Gordon A. Craig

Gordon A. CraigPresident of the Association, 1982

This presidential address was delivered at the 97th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, held in Washington, D.C., December 28–30, 1982.

The Historian and the Study of International Relations

The custom of inviting distinguished foreign scholars to become honorary members of the American Historical Association goes back to the year 1885; and the first of them were Leopold von Ranke, William Stubbs, Samuel Rawson Gardiner, and Theodor Mommsen. This was a formidable quartet, and their names are still capable of causing an involuntary nod of respect when they are mentioned; but I should be surprised to learn that their works were much read now. The importance of reading the older works even in one’s special field seems to have diminished as a result of the great expectations of new discoveries engendered by the invention of scientific techniques for exploiting the archives;1 and, as for general reading, so many books roll off the presses every year that it is easy to conclude that there is no time for reading the classics, which are, in any case, old-fashioned and out of date.

This prejudice, for that is what it is, sometimes makes our critical judgments unbalanced, if not naive. It was surprising to find, in the special issue of the Journal of Modern History devoted to Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean,2 no mention of Mommsen’s Roman History, although it too dealt with the Mediterranean as a physical and human unit and discussed such questions as overlapping civilizations, the Jews as a separate civilization, and the extension of Mediterranean culture to the Western world, and although it included descriptions of religion, money, industry, agriculture, the institutions and economy of war, architecture, art and literature, public morality, crime, cuisine, and other aspects of Mediterranean life from Egypt to Spain that are as rich as, and perhaps more disciplined than, Braudel’s.3

Our first four honorary members were political historians, and all were concerned with the State: Stubbs with the genesis and growth of its institutions, Gardiner with its travails in time of civil war (but also with its foreign relations), Ranke with its nature and its role in the world of States, and Mommsen with its growth to world power and the effect that that had upon its culture and institutions. This preoccupation may be another reason for their relative neglect. In recent years political history has not been the liveliest of fields—ten years ago, Jacques Le Goff described it as “a corpse that has to be made to lie down”4—and diplomatic history in particular has failed to engage the attention of the profession, whose prevailing attitude has varied between condescension and antipathy. The chief reason for this aversion is probably a pervasive feeling that its methods are outmoded and that, in comparison with some of the newer fields of specialization, it is unlikely to yield anything very new in the way of results, although what Charles S. Maier has called “a bad conscience about the legitimacy of American power”5 since Vietnam has, no doubt, also made the study of the relationships and rivalries and conflicts of the Great Powers distasteful to many scholars.

The decline of the study of international relations is, in any case, palpable. It is reflected in the diminished attention given to political and diplomatic history in professional and scholarly journals (in 1970, when Daedalus planned an issue on “The Historian and the World of the Twentieth Century,”the decision to include an article on political and diplomatic history was very belated), in its modest representation in the programs of the annual meetings of this Association (for the years 1976–82 inclusive, the study of international relations very broadly conceived has averaged 5 sessions out of 128), and in its shrunken share in university history departments and curricula. The great luminaries of our profession are no longer diplomatic historians, as they were in the 1930s and 1940s and even the 1950s, and some departments have none at all.

This trend confronts us with a paradoxical situation. There have been, depending on how one counts, five wars in the Far East since 1945, six in the Middle East, one in the South Atlantic, and any number of bloody conflicts in Africa. The world we live in is just as filled as it was in the 1930s with combustible materials, and their potential for destroying us if we don’t bend our collective intelligence toward preventing annihilation is infinitely greater. And yet, in the face of this harsh truth, our interest in, and commitment to, the study of international relations has shown no sign of increasing.

