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HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS
HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS

FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD TO THE 21ST

CENTURY

2nd Edition

Howard LeRoy Malchow

CONTENTS

List of Figures
Preface to the First Edition
Preface to the Second Edition

Introduction: History and the Discipline(s) of International

Relations
History
Political Science
IR
Recommended readings

Part I IR: The History of a Discipline

1 The Discipline of IR from the First World War to the

Early Cold War
The “great debates” tradition
The foundation years
Idealism, Realism, and a First Great Debate?
An American discipline defined: Morgenthau and the uses of
history
Recommended readings

2 After Morgenthau: Scientific Realism and Its Critics

IR, scientism, and a bipolar world
From the Cuban missile crisis to a “managed” Cold War
The end of the Cold War
 Radical perspectives and critiques
Recommended readings

3 The Other Social Sciences and the State

Sociology and Anthropology
Economics and political economy
Psychology
Recommended readings

Part II IR and International History

4 The Ancient World

States, empires, and the origins of diplomacy in the ancient Near
East
Father of the discipline? The Greeks, the Polis, and Thucydides
After the fifth-century Greeks: From Alexander to the Romans
The ancient world and IR schools of thought
The Lessons of Late Antiquity?
Recommended readings

5 IR’s Middle Ages

Universal empire, universal church, and feudalism: The medieval
problematic in Europe
Diplomacy in the Middle Ages
The early medieval Muslim world
The Crusades
The later medieval, early modern Muslim world
Difference
Recommended readings

6 Machiavelli, the Italian City-State, and The Prince

Historicizing Machiavelli
Machiavelli’s The Prince, in his time
And in ours: A work “for all time”?
Recommended readings
7 The Sovereign State and the “Westphalian System” in
Early Modern Europe
The European territorial state before Westphalia
Westphalia in IR
Ultima Ratio Regum: War, balance of power, and international law
in ancien regime Europe
Recommended readings

8 Nation, State, and Empire in the Long Nineteenth

Century
The European system restored and maintained
The system challenged and remade
International Relations in Europe and abroad after 1870
The coming of the Great War
Recommended readings

9 The Failure of Diplomacy, New and Old, and the End of

European Hegemony
War and peace
The Twenty Years’ Crisis
The Second World War and “the provincializing of Europe”
The postwar settlement
Recommended readings

10 Cold War and Post-Cold War

The rhetoric of narration
More than metaphor, but what kind of reality?
The end of the Cold War
Post-Cold War
Recommended readings

Part III Contemporary IR and the Uses of History

11 Civilizations, Religion, and a Darker Globalization:

Sovereignty, World Orders, and Western Decline in
Twenty-First-Century IR
 The West versus the rest?
Religion and the new “post-secularity”
Within and beyond the historical and future state: The limits of
sovereignty
Globalization and global governance: International organizations
(IOs) and liberal internationalism/institutionalism in twenty-
first-century IR
BRICS in IR
Recommended readings

12 The Uncertain Future of Liberal Theory and of Grand

Theory in Twenty-First-Century IR
Global human rights
The democratic peace
The end of International Relations Theory?
Recommended readings

Afterword: Description, Prediction, Policy—Does History

Matter?
Whither?
Recommended readings

Appendix A: Glossary of Terms

Appendix B: Works Cited in Text
Appendix C: Timeline
Index
FIGURES

I.1 Edward Hallett Carr. National Portrait Gallery, London; photo

Eliot and Fry
1.1 Hans Joachim Morgenthau. National Portrait Gallery,
Washington DC; S/NPG.82.64; photo Philippe Halsman
4.1 Thucydides’ Greece, map of the Athenian Empire
4.2 Map of Alexandrian successor states
4.3 Map of warring states and Qin China, third century BC
4.4 Map of late-antiquity Roman Empire
5.1 Map of the Spread of Islam, 750
5.2 Map of late Byzantium and the Crusades, eleventh to
thirteenth centuries
6.1 Machiavelli’s Italy
7.1 Europe at the end of the Thirty Years’ War
7.2 The rise of Prussia
8.1 Europe and the Congress of Vienna
9.1 Postwar settlements, 1919–23
10.1 A bipolar world
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

I must confess at the outset that previously my writing interests

have been largely those of a historian of domestic, rather than
international, relations, and of cultural and social, rather than
political, phenomena; some IR scholars may regard that distance
and late entry as a liability, and this book as a kind of impertinence.
I of course prefer to think that it may offer the advantage of an
outsider’s perspective.
“Outsider” is not quite accurate. This text has been closely
informed by my experience teaching an undergraduate introduction
to International Relations (IR). Moreover, my previous work and
teaching profited greatly from transnational, postcolonial approaches
to the formation of domestic identities, ideas, and practices,
approaches that emphasize transnational hybridity and circularity.
When some years ago I turned, for a research project, to the
familiar subject of the Anglo-American special relationship, a topic
generally approached as essentially one of politics and foreign policy
and of the clubby relationship of political elites, what seemed to be
missing often was the larger and deeper cultural context in which
American and British political affairs were enmeshed. Moreover, in a
sense the discipline of IR itself, in its origins and discourse, is a
product of this special relationship; that is, it has a significantly
Anglo-American, transatlantic character.
This exploration has led to two general conclusions about what a
social science of IR might be or ought to be. The first is,
unremarkably, that the study of politics generally, including the
politics of foreign affairs, can almost always profit from a more
serious engagement with social and cultural contexts—a
commonplace in the discipline of History but, as will be clear below,
a matter of some contestation among political theorists. Second, and
perhaps more fundamental, is that IR has been too narrowly
construed by both international historians and political scientists as
relations among states within a system of states. Though such an
assumption may have in the past been productive of interesting
scholarship, there is growing reason to doubt its adequacy, either in
explaining the past or, especially, in engaging the unfolding,
borderless crises of our current era. In this text, I attempt to
endorse the more holistic view, embraced by many “Constructivists,”
that the field needs to seek a larger understanding of international
relations and the history of international relations in a global realm
of shifting identities, values, ideologies, and economic regimes.
This book owes a great deal to my students and my colleagues at
Tufts University and beyond. Special thanks are due to the patient
and wise, if often skeptical, advice of Daniel Mulholland. Among
other colleagues, thanks are due to David Ekbladh, Steve Marrone,
and Vickie Sullivan for their useful comments. I am indebted to John
Fyler, master himself of lucid and thoughtful prose, for attempting to
help me redress stylistic infelicities. Finally, special thanks are due to
Erik Goldstein, past director of the flourishing IR program at Boston
University, and long-time friend and colleague. Needless to say, what
follows, however much improved by their kind advice, is my
responsibility alone.
Somerville, Massachusetts
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

