Stories we live by: the rise of Historical IR and the move to concepts

Abstract

Scholars of the humanities and social sciences are necessarily storytellers. Thus, crafting narratives is an inescapable feature of the practice of International Relations scholarship. We tell stories about the past to orient ourselves in the present and envision the future. Historical International Relations has greatly expanded the repertoire of available narrative elements. However, when we read the past through the prism of our present, we risk closing down opportunities for different ways of imagining both the present and the future. In this article, we acknowledge the advances made in HIR over the last decades but suggest that a closer engagement with conceptual history would enhance its potential even further, making it possible to explore how a wider space of experience can also widen our horizon of expectations.

Introduction

At the conclusion of the TV-series ‘Game of Thrones’, after ruinous civil war and on the cusp of a new era, Tyrion Lannister argues that ‘There’s nothing more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it’. Thus, he argues, Bran Stark, who knows all the past of the kingdom should become its next king: ‘Who better to lead us into the future?’.¹ In a universe having survived ‘polycrisis’² and where politics, high and low, resonates with twenty first century viewers, this insight carries the day: crafting a compelling narrative is never more important than when the perception of rapid and impending change is widespread.³ Stories—or narratives for that matter—connect the present with a meaningful past and thereby offer a way forward. This is what makes them so powerful, and this is why they do not fade away even if ‘falsified’ by ‘empirical’ evidence.

Cast as the Machiavellian (albeit with a conscience), Tyrion Lannister surely does not believe that a story being ‘good’ equates with a story being ‘true’. After all, the story he tells about storytelling is intended to win the crown for Bran, and its efficaciousness in doing just that is what matters. Implicit in the story is thus the insight that narratives are never innocent. This insight has been famously discussed by theorists such as Hayden White and Michel Foucault and explored in the margins of the International Relations (IR) discipline over the last three decades (see for example Campbell 1998; Devetak 1999; Roberts 2006; Suganami 2008). Narratives come with their own specific modes of inclusions and exclusions. They determine what lessons historical records are assumed to offer, what evidence is deemed convincing and relevant, and what the possible future looks like. This is very much the case for International Relations.

The chief example concerns how the trifecta of anarchy, states and sovereignty thoroughly influenced the way the discipline thought about the global order. Current stories about ‘the Thucydides trap’ structuring China-US relations or the necessity of avoiding ‘a new Munich’ over the war in Ukraine are similarly based on ideas of sovereignty, anarchy, and the nation state. The primary mover here is considered to be ‘the Treaty of Westphalia’, signed in 1648. It is not uncommon to hear stories of the Westphalian system and how ‘the’ Treaty of Westphalia kick-started the modern state and state system, if not even modernity itself. Meanwhile we know that there is no ‘Treaty’ of Westphalia, as there were at least two of them in 1648, that sovereignty was not mentioned in any of them, that the treaties spoke of estates and not states and that there was no overarching systemic feature of the treaties (Carvalho, Leira and Hobson 2011). The narrative of Westphalia has all the hallmarks of a myth.⁴ Regardless of the historical evidence, the problematisations and the alternative stories, ‘1648’ and ‘Westphalia’ refuse to go away. Is there, then, as Tyrion Lannister highlights, nothing more powerful than a good story, and can nobody defeat it? At least, stories are not subject to a rational process of evidence and refutation, as positivist notions of science may suggest. The established stories—if not even myths—prevail and empirical evidence cannot defeat them.

It is here where the question of stories becomes relevant for the future development of Historical International Relations (HIR). Not because Historical IR is like Bran Stark and should claim the IR throne as the best approach to ‘lead us into the future’, but because the burgeoning literature in HIR faces a ‘constitutional’ problem. The impetus of HIR is driven by a desire for historical correctness or at least some historical sensitivity in the hope that the ‘better’ narrative prevails. Historical IR has in this respect invigorated a new empirically driven research agenda, expanding IR both spatially (different regions) and temporally (different time periods). While the hope for historical sensitivity is perfectly legitimate, the inscribed hope in HIR that stories align somehow automatically to the evidence that is presented to them, gets continuously disappointed: the old stories prevail, and nobody can defeat them.

Historically minded IR scholars now have two ways of dealing with this disappointment: they can either blame the apparent ignorance of those who fail to take into account how ‘it has really happened’; or they can accept that fighting a story is like fighting a windmill with a horse stick: maybe you are lucky and take one down, but most of the time you don’t. Yet this second option then pushes HIR from the search for empirical sources to questions of historiography—that is, the question of how history is written, with what methods and based on what sources.⁵ It is here we find thorny questions like the relationship between evidence and theory or the relationship between language and history that take us to the depth of social theory. To accept that we are dealing with stories thus leads us to accept that we also develop stories and can only hope to tell better ones. The best we can hope for is that we ‘compare’ stories, evaluate them, find them more or less convincing. What we cannot hope for is that there is an end to—or even an escape from—stories being told.

