[Miriam_Dobson,_Benjamin_Ziemann]_Reading_Primary_(BookZZ.org)

120 Anja Kruke

14A. Taylor, ‘Speaking to Democracy: The Conservative Party and Mass Opinion from the 1920s to the 1950s’, in S. Ball and I. Holliday (eds), Mass Conservatism: The Conservatives and the Public Since the 1880s, London and Portland: Frank Cass, 2002, pp. 78–99, pp. 85–88.

15A. Taylor, ‘“The Record of the 1950s is irrelevant”: The Conservative Party, Electoral Strategy and Opinion Research, 1945–64’, Contemporary British History 17, 2003, 81–110, 87–95.

16L.R. Jacobs and R.Y. Shapiro, ‘Issues, Candidate Image, and Priming. The Use of Private Polls in Kennedy’s 1960 Presidential Campaign’, American Political Science Review 88, 1994, 527–540.

17J. Raupp, Politische Meinungsforschung. Die Verwendung von Umfragen in der politischen Kommunikation, Constance: UVK, 2007.

18See for an early analysis of the structural effect polls in the media have on American politics H.A. Mendelsohn and I. Crespi, Polls, Television, and The New Politics, Scranton, Penn.: Chandler, 1970.

19L. Beers, ‘Whose Opinion? Changing Attitudes towards Opinion Polling in British Politics, 1937–1964’, Twentieth Century British History 17, 2006, 177–205, 187. Here, the criticism of polling is emphasised.

20This is empirically scrutinised by S. Herbst, Reading Public Opinion. How Political Actors View the Democratic Process, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998; N. Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media, Cambridge: Polity, 2000.

21Kruke, Demoskopie, pp. 438–449.

22As an example, see L. Black, The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain: 1951–64. Old Labour, New Britain?, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

23See M. Glaab, Deutschlandpolitik in der öffentlichen Meinung. Einstellungen und Regierungspolitik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1949–1990, Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 1999.

24See M. Kohli, ‘Die Entstehung einer europäischen Identität: Konflikte und Potentiale’, in H. Kaelble, M. Kirsch, and A. Schmidt-Gernig (eds), Transnationale Öffentlichkeiten und Identitäten im 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2002, pp. 111–158; W. Bergmann, ‘Survey-Fragen als Indikatoren für den Wandel in der Wahrnehmung politischer Probleme: Antisemitismus in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1949–1998’,

Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 12, 2003, 231–258.

25Kruke, ‘Western Integration’.

26Bergmann, ‘Survey-Fragen’, p. 239.

27Ibid., pp. 253f.

28S. Casey, Cautious Crusade. Franklin D. Roosevelt, American Public Opinion and the War against Nazi Germany, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. For the early use of polls by Roosevelt see M.G. Holli, The Wizard of Washington. Emil Hurja, Franklin Roosevelt, and the Birth of Public Opinion Polling, New York: Palgrave, 2002.

29L.R. Jacobs and R.Y. Shapiro, ‘Presidential Manipulation of Polls and Public Opinion: The Nixon Administration and the Pollsters’, Political Science Quarterly 110, 1995, 519–538; L.R. Jacobs and R.Y. Shapiro, Politicians Don’t Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

30R.M. Eisinger, The Evolution of Presidential Polling, New York: CUP, 2003. Responsiveness is a term that arose at the same time when polls became a pivotal part of politics in the public. See for different studies V.O. Key, The Responsible Electorate, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1966; Jacobs and Shapiro, Politicians Don’t Pander; B.I. Page, ‘Democratic Responsiveness? Untangling the Links between Public Opinion and Policy’, Political Science and Politics 27, 1994, 25–29.

31E. Noelle-Neumann, The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion – Our Social Skin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984; for the discussion see Spichal, Public Opinion.

32See B. Rottinghaus, ‘Following the “Mail Hawks”. Alternative Measures of Public

Opinion polls 121

Opinion on Vietnam in the Johnson White House’, Public Opinion Quarterly 71, 2007, 367–391.

