
keel” (see Miscamble 1992:28). Of course, Kennan’s fears were realized. His view
was eventually overrun by harder-bitten analyses of the Soviet threat. Containment,
codified in NSC-68, became primarily a military, albeit defensive, doctrine. As the
cold war escalated, he increasingly felt, he wrote later, “like one who has
inadvertently loosened a large boulder from the top of a cliff and now helplessly
witnesses its path of destruction in the valley below, shuddering and wincing at
each successive glimpse of disaster” (quoted in Zakaria 1996:6).
HISTORY, ANALOGY, AND POLICY REALISM 83
Had Kennan at the time turned his political profiling skills on his State
Department colleagues, he might have realized how distant his ideas were from
theirs. To say in the face of the Kremlin’s diplomatic bluster and elaborate military
parades, that Soviet-style expansion had over the centuries exacted a “severe tax on
Tsardom” looked to many like a policy of insouciance, and a retreat into history.
The un-Washington character of Kennan’s language and historical deductions may
also have contributed to rejection of his recommendations. His own writings could
be deeply ambivalent. (William F.Buckley called Kennan “one of the principal
ambiguists among the American intelligensia” (quoted in Hixson 1989: ix).)
Defending the primacy of diplomacy in one argument, Kennan would stress “the
adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting
geographical and political points” in the next (Kennan 1947:576). Generally, the
reaction to Kennan’s “policy history” was to seize on the combative, workaday
“lessons” it contained, and to discard the longer-term, moderating ones. When Dean
Acheson was Under-Secretary of State, for example, he dismissed Kennan’s muted
estimation of the USSR’s intentions and its history of risk aversion, emphasizing
instead the Soviet capacity for aggression. Later, at the State Department helm,
Acheson would welcome NSC68 as an appropriate tool with which to “bludgeon”
the executive into setting an aggressive policy. As Acheson later recalled, Kennan’s
“recommendations
…were of no help; his historical analysis might or might not
have been sound, but his predictions and warnings could not have been better”
(Miscamble 1992:26).
Lost on policymakers, Kennan’s “Shakespearean insight and vision,” as Louis
Halle called it, is exactly the sort of approach that sets social scientists’ teeth on
edge. Reading Kennan’s Gibbonesque passages, one can almost hear the chorus of
derision—“intuitive,” “folkloric,” “anti-scientific,” “unoperationalizable,” “dyad-
specific,” and on and on. Apparently, though, Kennan’s attention to the long term
was fruitful. This is clearest in his views that political motivations can be deeply
anchored in the national psyche; that, especially on rhetorically-charged issues,
professional diplomacy remains an important tool of statecraft; and that historical
perspective can be a source of moderation in policy. The depth of Kennan’s views
of the Soviet Union, for example, makes for less dire scenarios than we saw in
Niebuhr. Within this framework, Kennan provides a plausible description of the
end of the cold war. As previously mentioned, Kennan expected that Kremlin high
priests would soften their ideology, and he believed in the historic perils of
“imperial overstretch,” to use Paul Kennedy’s words. The following assessment of
Russian political economy, from the 1947 “X” article, also rings true: “Russia will
remain economically a vulnerable, and in a certain sense an impotent, nation,
capable of exporting its enthusiasms and of radiating the strange charm of its
primitive political vitality but unable to back up those articles of export by the real
evidences of material power and prosperity” (Kennan 1947:578). That said, Kennan
was surprised by how abruptly and bloodlessly the end came.
Kennan continues to try to bridge the gap between plausible and useful history:
pointing, in 1983, to late nineteenth-century Europe in order to illuminate the
84 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
“dreadful and dangerous condition” of US—Soviet relations, where antagonism,
suspicion, and militarization formed “the familiar characteristics, the unfailing
characteristics, of a march toward war” (quoted in Oberdorfer 1991:30); comparing
the complex, post-cold war foreign vista to that which confronted the early Republic
in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars and the splintering of the Spanish Empire
(Kennan 1995); or mapping the rivers of hatred in the Balkans (Kennan 1993b).
It would be foolish to deny that Kennan’s ideas have not been, to some extent,
politically instrumental. The more interesting question is whether he twisted his
history to fit his politics. Kennan scholar David Mayers suggests that there was no
need. Precisely because of the meticulousness of his scholarship, Kennan’s
monographs serve as compelling “exercises in political edification and resonate
with lessons for American leaders,” raising “a warning from the past and [an]
implied rebuke of present trends” (Mayers 1988:219–20). Mayers notwithstanding,
Kennan’s interpretation of the immediate origins of the cold war is couched to
vindicate the idea of political, rather than military, containment. As Kennan tells
it, with the Marshall Plan putting down roots and the Berlin Blockade successfully
thwarted, he felt the time was ripe for “serious talks” with the Russians. Thus, he
wrote, “it was one of the great disappointments of my life to discover that neither
our Government nor our Western European allies had any interest in entering into
such discussions at all. What they and the others wanted from Moscow
…was
essentially ‘unconditional surrender.’ And they were prepared to wait for it. This
was the beginning of 40 years of cold war” (Kennan 1994: A17). This is a plausible,
though not universally held, interpretation of events. Most explanations consider
the intransigence of both sides. It should be noted that Kennan has also been
accused of distorting history in order to blame the cold war squarely on Russia.
William Appleman Williams (1956: 222–4), the shrillest of these critics, blasted
Russia Leaves the War, the first volume of Kennan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Soviet-
American Relations, 1917–1920 (1956) on grounds that the diplomat-turned-
chronicler had rearranged Russia’s historical scenery in order to justify
containment, perhaps even in hopes of cadging a job as Secretary of State in the
event that Adlai Stevenson were to be elected President.
Despite these charges, Kennan’s historical claims seem to maintain a basic
modesty and balance. As a practicing historian, after all, he is struck most by how
subjective and open-ended history is: “its multi-dimensional quality, its lack of tidy
beginnings and endings, its stubborn refusal to be packaged in any neat and
satisfying manner
…every beginning and ending of every historical work is always
in some degree artificial and contrived” (Kennan 1960:205). Kennan insists that
the historian is never merely a purveyor of facts. At his disposal are “only the
hieroglyphics of the written word, as preserved in the crumbling old documents,
and sometimes a few artifacts that have survived the ravages of time and neglect—
perhaps even a portrait, or a drawing, or, if he works in recent history, a photograph
or two. But these evidences only hint at the real story—they don’t tell it” (Kennan
1986: 42). The telling is left to the historian’s imagination.
HISTORY, ANALOGY, AND POLICY REALISM 85
This unassuming method becomes a foil for too certain a science of history. The
texture of Kennan’s history could not be more different from the pinpoint “events-
data” we shall see in
. “In the fabric of human events, one thing leads to
another,” Kennan observes in American Diplomacy (1950:50); “Our action in the
field of foreign affairs is cumulative; it merges with a swelling stream of other
human happenings; and we cannot trace its effect with any exactness once it has
entered the fluid substance of history.” Admittedly, Kennan is not exactly brimming
with an historical logic to diplomatic practice. If anything, he represents a sort of
fatalism in his belief that the Russian character would endure, or, similarly, that
Tashkent would always be Tashkent. Nevertheless, if he sounds at times like a man
from another century, in other ways he can be quite acute. He recognizes the limits
in statecraft of relying solely on eurocentric history, pointing, as an example, to
the aridity of applying Westphalian logic to the Chinese experience; and he is alert
to the fallacies of tracking cross-cultural historical “stages.” This skepticism also
seems to underlie Kennan’s entreaties for a modest, self-effacing foreign policy,
where, he says, “our own national interest is all we are really capable of knowing
and understanding” (ibid.: 103).
Conclusion: through a glass darkly
This is also the thesis of an eerily current essay of Kennan’s, “America and the
Russian Future,” which appeared in Foreign Affairs in 1951. Kennan concedes in
the article how superficial and imperfect our knowledge is. He notes that if there
are laws of politics, they will be peculiar to circumstance, modified by national
character, and vulnerable to contingency—all of which means that the better part
of political prediction is spent poking at historical tea leaves. “These things being
so,” he concludes, “we must admit with respect to the future of government in
Russia, we see ‘as through a glass, darkly’” (Kennan 1951:368).
However, there is another sort of darkness in Kennan’s realist approach generally:
a deep historical pessimism that casts gloom on the narrative as well as the lessons
of history. If classical realism represents a philosophy of history, as Martin Wight
believes that all international theory must, it is a somber outlook. More to the
point, realist history has sustained a philosophy of prudence in statecraft. In pursuit
of the Aristotelian ideal of bridging theoretical and practical wisdom, policy realism
has perhaps issued in grimmer scenarios than those of detached political science.
That said, however, many of the subtleties of realist thought, especially normative
ones, stem from that same Aristotelian commitment. A troubling suggestion in this
chapter, however, is that those subtleties translate poorly into policy. Percolating
through political and bureaucratic filters, “realism” has prompted schemes that
bear little resemblance to the theory, even taking into account the diversity of realist
thought. Policymakers may prefer historical deductions that bear at least the color
of science.
Realism’s attention to history lends a salutary “concreteness” to interna tional
theory, but its predisposition to inquire into certain features of the international
86 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
landscape at the expense of others threatened to cut short debate and sharpen
foreign policies. Realists too easily link the idea of historical inevitability to that
of political necessità. The challenge for realists is to avoid this trap of tragedy. Too
much pessimism and prudence risks closing off alternative scenarios and blinding
leaders to obvious historical changes. As Niebuhr cautioned in The Children of Light
and the Children of Darkness (1944: 176), “if hopes are dupes, fears may be liars.”
Realists continue to take perverse pleasure in the defects of legalism and populism
in foreign policies, but that is the reality today, and the result is not all windy
Wilsonian moralism either. World politics are still distant from what the poet
Seamus Heaney called “that further shore where hope and history rhyme,” but the
record has not been irretrievably grim.
HISTORY, ANALOGY, AND POLICY REALISM 87
8
8
5
THE POVERTY OF AHISTORICISM
Kenneth N.Waltz and neorealist theory
Bernard Crick once noted (1964:239) that American political thought seems always
to be evolving from “mere opinion” to “scientific knowledge,” as enthusiastic
revisionists haul ideas out of the shadows and up the peaks of science. Neorealists
claim to have done precisely this with classical realism, replacing their forebears’
ideas about human nature, historical contingency, and diplomatic practice with an
elegant theory of international politics. At the center of neorealism’s scientific
claims is its avowed ahistoricism. Neorealists contend that their predecessors’
attention to history reflected a basic misconception of theory. In place of an
unwieldy “struggle with the facts,” neorealists offer a timeless deductive theory in
the tradition of natural science. The anarchical structure of the international realm
is the cornerstone of the project. Neorealists argue that structure explains more
about the history of international relations, and does so more economically, than
any other level of analysis.
This chapter first briefly describes neorealism’s foundations in the philosophy
of science. It then examines the writings of the preeminent neorealist, Kenneth
Waltz, focusing on his landmark work, Theory of International Politics (1979), which,
according to one study, “revived the flagging fortunes of the Realist tradition”
(Buzan et al. 1993:1). Turning toward structural research more generally, the chapter
explores historical challenges, problems of theorizing historical change, and
questions of statecraft and ethical choice. A further section reviews Stephen
M.Walt’s Revolution and War (1996), a recent addition to the neorealist literature,
highlighting the problem of “theoretical filtering,” or how a closed theoretical
design may unduly narrow the researcher’s range of historical interests and evidence.
Waltz has had a vast impact on the discipline, both in the development of the
neorealist research project, and in various reactions against it. In terms of the use
of history in international relations, Waltz has pervasively affirmed—even for his
critics —that rigorous deductive methods are a way of overcoming the historical
problem.
A “scientific research programme”
Since the mid-1980s, neorealism has dominated international relations in the
United States, although its position of “intellectual hegemony” has perhaps passed
its peak (Burchill 1995:83). In the field’s empirical wing, Waltz’s theory spawned a
number of structural hypotheses about geopolitics (for example, Gilpin 1981,
Mearsheimer 1990, Liberman 1993, and Mastanduno 1997); nuclear proliferation
(for example, Frankel 1993, and Sagan and Waltz 1995); political economy (for
example, Gowa 1989 and Grieco 1995); international cooperation (for example,
Oye 1986, Snidal 1991, and Mearsheimer 1994/1995); the formation of alliances
(for example, Walt 1987, Snyder 1990, Labs 1992, and Schweller 1994); and actual
foreign policymaking (Elman 1996). Neorealism has also elicited two main counter-
theories: neoliberalism and constructivism. These are errant, though identifiable,
children of Waltz in that they adopt much of his method and language and mirror
many of his assumptions about the philosophy of science (see, for example, Baldwin
1993, Kegley 1995, and Wendt 1995). Neorealism has prompted scores of
philosophical and empirical challenges from a wide range of other perspectives as
well.
Neorealists argue that the inductivist approach to theory lays an inadequate
foundation for a cumulative science of international politics. For Waltz, theory is
a tool that makes political explanation possible. It is “a picture, mentally formed,
of a bounded realm or domain of activity
…and of the connections among its parts”
(Waltz 1979:8). Without a theory, we are left with disconnected and randomly
selected facts. Moreover, theory should be ahistorical in the sense that it is liberated
from details of history, and is meant to apply with equal force to any historical
period. “Though related to the world about which explanations are wanted,” Waltz
suggests (ibid.: 6–7), theory “always remains distinct from that world. ‘Reality’ will
be congruent neither with a theory nor with a model that may represent it.”
On these grounds, Waltz describes Quincy Wright’s The Study of International
Relations (1955), for example, as a profoundly anti-theoretical enterprise, attempting
“a synthesis of all possibly relevant knowledge” (Waltz 1959b: 66). He criticizes the
Correlates of War project, the subject of the next chapter, on the grounds that its
“data-making” is naïvely inductive. Without a theory, one does not know where to
begin, or what data to generate (Waltz 1975: 9). He tars the entire school of classical
realists as “behavioralists” who strove to bring theory into focus with history. They
failed “to take the fateful step beyond developing concepts to the fashioning of a
recognizable theory.” Waltz concedes that Morgenthau presented “elements of a
theory
…but never a theory…without a concept of the whole he could only deal
with the parts.” He adds that Morgenthau “was fond of repeating Blaise Pascal’s
remark that ‘the history of the world would have been different had Cleopatra’s
nose been a bit shorter’ and then asking ‘How do you systemize that?’ His
appreciation of the role of the accidental and the occurrence of the unexpected in
politics dampened his theoretical contribution.” Waltz is equally critical of Aron’s
explication of the qualitative difference between economic man and political man,
and the challenges this poses for a theory of politics: “Aron did not relate obvious
differences between economics and politics to the requirements of theory
construction. He merely identified differences in the confident belief that because
of them no international-political theory is possible” (Waltz 1990: 24–6).
90 THE POVERTY OF AHISTORICISM
If the deductive method is, as Buzan et al. (1993:191) note, “happily adrift from
the world,” where does theory comes from? According to Waltz (1979: 9), theory is
a creative act that transcends “experimental” history. “The longest process of painful
trial and error will not lead to the construction of a theory unless at some point a
brilliant intuition flashes, a creative idea emerges.” While inductivists propose to
build theory out of facts, Waltz points out that “many of the greatest natural
scientists, even in the nonage of their disciplines, built upon highly abstract and
truly breathtaking generalization” (Waltz 1959b: 58). Theory requires more
abstraction and less history. Logical inquiry must begin with a conceptual
proposition, and then deduce and test assumptions derived from it. Only after a
theory is established may evidence be systematically canvassed. Waltz cites Albert
Einstein: “A theory can be tested by experience
…but there is no way from
experience to the setting up of a theory” (Waltz 1979:7).
The deductive mode of inquiry that Waltz champions has assumed nearcanonical
status in the natural sciences. Some social scientists have adopted this model,
believing that a social “physics” may be derived through a chain of logical
deductions. As Carl Hempel did with history, deductivists pursue “covering laws.”
They deduce particular outcomes from general assumptions. Elegance (simplicity)
and parsimony (economy of explanation, not enumerating causes unnecessary to
account for the facts) are considered virtues here. It is probably fair to say that, in
the wake of Theory of International Politics, most empirical work in international
relations, at least in the United States, has adhered more or less to the main
propositions of deductive social science.
Many of Waltz’s critics have responded
in kind, attempting to falsify neorealism and suggesting other deductive and
positivist paths of research. Even constructivists, who have tried to redirect the
discipline away from neorealist materialism and toward the social underpinnings
of “state” behavior, espouse “a very pro-science line” and “fully endorse the
scientific project of falsifying theories against evidence” (Wendt 1995:75).
According to deductivists, a rigorous process of falsification compensates for
this theoretical elegance. This is the laboratory idea of testing theory against
historical facts. Karl Popper’s (1959 and 1965) rigorous doctrine of falsification is
well known, notably his example that the proposition that all swans are white is
falsified by the existence of a single black swan. (Cf. Ashley (1986:261, 298, n. 9 and
11.) Waltz applauds Popper’s critique of induc tivism, although he is less taken
with Popper’s low empirical threshold for falsifying theory. Waltz argues that
testing theories is “a difficult and subtle task
…questions of truth and falsity are
somehow involved, but so are questions of usefulness and uselessness. In the end,
one sticks with the theory that reveals most, even if its validity is suspect” (Waltz
1979:123–4). What Waltz is describing is Imre Lakatos’s “sophisticated
methodological falsification.” Lakatos argues that theories should be tested not so
much against the “facts” as against other theories. His model states (Lakatos 1970:
116):
HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 91
a scientific theory T [is] falsified if and only if another theory T
′ has been
proposed with the following characteristics: (1) T
′ has excess empirical
content over T: that is, it predicts novel facts, that is, facts improbable in the
light of, or even forbidden, by T; (2) T
′ explains the previous success of T,
that is, all the unrefuted content of T is contained (within the limits of
observational error) in the content of T
′; and (3) some of the excess content
of T
′ is corroborated.
This simply means that a few falsifying cases do not overturn a theory. According
to Lakatos, a good theory subsumes a number of previously disparate
generalizations in a single explanatory system. In terms of falsification, there is no
such thing as a “crucial case.” No single experiment capsizes a theory. The important
thing is how well a proposition withstands repeated attempts at falsification. If it
does well, the theory grows in stature; it has proved its mettle, and research based
on the model gains momentum. If it does poorly, the theory is subjected to further
tests, refashioned, or, in extreme circumstances, discarded. What Lakatos calls a
“positive heuristic” arises among researchers, and a “protective belt” of auxiliary
assumptions and hypotheses is erected around the theory’s core. These peripheral
assumptions endure actual testing. The idea is to shield the core theory through
the project’s fits and starts, even as postulates based on it may be upended. Only
when the number of anomalies becomes overwhelming is the model displaced by
a theory that appears to offer greater explanatory power.
Within this rigorous framework, neorealists set out to fashion what Lakatos calls
a “scientific research programme,” a focused progression of experiment and
criticism. The idea was, literally, to discipline the field of international relations.
Researchers would dedicate themselves to one theoretical approach over an
extended period, and not be deterred by initial contrary findings.
The anarchical
structure of the international realm has been neorealism’s core, and has sustained
a range of hypotheses and testing aimed at generating novel explanations and
predictions about inter-state relations. The apparatuses of the discipline have also
supported this research program, with several journals well disposed toward
neorealist research.
“Scientific” realists have also traced the evolution of realism, using Lakatos’s
procedure for “rationally reconstructing” the paradigm. The “steps” of realist
scientific discovery are thus retraced by recounting the paradigm’s “internal
history.” In such reconstructions of field, the realists that have been discussed thus
far are deemed “foundational” thinkers in a linear progression of increasingly
sophisticated and precise theories which ends with Waltz. One account that
explicitly follows Lakatos’s methodology describes realism’s “growth of objective
knowledge” in this way: what “began as a philosophical reflection on the nature
and behavior of security-seeking entities, has gradually been transformed—however
imperfectly—into the abstract, deductive formulations which modern social science
demands” (Tellis 1995:4).
92 THE POVERTY OF AHISTORICISM
As noted earlier, Lakatos himself was uncertain to what degree his assumptions
and methods applied to the social sciences. He noted (1970:175–6 n.) that much
social science theorizing was lacking in rigor, and required “patched-up,
unimaginative series of pedestrian ‘empirical’ adjustments.” He was particularly
dubious of attempts to quantify social studies, fearing that statistics might function
“primarily to provide a machinery for producing phony corroborations and thereby
a semblance of ‘scientific progress’ where, in fact, there is nothing but an increase
in psuedo-intellectual garbage.”
Setting Lakatos’s own doubts aside, it is interesting to note that while Waltz
claims to have hurdled the “logical-positivist” problem of the behavioral realists,
the whole process of falsification hinges on historical evidence. In other words,
because neorealist theory is deliberately “underdetermined” by the “facts,” the wall
between history and theory stands. Nevertheless, in terms of developing the research
program, the empirical battle wages on in the “experimental” literature. Waltz
obviously holds a sophisticated view of the relationship between theory and fact.
He notes, especially in his early work, that “facts” are “theory-laden.” “Direct”
observation is influenced by expectations, and the distinction between evidence and
observation is often blurred. He also contends that “empirical verification, while
important, cannot produce certainty, in the social or in the natural sciences, for by
the most intricate and oft-repeated tests one does not exclude alternative
possibilities.” Consequently, he says, “historical refutation is seldom accepted as
conclusive” (Waltz 1959b: 57–9). In his later writings, however, Waltz holds that,
if subjected to “hard cases,” a theory may in fact be “confirmed,” although he notes
that any test is conclusive only in reference to the assumptions postulated. The
possibility lingers that some untried series of tests might undercut a theory, just as
a new theory may explain or predict more than the abstraction at hand (Waltz 1979:
123–4).
Nevertheless, when Waltz suggests that deductive methods have subdued the
historical problem, we might bear in mind the serene protocol he establishes in
Theory of International Politics for testing a theory:
1. State the theory being tested.
2. Infer hypotheses from it.
3. Subject the hypotheses to experimental or observational tests.
4. In taking steps two and three, use the definitions of terms found in the theory
being tested.
5. Eliminate or control perturbing variables not included in the theory under test.
6. Devise a number of distinct and demanding tests.
7. If a test is not passed, ask whether the theory flunks completely, needs repair
and restatement, or requires a narrowing of the scope of its explanatory claims.
(ibid.: 13)
Although presented as straightforward scientific procedures, these are challenging
standards by which to judge historical evidence. Neorealism has been able to
HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 93
sidestep troublesome historiography because a few contrary cases do not overturn
the theory, but the entire research program will be paralyzed if dismissing historical
evidence becomes common practice.
Early Waltz: philosophy, history and the pursuit of parsimony
This section looks briefly at the development of Waltz’s ideas. This development
is germane to our topic because it traces a leading theorist’s attempts to bridge a
skeptical view of history and rigorous structural theory. Despite Waltz’s insistence
on a uniquely “political” voice of inquiry, there are unavoidable parallels with other
fields. In many ways, international relations was ripe for structural analysis.
Structuralism made its mark in sociology and anthropology in the works of Émile
Durkheim and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Structural work revolved around the idea that
social characteristics were interrelated in a systematic way, and that ordered
relationships could be discovered among these social “facts” and institutions
without resorting to psychology or history.
Writing for a 1954 international theory symposium, Waltz acknowledged the
appeal of historical discourse, noting how the play of the mind over historical
evidence elicited patterns of behavior, parallels with contemporary dilemmas, and
pitfalls to be avoided. He suggested as well that an anchor in history helped save
analysts from being swept up in vogue methodologies and strategic fads. However,
there were limits to historical inquiry. Waltz pointed to Warren S.Thompson’s
warning, in 1929, that without some sort of global distributive justice, population
pressures alone would lead the “havenots” to launch war on the “haves.” He noted
that Thompson’s estimate of cause “seems to be stated in a form that permits
empirical-historical testing,” yet when the thesis is unpacked, “it becomes
impossible to estimate the significance, or insignificance, of this one factor without
relating it to others” (Waltz 1959b: 54). Why have intense population pressures not
always resulted in wars? What might constrain the wrath of the impoverished?
Would a more equitable distribution of wealth necessarily reduce the incidence of
war? Data never clearly show these sorts of correlations. What was needed was a
nonhistorical and nonempirical framework—a theory— with which to establish
those ties.
Waltz’s own grasp of the imperfections of historical knowledge bolsters his
defense of ahistorical theory. He recognizes problems of objectivity, “utility,” and
presentism in history. As noted above, his early skepticism centered on the problem
that historical “facts” are easily tailored to fit the observer’s expectations. “It would
be foolish to argue that simply by taking a more intensive look at the data one can
build a compelling case for one or the other explanatory theory,” he explains.
“Staring at the same set of data, the parties to the debate came to sharply different
conclusions for the images they entertained led them to select and interpret the
data in different ways. The estimate of cause is an idea related to but not identical
with the occurrence one seeks to explain. The idea we entertain becomes a filter
through which we pass our data” (ibid.: 60). If one were convinced that democracies
94 THE POVERTY OF AHISTORICISM
are pacific, for instance, it would be easy to argue that democratic wars were
preventive or defensive actions. Alternatively, one might argue that democracy had
slipped, perhaps at the hands of an overzealous president or a frenzied legislature.
Waltz’s skepticism about using history has been obscured by his broader
theoretical achievements. His most conspicuous revision of classical realism is a
causal reversal in explaining state behavior under anarchy. Broadly speaking,
classical realists followed what Waltz calls the “inside-out” method of theorizing.
They saw foreign policies originating at the individual and state level. Human
nature, calculations of interests, political leadership, national character, and a
variety of other domestic factors drove decisions. Neorealists, by contrast, suggest
that state behavior is generated by the structure of international power, and a state’s
relative position in the system. Neorealists thus proceed from the international
realm and backtrack toward unit-level analysis, discounting classical ideas about
interests, leadership, values, and so forth.
To this end, Waltz’s book, Man, the State and War (1959a), re-categorizes the
history of political thought around the problem of war. Spinoza, Kant, and
Rousseau provide the philosophical models for what Waltz calls the three “images”
of political life: the individual, the state, and the international realm. Spinoza saw
political ills as an outgrowth of individual passions. Kant believed that, over time,
war weariness, cosmopolitanism, and the proliferation of constitutional states
would yield international reforms. For Rousseau, international behavior was a risky
game in which survival and cooperation were always at odds. Waltz draws a handful
of historical analogies and makes a seven-page dash through European history, from
the origins of the First World War to the 1956 Hungarian uprising. However, the
book is primarily a synthesis of traditional political philosophy. These “ahistorical
analyses,” he says, “lay bare the logic of civil society and at the same time make
clear why the logic does not carry men past the establishment of separate states to
the founding of a world state” (ibid.: 228).
Waltz deals adeptly with the “level of analysis” problem. His critique of
reductionism in explaining political conduct is effective, particularly his extended
treatment of the first-image “psychologism” of behavioralism. Waltz also argues
persuasively that the “irrationalities” of clashing political preferences cannot be
attributed to a fixed human nature:
While human nature no doubt plays a role in bringing about war, it cannot
by itself explain both war and peace, except by the simple statement that
man’s nature is such that sometimes he fights and sometimes he does not.
And this statement leads inescapably to the attempt to explain why he fights
sometimes and not others. If human nature is the cause of war and if, as in
the systems of the first-image pessimists, human nature is fixed, then we can
never hope for peace. If human nature is but one of the causes of war, then,
even on the assumption that human nature is fixed, we can properly carry
on a search for the conditions of peace.
(ibid.: 30)
HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 95
Sounding much like Niebuhr, Waltz suggests that “First-image optimists betray a
naïveté in politics that vitiates their efforts to build a new and better world. Their
lack of success is directly related to a view of man that is simple and pleasing, but
wrong” (ibid.: 39).
Analysis centered exclusively on the state is not very productive either. Even if
it is true that bad states make war, says Waltz, “the obverse of this statement, that
good states mean peace, is an extremely doubtful proposition” (ibid.: 122). Viewed
in isolation, the failings of each causal tier are apparent. We need an integrated
theory that includes the idea of structure. “The action of states, or, more accurately,
of men acting for states, make up the substance of international relations. But the
international political environment has much to do with the ways in which states
behave. The influence to be assigned to the internal structure of states in attempting
to solve the war—peace equation cannot be determined until the significance of the
international environment has been considered” (ibid.: 122–3).
A causal hierarchy is beginning to crystallize. Waltz sees the first and second
images as methodologically intractable. They are diverse and malleable, and thus
“underpredictive” from a deductive standpoint. The third image, however, is the
“more inclusive nexus of causes” and is therefore the final determinant of war and
peace. It is “social structure—institutionalized restraints and institutionalized
methods of altering and adjusting interests—that counts” (ibid.: 230–1). In a world
of sovereign states, conflict is inevitable. “Each state pursues its own interests,
however defined, in the way it judges best. Force is a means of achieving the external
ends of states because there exists no consistent, reliable process of reconciling the
conflicts of interest that inevitably arise among similar units in a condition of
anarchy” (ibid.: 238).
Waltz illustrates his principal idea—international anarchy—by recounting
Rousseau’s parable of the stag hunt: as the hunting party closes in on the deer, one
of its members is distracted by a hare. Making a quick calculation about his
individual interests, the hunter deserts the collective effort, spooks the stag, and
chases after a unilateral dinner of hare. Rousseau suggests that the uncooperative
hunter is acting rationally. Because any member of the party may decide to defect,
it is in the interest of each to do so first. Again, conflict is inevitable. It is a “by-
product of competition and attempts at cooperation in society
…conflict results
from the seeking of any goal — even if in the seeking one attempts to act according
to Kant’s categorical imperative” (ibid.: 171). Citing John McDonald, Waltz
concludes, “Everybody’s strategy depends on everybody else’s” (ibid.: 201). This
problem has been given mathematical form by game theorists and has been
rediscovered by comparativists and international relations scholars as “two-level”
and “nested” games (see the classic Neumann and Morgenstern 1944, and the more
recent Evans, Jacobson and Putnam 1993).
Waltz’s excellent “second-image” book, Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics (1967)
is an historically rich snapshot of the provenance of American and British foreign
policies. In it, Waltz presents a very different view of what drives state behavior. As
he remarks at the outset, “adding the internal to the external dimension of foreign
96 THE POVERTY OF AHISTORICISM
policy makes for many complications” (Waltz 1967: v). He finds that, in setting
foreign policy, democratic polities are hobbled by their inclusive, debate-driven,
and populist governance. In an instructive counterpoint to this plodding process,
Waltz invokes Bismarck, who, when questioned in the Reichstag about his foreign
policy, reportedly told the members of the lower house that the conduct of foreign
affairs was difficult enough without “three hundred asses” trying to impose their
illinformed opinions. Waltz concludes not only that “third-image” constraints are
distorted as they filter through democratic institutions and processes, but that
foreign policies originate at the unit level. They are not rational and ineluctable
responses to external conditions of anarchy. Waltz describes all too well how US
foreign policy acquires a “Dixiecrat” drawl, just as class interests and civil service
mandarins set the tone of British foreign relations.
Waltz’s early work is perhaps most important for its insistence that there be
international relations theory. Leery of empiricism and aware of the attendant
epistemological problems, Waltz exhorts theorists to indulge in abstraction, to
transcend the descriptive and anecdotal. The problems of empiricism, he writes,
“constitute not merely a justification for theory but an argument that theorizing
is an omnipresent, though often merely implicit, operation” (Waltz 1959b:54–5).
Waltz made his own theory explicit in Theory of International Politics, the main design
of which is the subject of the next section.
Theory of International Politics
When it was published in 1979, Theory of International Politics got a chilly reception.
Hedley Bull (1980:20) called Waltz’s work a “reductio ad absurdum of its own starting
point,” with implications “at loggerheads with common sense.” Margaret Bates
(1981:589) noted that “the quest for explanatory power turns into a search for
descriptive adequacy.” Richard Rosecrance (1981:712–13) decried Waltz’s “extreme
structural formulation,” which “fails to pay attention to the real differentiation of
state units that has taken place in the last one hundred years.” Waltz’s former
teacher, William T.R. Fox, suggested (1980:493) that “A new Plato or a new Aristotle
writing in the field of International Relations would
…be a theorist whether or not
he plays the game according to Waltz’s philosophy of science rules.”
Theory of International Politics offers a bleak assessment of postwar international
theory. Waltz notes that “nothing seems to cumulate, not even criticism”—a
problem he attributes to the field’s stubbornly anti-deductive leaning (p. 18). Waltz
labels as “reductionist” theories that encompass first- and secondimage analysis.
His criticism of classical realism on these grounds has already been mentioned.
Much of this book is devoted to upending competing “systems” theories. Waltz
shows that Lenin, Hobson, Galtung, Wallerstein, Hoffmann, Rosecrance, and
Kaplan are all inductivists of one sort or another. Waltz’s corrective to this, true
to the “third-image” focus of Man, the State and War, is the idea that structure is
the “prime mover” in international politics. Analysis must center on the
international system itself, as distinct from the character of states and people.
HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 97
Although the shape of the system is determined by the interactions and character
of states, each state is “black-boxed” into a rational unitary whole. Its component
parts and dynamics are assumed in the theory rather than incorporated as variables.
Amid Waltz’s scientific goings on, it is easy to forget that he is a realist. He
adheres to an unreconstructed realist view regarding the pursuit of interests and
conflict among nations. “The ruler’s, and later the state’s, interest provides the
spring of action; the necessities of policy arise from the unregulated competition
of states; calculation based on these necessities can discover the policies that will
best serve a state’s interest; success is the ultimate test of policy, and success is
defined as preserving and strengthening the state” (p. 117).
However, the methods of economics, not of history, inform Waltz’s realism. He
believes economics is a more “mature” science than international relations by virtue
of its development of deductive theory. He also believes that the economic model
is proper. “Reasoning by analogy is helpful where one can move from a domain
where theory is well developed to one where it is not. Reasoning by analogy is
permissible where different domains are structurally similar” (p. 89). Throughout
the book, Waltz draws parallels between balance-of-power theory and neoclassical
microeconomic theory, i.e., ideas about how market forces condition the behavior
of firms. The idea is that the international structure shapes political outcomes just
as “the market” intervenes between economic acts and outcomes. In both cases,
order emerges out of self-interested acts and the interactions of the units. “No state
intends to participate in the formation of a structure by which it and others will
be constrained. International-political systems, like economic markets, are
individualist in origin, spontaneously generated, and unintended” (p. 91).
Structural incentives and punishments devalue norms, transcend the vagaries and
intentions of specific actors, and lend coherence to decisionmaking. Waltz believes
that this logic applies not only to the 350 years of Westphalian history, but “obtains
whether the system is composed of tribes, nations, oligopolistic firms, or street
gangs” (Waltz 1990:37).
The economic model is an attractive parallel, a way of rationalizing
decisionmaking and outcomes in an anarchic and competitive realm. Then again,
the analogy prompts a number of questions: Is power fungible? (See Keohane 1986:
184.) Is it useful to think of power as a single currency, encompassing different
types of capabilities? Are the ends that states seek constant enough that the parallel
with firms holds? Does military power translate directly into political power? How
might one gauge the strength of what Montesquieu calls the “spirit of a nation”?
Looming over the entire analogy, however, is the rational choice problem. The
economic model assumes that we can confer a rationale upon acts, and that
outcomes can be reliably anticipated. True, firms and states try to survive in a
competitive and unregulated realm (the neoclassical assumption). However, whereas
firms survive by maximizing returns, states survive by very diverse means. As
Raymond Aron argues in Peace and War (1966:8–18), the rules of the game are never
clear in politics; the ends of political action vary with the actors. Unlike soccer
players or economic man, for whom winning or “maximizing satisfactions” are
98 THE POVERTY OF AHISTORICISM
unambiguous and universal goals, diplomats and soldiers pursue no single, rational
end. Not all states function alike. They initiate policies and react to events in
different ways.
