Abstract

There is a burgeoning debate on how relations between the West and the non-West will be governed in an international order moving towards multipolarity. We argue that a significant terrain of contestation across the West/ non-West divide is history and temporality. Populist governments in the non-West are contesting the linear visions of history that presume their backwardness and seeking to replace them with cyclical visions where an idealized (distant) past of their independence from and domination over the West is to be realized in the future. This form of chronopolitics, which is conditioning the present foreign policy choices of many non-Western states, is being contested in various ways by populist and liberal actors in the West as well as liberal actors in the non-West. In this paper, we identify and conceptualize these different chronopolitical strategies and discuss how Historical IR can play a critical role in this complex terrain of contestation. We illustrate our arguments by focusing on select encounters in Turco-European Relations during the 19th and early 20th centuries.