1.12.09

Visiting Archives: The Jimmy Carter Library and Museum in Atlanta, Georgia

A recent project took me to the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta, Georgia, and I thought this might be a good time to launch a second series on the IHP blog: archive visit notes. Hopefully the information in the posts will help researchers to get better acclimated with various archives before they go, or even help them to discover new archives!



I contacted the Jimmy Carter Library in advance of my visit by the form available on their website. The research room director responded with some information about their holdings which became clearer on-site, as well as with a list of local housing options.

From Geneva I checked the National Archives and Records Administration Archival Research Catalog (ARC), limiting all results (possible under “Search Options”) to the Jimmy Carter Library, for relevant records – the order in which they were returned did not make much sense to me at the time. Upon arriving the research room director ran a search for me, one which was classified by series and thus gave a better idea of the hierarchy of files – to those heading to a NARA archive I would recommend sorting your catalog search results by “Hierarchy” – knowing the record group certainly helps in a first sorting of which sources might be useful and which will likely not be so useful.

A source which is not noted on the Jimmy Carter Library website, but which was extremely valuable, was their CREST database (housed on an in-room computer, not accessible remotely). The CREST database mostly houses once-sensitive documents which have been reviewed and either declassified or sanitized (redacted). The advantage – and disadvantage – of all things digitized is that it is key-word searchable. This works well if you are looking for person names or agency names. However, if you have a less concrete subject, you will likely want to run the search several times, with varying key words, in order to best cover all your bases. As in real life, official titles or names were not always used in cabled correspondence, meaning a thorough search of the CREST database takes some good detective work. The CREST database documents each have unique identifying numbers which can be deconstructed, leading you back to potential files of interest – it can serve as another search tool.

Once on site, you also have the possibility to consult extensive finding aids for their series mentioned online, such as the White House Central Files, or the files of the First Lady’s Office. While the row of binders certainly looks daunting, they are actually a bit wanting in information – often the descriptions are vague, the type with official department titles but little indication of the content – that it serves the researcher best to order any box which might look interesting for their research.

In order to access the archive, I had to fill out a contact form and provide identification (a passport suffices). This in turn permitted me to receive a researcher card, valid at the Carter library for one year.

Prior to entering the archive, researchers are given keys to lockers just outside the reading room for all bags, coats, and nonessentials. Upon entering, researchers have to sign in and present any paper they wish to bring in (or when exiting, what they wish to bring out) to the research room supervisor in order to ensure documents are not being added or pilfered. There are no set pull times for files – one fills out a short request form, and usually in less than five minutes they are available for consultation.

The reading room itself is well stocked with reference works for the period of the Carter presidency, as well as the latest volumes concentrating on the Carter presidency. In addition to the document finding aids, there are extensive finding aids for audio and visual material (generally these results are available on the ARC catalog as well).

Researchers are permitted to photograph all documents (without flash, of course), as well as make copies (or print copies if they are in the CREST database). Copies, however, are fee-bearing.

In terms of accessing documents, as the Carter presidency was less than 30 years ago, there are still lots of documents which are classified. Even some that have passed the 30 year limit are still classified, due to too few staff to review such material. Therefore, I would recommend if the Carter archives were to be consulted for a major work (like a dissertation) in the next few years, that a minimum of two visits be planned - a first one to survey and examine what is already available, and a second one at least three or four months later, in case any access reviews or FOIAs need to be ordered.

The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library is part of the Carter Center complex, which in turn was formerly the Augustus Hurt Plantation.



In addition to the offices of the Carter Center and the archives, the property houses an actual library, a public museum, and a gift shop. There is a cafeteria (adorned with photos of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter feasting all around the world) where researchers are entitled to a complete lunch for $4 (open 11am to 3pm). Between the archives and the museum/gift shop/cafeteria entrance is a small rose garden which is nice on a clear day.





Overall, the Carter archive was very welcoming to researchers, from the receptionist to the multitude of research room staff. A plus for those planning to spend multiple days there is that their chairs are superbly ergonomic! I look forward to returning sometime in the near future.

26.11.09

IHP Fondue
















At the Bains de Paquis, Wednseday, 25 November

Photos courtesy of Lisa Komar

2.11.09

Getting to know the IHP Faculty: Davide Rodogno

New school year, more interviews! We begin with Davide Rodogno, Professeur boursier, who is a co-director of the Doctoral and Faculty Seminar in International History and Politics this year (and who will team-teach a course on the League of Nations and the United Nations: A Parallel History in the spring).



Jaci Eisenberg: I’m curious about how you became interested in your specific areas of research. Could you tell us about what you did your graduate studies on, and how that’s evolved into what you’re working on today.

Davide Rodogno: I was a Ph.D. student here at the Graduate Institute. Our director, Philippe Burrin, was my supervisor and I also was a teaching assistant for Professor Bruno Arcidiacono and Matthew Leitner. I consider the three of them as my mentors. The topic of my dissertation was on Fascist Italy military occupations in Europe during the Second World War.

The topic of my Ph.D. actually began as a seminar paper in late 1994. Bruno Arcidiacono asked me whether I was interested in working on Fascist policy towards the Jews of the occupied territories in Europe. The topic appealed to me a lot, since it contributed to the understanding of the persistence of a myth alive still today in Italy: Italiani brava gente, the Italians were good people and benevolent occupiers. In 1995, I came to the conclusion that if one really wanted to understand Fascist policies towards the Jews in Europe it was necessary to understand the broader context of the military occupation or annexations. The seminar paper became a mémoire and, eventually, a PhD dissertation.

In 2000, while finishing my thesis, I became interested in the topic of my second book, (a history of humanitarian interventions during the nineteenth century, which should be published by the end of 2010). I should mention that the 1990s was a time when at the old HEI there was a lively debate on humanitarian interventions. As a student I had the privilege to attend seminars of international law professors such as George Abi-Saab, Theodor Meron, and Luigi Condorelli. While preparing my thesis defense, I dealt with questions concerning the history of genocide and I came across Vahakn Dadrian’s book on the Armenian genocide. Dadrian mentioned humanitarian interventions during the 19th century, without giving any definition of this international practice. So, I started doing some historiographical research and realized that, with the exception of some international law articles, nothing had been written on the history of humanitarian interventions.

Shortly after my doctoral thesis defense I applied for a bourse chercheur avancé of the Fonds National Suisse. My research project was about armed intervention against massacre in the Ottoman Empire throughout the nineteenth century. In the meantime, I was already working for the World Bank in Lithuania and try to keep as many professional doors open for my future because I wasn’t so sure that I would get the Post-Doc fellowship.

So, this is how things developed in my case. Curious maybe, but that’s the way it is.

Jaci Eisenberg: What were you doing at the World Bank exactly?

Davide Rodogno: The World Bank had to prepare a Country Economic Memorandum, a photograph of Lithuania, one of the post-communist transition countries, as they were called back in the 1990s. I was one of the members of a team of 10 experts, and the only non-economist of the group. I had to prepare a report on the business environment. It was a very formative experience because I could interview the ex-President of Lithuania, the representatives of the patronat, of the workers, of small-and-medium size enterprises, as well as NGOs monitoring corruption in the country.

At the very same time I was applying for the YPP (the Young Professional Programme of the World Bank) the FNS awarded me the post-doctoral fellowship. I decided that I would keep working in academia. I moved to London and to Paris. From there I moved to St. Andrews, where I was appointed Academic Fellow in 2005.

Now, to go back to your first question, while I was working on the history of humanitarian interventions throughout the 19th century, I realized that a number of public opinion movements, such as the Pro-Armenian, Pro-Macedonian, the Congo Reform Association had a truly transnational dimension. I started developing an interest in transnational history, and wanted to combine this new research interest with my previous interest in the history of humanitarianism and humanitarian interventions. In 2007, I submitted a new proposal to the Fonds national, this time for a position of Professeur boursier, on the history of international humanitarian associations.