Since I finished the first edition of this book some five years ago,
there have been changes in the world at large, some anticipated,
others not, that have been of consequence for the discipline of IR.
The continued “rise” of China as a global economic and more than
regional political power continues to drive extensive discussion in the
field, not only over the future of the world system and the
relationship of the West to the rest but over important aspects of
past and present IR theory. This edition addresses the gathering
emergence of BRICS, including China, in IR discourse, and in general
pays more attention to the familiar problem of Euro- or Western-
centrism in the discipline’s theory and practice. Material has been
added on late antiquity and on the medieval Muslim world. The ever-
continuing “war against terrorism,” and especially the violent attempt
by ISIS to create a new caliphate in the Middle East, has promoted
and sustained a “post-secular” turn in IR scholarship. It was
necessary to address the recent contribution of religious studies—a
sub-field that has in a decade or so moved from the margins to
center stage in the discipline. Finally, the dramatic movement since
2016 in the West itself toward a politics of populist and xenophobic
nationalism has done much to undermine confidence, some would
argue, in the norms and institutions of Liberal Internationalism,
producing lively debate over a major school of IR theory.
More generally, I have taken advantage of the opportunity a new
edition provides of updating the sources upon which this work is
based, adding, where significant new work has appeared, material
both within the text and in the “Recommended readings” at the
conclusion of each chapter. There are more maps, highlighting
especially the more extensive treatment of pre-modern international
relations beyond Europe. And in the Appendix readers will also find a
new “timeline” chart locating the various schools of IR thought in
their approximate chronological sequence, as well as a glossary of
some terms used in this book, explained and located within their
common IR usage.
INTRODUCTION: HISTORY AND THE
DISCIPLINE(S) OF INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS

The academic field of International Relations (IR) is a popular

undergraduate concentration. This is especially true at American
universities where, often to the puzzlement—sometimes
consternation—of teacher-scholars in the humanities and social
sciences, IR departments and programs, separate or embedded as
concentrations within older disciplines, have flourished even as their
parent fields may have stagnated or declined. This growth is
reflected in both the numbers of students enrolled in IR courses and
the growth of faculty engaged in IR research and writing, and in the
institutionalization of the field—in journals and electronic mailing lists
(listservs) devoted to its interests and in scholarly organizations to
promote professional contact and dialogue.1
This textbook seeks to introduce, from the perspective of a
practicing historian, IR’s theory and practice to both undergraduate
and graduate students of International History, as well as to
students of IR and Political Science who may profit from a closer
understanding of both the opportunities and the limitations of
historical narrative and analysis. Its objective is to offer not just a
general introduction to the discipline of IR, but to address ways in
which History can inform and perhaps interrogate IR scholarship, as
well as ways in which IR may inform History. We shall do this first by
placing the field itself into its own historical contexts, relating both
its institutional development and its central concerns and theories to
the larger history of the times. That is, we shall “historicize” the
discipline. We shall then examine a series of historical eras and
events that have been highlighted in much IR scholarship as
significant in defining the discipline and establishing its key concepts.
We shall conclude with some observations about the current state of
the special relationship between the disciplines of History and IR.
This is, of course, to beg the question whether IR is properly a
discipline at all, or whether it can best be understood as located
within a larger parent field such as History (as diplomatic,
international, global, or transnational history), as is the common
orientation in Great Britain, or, as often in America, in Political
Science (where IR is one of its major concentration fields). Or is it,
as many IR programs in American universities declare, a composite
discipline, an “interdisciplinary” or “multidisciplinary” field—with all
the richness but also epistemological ambiguity that may suggest?
Questions also arise with respect to the various purposes served
by IR as a scholarly field. Is it an interrogating narrative of past and
present interstate conflict and conflict resolution (of, that is, war and
peace)? Is it a social science that seeks to reduce the realm of
myriad historical contingency to laws and probabilities? Is its implicit
or explicit goal that of informing present and future policy? If so,
whose policy? While any discipline as a scholarly enterprise requires
objectivity, a stepping outside—as far as that may be possible—of
one’s cultural and historical conditioning, the “presentism” and
policy-orientation of much IR scholarship may pose special problems.
Historians, closer to the sources upon which historical narrative is
built, may be more sensitive than political scientists or historical
sociologists to the dangers of employing history as simply a reservoir
of examples for the construction and rationalization of theory. In this
regard, historians themselves have, of course, not been free of
malpractice, but their discipline is more attuned to the dangers of
what may be called “Whig history” (using the past to justify the
present) than many outside the field who seek to manipulate
historical evidence.
 As we begin, it may be well to bear in mind two adages that are
both descriptive and cautionary. First, while History complicates,
Political Science (or indeed social science generally) simplifies—
either may be a virtue or a vice. Second, History, popular
assumptions to the contrary, does not in fact repeat itself. As the
ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus observed, history is a flowing
river where no man can step into the same water twice. This is not
to deny that the “lessons of history” may be profitably examined, but
to caution against a too-easy parallelism of past, present, and
future.

