History, Theory, and Common Ground

Common Ground 1 Sigmund Freud once pointed out that ”it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other.” He called this ”the narcissism of minor differences ,” explaining it as ”a convenient and relatively harmless satisfaction of the inclination to aggression, by means of which cohesion between the members of the community is made easier.”’ Freud had nationalism in mind, of course, not the long and uneasy relationship between theorists and historians of world politics. But shoes may fit several pairs of feet. Are we academic nationalists? We have been trained since graduate school to defend our turf against assaults from deans, dilettantes, and adjacent disciplines . We organize our journals, scholarly organizations, and university departments within precisely demarcated boundaries. We gesture vaguely in the direction of interdisciplinary cooperation, rather in the way sovereign states put in polite appearances at the United Nations; reality, however, falls far short of what we routinely promise. And we have been known, from time to time, to construct the intellectual equivalent of fortified trenches from which we fire artillery back and forth, dodging shrapnel even as we sink ever more deeply into mutual incomprehension. The world is full of what seem to be ancient patterns of behavior that are in fact relatively recent: real-world nationalism is one of them.* Another, as it happens, is disciplinary professionalization:a century ago historians and politicalscientistshad onlybegun to think of themselvesas distinct comrn~nities.~ Might there be a connection? Could we have allowed a “narcissism of minor differences,” over the past several decades, to Balkanize our minds? john Lewis Gaddis has been Distinguished Professor of History in the Contemporary History Institute at Ohio University,and in the fall of 19977uill become Robert Lovett Professor of History at Yale University. His latest book is We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 1. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, James Strachey, trans. and ed. (New York: Norton, 1961),p. 72. 2. On nationalism, see E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 2780: Programme, Myth, and Reality (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990), and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991). 3. Dorothy Ross, in The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991),pp. 257-300, discusses how historians and political scientists came to regard themselves as distinct communities. Znternational Security, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Summer 1997), pp. 75-85 0 1997 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 75 International Security 22:l I 76 Laboratory versus Thought Experiments It might help, in thinking about this possibility, to set aside disciplinary boundaries for a moment and consider a simple question: can we, in investigating phenomena, replicate phenomena? Certain fields do this all the time. They rely upon controlled reproducible experimentation; they are able to re-run sequences of events, varying conditions in such a way as to establish causes, correlations, and consequences. Mathematicians recalculate pi to millions of decimal places with absolute confidence that its basic value will remain what it has been for thousands of years. Physics and chemistry are only slightly less reliable, for although investigators cannot always be sure what is happening at subatomic levels, they do get similar results when they perform experiments under similar conditions, and they probably always will. Verification, within these disciplines, repeats actual processes. Time and space are compressed and manipulated; history itself is in effect re-run. But not all scienceswork this way. In astronomy, geology, and paleontology, phenomena rarely fit within computers or laboratories; the time required to see results can exceed the life spans of those who seek them.4These disciplines depend instead upon thought experiments: practitioners re-run in their minds what their petri dishes, centrifuges, and electron microscopes cannot manage. They then look for evidence suggesting which of these mental exercisescomes closest to explaining their real-time observations. Reproducibility exists only as a consensus that such correspondences seem plausible. The only way we can re-run this kind of history...