33S. Herbst, Numbered Voices: How Opinion Polling Has Shaped American Politics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

34L. Lipari, ‘Polling as a Ritual’, Journal of Communication 49, 1999, 83–102.

35S. Igo, The Averaged American. Surveys, Citizens and the Making of a Mass Public, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006.

36Igo, The Averaged American, pp. 234–280.

37Ibid., p. 243.

38For a more detailed definition of the idea of an orientation by second-order-observation and the constitution and role of the public see R. Stichweh, ‘The constitution of a world public’, Development 46, 2003, 26–29; Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media.

39This is the general hypothesis of Igo, The Averaged American, see esp. p. 280.

40Archive of Social Democracy (AsD), Bonn, Depositum Albrecht Müller, 1/AMAD000222.

41For further reading on détente see A. Hofmann, The Emergence of Détente in Europe. Brandt, Kennedy and the Formation of Ostpolitik, London: Routledge, 2007.

42Infratest Sozialforschung conducted the politically sensitive polls; other institutes were also under contract, but had to deliver more general polls that were distributed quite widely.

43For detailed information on this campaign see A. Müller, Willy wählen. Siege kann man machen, Annweiler: Plöger, 1997.

44U.A. Balbier, ‘“Der Welt das moderne Deutschland vorstellen”: Die Eröffnungsfeier der Spiele der XX. Olympiade in München 1972’, in J. Paulmann (ed.), Auswärtige Repräsentationen. Deutsche Kulturdiplomatie nach 1945, Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau, 2005, pp. 105–120.

45This is not explained further, but that is not necessary, because the aspect of mobilisation of one’s own followers belonged to a longer lasting discourse on the different aspects of voter mobilisation under different circumstances in the SPD. Another pollster, Infas, that worked for the SPD and the government had postulated that it was most important to win its ‘own reserve’ completely, i.e. to mobilise the people who constantly vote for the SPD. See in detail Kruke, Demoskopie, pp. 283ff.

46See Laura Beers, Conceptualizing the Liberals in the 1930s, manuscript (2007).

47This is the founding idea of psephology. As a classical introduction see P.F. Lazarsfeld, B. Berelson and H. Gaudet, The People’s Choice. How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign, New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1944.

48Originally, it refers to the concept of a ‘value change’, which had been brought forward in the influential study by R. Inglehart, The Silent Revolution. Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.

49G. Pridham, Christian Democracy in Western Germany. The CDU/CSU in Government and Opposition, 1945–1976, London: Croom Helm, 1977, pp. 209–214.

50For the example of the use of the Kinsey Reports by market research see Igo, The Averaged American, p. 241f.; for general aspects see A. Kruke, ‘“Atomwaffe im Propagandakampf”? Marktund Meinungsforschung in Politik und Wirtschaft in der frühen Bundesrepublik’, in H. Berghoff (ed.), Marketinggeschichte. Die Genese einer modernen Sozialtechnik, Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2007, pp. 346–371.

Select bibliography

Allport, F.H. ‘Towards a Science of Public Opinion’, Public Opinion Quarterly 1, 1937, 7–23.

Bulmer, M., Bales, K. and Sklar, K. (eds), The Social Survey in Historical Perspective, 1880–1940, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

122 Anja Kruke

Casey, S., Cautious Crusade. Franklin D. Roosevelt, American Public Opinion and the War against Nazi Germany, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Converse, J.M., Survey Research in the United States. Roots and Emergence 1890–1960, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

Eisinger, R.M., The Evolution of Presidential Polling, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Geer, J.G., From Tea Leaves to Opinion Polls: A Theory of Democratic Leadership, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Herbst, S., Numbered Voices: How Opinion Polling Has Shaped American Politics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Igo, S., The Averaged American. Surveys, Citizens and the Making of a Mass Public, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Kruke, A., Demoskopie in der Bundesrepublik. Meinungsforschung, Politik und Medien 1949–1990, Düsseldorf: Droste, 2007.

