1.
Kurki, M. and C. Wight (2007) “International Relations and Social Science”
in T. Dunne, M. Kurki and S. Smith, eds. International Relations
Theories. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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,
,
Furlong, P. and Marsh, D. (2010) “A Skin not a Sweater: Ontology and
Epistemology in Political Science”, in Marsh, D. and Stoker, G. (eds)
Theory and Methods in Political Science, 3rd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
3.
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Schmidt, B. C. (2002) “On the History and Historiography of International
Relations”, in Carlsnaes, W., Risse, T. and Simmons, B. A. (eds)
Handbook of International Relations. London: SAGE.
de Carvalho, B., Leira, H. and Hobson, J. (2011) “The Big Bangs of IR: The
Myths that Your Teachers Still Tell You About 1648 and 1919”,
Millennium: Journal of International Relations, 39(3):735- 758.
Wæver, O. (1998), “The Sociology of a Not So International Discipline:
American and European Developments in International Relations”,
International Organization, 52 (Special Issue): 687–727.
Büger, C. (2007) Paradigms, Cultures, and Translations: Seven Ways of
Studying the Discipline of International Relations.
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Hans J. Morgenthau”,
.
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, (
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1
International Relations and
Social Science
MILJA KURKI AND COLIN WIGHT
Chapter Contents
●
Introduction
●
The philosophy of social science in IR: an historical overview
●
Contemporary IR theory: science and the fourth debate
●
Exploring the key implications of meta-theoretical differences in IR theory
●
Conclusion
Reader’s Guide
This chapter provides an overview of the key philosophy of social science debates within
International Relations (IR) theory.1 Often IR theorists do not address the philosophy of social
science explicitly, but nevertheless philosophical issues are implicit in their claims. Since the
mid-1980s ‘meta-theoretical’ debates surrounding the philosophy of social science have played
an important and highly visible role in the discipline. This chapter explores both the implicit
and explicit roles played by meta-theoretical assumptions in IR. It begins with a brief historical
overview of the philosophy of social science within IR. We then examine the contemporary
disciplinary debates surrounding the philosophy of social science. The final section highlights
some of the key ways in which meta-theoretical positions shape theoretical approaches to the
study of world politics.
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15
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INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND SOCIAL SCIENCE
The philosophy of social science has played an important role in the formation, development, and practice of IR as an academic discipline. Often issues concerning the philosophy of social science are described as meta-theoretical debates. Meta-theory does not take
a specific event, phenomenon, or series of empirical real world practices as its object of
analysis, but explores the underlying assumptions of all theory and attempts to understand the consequences of such assumptions on the act of theorizing and the practice of
empirical research. One way to think about this is in terms of theories about theories.
The role of meta-theoretical debates is frequently misunderstood. Some see
meta-theorizing as nothing more than a quick precursor to empirical research. Others
see it as a distraction from the real issues that should concern the discipline. However, it
is impossible for research to proceed in any subject domain in the social sciences in the
absence of a set of commitments embedded within positions on the philosophy of social
science. In this sense, meta-theoretical positions direct, in a fundamental way, the manner
in which people theorize and, indeed, ‘see’ the world.
To put this in philosophical terminology, all theoretical positions are dependent upon
particular assumptions about ontology (theory of being: what is the world made of? what
objects do we study?), epistemology (theory of knowledge: how do we come to have
knowledge of the world?), and methodology (theory of methods: what methods do we
use to unearth data and evidence?). On the basis of these assumptions researchers may
literally come to ‘see’ the world in different ways: ontologically in terms of seeing different
object domains, epistemologically in terms of accepting or rejecting particular knowledge claims, and methodologically in terms of choosing particular methods of study.
Meta-theoretical positions have deep, if often unrecognized, consequences for social analysis. Being aware of the issues at stake in meta-theoretical debate, and of their significance
in terms of concrete research, serves as an important starting point for understanding IR
theory and facilitates a deeper awareness of one’s own meta-theoretical orientation.
Meta-theoretical debates surrounding the philosophy of social science in IR have tended
to revolve around two interrelated questions. Is International Relations a science or an
art? What does the ‘scientific’ study of world politics entail? A position can be taken on the
question of whether IR can be a science only on the basis of some or other account of what
science is, and an account of what we think IR is. Hence, the questions of what science is,
and what IR is, are prior to the question of whether IR can be a science. This inevitably
takes the discussion into the terrain of the philosophy of science. This seems a long way
from the concerns of a discipline focused on the study of international political processes,
and the frustration of some within the discipline concerning meta-theoretical debate is
understandable. Yet, there is no way to avoid these issues and at a minimum all contributors to the discipline should understand the assumptions that make their own position
possible; as well as being aware of alternative conceptualizations of what IR theory and
research might involve.
For a large part of the history of the field a particular philosophy of science has dominated. The influence of positivism as a philosophy of science has shaped not only how
we theorize about the subject, and what counts as a valid question, but also what can
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Introduction
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count as valid forms of evidence and knowledge. Such is the influence of positivism on
the disciplinary imagination that even those concerned to reject a scientific approach to
IR tend to do so on the basis of a general acceptance of the positivist model of science.
There are two points worthy of note in this respect. First, despite the acceptance of the
positivist model of science by both advocates and critics alike, it is clear that the account
of positivism that dominates the discipline is rudimentary. Second, within the philosophy
of science positivism was long ago discredited as a valid account of scientific practice. Had
the discipline been prepared to take the philosophy of social science, and by extension the
philosophy of science, more seriously, a long and potentially damaging commitment
to positivism might have been avoided. This does not mean that all research underpinned
by positivist principles is invalid. Indeed, we believe that scholars, who might be considered to be working in the positivist tradition, have made some of the most important and
lasting contributions to the discipline. Nonetheless, this view of science is highly contested
and there is no reason to insist that all research should fit this model. Equally, a rejection
of the positivist model of science need not lead to the rejection of science.
This chapter argues that social science debates within the discipline can be moved forward
by a comprehensive re-examination of what science is. Hence, besides reviewing the historical and contemporary philosophy of social science debates in IR, the chapter also points
towards new accounts of science that have been introduced to the discipline in the last decade
or so; accounts that hold the promise of reformulating our understanding of the aims and
methods of IR as a social science. Science, we argue, is not based on a dogmatic insistence on
the certainty of its claims but, rather, rests on a commitment to constant critique.
The philosophy of social science
in IR: an historical overview
The discipline of IR, in common with all the social sciences, has been deeply divided on
many issues throughout its history. A common way of narrating this history is in terms of
the great debates surrounding these key issues. In many respects debate is the wrong term to
use, since in some of them a group of theorists situated their own approach as a direct counter to previous ways of thinking, without generating a substantial set of responses (Schmidt
1998). Some of the debates, however, were genuine and scholars within the discipline have
often been prepared to engage with one another over substantial areas of disagreement.
Although there is no consensus on the exact number of great debates, four are generally
accepted to have played an important role in shaping the discipline (Wæver 1996).
The first debate refers to the exchanges between the realists and idealists before, during,
and immediately after the Second World War. This was primarily waged over the role of
international institutions and the likelihood that the causes of war might be ameliorated.
The second debate emerged in the 1960s. It pitted the traditionalists, who were keen to
defend a more humanistic methodology, against the modernizers, who aimed to introduce
a greater level of methodological rigour to the discipline. The interparadigm debate of
the 1970s and 1980s focused on disagreements among the realist, pluralist, and Marxist
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The first great debate in the discipline is said to have taken place between the idealists
and the realists. The idealists were driven by a desire to develop a set of institutions, procedures, and practices that could eradicate, or at least control, war in the international
system. They were motivated by the horrors of the First World War and they sincerely
believed that there must be a better way to organize international affairs. The most visible, and historically important, aspect of their programme cohered in Woodrow Wilson’s
Fourteen-point Plan for a new postwar order. However, the most enduring contribution
of the idealists in terms of disciplinary development was the idea of an academic discipline constructed to study the world of international politics. For the idealists, ignorance and lack of understanding was a primary source of international conflict. A better
understanding of international processes was required if control of the system was to
be achieved. The idealists believed progress was only possible if we could develop and
use reason to control the irrational desires and frailties that infect the human condition.
The pinnacle of human reason in the service of effective control was science. This thinking led to the establishment of an academic department of international politics located
in Aberystwyth, Wales. The aim of this new discipline was the production of a body of
knowledge that could be used in the furtherance of peace. Although the idealists never
clearly articulated what they meant by science, they were committed to producing knowledge that was scientific.
The absence of a clear account of science in the early years of the discipline is understandable given that the philosophy of science was itself not yet fully established as an
academic field of study. Science, to the Enlightenment mind, was self-evident. Yet the realist critique of the idealists was to challenge the extent to which the knowledge produced
by the idealists was scientific. In particular, realists challenged the ‘unsystematic’ and
value-driven idealist approach to IR. Both E. H. Carr (1946, 1987) and Hans Morgenthau
(1947, 1948a; discussed in more detail in Chapter 3) accused the idealists of focusing their
attention on how the world ‘ought’ to be, as opposed to dealing with how it objectively
was. In a scathing attack Carr famously concluded that the difference between realism and
idealism was analogous to that between science and alchemy (1946: 1–11).
Neither Carr nor Morgenthau, however, can be said to have uncritically embraced
a naive view of science. Carr was only too well aware of the problematic status of facts
and associated truth claims. His celebrated notion of the ‘relativity of thought’ and his
sophisticated treatment of historical method can hardly be said to constitute an uncritical commitment to science. Likewise, Morgenthau went to great lengths to distance his
approach to political science from attempts to construct ‘iron laws’ comparable to those
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Science and the first debate
17
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perspectives on how best to understand and explain international processes. Finally,
the most recent debate, which some IR theorists call the fourth debate, has centred on
deep-seated disagreements about what the discipline should study and how it should study
it. While these debates have often highlighted the paradigmatic divisions between different
and distinct IR theoretical schools of thought, an often-unrecognized issue has cut across
and underpinned all the debates. This is the issue of whether or not International Relations
can be, or should be, a form of inquiry based upon scientific principles.
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discovered in the natural sciences (Morgenthau 1947). Despite his belief that international
politics was governed by ‘objective laws’ rooted in human nature, Morgenthau articulated
a series of telling objections to any attempt to construct a science of international politics
modelled on the natural sciences. After all, if international politics was governed by ‘objective laws’ rooted in human nature, then the true causes of war were to be found in biology,
and any nascent science of IR could provide only suggestions for dealing with a realm of
human activity that was to a great extent predetermined. Morgenthau’s account of IR was
not concerned to provide a series of in-depth explanations of the workings of the world
but, rather, aimed at articulating a series of techniques and modes of operation for dealing
with a world on the basis of a simple, but enticing, explanation. Nonetheless, despite these
caveats, and the limited nature of debate surrounding understandings of science within
the discipline, the status of science was clearly important in the early period of the development of the subject. In the second great debate, however, it was to take centre stage.
Science and the second debate
The second debate took the ‘rhetorical’ arguments about science and gave them methodological substance. Drawing on the behaviourist revolution in the social sciences, a new
breed of ‘scientific’ IR scholars, such as David Singer and Morton Kaplan, sought to define
and refine systematic scientific methods of inquiry for the discipline of IR. The behaviourist research instigated fierce resistance from those committed to a more historicist, or
interpretive, form of IR.
For the proponents of the behavioural revolution, IR could move forward only if it
consciously modelled itself on the natural sciences. By the time the second debate had
emerged in IR the philosophy of science was a well developed and institutionally located
academic discipline. Moreover, within the philosophy of science one view had come to
dominate; although ironically just as IR was to formalize its vision of science the consensus within the philosophy of science had already begun to unravel. The model of science that had dominated was called positivism, and the behaviouralists in IR embraced it
enthusiastically. There are many versions of positivism and such was its promotion and
reception in IR that it has come to be a synonym for science. This is a regrettable move
since it effectively closes down all debate on what kind of science IR might be; if IR is to
be a science, it must be modelled on positivist principles.
Positivism suggests that scientific knowledge emerges only with the collection of
observable data. The collection of sufficient data, it was presumed, would lead to the
identification of patterns that would in turn allow the formulation of laws. The importance of observable data for this approach cannot be over-stressed. The inscription on
the Social Science Research Building façade, at the University of Chicago, reads, ‘If you
cannot measure it, your knowledge is meagre and unsatisfactory’. This stress on observable data and measurement led the proponents of the new scientific model to engage in
a series of sharp criticisms of the account of science adhered to by many realists and other
IR scholars. Many of the core concepts of ‘classical’ realism were deemed to be lacking
in specificity and were not susceptible to measurement. Power and the national interest,
for example, if they were to be studied according to the principles of the new science,
needed increased levels of clarity and specification; anything that could not be rigorously
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INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND SOCIAL SCIENCE
measured and subject to testing was to be purged from the new ontology. New methods
were developed and the mathematical modelling of international processes took pride of
place. The behaviouralists hoped that through the relentless accumulation of data, knowledge would progress and control would follow.
The behaviouralist criticisms of the traditional approach did not go unchallenged.