It is hard to justify this or to believe that it does not represent a disservice to the lay audience from which we ultimately derive our legitimacy.6 That audience is interested in foreign affairs, as can be seen from many signs and portents, ranging from its continuing fascination with diplomatic memoirs to the nuclear freeze movement, and not excluding the revival, on some campuses, of international relations programs outside and at the expense of history departments. The general public has a right to feel that our work should bear some relevance to its concerns, to expect the historian to do what Friedrich Schiller, in his inaugural lecture atjena in 1789, said he should do—namely, “select from the stream of events those that exercise an essential, unmistakable, and easily comprehensible influence on the present shape of the world and the situation of the contemporary generation.”7 Unless we are prepared to ignore that feeling, and to close our ears to poet Roy Fuller’s warning that

The treason of clerks is when
They make a fetish of the pen,
Forget that art has duties to—
As well as to the “I”—the “You,”
And that its source must always be
What presses most, most constantly,

then we should perhaps think about directing more attention and a greater proportion of our resources to what has become—incongruously, given the state of the world—a neglected field.

Even during its decline, the historical study of international relations has grown in scope and sophistication. We are a long way from the time when the standard monograph in diplomatic history was literally copied out of the bound volumes of the Foreign Office papers in the Public Record Office, tricked out with Latin tags and formidably arcane footnotes, and set forth to grace the lower shelves of university libraries. In recent years, diplomatic history has embraced more general questions, like the moral and intellectual roots and assumptions of national policy, domestic factors as determinants of policy, interagency competition in decision making, public opinion and the way in which it is influenced by the media, comparative political systems and ideological convergence, and much else. This broad scope is commendable but, like many good things, has tended to become excessive and to lead to a kind of reductionism in which the State as an independent actor has disappeared and diplomatic history has been subsumed under social history. German historians, for example, inspired by Thomas S. Kuhn’s book on scientific revolutions,8 have for some time been arguing that traditional paradigms like the national state and the concepts of hegemony and balance are no longer satisfactory and that the great movements of modern politics must be regarded as functions of the process of modern industrialism.

Works of this sort, and the varied attempts to assert a Primat der Innenpolitik, have been less than satisfactory. The impressive amount of scholarship devoted to structural explanations of German foreign policy before 1914, for example, have succeeded at best in giving an undifferentiated and static account that fails to explain why particular decisions were made, rather than quite different ones, and why they had the results they had.9 Such things, it becomes ever clearer, cannot be explained without analysis of the international system and its dynamics. Or, for that matter, without reference to something that Ranke understood but that we have either forgotten or sought to depreciate—namely, the autonomy of the State and its tendency to go its own way and resist pressures upon it.

Ranke put this in terms that we would doubtless reject as mystagogical when he talked of States as individuals with their own lives, “progressing amid all the turmoil of the world ..., each in its own way, ... celestial bodies, in their cycles, their mutual gravitation, their systems!”10 But Eric A. Nordlinger has said very much the same thing in a recent book in which he has rejected the society-centered perspective that, he said, has “a pervasive grip upon citizens, journalists and scholars alike,”and has argued persuasively that even the democratic State “is not only frequently autonomous insofar as it regularly acts upon its preferences, but also markedly autonomous in doing so even when its preferences diverge from the demands of the most powerful groups in civil society.”11

How the State asserts its authority in foreign affairs has been described by Stanley Hoffmann in a passage that emphasizes the degree to which its sphere of action is composed not of determinable but of uncertain factors that it is the duty of statecraft to assess, shape, and exploit. Statecraft, Hoffmann has claimed,

emanates from a milieu—the domestic society—whose values, political and social institutions, experiences, and patterns of authority are never entirely fixed or coherent, never point only in one direction, and, while ruling out certain choices, leave a considerable margin for maneuver ...; and statecraft operates in a milieu—the international system—that has repeatedly been defined as an arena for competition for multiple stakes, with uncertain rules which the players ... hammer out by trial and error, and characterized by moves which, however cleverly calculated, are more like wagers than rational adaptations of means to ends.12

