International Studies Compendium Project

Extract

Comment on this article   History has been defined as the elaborated, secular, prose narrative of public events, based on enquiry ( Burrow 2008 :3). International Relations can be roughly defined as the discipline that deals with political transactions that transcend national boundaries (cf. Aron 1966 :4–8). Thus, there is obvious overlapping between the two disciplines inasmuch as history deals with international political transactions and International Relation deals with past instances of such transactions. Until, say, the 1960s, this would have been regarded as stating the obvious. However, the spectacular postwar development of the social sciences, the emergence of International Relations as an independent discipline, and the steady movement of historians' interest away from their traditional focus on political and diplomatic history ( Haber et al. 1997 :40–3) led to a progressive estrangement between the two disciplines. The end of the Cold War led to a still further widening of the gap, since the intellectual scene was dominated by ideas about the “end of history” and the postmodernist characterization of history as merely another form of fiction. Nevertheless, the bond between the two disciplines is too strong to be fully broken. History and International Relations were born from virtually the same womb: Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War (1972) , one of the ... log in or subscribe to read full text