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The international and the limits of history
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 September 2015
Abstract
This article addresses the relationship between history and the international. Starting from the ‘history controversy’ in IR in the 1980s and 1990s, it shows that that debate hinged on the political import of history as a form of knowledge. This political meaning, to which agency and freedom were central, was challenged through the theorisation in IR of the problematic relationship of the international, as a fragmented political form, to historical time: the spatial inside–outside division was understood as carrying a corresponding temporal and historical division, between progress and repetition. To explain why history carried this political significance, the article explores the connection of historical consciousness to sovereignty and political subjectivity. It shows that history as a distinctively modern form of relation to ‘the past’ is inseparable from the rise of modern sovereign authority and its accompanying political subject and idea of freedom: sovereignty’s reformulation of political space went along with a refashioning of the character of historical time. However, history’s conceptual attachment to sovereignty also ties it to the fragmented form of the international. History thus finds its limits in the international and IR becomes a site for the critique of the relationship between history, political form, and subjectivity.
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References
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85 The ‘break’ with the past discussed here cannot be dated punctually, any more than can the coming into being of the sovereign state and the states-system, or the advent of capitalism. The work of early-modern humanists, stressed by Fasolt, can be placed at the beginning of a long process, the importance of Montesquieu’s relational conception, to which Schiffman draws attention, perhaps just after the mid-point, and the French Revolution, central to the accounts of both Koselleck and Hartog, at the end, as the definitive culmination that announced completed rupture.
86 Ibid. The basic principle that a sovereign authority (for instance, the UK parliament) cannot be bound by the actions of its predecessors illustrates how freedom in time is fundamental to sovereignty.
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