It is certainly a formidable and frustrating task to argue that all our attempts in HIR accumulate to just stories being told. This contribution seeks to approach the topic productively and explore the reason why stories prevail. We argue that the reason why there is no escape from the ‘stories we live by’ is because we always have to deal with concepts (Kessler 2021). Concepts like the ‘state’, ‘sovereignty’ or ‘modernity’ are empirically unfalsifiable yet remain important for sense-making. We simply cannot do without them and because we do have to deal with concepts, we always and necessarily touch on questions and problems that are not exhausted by empirical data but where we actually have to build stories around them. In the end, the very spatial and temporal categories through which we make sense of dynamics and changes are linguistic constructs.⁶ Yet to accept that our social world is one of artifice expressed through concepts does open the door for a history of those very stories, a history of the concepts being used. Stories are not random and there is much to be said about where our stories come from and what they presuppose. Stories have their own historicity and allow for further explorations, exchange, and comparisons: what stories have been told, what stories were impossible to tell in the past because specific concepts did not exist. In this sense, the stories we live by tell us a great deal about the project of HIR. They tell us something about how in the past the future was imagined, which stories were forgotten, and thus about the contingencies that made our present stories possible.⁷

We certainly do not pretend to have all the answers and certainly must work with shortcuts, omissions and biases.⁸ We nevertheless want to suggest that to take seriously the linguistic constitution of histories, conceptual history offers a useful inroad to embrace stories, push HIR to historiography and thus tell different stories in world politics. As an illustration of what kind of questions then come to the fore, we point to systemic conceptual shifts, such as the shift German conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck referred to as the Saddle Time. ⁹

In the hope of stimulating further inquiries from various angles in IR, this article proceeds in two steps: the first section explores the very basic story that the Treaty of Westphalia did not only end the 30 Years War in 1648, but also gave birth to the modern state. It shows how HIR has spent a great deal of energy on problematising, debunking and critiquing this story. It also shows that despite all those efforts, the story is able to survive empirical ‘falsifications’: it is continuously reproduced in even very recent contributions. The second section then suggests that the impetus behind HIR is still dominated by an empiricist urge to find out the ‘truth’. Instead, to accept and embrace stories also demands an embrace of historiography where the conceptual and linguistic dimension raises the question of conceptual shifts and rupture. We couple these insights from reading Historical IR explicitly with ideas from conceptual history as one possible avenue to raise different questions. Contrary to the idea that the right empirical material will lead to different stories that debunk established myths in an automatic process of conjecture and refutation, conceptual history points to a) a changing relationship of past, present and future that b) made modern stories possible and c) thus show the historicity of stories. A brief conclusion ties the argument together. Here we suggest that Historical IR could expand its critical potential further by the accepting the constitutive function of concepts and how they structure our ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’.¹⁰

1648: The treaty of our discontent

Before we can recount the many challenges that we currently identify, we have to briefly lay out the baseline. In ‘mainstream IR’, which typically could be found in textbooks and classrooms, rather than in academic texts, history was primarily used as a repository of data. These data were furthermore only allowed to speak to a very circumscribed set of issues. Central to disciplinary IR was an understanding of the past as defined by a massive break brought on by the peace treaties signed in Münster and Osnabrück in 1648, treaties allegedly establishing sovereignty as the founding principle of European politics, with the nation state and international anarchy as correlates of this principle of sovereignty. This was an understanding brought into post-war IR by Leo Gross (1948) and echoed, for example, by Hans J. Morgenthau (1985, 254) arguing that the treaties ‘made the territorial state the cornerstone of the modern state system’. These cornerstones in turn defined the remit of disciplinary IR, with history demonstrating states guided by the necessity of balancing and utilising the twin tools of diplomacy and war. The disciplinary self-understanding of IR in the early 1980s mirrored this view of the subject matter; the discipline had been born in 1919 as a reaction against the Great War, and after a generation of idealist folly, it had first become realist then scientific.¹¹ Critical scholars in the 1980s tried to imagine an order beyond states only to find out that the conceptual framework kept reproducing the state: the state was inscribed in the socio-political vocabulary to such an extent that it was impossible to imagine a world beyond it. Thus, even Marxist scholars like Wallerstein, who pointed to the structural force of the capitalist world system, nevertheless had to concede that the primary actors in IR were states.

The myths of 1648 and 1919 create an image of continuous continuity, where the future looks very much like the past; the structuring features of tomorrow will be more or less the same as the structuring features of yesterday.¹² Technological innovations might change the stakes of the game and relative power might vary, but states interacting in an anarchical system remained the baseline. In many ways this could be considered a cyclical, or pre-enlightenment, view of history where, as German conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck argued, ‘the expectations cultivated […] subsisted entirely on the experiences of their predecessors, experiences which in turn became those of their successors. If anything changed, then it changed so slowly and over so long a time that the breach separating previous experience and an expectation to be newly disclosed did not undermine the traditional world’ (Koselleck 1985, 264).

