What’s so Critical About Critical Oral History?

ABSTRACT

James Blight, David Welch, and Janet Lang developed Critical Oral History in the 1980s and 1990s as an attempt to expand foreign policy history’s understanding of the past beyond a document-based epistemology. Despite this new method’s incorporation of “oral history” into its name, Blight, Welch, and Lang utilized few methodological or theoretical perspectives from oral history. While Critical Oral History has had a small renaissance in foreign policy history research in recent years, differentiation from political science’s method of expert interviews is still largely absent. In this article, I argue that if international history and international relations researchers are to use the concept of oral history as opposed to expert or elite interviews, it should be an indicator of the type of epistemological assumptions and thus, methodological analysis, in which memory is problematized. This will allow foreign policy history researchers to open a new variety of research questions and analytical foci while also problematizing memory. For oral historians, it offers reflections on intersubjective power relations and opportunities to expand understandings of misremembering, silence, and other key tenets of oral history theory. Examples from oral history interviews with retired Finnish and American diplomats are presented to implement these ideas in what I term a Foreign Policy Oral History method and methodology.

KEYWORDS:

• critical oral history
• foreign policy
• foreign policy history
• international history
• international relations
• memory

In 1972, Brian Harrison complained in the journal Oral History that the small group of social historians who created that journal had “not yet contacted an important group of historians who often make extensive use of interview material—the recent political historians.”¹ Harrison continued by stating that, while political historians were using interviews widely in this period, they were still “apprehensive about the recent growth of oral history.”² Despite more recent attempts to bridge oral history and international history,³ numerous aspects of fruitful interdisciplinary cooperation remain largely unexplored.

In the 1980s and 1990s, James Blight, David Welch, and Janet Lang tried to bridge this gap by introducing a research program termed Critical Oral History (COH).⁴ As a field of interdisciplinary research designed to introduce new perspectives on foreign policy history, COH offered reflection on the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, and how decision-makers come to terms (or not) with their policy mistakes through the process of retelling their pasts publicly.⁵ The idea was that, by organizing seminars with decision-makers and officials from all sides involved in key historical events, posing to them provocative questions, and having them reflect on archival documents, a new perspective on the heretofore “document-based” historical record could be gleaned. The endeavor has remained a subfield of international history and international relations,⁶ though with little methodological or epistemological reflection.

While the incorporation of memory data into historical research has become more prevalent with the academic boom in memory studies of the late 1990s and early 2000s,⁷ application of memory studies in international history and international relations (IR) is still a developing field.⁸ As early as 1995 Jonathan Soffer issued a call to arms for international historians to use the growing cache of oral history data in the realm of foreign policy research.⁹ However, more than twenty-five years later, this cache of data remains largely untapped. Most foreign policy history researchers do not see much value in oral history data aside from adding color to archival narratives or filling in blind spots where archives are closed. In this article, I will use foreign policy history as a term to denote both international historians and IR scholars who utilize a historical perspective in their work.

While the prospect of using oral history has been recently revived in intelligence history, this resurrection could benefit from a more extensive reflection on epistemological and ontological premises that have traditionally kept foreign policy history and oral history at arm’s length.¹⁰ The closest proposal to problematizing memory in oral history interviews with decision-makers comes from Andrew McFadzean, though he largely focused on the benefits for biographical research rather than wider social-political analysis.¹¹ The primary question remains: in foreign policy history research, what differentiates oral history methods and methodology from political science’s expert interviews, aside from putting a trendy buzzword in one’s research title?

Interview data and memoirs are increasingly used by analysts of foreign policy to underline the legitimacy of their claims without critically questioning these data’s epistemological value. A large part of oral history’s value is in the method of intersubjective data creation and negotiation of the past, as well as the methodology by which interview data is analyzed. I propose that if we are to use the concept of oral history as opposed to expert or elite interviews in international history and IR, it should be an indicator for the type of epistemological assumptions and thus, methodological analysis in which memory is problematized. It will also help promote a research agenda of investigating the role memory plays in foreign policy research.

The first step in explicating this frame is conceptually delineating between interviews, oral history, and memory. In this article, memory focuses on the individual and is defined as decision-makers’ subjective remembering of their past. Remembering is the act of recollecting past actions in the present. Memory and remembering differ insomuch as remembering is an act and memory is the result of the act, which can either become a physical trace or can remain elusive and only a remediated experience.

Oral history in this article is understood as a form of interview method that allows for a deeper contemplation of intersubjectivity, power, memory, and remembering when collecting and analyzing interview data. Andrew Hammond argued that history is more than just facts and oral history allows researchers an opportunity to contemplate this.¹² Similar thoughts on valuing subjective aspects of interviews in political science have been preliminarily presented in relation to constructivist schools of thought, though there is still a focus on uncovering “the inside story.”¹³ Oral history can make a valuable contribution to foreign policy history by expanding on Hammond’s argument and constructivist IR’s openness to problematizing memory in different data collection and analysis methods. This will add to the wider debate on the meaning of history in IR.¹⁴ One example would be the methodological innovation of reading against the grain in the fashion of Frank Costigliola. This is where researchers do not look for traditional facts (dates, meetings, etc.) per se, but the deeper political, professional, and sexual ideologies or subcultures which are hinted at in the stories that interviewees tell.¹⁵

The phenomenon of history-telling, introduced by Alessandro Portelli, connects memory, remembering, and oral history. History-telling occurs when the interviewee “weaves personal recollections into a broad historical background” and the self is integrated into a more complex social framework.¹⁶ This highlights interviewees’ attempts to match individual memory with collective narratives of the past within their society, which is inherently a dialectical process. Through the act of verbalization, interviewees navigate their vacillating positionalities. This is a negotiation between individual expressions and “socially defined … discursive structures (motifs, formulas, genres),” referred to as social grammars by Portelli, which creates a unique performance.¹⁷ Treating interviews as a form of history-telling can offer insights into different forms of individual agency and navigation of collective ideas, narratives, and habits, which international historians and IR scholars may have previously neglected.¹⁸

This argument may not be novel for oral history and memory data researchers. However, considering two key epistemological premises of oral history can help promote innovative research agendas in foreign policy history and promote contemplation of oral history theory itself. First, applying oral history to foreign policy history offers new reflections on the power and social significance of remembering and memory in contexts sometimes unusual for oral historians—that is, contexts in which the interviewee has an increased position of power in an interviewer-interviewee asymmetrical relationship. Portelli was skeptical about oral history’s ability to separate individuals with power (elites) from collective narratives,¹⁹ which in his view was the prime value of oral history as a method and methodology. I propose that, with proper reflection on power when shaping method, Portelli’s misgivings can be overcome. The research interest and focus on power that is inherent in IR helps oral historians reflect on the added value of oral history when researching different social milieus. Traces of this thinking can be seen in research endeavors such as the Wellcome Witnesses to Twentieth Century Medicine Project. Wellcome Witness investigated how the historical record of modern medicine’s development has been “designed to conceal rather than reveal the processes by which scientific medicine is conducted.”²⁰ Putting IR interviews in a dialectical relationship with oral history methods and methodologies allows for a deeper interdisciplinary reflection on different approaches to addressing the ever-fluctuating tensions between individual and collective agency in different communities.

Second, and as a result of the first point, this article offers an epistemological guide for foreign policy history researchers interested in going beyond the mere meaning of words and facts presented in interviews—it highlights the value of misremembering, silence, and other themes oral historians have traditionally used to “read against the grain.”²¹ I contend that scholars and political analysts need to ask how individual memories of practitioners shape the analytical territory on which we perform. This will allow foreign policy history researchers to open a new variety of research questions and analytical foci that may be more attuned to an oral historian’s ontological premises, but not to those of a diplomatic historian or political scientist. The overarching goal of this article is to show the value of cross-pollination between oral history and foreign policy history.

In the remainder of this article, I present oral history and memory data research traditions to continue the intuition of Blight, Welch, and Lang, but in a more epistemological and theoretically stringent conceptualization. Examples to explicate the theoretical and epistemological points are taken from oral history interviews conducted and transcribed by the author in the fall of 2021 on the topic of Finnish foreign policy history.

