DRAFT SYLLABUS Hist. 6030, Spring 2016 History and its Uses in International Affairs The George Washington University

Professor Hope M. Harrison Off. Hrs: 1957 E. St., N.W., Suite 401 Class: Tues. 5:10-7 p.m. Tues. 2:00-4:30 p.m. 1957 E. St., N.W., Room ?? And by appointment e-mail: [email protected] Phone : 202-994-5439

Course Description: This course examines some of the ways that history affects international affairs, including how policymakers in the US and elsewhere "learn" from the past to inform their current policy decisions and how they and others politicize the past for current goals. It also examines a variety of ways countries go about dealing with difficult aspects of their past.

What is history? How is it portrayed? Who decides how it is portrayed? How can we learn from it? How does it affect international affairs? How do political leaders deal with difficult parts of their country's history? What are the kinds of lessons policymakers tend to learn from history and why? Do historical analogies help or hinder policymaking? These are some of the core issues we will study in this course.

We will examine the interconnections between history, collective memory, and identity looking at cases from the U.S., Armenia, Turkey, Germany, , Latin America, , , and elsewhere. We will study different ways countries handle atrocities from their past. History and politics come together in complicated ways in monuments, memorials, history textbooks, war crimes tribunals, and in truth and reconciliation commissions.

One of the most common ways people "learn" from history is by making analogies, such as: "Slobodan Milosevic or Saddam Hussein or or Al Qaeda terrorists are like Adolph Hitler, so we should follow the same hard-line strategy against them as we did against Hitler." We shall see that sometimes the historical analogies we make are correct and useful, but sometimes they can be very misleading. Thus, following the strategy that worked for the historical case may not work with the current case. We will examine the analogies policymakers have drawn to Versailles, Munich, Vietnam, and 9/11.

Learning Outcomes: As a result of completing this course, students will be able to: 1. Develop a healthy appreciation for history and its imprint on our present world 2. Understand how historical narratives are shaped by states, organizations, and individuals 3. Analyze the interaction between history and politics when following the news and in examining historical cases 4. Identify the historical roots of current issues 5. Recognize the importance and uses of history in international policymaking 6. Understand the legacy of the past as it affects the ways different nations regard and interpret international affairs

1 7. Comprehend how historical analogies and reasoning impact politics 8. Appreciate how issues of identity and memory factor into our historical understandings and how this can condition political decision-making 9. Write and speak in a convincing way about interactions between history and politics in international affairs 10. Look at a memorial or a museum exhibit in a critical way

Requirements and Grading: 30% participation (meaning attendance AND participation in class discussion) 30% for three 3-page papers (double-spaced), all due at the start of class as marked on the syllabus (Jan. 28, Feb. 9 & March 8) and based on the assigned readings 40% 15-page research paper (double-spaced) due by Wednesday May 14 at 5 p.m. in my office (hard copy and must include notes and bibliography). The paper must have at least 15 sources and these must include scholarly and primary sources and not just journalistic accounts. Your paper should also draw directly on the concepts we discuss and read in the course. A short topic proposal for your research paper is due in class on March 1. An outline and preliminary bibliography are due by Apr. 5 by e-mail. See style guidelines under Projects in Blackboard.

Class policies: • Attendance is required in this class. You must contact me in advance if you are going to miss a class. • Phones, Blackberries, etc. are not permitted to be used in the classroom. They distract the person using them and others nearby from concentrating on the class. • A laptop is permitted only to take notes—not to be surfing the web, checking e-mail or anything else.

