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The current discussion about the ideological entailments of international history scholarship is most welcome, since this issue certainly merits more systematic analysis. I would endorse the key point made in different ways by Bruce Cumings, Douglas MacDonald and Jeffrey Kimball that we need better to appreciate the fact that all historical representation has ideological implications, whether these may be overt or subtle. It follows that seeking to tar fellow scholars with whom we disagree as ‘ideologues’ is a move of dubious legitimacy. Neither scrupulous honesty nor the professional conventions and procedures of the discipline nor the deployment of formidable arrays of archival sources can provide a safeguard against implication in ideological contestation This, at any rate, is one of the conclusions of my forthcoming historiographical study entitled _Remembering the Road to World War Two: International History, National Identity, Collective Memory_ (London: Routledge, August 2010). This is a comparative analysis of key debates on the origins of the Second World War in each of the major combatant countries, exploring how international history scholarship has been bound up with wider cultural discourses on national identity and collective memory. This entails, for example, reading the literature on Nazi foreign policy against the context of wider debates over mastering the Nazi past in the FRG, and analysing international history writing on French foreign policy before the war in relation to the unfolding ‘Vichy Syndrome’. The precise relationship between the different variables of history, identity and memory naturally varies from case to case, but the three are always intimately related, speaking to and feeding off each other. Collectively the case studies suggest that historians’ commonplace claim that disciplined scholarship necessarily functions as a salutary antidote to the ‘myths’ circulating in political discourse and collective memory is difficult to sustain. In relative terms, the US case study is one where the discursive connections are harder to tease out. However, I argue that the literature on US intervention in the war can be read profitably against the backdrop of the ‘good war’ mythologizing that has constituted the dominant American collective memory of the war and which has become more politically and ethically charged over the last two decades (with the ‘greatest generation’ phenomenon and subsequent mobilisation of World War II in the rhetoric of the ‘War on Terror’). The ‘good war’ myth is dubious, inter alia, because of how Nazi evil is used as a foil to point up American virtue in moves that are not logically entailed, reinscribing positive understandings of the national self and of the benevolence of the wider American purpose. The terms in which intervention is debated in the international history literature – with the wisdom and rectitude of intervention largely assumed – mean it risks complicity with the simplistic pieties of this broader war myth. Moreover, there is arguably a deeper ideological tension suffusing writing on intervention in the shape of investments in American exceptionalism. Often the fact of an exceptionalist essence appears to be taken for granted, with debate arising rather over the relative merits of the ‘exemplarist’ and ‘vindicationist’ policy options that might follow from and give expression to it. Space here precludes provision of the detailed textual analysis that might render these bald claims plausible. However, my reading chimes with Anders Stephanson’s observation of some years ago that ‘To have an account of any given question of [US] foreign policy is by implication to have an account of what the United States is and ought to be. It is to take a personal position on a certain political terrain’ (‘War and Diplomatic History’, _Diplomatic History_, 25:3, 2001, 395-6). Patrick Finney Aberystwyth University
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