Historians across Borders: Writing American History in a Global Age

6. American Foreign Relations in European Perspectives: Geopolitics and the Writing of History

118 Chapter 6 American Foreign Relations in European Perspectives Geopolitics and the Writing of History hans krabbendam, pauline peretz, mario del pero, and helle porsdam Although the United States and Europe have no common borders, they have always shared a sense of historical proximity—which has been “translated,” at one point or another, into wars and alliances, migrations, intellectual exchanges, and trade. Yet more and more, Europe is disappearing from the picture, losing relevance and centrality in the American representation of the world. Americans are more interested, geopolitically and academically, in other regions, such as Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia. What this means is that the geopolitical background from which European scholars are writing is deeply asymmetrical: since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, Europe has become less relevant for the United States, and, with a few exceptions, when it comes into play at all, it is most often as one collective entity, the European Union. It could be said that Europe—or what is viewed as Europe—is expanding, as the memberships of bodies such as the European Union and the Council of Europe continue to grow. The identity and specificity of individual European states tend to disappear in the American eye. At the same time, the United States remains as relevant as ever to Europeans. In this chapter, we shall look at how this evolving geopolitical condition and our position in both the European and American academic fields translate into our writing about American foreign relations and America ’s role in the world. We argue that location plays differently in these fields than in other, related fields of American history, because American Foreign Relations | 119 our evolving geopolitical position cannot but inform our objects of investigation and our interpretations. Foreign relations are broadly conceived and potentially comprise all kinds of connections that the United States maintains with rest of the world, including trade, financial relationships, migrations, and cultural transmissions. Our main focus here, however, is on diplomatic history in the twentieth century, including its cultural dimensions, although we will draw some parallels with migration studies in the modern period, a field that European scholars interested in North America have traditionally privileged. Originally, most of the scholarship that European historians produced on both diplomacy and migrations focused on transatlantic connections and bilateral relations. Whereas European historians of migrations needed to contribute to U.S. history and their own national history, those invested in diplomatic history belonged to the distinct field of international relations and hardly considered themselves historians of the United States. Nevertheless, over the past twenty years, in the context of the internationalization of Western academia, many European diplomatic historians have increasingly considered themselves specialists in American history, developing expertise in U.S. foreign policy. They have moved from being regarded as I.R. scholars to being seen as local authorities on the United States, as they have been offering an alternative view of the American role in the world and challenging the United States’ conception of its power, both soft and hard. While most American historians deal with U.S. power as projection, European historians argue for it as relation and focus more extensively on its cultural dimensions. This approach has made possible a better understanding of European agency in areas where U.S. authority had often seemed dominant. At the same time, the interest of a growing number of European historians is no longer captured by the transatlantic relationship but instead piqued by the more international set of relationships of which both the United States and Europe are part. In a sense, there has been a degree of convergence between U.S. and European historiography, as European scholars have turned from bilateral connections to more comprehensive transnational perspectives even while pursuing the role of their own country or continent. A corresponding shift can be discerned in migration studies, as hemispheric and global perspectives have tended to supplant the bilateral focus. European migration was more than a collection of national migrations. 120 | Chapter 6 Hence, these fields tend to promote a greater awareness of national or European identity among their practitioners. A Swedish scholar studying U.S.-Swedish relations can hardly avoid approaching the topic from the Swedish viewpoint, especially if using Swedish archival materials ; a European foreign relations expert examining the relative roles of the United States and Europe in ending the Cold War will...