Academic Integrity: All work that you hand in for this class must be the product of your own labors for this class. I personally support the GW Code of Academic Integrity. It states:: “Academic dishonesty is defined as cheating of any kind, including misrepresenting one's own work, taking credit for the work of others without crediting them and without appropriate authorization, and the fabrication of information.” For the remainder of the code, see: http://www.gwu.edu/~ntegrity/code.html

Support for Students Outside the Classroom: DISABILITY SUPPORT SERVICES (DSS) Any student who may need an accommodation based on the potential impact of a disability should contact the Disability Support Services office at 202-994-8250 in the Marvin Center, Suite 242, to establish eligibility and to coordinate reasonable accommodations. For additional information please refer to: http://gwired.gwu.edu/dss/

UNIVERSITY COUNSELING CENTER (UCC) 202-994-5300 The University Counseling Center (UCC) offers 24/7 assistance and referral to address students' personal, social, career, and study skills problems. Services for students include: - crisis and emergency mental health consultations

2 - confidential assessment, counseling services (individual and small group), and referrals http://gwired.gwu.edu/counsel/CounselingServices/AcademicSupportServices

Security: In the case of an emergency, if at all possible, the class should shelter in place. If the building that the class is in is affected, follow the evacuation procedures for the building. After evacuation, meet in the park across the street on E Street or another assigned rendezvous location.

6 Books, Required Reading for Purchase: 1. Margaret Macmillan, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History, Random House, 2009/2010. 2. Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, eds., History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American past. Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 1996. 3. David Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, Vintage, 1994. (This won the Pulitzer Prize.) 4. Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time. Free Press, 1988. 5. Louisa Lim, The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited, Oxford University Press, 2014. 6. Mary Elise Sarotte, 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe, Princeton University Press, 2009.

There will also be assigned articles accessible on Blackboard or the internet. BB=Blackboard on syllabus. Check the class site on Blackboard regularly. I also recommend reading the newspapers regularly, since topics relevant to the course are featured almost daily. I encourage students to forward relevant newspaper and journal articles to the class via Blackboard.

If you miss class, you must notify me in advance and complete a one-page paper summarizing and analyzing the readings for the class you miss.

Please come to each class with the readings for that day and prepared to discuss them.

Jan. 12 Introduction

Jan. 19 The Uses and Abuses of History Margaret Macmillan, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History. Whole book. Discussion of the book in class. In class viewing of "Hiroshima: Why the Bomb Was Dropped"--ABC News documentary, narrated by Peter Jennings and aired on July 25, 1995, for the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. Hand-out of questions to be answered on the documentary.

Jan. 28 Hiroshima and the Enola Gay: The History and the Planned Smithsonian Exhibit of 1995 for the 50th Anniversary of the End of World War II Barton J. Bernstein, "Hiroshima, Rewritten," New York Times, January 31, 1995. BB Karen de Witt, "Smithsonian Scales Back Exhibit Of Plane in Atomic Bomb Attack,"

3 New York Times, January 31, 1995. BB Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, eds., History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past, Introduction, Ch. 1, and Ch’s 4-7. Norman Davies, "The Misunderstood Victory in Europe," New York Review of Books (May 25, 1995), pp. 7-11. BB Gar Alperovitz, "Hiroshima: Historians Reassess," Foreign Policy, No. 99 (Summer 1995), pp. 15-34. (access on-line via Gelman library’s Aladin database)

1st 3-page paper due at the start of class: Write a paper about how you would have exhibited the Enola Gay, justifying your planned exhibit. Also discuss your view of what you think is the duty of a museum in this case, considering historical vs. commemorative motives. Please do NOT recount for me what happened in the Smithsonian case; tell me how YOU would have handled the exhibit. Describe clearly what your exhibit would include, what you would “select” (concept from Davies’ article). Refer to the readings (just using parentheses with the author’s name is fine). The main part of your paper must be a description of your exhibit. See more guidelines on BB.

Feb. 2 Analogical Reasoning Cases: Munich, Hitler, the Cold War, Stalin, Korea, Vietnam, 9/11, 2011 , Putin and the Crimea in 2014 Questions on the readings. BB Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time, Ch's 1-5. Jeffrey Record, “The Use and Abuse of History: Munich, Vietnam and ,” Survival, Vol. 49, no 1 (March 2007), pp. 163-180. BB Arnold R. Isaacs, Vietnam Shadows: The War, Its Ghosts and Its Legacy. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997. Ch. 4, "The Syndrome," pp. 65-102. BB Articles on Iraq in 2002/03 & the analogy with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. BB Articles on historical analogies for the 2011 Arab Spring. BB Articles on analogy between Putin taking over the Crimea in 2014 and Hitler taking over the Sudetenland in 1938. BB

Feb. 9 Learning from History 2nd 3-page paper due at the beginning of class. Assignment up on BB. Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics. Princeton Univ. Press, 1976. Ch. 6, "How Decisionmakers Learn from History," pp. 217-282. BB Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time, Ch's 6-14.