In this realm of ambiguity, the statesman must ask himself repeatedly, How much choice do I actually have? How compelling are the domestic and foreign considerations that I must bear in mind? How much freedom do I derive from, or to what extent am I limited by, the stability and effectiveness, or the unsteadiness and incompetence, of my political system compared with my opponent’s, our relative physical and moral resources, and the momentum of events? And he must at the same time remember that the game does not end when he makes up his mind to act or not to act, for once decisions are implemented they assume a life of their own, producing reactions and counterreactions among the other players and creating situations that may confound original expectations. The decision of the German government in 1890 not to renew its alliance with Russia was intended to give greater coherence to the German alliance system and to encourage the British to join it. It had quite the opposite effect, for Germany’s junior partners were tempted to raise the price of their collaboration, while the British, no longer having to worry about coordinated pressures from Berlin and Petersburg, became more aloof. Disconcerted, the German government, after what Ambassador Paul von Hatzfeldt called a period of “hysterical vacillation,”13 tried to regain the initiative by a policy of colonial blackmail, which elicited rather firmer responses than it had expected and further contributed to the deterioration of Germany’s position.

It is these aspects of international relations to which—if we can only moderate our absorptive interest in the domestic influences on policy—we should direct our attention: the story of how nations deal with each other, their actions in specific cases, the modalities they employ and the combinations they form in order to protect and advance their interests, their disputes and the ways in which they are or are not resolved, and the ways they get in and out of wars.

In a sadly neglected book, D. P. Heatley wrote in 1919that, before the diplomatic historian embarks upon his special research, he must try to acquire “the habit of mind that is required for appreciating questions of foreign policy,”and he went on to say, “We must never separate the study of policy ... from the appreciation of the instruments on the understanding and use of which success depends, and we must test the character of the instruments by the work they have to do.”14 Heatley thought it unlikely that historians could acquire all this from practical experience but suggested that they could at least profit from reading in the specialized literature on the art and technique of negotiation. This remains good advice. Indeed, the great handbooks on diplomacy from Wicquefort and Callières to Martens and Satow are an indispensable source for the writer on international relations, not merely for technical knowledge but for a sense of the continuity of problems in foreign affairs, the limitations set on policy, and the very feel of the diplomatic process.15 The neglect of this literature has contributed to the foreshortening and one-dimensionality of much recent diplomatic history.16

The contemporaneity of these works is startling. Consider the remarkable memoirs of the Flemish soldier-diplomat Philippe de Commynes, who served both Charles the Bold of Burgundy and Louis XI of France, accompanied Charles VIII during his invasion of Italy in 1495, and went on two missions to Venice to try to forestall the formation of the Sainte Ligue that turned that adventure into a fiasco. Commynes, though not a very successful diplomat, was observant, and his memoirs are filled with incisive, if melancholy, reflections on the politics of his day and the art of diplomacy that are not without a piquant modern relevance, like his repeated insistence upon the predictably disastrous effects of summit conferences.17 Particularly striking is his conviction that the anarchic individualism of Europe’s rulers, imperfectly restrained by the fear of God’s wrath, might be curbed (and this is suggested rather than said) if men built upon the rudimentary elements of equilibrium that the state system provided. These he described, quaintly enough, by saying that God had given to every nation

quelque aquillon. Car au royaume de France a donné pour opposite les Angloys; aux Angloys a donné les Escossoys; au royaume d’Espaigne Portugal. Il pourroit donques sembler que ces divisions fussent necessaires pour le monde et que ces esquillons et choses opposites ... sont necessaires ... et principallement pour la bestialité de plusieurs princes et aussi pour la mauvaistié d’autres qui ont sens assez et experience, mais ilz en veulent mal user.18

For the political mores of his time, Commynes had a deep aversion, and he saw nothing glorious in the age’s continuous warfare, regarding the new weaponry, the artillery that Charles VIII brought into Italy, with the same repugnance as his contemporary Ludovico Ariosto, who called it a

hellish instrument
the worst device, in all the years
of the inventiveness of humankind,
which e’er imagined was by evil mind.19

More clearly than any of his contemporaries, Commynes realized what was at stake in the unremitting competition of the European states. He saw that these rivals were dependent upon each other whether they liked it or not (“Car nulle mutation ne peult estre en ung royaulme qui ne soit douloureuse pour la pluspart; et combien que aulcuns y gaignent, encore il y eu a cent foiz pluz qui y perdent”);20 he feared that their tendency toward “bestiality”would destroy them all if it continued to be uncontained.

