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What Bandwagon?
Diplomatic History Today
Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht
| In his essay, "The Diplomatic History Bandwagon," Thomas W. Zeiler presents a general, much-needed, and tremendously useful survey of the state of the field for general readers and scholars working in other subfields of American history. Zeiler recapitulates how, despite forays into novel areas, the field suffered from a lack of recognition in mainstream history until twenty years ago, when a new generation intensified cooperation with other fields, including international history and cultural studies. That move, he feels, has rewarded diplomatic history with the recognition it deserves, making it part of mainstream history once again. Zeiler underscores his argument by placing an avalanche of studies into different subcategories, applauding innovative trends, and concluding that diplomatic historians today constitute "an advance guard driving the bandwagon of internationalization, riding along with those who study mentalités and culture."1 |
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And yet, there is a catch. Zeiler is not entirely happy with the results of the past twenty years. Like many diplomatic historians, he fears that change and adaptation might carry the profession over the edge, obscure important questions, and allow scholars to lose sight of the core of what they are supposed to be doing. That core, he contends, consists of studying official state records and "appreciat[ing] how power functions at home and abroad."2 The real question for Zeiler, then, is not how to make sense of the merger between his field and other types of history but, instead, to assess how far diplomatic historians wish to venture in one of those novel directions without discarding the state as the central category of analysis. |
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Stressing the original conception of diplomatic history, Zeiler makes a powerful plea for a stronger emphasis on the state. Zeiler believes that other historians should read and borrow from diplomatic historians because the latter group understands the meaning of the state and knows how to work in government archives. "Studying discourse is fruitful," he contemplates, "but the state is relegated to a secondary role in American history at the peril of losing a sense of the nature of power, who captures it, who loses it, and how it is deployed." This "time-honored tradition of understanding the state and power" constitutes diplomatic history's essential contribution to general scholarship, and Zeiler because "maintaining the state in American history is essential to good research."3 |
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I remain less convinced than Zeiler that the state and power constitute the keys to "good research" in diplomatic or any other history; if that was the case, diplomatic historians could abandon their search for new labels and rename the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) the Society for Historians of American Power and the State. While that concept may have worked well in eras when diplomatic history exercised more of an influence on the discipline of history in general, I do not think it works any longer. Below, I will outline three reasons for my skepticism: first, the study of power and the state has never been exclusively the domain and focus only of diplomatic historians; second, much new scholarship in foreign relations has opened up important and interesting areas of inquiry not shaped by power and the state; and third, the attractiveness of diplomatic history and its practitioners stems from more than the field's methodological concepts—the history of the field is a good example of how historians can sharply disagree without disrupting their chosen field. |
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