Problematizing Memory in Oral History Data—A Foreign Policy History Perspective

Former US secretary of state Dean Rusk noted that the majority of thoughts in decision-making processes are never recorded in document form.²² This is a key epistemological and methodological puzzle for international history as well as IR scholars and highlights the value of oral history interviews. As such, diplomatic historians, who by and large investigate the state and actors that possess political power, have traditionally “sought to address questions whose answers could be determined by recourse to bodies of documentary evidence that diminished uncertainty—ideally to the vanishing point.”²³ Social and cultural histories alternatively have cultivated methods to investigate actors who could not or did not always leave firsthand written accounts—those with relatively less power who thus leave different historical traces. As such, “read[ing] traditional bodies of evidence ‘against the grain’ ” to tease out subtle and nuanced meanings has become a common methodological practice in social and economic history.²⁴

Blight, Welch, and Lang’s COH further challenged these traditional, document-based currents in diplomatic history. COH raised the prospect that new questions could be posed that documents might not be able to answer and that different forms of non-document-based evidence could enrich research perspectives in foreign policy history. For example, interview methods such as “expert interviews” are common among political scientists and often considered a “preferred tactic of data collection when in fact it appears likely that it will get better data or more data, or data at less cost than other tactics.”²⁵ In response to the introduction of COH, Mark Kramer, while applauding the innovative nature of the new method, also identified misremembering and attempts by interviewees to shape interpretations of the past as key shortcomings.²⁶

Attempting to circumvent fraught debates of memory and the inherent subjectivity of interview data, Blight and Lang emphasized the use of phenomenological psychology as a framework for their new method. In effect, COH’s methodological innovation was its attempt, with documents, to “reconstruct the psychological reality of decision-makers,” and encourage those decision-makers to reflect on their emotions from periods of extreme crisis.²⁷ Memory was not problematized, as Blight and Lang were primarily “two psychologists seeking to make policy-relevant contributions to issues of war, peace, and international conflict.”²⁸ Ironically, because Blight and Lang attempted to sidestep memory in exchange for psychology, critiques that could have been readily countered by the oral history canon went unaddressed and caused a certain reticence toward COH as a new method in the study of foreign policy history.²⁹

In line with Kramer’s critique, foreign policy history researchers and opponents of memory data argue that interviews should only be used to triangulate other data sources and confirm or add nuance to traditional document-based analysis. Penny Summerfield would respond to this challenge by stating that any interview is in effect a remediation influenced by context, which reconciles “our understandings of ourselves and the meanings of our experience contemporaneously as well as retrospectively.”³⁰

Accepting that interview data is inherently a product of remembering is one of the key benefits of applying methodological discussions of oral history data in analysis. Alessandro Portelli argued that

the discrepancy between fact and memory ultimately enhances the value of the oral sources as historical documents. It is not caused by faulty recollections … but actively and creatively generated by memory and imagination in an effort to make sense of crucial events and of history in general … . Beyond the event as such, the real and significant historical fact which these narratives highlight is the memory itself.³¹

Similarly, Finnish scholar Jorma Kalela argued in 1984 that oral history was better termed “memory research” as memory was a critical piece of oral history that was not well conveyed when the term oral history was translated into other languages.³² The way in which the past is recounted and the interview narrative that is created is as important as objective facts—they simply shed light on different history and meaning-making processes.

Oral history at its core possesses an understanding that both interviewer and interviewee are conscious that a historical record is being created. Lynn Abrams argued that the interviewee constructs her or his reminiscence (1) in relation to her or his self-concept; (2) in relation to the interviewer; and (3) in relation to the available cultural resources of interpretation, narration, and values.³³ By analytically emphasizing oral history as the active process of data creation in the present, oral history can help foreign policy history researchers refocus on the “emotional truths interviewees form about their pasts.”³⁴ In Portelli’s conceptualization, and in navigating between the individual and the collective, oral history allows for all parties to search “for a connection between biography and history, between individual experience and the transformations of society.”³⁵

Emphasizing the act of remembering, researchers of foreign policy history can abstain from writing the unwritten history or “inside story” that is so alluring to many researchers and inherently gives the interviewee a position of power in shaping data. As Brian Harrison highlighted already in 1972, the interviewer must be aware of the interviewee attempting to lure the interviewer into writing an “official” history.³⁶ In the words of Nathan Reingold, oral historians must seriously consider “the self-consciousness of the person being interviewed who knows that [they are] speaking to posterity.”³⁷ As such, it can be said that oral history as a method and methodology places more emphasis on the act of telling about the past, as well as the potential impact of a society’s history culture and politics of history at the time of remembering (or, in other words, understanding interviews as history-telling).

In picking up Blight, Welch, and Lang’s initial impulse to address the puzzle of an undocumented nature of decision-making, it is pertinent to ask how data analysis could benefit from social science discussions of memory.³⁸ Instead of attempting to reconstruct the past realities of decision-makers, which inherently requires reliance on memory, a more fruitful avenue of modernizing COH could be to consider what is transmitted from the past to the present, how the past is interpreted,³⁹ and what new perspectives this might give us when studying foreign policy history.

Ulla Savolainen and Riikka Taavetti argued that the diversification of oral history and memory research into new fields enables the consideration of more diverse pasts and new perspectives. However, this multidisciplinary diffusion of oral history methods requires reflection so as not to perpetuate the blurring of concepts and the prevention of mutual understanding.⁴⁰ This latter characterization is a useful explanation of why COH and oral history have largely remained parallel but separate fields of research, though awkwardly sharing a name. Memory data research is theoretically demanding, and its implementation requires critical and ethical subtlety.⁴¹ Theoretical and epistemological considerations are important for updating the methodological benefits of applying oral history as a data collection method in foreign policy history research.

Foreign Policy Oral History—Examples from Finnish Foreign Policy History Research

The remainder of this article will offer examples of how oral history analysis is valuable in opening new perspectives in foreign policy history research. I applied a method, which I term Foreign Policy Oral History, when researching Finnish foreign policy changes and continuities in the 1990s. Because of the availability of Finnish archival documents, I used a form of triangulation to construct a particular oral history interview that mixes interviews with document traces of the past to create an analytical frame similar to the original structure Blight, Welch, and Lang proposed. However, I constructed this interview strategy to highlight how interviewees utilized collective habits and language to present the past, as well as different forms of remembering and internal self-negotiations. One aspect that differs from the COH method was that documents were strategically presented only after the interviewees performed an initial narrative. This strategy helped me consider how documents influenced memory as well as how interviewees navigated between individual and collective recollecting and performance. It also allowed me to reflect on how different classes of data and data collection methods interact and offer different traces of the past.⁴²

These initial considerations led to a two-part interview strategy. The first half of all interviews were semistructured oral history interviews where the interviewee was allowed to construct a narrative about the topic at hand (Finnish peace-mediation policy in Nagorno-Karabakh from 1995 to 1996 and by association, Finnish foreign policy in the 1990s). The interviewee had substantially more power in directing the narrative in this part of the oral history interview. In the second part of the interview, I presented archival documents that the interviewees wrote during the period being studied. After allowing the interviewee to read the documents, I asked questions and observed how the original narrative from the first half of the interview was subsequently amended to better reflect the new data the interviewee had themselves authored. This caused an internal self-reflection on how interviewees’ contemporary memories aligned with past representations of events, which they considered credible. As such, this method allowed for memory, remembering, and critical self-reflection to be on display during the interview. It also offered traces of potential negotiation processes between established collective narratives and individual remembering.

The topic of discussion in interviews was Finland’s role in mediating conflicts in the post-Soviet space following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Inherent in this topic was the way in which Finland’s foreign policy and external image changed following the Cold War. The specific case of Finland’s leadership in the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Minsk Group from 1995 to 1996 was the focus of all interviews. The OSCE Minsk Group was the diplomatic forum responsible for mediating the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Finland and Russia were Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group between 1995 and 1996, in which the United States, the European Union, and other post-Soviet countries participated. I interviewed six Finnish retired decision-makers from different levels in the decision-making process and one American diplomat. Interviews ranged from one hour to three hours. Six interviewees were men and one was a woman. Considering the composition of decision-makers who worked with the policy issue being researched at the time, this was a relatively representative gender sample.

The number of interviewees is of increased consideration in oral history. Oral history projects range from narrow approaches, in which a single-digit number of interviewees is utilized, to broader, more sociological approaches, in which conclusions can be more generalizable. The narrow approach allows for “greater depth and detail in subsequent historical analysis … where great complexity and detail can be carefully teased out.”⁴³ Portelli argued that, as a science of the individual, oral history deals “with the portions of the [social] mosaic that cannot be subsumed under the grid.” While a narrow approach, as offered here, may not provide a social grid of standard experiences, it does offer a “horizon of shared possibilities, real or imagined.”⁴⁴ This in and of itself is a valuable point of reflection for social scientists.