Many argued that the core concepts of the discipline were simply not susceptible to the
kind of austere data collection procedures advocated by the new model of science. Chief
among them was the English school theorist Hedley Bull, but the traditionalists also
included some of the initial defenders of science in IR such as Morgenthau (see exchanges
in Knorr and Rosenau 1969). For these theorists, systematic inquiry was one thing, the
obsession with data collection and manipulation on positivist lines was another. Study
of IR for Bull and Morgenthau involved significant conceptual and interpretative judgements, something that the behaviourist theorists in their focus on systematic data collection and scientific inference seemed not to adequately recognize. The dispute over science
also developed a geographical aspect. Although there were some advocates of the new
science in Britain and Europe it was largely a US-led development. Despite the fact that
the austere version of science advocated by the behaviouralists was significantly watered
down over the passage of time, the underlying principles of that approach remain deeply
embedded within the account of science that continues to dominate the discipline. It was
also to have a lasting affect on the methodological techniques taught in graduate schools,
with hypothesis testing, statistical analysis, and data manipulation becoming indispensable requirements of all methodological training.
Science and the interparadigm debate
In the 1970s and 1980s the so-called interparadigm debate ostensibly moved IR away
from the ‘methodological’ issues of the 1960s. The question of science was not an explicit
component of this debate because to a large extent a consensus had emerged around
a commitment to positivism. Indeed, it could be argued that this debate could take the
form it did only as a result of a general shared commitment to the principles of science. All parties to the interparadigm debate accepted the validity of a broadly conceived
positivist account of science. Certainly, the fascination with data collection, the insistence
on measurement, hypothesis testing, and the statistical analysis of the early behaviouralists had been modified and toned down but, nonetheless, no one seriously attempted to
argue that these were not important aspects of the study of international phenomena.
Despite the consensus on science, however, issues surrounding the nature of scientific
inquiry quickly resurfaced; in particular, the problem of theory choice and the alleged
incommensurability of differing theoretical perspectives.
Much of this was indebted to Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) ground-breaking study of the
history of science. Kuhn had argued that science developed through two distinct phases.
In its ‘revolutionary’ phase, science was marked by theoretical fragmentation. New modes
of thought would arise and challenge traditional ways of thinking. Although the revolutionary phase ensured that theoretical innovation was always possible, Kuhn argued that
such phases did not lead to a progression in terms of a body of cumulative knowledge. In
a revolutionary phase, the theoretical protagonists expend their energy on attempting to
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gain theoretical dominance as opposed to increasing the overall stock of knowledge surrounding a subject domain. Knowledge could only progress, Kuhn argued, in periods of
what he called normal science. In an era of normal science one theoretical school, or what
Kuhn called a paradigm, would dominate. In such periods knowledge could progress
because everyone was in agreement on the validity of the chosen paradigm and hence the
vast majority of scholars were working in a particular subject using agreed methods and
techniques and could compare their findings.
Kuhn’s model of scientific development was enthusiastically embraced by the discipline. Since its inception the discipline had been attempting to develop a body of
cumulative knowledge surrounding international processes. Yet, after decades of study
there was still very little agreement on key issues. Despite the disagreements between
them, the realists and behaviouralists had suggested that progress could be achieved
only by adopting a more scientific mode of study. Kuhn’s model suggested a different,
more conservative, conclusion. The discipline needed the adoption of a single paradigm around which research could converge. In the mid-1970s three paradigms vied
for theoretical dominance; realism, Marxism, and pluralism. The question was how to
compare them. Which paradigm should the discipline adopt in order to move forward?
Kuhn provided no answers. Indeed, he suggested that there was no answer; paradigms
were incommensurable; they simply could not be compared. Theory choice became
largely a matter of aesthetics; or what one of Kuhn’s critics was to call ‘mob psychology’
(Lakatos 1970: 178).
It is ironic that although the interparadigm debate did not directly involve disputes
over the nature of science it was the period of disciplinary development in which the philosophy of science began to play a substantial and explicit role. The conservative nature
of Kuhn’s model, and the fact that theory choice becomes a matter of taste, ensured that
some scholars would look to alternatives. Karl Popper (1959) became an important influence, but it was the importation of Imre Lakatos’s (1970) model of research programmes
that was to have the greatest impact, and it is his model that is generally adopted by the
more scientifically orientated ‘positivist’ wing of the discipline.
Contemporary IR theory: science and
the fourth debate
What we call the ‘fourth debate’ emerged in the mid-1980s. (Note that this debate is somewhat confusingly also referred to as the ‘third debate’ by some IR theorists.)2 This debate
has most explicitly focused on the issue of science in the disciplinary history of IR. Since
the discipline is still largely in the middle of this debate we will deal with it as a contemporary issue and discuss it in terms of the cleavages and divisions around which the discipline
is currently organized. There are many ways to characterize the ‘fourth debate’; as a debate
between explaining and understanding, between positivism and postpositivism, or
between rationalism and reflectivism. This section will examine these different terms
and through them the key philosophical positions in contemporary IR.
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The terms explaining and understanding come from Max Weber’s distinction between
Erklären and Verstehen, and were popularized in IR by Hollis and Smith in the early
1990s (see Featured Book box). Another way of describing this distinction is in terms
of a scientific approach versus an interpretive or hermeneutic approach. While explanatory theorists seek to emulate the natural sciences in following scientific methods and in
seeking to identify general causes, advocates of understanding focus on the analysis of
the ‘internal’ meanings, reasons, and beliefs actors hold and act in reference to (Hollis
and Smith 1990). For the advocates of understanding, social meanings, language, and
beliefs are said to constitute the most important (ontological) aspects of social existence.
Explanatory theorists do not generally disagree with this claim; however, they do not see
how such objects can be incorporated into a scientific framework of analysis. Scientific
knowledge, for the explanatory theorist, requires empirical justification; and meanings,
beliefs, and ideas are not susceptible to validation by such techniques. Without such justifications, knowledge claims can be nothing more than mere speculation. Advocates of an
interpretive approach, on the other hand, argue that we should be guided in our analytical
procedures by the most important factors impacting on human behaviour (beliefs, ideas,
meanings, reasons), not by an a priori commitment to something called science.
21
FEAT U R ED B OOK
Martin Hollis and Steve Smith (1990), Explaining and Understanding International
Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
Steve Smith and Martin Hollis were in many ways responsible for the rise of the meta-theoretical turn in
International Relations scholarship. Their book is a classic text which explicates how assumptions about
science permeate the study of international relations. Martin Hollis, a highly respected philosopher
had specialized in the analysis of hermeneutics, Wittgenstenian philosophy, and philosophies of action
and Steve Smith, a theorist of international relations and foreign policy, at the University of East Anglia
jointly taught a course exploring philosophical underpinnings of IR. It was this course that provided the
motivation for their co-authored book, and which reflected, in a highly productive manner, not only the
coming together of different specialisms, but also a dialogical approach to the discussion of philosophical matters. The conclusion to this text is especially effective in demonstrating how deep philosophical
debates are embedded in debates about world politics as well famously claiming always at least ‘two
stories to tell’ about world political events, which cannot easily be combined into one single overall
‘truth’. Hollis and Smith characterized these stories as Explaining and Understanding. While the intricacies of people’s motivations and reasoning (e.g. the reasons a leader might have for starting a war)
could be understood through an interpretive research agenda, this approach runs the risk of leaving out
what others can consider the most crucial ‘explanatory’ factors, such as the role external factors have in
directing thoughts, actions, and options (e.g. state leader’s positioning within military alliances, actors’
positioning in market structures). When we consider world political issues, whether it be the causes of
the Iraq war or the causes of global poverty, debates about the role of agency and structure, internal
understanding and external explanation, are key to how we approach the debates.
Hollis and Smith also powerfully demonstrated that how we debate the causes of international political
developments is highly dependent on, and reflective of, the philosophical underpinnings we adopt—
whether implicitly or explicitly. This is an interesting implication to highlight for one might consider that
Hollis and Smith’s own argument—that there are always (at least) two mutually irreconcilable stories
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MILJA KURKI AND COLIN WIGHT
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to tell about international relations—as an important political move in the study of IR. By arguing that
not all stories could be reduced to a scientific agreement on a single truth, the text can be seen as an
important ‘political’ defence of, first, the integrity of reflectivist IR research and, second, of political as
well as theoretical pluralism. Yet this argument is not without its problems. First, why only two stories?
Second, are academic accounts of global politics really little more than stories? Third, if the stories we
tell about international realtions are not in some sense comparable, and hence we cannot judge between
them, are all stories equally valid?
Clearly, a particular vision of what science is frames this debate. The explanatory theorist reduces the ontological complexity of the social world to those aspects of it that
can be observed and measured. Thus the ontology adopted by this approach is shaped
by epistemological and methodological concerns. This leads to a sharp split between
these two approaches in terms of methodology. Explanatory theorists privilege quantitative methods, or attempt to quantify qualitative data. Supporters of understanding
adopt interpretive methods (qualitative, discursive, historical), shunning the generalizing
approach of the explainers. This debate also has epistemological consequences insofar as
explanatory theory emphasizes observation as perhaps the only way of generating valid
knowledge, whereas the understanding side of the debate concentrates attention on the
interpretation of unobservable, and hence immeasurable, contexts of action.
Positivism and postpositivism
Underpinning the explanatory framework is a positivist vision of science. This account
of science has its roots in an empiricist epistemology. Often the terms positivism and
empiricism are confused in the discipline. Positivism is a theory of science, and generally
most positivists adopt an empiricist epistemology. However, not all empiricists embrace
positivism, so it is important to maintain the distinction between the two terms. Equally,
it is possible to accept the validity of empirical data without adopting a positivist account
of science. As an epistemology, the empiricist approach to the acquisition of knowledge is
premised on the belief that the only genuine knowledge we can have of the world is based
on those ‘facts’ that can be experienced by the human senses. The implication of this
empiricist epistemology for science is that scientific knowledge is secure only when based
on empirical validation. This is why positivists privilege observation, empirical data, and
measurement; what cannot be an object of experience cannot be scientifically validated.
The key assumptions of the positivist view of science and social explanation can be
summarized as follows. First, for positivists, science must be focused on systematic observation. The aim of the philosophy of science is to produce a set of logically rigorous
guidelines concerning appropriate methodological techniques and criteria for ensuring
that knowledge claims are grounded in appropriate observations. Indeed, for positivists
the validity of science rests on these rigorous methodological guidelines; it is these guidelines that allow us to distinguish between scientific knowledge and mere ‘belief ’. Second,
all positivists believe that the collection of sufficient data, generated through repeated
instances of observation, will reveal regularities, which are indicative of the operation
of general laws. These general laws are only the expression of relationships between
patterns among observable events and there is nothing more going on behind the data.
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Any attempt to introduce non-observable processes, mechanisms, and events as explanations of the data are considered inadmissible. This belief in the importance of regular patterns when linked to the insistence on empirical validation becomes important in terms
of how positivists conceive of causal analysis. For the positivists, causal relations are discovered through the detection of regular patterns of observable behaviour.
Third, because positivists emphasize the importance of observation, they avoid talking about ‘realities’ that cannot be observed. This directs them away from developing
‘deep ontological’ conceptual systems that aim to grapple with unobservable entities such
as ‘discourses’ or ‘social structures’. This insistence on observation means that positivists
are not, as they are sometimes described, naive realists.3 Positivists do not believe in an
external world independent of humanity (Kolakowski 1969). The positivist motto was
esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived), which makes existence logically dependent upon
perception (Hollis 1996). When non-observable entities are referred to, they are treated
in wholly instrumental terms. These non-observables are useful fictions that help explain
the data, but positivists refrain from giving them ontological significance. It follows that
positivists emphasize the instrumental function of knowledge. Knowledge has to be useful not truthful (Waltz 1979). It is partly this commitment to the instrumental validation
of knowledge that makes positivists some of the most vehement critics of the role of
meta-theory within IR.
The positivist approach to social explanation has been modified in significant ways
since the 1960s as the positivist philosophy of science has adapted itself as a result of
a range of criticisms. The so-called ‘soft’ postbehaviourist form of positivism is still significant in contemporary IR. It underpins, for example, the influential contribution to social
analysis of King, Keohane, and Verba (1994). They aim to build a unified logic of inference for both quantitative and qualitative inquiry, and foreground the role of observation
and measurement. Indeed, they aim to rescue social science from speculative and unsystematic social inquiry by showing that the ‘scientific logic of inference’ can be applied
in qualitative studies. By demonstrating how qualitative analysis can become ‘scientific’,
King, Keohane, and Verba hoped to force qualitative approaches to ‘take scientific inference seriously’, hence allowing these approaches to start making ‘valid inferences about
social and political life’ (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994: 3, ix).
Against the positivist insistence on a ‘science’ of human behaviour, a diverse range of
postpositivist positions has emerged. It is tempting to categorize these postpositivists as
articulating a version of the interpretive understanding position detailed above. However,
whilst many postpositivists draw inspiration from interpretive thinkers, the term ‘postpositivist’ can be used to refer to approaches that draw on a wider range of intellectual
traditions; what unites them all is a commitment to reject positivism as a valid approach
to the study of social processes.