Kruke, A., ‘Western Integration vs. Reunification? Analyzing the Polls of the 1950s’,

German Politics and Society 25, 2007, 43–67.

Mendelsohn, H.A. and Crespi, I., Polls, Television, and The New Politics, Scranton, Penn.: Chandler, 1970.

Noelle-Neumann, E., The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion – Our Social Skin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Robinson, D.J., The Measure of Democracy: Polling, Market Research, and Public Life, 1930–1945, Toronto/Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1999.

Worcester, R., British Public Opinion. A Guide to the History and Methodology of Political Opinion Polling, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.

Worcester, R. (ed.), Political Opinion Polling. An International Review, London: Macmillan, 1983.

7 Memoranda

Kristina Spohr Readman

Memoranda are written communications that give directions and transmit information within bureaucratic structures.1 For the purpose of this chapter, the bureaucratic apparatus of interest is the state, and here the distinctive feature of memoranda is political analysis and stocktaking, and then policy recommendation. With reference to the nation-states of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, memoranda can be political position papers, opinion pieces, longer ‘think pieces’, or short briefing notes on topics varying from foreign policy to issues of state finances to social matters. Any of these types of memoranda can be both solicited and unsolicited documents, mostly produced and consumed within the governmental machinery – by which is meant the civil servants, personal political advisors, and ultimately the decision-makers; although certainly in the early modern period many of the unsolicited memoranda were written by (more or less expert) people from outside the government. Significantly, memoranda can also take the form of short notes of discussions or minutes.

As the nature of memoranda has varied and evolved over time, so too has the historian’s approach to the genre developed – not least since Leopold von Ranke. PostRankean political and diplomatic historians have tended to see memoranda as an important document type amongst other key state papers (especially dispatches, telegrams, and emails, as well as minutes of meetings or telephone conversations, and reports), even if over the past decades their practice has evolved to encompass other types of primary sources as well. A particularly close link thus exists between a specific sub-discipline of history and the source type in question. Before turning to the post-Rankean practices of professional historians and their uses of memoranda, a brief comment on the origins of this source – its production, use and preservation since the early modern period – is necessary.

The professionalisation of state bureaucracies and the rise of political history

As a genre, political memoranda appeared with the development of the state as a bureaucratic structure and state-state interaction: diplomacy. Inter-state relations could take many forms – those of competition, conflict, cooperation, partnership or neutrality – and hence, diplomacy was a crucial aspect of state activity from the

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start.2 It was in the fifteenth century that modern diplomacy began among the major powers in northern Italy and Spain as the then most developed state structures in Europe.3 By the sixteenth century, the Spanish monarchy’s bureaucracy was the most advanced in Europe in terms of the organisation and structure of the political administration as well as in its internal and international communication and record keeping. Philip II of Spain was particularly receptive to and keen to read both solicited and unsolicited memoranda, or memoriales as the Spanish called them, as his frequent annotations reveal; his policy-making thus generated a considerable paperwork trail. Not only was the writing and the reading of important memoranda embedded in the routines of Spanish government bureaucracy, but moreover, the first modern depository of government documents – established in 1540 by Philip II’s predecessor Charles V of Spain – became in 1578 the first ‘national’ archive, the Royal Archive at Simancas. Philip II was an avid collector of documents. He called for documents to be sent to his archive for preservation, and sent chroniclers to Rome to make copies of Italian documents. The English bureaucracy was as yet far less developed, and the French one far more casual.