Waltz defines his “market,” the international system, according to three criteria:
its ordering principle, the character of its units, and the distribution of unit
capabilities within it (pp. 88–97). Looking at the modern world through this lens,
he makes a number of observations:
• the international system is anarchic;
• under anarchy, states are functionally alike in that all seek survival through “self-
help.” The character of states “drops out” of the equation; they become “units”
that differ only in their material capabilities for survival;
• the system is (was) bipolar;
• states’ positions in the system are determined by their relative power capabilities
—“the placement of states affects their behavior and even colors their character”
(p. 127);
• these capabilities are translated into political power through the “utility of
force”; and
• the system tends toward self-perpetuation. Various balances of power arise as
alliances form to counter revisionist states.
In structure, Waltz seeks a broadly plausible reason why states behave the way they
do; “why the range of expected outcomes falls within certain limits,” “why patterns
occur,” “why events repeat themselves” (p. 69). Although his theory is not a theory
of foreign policy, its main implication is that state choices are driven by external
conditions. Configurations of power “socialize” state behavior. This is the basis for
Waltz’s balance-of-power hypotheses. Either “states” are rationally persuaded toward
a balance, or a hidden hand of structure impels them there. These structural
incentives override ideology and other unit-level characteristics. As Waltz argues
elsewhere (1986:329), “state behavior varies more with differences of power than
with differences in ideology, in internal structure of property relations, or in
governmental form. In self-help systems, the pressures of competition weigh more
heavily than ideological preferences or internal political pressures.” In Theory of
International Politics, Waltz submits into evidence two “hard cases”: the Franco-
Russian “Dual Alliance,” formalized in 1894 in reaction to the “Triple Alliance”
of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy; and US rearmament following the Second
World War. He contends that second-image analysis would not anticipate these
alliances. “Republicans” and “cossacks” did not want to ally. Americans and their
leaders wanted to retrench in isolation, not divide the globe with the Soviets. Waltz
points also to the dynamics of the cold war. He argued that although the United
States and the USSR comprised very different, if not antithetical, social and political
orders, the behavior of each was remarkably similar. The idea is that these parties
were driven by structure; they acted as balancers despite themselves.
HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 99
Many of these assertions have been challenged on logical as well as historical
grounds. Before addressing those challenges, I would like to relate three hypotheses
Waltz derives from his third-image focus. Each presents intractable problems in
terms of historical testing.
Interdependence increases opportunities for conflict. “Interdependence,” Waltz (1979:
138) writes, “looks different when viewed in the light of our theory.” If one assumes
that the international system is premised on “self-help,” then interdependence
produces vulnerability. “Close interdependence means closeness of contact and
raises the prospect of at least occasional conflict. The fiercest civil wars and the
bloodiest international ones have been fought within arenas populated by highly
similar people whose affairs had become quite closely knit together. It is hard to
get a war going unless the potential participants are somehow closely linked
… It
would seem to follow that a lessening of interdependence is desirable” (Waltz 1970:
205). In fact, Waltz is sanguine on this point. He believes that during the cold war,
bipolarity effectively curbed the spread of interdependence, and that economic
might is furthered by state power. Challenging Charles Kindleberger’s contention
that “the nation-state is just about through as an economic unit,” Waltz argues
(1979:94) that “economic capabilities cannot be separated from the other
capabilities of states
… States use economic means for military and political ends;
and military and political means for the achievement of economic interests.” The
state remained the ultimate arbiter of economic activity: “When the crunch comes,
states remake the rules by which other actors operate” (p. 94). This line of reasoning
would perhaps apply to the rise of the “trading state,” but less so to the emergence
of multi-national commercial networks. Wallerstein (1974) and others deny that
there is such a thing as national development in the modern world system (see also
Rosecrance 1986, Kennedy 1987, and Strange 1996).
Bipolarity is best. Morgenthau preferred a multipolar balance to a bipolar one
because the uncertainties generated by multiple power centers instilled greater
caution in statesmen. Waltz favors bipolarity; he contends that it cultivates
“transparency” in the system, which breeds general stability and predictability in
statecraft. “Those who are elevated to power and direct the activities of great states
are not wholly free agents
… The pressures of a bipolar world will strongly encourage
them to act in ways better than their characters might otherwise lead one to expect”
(Waltz 1964:906–7). In extolling the advantages of bipolarity, Waltz returns to the
economic analogy, citing duopoly benefits, prospects for collusion, heightened
foreseeability, lowered transaction costs, and so forth. Waltz’s prime exhibit is the
postwar world. Writing in 1964, when US troops in Vietnam were still “military
advisors,” Waltz was able to sanction bipolarity’s lack of “peripheries” as a systemic
virtue. In a multipolar world, “the dangers are diffused, responsibilities unclear,
and definition of vital interests easily obscured.” Such a precarious order tempts
leaders into rash adventures. In a bipolar system, on the other hand, there are no
shadowy zones on the map. International politics is a zero-sum game where
“caution, moderation, and the management of crisis come to be of great and
obvious importance” (ibid.: 884). The idea is a clear reflection of its times. But
100 THE POVERTY OF AHISTORICISM
Waltz seems blind to the potential for escalation that bipolarity implies, a problem
he later acknowledges with respect to the US military buildup that began in the
Carter administration and continued through most of the Reagan period, and
which “burned up resources that could have safely been put to constructive use”
(Waltz 1993:54). The same sort of presentism fueled Waltz’s predictions that the
United States and the USSR would long endure as the predominant world powers,
a quite different prophecy from Kennan’s historically inspired vision of the rot of
the Soviet Union.
More nuclear weapons may be better. According to Waltz (1979:180), nuclear
weapons did not transform the nature of strategy. “Gunpowder,” he notes, “did
not blur the distinction between the great powers and the others
… nor have nuclear
weapons done so.” Waltz’s provocative thesis is also linked to the stability of the
long bipolar peace, where the “balance of terror” reinforced an already stable bipolar
system by heightening the risks of miscalculation. He suggests (1981:3–4) that
“much of the writing about the spread of nuclear weapons has this unusual trait:
It tells us that what did not happen in the past is likely to happen in the future,
that tomorrow’s nuclear states are likely to do to one another what today’s nuclear
states have not done. A happy nuclear past leads many to expect an unhappy nuclear
future.” Through the “measured spread” of nuclear weapons, he writes, new nuclear
states “will confront the possibilities and feel the constraints” of their newly
acquired power. They will be “more concerned for their safety and more mindful
of dangers
… Nations that have nuclear weapons have strong incentives to use them
responsibly.” He argues that this logic applies even more forcefully to weak states.
“A nuclear Libya, for example, would have to show great caution, even in rhetoric,
lest she suffer retaliation in response to someone else’s anonymous attack on a third
state” (ibid.: 30, 12).
Two observations may be made about Waltz’s theory. First, although Waltz is of
the ex nihilo “brilliant intuition” school of theoretical insight, one wonders if his
theory was not born of the interplay of observation and abstraction. In many ways,
Theory of International Politics depicts the seemingly settled bipolarity of what Waltz
(1979:203–4) calls the “mature,” post-Nixon world, where prescriptions for statecraft
devolve into the “managerial” tasks of maintaining this “sensible duopoly.” Writing
in the tradition of E.H. Carr, Robert Cox has noted (1986:248) that neorealism
“appears ideologically to be a science at the service of big-power management of
the international system.” Cox sees an “unmistakably Panglossian quality” to
Waltz’s defense of bipolarity, noting that “the historical moment has left its
indelible mark upon this purportedly universalist science.”
Second, Waltz’s method prevents him from exploring the origins and
underpinnings of anarchy, actual state calculations about their power positions vis-
à-vis other members of the system, and what it is, exactly, that states do. Although
he is content to do so, Waltz can merely describe the mechanics of the system itself.
There is a kind of modesty here. “Although neorealist theory does not explain why
particular wars are fought,” Waltz writes (1988: 44), “it does explain war’s dismal
recurrence through the millennia.” He suggests that asking balance-of-power theory
HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 101
to explain specific policies of states is like expecting the law of gravity to predict
the “wayward path of a falling leaf” (Waltz 1979:121). In this respect, Justin
Rosenberg (1994:27) suggests that Waltz isolates only a permissive cause, as opposed
to any efficient causes, of war. Neorealism is “a contradiction of perpetual peace
rather than a theory of international politics.” If neorealist theory has a
deterministic ring to it, Waltz insists that this is not the case. Indeed, when
challenged on this, he relaxed his stance somewhat, claiming only that “structure
shapes and shoves the units of a system” (Waltz 1986:336). Still, perhaps more than
most classical realists, Waltz is of the “recurrence and repetition” school of
international thought. In this, neorealist theory is nothing if not a philosophy of
history. Waltz (1979:66) notes:
The texture of international politics remains highly constant, patterns recur
and events repeat themselves endlessly. The relations that prevail
internationally seldom shift rapidly in type or in quality. They are marked
instead with dismaying persistence, a persistence that one must expect so long
as none of the competing units is able to convert the anarchic international
realm into a hierarchic one. The enduring anarchic character of international
politics accounts for the striking sameness in the quality of international life
through the millennia.
Historical critiques
The nub of historical objections to neorealist theory and research is that an exclusive
focus on structure and on the “striking sameness” of inter-state behavior shrouds
crucial historical distinctions and leaves little room for explaining or understanding
even large-scale change. Waltz simply notes (1986: 341) the constancy of balance of
power politics “as practiced over the millennia, from ancient China and India, to
the Greek and Italian city states, and unto our own day.”
The assumption of anarchy
Recall that the neorealism begins with anarchy as an inventive ordering principle.
At some point, however, the idea of structure is taken to represent structure in fact.
Declaring that the world has never been hierarchically governed, neorealists do not
delve into the particulars. The system is assumed to exist in the form Waltz proposes
(see Buzan et al. 1993:182–6). This either-or attitude parallels earlier realist notions
that the makeup of the international system could only be either state pluralism
or a world state.
Barry Buzan and Richard Little (1994) take up the question of international
system via a long view of history that extends beyond Europe and the Westphalian
centuries. This critique of neorealism is rooted in the English School tradition
associated with Wight, Bull, Butterfield, John Vincent, Michael Howard, Adam
Watson, and other members of the British Committee for the Theory of
102 THE POVERTY OF AHISTORICISM
International Politics. Instead of accepting structure as an atemporal framework of
analysis, the idea is to consider what ‘international system’ means in a more
historically patient and probing way. Buzan and Little (ibid.: 231) suggest that even
the most abstract of international relations theories are eurocentric, and thus are
“skewed by the historically unrepresentative, and rather brief, record of events in
one corner of the planet.” They point to what they term the “anarchophila” of
realism, especially structural realism. This is the “disposition to assume that the
structure of the international system has always been anarchic, that this is natural,
and (more selectively) that this is a good thing” (ibid.: 236). The approach unleashes
a number of questions glossed over in Waltz: How big does a system have to be? Is
a system composed solely of military-political interactions? Can culture or
economics engender systems? Do all international systems have structural effects,
i.e., do systems always shape behavior among its “units”?
Indeed, when Waltz evokes “ancient China and India,” and the “Greek and
Italian city states,” as evidence of the cross-cultural and timeless nature of anarchy,
he is reciting a standard realist litany of historical international systems. It may be
that the field’s anarchists favor these periods precisely because they represent some
of the “few historical times and places that resemble the international anarchy of
modern Europe” (ibid.: 234). One also wonders if these periods do not leap to mind
because they form the historical backdrop to the usual suspects in realism’s
multicultural pantheon: Sun Tzu, Kautilya, Thucydides, and Machiavelli,
respectively. A longer and wider historical survey suggests that Waltz and other
anarchy-based systems theorists are narrowly informed. The kind of global structure
that Waltz proposes, with politicomilitary systemic effects, has been in existence
for about the past 500 years. Before that—and arguably “unto our own day”—systems
somewhere between anarchy and hierarchy appear to have been the norm. Buzan
and Little (ibid.: 249) suggest that
almost nowhere (except in the relatively short history of modern Europe) is
anarchy persistent. Numerous cases offer reasons to question the neorealist
argument that anarchy is self-sustaining: in South Asia, East Asia, the Middle
East and the Mediterranean, anarchic systems regularly and repeatedly
collapsed into empires or suzerain systems. If one focused on East Asia and
the Middle East (rather than on Europe as we mostly do) the question would
be why hierarchic systems persist.
Adam Watson (1992) elaborates on this broader range of “ordering principles.” His
survey extends from the first stirrings of the Sumerian system 5000 years ago (as
inferred from cuneiform tablets) to the contemporary scene. He posits a spectrum
of international orders, stretching from anarchy at one extreme, through hegemony,
suzerainty, and dominion, to empire at the other (see also Mann 1986). For Watson,
absolute independence (sovereignanarchy) as well as absolute empire are theoretical
extremes that do not exist in practice. Yale Ferguson and Richard Mansbach (1995)
have offered an equally rich view of non-Westphalian polities which encompasses
HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 103
a vast assortment of other (often divided or crosscutting) political identities and
loyalties. They contend that statist language and theory create a false sense of
continuity in the international system. This tendency to regard Westphalian polities
as timeless also underpins statist ideology, “reinforcing the institution it purports
to describe and explain” (ibid.: 24). For now, let us set aside the broader criticism
of the assumption of anarchy on grounds of interdependence and international
society. A critique of the billiard ball model of realism will be advanced in the
concluding chapter of this book.
Do states act alike?
“If there is any distinctly political theory of international politics, balanceof-power
theory is it” (Waltz 1979:117). Consonant with his philosophy of science, Waltz
exhibits little interest in the underlying history and process by which the balance
of power happens. Balancing is an automatic response to changes in the contours
of systemic power. Wendt argues (1987) that the neorealist conception of structure
fails to explain political conduct, because it fails to develop any linkage with human
agency. It is not simply that neorealism fails to consider agency and process. More
important is the assumption that there are sharp limits to historical choice. In this,
the theory veils a profound belief about political necessity. It also downgrades the
effects of political process, institutions, conceptions of legitimacy, and so on (cf.
Howard 1991:188–200). The degree to which political action is structured by the
system is almost postmodernist in force. If postmodern politics are imprisoned by
the structure of language and knowledge, then neorealist politics are surely
imprisoned in the structure of power. This can lead to a facile view of political
dynamics. The neorealist John Mearsheimer (1994/1995: 13), for example, breezily
observes that “the balance of power is the independent variable which explains war.”
Paul Schroeder’s criticisms of balance-of-power theory, discussed in the previous
chapter, apply with far greater force here. Interestingly, Schroeder is a “systemic”
historian whose analyses focus on the interactions between states and the
international system. He writes that Ranke’s Primat der Aussenpolitik (primacy of
foreign policy) is obsolete, but that historians must nevertheless continue to
interpret international affairs in terms of its own dynamics and norms, “not as a
dependent variable of any other systems or structures in society” (Schroeder
1994b:ix). As we have seen, Schroeder’s system is mildly “institutional.” He describes
an international order in which the use of force is regulated by conventional norms
of political conduct and association. He also suggests that what international
politics have meant in practice has always been bound up in the ideology of the
practitioner and the context of his times. In this sense, statecraft is not simply
shaped by one’s relative power position; rather, statesmen play a role in creating
and changing the system in which they operate. Thus, while the Congress of Vienna
is often hailed as a restoration of the European balance in the wake of the
Napoleonic Wars, Schroeder contends—as against the “sameness” principle of
neorealism—that the Congress transformed the European system. A “competitive
104 THE POVERTY OF AHISTORICISM
balance-of-power struggle,” he writes, gave way to a system founded on “benign
shared hegemony and the mutual recognition of rights underpinned by law” (ibid.:
580).
We also suggested in the previous chapter that states, especially weak ones, do
not necessarily “balance” against power or threats, but exhibit a range of responses
including denial, isolation, embracing the threatening state in a restraining alliance,
diplomatic settlements, and bandwagoning with aggressors. Schroeder points to the
diverse strategies that states adopted in response to Austrian Emperor Joseph II’s
1785 attempt to “exchange” the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) for Bavaria, a swap,
which, if successful, would have heightened and centralized Austrian power and
thus threaten the German equilibrium. Schroeder notes that “the balance” at stake
was not simply a material one existing between the great Austrian and Prussian
powers. He suggests that “the balance” referred also to the virtues represented by
the Reich constitution, which provided for certain liberties within Germany’s many
states. (This, he notes, “is another indication of the ways in which a purely power-
political view of international politics is too crude to capture vital elements of the
process.”) Many “units” hid from the Austrian threat, ignored the issue, or remained
neutral, even while acknowledging that Austria’s triumph would likely harm their
interests. Some states—Prussia and Hanover—did balance. Others began by hiding
out, then bandwagoned with the winning Prussian side. Still others tried to
transcend the threat, banding together in an attempt to revive and reform the
institutions of the Reich as a means of guaranteeing territorial rights and arbitrating
future disputes (Schroeder 1994a: 118–19).
Schroeder contends that this type of scenario, in which different states perceive
and respond to the same threat in different ways, recurred in almost all the major
crises of the Westphalian era (the Napoleonic wars and the Second World War were
discussed in the previous chapter). He writes that neorealist theory “not only
prevents scholars from seeing and explaining the various strategies alternative to
balancing, or the different functions and roles of various actors within the system,
but even blocks a genuine historical understanding of balancing conduct and the
balance of power itself as a historical variable, changing over time, conditioned by
historical circumstances, and freighted with ideological assumptions” (ibid.: 148).
As for the assertion that self-help and the security imperative preclude any
international division of labor, Schroeder points out that states have frequently
taken on different functions within international systems. Waltz’s contention that
“the domestic imperative is ‘specialize!’” while “the international imperative is ‘take
care of yourself!’” is over-simple. In the nineteenth century, for example, functional
cooperation was the norm. Britain claimed a special role as holder of the European
balance, Russia saw itself as guardian of the monarchical order, Switzerland acted
to keep the passes between Germany and Italy out of any single great power’s
control, Denmark and Sweden guarded the entrance to the Baltic, the Ottomans
blocked hegemony over the Turkish straits. Schroeder argues that specialization was
in fact a sound state strategy, and that a failure to specialize might be punished.
He also argues that it would be wrong to see these roles as reducible to their impact
HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 105
on security and the balance of power (ibid.: 124–7). One could also say that this
was not the system forcing compliance on the units so much as it was the units
working “inside-out” to keep the system afloat. Schroeder concedes on this and
other issues that history offers no “ironclad” retort to neorealism. Still, the
neorealist framework almost certainly forces misexpla-nations upon the evidence.
Schroeder concludes that neorealism’s assumptions about the “unchanging,
repetitive nature of balance-of-power politics and outcomes throughout the ages,
may make its theory of international politics simple, parsimonious, and elegant;
they also make it, for the historian at least, unhistorical, unusable, and wrong”
(ibid.: 129).
The problem of change
As noted earlier, Waltz’s world is remarkable for its changelessness and its focus on
structure at the expense of process. Anarchy, ironically, is an extraordinarily stable
social condition. Richard Ashley (1986:290–2) offers what is perhaps the most
thoroughgoing critique of the approach on these grounds. He argues that
neorealism is silent on four crucial historical dimensions, what he calls the “four
p’s: process, practice, power, and politics.” Historical and political process is
occluded by a “fixity of theoretical categories” and “pregiven structure.” Practice
vanishes as “men and women, statesmen and entrepreneurs, appear as mere supports
for the social process that produces their will and the logics by which they serve
it.” Each is reduced “to some idealized Homo oeconomicus, able only to carry out,
but never to reflect critically on, the limited rational logic that the system demands
of them.” Neorealism’s portrayal of power is entirely material, denying the social
bases and limits of power. That is, unlike Morgenthau, neorealism fails to see power
as a social or psychological relationship. Ashley stresses that “no other position on
power could possibly be compatible with neorealism’s atomistic and utilitarian
conceptions of international order.” Finally, politics are reduced “to those aspects
which lend themselves to interpretation exclusively within a framework of
economic action under structural constraints.” Politics becomes “pure technique
…
strategy is deprived of its artful and performative aspect, becoming instead the mere
calculation of instruments of control.”
John Ruggie, like Schroeder, contends that functional differentiation does occur
among states, and indeed is indispensable in understanding systemic change. Ruggie
is thus reluctant to see the character of the units “drop out” of the analysis. He
contends that international politics have not been static; anarchy has a history.
Unit-level change in the foundations of anarchy has in the past underpinned the
transformation of the international system, he insists, pointing to the shifting
notions of sovereignty and legitimacy behind the passage from medieval Europe
to the modern state system. Because the medieval system reflected “a patchwork of
overlapping and incomplete rights of government,” it was a tangle of anarchy and
hierarchy. It was also impossible to distinguish the conduct of “international”
affairs from domestic ones. These were not unitary, sovereign actors; there was no
106 THE POVERTY OF AHISTORICISM
absolute boundary between public territories and private estates. The medieval
polity was a “segmental realm,” but its parts were separated from each other by
principles that are profoundly different from those of the modern age. It is thus a
bald anachronism to force neorealist logic on the period; it is “historically
inaccurate, and nonsensical besides.” Shifts in the bases of sovereignty produced
the modern state system. To assume that the new principles are now timeless is to
deny the motion of history. As Ruggie summarizes, “the problem with Waltz’s
posture is that, in any social system, structural change itself ultimately has no source
other than unit-level processes. Waltz’s theory of ‘society’ contains only a
reproductive, but no transformational logic” (Ruggie 1986:142, 152).
One attempt to describe the medieval period in neorealist terms has drawn sharp
censure for its portrayal of history. Markus Fischer (1992), employing the neorealist
model, reports that the historical record “shows,” “suggests,” and “indicates” that
medieval polities were constrained by Europe’s power structure as well as by the
norms of Christendom. The implication is that neorealism explains European
politics even before the dawn of Westphalia. In response, Rodney Hall and Friedrich
Kratochwil (1993:491) argue that Fischer’s thesis rests on precarious historiographic
ground—that he has allied himself with historians with “structuralist
methodological proclivities” and has studiously avoided unhelpful historiography.
The critics suggest that “it should be possible to learn from historical materials by
treating the dead fairly or even sympathetically
…The credibility of claims of
neorealist scholarship to scientific status is not enhanced by arguments that appear
to violate explicit injunctions of science against selective use of data.” The
ransacking problem is raised, but the exchange, including Fischer’s response (1993),
also suggests that international theory is being overworked, especially if its validity
rests on specialized debate among historians.
Waltz does not deny that international change—albeit glacial—occurs. “Surveying
the rise and fall of nations over the centuries,” he notes, “one can only conclude
that national rankings change slowly. War aside, the economic and other bases of
power change little more rapidly in one major nation than they do in another”
(Waltz 1979:177). Furthermore, “The death rate among states is remarkably low.”
“Who is likely to be around 100 years from now -the United States, the Soviet
Union, France, Egypt, Thailand, and Uganda? Or Ford, IBM, Shell, Unilever, and
Massey-Ferguson?” (ibid.: 95). Waltz’s conception of what is changing—namely
national power capabilities—is striking because it is so sharply circumscribed.
Neorealism appears incapable of envisaging any outcome that transcends the
calculus of power and control. One is tempted to say that this is not historical change.
The advent of nuclear weapons, the rise of capitalism, the Enlightenment, the
Islamic conquest of Africa, the spread of Confucian teachings—these varieties of
history are homogenized in a sea of structure. Outside of their connection to power
they are merely ideas, technologies, and social forces with no specific bearing on
the international system.
Then, of course, there is the end of the cold war. If neorealism’s stock prospered
alongside the grand strategic thinking and arms racing of the 1980s, it plummeted
HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 107
(or should have) when the cold war ended and the international system changed
differently and more rapidly than structuralists had anticipated. This was, after all,
precisely the sort of tectonic upheaval one would expect the theory to explain or
predict. Waltz (1993:50) has since offered a quasi-structuralist reading of events:
“The political and economic reconstruction attempted by the Soviet Union
followed in part from external causes
… Economic reorganization, and the
reduction of imperial burdens, became an externally imposed necessity, which in
turn required internal reforms.” The fact remains that the Soviet Union crumbled,
and bipolarity ended with virtually no change in Soviet military capabilities. Nor
did the superpower standoff end in the sort of hegemonic war prophesied by many
neorealists. The whole affair, rooted in less than systemic factors, seriously
undermined the approach (see Everts 1992). Gaddis argues that fixity on structure
blinded neorealists to this possibility:
Structuralists see time as a scale against which to measure events, but they
pay little attention to the fact that the passage of time, in and of itself, also
shapes events. In this respect, they resemble those pre-Darwinian
paleontologists who believed in the immutability of species: despite being
surrounded by evidence showing that animals, plants, and even land forms
had evolved over time, these scientists simply assumed the absence or the
unimportance of evolution and therefore lacked the means to understand,
account for, and anticipate structural change.
(Gaddis 1992/1993:38)
Through the looking glass: Stephen Walt’s Revolution and
War
In some ways, Waltz anticipated Gaddis’s criticism. Waltz conceded that theory was
an “image” or “idea” through which historical evidence is filtered. “Knowledge, it
seems, must precede theory, and yet knowledge can precede only from theory”
(Waltz 1979:8).
This paradox is unavoidable in any research. Waltz’s skepticism
is aimed largely at historical inductivists who believe that theory will materialize at
the end of their inquiry. Nevertheless, its implications are no less profound for
deductive theory and scientific research projects. Indeed, because the problem arises
when preconceptions precede observation, an inductivist might be less disposed to
interpret things in a particular way.
How has this problem affected actual research within the neorealist program?
This section considers a prominent current example of neorealist inquiry, Stephen
M. Walt’s Revolution and War (1996). Revolution and War has been the subject of a
journal symposium and conference roundtables. One reviewer notes that the book
represents “one more piece of evidence that [neo]realism remains a rich and vibrant
research tradition despite recurrent claims to the contrary” (Desch 1997:126). Walt’s
central contribution to the field is to emphasize how perceptions about power affect
state behavior. This is not a new idea, but it is helpful inasmuch as it has enriched
108 THE POVERTY OF AHISTORICISM
the neorealist framework of material capabilities. In Origins of Alliances (1987), Walt
proposed that states balance not only against power, but also against threats. He
carries this idea forward in Revolution and War. Whether or not this is the sort of
“patched-up adjustment” of neorealism that Lakatos criticized in deductive social
science, Walt’s threat-based approach is a signal example of second-generation
neorealist theory and research. If the approach appears to have more in common
with Robert Jervis’s classic Perception and Misperception in International Politics (1976)
than with Theory of International Politics, it should be noted that Walt’s language,
assumptions, belief in deductive science, as well as his view of the international
realm as composed of rational, unitary, self-seeking states whose motivations are
reducible to security interests, are all firmly in the neorealist tradition.
Revolution and War examines the international impact of revolutions. The book
pursues an explicitly systemic approach. “Decisions to go to war are not made in
a vacuum. War is ultimately a response to problems that arise between two or more
states. Understanding revolution and war thus requires an international-political
perspective: instead of focusing primarily on the revolutionary state itself, we should
consider how revolutions will affect the relationship between the state and the other
members of the system” (p. 12). He contends that revolutions are watershed events
in the international system, causing sudden shifts in the balance of power, altering
patterns of international alignments, casting doubt on existing agreements and
diplomatic norms, and enticing other states to try to improve their own geopolitical
positions. Foreign aggressors may exploit the national upheaval that attends
revolutions. Later, when the revolution has been solidified, its leaders may enter a
heady period during which they attempt to export the revolution. Revolutionary
states and foreign powers often exaggerate each other’s hostile intentions, and
conflict ensues. All of these concerns, Walt argues, are mediated by state (elite)
perceptions. Setting out to rectify a number of “folk theories” about revolution
and war, Walt theorizes that revolutions
intensify security competition and increase the probability of war by altering
each side’s perceptions of the balance of threats. In addition to affecting the
balance of power, a revolution also fosters malign perceptions of intent and
a perverse combination of insecurity and overconfidence, based primarily on
the possibility that revolution will spread to other countries. Although war
does not occur in every case, strong pressures for war are always present and,
invariably, the level of security competition increases significantly.
(p. viii)
Revolution and War suggests several intriguing dynamics that underpin this “security
competition.” What Walt terms “spirals of suspicion” mount as threats and
insecurities are exaggerated on both sides. Revolutionaries resort to bombastic
language, stress historic wrongs in inter-state relations, and interpret other states’
reactions in the worst possible light. If status quo powers respond in kind, even
mild diplomatic disputes are likely to escalate. When either revolutionary or
HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 109
reactionary fervor is linked to a belief that one holds an offensive advantage, conflict
becomes even more probable. Walt’s interest in perceptions yields a further
observation: good information is scarce during revolutionary periods. Normal
channels of inter-state communications collapse at precisely the moment when they
are most needed. Diplomats are withdrawn, intelligence networks are curtailed,
scholarly exchanges are suspended, and media freedoms are circumscribed. All the
while, nefarious accounts of revolutionary intentions are sown abroad by counter-
revolutionary émigrés.
Walt carries forward the theory-hypothesis-testing method. He compares “process-
tracing” case studies, precisely the sort of analysis so lacking in Waltz’s approach.
Looking at revolutions in France (1789), Russia (1917), Iran (1979), China (1949),
America (1776), Turkey (1921), and Mexico (1910), Walt effectively bridges levels
of analysis and strikes a good balance between economy of explanation and
historical content, making extensive use of historical evidence and interpretation.
Walt considers his theory “supported” if the mechanisms described above were
present, even if war did not result. Wars did follow close on the heels of the French,
Russian, Iranian, and Chinese revolutions. Walt argues that war did not result in
the other cases because leaders decided that the costs outweighed the benefits of
conflict. He suggests that these decisions were gauged according to perceptions
about the offense—defense balance and beliefs about whether or not the revolutions
might be exported. Interestingly, Walt is trying to make an elite preferences
argument, yet he has difficulty discerning elite preferences. He relies on an
oftenepigrammatic method that highlights “state” perceptions as expressed in the
public pronouncements of Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Khomeini, and others.
Walt has little trouble finding historical examples to demonstrate his main ideas.
His thesis, after all, is not that revolutions cause war, but only that they heighten
security competition in the system. This stance allows Walt to gainsay historians’
suggestions that wars were on the horizon whether or not they were propelled by
revolution (p. 118). His historiographic focus does appear to be largely governed
by the degree of theoretical fit. He devotes eighty pages each to the French and
Russian revolutions, and sixty pages to the Iranian case. The American, Mexican,
Turkish, and Chinese revolutions, where the thesis seems to apply in only the most
general way, if at all, are canvassed in a single chapter. The international impact of
the French Revolution, his first case study, seems to provide a kind of template by
which to view the other revolutionary periods. The French Revolution is probably
so deeply ingrained in our thinking that this is unavoidable. Walt contends that
his cases show how “revolutions have independent causal effects on the level of
security competition and the probability of war” (p. 333). However, it seems difficult
to separate these effects, as Walt claims to have done, from other sources of conflict.
Walt points, for example, to Poland’s invasion of Russia in 1920 as evidence that
the 1917 revolution had created an inviting vacuum. However, it seems equally
plausible that the systemic upheavals of the First World War, rather than the
Russian Revolution, “caused” Poland to take the offensive.
110 THE POVERTY OF AHISTORICISM
At other turns, Walt seems to fit the evidence to his theory. In keeping with his
hypotheses, he describes the Soviets’ “highly paranoid view of world politics” as a
generic revolutionary trait (p. 203). Kennan, as we have seen, suggested that this
paranoia had much deeper roots. The Chinese Revolution no doubt indirectly
affected the outbreak of the Korean War, but the case fits a number of other
theoretical scenarios as well (p. 323). Newly available archival materials suggest that
Stalin had more influence over North Korea than did Mao (see Foot 1996:473–82).
The Turkish case seems to be a particularly poor fit, leading Walt to judge that its
“familiar dynamics or revolutionary situations” took on “a muted and less
dangerous form” (p. 310). Whether this was a revolution at all remains a point of
lively debate. At the time, the outline of “Turkey” (as mapped at the Treaty of
Sevères) was in dispute. The “liberation” movement drove the occupation forces
from Anatolia and Thrace, before leading an extraordinarily successful (and often
heavy-handed) program of modernization and westernization. This consensus was
slow to emerge, however. Initially, the movement was a hydra-head of diverse elites,
ranging from Kemalists espousing a kind of Anatolian nationalism, other
nationalists who harked back to the French Revolution, the Turanists, who
envisioned a Pan-Turkic state stretching across Central Asia to China, and a strong
retinue of Ottoman military officers and civil servants who intended to reestablish
the Caliphate and rebuild the empire. Again, the Turkish case seems to have been
more a question of perceptions and misperceptions than of objective assessments
of international threats, if any. The European powers appear to have imposed their
own “orientalist” interpretations on events, which is particularly ironic given
Atatürk’s eventual orientation of Turkey toward Western manners and mores.
Ultimately, the revolution probably enhanced Turkish relations with Europe far
more than it undermined them.
The international effects of the Iranian Revolution best buttress Walt’s thesis.
The Iranian case highlights Walt’s vast improvement over Waltz’s analysis: material
capabilities alone could never do justice to the meaning of revolutionary Iran.
Ayatollah Khomeini certainly provided abundant provocative “foreign policy”
pronouncements. On one occasion Khomeini stated, “we have in reality, then, no
choice but to
…overthrow all treacherous, corrupt, oppressive, and criminal
regimes” (p. 210). On another, “it is only through the active, intentional pursuit
of martyrdom that unjust rulers can be toppled” (p. 215). The bounty on Salman
Rushdie’s head was also unambiguous. The Iran—Iraq War was almost certainly
sparked by Baathist fears that the revolution might spread. Still, it seems
problematic to squeeze the Islamic theocracy into a self-help unit, treating it as just
another revolutionary state. The possibility also exists that Khomeini’s threats were
manufactured in order to cement his hold on power—though admittedly this would
not assuage perceptions abroad. V.S.Naipaul has argued recently (1997) that to think
of the Iranian stance toward the West in terms of rational “foreign policy goals” is
to misjudge a cynical system of domestic control.
Revolutions heighten uncertainties, and create power vacuums and geopolitical
opportunities. They may have profound impacts on both security and economic
HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 111
interests. Besides posing this insight in a fashion acceptable to political scientists,
one wonders about the originality and profundity of Walt’s contribution. More
importantly, Walt’s approach leaves whole realms of questions unasked. His inquiry
remains encased in neorealist assumptions about the nature of international
politics. The real filtering lies in the idea that states seek security above all else.
Explanations are couched exclusively in terms of capabilities, threats, and power
vacuums. The “selfhelp” assumption sustains the validity of the comparison.
Otherwise, changes in international context and norms would cast doubt on
comparisons of the international reaction to, say, the American and Iranian
revolutions. The assumption is that states will go to war when these conditions are
present. What might inhibit this outcome? How might international institutions
mitigate the uncertainties that put states on edge in revolutionary times? What role
could third parties play? Can revolutions enhance concord between states? In several
of Walt’s cases, war did not follow revolution, and these questions remain
unanswered because they are unasked.
Conclusion: politics without process
Waltz notes that “the more complex and intricate the matters being studied are,
the stronger the urge ‘to be simple-minded’” (Waltz 1990:27). In political analysis,
parsimony may be a dubious virtue. Being simple-minded closes off other ways of
understanding, abbreviates inquiry, and undercuts progress in the field. It may also
veil a complacent historical epistemology. As Kratochwil (1993:64) has noted, a
“Platonist preconception” with form has dominated structural theory. “The search
for invariable laws of international politics has not only significantly reduced the
number of interesting questions, it has also led to premature closure
… The
unchanging or cyclical nature of international politics is substituted for the
investigation of actual processes and decisions.” Besides affirming that power
politics are here to stay (and that arsenals should remain well stocked), Waltz offers
no counsel to the prince. Indeed, having toiled so long to isolate a theory of
international politics, Waltz closely guards his achievement. No one has argued
more consistently than he that neorealism is not, and was never intended to be, a
theory of foreign policy (Waltz 1996). Meanwhile, neorealist claims about structural
effects have grown so extensive as to very nearly render the theory unassailable to
historical challenges, i.e., unfalsifiable (Elman et al. 1995:194). Ironically, this is
exactly what neorealists used to say of classical realism.
Other visions of the international system open up realms of inquiry rather than
close them off. It is worth pointing out in this regard that, while neorealists revere
Thucydides for explaining the Peloponnesian War in terms of economics, they are
often guilty of a reductionist view of the Athenian’s great History, which is shaded
by far more than relative numbers of spiked shields, hoplites, and archers.