These concerns are still our concerns, and the attempts, since Commynes’s time, to devise means to restrain international violence and check the hegemonial ambition of single powers have been among the great themes of modern diplomatic history. Since A. H. L. Heeren’s History of the Political System of Europe appeared in 1809 and Ranke’s essay The Great Powers in 1833,21 efforts to devise viable international systems have intrigued the historical imagination, and in this century a long line of distinguished practitioners—one thinks of Webster, Temperley, and Sumner, of Renouvin, Woodward, Taylor, and Medlicott, of Chabod, Langer, and Sontag—have written of the emergence and elaboration of the nineteenth-century system, its working assumptions and operating rules, its mutations and transformations, and its eventual collapse. The time has now come to extend that investigation to the attempts at system-building in our own time, to the effects of the expansion of the international community and the breakdown of its ideological homogeneity, to bipolar and tripolar systems, to systems that exist on the basis not of agreement but of tacitly defined disagreement (the Cold War, for example, as a political system), and to the changed relationship between force and statecraft, which has diminished the reliability of the former as an instrument of the latter and led to the paradoxical situation that military force is now useful only as long as it is not used.22

Even the best of the older diplomatic histories tended to be descriptive rather than analytical, particularly when dealing with the modalities that supported systems, like alliances, the crises that threatened them, and even the perennial process of negotiation. Roger V. Dingman has pointed out with respect to alliances that for any very extensive discussion of the unstable combinations of passion and reason and fear that inspire and sustain them and of the way they actually work, one must return to Thucydides, particularly to his discussion of the debate between Corcyra and Corinth over the former’s request for an alliance with Athens and his account of the unhappy course of the alliance between Athens and Mytilene.23 Modern historians have often been imprecise in their terminology, making no distinction between alliances, alignments, ententes, and coalitions and—unlike Thucydides—generally regarding alliances from a legal or operational point of view rather than seeing them as quasi-organisms, composed of complex linkages and existing in a multilayered environment that itself changes over time. Dingman has suggested that diplomatic history would profit from a more analytical and differentiated approach that would pay attention to the nature of the binding elements between partners (whether the alliance is sustained by ties between individuals, political agencies or military services, private agencies, or peoples), to the effect of changes of leadership (like the fundamental change in Anglo-American relations when John Foster Dulles succeeded Dean Acheson as secretary of state), and to the inner dynamics of change that operate in long-term alliances and confront the alliance managers periodically with the necessity of making adjustments, perhaps in purpose and structure, if the alliance is to retain its vitality.24 This seems reasonable enough. Indeed, it cannot help but be instructive to restudy the history of older alliances in the light of the life cycle of the NATO alliance, which itself validates the usefulness of Dingman’s analytical scheme.

Much of what has been said of alliances may also be applied to crises, the purple passages of diplomatic history, exciting recent examples of which await the pen of the historian. The fact that, for the post-1945 period, all of the documents are not available and that the Soviet diplomatic records are probably going to remain so should not discourage historians from tackling these subjects, and Robert M. Slusser, in his study of the Berlin crisis of 1961, has shown what can be accomplished by the artful use of memoirs, official releases, and press coverage.25

The Slusser study suggests the need for an investigation of the broader complex of which the Berlin crisis was a part—the whole sequence of events that began with the Khrushchev ultimatum on Berlin in November 1958 and ended with the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.26 In retrospect, this appears as a series of linked crises of mounting intensity, which were generated, on the one hand, by Soviet concern over unrest in the satellite states and ideological sniping from Peking and, on the other, by changing Soviet perceptions of American leadership; and its final resolution proved to be the turning point from the Cold War to the detente period, reminding us that the Chinese character for crisis also means opportunity.27 It is possible that crises, like alliances, should be regarded metaphorically as organisms whose nature changes in response to mutations in the international environment and that pass through a perhaps predictable sequence of transitions—that there is, in fact, an anatomy of crisis that it would be useful, for general purposes of historical analysis, to discover. It is clear, moreover, that the catalytic effects of crisis deserve more systematic attention than they have received.