I started this 4 years’ project when I came in Geneva, in 2008. It is an entirely new experience for me. For the first time a lead a small research group and collaborate with two IHP Ph.D. students: Shaloma Gauthier and Francesca Piana. The first thing that we did was to narrow down the topic. We have decided to focus on humanitarian relief operations in the aftermath of conflicts, whether internal or international during the 1920s and 1930s. Our units of analysis are European and Northern-American non-state humanitarian actors, such as the ICRC, the League of Red Cross Societies, Save The Children, l’Union Internationale de Secours aux Enfants or the American Relief Administration. The project is about a given number of situations, post-war situations, and a given number of configurations. Geographically, the project covers an area that goes from Poland, down to Eastern and Central Europe, the Balkans, and then Turkey and Caucasus, including the relief for Armenians, from Anatolia to Asia Minor. We try to understand who were the actors doing what, and how humanitarian cooperation took place.

As you see, my interest in the history of Ottoman Armenians is still alive today. The reason why today I keep working on the international relief on behalf of Armenian populations, especially women and children in the 1920s, is because for me this is in a way the third chapter of a story that begins with the Armenian massacres of the 1890s, when no humanitarian intervention ever took place, and tragically continued during the War with genocide.

Jaci Eisenberg: Have you started any other projects? In previous conversations you’ve mentioned the League of Nations Century Project.

Davide Rodogno: This is a very long-term project that involves the colleagues of this academic unit, and possibly of other academic units, who have an interest in the history of international organizations. On the one hand, we wish to cooperate with the United Nations in the process of digitization of the documents. Currently, we are exploring the possibility of focusing on the Fonds Nansen, which is a corpus of documents that stands alone. Moreover, some of these documents have already been microfilmed, so the digitization process should be smooth and easy. On the other hand, we are developing a scientific project that will go along with the digitization. The history of Nansen is inextricably linked to the history of refugees, and, as you know, HEID hosts a refugee center, directed by Jussi Hanhimäki.

Jaci Eisenberg: You’ve already mentioned quite a lot of future projects, but do you have any others that you’d like to talk about?

Davide Rodogno: I would like to teach a seminar on the history of NGOs (maybe co-teaching it with Professor Pierre-Yves Saunier of Lyon). Pierre-Yves and I have already been discussing a number of things that we’d like to deal with in our seminar. We would like to encourage students to work in the archives of NGOs, to study the history and politics of NGOs as well as the history of NGOs governance a very topical question. As you know, a number of NGOs have their headquarters in Geneva or in Switzerland, and I wish our students to exploit this gold mine of unexplored archives in the future.

Bernhard Struck (University of St Andrews), Jakob Vogel (University of Cologne) and myself organized a two-round conference on the history of transnational networks of experts and organizations during the long nineteenth century. We are currently preparing a synopsis, and hoping to find an editor willing to publish this volume.

Finally, let me mention the Groupe d’Histoire des Organisations Internationales (History of International Organization Network). Last year, together with Sandrine Kott, from the University of Geneva, and Daniel Palmieri, from the ICRC, we funded this group. Our initial aim was to provide advanced students, independent scholars, university professors, as well as archivists with a forum and a locus where they could meet and exchange their views on the history of international organizations. We began by organizing a number of meetings with the archivists of the ICRC, the United Nations, the ILO. This year we’ve got an award from UNO Academia to organize a seminar on the history of international organizations. On October 27, we had a brilliant Oxford historian, Patricia Clavin, come to Geneva and present a fascinating paper on the League of Nations during the Second World War. By the beginning of 2010, we plan “to go virtual” and to have a website allowing scholars and students from all over the world to join the network. So, students and scholars coming to Geneva – where many archives of international organizations are located – will get to know the community of students and scholars sharing their same interests.

Jaci Eisenberg: Do you have any advice for the students of the History and Politics section?

Davide Rodogno: Just follow your passion. Especially for Ph.D. students, this is extremely important, because they have to live with their topic for 4 years. They should not follow any ephemeral fashions or short-term interests and take all the time necessary to understand what really their passionate about.

Professor Davide Rodogno, Office Hours on Wednesdays from 16h to 18h, Voie Creuse 334.

20.10.09

How accurate are your sources?

The Columbia Journalism Review recently profiled the "Tilburg Checkers", a group of Dutch Journalism students whose fact-checking skills are being honed through an intensive course of re-fact checking mainstream press articles - an astonishing amount of which are incorrect in some way or another.

This article certainly applies to history as well. In researching my Master's thesis, I found mistakes which ran the gamut from:

CONFUSION - for example, Patricia Clavin and Jens-Wilhelm Wessels' ("Transnationalism and the League of Nations: Understanding the Work of its Economic and Financial Organisation." Contemporary European History 14, no. 4 (2005), 490) indictment of sloppy research on behalf of economic historians:

They often write of ‘Geneva-based ILO-LON economists’, although many of the League reports originated from committees comprising government representatives, such as the Delegation on Economic Depressions. League officials, League economists, members of the International Labour Organisation, League committees and delegations comprising national representatives are frequently, and confusingly, lumped together See Andres M. Endres and Grant A. Fleming, International Organisations and the Analysis of Economic Policy, 1919–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).


To MISAPPROPRIATED ERRORS - such as assuming the title of a person, as seemingly presented in official sources, was indeed their title - without further checking.

In my professional experience i've even copyedited works who employed primary sources in their own way, mixing and re-ordering the quotation until it bore little resemblance to the original!

How frequently do you find mistakes in your sources? How do you address them in your research? Let us know!

14.10.09

Digitized archives

A recent article in the New York Times talks about some recent grants by the Levy Foundation to private organisations or institutions to digitize their archives. It emphasizes the positive, that such digitization is unearthing works which were previously uncataloged.

If you are a researcher that had worked with both paper and digital archives, what are your thoughts? Is it possible to conduct comprehensive research from digital archives alone, or must one imperatively see the paper in person?

13.10.09

Public Lecture: Global migration and the crisis: Do we still need immigrants now?

From the Programme for the Study of Global Migration:

Global migration and the crisis: Do we still need immigrants now?


Philippe Legrain, Journalist, Writer and Visiting Fellow at the European Institute (LSE)

Monday 26 October 2009, 12:15

Location: Room CV 342 (third floor)
La Voie Creuse, 16 - 1202 Geneva

An event organized with the Editions Markus Haller, publisher of the French version of Mr. Legrain’s book Immigrants - Your Country Needs Them/Immigrants - un bien nécessaire.

The library: making your research easier

The HEID library recently updated its landing page, as well as added some new tools for research, the most interesting of which is a downloadable toolbar with quick links to the Geneva library catalog, the UNIGE A to Z journal database, database listings, etc. I've been using it for a few days now, and I can attest that it really saves time!

29.9.09

What inspires your research?

It's not exactly international history and politics, but interesting nevertheless:

September's National Geographic had a fascinating story about a non-historian who created the Mannahatta Project - an effort to re-envision Manhattan as it was before its discovery by Henry Hudson in 1609 - after seeing an historical map in a coffee table book.

This begs the question: what sources inspire you? Have you found a great research topic in an unusual place? Let us know!

3.9.09

Welcome back!

After a three month summer vacation, welcome back returning IHP students, and welcome to all new students!

I will take this opportunity to shill for contributors to the blog - anyone from the IHP section - students, professors, etc. - can contribute content - thoughts on the news, information about side projects, questions about methodology, reports (like Fiona Ziegler's excellent contribution from January), other topics - there aren't really too many restrictions on what can appear here! And there is no set schedule - if you have a one-off piece, we'd be happy to have it. Or if you would like to start a column, that is great as well! Contact me at jaci.eisenberg(a)graduateinstitute.ch and I will arrange for blog posting access.

One more thing: I came across an interesting article in Harper's magazine the other day by Mark Slouka ("Dehumanized: when math and science rule the school", September 2009) on the overemphasis on math and science in American higher education, to the detriment of the humanities. While the debate could go on for ages as to whether history is more social science or included within the humanities, his take on the ramification of favoring fields of study whose output is easier to turn into a professional field (say a math major becoming an accountant) than those where it is more difficult (like literature, history, or political science) is worth a read. You can access the link here, although to read the complete article you will need a login. If anyone is interested I would be more than happy to lend them my copy.

See you in class!

