Session Abstract

In assessing a swelling archival mass, many diplomatic historians have questioned the meaning of important trends related to imperialism and decolonization in a period that is still commonly  interpreted through the “Cold War lens.”  This line of questioning is closely related to a new sort of methodological consensus in the field of diplomatic history: embracing a culture of pluralism, historians have begun to use an ever-growing toolkit to delve more deeply into important and interesting international questions.   In a similar and related pattern, the explosion of  multi-archival, multi-national, and multilingual scholarship in the past decade—by no means new for diplomatic historians, but exponentially growing in practice—has benefitted the field, as recent works on modernization theory, economic and social development, ideology, human rights, domestic politics, nation-building, cultural diplomacy, and national liberation movements have shown.

This expansion in archival and methodological reach has resulted in a field that is as vibrant as it is diverse.  Perhaps because of this, scholars have struggled to find a consensus narrative for the second half of the twentieth century.  Finding dominant synthetic lines in this emerging historiography is anything but straightforward.  The closest thing to a consensus is a shared understanding that different but often interrelated forces unraveled the traditional assumptions of superpower conflict, resulting in a markedly more complicated international system. Compelling frameworks for understanding the era’s international tumult—which include superpower détente, decolonization, globalization, and human rights—are characterized as much by discord as harmony.  Historians correctly recognize the difficulties of striking an accurate and comprehensive understanding of the period. This resistance to synthesis, notable in national histories as well, has led one prominent intellectual historian to characterize the last third of the twentieth century as “the age of fracture.”

For many scholars working within the context of pluralism, questions of imperialism and decolonization have emerged as a central theme, one that interacts in interesting ways with other major trends.  This panel examines four different ways to view the transition from the imperial past to the global present.  In her paper, Kate Burlingham examines how the World Council of Church’s new Programme to Combat Racism reflected not only the racial, ethnic, and linguistic changes in the World Council of Churches, but also the developing human rights discourses and growing national and international concern regarding the on-going anti-colonial wars in Angola.  Ryan Irwin examines Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s appointment as the United States’ ambassador to the UN in 1975 as a window into the globally contested nature of racism, sovereignty, and world order at the height of the cold war.   In his paper, Maurice Jr. Labelle uses the specific case of the Arab boycott of Coca-Cola in 1968 to highlight the interplay between cultural and political processes of decolonization and globalization.  Finally, Chris Dietrich employs a combination of United Nations and U.S. government documents to examine how the imperial past influenced the international debate over economic development, specifically the relationship between modernization theory and the postcolonial concept of “permanent sovereignty.”