Thucydides was intrigued as well by the “spirit” of the Athenians, by different forms
of power, the psychology of clashing cultures and economies, open versus closed
societies, innovation versus resistance to change, self-reliance versus international
112 THE POVERTY OF AHISTORICISM
commerce, constitutions and law, the role of rhetoric, the dislocations of social and
economic upheaval.
Thucydides also grasped the moral tragedy of war. Waltz notes that international
affairs are conducted “in the brooding shadow of violence,” but the ethical
implications of anarchy are left unexamined (Waltz 1979:102). Discourse on
international ethics generally revolves around the tension between political
necessity and moral demand, with ethical choices either derived from “rules” or
based on calculations of expected consequences. In neorealism, such questions are
deemed “unscientific” or “metaphysical,” in any case, beyond the pale of theoretical
discourse. A foreign policy based on the third-image, says Waltz, “is neither moral
nor immoral, but embodies merely a reasoned response to the world around us”
(Waltz 1959a:238). Neorealists seem convinced that states, much less individuals,
are powerLess to alter the system in which they find themselves. If structural theory
does not actively sanction existing structures, it at least fuels a certain fatalism about
change. This itself is an ethical stance. As one critic notes of the “science” of
international relations: “The subject is unavoidably normative. It is not that
normative concerns ought to be addressed, rather that they have always been at the
centre of the subject. Lying at the heart of value-neutrality was a very powerful
normative project, one every bit as ‘political’ or ‘biased’ as those approaches
marginalised and delegitimised in the name of science” (Smith 1992:490). Wedded
to structure and sameness, neorealism restrains rather than inspires meliorist hopes.
Diplomats may conclude that ethics no longer matter.
HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 113
11
4
6
“THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING
SCIENTIFIC”
J.David Singer and the Correlates of War
The use of history in international relations reaches its methodological zenith in
the quantitative approach. While neorealism pursues scientific rigor by way of
deductive theory and empirical falsification, quantitative political science employs
the full arsenal of computer and statistical methods in heavily inductive fashion.
Quantitative researchers believe that their methods remedy many of the historical
problems recounted in the preceding chapters: selection bias, interpretive prejudice,
theoretical filtering, anecdotalism, and ahistoricism. “The historian can continue
to pile up facts and do his case studies but only as he borrows from the social
sciences can he produce hard evidence or compelling interpretations of the past,”
argues J.David Singer, founder and director of the Correlates of War project at the
University of Michigan Center for Research on Conflict Resolution. Failing this
scientific rigor, “our understanding of the past will remain in the hands of the
literati, responding to one revisionist or counter-revisionist interpretation after
another, as the consensus ebbs and flows” (Singer 1969:82).
Begun in 1963, the Correlates of War (COW) is today the premier behavioral
research program in international politics. Heralding a true science of international
relations, the project held out reproducible, long-term historical study in place of
the “intuition,” “folklore,” and “armchair theorizing” that have marked “several
centuries of pre-operational speculation” and “wisdom literature” about the causes
of war (Singer 1981:1). A succession of researchers has compiled a statistical database
for major wars, alliances, civil conflicts, and systemic attributes from 1816 to 1992.
(COW data sets include Singer and Small 1972, Small and Singer 1982, and Singer
and Small 1994a, 1994b.) Analysts continue to digest historical accounts, and work
based on COW data is ongoing around the globe. (The latest bibliography of
COWbased research is Diehl 1992.) Pursuing a diverse agenda of data-making, index
construction, statistical manipulation, and theoretical modeling, the project’s
contribution has come in the form of fragmentary findings and as the result of its
more narrowly posed hypotheses. As yet, there has been no major breakthrough in
the study of war (see Vasquez 1987).
Quantitative work is the most scientific approach to international relations in
that its historical sample extends far beyond the cases cited anecdotally or
analogically in traditional work, and its statistical analyses are, in themselves,
objective and reproducible. Nevertheless, it is also the most historical approach in
that its findings and prescriptions hinge entirely on “coded” historiography. As
Donald Puchala (1990:64) has noted, “behaviorists were not ignoring history. They
were coding it!” Indeed, the COW has done extraordinarily heavy historical lifting,
in terms of both numbers of hours and history books, far outpacing any other
research project in the field. Nevertheless, historical appraisals of the COW, and
of quantitative international relations generally, have typically amounted to blanket
pronouncements on social science methods, and have ignored the cliometrics
debate among historians. This chapter first places quantitative international
relations in the context of social science history, before exploring the COW as a
case of behavioral science. It then addresses problems of “data-making,” the
procedure by which narrative history is transformed into statistical indicators, and
attempts to replicate a randomly selected sample of COW historical data. The
chapter moves on to address the “quantitative fallacy,” before, finally, assessing the
COW and other quantitative work from the perspective of historical skepticism.
History by the numbers
The strength of quantitative history, or cliometrics as it is also known, is that it
offers a method of systematic, comparative historical research buttressed by clear
standards of evidence. Figures take the place of “feel,” variables are defined and
delimited, operations are precisely described. Once a data set has been prepared, it
can be subjected to any number of statistical tests. Perhaps the most common
application is the “large n” analysis of “aggregate” data, meaning that historical
hypotheses are put simultaneously to many cases, usually with the help of a
computer. The hope is that such “longitudinal” or “time-series” analyses may reveal
patterns and associations which had been not simply undiscovered, but were
undiscoverable using traditional methods.
Is it possible to extend quantitative methods to international history? Is this a
worthwhile strategy for exploring the causes or correlates of war? Does the
quantitative historian, as one critic suggested, “borrow the vices of other disciplines
and surrender the virtues of his own”? (Fischer 1970:37). Because the traditional—
quantitative argument in politics is paralleled so closely in the debate over historical
methods, a brief review of what has happened in Clio’s domain is in order.
Cliometrics was born the twin of l’histoire annaliste, the “bottom—up,”
socioeconomic history invented by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre of the Annales
school in the 1920s.
The annalistes denounced “event-centered,” “political” history
as superficial and elitist. Far more important was the history of everyday life (la
vie quotidienne) which, when studied over the long term, would reveal the “geologic”
contours underlying societies and economies. These were historical problems that
required quantitative inquiry: tariffs, divorces, the growth of industry, patterns of
trade and extraction, exchange rates, crop yields, literacy rates, caloric intake, and
so on. The method was urged on other historical genres as well. Emmanuel Le Roy
Ladurie’s insistence that “history that is not quantifiable cannot claim to be
scientific” was a slap at narrativists, but also undercut traditional nomothetic
116 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
practitioners who believed that their work, while not quantitative, was nevertheless
scientific (see Jarausch 1985: 14). Georges Lefebvre, the great historian of the French
Revolution, coined what would become the password for a generation of
quantitative historians: “Il faut compter” (quoted in Thomas 1966:275).
The admonition to count got a rocky reception. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1962:
770) noted in 1962 that “almost all important questions are important precisely
because they are not susceptible to quantitative answers.” In his presidential address
to the American Historical Association that same year, Carl Bridenbaugh (1963:325–
6) inveighed against “scientific” approaches to history, which he saw as “culturally
impoverished” and revealing “little if any historical sense.” He announced, “The
finest historians will not be those who succumb to the dehumanizing methods of
social sciences
… Nor will the historian worship at the shrine of that Bitch-goddess,
QUANTIFICATION.”
Nevertheless, the method spread in popularity in the 1960s and profited from
computing advances in the 1970s. In 1966, the TLS published a famous series, “New
Ways in History,” pitching cliometrics’ statistical methods and socioeconomic
content. The lead piece noted that it “seemed certain that the computer will replace
the ‘stout boots’ worn by the advanced historians of the past generation,” and that
econometrics especially offered “definitive solutions” to historical debates (Thomas
1966:276). Another contributor added that cliometrics had liberated history from
the “tyranny of literature” by making intelligible a cache of new sources (Weaver
1966). Elsewhere, François Furet (1971:160) saw cliometrics not merely as “a
transformation of the raw material of history,” but as representing “a revolution
in historiographical consciousness.” Lee Benson (1966:12–13) hailed a “genuinely
scientific historiography,” and held out the possibility of discovering or developing
general laws of human behavior.
Sophisticated mathematics and models soon meant that narrativist historians
did not know what their behavioralist brethren were up to. Two cultures emerged,
one qualitative and “humanistic,” the other quantitative and claiming the mantle
of science. For some historians, the idea that their craft might be enriched by the
social sciences implied a certain shoddiness or inadequacy in traditional work.
Traditional historians also felt coerced to accept historical assertions grounded in
thousands of hours of research and the latest statistical technologies. For many, the
only options were to accept quantitative findings uncritically, or, more likely,
simply ignore them. The divide deepened as historians took sides in several high
profile cases, most prominently the publication of Robert Fogel and Stanley
Engerman’s Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974). Based
on data on 80,000 slaves drawn from probate and census records from fifty-four
counties in eight Southern states between 1775 and 1865, the book’s authors argued
that slavery was a relatively mild form of industrial organization, that slave families
rarely were rent apart, that slaves adhered more or less to a Protestant work ethic,
and that however ethically abominable slavery was, economically it was a rational
strategy. Fogel and Engerman claimed to have demolished a century’s worth of
slavery historiography, yet a series of hostile reviews, many written by economists
“THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING SCIENTIFIC” 117
and statisticians, suggested that their strong conclusions rested on indefensible
interpretation of sources and defective manipulation of data (see Handlin 1979:206–
6). Unfortunately for the behavioral camp, Time on the Cross had securely hitched
its claims to the quantitative method. The episode was seen to vindicate the skeptics,
lending credence to Mark Twain’s aphorism about “lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
Historians were most alarmed, however, that evangelical cliometrics would erode
the humanistic and literary foundations of the discipline. In its utopian stage,
quantification held out a computerized version of Acton’s pledge of a “Rankean”
historical science of “completeness and certainty.” Quantitative claims have since
receded. Revisiting the new history in the TLS in 1975, Elie Kedourie (1975:238–
40) cooled to the approach, calling quantitative “scientism” a “paradoxical, not to
say impossible, quest,” and urging historians to abandon the “dizzying heights of
method” for the more solid ground of resourceful and imaginative description.
Theodore Rabb, a founder of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, noted in 1981
that “The great hopes of the early days of the computer have apparently been
disappointed; now there is a more limited role for those who wish to count” (Rabb
1981:322).
Still, despite what Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1977:136) called the “futile
banishment proceedings” taken against it, a modest cliometrics is ensconced in the
canons of historiography. It is important to recall, however, that although methods
have progressed from IBM keypunch technology to a cornucopia of software
packages, quantification does not replace the historian’s interpretive and logical
skills. The method may lend a keener edge to research and causal claims than those
based on narrative, but quantitative findings rely nonetheless on the accuracy of
the data employed. In any case, today’s “new” historians are not limited to numbers.
“Bottom—up” history is now being applied to cultural “mentalities,” material and
popular culture, intellectual and labor history, and historical sociology in the
manner of Charles Tilly.
Through all of this, only the most tenuous link has existed between cliometrics
and diplomatic history. Happily, the construction of diplomatic history has evolved
over the years from “dry-as-dust” monographs summarizing official communiques
toward a richer interpretive practice, tracking inter national trade, technology
transfers, political economy, environmental issues, institutional roles and
bureaucratic politics, as well as providing new takes on traditional areas of power
and statecraft. (Many practitioners now prefer the more inclusive term,
“international history.”) Rarely, though, has diplomatic history taken the form of
straight quantitative work. Charles Maier notes (in a survey of diplomatic history
that sparked a raft of rebuttals), that “Rankean exegesis still forms the basis of the
craft,” suggesting that “history from the bottom up takes its toll in a field of human
activity that is still largely executed, if not ultimately shaped, from the top down”
(Maier 1980: 356–7).
This may be why the many historians who favor social science methods rarely
attempt diplomatic history. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Comparative
Studies in Society and History, Journal of Social History, Social Science History, and
118 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Historical Methods are all venues for longitudinal studies seeking greater comparative
content and broader generalizations than found in traditional outlets. Yet, over the
past 10 years these journals combined have published no articles based on
“operationalized” diplomatic historiography. Meanwhile, Diplomatic History, Revue
d’histoire diplomatique, The International History Review, and Diplomacy and Statecraft
have hewed to traditional methods. Singer and long-time COW historian-in-
residence Melvin Small organized a diplomatic history section of the Social Science
History Association, but the group disbanded a few years later for lack of conference
papers (Small 1990:21 n. 1). The hope, voiced by Ole Holsti and Robert North
(1965:155), was that “modern social science methods coupled with the use of
computers may transform history into something approaching a laboratory of
international behavior.” Today, however, virtually no one is doing quantitative
diplomatic history on the history side; the initiative for cliometric work in
international politics rests almost entirely with political scientists.
The COW as behavioral science: “systematic, visible, explicit,
and reproducible” (Jones and Singer 1972:20)
The COW has been the source of scores of articles and several books addressing a
wide range of empirical questions on war. Among the COWs own basic findings
(some of which are hotly contested among COW “users”), are the following:
• There were 209 international wars between 1816 and 1992;
• The international arena remains “fundamentally as war-prone as it has been since
the Congress of Vienna,” although war is perhaps becoming less frequent but
more lethal (Small and Singer 1979:80). Of the 177 years under study, some kind
of international war was underway every year except 1908;
• European states were the most bellicose. Since the Congress of Vienna the most
frequently warring nations were: Britain (52 wars), France (44), Turkey (27),
Russia/Soviet Union (25), China (17), and Italy (15);
• States won 65 percent of the wars they initiated; they lost 28 percent of them;
• Wars do not appear to begin with any cyclical regularity. Peak amounts of war
underway, however, show a strong periodicity in the range of 15 to 20 years;
• There is a fickle relationship between alliances and security. In the nineteenth
century, the greater the number of formal alliances covenanted by states, the less
likely was war to occur; in the twentieth century the opposite is true;
• Preparing for war rarely ensures peace. Disputes between and among major
powers tend to escalate into war if preceded by an arms race; disputes not
preceded by an arms race do not;
• A “transparent” international system of disparate powers seems to promote
peace; findings are mixed on the bipolar/multipolar question, although a “tight”
bipolar system is associated with greater amounts of war; and
• There is reason to be skeptical of “democratic peace” claims. “States with such
governments have not been noticeably peace-prone or unaggressive over our
“THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING SCIENTIFIC” 119
historical period
…they did become involved in quite a few wars, and not always
as defenseless victims of a dictator’s aggression” (Small and Singer 1976:67–8).
Geller and Singer (1998:87–8) note that the evidence that democratic dyads are
more pacific than non-democratic pairs is “consistent and cumulative,” although
there are competing explanations for this phenomenon.
Singer’s principal claim is that these and other COW findings are distinguished
from mere assertions by virtue of the rigorous, reproducible manner in which they
are derived (Singer 1965:75). That is to say, the project’s methodology underpins
its epistemology. Singer’s work is a running indictment on these grounds of the
tactics employed by traditional researchers. He calls international relations
“methodologically, the most retarded segment of one of the most retarded social
sciences,” and anticipates a day when the “antiscientific” mentality, “untouched by
any post-Ptolemaic tendencies,” will seem as anachronistic in the study of global
politics as alchemy or astrology do to today’s natural scientists (Singer 1989:225).
Co-investigator and diplomatic historian Melvin Small makes the parallel claim
that “Historians of international relations are among the most methodologically
conservative of a conservative trade,” clinging to “ways little changed since the time
of Thucydides” (Small 1990:29). The idea is that the field’s Luddites have produced
volumes of “literary speculation” on the causes of war, but no hard evidence.
Funded initially by the Carnegie Corporation and later by a series of grants from
the National Science Foundation, and, most recently, the United States Institute
of Peace, the COW has sought policy as well as intellectual “payoffs.” Singer has
never hesitated to link up the project with a long stream of progressivist,
quantitative peace research back to Jean de Bloch’s six-volume work La Guerre Future,
published in Paris in 1898, which used a mathematical model to argue that modern
firearms and social organization had made war an economic impossibility, to Lewis
Richardson’s accounts of “deadly quarrels,” and Pitirim Sorokin’s and Quincy
Wright’s studies of war and revolution.
Singer has never said that politics can be a pure science. Like “hard” science,
though, the COW is ardently nomothetic, or law generating, in its approach to
history. “The moment that one goes beyond the telling of a single narrative or the
interpretation of a single case, one is into the ‘nomothetic’ mode, and is thus laying
the groundwork for cumulative knowledge” (Singer 1990a:142). Singer dismisses
the differentia specifica school, suggesting that an “undue preoccupation, yea
obsession, with the unique, the discrete, the non-comparable, is what has largely
kept history from developing into a cumulative discipline” (Singer 1969:77). “[W]
e begin with the assumption that there are indeed regularities in the origins of
different types of wars, and that they are discoverable
…we assume that those
regularities are as relevant to the future as to the past” (Singer 1972a:244).
The project has pursued these regularities inductively, waiting agnostically for
the data to mount before making theoretical claims. As statistical patterns emerge,
the mode of inquiry becomes increasingly theoretical and the search for causal
patterns more focused. Singer sees deductive theory as fashioned from “whole cloth”
120 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
and limited in compass, often producing dueling monocausal explanations. With
its built-in flexibility and sophisticated computing, the COW is prepared for
complexity. Thus, if states go to war based on an elaborate, multi-level logic that
changes with the international environment, presumably this can be discovered. As
an agnostic, however, Singer should also be prepared for indeterminacy. If states
go to war for all sorts of reasons, if there is no clear pattern, that too would be an
important discovery.
This behavioral road to theory follows a three-fold epistemology: existential,
correlational, and explanatory.
Existential knowledge. The lion’s share of the COWs work has been devoted to
transforming historical narrative and other artifacts into data sets on war (defined
as combat between armed forces including at least one member of the international
system in which at least 1000 battle deaths occur annually). Because the COW is
heavily inductive, this initial marshaling of evidence is critical. Deciding what to
study is, of course, a “theoretical” exercise, but the COWs attempt not to sift the
historiography for theory-friendly cases seems to have succeeded. As Singer notes,
“we set up our coding rules and then examine all the cases which qualify; there is
much less of a tendency to ransack history in search of those isolated cases which
satisfy one’s theoretical or rhetorical requirements of the moment” (Singer 1969:79).
The COW has created a massive trove of statistical evidence. Its data sets,
published as The Wages of War (Singer and Small 1972) and Resort to Arms (Small
and Singer 1982), are avowedly existential, while the 1994 update is a computer file
with minimal text. “All we have done is to generate a particular set of data and then
refined and systematized it into a multitude of potentially useful forms,” write
Singer and Small (1972:374). The value of the work is more instrumental than
intrinsic.
The data comprise: identification of all international wars from 1816 to 1992,
and the magnitude, severity, and intensity of each; systemic data including amounts
of war begun and underway, secular trends, cycles and periodicity, and seasonal
distribution in the incidence of war. Data at the national level include the war-
proneness of nations, and statistics on victory, defeat, and battle deaths. Similar
compilations are made for civil wars. Other indicators include, at the national level:
industrial capabilities, military preparedness, diplomatic standing, and regime
stability. At the “dyadic” level are alliances and other diplomatic ties, shared
membership in international organizations, and geographical proximity. In terms
of regional and global “ecologies,” the COW has prepared data on the
“configurations” formed by alliances and other diplomatic bonds, power polarity,
and the distribution of capabilities. Supplementary data touch on trade patterns,
demographic history and ethnic composition. The Behavioral Correlates of War
(BCOW) tracks 34,000 discrete diplomatic, economic, military, and unofficial
“moves” in the midst of some forty-eight international crises.
Correlational knowledge. The second level of knowledge builds on the first. The
goal is a “correlational coefficient,” a measure of the association between two or
more variables, generally between a class of events or occurrences associated with
“THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING SCIENTIFIC” 121
war (outcomes) and certain state-level traits or system-level conditions or
configurations (predictors). Singer (1990a: 139) is quick to point out that
correlation is necessary but not sufficient to establish a cause. He advises social
scientists to “forget about (or, at least, sidestep) causality. Almost any social process
of interest can occur via so many different and unobservable routes that we would
have to make inferential leaps of heroic proportions in order to specify causality.”
However, assuming the existential work is sound, quantitatively derived correlations
are more reliable than patterns “observed” via narrative. Thus, rigorous statistical
techniques permit at least a “modicum of prudently inferred causality” (Singer 1979:
162).
Explanatory knowledge. This is the prize. Synonymous with theory (“a reproducible
and compelling explanation of a given class of events” (ibid.: 162)), explanatory
knowledge illuminates why a correlation holds historically and why it will or will
not hold in the future: it has predictive value. “Correlational knowledge can carry
us part way,” says Singer, “but until we have built and empirically tested a theory
which offers a compelling explanation of the changing as well as the constant
associations in the past, we make predictions of less than desirable solidity” (ibid.:
162–3).
Arguably, this is the most creative or intuitive aspect of the COW, as the
researcher shelves his coding manual and quits the mechanics of correlation in
favor of theory. This is also the site of some of the project’s most innovative
cliometric work. In what Singer dubs the “controlled historical experiment,”
regression analysis is used to “isolate” the effects of individual predictor variables
as a way of pinpointing causality. A good analogy is a flight simulator, on which
crash investigators experiment with different weather patterns and rudder positions
in order to match the flight-data record of an airplane that has crashed. In the
COW’s case, a computer acts as the simulator, the historical record holds the black-
box information, and the outbreak of war is the plane crash. As Singer explains:
we can experiment with a large number of contending explanations. If we
begin with a reasonably extensive and accurate database, we can experiment
with differing magnitudes of our key variables. And if we are willing to move
back into the referent historical world when we run into dead ends in the
simulation, we can achieve a valuable interplay between our deductive and
inductive emphases. These and other virtues add up to a method in which
we can ultimately—by a systematic trial-and-error procedure—“reproduce”
diplomatic history.
(ibid.: 165)
For Singer this is the surest way to unravel “the almost inevitable system dynamics”
underlying 175 years of world politics (ibid.: 162). The researcher not only subjects
correlation-inspired hunches to the “hard facts of history” but also jigs multiple
variables, i.e., hones personal hypotheses, until a good “fit” emerges. Through this
122 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
sophisticated seesawing between imagination and testing, it is hoped that a
consistent body of theory will fall into place.
Data-making: doing history or undoing it?
“The problem of science in international relations,” Singer writes, “is ultimately
the problem of data-making,” of translating historical traces into “operational”
language (Singer 1965:78). Because quantitative experiments rise or fall based on
the quality of their inputs, explicit coding criteria are imperative to sort through a
bewildering array of artifacts and generate good historical data. This is no small
task. As Singer notes, “in no social science field is [data-making] any more difficult
than in international relations. Even the original gathering of reliable facts is
surrounded with the impediments of governmentally imposed secrecy and
distortion as well as the diffuseness of such facts in time and space” (ibid.: 69).
Each time the COW data set has been published, its creators have disclaimed that
they were “painfully aware of the inconsistencies and dissimilarities that made the
original datamaking operations a source of such agony and frustration” (Small and
Singer 1982:23).
Is it history? Can historical narrative or archival materials be “coded” and
statistically manipulated without undoing the standards that make it “historical”
in the first place? It seems to me that cliometricians are “doing history.” Even if
the description of diplomatic events takes statistical form, the broader questions
addressed are not so different from those raised by comparatively minded
narrativists. These days, certainly, the scholarship of social science historians is
widely accepted by their guild peers. Most importantly, cliometrics is a creative
process, governed by certain rules of historical construction. As Small (1990:33)
describes it, “Much of our data is literally made by converting the buzzing welter
of historical traces into analytically useful indicators.” Whatever its “end use,” this
is knowledge produced.
Is it reliable, valid knowledge? The cliometric refrain about having transcended
the foibles of the humanities rests above all on the claim of reproducibility, that
hallmark of science where findings are “confirmed” by re-running tests and
reproducing results. Repeatedly in quantitative work, we hear that the
traditionalist’s personal idiosyncrasies have been squelched. Singer (1990a: 298)
suggests that experimenter bias “need not concern those of us who conduct
historical experiments.” After all, the major purpose of clear operational procedures
is “to minimize or eliminate those pre-investigative biases which make traditional
research so unproductive of generalized, high confidence knowledge, and so
ephemeral in its scientific effects” (Singer 1972b: 87). Singer even rejects the rubric
of “content analysis,” as data-making is sometimes called, on the argument that
coders are not analyzing anything, but are merely translating historical information
from the narrative to the numerical idiom.
For all this talk of reproducibility, however, it is important to recognize that
replications of COW findings have centered almost exclusively on the
“THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING SCIENTIFIC” 123
“experimental” stage: they target the project’s modeling efforts and computer runs,
not the historical data themselves. Reproducing outputs is in any case a modest
feat. Outputs should be perfectly reproducible, or nearly so, since they involve
plugging a given set of numbers into a well-defined computer operation.
Reproducing the data is much harder. Even with the coding manual in hand, it
is impossible to know exactly how statistical indices were tabulated in the first place.
We cannot re-create the individual and group decisions regarding historical
selection, interpretation, and reconciliation taken by COW investigators. Of the
history books strewn upon his desk, which does the investigator choose to follow?
Is he or she drawn to an elegant account? Does he or she have an eye for a good
university press? John Vasquez (1987:115–16) reports that among the COW team
there is “constant discussion on [data reliability], only a small portion of which
finds its way into print.” What are the project’s principles of historical selection?
How does it resolve inconsistencies? The COW bibliography lists, with a handful
of exceptions, only those sources finally adopted, not all the materials consulted.
If a particular historian’s estimates or interpretations are ultimately discarded, the
book does not appear. This practice gives a smoother gloss to data-making and to
the data themselves than perhaps was the case (Small and Singer 1982: Appendix A).
Also, the more obscure a conflict is, generally the less information we have about
it. Conversely, there may be a host of perspectives on prominent wars, necessitating
a certain amount of “picking over” the evidence. Thus the COWs details on the
Changkufeng War (Japan and the Soviet Union, two weeks in 1938) appear to have
been drawn only from Alvin Coox’s Anatomy of a Small War (1977), the British-
Zulu War (1879) is represented by one book, Donald Morris’s Washing of the Spears
(1965), the Central American War of 1907 (Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador) by
another, Pedro Zamora Castellanos’s Vida Militar de Centro América (1934), a general
account of military affairs on the isthmus published by the Guatemalan Army press.
Evidence of the Javanese War (1825–30) rests on E.S.de Klerck’s History of the
Netherlands East Indies (1938) and Bernard Vlekke’s Nusantara (1960). Meanwhile
eight sources are cited for the First World War, six for the Second World War. The
effect is probably unique to history: a paradox of obscurity, where little-treated wars
seem historically “settled,” while debates continue to surround major conflicts.
The COWs minor coding conveniences add up as well. In tracking alliances, for
example, it was decided to code only written undertakings, not de facto or secret
ones, and not to code alliances forged during wartime. Treaty obligations are
inferred literally from the document, without considering any informal
arrangements or other contexts. By a similar legalistic logic, the Russo-Afghan War
(1979–1988), for example, is not considered an international war at all, but is
subsumed in the Afghan Civil War. COW researchers also routinely construct
missing materials through “informal estimates,” mathematical extrapolations,
“moving averages,” and graphic “curvefitting” (see Singer 1990a: 121–2).
It is also clear when examining the COWs protocols that some figures cannot
be tallied with the kind of precision the project advertises. As a rule, the most
intractable of these involve battle deaths. Between the fog of war and the fog of
124 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
history, where the numbers are fiddled in war office propaganda, memoirs, state
papers, and nationalist historiography, body counts are notoriously hard to pin
down. Lewis Richardson complained after “long searches in the pages of literary
history,” that such sources were
deplorably vague on the subject of casualties. We look for numbers but find
instead phrases such as “many fell in battle” or “routed their enemies” or
“suffered heavy loss” or “Thus closed the struggle which for seven years had
stained the peninsula with blood.” The number killed in one or two
outstanding battles may be mentioned, but these melancholy statistics are
seldom totaled for the whole war. Military historians
…sometimes give precise
casualties for their own forces, but only very vague statements about their
enemies.
(Richardson 1960:9–10)
Richardson’s way around this was to use logarithmic scaling of the magnitude of
war death instead of absolute numbers. The COW has tried to overcome the
problem through more exhaustive research, poring over shelf-loads of histories
written in the nineteenth century, adding machine at hand, trying to recapture
earlier, presumably more accurate, estimates. That these estimates are more accurate
is, it seems fair to say, largely an article of faith. Interestingly, the project claims to
have found the vast carnages of the twentieth century more difficult to calculate
than earlier wars. Especially troublesome were the First World War, the Second
World War, Korea, Vietnam, Iran—Iraq, and the Gulf War, in which it estimates
100,000 Iraqi combatants died.
Acknowledging these problems, the COW rates its battle death figures as either
“high confidence” or “somewhat lower confidence” estimates. Of the battle deaths
listed for the 118 inter-state wars identified in Resort to Arms, twenty-nine are “high
confidence” numbers, while eighty-nine merit “somewhat lower confidence” for
one or more participant. (No confidence levels accompany battle fatalities for the
ninety wars that appear for the first time in the 1994 update.) These qualifications
vanish in subsequent calculations, to profound effect. Because war dead is a primary
indicator used to construct other indices, “lower confidence” estimates creep into
virtually every corner of the data set. The severity of war, for example, is inferred
directly from battle deaths. In turn, the intensity of war is calculated by dividing a
composite number (nation-months at war, estimated size of pre-war armed forces,
estimated total pre-war population) into the total number of fatalities. These carnage
figures are then used to calculate “annual amounts of war underway,” from which
a series of systems-level secular, cyclical, and periodic trends are derived. These same
fatality figures are incorporated into a basket of state-level patterns including war-
proneness, win-loss—battle death ratios, initiator—battle death ratios, and national
performance in war.
“THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING SCIENTIFIC” 125
Is the Correlates of War “realist”?
These are difficult numbers compounded in derivative indicators. Broad, theoretical
biases accumulate as well. Even in inductive work, data-making cannot proceed
willy-nilly; especially when working with a large number of cases, some theoretical
selectivity is required. This is part of the small n/large n tradeoff: although hobbled
by truncated sample size, small n work can be historically “rich,” i.e., it can
incorporate a great many variables and tell a fuller story; large n work, by contrast,
surveys many cases but can scrutinize only a few variables lest the project become
unwieldy. Thus, in quantitative work especially, initial assumptions are critical since
these few indicators will determine the broad contours of the data.
One of the ironies of the COW is that Singer, an exuberant critic of realism,
opted to work within the paradigm. The result, he notes, is a “rather familiar set
of variables” apropos of state-centered power politics, militaryindustrial
capabilities, alliances, polarity, and so forth (Singer 1976:26). Leng and Singer (1990:
224) suggest that “a realpolitik perspective identifies the key variables to which
policymakers historically have directed their attention in the course of disputes in
which their security is threatened.”
Some COW researchers sound downright
Waltzian in their views on global conflict, pointing to “the constancy and
timelessness of basic inter-state relations” (Gochman and Maoz 1990:221). However,
nowhere does Singer admit that the realists had got it right. The aim rather was to
wade into the paradigm, constructing more precise and complex realist models,
eventually putting its hypotheses to the empirical test. Collecting realist data is the
sensible way to proceed here. At the same time, Singer hopes to remain alert to
alternative theoretical schemes. This is the agnostic’s strategy of traveling far along
the inductive road before committing to a particular paradigm. The COW simply
has not made the data needed to explore whole realms of international politics,
apparently deciding that it would be more profitable to focus on the dyadic military
logic by which conflicts unfold rather than test the influence that economics,
international norms, international organizations, or black-letter law may have on
war.
The project’s state-centeredness has its empirical pitfalls as well. Most glaringly,
extra-systemic wars (colonial or imperial conflicts in which at least one combatant
was not a member of the state system) are coded as if the system actor were the only
participant. Thus, looking at the data, the only combatants in the Javanese War
(1825–30), the Congo Arabs War (1892), and the Mozambique War (1964–75) were
Holland, Belgium, and Portugal, respectively. In such wars, virtually no data are
recorded for any non-system member, a significant coding decision given that extra-
systemic wars account for two-thirds of COW conflicts. In these 134 cases, the
project’s concern with the inter-actionary dynamics of war simply falls down.
Looking exclusively at system members through a Westphalian lens helps to
formalize and operationalize conflict, but the practice no doubt portrays war as a
more tractable problem than it really is.
126 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
On the question of validity and reliability, we must in the end rely on the COWs
assurances of respectable “inter-coder reliability,” a measure of how similarly
different people code the same material. Inter-coder reliability is, as Singer says, a
factor of the “clarity, explicitness, and precision of the coding rules” (Singer 1990a:
119).
More importantly, though, it is a factor of the consistency of the material
being coded. That consistency happens to be quite high in the case of the COW
since coding of events, actions, targets, etc., proceeds on the basis of a “clean”
history: a master verbal chronology in which ambiguities and/or discrepancies that
may have existed in the original sources have been smoothed over or reconciled.
Given this ready-to-wear approach, where coders are handed these assumptions and
this set of facts, outcomes should be reasonably close. The real historical work, the
“agony and frustration” part—slogging through the history books, delving in the
archives and state papers, dredging up memoirs and media reports, drawing
inferences, choosing narratives and extracting what is important—has already been
done. Hewing to the coding rules, the coder merely gives this prefabricated history
its final, operational form.
A more meaningful test would involve having our coders, preferably seasoned
diplomatic historians, march up the steps of the Library of Congress or the
Bibliothèque Nationale or some other depository of knowledge, where each
researcher would then select, digest, and harmonize his sources. Then he would start
coding. Bound up in historical judgments and expertise, this sort of replication
would be far rowdier than the COWs perfunctory routine. Think of the problems
lurking in the realist, declinist, progressivist, nationalist, Marxist, and other
ideological or axe-grinding histories and hagiographies our investigators might
discover in the stacks! The point is, if subjected to a true test of reproducibility, inter-
coder reliability would presumably plummet.
Testing randomly: selected COW data
I am not a diplomatic historian and had at my disposal only a good university
research library, yet my own attempt to replicate COW data supports a skeptical
view. I first had a computer randomly select five COW wars: Sepoy, Italian
Unification, Italo-Turkish, Chaco, and Indonesian Independence. Without
knowing which sources the COW used or what numbers it had arrived at, I then
constructed data for each war’s primary indicators: magnitude (nation-months: the
sum of all the participants’ months of active involvement, emphasizing, as the
COW does, military rather than legal events), severity (battle deaths by participant),
and intensity (calculated two ways: battle deaths per nation-months, and battle deaths
per 10,000 population). My findings are as recorded in Tables
The Sepoy War (1857–9)—Table 6.1
Sen (1992:5) states that “no military revolt in the world has produced so much
literature.” The conflict has drawn commentary from Disraeli, Marx, and Victorian
“THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING SCIENTIFIC” 127
do-gooders, to contemporary Indian nationalists. There is a yawning interpretive
gulf in the literature over whether the war was a “mutinous uprising” against the
British by the sepoys, the native soldiers of the Bengal Army, or whether it was a
“Great Rebellion” or “Popular Resistance,” a premonition of the independence
movement. Not surprisingly, debate about causes and consequences has been lively,
even coloring battleto-battle accounts. A recent history suggests that, despite its
ardor, this debate has been fueled by “a sparse diet of questionable depositions,
muddled accounts, dubious journals, and the narratives of shell-shocked survivors
with axes to grind” (Ward 1996:555). Others note an “inevitable bias” born of
“superficial, inadequate and essentially partisan” British source materials and a
dearth of documents on the side of the “mutineers” (Harrison 1980: lvi and Mutiny
Reports from Punjab 1976: introduction). Amid this “orgy of murder,” battle deaths,
especially on the Indian side, are extremely hazy. There are plausible accounts of
individual battles, yet the “Independence Movement” school claims that the
insurrection was general. It is unclear who among the Indians were fighting, much
less dying. A “Narrative of Events” issued by the Raj several months into the conflict
noted that “in consequence of the general nature of the rebellion and the
impossibility of identifying the majority of the rebels the Magistrate recommended
the wholesale burning and destruction of all villages proved to have sent men to
take active part in the rebellion” (Majumdar 1963:390). Making this gruesome
calculus even more precarious is the fact that the conflict raged in the midst of near
pestilence across Northern India, a region that during the conflict became known
as the “Famine Tract.” Bhargava (1992:142) estimates that between starvation and
forced emigration, 500,000 Indians died. In such an atmosphere, it is folly to
pretend anything approaching accuracy in gauging battle deaths. Embree (1963:63)
says only that “hundreds and thousands” gave up their lives. (The COWs 1994
estimate of total battle deaths, including Indian ones, is 15,000. I preserved the 1982
methodology—which neglects extrasystemic actors, i.e., the Indians—in order to
compare intensity figures.) On British casualties, Edwardes (1963:202) is the least
Table 6.1 Sepoy War (1857–9)
128 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
equivocal and most quoted, noting that 2034 men died in action, while 8987
succumbed to “sunstroke and sickness.” Following the COWs criterion of including
all “war theater” deaths induced by combat wounds, exposure, or disease, I adopted
these figures and added the roughly 400 British non-combatants thought to have
been massacred at Cawnpore and Lucknow.