2.6.09

Memoire advice for 1st years

The 2nd year IHP class, in the thick of writing their mémoires, would like to offer this advice to the 1st years:

NOW:
- Look for a professor to advise you NOW because they are (as well as several of you) are gone during the summer. A letter will arrive shortly by mail notifying you that you will need to provide the name of your professor and your topic at the very beginning of September.
- Pick a topic you like because to work one year on a single topic is difficult otherwise.

SOON:
- Create a comprehensive bibliography early on and ensure the books are available in the RERO network. If not you might need to order them through Inter-Library Loan or request that the library purchase the book, both of which take a while and can make you lose time.

LATER:
- Take at least one class or have a part-time internship or job in your spring semester so you have something to keep you on schedule – otherwise the mémoire can devour your days.
- Plan on submitting a first full final version in May or June of your 2nd year so you are able to correct it afterwards.

ALWAYS:
- Be organized!

More to follow....

17.5.09

Getting to know the IHP Faculty: André Liebich

Our interview project continues with André Liebich, Professor of International History and Politics. This semester he teaches a course on Nationalism, as well as one entitled Reading the Yugoslav Wars.



Jaci Eisenberg: How did you become interested in your specific areas of research? Could you walk us through first what exactly you research, and then perhaps process that has led/leads you to chose these areas.

André Liebich: I’ve been working the last few years on issues of nationalism and minorities, and that’s a stage in a long process. I’ve always been interested in the relation between ideas and politics, in an historical perspective. I began as a political scientist, my first degree was in political science, and economics. I then did a degree in Soviet studies, and then a Ph.D. in Political Science. My initial interest was in political theory, and because I had this interest in what was then Soviet-dominated or Communist Europe, I was interested in Marxism and Marxist regimes. My first book was in political theory, on an aspect of Hegelian thought. My second and third books were, respectively, on Russian Socialist émigrés, and on minorities in Eastern Europe. I have very eclectic interests, but there is sort-of a fil conducteur which is ideas, even minorities of course is a recent concept, and how they work themselves out in the political sphere. I do contemporary things as well, both in terms of teaching and services, and occasional work. But I think my serious work involves looking backwards to see how this relation between ideas and politics has played itself out at different times.

Jaci Eisenberg: You had just mentioned your teaching. While we’re on that topic, could you talk a little bit about the courses you’re teaching this semester?

André Liebich: Yes, this semester I’m giving a “Nationalism” class, which is a service class that the history and politics section does for the MIA. It’s nationalist theory, so we read authors and look at case studies. My other class this semester is called “Reading the Yugoslav Wars”, and that’s contemporary historiography. There’s an enormous literature already on the Yugoslav wars. We’re looking at schools of thought, biases, debates, even controversies of which there is no lack. The “Nationalism” class is one which I’ve given previously twice. It’s a regular, semi-obligatory class for the MIA. The “Yugoslav” class is my own choice, and that’s also something, that is very valuable and, some extent, specific to this section: we’ve always had a lot of liberty to choose what we want to teach, and we are encouraged to change our teachings. The rationale behind this is that we are a small Institute, students are here at least two years, so they should have some sort of choice in the classes they are offered. In the autumn I gave a class on “Political Ideas”, which is also an obligatory class for the International History and Politics – MIS incoming students, next year it will be semi-obligatory. And I gave a class on “Minorities and Nationalities” in a largely historical perspective. Next year I’m going to give a class in the autumn on Russian Foreign Policy since the fall of the Soviet Union. I’ll try to look at continuities - ideological continuities, ways of thinking, and security concepts - in both present Russia, Soviet Union, and even Tsarist Russia.

Jaci Eisenberg: Where have you studied? How did that path progress into teaching?

André Liebich: I was brought up mostly in Montreal, and I went to McGill, which is a good Canadian university. I studied political science and economics - it was one department at the time, a bit like History and Politics are here, and everybody had to take a Minor in Economics. So, in fact, I took some History courses, but not that many. I went on from there to Harvard, to the Soviet Studies program. Harvard has the oldest Russian Research Center in the US, and, of course, it’s a very dynamic place. That was a two-year program, from which I went on directly into, what is called then and now at Harvard, the Government department. There I wrote my thesis with two people: Adam Ulam, whose title was Professor of both History and Politics, a specialist of the Soviet régime, who had actually begun as a specialist of the British Empire and of British labour; my other thesis director was Judith Shklar, who was a classical Political Theorist, with books on the great political philosophers, such as Rousseau, Hegel, and on normative theory, notably a book entitled "Ordinary Vices.” As I was finishing my studies, I got a fellowship to go to Oxford, St. Antony’s College, which is a very cosmopolitan place; it’s one of the newest of the colleges, a graduate college, and by Oxford standards it is very laid-back. It’s something of a meeting place for people from all over because they have regional centers, a Europe center, a Russian center, a very famous Middle East center, and now a Japan Institute too. From there, I went back to Montreal, where I began teaching, at a newly-founded university the Université du Québec à Montréal, the first state university in Quebec. In my sixteen years of teaching in Montréal I also taught at my alma mater, McGill, and at the Université de Montréal as well. I became Professor of Political Science, Secretary of the Canadian Political Science Association, and so on. It was when I came here, in 1989, that I discovered that I was a Historian. And I was very pleased to learn that, because the way in which Political Science had developed left me completely cold. To my great relief, I no longer had to subscribe to or read the American Political Science Review. My Chair here when I came was called “le monde communiste.” This was autumn 1989. My first class was on the Socialist bloc and every week one of these countries ceased to be Socialist. That was a moment when I was reconfirmed in my belief that history gives us much more of a handle to understand what is happening, even today than formal models or one-size-fits-all political science approaches. It seems to me that the fall of the Soviet Union was the great failure of social science at the time; Historians didn’t anticipate this either, of course, but they weren’t in the business of anticipations and they could take a much longer view. Once it happened, it was much easier for them to find their point de repère, and their way. I remember after 1989, journalists called and were very eager to know about the Sanjak of Novy Bazaar. Well, you had to be a historian to know what this was because it hadn’t been mentioned for the last 80 years. Suddenly, places and matters such as these became contemporary, relevant, and burning issues.

In the course of my career, I spent several years on sabbatical or on research leave. I went back to my second alma mater, Harvard, for two years. I was at the Kennan Institute, which is the Russian Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. I spent a year at Stanford at the Hoover Institute, where they have marvelous archives – that’s where I was working on Russian émigrés. And here, since I came to Geneva, I have spent a year at Princeton, at the Institute for Advanced Study, which is of course a fabulous place, it’s Einstein’s office, and all that. The Princeton Institute treats its members very well. . But the experience confirmed to me that I was happy to be in a European setting. Since then I’ve been on sabbatical in London for a semester, and I’ll be going on sabbatical next year as well, in the Winter semester, to St Antony's and then to Nuffield College, in Oxford.

Jaci Eisenberg: Could you talk about some of the books, or perhaps research projects you’ve been involved with in the past?

André Liebich: When I was studying Political Science at McGill, a great revelation was Charles Taylor’s class in the history of Political Thought. I became utterly fascinated by Hegel, on whom Taylor was then writing. A visiting French academic at Harvard, Miguel Abensour, suggested that I do my thesis on a figure whose name came up frequently in discussions of the origins of Marxism but who had never been studied in his own right. This was August Cieszkowski, a Young Hegelian, French utopian socialist and Polish Messianist, meaning he tried to offer an interpretation of Polish, indeed universal, history, in terms of suffering and redemption. A very interesting figure, who hadn’t been really treated in depth in historiography, in part because he was so difficult to pin down. He wrote his philosophy in German, his social works in French, and his messianic quasi-religious philosophy in Polish. Obviously, a very particular combination My thesis on Cieszkowski was an intellectual biography, where I tried to set him in a Mannheimian perspective. It’s called “Between Ideology and Utopia,” which refers to the two paradigms that Karl Mannheim offers, and, which as my title suggests, don’t seem to me to be adequate, because some people fall between the two, as did August Cieszkowski. Then I did an edition of Cieszkowski's writings in English, published by Cambridge University Press. It put at the disposition of an English-language reading public, texts which were obscure and in different languages.