History
Historical narrative as oral tradition is older than writing itself, and
historical philosophy and analysis were no monopoly of the West—as
the work of the late thirteenth-, early fourteenth-century Persian
Rashid al-din Tabib, a Jewish convert to Islam, or the late
fourteenth-century Maghrebi Arab Ibn Khaldun illustrates. History as
a scholarly discipline in the West, however, has its origins in the
European Enlightenment, and assumed a legitimate place in
university curricula and a professional presence in the nineteenth
century. In Britain, while professorships in History had been
appointed at Oxford and Cambridge from the early eighteenth
century, History as a distinct examination field for undergraduates
had to wait until the late Victorian period. In addition to an
undergraduate History curriculum, American universities—more
influenced by the professionalization of History in Germany—
developed research programs, journals, professional organizations,
and seminar-based postgraduate training by the late nineteenth
century.
While this is not the place for a full narrative of the development
of the discipline as an academic profession, it is relevant to our
interests that History, as practiced in its formative years, was much
influenced by its belles-lettristic origins, and by an interest in
producing narratives of political power, war, and commanding
personalities. Above all was the privileging of what German scholars
of the era called Außenpolitik, the narrative and analysis of foreign
affairs—generally from a nationalist perspective. Following from the
eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder’s
observation that each people or Volk had its own unique culture and
history, nineteenth-century historiography was above all a story of
the rise and conflict of nations. German influences, again especially
in the American academy, also pushed the field toward a more
“scientific” and empirical character by insisting on the importance of
objectivity and precision, to be arrived at through a close, disciplined
attention to original archival documents. In the famous words of
Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), the task of the historian was,
above all, to tell history “wie es eigentlich gewesen”—“as it really
was,” stripping away metaphysical and literary pretensions. It was
Ranke as well who helped place diplomatic history at the heart of
the nineteenth-century historian’s enterprise through his own
exploration of the detailed and voluminous archives of the sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century Republic of Venice.
Some contemporary historians, critical of the uses to which some
IR scholars may put historical “facts,” argue that IR often seems to
adopt uncritically the outmoded empiricism of nineteenth-century
historiography, just as it privileges the Außenpolitik biases of that
scholarship and its assumptions of the primacy of the (nation) state
in its theory. Certainly “cutting-edge” History moved on in the early
and mid-twentieth century in ways that left the subjects of
traditional historical exploration—diplomacy, war, Great Men, and
Great Ideas—on the margins, if thriving in the genres of popular
historical narrative and political biography. While this criticism is no
doubt unfair to those IR scholars who do care about and are
informed by current historiographic issues and debates, as it is to
many of those historians who continue to produce sophisticated
work on warfare and diplomacy, certainly the history that matters to
many IR scholars not trained in the discipline of history can
sometime seem dated and outside the profession’s mainstream.
 The modernist movement of History (from, roughly, the 1920s to
the 1970s) into large areas of, usually domestic, social phenomena—
and consequently a shift from an interest in the international
narrative of war and politics to their domestic political and social
contexts—involved a vast expansion of the historian’s craft that saw
historians absorb concepts and practices from many social science
fields, from anthropology and sociology to psychology, economics,
and demography. The rise of social history in the interwar period
and, especially, in the 1960s challenged the predominance of
traditional political and biographical narrative, as well as the primacy
of Außenpolitik: there was a shift from a view of social history as
simply “history with the politics left out,” as a source of narrative
color, to one that demanded the integration of political, economic,
and social/cultural understanding and thus centered questions of
how social change constrained and shaped politics.
In this, the careful work of the historian of international relations,
of diplomatic history as practiced in the archives, came to seem to
many as less relevant and less interesting in an age defined by
democracy and social conflict, and the retrieval of the history of
those common people who had suffered from the “enormous
condescension of history,” in the words of the prominent social
historian of the left, E. P. Thompson, in 1963.

Historical Narratives, Historical Facts, and

Edward Hallett Carr
Although History often borrowed heavily from the social sciences in
its high modernist period—and we should bear in mind that more
than most disciplines History contains a wide spectrum of practice—
it remained in the minds of many social scientists from outside the
field (and especially Political Science-trained IR scholars) an
undertheorized realm of contingency (“one damn thing after
another”) and antiquarian detail. It might provide a useful
warehouse of data, but the historian’s reductionist project of
historicizing all phenomena—that is, locating events and ideas in a
particular and perhaps unique social/historical setting—inhibited his
ability to construct larger views or pose meaningful questions and
answers. This characterization, which continues to be repeated in
some quarters of IR, oversimplifies and distorts the actual practice of
many historians.
The lack of an explicit theoretical apparatus does not of course
mean the absence of “theory,” however unselfconsciously employed.
Nevertheless, many social scientists rightly insist that historians are
not always interested in understanding the limitations of the
theoretical assumptions they may make, that they, or at least many
of them, are more interested in constructing a narrative—telling a
story—than in posing well-defined research questions, and that they
are inclined to leave the search for “ultimate causes” to others. It is
important, however, to understand that these issues have long been
debated among historians themselves, especially since the advent of
the new social history in the 1960s and, subsequently, its
postmodernist critics.
From the ancient Greek historians on, at the center of most
historical inquiry and of its epistemology (the study of the nature of
historical knowledge) has been the issue of causation, itself
embedded in the definition of history as change over time (whether
the never-repeating river of Heraclitus, or cyclical or evolutionary
change). Apart from “mere antiquarianism” (the discovery and
presentation of detail for its own sake) that is regarded by most
historians as allied with but properly outside the scholarly practice of
History, even the simplest literary narrative engages at some level
the problem of causation.
The definition and search for causes lie at the heart of much that
has been written about the practice of history. The student
interested in the application of History to the study of International
Relations would do well to begin by familiarizing him- or herself with
the issues raised in a classic of such historiography, Edward Hallett
Carr’s What Is History? Read by generations of undergraduate and
sixth-form history students in Britain, Carr’s essay has fallen out of
usage in the United States, where his version of progressive
modernism went out of fashion well before his death in 1982.
Nevertheless, the text poses useful, instructive questions and
caveats for those intending to practice or use history, from an
academic sage who is also commonly regarded as a founder of the
Realist school of IR scholarship. In IR Cold War debate (and after),
Realists are often identified with the ideological right, but Carr was a
man of the left, a determined advocate of the wartime alliance with
the Soviet Union who dedicated the rest of his long life to writing its
early history (1917–29), a fourteen-volume study. This may sound
like an antiquarian’s love of detail, but in fact Carr was a great
enemy of what he called a “fetishism of facts.”
What Is History?, a series of lectures from 1961, has its critics—
especially among postmodernists who find it insufficiently
“intersubjective” and dated in its conception of “progress.” While we
can admit that it is certainly of its mid-twentieth-century modernist
time, it is nevertheless also a text that continues to speak to us
about how historians (and those who use history) ought to go about
their business. The first chapter poses his central question—what is
a fact, or more precisely, what is an historical fact? He means
generally for all history writing, but one must note the special
importance of the subject for IR, where there has long been a
tendency to accuse theory-averse historians of simply stringing facts
together while at the same time selectively to employ historical
evidence in confirming “scientific” hypotheses and paradigms.
Figure I.1 Edward Hallett Carr.