Unsurprisingly, when scholars sought to challenge the naturalised understanding of sovereignty via structural realism, they questioned first the lack of historical depth and the problems of periodisation (Ruggie 1983, 1993), then the historical stability of core concepts (Der Derian 1987; Bartelson 1995), and ultimately then the very dates themselves, as the whole idea of a monumental change in 1648 was repeatedly debunked (Osiander 2001; Teschke 2003; see extensive discussion in Carvalho, Leira and Hobson 2011). Ultimately, the notion of a discipline concerned first and foremost with war and intra-European issues and becoming ever more scientific was likewise completely rejected (Long and Wilson 1995; Long and Schmidt 2005; Hobson 2012; Vitalis 2015; Owens and Rietzler 2021). In a more macro perspective, the challenges against 1648 and 1919 served to turn attention towards other actors than states and other topics than balance of power, war and diplomacy, bringing in actors and topics like hierarchy, empire, race and gender. The challenges were also directed against the cyclical understanding of history, suggesting in its stead a more linear understanding of time, at times even with a progressivist bent.¹³

Reading Historical IR as variations over the theme of ‘debunking the myth of 1648’ is an oversimplification. It should also be stressed that while much of the early turn to history can be understood as an internalist response to perceived problems of the IR discipline, more recent advances in Historical IR have explicitly been inspired by external challenges of the present. Even so, a great deal of important historical work of the last three decades can be read in light of the rejection of earlier historical constructs. State-centrism and Euro-centrism has been challenged with reference to the prevalence of empires and imperial thought throughout recorded time, and their continued importance up until our present (Barkawi and Laffey 2002; Bell 2007; Nexon 2009; Bayly 2016). This has also included in-depth studies of the many auxiliary and parallel actors working in and around empires, such as trading companies (Phillips and Sharman 2020), hybrid violence providers (Thomson 1994; Percy 2007; Leira and Carvalho 2010; Riemann 2021), and families (Leira 2018; Haldén 2020). Many of these works necessarily also challenged traditional IR ideas about the state, including topics such as the importance of borders and cartography (Branch 2013; Goettlich 2019) and how states emerged (Kaspersen and Strandsbjerg 2017).¹⁴ Although not necessarily framed as challenges to the anarchy-assumption of traditional IR, many of these works drew attention to the prevalence of hierarchies in international relations, not only of polities but also of race and gender (Zarakol 2017; Yao and Delatolla 2021; Towns 2021).

The uniqueness of Europe has furthermore been challenged with reference in particular to the importance of Asian examples and traditions (Hobson 2004; Phillips and Sharman 2015; Neumann and Wigen 2018; Zarakol 2022). Several of these works also expanded the timeframe of interest. Where earlier work, if interested in history at all, had primarily concerned itself with Europe after 1648 and earlier episodes perceived as similar to that period (like the Greek city-state system), the debunking opened up the study of other periods, in and beyond Europe. The medieval period, which had for instance typically been read simply as a precursor (or indeed some sort of constitutive temporal other), has been reappraised (Costa Lopez 2020), as has the first half of the early modern period (the one before 1648) (Carvalho 2014; Caraccioli 2021). Most strikingly, the nineteenth century (often bracketed both in IR accounts of international relations and of international thought) has received a great deal of attention, with the most far-reaching claim being that this century changed international relations so profoundly that what came before is scarcely comparable to what has come after (Buzan and Lawson 2015). Finally, building on early explorations of the historicity of core concepts, more attention has been directed at how even the ways of articulating international relations have been changing, with a special emphasis on, for example, diplomacy, war, peace, empire, foreign policy and balance of power (Constantinou 1996; Leira 2016; Bartelson 2018; Jordheim and Neumann 2011; Leira 2019; Andersen 2016).

In sum, the narratives of international relations which structured the discipline of IR two generations ago should now in principle have been left in the rear-view mirror; they should have faded and become mere relics. The projection from past through present to future of endless balancing by sovereign units in an anarchical system has been belied both by present practice and by the expansion of historical knowledge. In one sense, then, the historical interventions should be considered as an intellectual success. Many works of Historical IR have been explicitly motivated by a desire to open up thinking space and to demonstrate how our current international relations are contingent, that things could have been different. This they have managed. The warning of Tyrion Lannister nevertheless cautions scepticism. Indeed, when assessing the impact of myth-busting a decade ago, it was found that the myths of 1648 and 1919 remained fairly strong where knowledge is passed on, in textbooks (Carvalho, Leira, and Hobson 2011). A somewhat cursory glance at developments over the last decade suggests that at least the former of these myths is still relatively prevalent. To give but two recent examples, in the Politics and IR Companion (Leach and Lightfoot 2018, 89) we learn that the Treaty of Westphalia (given as a singular): ‘created a basis for national self-determination […] created the concept of coexisting sovereign states’. In Introduction to International Relations. Theory and Practice (Kaufman 2022, 87–88) we get a somewhat more elaborate picture. The Treaty, also here in singular: ‘firmly establishing the nation-state as the primary actor in in the international system […] established the European political system that we are familiar with […] It ended the Holy Roman Empire and replaced it with a system of sovereign states’.¹⁵ References to the disciplinary myth of 1919 are on the other hand harder to find. The difference here probably reflects the different status of the myths. The myth of 1919 was an epistemic myth, concerned with how IR has approached the world. The combination of historiographic myth-busting and renewed interest in questions of gender and race reduced its usefulness. On the contrary, acknowledging the racialised and gendered origins of the discipline can allow for an alternative story of progressive disciplinary development, one not happening through successive great debates, but one finally coming to terms with its past in time to deal with the problems of the present. The myth of 1648 is, on the other hand, a myth of ontic origin, and a second order construct at that—concerned less with events of 1648 than what later renderings have made 1648 mean.