Some postpositivists are influenced by developments from within the philosophy of
science and attempt to use these to articulate a non-positivist version of science (see
the later section on scientific realism for more detail). These postpositivists reject both
the positivist account of science and the hermeneutic alternatives. Importantly, for these
postpositivists it is only a particular version of science that is rejected, not the idea of
science itself. Many feminist theorists (discussed in more detail in Chapter 10), who
would rightly be considered postpositivists, are also keen to develop more sophisticated
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versions of science. And many postpositivists are keen to repudiate the positivist account
of science that has dominated the discipline and accept the importance of meanings,
beliefs, and language without adopting a hermeneutic perspective. This is particularly the
case in relation to postmodern, or poststructuralist, theories (discussed in more detail in
Chapter 11). The interpretive approach rests on the conviction that meanings and beliefs
are the most important factors in the study of social processes and that social inquiry
could play an important role in uncovering the deep meanings that exist beneath the
surface appearance of observed reality. This conviction relies on the belief that there are
hidden meanings to be had. Poststructuralist theorists are sceptical of this viewpoint and
have no wish to return to what they term the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. Poststructuralists
are also sceptical of the validity of all knowledge claims and reject the idea that science
produces anything like true knowledge, even in terms of the natural sciences.
In many respects, the positivist/postpositivist designation represents a particular
moment in the history of the discipline. It marks a particular period in time when the
positivist orthodoxy had begun to crumble in the philosophy of science, and the effect of
this was felt throughout the social sciences. It is an accident of history that this collapse
occurred at the same time as a range of new social theories, and philosophies, was emerging. These new theories all rejected the positivist vision of science and, in particular, its
application to the social sciences. Yet in many respects this rejection of positivism was all
they shared in common and it is incorrect to infer that this necessarily requires them to
adopt an interpretive philosophy and methodology.
Rationalism and reflectivism
The rationalist/reflectivist divide takes the explaining/understanding divide and the positivist/postpositivist debate and encapsulates them both under a single label. This terminology, utilized by Robert Keohane (1988) in his address to the International Studies
Association, can be associated with the explanation/understanding and positivist/postpositivist divides, but also has particular additional connotations. Keohane takes his label
of rationalism directly from rational choice theory. Rational choice theory is essentially
a methodology constructed from a commitment to a positivist account of science. The
rational choice theorist accepts the general complexity of the social world but ignores
the majority of it in order to produce predictions based on a particular understanding
of individuals. According to rational choice theorists we should treat individuals, and
by extension states, as utility maximizers, and ignore every other aspect of their social
being. This does not mean that rational choice theorists actually believe this is a correct
description of what an individual is. However, they do believe that if we treat individuals
in this manner we may be able to generate a series of well grounded predictions concerning behaviour on the basis of observed outcomes. Keohane accepts the limitations
of this approach, but argues that it has been spectacularly successful in terms of knowledge production (Keohane 1988). This approach is deductive as opposed to the inductive
bias of previous forms of positivism but, nonetheless, observation, measurement, and
the attempt to specify general universal laws are still at the heart of this form of analysis.
The approach is deductive because it begins with a theory of the individual and then utilizes observation and hypothesis testing to substantiate, or falsify, a set of claims relating
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Beyond the fourth debate? Rethinking International
Relations as a science
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to behaviour on the basis of this view. It is an approach to explanation that is compatible
with the wider positivist tradition in IR, but it is not synonymous with it. It is for this
reason that the term rationalism has been associated with both the explanatory and the
positivist tradition in IR.
In his now (in)famous speech, Keohane (1988) also noted the emergence of a series of theories that were sharply critical of mainstream rationalist approaches to the
discipline—critical theory, constructivism, poststructuralism, and feminism. He called
these approaches reflectivist, due to the fact that they rejected the classical positivist/
explanatory approach to IR theory and research, emphasizing instead reflexivity and the
non-neutral nature of political and social explanation. He noted the potential of these
approaches to contribute to the discipline but, in a direct reference to Lakatos’s account of
science, suggested that they could be taken seriously only when they developed a ‘research
programme’. This was a direct challenge to the new theories to move beyond criticism
of the mainstream and demonstrate, through substantive research, the validity of their
claims. Many of the so-called reflectivists have seen this as nothing other than a demand
that they adopt the model of science to which Keohane and the mainstream are committed. On the other hand, the mainstream has been reluctant to take the knowledge claims
of reflectivist scholars seriously, because they challenge the very status of the ontological,
epistemological, and methodological assumptions upon which the mainstream depend.
The debates between explaining and understanding and rationalism and reflectivism
have produced a dichotomous logic that has fashioned two wings of the discipline: a ‘proscience’ viewpoint versus an ‘anti-science’ position. Typically, this debate has been framed
around positivism as the dominant account of what science is. While positivism and its
debate with the anti-science faction of the discipline has been the dominant issue in IR,
recent developments in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of social science
suggest that this way of framing the issues is unproductive. Significant strides have been
taken in the philosophy of science to move beyond positivism: positivism is no longer
seen to be a valid account of science and has been replaced by scientific realism. A comprehensive account of scientific realism is beyond the scope of this chapter; however,
the important contribution it makes in terms of social science is to reject any attempt to
arrive at a set of clearly defined procedures that fix the content of the scientific method.
For scientific realists, each science must arrive at its own mode of operation on the basis
of the object domain under study (see, for example, Roy Bhaskar 1978, 1979). Because
object domains differ in fundamental ways, scientific realists claim it would be inappropriate to expect methods deployed in one science to have a universal application. Hence
the social sciences should not be attempting to copy the natural sciences, not least because
given the immeasurable distinctions within the various natural sciences it is impossible to
identify a set of procedures and techniques that are adopted by all.
For scientific realists, what makes a body of knowledge scientific is not its mode of
generation, but its content. Contra a positivist account of science, a body of knowledge is
not declared scientific because it has followed a particular set of procedures based upon
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empirical ‘facts’ but, rather, because it constructs explanations of those facts in terms
of entities and processes that are unknown and potentially unobservable. For scientific
realists, scientific knowledge goes beyond appearances and constructs explanations that
often run counter to, and even contradict, observed outcomes. Social science involves the
study of the complex and interacting social objects that produce the patterns we observe.
Because of their unobservable nature, most social objects have to be ‘got at’ through careful conceptualization. This is always a complex process that involves mutually constituted
processes between agents and the objects of knowledge; yet social knowledge, however
imperfect and embedded in conceptual and discursive frameworks, is knowledge of
something—something called social reality.
Epistemologically, scientific realists are relativists; they argue that no epistemological position has priority in the acquisition of knowledge for there are always many ways in which
to come to know the world. But this does not mean that all views are equally valid and they
believe in the possibility of rationally adjudicating between competing knowledge claims.
What is important to science is that any and every claim is open to challenge and, moreover,
that all claims require epistemological support. This does not mean that these epistemological supports are always predicated on facts, or other such empirical data, but it does mean that
those concerned to challenge particular claims make clear the evidential basis on which the
challenge is made. Science, it is argued, rather than being committed to a dogmatic insistence
on the certainty of its claims, rests on a commitment to constant critique.
Methodologically, it follows that scientific realists adopt a pluralist approach: contrary
to the positivist emphasis on quantitative methods and the interpretive emphasis on
qualitative methods, scientific realists emphasize methodological pluralism. Because the
social world is ontologically highly complex, and there are many ways to come to know
the world, it is better that one does not restrict methods a priori. A student of democratic peace, for example, should not study only regular patterns in history (positivist
approach), nor simply interpret particular decision-makers’ perceptions (‘understanding’
approach), but should make use of multiple ways of obtaining data. Because the social
world is ontologically complex, it is better that one does not take an a priori position on
either methodology or epistemology.
Scientific realism has already made major contributions to social theory and the development of research techniques in other social sciences, and it is now beginning to make
an impact in IR. It has played a major role in the development of constructivism, although
not all constructivists have embraced it. Alexander Wendt (1999) is perhaps the most
notable theorist to embed his theory explicitly in a scientific realist framework, and it
underpins his attempt to construct a via media, or middle ground, between rationalism
and reflectivism. However, Wendt’s adoption of scientific realism has been criticized by
other scientific realists on the grounds that he has failed to move sufficiently beyond the
parameters of the current debate and that he remains basically locked into a modified
commitment to positivism. Another version of scientific realism has emerged which uses
the label critical realism to differentiate itself from Wendt’s account. Critical realists such
as Patomäki and Wight (2000) take scientific realist ideas further in important respects.
Notably, they argue that the dichotomy between rationalism and reflectivism is mirrored
in the distinction between an approach that focuses on materialist issues, and one that
concentrates on ideas. For critical realists, both ideas and material factors are important
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in producing social outcomes, and both need to be integrated into the research process.
According to critical realists, the question of whether material factors or ideational issues
are the most important in determining outcomes is an empirical matter that can be
decided only on the basis of research that examines the relationship and interplay of both.
So while critical realists agree that meanings and ideas matter they insist that ideas always
emerge in a material context, and that the meanings we give to events are, in part, a consequence of how these events were materially constructed, composed, and represented.
The emergence of scientific and critical realism in IR is an important new trend in the
discipline. It has opened up new potentially constructive avenues for meta-theoretical
and theoretical debate in IR. By refusing to juxtapose explaining and understanding and
causal and non-causal analysis, by rejecting an a priori commitment to either material or
ideational factors, and by refusing to endorse either the positivist model of science, or the
rejection of science advocated by some reflectivists, it has enabled the discipline to move
forward from the fourth debate and allowed the non-positivist theoretical perspectives to
be appreciated in a new light; as scientific contributors to the discipline.
In this final section we examine how meta-theoretical assumptions influence the manner
in which IR theorists formulate different understandings of certain issues: such as the
nature of theory, the possibility of objectivity, the criteria to be used in theory-testing, and
the relationship of theory and practice. In many respects these issues emerge out of the
debates considered above, and in some cases they are constitutive of them. In the chapters
that follow many of these issues will re-emerge, even if only implicitly. In highlighting the
often implicit role of meta-theory we hope to alert students to the multiple ways in which
meta-theoretical assumptions influence IR theory and research.
Types of theory
It is reasonable to assume that a book dealing with IR theory would provide a clear
account of what theory is. Unfortunately there is not one but many. This makes a direct
comparison between theoretical claims often difficult if not impossible; being aware of
the many different types of theorizing means that comparison is not always possible and
alerts us to the fact that different types of theories have different aims.
One of the most common types of theory is what we will term explanatory theory.
This is probably the type of theory most students initially think of when they use the
term theory. Explanatory theory attempts to ‘explain’ events by providing an account of
causes in a temporal sequence. Thus, for example, we can think of theories that attempt
to explain the end of the Cold War in terms of a series of connected events occurring over
time. For positivists, this type of theory must produce verifiable (or falsifable) hypotheses
which can be subject to empirical test. Another common type of explanatory theory does
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not attempt to link particular events in causal sequences but, rather, attempts to locate the
causal role played by particular elements in the chosen object domain and, on the basis
of this analysis, draw conclusions and predictions aimed at exercising control. A good
example of this type of explanatory theory is neo- or structural realism (see Chapter 4).
According to neorealists such as Waltz (1979) theory can be considered a simplifying
device that abstracts from the world in order to locate and identify key factors of interest. Once these factors are identified this type of theory aims at predicting a large range
of outcomes on the basis of a few important causal factors. For this type of explanatory
theory it is not important that the theory provides a realistic model of the world but,
rather, that the theory is ‘useful’ in terms of its predictive capacity.
Explanatory theories are sometimes said to be ‘problem-solving theories’. This distinction comes from Robert Cox (1981) who claims that this type of theory is concerned only with taking the world as given and attempting to understand its modes of
operation. As such, problem-solving theories are often said to be concerned only with
making the world work better within clearly defined, and limited, parameters. In opposition to explanatory theories, Cox identified another type of theory which he called
‘critical theory’. Cox’s category of critical theory is confusing since the content of the
term critical is dependent on a political context. What one theorist considers critical
may be considered dogmatic by another. However, there is a form of theorizing that we
think does merit the label ‘critical’. By critical theory we mean that type of theory which
begins with the avowed intent of criticizing particular social arrangements and/or outcomes. Hence a theory might be considered critical in this sense if it explicitly sets out
to identify and criticize a particular set of social circumstances and demonstrate how
they came to exist. We want to phrase it in this manner since it is highly probable that
this type of critical theory builds its analysis on the basis of an examination of the causal
factors that brought the particular unjust state of affairs about. On this account of critical theory there is no necessary conflict between the identification of an unjust state of
affairs and a consideration of the causes of that state of affairs. Hence it is possible for
a theory to be both explanatory and critical. Many feminist theories fit this model. They
identify a particular set of social arrangements that are considered unjust and locate
those social conditions in a set of particular causal circumstances. Interestingly, many
feminists also take the additional step of indicating how an eradication of those causal
factors might make the world better in some or other way.
Once a theorist takes the step of indicating alternative futures or social modes of operation that do not currently exist, but might be brought into being, they have entered the
realm of normative theory. This will be discussed in more detail in the following chapter
but generally speaking it is fair to say that normative theory examines what ‘ought’ to be
the case. Normative theory comes in strong or weak versions. In the weak version the
theorist is concerned only to examine what ought to be the case in a particular domain of
interest. Theories of justice for example can be considered normative in that they debate
not only what justice is, but also what it ought to be. The strong version of normative
theory is often called ‘utopian’ in that it sets out to provide models of how society ought
to be reorganized. Marxist theory can be considered strongly utopian in this manner.
