Diplomatic history deals with the history of international relations between states. Diplomatic history can be different from international relations in that the former can concern itself with the foreign policy of one state while the latter deals with relations between two or more states. Diplomatic history tends to be more concerned with the history of diplomacy, but international relations concern more with current events and creating a model intended to shed explanatory light on international politics.Matusumoto, Saho "Diplomatic History" pages 314-316 in Kelly Boyd, ed., The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing (1999) p. 314.
History
Historiography
Ranke In the 5th century BCE the Greek historian Thucydides was highly concerned with the relations among states. However Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), the leading German historian of the 19th century, codified the modern form of diplomatic history. Ranke wrote largely on the history of Early Modern Europe, using the diplomatic archives of the European powers (particularly the Republic of Venice) to construct a detailed understanding of the history of Europe wie es eigentlich gewesen ist ("as it actually happened"). Ranke saw diplomatic history as the most important kind of history to write because of his idea of the "Primacy of Foreign Affairs" (Primat der Aussenpolitik), arguing that the concerns of international relations drive the internal development of the state. Ranke's understanding of diplomatic history relied on using as sources the large number of official documents produced by modern western governments; he argued that historians should examine such sources in an objective and neutral spirit.Philipp Müller, "Doing historical research in the early nineteenth century. Leopold Ranke, the archive policy, and the relazioni of the Venetian Republic." Storia della storiografia 56 (2009): 81–103. online
20th century scholars Ranke's understanding of the dominance of foreign policy, and hence an emphasis on diplomatic history, remained the dominant paradigm in historical writing through the first half of the twentieth century. In the early 20th centuries, work by prominent diplomatic historians such as Charles Webster, Harold Temperley, and Bernadotte Everly Schmitt focused on great European events, especially wars and peace conferences. A notable breakthrough in diplomatic historiography occurred in 1910 when the French government start to publish all of the archives relating to the war of 1870.
Ranke's approach, combined with the effects of the War Guilt Clause in the Treaty of Versailles (1919) that blamed Germany, stimulated a massive outpouring in many languages on the origins of the war of 1914.M. H. Cochran, "Historiography and war guilt." Political Science Quarterly 43.1 (1928): 76-89 online The Bolsheviks in Russia published key secret papers from the Allies in 1918 and other governments commissioned carefully edited, multivolume collections of key documents in their possession. Numerous historians wrote multi-volume histories of the origins of the war. In the interwar period, most diplomatic historians tended to blame all of the Great Powers of 1914 for the First World War, arguing that the war was in effect everybody's responsibility. In general, the early works in this vein fit fairly comfortably into Ranke's emphasis on Aussenpolitik.Christoph Cornelissen and Arndt Weinrich, eds. Writing the Great War: The Historiography of World War I from 1918 to the Present (2021) online
Historian Muriel Chamberlain notes that after the First World War: diplomatic history replaced constitutional history as the flagship of historical investigation, at once the most important, most exact and most sophisticated of historical studies.Muriel E Chamberlain, Pax Britannica'? British Foreign Policy 1789-1914 (1988) p 1 She adds that after 1945, the trend reversed, allowing political, intellectual and social history to displace diplomatic history.
For the first half of the 20th century, most diplomatic history working within the narrow confines of the Primat der Aussenpolitik approach was very narrowly concerned with foreign-policy making elites with little reference to broader historical forces. The most notable exceptions to this tendency were A. J. P. Taylor and William Medlicott in Britain, Pierre Renouvin in France, and William L. Langer in the United States, who examined economic and domestic political forces.
Causes of World War Two
Sir Winston Churchill's multi-volume The Second World War, especially the first volume The Gathering Storm (1948) set the framework and the interpretation for much later historiography. His interpretation, echoing his own position before the war, that World War II was caused by the mad ambitions of Adolf Hitler; Churchill damned the cowardly and weak-willed British and French leaders who used appeasement in a futile effort to avoid the war. Churchill did not consider the argument that the alternative to appeasement was a premature war that Germany would win in 1938. The British historian A. J. P. Taylor's 1961 book The Origins of the Second World War challenged Churchill's viewpoint and argued that Hitler had no master-plan for conquering the world. Instead he was an ordinary statesman –-an opportunistic leader seizing whatever chances he had for expansionism. The fact that a world war started over Poland in 1939 was due to diplomatic miscalculation by all the countries concerned, instead of being a case of German aggression. British historians such as D.C. Watt, Paul Kennedy, George Peden and David Dilks argued that appeasement was not an aberration, and that it was an old British tradition which in this case flowed from numerous structural, economic and military factors. Historians such as Christopher Thorne and Harry Hinsley abandoned the previous focus on individual leaders to discuss the broader societal influences such as public opinion and narrower ones like intelligence on diplomatic relations. In recent years the debates regarding the 1930s have continued, but new approaches are in use, such as an analysis in terms of Britain's national identity.Patrick Finney, "The romance of decline: The historiography of appeasement and British national identity." Electronic Journal of International History 1 (2000) Online.Donald C. Watt, "The historiography of appeasement." in Alan Sked and Chris Cook, eds. Crisis and controversy: Essays in honour of AJP Taylor (1976) pp 100+.
French approaches A group of French historians centered around Pierre Renouvin (1893–1974) and his protégés Jean-Baptiste Duroselle and started a new type of international history in the 1950s that included taking into account what Renouvin called (profound forces) such as the influence of domestic politics on French foreign policy. However, Renouvin and his followers still followed the concept of with Renouvin arguing that French society under the Third Republic was “sorely lacking in initiative and dynamism” and Baumont arguing that French politicians had allowed "personal interests" to override "any sense of the general interest". In 1979, Duroselle's book La Décadence offered a total condemnation of the entire Third Republic as weak, cowardly and degenerate.Peter Jackson, “Post-War Politics and the Historiography of French Strategy and Diplomacy Before the Second World War" History Compass, Volume 4/5, 2006 pp 870-95S. W. Helprin, Some Twentieth-Century Historians (1961) pp 143-70
Fischer debate on World War One At the same time, in 1961 when the German historian Fritz Fischer published Griff nach der Weltmacht, which established that Germany had caused the First World War led to the fierce "Fischer Controversy" that tore apart the West German historical profession.Matusumoto, Saho "Diplomatic History" pages 314-316 from The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing page 315. One result of Fischer's book was the rise in the Primat der Innenpolitik (Primacy of Domestic Politics) approach. As a result of the rise of the Primat der Innenpolitik school, diplomatic historians increasing started to pay attention to domestic politics. In the 1970s, the conservative German historian Andreas Hillgruber, together with his close associate Klaus Hildebrand, was involved in a very acrimonious debate with the leftish German historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler over the merits of the Primat der Aussenpolitik ("primacy of foreign politics") and Primat der Innenpolitik ("primacy of domestic politics") schools.Kershaw, Ian The Nazi Dictatorship, London, Arnold, 2000, pp. 9-11. Hillgruber and Hildebrand made a case for the traditional Primat der Aussenpolitik approach to diplomatic history with the stress on examining the records of the relevant foreign ministry and studies of the foreign policy decision-making elite.Kershaw, Ian The Nazi Dictatorship, London, Arnold, 2000, pp. 9-10. Wehler, who favored the Primat der Innenpolitik approach, for his part contended that diplomatic history should be treated as a sub-branch of social history, calling for theoretically based research, and argued that the real focus should be on the study of the society in question.Kershaw (2000), pp. 9-10. Moreover, under the influence of the Primat der Innenpolitik approach, diplomatic historians in the 1960s, 70s and 80s start to borrow models from the social sciences.
Mason–Overy debate on internal pressures inside Nazi Germany