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This article analyzes the use of historical analogies to interpret and explain foreign policy behavior, focusing on the South China Sea conflict. In reviewing coverage in the international English-language press, we find a range of historical analogies, from the conflict between Athens and Sparta to the 1938 Munich agreement, to interpret China's strategy and motivations in the region. While analogies are powerful tools for interpreting international events, their use has dangers as they are often deployed to justify decisions rather than analyze options. This article has two goals. First, we argue that relying excessively on Western analogies for understanding China can be misleading; instead, we suggest visiting examples from China's past that offer alternative readings of its current ambitions. Second, we suggest a way to overcome the deterministic application of historical analogies by not taking them individually, but rather taking them as sets of alternative scenarios. This way, they can provide important insights for generating critical debate and informing tactful diplomacy.

Prefiguring future by constructing history (introduction) / Andreas Leutzsch -- Analogy, allegory and anachronism / Peter Burke -- The subversive power of historical analogies / Antoon De Beats -- The tapestry of history: parallels, analogies, metaphors / Javier Fernández-Sebastián -- Driving with the rearview mirror? historical analogies and European foreign policy / Roland Vogt -- Handing over memories: the transnationalisation of memorials and the construction of collective memory in post-war and postcolonial Hong Kong / Andreas Leutzsch -- The sieve of memory: Chinese coming to terms with the past and parallels in European cultures of remembrance / K. Martin Chung -- Generational conflict in context of the cultural revolution in Chinese movies since 1990 / Barbara von der Lühe.

Cyber weapons and the possibility of cyber conflict—including interference in foreign political campaigns, industrial sabotage, attacks on infrastructure, and combined military campaigns—require policymakers, scholars, and citizens to rethink twenty-first-century warfare. Yet because cyber capabilities are so new and continually developing, there is little agreement about how they will be deployed, how effective they can be, and how they can be managed. Written by leading scholars, the fourteen case studies in this volume will help policymakers, scholars, and students make sense of contemporary cyber conflict through historical analogies to past military-technological problems. The chapters are divided into three groups. The first—What Are Cyber Weapons Like?—examines the characteristics of cyber capabilities and how their use for intelligence gathering, signaling, and precision striking compares with earlier technologies for such missions. The second section—What Might Cyber Wars Be Like?—explores how lessons from several wars since the early nineteenth century, including the World Wars, could apply—or not—to cyber conflict in the twenty-first century. The final section—What Is Preventing and/or Managing Cyber Conflict Like?—offers lessons from past cases of managing threatening actors and technologies.

Ostentacyjne przywoływanie patriotyzmu i narodowych symboli, ich polityczna instrumentalizacja i indoktrynacja odbywają się dziś w atmosferze permanentnego sporu tożsamościowego. Rezerwuar postaci i symboli historycznych dostarcza jego obu stronom instrumentów do manifestacji swoich idei i reprodukcji podstawowej antropologicznej dychotomii: "my" versus "oni". Historyczne analogie służą usprawiedliwianiu obywatelskiego nieposłuszeństwa, a pamięć zbiorowa jest powszechnie włączana w repertuar praktyk kontestacyjnych, szczególnie przez przedstawicieli młodego pokolenia, którzy skutecznie korzystają z nowych technologii komunikacyjnych i kodów popkultury. Dążąc do ustanowienia własnej reprezentacji symbolicznej, przechwytują postawy i narzędzia reprezentowane przez oficjalny dyskurs pamięci, dekonstruują narodowe mity i obalają uprzywilejowane wzorce patriotyzmu. Artykuł ukazuje, w jaki sposób "turpopatriotyzm" i "softpatriotyzm" stały się osiami polskiej debaty o symbolicznym głównym nurcie i peryferiach, a także, jak młodzi Polacy podważają hegemoniczne wzorce świadomości historycznej.