The American interviewee, Joseph Presel, was an ambassador and the US representative to the OSCE Minsk Group during the period being studied. The Finns included former foreign minister (and later president) Tarja Halonen; former ambassador René Nyberg; former state secretary Heikki Talvitie; former advisor to the president, Alpo Rusi; former Finnish ambassador to the US, Jukka Valtasaari; and former member of the policy planning department at the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kari Möttölä. Of the Finnish participants, only the first three were primarily involved with peace mediation in Nagorno-Karabakh and comprised a large portion of the decision-makers working on the policy initiative in Finland. The respondents represent a variety of foreign policy viewpoints within the Finnish foreign and security policy community, offering different perspectives on the research topic. This distribution was also useful for creating context and understanding larger trends in Finnish foreign policy at the time.

There are indeed certain peculiarities in Finnish foreign policymaking that influenced presentations and interactions that are discussed below. For example, it has been said that tact in Finnish culture means avoiding conflict.⁴⁵ The culture of conflict in different milieus may certainly influence the form and severity of contestation that is appropriate and effective in Foreign Policy Oral History. That being said, I surmise that because of my positionality as an outsider to the Finnish foreign policy community, international norms inherent in diplomatic culture led to more similarities than differences in narration strategies, interview preparation, and overall performance than might have been expected.⁴⁶

Before going further, Yaacov Vertzberger’s qualification for researching decision-makers should be noted. The tendencies presented here are not universal or exclusive—they are based on a limited sample size and offer hypotheses for tendencies in certain professional cultures⁴⁷ (in this case, that of Finnish foreign policymakers). This Foreign Policy Oral History method can nonetheless be used to reflect on intersubjective power relations in different policymaking cultures and more specifically for problematizing memory or interviews as memory data. The main intention is to illustrate the value of using an oral history method and methodology to open new analytical strategies for researching the past and different classes of material, as presented in the first section of the article.

Ethics, Power, and Epistemology—Dialectical History-Telling

Ethics, power, and epistemology are critical considerations in any oral history research.⁴⁸ Oral history is a way to give agency and voice to underrepresented groups in the historical record, which has traditionally been state-oriented. However, when misused, oral history has the power to destroy reputations and inflict emotional and ethical damage.

Ethical consideration is significant when working with people with relatively less power in society. While similar considerations are important when working with former decision-makers (for example, in foreign policy history research), a researcher’s ability to influence participants’ public images is much lower. Former decision-makers often remain in the public light and have a history of shaping testimony with the maintenance of their public image in mind. Additionally, it is natural for academics to contest and question decision-makers’ power. As such, the intersubjective creation of data is also, in a way, a negotiation over who will be able to control narratives of the past better, as well as the meaning of historical interpretation in contemporary political debates.

Thus, while ethical standards are relevant in this new conceptualization of Foreign Policy Oral History, best practices in accordance with the traditions of each discipline vary, and an understanding of the professional milieu in which the researcher is working is important. Similar to Rusk’s point that the majority of steps in the decision-making process are not recorded, it must be noted that there is usually a reason for this. Diplomats and decision-makers are more conscientious of their paper trail and binding agreements. Verbal contracts and trust are essential when working with former decision-makers and important in establishing a working relationship.

For example, in political history and some other disciplines in Finland, it has been common that interviews with (retired) politicians and decision-makers do not require a signature to denote consent; rather, spoken consent in an interview recording has traditionally been considered ethically sufficient. It is important that the intentions of the research project and analytical focus of the interviews are presented to the interviewees multiple times.⁴⁹ A signed consent form has been generally considered a poor primer for working with former decision-makers and as such, the discipline has adapted to these specific professional cultural norms. Allowing interviewees to rescind their consent at any time is also critical. However, it is often the case that retired decision-makers want to have their voice recorded for posterity and therefore consider interviewers to be doing them a service. Establishing a relationship (and thus, an amicable intersubjectivity) is important to balance with ethical considerations, which are both textured by the amount of social capital and power that retired decision-makers have at their disposal.

Finnish ethical review requirements do differ from those of other countries. According to the Finnish National Board on Research Integrity (TENK), many research projects do not require an ethics statement if they are based on informed consent, are conducted on adults, do not harm participants in any way (or cause potential damage to their public reputation), or cause stress different from other everyday situations. TENK acknowledges that Finnish ethical review requirements may be different from other contexts and, as such, has modalities for offering post-research ethical descriptions (rather than ethics statements) that explain ethical review practices in Finland to international funders and publishers, if required.⁵⁰

In balancing an intersubjective power asymmetry, ethics, and data collection concerns, contestation is a relevant strategy to pursue in Foreign Policy Oral History. Eva M. McMahan wrote that the practice of offering counterpoints to be disproven in interviews with “elite” respondents is significant in understanding the interviewee’s subjective positionality and self-image. Contestation may not always lead respondents to directly renege on the premises of their self-image, but it can elicit acknowledgment from respondents that their narrative can be contested.⁵¹ By prioritizing memory as the field of play and pairing this with an interview strategy that allows for ethical contestation, the researcher is able to subtly navigate the interviewee’s attempt to tidy “up embarrassing disorders of [their] dead past, [which] reverently conceals [their] own skeleton in a hidden closet.”⁵² Viewing foreign policy actors as “history shapers” makes these considerations more significant because power relations are qualitatively different from those of most oral history interviews. Contestation of an interviewee’s narration (or history-telling) may be self-evident for oral historians as a technique in interview analysis. However, when done during the interview rather than as a methodological tool to interpret interview data afterward,⁵³ a new form of nuance is added to the meaning of contestation as a method as well as a methodology.

Within this new framework of contestation, it is ethically necessary to present the intentions of investigating memory to decision-makers in oral history research. Decision-makers are generally well-versed in history as both a political tool and an academic discipline. History plays an essential role in everyday practices of policymaking,⁵⁴ thus influencing how many actors within policymaking milieus come to value and conceptualize the past as a policy tool as well as a process in which they are primary actors. Many retired decision-makers retain their own archives and diaries. This understanding of history and policymaking can be best described as a sense of historicism (defined as the “extrapolation of past tendencies into the future”⁵⁵) within the decision-making community. The past is used to advocate for contemporary policies in shaping an ideal future. The discipline of history has been noted as one of the most important subjects a decision-maker can study,⁵⁶ affirming a sense in the decision-making milieu that they are themselves creators as well as consumers of history.

Upon retirement, the residual power former decision-makers have offers them an unusual societal position to create and distribute their own forms of history, thus shifting this culture of historicism from a decision-making to a public history context. Former decision-makers’ narratives of the past are usually taken, to an extent, as authoritative in public debate because of the actor’s own participation in the events they are writing about or commenting on.⁵⁷ It is not uncommon that decision-makers establish a common habit and language of presenting their narrative to domestic as well as foreign audiences.⁵⁸ Therefore, the researcher’s role in problematizing subjectivity, memory, and potential conflicts of interest (conscious or subconscious) in these actors’ usage of power to define the historical record is a valuable prospect of Foreign Policy Oral History interviews and an addition to Portelli’s concept of history-telling.

I found these tensions visible when perceptions of historical epistemology arose in my interviews with former decision-makers. Despite attempts to explain memory as a research focus in my project on Finnish foreign policy, it was often that retired decision-makers reverted to a traditional document-based understanding of history. One interviewee noted “[t]his [document] could be interpreted against us … . Do you have any access to American and, and say, British … or actually, actually French reporting? While I don’t know what reporting, but the American reporting would probably be most interesting.”⁵⁹ Sometimes interviewees would even refer to certain documents as “magic memos,” alluding to a smoking gun–type document in the archive that supported their argument.⁶⁰ History’s role in foreign policymaking is primarily understood in instrumental terms as “applied history”—a Rolodex of examples, lessons, analogies, and inspiration for the practice of diplomacy.⁶¹ Even when I explicated the research focus on memory to interviewees prior to the oral history interview, there remained a Rankean perception that documents are the primary sources of historical truth, and practices of triangulating different national perspectives are important in verifying interpretations.⁶² Interviewees would also mention they had gone through their personal archives prior to the interview to prepare their testimony, a commonality in many oral history interviews.