By then I had begun teaching, and I came to author a number of articles on contemporary Eastern Europe, which I still continue to do and still enjoy. I tried to explain how different Eastern Europe was from the Soviet Union, as I try to explain today how different it also is from Western Europe, as I think we are finding today. My next big project was Russian Emigration. I was going to do a political and ideological history of the Russian Emigration, and I was going to divide it into schools across the political spectrum – left, center, right. I began with the Left, the Mensheviks, and I never left them. There was so much fascinating and original material there and they were so influential in developing the way Socialists in the West saw the Soviet Union. The Mensheviks criticized the Soviet Union, from a socialist perspective, and never ceded to outright anti-Sovietism. That project took me much longer than expected, it was very much a labour of love. I spent much time in different archives – Stanford, Amsterdam, New York, Paris, London but at the time, the Soviet Union was closed for this sort of research. Since then, I have gone to Russia, to make sure that I hadn’t missed anything. I have been relieved to find that none of my Mensheviks had been a secret Soviet spy I published that book, which was very well received, won a prize, and is being translated., I am still involved in work on the Mensheviks, because the history of the emigration has become very important in post-Soviet Russia, whereas it was banned in the past, treated with utter contempt, and so on. Now it’s a real source of legitimacy, a sort of point d’ancrage, the link with "Another Russia," the authentic Russia, as it were. Indeed, in post-Soviet Russia, there is something of a cult of the emigration, which is a little bit disturbing, because some of these émigrés were pretty scary, but the Mensheviks have had their share of attention, of course, because of that. So I have been putting out Menshevik documents with Russian colleagues. There are now six volumes, and a seventh, final one is coming out. These are archival documents which are published with lengthy introductions, annotations, indices, and biographies, and so on.

Since I came to Geneva, I have turned to minority issues, initially because the Swiss government was very preoccupied with the minority problem. I first did a commissioned report and then as I became more involved in that the subject, I started giving classes, several of my seminars were devoted to this. I directed memoires and theses in this area, some of which have been published. I wrote a book in French on minorities in Central and Eastern Europe, which is something of a popularization, justified by the fact that there is so little in French on minorities, the French are allergic to the idea of ethnic minorities. They believe they don’t have any at home and, if they do, they don’t want to see them. From minorities I went on to nationalism. And the major book that I am preparing, is to be called Must Nations become States? It’s about the developement of the idea of self-determination from the French Revolution to the First World War, with a number of case studies. I have a chapter on the Poles in Paris after 1830, a chapter on Mazzini, another one on the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and a final one on Masaryk and the creation of Czechoslovakia. That’s a project which has been generously financed by the Fonds national, one that I should have finished already, but there’s always something more coming up.

I’ve worked also in Roma issues, and I’ve written on that, both scholarly and popular articles. I’m involved now in an EU project, which is about seeking out best practices in Roma policies in Central and Eastern Europe. Applied or policy research is not really my cup of tea, but it’s something that one does, as a service, and as a different way of approaching one's subjects of research. I’m also involved in a project on citizenship, which is particularly interesting because it has all sorts of ramifications. This is a project which originated at the Carnegie Endowment and has become a network nested at European University Institute in Florence. I have contributed to the project's book on the new EU members. A second edition is now coming out. It includes the newcomers, Bulgaria and Romania and we also have Croatia and Turkey, perhaps in a sort of anticipation. Although there is a Professor of Law from Edinburgh co-directing the project it’s really the social-historical-political analysis of citizenship laws and practices, that is so interesting. It’s as if citizenship were too important to be left to the lawyers! There is always something new or surprising to discover as one looks at the implications and the image of the state that comes through in the way that it formulates and implements its nationality policies, especially since citizenship laws are changing all the time, all the more so in the post-Communist countries - being a plural citizen myself, I’m very interested in citizenship.

Jaci Eisenberg: You’ve just mentioned quite a few projects that you’re in the process of completing. Do you have any on tap for the future?

André Liebich: Yes, well, I do have to get some things off my desk, but I do have two projects for the near and further future. Both are of a biographical nature. When I go on sabbatical next year to Oxford, I want to do a biographical study of a British journalist called Henry Wickham Steed. He was editor of the Times during the First World War and just after the First World War, but the way that I come across him is that he was the great promoter of Central European independence. He had a very colorful life, of course, as a Foreign Correspondent in different places. Very contradictory person, with a complicated personal life. I found his unpublished memoirs in addition to his published memoirs and I got permission from his executors to use them. There’s another further biographical project which I want to do somewhere down the road, which is about another also very complex and very contradictory personage known under different names, Michal Czajkowsk, but also Sadyk Pasha. He was a Polish exile of the 1830s who wrote popular romantic novels in French with a a Ukrainian theme, then went to the Ottoman Empire, converted to Islam, and became a high-ranking Ottoman official who created a Polish legion under Ottoman command. At the end of his life, he retracted everything, begged the Tsar for forgiveness, and went back to die in Russia. Very strange sort of person, who shocked his environment several times, an author, as well as a political figure, whose very name, “Sadyk” meaning faithful, was ironic, because he was seen by his contemporaries as faithless, as an apostate, as he had given up his Catholic Christian faith for Islam, then gave up Islam for Russian Orthodoxy. These are biographical subjects, which are going to be fun, but I think we all find that we don’t really define what we are going to do. You sit down to do one thing, and then you get a phone call, or someone writes you and says, we really need an article on this, and you say, oh, that’s a good idea. Or there’s a Conference and you say, ah! I think I could perhaps contribute something to this, or someone says, I really need you for one thing or another.

Jaci Eisenberg: Do you have any other pieces of advice for the students in the IHP section?

André Liebich: I think this is a great place. There’s a combination of academic cultures, both at the level of the faculty, and at the level of the students, it’s really remarkable. There are many places which are quite international in terms of the student bodies these days. I was in England a few days ago, and at both the LSE and Oxford you hear French, German, East European languages, you see the people who are obviously from Asia, and so on. But the faculty tends to be much more homogenous. They tend to come out of the same, in this case, English, mold, or in the United States you have the American mold. Here you have people who have studied in all sorts of places, very often not places from which they originate. And that, I think, gives a sort of originality to the Institute.

12.5.09

2009 Europaeum Lecture: Margaret MacMillan discusses “90 Years On – Lessons for Peacemakers from 1919?”

The 2009 Europaeum Lecture was held this evening, in the Auditorium Jacques-Freymond, at 18h30. IHP Professor Jussi Hanhimäki delivered opening remarks, among which was the exciting news that Professor Davide Rodogno (also IHP) is launching the League of Nations Century Project with Margaret MacMillan as co-chair. While official details were not released, one can assume this will follow in the steps paved by the United Nations Intellectual History Project and the ILO Century Project.

This years’ Europaeum speaker, Margaret Macmillan, is a world-renowned international historian. Currently Professor at and Warden of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, Dr. MacMillan has written several works familiar to us: “Paris 1919,” “Nixon in China,” and most recently, “The Uses and Abuses in History.” Dr. MacMillian began her remarks by noting this was her first visit to Geneva (which she was quite enjoying), but it would not be her last. Our location even prompted her to let us in on the fact that Woodrow Wilson and David Lloyd George (who also happens to be her great-grandfather!) originally wished to hold the peace conference in Geneva, believing tempers to be too high in Paris, but in the end, Paris it was.

The topic of the lecture was “90 Years On – Lesson for Peacemakers from 1919?”, and Dr. MacMillan did not disappoint in offering possible answers. However, before delving in, she warned against believing history has “lessons” to be “learned.” For her, such “lessons” necessitate skepticism if they are employed in a definite way (“History teaches us…”); such beliefs can force decision-makers into taking erroneous decisions. On the other hand, historical “lessons” are useful in the sense that they provide policymakers with a range of possible options to act with. In sum, she synthesized her most recent work: history can be a dangerous tool, but it is the only one we have.

Are there lessons to be pulled from the Paris Peace Conference of 1919?