As for negotiation, it is perhaps enough to say that, although the basic principles of bargaining and compromise are much what they were in the classical age of diplomacy,28 its forms and procedures have been modified as a result of the increased heterogeneity and expansion of the international community and of the revolution in communications, the increased influence of public opinion, and even the nature of military power in our time. Diplomatic historians have normally thought of negotiation as the province of the individual statesman, generally representing a Great Power, a Kaunitz or a Castlereagh, guided by the principles of Slaatsrdson and by a jealous regard for his country’s interests, who masters the complexities of the issues at stake, confounds his rivals by his dialectical brilliance, and finally brings them to his way of thinking. Pace Henry Kissinger, this model fits few of the negotiating situations of our day. In the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), for example, the chief of the U.S. delegation did not play a central role in developing or even have any influence on the American negotiating positions, which were prepared in Washington, in the National Security Council and the Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, and the Treasury, which intermittently sent experts to advise the delegation. Before the conference was over, its sessions had been attended by a number of congressmen, and it was being examined by several congressional subcommittees. This bureaucratization of the negotiating process left little room for diplomatic virtuosity or, for that matter, since the recommendations of the various agencies were not always perfectly coordinated, for a clear conception of the national interest.

Notable also at the CSCE was the heightened role of the lesser powers, not only in pressing successfully for the conference (against the wishes, in the first instance, of the U.S. government) but in sharing on equal terms in all decisions. In a way that would have been considered unthinkable either at Vienna in 1814–15 or at Paris in 1919, all thirty-five delegations participated in the negotiation of all parts of what became the Helsinki Agreement of 1975, and all decisions were made by consensus. This process of reaching accord may indicate that the reliance of the superpowers upon arsenals of nuclear weapons that threaten the whole community has increased the determination of the lesser powers to resist superpower dictation and insist upon the right to be consulted on all decisions that may affect peace or war, and that this new resolve may have profound effects on diplomacy in other contexts.29 In any event, it is clear, from the Middle East crisis of 1973 and the Lebanon crisis of 1982, that the diplomatic historian is going to have to be prepared to deal with increasingly complicated forms of negotiation.

In dealing with these and other problems of recent diplomacy, we may gain in analytical sophistication if we overcome our congenital distrust of theory and our insistence upon the uniqueness of the historical event. Thucydides once wrote of “events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future”;30 and in this spirit some of our colleagues in political science have reminded us that one can, after all, on the basis of similarity, treat unique cases as members of a class or type of phenomenon and, by appropriate methods of analysis, discover correlations among different variables that may have causal significance or, at the very least, serve as indicators of predictive value.31 By the use of case studies and what has been called the method of structured focused comparison, Alexander L. George and Richard Smoke have described the various ways in which deterrence has been used in U.S. foreign policy and the combinations of technique and circumstance that have made for success or failure in its employment, elaborating in the course of their analysis a theory of deterrence;32 and there is no good reason why this method should not be applied to the study of a whole range of diplomatic modalities and issues.

This enterprise can best be conducted by means of a collaboration between disciplines, to the benefit of both. Political scientists would profit from the fidelity to milieu et moment that historians would bring to case studies; they, in turn, might learn from the analytical techniques employed by their partners some new questions to ask in their individual research and some new ways to test the validity of their hypotheses. And, at the very least, their comparative sense would be quickened.

