E-mail, relativism and truth in the history of international relations

As it turns out, the books and journal articles we read are written by people. Actual, flesh-and-blood human beings. Human beings with the capacity to communicate not only through peer-reviewed and painstakingly scrutinized publications, but also through more direct media, such as the human voice. But more importantly: they are able to communicate via e-mail. And not just private, one-on-one e-mail, but something far more sophisticated: a moderated, electronic subscription e-mail list, dedicated solely to the history of international relations. This list has a name, too: it is known as… H-Diplo.

It actually is very stimulating to find there is a place where an international community of professors (and sometimes students) share their thoughts with one another, discussing important issues in the history of international relations, without the burdens and the lag of academic publishing. This is one of the goals of H-Diplo, which was founded in 1993: apart from commission work such as reviews and roundtables, it hosts an e-mail discussion list. Thus, participants can trade arguments in a matter of days. Most importantly, these discussions are public, so that anyone willing to head to the H-Diplo website can watch and learn from the frank but collegial exchanges of ‘big guys’ like Jeffrey Kimball and Robert Jervis. Professors challenge each other to be the best they can be, and everyone else profits in the process. It all seemed so harmonious… until last month:


‘In 1994 or 1995 I made my first post on H-Diplo, and I have certainly been one of the most active posters—perhaps, indeed, the most active—for the last 17 years.’
‘[In the late 1990s] H-Diplo became the site of a series of very heated discussions about postmodernism, whose value I and some others sharply questioned. (…) I had been taught that historians used the fullest possible documentary record to make the best judgments they could about what actually happened. Now a new view was taking hold: that arguments about knowledge, as Joan Scott put it in a celebrated article, were about the interests of groups, not the opinions of individuals, and that everyone was free to reshape the past based in large part on identity politics. (…) A new view of history has triumphed, one which indeed denies the existence of any single truth. (…) The idea that certain books are superior in research, argument, or scholarship to others has become most unfashionable.’
‘This will be my last post on H-Diplo.

Sincerely yours,
David Kaiser’ 07-10-2011


This post was then responded to by about 20 different authors, mostly American scholars but also some Europeans, including a few PhD students. They range from strongly supportive of Dr. Kaiser to fairly dismissive. It’s an interesting exchange to read through, because it gives some insight into the current state of the field of the history of international relations. A lot of it focuses on relatively practical reasons why people might have become less inclined to engage in serious debate, which is interesting for the rather grim picture this paints of the strictures of academia. Here, however, I’d like to deal with the theoretical issue raised by Dr. Kaiser, because the debate puts forward some elementary positions that are worth considering for any historian of international relations. Kaiser’s claim is that postmodern relativism with regard to ‘truth’ has led to a decline in the quality of scholarship as well as a decline in scholarly debate in the history of international relations, because everyone is now entitled to his own version of the truth.

One response to this claim is that it doesn’t matter whether historians are relativists with regard to truth. Whether historians believe in an absolute truth that exists independent of the historian, which the historian attempts to uncover, or whether they believe that history is fundamentally a construction of the historian, in practice this boils down to the same thing: whether a particular account is found credible. This involves critical appraisal of the available evidence, coming up with smaller and larger hypotheses, and arguing for or against a particular overall interpretation. Whether or not the result of this process is some sort of absolute truth or merely ‘a’ truth doesn’t matter, or as David Stone puts it in one of his posts: ‘If someone has attempted to resolve a debate on H-Diplo by saying that truth doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter or is the arbitrary creation of the historian, I haven’t seen it.’ (17-10-2011) So we should be talking about concrete method, not abstract theory.

Against this, Jeffrey Kimball and Jonathan Rodwell argue that it’s essential to consider the philosophical framework authors work within. Rodwell: ‘Without “philosophy” (or, more accurately, epistemology) how do we know what evidence to find? How do we know the evidence means what we say it means? More pertinently, if we deny theory any role, we may miss what theory it is that we are actually using. Everyone has a theoretical perspective.’ (17-10-2011) While this shouldn’t be taken to mean that diplomatic historians have always been so naïve to think they could directly grasp the historical past, there certainly is a case to be made that international historians have often thought too little of the theoretical aspect of their work, especially epistemological issues such as the ones Rodwell raises. Such criticism is typically associated with postmodernism, which urges authors to be reflexive, in other words to be aware of their own particular biases and standpoint. The relativistic part of it comes with the claim that because each author views the world through a unique subjective lens, each author arrives at a different version of the truth – and no such version can be determined to be ‘more true’ than the other. But this is precisely where Kimball interjects, pointing out that this assumption legitimates scholarship that is distorted by political biases. In opposition, he emphasizes the importance of good historical methodology, based on rigorous archival work and tested through debate. This, he says, can still bring us to accept a common version of the truth, a ‘scientific’ truth: ‘historical methodology of the non-postmodern/post-structuralist type can help us to overcome our political biases in the search for what happened, when it happened, how it happened, and why it happened’. (20-10-2011) What Kimball seems to be saying is that one’s theory of truth is reflected in method, particularly the way historians engage in discussions about evidence.