In addition, and in contrast to the myth of 1919, it is a myth connected to core (non-empirical) concepts of the discipline: to question 1648 is to question the idea of global order that we reproduce on a daily basis. It is to question the origins of states and the way in which they have come about. In short, 1648 concerns the subject matter which IR studies. Other actors and other places might be added to the mix but rejecting the myth of 1648 would challenge the self-perception of much of IR completely. ‘Westphalia and all that’ thus continues a zombie existence in IR, not due to its veracity, but due to its usefulness in conveying that IR is and has always been a discipline concerned with states and the state-system. Since the point of the myth was never historical accuracy, but the maintenance of a specific disciplinary identity, empirical refutations of what happened in Münster and Osnabrück should not be expected to make all that much difference (Leira and Carvalho 2018). Mythical stories are not easily shaken, and, paradoxically, many of our revised stories retain a strong affinity for mythical pasts.

Stories and their times: the case for conceptual history

Myths, as ‘good stories’ are stubborn things.¹⁶ You can throw refutations, inconsistencies, and contingencies at them, but absent of a major shock, they often remain more or less impervious to empirics. To us, this illustrates a potential problem with some of the Historical International Relations literature. As we laid out briefly in the previous section, the impetus of HIR has often been to unearth points of origins, to tell history as it really happened and thereby challenge the dogmas upon which ‘orthodox’ IR has been built. This has been a driving force for much of our own work, and we absolutely support the idea of continuously developing ‘working truths’ (Kornprobst 2007, 34)—widely accepted accounts about what happened in the past. We also believe that IR could acknowledge the ‘working truths’ of historians rather than stubbornly sticking to our own ones. Yet, as the last section has shown, it would be futile to believe that those working truths can become more than temporarily accepted stories. If even the very basic myth of 1648 is not ‘debunkable’ by whatever challenging, alternative or ancient empirical evidence is presented, then it is time to accept that there are always stories we live by and that HIR cannot construct a solid empirical basis for our theories, but that it simply tries to tell different stories that are already infused with conceptual and theoretical presuppositions. One could lament the lack of historical sensitivity of course, but that would turn HIR into institutionalised naggers, a very unsatisfying state of affairs for everybody. It is more productive to take ‘stories’ seriously and ask what consequences for HIR arise—consequences that inevitably take us into the realm of historiography and hence the (meta-)theoretical underpinnings of historical research.

Here, we suggest that a promising avenue can be found in taking concepts and their (historical) changes seriously: while concepts are a necessary ingredient for all ways of sense-making, they are not true in any positivist sense (Koselleck 1985).¹⁷ Key concepts like international, sovereignty, diplomacy, war, or the state for that matter encapsulate various histories and stories that are not disproven by pointing to some empirical fact. In this sense, concepts like anarchy or sovereignty did not emerge because 1648 happened and one cannot verify or falsify the use of sovereignty by pointing to a police car or a politician in front of a camera. Rather, to draw from two Koselleckian notions, they structure the relationship between our ‘space of experience’ (our repertoire of stories to draw on) and ‘horizons of expectations’, (the futures that are possible to imagine) (Koselleck 1985: ch. 14). That is—to link them to stories—they structure how stories remember a specific past and allow for specific ‘imaginations’ of the future. In the following, let us discuss three dimensions in relation to conceptual history: their emergence and semantic struggles; the rupture and systemic changes in how past, present, and future are related; and the historicity of stories themselves.

The emergence and transformations of concepts are subject to different rationalities than usually considered in HIR. This is particularly troublesome as HIR makes use of concepts all the time without taking them seriously in their own right. One way to handle this, is to engage with recent publications in IR where a debate on concepts is emerging (Berenskoetter 2016; Ish-Shalom 2021; Kessler and Lenglet 2020). These contributions point to the linguistic constitution of concepts that nevertheless always reach beyond their linguistic confines as they carry on traces of past experiences and struggles. Concepts do not come out of nowhere. The emergence as well as the use of concepts are subject to debate, they are continuously renegotiated, and hence they are always subject to reinterpretation. We may misunderstand the concept and hence use it in a wrong or at least in a less commonly acceptable way, but that misunderstanding is not remedied by the reference to empirical facts, but via the highlighting of discursive rules and structures in which the concept operates. This is also why analogies and stories are rhetorically effective while empirical ‘facts’ remain impotent. Analogies and stories tie together past, present and potential future through the combination of ‘common wisdom’ (as opposed to ‘working truths’) and central concepts. Past struggles around concepts allow us to explore the imaginaries and expectations that have not been taken further. They open the gateway to the alternative paths and visions that have not been taken on and hence the buried expectations and experiences. Highlighting concepts in this way helps us understand why ‘1648’ simply does not constitute a new system as if the signing of ‘the’ treaty (again in the singular) constituted a new order, but how it is a site for continuously renegotiating experiences and expectations that our stories draw upon. And yet, past struggles over conceptual meaning are inscribed in the way we use sovereignty and hence they drag us back to specific moments in time.

