History Vs. Politics and International Relations

A Clash of Narrative Styles? History vs. Politics and International Relations Andrew R. Hom University of Glasgow <DRAFT> Introduction Peter asked me to think about how I use history in my own work or how Politics and International Relations (PIR) relates to History. I’m still not sure about the first question,1 but what follows attempts an answer to the second based around my previous work on IR theory as a narrative enterprise (Hom 2016a, 2016b). Briefly, I argue that if we focus on the narratological aspects of both disciplines, there is not as much in the way of hard distinctions between History and PIR as is often thought. There are differences, but these are most often ones of degree or proportion in how various elements from a shared discursive toolkit are deployed. However, we can locate a more decisive disciplinary contrast in some seemingly obvious observations about how History and PIR self-consciously relate to time. This takes place over three sections. In the first, I compare the thematic and formal differences between the two and show how these do not sustain a disciplinary distinction. In the second, I do the same for how each discipline approaches the past or ‘uses history’, again highlighting exceptions to any hard core distinctions between the two. In the third and concluding section, I focus on each discipline’s self-understood vocational motivation, that is, the respective justifications for Historical or PIR research, in order to draw a more robust and durable distinction in terms of time. I argue that this distinction is what actually accounts for the other, more fluid differences and reflect briefly on the implications of temporal orientation for both History and PIR. 1 The first question is in fact an uncomfortable one for me because I often worry that I have cherry- picked historical illustrations in my own work on security and time. So perhaps no surprise that the second one gets the attention below. 1 Narrative themes and forms in History and PIR At first blush, the forms of presentation, argumentation, and justification in History and PIR are quite different. There is little apparent similarities between, say, the lengthy twists and turns of a political biography (Jenkins 2002) or a ‘bromance’ history of the diplomacy between great powers (Gill 2013; Robb 2013), the tragic miscalculations, secrecy, and general fog that tinges a historical explanation of war (Tuchman 2014), or the huge sweep and dizzying contours of a macrohistorical/longue durée account of the past (Braudel 1996), on the one hand; and the tersely stated conditions and outcomes of a nomothetic covering law (see Ray 2009:144), the mathematical elegance of a statistically significant finding (see Singer 2002:86), or the rigorous tree and branch logic of a game theoretic or rational choice model (see Snidal 2004), on the other.2 Of course, a lot of qualitative, historically-minded, and ‘thick’ descriptive work in PIR blurs any distinction between historical and social scientific work (e.g. Hall 1999; Lawson 2006; Steele 2008). However, for the purposes of establishing a ‘hard case’, I’d like to focus on the purported underlaps between History as a narrative mode and PIR as a theoretical one, for I think that this seemingly wide gap collapses if we take the thematic or rhetorical and the formal aspects of narrative seriously. Themes and ideologies At least since Hayden White (1975), and more likely long before, History and especially historiography has taken the question of the rhetorical or synoptic theme of an account and the political position that it implies seriously. We might think of this as the ‘dramatic’ dimension of Historical explanations. For example, to meet their basic function of rendering intelligible and even logical the underlying ‘course of events’ (Trachtenberg 2006:27) histories regularly employ ironic or tragic reversals of fortune via unintended consequences (Tuchman 2014). Or they may chronicle the cynical personal or particular ambitions that end up influencing international politics. Or they may invoke cyclical metaphors to explain the rise and falls of historical agents or social systems (see Lemon 2003). And of course there is a whole category that has fallen out of favour, ‘Whig’ history, which propounds a ‘presentist’ logic in which past events make sense primarily in how they necessarily drive states of affairs toward the current condition. If we replace ‘current condition’ with ‘future end state’, then we have the similarly suspect idea of history as teleology. 2 There also tends to be drastically different word counts attending this split; for example, compare (Jackson 2013) in History with (Schuessler 2015) in PIR, although cf. (Lebow 2008). 