The future historian of the Nixon-Kissinger detente policy, for example, will certainly be struck by Kissinger’s explanation of its failure. In the second volume of his memoirs, he argued that, since “détente is the mitigation of conflict among adversaries, not the cultivation of friendship,”it was particularly hard for Americans to understand. “The American perception of international affairs,”he wrote, “has traditionally been Manichean. Relations among states are either peaceful or warlike—there is no comfortable in-between.”Kissinger hoped to change this: “We in the Nixon Administration felt that our challenge was to educate the American people in the requirements of the balance of power,”but Watergate made this impossible.33

There is, of course, some truth in Kissinger’s position. But, if one takes the trouble to study the terminology of the older diplomacy, one discovers that détente was generally understood to mean only the first stage in the process of mitigation of conflict. It was no more than an easing of tension, which might be temporary or might, in the right circumstances, lead to a rapprochement between the powers in question. That, in turn, might or might not change their relationship into an entente, which might finally, if all went well, eventuate in a process of appeasement to remove salient differences between them, or even in an alliance. These terms were carefully differentiated and regarded as distinct stages in a difficult process, and transition from one to another was dependent upon clearly understood conditions and changes of climate.34

A careful comparative analysis of the origins of the Anglo-French entente of 1904 and its subsequent development into an alliance, the appeasement policy of Neville Chamberlain, the Ostpolitik of Willy Brandt, and the Nixon-Kissinger detente policy indicates that both Chamberlain and Kissinger (the former certainly more rashly than the latter) anticipated the end result of what should have been a laborious process, without—and this contrasts with the measured approach of the British and French governments at the beginning of the century and of Willy Brandt when he turned east in 1970—proper attention to antecedent conditions. This suggests that the ultimate failure of the Kissinger policy of detente may have been due less to the reasons that he has adduced than to a not unjustified perception in this country that the Soviets were being given rewards that they had not earned, because there was no persuasive evidence that they had modified their behavior, although that was the point of the exercise.35

Despite the advantages that collaboration with the political scientists can bring to the diplomatic historian, they should not, of course, be his principal concern. He has more than enough work of his own to do; not only is the history of the period since 1945 ripe for investigation, as John Lewis Gaddis has just shown in his masterful and comprehensive account of the evolution of containment policy from Kennan to Carter,36 but many subjects that one might have thought to be finished and filed away are in reality waiting to be reawakened to new life by insight and imagination and a sense of relevance. These attributes inform Samuel R. Williamson’s meticulous accountof the origins of the Anglo-French alliance of 191437 and Paul Kennedy’s study of the rise of Anglo-German antagonism in the last part of the nineteenth century, which combines incisive analysis of the changing context of international relations with a powerful narrative account of the role of individuals and elites in the decision-making process.38 Works like these remind us that history is something more than a social science, intent upon structures and broad lines of development, that it must, as Ernst Schulin has written, “place an extraordinarily high valuation on the significance of the particular momentary situation, the concrete desires and decisions of individual persons, the surprising ‘chance’events. No other discipline can take from it the task of balancing these great factors. It is precisely for this purpose that it is there.”39

There remains, particularly if we wish to regain our credit with the lay audience, the question of style, which has, unfortunately, been one of the chief casualties of the increasing specialization of our discipline. Some time ago, when the Council was discussing the desirability of founding a popular journal of history, it received a memorandum suggesting that it might be difficult to find writers for it, since there were now “few historians ... who [could] speak to anybody except in the jargon of their specialty.”The writer continued, “The profession must be taught to divest itself of the literature of pedantry, obscurity and boredom and to realize that ... its economic survival may well depend upon an ability to communicate with those who support, with their tuition and endowments, our centers of scholarly research.”