Feb. 16 Russia and the Past, 1985-91, 2014 David Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb, Preface, Ch’s 1, 3, 4, 8, 9, 10, 15, 18, 20, 26, 27, and pp. 505-530 of Part V, and the Afterword, 531-542. Chronology on Soviet/Russian history. BB Questions on the readings. BB Mikhail Gorbachev’s “history speech” of Nov. 2, 1987. BB March 17, 1990 letter from Yegor Ligachev to Gorbachev, in Ligachev’s memoirs, Inside Gorbachev’s Kremlin (Pantheon Books, 1993), pp. 114-117. BB Material on the May 2014 Russian law on the historical memory of World War II. BB

4 President Vladimir Putin’s speech referring to the historical justification for the Russian take-over of the Crimea, March 18, 2014. BB Optional: “The History Man,” chapter in Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2013). BB

Feb. 23 China and the Tinanmen Square Massacre, 1989 Chen Jian, “Tiananmen and the Fall of the Berlin Wall: China’s Path toward 1989 and Beyond,” in Jeffrey A. Engel, ed., The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989 (NY: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 96-131. Read this for background before you read the Lim book. Louisa Lim, The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited. Whole book. Chronology. BB Questions on the reading. BB

March 1 German Unification, 1989-90, and Lessons of History 1-paragraph research paper topic proposal due in class. Chronology of German unification. BB Questions on the readings. BB Mary Elise Sarotte, 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe, Princeton University Press, 2009. Whole book. Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (Harvard University Press, 1997), p ix. on what "lessons of history" Zelikow and Rice drew from the experience of working on German unification. BB Stephen F. Szabo, The Diplomacy of German Unification. St. Martin's Press, 1992, pp. 53-54. BB

March 8 Turkey and Armenia and the Events of 1915: Genocide or Not? 3rd 3-page paper due at start of class. The assignment is up on BB. Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2001. Ch. 1, "The Armenians and Greeks of Anatolia," pp. 17- 42. (the Armenian view) BB Mim Öke, The Armenian Question, 1914-1923 (K. Rustem & Brother, 1998), pp. 127- 136. (the Turkish view) BB U.S. Presidential Statements annually on Armenian Day of Remembrance, April 24: 1981, 1998-2014. BB Articles on Day of Remembrance and Turkey, 2014. BB Materials from discussions and votes in the House of Representatives in fall 2000 and spring 2014 on a Congressional resolution on the Armenian genocide. BB Articles on Armenia and Turkey. BB Chronology on Turkish-Armenian relations and the US and on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. BB

March 22 Japan, Korea, China, and the legacy of the 1930s and World War II Guest lecture by Prof. Daqing Yang of GW Questions on the readings. BB Shuko Ogawa, “The difficulty of apology: Japan’s Struggle with Memory and Guilt.”

5 Harvard International Review, Fall 2000. (access on-line) Chunghee Sarah Soh, “The Korean `Comfort Women:’ Movement for Redress,” Asian Survey, Vol. 36, no. 12 (Dec. 1996), pp. 1226-1340. (access on-line with JSTOR) Two chapters from Yoichi Funabashi, ed., Reconciliation in the Asia-Pacific, Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 2003. Chapter 2 by Victor Cha, “Hypotheses on History and Hate in Asia: Japan and the Korean Peninsula” and Chapter 3 by Daqing Yang, “Reconciliation Between Japan and China: Problems and Prospects.” BB Alexis Dudden, “Apologizing for the Past between Japan and Korea,” Ch. 2 in Max Paul Friedman and Padraic Kenney, eds., Partisan Histories: The Past in Contemporary Global Politics (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 39-54. BB Newspaper articles from 2001-2010 and from 2010-2012 on the conflict between Japan, China, and Korea over the past, textbooks and the Yasukuni Shrine. BB See also the Memory and Reconciliation website of the Sigur Center for Asian studies: www.gwu.edu/~memory

