That France was occupied after the wars is not a secret yet neither historians nor political scientists have made much of it. De Graaf details the Council’s inner workings, which included setting up the occupation, coordinating police and surveillance, building fortresses, and exacting reparations. The occupation was negotiated and administered by the Allied Council, a first-of-its-kind ministerial level group that met in Paris, in conjunction with a military occupation headed by the Duke of Wellington. Indeed, it was the “seed of a new, modern system of European collective security” (458).
In Fighting Terror after Napoleon, de Graaf homes in on one aspect of the post-Napoleonic period, the allied occupation of France from 1813-1818, and argues that this nearly forgotten period was far more important than has been acknowledged. Scholars in both disciplines now challenge aspects of what was an implicit, state-centric inter-disciplinary consensus on concepts and objects of study, by denaturalizing concepts such as security and the balance of power centering actors such as women, capitalists, and colonized peoples and self-consciously historicizing the international.Īmong historians, Beatrice de Graaf is at the leading edge of this shift. Editors of a forthcoming Oxford Handbook of History and International Relations point to “intellectual currents” that foster deeper cross-disciplinary engagement.
Since then, however, there has been a qualitative shift. Ultimately, however, dialogue in both cases has been met with frustration at the seemingly unbridgeable ‘gulf’ – even an “eternal divide” – separating the disciplines. Paul Schroeder’s landmark 1994 Transformation of European Politics kicked off one wave the Congress’ 2014/15 bicentennial lent energy to another. The Congress of Vienna and the Concert of Europe have long captured the attention of historians and IR scholars, tempting them toward conversation.
Introduction by Jennifer Mitzen, The Ohio State University
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