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)