Although Carr sees History itself as a social science, he cautions

(the warning is apt for both historians and political scientists) against
cherry-picking—the selection and organization of some convenient
“facts,” and the suppression of others, to establish an argument.
Selection of appropriate facts—whether in the creation of a simple
narrative or an argument—being unavoidable in the writing of any
history, he asserts that it is the historian’s interpretation that
converts a mere fact to an historical fact, and hence it is of critical
importance to “know the historian” (his own historical context, his
social milieu, his biases, convictions, and intentions) before one can
judge the value of the history he writes. However much “objectivity”
may be a laudable goal, it can only be imperfectly achieved; the
historian himself can never stand outside his own history. Each
generation writes out of and for its own time.
If we are all enmeshed in our own time, there can be no final,
definitive history of the kind positivist nineteenth-century scholars
sought to discover or create. Even the words we use have a
meaning for us they may not have had in the past, or may not have
in the future. Being well-versed in historical dialectic, Carr tells us
that history, a flowing evolutionary process, is an unending dialogue
between the facts and the historian, between the past and the
present. If some historians attack political science for its present-
orientation, Carr reminds us that all history is itself illuminated by
the (historian’s own) present. Good history appreciates that theory
and models of explanation are necessary (even when lightly or
tentatively employed); good social science (i.e., both political science
and historical sociology) dialogues with and adapts to historical fact.
Where they differ is in the search in social and political science for
basic laws, or at least hypotheses of basic laws. The historian,
according to Carr in his third lecture, is interested in hypotheses as
well, not to propose some general universal theory of history (the
way now-unfashionable generalists like Arnold Toynbee attempted
earlier in the twentieth century) but to help find what may be
generalizable in a unique fact and which facts can help us
understand long-term processes in history. In this, the historian is,
above all, concerned with the problematic of historical causation
(something Carr expands upon in subsequent lectures).
To understand causation is to learn from history about the present
and from the present about history. But this does not mean that
history’s purpose is to confirm current moral judgments. Here Carr
sounds like the IR Realist he was taken to be—leery of “hypothetical
absolutes” like liberty, justice, or natural law. But if “learning from
history” is a hard-headed, unidealistic affair, it is also extraordinarily
difficult because of the myriad ways the world changes. Carr is
therefore much concerned with the danger of misusing or
misunderstanding history, reminding us that—he was a junior
member of the British delegation at the Paris peace conference in
1919—“Everyone in the delegation believed that we could learn from
the lessons of the Vienna Congress” (67). Of course, they got it
wrong.
Whatever caveats may be suggested by Carr’s own location in
time and place—and in the last few years there has been a fresh
engagement with aspects of Carr’s work—his advice about the
practice of history generally and, in particular, the interpretation and
uses of historical facts remains compelling and merits close attention
by, especially, those students preparing to explore the disciplines of
History and IR.

International Relations within the discipline of

History: Diplomatic history
As the discipline History developed as a postgraduate-trained
profession, there was a tendency toward specialization. By the
beginning of the twentieth century, diplomatic history became
increasingly separated as a field narrowly devoted to the study of
the operation of foreign office bureaucracies and their political
masters, through the intense examination of foreign office archives
(the difficulty of access to this source made—and makes—recent or
contemporary diplomatic history problematic) and correspondingly to
the kinds of research questions that a preoccupation with the
minutiae of such sources might suggest. Many historians came to
consider diplomatic history as a kind of antiquarianism, in G. M.
Young’s famous dismissal, “the record of what one clerk said to
another clerk.” Like diplomacy itself, it seemed to many scholars too
much a matter of form and process and too little of the larger social,
and indeed political, contexts.
Generally speaking, the subfield of diplomatic history, as it was
established in the early twentieth century, was a well- (if narrowly)
defined narrative of state-to-state relations that viewed diplomacy as
a by-and-large rational, self-contained activity, emphasizing: (1) the
study of formal negotiation within an early modern and modern
structure of sovereign states, (2) the study of permanent
bureaucracies and of a corps of officials sent abroad (the diplomatic
profession), and (3) a Eurocentric—and in the case of diplomatic
history in the United States often an American-centric—view.
The First World War provided a huge stimulus to the field of
diplomatic history due to a contemporary need to unravel the
complicated and secret nature of prewar maneuvering, the (at least
selective) opening of European foreign office archives after the war,
and the general turn against pin-stripe-trousered diplomats for not
preventing Armageddon. This led to a search for blame by liberal
historians during and after the Paris peace negotiations in 1919.
Moreover, the establishment of the League of Nations encouraged
scholarly interest in the history of international law and arbitration.
But the “failure of the diplomats” in 1914 also perforce heralded the
diminution of the history of (inconsequential) diplomacy in the
following decades at a time when social and ideological contexts
came to demand a larger attention.
In the post-Second World War, mid-century revolution that saw
the scholarly research and writing of history move from high political
narrative to (usually domestic) social analysis and description—often
informed by the allied disciplines of Sociology and Anthropology—a
seemingly old-fashioned diplomatic history was in fact slow to take
on the importance of domestic social contexts, or the behavioralist-
inspired new work in political science. While it is true that some
diplomatic historians made a tentative use of the new social history
—in exploring for instance the social composition of foreign service
elites—the epistemological narrowness of much traditional diplomatic
history meant that it was increasingly “doubly marginalized” within
the historical profession: as social-political history moved to study
the dispossessed rather than elites, and as postmodernist cultural
historians shifted focus away from politics and raised fundamental
questions about the possibility of document-based objectivity.
As a result, diplomatic history became somewhat isolated; old
departmental positions in the field went unreplaced, and there were
relatively few new positions in the seventies and eighties. The
traditional history of foreign relations had by the late twentieth
century become something of a sidelined subfield, and ironically the
rise of a separate discipline of IR seemed to confirm this relegation
by subsuming within its own discipline diplomatic history’s larger
purposes while continuing to validate its antiquarian research as a
reservoir of useful data. Arguably, however, there has been since the
nineties something of a revival. By the end of the first decade of the
twenty-first century, one scholar could observe, against earlier
pessimistic predictions, that history departments and historical
journals no longer seemed determined to shut out its practitioners.
To the extent that there has been a revival, one may credit two,
somewhat contradictory, factors. In the first place, the much
commented on “decline of the state” in an era of globalization lost
much of its fashionable attraction among international theorists by
the turn of the millennium—indeed, some scholars argue for the
reverse, that the nation state and its defensive and aggressive
ideology, critical to varieties of Realism as it is to traditional
diplomatic history, have in the new century robustly returned in
theory and practice. At the same time, and perhaps working against
the sense of that explanation, has been a move among some
diplomatic historians to reject the traditional limits of the field to
embrace a “new diplomatic history” that is sensitive to social,
ideological, and economic contexts in both national and transnational
analysis—a methodological shift in which the boundaries became
permeable in both directions. Some mainstream social and cultural
historians now show more interest than before in the possibilities of
a diplomatic history of cross-fertilization of the domestic, the
international, and the transnational. A “methodological renaissance”
is expanding “the playing field of approaches, actors, topics, and
interactions” (Zeiler, 2009, 1053, 1071).
In summation, the field of diplomatic history can be said, by and
large, to continue to follow two tracks: on the one hand as a
continuing, comparatively narrow traditional subdiscipline, and on
the other as a “new diplomatic history” that is largely
indistinguishable from an “international history” that interweaves
domestic and transnational politics, and emphasizes social milieus,
cultures, and economic structures. The first track remains dedicated
to a close examination of diplomacy as a largely self-contained
activity—a negotiation event or the art of statecraft of a towering
figure like Bismarck, with an emphasis on close description and,
often, a deep suspicion of systems theory. If this kind of history has
long been congenial to Classical Realists in IR, it is also true that by
the end of the twentieth century the excesses of (especially
Neorealist) IR theory inspired a revival in some quarters of
diplomatic history as the history of an art that emphasizes
contingency, personality, and unpredictability.
A main thrust of international history generally, and the new
diplomatic history closely associated with it, has been to integrate
the international into national historical narratives by, for instance,
presenting the United States as “America-in-the-world.” In Britain
there has been a parallel, perhaps more pronounced, effort to
incorporate its imperial past into domestic historical narrative, a
perspective encouraged by its postcolonial, multicultural present.
Some recent scholarship, however, seeks to go beyond either of
these narrative traditions and searches social theory for ways in
which modern diplomacy may be said to be a part of the more
general processes of “global governance,” that is, of transnational
“regimes.”