The War of Italian Unification (1859)—Table 6.2
This conflict is often considered part of the lengthy ferment of the Risorgimento
from 1848 until 1870, when Rome was finally wrested from the Pope. This
periodization makes for a protracted, low-intensity conflict usually referred to as
the War(s) of Italian Independence. That said, historians have been just as likely to
compress the periodization, identifying a number of separate wars —although
because the COW has included none of Garibaidi’s southern campaign, it has
perhaps misnamed the war. I collected data through 1861 only to discover later
that the COW was referring only to the three-month conflict more commonly
known as “The War of 1859” or “The Franco-Austrian War.” Also, neatly packaging
Piedmont-Papal States and Piedmont-Sicily as distinct wars results in a misleadingly
simple picture of Garibaldi’s crusade. (According to my research, the Papal States
were not a member of the state system. The COW defines a member of the state
system as an entity of at least 500,000 inhabitants whose sovereignty was
“legitimized” by both Britain and France posting to its capital a resident diplomat
above the rank of chargé d’affaires. In 1860, the Papal States met the population
criteria, yet Britain’s envoy to the Eternal City was a lowly counsel general.) Most
troublingly, the Westphalian model distorts the dynamics of Italy’s unification.
This was a case of anarchy mitigated by nationalism. As the conflict spread south,
not everyone was averse to being “conquered” by Piedmont, and the fighting was
punctuated with a series of plebiscites. In the literature, battle death estimates range
widely and mix “methodologies,” referring to “killed, wounded, or missing” one
day, and “fallen” or “losses” the next. I compiled my decidedly “low confidence”
figures according to the four major battles, employing a killed-to-wounded ration
of 1:3.5. At times, I split the difference between accounts. The COW adopted some
unusual population figures.
The Italo-Turkish War (1911–12)—Table 6.3
Prime Minister Giolitti described Italy’s attempt to wrest Libya from the Ottoman
Empire as “a war sui generis” (Herrmann 1989:332). Prompted by a surge in
nationalism at home, the Italian campaign quickly became mired in a delicate mess
as Germany and Austria tried diplomatically to constrain Italy’s actions, which they
feared might topple the feeble old man of Europe. Thus, third and fourth parties
whom the COW does not acknowledge were crucial “participants” in the war. As
Bosworth (1996:63) notes, “It was a war in which experts in warfare were less
important than experts in bribery.” On participants and periodization, the
“THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING SCIENTIFIC” 129
anthropologist Evans-Pritchard (1949) argues that it was more an Italo-Sanusi War
than an Italo-Turkish one, and that resistance led by Sanusi guerillas continued for
a decade following the Peace of Ouchy. He also cautions that Italian battle accounts
must be read “with reserve,” as they are probably distorted by state censorship and
the belief that an “African” war could only be a runaway victory for Italy. Beehler,
a former US Navy commodore and naval attaché to several American embassies,
writes as a naval advocate. He almost certainly exaggerates the significance of Italy’s
naval warfare, which is portrayed elsewhere as a diversion from the stalled desert
war. Beehler’s book (1913) comes complete with block letters to call attention to
crossroads where peacetime Turkey neglected to prepare for war, thereby sealing its
doom. Also, tucked into the volume was a sheet of paper that appeared to be a hand-
typed entreaty from the author directing the reader to the “Lesson” of the book,
namely that “the weak are prey for the strong man armed,” adding that “oceans no
longer protect us from oversea invasion but facilitate it,” hence “the urgent necessity
of an adequate U.S.Navy.” My battle death guesswork for “Turkey” is elevated by
reports that 180,000 natives were killed in Cyrenaica province between 1911 and
1914.
Table 6.2 War of Italian Unification (1859)
130 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
The Chaco War (1932–5)—Table 6.4
After the War of the Triple Alliance, the Chaco War was South America’s greatest
armed conflict. Fought in one of the most desolate places on earth, over rumored
oil riches, the war was more of a patriotic clash than a rational, interest-based affair.
As Clodfelter (1992:703) notes, “there were probably fewer gallons of oil in the area
won than there had been gallons of blood sacrificed to win it.” As the numbers
suggest, at the time, the war had a profound impact on the nations involved.
Roughly 15 percent of all Paraguayans and 10 percent of Bolivians saw duty in the
Chaco. Bullets continue to fly in contemporary Latin American historiography of
the war, with no shortage of heroes, martyrs, and villains. This is the sort of “toy-
soldier” war—with two system members, clean start and stop dates, and minimal
non-combatant involvement—that most easily conforms to the COW’s coding
criteria.
The Indonesian War (1945–6)—Table 6.5
This conflict is usually considered part of the Indonesian War of Independence
stretching from 1945 to 1949. The COW focuses on the British/Indian
“replacement” of the departed Japanese until Dutch forces could arrive, and on a
major pacification effort by the Dutch beginning in December 1946, including
Westerling’s notorious six-week campaign on the island of Sulawesi, in which
perhaps 40,000 Indonesians were butchered to death (Zainu’ddin 1980:224 and
Neill 1973:329). After March 1947, negotiations took the forefront, although the
Table 6.3 Italo-Turkish War (1911–12)
“THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING SCIENTIFIC” 131
Dutch continued a series of potent “police actions” between July 1947 and February
1949, which included indiscriminate shelling of Medan, Palembang, Modjokerto
and other cities. As many as 4000 additional islanders were killed. Because of system-
member battle death inclusion criteria, the entire “guerilla phase” of the
independence struggle (lasting about two years) is missing from the COWs
calculations. The COW does not include these tens of thousands of Indonesian
battle dead because Indonesia was not at the time a member of the state system.
The coding introduces an extraneous dynamic to the conflict, where “war” ends
abruptly when the numbers fall below the threshold; conflict does not peter out
into peace. I opted for the “orthodox” periodization, hence the quite different
nation-month periods and intensity figures. There seems to be no satisfactory way
to account for Indian troops acting as British agents. Almost all “British” battle
deaths were members of the 4th Indian Division. (According to its 1994
methodology, the COW lists zero British deaths, and a total of 5000 battle-related
deaths.) As the conflict dragged on, world opinion probably became Indonesia’s
strongest ally.
The perils of data-making
Sifting for details on nineteenth-century diplomatic postings in a crumbling, onion-
skin Alamanach de Gotha (which is the size of a deck of cards and written in French),
I developed a new appreciation for the grueling work of datamaking. I am afraid,
however, that what really stood out in my attempted replication were the historical
problems associated with the process. First, the COWs exclusion of non-system
members from its data seems to me indefensible. As I noted earlier, the project
Table 6.4 Chaco War (1932–5)
Smith sources: Zook (1960), Clodfelter (1992), and Farcau (1996).
132 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
inflicts this Westphalian bias upon 134, or fully two-thirds, of the 209 conflicts it
identifies. The practice ensures that any logic of war discerned in these cases (and
in the aggregate) will be seriously flawed. Most wars are simply not of the tidy “toy-
soldier” variety, with two system members, clean start and stop dates, faithful
military records, and minimal non-combatant “interference.” Second, historical
inferences and interpretations can be quite fluid, even as they relate to “factual”
questions such as battle deaths. It was revealing to track the historical “archaeology”
of the data, as qualified battle death estimates, for example, were repeated matter-
of-factly by later writers. I was reminded of the adage that history does not repeat
itself; historians repeat each other! Third, differences in periodization affect
statistical results, with intensity figures being especially volatile. Do we conceive of
one long war or a series of short ones? Was a war preceded or followed by a number
of guerilla raids or police actions that fall outside our definitions? To say that this
is a question of “clear coding criteria” seems inadequate. Fourth, soaking in the
histories, one appreciates the complexity of events, as well as some of the distortions
imposed by the quantitative method. With the possible exception of the Chaco
War, the COW seems to have missed the central dynamic of each of the wars under
study. Finally, the exercise chips away at the notion that thoroughness in historical
research will necessarily lift the interpretive mist from events. The opposite may be
true. As the critic Leonard Woolf once noted: “the moment one begins to investigate
the truth of the simplest facts that one has accepted as true it is as though one had
stepped off a firm narrow path into a bog or a quicksand—every step takes one steps
deeper into the bog of uncertainty” (quoted in Guralnik 1994: xii).
Table 6.5 Indonesian War (1945–6)
“THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING SCIENTIFIC” 133
When one compares the reliability of different data sets, it becomes clear what
a quagmire war research can be. War data sets are most at odds over what they
include. The COW compared its first list of wars with six prior compilations
covering comparable time frames and found “an overall interstudy agreement of
only 12 percent,” although Singer and Small (1972:79) suggest that if we control
for different theoretical foci and inclusion rules, disagreement is less severe. Edward
Mansfield compared the wars in common in five different war data sets—those
compiled by Wright, Richardson, Small and Singer, Bueno de Mesquita, and Levy
—on a number of variables and found marked differences, most surprisingly a low
correlation (about 0.22) from one compilation to the next between numbers of wars
begun in any particular year, a figure that remained low even after the data were
adjusted to include only inter-state wars, thus eliminating those hard-to-date
colonial conflicts (Mansfield 1988:25–6).
Perhaps nowhere is the volatility of war data more conspicuous than in the
evolution of the COWs own data sets. In between the 1982 list (international wars
n=118) and the 1994 list (international wars n=209), COW researchers added five
inter-state wars fought during the 1980s and early 1990s (Falklands, Lebanon, Sino-
Vietnamese, Gulf War, and Azeri-Armenian), but also, citing a “relaxation” in the
inclusion criterion on battle deaths, they have added a remarkable eighty-five
international wars between 1816 and 1980 which were not included in the earlier
survey (Singer and Small 1994a: 8–11). These ballooning numbers have to be
unsettling for researchers who have based their work on the earlier data.
Data-making is not a science. A data set’s crisp tabulations are the fruit of a
painstaking, but ultimately untidy, historical process where theory shapes the broad
outline of the data while individual coders craft its finer features. Given variances
from one compilation to the next, as well as each data set’s internal yardsticks,
claims of reproducibility should be scrutinized closely. The problem seems less a
factor of research design or disingenuous investigators than of the nature of the
material, with its competing and controversial truths. Small puts a brave face on
the historical problem, in the end appealing to the macro-validity of the data: “For
the social scientist, the question is how valid is the indicator for the thousands of
cases in the sample, not whether each figure represents absolute historical reality”
(Small 1979: 75). Yet, as we saw with battle deaths and other primary indicators, it
is precisely the aggregate numbers that get muddled. “Guesstimates” snowball into
conjecture as imprecisions and biases in selection, interpretation, and coding are
reproduced throughout the data. However candid COW researchers are about the
agonies of data-making, the project nevertheless proceeds on the basis of a clean set
of data points which effectively conceals, but does not eliminate, the historical
problem.
Contending with the quantitative fallacy
When method is king, does it rule the material? According to David Hackett Fischer,
a frequent history error is the “quantitative fallacy,” which arises when a factor’s
134 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
importance rests on its susceptibility to measurement. Historians should count
everything they can, Fischer encourages, but singleminded behavioralism can bypass
qualitative questions and impel the historian into some causal backwater just
because that is where the numbers happen to be (Fischer 1970:90–4).
Cliometric international relations seems especially prone to the quantitative
fallacy. Security, power, interests, aggression, prestige, deterrence, polarity, and
democracy are all ambiguous abstractions that resist counting. Since the COW
purports to quantify national attributes, inter-state relationships, and actual
diplomatic behavior, let us look at how validly it measures one element from each
of the categories: material capabilities, prestige, and crisis behavior.
Material capabilities. The COW calculates state power capabilities according to six
figures: population (total and urban), industry (energy consumption and steel
production), and military capabilities (size of armed forces and level of military
spending). This material-realist conception of power, a husk of classical realist
criteria, departs forthwith from Morgenthau’s idea of political power as a
psychological construct. COW criteria seem better suited to study nineteenth-
century European realpolitik, with its “quid pro quo with a measuring cup” approach
to the balance of power, than contemporary foreign affairs. Even then the COW
sidesteps questions of geography, military morale, strategic competence, public
opinion, and autonomy in decisionmaking, the strength of political institutions,
and regime legitimacy, not to mention all the intricacies of culture, ideology, or
national identity. Not that these are easy concepts to grasp: Singer is probably right
in believing that such variables are “too idiosyncratic, state-specific, and dyad-
specific to permit valid comparisons across space and time” (Singer 1990b: 55).
Still, the quantitative method debars us from exploring them at all.
Prestige. COW seeks to measure the “diplomatic importance” or “status”
attributed to states by other states without regard to power, capabilities, and
influence (Singer and Small 1966:236). The indicator is constructed by tallying the
number of diplomatic missions and the rank of the foreign emissaries accredited
and dispatched to each state capital. The presence or absence of an embassy and
top envoys is thought to imply the host country’s diplomatic status. More than a
few implausible rankings turn up, however. In 1955, Mexico (17th) is deemed of
greater diplomatic importance than the Soviet Union (18th). In 1960, Italy leads
the list. In 1965 Israel (13th) is on par with the Soviet Union (15th); and North
Vietnam ranks 112th. In 1970 the United States is ranked 6th, trailing Holland
(2nd), Belgium (4th), and Switzerland (5th); the Soviet Union (17th) is deemed less
diplomatically important than Austria, Denmark, Pakistan, and Yugoslavia (13th–
16th, respectively); while pre-Nixon China is ranked 63rd, lagging Sudan (32nd),
Mali (46th), and Guinea (49th).
Something is clearly amiss. A better measure of diplomatic stature might focus
on diplomatic outcomes, or factor in military-industrial capabilities or trade
prowess, which must have some bearing on prestige. Again, the COW forestalls any
such complex of factors. We are left with a lonely indicator, which again is folded
into other variables and operations.
“THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING SCIENTIFIC” 135
Crisis behavior. Coding of the project’s truly behavioral questions spirals into the
interpretive stratosphere, demanding judgment-calls that fall well outside the
“explicit descriptive dimensions” outlined in the BCOW protocols for coding
militarized inter-state crises (Leng 1995). What was the “specific precipitant event”?
What was the “tempo” of the action? Were threats and ultimata made? (These
prejudicial terms have been euphemized into “intend action” and “request action.”)
Were threats conditional or unconditional? Did they challenge the “vital interests”
of the target? Were they a “serious affront” to the “dignity or prestige” of the target
state? Did a “display of military force” constitute an “alert,” a “mobilization,” or
a “show of force”? Did the use of force constitute a “blockade,” an “occupation of
territory,” a “seizure,” a “clash,” a”declaration of war,” or a full-blown “war”? Were
trade talks an “economic consultation” or an “advise (economic)”? (Note the
“neatness effect” flowing from the precise, either-or options available to coders.)
These questions were plucked from the BCOWs behavioral “choice tree.” The
approach replaces static explanations of outcomes, such as geography or regime
type, with a dynamic model of “influence attempt-response sequences.” Thirty-four
thousand distinct “events” surrounding forty-eight international disputes have been
fitted into 132 different military, diplomatic, economic, and unofficial categories.
Most of the crises comprise hundreds of distinct events. The most complex case is
the 1956 Suez Crisis (Egypt, Britain, France, Israel), with 2300 events. Each crisis
is then translated into a string of numerical event codes that can be analyzed
statistically. COW researchers see in the data evidence that “the evolution of
interstate disputes is more structured than is often believed” (Gochman and Leng
1983:98). Crises tend to escalate more rapidly when “vital interests” are at stake,
and great power involvement aids effective conflict resolution. Moreover, how one
negotiates seems to sway outcomes: coercive tactics are likely to elicit defiant
responses, while chances are that “reciprocity” (“mixing tit-for-tat responses with
occasional accommodative initiatives”), will yield a peaceful resolution (Leng and
Singer 1990).
Dispute behavior may be less structured than the COW suggests. Its hierarchical
choice tree gives the impression that history is not path dependent but path
determined. In hindsight, the “steps to war” lead ineluctably to the outcome, each
limb representing an isolated, independently operating, mechanistically causal link.
The assumption is that an added pinch of “consultation,” a dollop of “political
concession,” or a touch less “violation of international law” would send the process
branching off in a more pacific direction. However, strict causal tiers may confer
an artificial coherence on crisis decisionmaking, obscuring broader historical
processes or neglecting other causes. In other words, this could be neatly sketched
post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning. If a “show of strength” is followed by an
“evacuation,” or if an “antiforeign riot” is followed by a “change in economic
assistance,” were the events that followed caused by the events that preceded them?
This is a challenge for any historical construct, although “diagramming” state
behavior in this way assumes an unequivocal cause and effect, something more
easily hedged in narrative. The connection between events is direct (“antiforeign
136 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
riot→new economic package”) rather than implied (“Two days after the riots in
Manila, the Prime Minister unveiled a new foreign aid package.”). When coding
begins, causal rumination ends. The method cannot abide any modesties of
narrative: “perhaps,” “appears,” “seems,” “suggests,” etc. If there are historical
ambiguities, they are better preserved in narrative.
This is not to suggest that diplomacy is immune to path dependence.
Decisionmakers always work within historical contexts. Constraints are imposed
by previous decisions taken, and the range of choices narrows. However, this is
different from an iron cage of causality. There were choices along the way, things
did not have to turn out the way they did. As Lawrence Stone (1977:38) warns,
“crunching historical explanation into a single one-way hierarchy of causation
…
threatens to strangle imaginative historical inquiry. It blocks off any possibility that
historical explanation may, in fact, be a much messier and more loose-ended
process. To borrow the language of the engineers, it may be a nonlinear, multiple-
loop feedback system, with many semiindependent variables, each responsively
reacting to the influence of some, or all, of the others.”
Indeed, the BCOWs precision coding, with its 132 discrete inputs neatly divided
into functionally distinct military, diplomatic, economic and unofficial actions,
almost certainly demands artificially sharp coding distinctions. Can we truly sever,
as the BCOW does, a “military intrusion” from a “violation of territory”? Can we
treat “supply nuclear weapons” and “political intervention” as separate occurrences?
Is there a clear line between official and unofficial actions? It is not clear that these
are independent variables. Cause and effect may spill back and forth across different
state functions. Certainly diplomatic initiatives are taken bearing in mind various
military and economic relationships, or a military intervention might be for
economic reasons. Modeled after a decision-tree rather than a continuum, the COW
does not entertain the possibility that war may be politics (or economics) by other
means, that there might be a unity to foreign policy. Clausewitz will be spinning
in his grave.
The question is crucial because this is international history, with its gray zones
of diplomacy, and oftentimes intentional lacunae of ambiguity, where words and
deeds may target a domestic audience or an unnamed third party as much as an
obvious foreign adversary. Paul Schroeder has noted that it is deceptive to code
only overt behavior since doing nothing is one of the most important “actions” in
foreign policy. The effect of nonintervention can be passive cooperation, such as
Germany’s tacit encouragement of French colonialism in Asia and Africa as a “safe”
outlet for la mission civilisatrice. It can be over-simple to categorize diplomatic ties
in terms of either conflict or cooperation, since alliance and antagonism often
coincide as states join or seek alliances for reasons of control as well as friendship.
Austro-Prussian behavior during the Schleswig-Holstein dispute and the resulting
Danish-German War in 1863–4, for example, appears on the surface to be a litany
of shoulder-to-shoulder cooperation between Austria and Prussia against the Danes:
allying to intervene in the dispute between Denmark and the German
Confederation; together muscling the other German states out of deciding the issue;
“THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING SCIENTIFIC” 137
presenting a joint ultimatum to Denmark; launching and fighting the war together;
agreeing jointly to an armistice; in lock-step resuming hostilities after negotiations
broke down at the Conference of London; together imposing terms on defeated
Denmark; declaring joint sovereignty over the conquered provinces and sharing
administrative duties. Yet, what looks like a catalogue of cooperation was in fact
part and parcel of Bismarck’s strategy to undercut Austria’s influence in Germany,
and throughout the entire episode Austria was trying unsuccessfully to resist the
Prussian’s designs. This in mind, Schroeder asks us to imagine the following
sequence of events: “(1) A man takes a woman by the hand; (2) He puts his arm
around her; (3) He draws her close to him; (4) He kisses her; (5) He strangles her.”
Only a deluded coder would treat these as five separate actions, four amicable, one
deadly, but this is essentially how diplomatic history is translated into events data
(Schroeder 1977:4–8).
The quantitative fallacy at each of these levels of analysis, whether we are looking
at power, prestige, or actual state behavior, is that the “aggregate” data are actually
a compilation of disaggregated historical traces. Even the narrativist does not start
at the beginning of the story: his periodization is somewhat arbitrary; there are
always earlier antecedents. As Maitland famously put it, “Such is the unity of history
that anyone who endeavors to tell a piece of it must feel that his first sentence tears
a seamless web” (quoted in Marwick 1970:326). This is radically the case with
snapshot data points, each of which has no history. “Historical context” turns out
to be cross-sectional, as “time series analysis” usually means looking at a few
historical shavings under a glass slide. It is unclear how well the approach captures
the longitudinal character of international conflict (see Goertz 1994:172).
By focusing on the immediate logic of conflict, and pegging a number of indices
to the war’s “initiator,” the COW sidesteps problems of deep causality and
underlying motivations. Not all wars start with tanks crashing across borders. They
may be preceded by generations of low-grade tensions, motivations bred in the
bones of the participants. Knowing that India “started” the Bangladesh War of 1971
is no substitute for understanding the poisonous history of the subcontinent. Was
the Sinai War of 1956–7 precipitated by Nasser nationalizing the Suez Canal, or
earlier by Britain and the United States withdrawing support for the Aswan Dam,
or earlier still by Zionism itself? Causality works at many different levels. The
BCOW cites Egyptian border raids as the “first hostilities” in the Sinai War, while
the main COW data set credits Israel with initiating the conflict some months
later, yet neither project really accounts for decades of enmity between Arabs and
Jews. Across quantitative work, such complex questions of responsibility and
periodization are handled in too simple a manner.
Finally, a word on the qualitative side of war. Raymond Aron (1966:328–30) once
observed that although “all national histories resemble each other in the eyes of
the statistician or the moralist,” in fact some historical episodes are “creative,”
setting precedents and spurring ideas, while others turn out to be “historically
sterile.” The COW adopts an homogeneous conception of conflict. The project
does draw distinctions in some operations, notably in measuring alliance
138 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
configurations, though for the most part all states and all wars end up in the same
stew. The Lopez War (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, 1864–70), the Riffian War (France
and Spain, 1921–6), or the Soccer War (Honduras and El Salvador, five days in
1969) are considered analogous to the Second World War or the Gulf War in the
sense that each, equally, is plumbed for the logic of conflict. Behavioral dyads are
treated generically as well: the Pastry War (France and Mexico, 1838–9) and the
Rann of Kutch (India and Pakistan, three months in 1965) lumped with the
Anschluss and the Fashoda Crisis. Individual diplomatic and military “moves” are
analogized too, at times uncongenially. Russia’s occupation of the Danube
principalities in 1853 is classified as a “show of force” preceding the Crimean War,
as are Egyptian troop movements near the canal during the Suez Crisis and the
Soviet Union’s “air-shows” in the throes of the Berlin Crisis. Ship rammings and
trawler line cuttings during the Cod War (Iceland, Britain, et al., 1975–76) are
classified exactly the same way.
Viewed through a lens of prudence or discretion, crucial distinctions emerge.
Lessons gleaned in the aggregate may be ill-suited for a great power uniquely placed
in the international system, or for a modern Asian city-state, or a diminutive
country nestled in a federalist Europe. Moreover, in the realm of self-given meanings
rather than scientifically conferred ones, some historical analogies loom
inordinately large, either as high-water marks to emulate or debacles to avoid. As
one scholar notes of the “Copenhagen complex” (the fixation spawned by Britain’s
capture of the neutral Danish fleet in 1807), it “seeped into men’s perceptions and
became part of the vocabulary of political life,” influencing German foreign
policymaking in particular for a century (quoted in Levy 1994a: 280). In 1914 and
again in 1939, the French General Staff diligently studied “the lessons of last time”
and committed appalling strategic and tactical blunders as a consequence. Desert
Storm, Munich, the “loss” of China, Vietnam, the Suez Crisis, the War of the Pacific,
the Conquest of Mexico, and the ill-fated UN intervention in Somalia all became
touchstones for subsequent foreign-policy decisions.
In sum, the quantitative approach tends to focus on the obvious exterior to what
are almost certainly complex and deep-seated phenomena. It is like comparing
buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry on square footage alone. Therein
lies a fallacy. For this reason, qualitative history, in depth and in context, may
prove more fruitful in explaining international politics. As David Dessler has
argued, it may be that only careful and intensive case studies, contending with a
complex of variables over the long term, will reveal the underlying “generative
structures and processes” of causality (Dessler 1991: 352). Balance-of-power politics
is probably best understood by charting the depths of German and British
diplomatic-economic history over the decades prior to the First World War—a close
reading across levels of causality and considering far-flung variables as well as those
closer to home. The role of prestige in international politics is highlighted by a
keen look at the motivations that seem to have driven involvement in the Korean
War. Steeping oneself in the history of the Cuban Missile Crisis may reveal the
forest of crisis behavior better than hundreds of choice trees.
“THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING SCIENTIFIC” 139
Rigor on its face: cliometrics assessed
“The good of counting,” Dr. Johnson remarked in 1783, “is that it brings everything
to a certainty which before floated in the mind indefinitely” (quoted in Stone 1977:
17). The danger of counting in international relations, however, is that the method
will burden history with more certainty than it can bear.
Quantitative work helps curb impressionism, anecdotalism, and selection bias
in historical usage in the field, and reins in theoretical wanderings too far from the
historical “record.” It can also prod other researchers to define clearly their
assumptions and terms, and, unlike structuralists, quantitative researchers are
willing and methodologically able to work across levels of analysis. The COW in
particular has broached a number of counter-intuitive challenges to orthodox
international relations, which have spurred more theoretically focused qualitative
work. The project’s findings on obverse alliance indicators in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries have kindled further work in that field. Early on, Singer engaged
the bipolar/multipolar question, while more recent (and more skeptical) COW
work has pointed to the multidimensionality of polarity and its aversion to precise
measurement. The project has also contributed to the democratic peace debate, both
through its own early work on the subject, and through its BCOW dyads being
incorporated into Bruce Russett’s (1993) research. It has also advanced an array of
smallerscale findings. Throughout, the project has been a source of inspiration as
well as a clearinghouse of methods and data for quantitative analysts.
Still, the COWs approach exhibits a certain quaintness. From the start, the COW
assumed that the “facts” of diplomatic history existed independent of interpretation
and theory, that the historical scientist really did “go naked into the laboratory.”
It also deemed that those facts could be extracted from the larger story without
doing violence to the parts or the whole. Yet, repeatedly we see the material
shoehorned into the method—a method not particularly congenial to diplomatic
history, with its murky motivations and where perceptions about security, power,
prestige, interests, and norms seem so important. These ambiguities appear to be
characteristic of a sphere where states (and other entities) pursue a variety of political
ends defined in a variety of ways. The greatest folly of quantitative work may be
that it strips this ambiguity from political inquiry. Michael Howard (1983:192–3)
notes that the narrative military historian creates order out of chaos, “with neat
little blocks and arrows moving in a rational and orderly way, with the principles
of war being meticulously illustrated,” and that this, he says, is “an almost
blasphemous travesty of the chaotic truth.” If quantitative methods make an even
greater travesty of the truth, they are doing us no favors.
This may be why diplomatic historians have shied away from cliometrics. Driven
by the admonition to count, the method may not track the most fruitful predictors
of state behavior. Indeed, it may trivialize war and diplomacy, as easily quantifiable
indicators stand in for less tangible but perhaps more theoretically important
factors. Claims of reproducibility, meanwhile, seem overstated. Interpretive
problems are concealed in a neat set of “de-bugged” history, a composite of “hard”
140 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
and “soft” numbers where errors in the “independent” variables are reproduced
across the data which, nevertheless, become the authority for all manner of
assertions. One can imagine how apocryphal history might become hard data. It
has been remarked that the COW, like other data-making enterprises, has spawned
an “invisible college” of researchers who use its data. More to the point, low
reliability in correlations between data sets suggests that unique inclusion rules and
coding interpretations make each compilation an island of knowledge, bounded
by its own definitions and models of conflict. This may be the reason that
quantitative work rarely cumulates much beyond the research communities that
sprout up around each data set.
Thus, to the skeptic’s eye, the more guarded quantitative conclusions are, the
more confidence they inspire. Appearances to the contrary, cliometrics does not
have a clinch on rigor. As M.J.Moroney has noted, the method induces “delusions
of accuracy.” “When the job is done it looks very accurate. It is an easy and fatal
step to think that the accuracy of our arithmetic is equivalent to the accuracy of
our knowledge about the problem in hand” (quoted in Duvall 1976:70). The
method’s comparative advantage in rigor does seem inflated. “Data” are very
seductive, yet no amount of statistical trapeze-swinging or quantitative boosterism
should divert us from fundamental historical questions. Even when cliometrics
reveals a particular pattern or correlation, how that relationship is interpreted
remains a historical judgment, ambiguities and all.
Finally, how has the COW fared as an exercise in nomothetic science? What laws
of behavior does it propose? Thirty years hence, hundreds of histories have been
digested and megabytes of data prepared, yet the theoretical denouement remains
just around the corner. Despite great optimism and enormously hard work, the
project’s crucial explanatory phase is lagging badly. The fact is that the material
still exhibits “no dominant theoretical strand, no culminating argument, no
recurrent cadenza” (Small and Singer 1982:292). With COW data widely available,
it is not surprising that research based on that information is strewn across the
literature. Still, the findings remain fragmented. Singer has edited several volumes
of disparate papers, but to date has not attempted to integrate them.
Surveying this pinnacle of historical work in international relations, elevated by
quantitative methods and the canons of social science, the obvious question is why
has the payoff been so paltry? A better question might ask if there is an anti-payoff.
With no robust correlations to show, not to speak of theoretical coherence, the
most rigorous conclusion might be that state behavior is not so formulaic or
nomothetic after all. Indeed, it may be misguided to take too Olympian a cyber-
view on the problem of war. Middle-range theories buttressed by a close reading of
a variety of histories may turn out to be more fruitful. Quantitative researchers
might consider the conclusion of that masterly work of social science history,
Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip
II: “we must visualize a series of overlapping histories, developing simultaneously.
It would be too simple, too perfect, if this complex truth could be reduced to the
rhythms of one dominant pattern” (Braudel 1992:651). This anticipates some
“THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING SCIENTIFIC” 141
strands of postmodernism explored in the next chapter, and is one of a number of
remedies that will be advanced in the final chapter.
142 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
7
EXIT FROM HISTORY?
Postmodern international relations
To the postmodern eye, the field’s scientific theorists resemble eighteenthcentury
encyclopédistes, amassing information in hopes of discovering the underlying unity
of knowledge. Postmodernists regard this as an impossible task. In the kaleidoscopic
world of postmodernism, knowledge is fragmented, relative, and particular. Truth
does not exist in the form of “laws” of history or human behavior. There are no
universal political structures or normative values. The scientific formalism that
postmodernists abhor is most evident in the quantitative research we have just
surveyed, but in fact it underpins all positivist social thought back to the eighteenth
century, perhaps to Machiavelli. As Chris Brown notes (1994:60), all postmodernists
—post-structuralists, post-positivists, post-Fordists, feminists, Foucauldians, critical
theorists, methodological anarchists, dissident theorists, Marxist epistemologists,
Gramscians, the Frankfurt School, and American neopragmatists—are united by “a
sense of the futility of the defences of modernist rationality offered by traditional
supporters of the Enlightenment Project.”
Postmodernist theory is extraordinarily diverse, encompassing a wide array of
aesthetic and epistemological challenges to “modernity,” itself a contested idea.
Even so, the broad challenges postmodernism poses for history and politics are
relatively straightforward. Postmodernists forcefully reject Ranke’s archival method
and Acton’s optimism regarding the “completeness and certainty” of history.
Indeed, postmodernists view all historical truth claims as unfounded. They scorn
high political accounts, both of the great-man and drum-and-trumpet varieties, and
denounce “philosopher’s history” conveying universal lessons or tracing the
meaning and direction of events. Some postmodernists (for example, Jameson 1983:
125) contend that we live in a “perpetual present,” as the flux of events leads to
“the disappearance of a sense of history.” Others (for example, Baudrillard 1994)
view history as a dustbin of recycled images and ideologies. Still others follow
Michel Foucault’s (1984:95) claim that “all knowledge rests upon injustice,” and
view history as a Western myth that oppresses people from other cultures. But few
postmodernists reject history altogether. As this chapter should make clear,
postmodernists rely on de-formalized history, apart from “heroic” or statist scripts.
Postmodernists identify closely with the “new” narrative historians, who have
democratized and localized history. Postmodernists are keenly aware of the
problems of history, so much so that their historicism threatens all historical
learning. Nevertheless, postmodern views of history have produced a number of
novel explanations for international politics. These include strategies for
“decentering” power, “counter-memorializing” political theory, historicizing
identity politics, reconsidering the impact of time and space, and rethinking
globalization and pastiche.
Postmodern knowledge: content over form
In 1995, The New York Times described the conflict in Bosnia as a “postmodern
war,” in which the distinction between armies and peoples dissolved, hi-tech
weaponry played little role, tribal identity supplanted national loyalty as the seat
of conflict, and atavistic warlords terrorized United Nations peacekeepers —all of
which was filmed by camera crews for immediate global consumption (Cohen
1995). The war underscores several themes in postmodern historical and political
analysis:
The Fallacy of “Metanarratives.” That this war happened at all belies several modern
“metanarratives” (grand theories), namely, the march of progress, the end of history,
and the rise of European unity (Lyotard 1984). The West failed to comprehend this
tribal bloodletting because it did not fit the modern models. Genocide, which the
“civilized” world had declared would never happen again, was, in fact, happening
again. International paralysis over intervention illustrated the lack of universal
norms that might spur multilateral action.
Anti-essentialism. There are no pure Platonic forms. Social life is plastic, ephemeral,
and amorphous. Local culture and local knowledge shatter universal conceptions
of truth. Different readings of events are different realities, in this case based on
ethnic identity. Modern institutions are not natural or permanent. There was no
“essential” Yugoslavia, but neither is there an essential Bosnia or Greater Serbia.
Despite their organic rhetoric, these are “imagined communities” (Anderson 1983).
Pastiche. Pastiche refers to a hodgepodge of eclectic forms that coexist and
sometimes clash in the postmodern world: modern/pre-modern, religious/ secular,
universal/parochial, high/low technology, high/low culture, Fordism/ handicrafts,
traditional/rational-bureaucratic, etc. In the Bosnian case, ethnic clans browbeating
world government is a perfect pastiche. A multiplicity of new (and a return to old)
forms of political association undermine the state as the sole seat of power and
object of political allegiance. Pastiche challenges “totalizing” descriptions of social
phenomena. Societies may move in several different directions at the same time.