2 In PIR, covering laws, decision trees, and statistical tests do not typically manifest such themes openly. Yet PIR is hard to imagine without them. To excise tragedy and unintended consequences, we would have to do without most of classical realism and its contemporary ‘willful’ or ‘reflexive’ variants (Morgenthau 1945, 1948; Lebow 2003; Williams 2005; Hom and Steele 2010), as well as benchmark neorealist accounts of the tragic effects of systemic constraints (Mearsheimer 2001). We would also need different ways to signify the ‘tragedy of the commons’ and other collective action problems (Hardin 1968; Olson 1974). Neorealists would be left without resort to the metaphor of cycles in making sense of international trends (Gilpin 1981), as would power transition (Lemke 1997) and ‘long-wave’ (Boswell and Sweat 1991) theorists of war. Eliminate cynical ambition or political conflicts before the water’s edge, and theories of war based on deceit (Schuessler 2015) or diversion (Tir 2010), important facets of rational choice theory (Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, Siverson, and Morrow 2005), and parts of bureaucratic politics (Allison 1969) and institutional pathology accounts (Pierson 2004; Fioretos 2011) also drop out. Elsewhere, critical PIR scholars have for some time decried the Whiggish pretensions of much theory – although in PIR this most often falls under the label ‘presentism’ – which either takes current arrangements as a self-sufficient slice from which to generalize across time, as in neorealism (Waltz 1979), or reduces the past to under-laborer for the present, as in modern IPE (see Blaney and Inayatullah 2010), theories of political development (Fukuyama 2006, 2012) and modernization theory (see Latham 2000; Gilman 2007). These latter themes can also complement teleological themes (Wendt 2003; see Heydebrand 2003), even if it is not always clear whether we have realized the telos in the present or must await a guaranteed future (e.g. see Russett 1993; Owen 1994; Spiro 1994). So although not as self-consciously or self-confidently narrative in their practice, PIR scholars still rely heavily on narrative tropes quite similiar to History. These overlaps mimic the similarities between History and PIR in terms of political positionality or ideological bias. Without delving too deeply into this, I hope it will suffice for now to note that White’s account of the four ideologies of History maps fairly cleanly onto PIR. He has History expressing the political ideologies of conservatism, liberalism, radicalism, or anarchy. Much of domestic political science, I suspect, falls into the liberal camp.3 In IR the terms do not reflect domestic political affiliations, yet some years ago Martin Wight (1966, cf. 2005) noted that most international theory fell into realist, liberal, or revolutionary camps. Realism is often viewed as the ‘conservative’ view of international affairs insofar as it imputes 3 At least, each time that a poll or survey is taken, political scientists’ political leanings support this. 3 transhistorical truths about power (Morgenthau 1946) or pitiless structural constraints on state action (Waltz 1979). Liberalism maps most closely, while radicalism and revolutionism have clear affinities. Finally, in IR anarchy usually expresses a basic ontological presupposition about international politics.4 As one final bit of evidence about the ideological inflection of PIR, it’s worth pointing out that in the past decade or so critical scholars have begun to call out the implicit political and ideological bias of putatively ‘objective’ and rigorous scholarship in PIR (Linklater 1990), most notably the democratic peace thesis (Oren 2003; Steele 2007; Ish-Shalom 2013).5 It is issues like these that also underpin the critical IR move toward autoethnographic disclosure and reflection (see Bleiker and Brigg 2010a, 2010b) as part and parcel of a systematic (Jackson 2011:156–87) and/or ethically reflexive (Amoureux 2015) social science.6 Non-narrative forms? Yet it can be argued that, even if rigorous social science in PIR serves organizing themes or tropes identifiable as narrative devices, the manner of explanation pursued by PIR scholars differs so drastically from historians as to render the aforementioned connections irrelevant. What have explanatory devices like covering laws to do with historical narrative, which sits much closer to literature in terms of form and substantive content?7 Quite a bit, I would argue. Although the level of detail and number of twists, turns, and developments accommodated in a history far exceeds the capacities of social scientific explanations, this does not mean that the latter do not deploy some narrative structure and content. In other words, much like historical narratives, even rigorously ‘theoretical’ propositions like covering laws propound a world of action or a ‘“field of occurrence”’ (Carr 1986:23) by ‘unfolding’ an intelligible sequence (see Ricoeur 1984:3) in their own stark way, which relies on implicit claims about time and history. By invoking a necessary connection between its cause and effect, the covering law model unfolds an absolute rather than a contingent or probabilistic succession applicable to chronologically near or distant events. 4 Although there are calls to reappraise anarchy as an interpretive costruct or a contingent empirical condition.

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