This perception of history was beneficial for the overall interview strategy. Former decision-makers are quite clever in how they shape their responses to conceal information or present a certain image. An interviewee’s unfamiliarity with the intricacies of oral history allows the interviewer a form of analytical leverage while also retaining ethical standards. Explanations of oral history and memory analysis were largely disregarded by the interviewees because of their confidence in their own understanding of what the past is, how to study it, and their role in creating it. In effect, when memory is the analytical focus, former decision-makers are unconsciously forced to perform on a stage where they may have less expertise in controlling the prevailing context necessary for successfully curating an external image.

This being said, some former decision-makers may have their own preconceptions of oral history research, though it is largely a conceptualization that does not problematize memory. This is either derived through their own experiences studying history or from their role as interviewees. When opening the discussion with Jukka Valtasaari, after presenting the consent form and premises of the research design, I was then given a short lecture on what oral history should be. The interviewee explained the trials and tribulations of Finnish foreign policy over the past eighty years and the struggles Finnish elites went through in attempting to navigate perceptions and misperceptions in European politics, “and that is what … writing an oral history is about.”⁶³ This was later expanded upon in Valtasaari’s recollections of how certain diplomats were valued in the community, stating “this is oral history–type material,” or perhaps this is something that should “go in the oral history part [of your work].”⁶⁴

There was also the self-validation of former decision-makers’ continued role as gatekeepers to certain types of knowledge of the past. Valtasaari reiterated the importance of diplomats as sources of historical truth, citing previous publications from diplomats such as US ambassador to NATO Robert Hunter, for their representation of the “real story.” Valtasaari concluded that this type of information only “comes in our history. It doesn’t come off if … Aunesluoma [Professor of Political History, University of Helsinki] reads research reports … it’s not there.”⁶⁵ However, epistemological delineations between oral history and scientific histories were still present in Valtasaari’s interview. When I asked if the interview could be cited directly with Valtasaari’s name, he asserted “why would I want to be anonymous? … [This is just] another way to describe the picture … its private stories and facts are facts … just make it a good oral history.”⁶⁶ In this conceptualization, interviewees see their value in elucidating the past and increasing contextual knowledge of events, processes, and relationships.

This mentality that oral history is a necessary complement to understanding diplomatic milieus and for interpreting archival documents stems from a traditional perception of political history. Pertti Torstila stated, “a lot is often left unsaid in the fact-oriented official reports of ambassadors. A contemporary diplomat in his/her active years cannot reveal his/her deepest feelings. The truth remains empty.” But in memoirs, “the diplomat gets the opportunity to express his/her feelings with reasons.”⁶⁷ While this is also applicable to oral history data to an extent, the memoir still grants former decision-makers greater control in dictating a narrative of the past. Oral history requires that the narrative become intersubjective. While emotion may still be presented, interviewees’ emotional truths are still managed for an audience in an attempt to retain power over the narrative as well as the narrator. Considering how different data collection methods circumvent, circumscribe, or amplify former actors’ agency in writing a historical narrative is important. While this is inherent in all oral history methodology, it may become more prominent with former decision-makers because of how they value history as a tool in sustaining their self-image.

A second point in navigating among power, ethics, and contestation is understanding how interviewees of a certain professional community may coordinate aspects of their presentations. For example, during my interview project with Finnish diplomats on peace mediation in Nagorno-Karabakh, it was primarily the main actors of the Finnish delegation who agreed to interviews. Most other diplomats declined interviews, either for a lack of interest in the topic, or because they may have wanted to allow the primary actors to dictate the narrative. While it is not possible to see into the inner workings of this milieu and confirm this hypothesis without doubt, it was apparent that the interviewees talked among themselves and passed information about the interviewer. For example, former ambassador René Nyberg offered backhanded compliments of his former boss, former foreign minister Tarja Halonen, in one interview:

The foreign minister was Halonen. That’s a story! That’s a story, because … she is a very tough cookie. And, and very undisciplined in her behavior. She throws tantrums. She bursts out in in either laugh or swears. There’s one of the reasons why she probably … she has had one thing in common with Putin, which did, was not, a disservice for her. They both grew up in the street. You in America, you would say slum. Leningrad was more of a slum than Helsinki, Kallio.⁶⁸

Nyberg presented an initial impression in his interview that the two did not get along, and he did not have the most flattering image of Halonen in his memory. However, in the subsequent interview with Halonen, one of the first things she noted was “René said you have very good Finnish.”⁶⁹ Nyberg noticeably discussed me and his interview experience with Halonen before she participated in her interview.

It is conceivable that this presentation by Nyberg was a test to see what the interviewer would do with the data. Would this information be quickly circulated or published, or did the interviewer conform to an informal agreement by which researchers and decision-makers often abide? That being said, by having access to decision-makers and the power their knowledge entails, researchers accept that portions of the information they gain are only for context. There is a common agreement regarding what should be written about and what should be kept confidential. This is reflected by the prominent Finnish diplomat and foreign policy commentator Max Jacobson’s perspective that “the hard values of American journalism cannot be transplanted as such into a small nation as Finland, where a certain tact is necessary when dealing with personal information. When everyone knows each other, it is not necessary to publicize everything.”⁷⁰ Ossi Naukkarinen highlighted Jacobson’s quote to show how conceptions of subgroup identity may be conflated beyond their bounds, further muddying the division between individual and society: “A member of the elite is obviously inclined to think that everybody belongs to the same group and knows each other, and behaves in a way that does not disturb the internal harmony of the group. For the outsiders to the elite—which is almost everybody—this phenomenon appears as an act of covering up and keeping quiet about things.”⁷¹

In this regard, a culturally specific understanding of conflict within a specific social milieu was necessary for gaining confidence and further engaging with the group. It is plausible that, as Halonen was a former president and in a high position of social prestige, if I had performed poorly in the interview with Nyberg or uncouthly publicized his responses, it might not have been possible to obtain an interview with Halonen due to the collective gatekeeping and coordination within their professional community. Thus, these acts of gatekeeping and testing trustworthiness (as well as the interviewer’s understanding of diplomatic code) were also forms of utilizing power to control process as well as narrative.

Misremembering and Silence

As noted above, Blight, Welch, and Lang’s COH perspective had its pitfalls, partially because it did not fully embrace aspects of oral history that valued interviews as sources of nonfactual data. Considering misremembering and intersubjectivity as analytical strengths is where the “Critical” in COH could have made a lasting impact on the epistemology of foreign policy history, taking up fundamental oral history scholars such as Alessandro Portelli who value misremembering as a critical outcome in oral history interviews.⁷²

Portelli agreed that interview data is a subjective source of collecting traces of the past. At the same time, his work also highlighted the subjective nature of document traces, reflecting the argument of objectivity and epistemology back onto traditional data sources in historical research. In summation, Portelli offered the foundational argument that “errors, inventions, and myths lead us through and beyond facts to their meanings.”⁷³ By leaning into an oral history tradition, foreign policy history researchers can participate in a research literature that problematizes memory and sees misremembering in interviews as beneficial in the data creation process.

In my interview data from Finnish decision-makers remembering the 1990s, I observed misremembering, or rather selective remembering, in regard to politically contentious topics such as Finlandization. Finlandization can be defined in various ways, ranging from an ideal type of asymmetrical state relations where a smaller country amends its policies to be more amicable to a larger neighbor, to a specific notation of Finland’s relationship with Moscow during the Cold War.⁷⁴ Both can have positive or negative connotations, and use of the term often evokes strong emotions due to the plethora of normative historical judgments with which the term has been associated. In contemporary domestic Finnish debates, despite conceptual ambiguity, “Finlandization” is a hot-button issue and has implicitly and explicitly been utilized as a political tool to question intentions. It can insinuate that someone may not have Finland’s best interests at heart and that they conflate Russian interests with Finland’s. It represents an emotional discussion of identity as well as which reference group in the world Finns want to associate themselves with.⁷⁵

In relation to sensitive subjects such as Finlandization, misremembering can be used as a diplomatic tool to divert the interviewer from difficult topics and allow the interviewee to open a new topic of their choosing. While this is a difficult hypothesis to validate, oral history data from my interviews give some plausible support to this claim.