The History of War and Warfare

The subfield of military history is of course closely related to that of
diplomacy—as war is often the consequence of the failure of
diplomacy or the condition that requires diplomatic settlement.
Moreover, war studies have traditionally shared with the history of
diplomacy an interest in narrative and a focus on the behavior of
rational actors—military leaders and strategists—somewhat removed
from larger social and cultural contexts. Among historians at large,
they have consequently also been regarded together as
subdisciplines apart from the mainstream interests of the profession
—though narratives of warfare continue to have a large presence in
the genre of “great battles” popular history. Since the fifties, this
separation has been challenged, most notably, in work on “military
revolutions” in early modern Europe—especially that of Michael
Roberts (1956) and those like Geoffrey Parker (1988) who have
followed him in attempting to place the study of war into a larger
social and cultural history of, especially, the formation of the early
modern state.
Historical studies of the origins and conduct of wars have long
been consulted by political scientists, especially IR Realists,
interested in distilling autonomous “laws of war.” Like Stephen Van
Evera (Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict, 1999) or
Stephen M. Walt (Revolution and War, 1996), they often make
extensive use of historical narrative—generally of early modern and
modern European conflict—and comparative methods, as in Daniel S.
Geller and J. David Singer’s “scientific study of international conflict”
(1998) or the work of Claudio Cioffi-Revilla on “scales of conflict in
long-range analysis” (1996). David Singer’s long-running (from
1963) “Correlates of War” project, while open to the charge of
Eurocentric bias, has provided an ever-growing data-set on varieties
of warfare and their causal factors. Though like Singer a political
scientist, John Weltman, in his general narrative of the “evolution of
war,” has nonetheless echoed many historians in his skepticism
about the search for “calculable laws of war,” preferring to
emphasize the particular “social, material, and intellectual context
within which such conflicts occur” (Weltman, 1995, x–xi).
As a scholarly subfield, war studies cover a spectrum of
approaches, from those that, like Thucydides’ classic work, raise the
widest historical and cultural issues, to narrower considerations of
the grand strategy of, say, a Napoleon, down to highly specialized
work on tactics and technologies. Military history has often been
written, not by professional historians but by those with military
training and experience, like the early and mid-twentieth-century
British expert on military affairs, Captain Basil Henry Liddell-Hart
(1895–1970), “the most important writer on strategy and military
matters in the English-speaking world” (Mearsheimer, 1988), who
never held a university post (other than as a visiting scholar), or the
renowned nineteenth-century American naval historian, Captain
Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914), who served on active duty and
subsequently taught at a military academy. The field has often been
located somewhere between academia and the world of the policy-
oriented think-tank: Mahan’s work on the geopolitics of naval
strategy was, as is well-known, influential not only in Theodore
Roosevelt’s White House but in pre-First World War Berlin, and
Liddell-Hart was a passionate and seemingly prescient interwar
advocate of mechanized warfare.
The close connection between traditional military history and a
somewhat discredited late nineteenth-century geopolitics
encouraged a distaste for the field among many historians, as did a
general low regard for the professional officer class during and after
the First World War. In Britain, though a chair of military history was
established at Oxford in 1909 and one in military studies at King’s
College, London, just after the First World War, the field waned until
its revival at the beginning of the Cold War. The closeness of this
subdiscipline to a Cold War and post-Cold War political science of
“security studies” or “strategic studies” (aka International Strategic
Studies or ISS), subdisciplines marked by a Washington- or London-
outward point of view, further discredited the field in the eyes of
some historians, at least during the long Cold War. Subsequently the
field has been pushed to broaden its definition of “security” beyond
a preoccupation with military affairs and beyond the state to include
much that social and cultural historians might endorse—for instance,
the concept of “human security” involving underdevelopment,
disease, malnutrition, and gender issues.
The Cold War era nevertheless saw a revival of interdisciplinary
interest in war, and scholars were often able to tap into government
resources and government-supported think-tanks. The salience of
the nuclear arms problem in the fifties and sixties, and the
importance of nuclear weapons technologies to both diplomatic and
military affairs (Liddell-Hart turned late in his career to nuclear
defense issues), fuelled a degree of institutionalization for war
studies. In 1953, a Department of War Studies was established at
King’s College, London, to be followed by similar multidisciplinary
programs elsewhere in the UK. On both sides of the ocean, the
contemporary era has seen the emergence of scholars of widely
regarded stature, like the military historian Sir Michael Eliot Howard,
appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University in
1980, or the prolific American political scientist and past president of
the International Studies Association, Jack S. Levy. As one would
expect, the study of war was most comfortably ensconced in the
service academies where, by the end of the century, strategy and
policy departments and chaired positions in strategic studies
continued to proliferate.
More than is true of the subdiscipline of diplomatic history, modern
military history can have a close affinity with certain social sciences.
Studies of strategy and tactics may draw on psychology and game
theory while larger studies of war and society may be informed by
sociology and anthropology. In the United States, the field of war
studies was pioneered by historical sociologists and liberal
internationalists at the University of Chicago in the interwar period,
as a part of the post-First World War project to uncover the roots
and character of mass violence (Quincy Wright’s two-volume
comparative historical analysis, A Study of War, the fruit of this
collective effort, was published in 1942).
Military history can claim a deep and prestigious pedigree,
beginning with (the perhaps mythical) General Sun Tzu’s sixth-
century BC text, The Art of War, or Thucydides’ fifth-century BC
classic, The History of the Peloponnesian War. It often has a
theoretical affinity for the work of Niccolò Machiavelli (who wrote a
book on The Art of War) and Thomas Hobbes, and owns a major
figure in the philosophy of war in Carl von Clausewitz. Though
recently there have been interesting comparative studies in the
“culture” of warfare and in its role in the construction of social
thought, nevertheless, the field still struggles somewhat for
legitimacy among professional historians, if not among IR scholars
(especially Realists) who see it as closely related to their central
concern with power and state security.
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Norman Prince
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
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eBook.

