Re-Writing International Relations: History and Theory Beyond Eurocentrism in Turkey
128
Re-Writing International Relations: History and Theory Beyond Eurocentrism in Turkey
128Hardcover
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783487837 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/14/2016 |
| Series: | Global Dialogues: Non Eurocentric Visions of the Global |
| Pages: | 128 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.24(w) x 9.41(h) x 0.56(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Re-Writing International Relations
History and Theory Beyond Eurocentrism in Turkey
By Zeynep Gülsah Çapan
Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.
Copyright © 2016 Zeynep Gülsah ÇapanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-783-7
CHAPTER 1
'History' in International Relations
The aim of this chapter is to enter into conversation with the problem of the discipline of history and to understand the relationship between 'the past', 'history' and 'historiography'. In that vein, the first part of the chapter will discuss what history is and how it is different from the 'past'. The second part of the chapter will focus on how the 'past' is transformed into history. The third part of the chapter will elaborate on how to understand historiography and historiographical debates.
The field of International Relations (IR) in the last few decades has undergone what has been dubbed as the 'historical turn' or the 'historiographical turn'. The aim has been to bring 'history' back in to IR as a way of overcoming the shortcomings of the field, since the misuse of history was identified as one of the persistent problems of the field. Barry Buzan and Richard Little identify five shortcomings:
presentism, or the tendency to view the past in terms of the present; ahistoricism, or the insistence that there are trans-historical concepts that allow us to identify universal regularities; Eurocentrism, or the privileging of European experience in our understanding of international relations; anarchophilia, or the propensity to equate international relations with the existence of an anarchic system; and state-centrism, or the preoccupation with the state at the expense of other international actors.
Three of the five shortcomings, presentism, ahistoricism and Eurocentrism, are directly linked to the role history plays in the field. John Hobson in similar vein identifies two main shortcomings: 'tempocentrism' and 'chronofetishism'. Tempocentric ahistoricism extrapolates the characteristics of the present system and actors 'back in time', which 'smooths out historical ruptures and social differences'. Problematizing this enables a rethinking of the 'specific and unique origins of the modern international system'. Chronofetishism focuses on the present by 'bracketing or ignoring the past' and portraying 'the present as a natural, spontaneous, self-constituting entity that is ... eternalized'. Both discussions underline the misuse of history as something that needs to be remedied in the field. As a consequence, there have been increasing number of works that historicize concepts, events, issues and the field in general. History is being used as an explanatory tool to deepen the understanding within the field, yet history as a concept that also needs to be explained and engaged critically is being overlooked. Even though history has been brought in, it is often overlooked which history is being brought in, thus privileging one understanding of history over others, as a result of which 'the discourse of the historical turn actually runs the risk of facilitating continued hegemony of an ahistorical or at worst anti-historical research culture in IR'. History should not be just brought in as an unproblematic concept but rather engaged with critically. As Vaughan-Williams states: 'In order to historicize the concepts, logics and theories with which we study international relations it is necessary not to bring "history" but more specifically the "problem of history" into the discipline'.
The concept of 'history' is not unproblematic and has always been contested and widely discussed. Overlooking these debates privileges one version of the definition of history rather than opening up for discussion of its contested nature. The discussions revolving around the 'problem of history' can be divided into three perspectives: reconstructionism, constructionism and deconstructionism. Reconstructionism argues that primary sources can lead to achieving the Rankean aim of knowing the past 'as it actually happened'. Marwick, one of the leading proponents of reconstructionism, defines history as 'a body of knowledge about the human past based on the systemic study of sources'. Constructionism consists of a wide array of 'schools' 'that appeal to general laws in historical explanation'. French Annalistes, modernization theory and the Marxist or neo-Marxist approaches are all included under the heading of constructionism. According to constructionism, 'History can explain the past only when the evidence is placed within a preexisting explanatory framework that allows for the calculation of general rules of human action'. Deconstructionist history questions the assumption of writing history 'as it actually was' and focuses on a postmodern understanding of history. The main proponents of this perspective are Hayden White, Dominick LaCapra, Keith Jenkins and F. R. Ankersmit, among many others. Deconstructionism views 'history and the past as a complex series of literary products that derive their chains of meaning(s) or significations from the nature of narrative structure (or forms of representation) as much as from other culturally provided ideological factors'. This brief sketch demonstrates clearly how erroneous it is to automatically bring in history as if it was a neutral concept.