This type of theorizing has been neglected for some time now, mainly because the term
utopian has negative connotations associated with ‘unrealistic’ expectations.
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Another common type of theory is known as constitutive theory. Constitutive theory
does not attempt to generate, or track, causal patterns in time, but asks, ‘How is this thing
constituted?’ This type of theory can take many forms. In one sense constitutive theory
entails the study of how social objects are constituted. State theory, for example, does not
always ask how the modern state came to be, but can focus solely on questions, such as,
‘What is a state?’, ‘How is a state constituted?’, ‘What functions does the state play in society?’. However, the term constitutive theory is also used in the discipline in another sense:
to refer to those authors who examine the ways in which rules, norms, and ideas ‘constitute’ social objects. For these theorists, the social world (and perhaps the natural world)
is constituted through the ideas, or theories, that we hold. For this type of constitutive
theory, it becomes important to theorize the act of theorizing.4
The last type we wish to discuss is theory considered as a lens through which we look
at the world. Many positivists would be unhappy at labelling this theory. It is certainly
not theory in the sense of a coherent and systematic set of logical propositions that have
a well formulated and specified set of relationships. However, many social theorists do
not think that the ontology of the social world permits a view of theory that allows such
clearly defined sets of relationships. Instead, they are concerned to explore how social
actors navigate their way through social events and processes. In order to make sense of
this we need to comprehend what these social processes mean to them, and we do this by
understanding the varied ways they make sense of the social world. All social actors view
the world in particular ways, and these views of the world do not always display as much
coherence, or logic, as one might expect of a systematic and well defined theory. Yet, if the
theorist is to grasp how social actors understand the world, they need to be aware of the
lens through which those actors view, and act in, the world.5
Question of objectivity
Another important issue of contention that arises in meta-theoretical debates is that of
objectivity. One of the key notions of Western thought, particularly since the Enlightenment,
has been the search for truth, and the ideas of truth and objectivity are closely related. It is
important, however, to distinguish between truth and objectivity. There are many theories
of truth, and some theories deny that there is, or can be, such a thing.6 Philosophers have
addressed the issue of truth in various ways and we cannot go into them at length here. The
confusion of truth with objectivity arises due to the fact that the term objective has two
closely related meanings. In the first sense, an objective claim can be said to be a statement
relating to external facts as opposed to internal thoughts or feelings. Hence, it is possible
to talk in this sense of something being objective independent of any belief or statement
about it. It is easy to see how this can be confused with truth. Something that is said to be
the way it is independent of any belief is a common-sense way of talking about truth. This
is not, however, how most philosophers, or scientists, think about truth. Truth is typically
understood by philosophers and scientists to express a relationship between the world
(however defined) and a statement referring to that world; or to a set of beliefs or statements that can be said to be true if they have been arrived at through a given set of procedures. Truth expresses a relationship between language and the world, or a set of human
conventions about what counts as ‘true’. For many philosophers the idea of an external
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world having a ‘truth’ independent of any belief about it is nonsense. External objects may
exist independent of theory but they could not be said to be true in any meaningful sense
of the word. They have an existence, but to exist is not the same thing as to be true.
The second sense of objective is more interesting in terms of disciplinary debates.
Objectivity in this sense relates to a statement, position, or set of claims that is not influenced by personal opinions or prejudices. Objectivity thus refers to the attempt by the
researcher to remain detached, dispassionate, impartial, open-minded, disinterested,
judicial, equitable, even-handed, fair, unprejudiced. Very few, if any, theorists in IR believe
that we can ever produce a set of statements that can be said to be accurate in terms of
representing the external world exactly as it is. The main lines of debate surround the
extent to which we might aspire to knowledge that approximates this goal, how we might
justify and provide evidential support to show how one claim fares better than another in
this respect, and how objective, in the sense of impartial, we might be.
Positions on these issues deeply divide the discipline. Most positivists, for example,
strive for objective knowledge by attempting to define methods and criteria for knowledge production that minimize the influence of value-biased judgements. This point of
view seems persuasive in that striving for systematic and rule-governed procedures relating to knowledge production seems preferable to knowledge acquisition on the basis of an
unsystematic and haphazard set of procedures. Positivists argue that, although knowledge
is never perfect, through the observance of agreed-upon research criteria, we can aim to
make some justifiable judgements between competing knowledge claims. Neoliberals (see
Chapter 6), for example, might claim that while their account of the role of institutions
is not the only one, nor necessarily an absolute truth, it is still empirically the most valid
one in relation to a number of instances. Because this theory can be validated by empirical
observations and patterns, and can be used to predict state behaviour, it can be considered
more truth-approximating than many others.
For theorists informed by more interpretive approaches to knowledge, social knowledge
is by definition always ‘situated knowledge’; knowledge claims can never be formulated
outside the influence of social and political context. It follows that we must accept that
knowledge systems are always socially and politically informed and socially, politically, and
ethically consequential. Poststructuralists take this view on knowledge to entail that claims
about ‘reality’ are always constructions of particular discursive and social systems and are
always implicated in power relations. They are also sceptical of truth claims due to the fact
that such claims have often driven some of the most violent episodes of human interaction.
When a group of people firmly believes that they alone possess the truth they can become
dogmatic and attempt to implement policies on the basis of that truth, with little or no
regard for alternative views. Being sceptical of truth claims then becomes not only a philosophical belief but a political position aimed at preventing totalitarian forms of politics.
Other interpretive theorists are concerned to maintain some notion of objectivity even
if they reject the idea of truth. Constructivists, for example, recognize that there is no
way to produce statements about the world that might be said to be true in the sense of
providing complete and accurate accounts of the way the world is, but they do aspire to
objectivity in the sense of attempting to remove bias and gaining support for claims by
negotiation within the scientific community. In some respects this position can be said to
resemble the position advocated by many positivist scholars. However, for constructivists,
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Related to the issue of truth and objectivity is the question of how to evaluate and compare our theoretical frameworks. Positivists argue that only systematic empirical observation guided by clear methodological procedures can provide us with valid knowledge
of international politics, and that we must test theories against the empirical patterns in
order to compare theories. Interpretivists, and many other postpositivists, on the other
hand, insist that there is no easy or conclusive way of comparing theories, and some go
so far as to suggest that theories are incommensurable; in other words, theories cannot
be compared because either the grounds for their knowledge claims are so different, or
they see different worlds (Wight 1996). Scientific and critical realists accept that theory
comparison and testing always require recognition of the complexity of judgements that
are involved, and an awareness of, and reflection on, the social and political context in
which such judgements are formed, as well as analysis of the potential consequences of
our judgements. They accept that positivist observational criteria are often a poor guide
to choosing between theories if applied in isolation and without adequate critical reflection. Scientific and critical realists argue that theory comparison must be based on holistic
criteria: not merely on systematic observation but also conceptual coherence and plausibility, ontological nuance, epistemological reflection, methodological coverage, and epistemological pluralism. They also accept that all judgements concerning the validity of
theories are influenced by social and political factors and hence are potentially fallible.
The consequences of how we test and evaluate the validity of knowledge claims are fundamental to any theory. Depending on our different criteria of evaluation some approaches
literally get legitimated while others are marginalized. These kinds of judgements have
important theoretical and empirical consequences for the kind of world we see but, also,
political consequences for the kind of world our theoretical frameworks reproduce. The
important thing to note in engaging with the theoretical frameworks in the chapters to
come and in comparing their validity is that there are multiple criteria for theory testing
and comparison in IR. Although some social scientists have assumed that criteria regarding the predictive and instrumental empirical value of a theory provide superior criteria
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the overriding considerations for arriving at judgements relating to knowledge claims are
intersubjective agreement as opposed to empirical evidence.
Scientific and critical realists accept large parts of the interpretivist position regarding
objectivity, and argue that while we always interpret the world through our own socially
positioned lenses, and while there is no easy way to prove the truth of a particular theory,
not all theories are equal. Importantly for scientific realists, it is precisely because the world
is the way it is independent of any theory that some theories might be better descriptions
of that world, even if we do not know it. It then becomes a task of deciding which theory
is the most plausible. In determining this, scientific realists rule nothing out and privilege
no one factor; they are epistemological opportunists. For scientific realists there is not one
set of procedures for adjudicating between knowledge claims that covers all cases. Each
case must be assessed on its own merits and on the basis of the evidence it supplies. For
scientific realists, scientific and explanatory activity is rendered meaningless if we are not
accounting for something real in more or less objective ways.
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for theory testing, the interpretive and scientific realist positions on theory comparison
also have their strengths. Indeed, having been dominated by the rather narrow criteria for
theory comparison for some time, IR theory should, in our view, start to make more use
of the holistic criteria. Science, after all, need not be defined by empirical methods alone
but can also be seen to be characterized by ontological, epistemological, and methodological pluralism and reflectivity.
Theory and practice
Another key aspect at stake in meta-theoretical debate within the discipline has been a discussion over the purpose of social inquiry. For some the purpose of social inquiry is to gain
adequate knowledge of social reality to ground and direct policy-making (Wallace 1996).
Others argue that the relationship between theory and practice is more complex than this.
Booth (1997) and Smith (1997), for example, argued that the role of theory is often practical in a different sense from what is understood by those who argue for a policy-relevant
IR. Wallace and others, Booth and Smith argue, make too much of a separation between
theory and practice: they assume that theory is not practice and that ‘practice’ entails ‘foreign policy-making’ devoid of theoretical groundings. Booth and Smith, and alongside
them many critical theorists, argue that theory can in itself be a form of practice, that is,
if we accept that theory constitutes the world we live in, by advancing a theory one may
either reproduce or change mindsets and, hence, social realities. Equally, all practice is
predicated on the basis of some or other theory. As Booth and Smith point out, a policymaker’s view of the world is not necessarily untheoretical: it is actually deeply embedded
in social and political points of view.
As the following chapters will reveal, theorists from different camps tend to hold different
views on this issue. The traditionally dominant perspectives of realism and liberalism, along
with their neo-variants, tend to lean towards Wallace’s point of view, while many of the
newer perspectives, especially feminism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism, tend to put
an emphasis on the role of theorizing itself as a form of world political practice. Again, the
key point advanced here is that there is no agreed-upon understanding of the relationship of
theory and practice: a position on theory and practice is directed by a meta-theoretical and
theoretical framework; and the way one conceives of the relationship of theory and practice
has important consequences for how one views the purposes of IR theorizing itself.
Conclusion
This chapter has aimed to provide the reader with an understanding of the nature and
importance of meta-theoretical, or philosophy of social science, debates within IR. We
have examined the manner in which discussion concerning the nature of inquiry in the
discipline has shaped both the history of the discipline and the contemporary theoretical landscape. We have argued that positivist models of science have dominated, but that
recent engagements with the nature of science are creating possibilities for new kinds
of understandings of IR as a social science. We also examined a number of important
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issues that are at stake in the way in which theorists from different theoretical schools
come to understand and study the world and how they propose to validate or reject
knowledge claims. We would like to conclude by highlighting another aspect of debate
within the discipline that students should be aware of.
All sciences are social environments with their own internal dynamics and modes of
operation. As a set of social practices taking place within a structured social environment,
the discipline of IR has a unique internal political structure that is both shaped by the manner in which debate occurs, and which shapes the contours of that debate. In examining and
evaluating the theoretical approaches outlined in the following chapters, students should
be aware that all the theoretical schools of thought in IR and all meta-theoretical positions
that underpin them—including ours—are attempting to get their audience to ‘buy in’ to
the argument. In this respect IR theorists resemble salespeople, and what they are selling
is their theory. Words such as ‘critical’, ‘sophisticated’, ‘simplistic’, ‘naive’, and ‘dogmatic’ are
not neutral descriptions of theoretical positions but, rather, are deployed to either delegitimate alternative views, or prove the superiority of one approach over all others. However,
much like any good customer, the student would be well advised to reflect critically on the
limitations inherent in all the approaches presented to them, even the most persuasive. It is
important to remember that all theoretical and underlying meta-theoretical positions are
subject to criticism and dispute. Indeed, viewing IR through the philosophy of social science reminds us that all claims to knowledge are open to challenge from other perspectives.
Recognizing this does not necessarily lead to relativism, but to a certain humility and degree
of reflection with regard to the claims we make and reject in studying world politics.
Realizing that all theories are ‘selling you’ a perspective is also important in highlighting
the politics of the theoretical and meta-theoretical decisions we make. Each theoretical
and meta-theoretical avenue involves a number of judgements about what is an important object of inquiry and what is, or is not, a valid knowledge claim. These judgements
have consequences for the kind of world we come to see, for how we account for processes
within it, and for how we act in that world. Meta-theoretical and theoretical debates, then,
are not abstract philosophical exercises but are also potentially politically consequential
for the kind of world we live in. Caveat emptor (let the buyer beware).
QUESTIONS
1. What is meta-theory? What role does meta-theoretical debate play in International Relations
scholarship?
2. What role has the debate over science played in the discipline of IR historically?
3. Is IR a science or an art? What is at stake in this debate? What does the ‘scientific’ study of
world politics entail?
4. What is meant by the terms positivism/postpositivism, explaining/understanding, rationalism/
reflectivism?
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5. Should we think of the contemporary meta-theoretical debates in IR (between positivism and
postpositivism, explaining and understanding and rationalism and reflectivism) as debates
between mutually incompatible positions?