While present-day historians certainly benefit from the increasingly organised state apparatuses of collecting and preserving governmental documents from the sixteenth-century onward, already some chroniclers or contemporary historians such as Italians Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540) and Paolo Giovio (1486–1552) relied heavily on the existence and privileged access to these early state papers including memoranda. The former indeed became the ‘father of Modern History’ through his methodical research based on primary sources that included state papers. A century later, William Camden and Sir Francis Bacon followed the Italian authors in method and conception.4 Among the methodological precursors of the scholarly historical works of the nineteenth century were the German Johann Christoph Gatterer (1729–1799) and Scot William Robertson (1721–1793). For Gatterer research, evidence and presentation were deeply intertwined, and he highlighted the necessity of distinguishing between important and unimportant events. Gatterer was keen to see histories that incorporated analysis founded on meticulous research and use of source materials rather than majestic chronological narratives.5 Robertson, likewise emphasised exhaustive original scholarship, and was well acquainted with original documents: his History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V (1769), had an extensive scholarly apparatus, including an appendix of proofs and illustrations. Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) – more famous and certainly scrupulous in his search for evidence – had, like many other important Enlightenment historians, a tendency to rely on existing works of synthesis. Meanwhile writers such as Voltaire, Hume and Smith pointed toward new areas of history, the social, economic and cultural.6 Nevertheless, the expanding system of territorial states meant historians’ increased focus on diplomacy and the predicament of war, as they sought to explain the principles underlying the conduct of international relations – albeit always in keeping with the didactic and moralising nature of eighteenth-century historical thought.7

The professionalisation of history as an academic discipline brought with it the exploration of the production, nature, use of and access to the most important

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Decision-makers looked for ever more detailed political analyses and policy recommendations, and in the increasingly hierarchical state bureaucracies some civil servants saw an opportunity to raise their own profile through document production and dissemination. Whilst the study of diplomatic correspondence (dispatches and telegrams) has predominated, memoranda have proven useful to diplomatic historians seeking to explain internal decision-making processes and the motives and rationale behind certain policies. Importantly, some memoranda have caused major historiographical debates, if not fierce controversies. Among twentieth-century memoranda of historical significance are the ‘Crowe Memorandum’ of 1907 (a study of the Anglo-German relations of the time), Imperial Germany’s ‘Septemberprogramm’ of 1914 (on the Reich’s war aims), Hitler's ‘Four-Year Plan’ of 1936 (a memorandum on the Nazi economic programme to prepare for war), the ‘Hossbach Memorandum’ of 1937 (a summary of a meeting where Hitler laid out his war plans), Sir Orme Sargent’s memorandum ‘Stocktaking after VE-Day’ of 1945 (on Britain’s postwar position), and Kennan’s so-called ‘Long Telegram’ of 1946 (an analysis of Soviet policies).

Regarding the creation and dissemination of documents generally, mediatheorist Friedrich Kittler has identified a growing estrangement of the author from his or her written word over the past two centuries.11 He has argued that in the nineteenth century the writer acted as creator and linguistic controller whilst producing a handwritten work, whereas by the twentieth century the ‘human author’ became more distanced by the use of the typewriter, and today, of computers. Certainly, for much of their early history, memoranda were handwritten and underwent the stages of being drafted and redrafted, with passages ‘overwritten’ (corrected or amended), added to and deleted, before eventually a final clean version would be produced and passed to the selected few addressees, who might further annotate the document or write comments on the margins. This was a lengthy process, and one that provided historians an excellent opportunity to trace the train of thought of the author and others who commented on the memorandum when studying the drafts. The typewriter revolutionised the production of documents in terms of speed. The author of a memorandum would now type drafts or have them typed – often multiple copies or later carbon copies – which were disseminated and on which corrections, suggestions and comments would be noted by hand. Often a further fresh copy would be typed out, for circulation among the policy-makers (who might write minutes or longer comments on the paper). Unsurprisingly, with the bureaucratic machinery involved in producing and consuming documents ever growing by 1900, the constant flow of documents was much greater than a century earlier.