Title: Norman Prince

A volunteer who died for the cause he loved

Author: George Franklin Babbitt

Contributor: Frederick Henry Prince

Release date: September 26, 2023 [eBook #71732]

Language: English

Original publication: Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1917

Credits: Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading

Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced
from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NORMAN

PRINCE ***
 NORMAN PRINCE
An American Volunteer who died for France

Norman Prince
 NORMAN PRINCE
A VOLUNTEER
WHO DIED FOR THE CAUSE
HE LOVED

WITH MEMOIR BY
GEORGE F. BABBITT

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1917

COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published December 1917
To the
LAFAYETTE FLYING SQUADRON
 (formerly the Escadrille Américaine)
—those gallant young Americans who led
the way their country was later to follow

“Under the little crosses where they rise

The soldier rests; now round him undismayed
The cannon thunder, and at night he lies
At peace beneath the eternal fusillade
That other generations might possess
From shame and menace free in years to come,
A richer heritage of happiness;
He marched to that heroic martyrdom.”
 CONTENTS
I. Memoir 1
II. His Own Story 15
III. Letters 25
IV. From His Father 49
V. A Comrade’s Tribute 60
VI. His Brother’s Service 65
VII. From the French Envoys 68
VIII. Messages of Condolence and Appreciation 71
 ILLUSTRATIONS
Norman Prince Frontispiece
As Master (pro tem.) of the Pau Draghounds 6
With His Favorite Plane 10
Portrait as Exhibited at Allied Fairs 18
With His Superior Officer Lieutenant de Laage
de Mœux 26
Application to ride a Breguet de Chasse 30
Memorandum of the Bringing-down of his First
German Machine 38
Cover of a French Periodical 46
Norman Prince, Frederick Henry Prince, Jr.,
and Frederick Henry Prince 50
Concours Hippique 54
Camp Norman Prince 62
Frederick Henry Prince, Jr., with his Nieuport 66
Decorations 72
 NORMAN PRINCE

