The Weight of History on International Relations

Abstract

Foreign policy actors often refer to history when discussing or communicating on their decisions. In his comprehensive work on the Vietnam decision of 1965, for instance, Y. F. Khong recounted that US officials drew more than one hundred historical analogies during the internal meetings which preceded the decision to go to war. Such references to history have been observed in fields as different as defence and security policy, economic policy, environmental policy… Therefore, a research field has emerged that tries to analyse the presence of history in international relations. Whereas a first generation of works insisted on the uses of history by foreign policy actors, recent scholarship has showed that history is not only an object of (international) politics. It is also a subject of (international) politics in the sense that it constitutes the actors’ identities, weights on their understanding of the problem, and, therefore, drives foreign policy in particular ways. Several notions have been proposed in order to grasp this phenomenon: historical analogy, memory, foreign policy myth... This panel proposes to bring together scholars from various traditions with a common interest for the weight of history on international relations. We welcome in particular papers with a particular focus – whatever the case-study - on the concrete transmission mechanisms between past events and current situations: historical traumatism, institutionalization of a social memory, attempt to “learn from the past”, etc.

Title	Details
History as a Tool for Foreign Policy in the Baltic States After Independence	View Paper Details
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Shifting Military Cooperation in Djibouti. The Weight of a Long Shared History on the Renewal of the 1977 Treaty with France	View Paper Details