When Finlandization was discussed in interviews, it was a topic that I carefully broached. Most often, I did not ask about the phenomenon specifically in the first part of the interviews. The conversation was usually opened when I presented an archival document in the second half of the interviews, which directly used the term (Suomettuminen in Finnish) and simply asked for the interviewee’s interpretation of the document. Only on one occasion did I use the term Finlandization verbally in my questions. In taking this limited approach, I allowed the interviewee to set the opening terms of the discussion as much as possible, with simple priming from Foreign Ministry documents, which respondents considered credible and could not easily dismiss.

Even with this subtle priming, there were often emotional responses. Kari Möttölä, for example, refuted Finlandization in his initial narrative as having limited, if any, significance on Finnish post–Cold War policy. This allowed the respondent to construct a narrative of distinct periods of Finnish history—Finlandization and post-Finlandization. Such a narrative is in line with a portion of Finnish political and historical analysis from the 1990s that quickly moved to historicize Finlandization as a past phenomenon and make a strong delineation between Cold War Finland and a new sovereign, European future.⁷⁶ In effect, the way in which interviewees addressed Finland’s Cold War history in the first half of their interviews largely conformed to existing understandings and thus, shared habits and grammars of presenting the past. It was only in the second section, when these collective understandings were contested with documents, did the disjunction between personal and collective memory become more present, allowing space for deeper reflection on the part of both the interviewer and interviewee on history-telling.

When interviewees were presented with Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs documents that explicitly detailed concerns about other countries continuing to consider Finland possibly unable to escape the “ghost of Finlandization” in the 1990s,⁷⁷ respondents’ narratives changed. The tone of the interview and the presentation patterns of the interviewees shifted from a smooth narration to a more disjointed presentation. For example, Möttölä shifted his narrative from a previous strict delineation in eras to a more nuanced approach of how Finland’s external image was slower to change in the 1990s.⁷⁸ Halonen, when addressing Finlandization, changed her cadence from swift responses to a more deliberative approach. Her tone fluctuated, she seemed to be weighing her words carefully, sighing with hints of hesitancy: “Yeah … these … . In my time, these were not talked about. But of course … . Well, yes, I can comment on these, I can read and see what this is … that, but, you can’t … ehh … [exhale].” As seen here, Halonen initially denied the term’s usage during her period as foreign minister, but then decided to comment on the documents at a later date. After creating this time to think, Halonen eventually offered a measured answer: “Yes, this Finlandization … it was a fear, it was quite hard for Finnish diplomats, it still is for some.”⁷⁹ I interpreted this statement as being general enough to remain relatively safe if her words were to be publicized while also providing useful insights into the culture of Finnish diplomacy. An understanding of the emotions associated with Finlandization—that it was a fear and still remains so today for some—was useful for looking further into the emotional truths interviewees might hold with regard to their own past as well as a national Finnish past.

René Nyberg, on the other hand, attempted to divert the conversation to a different topic. When presented with documents discussing international perceptions of Finlandization and asking for his interpretation, Nyberg launched into a longer story about Finnish arms purchases from the Soviets during the Cold War. However, upon continued contestation, Nyberg offered a more telling response:

Interviewer:

I’m interested in seeing how you interpret this … [presents document to Nyberg]⁸⁰

Nyberg:

This is Washington and it’s early in ’95. That was when we prepare to go to … . Yeah, this, this was one of the big mistakes we ever made … . That was an embarrassing thing. Presel said to me that he’s not, he [Finnish Major General Heikki Vilén—mentioned in the document referenced] is not a real general. He had two stars. He … he died … twenty years ago, he’s not anywhere, any, any … more with us. And he was, he was running the Secretariat to prepare the peacekeeping operation. And he … spoke Russian, which in this sense said he had been an interpreter, with Finnish officers … do you know how we bought weapons from the Soviet Union?

Interviewer:

Finland? No, I don’t.

[Nyberg proceeds to tell a story of Finnish arms purchases from the USSR and how he knew Major General Vilén, who was involved in the research topic being discussed, from his time at the Finnish Embassy in Moscow] …

Interviewer:

So this was … this complaint was largely aimed at Vilén because of his Soviet [experience] or his interactions in the USSR?

Nyberg:

Yes, yes, yes … well, he just couldn’t. He just wasn’t, he wasn’t competent. Now, there was no … no, … there was nothing … . This Finlandization thing … I don’t, I don’t really understand that. I don’t really understand that … . Well, yes, you might say that we will—wouldn’t be too much the kind of things Finns and Russians, only Finns and Russians, but there was never any, any doubt cast on us by the Americans. Definitely not by Joe Presel on this, the only criticism was Iran.

Interviewer:

So could this have been him signaling perceptions, other perceptions, in Washington?

Nyberg:

I don’t have an answer. I don’t have the answer. But I just deny the fact that … but Vilén was just incompetent. That’s the point.⁸¹

This example highlights the value of sustained—yet socially appropriate—contestation, seen here as continued requests for clarification, which disallowed the interviewee to shift the topic of discussion. With regard to Finlandization, the emotional negotiation of self-image and history was indeed present, as described above by Halonen’s comment that Finlandization “was a fear, it was quite hard for Finnish diplomats.”⁸² When simply asked for an interpretation, Nyberg offered denial of a nonexistent accusation. He became more defensive in his responses and attempted to refocus the discussion on the purported incompetency of a former colleague rather than on the discussion of Finlandization. The limited attempt at explaining Finlandization and the seeming frustration that resulted hinted at the difficulty of discussing or explaining away the topic. This adds a layer to Portelli’s understanding of history-telling: by asking unexpected questions, the interviewer encourages “the history-teller to explore new areas of experience, or to verbalize explicitly what is taken for granted and remains unsaid when speaking to members of the immediate community.”⁸³ In this regard, document evidence paired with sustained, couth contestation led to either a nuanced narrative or diversionary strategies. This highlights the significance of the concept’s (Finlandization) continued influence, as well as the importance of presenting a certain, curated image of Finland to the world.

This strategy of misremembering to diffuse potentially controversial topics was also present in American research participants’ interviews. US ambassador to the OSCE Minsk Group, Joseph Presel, was referenced as the source of this “ghost of Finlandization” comment in Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs reporting. He was also referenced by Nyberg as being involved in related conversations (see above). However, Presel’s recollection on the topic was nonexistent: “Maybe, maybe … maybe it’s because I’m old, maybe I’m getting Alzheimer’s. I have absolutely no recollection of ever hearing the name of General Vilén before. And I doubt I said that, but if the Finns say I did, I’m sure I did.” Presel went on to deflect a conversation on the US government’s perceptions of Finland in the 1990s by saying:

Presel:

the Finlandization thing is tough because if you ask even a well-educated American, which by now you are, about this kind of thing—and if you say Finland—they will say two things: the only country that pays World War I debts and Finlandization. That’s all we know! We don’t, we don’t stop to think about the fact that this is a remarkably successful northern European social democracy. There’s almost exclusively middle class and Lutheran and they have done very, very well. We don’t, we don’t take them seriously. Because we don’t think about them at all. I have oodles of respect, admiration, and affection for the Finns.⁸⁴

Louis Clerc argued that “the contours of Finland’s national project are drawn in a dialogue between external models and blueprints, foreign perceptions and Finnish intentions … self-perceptions develop through contacts with the world in a never-ending cycle of persuading oneself and others of Finland’s worthiness.”⁸⁵ In this perspective, the positionality of the interviewer as a foreigner, and perhaps an American in particular (considering Finland’s long-held aspirations of being a member of the West),⁸⁶ also adds a level of reflection when interpreting these oral histories as performances. Kristiina Silvan explored how being an outsider can act as both an advantage and disadvantage in multicultural interviews, highlighting that there are many things an interviewee will explain to an outsider that would be taken for granted if the interviewer and interviewee were from the same culture.⁸⁷

Not only was there an instructive and performative aspect seen in how the interviewees understood epistemologies of history, but also in how they presented Finnish foreign policy intentions, actions, and achievements. Jukka Valtasaari argued in his interview that “the more you’re talk[ed] about [e.g., Finland talked about in the international community], the more Finlandization disappears.”⁸⁸ This also alludes to the fact that Finns are misunderstood because of a lack of interest or knowledge on the part of the international community, as Presel also noted. This then creates a mindset of needing to explain Finland in a managed way to the outside world.