Power/knowledge. Foucault (1980) argues that knowledge is inherently political,
that a web of specific social conditions governs truth. People in power shape truth
by manipulating language, symbols, and images. In the Yugoslav case, cohesion and
then war were justified by officially sponsored views of history. Tito held Yugoslavia
together by exploiting images of federalism and interpretations of foreign threats.
Slobodan Milosevic and Franjo Tujman have torn the country apart by exploiting
ethnic Serb and Croat (respectively) versions of history.
144 EXIT FROM HISTORY?
Time-space compression. The war illustrates the fragmentation of time and the
twisting of historical memory. Centrifugal forces in culture and history shatter
statist geography, unsettle continuity in international politics, and encroach on
traditional modes of political deliberation. Geography becomes a mental construct
(Harvey 1990). Instant news emancipates us from time. The media anticipate and
influence events. Knowledge and images are commodified for global consumption.
Spectators become inured to violence (Baudrillard 1994).
As these concepts suggest, fragmentation as much as globalization is the hallmark
of postmodernity. The former Yugoslavia is only one of a number of modern states
that have been challenged along fault lines of language, culture, tradition, and ethno-
history. This is indicative of a global trend toward separatism, regionalism, and
cultural and ethnic nationalism. According to the Carnegie Commission on
Preventing Deadly Conflicts (1997:25–9), virtually all violent conflicts in the world
today are being waged within states, often with domestic irredentist fighting as
factions seek to reclaim and ethnically cleanse legend-veiled regions. But
postmodernists see centrifugal forces everywhere: in the growing popularity of
“gated communities,” in the resurgence of private and parochial schools, in
privatization and the devolution of power and money to states and provinces, in
disintegrating urban life, declining civic spirit, and spreading alienation and
despair. Postmodernists acknowledge that the information revolution has brought
people together, but hasten to add that it also provides a soapbox for cranks and
spawns Internet chat rooms devoted to exclusive interests. Idiosyncratic versions of
truth flourish in this environment. In radical politics, Marx’s internationalist battle
cry, “the workingmen have no country,” has given way to local fundamentalisms,
neofascism, cults of tradition, and spates of terror.
The death of metanarrative
Postmodernists argue that in such an atmosphere, universal myths and archetypes
are obsolete. Hence, Jean-François Lyotard’s canonical statement that “the
postmodern condition” is defined by “incredulity toward metanarratives” (grands
récits), and “the failure of the universal.” “Modern,” conversely, designates “any
science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse
…making an explicit
appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics
of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation
of wealth” (Lyotard 1984: xxiii–iv).
The great political narratives of modernity—Marxist utopianism, the
Enlightenment unfolding of reason, Capitalism, Nationalism, Revolution,
Emancipation, Modernization—certainly can strain credulity. Postmodern critiques
tend to single out the Enlightenment, which is doubly flawed for its scientistic
methods and progressivist faith (precisely the critique of Enlightenment thought
made by classical realists such as Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and Kennan). Certainly
not all the political promises of the Enlightenment have been met. The growth of
knowledge was to have been liberating and intellectually enriching. Public
HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 145
administration would stem the arbitrary use of power, heighten productivity, and
free people from backward thinking and practices. “Only through such a project,”
notes David Harvey (1990:12), “could the universal, eternal, and the immutable
qualities of all of humanity be revealed.” The twentieth century, the test tube of
modernity, has shattered any such optimism. Paul Fussell, writing about the First
World War, points to the “hideous embarrassment to the prevailing Meliorist myth
which had dominated the public consciousness for a century.” The prosperity of
the welfare state has been matched by novel Leviathan efficiencies in coercion,
cruelty, surveillance, and fear. International politics have seen the advent of nuclear
war and total war; technology, propaganda, mass movements, unconditional
surrender, Machtpolitik, jack-booted glorification of violence and “corpse-like
obedience” have become wedded to the state (Fussell 1975:8).
For some postmodernists, Hitler and Stalin represent Enlightenment thought
run amok. For others, totalitarianism represents the logical conclusion of the
Enlightenment project, that the quest for human emancipation was doomed to
become a system of universal oppression. This was the thunderclap that issued from
the Frankfurt School, the wellspring of Critical Theory, beginning with its Anti-
Semitism Project in the 1940s. Walter Benjamin set the tone: “The current
amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth
century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—
unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable”
(quoted in Wiggershaus 1994:327). Benjamin’s colleagues Theodor Adorno and
Max Horkheimer argued in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972) that such horrors as
genocide and purges were inherent in modernity. They were not vestiges of
primitivism that the instruments of civilization had failed to eradicate or suppress,
but rather were seated at the core of progressive thought, before tunneling outward
and spilling forth in events. In short, “Enlightenment was totalitarian” (ibid.: 328).
The scientific domination of nature was extended to humankind, crushing
dissenting expressions of culture and personality. Here, critical theory dovetails
with “traditional” critiques of the gospel of progress. Voegelin, Arendt, de Jouvenel,
Oakeshott, Popper, Koestler, Orwell and others have argued that modern,
“totalizing” ideologies and “scientific” renditions of politics may turn gnostic and
genocidal.
Above all, the end of modernity signals the death of the great paradigm of science.
Fairly or unfairly, postmodernists contend that all science is ensnarled in the
Enlightenment myth, that “the hero of knowledge works toward a good ethico-
political end—universal peace” (Lyotard 1984:xxiv). Postmodernists claim that, as a
foundation for knowledge, science verges on the totalitarian. Any project aimed at
the pursuit of truth is wrong-headed, as there is no final and definitive truth “out
there” waiting to be discovered. Lyotard contends that science creates and then
consumes this discovery ethos in order to justify itself. The conditions of scientific
truth, the “rules of the game,” he claims, are “immanent in that game
…they can
only be established within the bonds of a debate that is already scientific in nature
…
there is no other proof that the rules are good than the consensus extended to them
146 EXIT FROM HISTORY?
by the experts” (ibid.: 29). Postmodernists not only tear at the moorings of science,
but also the methods they suggest in place of science are further undermining. As
Rosenau (1992:8) suggests, postmodernists “seek to ‘locate’ meaning rather than
‘discover’ it. They offer ‘readings’ not ‘observations,’ ‘interpretations’ not ‘findings’;
they ‘muse’ about one thing or another. They never test because testing requires
‘evidence,’ a meaningless concept within a post-modern frame of reference.” All
discussions are equally “interesting.” Distinctions may be made on aesthetic and
sometimes moral grounds, but not on the basis of epistemology.
In place of science, there is what Lyotard calls “narrative” (as opposed to
metanarrative), which simply means discourse that does not depend upon prior
justification for truth; it is not “founded” on anything. Narratives are pragmatic,
“legitimated by the simple fact that they do what they do” (Lyotard 1984:23). To
the scientist, of course, narrative practices reflect an alien mentality: savage,
primitive, backward, composed of opinion, custom, tradition, prejudice, ignorance,
and ideology. Lyotard claims (ibid.: 27–9), however, that science has trouble logically
grounding its own claims. It rests upon the Enlightenment idea, yet the rules of
science dictate that this debt not be acknowledged. Science “cannot know and make
known that it is the true knowledge without resorting to the other, narrative, kind
of knowledge, which from its point of view is no knowledge at all.”
Without mooring or center, the postmodern world may seem disorienting and
terrifying. For many postmodernists, though, these realizations are liberating.
Monolithic truth, after all, could be arrogant and authoritarian, used to justify
privilege and make the poor and the weak feel inadequate. Now truth is pluralistic
and contextual, redefined as “self-understanding” or perspective, and changing with
ethnicity, gender, class, race, age, religion, time, place, etc. (Rosenau 1992:78–81).
Non-Western peoples no longer lag behind “universal” forms of culture or
development. People may now embrace their own experience and culture, and move
to traditional rhythms rather than world time.
The narratives of international relations
For postmodernists today, the bankruptcy of Enlightenment thought is obvious,
and the modern myths are in the process of being dismantled. Yet, international
relations continues to resist the sublime of the postmodern. The field remains
almost exclusively modernist in outlook and method, representing reality through
sweeping world-historical forms (for example, structural realism, world-systems
theory, the balance of power, hegemonic stability, the rise and fall of great powers,
long waves in international political economy, the end of history, the clash of
civilizations) as well as more modest, but nonetheless universal, aprioristic concepts
(for example, sovereignty, anarchy, security, Asian tigers, Islamic fundamentalism,
international law, human rights, etc.).
According to postmodernists, each of these, as a foundational narrative, is a sham.
Just as E.H.Carr argued of the harmony of interests and free trade, they are
“naturalized” conventions, i.e., historically constituted trajectories raised to the level
HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 147
of model or law. They explain individual, unique events by inserting them into
formal explanatory systems and lines of progress. Postmodernists argue that this
conformity and standardization deprives us of history by denying the authenticity
and uniqueness of events, as well as the variety of other, potential historical
constructions. Security policy, for example, can be viewed as historically
conditioned responses to crises of identity or perceptions about anarchy (Campbell
1992). Postmodernists explode the assumption of anarchy (Ashley 1995). They blur
the line between domestic and international politics through “rearticulations of
political time and space” (Walker 1993:79). Postmodernists contend that there is
nothing natural about democratic elections or free markets (Rosenberg 1994).
International development and modernization are not assured, certainly not along
preconceived lines. “Development” can be destructive of traditional social fabric
and ways of knowledge. Samir Amin (1989:114) argues that eurocentric “humanist
universalism” has “brought with it the destruction of peoples and civilizations who
have resisted its spread.” International law does not necessarily benefit all mankind,
but may be rigged in favor of the industrialized North (Grovogui 1996). The
universality of human rights flies in the face of all postmodern thought.
“New” history and postmodern politics
What narratives do postmodernists tell? Much of the difficulty in understanding
how postmodernists use history is due to the fact that postmodernists typically
endorse local knowledge, yet remain skeptical toward knowledge in general.
Postmodernists subvert most of the conventions of historiography. They resist truth
claims, and willfully blur history and fiction. Many see history as nostalgia,
anachronism, or myth. Some postmodernists reject the idea that people make their
own history, believing that events are determined by chance and trivia rather than
voluntarism. Others renounce the idea of history as a coherent and worthwhile
object of study.
Postmodern history has been controversial, to put it mildly (see, for example,
Windschuttle 1997). Critics claim that postmodernism undercuts professional
standards and subverts long-established rules of historical narrative. By dismissing
the idea of historical correspondence to a true past, postmodernism is said to invite
a general disregard for truth. Even the quest for truth as the historian’s ideal is
relinquished, replaced by an “anything goes” attitude that fosters Oliver Stone-style
fictionalizations of history, in which the historian is free to exploit any gap or
ambiguity in the record. Critics claim that postmodern political correctness stifles
free debate, and that its murky jargon enfeebles the mind. Many critics find
postmodernism’s ties to Nietzsche especially noxious. The philosopher’s specter
hangs over postmodern history, both in his subjectivism regarding truth and, more
distantly, in the admonition to destroy the past in order to make way for the
supermen of the future. Perhaps the most cutting criticism of postmodern history
is that its relativism erodes ethical judgment—that of the author, the audience, the
148 EXIT FROM HISTORY?
discipline, and in any moral lessons that one might draw from the past. One critic
(Gilley 1996) calls this “History without morality, history without truth.”
That said, postmodernists are not, for the most part, antihistorical. Rather, they
view history, and its role in political life, differently than their modern counterparts.
First, postmodernists highlight forms of historical knowledge that are diminished
or disqualified within the hierarchy of science. In this, postmodernists have
“brought that peripheral, blurred area between history and fiction close to the center
of contemporary historiographical debate” (Ginzburg 1991:87). Second, while
traditionalists seek to explain or understand the past, postmodernists seek to
“problematize” it, to unmask its biases, assumptions, and political uses. As Brenda
Marshall (1992:4) explains,
Postmodernism is about history. But not the kind of “History” that lets us
think we can know the past. History in the postmodern moment becomes
histories and questions. It asks: Whose history gets told? In whose name? For
what purpose? Postmodernism is about histories not told, retold, untold.
History as it never was. Histories forgotten, hidden, invisible, considered
unimportant, changed, eradicated. It’s about the refusal to see history as
linear, as leading straight up to today in some recognizable pattern.
(It is worth inserting that modernity can be inimical to history. It defines itself in
opposition to the past, turning to history chiefly in order to establish what
modernity is not. The past’s sepia tones affirm the brilliant hues of modern novelty.
But history holds few lessons for modernity, whose gaze is always on the future.)
In the postmodern attitude toward the past, again there is confluence between
political and historiographic theory. Historians and political scientists breathe the
same academic air and register similar frustrations with social science. More
importantly, the postmodern ethos encourages breaking down boundaries of
inquiry. It even entails something of a duty to borrow from other fields, and the
rules for doing so are relaxed. Postmodernists thus lapse easily between history and
politics. It would be wrong to say that postmodernist politics “borrows”
postmodern history in the way that, say, realist theory may turn to realist history
for evidence. Rather, methods and insights from other fields are bundled with one’s
own ideas, with none of the anxieties usually felt when appropriating from another
discipline. In terms of method and content, both fields have seen theory cum
philosophy of history be chipped away by the tighter focus of “micro-narratives”—
smaller, stand-alone accounts that make no claim to universality. Given the
historical profession’s characteristic ambivalence about its affiliation with social
science, many historians have found “small is beautiful” a palatable creed. The
skepticism with which most political scientists view postmodern narrative is also
understandable, since the entire nomothetic tradition is at stake.
Lawrence Stone became the standard bearer for the new historical sensibility with
his essay, “The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History” (1979).
Stone argued that the historical profession had undergone a transformation during
HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 149
the 1970s, as the premise of social science history, “that a coherent scientific
explanation of change in the past” was possible, was widely contested. He urged
that historical subjects be broadened to include aspects of everyday life that had
been neglected by the Annalistes’ penchant for studying large, often quantifiable,
historical trends. This reflected the growing belief “that the culture of the group,
and even the will of the individual, are potentially at least as important causal agents
of change as the impersonal forces of material output and demographic growth”
(quoted in Iggers 1997:97). New narrative lent itself to explanations that focused
on human agency and political process much more than structural conditioning.
Stone later became a great defender of history against postmodern incursions, but
here he shares a great deal in common with his future foes. Both dispense with
world history and historical “geology,” embracing instead modest narratives joined
to local culture and knowledge.
New history and postmodern politics both view “heroic” history as obsolete—
narrow, elitist, victorious, patriarchal, or merely dry in its veneration of great events
and deeds. Great-man history is thought to attach excessive importance to
individuals, presenting history in dramatic form, with leading roles and tragic
choices. Rosenau (1992:64) suggests that the method does not chronicle great men;
it creates them. The method also bars access to the chaos and complexity of reality.
A state at war, for example, is a vast machine, a fact concealed in military history
that confines itself to the deeds of warlords. Drum-and-trumpet history glorifies
conquests and triumphs, when “victories” may in fact be more equivocal and less
precise in their effects than Churchillian history suggests. Names, dates, battles,
wars, treaties, winners, losers, etc., all seem tangible on the historian’s page, yet they
mask important details. Chief among these for postmodernists is the politics of
historical representation itself. Struck by the link between power and “discourse”
(practices and patterns of speech and writing), postmodernists typically see this
“old” approach to history as justifying “old” raison d’état politics. It reflects and
reproduces established powers and interests and diplomatic practices. Old history
is also seen as handmaiden to dubious political teleologies—the nation-state, the
rise or fall of the West, the march of civilizations, world capitalism, global
federalism, and so on. The approach is unacceptable because it assumes history is
going someplace in particular, fulfilling a premeditated trajectoral narrative.
Postmodernists are generally receptive, however, to new history’s populist and
localist views of the past. New history features fragmented and diverse subjects.
Redressing modernism’s supposed contempt for ordinary people, it directs research
away from the high and mighty, and toward socially invisible and inarticulate
people. It explores microhistory, or “petite histoire,” as cultural close-up, as in
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou (1978) or Natalie Zemon-Davis’s famed
Return of Martin Guerre (1983). It attempts to salvage “illegitimate,” “discredited,”
“deviant,” “estranged,” and other neglected subjects. It advocates “victim’s” history,
women’s “(her)story,” black history, and other “niche” accounts. New history is
generally social in nature, but on a small scale, elevating the ordinary and the
humdrum over global theory. Asef Bayat’s Street Politics (1997), for example, bridges
150 EXIT FROM HISTORY?
history and politics in analyzing poor people’s social movements in revolutionary
Iran, a process Bayat describes as “quietly encroaching” on state power. New history
is also interested in how identities are shaped and practiced, for example in George
Chauncey’s Gay New York (1994). It privileges peripheral peoples and “fourth
world” accounts, sharing much in common with ethnography, as in Eric Wolf’s
Europe and the People Without History (1982). New history includes subaltern (of
subjugated, especially colonized, people, usually a reference to the Indian
subcontinent) and post-colonial histories such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing
the Past (1995), which seeks to recover Haitian history from colonialism. This
approach also employs “heteroglossia,” meaning that the Actonian Voice of History
is replaced by “varied and opposing voices,” a device that underlines multiple
viewpoints and conflicting interpretations of events (Burke 1992b: 239).
As evidence, new historians frequently cite “secret texts,” “hidden transcripts,”
and other unorthodox sources, as in James C.Scott’s Domination and the Arts of
Resistance (1990), equally a work of new politics and new history. Seeing identity
shaped at home and hearth, new history incorporates local vernacular, myth, legend,
story, and song. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) and Kirsten
Hastrup’s volume, Other Histories (1992) are good examples of this. New history
emphasizes the oral tradition, as in Elizabeth Tonkin’s Narrating Our Pasts (1992),
which describes traditional storytelling across Africa, or Patricia Turner’s I Heard
It Through the Grapevine (1993), a major study of rumor in American black culture.
A classic of the genre is Ronald Fraser’s Blood of Spain (1986), an oral history of the
Spanish Civil War. Fraser argues that oral narratives are valuable as “straight”
history, but that omissions and oversights and reworkings of historical
consciousness also expose deeper currents of culture and politics.
New historians view the oral tradition as a bond of narrative and memory that
preserves traditions and identity. It serves as a kind of “kitchen-table” resistance to
“official” history, as in Eastern Europe, China, and the Soviet Union. It may be a
tool of cultural resistance for oppressed people—secret Jews, for example—or
minorities and nationalities whose language has been banned in public and in print.
This was the case with Catalan, Gallego, and Basque in Franco’s Spain, part of the
caudillo’s campaign to abolish “dissident” political memory. This was also true of
Kurdish in Turkey until 1991 (uses of Kurdish language and culture in other than
folkloric fashion are still discouraged) and in East Timor following the Indonesian
occupation in 197 5, as Jakarta has sought to undermine East Timor’s common
indigenous tongue, Tetum. Ironically, use of Portuguese in East Timor has emerged
as an everyday form of resistance against Indonesian domination. Oral history is
perhaps the only way to grasp the horror of concentration camps, gulags, or prison
cells, and even then it falls short of recapturing what really happened.
Postmodernists take a broader view of art as historical and political artifact. The
“opera-house” definition of culture succumbs to popular culture, at least the high/
low distinction is deemed artificial, or reality is a pastiche of the two. Fernand
Braudel’s (1979) notion of “material civilization” is extended to encompass popular
and populist traces. Slang, aphorism, jokes, film, newsreels, advertisements, graffiti,
HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 151
street art, reggae, rap, or 1950s lounge music, as well as dime-store comics, tabloid
newspapers, television sitcoms, video games, and other manifestations of “kitsch,”
are all considered valid expressions of human experience and a suggestive archive
of political culture. Stephen Whitfield’s Culture of the Cold War (1991), for example,
argues that the cold war was sustained through the use of popular media. John
Johnson’s Latin America in Caricature (1980) contends that United States public
opinion and foreign policy toward Latin America were reduced, literally, to
cartoons. Postmodernists suggest that these “tacky” images may reflect greater
emotional appeal and political meaning than the prism of high politics. The
historian Warren Susman wonders if “Mickey Mouse may in fact be more
important to an understanding of the 1930s than Franklin Roosevelt” (quoted in
Rosenau 1992:66).
New history “privileges,” that is, pays special attention to or elevates, the local,
the neglected, the inarticulate, the powerless. In theory, postmodernists reject
privileging of any sort: all perspectives are equally valid. But in practice, they do
privilege the oppressed in order to restore balance to a long tradition of heroic
historical representation. New historians typically claim only to be telling stories,
or describing rather than explaining. Yet, also in a positive way, the “polyvocality”
of new history gives voice to previously muted and marginalized political actors,
and is keenly attuned to popular groundswells of political change.
The crisis of representation
If new history no longer seems very new, that is because it has passed easily into
the profession. Most historians today are probably doing one form or another of
new history, or have been influenced by it. This is less the case with postmodernism’s
more radical critiques. Postmodernists claim that history and time cannot be
represented through conventional historical models. The so-called “crisis of
representation” reflects postmodernists’ great interest in language and in “texts,” a
term used to denote all human artifacts—cave paintings, buildings, literature,
political oratory, film, foreign policy, etc. Most people will probably accept that
language is an imperfect medium; it is impossible to represent reality without
distortion. However, postmodernists reverse this relationship between reality and
representation. Language is now said to produce a world of its own making. It does
not convey reality, it constitutes reality. Postmodernists apply this critique to spoken
and written texts, but also to texts in general. Hence the “linguistic turn” in virtually
every field in the humanities and social sciences. All discourse — architectural,
artistic, literary, political, historical, and so on—is subjugated to what Frederic
Jameson (1972) called “the prison house of language.”
Thus, amid “modern” debate about facts versus textual representations, or
historical events versus historiography, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida
intervenes to announce that there is no “outside-the-text”: “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.”
The world certainly exists independent of language. Derrida’s statement is usually
understood to mean that our comprehension of things, nonetheless, is always
152 EXIT FROM HISTORY?
textualized, or cast in terms of language (see Callinicos 1995:3). Derrida uses the
term différance to refer to the gap between a word (the signifier) and the thing to
which it refers (the signified). He contends that no one-to-one correspondence exists
between them. Expression is derivative, a copy or “simulacrum” of something else.
Words contain traces of other words, images refer to other, similar images. These
never convey clear meanings because there is no privileged spot from which a
definitive meaning can be ascribed. There will always be gaps between what an
author intends to say, what he actually says, and what the reader understands. To
make this clear, Derrida would write certain problematic words “sous rature” or
“under erasure.” He would write a word, cross it out, then leave it on the page, still
legible beneath his redaction. Derrida’s point was that words were necessary, yet
inadequate for the tasks set for them (Sarup 1993:33). The larger point is that the
structure of language collapses, taking truth with it. All debates are deemed
“intertextual,” with no final resting point or resolution.
The determination of thought by language leads to Roland Barthes’s widely
reported “death of the author.” Barthes argues that any text is comprised of a “tissue
of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” (quoted in Bertens
1995:7). Regardless of what the author intends, he or she remains a mouthpiece for
language, culture, and context. Conversely, the readers of a text take on a heightened
role. They no longer passively imbibe the author’s “message,” rather, they interpret
a text according to their own cultural and mental markers. This is gibberish when
contrasted to the liberal idea of history as an individual creation. Even Oakeshott
claimed that history was “the historian’s experience” and no one else’s. The view
of history as a linguistic and cultural construction meshes neatly, however, with
pre-modern notions of history as story. The storyteller, troubadour, balladeer, and
saga writer convey traditional, collective knowledge. They do not claim ownership
of the narrative, nor do they claim to be telling the truth as measured against some
external standard. The liberal idea of the author as a unique, copyrightable voice
would appear much later (along with what Harold Bloom called the “anxiety of
influence,” that the authors’ ideas are not their own).
History as politics
Michel Foucault lends a sharp political edge to constructed knowledge. Foucault
is a consummate reductionist in his political theory. He views not merely all politics,
but all knowledge, in terms of power and domination. This is the power/knowledge
(pouvoir-savoir) construct noted earlier. Foucault rejects the juridical and
institutional study of power in favor of analysis of the techniques and tactics of
domination. Mitchell Dean (1994:152) felicitously calls this the “anti-Leviathan”
approach to power. Foucault contends that the creation and transmission of
knowledge is regulated by the episteme of the era. Episteme governs discourse, by
setting the boundaries to how people think, talk, and act. In turn, “discursivity”
engenders a “regime” of truth, “linked in a circular relation with systems of power
which produce and sustain it” (Foucault: 1980: 131–3). Thus, the crisis of
HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 153
representation is acutely political. The will to power is transubstantiated into a “will
to knowledge” (la volonté de savoir). Theory is practice, part of the workings of power
and domination. The definitions and methods of knowledge are at the center of
the permanent coercions that keep “bodies docile.”
This is especiaily true of “theoretical” history, i.e., accounts in which a theoretical
lens will “filter, hierarchise, and order” knowledge (ibid.: 83). In his own “historical”
work, Foucault carries out what he first termed “archae ology” and later
“genealogy,” an approach associated with Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals (1887).
Genealogy is a “history of the present.” It illumines the conditions and rituals of
power. Genealogy does not claim to have discerned the true meaning of the past,
nor does it aim to present a complete picture of the past. By confining itself to the
present, genealogy intends to avoid the dead end of trying to represent events bound
up in past, and hence inaccessible, discursive archives.
Genealogy is not so much an historical method as it is a sustained assault on the
philosophical approach to history. Far from rejecting history, Foucault claims that
genealogy demands “relentless erudition,” “patience and a knowledge of details,”
and “a vast accumulation of source material” (Foucault 1984:76–7). In short, it
requires more history and less theory. Still, its aim is to destroy the idea of history
as stable or monotonous or unfolding according to some transcendental plan.
Fittingly, Foucault’s discussion of genealogy streams forth in the language of
dissolution: “divergence,” “marginalism,” “dissociation,” “disintegration,” “self-
destruction,” “inconstancy,” “dismantling,” “decadence,” “singularity,”
“inaccuracy,” “impermanence.” As this outpouring of skepticism washes over
traditional history, it reveals that knowledge is a matter of perspective. “We want
historians to confirm our belief that the present rests upon profound intentions
and immutable necessities. But the true historical sense confirms our existence
among countless lost events, without a landmark or a point of reference” (ibid.: 89).
History as literature
Derrida and Foucault generally see history as a branch of politics. Hayden White,
a prominent historiographic theorist, argues that history is a branch of literature,
though certainly with political and ideological colorations. Treating history as
literature in style and/or content is not new. Many dissident (i.e., non-Rankean)
nineteenth-century historians, particularly Anglo-Saxon ones, wrote popular
histories in novelistic form. Thomas Babington Macaulay, the doyen of these
literary historians, once noted that “facts are but the dross of history,” and his own
work often fell afoul of those facts. Arthur Marwick (1970:51–2) recounts a
wonderful passage in Macaulay’s History of England (1848–55) in which William III
bids farewell to the States of Holland before setting out for Britain. Macaulay writes:
“In all that grave senate there was none who could refrain from shedding tears. But
the iron stoicism of William never gave way; and he stood among his weeping
friends calm and austere, as if he had been about to leave them only for a short
visit to his hunting-grounds at Loo.” This is, in fact, a direct plagiarism from the
154 EXIT FROM HISTORY?
Odes of Horace, describing Regulus making his farewell to the Senate. The imitation
may be conscious or unconscious, and we do not know the king’s actual state of
calm or austerity, but this compelling, classical image adheres to the historian’s as
well as the reader’s imagination.
For White, this is how all history works. He argues that we must treat “historical
work as what it most manifestly is: a verbal structure in the form of a narrative
prose discourse” (quoted in Jenkins 1995:146).
The historian uncovers certain facts,
but when it comes to plot, he employs a repertoire of culturally specific literary
conventions. The historian is a vessel for literary and rhetorical culture. White is
interested in telling the truth about history, but he claims that beyond isolated facts
there is no truth to tell. History has neither rhyme nor reason. Whether the historian
is aware of it or not, these literary models alone infuse history with meaning. As
soon as the historian steps beyond the mere recital of structured facts in the form
of annals or chronology, he is, to use a Derridean word, signifying. All plots become
metaplots. Author and reader turn to the devices of literature in order to grasp what
is, in fact, a chaos of singular events.
White steps beyond earlier constructionist assertions to elaborate a scheme by
which history drifts into literature.
He argues that historical artifacts are first
selected and arranged from the “unprocessed historical record” into a chronicle
that pinpoints a beginning and an end. The historian then fashions a “primitive”
story, adopting a “hierarchy of significance” that assigns priorities and chains of
causation. This stage in historical construction entails a measure of invention and
interpretation on the historian’s part, and is drawn to suit his intended audience.
The account is then sharpened by formal historical explanations according to the
conventions of argument, emplotment, and ideology. By emplotment, White means
a culturally resonant and recognizable meaning that is produced and then encoded
into the story; he contends that in all history this mythos takes one of four forms:
romance, comedy, tragedy, or satire. As for ideology, White holds that “every history
is attended by specifically determinable ideological implications,” and he lists four:
anarchical, conservative, radical, and liberal. He adds a final twist in the form of
tropes, or figurative uses of language. White again points to four: metaphor,
metonymy (substituting for the name of a thing the name of an attribute of it),
synecdoche (using a more comprehensive term in place of a less comprehensive
one), and irony. These are, respectively, representational, reductionist, integrative,
and negational in their usage. Tropes are significant for White because he believes
that “direct,” corresponding language is inadequate to recount what really
happened. Instead, the historian must circle around the subject, identifying things
by reference to other things, incorporating singular events into broader categories
or reducing them into manageable parts, or, in the case of irony, explaining through
opposition.
The way in which this rhetorical recipe is “cooked up” produces the historian’s
signature style. But in the end, the explanatory effect is the same as that of a poem
or novel. White’s taxonomy may come across as Procrustean and maddeningly
linguistic. Still, the idea of culturally specific story lines should not be dismissed.
HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 155
Such icons allow us to imagine a reality that is whole and complete. A number of
other iconic scripts leap to mind: paradise lost, pride goeth before the fall, Athens
and Sparta, the Bildungsroman, the cautionary tale, vanquished villains, and tales of
redemption, to mention a few Western standards that might guide political
explanations. Hayward Alker, a (modern) micro-structuralist, suggests that
“mythopoetic” or “moral-ideological” narratives are imbedded in all social science
paradigms and theoretical traditions (Alker 1996:270–2). Thucydides, for example,
may be read as a morality play in which the gods castigate Athens for her hubris.
Malthusians prophesy damnation in the form of subsistence wages to check the
prolificity of the laboring classes. Marxists offer earthly salvation. Stories may be
far more complex as well. But, like fairy tales, they still adhere to definite scripts,
which may be formally analyzed using scriptural hermeneutics, grammatical
reconstructions, plot summaries, and other models. (See also Suganami 1997.)
Although most interest in the literary aspects of political theory is animated by
Lyotardian skepticism toward metanarratives, it is possible that “culturally
resonant” stories may exhibit patterns across cultures, and that these may be
amenable to formalization. Citing Jonathan Culler, Alker (ibid.: 173) foresees
research related to cross-cultural “essences” in terms of the norms and expectations
that infuse all literary texts.
These and other literary aspects of historical narrative are not lost on historians.
Norman Davies, Richard Price, Golo Mann, Simon Schama, and other working
historians have experimented with different ways of couching narrative, writing
history backwards, introducing heteroglossia in the text, and engaging a variety of
fictional forms (see Burke 1992b). Though no postmodernist, Schama has taken to
writing what he terms “historical novellas,” which, he says, “while they may at times
appear to observe the discursive conventions of history,” are in part, “pure
inventions, based, however, on what documents suggest” (quoted in Callinicos 1995:
3). Other experiments further blur the line between fiction as history, as
historiography edges toward the “non-fiction novels” of Truman Capote or
Norman Mailer. The distinguished historian William McNeill, a devotee of
Toynbee and defender of world history, argues that history must reach the mythical
plane in order to make intelligible the “elastic, inexact character of truth, especially
truth about human conduct” (McNeill 1986:7). On a related front, some
postmodernists see no reason that the disjointed nature of reality should not be
reflected in a more fragmentary approach to history (Burke 1992b: 237–8). History
may read like Yeats, Joyce, Kafka, Faulkner, Huxley, García Marquez, or Rushdie.
Some argue that literary pastiche or filmic montage, which edit chronology and
image sequence, may offer a better likeness of reality than traditional writings.
Faulkner, who wrote fragmented stories about history and memory in the American
South, once noted that the past is constantly with us; it is not even past. García
Marquez has argued that shifting images and broken time of “magical realism” may
seem fantastical to the rational European mind, but they are the everyday reality
in Latin America.
156 EXIT FROM HISTORY?
History as commodity
Finally, a word is in order about Lyotard’s (1984) notion of “commodity culture”
as it relates to history and historiography and what is sometimes called the “heritage
industry.” For Lyotard, knowledge is commodified and mercantilized, reaching a
fever pitch in the “computer society.” This leads to a not very flattering view of
what historians typically do. Historical bestsellers tap into current consumer
political and aesthetic tastes, seek out market niches, and avail themselves of the
retailing ploys of book clubs. Museum curators make a spectacle of the past,
violently squeezing history into thematic exhibitions that target audience appeal
and boost gift shop sales. University historians and political scientists embrace
academic fads and succumb to institutional and political demands. Edward Said
(1979:295–300), for example, contends that historical representation of the Orient
was shaped by European academics, and later by elites in the American State
Department and defense establishment, the RAND Corporation, the Middle East
Studies Association and other politically privileged cadres. No doubt there is some
hyperbole here. Postmodernists may be working on Nietzsche’s bon mot that truth
inheres only in the exaggerations. Yet, as someone who has lived in the Near East
and has had some opportunity to compare its reality with its “otherly”
representation, Said’s thesis, in any case, does not seem so outlandish to me.
Patrick Joyce has argued that “the major advance of ‘postmodernism’ needs to
be registered by historians: namely that the events, structures and processes of the
past are indistinguishable from the forms of documentary representation, the
conceptual and political appropriations, and the historical discourses that construct
them” (quoted in Callinicos 1995). Students of politics should also take note. A
promising trend in each of the postmodernist critiques explored here is that the
politics of historical representation are ripe for “deconstruction.” For Derrida,
deconstruction meant attempting to hoist a text on its own petard by revealing
ways in which the author’s words are employed inconsistently and paradoxically.
But deconstruction can also simply mean exposing political motives and ideologies.
Postmodernists are clear that discourse involves strategy; people have “projects,” a
term usually used unflatteringly to describe advocacy that is concealed in language
and method. Whatever one decides to call it, dismantling ideological biases (and
laying bare what is privileged and what is censored), is a form of sound and
affirmative historical inquiry.
Shifting explanations
We have seen that postmodernists view history as perspective with politics. There
is no single, objective reality, but rather a multiplicity of experiences, some of which
have achieved “privileged” status, typically because they benefit established interests.
The resultant “hegemonic discourse” is a disguised system of control and
domination that legitimates and safeguards its own favored status. This broadened
intellectual and historical ambit elicits new forms of political analysis and
HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 157
explanation. It also points to a kind of subterranean history of possibilities. As
Richard Ashley notes (1989:33), historical narratives privilege “one or another
subject as the sovereign center, the ultimate origin and register of truth and
meaning, in whose terms all else must be interpreted.” Here I set out briefly several
postmodernist reformulations of international theory that rest upon this
“problematized” understanding of history. I focus on shifting views of power,
critiques of the anarchy/ sovereignty problem, strategies of “counter-memory,”
foreign policy as identity politics, radical views of time and space, and an emerging
pastiche theory of globalism.
Decentering power
Foucault argues that one of the great failings of political theory is its fixation upon
the person of the sovereign. “We need to cut off the King’s head; in political theory
that has still to be done” (Foucault 1980:121). Postmodernists in international
relations follow suit, rejecting the “juridicalpolitical” theory of sovereignty and
removing the analysis of power (and there is a great deal of emphasis on power)
from the center to the margins — from the head, as it were, to the extremities of
the body politic, thus connecting with the political actors whose stories new
historians recount.
In this “decentered” analysis, identities and boundaries are constantly in motion.