First, Dr. MacMillan pointed out, the context is quite different. In 1919, leaders of the Great Powers came together for 6 months to come up with a settlement. Today, such a meeting would be impossible and impractical. Meetings such as the G7 or G8 tend to only last two days! In a related vein, Dr. MacMillan observed it is no longer the “fashion” to have large international conferences to deal with several issues at once; nowadays we tend towards issue-specific conferences (ex. the Dayton Conference to deal with Bosnia).

Dr. MacMillan pointed out that the prevailing view of the “six months that changed the world” in 1919 is that the settlement was a complete disaster, directly causing World War II 20 years later. She would beg to differ: not all of it was a failure, nor did it lead directly to World War II. The politicians meeting in Paris did the best they could in very difficult circumstances, an observation often ignored with our benefit of hindsight. As she went on to explain, in 1919, conditions were not favorable for peace. The world, postwar, was in turmoil, suffering from a huge loss of life: to paraphrase, society went through enormous tremors. The prevailing belief was that World War I was to be followed by a revolution (in the vein of the Bolshevik Revolution) which would turn European society on its head. But in the end, this was not the case.

Slightly off topic, but interesting nevertheless, Dr. MacMillan addressed the misconception that the Treaty of Versailles “created” Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia out of nothing. As she sees it, empires were disintegrating and the people which had been part of it were demanding states, homelands of their own. Therefore, it is more accurate to say the constituent groups of (soon-to-be) countries like Czechoslovakia dreamed them up, with the Treaty of Versailles merely solidifying the borders.

Returning to the central question of what lessons can be learned, Dr. MacMillan suggested that the means to enforce the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles were lacking, inherently suggesting that modern-day peacemakers should not try to devise settlements they cannot uphold.

Another “lesson” would be that leaders should be realistic in explaining to their publics what they can and cannot expect from a peace settlement. Politicians who pander to the ballot box will end up disappointing. For example, David Lloyd George ran his Winter 1918 election on the platform of seeking revenge on Germany, and this was fulfilled by the enormous German reparations bill. However the actual wording of the reparations bill split the payments into three, whereby the first part would have to be paid before the bill for the second part was issued – leaving Germany with no incentive to pay the first part (who wants to get further bills?). In reality, the amount of reparations paid by Germany was likely less than that paid by France after the Franco-Prussian War. But given the rhetoric surrounding the reparations payments, the German people had the impression they had paid too much.

Another caveat for modern peacemakers would be the need to consult those affected by potential divisions. At the Paris Peace Conference, the British delegation created Iraq – essentially they threw portions of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire together, believing their advanced technology, combined with a complacent local ruler, would suffice to give them power. However this did not turn out as planned.

Dr. MacMillan also noted that human mistakes are made, even in situations like these. A prime example was Woodrow Wilson’s stubbornness to compromise on terms of accession to the League of Nations. The bill approving membership in the League was subjected to joinders, small concessions, as it passed through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. While it is clear that David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau would have accepted American membership with some concessions – they were quite keen to have the US on board – Wilson was so stubborn about the alterations that he even convinced his own party to vote against the bill.

Dr. MacMillan offered some general instructions to us historians: we should cut some slack to the politicians present at the negotiations in 1919 – there was no way they could predict the Great Depression, nor could they predict the rise of Germany under Adolf Hitler. In more general terms, in history, never dismiss the defeated, and never assume anything in history is permanent.

In closing, events like the Paris Peace Conference show that unintended consequences were much greater than the intended ones.

3.5.09

Getting to know the IHP Faculty: Jussi Hanhimäki

We continue our interview series on History at HEID with Jussi Hanhimäki, Professor of International History and Politics, who is also currently head of the IHP unit. This semester he is teaching three courses: Transatlantic Relations since 1945, the United States and the Cold War World, and the IHP Doctoral Seminar (with Davide Rodogno and Brigitte Leucht). Professor Hanhimäki is also the Director of the Programme for the Study of Global Migration.



Jaci Eisenberg: What has your academic path up to now been?

Jussi Hanhimäki: I studied first in Finland – Tampere University – where I did my Bachelor’s Degree. Then I went to the United States – I was at Boston University – where I did my Master’s and my Ph.D. Afterwards I taught in Canada for one year, at Bishop’s University, which is in the province of Québec. Then I had a couple of years of post-docs. I spent a year at Harvard, at the Charles Warren Center for the Study of American History, and then I spent a year at the Contemporary History Institute at Ohio University, after which - 1995 - I moved to London, and was at the LSE for five years as a Lecturer in International History. And then in 2000 I came to the Institute.

Jaci Eisenberg: How did you become interested in your specific areas of research? Were you influenced by certain professors?

Jussi Hanhimäki: In Finland, what got me interested in American History was an American Fulbright Professor who was there, and who was a very good teacher. He recommended that I spend a year in the US in this exchange program, to which then I applied, and was accepted, and I went for a year, and then I never went back, in part because there was another professor at Boston University who then got me interested in more specifically in US foreign policy. Initially I wanted to go to the US to study African-American history, but for some reason that didn’t happen, and then… so I didn’t write about the Black Panthers, but instead I wrote about the United States and Finland during the Cold War. I think those two professors, probably, are the most influential.

Jaci Eisenberg: How have your research interests evolved over time?

Jussi Hanhimäki: They’ve expanded. When I started out with my dissertation it was on, like I said, the United States and Finland after the Second World War. That then became a book, and then I wrote another book that was about the United States and Scandinavia since 1945… so always my main interest has been in American foreign policy, but the scope has expanded. I wrote a book about Kissinger later on, and, so, from the more narrow regional focus, it has become, well, I guess, global in some ways. And more recently then I’ve, I guess at the moment it’s really three things, they’re all related to American foreign policy. One is transatlantic relations, which is a key interest, and I’m writing a book about that. The United Nations, which I just finished last year; and then, more recently, refugees and migration issues. So, looking at historical perspectives of those… evolving interests, I guess.

Jaci Eisenberg
: Could you elaborate on some of the projects that you’ve done in the past, either on some of the books you’ve written or on research groups you’ve been involved with?

Jussi Hanhimäki: I think, individual research, the interesting part, the reason I did my dissertation in, is I, aside from intellectual ones, is a very practical one. Since I was studying at an American University, and to write about something that had to do with Finland, and, not very many others had any kind of language skills that would have been useful. So I think that’s something that is sort of very practical and not very scientific, perhaps, but, I got to spend time in Finland doing research, etc. etc. And that was very interesting in its own right, I think, but then working on someone like Kissinger, has its own different kind of appeal in the sense that there’s a huge amount of material; it’s interesting to look at global affairs, but to use one man as a way of gaining some insight into it. And it was fascinating because it was a more recent period, the dissertation had to do with the 1940s and 50s, so most of the actors had died - I couldn’t do any interviews, really, for that, but for the Kissinger book, you got to meet a lot of the people who you read about in books and documents, and that was fascinating, meeting with Henry Kissinger and some others – Brent Scowcroft and people like that – gives a different sense of history. When you actually get to be face-to-face with somebody who was there, and who doesn’t, of course, remember much about the specific documents that you have been studying for months and months, and has forgotten much of the detail that went on. But that was sort of fascinating, fascinating to me to meet those people.

Jaci Eisenberg: Tell me about your more recent project, as part of the Programme for the Study of Global Migration.

Jussi Hanhimäki: The Programme for the Study of Global Migration is a broad program which has several projects within it, and one of the projects I’m most closely associated with is the Refugee project – it’s called “UNHCR and the Cold War.” We are using the UNHCR archives, which are across the street from where we are sitting. And we’re looking into a group of people – the refugees – that were in many ways caught in between the currents of the international politics of the Cold War. Refugees were not, for most people like Henry Kissinger or others, refugees were not important in their own right; they could be used as tools of policy, and so on, but they were unimportant in their own right; so in that sense it’s a very different approach to looking at international relations. And of course the important part there is the role of international organizations like UNHCR who tried to play an important role, but also tried to play a non-political role, which proved to be quite impossible. If you’re going to help refugees in a conflict area, in which the Soviet Union and the United States have some interest, in which you have often several national liberation movements fighting over control of territory, etc., etc., for a humanitarian organization to go in there and try to act non-politically was extremely difficult. So, it’s interesting to see how these neutral, supposedly neutral actors have to also compromise in order to be able to help the people; after all, they’re there in order to be able to save lives. So it’s interesting to see how these compromises are made, and how successful the organization ultimately, ultimately is, and I think in most cases, you see in Angola and in other parts of Africa, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, with the boat people and, so you see that the UNHCR was a very adaptable organization. It could actually deal, relatively successfully with relatively modest means at its disposal, and actually help people. Of course, it didn’t solve the refugee problems, um, as such, but at least it was able to operate and save lives every day, so that’s an interesting, um, interesting way to learn about another side of international history, rather than what I used to do more, almost exclusively which was sort of conference table and diplomacy, and high politics, and so on.