The meaning of silence is also a key debate in oral history,⁸⁹ where meaning can be found in asking why certain historical traces are offered in interviews and why others are hidden or tucked away. Ulla Savolainen argued that silence can be the result of culturally available frames of interpretation—if existing narrative frames do not exist, interviewees may find it more politically or socially difficult to present their memories.⁹⁰ Extending Portelli’s conceptualization that errors tell us more about the individual research participant, silences also offer insight into specific social and cultural currents that shape group and, subsequently, individual self-images and their external presentation. While Valtasaari’s sentiment is shared in Presel’s responses on why perceptions of Finlandization may have persisted (and may continue to circulate today), there seemed to be a hierarchy of priorities in interviewees’ presentations. Because misremembering was used as a diversionary tactic to redirect the conversation, silence was a subsequent result. As shown in Presel’s explanation of Finlandization, the original question regarding official US perceptions of Finland went unaddressed and was substituted with a discussion of superficially public US perceptions of Finland. Promoting good relations and respect for Finnish colleagues became the primary narrative. Nyberg’s partial success in avoiding the topic only showed a crack in the facade, hinting that there was still a curated presentation being offered. It is likely that true feelings remained silent behind his official storyline.

Summerfield argued that “unlocking memory is perhaps central to the role of oral history.”⁹¹ Silence is implicitly a function of power and different milieus utilize silence differently in their conscious and subconscious representation of meaning to external audiences. For disadvantaged and neglected groups, this may be due to habitual oppression. For decision-makers, silence needs to be reconsidered as a form of extending or conforming memory to power, as well as a demonstration of how power has been internalized in interviewees’ own remembering and conceptualization of their pasts. In this sense, it is a novel idea to consider how silence is used by those who have had and continue to wield power and social respect, such as former decision-makers.

Conclusion

A large part of oral history’s value resides in how interview data is analyzed. This article has highlighted the need to reemphasize oral history as a signpost for a specific type of data collection method and methodological analysis. This is opposed to expert or elite interviews that attempt simply to substitute interview methods when other forms of data collection are not available. Thus, I propose a new label—Foreign Policy Oral History—as an indicator for the type of epistemological assumptions and, thus, methodological analysis whereby memory is problematized. Making oral history a conscious interdisciplinary marker will help promote a research agenda problematizing memory in foreign policy history research more generally.

Memory is a key component of oral history and a feature that differentiates oral history from expert interviews as a method and a methodology. Oral history shifts a researcher’s analytical and epistemological focus: rather than looking for traces of a verifiable past, the way in which the past is remembered, the narratives used to represent the past, and the performative aspects of remembering are all variables that tell researchers as much about the narrator as they do about the narrative. In this sense, oral histories can offer a glimpse into the negotiation between cultures that influences decision-making and how individuals internalize said cultures in memories and acts of remembering. This premise helps shift a researcher’s methodological focus, privileging interview transcripts as mnemonic narratives that can be compared with and contrasted to narratives created solely from archival data or other data collection methods.

Focusing on misremembering and silences also helps problematize memory in oral history⁹² and helps us refocus on the “emotional truths interviewees form about their pasts.”⁹³ Oral history as a reflection on self-images and the influence of ideas in foreign policy decision-making culture offers a new type of knowledge to the study of foreign policy history as an increasingly interdisciplinary field of study. By using oral history for those with power in addition to those traditionally excluded from the state-based narrative of the past, oral history may glean new insights into traditional concepts such as misremembering and silence.

These are points often missed in contemporary calls for the use of oral history in foreign policy history research. Reading the interview transcript or video “against the grain” is what truly allows foreign policy history researchers to widen their research interests. As Soffer suggested, oral history can be utilized “in a systematic way” to investigate the “artifacts of ideology.”⁹⁴ Oral history, as an inherently different method and methodology for data collection and analysis than expert interviews, offers IR scholars and international historians a new tool to address questions of power, the meaning of remembering and memory, and the meaning of history in the contemporary moment. Alternatively, it forces oral historians to reflect on different forms of power and how power is used in different communities. In this regard, understanding power refines our understanding of history-telling.

Using this new Foreign Policy Oral History method, I saw a collective narrative solidify in the unprimed narratives presented in the first part of interviews. When questioned with documents in the second part of the interviews, the process of individual navigation of collective grammars and habits arose—the facade separating internal and external presentations became more visible. Thus, contestation of a politically prickly topic such as Finlandization, paired with archival documents to prime or contest interviewees’ memories, led to a real-time emotional contemplation that was veiled by strategies of re-narration as well as diversion. When the back end of Finnish diplomacy and image maintenance was seen by an outsider, attempts to validate a national self to the outside world with traditional narratives became more difficult. This gave the interviewer a front-row seat to memory and identity self-inspection as interviewees renegotiated what they thought they remembered about the past and what they wrote in official documents at the time. While the veil was not entirely removed, focusing on the relationship between memory and oral history showed its value in researching epistemologies of the past, as well as the subjectivity of former decision-makers as actors in shaping our knowledge of history.

Foreign Policy Oral History can only succeed with curiosity to diversify epistemological premises from both foreign policy history researchers as well as oral history scholars. Andrew Hammond argued “that some of the keenest insights from oral history theory and methodology lie in allowing us to explore a broader range of research questions. This is especially true with reference to questions surrounding identity and culture, as well as those that consider meaning, memory and narrative.”⁹⁵ This new conceptualization of Foreign Policy Oral History and memory requires further application to expand its validity beyond the Finnish foreign policymaking community. This could, for example, take the form of group interviews, as proposed by Bethan Coupland, to explore the relationship of individual and collective memory (or shared recollections in Portelli’s terms) and remembering in different professional and cultural communities.⁹⁶ The initial application here has nonetheless offered a data collection and analytical strategy upon which to improve. While oral history originally worked to turn traditional document-based history research on its head, it is time for international history to return the favor and expand oral history’s field of inquiry for continued interdisciplinary development.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Riikka Taavetti and Juhana Aunesluoma for their comments and guidance. Feedback received from the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity’s conference “Genealogies of Memory 2022: History and Memory in International Relations,” the Finnish Oral History Network’s 2022 conference “AFTER: Time, Place & (Dis)Connections in Oral History & Life Storying,” as well as the anonymous reviewers was instrumental in developing this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ulkopolitiikan tutkimuksen säätiö [Foreign Policy Research Foundation].

Notes on contributors

Bradley M. Reynolds

Bradley M. Reynolds is a doctoral candidate at the University of Helsinki. His doctoral research focuses on Finnish and Russian foreign policy in the 1990s, looking at how non-NATO security institutions (such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation, or OSCE) textured new institutional, bilateral, and multilateral relations in the post–Cold War European security system. He is on the board of two Finnish NGOs—the Finnish Oral History Network (FOHN) and Historians without Borders (HwB). FOHN provides a forum for oral history, memory studies, and life storying scholars in Finland. HwB promotes public history debate as well as the use of history as a form of conflict resolution internationally. Reynolds’s relevant reviews and original research have been published in Cold War History, European Security, and H-Diplo (among others).

Notes

^1. Brian Harrison, “Oral History and Recent Political History,” Oral History 1, no. 3 (1972): 30.

^2. Harrison, “Oral History and Recent Political History,” 30.

^3. Andrew Hammond, “Through a Glass, Darkly: The CIA and Oral History,” History: The Journal of the Historical Association 100, no. 2 (2015): 311–26; Eldad Ben Aharon, “Doing Oral History with the Israeli Elite and the Question of Methodology in International Relations Research,” Oral History Review 47, no. 1 (2020): 3–25.

^4. For an early introduction of Critical Oral History as a method and methodology, see James G. Blight and David A. Welch, On the Brink: Americans and Soviets Reexamine the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 6; see also a useful overview in Geri Augusto, Wesley Hogan, and Danita Mason-Hogans, “Adapting Critical Oral History Methodology to Freedom Movement Studies,” Oral History Review 49, no. 2 (2022): 275; R. Kenneth Kirby, “Phenomenology and the Problems of Oral History,” Oral History Review, 35, no. 1 (2006): 37n5.