The rituals of power are now played out everywhere, on the factory floor, in the
office, within families, in the structure of institutions, in language itself. Richard
Ashley and R.B.J.Walker argue that decenteredness is increasingly the condition of
everyday global life: “narratives of knowing and doing intersect in mutually
destabilizing ways, contingency threatens to displace necessity, the very identity of
the subject is put in doubt, and human beings live and toil as exiles, deprived of
any absolute territory of being to call home.” They point to working mothers torn
between home and career; draft-age youths who see themselves as cosmopolitan, yet
are expected to take up arms in the name of national security; “foreign” workers
who find themselves suspended between two different cultures and jurisdictions,
belonging fully to neither; journalists who must make impossible distinctions
between domestic, international, environmental, economic, sports, and fashion
news; businessmen torn between traditional identity and the identity of the
marketplace; peace activists dissatisfied equally with nationalist and universalist
rhetoric (Ashley and Walker 1990b: 260–1). Each of these experiences chips away
at that great signifier of international relations, state sovereignty.
These are experiences of exile. Rocked from its narrative foundations, life
becomes ambiguous, paradoxical, and deterritorialized. Identities, loyalties, and
values span cultures and continents, or fall in the interstices of sovereign space.
Ashley and Walker argue that one can no longer speak of rational individuals whose
identities are given, and whose interests coincide with those of their compatriots.
The postmodern condition throws shared moral principles into doubt, jeopardizes
social norms, and fragments common sense. Citing the Bulgarian-French
158 EXIT FROM HISTORY?
psychoanalyst and cultural theorist Julia Kristeva, they suggest that exile leads to
dissidence. Estrangement from the certain truths of modernity creates a space in
which one can think and act outside of the forms of knowledge imposed by
essentialist narratives. This leads in turn to new ways of power and resistance, as
people confront “a diversity of representational practices that would traverse them,
claim their time, control their space and their bodies, impose limitations on what
can be said and done, and decide their beings” (ibid.: 261). As the sovereign state
recedes, new complexities and identities emerge.
This type of discourse undercuts the “naturalness” of sovereignty and the
concomitant “fact of anarchy.” Here, postmodernists are up against a formidable
tradition of Western political philosophy that has “reified” the nation-state,
mentally fashioning it into a “real” thing. Anarchy as well as its remedies, notably
the “domestic analogy,” are said to be rooted in caricaturized Hobbesian, Kantian,
and Grotian representations of reality. In the section on counter-memory that
follows, we will see how postmodernists seek to expose the disjunction and
incoherence of this “tradition.” In terms of contemporary international relations,
Ashley argues that (especially North American) discourse has been “disciplined” by
the twin assumptions of anarchy and sovereignty. To be considered a “serious
thinker” in this milieu, one must pose questions that in one sense or another address
the “anarchy problématique.” This applies equally to theorists of realism, liberalism,
world order, economic interdependence, international cooperation, international
institutions, and so forth. Each understands the world in terms of the absence of
a global Leviathan and the presence of a multiplicity of sovereign states. Each locates
the sovereign state at the heart of personal analysis, ignoring other historical and
potential forms of social organization (Ashley 1995: 95–6). Even the appellation
“international relations” is laden with these assumptions.
Ashley contends that sovereignty is an “heroic practice,” another Foucaultian
idea. Sovereignty is said to be “double-voiced,” that is, it turns on a dichotomy, in
this case on the opposition of sovereignty versus anarchy, with sovereignty
privileged as the regulative ideal. In one voice, this heroic practice holds out
sovereignty as representing resolution, meaning, security, domesticity, and truth.
In another, it invokes the perils of anarchy, “a fearsome time and place of ambiguity,
contingency, and chance,” where truth is contested and power is arbitrary (ibid.:
103). Posed in this either-or fashion, sovereignty becomes the natural and necessary
antidote to the absence of knowledge and authority—an absence modernity cannot
tolerate. Ashley describes this as a discourse of domestication, a foundation for
universal truth and security within its domain.
Modern sovereignty also domesticates the wilds of history. For Ashley, modernity
denotes a “disposition to privilege some historically imposed limitations of human
knowing and doing as essential to ‘reasoning man’s’ sovereign being and, as such,
as the already present transcendental foundation and source of humans’ capacities
for the autonomous use of reason in history” (ibid.: 99–100). The strategy of the
modern sovereign is to “enclose history,” to mark contingency and ambiguity as
deviant and fearsome, and thus to discipline historical “indeterminacy and
HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 159
equivocity
…to impose boundaries and ‘domesticate’ the chance, contingency, and
ambiguity of a pluralistic history” (ibid.: 102). The success of sovereign
interpretations of history, i.e., of reifying the nation-state teleology, is not based on
repression, nor is it beholden to classical or Christian conceptions of divine reason.
Instead, sovereignty is uttered by the anthropocentric voice of modernity. The
weight of historical contingency and not knowing bears down on “reasoning man.”
He relents, believing that he is mastering his own historical contingency by
acknowledging power and truth as mediated by the sovereign state.
Postmodernists argue as well that when political identity is bundled with
sovereignty, identity is reduced to a sense of place, to the “flat Euclidean spaces of
modernity” (Walker 1993:176). The modern mind (and state), with its penchant for
fixity in categories, systematically excludes other forms of social organization and
other axes of identity such as culture, class, race, and gender. In the international
context, fixed geography is said also to privilege spatial conceptions of identity
(identity as loyalty to place) over temporal ones (identity as tradition or shared
history). Postmodernists emphasize that the emergence of the Westphalian system
was an historically specific pattern of political differentiation. A new canon of
diplomacy and law restructured political space, curtailing medieval forms of divided
sovereignty, of overlapping and crosscutting loyalties where localism and
universalism coexist (ibid.: 117). Universalism is now pursued within the bounds
of the sovereign state. In this context, identity and difference become another
heroic, binary practice with its rituals of inclusion and exclusion. Postmodernists
regard these absolutist boundaries as obsolete. What is needed in theory and practice
is a shift away from international politics toward a global politics that recognizes
exile space and dissident identities.
Counter-memory
Postmodernists define “memory” and “counter-memory” as opposed historical
strategies for reading a text. Memorialization is said to encase history in an
“originary” past, where ambiguities and uncertainties are forgotten. This
memorialized past then serves to “ground” modern disciplinary thought and
political practice. Counter-memorialization, by contrast, contests this iconic,
foundational reading of history. It resists the “politics of forgetting” and seeks to
retain the ambiguities and complexities of the history of any discipline and the
classic texts that anchor it.
Memorial history fixes the past along neat dichotomous markers that impose
discipline and order on an ambiguous and chaotic past. It papers over paradox,
ambiguity, and uncertainty. Instead, it attributes a high degree of coherence to a
text as well as a central logic—a plot, White would say—of crisis overcome and
ambiguity resolved. A text is thus easily summarized and caricaturized, its basic
themes encapsulated and enumerated (Ashley and Walker 1990a: 384). Through
catechistic invocation, these themes become the substructure of paradigm and
tradition. Ultimately, they transmute a contextual, temporal historical construction
160 EXIT FROM HISTORY?
into a powerful myth of origin. As Walker (1993:27) argues, “Other points of
departure are rendered trivial or even unthinkable. The highly problematic
character of claims about origins, continuities, teleologies, progressions and
ruptures is conveniently forgotten.”
Counter-memorialized readings of history refuse to repeat this “willful amnesia,”
instead approaching “settled,” “classic” texts as “openly contested cultural terrain,”
and analyzing “afresh the ways in which classic texts contend with ambiguity,
uncertainty, and resistant counterinterpretations.” Like genealogy, counter-memory
is said to require more history, not less. It is conceived as an exercise in fealty toward
texts: honoring detail, specificity, and context, and retaining intended paradoxes
and crises of interpretation. This is another tactic to problematize essentialist
interpretation, but it is more than that, it is a joyous reading of a problematic past.
Counter-memory aims “to enrich not diminish, the cultural resources of a
discipline, community, or culture
…to appreciate the intrinsic ambiguity,
uncertainty, irony, and recombinatorial possibilities of its own textual inheritance”
(Ashley and Walker 1990a: 385). Postmodernists are not unique in this, but they
do face the task with greater irreverence (and joy) than the typical historian of
political thought. It also bears mentioning that international theory is full of cracks
into which to drive this wedge. Critics have long held that students of international
politics are licentious in their use of the classics. Michael Donelan (1990:42)
observes that political philosophers often become mere “ventriloquists’ dummies”
in the hands of their modern international relations manipulators.
Walker asserts precisely this in his counter-memorializing deconstruction of
Machiavelli as the foundation for traditional international relations. Walker argues
that modern theories of international relations express assumptions about political
community that crystallized in the early modern period, with Machiavelli and his
conception of lo stato as expounded in The Prince at the roots of “a tradition, an
origin, a code, a centre, a home from which one can set out to explore the
contingencies and transformations of the world outside” (Walker 1993:44). Walker
contends that an originary reading of Machiavelli caricatures a complex mind as
well as a complex time. Immunized from critical analysis, Machiavelli becomes the
legal and geopolitical expression of sovereignty, an “ahistorical apology for the
violence of the present” (ibid.: 31). Blind acceptance of this tradition in turn debars
us from fundamentally confronting the narratives by which the state bestows
legitimacy on its power apparatus.
A counter-memorializing reading attempts to limn the Florentine’s “historical
moment” of cultural and religious ferment on the cusp of modernity. Counter-
memory opens up connections to Machiavelli’s other works, The Discourses, The
History of Florence, and The Art of War. These texts are then seen for what they are:
feints and thrusts in the wide-ranging negotiations among Machiavelli, Savonarola,
Guicciardini, and others about the character of civic humanism, political
legitimacy, political ethics, the roots of identity, and the role of the church (Ashley
and Walker 1990a: 386). This fuels a more searching and unsettled depiction of
Machiavelli as a voice of crisis rather than essence. The point is that the “tradition”
HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 161
of international relations is not, in fact, rooted in a fixed historical marker of power
and authority. Ashley and Walker suggest that the same sort of historicism holds
for Hobbes, Rousseau, Bentham, Marx, Kant, Weber, and so on. All the pillars of
the tradition “emerge and reply to historical circumstances where margins widen,
ambiguity and chance seem to undermine every certain referent, temporality seems
to displace every extratemporal standpoint” (ibid.: 383).
Historicizing identity
The finest example of the new historicism in international relations is David
Campbell’s Writing Security (1992). Amid orthodox, revisionist, post-revisionist, and
“joint-venture” interpretations of the cold war, Campbell casts American foreign
policy in a fresh light. He places security at the heart of identity politics. He argues
that, historically, global threats have been interpreted in ways that define
domesticity and foreignness. United States foreign policy has represented the
“other” as a way of creating and controlling American identity.
Like Ashley and Walker, Campbell sees the production of identity as a way of
mastering geopolitical ambiguity. He suggests that the Hobbesian conception of
anarchy rests on a stylized history, in which one form of social organization and
identity (the church) is supplanted by another (the state) at a clear juncture
(Westphalia). A nuanced reading of history will appreciate the coeval emergence of
states and the international system. This leads Campbell to a different conception
of foreign policy:
Foreign policy shifts from a concern of relations between states which takes
place across ahistorical, frozen and pregiven boundaries, to a concern with the
establishment of the boundaries that constitute, at one and the same time, the
“state” and the “international system.” Conceptualized in this way, foreign
policy comes to be seen as a political practice that makes “foreign” certain
events and actors
… The construction of the “foreign” is made possible by
practices that also constitute the “domestic.” In other words, foreign policy
is “a specific sort of boundary-producing political performance.”
(ibid.: 69)
In this context, Campbell argues that the “constant articulation of danger through
foreign policy is
…not a threat to a state’s identity or existence; it is its condition
of possibility” (ibid.: 12). The national security estate identifies and interprets
threats so as to create and maintain a consensus about security. Crisis becomes a
permanent part of the cultural terrain. Threats enforce closure on the community
at risk; they set the behavioral and normative boundaries of the community being
protected. In this way, identity is constituted in opposition to “foreign” threats.
Unlike essentialist or materialist views of security, this approach is anti-
foundational. National interests and security are not founded on anything. They
are highly arbitrary, resting solely on imagination, interpretation, and rituals of
162 EXIT FROM HISTORY?
inclusion and exclusion. Campbell believes this is especiaily true of the United
States, which he calls the imagined community par excellence. “There has never been
a country called ‘America,’ nor a people known as ‘Americans’ from whom a
national identity is drawn
… Defined therefore more by absence than presence,
America is peculiarly dependent upon representational practices for its being.
Arguably more than any other state, the imprecise process of imagination is what
constitutes American identity” (ibid.: 105).
Campbell supports his claim with extensive use of foreign policy “texts” drawn
from American political and cultural history. He argues that civilization and
barbarism was the leading trope of eighteenth-century boundary building. America
is said to have imagined itself in moralistic opposition to the primitive “Old
World,” and later through the myth of the frontier, which created boundaries
against “Indians” and, within its borders, “Africans.” In the nineteenth century, the
image of civilization and barbarism was replaced by the metaphor of the normal
and the pathological. Campbell points to the proliferation of medical language
framing foreign policy texts of the period. Political elites used the “trope of the
body” in order to define the moral and physical space of identity. The “other” was
described in terms of disease, infection, cancer, epidemic, madness, and so on, while
foreign policy pronouncements cited dangers of degeneration, miscegenation, and
decay. (This discourse parallels broader nineteenth-century cultural trends linked
to ideas about evolution, eugenics, sociology, anthropology, etc. In their infancy,
the “human sciences” lent themselves to a number of dubious social projects,
particularly the policing of race.
) For Campbell, such “socio-medical discourse”
served to regulate American political hygiene. It rendered threats in bodily form,
and invoked the authority of diagnostic nomenclature as well as the necessity for
often-invasive intervention. Now the health and security of the patient depended
on the specialized knowledge of “national security managers” (ibid.: 96). For
Campbell, this is the tradition of social purity in which Kennan described the
“malignant parasite” of communism, and Ronald Reagan responded to the 1985
hijacking of a TWA aircraft in Beirut by claiming that no nation was “immune”
from terrorism: “If we permit it to succeed anywhere it will spread like a cancer,
eating away at civilized societies and sowing fear and chaos everywhere.” “In such
discourse,” Campbell notes, “there are no gray areas, no complexities, no
historicized understandings, no doubts about the self, and no qualms about the
nature of the response” (ibid.: 97).
The cold war extended this “geography of evil” as a way of scripting American
identity (ibid.: 143). The “red scare” followed an American pattern of what
Campbell calls the “apocalyptic mode” of statecraft, in which exorbitant fears are
used to quell dissidence and prescribe action against impending disaster (ibid.: 153).
Campbell highlights the “quasi-puritan” sermons shaping from on high the
discourse of the cold war. Through the florid preaching of NSC directives, the
Security State set out to displace God as the object of ultimate loyalty. War became
domestic politics by other means. The security community turned on the enemy
within, tilling the soil for McCarthyism. Campbell’s recounting of the loyalty-
HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 163
security programs of 1947–57 is enough to make one’s skin crawl. His discussion
of the cultural crisis of the 1960s is also compelling. Campbell argues that rational
assessments of the cold war fail to grasp the motivations behind these policies. He
contends that world communism, the economic collapse of Europe, Red China,
North Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua, Libya, etc. never posed a threat in terms of
traditional calculations of military power. They were dangerous because of their
“proclivity for anarchy and disorder” (ibid.: 32). Policing these threats was a way
of policing America’s image of itself. Enmity toward communism and the Soviet
Union functioned as a code for the inscription of boundaries. Through “a series
of ritualized performances
…the figuration of difference as otherness in the cold
war rendered a contingent identity (‘the West,’ ‘America,’ et al.) secure” (ibid.: 195).
How will the United States maintain difference and identity in an increasingly
interdependent and homogenized world? Campbell argues that the war on drugs
during the Reagan and Bush (and now Clinton) administrations has parroted the
fear-mongering script of the cold war, citing the “clear and present danger” to
sovereignty, security, authority, families, values, children, and so on. The drug war
has also been openly militarist in imagery and language, with talk of offensives,
eradication, and boot camps; it has in fact been militarized along US borders and
in the Andean campaign to staunch the supply of cocaine. Campbell argues that
McCarthyist drug testing was just one of a number of hysterical erosions of civil
rights in the effort to ferret out this particular un-American activity. He contends
that “drug profiles” were reinvented stereotypes rooted in a long tradition of linking
drug use to psychological, sexual, and political deviants, and of pegging minorities
and “foreign” ethnics as habitual abusers. Turning to another branch of political
economy, Campbell looks at how Japan has been depicted at a time when the
boundary between domestic and foreign industry is increasingly blurred. He cites
a revisionist trend in academic discussions of “the Japan problem” that emphasizes
what Steven Schlossstein calls the United States’s “dark side” of “racism, insularity,
arrogance, narrowness, and resentment” (ibid.: 228). This is paralleled in the
economic press’s depiction of Japan “buying up” America in the 1980s, even though
Japan’s share of total foreign assets in the US remained fairly steady during the
period (and lagged behind the percentage held by the Netherlands and Britain).
Villainous portrayals of Japanese people in advertisements and in popular fiction
and movies further darkened American perceptions of Japan. Campbell argues these
“texts,” like the “deviance” attached to drug use, delimit everything that America
is not, thus again negatively defining American identity.
This fascinating thesis raises a number of questions: Is identity constituted chiefly
in relation to difference? It seems one could construct an affirmative theory of
identity as well. To what extent is identity molded by elite pronouncements? At
times, one wonders if Campbell does not bend the evidence to his thesis. Some of
his claims seem to parallel the colorful oratory from the likes of Billy Graham,
J.Edgar Hoover, and Strom Thurmond that Campbell favors as evidence.
Occasionally, a throwaway line by a cabinet member or political appointee will be
portrayed as firm identity policy. Is the construction of identity as top-down as this
164 EXIT FROM HISTORY?
model suggests? Who is scripting whom? During the McCarthy period, and
certainly during the 1960s, there was a great deal of dissent against elite “scripts.”
Likewise, anti-drug diktats by the Reagan and Bush administrations resonated with
many Americans, but a great many others found Ronald (and Nancy) Reagan’s
“just say no” campaign ludicrous. Linguistic deconstructions are probably more
likely than reserved historiography to fall in this trap of rhetoric. Interestingly,
Writing Security claims to be a genealogy, not a history. Campbell states at the outset
that other, valid interpretations of American foreign policy are possible.
Nevertheless, like many postmodernist works, the book presents evidence and
argument in relatively traditional form. And while the book’s claims are not posed
as necessarily true, they are presented with greater solidity than one might expect.
Disrupting time and space
While modernists follow a rational, orderly conception of space and time,
postmodernists emphasize discontinuity, historical “moments,” bursts of insight,
and spatial fragmentation. Some postmodernists take the idea of past, present, and
future to be egocentric and presentist. They aim to remove contemporary man from
the position at the center of history he has held since the Renaissance. Others reject
“chronophonism,” the assumption that time is linear or chronological. A cyclical,
random, or erratic vision of time may be equally engaging; or it is possible to think
of time as spherical, with the present drifting between horizons of past and future.
Unsurprisingly, this departure from linearity engenders skepticism about modern
notions of cause and effect. Postmodern analysis casts occurrences in terms of
contingency, discontinuity, complexity, and intertextuality. Events are essentially
authorless. Everything is related to everything else; it is impossible to isolate causes
or “heroic” agents. It can be tyrannical, even, to suggest that certain inputs produce
a certain outcome (Rosenau 1992:32–3).
Postmodernists reconceptualize space as well. They attempt to undo the Age of
Discovery view of the world as a finite, mappable entity that can be integrated into
a universal body of knowledge. David Harvey argues that modern geography rests
on an “outside” perspective honed in the art of the Renaissance. He argues that
modern mapmaking creates a “seeing eye” that hovers above the earth, a perspective
that is privileged as authentic and scientific despite its distance from the human
mind. This “outside” cartography departed radically from medieval ideas about the
relationship between people and place, and was instrumental in locating people in
sovereign space by clarifying and controlling boundaries, property, identity, and
an array of other spatial practices (Harvey 1990:242–4). Postmodernists reject this
systematically fixed view of the world. They consider boundaries fluid, mental
constructs, and deem the local space of traditional communities more authentic
than scientific geography. In the postmodern concept of “hyperspace,” geography
collapses altogether. Space is no longer fixed; all places are in flux.
What does this mean for world politics? In one take on the contemporary scene,
Jean Baudrillard pessimistically calls history “a catastrophic process of recurrence
HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 165
and turbulence.” There is nothing new under the sun in the form of original or
unique events. Instead, history is an “immense simulation model,” in which politics
recycles leftover ideologies and images of conflict (Baudrillard 1994:7, 11).
Baudrillard suggests that the dissolution of empires, for example, results in recycled
microhistories: micro-imperia, micro-dictatorships, micro-autarkies, and so forth.
Like the shards of a shattered mirror, each reflects the polity from which it was
dispersed. Baudrillard also applies this idea of recycled imagery and virtuality to
the Gulf War. He declares that the Gulf War was only imagery, a “quasi-unreal
event,” an “orgy of simulation,” stripped of authenticity and meaning. He argues
that the war followed a second-hand script, hatched during the cold war, that could
be played out without the use of nuclear weapons only after the collapse of the
Soviet Union. The war’s virtuality was driven by the media as well. It was not simply
conveyed by television, but was made by televi sion. The war was a spectacle of
imagery, laden with manipulative “anticipation of effects, morbid simulations,
[and] emotional blackmail,” and consumed by a public “overexposed to the media,
underexposed to memory” (Baudrillard 1994:62–3).
Postmodern ideas about “synchronism” and “diachronism” (single-time and dual-
time) are especially germane to development studies. Postmodernists typically adopt
the diachronic view that traditional cultures are not lagging behind modern ones,
but instead are following their own calendars. This makes for a less egocentric view
of non-Western societies and an almost ethnological interest in cultural dignity.
Here, postmodernists, perhaps more than other theorists, cut through the familiar
forms of liberalism to appreciate differences in politics and culture. Although
synchronism by other names has long been the bane of modernization theory,
postmodern critiques are particularly acute, extending beyond the fallacy of
mechanistic development in their expression of contempt for the blind teleology
and “outside” benchmarks of moral and material status of the development ethos.
Postmodernists also turn modernization back on the industrialized world, where
productive capitalism is thought to trap people in a mechanical, “time-clock”
regime (Harvey 1990: 226–39). Postmodernists also offer cogent explanations for
civil and ethnic strife based on the fragmentation of time within states and societies.
In Israel, for example, a Biblical past coexists uneasily with a modern state. In the
political geography of Africa, a modern statist narrative arbitrarily overlays a tribal
one. During the prelude to the war in Yugoslavia, Serbian nationalist texts
“centered” the Battle of Kosovo Field, in which Ottoman troops routed Serbian
forces, and laid claim to their Balkan empire. The fact that Kosovo Field took place
in 1389 did little to diminish its evocative reality in this late twentieth-century
ethnic cauldron. Some Serbs still refer pejoratively to Bosnian Muslims as “Turks.”
Serbian defendants at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague have founded
their defenses on historic fears of Muslim persecution.
Such atavistic uses of history and memory suggest that social groups may be
forever haunted by their past. However, postmodernists also make the case that
people are not bound by history. The centrifuge of modernity has separated societies
from their prior practices. Unlike realists (and Annalistes), who focus on the almost
166 EXIT FROM HISTORY?
geologic “slow-time” of social life, postmodernists are struck by the impermanence
of social forms. “The transitoriness of things makes it difficult to preserve any sense
of historical continuity,” argues Harvey (ibid.: 11). This lends plasticity to politics:
states are protean, the international system is more ephemeral than modernists
assume. Moreover, volatility in geopolitical and other commitments heightens
insecurity. Lyotard (1984:66) sees a trend toward “creative turmoil,” in which “the
temporary contract is in practice supplanting permanent institutions in the
professional, emotional, sexual, cultural, family, and international domains, as well
as in political affairs.” Paul Virilio’s Speed and Politics (1986) argues that contracting
time and space accelerate military logistics to a permanent state of crisis
management. James Der Derian’s Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War (1992)
suggests that power is now more compelling in time than in space, that swiftness
has become the greatest military comparative advantage. The lightning speed of
unfolding events and communications also increases fears that “nothing takes place
in real time. Not even history. History in real time is CNN, instant news, which is
the exact opposite of history” (Baudrillard 1994:90). The rapidity and
“imagification” of events may render obsolete modern modes of political
deliberation and circumspect statecraft, particularly those rooted in the frozen time
of the cold war.
Postmodernists lock horns with Marxists over the question of historical laws,
but when it comes to the effects of global capitalism the two are frequent allies.
Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto (1848) of the explosive effects
of capitalism spurring the “canalization of rivers,” “the clearing of whole
continents,” achieving “wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman
aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals.” The social and cultural dislocations of
capitalism are even more striking: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train
of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed
ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air”
(Marx and Engels 1991:738–9). Marx’s prediction that economics would ultimately
turn on the economy of time also seems borne out in the compression of time and
space of capital accumulation. Time is money, the expression goes. Today, capital
is also radically deterritorialized. Transactions are instantaneous, occurring, as Marx
envisioned, in “the twinkle of an eye.” Postmodernists echo this great critique of
modern political economy, pointing to the socioeconomic implosions sweeping
the “peripheral” world, and seeing the globalization of production for profit as a
vast regime of social and political control. Central Asia, for instance, has been
transformed in less than a decade from a backwater of the cold war to an epicenter
of geo-economic rivalry, as vast oil supplies “commodify” the former Soviet
republics. The juggernaut of Chinese “market-Leninism” may radically change the
nature of that country’s society and politics. The economic collapse in Southeast
Asia has seen domino theory recycled as “contagion theory”—the idea that if one
country’s economy is permitted to implode, it could start an uncontrollable chain
of events involving markets and investors around the globe (Sanger 1998).
HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 167
Globalization and pastiche
When Oliver Reiser coined the term “globalization” in Planetary Democracy (1944),
he envisioned the process in unmistakably metanarrative form, as the “planetary
synthesis of cultures” into a kind of universalistic humanism. This triumphalist
tone resounds in neoliberal appraisals of globalization, both in terms of commerce
and democracy. Postmodernists are not alone in decrying this way of thinking,
nor in pointing out the ill effects of globalization, notably the bland homogeneity
spurred by time-space compression and the diffusion of capitalist “technoculture,”
a process that may suppress or even eradicate traditional identities (Scholte 1996:
48–9). However, unlike many critics and advocates, postmodernists do not view
globalization as an inevitable, totalizing process. Rather, eclecticism replaces the
master script of globalization. The contemporary landscape is seen as a pastiche of
global, local, and hybrid cultures, as modernist narratives intersect with local history
to create novel social complexities and configurations. Traditional cultures
negotiate with global practices and norms, assimilating some easily, rejecting others,
or producing hybrid forms in which global mores are tailored to local conditions.
One sees this eclecticism in everyday dualities of shopping malls/farmers’ markets,
storytelling/information highway, Fordism/flexible accumulation, global
blockbusters/independent film-making, state agencies/NGOs, federalist
movements/militia movements, and so forth.
Postmodernists explore how these disparate scripts interact across different
realms of society: Who profits from globalization? Do the benefits of globalism
outweigh the violence done to traditional forms of economic exchange and political
organization? Are benefits evenly distributed? How does globalization influence
society and psychology? How to square the universalization of liberal democracy
with the troubled welfare state? Importantly, postmodernists and other critical
theorists argue that globalization entails more than these kinds of rationalistic and
structural reforms: it also demands a degree of cultural amnesia, an erosion of
history and memory, a forgetting of the old symbols and norms of authority, and
an (arguably, forced) march into globalist terra incognita. Because globalization
threatens identities and cultures, it may elicit indigenist or atavistic reactions. The
revival of historical enmities—real or imagined—shores up identity, clarifying or
reclarifying the “we” and the “they” in the face of global homogenization, anomie,
and disempowerment. Folkways become a form of resistance, but so may
protectionist, nationalist, racial, or ethnic appeals fuel a kind of renationalization
and remercantilization. Harvey (1990:306) notes that “there are abundant signs that
localism and nationalism have become stronger precisely because of the quest for
the security that place always offers in the midst of all the shifting that flexible
accumulation implies.” Zygmunt Bauman (1997:65) contends that globalization
and tribalization are “close allies and fellow conspirators.”
In this age of pastiche, an understanding of local history is perhaps more
important than ever, particularly since both Marxism and modernization theory
(and a great deal of international relations theory) discount the role of culture and
168 EXIT FROM HISTORY?
historical forms of political association (Kellner 1998:34). A monoperspective is
gone. People live local lives in the shadow of global culture and capital, neither
fully autonomous, nor fully members of universal civil society and economy. No
longer can one speak of whole societies as “traditional” or “developing.” Countries
move in different directions at once. Historical continuities coexist with
modernization and change; novel forms do not necessarily signal a complete
rupture with the past. Even developed states witness neo-Luddite movements,
various fundamentalisms, “mininationalisms,” splintered identities, and localized
violence. Local history is essential to appreciate the historic allure of nativism and
to demystify mythistorical appeals. Amid this eclectic geography, borders—even
within states—become increasingly poignant. Whether in Bosnia, Mexico, or Turkey,
or in ASEAN, the EU, NATO, or NAFTA, questions of culture and identity are
central to drawing boundaries. Again, local history illuminates these shifting and
overlapping frontiers of identity.
It is impossible to do full justice here to the impact of pastiche on the study of
international politics. Suffice it to say that pastiche parallels a growing commitment
to pluralism in the field, particularly as the discipline awakens to the social
constructs underpinning politics. The title of Yosef Lapid and Friedrich
Kratochwil’s volume, The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory (1996) speaks
for itself, as does that of Jill Krause and Neil Renwick’s collection of essays, Identities
in International Relations (1996). Socially-based constructivist theory borrows heavily
from postmodernist identity politics (Wendt 1992). Increasingly, one discerns twists
of pastiche in “traditional” works as well, such as Fred Halliday’s Rethinking
International Relations (1994), Anthony Smith’s Nations and Nationalism in a Global
Era (1995), or Ian Clark’s Globalization and Fragmentation (1997). James Rosenau’s
Along the Domestic-Foreign Frontier (1997:31) describes the ambivalence of
contemporary politics in terms of “fragmegration” (a portmanteau word for
fragmentation and integration). Rosenau argues that this emerging world view is
marked by imaginary, fluid, or porous frontiers, a diversity of actors, issues, values,
norms, practices, and global structures, and the centrality of “citizen skills” in
taming a turbulent world.
Conclusion
Despite an alleged disdain for the past, postmodernists exhibit a broad interest in
history and a salutary self-consciousness about the politics of historical
representation. Disgruntlement with positivism and the assumptions that it
entertains has led postmodernists to reassess what Rankean history has offered (and
failed to offer) international relations, and to question the field’s canon of received
historical verities. In this, postmodernism throws open doors for the mind,
revealing new vistas, problems, and relationships.
Nevertheless, linguistic, cultural, or contextual determinism is no better than any
other form of determinism. Foucaultian postmodernism perhaps underappreciates
people’s capacity for independent thought and action, and, when pursued to its
HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 169
logical conclusion, ends in despair. By closely historicizing ideas and events,
postmodernists threaten to immure them within a parti cular past. An unstinting
belief in difference blinds theorists to parallels, analogies, and similarities that may,
in fact, exist. One may also ask, how postmodern is it? Theorists of international
politics who bear that appellation are invariably critical of high politics, but this
is accompanied by a sense that local knowledge is the level of analysis with the
richest payout. Even hardened postmodern epistemologists often accept non-
traditional histories at face value, or report their own discoveries in a tone of belief
reminiscent of Waltz discoursing on great-power strife. There is more than a vestige
of positivism in the idea that marginalized historical actors offer a more authentic
and fruitful archive than state papers or press conferences. Postmodernists may
romanticize traditional resistance, much as cosmopolitans idealize the “global
village.” Celebrations of, say, the Ogoni in Nigeria or the Zapatistas in Chiapas can
fall into folkloric “otherness,” reducing indigenous peoples to anti-globalist icons.
More importantly, there is a profoundly illiberal side to postmodernism that
raises questions about the historical and political responsibilities of social theorists.
Some versions of postmodernism reject the idea of shared humanity and universal
norms of freedom, human rights, or international law. These beacons of hope fade
into the mists of particular cultures. This is one of the reasons that critics have
encouraged postmodernists to abandon the role of gadfly and contribute
affirmatively to the field. Keohane (1988) has challenged postmodernists to propose
and pursue a reflective research program of their own. Waltz, Mearsheimer, Holsti,
and others have voiced similar admonishments from what postmodernists view as
the comfortable cave of orthodoxy (Smith 1996:34). But there is a postmodern
project that is looser, hipper, more localist than that of social scientists. Arguably,
postpositivists are among the most activist theorists in the field. In place of
structural sameness and scientific detachment, postmodernists assume a
multiplicity of pragmatic truths, an idea akin to Aristotelian phronesis, or practical
wisdom. While much of the reaction to globalism is vilified as atavistic, tribalist,
or fundamentalist, for example, one may also see resistance to globalization as
favoring a renewal of small-scale collective solidarities, which may or may not be
tied to place (Scholte 1996:53). In this vein, Richard Rorty has explored a kind of
anti-foundational communitarianism based not on belief in God or Reason, but
on historic practices and affinities. Rorty notes, “If we give up this hope, we shall
lose what Nietzsche called ‘metaphysical comfort,’ but we may gain a renewed sense
of community. Our identification with our community—our society, our political
institutions, our intellectual heritage —is heightened when we see this community
as ours rather than nature’s, shaped rather than found, one among many which men
have made
…what matters is our loyalty to other human beings clinging together
against the dark, not our hope of getting things right” (quoted in Novick 1988:541).
Much, though certainly not all, of this project turns on a new vision of history,
not as social science laboratory or gigantist narrative, but as a site of complexity
and possibility. Hayden White submits a strategy for using history in a time of
170 EXIT FROM HISTORY?
apparently history-less chaos, arguing that the crisis of representation frees us from
the “terror of history”:
Since the second half of the nineteenth century, history has become
increasingly the refuge for all those “sane” men who excel at finding the
simple in the complex and the familiar in the strange. This was all very well
for an earlier age, but if the present generation needs anything at all it is a
willingness to confront heroically the dynamic and disruptive forces in
contemporary life. The historian serves no one well by constructing a specious
continuity between the present world and that which preceded it. On the
contrary, we require a history that will educate us to discontinuity more than
ever before; for discontinuity, disruption, and chaos is our lot.
(quoted in Jenkins 1995:144–5)
It is hard to be a little postmodern. Nevertheless, postmodern insights increasingly
find their way into “traditional” international thought. In Britain, Canada, and
Australia, critical theorists have drawn epistemology to the center of the discipline
in a way that underscores the narrowness of the field’s great (positivist) debates
(Smith 1996). In the United States, there is a vigorous cadre of postmodernists, yet
the mainstream seems intent on rescuing the discipline from them. A recent survey
on history and international relations in the journal International Security aimed to
defend diplomatic history, which is described as one of the few remaining outposts
of “pre-postmodern” history (Elman and Elman 1997). Traditionalists fear that
diplomatic history is being elbowed aside by politically correct “social history,” a
pastiche of inference and artifice “uncoupled from objective evidence” (Haber et
al. 1997: 40). The conceit of this argument is that it equates “objective” history with
high political history, and suggests that broader social forces cannot be represented
in a rigorous way, or else are trivial in their effects. One wonders if this is not the
political equivalent of Matthew Arnold’s attempt, in Culture and Anarchy (1869), to
defend Victorian high culture against the low-brow tide of “Barbarians, Philistines,
and Populace.” The populist usurpation in international relations is perhaps less
dire—and the views being defended less deserving—than they may seem. Serious
scholarship can no longer shrug off concerns about the nature of evidence and the
diversity of politics.
HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 171
1
72
8
CONCLUSION
History, skepticism, and the recovery of theory
This study has attempted to examine critically the historical assumptions, methods,
and evidence underpinning a range of approaches to international politics. The
relation between history and international relations is indeed deceptively simple.