A major example of how the choice between positivism (‘traditionalism’) and relativism (‘postmodernism’) may have a real effect in practice comes from Tom Nichols. Nichols writes that ‘postmodernism, if misused, is an invaluable tool for disposing of inconvenient evidence – or better yet, for avoiding any serious encounter with evidence at all’. (24-10-2011) He relates this to the 1990s, during which newly available evidence shed new light on the Cold War, putting the accounts of revisionist historians under pressure. A postmodern view on truth allowed these historians to disengage from a difficult, if not unwinnable, debate, rather than attempt to change their narrative to incorporate the new evidence.

At least as far as H-Diplo is concerned, it seems clear from the response to Kaiser’s post that postmodernism isn’t quite as dominant as he suggests (although this could be simply because H-Diplo currently attracts more ‘traditionalist’ historians). It also shows, in my view, that there is still a good amount of room for improving our understanding of theoretical matters through further reflection and debate. Whether such debate will take place on H-Diplo is, however, unclear: for the past month, there have been no new discussion posts, not only on this topic, but on any topic whatsoever. Perhaps the final contribution to the discussion Kaiser started indicates the general mood. It was posted by a lowly PhD student from Toronto, Jennifer Polk, who writes: ‘"Traditionalists" vs. "postmodernists" - I don't think this distinction is particularly useful anymore (if it ever was). You're either intellectually curious and rigorous, or you're not.’ (25-10-2011) End of discussion.

China and the World: Tuesday, December 6

A rare opportunity to hear one of the foremost experts on recent international history speak on the highly relevant subject of his new book:

Odd Arne Westad lezing,

dinsdag 6 December, 2011

(contact: Ruud van Dijk; Artemy Kalinovsky)

Odd Arne Westad, hoogleraar aan de London School of Economics en een van de meest prominente kenners van de recente geschiedenis van de internationale betrekkingen zal op dinsdag 6 december aanstaande als spreker op te treden voor onze universiteit

Dinsdag 6 december, 2011; 16-18u; Agnietenkapel

De titel van de lezing is:

China and the world:

the origins of Chinese global power from 1750 to today

Westad is onder meer bekend van zijn baanbrekende en bekroonde The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of our Times (Cambridge, 2006). Hij is ook mede-bezorger van het grote, drie-delige naslagwerk Cambridge History of the Cold War, en oprichter van het tijdschrift Cold War History (Routledge). Vorig jaar werd Westad verkozen tot de British Academy, en hij is momenteel genomineerd om volgend jaar de American Historical Association te leiden.

Meer over Westad is te lezen op de volgende websites:

http://www2.lse.ac.uk/internationalHistory/whosWho/academicStaff/westad.aspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_Arne_Westad

Legacies of Stalingrad: Monday, November 21

Book presentation and discussion:

Boekpresentatie: Legacies of Stalingrad

Christina Morina over de maatschappelijke impact van het Oostfront

Datum: maandag 21 november
Tijd: 17:00

Locatie:

P.C. Hoofthuis, zaal 1.04

Spuistraat 134, 1012 VB Amsterdam

Informatie: Voertaal: Engels
Toegang: gratis

Maandag 21 november wordt in het P.C. Hoofthuis van de Universiteit van Amsterdam de dissertatie 'Legacies of Stalingrad. Remembering the Eastern Front in Germany since 1945' (Cambridge University Press, 2011) van de Duitse historica Christina Morina gepresenteerd. In haar boek vertelt Morina over de impact die het Duitse Oostfront tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog heeft gehad op de Duitse naoorlogse politiek en maatschappij.

Dr. Moritz Föllmer van de Universiteit van Amsterdam zal het boek becommentariëren.