^5. Bryce J. Allen, James G. Blight, and David A. Welch, “Essence of Revision: Moscow, Havana, and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” International Security 14, no. 3 (Winter 1989/90): 136–172; James G. Blight and Janet M. Lang, “Burden of Nuclear Responsibility: Reflections on the Critical Oral History of the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 1, no. 3 (1995): 225–64; James G. Blight and Janet M. Lang, Dark Beyond Darkness: The Cuban Missile Crisis as History, Warning, and Catalyst (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018); James G. Blight and Janet M. Lang, The Fog of War: Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005); James G. Blight, Janet M. Lang, and David A. Welch, Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived: Virtual JFK (Lanham, MD: Roman and Littlefield, 2009); James G. Blight and Janet M. Lang, “Robert McNamara: Then and Now,” Daedalus 136, no. 1 (2007): 120–31; James G. Blight and Janet M. Lang, “Forum: When Empathy Failed Using Critical Oral History to Reassess the Collapse of US-Soviet Détente in the Carter-Brezhnev Years,” Journal of Cold War Studies 12, no. 2 (2010): 29–74.

^6. For example, see “Critical Oral History—Wilson Center,” Wilson Center, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/critical-oral-history.

^7. Susan Crane, “Writing the Individual Back into Collective Memory,” AHR Forum (1997): 1372–85; Anna Green, “Individual Remembering and ‘Collective Memory’: Theoretical Presuppositions and Contemporary Debates,” Oral History 32, no. 2 (2004): 35–44; Wulf Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies,” History and Theory 41, no. 2 (May 2002): 179–97; Emily Keightley, “Remembering Research: Memory and Methodology in the Social Sciences,” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 13, no. 1 (2010): 55–70; Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley, “Memory, Media and Methodological Footings,” in Memory in a Mediated World: Remembrance and Reconstruction, ed. Andrea Hajek (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2016); Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering, eds., Research Methods for Memory Studies (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).

^8. Lina Klymenko and Marco Siddi, “Exploring the Link Between Historical Memory and Foreign Policy: An Introduction,” International Politics 57 (2020): 945–53; Zheng Wang, Memory Politics, Identity and Conflict: Historical Memory as a Variable (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Duncan Bell, Memory, Trauma and World Politics—Reflections on the Relationship between Past and Present (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Eric Langenbacher and Yossi Shain, eds., Power and the Past: Collective Memory and International Relations (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2010); Kathrin Bachleitner, Collective Memory in International Relations (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019).

^9. Jonathan Soffer, “Oral History and the History of American Foreign Relations,” Journal of American History 82, no. 2 (1995): 607–16.

^10. Hammond, “Through a Glass,” 323–26; Ben Aharon, “Doing Oral History with the Israeli Elite,” 6–8.

^11. Andrew McFadzean, “Interviews with Robert Bowie: The Use of Oral Testimony in Writing the Biography of Professor Robert Richardson Bowie, Washington Policy Planner and Harvard University Professor,” Oral History Review 26, no. 2 (1999): 29–46.

^12. Hammond, “Through a Glass,” 312–14

^13. Vincent Pouliot, “ ‘Sobjectivism’: Toward a Constructivist Methodology,” International Studies Quarterly 51, no. 2 (2007): 359–84.

^14. Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman, eds., Bridges and Boundaries: Historians, Political Scientists, and the Study of International Relations (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); Benjamin de Carvalho, Julia Costa Lopez, and Halvard Leira, eds., Routledge Handbook of Historical International Relations (London, UK: Routledge, 2021).

^15. Frank Costigliola, “ ‘Unceasing Pressure for Penetration’: Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan’s Formation of the Cold War,” Journal of American History 83, no. 4 (1997): 1309–39.

^16. Alessandro Portelli, “History-Telling and Time: An Example from Kentucky,” Oral History Review 20, no. 1–2 (1992): 51–52.

^17. Alessandro Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1997), 82.

^18. There are ongoing projects to address these shortcomings in international history. For example, New Diplomatic History is a developing research agenda that “focuses broadly on the historical study of diplomats, their methods, and their cultural, political, and social milieux.” See “About—New Diplomatic History,” Network for New Diplomatic History, accessed June 16, 2023, https://newdiplomatichistory.org/about/.

^19. Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia, 6.

^20. E. M. Tansey et al., eds., Wellcome Witnesses to Twentieth Century Medicine: Witness Seminar Transcripts, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, April 1997, https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/2079/1/wit1.pdf.

^21. Stephen Haber, David Kennedy, and Stephen Krasner, “Brothers Under the Skin: Diplomatic History and International Relations,” International Security 22, no. 1 (1997): 39–40

^22. Richard Neustadt and Ernest May, Thinking in Time: The Use of History for Decision-Makers (London, UK: Macmillan, 1986), xvi.

^23. Haber, Kennedy, and Krasner, “Brothers Under the Skin,” 39–40.

^24. Haber, Kennedy, and Krasner, “Brothers Under the Skin,” 39–40; William R. Keylor, “The Problems and Prospects of Diplomatic/International History,” An H-Diplo State of the Field Essay, H-Diplo, Essay no. 126 (April 10, 2015), https://networks.h-net.org/system/files/contributed-files/e126.pdf.

^25. Lewis Dexter, Elite and Specialized Interviewing (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970; Essex, UK: European Consortium for Political Research, University of Essex, 2006), 11. Citations refer to the 2006 edition.

^26. Mark Kramer et al., “Remembering the Cuban Missile Crisis: Should We Swallow Oral History?,” International Security 15, no. 1 (1990): 212–18.

^27. Blight and Lang, “Burden of Nuclear Responsibility,” 225, 228–33.

^28. Blight and Lang, “Burden of Nuclear Responsibility,” 226.

^29. For further critique of COH, see Michael G. Wessells, “Comment on Blight and Lang’s ‘Burden of Nuclear Responsibility: Reflections on the Critical Oral History of the Cuban Missile Crisis’,” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 1, no. 3 (1995): 267–69.

^30. Penny Summerfield, Histories of the Self: Personal Narratives and Historical Practice (London, UK: Routledge, 2019), 109.

^31. Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 26.

^32. Jorma Kalela, “Muistitietotutkimus ja historialiike” [Memory research and history movement], Kotiseutu [Home region] 75, no. 1 (1984): 4–5; Jorma Kalela, “Mitä on kansanomainen historia?” [What is folk history?], Kotiseutu [Home region] 75, no. 4 (1984): 182; see also Jorma Kalela, Making History: The Historian and Uses of the Past (London, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011).

^33. Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (London, UK: Routledge, 2010), 54.

^34. Richard Cándida Smith, “Analytic Strategies for Oral History Interviews,” in Handbook of Interview Research: Context and Method, eds. Jaber Gubrium and James Holstein (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2001), 713, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412973588.

^35. Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia, 6.

^36. Harrison, “Oral History and Recent Political History,” 37.

^37. Cited in Anthony Seldon and Joanna Pappworth, By Word of Mouth: Elite Oral History (New York: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1983), 25.

^38. Geoffrey Cubitt, History and Memory (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2007); Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis Coser (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory,” 179–97; Keightley and Pickering, Research Methods for Memory Studies.

^39. Kalela, “Muistitietotutkimus ja historialiike” [Memory research and history movement], 4–5; Kalela, “Mitä on kansanomainen historia?” [What is folk history?], 182; Katja-Maria Miettunen, “Muistelu historiantutkimuksen haasteena ja mahdollisuutena” [Remembrance as a challenge and opportunity for historical research], in Muisti [Memory], eds. Jani Hakkarainen, Mirja Hartimo, and Jaana Virta (Tampere, FI: Tampere University Press, 2014), 167–177.

^40. Ulla Savolainen and Riikka Taavetti, eds., Muistitietotutkimuksen paikka. Teoriat, käytännöt ja muutos [A place for memory research. Theories, practices and change] (Helsinki, FI: Finnish Literature Society, 2022), 18.

^41. Savolainen and Taavetti, Muistitietotutkimuksen paikka [A place for memory research], 18.

^42. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1954; republished 2002), 56–57. Citations refer to the 2002 edition.

^43. Carla Pascoe Leahy, “Selection and Sampling Methodologies in Oral Histories of Mothering, Parenting and Family,” Oral History 47, no. 1 (2019): 106, 109.

^44. Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia, 88.

^45. Ossi Naukkarinen, “Everyday Aesthetic Practices, Ethics and Tact,” Aisthesis: Pratiche, Linguaggi E Saperi Dell’Estetico 7, no. 1 (2014): 40.

^46. Christer Jönsson and Martin Hall, Essence of Diplomacy (London, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005).

