Making Diplomatic History
Everyone knows the dot-com bubble has burst. But the Internet is still making history — literally. Dozens of public and private facilities around the world are putting thousands of treaties, diplomatic communiqués, and internal government correspondence onto Web-based archives. Accessible from almost anywhere in the world, these Web sites have the potential to reshape the ...
Everyone knows the dot-com bubble has burst. But the Internet is still making history -- literally. Dozens of public and private facilities around the world are putting thousands of treaties, diplomatic communiqués, and internal government correspondence onto Web-based archives. Accessible from almost anywhere in the world, these Web sites have the potential to reshape the future study of diplomatic history.
Everyone knows the dot-com bubble has burst. But the Internet is still making history — literally. Dozens of public and private facilities around the world are putting thousands of treaties, diplomatic communiqués, and internal government correspondence onto Web-based archives. Accessible from almost anywhere in the world, these Web sites have the potential to reshape the future study of diplomatic history.
Two American Web sites are leading the effort: George Washington University’s National Security Archive (www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/) and the more recent Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (cwihp.si.edu/default.htm).
The National Security Archive page boasts tens of thousands of documents, searchable and available in full text. According to its executive director, Thomas Blanton, the Archive has 25 staffers who manage Freedom of Information Act requests. In January 1989, Blanton’s team filed a lawsuit — which it won — to save nearly all of the Reagan administration’s e-mail messages. Then National Security Advisor Colin Powell had ordered the messages destroyed earlier that month.
Founded in 1997, the sleeker Cold War International History Project Web site has fewer documents, but many are translated into English from other languages.
But are digitized documents really shaping the future study of diplomatic history in a serious way? For John Lewis Gaddis, who is lauded as the grandfather of Cold War history and teaches the subject at Yale, the answer is an emphatic yes. Gaddis says the Internet’s effect is perhaps most important outside the United States, particularly "when you consider that in many parts of the world, Russia and China especially, the Internet may be available even when basic books on Cold War history are not," he explains. This unprecedented access, Gaddis says, is helping to create an environment in which scholars from other countries write their own histories of major world events — "something that’s long overdue."
Odd Arne Westad of the London School of Economics takes the idea a step further: "The fact that thousands of archival documents from the ‘other side’ are now available in English," he says, "has made diplomatic historians much more aware of the need to ask questions about motives and perceptions of the leaderships of other countries." And in many cases, Westad says, online archives have encouraged former authoritarian regimes to further open their previously ironclad archives. "I just came back from Belgrade," Westad says, "where these Web sites have provided much of the inspiration for opening their own archives.”
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