I
MEMOIR

It is fitting that the record of a young life of high aspiration, of fine

achievement, and, finally, of supreme self-sacrifice on a world’s
battlefield, should be permanently preserved, not only for the
satisfaction of those near relatives and friends who deeply mourn its
tragic and untimely end, but for the sense of pride and rapture of
soul which the contemplation of such a record everywhere inspires.
Grievous as it is to see a young and happy life cut off at the
threshold of a promising career, there is compensation as well as
consolation for such a fate when the fine fervor of youth, thoroughly
imbued with a loyal and patriotic spirit, has won for its possessor the
well-deserved plaudit of living and dying a hero. Such was the fate
and such the reward of the subject of this memoir.
Norman Prince was the younger of the two sons of Frederick
Henry and Abigail (Norman) Prince. He was a grandson of Frederick
O. Prince, an eminent citizen of Massachusetts and a Mayor of
Boston, and of George H. Norman, a distinguished citizen of
Newport, Rhode Island. He was born August 31, 1887, at Pride’s
Crossing, Massachusetts, receiving his early education under private
tutors in this country and in Europe and completing his preparation
for college at Groton, where he passed five happy and helpful years.
He was graduated, with honors, at Harvard College in the class of
1908, taking the academic course in three years and receiving a cum
laude with his degree of Bachelor of Arts. Entering the Harvard Law
School immediately after his college graduation, he received the
degree of Bachelor of Laws three years later. He was admitted to the
bar and subsequently began the practice of law in Chicago,
coincidentally devoting much of his time and attention to the study
and practice of aviation at a time when flying was popularly regarded
as a mere sport rather than a practical utility in this country. This was
a diversion from his more serious work at the start, but foreseeing
the ultimate possibilities of aeronautics for practical purposes, and
becoming an enthusiast in its scientific development, he neglected
the practice of his intended profession, and being enabled to provide
the necessary funds for experimenting with various types of flying
machines, he tested their comparative advantages for aerial
navigation. He possessed an exceptionally quick intelligence and
applied himself with zeal and diligence to subjects that interested
him.
From his early boyhood Norman had been passionately fond of
manly outdoor sports, more particularly those connected with
equestrianism. He loved hunting, polo, and kindred activities, and he
thus developed qualities of sportsmanship that proved useful to him
in his later experience in aviation. His courage and enthusiasm
enabled him to undertake aerial flights that appalled less intrepid
amateur navigators, but which were a joy and an inspiration to him
from the beginning. Among his associates in amateur sports he had
the reputation of being absolutely fearless. “I never knew a pluckier
fellow,” said one of his schoolmates, recalling the days of their earlier
companionship.
At the outbreak of hostilities in Europe his love of the strenuous
life, combined with his intensely patriotic instincts and his deep
sympathy with the cause of the Entente Nations,—more particularly
for France,—prompted him to go abroad and offer his services in
their behalf. He adopted this course ardently and spontaneously,
feeling that he was thus performing a duty that he owed to the cause
of Liberty and Righteousness throughout the world.
One of the finest chapters in the history of contemporary life is that
which records the loyalty and patriotic fervor of so many young
Americans, who at the beginning of the World War, before their own
country had abandoned its attitude of neutrality, volunteered for
military service on the side of the Allies, in the fighting ranks of the
foreign legions, especially in the aviation service, which called for
efficiency and courage in individual combat that recalled the heroism
and devotion of the ancient days of chivalry. The inspiring example
of these early American volunteers may be said to have given the
first impulse to the popular uprising which ultimately led to our
country’s active participation in the war.
Having passed many of the earlier years of his youth in France,
Norman saw and appreciated his opportunity to testify to the
sincerity of his love for what he affectionately called his “second
country.” He took passage abroad in December, 1914, four months
after the outbreak of the war, arriving in Paris early in the following
January, when he promptly offered his services to the Government
as a volunteer in the French army to serve until the end of the war
—“jusqu’ au bout,” as he emphatically put it when he took the oath of
allegiance. He began his preliminary training in the military aviation
school at Pau, and on receiving his certificate of proficiency, he
served for a short time in the aerial defense of Paris and was then
sent to the Western battle-front, where, as is told in the subsequent
pages of this memoir, he distinguished himself by his skill and
bravery in many air raids against the enemy, winning at once the
confidence and admiration of his commanders and comrades.
 As Master (pro tem.) of the Pau Draghounds

At the beginning of his active service in France Norman conceived

the idea of bringing the American aviators, together with some of
those of the foreign legions, into a single squadron, not only that the
Americans might thus be associated in closer comradeship, but also
that their achievements might become more distinctive and thus
redound to the glory of their native country as well as to that of the
Allies. This laudable purpose, which was inspired wholly by
Norman’s initiative, was realized by the organization of the American
aviators into a body which was at first known as the Escadrille
Américaine and which subsequently became the famous Lafayette
Flying Squadron. Originally carrying the Tri-color, this Squadron was
permitted to carry the Stars and Stripes after the entrance of the
United States into the war. It thus became the proud distinction of
this Squadron that it was accorded the honor of carrying the first
American flag that appeared on any of the battlefields of the World
War. These aviators soon became famous for their skill and daring in
their aerial raids over the German lines, and they were repeatedly
cited in army orders, individually and collectively, for their fine
courage and unflagging spirit of self-sacrifice. In one of these official
orders General Pétain, Commander-in-Chief of the French Armies
on the Western front at the time, took occasion to say that this
American Squadron had aroused the profound admiration of the
commanders under whose direction it had fought, as well as of all
the French aerial squadrons fighting beside it and aspiring to rival it
in valor and achievement. It was for his fine individual conduct on
this famous battle-front that Norman won successively the Croix de
Guerre, the Médaille Militaire, and the Croix de la Légion d’Honneur.
Coincidentally, he successively achieved the ranks of sergeant,
adjutant, and lieutenant. He had up to this time engaged in 122
aerial engagements with the enemy ’planes and was officially
credited with five Boches brought down in battle, not to mention four
others not officially recorded. Few of his comrades had rendered
more active service. He was as ambitious as he was intrepid and
resourceful.
On the morning of Thursday, October 12, Norman and other
members of his Squadron were assigned to convoy a French
bombarding fleet in an aerial raid on Oberndorf, a German arms and
munition center located in the Vosges near the plains of Alsace.
While circling over the town, they came in close contact with a
formidable array of German aircraft, and a terrific encounter ensued
in which shot, shell-fire, and skillful manœuvering disabled many of
the machines on both sides. It was at the conclusion of this battle in
the air that Norman’s Nieuport machine struck an aerial cable while
he was endeavoring to make a landing in the dark within the French
lines near Luxeuil. In this collision his machine was overturned and
wrecked and he was thrown violently to the ground. On being
rescued by his comrades, it was found that both his legs were
broken and, as was subsequently found, he had sustained a fracture
of the skull. He was carried to the neighboring hospital at Gerardmer,
where for a time he manifested the undaunted courage that he had
always shown under adverse conditions, cheerfully requesting the
attending surgeons who were setting the bones of his broken legs to
be careful not to make one shorter than the other! The skull fracture
was not discovered until later, and it was as a result of this latter
injury that Norman died from cerebral hemorrhage on the following
Sunday morning, October 15. His comrades gathered around his
bedside when he became finally unconscious, in the vain hope of
detecting symptoms of renewed vitality, but he passed away
peacefully as in a sleep. Those of his near relatives who had been
summoned from Paris arrived at his bedside too late to find him
alive.
 With his Favorite Plane

