294 ANALYZING DATA
social forces (naive and dangerous) and the means to peace (through dominance, or through
diplomatic cunning vis-à-vis irrational others). I wondered how they could be so sure of claims
that either stated or implied that (a) governments knew better than citizens how to ensure security,
(b) the arms race was a given and could not be reversed, and/or (c) citizen criticisms of govern-
ment defense strategies were ill-advised at best.
Yet if I was going to challenge the certainties of others, I also needed to take a strongly self-
reflective stance toward my own conclusions. For my project, this entailed a certain humility vis-
à-vis the evidence. Numerous aspects of the interwar period had been mined already, and extensive
documentation existed. More importantly, it required the awareness that I, like others, could not
escape the hermeneutic circle: I could not develop a once-and-for-all explanation of peace move-
ment influence that was separate from the late–cold war context and critiques of it, nor could I
remove completely the lenses through which I experienced and analyzed this context and these
critiques. In other words, because academics cannot get outside of what we might call our indi-
vidual subjectivity as scholars, I needed to acknowledge why certain questions about peace move-
ments were important to me during the 1980s, and how my concerns fit into knowledge practices
that made some topics and types of questions more salient than others during this period of time.
From the above narration of my often-stumbling autodidactic path toward understanding a
substantive and theoretical problem in critical as well as historical terms, I now move to what I
learned and the specific steps that I hope to pass on to others engaged in critical interpretation. I
condense the “lessons learned” into the following aspects of critical interpretation. First, I discuss
the dual nature of the project of critical interpretation; then, I move to a series of points on the
relationship among interpretation, narrative, and evidence.IDENTIFY DOMINANT INTERPRETATIONSCritical interpretation initially requires laying out the specifics of dominant interpretations (in
other words, meta-narratives) that are constructed and reproduced most frequently by those in
power. Dominant interpretations have enormous influence, because they shape not only the way
scholars (as well as those outside the academic community) see a particular set of issues, but also
what kinds of questions about these issues are considered legitimate for scholars to ask and what
kinds of actions leaders and their publics are supposed to take.
In the interwar case, the dominant interpretations, or meta-narratives, accused peace move-
ments of being naive and dangerous. The lesson was that peace movements led to imprudent or
nefarious foreign policies. This lesson has had a strong impact on “real life”: Leaders in the
United States and Britain, from Anthony Eden in Suez to Ronald Reagan in Central America to
George Bush in the Persian Gulf, used the “appeasement bogey” against subsequent peace move-
ments. People were supposed to be quiet, know their place as followers, and not stir up public
sentiment against U.S.- and/or British-led wars.
Yet many contradictions existed in the dominant narratives about peace movement influence.
First, why was it that the conventional wisdom persisted in calling peace movements naive and
dangerous (and could they be both?), while historians who examined particular interwar policies
inevitably cited not such movements but strategic or economic reasons as causes? In other words,
how could peace movements be dangerous if they were ineffective? Second, if the League of
Nations was such a failure, why did anyone bother to construct a United Nations in 1945? Who
was pushing for global international organization, how, and why?
In the interwar case (and I suspect in most others), the dominant narratives were full of contra-
dictions that, in my view, cried out for examination and critique.