March 29 Germans Dealing with the Historical Memory of the Wall Questions on the readings. BB Chronology on Germany dealing with the East German communist past and with the history of the Berlin Wall. BB Brian Ladd, “Berlin Walls,” in The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (The University of Chicago Press, 1997), Introduction and Ch. 1, pp. 1-39. BB Polly Feversham and Leo Schmidt, The Berlin Wall Today: Cultural Significance and Conservation Issues (Bauwesen, 1999), excerpts. BB Hope M. Harrison, “The Berlin Wall and its Resurrection as a Site of Memory,” German Politics and Society, Issue 99, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Summer 2011), pp. 78-106. BB Hope M. Harrison, “From Shame to Pride: The Fall of the Berlin Wall through German Eyes,” The Wilson Quarterly, Nov. 4, 2014. http://wilsonquarterly.com/quarterly/summer-2014- 1989-and-the-making-of-our-modern-world/from-shame-pride-fall-berlin-wall-through-german- eyes/ Peter Schneider, “What happened to the Wall, anyway?” in Schneider, Berlin Now: The City after the Wall, transl. by Sophie Schlondorrf (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), pp. 154-164. BB Anna Saunders, “Remembering Cold War Division: Wall Remnants and Border Monuments in Berlin,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies, Vol. 17, no. 1 (Apr. 2009), pp. 9-19. BB Michael Cramer, Cycling, Skating, Hiking along the Berlin Wall Trail, Germany (Esterbauer, 2003), pp. 5-13. BB

Also look at these websites: http://www.berliner-mauer-gedenkstaette.de/en/index/html The Berlin Wall Memorial and Documentation Center at Bernauer Strasse in Berlin. Includes information on the historical events concerning the Wall, the memorial site, and victims of the Berlin Wall. http://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/denkmal/denkmale_in_berlin/en/berliner_mauer/index.sht ml about the Berlin Wall including the history, then and now pictures, maps to see what is left, monuments to victims of the Wall

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Apr. 5 No class. By 7 p.m., please e-mail me your outline (at least 2 pages) and preliminary bibliography (1-2 pages) for the research paper.

Apr. 12 How to Deal with the Crimes of Past Regimes: Truth Commissions Guest speaker, Michael Evans, National Security Archive. Consult the website of the National Security Archive (located at GW) to learn about their work on truth commissions http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/ and particularly the work of Michael L. Evans with the Colombia Documentation Project http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/colombia/index.htm. Readings TBA.

Apr. 19 Conclusions

Wed. May 4 15-Page Research Paper Due by 5 p.m. in my office in hard copy and also uploaded onto Blackboard (must include notes and bibliography—see style guidelines on BB under Projects).

7 Suggested Research Paper Topics, using the information in the course on learning from history:

1. how having served in George H.W. Bush’s Administration (1989-92) at the end of the cold war may have affected the foreign policies of a policymaker in George W. Bush’s Administration (2001-9).

2. a case study of 1 country or a comparative study of 2 or 3 countries in their efforts to come to terms with the "criminal" past of their country and their officials. Among the possible cases are former communist countries such as (East) Germany, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Russia, or other countries such as South Africa, Chile, Argentina, France, united Germany, Japan or the US.

3. the effect of the "Vietnam syndrome" on US policies in the Persian Gulf War and/or the wars in Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan or Iraq.

