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The
world made simple
CAS prof pens international relations encyclopedia solo
By David J. Craig
Few students take an advanced degree in international relations without learning to throw around the term parsimonious theory. Cathal Nolan is sick of it. And in the 82nd entry of the P section of his new Greenwood Encyclopedia of International Relations, he tells readers that a parsimonious theory is merely “one which explains much with little, like this.”
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| Cathal Nolan, a CAS associate professor of history and executive director of BU’s International History Institute, authored the four-volume Greenwood Encyclopedia of International Relations to “reclaim history” as the basis for understanding international relations. Photo by Vernon Doucette |
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Not all entries in Nolan’s four-volume reference set are quite
so, well, parsimonious, but they are as candid and as lacking in pretense.
Nolan, a CAS associate professor of history and executive director of
BU’s International History Institute, wrote the encyclopedia partly
to encourage students to “cut to the chase” and think about
international relations in plain English.
“An agenda that runs throughout this work is to show that the jargon-laden
theoretical apparatus that American political science has become is a
case of the emperor having no clothes,” says Nolan. “Political
science, which is the dominant discipline in international relations,
has lost its roots in history and has become almost completely abstract
over the last few decades. I’m incredibly frustrated with the lack
of factual knowledge among international history students. My goal was
to reclaim history.”
The result is a work of remarkable breadth. Featuring more than 6,000
alphabetically arranged and cross-referenced entries spread over 2,370
pages, the Greenwood Encyclopedia of International Relations (Greenwood,
2002) is one of the largest international relations reference guides ever
published, and certainly the largest ever written by a single author.
Aimed at college students and lay readers, it emphasizes the rise of the
major European powers from 1650 to the present, covering their diplomatic,
military, and political relations. It also describes key nations, people,
and concepts dating as far back as ancient Greece, includes an entry for
every currently existing nation, and explains influential concepts in
diplomacy, international law, economy, geography, and political science.
“I made a conscious effort to be universal,” says Nolan. “When
I describe Tahiti, I give a sense of its local history instead of treating
it simply as an object of competition among colonial powers.”
Nolan began work on the project about a decade ago, scribbling down for
fun concise explanations of concepts he came across in his studies or
casual reading. Drafting a master list of entries and writing much of
the text came easily for the specialist in American foreign policy, but
when he began working on the encyclopedia in earnest in 1995, Nolan needed
to read up on ideas that he was unfamiliar with.
“My personal weakest area was international economic history, which
includes things like the history of the gold standard and trade regimes,”
he says. “In a field like that, I figured out what were considered
the major works and I read them. I spent a lot of time in indexes: if
a term showed up in three or four out of five major works in a subfield,
I figured it deserved an entry. This book then took over my intellectual
life, because it was driving me into areas that I otherwise would never
have gotten into.”
Whereas most large reference books employ scores of writers, Nolan’s
encyclopedia benefits from the single-author approach, he says, because
it interprets history from a consistent perspective. For instance, Nolan,
who has published widely on human rights and the ethics of international
affairs, was determined to describe the moral significance of his subject
matter.
“There is what I consider a cult of objectivity in political science
and in other fields that has become so arid, so mindlessly mathematical,
and so dull and uninteresting that it’s rendered much of the literature
unreadable and meaningless,” says Nolan. “I think that when
writing history you must be factually accurate and write, as John Quincy
Adams said, ‘without country or religion,’ but I also think
that the normal human response to history is to try to figure out the
moral significance of what happened. Do we study Hitler for a mere narration
of the events of the Third Reich, or to somehow get closer to the meaning
of the human condition?
“So when you read my entry about Mao, you’ll read about the
impact he had on China, but you’ll also learn that he was a moral
monster, because he was,” he continues. “And when you read
about the SS, I tell you that it was a wholly evil organization. And in
my entry for Marxism, you’ll get all the standard definitions, but
you’ll also learn that it was a heartfelt cry of moral anguish at
the condition of much of the European masses in the 19th century and that
it became twisted in its application both because of some of its theoretical
flaws and because of the inevitable corruption of human beings in power.
You can accept or reject what I say, but I don’t think you’ll
be bored by it.”
1 November 2002
Boston University
Office of University Relations