The dead hero was given all the honors of a military funeral, which
was held in the Luxeuil aviation field, where the body rested on a
caisson draped with the American and French flags. The services,
which were conducted by a French regimental chaplain, were
attended by a large representation of the Allied military divisions,
including French and English officers of high rank, as well as a full
representation of the American Escadrille and pilots from the
neighboring aviation camps. During the funeral, instead of the
customary firing of cannon as a salutation to the dead, a squadron of
aeroplanes circled in midair over the field in honor of the departed
aviator, showering down myriads of flowers. The body was borne to
a neighboring chapel, there to rest until the end of the war, in
accordance with the military regulations governing the temporary
disposition of the remains of those dying at the battle-fronts.
A memorial service, held on the following Sunday in the American
Church in Paris, was described by those present as one of the most
impressive ever witnessed in that sanctuary. The American colony
came in full numbers to testify their admiration and appreciation of
their fellow-countryman’s valor and sacrifice. The President of the
French Republic, the heads of the executive and legislative branches
of the Government, the Army and Navy and the Diplomatic Corps
were represented by their most distinguished members, and the
emblems of mourning contributed to a scene that was as beautiful as
it was significant and memorable.
This is but the bare outline of the biography of a rare spirit whose
loyalty to his ideals and the high chivalry of whose devotion to the
cause of Liberty, Civilization, and Humanity have made his name
one to be remembered and his memory cherished with those of his
patriotic comrades and fellow-countrymen who fell for the same
cause “in the sunny morn and flower of their young years.”
It deserves to be noted here that in all of Norman’s spoken or
written messages, telling of his experiences in France, there is
nowhere to be found a note of doubt or discouragement or a word
denoting any lack of confidence in the ultimate triumph of the cause
for which he was fighting. The Allies might meet repeated reverses,
and tremendous sacrifices of blood and treasure might have to be
made, before a decisive victory could be achieved, but he never
doubted the final outcome of the war. His faith in this respect was as
firm and unflinching as were his courage and natural optimism in all
human affairs. His sense of consecration was unceasingly vibrant.
He deeply regretted that his own country was not yet actively
enlisted on the side of the Allies and that he was not permitted from
the beginning to represent his Government as well as his country in
the fighting lines, but this disappointment did not diminish his
enthusiasm as an American volunteer soldier giving his services for
a cause that he believed to be that of his country and of the world. In
one of his letters he wrote enthusiastically:

“Everything goes well. Before the end of this war we shall

have aeroplanes with at least 800 or 1000 horsepower flying
from Soissons to Petrograd, setting fire to the four corners of
Berlin.”

The death of his comrade Victor Chapman touched him deeply.

“Poor Victor!” he wrote. “He was killed while fighting a German
aeroplane that was attacking Lufberry and me. A sad but glorious
death, facing the enemy in a great cause and to save a friend!”
Norman Prince’s heroic sacrifice is finely described in the ode
written in memory of the American volunteers fighting for France, by
Alan Seeger, the young American soldier-poet, who finally gave his
own life for the cause of the Allies on the battlefield of Belloy-en-
Santerre;

“Yet sought they neither recompense nor praise,

Nor to be mentioned in another breath
Than their blue-coated comrades, whose great days
It was their pride to share—aye, share even to the death!
Nay, rather, France, to you they rendered thanks
(Seeing that they came for honor, not for gain),
Who opening to them your glorious ranks
Gave them that grand occasion to excel—
That chance to live the life most free from stain
And that rare privilege of dying well.”
 II
HIS OWN STORY

Some of Norman’s experiences in the French aviation service

were of an exceptionally thrilling character, showing the peculiar
perils of aerial warfare. At the time of his last home visit on a short
furlough, he was invited to relate some of these at the Tavern Club in
Boston. His story, as modestly and frankly told by him on that
occasion, is best given in his own words:

“I sailed for Europe in the latter part of the year 1914 in

order to do what I could to help the cause which I believed,
and still believe, to be that of my own country, as well as that
of the Allied Nations.
“Reaching France I offered my services to that Government
as an aviator. They were promptly accepted and I contracted
an engagement to serve France until she had achieved
victory. Seven other Americans enlisted with me at the same
time as aviators, and we proceeded from our dépôt, where we
were clothed, to the flying school at Pau in the south of
France in the Pyrenees, where conditions for flying are
exceptionally good, there being hardly any wind in that region.
The school at Pau at the time was the largest flying school in
the world. While we were there about three hundred young
men were in training, and at last accounts, there were over
five hundred pupils practicing in aviation, using at least two
hundred modern machines. We remained there a month. As a
rule it takes about forty-eight days to turn out a military
aviator, qualified and fitted to obtain the civil and military
licenses required. In order to obtain the latter it is necessary
to make a successful flight of about four hundred miles across
country. I had already acquired a fair knowledge of the
science of aviation at home and had made numerous flights in
different machines, so that the training at Pau came
comparatively easy to me, but it was necessary for me to
become thoroughly acquainted with all the rules governing the
French military aviation service, as well as to make myself
familiar with the French machines in order to meet the full
requirements of the training. When we were through this
school we received our brevets militaires and we had ridden
every kind of air craft used in the French Army.
“All licensed aviators, as turned out, are sent to the reserve
station for aviators near Paris. In our case, after spending a
week or two there, we were found fit for more active service,
and we were suddenly sent to the front in the north of France,
arriving there in time for the May attacks near Arras and
Artois. Our perilous experiences in aerial warfare were soon
to begin. After one reconnoitering tour we were sent out to
bombard munition dépôts, railway centers, and aviation fields
in the rear of the enemy’s lines, from ten to forty kilometres
distant from our base. I have a vivid remembrance of my first
bombarding expedition. The action took place at a point not
far within the enemy’s lines. I was sent with two or three
members of my squadron to bombard a station where
ammunition was being unloaded. It takes about forty minutes
for a machine heavily loaded with bombs to get to a sufficient
height to cross the lines. The minimum height at which we
crossed was about seven thousand feet. I saw my comrades
cross ahead of me and noted they were being heavily shelled
by the enemy. Accordingly, I decided to go a little higher
before crossing. When I found I had only sufficient gasoline
left to make my bombardment and return to my base, I started
over. I was soon to experience what I may call my baptism of
fire. The impression made upon me by the terrible racket and
the spectacle of shells aimed at me and exploding near by
made me shiver for a moment. Though I was confident and
unafraid, my limbs began to tremble. Still I kept straight on my
course. I would not have changed it for the world. My legs
were so wobbly from nervous excitement that I tried to hide