Jaci Eisenberg: Do you have any advice, or anything at all, that you would like to impart to the students of the IHP section?

Jussi Hanhimäki: There is a wide variety of courses available, and there will be also next year… What I would say is try some new things. Don’t think, since you did this as an undergraduate this will be an easy course, so I’m just going to do this and get a good grade. So don’t do that. Try new things, try things that really are something you wouldn’t find elsewhere, I think, at least not in the form that they are taught here. I think the Institute, and Geneva, offers a certain value-added that you won’t find in the sort of, I guess, more traditional History department or University. And a lot of the courses are interdisciplinary… they’re all good, the courses! But I think you should follow one’s instincts and try as many different possibilities of different courses. And certainly every term when it’s the first week you should go and check out a few options before you finally decide what you are going to do. And get involved in, you know, in other ways. We have the seminars that we are organizing, we have a couple of seminars in April and May, conferences and guest speakers coming. The Transatlantic Security Conference in April, 23rd, 24th, and then we have Margaret Macmillan, she’s coming to give a talk on May 12th. And the week after that we have Matthew Connelly, who is a young, historian from Columbia University who has written a book about population control. So there’s a lot of events coming, interesting courses, and all the guest speakers, and Conferences… as much time as you can spend, I think those can be very inspiring. Take advantage, because two years passes fast.

Jaci Eisenberg: If there are potential students that are looking at this page, what would you say is the value of HEI over other schools that a student might choose?

Jussi Hanhimäki
: One is where we are. Geneva is the… the fact that it is called the humanitarian capital of the world is in part propaganda, but it is also very true. I think the University experience here, because of that, is something very unique. There is the opportunity to see and interact with global actors, that you will not find in a sort-of, you know, if you go to Oxford or Cambridge, you do not find this sort of international environment. And secondly, I think the faculty and the courses reflect, as well as the student body, they reflect this international nature of the Institute. Most of our students speak three, four languages, many of them carry more than one passport, and same is true of a lot of the faculty. Faculty and the students, they have more than linguistic and national variety, they come from different educational backgrounds, so you will find – sometimes this is confusing, because you go to a course, and you’re used to doing courses exactly in this way, right?, in the United States, for example, you get your list, with specific page to page readings and so on. Here, the Professor may have been trained in a very different kind of system and has a very different approach, this may be confusing, I think first year students are often a little bit confused in the beginning because there is no uniformity to how courses are organized or taught, but you think of that as sort of an asset, an enriching experience, you do get exposed, even if you never venture beyond the HEID campus, you will get exposed to all of these international influences.

And thirdly, all the activities (conferences, guest speakers) and the teaching programs, and together offer a first-rate graduate education that is internationally highly respected, and I think, in comparison to a number of other places, also relatively inexpensive. So it’s extremely good value for money, I think that’s one of the important points that you could add. And, so… it’s a win-win situation.

21.4.09

Getting to know the IHP Faculty: Brigitte Leucht

Our interview project continues with Brigitte Leucht, a visiting lecturer in the IHP Section for the 2008-2009 academic year. This semester she is teaching a course on European Union external relations, and she also co-directs the Doctoral Seminar with Professors Hanhimaki and Rodogno.



Jaci Eisenberg: How did you choose history as a field?

Brigitte Leucht: I’ve always been interested in history, even at school… but as I found out later, history was my way of understanding the world; history and politics, I would say, in combination. For my undergraduate studies, I did study History and English - you had to combine two subjects. For me, literature was interesting, but it was not what I wanted to make my job. If you look at subjects like lenses, through which you can understand what is happening around you, history was a better track. And I’ve always liked reading, I’ve liked to do things in depth, and I’ve remained curious in a way this is why I kept doing it…

Jaci Eisenberg: Specifically you have focused as of late on European Integration. How did you come to that area of research?

Brigitte Leucht: Actually, by accident, I would say. I started out doing American history, Constitutional history, and also the history of political ideas, that was more tangible at that point. When I was between my Master’s and my Ph.D., I went to the archives, and I wanted to do something that includes the US, but also Europe in some way. I had a look at the papers of George Ball because I was interested at that point in the Rome Treaties, the treaties that established the EEC. And then I found materials that related to an earlier period, the Schumann Plan negotiations, and that is basically how I started working on European integration. I did not have a background in studying European integration when I started my Ph.D. My background really was more in American history, legal history, Constitutional history, and to some degree, international politics in the 20th century. I would say I always knew what interested me in terms of discipline but the actual topic, to some degree was coincidence.

Jaci Eisenberg: What has your academic path been?

Brigitte Leucht: I did my undergraduate work at the University of Vienna, in History and English. I would also like to add that if you are interested in understanding the how and why of these choices, I’ve to some extent always been shaped by teachers. I think you can be as rational as you like; people do have an impact. The person who supervised my Master’s thesis in Vienna, was a well-known Austrian historian, Gerald Stourzh, and the way he did history, I found it fascinating. He spoke different languages, his lectures were, some people found them dry in the sense of too ‘legal’, but I found them really intellectually stimulating. It made me go to the library afterwards and ask more questions. So in a way, I wanted to continue doing that. That’s why I did the Master’s, and my Master’s was actually at New York University under the auspices of the Fulbright program, which was a good label to have. I focused mainly on American Constitutional history - that was the idea, to go to the States, to understand how people there do American history. But then this thing happened with my archival visit, and I ended up doing a transatlantic/European integration topic. After I completed my Masters, I went back to Vienna, I worked for a couple of years for the Austrian Fulbright Commission, because at that point I just wanted to try something else. I liked academia, but I was not entirely certain – I was 27 when I came back – if I should not try something else as well. And I must say I really liked working outside of academia, too. But I missed in-depth research, and I missed the time to really read. I continued work on the weekends, but intellectual progress was not possible, not in the same way as when you do it full time. And then I decided basically to go for a Ph.D. program; I applied for a fellowship - I actually applied for a couple of fellowships, which I did not get - and then the one I got was at the University of Portsmouth in England, so that’s why I did my Ph.D. there.

Jaci Eisenberg: From England, how did you end up at HEID?

Brigitte Leucht: Again, coincidence. Of course, you have to be qualified. But basically I was contacted and asked if I would like to teach here for a year. And that was about a year ago, I had just written the last word of my thesis after many, many years, so that was a very welcome invitation. And I came here for an interview and was offered a one-year visiting lectureship.

Jaci Eisenberg: Could you tell us about specific pieces of research you’ve completed in the past?

Brigitte Leucht: My Master’s thesis in Vienna was on the equal protection clause of the American Constitution: the idea of equality before the law, how that came into the Federal Constitution. What I looked at was basically a lot of the State Constitutions, some of them going back to the early 19th century, including provisions that contain the idea of equality before the law, even though they don’t call it that. It was a history of ideas. Later, I also got involved in a project that looked at the impact that new media had on how we tell history. That was actually very, very interesting for me because up to that point, I was very positivist: the sources tell you what happened and as a historian, you construct your story from the sources. The media project was also with a different bunch of people, more ‘alternative’ people, different from diplomatic historians, less conventional perhaps, and we presented our findings as a website where we compared how history is presented in different media. And just by thinking through how you present history on film, on CD-ROM, on a website, you reflect on what you do when you actually write a book or write a paper. I learned a lot through that. And then the Ph.D. was basically on how European integration really started, and what I did is that I looked at the formal and informal cooperation between American and European actors at the Schumann Plan negotiations, trying at the same time to become more interdisciplinary and learn from politics -not just to do it, but because you get more interesting and better results in the end, I think. I utilized the network concept, and tried to really understand what happened at the negotiations.