6. What are the key assumptions of scientific realism? What is the significance of scientific
realism in disciplinary debates?
7. How should we conceptualize the role of theory in the discipline? What do different conceptions of theory have to offer?
8. Can we have value-neutral knowledge of world politics?
9. Can we judge some theories to be better than others? If so, what is involved in making such
judgements?
10. What is the purpose of IR theorizing?
11. How significant is the fourth debate in the contemporary discipline of IR? Has it, and should
it be, transcended? What is the significance of meta-theoretical debates for IR theory and
research?
12. Which meta-theoretical leanings do you find persuasive? Why? How would you justify the validity of your position against your critics?
FURTHER READING
■ Cox, R. (1981), ‘Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations
Theory’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 10/2: 126–55. A key piece outlining
a critique of ‘problem-solving theory’ in IR.
■ Hollis, M. and Smith, S. (1990), Explaining and Understanding International Relations
(Oxford: Clarendon Press). An influential account of the meta-theoretical debates over explaining
and understanding in the context of IR.
■ King, G., Keohane, R. O., and Verba, S. (1994), Designing Social Inquiry; Scientific
Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). A key work
outlining a positivist approach to qualitative research.
■ Knorr, K. E. and Rosenau, J. N. (1969) (eds), Contending Approaches to International
Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). A collection of key articles by the
contenders in the second debate.
■ Nicholson, M. (1996), Causes and Consequences in International Relations:
A Conceptual Study (London: Pinter). A positivist introduction to philosophy of social science
in IR.
■ Patomäki, H. and Wight, C. (2000), ‘After Post-Positivism? The Promises of Critical
Realism’, International Studies Quarterly, 44/2: 213–37. This article outlines the contributions of a critical realist approach to theorizing science in IR.
■ Smith, S., Booth, K., and Zalewski, M. (1996) (eds), International Theory: Positivism
and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). A collection of essays evaluating the
contributions of the positivist/postpositivist debate in IR.
9780199_548866_03_cha01.indd 34
11/27/2009 10:49:43 AM
Visit the Online Resource Centre that accompanies this book for lots of
interesting additional material. www.oxfordtextbooks.co.uk/orc/dunne2e/
9780199_548866_03_cha01.indd 35
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND SOCIAL SCIENCE
■ Wendt, A. (1999), Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press). An important constructivist work with a strong philosophy of social
science element. Notably, this book introduces scientific realist themes to IR theory.
35
●
■ Wallace, W. (1996), ‘Truth and Power, Monks and Technocrats: Theory and Practice
in International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 22/3: 301–21. See also
responses by Booth and Smith in issues 23/2 and 23/4. These articles constitute an
interesting debate over the relationship of theory and practice in IR theory.
11/27/2009 10:49:43 AM
Part One
HISTORICAL,
PHILOSOPHICAL AND
THEORETICAL ISSUES
IN INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS
1
On the History and Historiography
of International Relations
BRIAN C. SCHMIDT
Thus, today, after a quarter-century of
activity, the study of international relations is still in a condition of considerable
confusion. The scope of the field, the
methods of analysis and synthesis to be
followed, the proper administrative
arrangements to be made in college curricula, the organization of research – all
these are matters of continuing controversy. (Kirk, 1947: 7)
In brief, as a field of inquiry, international
relations today resembles a poorly
marked-out arena in which a multiplicity
of research programs and strategies compete, coexist, overlap, or retain splendid
isolation. (Plating, 1969: 11)
The field of international studies has
become a little like the Tower of Babel,
filled with a cacophony of different
voices – or, as some have implied, a set of
tribes that are very territorial, sniping at
those who come too close and preferring
to be with those like them. As a result,
the field of international relations has
become an administrative holding company rather than an intellectually coherent area of inquiry or a community of
scholars. (Hermann, 1998: 606)
These quotations indicate a preliminary reply to
those who question the value of engaging in
research on the disciplinary history of the field of
international relations (IR).1 While a common
diagnosis of the contemporary state of the field is
that it lacks a coherent identity, the statements
above indicate that the identity of the field has
never been as secure as many might imagine. A cursory review of recent books and articles found in
the ever-expanding number of specialized journals,
and the programs of the annual meetings of the
International Studies Association (ISA) and British
International Studies Association (BISA), reveals a
complex field of extraordinary scope, yet an element of suspicion continues to be cast on the task of
examining its history. One possible explanation for
the reluctance to grant legitimacy to this research
task is the common notion that we already know the
history. Another possibility is that those in the
mainstream are satisfied with the dominant story
that is told about the development of the field. In
any event, there is no shortage of brief synoptic
accounts of this history in introductory textbooks,
state-of-the-field articles and ISA Presidential
Addresses.
These renditions frequently retell a conventional
story of how the field has progressed through a
series of phases: idealist, realist, behavioralist, postbehavioralist, pluralist, neorealist, rationalist, postpositivist and constructivist. The image of the first
three phases has been so deeply ingrained in the
minds of students and scholars that there almost
seems to be no alternative way of understanding the
early history of the field. Hedley Bull, for example,
claimed that it is ‘possible to recognize three successive waves of theoretical activity’: the ‘idealist’
or ‘progressivist’ doctrines that were dominant in
the 1920s and early 1930s, the ‘realist’ or conservative theories that developed in the late 1930s and
4
HANDBOOK OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
1940s, and lastly the ‘social scientific’ theories that
arose in the late 1950s and 1960s ‘whose origin lay
in dissatisfaction with the methodologies on which
both earlier kinds of theory were based’ (Bull,
1972: 33). This story of the field’s evolution is, in
turn, often buttressed by the closely related account
of the field evolving through a series of ‘great
debates’, beginning with the disciplinary defining
‘great debate’ between ‘idealists’ and ‘realists’ and
extending perhaps to the latest debate today
between ‘rationalists’ and ‘reflectivists’ (Banks,
1986; Katzenstein et al., 1999; Keohane, 1988;
Lijphart, 1974a; Maghroori, 1982; Mitchell, 1980).
This particular construction of the field’s history
tends to have the effect of making the present
debate a matter that all serious students of IR must
focus on while relegating previous debates to
obscurity.
Finally, the field’s history is commonly chronicled by reference to the external events that have
taken place in the realm that has been conventionally
designated as international politics. There is a strong
conviction that significant developments in international politics such as wars or abrupt changes in
American foreign policy have, more fundamentally
than any other set of factors, shaped the development of IR. The birth of the field, for example, often
associated with the founding of the world’s first
Chair for the study of international politics, in 1919
at the Department of International Politics at the
University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, is characteristically viewed as a reaction to the horror of
the First World War (Porter, 1972).
My main intention in this chapter is to problematize these prevalent interpretations of how the field
has developed and to indicate that the history of the
field is both more complicated and less well known
than typically portrayed in the mainstream literature. While it is quite evident that we do not possess
an adequate understanding of how the field has
developed, there are a number of reasons why it is
crucially important for contemporary practitioners
and students of IR to possess an adequate familiarity with this history.
First, numerous theoretical insights, of largely
forgotten scholars, have been simply erased from
memory. Yet, once recalled, these insights can have
critical purchase in the present. Second, the field
has created its own powerful myths regarding the
evolution of the field that have obscured the actual
history (Booth, 1996; Kahler, 1997; Osiander,
1998; Schmidt 1998a, 1998b; Waever, 1998;
Wilson, 1998). Third, an adequate understanding of
the history of the field is essential for explaining the
character of many of our present assumptions and
ideas about the study of international politics.
While current intellectual practices and theoretical
positions are often evoked as novel answers to the
latest dilemmas confronting international politics, a
more discriminating historical sense reminds us that
contemporary approaches are often reincarnations
of past discourses. Without a sufficient understanding of how the field has evolved, there is the constant danger of continually reinventing the wheel.
There is, in fact, much evidence to support the
proposition that much of what is taken to be new is
actually deeply embedded in the discursive past of
the field. Finally, a perspicacious history of the field
offers a fruitful basis for critical reflection on the
present. Knowledge of the actual, as opposed to the
mythical, history may force us to reassess some of
our dominant images of the field and result in opening up some much needed space in which to think
about international politics in the new millennium.
My purpose in this chapter is not to provide a
comprehensive history of the broadly defined field
or discipline of IR. Not only would such an
endeavor be impossible in this context, but, as I will
indicate below, there is sufficient ambiguity concerning the proper identity of the field, with respect
to its origins, institutional home, and geographical
boundaries, that simply writing a generic history of
IR without addressing these sorts of issues in detail
has reached the point of being counter-productive.
Moreover, while much of the previous work on the
history of the field has not exhibited sufficient
theoretical and methodological sophistication in
approaching the task of providing an adequate historical account, some recent work in this area is
forcing scholars to confront a number of historiographical issues. This latest wave of scholarship
clearly recognizes the necessary link that exists
between establishing the identity of the discipline
and presenting an image of its history. Furthermore,
the manner in which the history of IR is reconstructed has become almost as significant as the
substantive account itself, and therefore it becomes
crucially important to address the basic research
question of how one should approach the task of
writing a history of the field.
I will begin by briefly discussing a number of lingering and contentious issues concerning the extent
to which there is a well-defined field of IR that has
a distinct identity, as well as the equally controversial question of whether the history of the field
should be written from a cosmopolitan frame of
reference – that does not pay significant attention to
distinct national and institutional differences – or
whether it is necessary to approach this task from
within clearly demarcated national contexts.
Although it should be evident that IR is a discrete
academic field after more than fifty to a hundred
years of evolution, depending on how one dates the
genesis of the field, ambiguities have continually
arisen regarding both the character of the subject
matter and the institutional boundaries of the field.
Adding to the confusion surrounding the identity of
the field is the fact of the overwhelming and continuing dominance of the American IR scholarly community that sometimes leads to the erroneous
ON THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF IR
conclusion that the history of IR is synonymous with
its development in the United States. While there is
much merit in Stanley Hoffmann’s (1977) assertion
that IR is an American social science, despite the
influence of a great many European-born scholars, it
is also the case that notwithstanding the global
impact of the American model, there are many
indigenous scholarly communities that have their
own unique disciplinary history. This is, for example, clearly the case with the English School, whose
contributions have only recently begun to be properly documented and assessed (Dunne, 1998; Little,
2000). Certainly these communities have been
deeply impacted by theoretical and methodological
developments in the United States, but there are
nevertheless differences in how the subject is studied in different parts of the world (Jorgensen, 2000).
The interdisciplinary character of the field and differences in national settings sometimes lead to the
conclusion that a distinct discipline or field of IR
does not really exist, but despite ambiguities about
disciplinary boundaries and an institutional home,
IR, as an academic field of study, has a distinct
professional identity and discourse.
I next focus on the historiography of IR, that is,
both the scholarship on the history of the field and
the methodological principles involved in that
research and writing. My attention will focus on two
fundamental problems: first, presentism, which
involves the practice of writing a history of the field
for the purpose of making a point about its present
character; and second, contextualism, which
assumes that exogenous events in the realm of international politics have fundamentally structured the
development of IR as an academic field of study. I
will attempt to illustrate these issues by reviewing
the existing literature. Recently, there has been a
notable increase in both the quantity and quality of
literature on the history of the field, and it can be
argued that, in general, the history of the social
sciences is becoming a distinct research specialty.
This new literature has cast increasing doubt on the
conventional images of the development of IR. My
critical purpose in this chapter is to challenge the
dominant understanding of how the field has progressed and to encourage more sophisticated work
on the disciplinary history of IR.
Throughout the chapter, I will occasionally make
reference to a conceptual framework developed by
John Gunnell (1998). The framework, which
Gunnell terms the ‘orders of discourse’, is applicable to analyzing various issues in the field of IR,
since it shares many of the characteristics associated with the other social sciences. In Gunnell’s terminology, the social sciences are second-order
metapractices that ‘are identified, in terms of logic,
function, and self-understanding, by the fact that in
various ways they speak about and sometimes to
first-order activities’ (Gunnell, 1998: 22). Firstorder practices, which include natural science,
5
religion, music, art and politics, are defined by
Gunnell as ‘modes of activity that are primordial
and “given” in that their various forms and historical manifestations represent functionally necessary
elements of human activity’ (1998: 19). With
respect to the relationship between the orders of
discourse, the crux of the issue concerns that
between second-order and first-order practices. The
former have sought in various ways to acquire epistemic and practical authority over the latter.
Gunnell writes that ‘the history of the social
sciences has largely been driven by the issue of how
to vindicate its cognitive claims and translate them
into a basis of practical authority’ (1998: 3). In
applying this framework to the intellectual history
of IR, we can see how the various theoretical,
methodological and epistemological positions that
have arisen since the field first came into existence
have often been involved with seeking to achieve
authority over the practice of international politics.
And histories of IR, like many of those offered in
the other social sciences, have often served to
vouchsafe a particular rendition of the field in order
to legitimate a contemporary image of a scientific
approach. This search for validation explains in part
the attraction in social science of turning to the
history and philosophy of natural science, another
second-order practice, in accounting for the growth
of the field. It will be through the medium of disciplinary history which, in Gunnell’s terms, qualifies
as a ‘third-order discourse’ (i.e., those that have
another metapractice as their object) that I will
explore the manner in which the field of IR has
sought to acquire the authority of knowledge that
would provide theoretical and practical purchase in
its relationship to international politics.
