This overarching chapter offers a comprehensive overview on how history is dealt with in International Relations (IR) and presents a conceptual framework for the study of history in IR based on the concept of historicity. The chapter also makes the case why looking at imperialism – the cross-cutting theme addressed in every chapter in this book – is a particularly fruitful way for both tracing the role of history in international politics and making use of the concept of historicity. The chapter introduces in particular six modes of historicity which shape its core argument on the centrality of history for a better understanding and better analyses of international politics.

This chapter examines how the double historical experience with imperialism is incorporated into the collective memory of Ottoman and Post-Ottoman societies and to what end. While collective memory – sociocultural narratives and practices of collectively remembering (and forgetting) specific aspects of the past – and its cultivation reflects to the past it is a product of the respecting present. Using the example of the Battle of Kosovo and the Status of Jerusalem and focussing on the linkages between memory cultures and national identities this chapter highlights how different actors at different points in time have made use of the Ottoman past to shape the Post-Ottoman present according to their respective agenda.

Introduction

What in the world happened so that over the course of human history not only did institutionalized cross-border relations between polities become common practice, but in global modernity a thing called the ‘international political system’ was eventually established – a system of global reach, that is to say, within which struggles over collectively binding decisions are played out? This is a system with a remarkable internal complexity that includes a myriad of actors, rules, traditions and mythologies, many of which date back to premodern times. It is also a system in which the specific type of hierarchical (imperial and colonial) relationship that dominated international politics when it took its modern shape during the nineteenth century has continued to play the same prominent role up until the present. Drawing from historically oriented scholarship in international relations (IR) and global historical sociology – while being theoretically anchored in the world society approaches of modern systems theory – this chapter studies some central dynamics that have shaped the evolution of international politics and its imperial underpinnings. This approach allows for a better understanding of what happened after the modern international political system became firmly established as a distinct and recognizable social field rather than one based on conventional IR theories. However, this system and its field-specific power constellations are anything but static. They were the result of social evolution and have been subject to ongoing transformations ever since. Accounting for these changes from a theoretical perspective and showing how they are linked to the field-specific power relationships being played out in this system is the main conceptual concern of this chapter.

Change and transformation is understood here as a process of social evolution. According to Luhmannian systems theory (Luhmann, 1995a, 2012/13; Andersen, 2003), social evolution is triggered by communicative variations in a given social field. While such fields are integrated in larger contexts such as world society as a whole, systems theory also stresses the relative autonomy of evolution in a given social field or system. International politics, it is argued in what follows, is such a field. Starting out from the aforementioned observation that the modern international political system stabilized as a social form in the course of the nineteenth century, the chapter then proceeds to argue that an increasing external and internal differentiation of this system is, from a theoretical vantage point, a core feature of its ongoing evolution.

Recalibrating the integration–peace nexus

This book began by referring to the impact of European integration on the Franco-German border conflict. This example was the historical nucleus from which the belief in the major ‘post-World War II promise’, namely that European integration has the power to substantially transform borders from lines of conflict into lines of cooperation, originally departs (Miard-Delacroix and Hudemann 2005). This assumption does indeed often nurture the belief system(s) of EU decision-makers and the image of the EU in conflict societies, as the previous chapters, and in particular chapter 7, have shown. We have not argued in this book that the assumption of such a nexus between integration and peace is entirely misguided (Tavares 2004). Indeed, there are plenty of examples that show integration has had a positive effect on border conflicts in Europe. What we have, however, attempted to show from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective is that any linear and one-dimensional conceptualisation of a catalytic function of integration and association on border conflicts does not stand the test of rigorous empirical research. Thus, the case studies in this book on border conflicts in Northern Ireland, Greece and Turkey, Cyprus, Russia and Europe's North aswell as Israel and Palestine have shown that alongside the manifold instances of catalytic effects of integration (and to a lesser extent association) on border conflicts, there always looms the potential of integration and association leading to an intensification of border conflict dynamics.