Saddle Time and transformative change

Concepts refer backwards to past political and social struggles. There is a reason why—in our attempt to ‘finally’ understand sovereignty, we continuously go back to past debates and uses. Then it’s Bodin all over again. At the same time, they also structure our expectations on what the future looks like: as long as we think in terms of sovereignty, the future will be characterised by states that somehow stand in relation to one another—even if those relations are subject to change. The semantic struggles around them with the continuous reinterpretation and innovation of concepts allows for the possibility of transformative change; that is, the possibility where not a single concept but the entire socio-political vocabulary is subject to change. To illustrate this systemic change, Koselleck’s notion of Saddle Time is quite helpful (Koselleck 1967, 93).¹⁸ According to Koselleck, the Saddle Time between 1750 and 1850 marks not only a significant discontinuity in the continuous flow of practices, but an epistemic rupture where the past becomes unintelligible to us and is now in need of translations and the reconstruction of that particular context (see Koselleck 2006). We may use the same words, but they now mean something else:¹⁹ The concept of revolution might be a case in point: it originally meant to ‘turn back’ (from Latin revolvere) and only today means ‘sudden break’. The move from ‘estate’ (as inherited title) to ‘class’ might be another. Even if the words, like ‘sovereignty’, ‘state’, ‘liberty’ etc. may stay the same—it is only within the Saddle Time that they acquired their specific modern meaning. As our entire socio-political vocabulary underwent a significant transformation, it is impossible to take a current concept and simply ‘project’ it backwards and then assume that it means the same thing. Past meanings are hidden from our view and understanding. It takes training and expertise to uncover (to use Foucault’s metaphor) their past uses and meanings.

Here, a dimension of HIR becomes visible that remains hidden as long as we stay in the attempt to uncover of ‘how it has really been’, an attempt that is based on a linear temporal order. The notion of Saddle Time points to a historically contingent and changing temporal order in the sense of how past, present and future relate to one another. Koselleck speaks here about how the space of expectations (past) is increasingly dis-connected from the ‘horizon of expectations’ (future) and hence the way in which they mutually constitute a present: how do concepts stabilise or de-stabilise temporal orders and hence the way and kind of stories we are able to tell? In the end, concepts have a very specific history linked to how the past, present and future are connected. One of the best examples of how that vocabulary has changed is offered by Ian Hacking’s The Emergence of Probability (Hacking 1975). As he demonstrated, today, we are accustomed to link probability to the ‘analysis of future contingency’. That contingency might be due to the fact that we lack the necessary information and hence expresses a state of ignorance, or it might refer to holding a specific card in game or a number in roulette and hence the relative frequency of positive to all possible cases. In both cases however, probability refers to a possible future. When we go back to the use of probability before Logic of Port Royale (1662), probability was firmly embedded in a distinction of higher and lower sciences where the higher sciences could demonstrate, and the lower sciences had to provide evidence by argumentations. Probability here used to refer to ‘evidence by authorities’ that had to be found at best in the Bible. It was thus backward oriented and the older the texts, the better. It would be futile to use our understanding of probability and project that onto medieval texts. It would create category mistakes of the first order. Yet these category mistakes are to be found in a changed temporal order.

Here we believe that an interesting avenue towards the ‘Time and IR’ literature is to leave behind the idea that past, present, and future stand in a linear relationship—as any chronology would tell us— which in turn requires a concept of time that takes us beyond the idea of a naturally given time that moves unmercifully forward. This is not only an empirical question that requires evidence,²⁰ so the classic historical methods don’t quite work here. As the ‘Time and IR’ literature has pointed out, but which has not significantly been taken up in HIR, a great deal of effort has gone into making temporality seem unitary, not least into attempting to make concepts of the Saddle Time seem universal. Like this literature we believe that the potential benefits of this opening up of the past can be further developed. If the idea of basic continuity, projected backwards from our present, is simply replaced with an idea of linear development leading to our present, a great deal of critical potential is left unexplored. To stress here: it is a good thing that much of Historical International Relations has challenged the ‘tunnel vision’ of earlier IR, where past, present and future retained an essential sameness. However, we fear that we in some cases see ‘tunnel vision’ replaced by ‘funnel vision’,²¹ where historical variety is acknowledged, but where one or more transformations is seen to have shaped a general unity. The continuous belief in one or more essential turning points and the logic of periodisation allows for the zombie existence of the myth of 1648. If revisionist history adds hierarchies, empires, race and gender to our historical knowledge, but we still continue to be told the story about 1648 and modernity, it seems that HIR remains at the margins and remains unable to tell better stories or at least defeat the story that the mainstream tells. What then is the point of dropping ‘Westphalia’? The place and date might be wrong, but they still work as shorthand for an argument.²²

The historicity of stories

Hence, there is the need to develop not only a historical but also a conceptual sensitivity. Accounts where the nineteenth century acts as some sort of funnel, creating unity out of diversity, risk reifying core concepts of international relations, such as ‘international’, ‘diplomacy’ and ‘war’, concepts which were being developed or transformed in this very period, but which are somehow held constant in our understanding of the past—as if they mean the same thing throughout history. Drawing on insights from conceptual history, we would stress how the nineteenth century was the time where we witness a rupture in the temporality of concepts itself, where experience and expectations, the relationship between past, present and future, was altered and thus different stories emerged. Stories could no longer be based on the past alone and stories about the unfolding of history in itself became possible (see Jordheim and Wigen 2018).²³ Here, we find different ideologies of progress that made experiences less relevant for much more open-ended expectations (Koselleck 1985, 274). Reifying the terms which became predominant in this transitory period, without acknowledging their own transformative capacity in their present, risks unduly narrowing our current horizon of expectations. To give an example, taking ‘diplomacy’ as a historical given underestimates the multiplicity of earlier practices being subsumed under that concept around 1800, the political potential of the label when introduced, and the revaluation of diplomacy with its horizon-expanding consequences in the twentieth century.