Jaci Eisenberg: Could you talk about some of the publications you’ve worked on?

Brigitte Leucht: I still have to publish my monograph. But I have published articles and book chapters that draw on the Ph.D. I also had a very active supervisor at Portsmouth University, Wolfram Kaiser, who encouraged his Ph.D. students to go to conferences, publish etc. If you worked hard, and you were committed, you didn’t have to have the Ph.D. completed; you could work as an academic. It helped me learn the different skills that are part of academic life, publishing, editing, and I became involved in two edited volumes. Both of them, very, very time consuming; I would have never thought how much time goes into editing a book. And in both cases we organized a conference, with a very clear framework, with invited speakers, who all had to address certain research questions. The idea was to produce an edited volume, but coherent nevertheless. This procedure also highlights what is one of the problems in European Integration History namely that there are so many national and private archives you could go to. There are so many research questions that need to be answered by more than just one person. The whole research area invites cooperation, hence the idea to do edited volumes and draw on the expertise of a group of researchers that each have done in-depth archival research. One of the books dealt with the use of social science concepts for European Integration History. The other one is more specifically on networks in the history of European Integration from its beginnings in post-war Europe up to the present tense.

Jaci Eisenberg: What sort of projects do you currently have on tap?

Brigitte Leucht: I’m still utilizing material from the Ph.D. Intellectually I would like to move on. The nice thing is that to write the monograph, after my year at the IHEID, I have a Post-Doc in Oxford to turn what was the more interesting story of my Ph.D. into a book. For my Ph.D. the problem was that the actual research question applied to just a very brief time period, so to turn it into a book with a major publisher wasn’t very likely. As it is so much work, I didn’t want to just publish it with any publisher, but wanted to use this to make a statement. What I can do in the next two years is to basically take my research a little bit further in time – from 1952 to the early 1960s - and tell the history of how the beginnings of European Competition Policy were influenced by transnational networks. Apart from that, I would like to do many other things. At some point, I would like to apply the research framework of the PhD to explain how the internal market program started in the 1970s. I’ve done a lot about the 1940s and 50s and would really like to move on in time. And, as a result of teaching, my interests are starting to become somewhat more global, especially as a result of what I’m teaching this semester, the EU external relations, where you get a completely different perspective on European integration history.

Jaci Eisenberg: Could you speak about the course you are currently teaching?

Brigitte Leucht: The idea is to understand the emergence of the European Union as an international actor. There are competing theories and conceptualizations of the EU as an actor: a trade actor, an economic actor, and/or, a normative actor, a humanitarian actor, less so a military actor. In the seminar, we have taken these theoretical questions as a starting point to explore the history of the EU’s external relations. What was European foreign policy like before there was an official foreign policy in the narrow sense, which only started in the 1970s? The EEC started in 1958, and it did have an external dimension: there was trade policy, development policy, so looking at the broad spectrum of foreign relations, not just foreign policy. And I find at the moment that I am really interested in that.

Jaci Eisenberg: Do you have any advice for the IHP Section students, or thoughts about HEID in general?

Brigitte Leucht: An academic career is great if you’re curious. I like the freedom that comes with it as well, I’m not a 9 to 5 person, I probably work more than 40 hours but I mostly work when I like to work. So there are a lot of things to be said for a life in academia. But it’s probably also worth trying something different. Teaching here at the IHEID has been a very, very good experience for me, especially, the student questions you’re not prepared for - they are what takes me further. Also, there’s an intimate relationship between teaching and research, which is encouraged here, but that is not the case in every institution.

3.4.09

Getting to know the IHP Faculty: Claude Auroi

We continue our interview series on History at HEID with Claude Auroi, Professor of Development Studies, who since the HEI/IUED merger, has been linked to the IHP section as an Associate Faculty member. This semester he is teaching a course on peasantry in globalization, and a seminar on history and development in Latin America.



Jaci Eisenberg : Quelle a été votre parcours académique ?

Claude Auroi : J’ai fait mes études à Genève, aux Hautes Etudes Internationales à l’époque, dans les années soixante. Ensuite, j’ai travaillé un peu dans le journalisme, et puis je suis revenu faire un doctorat, aussi à HEI, sur les questions de développement, et, après je suis devenu chargé de cours à l’Institut Universitaire d’Etudes de Développement, IUED. Ensuite, je suis parti au Pérou travailler dans les projets agricoles. Quand je suis revenu j’ai été nommé Professeur à l’IUED, qui ensuite est devenu IHEID.

Jaci Eisenberg: Comment vous est venu l’intérêt pour votre sujet principal de recherche ?

Claude Auroi : Mon domaine de spécialisation est l’agriculture, le développement rural, depuis ma thèse, que j’ai faite en 1975 sur l’agriculture cubaine. De là, je me suis intéressé à d’autres pays en Amérique Latine. J’ai travaillé un peu sur l’agriculture dans les années 80, dans les projets appliqués de la coopération technique suisse. C’est donc devenu mon domaine de spécialisation. L’aire géographique de spécialisation est principalement liée à l’Amérique Latine, mais aussi un peu à l’Afrique ; dans les années 70-80, j’ai travaillé sur l’Afrique de l’ouest. J’ai fais des missions pour la coopération technique suisse dans d’autres pays, mais disons que mon continent, c’est l’Amérique Latine et surtout l’Amérique du Sud – les Andes en particulier – le Pérou, la Bolivie, le Chili, l’Equateur, l’Argentine.

J’ai surtout fait des recherches de type agraire ; actuellement, je travaille beaucoup plus sur les problèmes de gouvernance : gouvernance politique, gouvernance de politique économique, surtout, mais aussi de politique tout court. Je m’intéresse au phénomène de nouveaux gouvernements plus à gauche actuellement en Amérique Latine. C’est un peu le thème sur lequel je travaille maintenant, j’ai donné depuis 2003 un cours chaque année à l’IMAS sur les problèmes de mondialisation avec un groupe d’étudiants qui font partie du International Master of Advanced Studies de l’IHEID. Je m’intéresse aussi à d’autres problèmes sur lesquels je me suis penché au fil du temps : liés par exemple à la biodiversité, à la protection et à la promotion de la biodiversité, ce sont des thèmes qui sont quelque peu liés à l’agriculture, que j’ai découverts lorsque je travaillais au Pérou dans les années 80. J’ai aussi travaillé depuis dix ans sur les question des commerce équitable, et publié deux livres sur ce sujet. J’ai toujours aimé l’histoire, je replace donc toujours les phénomènes dans un contexte historique.

Jaci Eisenberg : Avez-vous participé aux projets qui ont de forts liens avec l’histoire ou l’étude de l’histoire ?

Claude Auroi : Oui, j’ai écrit un livre sur le Pérou qui s’appelle Histoire violente du Pérou. Je me suis toujours intéressé, quand j’étudiais un pays, au problème de mettre en perspective historique, donc j’ai fait ce livre sur le Pérou. J’ai travaillé sur des pays en essayant d’avoir la vision historique de la situation parce qu’on ne peut pas, je crois, faire du développement sans le mettre en perspective historique. J’ai fait des missions en Albanie et j’ai toujours essayé de voir quelle était l’histoire de l’Albanie, d’où venait l’Albanie et comment la situation actuelle peut s’expliquer par des phénomènes du passé.

Jaci Eisenberg : Quels sont vos projets actuels?

Claude Auroi : Mes projets, c’est surtout continuer à travailler sur l’Amérique Latine, en organisant un colloque l’année prochaine sur les indépendances. C’est le 200e anniversaire des indépendances de l’Amérique Latine, puisque les mouvements de libération ont commencé en 1810. On fait donc un bilan des héritages, et des « mirages » des indépendances. Le colloque aura lieu à l’IHEID. Actuellement c’est surtout sur ça que je travaille, je suis proche de la retraite aussi, donc je ne me vais pas m’encombrer avec des projets épouvantablement grands, j’espère aussi un peu plus de temps pour écrire calmement. J’ai aussi travaillé beaucoup le thème des migrations, et un colloque vient de se tenir à l’IHEID sur ce thème ; j’ai écrit un aticle dans L’Annuaire suisse de politique de développement.

