Abstract
A remarkable yet mostly overlooked feature of Akira Iriye’s 1967 masterpiece, Across the Pacific: An Inner History of American-East Asian Relations, is its implicit argument that emotions play a crucial role in international relations. As Iriye later described it, the book reflected his view that international relations could not be fully understood without delving into “the intellectual, emotional, and psychological sources” that policymakers and the public drew on in forming ideas and opinions, which in turn influenced decision-making.1 Even as this approach became widely influential in diplomatic and international history, however, explicit attention to emotions as an analytical tool seemed to drop out of the picture. Iriye’s attention to the role of mental images in shaping foreign policy and public opinion gave rise to a thriving subfield, and international historians became increasingly interested in the intangible elements of foreign relations, such as ideas, ideology, perceptions and misperceptions, and cultural interchange. Yet historians rarely focused on the emotions that underpinned these intangibles.
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Notes
Akira Iriye, “Foreword to the Revised Edition,” Across the Pacific: An Inner History of American-East Asian Relations, revised edition. Chicago: Imprint Publications, 1992, p. v.
Akira Iriye, “Culture and International History,” in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 215–16.
Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997, pp. 180–1.
The dynamic is reminiscent of the then-predominant view among scholars of medieval and early modern Europe, which held that modernization was in part a process of subordinating unruly emotions to rationality, a consensus that was being challenged as Iriye was writing. Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” American Historical Review 107 (2002): 834–6.
Quoted in William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 13–15.
Frank Costigliola, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012;
Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht, Sound Diplomacy: Music and Emotions in Transatlantic Relations, 1850–1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
See also Alessandro Brogi, A Question of Self-Esteem: The United States and the Cold War Choices in France and Italy, 1944–1958. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002,
and Barbara Keys, “Henry Kissinger: The Emotional Statesman,” Diplomatic History 35 (2011): 587–609.
See, e.g., Richard Ned Lebow, “Reason, Emotion and Cooperation,” International Politics 42 (2005): 283–313.
On cognitive biases, see, for example, Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2011.
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© 2015 Barbara Keys
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Keys, B. (2015). Emotions in Intercultural Relations. In: Johnson, R.D. (eds) Asia Pacific in the Age of Globalization. The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137455383_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137455383_20
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