4. contested history and politics between Russia and Ukraine

5. a case of a foreign policy official in some country learning correctly or incorrectly from history

6. the politicization of history in a country on an issue

7. pick a current policy issue in the US or elsewhere and show how history could contribute to various ways of approaching the policy issue

8. discuss how a particular national memorial in the US or elsewhere depicts history--what it "teaches" and what it ignores and why

9. a case (like the Armenian genocide) of U.S. political involvement in a historical debate

10. how the opening up of historical facts under Gorbachev led to the collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe and then the collapse of the Soviet Union itself

11. lessons of history and the Arab spring

12. another topic approved by the professor

A short topic proposal for your research paper is due in class on Oct. 14. An outline and preliminary bibliography are due by e-mail on Nov. 4. The final paper is due on Mon. Dec. 15 by 5 p.m. in my office. The paper must have at least 15 sources and these must include scholarly and primary sources and not just journalistic accounts. Your paper should also draw directly on the concepts we discuss and read in the course.

8 Some relevant websites: www.ictj.org International Center on Transitional Justice (NY), covers activities concerning transitional justice (truth commissions, tribunals, etc) around the world. www.usip.org United States Institute of Peace (DC), has many relevant events and publications. www.gwu.edu/~memory Memory and Reconciliation in the Asia-Pacific Project of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies at the Elliott School, covers Japan, South Korea and China. www.gwu.edu./~nsarchiv/ National Security Archive at GW (7th floor of Gelman), has documents and information on truth commissions in Indonesia/East Timor, Guatemala, Chile, Honduras, and Colombia. The Archive has played a crucial role in obtaining US government documents for truth commissions. www.iraqmemory.org/en/index.asp The Iraq Memory Foundation (DC and Baghdad) deals with unearthing the Ba’thist past. www.memo.ru/eng/index.htm Memorial, the Russian organization, is dedicated to educating about and preserving the memory of the victims of the Soviet regime and also keeping a spotlight on human rights violations in contemporary Russia. http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/ This has much information on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission which was a model for many others. http://www.memoryatwar.org/ “Memory at War” at Cambridge University examines current debates over history and memory in Poland, Russia, and Ukraine.

There is a massive and growing body of literature on the intersection of history and politics, dealing with the subject in general and with regard to specific countries and issues. Here are some related books (that are not required) that may be of interest to you, including for your research paper: Frederick C. Corney, Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution (Cornell Univ. Press, 2004). Eric Davis, Memories of State: Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq (University of California Press, 2005). The Archdiocese of Guatemala, Guatemala: Never Again! (Orbis Books, 1999). Eric Foner, Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World (NY: Hill and Wang, 2002). Includes chapters on the US, Russia, and South Africa. Max Paul Friedman and Padraic Kenney, eds., Partisan Histories: The Past in Contemporary Global Politics (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Includes chapters on Germany, Japan, Korea, Chile, Spain, Armenia, Kazakhstan, India, Pakistan, Israel, Palestine, Nigeria, and the US. Adam Hochschild, The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994). Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (A National Security Archive Book, (NY: The New Press, 2004). Jane Kramer, The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany (NY: Random House, 1996. Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner, Claudio Fogu, ed., The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006). Includes chapters on Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Switzerland, and Russia. Edward Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum (Columbia Univ. Press, 1995/2001).

9 James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1995). Kenrick Oliver, The My Lai Massacre in American History and Memory (Manchester Univ. Press., 2007). Erna Paris, Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History (NY: Bloomsbury, 2000). Includes chapters on Germany, France, Japan, the US, South Africa, Yugoslavia and Bosnia. Tina Rosenberg, The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism (NY: Random House, 1995). Includes chapters on Czechoslovakia, Poland and Germany. Ellen Schrecker, ed., Cold War Triumphalism: The Misuse of History After the Fall of Communism (NY: The New Press, 2004). Kathleen E. Smith, Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR (Cornell Univ. Press, 1996). Kathleen E. Smith, Mythmaking in the New Russia: Politics & Memory During the Yeltsin Era (Cornell Univ. Press, 2002). Timothy Snyder, Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (Yale Univ. Press, 2004). Giles Tremlett, Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through Spain and its Silent Past (Walker and Company, 2007). Charles Villa-Vincencio and Wilhelm Verwoerd, eds., Looking Back, Reaching Forward: Reflections on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (Zed Books, 2000). Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997).

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