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
ACADEMIC FIELD OF STUDY
AS AN
The task of demarcating the disciplinary boundaries
of the field is an important prerequisite to establishing authority over its object of inquiry. Yet the question of whether a distinct field or discipline of IR
exists has been a matter of consistent controversy
(Gurian, 1946; Kaplan, 1961; Neal and Hamlett,
1969; Olson, 1972; Olson and Groom, 1991; Olson
and Onuf, 1985; Palmer, 1980; Thompson, 1952;
Wright, 1955). While the controversy is, in some
ways, related to the contentious issue of the origins
and geographical boundaries of the field, it more
fundamentally involves the question of the identity
of IR as a second-order discourse and the status of
its subject matter. Although it is apparent that this
question has never been answered satisfactorily, disciplinary history does provide an insightful vantage
point for viewing the manner in which the field has
attempted to establish its own identity.
6
HANDBOOK OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
The period that precedes the point at which we
can discern the identity of the field as a distinct academic practice can be termed its ‘prehistory’. Here
there was a gradual change ‘from discourse to discipline’ (Farr, 1990). This period is important for
identifying many of the themes and issues that
would later constitute the field as it took form
during the early decades of the twentieth century
(Schmidt, 1998b). The field’s antecedents included
international law, diplomatic history, the peace
movement, moral philosophy, geography and
anthropology (Olson and Groom, 1991). In The
Study of International Relations (1955), Quincy
Wright identified eight ‘root disciplines’ and six
disciplines with a ‘world point of view’ that had
contributed to the development of IR.2 Wright,
along with a number of others, argued that the task
of synthesizing these largely autonomous fields of
inquiry hampered the effort to create a unified
coherent discipline of IR (Bailey, 1932; Gurian,
1946; Kirk, 1947; Wright, 1955). Moreover,
Kenneth Thompson observed that ‘there was nothing peculiar to the subject matter of international
relations which did not fall under other separate
fields’ (Thompson, 1952: 433). The interdisciplinary character of the field and the fact that other
disciplines studied various dimensions of its subject
matter has sometimes led to the question of whether
‘international relations is a distinctive discipline’
(Kaplan, 1961). This is an interesting and important
question that has often been answered by pointing
to the field’s unique subject matter, typically
defined in terms of politics in the absence of central
authority as well as by adducing various epistemological and methodological grounds. Yet while the
question of whether IR is a distinct discipline is
intriguing, it is important not to let this become an
obstacle to reconstructing the history of the study of
international politics.
These issues do, however, highlight the importance of clearly identifying and focusing on the
institutional context of the field. The variability in
institutional context is, in part, responsible for the
wide range of dates that have been used to mark the
birth of the field. It makes a large difference, for
example, whether IR was institutionalized as a
separate discipline, as was largely the case after the
First World War in the United Kingdom, where a
number of independent Chairs were created, or as a
sub-field of political science, as was the case in the
United States, Germany and France.3 Yet orthodox
histories have been more inclined to emphasize the
impact of significant political events on the development of the field than the character of the institutional setting of the field. In the case of the United
States, for example, it is impossible to write the
history of IR without locating it within the disciplinary matrix of American political science. This is
different from the historical experience of IR in the
United Kingdom, where it was not a part of
political science, but rather a new field of inquiry
with a separate departmental home (Hill, 1987;
Waever, 1998). In addition to these institutional
variations, there are numerous differences with
respect to intellectual climate, access to information, research support, links between government
and academia, and the general structure and character of the university system (Simpson, 1998;
Smith, 1985).
The significance of institutional context is
closely related to the issue of the national context of
the field. Variations in institutional structure are
intimately related to the national setting in which IR
is situated. The issue of whether the boundaries of
IR should be demarcated in terms of one particular
country or whether it should be viewed as a more
cosmopolitan endeavor without regard to national
differences complicates the task of writing a history
of the field. Yet while the creation of a truly global
discipline may, perhaps, be an aspiration, studies
continue to indicate that the academic study of
international politics is marked by British, and
especially American, parochialism. Ever since
Stanley Hoffmann published his famous article ‘An
American Social Science: International Relations’,
discussion has ensued about the extent to which the
American academic community dominates the
‘global discipline’ of IR, and about the profound
consequences that this dominance has for the discipline as a whole (Alker and Biersteker, 1984;
Crawford and Jarvis, 2001; Goldmann, 1996;
Hoffmann, 1977; Holsti, 1985; Kahler, 1993;
Krippendorf, 1987; Smith, 1987, 2000; Waever,
1998). Yet despite the alleged American hegemony,
it is a fundamental mistake to associate the
American study of international politics with
the ‘global discipline of IR’. For although it is often
the case that many national IR communities seem to
be susceptible to embracing American theories,
trends and debates, IR, as Waever notes, ‘is quite
different in different places’ (1998: 723). I argue
that disciplinary histories of IR should be committed to reconstructing the discursive history of the
field in both its global and indigenous dimensions.
Although limitations of space prevent me from
commenting on the history of IR in every country in
the world, and much of what follows focuses on
developments in the United States and the United
Kingdom, it is important that more country-specific
studies of the development of IR be undertaken.4
THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS
One of the most significant problems in work on the
history of IR is that these histories have failed to
address adequately the question of how one should
write a history of the field. The tendency has been
ON THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF IR
to describe the history of IR as if a complete
consensus existed on the essential dimensions of
the field’s evolution. In the absence of any significant controversy concerning how the field has
developed, there has been little or no attention
devoted to historiographical issues. Yet as a number of related academic disciplines such as political
science have begun to examine more closely their
disciplinary history, several theoretical and
methodological controversies have arisen over what
in general constitutes proper historical analysis and,
particularly, what is involved in disciplinary history
(Bender and Schorske, 1998; Collini et al., 1983;
Dryzek and Leonard, 1988; Farr et al., 1990;
Gunnell, 1991; Ross, 1991; Tully, 1988). The historiographical concerns that this literature has
raised have, however, made little if any impact on
those who reflect on the history of IR. A major
exception to this generalization is found in Ole
Waever’s article ‘The Sociology of a Not So
International Discipline’ (1998), which is a significant contribution to the literature. With respect to
the existing state of the available literature on the
history of the field, Waever disapprovingly notes
that it is ‘usually not based on systemic research or
clear methods’ and that it amounts to little more
than ‘elegant restatements of “common knowledge”
of our past, implicitly assuming that any good practitioner can tell the history of the discipline’
(Waever, 1998: 692). But while the lack of theoretical sophistication is definitely rooted in the
assumption that practitioners already know the
history of the field, additional factors are at work in
reinforcing the tendency to simplify, and thus
distort, that history.
Traditions: Analytical and Historical
There is a general assumption that the history of the
field can be explained by reference to a continuous
tradition that reaches back to classical Athens and
extends forward to the present. The IR literature
contains numerous references to the idea that there
are epic traditions of international thought that have
given rise to coherent schools or paradigms such as
realism and liberalism (Clark, 1989; Donnelly,
1995; Holsti, 1985; Kugler, 1993; Zacher and
Matthew, 1995). Furthermore, and more importantly for the discussion at hand, there is a widespread conviction that these ancient traditions
represent an integral part of the field’s past and,
therefore, are relevant for understanding the contemporary identity of the field. One example of this
belief can be found in Jacek Kugler’s survey of the
literature on conflict and war in which he claims
that the ‘classic account of international war comes
from the realist tradition in world politics’, and that
the realist ‘approach to the study of war has a very
long tradition that can be traced from Thucydides
7
(400 BC), to Machiavelli (1513), to Hobbes (1651),
to Hume (1741), to von Clausewitz (1832), to
Morgenthau (1948), to Organski (1958), to Waltz
(1979) and to Gilpin (1981)’ (Kugler, 1993:
483–4). While it is certainly the case that the study
of the theorists associated with the classic canon of
Western political thought constitutes an element of
the practice of IR, as evidenced, for example, by
Kenneth Waltz’s Man, the State and War (1959), it
is, nevertheless, a fundamental misconception to
presume that the work of classic political theorists
such as Thucydides or Kant can be construed as
constitutive antecedents of the literature of
contemporary IR.
There is a certain irony in the widespread
tendency of contemporary scholars to make reference to the writings of classic political theorists in
that one of the dominant assumptions for many
years was that the canon of classic texts from Plato
to Marx did not have very much to say about international politics. This was the view popularized in
Martin Wight’s polemical essay ‘Why is There No
International Theory?’ (1966), which was presented
at the inaugural meeting of the British Committee on
the Theory of International Politics in 1959. Wight’s
argument contributed to the widespread view that
there was a rich and well-defined tradition of political thought but an impoverished and essentially contested tradition of international thought. This view,
along with the scientific ambitions of the behavioralists who directly challenged the relevance of the
canon, led the fields of political theory and IR to
drift apart, producing a profound sense of estrangement that only recently has begun to change
(Boucher, 1998; Brown, 1992; Knutsen, 1997;
Schmidt, 2000; Walker, 1993; Williams, 1992).
David Boucher has argued that one of the reasons
why IR does not have an established canon of classic texts stems from the mistake that IR theorists
made when they ‘cut themselves adrift from the
mainstream of political theory in order to develop
their own theories and concepts’ (1998: 10).
The strained and troubled relationship between
political theory and international relations theory
has not, however, prevented scholars from constructing numerous typologies and traditions for
classifying the ideas of classic political theorists
and linking them to the work of contemporary students of international relations (Boucher, 1998;
Donelan, 1990; Doyle, 1997; Holsti, 1985; Kauppi
and Viotti, 1999; Wight, 1992). While, symbolically or metaphorically, contemporary practitioners
may wish to describe themselves as descendants of
Thucydides or Kant, a serious conceptual mistake is
made when the history of the field is written in
terms of the development of an epic tradition beginning with classical Greece or the Enlightenment and
culminating in the work of contemporary scholars.
This common practice, which can be found in a
multitude of synoptic accounts of the history of the
8
HANDBOOK OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
field, commits the error of confusing an analytical
and a historical tradition, resulting in significant
obstacles to tracing the actual historical development of IR (Schmidt, 1994). Although discussions
of a tradition of IR are widespread and, as Rob
Walker (1993) has noted, far from monolithic, they
tend to refer less to actual historical traditions, that
is, self-constituted patterns of conventional practice
through which ideas are conveyed within a recognizably established discursive framework, than to
an analytical retrospective construction that largely
is defined by present criteria and concerns. In the
case of the disciplinary history of IR, such retrospectively constructed traditions as realism are
presented as if they represented an actual or selfconstituted tradition in the field, and serious
problems in understanding and writing the history
of IR result when the former is mistaken for, or
presented as, the latter.
Perhaps the greatest difficulty is that such epic
renditions of the past divert attention from the actual
academic practices and individuals who have contributed to the development and current identity of
the field. Instead of a history that traces the genealogy of academic scholars who self-consciously and
institutionally participated in the professional discourse of IR, we are presented with an idealized version of the past in the form of a continuous tradition
stretching from ancient times to the present. These
epic accounts, which are the norm in many of the
leading undergraduate texts, serve to reinforce the
idea that we already know the history of the field.
Attention usually is devoted to ‘founding fathers’
such as Thucydides, Machiavelli and Kant, while a
host of individuals who contributed to the institutionalized academic study of international politics
are routinely neglected. While academic scholars
such as James Bryce, Frederick S. Dunn, Pitman
Potter and Paul S. Reinsch may not be as historically
fascinating, they are much more relevant for tracing
the actual development of the field.
Presentism
The widespread tendency to write the history of the
field in terms of its participation in an ancient or
classic tradition of thought often serves to confer
legitimacy on a contemporary research program.
One of the primary purposes of the various histories
of IR is to say something authoritative about the
field’s present character, and this often contributes
to the tendency to distort the history of the field. In
order either to advocate a new direction for the field
and to criticize its current structure, or, conversely,
to defend the status quo, scholars often feel compelled to justify their position by referring to and
characterizing the general evolution of the field.
For example, histories that seek to account for the
rise and subsequent dominance of realist theory
frequently feel obliged to demonstrate the timeless
insights of the realist tradition, beginning with
Thucydides or Machiavelli. And those who periodically criticize the pluralistic character of the field
quite often make reference to an earlier period when
there was supposedly a dominant paradigm or
approach that united it. The crux of the matter is
that many of the attempts to reflect on the history of
IR are undertaken largely for ‘presentist’ purposes
rather than with the intention of carefully and accurately reconstructing the past.
‘Whig’ history, which Herbert Butterfield (1959:
v) described as the tendency ‘to emphasize certain
principles of progress in the past and to produce a
story which is the ratification if not the glorification
of the present’, and the problem of presentism in
general, has become a controversial issue among
those who are engaged in writing the history of
the social sciences (Collini et al., 1983; Dryzek and
Leonard, 1988; Farr et al., 1990; Gunnell, 1991;
Ross, 1991). The problem with presentism is not
that historical analysis is utilized to make a point
about the present, but that history is distorted as it is
reconstructed to legitimate or criticize a position
that the writer has set out in advance to support or
to undermine. Whig history ‘consists in writing
history backwards’, whereby the ‘present theoretical consensus of the discipline … is in effect taken
as definitive, and the past is then reconstituted as a
teleology leading up to and fully manifested in it’
(Collini et al., 1983: 4).