Thus, to move from the debunking of myths to conceptual change in ‘international relations’ (or whatever we might call the field above and beyond polities) holds a different promise for understanding both the historicity of stories and the stories of told histories. In particular, it is to be expected that conceptual change does not follow exactly the same logic ‘beyond’ the state as within polities. This promise is particularly obvious when it comes to ‘international’ concepts that emerged in the same period as when Koselleck described domestic conceptual change (see here also Capan 2020, 2022). Crucially, conceptual developments concerning ‘the international’ could also be infused with notions of past/future and historical development, as demonstrated for the concept ‘international’ itself (Marjanen and Ros 2022, Bartelson 2023). ‘The’ international is thus a concept that has emerged in the wake of a shifting spatio-temporal architecture and that invites us to endow it with distinct ‘rationality’ and historical change. As a concept, ‘the’ International similarly connects the past and the future in specific ways: there is the belief that History shows regular patterns that can be understood and mastered, and that there are criteria and conditions for progress that can be studied and compared. Since then, we may believe that there are distinct rules and regularities that can be studied in their own right and hence that historical research ‘unveils’ a particular knowledge that otherwise remains hidden from us. Yet this knowledge remains incomplete without taking into account the way stories connect the past with the future.

This then may allow us to tell a different story about our own condition today. That we are living in particularly unsettled times is not news (see Jordheim and Wigen 2018). Just as was the case during the Saddle Time, time itself seems to accelerate, upending our understanding of the world. For some, the solution is to return to futures past of essential tunnel-vision continuity, for instance suggesting that the US-China relationship has the makings of a ‘Thucydides Trap’ (Allison 2017). Others, taking a macro-perspective, suggest that we have now moved into the Anthropocene age. While discarding the tunnel-vision, such a take nevertheless explicitly relies on a stage-theory of history (albeit one where natural time and historical time have become inextricably intertwined). Yet others have rejected repetition and stages in favour of scenario-thinking. While explicitly aimed at expanding the horizon of expectations, scenario-thinking is invariably constrained by what is considered to the be the relevant space of experience. We believe that in all three cases, the stories we can tell narrow spaces of experience and hence create needlessly narrow horizons of expectation.

Typical for much of IR is a tracing of current changes in states and questions of positionality and alliances between them. There are in-our-face reasons why this is so. We would still like to suggest that many of the challenges underway are most visible in conceptual dislocations. In a world of bitcoins, bots and e-Residency, our nineteenth century understandings of money, capital, work, news, influence and belonging seem inadequate. It is no longer obvious that the conceptual apparatus developed over the last decades (not to say centuries) captures lived experience. On one hand, this suggests to us that historical analysis might provide us with better analytical tools by allowing for multiple temporalities and thus broadening the space of expectations. We are sceptical of analogical reasoning, and certainly do not expect to find analogies to bitcoins and bots in global politics before the nineteenth century. We do, however, suspect that a better appreciation of the partial disjointedness of time would open up a wider horizon of expectations.²⁴ On the other hand, we also believe that the unsettledness of our conceptual apparatus makes it likely that we will see significant attempts at synchronisation. Jordheim and Wigen (2018) suggested, even before the Covid pandemic, that ‘crisis’ is becoming an overarching tool of synchronisation. We find their analysis sound, but this still leaves open questions of how synchronisation is attempted in more specific fields, and if and how ‘crisis’ impacts how we express concerns about for instance money, capital, work, news, influence and belonging. Again, we believe that Historical IR has the capacity to widen the horizon of expectation here, pointing out and protesting the uniformity of synchronisation.

Conclusion

Stories structure the world. They link the past and the future together to create meaningful presents. While it is true that there is nothing like a good story, there are different stories to be told. The emergence of Historical International Relations has to be seen in this light. Today, there is certainly a greater sensibility and even acknowledgements of the various stories to be told. The story of 1648 that dominated our imagination has certainly been debunked as myth and other stories have started to emerge. While we are sympathetic to all these endeavours, our starting point for this article was the double observation of a world in seeming upheaval and a turn to history in IR to get a better grip on the present and the future, discarding the tunnel vision of the futures past of IR. From the perspective of conceptual history, we suggested that the link between past, present and future can be understood in terms of the space of experience and the horizon of expectations. Important work in historical IR over the last decades has in principle greatly expanded the space of experience. But the futures past have proved hard to dislodge. Part of the reason for this, we suggested, is that Historical IR has not quite reached its full potential. Ahistoricism has too often been replaced by a stage-theory of history, and the idea of a fundamental rupture has been retained, even if the dates have been moved around.

