Comment and Correspondence

Paul Kennedy, Walt W. Rostow

From Foreign Affairs, Summer 1988

Pointers from the Past

To the Editor:

Interpreting the larger tendencies and broader patterns of world history is, by its very nature, an intellectually risky business. The mere fact of generalizing across centuries and continents disturbs the orthodox professionals, whose own focus upon a single decade or region probably represents over 99 percent of all historical studies. The necessity to synthesize and make sense of vast amounts of secondary literature irritates the narrow specialist, who holds that it is improper to comment on, for instance, the policies of Gustavus Adolphus without years of research in the Swedish archives. Above all, perhaps, an author's attempt to point to the broader patterns of world history will provoke a response from critics who have their own, and very different, interpretations. Such disagreements will be the livelier if those critics sense that a new publication may also challenge their beliefs about the present and the future. As Marxists recognized long ago, just how the past is interpreted will always be a significant part of contemporary political disputes. "Pointers from the past" are, after all, trying to point us in a particular direction.

To that extent, W. W. Rostow's lengthy assault upon The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers in the Spring 1988 issue of Foreign Affairs is both perfectly natural and welcome. To be sure, anyone who reads a sustained critique of one's latest book in a journal as eminent as Foreign Affairs is bound to have mixed feelings: a dissatisfaction at the reviewer's failure to appreciate the volume in question, and a (admittedly only compensatory) satisfaction at the fact that one's arguments are getting such an airing. Ultimately the feelings of satisfaction must prevail; for does not the present heat generated by the debate over "lessons from the past" (or more accurately, over which "lessons" should be drawn from the past) suggest that we finally may be having our revenge on Henry Ford's well-known aphorism that history is bunk? If he had been right, then why should syndicated columnists across the country now be jostling to offer their opinions on the extent to which the past can offer pointers to the future?

Perhaps the real answer to the second question is that, while demonstrating by their very actions that they do not think history is bunk, journalists, politicians, reviewers and other sorts of pundits know that it is a very useful "grab bag" out of which materials for all sorts of interpretation can be plucked. In this connection, Ernest May's 1973 publication, "Lessons" of the Past still merits careful reading, perhaps especially by those who continue to use the term "appeasement" as if nothing in the historiography of the 1930s has altered since Churchill's The Gathering Storm.

Into this historical grab bag, of course, all reviewers have the right to grope, in the hope of bringing up evidence to counter the author's own interpretation of the past. But whatever counterargument they then produce deserves the same scrutiny they have given the book in question, especially when they make such a point about the problems of using analogies from the past.

This seems particularly necessary in the case of Professor Rostow's critique because of the peculiar but ultimately unsatisfactory emphasis he places upon the distinction between "hegemonic" and "balance-of-power" states in the 500-year story of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Laymen who have not noticed this distinction raised in any other review of my book may be bemused at such an emphasis, as well they should; professional scholars, well used to the way in which history is raided for examples and counter-examples, will be far less moved.

The idea that great-power politics since the Renaissance can be seen as a struggle between certain states that strive for continental "hegemony" and others that counter with a "balance-of-power" policy is not a new one. It is, perhaps, best described in its "pure" form in Ludwig Dehio's 1962 classic The Precarious Balance. In Dehio's rendition of events, Philip II of Spain, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Hitler led the five successive attempts to achieve European (and, to some degree, global) mastery, but they all were finally brought down by a coalition of "flank" powers, most notably Britain and Russia, and later the United States, which combined to oppose such hegemonic strivings. It was very much a tale of the good guys defeating the bad guys; and for a post-1945 German author fearful that the Soviet Union might become the new "hegemon," it was a useful one to lay before Anglo-American readers.

But the problem about employing such categorizations, as Mr. Rostow should well know, is that the issue is far more complex than those simple distinctions allow. After all, much of the recent interest in studying "hegemons" and "hegemonic regimes" in world politics has come from scholars in the field of international political economy, seeking to analyze the periods when the global trading and financial system appeared to center on one preeminent national economy. From this perspective, it is Great Britain itself, and later the United States, that are seen as the "hegemonic" powers, and the others that somehow have to relate to that hegemony. This is a point of more than semantic interest, since it is possible that many great-power clashes in the past were caused chiefly by one nation's fear of a rival's economic power. According to Mr. Rostow's fixed categorizations, one might conclude that the English should not have engaged in the three Anglo-Dutch wars of the seventeenth century (which were overwhelmingly "trade" wars), because their job was to preserve the European balance of power from the growing ambitions of France. Alas, nations often do not understand their function in world affairs in the way later interpreters do.