Given the elusive but persistent goal of mainstream IR in the United States to achieve the status
of a ‘true’ science, it is understandable why so
many of the existing accounts of the history of
the field continue to be Whiggish in character.
Histories of the field, and images of that history, are
frequently advanced for the purpose of either illustrating theoretical progress and scientific advance
or diagnosing an obstacle that is preventing the field
from making scientific progress (Brecher, 1999).
George Stocking provided an early and persuasive
explanation for why the professional social scientist
was likely to be Whiggish. According to Stocking,
there is ‘a sort of implicit whiggish presentism virtually built into the history of science and by extension, into the history of the behavioral sciences’
(Stocking, 1965: 213). The reigning logical positivist account of science that was offered by
philosophers of science during the 1950s and
1960s, which is the medium through which most
social scientists acquired their understanding of
science, was one of incremental and cumulative
progress whereby a greater understanding of the
natural world was made possible by an increasing
correspondence between theory and fact. Since logical positivists claimed that there was an essential
unity and hierarchy of scientific method, the history
of social science was bound sooner or later to replicate the same forward advance of knowledge.
ON THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF IR
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (1970) challenged the logical positivist
account of science and provided a basic impetus for
post-positivist philosophers and historians of
science. Not only did Kuhn attack logical positivism’s central premise of the separation of theory
and fact, as well as the correspondence theory of
truth, but he sought to replace the orthodox textbook account of the history of science with the idea
of a discontinuous history marked by scientific revolutions, that is, ‘those non-cumulative developmental episodes in which an older paradigm is replaced
in whole or part by an incompatible new one’
(Kuhn, 1970: 92). Kuhn’s theory of paradigms and
scientific revolutions represented a significant challenge to the orthodox account of scientific development. The crucial point of Kuhn’s revisionist
account of the history of science was his argument
that there was no transcendental vantage point
from which to claim that the replacement of one
paradigm by another constituted ‘progress’,
because the criteria for progress was paradigmspecific. While Kuhn made a significant impact on
philosophers and historians of science, many of
whom were displeased by the relativistic implications of the argument that resulted in the inability to
vindicate scientific progress, his book had an
equally dramatic impact on the field of IR, especially with respect to how many scholars have
come to understand the history of the field. The fact
that IR scholars increasingly have turned to Kuhn
and other philosophers of science, particularly
Imre Lakatos (1970), who, for many, appeared to
re-establish evaluative criteria of progress, serves to
illustrate the point that the task of writing the
history of the field often has been subordinate to the
more fundamental task of demonstrating progress
in the field.
Paradigms and the Historiography of IR
There are two principal ways in which the work of
Kuhn in particular, and the literature emanating
from the philosophy and history of science in
general, has had an impact on the historiography of
IR. First, IR scholars quickly set out to establish
their own paradigms. The situation was very much
the same in political science where political scientists began to use the word paradigm to denote specific schools of thought such as behavioralism
(Almond, 1966). In IR, realism has been assumed
by many to be the leading candidate for a paradigm,
and scholars have repeatedly undertaken the task of
defining and operationalizing the core assumptions
of the realist paradigm (Guzzini, 1998; Keohane,
1983; Lijphart, 1974b; Vasquez, 1983). In a historical sociology of realism, Stefano Guzzini argues
that the realist paradigm that was most eloquently
articulated by Hans J. Morgenthau served the
9
disciplinary function of defining an independent
field of study. Realism, according to Guzzini, ‘set
the paradigmatic boundaries of the discipline’
(1998: 27). While Morgenthau argued that international politics, like politics in general, was characterized by a continuous struggle for power, he
maintained that the struggle was qualitatively different in the international field where an over-arching central authority was missing (Morgenthau,
1948). The notion, which later would become the
cardinal claim of neorealists, that the international
system was characterized by a condition of anarchy, helped to differentiate domestic politics from
international politics (Waltz, 1979). The exclusive
focus that neorealists placed on the anarchical
structure of the international system subsequently
came to provide the predominant framework for
analyzing a wide variety of issues in the areas of
international security, international organization,
foreign policy and political economy.
The prevalence by which references are made to
the realist paradigm have led some to term it the ‘traditional paradigm’ which, according to Arend
Lijphart, ‘revolves around the notions of state sovereignty and its logical corollary, international anarchy’ (1974b: 43). Quite frequently references to the
realist paradigm are used interchangeably with
references to the ‘realist tradition’ or the ‘realist
school of thought’. Recently, a number of scholars
have problematized the notion that realism represents a singular, coherent theoretical position, and
instead have argued that there are actually a variety
of realisms (Ashley, 1981; Doyle, 1997; Dunne,
1997; Frankel, 1996; Goldmann, 1988; Guzzini,
1998). Nevertheless, almost everyone in the field is
able to identify the central tenets that are associated
with realism, which typically include the following
claims: that the sovereign state is the most important
actor in international politics; that state behavior can
be explained rationally; that states are unitary actors;
that there is a sharp distinction between domestic
and international politics; that states pursue power in
an anarchical self-help setting; and that the issues of
war and peace are paramount. The dominance of
realism has led Jack Donnelly to suggest that ‘tracing
the fate of realism provides a partial yet still useful
survey of the development of the field of international relations’ (1995: 175).
Yet while realism is considered by many to be
the leading paradigm in the field, it has certainly not
been the only candidate for paradigmatic status.
Scholars have made reference to a host of alternative paradigms, which are almost always defined in
opposition to the propositions of realism and whose
origins are typically linked to developments in
international politics. A classical example of this,
even though it allegedly predates the realist paradigm, is the so-called idealist paradigm of the
inter-war period. John Vasquez claims ‘that the
first stage of international relations inquiry was
10
HANDBOOK OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
dominated by the idealist paradigm’, which was
‘important in terms of institutionalizing the field
and creating the emphasis on peace and war’ (1998:
33–4). The central features of the so-called idealist
paradigm, which largely have been defined retrospectively by post-Second World War realist critics, are the exact antithesis of the tenets attributed
to realism (Bull, 1972; Carr, [1939] 1964; Guzzini,
1998; Hollis and Smith, 1991; Kegley and
Wittkopf, 1989; M.J. Smith, 1986; Vasquez, 1998).
Some of the other rival paradigms to realism have
included the ‘behavioralist paradigm’ (Lijphart,
1974a), ‘world politics paradigm’ (Keohane and Nye,
1972), global society and neo-Marxist paradigms
(Holsti, 1985), a ‘new paradigm for global politics’
(Mansbach and Vasquez, 1981), and pluralism
(Little, 1996; Viotti and Kauppi, 1999).
The Great Debates
Kuhn’s concept of a paradigm as well as other concepts borrowed from the philosophy and history of
science, such as Lakatos’s (1970) conception of a
‘scientific research programme’, have not only been
used to provide grounds for defining distinct
‘schools of thought’, but also to evaluate the overall
evolution of the field as well as specific approaches
in the field (Ferguson and Mansbach, 1993;
Guzzini, 1998; Keohane, 1983; Kugler, 1993;
Lijphart, 1974b; Smith, 1987; Tellis, 1996;
Vasquez, 1998; Walt, 1997). Arend Lijphart, for
example, has argued that ‘the development of international relations since the Second World War fit’s
Kuhn’s description of scientific revolutions’
(1974a: 12). The underlying purpose of utilizing
analytical frameworks borrowed from the philosophy and history of science largely has been to
demonstrate that scientific advances are being made
and that the field as a whole is progressing. In the
quest for cognitive authority over the subject matter
of international politics, IR has been drawn to
philosophers of science in the belief that they can
provide the grounds for empirical judgment and
evaluation. Ferguson and Mansbach, for example,
note that the attraction of the Kuhnian framework
for describing the history of IR is that it allowed
‘international relations scholars to see progress in
their field while surrounded by theoretical incoherence’ (Ferguson and Mansbach, 1993: 22). Yet this
is simply a misuse of Kuhn, since he argued that his
account of the development of science was not
applicable to the history of the social sciences, since
they were ‘pre-paradigmatic’. Moreover, analytical
constructs such as idealism and realism do not meet
the criteria of a paradigm as Kuhn described it. And
while Kuhn’s framework has been employed to
demonstrate progress, his basic argument was that it
was not possible to speak of progress from a
second-order perspective.
Within the orthodox historiography of IR, it has
been through the organizing device of the image of
a series of ‘great debates’ that the story of the
field’s development has been framed. This has
served to demonstrate either coherence or incoherence but, most commonly, scientific progress. The
widespread belief that the field’s history has been
characterized by three successive great debates is so
pervasive and dominant that, as Waever notes,
‘there is no other established means of telling the
history of the discipline’ (1998: 715). The story of
the field’s three great debates is, as Steve Smith
(1995) and Kjell Goldmann (1996) have argued,
one of the most dominant self-images of the field.
While all academic disciplines experience their
share of disciplinary controversy, IR may be unique
in that most practitioners believe that the history of
the field has been singularly marked by these
defining debates. This view has been reinforced by
explaining the debates in terms of exogenous influences such as the outbreak of the Second World
War, the rise of OPEC, the Vietnam debacle and the
end of the Cold War. For many in the field, it seems
self-evident that changes in the practice of international politics necessarily and directly bring
about a transformation in how the subject is studied
and taught. This is, for example, the standard explanation of the alleged paradigm shift from ‘idealism’
to ‘realism’ that occurred after the Second World
War. Perhaps more than any other claim about the
general history of the field, that which postulates
three great debates must be critically examined
(Kahler, 1997; Schmidt, 1998a, 1998b; Smith,
1995; Waever, 1998; Wilson, 1998). It is not
entirely clear that all of the debates actually have
taken place, and an examination of the discursive
artifacts of the field leads one to ask if the field’s
history has been seriously distorted by viewing it
within this framework. I do not deny that the field
has experienced numerous controversies, but I
question the appropriateness of understanding them
in terms of the conventional story of the field’s
three great debates.
According to the conventional wisdom, the first
great debate, which Miles Kahler (1997) has termed
the ‘foundational myth of the field’, was between
the interwar ‘idealists’ and the post-war ‘realists’.5
Almost every historical account concedes that the
realists won the first debate and, as a result, reoriented the field in a more practical and scientific
direction (Dunn, 1948; Fox, 1949; Guzzini, 1998;
Kirk, 1947; M.J. Smith, 1986; Thompson, 1960).
The alleged superiority of the realist view has made
it appear unnecessary to consider carefully the
nature of the claims made by those writing in the
field prior to the Second World War or even
the writings of many of those who are considered as
early realists. The interwar ‘idealists’, who are
greatly disparaged, are typically depicted as a group
of utopian pacifists and legalists who focused their
ON THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF IR
attention on reforming international politics rather
than on analyzing the realities of politics among
nations. The ‘debate’, which allegedly took place as
the League of Nations system broke down, is often
described in Kuhnian terms. While the idealists supposedly envisioned ever-lasting peace, the Second
World War is depicted as a glaring anomaly representing a severe crisis in the idealist paradigm,
which eventually resulted in its replacement by the
realist paradigm, which was superior in its ability
to rationally explain the persistent and ubiquitous
struggle for power among nations (Guzzini, 1998;
Hollis and Smith, 1991; Vasquez, 1998). Sometimes
the idealists are represented as alchemists who were
concerned with ‘what ought to be’ while the realists
are portrayed as scientists focusing on ‘what is’,
which was a prerequisite for creating a science of
politics (Carr, [1939] 1964). This story of the
‘debate’ between ‘idealists’ and ‘realists’ continues
to exert a strong influence on how the field understands its own history, and this accounts in part for
the perpetual need to retell the tale of how IR was
once rooted in idealism but was fortunate, after the
Second World War, to have embraced realism.
The second great debate, as characteristically
described in the literature, took place within the
context of the behavioral revolution that was
already deeply impacting the social sciences, especially political science, and which pitted ‘traditionalists’ against ‘behavioralists’ or ‘scientists’. The
debate is symbolized by the intellectual exchange
between Hedley Bull (1966), who sought to defend
what he termed the ‘classical approach’, and
Morton Kaplan (1966), who was one of the early
advocates of what came to be known as the
‘scientific approach’. A growing sentiment among
American scholars was that the field was losing
ground in its quest to acquire the mantle of science.
While realism, it was argued, served a number of
paradigmatic functions, some scholars claimed that
its tenets, such as the a priori foundational claim
that the struggle for power stemmed from basic biological drives rooted in human nature, as well as its
methodology, which relied heavily on historical
examples, were preventing the field from achieving
scientific status.
