World Orders in World Histories before and after World War I

Abstract

Historical arguments have always played an important role in debates on world order. In this context the question of continuities and discontinuities has often been a contested issue, and so has the necessity to choose between threatening and promising historical trajectories as well as between obsolete and promising elements of the past. Since interpretations of the past figured so prominently in debates about world order, theoretical and methodological debates on history were often related to the political discourses on possible world orders. Especially transitory situations in world politics inspired historians to try to answer the challenge of new perspectives on the future by reconsidering their conceptions of the past. Particularly global moments, when decisions about new world orders are on stage, are also moments of increasing theoretical activity for historians to look for new approaches and to find new ways to rewrite the history of what they think the world is. The ongoing ideological contestations over new world orders typically resorted to narratives of the past in order to legitimatize their proposals for the future. In many cases historians were invited to produce or mobilize existing narratives for these purposes.