One way of moving on, laid out here, is to problematise the linear understanding and analyse the ways in which the past, present and future are connected. If, as we claim, the concepts used to describe the past are today imbued with notions of progress, there is a very real risk of replacing the ahistorical (or pre-Enlightenment) view of realism with some form of implicit stage theory, where the nineteenth century signals the move to modernity and the shedding of earlier forms of organisation and interaction. This easily leads to ahistorical readings of the past before the nineteenth century, a problem which is only exacerbated by the conflation between concepts of practice and concepts of analysis in IR, where nineteenth century concepts in use in the twenty first century are used to make sense, for example, of the seventeenth century. Adopting nineteenth century concepts can also lead to a lack of imagination about future developments. As noted above, the funnel effect of nineteenth century concepts, the very concepts used to study historical IR, might obliterate difference in the more distant past, thus narrowing down the space of experience, in the process circumscribing our horizon of expectations. To take one small example, while we applaud the scholarship demonstrating the continuous importance of empires (and the concurrent newness of states), replacing one with the other risks simply replacing one totalising story of past present and future with another one, while also ignoring that the very concept of ‘empire’ (both in analytical terms and in practice terms) has undergone repeated change and that utilising it with an analytical twenty first century gaze might obscure more than it clarifies about the past (Jordheim and Neumann 2011).

From the perspective of Historical IR, it could well be argued that many of the central political concepts were indeed developed before the nineteenth century, and that they underwent changes both before and after the nineteenth century which were as important (or more important) than the nineteenth century changes. While we do not dispute the importance of these other periods of change, we are not engaging with them at this point. It should be enough to point out that these varied periods of conceptual change support our claim that historical records do not speak for themselves and that the current ‘episteme’ of Historical IR to produce ‘better evidence’ risks subscribing to a historiography that equates the work of the historically minded IR scholar with the need to show how ‘history really happened.’

Embracing conceptual history thus opens new perspectives on the way in which the past is being remembered, but also for how the future can be imagined. To advance in this direction, we proposed to incorporate the study of conceptual change more explicitly in historical analyses. This would entail acknowledging that the cherished analytical terms of IRs futures past and present are themselves changeable and changing historical products, many of them also in their capacity as practical concepts. Coupled with the idea of multiple temporalities and how synchronisation seeks to make them conform, this could allow us to move beyond periodisation and the homogenising ‘funnel’-effect of the nineteenth century. We hope that such a move would help retain a broader relevant historical space of experience, thus also making possible a horizon of expectations allowing us to make better sense of our present and our future possibilities. To end with Koselleck (1985, 274): ‘Thus it could happen that an old relation once again came into force; the greater the experience, the more cautious one is, but also the more open is the future’. For Historical IR to contribute to caution but still the openness of the future seems a worthwhile task indeed.

Acknowledgements

We have benefited tremendously from comments from Jens Bartelson, Zeynep Gülşah Çapan, Benjamin de Carvalho, Julia Costa López, Benjamin Herborth, three excellent anonymous reviewers and the editors of CRIA.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Work on this article has been financed by the Research Council of Norway, through the CHOIR project [project number 288639].

Notes on contributors

Oliver Kessler

Oliver Kessler is Professor of International Relations at the University of Erfurt. His research focuses on social theory of contingency, risk and uncertainty and the history of inter-disciplinary research. His work has been published in journals of international law, heterodox economics and social theory. His current projects look at the conceptual history of the market, postcolonial hierarchies, and the rise of geoeconomics. He currently serves as editor in chief of the European Journal of International Relations.

Halvard Leira

Halvard Leira is Resarch Professor of International Relations at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI). He has been part of establishing the subfield of Historical International Relations, and his research has covered diplomacy, foreign policy, conceptual history, international thought and international order. Current projects concern the conceptual history of international relations and gender and diplomacy in the 19th century. Leira is currently associate editor of both the Hague Journal of Diplomacy and European Journal of International Relations. [email protected]

Notes

1 S8E6 ‘The Iron Throne’.

2 The polycrisis is increasingly used to characterise the current mode of existence. For example, see https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/01/polycrisis-global-risks-report-cost-of-living/(last accessed: 24 October 2023).

3 We use storytelling here not as a theoretical concept. It does play with the topos of ‘how to tell better stories of world politics’ and ‘big bangs’. Yet storytelling for us can be treated in similar terms as narration. We thank one of the reviewers for help in clarifying this point. For the purpose of this contribution, stories and narratives are treated synonymously. For narratives see Suganami (2008).

4 See Benno Teschke (2003). For the purpose of this article, we see myth as a subset of narrative, distinguished by how ‘it transforms history into nature’ (Barthes 1972, 128; see also Leira and Carvalho 2018 for a discussion).

5 A nice opener to these questions can be found in Budd (2009).

6 We are clearly not the first to point out the history of temporal or spatial concepts. On the one hand, one could point out to the literature on the ‘emergence of territoriality’. On the other, there is now a vibrant literature on ‘time’ in International Relations (on which, see more below). While space limitations do not allow us to engage fully with those literatures, we do think that there is an unexplored terrain between the literature on time in IR, historical IR and conceptual history of IR.

7 There is a pragmatic dimension to this as stories have to be told. We do not explore this pragmatic dimension of the story we are about to tell. For an interesting avenue see for example (Hom 2020).