^47. Yaacov Vertzberger, “Foreign Policy Decision-makers as Practical-Intuitive Historians: Applied History and Its Shortcomings,” International Studies Quarterly 30, no. 2 (1986): 225.

^48. Savolainen and Taavetti, Muistitietotutkimuksen paikka [A place for memory research], 23.

^49. This process would be different if the decision-maker were not retired as institutional legal standards and nondisclosure agreements might be in play.

^50. Iina Kohonen, Arja Kuula-Luumi, and Sanna-Kaisa Spoof, eds., Guidelines for Ethical Review in Human Sciences (Finnish National Board on Research Integrity (TENK), 2019), section 4.1, https://tenk.fi/en/advice-and-materials/guidelines-ethical-review-human-sciences#4.

^51. Eva McMahan, Elite Oral History Discourse: A Study of Cooperation and Coherence (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015), 66.

^52. Daniel Aaron, “The Treachery of Recollection; The Inner and Outer History,” in Essays on History and Literature, ed. R. H. Bremner (Columbus: Ohio State University, 1966), 9–10.

^53. Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia, 66–67.

^54. Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time, 1–2, 232–33; Hal Brands and Jeremi Suri, The Power of the Past: History and Statecraft (Washington, DC: Brookings Institute Press, 2015).

^55. Eric Hobsbawm, On History (New York: The New Press, 1997), 19.

^56. Council on Foreign Relations, “Lessons from History Series: A Conversation with Henry Kissinger,” interview by Richard Haass, September 30, 2022, webinar, https://www.cfr.org/event/lessons-history-series-conversation-henry-kissinger.

^57. Pertti Torstila, “Diplomaatti lähihistorian tutkijana” [A diplomat as a researcher of recent history], Lähihistoria [Contemporary history] 1, no. 1 (2022): 110–20.

^58. In the Academy of Finland Reimagining Futures in Northern Europe Project (2013–17), it was possible to see in group interviews how defense officials mimicked the narratives of Foreign Ministry officials, not only showing these collective habits, but also hinting at certain intellectual relationships within the Finnish security policy community (unpublished interview transcripts). For more information, see “Reimagining Futures | in the European North at the End of the Cold War,” The Universities of Helsinki, Tampere, and Turku, https://blogit.utu.fi/reimag/.

^59. René Nyberg, interviewed in English, Helsinki, Finland, November 11, 2021, 01:08:05–01:08:20. Except where noted, all interviews were conducted by the author, and all recordings and transcripts are in the author’s possession.

^60. Kari Möttölä, interviewed in English, Helsinki, Finland, November 4, 2021, 15:05.

^61. Vertzberger, “Foreign Policy Decision-makers,” 223–47.

^62. Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen, “Leopold Ranke’s Archival Turn: Location and Evidence in Modern Historiography,” Modern Intellectual History 5, no. 3 (2008): 425–53.

^63. Jukka Valtasaari, interviewed in English, Helsinki, Finland, December 8, 2021, 00:00–01:00.

^64. Valtasaari interview, 69:48; 90:08.

^65. Valtasaari interview, 103:40.

^66. Valtasaari interview, 118:55.

^67. Torstila, “Diplomaatti lähihistorian tutkijana” [A diplomat as a researcher of recent history], 120.

^68. Nyberg interview, 16:36.

^69. Tarja Halonen, interviewed in Finnish, Helsinki, Finland, January 31, 2022. Translated from Finnish originals, “René sanoi, että puhut suomen hyvin.”

^70. Naukkarinen, “Everyday Aesthetic Practices, Ethics and Tact,” 40.

^71. Naukkarinen, “Everyday Aesthetic Practices, Ethics and Tact,” 40.

^72. Portelli, The Death of Luigi.

^73. Portelli, The Death of Luigi, 2.

^74. Tuomas Forsberg and Matti Pesu, “The ‘Finlandisation’ of Finland: The Ideal Type, the Historical Model, and the Lessons Learnt,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 27, no. 3 (2016): 473–95.

^75. Bradley Reynolds, “Finland’s Long Road West,” The Russia File (blog), April 6, 2023, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/finlands-long-road-west.

^76. Jörn Donner and Martti Häikiö, Image of Finland in the Year Zero (Helsinki, FI: Finnish Foreign Ministry, 1991); Timo Vihavainen, Kansakunta rähmällään: Suomettumisen lyhyt historia [A nation on its stomach: A short history of finlandization] (Helsinki, FI: Otava, 1991).

^77. Translated from Finnish original, “Suomettumishaamut.” Found in Aapo Pölhö, “ETYJ; Vuoristo-Karabah, Minsk-ryhmän puheenjohtajuus” [OSCE; Nagorno-Karabakh, Minsk-group chairmanship], WASB [Finnish Embassy Washington] 01, January 6, 1995, Finnish Foreign Ministry Archive (FFMA), Folder: Minskin konferenssi/Minskin ryhmä [Minsk conference/Minsk group] V 1996 (1-30.4), Box: Vuoristo-Karabakh; Minskin Prosessi [Nagorno-Karabakh; Minsk Process], Signum: 21.50 AZE, Arkisto [Archive] 1.

^78. Möttölä interview, 01:10:00.

^79. Halonen interview, 29:00–29:45. Author translation from Finnish original, “joooo … Näitä … . Minu aikana ei kyl näistä puhuttu. mut tottakai, siis … . No joo aa mä voin näitä, komentoida, mä voin lukea ja katsoo mitä nää on nää … tuota, mut, et ehh … [hengittää ulos] … Kyllä tämä suomettumisen … se oli pelko oli suomalaisilla diplomaateilla aika kova, on osalla vieläkin.”

^80. Pölhö, “ETYJ; Vuoristo-Karabah, Minsk-ryhmän puheenjohtajuus” [OSCE; Nagorno-Karabakh, Minsk-group chairmanship], FFMA.

^81. Nyberg interview, 38:12–45:00.

^82. Halonen interview, 29:00–29:45.

^83. Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia, 24.

^84. Joseph Presel, interviewed by phone in English, Helsinki, Finland and Providence, Rhode Island, December 7, 2021, 22:15.

^85. Louis Clerc, Cultural Diplomacy in Cold War Finland: Identity, Geopolitics and the Welfare State (London, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), x.

^86. Richard Milne, “ ‘It’s a Radical Change’: The Prospect of Finland Joining NATO Draws Nearer,” Financial Times, April 4, 2022, https://www.ft.com/content/83b5041b-6bcf-49de-b180-43c354a3302d.

^87. Kristiina Silvan, “Haastatteluja aika- ja kulttuurirajojen yli Valko-Venäjän kommunistisen järjestönuoruuden muistelukontekstissa” [Interviews across time and cultural boundaries in the context of recalling the youth of the Belarusian communist organization], Elore 25, no. 2 (2018): 80; Ilkka Pietilä, “Vieraskielisten haastattelujen analyysi ja raportointi” [Analysis and reporting of interviews in foreign languages], in Haastattelun analyysi [Interview analysis], eds. Johanna Ruusuvuori, Pirjo Nikander, and Matti Hyvärinen (Tampere, FI: Vastapaino, 2010), 415–16.

^88. Valtasaari interview, 97:51.

^89. For example, see Daniel James, Doña Maria’s Story: Life History, Memory, and Political Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 124–25; Luisa Passerini, “Memories Between Silence and Oblivion,” in Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory, eds. Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone (New York: Routledge, 2003), 238–54; Ulla Savolainen, “Tellability, Frame and Silence: The Emergence of Internment Memory,” Narrative Inquiry 27, no. 1 (2017): 24–46.

^90. Savolainen, “Tellability,” 24–46.

^91. Summerfield, Histories of the Self, 128.

^92. Kari Teräs and Pia Koivunen, “Historiallinen muistitietohaastattelu” [Historical memory information interview], in Tutkimushaastattelun käsikirja [Research interview manual], eds. Matti Hyvärinen, Pirjo Nikander, and Johanna Ruusuvuori (Tampere, FI: Vastapaino, 2017), 193–213.

^93. Cándida Smith, “Analytic Strategies for Oral History Interviews,” 713.

^94. Soffer, “Oral History and the History of American Foreign Relations,” 614.

^95. Hammond, “Through a Glass,” 314.

^96. Bethan Coupland, “Remembering Blaenavon: What Can Group Interviews Tell Us about ‘Collective Memory’?” Oral History Review 42, no. 2 (2015): 277–99.