Bringing in history into the discussion also needs to mean bringing the following questions into the discussion:
Who gets to tell the story of the past? What are the implications of where the story starts and stops; which characters and topics are included and excluded; what 'voice' is adopted; what metaphors provide structure? ... What dynamic relationship does each of us bring to the process of meaning and representation? Conscious or unconscious decisions about form, voice, and metaphor shape the content of historical stories, and many interpretive differences in historiography (especially in the international field) arise from this 'content of the form' and from inescapable issues of subjectivity and partiality.
The aim of this chapter is to discuss the problem of history and attempt to find an answer to the question, 'What is history?' The first section will engage critically with the concept of history and attempt to elaborate on questions such as, What is history? Can the past be known? Can history ever recover the past? The second section will discuss the role of the narrative and how the past is transformed into history. The third section will focus on what historiography means and how concepts, periods and historiographical debates should be approached.
WHAT IS HISTORY?
Is history the writing of the past 'as it happened'? The primary question 'What is history?' needs to be opened up in order to capture the complicated nature of its meaning into 'What is the past?' Is the past and history the same or are they different? Does the 'it' in the Rankean dictum of 'as it really happened' actually exist?
In its simplest terms, the past is what has happened and history is a retelling of a story of what has happened. There are a series of qualifications here:
1. History is not the telling of a story but the retelling. The past cannot be recreated in its entirety within a story and as such is always incomplete; history can retell a part of the past but never recreate it.
2. History is not the retelling of the story of the past but a retelling of a story of the past. Since history cannot capture the past in its entirety, it is always a partial story of what has happened and is never a final, closed, settled account of the past.
All the actors involved do not experience events in the same manner. The past does not have clearly delineated beginnings, middles and ends; it does not occur in a linear manner. It does not exist as a story to be told; the past has to be fashioned into a story. The events and actors of the past are transformed into an easily followable story, and it is that story that is history rather than the past itself. This point leads to two further elaborations on what history is:
3. If history is the retelling of a story and the past as it was cannot be captured, then every retelling is a construct.
4. If every retelling is a construct, then this construction is not based on recreating the past but according to the questions asked in the present. The retelling of a story necessitates that the past be fashioned into a story with a beginning, middle and end, with answers to questions such as, why is this important? The past is not lived in narrative form; it is written as such. This writing is as much about the facts of the past as about the concerns of the present. The questions the historians direct towards the text are the questions conditioned by the present.
5. Because the past is not retrieved, the writing of history is oriented in the present and related to the questions we have about the past in the present. As such, 'Is it possible that the past unfolded as a particular kind of narrative the first time around and can we recover it more or less intact, or are we only selecting and imposing an emplotment or story line on it derived from our own present? Are stories lived in the past or just told in the present?' Whatever is lived in the past is not the story told in the present; history is the story of the past told in the present and for the present.
In that sense, the question 'what is history?' needs to be opened up even further. As discussed, in order to understand what history is, it is necessary to elaborate on its differences with the 'past' and on the relationship between the past and history and to ask the question, what is the past? If the past is not retrievable and history is a retelling of a past, the next question becomes, why retell the past? It is not only 'what is history?' but also 'what is the purpose of history?' or rather 'who is history for?' Similar to Cox's oft-cited quote, 'Theory is always for someone', Jenkins states, 'History is never for itself, it is always for someone'.
6. History is not only and maybe not even primarily about events, issues, debates and actors of the past but about what their story means for the issues, debates, events and actors in the present. As Jenkins states:
The fact that history per se is an ideological construct means that it is constantly being re-worked and re-ordered by all those who are variously affected by power relationships; because the dominated as well as the dominant also have their versions of the past to legitimate their practices, versions which have to be excluded as improper from any place on the agenda of the dominant discourse. In that sense re-orderings of the messages to be delivered (often many such re-orderings are referred to academically as 'controversies') just have to be constructed continuously because the needs of the dominant/subordinate are constantly being re-worked in the real world as they seek to mobilise people(s) in support of their interests. History is forged in such conflict and clearly these conflicting needs for history impinge upon the debates (struggle for ownership) as to what history is.
