Lost in the Past: Emotions, History and International Relations

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to outline preliminary steps towards a history of emotions in IR. The primary contribution – and argument – of this study emerges from the observation that IR scholars have tended to write emotions ‘out of history’ in order to make sense of the present. Building on the works of historian Barbara Rosenwein, this study argues that much of the discipline of International Relations has incorporated into its thinking a strong but flawed ‘grand narrative’ of emotion. In brief, the narrative is this: the history of the West is the history of increasing emotional restraint – a progressive historical development that moves from ‘primitive’ emotional cultures, which give people much more liberty to manifest emotions they experience, to ‘civilized’ modernity and the bureaucratic rational state, which require social control of emotions. I assess two different arguments for this conclusion.

The first argument concedes that at least some IR theories do take seriously the historical representation of emotions but holds that much of IR theorizing rests on a temporal binary that uses a linear-progressive conception of emotional history, in which the experience and expression of emotion increasingly became subject to emotional control by social forces. Certainly not all IR theories insist on the universal validity of specific models of emotion concepts, as I will show below. But even those IR theories that do take history seriously, cannot avoid incorporating the grand narrative of emotional restraint outlined above into their thinking.

The second argument holds that the grand narrative, which represents the history of international relations as a history of increasing emotional restraint, is predominantly a Western historical narrative. This argument introduces a spatial binary that rests on a spatial misrepresentation of emotional history in IR. This second binary constructs the history of international relations as a narrative of an increasingly rationalized Western world against an emotionalized non-Western world that remains stuck in its violent past. I suggest that this double binary – temporal and spatial – is deeply problematic because it is rooted in a questionable historical understanding of emotions in IR: it employs a linear understanding of emotions that underappreciates and misrepresents the emotional epistemologies of previous eras. The alternative that this study develops of a history of emotions in IR is to advance the argument that the history of international relations resembles a history of emotional communities.

Emotional communities are “groups in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value – or devalue – the same or related emotions” (Rosenwein, 2006, p. 2). Precisely, the idea is to suggest non-linear ways to study emotions in IR as embedded in and expressed through various emotional communities in particular times and spaces. The most promising research strategy to develop such a cross-historical comparison of emotions is to historicize them. To historicize emotions means “subjecting discourses on emotion, subjectivity, and the self to scrutiny over time, looking at them in particular social locations and historical moments, and seeing whether and how they have changed” (Abu-Lughod and Lutz, 1990, p. 5).

This approach avoids some of the problems stemming from the double binary outlined above. First, it allows for a mapping of multiple emotional communities without introducing a particular temporal and spatial hierarchy. Second, the study of emotional communities enables us to evaluate contemporary notions of what is “emotional” in IR and if or how emotions have changed in their historical meaning and relative importance. Moreover, by historicizing emotions in this way, we can learn a lot about the moral values, power relationships and identities of various political communities of the past and present. Finally, to historicize emotions in this way lets us assess how different emotional communities interacted over time, contributing to a fuller understanding of globally entangled emotional histories. I illustrate this based on three interrelated approaches: communitarian, communicative, and comparative-connective. The analytical value of historicizing emotions through emotional communities is that it provides detailed insights into how emotions (or more precisely their meaningful expressions) change over time, how emotions are not merely the effects of historical circumstances but are actively shaping events and enriching historiographical theories in IR.

First, this study contributes to the historical turn by further bridging the so-called ‘eternal divide’ between History and Political Science/International Relations (Lawson, 2010). Precisely, it problematizes the Eurocentric and presentist character of much of IR in a novel way by engaging in a critical dialogue with a linear process of emotional control. As many scholars have argued, the scholar’s choice of theorizing history becomes constitutive of the way IR is theorized and understood. My aim here is to sensitize IR scholars about how they include emotions in their work and to warn against how an unconscious and anachronistic treatment of emotions may distort our view of history in IR. A more nuanced inclusion of emotions may add to our understanding of the complex historical processes that underpin and have underpinned global politics. For example, there has been a renewed interest in the study of hierarchies in IR (Zarakol, 2017). As pointed out above, emotions are important, yet underappreciated, manifestations of such historically constructed international hierarchies. That said, it should be pointed out that the approach put forward here still represents only one way of ‘doing’ history in IR. It is not meant to diminish existing approaches or to simply replace an existing grand narrative with a new one. As Lawson and Hobson (2008) have rightly pointed out, “history comes in plural modes rather than in singular form” and this study welcomes such pluralism.

Second, the study furthers the emotional turn by highlighting the historical dimension of researching emotions in world politics. Many IR scholars – with some important exceptions – study emotions in ahistorical ways through a universal psychologizing of international relations. Essentially, they suggest that today's emotions were the emotions of the past and will remain those of the future. But this viewpoint neglects the crucial fact that contemporary emotional categories and meanings are themselves the product of historical processes. While this has been increasingly recognized by some scholars (Hutchison, 2019; Linklater, 2014), it remains unclear what exactly is historical about emotions and how we should use history in their study. My point here is that before we can genuinely appreciate diversity or pluralism in and among emotional histories, we need to dispense with this grand narrative and its tendency to universalize emotion as regressive or atavistic tendencies. To this end, I suggest that the notion of emotional communities provides us with a novel historical perspective to open up space for a broader research agenda to analyze emotions in IR.