Jaci Eisenberg : Y a-t-il autre chose vous vouliez partager avec les étudiant(e)s de la section HPI ?

Claude Auroi : J’aimerais qu’il y ait plus d’étudiants et de doctorants qui s’intéressent à l’Amérique Latine dans la section HPI pour que l’on puisse vraiment avoir un pôle qui s’intéresse à ce continent un peu négligé, je trouve, par rapport à l’Asie, et aux relations outre-Atlantique. La Fondation Pierre du Bois a heureusement mis deux bourses à disposition d’étudiants de l’Amériqie latine, c’est un grand encouragement.

30.3.09

Getting to know the IHP Faculty: Isabelle Schulte-Tenckhoff

This interview marks a new series on History at HEID – interviews with IHP Section Faculty, in order for students to get to know how their Professors came to be where they are today.

We begin our interview series with Isabelle Schulte-Tenckhoff, Professor of Anthropology in the Development Studies Unit, and Associate Faculty member in IHP. This academic year she is teaching three courses: “Anthropology and Development”, “Droit(s): les paradoxes de la reconnaissance”, and specifically in HPI, “Hybrid Histories: Indigenous Peoples and Nation-Building in North America”.


Jaci Eisenberg: What are your main areas of research, as an academic?

Isabelle Schulte-Tenckhoff: Naturally, most of my research deals with anthropological issues, some classical, some less so. My main interest is indigenous peoples, especially in North America, and my research in this field focuses on legal anthropology and indigenous rights. I am also interested in multiculturalism, as well as the complex – and difficult – relationship between culture and rights.

Jaci Eisenberg: What are your specific areas of teaching?

Isabelle Schulte-Tenckhoff: In the Development Studies unit I teach a compulsory course entitled “Anthropology and Development”. Teaching anthropology in an interdisciplinary unit, which Development Studies is, raises particular challenges that you do not necessarily encounter when teaching in a disciplinary department. I address all at once the theory and history of anthropology, policy issues, applied anthropology, as well as a few fundamental issues such as identity or the sociocultural dimension of economics, and, on top of that, the potential contribution of anthropology as a critical discipline to the study of development and international relations. I have also been teaching a seminar addressing specifically the rights of indigenous peoples and the transnationalisation of law – its French title using the term “Droit(s)” to refer to both “law” and “rights”. Starting in 2010, I will teach that seminar in English. The fundamental problematic of the seminar is the dichotomy – if not the paradox – of recognition (of identity rights) and redistribution (of resources). The seminar also addresses a few theoretical concerns: what is “law”? what are “rights” ? – both in a broader framework than the one generally offered by legal positivism.

My seminar in HPI, entitled “Hybrid Histories: Indigenous Peoples and Nation-Building in North America”, is an attempt to look at the history of international relations from a non-Eurocentric viewpoint, and to establish indigenous peoples as international actors. This is why I thought about the seminar in the first place. I wished to create an opportunity for students to envision a larger frame of reference when dealing with the history of international relations. This is most topical, with minorities and indigenous peoples having gained entry into the United Nations, and with indigenous peoples especially having been extremely active over the last 30 years, both in New York and Geneva, within the human rights system and other UN agencies. Moreover, the historical dimension of indigenous claims beyond contemporary politics still need to be better understood : where does the legal-political category of “indigenous peoples” come from? what is the relationship between indigenous peoples and the states in which they now live? how to address what I would call the “founding dilemma” of neo-European states ? I think these are topics most relevant for HPI, where I can make a contribution as an anthropologist – and as an anthropologist interested in history!

Jaci Eisenberg: How did you become interested in your specific areas of research? As a student, when you were at university, how did you find this field?

Isabelle Schulte-Tenckhoff: By chance. I did my Ph.D. on potlatch theories. The potlatch is a form of ceremonial exchange to be found among the indigenous peoples of the Northwest coast of North America, that is, British Columbia, a portion of Alaska, even Oregon and California. The purpose of the potlatch is to confirm changes of status, or crucial moments of social life (a funeral, the investiture of a chief, a name-giving), via the exchange of so-called prestige goods. The potlatch has implications for anthropological theory and economics. Mainstream thinking has focused on allegedly wasteful spending and the apparent irrationality of ceremonial giftgiving. Yet the potlatch cannot be understood in terms of what is generally regarded as economic rationality, especially rational choice theory. So I started out with an interest in a critical approach to neo-classical economics. At the same time I discovered the situation of indigenous peoples as the somewhat forgotten inhabitants of North America. And it’s been going on from there. At one point, I started to focus more on legal issues because I worked for some years at the United Nations as a consultant for the Special Rapporteur on indigenous treaties.

Jaci Eisenberg: What was your path after working at the United Nations? Did you immediately go into teaching?

Isabelle Schulte-Tenckhoff: I was always teaching and working as a researcher simultaneously, either under my own steam, after having obtained funding from the Fonds National Suisse or other funding agencies, or as a consultant, because I always thought it would be interesting to do something outside of academia in order to set off my more academic side. I taught in several universities, in Switzerland and France, after obtaining my Ph.D., then I lived for nearly ten years in Canada where I also taught in different universities. I came back to Switzerland in autumn 2003 to take up the position I currently hold.

Jaci Eisenberg: How do your current interests align with the study of history?

Isabelle Schulte-Tenckhoff: My interest in history is of a methodological or epistemological nature – both because anthropologists have put a lot of effort into methodology and epistemology, and because anthropology as a discipline has a complicated relationship with history (some major classical theories, like evolutionism and diffusionism, are rather “pseudohistory”; conversely, so-called historical anthropology is an attempt to integrate anthropological concerns regarding society and culture into historical analysis). Also, one may look at archival sources as a sort of “field” (in the sense of anthropological fieldwork). It would be advantageous, especially at the level of Ph.D. studies, to expand on issues of methodology with regard to historical topics : how do you construct your object of research? how do you position yourself in epistemological or reflexive terms? As a historian no less than as an anthropologist, one must assume that one’s posture as a researcher affects the result of one’s work. One’s own interests, one’s concerns, one’s presuppositions flow into the work and ought to be objectified, to a certain extent at least.

Jaci Eisenberg: What projects are you currently working on?

Isabelle Schulte-Tenckhoff: I am finishing a book, which is actually a revised edition of a book I wrote prior to my Ph.D., which was a history of anthropology from a student’s point of view (I say that with hindsight). I’m revisiting the volume, which I’ve been using in my teaching, in order to give it a more precise focus in relation to development studies and international studies. The question is: what can anthropology accomplish in an Institute like ours ? I am also finalising a book on Canada. One of my more classic research foci is the culture concept. Cultural anthropology is one of the main components of North American anthropology – more so than in Europe, really, where anthropologists tend to focus rather on social organisation, to put it in a nutshell. One of my particular interests is the relationship between culture and law, which ties into my seminar on “law/rights” as well as the one I designed for HPI on “hybrid histories”. Canadianists tend to study either ethnicity, immigration and multiculturalism, or the situation of indigenous – or, as you say in Canada, aboriginal – peoples. For my part, I try to combine both these strands which are too often dissociated. So my other book is tentatively entitled Canada: autochtonie et multiculturalisme. It will be in French, like the history of anthropology whose initial title is La vue portée au loin.

Jaci Eisenberg: What are the advantages of IHEID?

Isabelle Schulte-Tenckhoff: For anybody who is an anthropologist or a sociologist, our Institute with its thematic focus is an interesting place to be at, especially since the merger has forced all of us, from ex-IUED as well as the former HEI, to give multi- or interdisciplinarity more thought. What is interesting in this regard is that student application figures are pretty high for the interdisciplinary programmes, and there seems to be a genuine interest among students. So I suppose we have our work cut out for us. The location is also a plus for anybody interested in international organisations, in certain topics such as refugees and migration, international policies, globalisation, the transnationalisation of law, and the like. In this regard, Geneva is a unique location.