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The international and the limits of history

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 September 2015

ANDREW DAVENPORT
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Abstract

This article addresses the relationship between history and the international. Starting from the ‘history controversy’ in IR in the 1980s and 1990s, it shows that that debate hinged on the political import of history as a form of knowledge. This political meaning, to which agency and freedom were central, was challenged through the theorisation in IR of the problematic relationship of the international, as a fragmented political form, to historical time: the spatial inside–outside division was understood as carrying a corresponding temporal and historical division, between progress and repetition. To explain why history carried this political significance, the article explores the connection of historical consciousness to sovereignty and political subjectivity. It shows that history as a distinctively modern form of relation to ‘the past’ is inseparable from the rise of modern sovereign authority and its accompanying political subject and idea of freedom: sovereignty’s reformulation of political space went along with a refashioning of the character of historical time. However, history’s conceptual attachment to sovereignty also ties it to the fragmented form of the international. History thus finds its limits in the international and IR becomes a site for the critique of the relationship between history, political form, and subjectivity.

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Articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 2 , April 2016 , pp. 247 - 265
Copyright
© 2015 British International Studies Association 

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References

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5 Ibid., p. 434.

6 ‘Totalitarian’ Richard Ashley once described neorealism as being, and not because it opted for the nomothetic end of the spectrum: Ashley, Richard K., ‘The poverty of neorealism’, in Robert O. Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 290Google Scholar.

7 These absences are equally marked in a subsequent amplification of the argument. See Lawson, George, ‘The eternal divide? History and International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations, 18:2 (2010), pp. 203–226CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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41 Representative is John Hobson’s complaint that in ahistorical IR ‘discontinuous ruptures and differences between historical epochs and states systems are smoothed over and consequently obscured’. Hobson, ‘What’s at stake’, p. 9, emphases in original. Many of these critics are of course closely associated with historical sociology in IR.

42 Constantin Fasolt, The Limits of History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), p. 4.

43 Schiffman, Zachary Sayre, The Birth of the Past (Baltimore, MA: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), p. 2Google Scholar, emphases in original. Priority in time, of itself, ‘does not constitute the past as an intellectual construct’ (p. 71).

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46 Schiffman, Birth of the Past, Part One.

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50 Ibid., p. 22. The sense of anachronism would only begin to emerge in the Renaissance.

51 Ibid., p. 18.

52 Ibid.

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54 Ibid., p. 72.

55 Illustrating the contrast between ancient and modern relations to the past, Schiffman notes that ‘this power [of the past in the present in antiquity] is altogether different from the modern one of a revered past, embodied in (say) the Constitution of the United States – yellowed with age and poured over by legal scholars with the aim of determining the “original” intent of the Founding Fathers. Livy felt the weight imposed by his patres—and the obligation it entailed—all the more heavily because they were still very much with him. Though they were dead, they had not departed; they had passed … but not into the past.’ Ibid., p. 74.

56 Ibid., p. 6.

57 Ibid., Parts Two and Three; see also, Wilcox, Measure of Times Past, chs 4, 5, and 6.

58 Schiffman, Birth of the Past, Part Four.

59 Wilcox, Measure of Times Past, ch. 2.

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61 Ibid., p. 263.

62 Ibid., p. 232.

63 Ibid., p. 236.

64 Ibid., p. 22.

65 Ibid., p. 240.

66 Ibid., p. 242.

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79 Ibid., p. 16.

80 Ibid., p. 18.

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83 Ibid., p. 19. To be clear: history is not political in the sense of addressing itself to political matters or promoting a partisan cause within the field of politics; it is political in that it underpins the modern form of political being as a whole.

84 Ibid., p. 7.

85 The ‘break’ with the past discussed here cannot be dated punctually, any more than can the coming into being of the sovereign state and the states-system, or the advent of capitalism. The work of early-modern humanists, stressed by Fasolt, can be placed at the beginning of a long process, the importance of Montesquieu’s relational conception, to which Schiffman draws attention, perhaps just after the mid-point, and the French Revolution, central to the accounts of both Koselleck and Hartog, at the end, as the definitive culmination that announced completed rupture.

86 Ibid. The basic principle that a sovereign authority (for instance, the UK parliament) cannot be bound by the actions of its predecessors illustrates how freedom in time is fundamental to sovereignty.

87 Ibid.

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93 Ibid., p. 75.

94 Ibid., p. 74 (Schmitt here approvingly quotes Jost Trier).

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103 Ibid., p. 6. To these might be added a third, the principle of historical distance, closely bound up with the difference between past and present and with historical perspective. On this subject, see the Special Issue ‘Historical distance: Reflections on a metaphor’, History and Theory, 50:4 (December 2011) and Phillips, Mark Salber, Caine, Barbara, and Adeney Thomas, Julia (eds), Rethinking Historical Distance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

104 Concerning the recent ‘memory boom’, Lorenz and Bevernage point to the role of historians in carrying out ‘a kind of “border patrol” of the relationship between past and present’, ensuring that, for the sake of freedom in the present, the line not be breached: Lorenz and Bevernage, Breaking up Time, pp. 19–26. As they note, the matter is put precisely by the historian Gabrielle Spiegel: memory ‘cannot perform historically, since it refuses to keep the past in the past, to draw the line, as it were, that is constitutive of the modern enterprise of historiography’. Spiegel, Gabrielle, ‘Memory and history: Liturgical time and historical time’, History and Theory, 41:2 (2002), pp. 149–162CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ref. p. 149.

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107 Hartog, , Regimes of Historicity, pp. 97–204Google Scholar. Hartog suggests that 1989 should be regarded as the end of the modern regime of historicity in that it marks the final vanishing of the mirage of the future that had always captivated modernity. It would probably be more accurate to say that 1989 was a landmark moment in the revealing of the limits of that regime, as no new regime has yet come into existence. A symptomatic reading might suggest that the anger and hostility that neorealism met with in the history controversy was so intense because Waltz reminded the critics of something they did not wish to know – the waning of the modern regime of historicity and its political subject.