7. History is not only a construct but also an ideological construct. If it is always written with a purpose and for someone, then the fashioning of the story is determined by the questions and frames necessitated by the purpose of the story.
8. History is a series of discourses that work to define, categorize, periodize, limit, silence and make the past intelligible. As history is written for some purpose, then the transformation of the past into history and the definitions, categories, periodizations and inclusions or exclusions of that written work are there to reinforce, reproduce and reify the discursive spaces of a specific rendering of the past.
9. The past is not what is in contestation but the historiographical renderings of it. History is a retelling of a story of the past with a purpose in mind that works within already existing discourses about the past. Thus, historical debates are not debates about the past itself but rather a debate between the discourses of the past. In that sense, 'History results not from the debate about the past reality as such, but from competing narrative proposals about the nature and possible meanings of past events,' and when 'a narrative proposal has achieved a more or less universal acceptance (like "the Cold War" or "the Industrial Revolution") it becomes concretized as past reality. It is no longer a narrative proposal, but has become the past'.
As discussed so far, history is not the past and its acceptance as being representative of the past is the result of the dominance and acceptance of the discourses of the past. This section attempted to open up the definition of history primarily by underlying the difference between the past and history. Furthermore, only asking, 'What is history?' is not sufficient in questioning the nature of history; what also needs to be asked is, 'Who is history for?' The writing of history is always informed by some purpose that conditions the questions the historian asks of the past, the text and the archive and that transforms the past into history. The next section will elaborate further on how the past is transformed into history.
TRANSFORMATION OF THE PAST
The previous section focused upon answering the question, 'What is history?' and discussed the way in which the past and history are not the same. This section will elaborate on how the past transforms into history. History is written through the narrativization of past events. Narrative 'is a discourse that places disparate events in an understandable order', and this order does not exist in the evidence but is imposed upon the events by the historian.
Hayden White, in The Content of the Form, reproduces the following list from the Annals of Saint Gall, which chronicles events that occurred in Gaul:
709. Hard winter. Duke Gottfried died.
710. Hard year and deficient in crops.
711.
712. Flood everywhere.
713.
714. Pippin, mayor of the palace, died.
715. 716. 717
718. Charles devastated the Saxon with great destruction
719.
720. Charles fought against the Saxons
721. Theudo drove the Saracens out of Aquitaine
722. Great crops
723.
724.
725. Saracens came for the first time.
726.
727.
728.
729.
730.
731. Blessed Bede, the presbyter, died.
732. Charles fought against the Saracens at Poitiers on Saturday.
733.
734.
The list is of the 'past'; these events did happen when the annalist entered them, yet the list is not a historical account mainly because it does not have a story or a plot. The past events have not been narrativized. First, there is no hierarchy among events. The great crops of 722 has an entry similar to the entry on Charles fighting against the Saracens. Secondly, there is no causality between the events. There is no attempt to understand the implications of Duke Gottfried's death in 709. Thus, White states:
Modern commentators have remarked on the fact that the annalist recorded the Battle of Poiters of 732 but failed to note the battle of Tours which occurred in the same year and which as every schoolboy knows was one of 'the ten greatest battles of the world history'. But even if the annalist had known of Tours, what principle or rule of meaning would have required him to record it? It is only from our knowledge of the subsequent history of Western Europe that we can presume to rank events in terms of their world-historical significance.
The above list chronicles a set of events during a given time and place and imparts knowledge about the past. What this list does not do is tell the story of the past; hence, it is not history as such. The events in the chronicle are assigned importance or placed within a causal relationship when the events are narrativized by the historian. Past events do not come with hierarchy of significance or causal relationships inscribed into them; the historian imposes it on them. An example from the Cold War about the hierarchization of events might put this point in context. A list of events between 1945 and 1950 might look as follows:
• 'February 1945 – Yalta Conference
• April 1945 – Death of President Franklin Roosevelt
• May 1945 – End of the Second World War in Europe
• September 1945 – Ho Chi Minh proclaims Vietnam an independent republic
• February 1946 – George F. Kennan writes the Long Telegram
• March 1946 – Churchill's 'Iron Curtain' speech
• April 1946 – North Atlantic Treaty establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is signed
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Re-Writing International Relations by Zeynep Gülsah Çapan. Copyright © 2016 Zeynep Gülsah Çapan. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd..
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