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History and International Relations

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DOI: 10.4324/9780203201244

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 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
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collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk."
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)
FOR MY PARENTS
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii

1 Introduction 1
2 The historical problem in international relations 7
3 History, contingency, and the roots of realism: 33
Reinhold Niebuhr and E.H.Carr
4 History, analogy, and policy realism: 59
Hans J.Morgenthau and George F.Kennan
5 The poverty of ahistoricism: 89
Kenneth N.Waltz and neorealist theory
6 “The importance of being scientific”: 115
J.David Singer and the correlates of war
7 Exit from history? Postmodern international relations 143
8 Conclusion: history, skepticism, and the recovery of theory 173

Notes 185
References 191
Index 211
 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 Chapter 3; Paul W. Schroeder for his remarks on Chapter 5;
J.David Singer, who took time from his busy schedule to discuss Chapter 6 with
me; and Patrick Yott, of the Alderman Library Social Science Data Center at the
University of Virginia, for his assistance, also with Chapter 6. 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 Chapter 2 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 Chapter 3 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 Chapter 4 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)
2 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

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
 INTRODUCTION 3

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
4 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

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
 INTRODUCTION 5

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
 6 HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

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.

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