This coincided with the professional turn of historians, who now aimed at systematically piecing together the historical facts of high politics based on these written sources. Yet this methodology found also its ‘abusers’, as governments stimulated the writing of official national histories by declassifying pre-selected state documents early in order to promote their perspectives of events. For example, the volumes of documents regarding the origins of the First World War that were published in the interwar years by most great powers, and the Western

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governments’ documents relating to the end of the Cold War era published in the 1990s, fulfil precisely such a purpose.12

As the discipline of history has grown more diverse during the twentieth century, so have diplomatic historians’ methods become more wide-ranging. Political historians generally have begun seeking to bridge the traditional gap between high and low politics, between domestic and foreign policy, by exploring the interconnectedness of these different layers and by using new methodological approaches from the social sciences to cultural studies.13 Historians of international affairs have moved away from using archival state papers as their predominant source, and their approaches to reading and interpreting these papers have evolved as well. The latest methodological trend affecting diplomatic history (and history more generally) has been the ‘linguistic turn’ – the focus on studying ‘texts’ and ‘language’. This approach has included the ‘history of concepts’14 (Koselleck) and the study of emotion and tropes in texts (Costigliola). More sweepingly diplomatic historians have been challenged by ‘culturalism’, pushing them towards exploring the effects, for instance, of ideology and culture, gender, race, the ‘other’ as well as memory as areas of cultural attitudes on their sub-discipline.15

But did the linguistic or cultural turn then create a crisis for international history? Assuming nation-states continue to be recognised as the main organisational structures in the world, traditional questions about states, power and policy will persist. The questions relating to the reasoning and actions of individuals – why certain decisions were taken by governments, what alternatives there were, why they were rejected, and what led to certain events or developments – cannot be omitted. Thus, memoranda and other state papers remain a crucial source to political historians.16 This is not to say that archival documents should not be used in conjunction with other sources, and also undergo textual scrutiny where useful.17 To quote T.G. Otte: ‘if the utterances of Foreign Office clerks ought not to be neglected by the historian, they need . . . to be set against a wider network of relationships of systemic, cultural, financial and economic nature.’ But significantly, as David Reynolds has highlighted, some of the culturalist approaches – the issue of ‘cultural’ explanatory primacy aside – are not as novel as they may seem. Zara Steiner and later D.C. Watt had focused on bureaucratic culture and policy-makers respectively, while Christopher Thorne and Reynolds have paid attention to cultural and racial dimensions.18 More recently Creswell and Trachtenberg, as well as myself, have analysed the interplay between political rhetoric and actual policy.19 And certainly early modernist international historians, such as Ragnhild Hatton as early as the 1950s, have found it important to engage with language, political culture and mentalités.20

In practice this means that, although it is interesting to recover ‘what was said’ and to explore ‘how the texts need to be understood’ as the new culturalists do, the explanatory primacy of language theory and cultural factors promoted by some extremist culturalists must be rejected. International historians remain keen to find preserved drafts and final versions of memoranda, with their main aim to uncover the thought processes of individuals within the government apparatus, to glean information about the circle of recipients (and those omitted), and thus to understand the intricacies of policy-making. They are interested in more than the text

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per se. Memoranda are read against the historical background of the specific contingent situations, such as when they were written, and when and how they were used at the time. International historians continue being interested in exploring the context in which the document was created in order to gather what is ‘meant’ by what is ‘written’; which influences affected the document’s author; what aims they pursued, and whether these were achieved; and what the wider political impact was. In other words, they continue to concentrate on establishing human agency and causalities.

A brief excursus on the culturalist approach as applied by Frank Costigliola clarifies the above. Costigliola has argued that, since historical situations and events – such as his case studies on the origins of the Cold War – are complex and diffuse, and not all their causes are attributable to single agents or conscious intentions, the scope of diplomatic history needs to be widened. He suggests doing so by exploring the connections between the personal and private lives of foreign policymakers, and the importance of emotions (such as personal desire, anger, contempt and prejudice) tied to cultural perceptions and the domestic political agenda. Not least in relation to documents produced in the Cold War, cultural and ideological presuppositions influenced how political issues were perceived. In Costigliola’s words: ‘Documents speak with many voices. In evaluating those voices, we need to pay attention to all aspects of foreign relations: the circumstantial, personal, emotional, and cultural, as well as the general, official, rational and political.’21

While emphasising the necessity of a thorough study of both text of and metaphors in a document – something that many diplomatic historians would do when for instance analysing Communist documents laced with the ideological ‘jargon’ – Costigliola has gone further. Particularly interested in the gender aspect of diplomatic language, he has identified tropes of masculinity in a number of American papers, especially in those dealing with American relations with the USSR,22 which he sees as emanating from a male-dominated political and military realm.

