CRITICAL INTERPRETATION AND INTERWAR PEACE MOVEMENTS 295ADDRESS THE ISSUE OF ALTERNATIVE INTERPRETATIONS
Critical interpretation also requires, however, a decision either to construct an alternative inter-
pretation or set of interpretations or explicitly to forego such construction altogether. One can
have a combination of substantive and theoretical reasons for the choice of constructing an alter-
native versus eschewing alternative interpretations, but scholars should be clear that, either way, it
is a methodological and epistemological choice.
In my case, I always wanted to find a “better” construction of the evidence first and foremost,
primarily for substantive reasons of historical understanding—I wanted to see if I could under-
stand peace movement activism during the 1920s and 1930s, which had always been considered
the “hard case,” that is, the case that many scholars and pundits unquestioningly believed was
problematic and ill advised. After beginning my project, I encountered a considerable body of
work, based on Foucault and others, that eschewed the construction of alternative narratives
altogether, because every construction is partial and any new dominant narrative carries with it
its own mechanisms of power, permitting some questions but foreclosing others. Although I
was sympathetic to this deconstructionist mode of thinking, it did not ground my original mo-
tives for undertaking the study. However, this type of critical thinking did influence my under-
standing of what I could accomplish in any reinterpretation. Hence my claim that I was
constructing “an” interpretation, one that I found better, more complete, and more coherent,
but that was also inevitably shaped by the available knowledge and mode of inquiry of my own
historical time. I appealed to Gadamer (e.g., Warnke 1987), Ricoeur (1993 [1981], 1988), and
others to make this claim.
COLLECT PRIMARY EVIDENCE
The process of collecting primary evidence, as a result of the existence of dominant narratives,
necessarily entails a tacking back and forth between dominant interpretations and possible alter-
natives. This means understanding that documents are repositories of interpretations—made by
others. When Foreign Office and State Department diplomats wrote dispatches to London and
Washington, they expressed their own assessments—interpretations—of particular situations at
particular points in time. Such assessments are not, and cannot be, completely “factual.” They can
report that a meeting occurred at a certain time between certain people on a certain day, but their
understanding of what was said and why it was said, and the meaning of participants’ different
positions, inevitably varies. Some documents may help in constructing a reinterpretation; others
may be more useful in deconstructing dominant narratives; still others may do both.
One of my favorite documents was a piece written by a Foreign Office official in 1931. The
document reflected on peace movement demands over the course of ten years for disarmament
and the passing of the Geneva Protocol (which would have banned aggressive war and required
arbitration of international disputes) and noted that the government’s intransigence vis-à-vis peace
movement demands had been counterproductive:
A very large part of the Protocol has already been wrung from us since 1924. If, in 1924, we
could have offered spontaneously what we have now been forced to give with not too good
a grace, we might almost have secured a Disarmament Conference in that year.... We have
done this before, we have said, “thus far and no further,” and only some years after have we
discovered that, while asseverating our complete immobility, we have been pushed several
miles further along the road. (Alexander Cadogan memo, March 13, 1931)