Relaciones Internacionales – Comunicación Internacional

100 years after the Paris peace conference

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Read the new special issue from International Affairs,

The uses of history in international society: from the Paris peace conference to the present 

International Affairs, Volume 95, Issue 1, 1 January 2019, Pages 181–200,https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiy238
Published: 01 January 2019

Abstract

History has been used—and abused—for centuries. Yet the more familiar notion of ‘history’s lessons’—a notion which tends to make most historians uncomfortable, and which surely demands thoroughgoing skepticism—is far from exhaustive of history’s uses in the practice and study of international relations. One important and timely subject is the more constitutive role of history in international deliberations over the creation, fragmentation and transformation of nation-states. What follows is a historical comparison of the changing ways in which the past has been used to frame the terms and content of such debates. While we will be exploring the uses of history as a guide or teacher, we propose to examine more specifically and at greater length the growth and persistence of newer uses: first, to bolster claims to independence and territory; and second, in demanding restitution in the form of financial reparations, apologies and other social privileges. By examining the ways in which history was used 100 years ago at the end of the First World War and in recent episodes of the Cold War and post-Cold War eras, we hope to show continuities and differences. What specialists must appreciate is that history is being used and will continue to be used not only within the confines of the academy, but within international society itself, where it may serve as a foundation for arbitrating political disagreements. If anything, non-specialist and popular reliance on history has grown, possibly because other forms of authority have attenuated.History has been used—and abused—for centuries. In the fifth century BC the father of modern history, Thucydides, famously declared in his Peloponnesian Wars that ‘the past was an aid to the interpretation of the future’ and expressed the optimistic hope that his work would serve as a guide for ‘all time’.1 Over a millennium later, the Europe of the Renaissance found in the rediscovered texts of ancient Greece and Rome practical advice on government and the relations among states. Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy made it clear that his purpose was to decipher the lessons of the past as an aid to statecraft in the present.2 Imperial China shared a similar deep respect for the wisdom of the past; civil service examinations from the Han to Qing dynasties were based on knowledge of great classics.The Chinese also discerned, or thought they did, an invariable cycle in history of decay and renewal. That attempt to find grand patterns in history which could unveil the mystery of the future exists in many cultures. In the Middle Ages, Christian histories explained the past and future through the triumphalist lens of the spread of their universal faith; and in the Victorian era, British histories typically did something similar with the emergence of constitutional government, the Industrial Revolution and the British empire.3 Karl Marx saw a different working-out of history through the mechanism of economic change and class warfare towards the inevitable triumph of the proletariat.That faith in history as a mentor, and the concomitant belief that its laws can be discerned, have persisted into the present. History has been and still is used in an attempt to work out the principles and discover the factors shaping relations between different peoples and institutions. Thucydides’ statement that ‘the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’ is much cited still, especially by the realist school of International Relations theory. At Harvard University the Belfer Center runs a programme to examine case-studies from the past to support the notion of the ‘Thucydides trap’ which posits that declining and rising powers almost invariably come into conflict.4 Statespeople and others repeatedly use examples and analogies from the past to speculate about the present, guess at the future and thereby prescribe courses of action. The decline and fall of Rome has been used in an attempt, for example, to discern the future path of the United States, while the appeasement analogy has become shopworn with repeated use since 1945.5

Yet the familiar notion of ‘history’s lessons’—a notion which tends to make most historians uncomfortable, and which surely demands thoroughgoing scepticism—is far from the only use of history in the practice and study of international relations.6One very important and timely subject is the more constitutive role of history in international deliberations over the creation, fragmentation and transformation of nation-states. What follows is a historical comparison of the changing ways in which the past has been used to frame the terms and content of such debates. While we will be exploring the uses of history as a guide or teacher, we propose to examine more specifically and at greater length the growth and persistence of newer uses: first, to bolster claims to independence and territory; and second, in demanding restitution in the form of financial reparations, apologies and other economic and social privileges.

By examining the ways in which history was used 100 years ago at the end of the First World War and in recent episodes of the Cold War and post-Cold War eras, we hope to show both continuities and differences. What specialists must appreciate is that history is being used and will continue to be used not only within the confines of the academy, but within international society itself, where it may serve as a foundation for arbitrating political disagreements, including those regarding the boundaries, assets, rights and duties belonging to states. Indeed, if non-specialist and popular reliance on history has changed at all, it has grown, possibly because other forms of authority have attenuated. Sovereign governments no longer acknowledge territorial and other gains won through discretionary military force as lawful or appropriate. Nor do they tend to call on religion or on theories of empire or racial superiority as formal justifications for state boundaries or sovereignties, as they did in centuries past. Perhaps because we often believe the past is the past and cannot be changed, history has increasingly been seen in this century and the last as a legitimate source of authority.

The twentieth century marked the high point of the nation-state and international relations—itself a new term—focused on state-to-state relations. An increasingly important use of history was as a building block and justification for autonomous nations with their own states and territory. The Paris peace conference of 1919 took place as multinational empires in Europe and the Middle East were disappearing, leaving vast amounts of territory up for grabs. History was adduced by the representatives of would-be nations as an important and sometimes clinching argument. It is true that arguments based on security, economics, access to such assets as railway networks, ports and raw materials, or treaty obligations were also used, but assertions about the national identity of a particular piece of territory necessarily drew heavily on history. Interestingly, conquest, for so long accepted in international law as a basis for acquiring territory, was no longer compatible with self-determination.

While history was also employed in Paris to support demands for restitution unrelated to territory, that application became most prominent later on with crucial changes in the international environment. As the twentieth century wore on, conquest fell away even further than it had done by 1919 as a basis for claims. Furthermore as both old and new states proved reluctant for various reasons to open up border questions or tolerate secession, history was used less as a basis for territorial claims and relatively more to buttress claims for other types of recompense, including financial reparations and the revision of norms and rules deemed incompatible with the principle of sovereign equality. The era of decolonization and anti-colonial liberation, which witnessed a proliferation of new members of international society, was largely a story of demands for a more genuine and multifaceted self-determination without dissolving the borders drawn by colonial Europe. The use of history as restitution persists into the post-Cold War period, where outright territorial annexation remains rare, but where more general questions of state-making and interstate relations are often answered by reference to distant pasts and memories. Thus history continues to serve as a legitimate authority, even a distinct ethic, in international deliberation, although its use should be interpreted according to the political interests it has furthered.

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TEXTO COMPLETO EN PDF: La historia y las rel internacionales

 

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