If there is any merit in this, we should be well advised to take as models for emulation our first four honorary members. Stubbs wrote in a clear and vigorous prose that at times rises to eloquence. Gardiner’s style, if not graceful, is never prolix; he had the gift of sympathy and understanding when judging the virtues and the weaknesses of complicated persons like Strafford and Cromwell, and his accounts of military and naval warfare are clear and often stirring. Ranke’s History of the Popes, which contains some of his most penetrating observations on foreign affairs, has been described as “not only a great achievement of historical research but a perfect work of art.”40 And Mommsen’s Roman History, which fulfilled its author’s desire “to make the ancients step out of their fantastic cothurnus and bring them into the real world for the reading public,”41 accomplished this objective without falsification or oversimplification; Mommsen indeed exemplified the qualities that he most admired in Polybius: “Truthfulness was second nature to him; ... his eye was ever directed to the actual course of events; ... [and] the manner of telling was a model of comprehension, simplicity, and clarity.”42

It was an unknown Roman, one of Mommsen’s anonymous characters, who first uttered the words that in time became proverbial, Stilus virum arguit (“The style proclaims the man”). The saying is no less true when amended to read, Stilus rerum scriptorem arguit (“The style proclaims the historian”). It is to be hoped that the future historians of international relations, who will have so many things to remember and think about, will not be unmindful of this maxim.

Gordon A. Craig (November 13, 1913–October 30, 2005) was J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Stanford. He was a member of the German Federal Republic's Orden Pour le Merite fur Wissenschaften und Kunste, and winner of the first Benjamin Franklin-Wilhelm von Humboldt Prize of the German-American Academic Council (1999).

Notes

1. See H. Stuart Hughes, “Contemporary Historiography: Progress, Paradigms, and the Regression toward Positivism,”in Gabriel A. Almond et al., eds., Progress and Its Discontents (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982), 240–48. On some negative effects of reliance on such techniques, see Konrad Repgen, “Methoden- oder Richtungskampfe in der cleutschen Geschichtswissenschaft,”Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, no. 10 (1979): 603.

2. “History with a French Accent,” Journal of Modern History, 44 (1972): 447–539.

3. Mommsen, Römische Geschichte (1854–56, 1885), 8 vols. (reprint edn., Munich, 1976), esp. 1: 466–69, 2: 321, 356–89, 3: 275–315, 4: 291, 5: 178–217, 232–34, 6: 158–79, 230–94, and 7: 188–248.

4. Goff, “Is Politics Still the Backbone of History?”in Felix Gilbert and Stephen R. Graubard, eds., Historical Studies Today (New York, 1972), 348.

5. Maier, “Marking Time: The Historiography of International Relations,”in Michael Kammen, ed., The Past before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States (Ithaca, N.Y., 1980), 356.

6. H. R. Trevor-Roper, History: Professional and Lay, Inaugural Lecture Delivered on November 12, 1957 (Oxford, 1957).

7. Schiller, “Was heisst und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universaigeschichte?”in Schillers Werke, 6 (Munich, 1912): 270.

8. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1962).

9. On such structural explanations, see Klaus Hildebrand, “Geschichte oder ‘Gesellschaftsgeschichte’: Die Notwendigkeit einer politischen Geschichtsschreibung der internationalen Beziehungen,”Historische Zeitschrift, 223 (1976): 328–57; and Paul Kennedy, “The Kaiser and German Weltpolitik: Reflections on Wilhelm II’s Place in the Making of German Foreign Policy,”in John C. G. Röhl and Nicolaus Sombart, eds., Kaiser Wilhelm II: New Interpretations (Cambridge, 1982), 143–48.

10. Ranke, “A Dialogue on Politics”(1836), in Theodore H. Von Lane, Leopold van Ranke: The Formative Years (Princeton, 1950), 168, 180.

11. Nordlinger, On the Autonomy of the Democratic State (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 1, 7, 203–19.

12. Hoffmann, Gulliver’s Troubles: or, The Setting of American Foreign Policy (New York, 1968), xvi.

13. Hermann von Eckardstein, Lebenserinnerungen und politische Denkunirdigheiten, 2 (Leipzig, 1920): 161.

14. Heatley, Diplomacy and the Study of International Relations (Oxford, 1919), 86–87, 4–5.

15. Wicquefort, L’Ambassadeur et ses fonctions par Monsieur de Wicquefart, Conseiller aux Conseils d’Estat et Privé du Duc de Brunsvic et Luneburg Zelle, etc. (Cologne, 1690); Callières, On the Manner of Negotiating with Princes by Monsieur de Callières (1716), trans. A. F. Whyte (1919; reprint edn., South Bend, Ind., 1963); Charles de Martens, Le Guide diplomatique: Précis des droits et des fonctions des agents diplomatiques et consulaires, ed. M. F. H. Geffcken, 2 vols. in 3 (Leipzig, 1866); and Ernest Satow, A Guide to Diplomatic Practice, 2 vols. (London, 1917).

