What is History in International Relations?

Abstract

To some extent, history has always been a core feature of the international imagination. On both sides of the Atlantic, leading figures in the discipline such as E. H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau, Martin Wight, Hedley Bull and Stanley Hoffman have all employed history as a means of illuminating their research. Indeed, Wight made searching the desiderata of international history the sine qua non of international theory, the best that could be hoped for in a discipline without a core problematique of its own.1 Although often considered to have been banished by the scientific turn in International Relations (IR) during the Cold War, at least in the United States, history never really went away as a tool of IR theory. And in recent years the (re)turn of history has been one of the most striking features of the various openings in IR theory ushered in by the end of the Cold War. As such, this forum is extremely timely, posing a series of important questions about the relationship between history and IR, and questioning the status of IR’s recent historical (re)turn. The general issue is a pressing one because Fred Northedge’s original goal in setting up Millennium was to provide a (British) counterweight to the ‘ahistorical positivist project’ that had engulfed mainstream American IR. Thus by bringing history back in, albeit in a critical way, Northedge’s thinking reflected a now commonly held assumption that there is a transatlantic divide that separates a historically informed British IR from a historyless US mainstream. And, in turn, these perceptions form the basis of the current forum.