What are breezily thought of as “empirical” historical questions are to the skeptic’s
eye a troublesome link in a science of international politics. Modern theorists
attempt to transcend the ambiguities of political choices and a diversity of state
practices and “bottom—up” politics. History is tidily packaged or transformed into
data, then fitted to mechanical laws and economical explanations. Postmodern
theorists view history with sharp skepticism, but nevertheless render historical and
“genealogical” judgments that cut against the grain of Enlightenment political
thought and practice.
At the same time, the divide between history and international relations is not
nearly as stark as it is often painted. History is a discipline in motion, and is not
immune to theory. Historians would be at sea without models and concepts and
narratives that lend coherence to the artifacts and, perhaps, intimate the stories they
tell. Similarly, theory often parallels current political problems and historical
structures. Rarely are history and theory distinct spheres overlapping, like a Venn
diagram, only at the “testing” stage. “Theory” does not refer simply to abstraction,
or “history” simply to the canvassing of a body of evidence. Moreover, the parallel
development of the disciplines—from great-power narrative, systems analysis,
cliometrics, populist appeals, and back to narrative—suggests that the historians and
political scientists do, in fact, converse.
The involution of international relations theory
Nevertheless, theorists continue to rend from the historical record ever more
ingenious explanations for international politics. In empirical war research alone
we find “heretofore neglected variable” explanations hinging on prestige, trade
expectations, environmental scarcity, ascendant power, descendant power, inter-
dependence as a condition of peace, inter-dependence as a condition of war, strategic
culture, power structures, threat structures, governance structures, social structures,
regional security regimes, democracy, nationalism, culture, justice, religion, and
civilization. The quest for parsimony encourages theorists to identify these sparse
models. Heedlessness toward the historical problem seals their success. It appears
not to hinder one’s career if one’s theoretical claims are “counter-intuitive,” even
slightly outrageous.
Surveying this embarrassing riches of theories, half-theories, and hunches,
K.J.Holsti (1987) labeled international relations the “dividing discipline.” It seems
likely, however, that the field is undergoing not division but involution. Involution
refers to increasingly complex or intricate development within fixed parameters.
The result of this process, explains the anthropologist Arthur Goldenweiser,
is progressive complication, a variety within uniformity, virtuosity within
monotony. This is involution
… The basic forms…have reached finality, the
structural features are fixed beyond variation, inventive originality is
exhausted. Still, development goes on. Being hemmed in on all sides by a
crystallized pattern, it takes the function of elaborateness. Expansive
creativeness having dried up at the source, a special kind of virtuosity takes
its place, a sort of technical hairsplitting.
(quoted in Geertz 1963:80–1)
The involution of the field yields a gothic proliferation of “historically
corroborated,” but often flatly contradictory, theories. The discipline has largely
settled on orthodox political science methods, notably the theory-hypothesistesting
approach, as the way to proceed. Driven to publish novel ideas, yet boxed in by
this pattern of inquiry, theorists fashion increasingly meticulous designs, and, like
Talmudic scholars or Marxist dogmatists, expound on arcane distinctions and
haggle over pennies. This discourse proceeds apparently unconcerned whether or
not the ideas being entertained can be tested and sustained historically. The
approach may simply yield islands of highly abstract theory that exist for their own
sake, without any sense of meaning or purpose. Indeed, the Lakatosian emphasis
on identifying a “winning” theory makes one wonder if students of politics have
not internalized the conflicts they study. The fine-tuned linguistics of
postmodernist theory threatens to fall into the same trap.
This theoretical elaboration, with its medieval flavor, may simply be selfdefeating.
It is important to recall that theory arises in response to interpretive problems.
Because historical evidence is complex, we need a theory to direct our inquiry. Yet,
while theory is a guide for framing questions, it also becomes a template for
answering them. This undercuts any role that history might play as an independent
body of evidence. Within a research program, where the bounds of inquiry are
stipulated, theory may be merely self-verifying. We propose hypotheses and
interpret historical evidence in light of our theoretical project, which we then claim
to have confirmed and advanced.
Thus, despite its apparent industry and vigor, research within the bounds of
political science does not necessarily evolve toward greater understanding or more
powerful explanations. Since history is filtered through theory, a proliferation of
theories further fragments historical interpretation. Supporting historical evidence
174 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
surfaces in the wake of theory; but then, it surfaces in the wake of most theories.
Theorists generally find what they are looking for. History is rich enough and
ambiguous enough to sustain a wide range of narratives. The unfixed nature of
theory and history often has researchers reeling from fad to counter-fad. As Yale
Ferguson and Richard Mansbach lamented in The Elusive Quest (1988), the academic
zeitgeist more than any rational scientific progression seems to buffet theory along.
The historical problem, then, seems partly a theoretical problem, a consequence
of the parsimony and elegance of theory, and the ensuing extravagance of its claims
on history. The simpler the model, the more Procrustean its treatment of history;
reasoning outward from an unbending principle “forces” the researcher to twist
the evidence. Grand structure and overbroad axioms alike seem misguided, not least
because they encourage a licentious historical method. It would not be too fanciful
to say that the search for historical laws or something very much like them, long
dismissed as quixotic by most historians, has been taken up by international
theorists. Brimming with Victorian confidence, Seeley championed “scientific”
historical methods, as the way to uncover “great truths having
…scientific generality
and momentous political bearings,” notably “the laws by which states rise, expand,
prosper and fall” (quoted in Thorne 1988:19). Moderate the language slightly, and
Seeley has described international relations’ more ambitious research projects.
In this quest for novelty and parsimony, we have seen theorists try to recast
economic thought in political terms. Microeconomic theory has offered a
particularly alluring model for structuralists. As Stanley Hoffmann suggests (1987:
15) of international relations in America, this “fascination with economics
…has
led scholars to pursue the chimera of a masterkey. They have believed that the study
of a purposive activity aimed at a bewildering variety of ends, political action, could
be treated like the study of instrumental action, economic behavior.” Many theorists
adapt theories of the firm, in which competitive markets shape behavior in
predictable ways, to the workings of the international system; or else theory is
inspired by the workings of economic efficiency, linking up political choices to the
production of goods or the allocation of resources. Both approaches see in the
dynamics of politics a “hidden hand” guiding interest and conflict to an
equilibrium.
The economic approach seems wrongheaded as applied to politics. Soldiers,
diplomats, populations, cultures, or civilizations rarely seem to acquit themselves
like rational economic actors. Economic choices revolve around the single,
reducible goal of maximizing satisfactions. Political choices are motivated by many
different goals, pursued in many different ways. This would cripple Pareto-optimal
or rational choice models that claim to have discovered a behavioral blueprint
beneath the apparent chaos of political conduct. More importantly, this sort of
closed explanatory world tends to impose uniformity upon political diversity.
Historical license is probably required in order to sustain the illusion that the
researcher has struck on a masterkey, either by carefully avoiding unhelpful
historiography, or canceling the search after uncovering a few confirming cases.
CONCLUSION 175
Researchers can even be oddly candid about their historiographic forays in search
of “best cases” offering “goodness-of-fit.”
I discuss this further below, but the diversity of political goals suggests that ample
historical content is required in order to understand what does inform decisions.
Instead of imposing a rationale on political behavior, researchers should critically
“consult,” via historical work, the people and processes involved. Pursued seriously,
this imperfect art will help to keep theory within the pale of plausibility.
Unfortunately, the plausibility of international relations theory is increasingly
being drawn into question, and not only by postmodern critics. The American
diplomat David Newsom (1996:121–9) has argued recently that faux science and
masterkey-ism have left the lion’s share of the discipline’s research stranded in
academia. Sloppy analogies and inaccurate accounts of the policy process have
undercut the field’s credulity and deepened the fault line between theory and
practice. The role of theorists as commentators on the current scene—considerable
in the days of Niebuhr, Morgenthau, Kennan, and Aron—has been abdicated to the
pundits. Perhaps worst of all, political science departments have become parched
terrain in which to cultivate future diplomats and political leaders.
Recovering history and theory
A recent wave of commentaries on selection bias in the social sciences exhibits little
sense of the historical dimensions of the problem. Political scientists have tended
to “methodologize” historical challenges. Questions about epistemology are
neglected in favor of more tractable problems about research design, in a way that
furthers the clinical view of history. Works by Barbara Geddes (1990), David Collier
(1995), and Collier and James Mahoney (1996) do not mention history or
historiography at all. Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba’s celebrated
Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (1994) brushes over
historical questions (see Lustick 1996). The trio note (King et al.: 133) that
investigatorinduced selection bias is an “endemic problem” in research, though it
appears not to extend to historical selection. Instead, we are told to consult “good
historians” who “understand which events were crucial” (ibid.: 53). The book does
discuss (ibid.: 212–13) the perils of analogical reasoning, yet the hazards are seen
to lie in the method’s shallow basis for generalizing, not, historically, in the analogy
being poorly drawn.
Two works have looked more closely at these problems. Donald Puchala, a self-
described refugee from positivist political science, argues that it is hopeless to found
international studies on the idea of historical truth. Following Rorty, Gadamer,
Adorno, and others, he invites students of international affairs to abandon any
epistemological claims in favor of a “pragmatic” attitude toward history, that “we
may finally be prepared to allow truth to be useful instead of controversial” (Puchala
1995:3). Puchala perhaps has in mind something like the “consensus
historiography” practiced in the United States in the 1950s, which employed motifs
of shared values rather than societal conflict. While pragmatic views of history—
176 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
foundation myths, core norms, collective goods, and the like—may have virtuous
effects on domestic polities, international parallels have proved elusive. The
conjoining threads of international history are more apt to enflame animosities:
the myth of the “white man’s burden,” imposed Lockean, Smithian, Marxist, or
Fukuyaman evolution, visions of manifest destiny, dependencia narratives, or
vulgarized realist histories. Arguably, theorists have been pragmatic, and that has
been part of the problem.
Ian Lustick’s paper, mentioned at the outset, illustrates clearly the problem of
multiple historical records. However, Lustick appears not to grasp what this implies
for research. He attempts to dissuade social scientists, faced with different
renderings of the same reality, from throwing off the theoryhypothesis-testing
harness. He suggests that the problem can be mitigated if researchers “direct explicit
and systematic attention to historiography
… and demonstrate self-consciousness
in the selection of source material and in the construction of stylized background
narratives.” He advises researchers to lay bare their historiographic allegiances, to
seek regularities across interpretive schools, and to mediate different accounts
through “quasitriangulation.” Lustick points to a “silver lining” in the historical
cloud: acknowledging the diversity of historical accounts and expanding our
database “will help, not hinder, efforts to find opportunities for study in which
cases outnumber variables” (Lustick 1996:605, 615–16). Lustick seems less concerned
that there are rival explanations; he turns a philosophical question into a
methodological game. More accounts means more cases. One could adopt this
method and do a multiple-case comparative analysis of a single event!
If pragmatism seems defeatist and political science tinkering inadequate, where
do we turn? My own view is that historical work should, in epistemology, inhabit
a middle ground between naïve chronicle and pure subjectivism. In method, it
should abandon the treasure-house view of history in favor of greater reflection and
research. In place of trying to distill the essence of politics from history, theorists
might wade deeper into history’s complexities. A more supple conception of theory
is also in order. Theory should seek as much light as possible, and avoid a
monolithism that flattens diversity and closes off ideas. For the ancient Greeks,
theory meant considering, contemplating, or speculating outside of fixed forms of
thought. In this vein, theorists might reconsider involuted theory, and instead relax
their scientific claims and nomothetic judgments, and tether their ideas closer to
the ambiguities of the material. Oakeshott often said that a “conversational” style
of theorizing was more fruitful than rudely juxtaposing truth claims. This in mind,
let us consider some remedies to the historical problem, and a broader view of what
historical skepticism might mean for international relations.
“History is not a feeding trough”
So declared the nineteenth-century historian Dietrich Schäfer (quoted in Marwick
1970:63–4). Understanding rather than instrumentality should guide historical
usage. We should resist viewing the past as an arsenal of unambiguous weaponry
CONCLUSION 177
to be deployed in international relations’ theory wars. Historical inference should
be guided by a critical spirit rather than by convenience. Historical evidence should
not be manipulated in order to flatter one’s ideology or to embellish one’s
teleological edifice. Patterns and perennials should not extend far beyond the
artifacts or arbitrarily occlude events that do not fit. Recalling that in “pure” history
there is no such thing as an aberration, theorists should acknowledge contrary
historiography.
Theorists who contend with a variety of historical schools and arguments are
likely to produce what are ultimately more compelling—and complex —insights.
Often the best history is the most engaged, not that which appears to have been
written on another planet. At least one knows where the historian stands; it is also
clear that his/her work represents in some sense an argument (and often a coherent
view of the world), rather than an infallible disquisition or edict on the past.
Researchers might go to some pains to consult histories that do not necessarily
share their theoretical proclivities—realist, structural, liberal, conservative, military,
economic, etc. If the goal is truly to “test” theoretical claims, then disturbing a cozy
consensus between history and theory suggests that research is proceeding apace.
As Georg Schwarzenberger noted in Power Politics (1951:10, 18), “Practically every
generation rewrites its history books, and not always for the reason that new
documents have come to light
… Students of international relations could do worse
than to analyze any situation from all relevant points of view
… In cases of doubt,
it is wise to remember that the choice is hardly ever between white and black but
only between various shades of gray.”
Nor should accounts be ripped from context. It can be deceptive to approach
historiography as a series of detachable events, which flow neatly one to the next.
There will, of course, be tears in Maitland’s famous “seamless web” of history, but
this is not to claim that events and broader social movements can be understood
and evaluated apart from the broader processes in which they are embedded. Taking
a cue from the Annalistes and the new historians, researchers might weigh broader
conceptions of international history than traditional, “event-centered” politics.
Viewing foreign affairs only through “diplomatic,” “military,” or “political” lenses
surely yields a distorted account of complex events and long-term trends.
J.H.Hexter referred to this old problem as “tunnel history.” By this, Hexter meant
the practice of splitting
the past into a series of tunnels, each continuous from the remote past to the
present, but practically self-contained at every point and sealed off from
contact with or contamination by anything that was going on in any of the
other tunnels. At their entrances these tunnels bore signs saying diplomatic
history, political history, institutional history, ecclesiastical history,
intellectual history, military history, economic history, legal history,
administrative history, art history, colonial history, social history,
agricultural history, and so on.
(Hexter 1961:194)
178 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Lest one assume that this arrangement evolved because it represented the most
fruitful approach to the past, Hexter points out that tunnel history originated with
the peculiar filing systems of various public and private archives. The system was
perpetuated, until the Annales breakthrough and other interdisciplinary and
postmodernist efforts, by historians themselves, and survives in the social sciences
to the extent that each discipline draws on “its” historical tributary in research.
In international relations, as in international history, what tunnels are relevant
and which walls should be breached are matters of some dispute. (I know a political
theorist who, at a faculty senate meeting, proposed renaming his department “The
Department of War and Imperialism,” since that seemed to be how most of his
colleagues conceived of politics.) Event-centered, “headline” history can be
enriched, though probably not replaced, by cultural, sociological, normative, and
economic foci, as well as aspects of cultural psychology and identity politics.
Political economy and studies of globalization, certainly, are booming in both
disciplines.
Top-down or bottom-up?
This eclecticism in history and theory is changing the face of international relations.
As was noted at the end of the previous chapter, it has also sparked defenses of old-
fashioned diplomatic history. As noted, Charles Maier (1980: 356) contended that
the nature of international politics resisted any movement toward “methodological
democratization.” “Rankean exegesis” was still the mainstay of diplomatic history
because international affairs were still dominated by necessitous, top-down
statecraft. More recently, traditionalists have skewered new historians for the
flimsiness of their constructs and have called for a renaissance in elite-based
diplomatic history, where at least there is a hard core of documentary evidence of
the sort “that statesmen and diplomats, at least at one time, scrupulously
maintained” (Haber et al. 1997:39).
Whether or not this represents the advent of the “documentary fallacy” remains
to be seen. The suspicion lingers that this historiographic claim is, in the first
instance, a theoretical claim—and one that many historians and political scientists
contest vigorously. (As noted, the more inclusive designation “international
history” seems to be gaining in favor.) What is really at issue is the Westphalian,
dare we say, “realist,” “billiard ball” assumption that states are “unitary, rational
actors.” Lashing back at social history and postmodernism, traditionalists welcome
Ranke’s aim to recount history “as it really was,” yet in the same gate slips Ranke’s
belief that high politics as reflected in state papers is the level, focus, and method
of historical analysis which best explains international outcomes.
An exclusively, or even primarily, top-down model seems increasingly difficult
to justify as high politics are eroded by the democratization of foreign policies and
the free flow of money, goods, and ideas. Fred Halliday (1996: 324) suggests that
the realist wedding of history and international relations, in particular, “rests on a
rather limited, if not dated, conception of history itself—that of diplomacy and
CONCLUSION 179
wars, with little space for more recent developments of economic, social and
popular orientation.” Even the assumption of anarchy requires a leap of
imagination. As Hedley Bull (1977) argued so well, foreign affairs unfold not under
stark anarchy, but under the precarious norms of an anarchical society. Although
some postmodern work might lead one to think otherwise, states are not apt to
wither away any time soon. However, many other forces coexist alongside the state
system, tempering anarchy, and, at times, sparking local reactions. One cannot
assume these forces away as inconsequential, or of such minor effect, that theory
can afford to overlook them.
Of course, there are other, less tractable ways of thinking about international
politics that employ matrices that are more complex or center on the interstices of
domestic and international realms, or work across different facets of society. Forty
years ago, A.E.Campbell decried the dominance of that “tradition of
historiography, long-established
…that diplomatic history can be studied as a thing
apart, and that the relations of nation-states proceed with little reference to
…the
emotions and the private interests of the people who live in them” (quoted in
Thorne 1988). The historical sociologist Michael Mann suggests (1986:16–17) that
states are “functionally promiscuous.” “Complexities proliferate the more we probe.
Military alliances, churches, common language, and so forth, all add powerful,
sociospatially different networks of interaction.” Mann acknowledges that “to
conceive of societies as confederal, overlapping, intersecting networks rather than
as simple totalities complicates theory,” yet no rigor need be lost in the process.
A great deal of relevance stands to be gained. The enemy in today’s world is not
great-power strife or dyadic conflict so much as it is violence and chaos flowing
from anomie and terrorism and ethnic conflict, as empires collapse and the
cartography of states is tested from below. Much of the field is now focusing on
the influence of non-state factors in political development, on shifting notions of
sovereignty and political loyalty, the interaction between global and local forces,
economics and identity, and so forth. This sort of layering seems vastly superior to
the “levels-of-analysis” lottery, where the theorist decides at the outset where to focus
his inquiry. This kind of work is messy and localist. It rewards smaller narratives
and greater historical expertise as a way of illuminating underlying causes and
historical precedents. There may also be less pressure to bend history to fit universal
theory. New history need not usurp the traditional narrative approach. In fact, event-
centered narrative is undergoing something of a recovery in contemporary
historiography, though in a way that favors description over analysis, and which
stresses the context in which events are imbedded as well as how they affect, and
are understood by, “ordinary people.” In addition, historians increasingly recognize
that their narratives, like all narratives, are conditional constructs (Burke 1992b:235).
This eclecticism may be seen as invigorating theory and history, not gutting them.
It may also engender greater appreciation for political change. The most pedestrian
historian is attentive to change, yet theorists of international politics more likely
direct our interest to continuities rather than innovations. The static assumptions
of many theories, wedded to law-based analysis, can yield a sort of behavioral
180 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
fatalism that presumes fixed patterns: political choices as thought to be more or
less determined by certain conditions and configurations of variables; states and
other actors reacting similarly to similar circumstances. Theories of international
change are still rare, or, like neorealism, depict change in glacial terms. One might
expect that as a discipline matures, dynamic theories would replace static ones.
However, international relations has marched in the opposite direction. Carr
thought more about change than Waltz ever did.
The failure of the discipline to anticipate the collapse of the Soviet Union was
a striking indication of this theoretical paralysis. The field was hardly looking for
dramatic change. The Winter 1989/1990 issue of International Security, under the
banner of “New Challenges for Soviet Security Policy,” explained the necessary
incrementalism of Soviet foreign relations and Western responses. One piece
ventured to ask, “Beyond the Brezhnev Doctrine: A New Era in Soviet-East
European Relations?” A year earlier, the journal had been probing urgent questions
like, “Is There a Tank Gap?” and whether or not conventional European security
could rest upon the “3:1 Rule,” which held that an aggressor required three times
its opponent’s “power” on the ground in order to pierce the adversary’s front-line
defenses. In retrospect, of course, it all has a surreal quality. As bells tolled the Soviet
demise, most of the discipline proved stone deaf. Kennan’s “X” article, steeped in
Czarist history and Russian cultural psychology, foretold the collapse better than
the array of modern theories.
Consider statecraft when conferring causality
The failure to understand the end of the cold war is related to the fact that much
of theory resides at a “safe” distance from everyday politics. Nearly forty years ago,
J.David Singer (1961:78) lamented that students of international politics “roamed
up and down the ladder of organizational complexity with remarkable abandon.”
Most theorists, Singer included, eventually landed on the systems rung. Several
dovetailed circumstances favored this model: its analogy to classical economic
theory; consensus on the approach among behavioralists; the structural aversion to
cracking open the “black box” of the state; perhaps the perception that systemic
research connoted systematic research. Most importantly, the systems path seemed
to be ascending to that El Dorado of the field: a “general theory” of international
relations.
The problem with distant theory is that it foists a rationale upon events and
actors. Theorists and researchers working at any level of analysis might play more
light on political process. The orthodox approach, beginning with Morgenthau
“looking over the diplomat’s shoulder,” has been less concerned with understanding
the rationale behind political acts, than it is with conferring a rationale upon those
acts—without regard to the actor’s intentions or motivations. Intentions are difficult
to gauge, but that does not make them any less important. The path to
understanding foreign policymaking almost certainly travels through the minds of
foreign policymakers. Unlike the tides, which rise and fall by no will of their own,
CONCLUSION 181
setting and executing foreign policy requires human agents. Diplomatic behavior,
where motivations are murky and where perceptions about security, power, prestige,
interests, economics, and norms are so important, seems particularly uncongenial
to “outside” explanations.
Viewed from afar, the “dynamic” “at work” in political choice may seem clear.
Yet, the fit between our model and the events it purports to decipher disregards the
uncertainties, the contingencies, and the ends sought that attended the decision at
the time. Imputed rationales curtail debate about necessity versus discretion in
statecraft, and disregard the fragile circumstances that surround political processes.
Ascribing causes to diplomatic decisions has become an excuse to ignore or
transcend ambiguous historical evidence. This could well be missing the point.
With politics working at many different levels and social domains, it is entirely
possible, as Aron (1966:7) contended, that “the ambiguity in ‘international
relations’ is not to be imputed to the inadequacy of our concepts: it is an integral
part of reality itself.”
Only historical inquiry can bridge this gap between political acts and scientific
explanations. As Peter Winch argued in The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation
to Philosophy (1958), “no historical situation can be understood simply by ‘applying’
such laws, as one applies laws to particular occurrences in natural science. Indeed,
it is only in so far as one has an independent historical grasp of situations
…that one
is able to understand what the law amounts to at all” (Winch 1958:136). This is the
idea advanced earlier of “consulting” political actors and processes to keep one’s
theory on track. Did foreign policy acts occur as hypothesized? Were decisions
taken for the reason(s) our model provides? Were leaders influenced or inspired by
pressure from below? Theoretical assertions require historical ballast. Again, this is
an imperfect art. At the level of traditional diplomatic history, content analysis of
public speeches is probably not the way to proceed. As Thucydides and Ranke both
found, personal accounts are often tainted, as memoirists flatter their own deeds
and wisdom; in most countries, extensive state secrecy is still in place; mentalities
and norms are difficult to gauge; coding of diplomatic history seems of marginal
utility. Still, historical evidence nevertheless remains the raw material of research
in the field. Its defects do not justify historically distant, “hang-in-the-air” assertions.
Distant theory is most distressing, however, because it overwhelms the human
factor in history. Politics are seen to unfold at a great remove from ordinary
experience. The historian William Dray (1963:132–3) deplored how “covering”
explanatory models—the deductive method—raise “a kind of conceptual barrier to
a humanistically oriented historiography.” The same is true of political models that
conceal people and process behind a mass of variables, or, as the case may be, one
big variable. Many theorists celebrate having diminished the place of leadership or
diplomatic practices or the perceived meaning of events in their explanations. The
same analysts will be hard pressed to grasp, say, the 1989 revolutions in Eastern
Europe without reference to Adam Michnik or Václav Havel or Mikhail Gorbachev,
or without some sense of the tenor of the times. These are the social sciences. This
same detached logic of necessity buttresses the belief that outcomes were somehow
182 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
foreordained. Even under the most compelling conditions, history wie es eigentlich
gewesen ist was bound up in individual or collective choices. Structure and process
were both at work. Nor were political decisions simply mechanically causal; they
were also morally responsible. As Hugh TrevorRoper noted (1981:364), “History is
not merely what happened: it is what happened in the context of what might have
happened.”
The fruit of skepticism
International relations theory dwells in the twilight between history and prophecy,
and it is sometimes tempting to conclude that its “back to the future” arguments
fail on both counts. Parsimonious social science explanations seem something of
a charade, marching, methodological banners flying, into the fog of human history.
History is not the autonomous body of evidence empirical researchers envision; it
is theory-laden, present-centered, and the source of a rainbow of interpretations.
Although the patterns of history are not as facile or nomothetic as social scientists
might like them to be, we can make modest claims on history and derive broad
historical lessons. But those lessons are complex and ambivalent; closer to
intimations, they underscore the abiding predicaments of world politics—the
dilemmas of power and security, of jealous sovereignty and the precariousness of
world community—but steer us along no definitive theoretical or practical path.
Given this empire of circumstance, skepticism remains a sound position. The
historian H.A.L.Fisher once noted that “Men wiser and more learned than I have
discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies
are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another
…
only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development
of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen” (quoted in Wight
1992:29). Fisher was arguing against the idea of progress, but he was not proposing
a doctrine of cynicism and despair. Indeed, not knowing, or withholding judgment,
keeps us alive to the possibilities of history, just as structure and determinism may
fuel complacency about our lot.
One can argue that the historical process itself challenges us morally, giving
substance (and ambiguity) to moral life. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. notes (1966: 17),
history should lead us “to a profound and humbling sense of human frailty.” It
should lead us to the perception, “so insistently demonstrated by experience and
so tragically destructive of our most cherished certitudes,” that “the possibilities of
history are far richer and more various than the human intellect is likely to
conceive.” And yet, since “the tragedy of history implicates us all in the common
plight of humanity, we are never relieved, despite the limits of our knowledge and
the darkness of our understanding, from the necessity of meeting our obligations.”
Only normative theory can suggest where those obligations lie.
The fruit of skepticism is the knowledge that the elaborate machinery of political
science cannot fathom the potential of history. At some point, scientific
understandings fail us. As Kant (1970:63) wrote, “Such illusory wisdom imagines
CONCLUSION 183
it can see further and more clearly with its mole-like gaze fixed on experience than
with the eyes which were bestowed on a being designed to stand upright and to
scan the heavens.” Empirical work needs a more critical attitude toward history,
especially awareness of presentism and ideological spin, but also of the conditional
character of history itself. “History,” in the words of the Dutch historian Pieter
Geyl (1949:16), “is indeed an argument without end.” We should view what is for
historians their own “great debate” about the precision and use of their craft as a
path toward greater rigor and relevance in our own ideas.
184 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
NOTES
2
THE HISTORICAL PROBLEM
1 Important works on the relation between history and international relations include
Bryce (1909), Hughes (1960), Gilbert (1968), Birch (1969), Jensen (1969), Ford (1972),
Reynolds (1973), Purnell (1976), Small (1976), Schroeder (1977), Stone (1977), Singer
(1978), Lauren (1979), Maier (1980), Friedländer et al. (1981), Craig (1983), Thorne
(1983), Hill (1985), Gaddis (1987), Thorne (1988), Sked (1989), Njølstad (1990),
Howard (1991), Kavanagh (1991), Watson (1992), Hall and Kratochwil (1993),
Salomon (1993), Buzan and Little (1994), Levy (1994b), Schroeder (1994a), Spence
(1994), Buzan and Little (1995), Puchala (1995), Ferguson and Mansbach (1996),
Lustick (1996), Elman and Elman (1997), Gaddis (1997a), Ingram (1997), Levy (1997),
Schroeder (1997), and Suganami (1997).
2 The original German is in Ranke (1874: vii). Georg Iggers points out that “eigentlich,”
the key to the phrase, had an ambiguity in nineteenth-century German that it no
longer has. The word meant “actually” or “really,” but it also meant “characteristic”
or “essential.” Iggers attributes this latter usage to Ranke, and suggests that a better
translation of the phrase might be, “how, essentially, things happened” (see Iggers and
Moltke 1973: xix, 137).
3 Cf. Marc Bloch’s (1963:140) plea to historians not to become obsessed with judging
their subjects: “Robespierrists! Anti-Robespierrists! For pity’s sake, simply tell us what
Robespierre was.” Cf. also Ernst Renan’s stricture that history be written “with as
much supreme indifference as if [it] were written in another planet” (Snyder 1958:8).
4 This was the reported rejoinder of Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College, Oxford,
to William Stubbs’s attempts to instill Ranke’s method in undergraduates. From 1866
to 1884, Stubbs held the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Oxford (see
Marwick 1970:54–5).
5 Of the luminaries of nineteenth-century American historiography, George Bancroft,
who studied under Ranke in Germany, probably comes closest to the master’s great-
nation Historismus. Bancroft’s magisterial History of the United States (1834–1840) sees
reflected in US history the tide of a universal democratic spirit, and in the case of
“manifest destiny,” harmony between divine will and US national interests.
6 The classic statement is Ernst Bernheim’s Lehrbuch der historischen Methode (1889),
which focuses on the “logic of discovery,” setting aside narrative construction as a
matter of aesthetics and ideology. Similar arguments are made in Goldstein (1976)
and Ankersmit (1983).
7 Here Oakeshott builds on criticism of the “Whig” interpretation of history, which
Herbert Butterfield (1931:v) described as “the tendency in many historians
… to praise
revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasise certain principles of
progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the
glorification of the present.” Cf. this culminatory account of history with
R.H.Tawney’s contention that “Historians give an appearance of inevitability to an
existing order by dragging into prominence the forces which have triumphed and
thrusting into the background those which they have swallowed up” (Tawney 1912:
177).
8 Spiro (1994:62) notes, “it is important to remember that the subjective judgments by
which variables are coded in data sets have significant and important effects on the
results yielded by analysis of those data.” He adds (ibid.: 78) that such analysis elevates
a static explanation (regime type) over path-dependent explanations, such as a shifting
balance of power, thereby “remov[ing] the variables from their historical context.”
See also Russett et al. (1995), wherein the authors essentially accuse each other of
manipulating data to conform to their theories. The broader interpretive question is
lost in this thicket of blame laying.
9 See the collection of papers prepared for the conference, “The Korean War: An
Assessment of the Historical Record,” sponsored by The Korea Society and The Korea-
America Society and held at Georgetown University, 24–25 July, 1995.
3
HISTORY, CONTINGENCY, AND THE ROOTS OF REALISM
1 This is not to suggest that the classical approach is unique to realism.
2 Oakeshott (1983:39) hastens to point out that “it was in ‘Livy,’ a well-known collection
of legenda, lying upon his table in Sant’Andrea in Percussina, and not at all in ‘Roman
history,’ that Machiavelli found the exemplars of human conduct which he used so
effectively to identify current situations, to express his reading of what was afoot in
his time, to predict what was likely to come of it and to counsel and admonish the
rulers of his day.”
3 Niebuhr first spoke of a nascent prophetic minority in Moral Man and Immoral Society
(1932:87). Although the idea of a moral elite (not necessarily religious in inspiration;
“realist” liberals might play this role) was a product of Niebuhr’s more radical days,
it is a notion he advocated, and in many ways embodied, throughout his life. See
Smith (1986:110–11).
4 By the late 1950s, Niebuhr had begun to question on prudential as well as ethical
grounds the wisdom of expanding the United States’ nuclear arsenal. In a perhaps
revealing passage he noted, “The uniqueness of this development probably can only
be explained by the fact that economic power is more readily transmuted into military
power than into political power” (Niebuhr 1959:295).
5 Michael Joseph Smith (1986:75–6) has pointed to the shallowness of Carr’s historical
probing, specifically his “virtually determinist” “sole reliance on undifferentiated
power as an explanatory factor.”
186 NOTES
4
HISTORY, ANALOGY, AND POLICY REALISM
1 Morgenthau wrote scores of essays against American intervention in Vietnam. For his
trouble, he incurred the wrath of the Johnson administration, which stripped him of
his security clearance and, perhaps, investigated his private affairs. In one piece,
Morgenthau (1965) expressed “the likelihood of Soviet military intervention” in
Indochina.
2 For variations on this theme see Claude (1962:25–37) and Tucker (1952: 214–24).
Tucker suggested that Morgenthau confused empirical and normative analysis: that
when he posited the “laws” by which politics did work, he was actually describing the
norms by which politics should work.
3 Hoffmann (1987:10), for example, argues:
What the leaders looked for, once the cold war started, was some intellectual
compass which would serve multiple functions: exorcise isolationism, and
justify a permanent and global involvement in world affairs; rationalize the
accumulation of power, the techniques of intervention, and the methods of
containment apparently required by the cold war; explain to a public of
idealists why international politics does not leave much leeway for pure good
will, and indeed besmirches purity; appease the frustrations of the bellicose by
showing why unlimited force or extremism on behalf of liberty was no virtue;
and reassure a nation eager for ultimate accommodation, about the possibility
of both avoiding war and achieving its ideals. “Realism,” however critical of
specific policies, however (and thus self-contradictorily) diverse in its
recommendations, precisely provided what was necessary.
4 I would be remiss if I did not mention that in a statistical survey of research in the
field, John Vasquez found that in 7000 applications of realist hypotheses, 90 percent
were either proved weak or were falsified. He tested a bare-bones conception of
“realism,” which conceived of states as autonomous, unitary, self-seeking, and rational.
He suggests that psychological approaches may pose the greatest challenge to realism.
“Rational” choices were heavily influenced by beliefs, perceptions, and the different
ways that statesmen digested information (Vasquez 1983: 176–203).
5
THE POVERTY OF AHISTORICISM
1 The title of this chapter is inspired in equal parts by Karl Popper’s The Poverty of
Historicism (1957) and Richard Ashley’s (1986) essay “The Poverty of Neorealism.”
2 The most concise survey of neorealism’s impact on the field is Keohane (1986). The
following other commentaries and critiques only scratch the surface. Challenges from
the classical realist school include Thompson (1996:125–45) and Forde (1995). A
critique of neorealism built around the role of prestige in international politics is
Mercer (1996). For the constructivist position, see Wendt (1987 and 1992) and
Katzenstein (1996). Representing critical theory are Ashley (1986) and Cox (1986). In
NOTES 187
terms of historical change, see Walker (1987) and Kratochwil (1993). For criticisms
from the standpoint of globalization theory, see the essays in MacMillan and Linklater
(1995) and Hirst and Thompson (1996). Critiques grounded in historical sociology
include Spruyt (1994) and Hall (1986). The “democratic peace” thesis is a direct
challenge to neorealism. See Nincic (1994), and Brown et al. (1996). Weighing in on
behalf of the English School are Buzan and Little (1995) and Little (1995).
3 See Richard Ashley’s (1986:26–63) discussion of “the triumph of scientific realism.”
4 The crispest exposition of the Lakatosian aims of the neorealist research program is
Tellis (1995). A number of other neorealists have been explicit in adhering to Lakatos’s
progressive approach to science. See, for example, Elman (1996). See also Vasquez
(1997).
5 In fairness, neorealist research has generally not relied on quantitative analyses.
However, see Walt (1987:275, Table 16, and 289–91, Appendix II). The field’s
increasingly frequent invocation of Lakatos over the past decade is probably a function
of the sociology of the discipline, not a reflection of any great awareness of Lakatosian
research parameters. Of course, Lakatos’s forgiving view of theory meshes well with
Waltzian and other deductive views of theory.
