|
|
|
Politics and Foreign Relations
Fredrik Logevall
| These are good times for the field of U.S. foreign relations history, as Thomas W. Zeiler's lucid essay makes clear. Not as good as they could be, but let's not be too finicky. Job openings are up, books are winning major prizes and generating heated interpretive debates, and the field's organizational home, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), is in robust health. No less important, one detects in recent years a greater willingness on the part of social and cultural historians—long ascendant in the discipline in the United States—to tolerate and even embrace the propositions at the heart of diplomatic history: that high politics matters, that top-down approaches are worthy and important, and that the projection of American power and influence abroad over the past two plus centuries needs serious and sustained study. Perhaps as sure a sign as any of the field's resurgence was the decision by the editors of the distinguished Oxford History of the United States series to publish a volume on foreign relations. George C. Herring's magisterial From Colony to Superpower is currently the only book in the series written on topical rather than temporal lines. Thus what stands out in this survey of the "state of the field" is the health of the field. Zeiler is an enthusiast, and although it would have been helpful to get more details on some of his suggestions—he calls, for example, for "pulling the mainstream a bit back toward considerations of the state," but does not really develop the point—there can be no denying the basic thrust of his essay: we are seeing an extraordinary amount of imaginative, useful work being done by historians employing widely varying categories of analysis. This is all to the good. U.S. foreign relations is very much a Janus-faced field, looking outward as well as inward.1 |
1
|
|
But it is the outward that is getting the lion's share of attention these days. International history is all the rage, as Zeiler duly notes. The approach is hardly new—it is worth recalling that Samuel Flagg Bemis, Ernest R. May, and other giants in the field were writing international history half a century and more ago. But only in recent years has it become predominant, as scholars respond to charges that U.S. diplomatic history has been unduly America-centric and parochial, written by historians who have not mastered any foreign languages and who lack knowledge of non-U.S. cultures. The result has been an outpouring of sophisticated, multiarchival works that deepen the internationalist dimension of U.S. foreign relations history. And more is on the way, as additional foreign archives open up, as greater numbers of historians develop the linguistic skills to work in them, as more non-U.S. scholars enter the fray, and as the documentary materials made available through the heroic efforts of outfits such as the Cold War International History Project and the National Security Archive (which deserve more prominent mention than Zeiler gives them) become more utilized.2 |
2
|
|
Zeiler describes that internationalist turn intelligently and sympathetically and then issues a warning: "One must be careful here, for rooting the field in international history risks losing sight of the Americanness that is the very character of U.S. diplomatic history." This is a trenchant observation, one I wish he had developed more fully. Most professional historians of U.S. foreign relations identify themselves as "Americanists," both in their training and their designation within their home departments. As such, their principal interest is in understanding and explaining the external behavior of the United States, as part of the broader aim of elucidating the contours of the American national experience. Whether that external behavior has been determined more by foreign or domestic variables is a core interpretive question, much debated ever since U.S. diplomatic history emerged as a distinct field. Many of us would say that it is not an either/or matter—international and domestic modes of analysis are not mutually exclusive but should very often be utilized together.3 |
. . . |
There are about 2284 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