Costigliola’s article on the ‘Long Telegram’ of 1946 by George Kennan (minis- ter-counsellor for the US embassy in Moscow) is a particularly good case in point. The Long Telegram – effectively an analysis seen by many as the root of the policy of ‘containment’ that defined America's position toward the Soviet Union for much of the following two decades – has played an important role in traditional Cold War historiography. It has been used to emphasise Kennan’s and the US government’s detailed knowledge and solid evaluation of Soviet foreign policy in the early Cold War context.23 Costigliola looks at the telegram for new facets and interpretations by analysing its language and metaphors. To this end, for nearly twenty pages, he contextualises the telegram against the background of Kennan’s earlier personal views of the USSR and the Russian people which had been generally positive, and argues that:

Kennan’s strong emotions, his ambition to be persuasive, and the sensuality that he and his friends had experienced in the Soviet Union – all made gendered language a particularly important rhetorical strategy. As Soviet American

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relations deteriorated in 1944-46, Kennan’s emotive rhetoric helped delegitimate the wartime policy of striving to cooperate with the Soviets. Bitter at Soviet restrictions on access to the Russian people and to officials, Kennan disparaged and discouraged the ties that others might develop with the Soviet leaders. He depicted those Americans seeking postwar cooperation as prone to ‘gushing assumption of chumminess’. The phrase called up an image of gullible United States officials, almost inevitably men, emasculating themselves and their nation with uncontrolled flows of homosocial feelings.24

To prove his points about Kennan’s gendered language helping to construct an ‘attention-grabbing morality tale’, Costigliola then spends the last seven pages of his article analysing the actual telegram’s text in detail, showing Kennan’s rhetorical devices to portray US–Soviet estrangement. He notes Kennan’s use of a discourse of pathological psychology (the US as the ‘doctor’ versus the USSR as a rapist), metaphors full of hypermasculinity (‘courage’, ‘vigor’, ‘firmness’), the absence of references to Russian people (‘propaganda machine’, ‘Russian rulers’, ‘Russian nationalism’, ‘political force’), and the use of a passive voice to dramatise. The closest to an overall conclusion regarding the historical importance of the telegram is Costigliola’s statement that Kennan ‘in [it], . . . channelled his complex feelings about the Soviet government, the Russian people, American society, and his own career into an emotional sermon that helped shape the meaning of the Cold War’.25 Costigliola’s main point seems to be a methodological one, when he postulates that, to understand text and context, one needs to understand that texts can also have shaped contexts by the use of allusive language which in turn conditions how we interpret the text.26 But crucially he abstains from engaging in depth with what exactly can be gleaned from his findings regarding the telegram’s impact on Cold War developments – a typical problem, as alluded to above, when the study of the text takes total precedence over establishing agency and causality.

An Example: The Crowe Memorandum of 1907

The historical importance of the now iconic memorandum by Sir Eyre Crowe ‘On the present state of British relations with France and Germany’ of 1 January 1907 is undisputable. Since its publication in 1928 in British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1989–1914, it has triggered a major historiographical debate on the nature of London’s foreign policy-making.27 More specifically attention has focused on the F.O.’s (if not Crowe’s) views on Germany and Foreign Secretary Edward Grey’s policies in relation to the German Reich, France and Russia. Denounced by some (Hermann Lutz, Keith Wilson, Niall Ferguson) as blatantly anti-German and deliberately misleading in its embellishment of Germany’s aims and objectives, others (D.W. Sweet, B.J.C. McKercher, Zara Steiner, Paul Kennedy, T.G. Otte) have praised the memorandum as a classic exposition of British statecraft, balance of power considerations as well as an accurate judgement of German Weltpolitik and the consequential problematic Anglo-German relations at the time.