Insofar as crises or transitions in diplomatic history have been born of academic criticism, however, they are partly self-generated. As Thomas Paterson points out, from at least the 1970s historians of foreign relations have themselves been looking beyond ‘government policy, decision-making, and national power’ to consider many supposedly ‘nonpolitical aspects of the past’ such as culture and gender. They have been drawing on and accommodating concepts, methods and data from a steadily widening intellectual catchment area; investigating the potentials of organization, ‘world-systems’ and dependency theories as well as psychoanalysis, corporatism, and public opinion for the study of foreign relations; drawing on archives in a growing number of countries; and rethinking established terms such as ideology and national security.
In fact, Leffler argues, it is precisely because diplomatic historians have been engaged (and should be prepared to engage) in such labours that their field is not so much in crisis as set to return from its unwarranted and involuntary quarantine: ‘uniquely positioned to deal with many of the issues that other historians deem central to an understanding of the American experience’. It is, he goes on, so long as diplomatic historians can overcome their ‘tendencies to fragment into topical subspecialities and warring schools of interpretation’.
To many observers, of course, such proclivities are precisely what for decades has characterized the study of American foreign relations, and in particular the study of the Cold war. The tendency of scholarly disagreements on occasion to become polemical – and sometimes personally abusive – or to display their political dimensions can have unintended and pernicious consequences; it is not, however, necessarily or solely harmful. The occasional hurling of invective may be an expression of the ‘fertile intellectual environment’ within which debates occur, or of the nature and importance of the issues over which participants disagree. In any event, the discipline has been and continues to be divided into a variety of camps (idealists and realists, nationalists and internationalists, revisionists, post-revisionists, progressives and more), though how many exist, how they should be classified, and how distinctive they are itself a matter of opinion – and occasional disagreement. Whether corralled into camps or not, moreover, diplomatic historians do have honest scholarly differences over whether their discipline should emphasize synthesis or diversity, whether it should seek new answers to old questions or pursue new agendas; and whether revisions and innovations have gone too far or have scarcely begun. Disagreements may simply be an unavoidable part of the diplomatic historian's lot.