Semiotic Guerilla. Historical Analogies and Deconstructions in Media Practices of Turbo- and Softpatriots

Currently, ostentatious evocation of patriotism and national symbols, their political instrumentalization and indoctrination exists in an atmosphere of permanent identity dispute. The reservoir of historical figures and emblems provides its both sides with instruments to manifest their ideas and multiply the basic anthropological dichotomy: 'we' versus 'they'. Historical analogies are used to justify civil disobedience. Collective memory is commonly included in the repertoire of contestation practices, especially by the members of young generation, effectively using new communication technologies and codes of pop culture. Striving to establish their own symbolic representation, they intercept the attitudes and tools represented by the official memory discourse, they deconstruct national myths, and subvert privileged patriotic patterns. The article presents how so-called 'turbopatriotism' and 'softpatriotism' become the axis of Polish debate about Sławomir Doległo 200 the symbolic mainstream and periphery and how young Poles discredit hegemonic patterns of historical awareness.

The idea that the past holds lessons for the present, under the guise of historical analogies, is prevalent in political and public discourse. Those analogies are often accompanied by dire warnings befalling those who "forget" or otherwise neglect the powerful lessons of History—and would then be "doomed to repeat it", as the saying goes. So, Would remembering history make it seem more or less likely to repeat itself in the future? In other words, does exposure to specific lessons about past events, especially ones involving causal claims, affect how people expect real-life events to turn out? Four studies (three preregistered) tested this experimentally. In Studies 1 and 2, participants expected the same behavior (the US adopting a harsh stance against Iran in the Nuclear Treaty) to result in a more negative outcome when this current stance seemed to match a "lesson" they had read about the break-out of World War II (European leaders adopting a harsh approach against Germany in the 1919 Versailles Treaty vs. a conciliatory approach in the 1938 Munich Agreement). Studies 3 and 4 attempted to eliminate some confounds present in the first two studies and to generalize the effect to different events. While results varied across studies, an internal meta-analysis indicated that the analogical effect on predictions (d = –.08) tended to become stronger as participants' knowledge about the target situation decreased (d-1SD = –.24). These findings support the possibility of analogical-based predictive effects for real-life political events, and are discussed in light of their research and political implications. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published

AbstractEver since Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the US presidency in June 2015, journalists, scholars, and other commentators in the United States have attempted to explain his political success with the aid of historical analogies. In so doing, they have sparked a wider debate about whether the Nazi past helps to make sense of the US present. One group in the debate has contended that Trump's ascent bears a worrisome resemblance to interwar European fascism, especially the National Socialist movement of Adolf Hitler. By contrast, a second group has rejected this comparison and sought analogies for Trump in other historical figures from European and US history. This article surveys the course, and assesses the results, of the debate from its origins up to the present day. It shows that historians of Germany have played a prominent role in helping to make sense of Trump, but notes that their use of Nazi analogies may be distorting, rather than deepening, our understanding of contemporary political trends. By examining the merits and drawbacks of Nazi analogies in present-day popular discourse, the article recommends that scholars draw on both the German and American historical experience in order to best assess the United States's present political movement.

Political scientists, historians, and diplomatists are concerned with the extent to which historical analogies provide clues and insights of use to policy­makers. This essay will endeavor to extract from the experience of the negotiations which ended (in theory) the first Indochina war in 1954, what may be of significance in the current effort to end the second Indochina war in Paris in 1968.

In this article we position the contributions to our special issue in relation to existing scholarship on racism and stereotypes. We pay close attention to conceptual strands in the literature that emphasize two cognitive-discursive characteristics of stereotypes: their essentialist reductions and projections and their metonymical qualities. We then extend our conceptual and thematic map further to include recent discussions of the relationships between national and European identifications, particularly in crisis contexts, and the role of memory politics in them. We conclude with a brief mention of the scope and potential dangers of historical analogies in moments of crisis and fragmentation.

Comparing present and past situations by means of historical analogy is prevalent in political and public discourses. But research on this phenomenon has often involved reception paradigms (where people are asked which past event is most applicable to a current situation or issue), thereby treating such analogies as unequivocal—rather than flexible—in their meanings. Instead, this paper uses 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. After coding their open answers, 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 massively 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 aligns 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.

Comparing present and past situations by means of historical analogy is prevalent in political and public discourses. But research on this phenomenon has often involved reception paradigms (where people are asked which past event is most applicable to a current situation or issue), thereby treating such analogies as unequivocal—rather than flexible—in their meanings. Instead, this paper uses 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. After coding their open answers, 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 massively 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 aligns 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.