8 One of the obvious omissions is that we cannot deal with the question of space and time. We do suggest that there are interesting stories to be told about ruptures and discontinuities of how the past, present and future relate to one another. However, this is a dimension that needs to be left to another occasion. On Time see (Hutchings 2008, Chamon, 2018; Hom 2020).

9 Alternative readings along the same lines could draw on Foucault or White and others highlighting structural ruptures in the understanding of space and time in history. Our reason for turning to Koselleck is that he is very explicit about concepts and their historical reconfiguration. As we will show, the difference lies in that conceptual history accentuates the historical formation of collective singulars like History and Progress. See Jordheim (2007, Jordheim 2012) and Jordheim and Wigen (2018). See also Kessler and Leira (2024).

10 The space of experience refers to the ‘remembered’ past that nurtures the present positionality, while the horizons of expectations are linked to the imagined futures and what actors ‘expect’ to happen (Koselleck 1985, chapter 14).

11 Our argument here is not directed against some realist ‘straw man’, and we fully acknowledge that various realists have engaged in sophisticated historical arguments. We do, however, believe that in particular the myth of 1648 with its many ‘realist’ implications has been close to a master narrative of IR. We thank one of our perceptive reviewers for drawing our attention to imprecisions in an earlier version of the argument.

12 Somewhat ironically, the myth of 1919 and the narrative of disciplinary great debates has a distinctly progressivist approach to science–IR’s understanding of the world will become progressively better. Betterment of science was observed, while betterment of the world remained unlikely, if not impossible.

13 Progress should not he read here as improvement or development, but a text like Thomson (1994) is surely progressivist in narrating a story of how the state gradually came to hold the monopoly on legitimate violent power.

14 These studies, as many of the other cited, also shade into the emergent academic field of Global Historical Sociology (Go and Lawson 2017).

15 It bears repeating that none of the empirical claims made in these two quotes would be accepted by historians working on the period, and that they have been debunked within IR for more than twenty years.

16 We use the notion of myth here to emphasise the naturalised character of the narrative of 1648.

17 For space reasons, we cannot provide a summary of this approach. For a summary and overview see (Kessler 2021).

18 While Koselleck admitted having introduced the notion of Saddle Time partly for marketing purposes, it still attracts considerable attention for theoretical reasons. Important for us, however, is that Saddle Time is not a period like ‘early modernity’, but demarcates an epistemic rupture in the temporal order: a disconnect of the past (highlighted in traditions, inheritance of titles, and origins) and the future (highlighted in prognosis, plans, expectations). A similar rupture could unfold today and hence we could see a similar transformation of concept formations. For an exploration along these lines, see Kessler and Leira 2024.

19 Koselleck links Saddle Time to an acceleration of social practices, something that we do not deal with in detail at this point.

20 Needless to say, the enactment and synchronisation work that was necessary to establish time zones and put everybody on the same clock has been shown empirically. This is of course enthusiastically acknowledged. Yet the question of the very relationship of temporalities touches upon meta-physical questions that are not exhausted by empirical observations. They can of course be flanked and made intelligible through empirical discussions. See Hom (2020).

21 We borrow the idea of the funnel from Stenius (2017, 264–266), but where he used it to discuss conceptual translation, we use it to illustrate conceptual homogenisation.

22 Here, the proposal by Helge Jordheim to explore ‘multiple temporalities’ (2012, 170) seems promising. We would suggest that a closer reading of temporal change, before, during and after the Saddle Time points in the direction of ‘multiple temporalities organised in the form of temporal layers that have different origins and duration and move at different speeds’. Yes, some parts of international relations can be understood as ‘Periods, discontinuities and structures of chronological succession’, but others are better grasped as ‘nonsynchronicities, structures of repetition, sudden events, and slow, long-term changes’ (Jordheim 2012, 171).

23 On the importance of collective singulars here see Kessler (2016). One could think that here again we introduce some kind of periodisation, but in our reading, we are more interested in the changing temporality and multiple temporalities through which modern singulars emerged that make us tell specific ‘myths’. We follow here the interpretation offered by Helge Jordheim (2012) who, to our understanding, comes closest to the German original texts. We could not agree more when Jordheim writes that: ‘Koselleck’s theory of historical times is not a theory of periodisation except in a very superficial sense. regarded as a whole, what Koselleck has to offer is a radically different theory of overlapping temporal structures and layers, synchronicities and nonsynchronicities that defy periodisation and, as stated in the passage just quoted, is even constructed with the purpose of defying periodisation, at least in the traditional historiographical sense. In the context of this theory of multiple temporalities the logic of periodisation, in terms of a chronological succession of more or less well-defined units of time, can only be one of many different temporal experiences, structures, and layers at work at any moment in history—more or less decisive, depending on the subject and the material in question.’ (Jordheim 2012, 157).

24 The importance of broadening the space of experience is clear, even if dealing with analogical reasoning. As Kopper and Peragovics (2019) suggests, making use of analogies beyond the Western experience make for alternative understandings of current affairs in the South China Sea. Beyond that, the growing interest in historical IR beyond Europe has the potential to disrupt conceptual homogenisation, by suggesting radically different spaces of experience.