16. Gordon > A. Craig, “On the Nature of Diplomatic History: The Relevance of Some Old Books,”in Paul Gordon Lauren, ed., Diplomacy: New Approaches in History, Theory, and Policy (New York, 1979), 21–42.

17. Commynes, Mémoires, ed. Joseph Calmette, 3 vols. (Paris, 1924), 1: 87, 135, 138–39, 14 1.

18. Ibid., 2: 208, 211.

19. Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, trans. Barbara Reynolds, 1 (Baltimore, 1975): 350–51.

20. Commynes, Mémoires, 3: 299–300. Compare Callieres: “No considerable change can take place in any one [of the states of Europe] without affecting the condition, or disturbing the peace, of all the others”; On the Manner of Negotiating with Princes, 11.

21. Heeren, Handbuch der Geschichte des europäischen System und seinen Kolonien (Göttingen, 1809). For a translation of Ranke’s Die Grossen Mächte, see Laue, Leopold von Ranke: The Formative Years, 181–218.

22. Richard J. Barnet, “The Search for National Security,”New Yorker, April 27, 1981, esp. pp. 105–34.

23. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (Baltimore, 1972), esp. 54–67, 197–200.

24. Dingman, “Theories of, and Approaches to, Alliance Politics,”in Lauren, Dipomacy: New Approaches, 245–66.

25. Slusser, The Berlin Crisis of 1961 (Baltimore, 1973).

26. Slusser himself has made a start on this: “The Berlin Crises of 1958–59 and 1961,”in Barry M. Blechman and Stephen S. Kaplan, eds., Force without War: The U.S. Armed Forces as a Political Instrument (Washington, 1978), 343–439, which is, however, largely a rather speculative account of Soviet policy that is very sparse on the policies of other powers. Also see Jack M. Schick, The Berlin Crisis, 1958–1962 (Philadelphia, 1971), an excellent chronological account but analytically cautious.

27. Gordon A. Craig and Alexander L. George, Force and Statecraft: Diplomatic Problem of Our Time (New York, 1983).

28. See Fred C. Iklé, How Nations Negotiate (New York, 1964).

29. On the CSCE and its consequences, see Craig and George, Force and Statecraft, 166–71.

30. Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, 48.

31. Alexander L. George, “Case Studies and Theory Development: The Method of Structured Focused Comparison,”in Lauren, Diplomacy: New Approaches, 43–68.

32. George > and Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice (New York, 1974).

33. Henry L. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston, 1982), 50, 753, 980–85.

34. See Lord Haldane’s distinction, in conversation with Paul Cambon in 1912, between detente and entente, in G. P. Gooch and H. W. Temperley, eds., British Docunwnts an the Origins of the War, 6 (London, 1930): no. 506 p. 681.

35. Craig and George, Force and Statecraft, chaps. 10, 17.

36. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York, 1982).

37. Williamson, The Politics of Grand Strategy: Britain and France Prepare for War, 1904–1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1969).

38. Kennedy, The Rise of Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860–1914 (London, 1980).

39. Schulin, “Die Frage nach der Zukunft,”in G. Schulz, ed., Geschichte heute. Positionen, Tendenzen, und Probleme (Göttingen, 1973), 133.

40. G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (new impression, London, 1935), 87.

41. Alfred Heuss, Theodor Mommsen und das 19. Jahrhundert (Kiel, 1956), 64.

42. Mommsen, Römische Geschtchte, 3: 465.