Over het boek:

Christina Morina's book examines the history of the Eastern Front war and its impact on German politics and society throughout the postwar period. She argues that the memory of the Eastern Front war was one of the most crucial and contested themes in each part of the divided Germany. Although the Holocaust gained the most prominent position in West German memory, official memory in East Germany centered on the war against the USSR. The book analyzes the ways in which these memories emerged in postwar German political culture during and after the Cold War, and how views of these events played a role in contemporary political debates. The analysis pays close attention to the biographies of the protagonists both during the war and after, drawing distinctions between the accepted, public memory of events and individual encounters with the war.

Ter voorbereiding op de discussie kan een pdf van het inleidende hoofdstuk van het boek worden aangevraagd bij: ruud.vandijk@uva.nl (n.b.: de uitgever stipuleert dat dit alleen te gebruiken is voor deze bijeenkomst)

Introduction

Hi everyone,

My name is Bastiaan Bouwman, and I'm honored to have been invited by Ruud to contribute to this blog. I gather this will be read mostly by UvA students doing the MA in History of International Relations, presumably those who embarked on the program last month, and of course those who are supposed to be writing their thesis instead of reading this. Good to have you on here - I'm the only student in the Research Master (rMA) in History at the UvA who is at all interested in the history of international relations, actually the only one who is interested in post-WWII history in general, so I can use the company. (Why does almost everybody in the 1-year MA do history of international relations, and only one (1) person in the rMA?) I'll be posting on whatever I feel might interest you, which could be something interesting I come across on the web or symposia-wise, something worthwhile from my own work, or simply something about my own experience as a student. Right now I'm in the process of trying to get published in Skript (www.skript-ht.nl), so I'll write about how that works in the future. If you're wondering: yes, MA and even BA students can get published in Skript, so it's something worth to consider doing if you've written a paper you're proud of.

I'll briefly say something about my background, to give you an idea of where I'm coming from. Presently I'm in the second year of the UvA's Research Master in History, specializing in the the history of international relations. My commitment to studying History hasn't been exclusive: I've also completed a BA in Philosophy, partly during an exchange at the New School in New York City, as well as some interdisciplinary courses at the UvA. But while I'm happy with the broad background that gives me, I'm currently in the process of specializing more and more, as I work towards my MA thesis, which should be finished about a year and a half from now (I plan to take my time). Specifically, I'm working on transnational human rights activism from the Helsinki Final Act (1975) to the end of the Cold War (1989+), taking the work of Amnesty International as a starting point for the time being. During the previous year I've also written on topics like Anglo-American relations during the British withdrawal from the Persian Gulf, the rise to power of Museveni in Uganda from 1986 on, and explanatory models in international relations theory with regard to the end of the Cold War. Apart from studying, I like to keep myself busy organizing events with happyChaos and organizing the Grand Tour this coming year (location TBA, but it looks like we're going to someplace hot and close to (a) palm trees; and/or (b) oil; and/or (c) popular uprisings!).

I look forward to seeing you on here as well as in the hallways of the university!

Transnational Dimensions of the Algerian War (of Independence)

That's the topic of an international workshop this coming Friday, October 14, at our university. One of the organizers is Dr. Niek Pas, speaker earlier this semester in the Colloquium. This "expert meeting" has a dual purpose: first, presentation of papers dealing with the topic "The Algerian War and / in Western Europe," and second, reflection upon and discussion about researching this theme of "la guerre d’Algérie dans ses dimensions internationales." In addition to the local organizer, there will be speakers from Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Germany, and France. Meeting languages are English and French, so it's also a good opportunity to hone those language skills that you worked so hard to master in high school. Space is limited, so if you'd like to attend (morning, 10-13, and/or afternoon, 14-17:30), please e-mail to: n.g.pas@uva.nl.

New, additional author

As this blog continues to develop (it's still quite new), I'm happy to welcome a new co-contributor. He is Bastiaan Bouwman, currently in the Research Master. I will let him introduce himself and in the meantime emphasize the interactive potential of this forum: author or not, there's also the comment function (at the end of every post) as a way to get involved.

Original Thesis Work? Get It Out There!

Something to think about when you're an Amsterdam MA student with a thesis on a Cold War topic. This is a prominent graduate student conference, and it's being held in London next spring. It would be a good opportunity to present the core of your thesis research (and get valuable feedback before you submit the final version!). Check it out and think about it!


Call for Papers
10th Annual LSE-GWU-UCSB International Graduate
Student Conference on the Cold War

London, 19-21 April 2012


The LSE IDEAS Cold War Studies Programme (CWSP), The Center for Cold War Studies (CCWS) of the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the George Washington University Cold War Group (GWCW) are pleased to announce the 2012 International Graduate Student Conference on the Cold War.

