Why Thucydides’ Trap Misinforms Sino-American Relations

Thucydides Trap has become a familiar term in scholarly and even popular discourse on Sino-American relations. It points to the ancient rivalry between Athens and Sparta as an analogy for contemporary relations between China and the United States. This analogy warns about the increased danger of war when a rising power catches up to an established power. This essay raises concerns about (mis)application of historical analogy, selection bias, measurement problems, underspecified causal mechanisms, and so on that undermine the validity of the diagnosis and prognosis inspired by this analogy and other similar works. My objection to this genre of scholarship does not exclude the possibility that China and the U.S. can have a serious conflict. I only argue that this conflict can stem from sources other than any power shift between them or in addition to such a shift. By overlooking other plausible factors that can contribute to war occurrence, a monocausal explanation such as Thucydides Trap obscures rather than clarifies this phenomenon. Because it lends itself to a sensationalist, even alarmist, characterization of a rising China and a declining U.S. (when the latter in fact continues to enjoy important enduring advantages over the former), this perspective can abet views and feelings that engender self-fulfilling prophecy. Finally, as with other structural theories of interstate relations, Thucydides Trap and other similar formulations like power-transition theory tend to give short shrift to human agency, including peoples ability to learn from the past and therefore to escape from the mistakes of their predecessors.

{ Introduction }

The introduction sets out the theoretical and historical stakes of the book. Opening with a cluster of Roman analogies stretching from the Iraq War to the American War of Independence, this chapter develops and explains the key questions that underpin the rest of the book. It offers extended rationales for its three keywords—empire, antiquity, and time—and makes claims for the methodological innovations it offers through its theorization of historical analogy. It situates the argument within the wider debates around temporality in American literary studies, postcolonial studies, and classical reception, as well as mobilizing its primary conceptual thinkers (namely, Reinhart Koselleck and Walter Benjamin). It closes by returning to the opening examples and putting the book’s main arguments into action.

Transformation of the political culture of Russian monarchism in panegyrics at the turn of XVIII—XIX centuries

The article analyzes the transformation of the “Peter-Catherine imagery” in the panegyric literature of the late XVIII — first quarter of the XIX century. The paper demonstrates the evolution of this imagery against the background of the French Revolution of 1789, the formation of an adamant cult of Catherine at the end of the empress’s reign, the stability of this cult in the panegyric tradition during the reign of Paul I and the first years of Alexander’s reign. The use of the “Catherine imagery” in secular panegyrics dedicated to the accession of Alexander I was unique: it aimed at presenting the new monarch not only as the new Peter, but also as the new Catherine, while criticizing Paul’s “tyranny”. At the same time, the political theology of the “beautiful days of Alexander’s reign” lacked the historical analogy with the “Catherine imagery”, which allowed the authors to conclude that the cult of Catherine II began to gradually “die away” during the reign of Alexander I and the figure of the tsar himself as the savior of Russia and Europe against the background of the military fortune of 1812 was subsequently redefined.

Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Indeterminacy, and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion

This essay praises Joan Neuberger’s book This Thing of Darkness (Cornell University Press, 2019) as a great accomplishment in cinematic interpretation and a detailed and subtle historical account. It contests Neuberger’s argument that Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible films present an unequivocal critique of Stalin and Stalinism by means of a historical analogy with Ivan. Platt argues that the films are intentionally, stubbornly ambivalent in their representation of Ivan, and by extension Stalin. He contends that although this was indeed a subversive movie in the Stalinist USSR, Eisenstein’s films did not offer any finalized conception of the historical role of these figures, and instead should be viewed as works that thematize the impossibility of achieving certainty in historical interpretation. In reading Neuberger’s This Thing of Darkness, one feels the urgency of the author’s efforts to prove that Eisenstein offered an unequivocal, “radical” and “subversive” denunciation of Stalin and the social violence of his era — one that accords with our own rejection of the Stalinist legacy. Author sympathizes with this effort, but it is misguided. Considered in his own social context, one cannot but appreciate Eisenstein’s bravery in articulating a different, but no less subversive position: as seen through the lens of Ivan the Terrible, Stalinist Russia was revealed to be incomplete, charged with contradictions that made it impossible to come to conclusions concerning the meaning of events.

Experience in training art specialists

In periods of social upheaval, historically turning points in the life of society, an appeal to the world of arts, artistic creativity, revealing a different reality to a person, re-created according to aesthetic canons – and is sometimes the world that a person needs, that system of value guidelines, on the basis of which it is spiritually strengthened or revived. That is why we singled out art education as a direction directly related to the spiritual development of a student, capable of expressing the actual ideas of the time through the immanent language of arts (of all types, directions and stylistic searches, genres). At the present stage, art education (as in the first third of the last century, when it received a structural and substantive design) is characterized by exploration and experimentation, therefore, the historical analogy carried out allows us to see the repetition or fundamental novelty of the processes aimed at preparing the student of the art profile.

The phenomenon of medieval Ius commune: the past of Europe’s legal future?

The historical approach enables us to perceive the specific legal phenomenon as continuous and to study the antecedents of current (or even future) legal challenges. This article discusses the possibilities of invoking the historical notion of ius commune (and various new concepts based on it) in a contemporary legal discourse on the future of the European Union (EU) law. Since issues of integrity and homogeneity remain central to the consideration of further legal developments of the EU legal framework it is especially relevant to look back at one of the most prominent phenomena in the Western legal tradition – ius commune, which to some extent united legal thought throughout pre-modern Europe. By analysing inherent characteristics related to its sources, methods and interaction with other (local) legal systems, we attempt to define the limits of such historical analogy. This may allow answering the questions as to whether and to what extent the model of medieval-originated ius commune could inspire further development of the EU legal framework (as a new ius commune).

Long live the past: A multiple correspondence analysis of people’s justifications for drawing historical analogies between the Paris attacks and past events

Comparing present and past situations by means of historical analogy is prevalent in political and public discourses. But when researching this phenomenon, scientists often use reception paradigms, where they ask people which past event is most applicable to a current situation or issue. In these paradigms, analogies are treated as unequivocal—rather than flexible—in their meanings. In this paper, we use a production paradigm to examine why European citizens (in France, Belgium, and Germany) selected historical analogies and justified their meanings following the two 2015 terrorist attacks in France. We find that most participants tend to mention a relatively small number of past events, characterized by similarities in time (recent), space (geographically close) and type (terrorist attacks) with the current attacks. However, a multiple correspondence analysis indicates that, even when they overwhelmingly agree about the relevance of a particular event (the attacks of September 11th 2001) for the present situation, participants confer widely varying—even conflicting—meanings to the “same” analogy, which align with different socio-political attitudes. We suggest that these variations do not just represent the emphasis that different participants place on particular sets of similarities between the past and the present attacks: They also embody specific, and conflicting, stances on salient and controversial issues surrounding the topic of contemporary terrorism (e.g., why were ‘we’ attacked, who deserves to be grieved, how should the government respond). Results are discussed in light of the literature on social representations of both history and terrorism.