Diplomatic History and Policy History: Finding Common Ground

It is difficult to imagine two fields of scholarly inquiry with so much in common and yet so little interaction as diplomatic and policy history. Policy, policy process, policymakers, policy origins, policy intentions, policy consequences—those terms and ones of a similar stripe roll just as easily off the tongues and word processors of diplomatic historians as of self-described policy historians. Moreover, the questions asked and the methods employed by the two groups of scholars bear a striking resemblance. Both fields focus perforce on the state and state-centered actors, concern themselves with elite-level decision making, interrogate fundamental issues of power within societies, and concentrate overwhelmingly on the twentieth century to the relative neglect of earlier periods. Each field occupies as well an embattled position within the larger historical profession, where social and cultural history have predominated since the 1960s.

One might expect, under the circumstances, strong bonds to be forged and fruitful cross-fertilization to develop between these two fields. Instead, a rather puzzling, if artificial, division has kept them separated. Diplomatic historians, so eager of late to expand the boundaries of their field to encompass some of the preoccupations of social and cultural history, have shown little inclination to explore the more obvious common turf on which they and their colleagues in policy history stand. Plainly, the older, more established field of historical scholarship has not rushed to embrace the newer field. Yet neither have policy historians shown much inclination to enter into a sustained dialogue, or explore shared interests, with specialists in foreign policy.

The landmark Harvard University conference of November 1978, which, as Julian Zelizer has recorded, "marked the first 'self-conscious discussion' of policy history as a distinct subfield of either history or the policy sciences," held out the promise of fruitful interchange among and collaboration between scholars of foreign and domestic policy. Indeed, the consensus reached by participants at that founding meeting certainly appeared to fold both dimensions of policy within the new field's boundaries. It held that "policy historians should define themselves around a common set of issues, including the distinction between the public and private realms, the role of professionals in policymaking, the role of crisis in policy development, how changes in process influence policy, the impact of institutional structure on policies, the relations between government and nongovernmental actors, the changing definition of policy over time, and the relations of policies to 'contemporaneous' intellectual assumptions."¹ Each of those issues had, of course, long been—and indeed remain—major areas of analysis within diplomatic history, as the participants surely recognized. The active involvement at that gathering of Ernest May, the distinguished historian of U.S. foreign relations, combined with the signal importance for the policy history field of his co-authored book, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers (1986), offered the promise of a genuine intellectual convergence between diplomatic and policy history.²

As readers of the Journal of Policy History are doubtless well aware, however, there has been no such convergence. Instead, policy history has evolved over the past quarter-century in such a manner that it has become essentially synonymous with the study of domestic policy. Specialists in the field write about welfare, Social Security, and education; about civil rights, health care, and housing; about environmental issues, tax and fiscal policies, and about a host of other subjects that mostly fall within the purview of federal- and state-level policy-making organs. Curiously, foreign policy and national security/defense matters have for all practical purposes remained outside the field's scope. Yet those have absorbed the lion's share of the U.S. federal budget for more than sixty years now, with U.S. defense spending currently amounting to 40 percent of the world's total and projected to reach a staggering $451 billion in 2007.³ Diplomatic historians investigate the latter realms, policy historians the former—with disappointingly little overlap. In practice, a de facto division of labor has characterized policy-oriented scholarship that echoes the British Government's separation of responsibilities between its aptly named Home...