In 2003, UCSB and GWU first joined their separate spring conferences, and two years later LSE
became a co-sponsor. The three cold war centres now hold a jointly sponsored conference each year, alternating among the three campuses.

The conference is an excellent opportunity for graduate students to present papers and receive
critical feedback from peers and experts in the field. We encourage submissions by graduate
students working on any aspect of the Cold War, broadly defined. Of particular interest are
papers that employ newly available primary sources, non-traditional methodologies, or
under-investigated aspects of the Cold War.

To be considered, each prospective participant should submit a 300 word proposal (original to this conference) and a brief academic CV (in Word or pdf format) to ideas.coldwar@lse.ac.uk, with “Graduate Conference Proposal- YourLastName” in the subject line. Participants must be PhD students (pre-viva) or research masters students. The deadline for proposals is 8 January 2012. Successful applicants will be notified by 5 February. Papers must be no longer than 7500 words including footnotes (in Chicago style) and submitted by 25 March. The author of the best paper will be awarded the Saki Ruth Dockrill Memorial Prize, the opportunity to publish the paper in Cold War History, and a £100 book voucher.

The conference sessions will be chaired by prominent faculty members from LSE, GWU, UCSB, CWSP research associates, and other prominent Cold War and international historians. The organizers will provide accommodation and meals. Participants may be asked to pay a small attendance fee (not more than £40) and will be responsible for their travel to London. Further information can be found on the conference website.

Dissertation Defense, Friday September 16: Samuël Kruizinga

Later this semester in the Colloquium on the History of International Relations, this Friday at the University auditorium (Aula): Samuël Kruizinga. The public defense of his dissertation, entitled Economische politiek. De Nederlandsche Overzee Trustmaatschappij (1914-1919) en de Eerste Wereldoorlog (Economic politics[policy]: The Dutch Overseas Trust Company, 1914-1919, and the First World War) will commence at 13 hours sharp. Samuël should correct me, but I think the Dutch word "politiek" in the title can and should be taken in both senses of the word. I look forward to seeing the book (or else ask him about it when he talks to our Colloquium, next month). Public dissertation defenses are good ways to learn something about the topic, and the research, at hand, and the receptions that follow not only provide drinks and snacks, but also opportunities to meet new people. Check it out if you can!

Special Lecture: Kurt Volker, Tuesday September 13

Kurt Volker in het Oost Indisch Huis

Dinsdag 13 september houdt Kurt Volker een inleiding getiteld

Ten Years After 9/11: Evaluating International Cooperation and Assessing Challenges for the Future

De lezing vindt plaats in de VOC zaal van het Oost-Indisch Huis, Kloveniersburgwal 48 te Amsterdam,

en begint om 12.00 uur precies

Volker (1962) is managing director en senior fellow van het Center for Transatlantic Relations aan de School of Advanced International Studies van de Johns Hopkins Universiteit. Eerder was hij permanent vertegenwoordiger van de VS bij de NAVO (2008-2009) en bekleedde hij uiteenlopende hoge functies in het State Department en de National Security Council. Hij begon zijn loopbaan als analist bij de Central Intelligence Agency.

Kurt Volker zal een inleiding houden van ongeveer een half uur, waarna er gelegenheid is tot het stellen van vragen. De bijeenkomst is uiterlijk om 13.30 afgelopen.

Studenten geschiedenis van internationale betrekkingen zijn van harte welkom.

Voor wie zich wil voorbereiden:

http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2011/0728/Afghanistan-and-Libya-point-NATO-to-five-lessons
http://www.euce.gatech.edu/node/206
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/08/23/dont_call_it_a_comeback
http://www.bloomberg.com/video/74276438/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZhIn9eX6Cw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCWWnAMPLwE&feature=related
http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2011/0526/Obama-s-crucial-moment-in-Poland
http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/volker-macedonia-moving-backwards

Welcome

I'm creating this as a test, to have a forum for all interested in the history of international relations, as practiced in the history department at Amsterdam. The university has all the official stuff, essential to run the program, but that's not the same as having a place where we can reach the entire group of students, staff, and other interested folk. So as the coordinator of the program, I'm giving this a try. Given that we do international relations, I'm starting off in English, but don't be surprised to see Dutch, German, or other languages here from time to time. We will develop this as we go along. In the meantime, spread the word!