'Where Are We Going?' International Relations and the Voice from Below*1

Review of International Studies (1999), 25, 107–122 Copyright © British International Studies Association ‘Where are we going?’ International Relations and the voice from below*1 CHRISTOPHER HILL Introduction They tell us that the Pharoahs built the pyramids. Well, the Pharoahs didn’t lift their little fingers. The pyramids were built by thousands of anonymous slaves . and it’s the same thing for the Second World War. There were masses of books on the subject. But what was the war like for those who lived it, who fought? I want to hear their stories.2 Writing about international relations is in part a history of writing about the people. The subject sprang from a desire to prevent the horrors of the Great War once again being visited upon the masses and since then some of its main themes have been international cooperation, decolonisation, poverty and development, and more recently issues of gender. All these subjects have been founded in a normative commitment to help what Studs Terkel called ‘so-called ordinary people’.3 Thus people who are not professionally involved in international relations, as diplomats, politicians, soldiers, journalists, lawyers or academics, have figured in the literature and in the canon of concerns which has driven it along. It could hardly be otherwise in an age which has seen the creation of a single international system, the explosion of the world’s population, the spread of democratic ideas, the systematic slaughter of millions and the invention of weapons of mass destruction. In accounts of these great events, however, the people have almost always appeared as objects, not subjects. On occasions, where a revolution is at hand or a democracy feels itself constrained in its foreign policy by the need to achieve domestic consensus the people are seen as an irresistible mass. But even here they are reified and depersonalised. For the most part intellectuals speak for the people, even * I am grateful to Alan Knight for comments on a draft of this article and to Mick Cox for encouraging me to write it. 1 This article draws in part on the Introduction to Gustave Folcher, Marching to Captivity: the War Diaries of a French Peasant, 1939–45, edited by Rémy Cazals and Christopher Hill, translated by Christopher Hill (London: Brasseys, 1996), pp. ix–xxi. The French original is: Les carnets de guerre de Gustave Folcher, paysan languedocien 1939–45 (Paris: Maspero, 1981). 2 Interview with Studs Terkel in Vanity Fair, cited on the back of the French Edition (Chacun sa guerre, Paris, Editions La Découverte, 1986) of his The Good War, New York, Pantheon Books/Random House, 1984. This collection of 47 interviews with various participants in the war is invaluable, but the selection is random and the accounts retrospective. 3 This description is the main theme of Terkel’s ten books. Other common terms range from‘the common/simple people’, ‘the man/woman in the street’ and ‘the public’ to the more pejorative ‘the great unwashed’ and the more political ‘the working class/the workers’. Terms and nuances naturally vary between languages and cultures. 107 108 Christopher Hill when they are trying to give a voice to those whose needs have been ignored.4 Although these commentaries are generally well-meaning, they are by definition delivered de haut en bas and it is always difficult to know if the views and needs imputed to ordinary people bear any relation to those actually expressed in the kitchens, bars, trenches, fields, factories, and bus queues of the world.5 In international relations in particular not only is it extremely difficult for us to assess the authenticity of such accounts and prescriptions, it has proved virtually impossible for the objects of the system to speak for themselves.6 The great poetry and prose of the First World War was largely written by men who while they might have served in the ranks (and officers like Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves were in just as much peril as any Private) were accustomed to expressing their feelings through the written word.7 The millions who were not writers or intellectuals, whose deaths are marked only by such monuments as the Ossuaire at Verdun containing more than 150,000 unidentified men, went silently to their fates. Some great events have produced their exceptional witnesses, such as Primo Levi of the Holocaust, Antonio Gramsci of fascism, Alexander Solzhenytsin of Stalin’s purges and Nelson Mandela of apartheid. The humanity and strength of these individuals in coming through the most extreme tests that can be imposed on a human being means that they can speak with authority for millions as well as for themselves.8 But most people do not have such qualities, and their individual tragedies go unchronicled, whether of peasant, soldier, Jew, gypsy, bomb victim or refugee. What is more, although this century has seen mass suffering on an enormous scale, the lives of many millions have been more routine, if still hard, than those which rightly fill us with horror. To adapt Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, it is the banality of suffering that most strikes one in contemplating the history of this century. That is why the diary of Anne Frank had such a world-wide impact. The record of the normal, unspectacular life of a young girl, gradually turning into the darkest nightmare, was something millions could identify with, and its success exposed a hunger for authentic, personal accounts of something that the finest historical work could not hope fully to understand (in the verstehen sense). This was also the reason why the authenticity of the Frank diary was so contested; many 4 An example is Cynthia Enloe’s influential book about the women in the margins of the male activities which dominate the history of international relations, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (London: Pandora, 1989). 5 This was what motivated Tom Harrisson to set up Mass Observation in 1937, simply to record what people were saying privately. The method did, of course, raise issues of propriety as well as of scientific method. See Tom Harrisson, Living through the Blitz (London: Collins, 1976), pp. 11–15. 6 Some of the few, lone voices which have been heard, from as far back as the Napoleonic wars, are included in Lawrence Freedman (ed.), War (Oxford: OUP, 1994). 7 The most famous of these writers are British—Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas—but the German Erich Remarque made just as big an impact in the long run with All Quiet on the Western Front. This echoed Stephen Crane’s novel about the American Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage, and anticipated Joseph Heller’s post-1945 classic of the private soldier’s war Catch-22, as well as the various revisionist films that have been made about the Vietnam War. 8 Their most relevant works in this context are Primo Levi, If This Were a Man (London: Abacus, 1987), Antonio Gramsci, Letters from Prison (London: Quartet, 1979), Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch (London: Gollancz, 1963) and Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (London: Abacus, 1995). International Relations and the voice from below 109 could not bring themselves to believe that something so powerful was not the product of art or artifice.9 How are we to cope with this dilemma, of the silent millions who have not spoken for themselves, and for whom any attempt to extrapolate is itself a form of dis- tortion? The traditional response of the political scientist is to study ‘public opinion’. This is not the place to go into the difficulties of this concept, which has spawned a huge literature, but the aggregating nature of the approach generally used is the mirror image of the attempt to get close to individuals.10 Too often, indeed, the concept is used as an excuse by policy-makers and commentators for not enquiring more closely into the consequences of a given action at the grass-roots or into the complexities of popular perspectives on it. The use of opinion polling as an instrument for deciphering democracy and (in the Clinton–Blair era) even for government, is a version of the tyranny of majoritarianism against which some strains of political philosophy have long warned. It is fundamentally Fordist in its assumptions. A more recent and more promising response is the work which has been flourishing over the last two decades on oral history. The effort to recover the testi- monies of ordinary people in their thousands is now well under way, with projects like the British Library’s ‘National Life Story Collection’ archive and a postgraduate course specialising in oral history at the University of Essex.11 This is a natural accompaniment to the upsurge of interest in social history and itself a reaction to the exclusively elite versions of history which the traditional concentration on high politics used to produce. There is now a great deal of work being done on subjects ranging from village life during the English civil war to the histories of football, dance and the shop floor.12 The popular presence in international relations, however, remains difficult to track, not least because of the unavailability of source materials. Historians of war have been interested in ‘bottom-up’ accounts since John Keegan’s path-breaking The Face of Battle in 1976.13 Military historians can interview ex-combatants retro- spectively, and the survivors of the holocaust can be asked to commit what they can bear to recall to the records of special archives like that of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC.

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