Do historians and IR scholars see the world, in the present or the past, differently? Sometimes. The books that Thomas Peak and I have written are evidence that as an IR scholar and historian, respectively, we are both interested in what he terms the “cosmopolitan moment.” We have both chosen moments of historical transformation, the reinvention of orders, or even order building—his study of Westphalia and my own of the Congress of Vienna—which we see as relevant to now. Together, Peak and I traverse nearly a half- millennium, which we leap across two centuries at a time: the seventeenth-century Treaty of Westphalia, the nineteenth-century Congress of Vienna, and our twenty-first-century “now.” Historians call this view of the past the longue durée.
Even though Peak and I are situated in different disciplines, I venture that we have a lot in common in how we think about history and why it matters. Both of us are engaged in reflecting on and probing the past as ways of anchoring our understanding of the present, how we got here, and how we understand our contemporary political landscape and its dilemmas. I expect we both see the present—including the existing “international order” as we know it—as only one version of the future, as it was imagined and shaped over time. Both of us assume, too, that there is more to know about that order, especially if we do not trace its origins through relatively recent genealogies: post–9/11, or post–Cold War, or even post– World War II. We both understand the constitution of subjectivities and of gender and the connection between the cultural and the political as simultaneously constitutive of international orders, their limitations, and potential. We use a similar “toolbox,” investigating this history “from below,” trying to capture and understand the range of experiences, ambitions, and expectations that are the sum of engagement with the potential of past “cosmopolitan moments” that marked out the path of the future that became our past. We give agency to a broader range of actors who are evidence of engagement with the politics between states, even in the process of imagining of states that is part of this longue durée history. As an historian I take from IR this interest in the international, in orders and ordering that are only now beginning to be part of the language historians use. I bring from my discipline, too, an entrenched sense of the valence of actors otherwise considered invisible or irrelevant, not least women but also economic actors, and that seeing them adds to our understanding of power and influence.
I teach history graduates who worry that, when history addresses the present too directly, it somehow politicizes the past. Working with IR scholars underscores the more salient point: not only that we cannot help but see the past through the lenses we have but also that the present can indeed be usefully placed in the context of the past, of decisions made and foregone. Ultimately, historians and IR scholars have a long history of borrowing from and translating each other. In that context, I am extremely grateful to Thomas Peak, writing from the frontiers of a Europe in conflict and in perpetual reinvention, for his careful and sympathetic reading of my book that, like his own, is about a time of making peace and the long history of learning and unlearning the lessons of war.