6 This is a restatement of Kant’s idealist epistemology, which held that the world could
only be observed through a synthetic framework of a priori principles (see Kant 1970:
16–17). The affinity with constructionist historians is also apparent.
6
“THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING SCIENTIFIC”
1 Here Singer speaks of “the importance of being scientific.”
2 Independent appraisals of the COW include Duvall (1976), Job and Ostrum (1976),
Starr (1976), Vasquez (1987), Dessler (1991), and Gaddis (1992/1993).
3 The School is named after the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, founded
by Bloch and Febvre at Strasbourg in 1929. After the Second World War the journal
was renamed Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations, and was edited by Febvre and later
Fernand Braudel at the Sixième Section of the École Politiques des Hautes Études.
4 John Vasquez argues that data-making is a “paradigmatic activity.” In other words, it
operates within the bounds of Kuhnian “normal science.” Vasquez’s “color it
Morgenthau” thesis holds that virtually all quantitative work in international relations
has adopted realist precepts. See Vasquez (1979) and Vasquez (1983: 139–41).
5 The 1994 data set makes a nod toward this problem, providing an aggregate figure
for all battle-related combatant deaths sustained in extra-systemic wars. This does give
a better sense of the overall killing. Unfortunately, the number is not broken down
by participant, making a muddle of a series of intensity figures based on battle deaths
per each participant’s population and months at war. Also, importantly, COW
researchers have recently proposed a new typology of war. Included are three new
categories of extra-systemic wars that involve non-state actors. One of these is a future-
looking classification of wars composed entirely of non-state actors, which some COW
participants see as a trend in conflict around the world. If carried through, this would
entail an enormous recoding task, as well as a rethinking of many of the project’s
central claims. See Wayman et al. (1997).
188 NOTES
6 The COW claims inter-coder reliability as impressively high as 0.94 using Scott’s pi,
although reliability falls off in more complex coding procedures.
7 Geller and Singer (1998) is a broad survey of the state of the art of quantitative research
on war, much of which is based on COW data. The book falls short of a “synthesis”
of quantitative work in the field, for reasons the authors make plain (Geller and Singer
1998:3–5). Nevertheless, the survey is clearly organized around a number of important
themes at the decisionmaking, regime, dyadic, and systemic levels, and will prove
useful as an extended literature review.
7
EXIT FROM HISTORY?
1 These are contested categories. Brown distinguishes postmodern theory from critical
theory, but affirms that all postmodern approaches are united by skepticism toward
Enlightenment social science: no small commonality. Yosef Lapid (1989) sees post-
positivists united by concerns about paradigms, perspectives, and relativism. The
relation between Marxism and postmodernism is hotly debated. On these points see
also Vasquez (1995) and Brown (1994). General surveys of post-modernism readers
may wish to consult include Harvey (1990), Bertens (1995), and, for a skeptical take
on postmodern social science, Rosenau (1992), which includes a helpful glossary of
postmodern terms. Ninkovich (1998) is an excellent review of recent postmodern
literature in international relations.
2 Pauline Rosenau (1992) makes a helpful distinction between skeptical and affirmative
postmodernism, which I generally adopt. However, I would amend this to say that
most postmodernists seem to be of two minds: skeptical on certain issues, affirmative
on others. Postmodernists in international relations generally seem more affirmative
than Rosenau allows.
3 Cf. W.B.Gallie’s statement that “history is a species of the genus story” (quoted in
Alker 1996:297).
4 For a fuller explanation of White’s theory than is possible here, see Jenkins (1995:
146–73), on which this discussion is based.
5 Thanks to Desmond Dewsnap of the University of Southern California for pointing
this out to me.
NOTES 189
1
90
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INDEX
Acheson, D. 84
Acton, Lord 44, 52, 142;
The Cambridge Modern History 14–15
Adams, H.B. 15
Adams, President J. 43
Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M.:
Dialectic of Enlightenment 145–2
Alamanach de Gotha 132
Albrecht-Carrié, R. 7
Alker, H. 156
American Civil War (1861–5) 26
American Historical Association 15, 116
Amin, S. 147
analogical reasoning 28–1, 47–9, 66–69, 84–
9, 97–2, 175–3
anank
35
anarchy:
Bull, H. critique 179–7;
historical critiques 101–8;
neorealist model 96–3;
postmodern critique 157–6, 161–9;
realist conception 33
Anderson, B.:
Imagined Communities 151
Anderson, M.S. 70
Angell, N.:
The Great Illusion 50
Ankersmit, F.R. 27
Annales (Annales d’histoire économique et
sociale/Annales: Économies, sociétés,
civilisations) 7, 30, 115–1, 149, 177–5
Anschluss (1938) 138
antiquarianism 3
appeasement 34, 55–8
Arendt, H. 146
Aristotle, 12, 33, 64, 65, 69, 86, 170
Arnold, M. 12;
Culture and Anarchy 170
Aron, R. 8, 33, 90, 98, 138, 175, 181
Ashley, R.:
counter-memory 160–8;
hegemonic discourse 157;
identity and geopolitics 161;
modern sovereignty critique 158–6;
neorealism critique 105;
and Walker, R.B.J. on decentering power
157–6
atavism 143, 166
Augustine, Saint 33, 39
Bacon, F. 54
balance of power:
alternative explanations for 72–7;
and cold war 74–9;
as historiographic school 72;
history of idea 69–3;
and moral reasoning 43, 73;
Morgenthau, H.J. theory 70–5, 73–8;
neorealist model 104–10;
Niebuhr, R. theory 43;
Schroeder, P.W. revisionism 72–7
bandwagoning 72–6, 104
Bangladesh War (1971) 137
Barth, K. 41
Barthes, R. 153
Basel, Treaty of (1795) 68
Bates, M. 97
Baudrillard, J. 165–3
Bauman, Z. 168
Bayat, A.:
Street Politics 150
211
ē
Beard, C.A. 16, 18, 51
Becker, C. 16, 18, 51, 65
Behavioral Correlates of War (BCOW) 121;
coding methods 135–1;
path dependence 135–2;
process tracing 135–3
Benjamin, W. 145
Benson, L. 116
Bentham, J. 161
Berlin, I. 44–6
Birch, A.H. 24–6
Bismarck, O. von 96
Blainey, G. 23
Bloch, J. de:
La Guerre Future 120
Bloch, M. 115
Bodin, J. 54
Bosnian War (1992–5) 143–50
Bradbury, M. 30
Bradley, A.C. 42
Bradley, F.H. 16
Braudel.:
and Annales 188n.;
history and social science 5;
material civilization 151;
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean
World in the Age of Philip II 141
Brezhnev, L. 80
Bridenbaugh, C. 116
British Committee for the Theory of
International Politics 102
British-Zulu War (1879) 124
Brown, C. 142
Bryce, J.:
International Relations 6
Buckley, W.F. 83
Bueno de Mesquita, B. 6, 134
Bull, H. 9, 54, 56, 97, 102, 179
Bultmann, A. 41
Burckhardt, J. 20, 40, 47, 48
Burke, E. 11, 33, 64, 67, 70, 72, 75
Burke, R 7
Bury, J.B. 15
Bush, President G. 163
Butterfield, H. 14, 31, 33–5, 102;
balance of power 70;
historical presentism 28–1;
Whig interpretation of history 186n.
Buzan, B. 90, 102
Campbell, A.E. 179
Campbell, D.:
creation of cold war identity 163;
McCarthyism 163;
US portrayal of Japan 164;
US war on drugs 163–1;
Writing Security 161–71
Canning, G. 71
Capote, T. 156
Carlos V 28
Carlyle, T. 14
Carnegie Corporation 119
Carnegie Commission on Preventing
Deadly Conflicts 144
Carr, E.H. 14, 21, 31, 33–5, 48–58, 61, 101,
147;
harmony of interests critique 49–2;
on historical knowledge 51–4;
on historical lessons 51;
and historical selection 18, 52;
idea of progress in 52;
Locarno Treaty (1925) 55;
Munich Conference (1938) 55–8;
Nationalism and After 57;
objectivity in history 52;
power and historical judgment 55–58;
progressivist historical interpretation
51–7;
realism critique 49;
sociology of knowledge 31, 49–2;
The Soviet Impact on the Western World 58;
task of the historian 52–5;
Twenty Years’ Crisis 28, 49–3;
What Is History? 52
Carter, President J. 100
Cassirer, E.:
The Philosophy of the Enlightenment 12
Castellanos, P.Z.:
Vida Militar de Centro America 124
Castlereagh, Viscount 67, 76
Cecil, Lord R. 68
Cecil, R. 54
Central American War (1907) 124
Chaco War (1932–5) 130–7, 132
Changkufeng War (1938) 124
212 INDEX
Chauncey, G.:
Gay New York 150
chronophonism 165
Churchill, W. 72
Cicero 47
Clark, I.:
Globalization and Fragmentation 169
Clausewitz, K. von 73, 136
Clinton, President W.J. 163
cliometrics:
advent 115–3;
Annales 115–1;
creative process 123–9;
and diplomatic history 118;
reception by historians 116–2;
reproducibility 119;
see also Correlates of War;
Singer, J.D.;
Small, M.
Cod War (1975–6) 138
cold war:
and balance of power 74–9;
and emergence of international relations
theory 61–5, 187n.;
foreign policy texts 162–70;
Kennan, G.F. on origins 81–8;
Morgenthau, H.J. on origins 74–9, 79–4;
neorealist explanation of collapse 107;
shaping historical interpretation 29–2;
theoretical paralysis 180–8;
Waltz, K.N. on stability 100–5
Collier, C. 175
Collingwood, R.G. 16, 26, 51
Comparative Studies in Society and History 118
Comte, A. 10, 46
Condorcet, Marquis de 10
Congo Arabs War (1892) 126
Congress of Vienna (1815) 104–9, 119
constructivism 89, 90
contagion theory 167
containment:
Gaddis, J.L. on 80;
Kennan, G.F. on 81–86;
Long Telegram and 81–6;
Morgenthau, H.J. on theory and practice
79;
NSC-68, codified in 83;
origins of 79–4, 187n.;
as political instrument 83;
US domestic political impact 161–70;
and “X” article 82
Coox, A.:
Anatomy of a Small War 124
Correlates of War (COW):
alliances 119, 139;
assessed 139–7;
background 113, 119–5;
battle deaths gauged 124–30;
bipolar stability 119, 139;
confidence levels 125;
contrasting data sets 132–9;
controlled historical experiments 122;
correlational knowledge 121;
crisis behavior 135–3;
data sets 121;
data-making 122–32;
data-testing 127–7;
eurocentric bias/exclusion of non-
system members 126, 132;
existential knowledge 120–6;
explanatory knowledge 121–7;
inclusion criteria 120, 132–9, 188n.;
major findings 118–4;
materials capabilities measured 135;
neorealist critique 89;
nomothetic approach 120, 140–7;
positivism 139–6;
prestige gauged 135;
qualitative critique 138–5;
quantitative fallacy 134–45;
realism of 125–2;
reproducibility 119, 123–9, 126–32, 128–
7, 140;
volatility of data 134;
see also cliometrics;
data-making;
Singer, J.D.;
Small, M.
Council on Foreign Relations 44
counter-memory 159–8
Cox, R. 101
Craig, G. 10
Crick, B. 87
Critical Theory 142, 145
Croce, B. 6, 16, 24, 39, 51
Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) 139
INDEX 213
Danish-German War (1863–4) 137
data-making: BCOW (Behavioral Correlates
of War) 135–3;
paradigmatic activity 125–1, 188n.;
perils 132–9;
quantitative fallacy 134–45;
reproducibility 123–30;
Schroeder, P. critique 136–3
Davies, N. 156
Dean, M. 153–60
Dehio, L. 7, 72;
The Precarious Balance 28
democratic peace:
and Correlates of War 119, 139;
historiographic debate 26–9;
Kant, I. 26–9;
quantitative analysis 27, 186n.;
Russett, B. 139, 186n.
Der Derian, J.:
Antidiplomacy:
Spies, Terror, and Speed 167
Derrida, J. 152–9, 154, 156
Dessler, D. 139
Dewey, J. 42
Dickenson, G.L.:
The International Anarchy 70
Diderot, D.:
Lettre sur les Aveugles 17
Dilthey, W. 13, 16, 21
Diplomacy and Statecraft 118
Diplomatic History 118
Donelan, M. 160
Dray, W. 182
Droysen, J.G. 16
Dulles, J.F. 44
Durkheim, E. 93
East Timor 151
Emerton, E. 15
Engels, F. 54
Enlightenment:
Cartesian view 12;
Morgenthau, H.J. critique 59–3;
Niebuhr, R. critique 40–2;
and positivism 10–11;
postmodern critique 142, 145–2
Enola Gay 4
Europe’s Catechism 11
European peace movement 30
événement-matrice 30, 138
Fashoda Crisis (1898) 138
Faulkner, W. 156
Febvre, L. 115
Federalist 51 71
Fénelon, F. 7, 72, 76
Ferguson, Y 103–8;
and Mansbach, R. The Elusive Quest 174
First World War (1914–18) 110, 124, 125
Fischer, D.H. 134
Fischer, H.A. L. 183
Fischer, M. 106
Fleiss, R:
Thucydides and the Politics of Bipolarity 28
Fogel, R. and Engerman, S.:
Time on the Cross:The Economics of
American Negro Slavery 117
Foreign Relations of the United States 4
Foucault, M. 12, 21;
archeology and genealogy 153–60;
history as politics 153–60;
juridical-political sovereignty critique
157;
on power/knowledge 142
Fox, C. 67
Fox, W.T.R. 97
Franco-Russian Alliance (1894) 99
Frankfurt School 145
Fraser, R.:
Blood of Spain 151
French Revolution (1789) 76
Fukuyama, F. 7, 9, 38
Furet, F. 116
Fussell, P. 145
Gadamer, H.-G. 20
Gaddis, J.L. 5, 7, 10, 80, 107
Galtung, J. 97
García Marquez, G. 156
Garibaldi, G. 128
Geddes, B. 2, 175
German historical school 16, 54
Geyl, R 16, 183
Gibbon, E. 7, 72, 74;
214 INDEX
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 82
Gilpin, R. 35
Ginzburg, C. 12
globalization 28;
begetting cultural amnesia 168;
and hybridization 168–6;
postmodern views of 167–6
Goldenweiser, A. 173
Gorbachev, M. 182
Graham, B. 164
Gukciardini, F. 7, 13, 72, 161
Gulf War (1991) 4, 125, 138, 165–3
Gulick, E.V. 7, 72, 77
Hall, R. 106
Halle, L. 7, 33–5, 84
Halliday, F. 179;
Rethinking International Relations 169
Hamilton, A. 71
Hardenberg, K.A. 68
harmony of interests 28, 50–3
Harvey, D. 145, 165, 168
Hastrup, K.:
Other Histories 151
Havel, V. 182
Heaney, S. 86
Hegel, G.W.F. 46, 54
Hempel, C. 20, 23, 90
Herodotus 28, 34
Herz, J. 33
heteroglossia 150
Hexter, J.H. 178
Hill, C. 7, 26
Historical Methods 118
historicizing identity 161–71
history:
and balance of power 69–5;
and causality 2, 21–3, 36;
context of 137, 177–5;
and contingency 29;
counter-memory 159–8;
covering model 23;
defined 7–8;
differentia specifica of 22;
event-centered 7;
and experience 16–17;
Foucauldian 153–60;
genealogy 154, 164;
Herodotus and histori 34;
ideology 2, 18–19, 24–6, 153–60;
idiographic versus nomothetic 22–5;
inference versus observation 20–3;
Kennan, G.F. on subjectivity 85–86;
laboratory 6, 90–5;
linguistic turn in 152–9;
literature 154–2;
policy, translated into 66–69, 86–1;
and political necessity 31, 35;
as politics 153–60;
post-historical world 170–8;
postmodern critique 153–63;
quantitative approaches, emergence of
115–3;
reactions to postmodern 170;
selection 2–3, 18, 26–9, 94, 123–9, 175–5;
skeptical view vii–3, 10–12, 16–20, 21–3,
25–8, 51–5, 94, 132–9, 147–4, 153–63,
182–90;
social science approach 20–6;
Thucydides on standards of evidence 34;
top-down versus bottom-up 178–8;
traditional versus scientific 24–6;
as Western myth 142;
Whiggish view 21
history and international relations:
balance-of-power historiography 72;
and foundational narrative 147;
historical analogies 28–1, 97–2;
historical sociology 179–7;
involution of 171–82;
levels of analysis 178–6;
new history and postmodern theory 147–
8;
parallel development of 10;
policy history 66–69, 86–1;
Procrustean treatment 11, 24–9, 28–1,
69, 86–1, 104–12, 110–16, 125–2, 134–45,
153–62, 174–2;
Ranke and 15–16, 25, 178–6;
relationship between 3–5, 7, 8–10, 22–6,
93–8, 149–8, 177–5, 182;
respective appropriation of Thucydides
35–7;
role of skepticism 94, 132–9, 147–4, 153–
63, 182–90;
INDEX 215
selection bias 2–3, 18, 26–9, 94, 123–9,
175–5;
top-down versus bottom-up history 178–
8;
US contrasted with Britain 7
Hitler, A. 27, 28, 34, 60
Hobbes, T. vii, 33, 35, 54, 65, 79, 161;
Leviathan 17
Hobson, J.A. 97
Hoetsch, O. 81
Hoffmann, S. 2, 28, 44, 97, 174, 187n.
Holsti, O. 118, 170
Hoover, J.E. 164
Howard, M. 7, 35, 102, 140
Hume, D. 10, 33
Huntington, S. 9
Huxley, A. 156
Iggers, G. 15
Indonesian War (1945–6) 131
International History Review 118
international relations theory:
ambiguities 181;
and classical Greek theory 177;
consideration of statecraft in 181–9;
defined 8;
historical skepticism 182–90;
involution of 171–82;
microeconomic theory analogy 98–3,
174–2;
as philosophy of history 33–5, 38;
recovery 176–4;
role of 24;
testing 25;
see also Carr, E.H.;
Correlates of War;
Kennan, G. E;
Morgenthau, H.J.;
neorealism;
Niebuhr, R.;
postmodernism;
realism;
Singer, J.D.;
Waltz, K.N.
International Security 26, 170, 180–8
Iran-Iraq War (1980–8) 111, 125
Italo-Turkish War (1911–12) 129–6
Jameson, F. 152
Javanese War (1825–30) 124, 126
Jay, J. 71
Jefferson, President T. 43
Jervis, R. 29;
Perception and Misperception in
International Politics 108
Johnson, J.:
Latin America in Caricature 151
Johnson, N. 11, 30
Jones, E.L. 22
Joseph II, Emperor 104
Journal of Historical Review 4
Journal of Interdisciplinary History 117, 118
Journal of Social History 118
Jouvenel, B. de 146
Joyce, J. 156
Joyce, P. 156
Kafka, F. 156
Kagan, D. 7
Kamenev, L.B. 47
Kant, I. 7, 26–9, 46, 94, 161, 183
Kaplan, M. 24, 97
Kautilya 65, 103
Kaye, H. 3
Kedourie, E. 117
Kennan, G.F. 31–4, 33–5, 79–86, 145, 163,
175, 181;
American Diplomacy 86;
on analogic reasoning 84–9;
Around the Cragged Hill 81;
At a Century’s Ending 81;
and end of the cold war 84, 86;
historical method 80–5, 84–86;
laws of politics 86;
Long Telegram 81–6;
The Marquis de Custine and His “Russia in
1839” 80, 82;
moralism 81;
national interest 86;
origins of containment 81–86;
pessimism 86;
post-cold war world 84–86;
Russian domestic politics 83;
Russian political culture 82–8;
Soviet political economy 84;
216 INDEX
Soviet-American Relations, 1917–1920 85;
Stalinism 80;
Williams, W.A. critique 85;
“X” article 82–8
Kennedy, P. 7, 84;
Rise and Fall of the Great Powers 28
Keynes, J.M. 62
Khomeini, Ayatollah 109, 111
Khong, F.K.:
Analogies at War 29
Khrushchev, N. 4
Kindleberger, C. 100
King, G., Keohane, R., and Verba, S.:
Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference
in Qualitative Research 175–3;
historical selection bias 175–3
Kissinger, H. 33, 44
Kjellen, R. 54
Klerck, E.S. de:
History of the Netherlands East Indies 124
Koestler, A. 3, 146
Korean War (1950–3) 27, 125, 139
Kosovo Field, Battle of (1389) 166
Kosygin, A.N. 80
Kratochwil, F. 106, 112
Krause, J. and Renwick, N.:
Identities in International Relations 169
Kristeva, J. 158
Kuhn, T.:
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 21
Kundera, M. 3
Kurds, in Turkish historiography 4;
cultural resistance 151
Ladurie, E. le R. 116, 117;
Montaillou 150
Lakatos, I. 25, 108, 173;
quantitative analysis 92;
scientific research programs, 91–6
Lapid, Y. 2;
and Kratochwil, F. Return of Culture and
Identity in IR Theory 169
Layne, C. 26–9
League of Nations 50, 54, 60, 70
Lefebvre, G. 116
Leffler, M. 5, 10
Lenin, V.I. 47, 47, 54, 97, 109
Lévi-Strauss, C. 93
Levy, J. 29, 134, 138
Liska, G. 70
Little Entente of Czechoslovakia, Romania,
and Yugoslavia (1920–1) 72
Little, R. 24–6, 102
Livy 36, 37–9, 186n.
Locarno Treaty (1925) 55
Locke, J. 46
Lopez War (1864–70) 138
Lukács, G. 21
Lustick, I. 6, 176
Lyotard, J.-F. 144–1, 146, 156
Macaulay, T.B. 14;
History of England 154
Machiavelli, N. 13, 31, 33, 34, 39, 51, 65, 103,
142;
Art of War 161;
counter-memorialized reading 160–8;
Discourses on Livy 36–8, 58, 161;
historical method 36–8;
History of Florence 161;
Italian nationalism 37–9;
modernity of 37;
philosophy of history 37;
The Prince 36–8, 160;
realism, roots of 36–9
Madison, President J. 71
Mahoney, J. 175
Maier, C. 118, 178
Mailer, N. 156
Maitland, F.W. 137, 177
Mann, G. 156
Mann, M. 179
Mannheim, K. 21, 52, 61;
Ideology and Utopia 49–2
Mansbach, R. 103–8
Mansfield, E. 132
Mao 109
Marshall Plan 85
Marshall, B. 148
Marshall, G.C. 35
Marwick, A. 14, 154
Marx, K. 7, 21, 47, 144, 161;
capitalism, global effects of 167;
The Communist Manifesto 167;
INDEX 217
German Ideology 49
May, E.:
“Lessons” of the Past 29
May, E. and Neustadt, R.:
Thinking in Time 11
Mayers, D. 85
McCarthyism 163–1
McDonald, J. 96
McNamara, R. 4
McNeill, R. 7
McNeill, W. 156
Mead, M. 22
Mearsheimer, J. 104, 170
Melian Dialogue 35
metanarrative 143, 144–3
Michnik, A. 182
Middle East Studies Association 156
Milosevic, S. 144
Molotov-Ribbentropp Pact (1939) 72
Monroe Doctrine 72
Montesquieu, C.L., Baron de 98
Morgenthau, H.J. 28, 31–4, 56, 81, 135, 145,
175;
American alliance building 75;
balance of power 69–5, 73–9;
bipolar stability critique 74;
cold war critic 75;
cold war theory and practice 79–4;
Enlightenment critique 59–3;
historical method 64–9;
history truncated 78, 86–1;
on ideology 63;
international society romanticized 75–
78;
international system 74–9;
knowledge, relativity of 61;
laws of politics 61–5, 78;
leadership 78–3;
legacy 78–3;
multipolarity 74;
nationalism 74;
neorealist critique of 89–4;
nuclear age 74, 76–1;
policy history 66–69;
political science 60–4, 64–9;
Politics Among Nations vii, 61–7, 75;
positivism of 61;
power politics 59–4, 62–6;
prudence 79;
realism as public philosophy 62;
Scientific Man vs. Power Politics 59–4, 69;
on Thucydides and Ranke 66;
and Toynbee 66;
on US foreign aid 68;
and Vietnam War 66–68, 75, 186n.
Moroney, M.J. 140
Morris, D.:
Washing of the Spears 124
Mozambique War (1964–75) 126
Munich Settlement (1938) 34, 55–8
Naipaul, V.S. 111
Napoleonic Wars (1796–1815) 72, 84–9
narrative history 147–8, 156
Nasser, A. 137
National Science Foundation 119
National Security Council 21, 83–8, 163
nationalist historiography:
Eastern Europe 4;
and ethnohistory 3–4;
in Machiavelli 37–9;
Turkish 4
neorealism:
anarchy assumption 102–8;
Ashley, R. critique 105;
classical realism critique 87;
end of cold war explained 107;
eurocentrism 102–7;
historical change 105–12;
historical critiques 102–12;
history truncated 104–12, 110–16, 111–
18;
international ethics 112–18;
philosophy of history 101–6;
political process 111–18;
Ruggie, J. critique 105–11;
Schroeder, P. critique 104–10;
state blackboxed 97;
theory of foreign policy 112;
see also Walt, S.M.;
Waltz, K.N.
new history 7;
and oral tradition 151;
and popular culture 151;
postmodern politics 147–8;
218 INDEX
privileging 152;
and traditional narrative 180
Newsom, D. 175
Nicholas I 80
Niebuhr, H.R. 41
Niebuhr, R. 31, 33, 61, 78, 84, 95, 145, 175;
assessed 48;
balance of power 43–5;
British imperialism 46–8;
The Children of Light and the Children of
Darkness 86;
Gifford Lectures 40;
historical determinism critique 44–6;
human nature and historical
contingency 39–2;
The Irony of American History 43;
liberalism critique 46;
liberalism in 41;
Moral Man and Immoral Society 49;
Morgenthau, H.J. critique 45
nuclear age 44, 186n.;
pacifism critique 41;
progress critique 40–2;
prophetic minority 42, 186n.;
relativism 48;
religion, role in imperialism 47–9;
Structure of Nations and Empires 31, 45–48;
tragic conception of history 41–4
Nietzsche, F.W. 16, 25–8, 65, 148, 170;
and Foucault 154;
Genealogy of Morals 154
North, R. 118
Novick, P. 20;
That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity
Question” and the American Historical
Profession 2
Oakeshott, M. 12, 51, 58, 146, 153, 177;
constructionist theory of historiography
16–20;
historical causality 20–2;
historical skepticism 16–19;
history and practice 17;
On History 19–1
orientalism 110–16
Orwell, G. 3, 146
Owen, J. 26–9
Palmerston, Lord 27
Pastry War (1838–9) 138
path dependence 135–2
Peace of Ouchy (1912) 130
periodization, historical 19, 24, 85, 132
Petrarch 38
philosophical history 7;
Kennan, G.F. on 80–5;
Machiavelli, N. on 37;
neorealism and 101–6;
Niebuhr, R. on 41–4;
Ranke and 13–14;
Wight, M. theory 33–5
phronesis 170
Pitt, W. 67
Plato 36, 61
political necessity 31, 35, 37–9, 86
Pollard, A.F. 70
Polybius 36
Popper, K. 25, 90–5, 146
positivism 2, 11, 14, 92, 139–6
postmodernism:
anti-essentialism 143;
atavism 166;
commodity culture 156;
counter-memory 159–8;
crisis of re-presentation 152–9;
decentering power 157–6;
Derrida and différance 152–8;
disrupting time and space 164–4;
foundational narrative 147;
globalization 167–6;
hegemonic discourse 156–4;
heroic history critique 149–6;
historicizing identity 161–71;
history as literature 154–2;
history as politics 153–60;
illiberalism of 170;
metanarrative critique 143, 144–3;
overview 143–50;
pastiche in 143;
power/knowledge 144;
Rorty, R. rendition 170;
synchronism versus diachronism 166;
time-space compression 144;
traditional reactions to 170;
trope of the body 162–70;
universal truth 146–3, 148;
INDEX 219
war imagery 165–3
presentism:
historical 2–3, 18–19, 24–7, 28–2, 101,
186n.
Price, R. 156
Puchala, D. 115, 176
quantitative fallacy 134–45
quantitative history:
see cliometrics;
Correlates of War
Rabb, T. 117
raison d’état 37
RAND Corporation 156
Ranke, L. von 2, 104, 142, 169, 184n.;
American historical profession 15;
balance-of-power historiography 72;
correspondence theory of history 12–16;
History of England 13;
History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations
from 1494 to 1514 13;
international relations theory 25, 178–6;
levels of analysis 178–6;
and political realism 15–16
Rann of Kutch (1965) 138
Rauschenbusch, W. 42
Reagan, President R. 100, 163, 164
realism:
anarchy 33;
and balance of power 43–5, 69–9, 100–5;
defined 33;
human nature 33;
moral choice 33;
neorealist contrast 87, 94;
origins of cold war 187n.;
philosophy of history 33–5, 37–9;
political necessity 31, 35, 37, 38, 86;
quantitative testing 187n.;
Rankean history 15–16, 25, 178–6;
rational reconstruction 61, 91–6;
Schroeder, P.W. revisionism 72–7;
see also Carr, E.H.;
Kennan, G. R;
Morgenthau, H.J.;
neorealism;
Niebuhr, R.;
Waltz, K.N.
Reiser, O.:
Planetary Democracy 167
revisionism, historical 4–5, 27–28
Revue d’histoire diplomatique 118
Reynolds, C. 28
Richardson, L. 120, 132;
on gauging battle deaths 124–30
Riffian War (1921–6) 138
Robinson, J.H. 16
Rorty, R. 170
Rosecrance, R. 97
Rosenau, J.:
Along the Domestic-Foreign Frontier 169
Rosenau, P. 146, 149, 189n.
Rosenberg, J. 101
Rousseau, J.-J. 33, 76, 94, 96
Rucellai, G. 72
Ruggie, J. 105–11
Rushdie, S. 111, 156
Russian Revolution (1917) 110
Russo-Afghan War (1979–88) 124
Ryan, A. 21
Ryle, G. 17
Said, E. 156
Saint-Simon, H.C. 10
Saint-Pierre, Abbé de:
Project for Perpetual Peace in Europe 60
Savonarola, G. 161
Schäfer, D. 177
Schama, S. 156
Scherer, P. 38
Schlesinger, A., Jr. 41, 116, 183
Schlossstein, S. 164
Schroeder, P. 26,
alternative explanations to balance of
power 72–7;
data-making critique 136–3;
neorealism critique 104–10;
on political equilibrium 72–7;
realist view of international society
critiqued 77
Schwarzenberger, G. 33, 63–7;
Power Politics 177
Scott, J.C.:
Domination and the Arts of Resistance 150
220 INDEX
Second World War (1939–45) 72, 124, 125,
138
security—power dilemma 35
Seeley, J. 7, 51, 66, 174
Seneca 47
Sepoy War (1857–9) 128
Sevères, Treaty of (1920) 110
Simon, J. 54
Sinai War (1956–7) 137–4
Singer, J.D. and Small, M.:
and content analysis 123;
experimenter bias 123;
Resort to Arms 121, 125;
theory defined 121–7;
The Wages of War 24;
see cliometrics;
see also Correlates of War
skepticism:
historical vii–3, 10–12, 21–3, 94, 132–9,
139–7;
Beard, C. theory 18;
Carr, E.H. view 18, 51–5;
Nietzsche, F. 25–8;
Novick, P. 2;
Oakeshott on 16–20;
postmodernism and 147–4, 153–63;
uses in international relations 182–90
Small, M. 118, 134;
data-making 123;
resistance to quantitative history 119;
see Correlates of War;
Singer, J.D.
Smith, Adam 46, 74
Smith, Anthony 3, 7
Smith, M.J. 61, 186n.
Soccer War (1969) 138
Social Science History 118
Social Science History Association 118
Sokol’nikov, G.Y. 47
Sorokin, P. 120
Spencer, H. 10, 46
Spengler, O. 7, 46
Spinoza, B. 54, 94
Spykman, N. 33
Stählin, K. 81
Stalin, J. 44, 47, 58, 80
Stark, W. 16
Stone, L. 149
Stretton, H. 23
Stubbs, W. 72
Suez Crisis (1956) 135, 138
Sun Tzu 103
Susman, W. 151
Sybel, C.L.H. von 16
Tacitus 36
Talleyrand, C.M. de 68
Taylor, A.J.P. 29, 55, 72
theoretical filtering 3, 25–9, 29–2, 86–1, 109–
16, 125–2, 153–60, 174–2
Thompson, W.S. 93–8
Thorne, C. 9
Thrasymachus 54
Thucydides, 7, 9, 15, 29, 31, 33, 72, 103;
History of the Peloponnesian War 34–7, 112;
moral tragedy of war 112;
roots of realism 34–7
Thurmond, S. 164
Tilly, C. 117
Tocqueville, A. de 62
Toynbee, A. 46, 50, 156
Treitschke, H. von 16, 54
Trent Affair (1861) 27
Trevor-Roper, H. 182
Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-
Hungary, and Italy (1882–1915) 99
Trotsky, L. 47
Trouillot, M.-R.:
Silencing the Past 150
Tujman, F. 144
tunnel history 178
Turkish Revolution (1921) 110–16
Turner, F.J. 15
Turner, R:
I Heard It Through the Grapevine 151
US foreign aid 68
US Institute of Peace 119–5
Utrecht, Treaty of (1713) 71
Vasquez, J. 59, 123–9, 187n.
Vattel, E. 75, 76
Venezuela-British Guyana border dispute
(1895–6) 26
Versailles, Treaty of (1919) 34, 60
INDEX 221
Veyne, P. 12
Vietnam Wars (1945–75) 100, 125;
Morgenthau, H.J. critique 66–68, 75
Vincent, J. 102
Virilio, R:
Speed and Politics 166
Vlekke, B.:
Nusantara 124
Voegelin, E. 146
Walker, R.B. J.:
on counter-memory 160–8;
on decentering power 157–6
Wallerstein, I. 97, 100
Walt, S.M.:
Revolution and War 107–16
Waltz, K.N. 23, 25, 28, 30, 33, 170;
analogic reasoning 97–2;
assessment 101–6;
bipolar stability 100;
change 105–12;
covering laws 90;
deductive method 89–4, 93–8;
economic model 98–3;
eurocentrism 102–7;
Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics 96;
functional similarity of states 104–10;
historical confirmation 92;
history truncated 102–8, 105–12;
interdependence and conflict 99–4;
international ethics 112–18;
Lakatos, I. 91–6;
levels of analysis 95–96;
Man, the State and War 94–96;
nuclear weapons 100–5;
Popper, K. 90–5;
Soviet Union collapse 107;
structural analysis 93;
theory and fact 92, 107–13;
theory defined 89–4;
Theory of International Politics 90, 92, 96,
97–6;
US and British foreign policy contrasted
96
War of Italian Unification (1859) 128–5
War of the Triple Alliance (1864–70) 130
Watson, A. 102,
critique of anarchy 103–8
Weber, M. 22, 24, 33, 65, 161
Wendt, A. 104
White, H. 20;
on history as literature 154–2;
uses of history 170
Whitfield, S.:
Culture of the Cold War 151
Wight, M. 9, 24, 24, 31, 33, 38, 86
Wilde, O. 12
Williams, W.A. 85
Wilson, President W. 58, 60
Whitfield, S.:
The Idea of Social Science and Its Relation
to Philosophy 182
Wolf, E.:
Europe and the People Without History 150
Wolfers, A. 33
Woolf, L. 132
Wooten, H. 68
Wright, Q. 2, 77, 120, 132;
The Study of International Relations 89
Xenophon 36
Yeats, W.B. 156
Zemon-Davis, N.:
The Return of Martin Guerre 150
Zinoviev, G.Y. 47
222 INDEX
Document Outline
- Book Cover
- Title
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- The historical problem in international relations
- History, contingency, and the roots of realism:
- History, analogy, and policy realism:
- The poverty of ahistoricism:
- ~The importance of being scientific~:
- Exit from history? Postmodern international relations
- Conclusion: history, skepticism, and the recovery of theory
- Notes
- References
- Index
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