Research
New research: The “Presence of the Past” in French, British, Spanish and German Military Doctrines.
My new research project aims at investigating the role that History plays in shaping French, British, Spanish and German security interests.
The way political actors conceive of their security interest is partly a matter of what constructivists call “identity”. Social Scientists have established that the way a community comprehends its identity is linked to the way it perceives its past. Origin myths, historical traumatisms and, more generally, memory are among the main vectors of social, ethnic or national identity groups. Yet, International Relations scholars who have worked on the role of identity in shaping security interests have seldom investigated its connection with memory. More precisely, those who have raised this question have generally come to very interesting findings but have only focused on decision-makers. I therefore plan to open the black box of the State and investigate how the past determines the identity of any relevant political actors, not only decision-makers.
Since several studies about the weight of the past in shaping public opinion already exist, I would like to focus on what Graham Allison called “bureaucratic entities”, i.e. governmental agencies, experts, military staff, etc. We know that these actors have their own identities and interests, sometimes quite different from those of the decision-makers. But are those identities rooted in some kind of representation of the past?
In order to answer this question, I analyze the “presence of the past” in French, British, Spanish and German military doctrines. The choice of this empirical material comes from the fact that doctrinal texts are supposed to reflect the military organizations’ rational thoughts on the « art of war ». My hypothesis is, on the contrary, that military organizations learn what collective memories and national myths teach them.