As in the case of political science, the debate
became polarized between those who believed that
the methods of the natural sciences, or at least those
described by logical-positivist philosophers of
science as the hypothetico-deductive model, could
be emulated and adopted in the study of international politics, versus those who argued that the
study of the social world was not amenable to the
strict empirical methods of natural science (Knorr
and Rosenau, 1969; Morgenthau, 1946; Nicholson,
1996; Reynolds, 1973; Rogowski, 1968; Vital,
1967). George Liska described the period in which
the debate between traditionalists and behavioralists
11
took place as the ‘heroic decade’ and suggested that
the key division was ‘between those who are primarily interested in international relations and those
who are primarily committed to the elaboration of
social science’ (1966: 7). The debate over the
merits and adequacy of a positivistic approach
surely has not diminished, but there is, nevertheless, a common view that the debate helped to
foster the scientific identity of the field through the
widespread acceptance and utilization of scientific
methods which aided in the task of developing a
cumulative theory of international politics. Morton
Kaplan’s (1957) systems theory, Karl Deutsch’s
(1953, 1964) communications and cybernetics
theory, Thomas Schelling’s (1960) early game
theory, Richard Snyder, H.W. Bruck and Burton
Sapin’s (1954, 1962) development of decisionmaking theory, and J. David Singer and Melvin
Small’s (1972) data collection in their correlates of
war project at the University of Michigan, are
generally viewed as contributing to the scientific
identity of the field.
Historical accounts of the third debate tend to be
more ambiguous than that of the other two debates,
but it is commonly described as an inter-paradigm
debate that took place in the early 1980s among
realists, pluralists and structuralists (Banks, 1985;
Maghroori, 1982; Olson and Groom, 1991;
Waever, 1996). The typical explanation of the origins of the third debate holds that, during the 1970s,
realism fell on some difficult times when events in
the realm of international politics, particularly in
the economic sphere but also regarding matters of
peace and security, appeared to contradict some of
the key realist assumptions about the nature of interstate politics (S. Smith, 1987). As a result of this
apparent incongruity, it is generally believed that
alternative ‘approaches’ such as Robert Keohane
and Joseph Nye’s ([1977] 1989) theory of ‘complex
interdependence’, Immanuel Wallerstein’s (1974,
1980) ‘world systems theory’, John Burton’s ‘cobweb theory’ (1972), and ‘dependency theory’
(Cardoso and Faletto, 1979; Evans, 1979) were
developed and directly challenged many of the
central tenets of realism. Most fundamentally, critics of realism attacked the core claims of statecentrism, the notion that independence rather than
interdependence characterized the condition of
international politics, and that a clear distinction
could be made between ‘high politics’ (i.e., military
and security issues) and ‘low politics’ (i.e., economic, environmental and human rights issues). It
has been suggested that it was within this context of
a growing focus on interdependence (Cooper, 1968;
Rosecrance and Stein, 1973) that the distinct subfield of International Political Economy emerged
(Katzenstein et al., 1999).
While it was argued that the publication of
Waltz’s Theory of International Politics (1979)
12
HANDBOOK OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
gave a new lease on life to realism in the form of
neorealism, which rapidly became the new orthodoxy, most accounts of the third debate do not conclude that realism was the victor. Unlike the
previous two ‘great debates’, the ‘third debate’ is,
according to Waever, ‘seen as a debate not to be
won, but a pluralism to live with’ (Waever, 1996:
155). In other words, claims about the ascendancy of
neorealism did not mean that adherents of a liberal
(pluralist) or Marxist (globalist) approach stopped
contributing to the discourse of IR, and some have
even questioned whether the three ‘paradigms’ were
ever in competition with one another. Adding to the
confusion of understanding this period of disciplinary history in terms of a ‘third debate’ was the
emergence, during the 1980s, of a number of postpositivist approaches that were sharply critical of all
the mainstream approaches in the field (Der Derian
and Shapiro, 1989; George and Campbell, 1990;
Peterson, 1992). According to Yosef Lapid, the
attack by feminists, Frankfurt School critical theorists, and post-structuralists on what they perceived
to be the positivist epistemological foundations of
the field signaled the dawn of a ‘third debate’,
which he claimed consisted of a ‘disciplinary effort
to reassess theoretical options in a “post-positivist”
era’ (1989: 237). That the literature can simultaneously make reference to two fundamentally different controversies under the same label of the ‘third
debate’ should be enough to indicate that there is
something seriously wrong with this understanding
of the history of the field.
What’s Wrong With the Image
of the Great Debates?
The newest cohort of disciplinary historians have
both noted the peculiarity of the field’s self-image
being derived from the idea of a set of recurrent
debates and pointed to some of the problems that
are involved in viewing the history of the field in
this manner (Goldmann, 1996; Kahler, 1997;
Schmidt, 1998a, 1998b; Smith, 1995; Waever,
1998; Wilson, 1998). There are so many problems
and difficulties involved in understanding the
history of the field within the framework of the
three great debates that we might be better off simply to reject discussing this account of how the field
has developed. In the first place, when attention is
directed to the details of the field’s history, it is not
evident that all of the three debates actually took
place. This is especially the case with respect to the
first ‘great debate’ (Wilson, 1998). Second, the stylized versions of the debates do not do justice to the
nature of the controversies that were in fact taking
place. Third, by focusing only on the three great
debates, a number of additional and, extremely
important, disciplinary controversies continue to
be overlooked. Finally, the use of the analytical
framework of a series of great debates to account
for the field’s history is a conservative move that
gives the field a greater sense of coherence than the
actual history of the field warrants (Waever, 1998).
One of the surprising findings to emerge from the
recent scholarship on the history of the field is that,
contrary to popular belief, the field was never dominated by a group of utopian scholars who adhered to
something akin to what has been described as the
idealist paradigm (Baldwin, 1995; Kahler, 1997;
Little, 1996; Long, 1991; Long and Wilson, 1995;
Osiander, 1998; Schmidt, 1998a, 1998b; Wilson,
1998). In most cases, it is difficult to find a scholar
who was self-consciously and institutionally a
member of the field of IR who adhered to the tenets
that are frequently associated with a construct
termed ‘idealism’ or ‘utopianism’. While it is the
case that the interwar scholars had a practical mission to reform the practice of international politics,
this objective, which is endemic to the very nature
of second-order metapractices, has continued to
animate the history of the field. This objective, I
argue, does not in and of itself qualify the enterprise
as utopian. Many of those who have been dubbed
‘idealists’ turn out, upon closer inspection, to subscribe to a position that is quite different from the
manner in which they have been characterized in
the secondary literature. The conventional label of
idealism that has been attached to the interwar
period of IR scholarship seriously misrepresents the
actual character of the conversation that was being
directed toward understanding international politics
(Osiander, 1998; Schmidt, 1998a; Wilson, 1998).
Apart from seriously distorting the formative years
of the field’s history, the idealist tag has inhibited
understanding some of the deep discursive continuities that exist between the present and the past.
Perhaps the most important continuity is the concept of anarchy that has given the field of IR a distinct discursive identity. Although it might appear
to those who are not familiar with the institutional
history of IR that anarchy is some newly discovered
research puzzle that lends itself to the latest tools of
social scientific inquiry, anarchy – and the closely
related concept of sovereignty – has served as the
core constituent principle throughout the evolution
of the field (Schmidt, 1998b). The interwar scholars
were keenly aware of the fact that their subject
matter, which included an analysis of the causes of
war and peace, directly dealt with issues arising
from the existence of sovereign states in a condition
of anarchy (Dickinson, 1916, 1926). Many of those
writing during the interwar period understood that
sovereignty and anarchy were inextricably associated with, and mutually constitutive of, each other,
and this explains why much of the interwar discourse
focused on the concept of state sovereignty. In
their study of the state, political scientists established a theoretical link between the internal and
external aspects of state sovereignty as well as
ON THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF IR
between domestic and international politics. The
juristic theory of the state, which, during the early
1900s, was the most influential paradigm for the
study of political science, depicted the international
milieu as one where states led an independent and
isolated existence (Willoughby, 1918). Proponents
of juristic theory evoked the pre-contractual image
of individuals living in a state of nature to describe
the external condition of states and drew many of
the same pessimistic conclusions that realists have
made about politics conducted in the absence of a
central authority.
Beginning in the 1920s, juristic theory was challenged by a new group of thinkers who collectively
put forth the theory of pluralism that fundamentally
transformed the discourse of both political science
and IR (Gunnell, 1993; Little, 1996; Schmidt,
1998b). Pluralists such as Harold Laski (1921,
1927) and Mary Parker Follett ([1918] 1934) argued
that juristic theory was entirely inconsistent with
the modern condition of interdependence, and this
clearly indicated that the state was no longer
omnipotent and immune from all other sources of
authority. The interdependent quality of international politics, which pluralists took to be
axiomatic, along with the existence of many international public unions (Reinsch, 1911), raised serious doubts about the validity of the claim that each
nation-state was entirely sovereign in relation to all
other actors. There are many similarities between
the pluralist critique of juristic theory and the
debate over interdependence that took place during
the 1970s, and yet there is almost no recognition of
this earlier discourse (de Wilde, 1991). Richard Little
argues that one of the main reasons why the intellectual heritage of pluralism has been obscured stems
from the ‘willingness of the discipline to accept the
attachment of the idealist tag to this seminal literature’ (1996: 69). The ‘idealist tag’ has also
obscured the manner in which the interwar scholars
approached the study of international security
(Baldwin, 1995) and international organization.
While the interwar scholarship is most often associated with the ill-fortunes of the League of Nations,
not everyone writing during this period assumed that
the introduction of this new international organization would by itself alter fundamentally the logic of
international politics (Duggan, 1919; Hicks, 1920).
The most pressing theoretical issue for those
involved in the study of international organization
concerned the manner by which various conceptions of state sovereignty could be reconciled with
the operation of the League of Nations. This was
certainly the case for Pitman Benjamin Potter, who
was the person responsible for giving specific form
to the study of international organization in the
United States (Potter, 1923, 1925).
Refuting the notion that the interwar period was
distinguished by idealism does not, however, rest
13
on denying that the field experienced a change of
emphasis after the Second World War. By the early
1940s, it was apparent that the field was undergoing
a transition, which was best exemplified by the
argument that the study of international politics
should replace international organization as the
central focus of the field (Dunn, 1948; Fox, 1949;
Kirk, 1947; Schuman, 1933; Schwarzenberger,
1941). Those who began to enter the profession
under the self-proclaimed ‘realist’ identity were
responsible for changing the emphasis in the field, but
it is important not to exaggerate the discontinuities
between the pre- and post-war discourse of IR. Like
those writing before the Second World War, the aim
of many of the ‘realists’ was to speak truth to power.
This was especially the case with the émigré scholars who deeply impacted the discourse of both political science and IR. A careful reading of the texts by
E.H. Carr ([1939] 1964), Hans J. Morgenthau
(1948) and Frederick L. Schuman (1933) reveals a
number of continuities with the earlier discourse
which have been entirely overlooked as a consequence of viewing their work in terms of the dubious dichotomy between idealism and realism. While
it is the case that Morgenthau and the other ‘realists’
helped to make ‘international politics’ the nucleus of
the field, it was not the case that those writing before
the outbreak of the Second World War were unfamiliar with many of the core claims of the ‘new’
power politics model (Bryce, 1922; Reinsch, 1900).
The discursive artifacts of the field’s history do not
lend much support to the claim that a debate, in the
sense of an intellectual exchange between opposing
theoretical positions or paradigms, ever took place
between the interwar and the post-Second World
War scholars.
Compared with the recent research on the interwar period of the field’s history, the details generally associated with the ‘second great debate’ or the
‘traditionalism versus scientism debate’ have not
been carefully and systematically investigated.
Consequently, this later period is not very well
understood, and additional research is required.
Within the existing literature on the second debate,
which typically construes it as a debate about the
scientific status of the field, two different accounts
of the nature of the controversy have been put forth.
Many of the early accounts of the controversy heralded it as a ‘great debate’ that contributed to a major
transformation in the field (Bull, 1972; Kaplan,
1966; Lijphart, 1974a, 1974b). Lijphart, for example, claimed that the ‘traditionalism-science debate
of the 1960s’ was more substantive and fundamental than the earlier debate between idealism and
realism (1974a: 11). He argued that the behavioral
revolution in IR resulted in a new paradigm – ‘the
behavioral paradigm’ – that was at great odds with the
substantive claims of the traditional realist paradigm.
According to this view, the traditionalists – those
14
HANDBOOK OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
who approached the study of international politics
from a legal, philosophical, historical, or inductive
point of view – lost out to what was perceived to be
a scientific approach that sought to emulate the
methods of the natural sciences. The result was that
IR became more scientific, realism lost its dominant
position, and the field was brought more in line with
the other social sciences.
Beginning with John Vasquez’s influential book
The Power of Power Politics (1983), an alternative
view of the ‘second debate’ began to emerge that
argued that the controversy was really only a pseudo
debate which was largely confined to methodological issues and did not involve substantive aspects
of the subject matter of international politics
(Guzzini, 1998; Hollis and Smith, 1991; Holsti, 1985,
1998; Vasquez, 1998). Vasquez (1983) sought to
demonstrate that the behavioralists largely worked
within the realist paradigm and merely sought to
advance the methodological credentials of the field.
In this manner, the debate has been construed as a
‘methodological debate’ which took place ‘within a
single [realist] theoretical orientation’, and that it
was ‘about how to conduct inquiry within that
approach’ (Hollis and Smith, 1991: 31). Holsti
endorses this view and argues that the ‘behavioural
revolution did not inaugurate a new way of looking
at the world, a new paradigm, or a new set of normative problems’ (1998: 33). One of the more significant implications of this revisionist interpretation
is the view that the ‘field has been far more coherent, systematic, and even cumulative than all the talk
about contending approaches and theories implies’
(Vasquez, 1998: 42).
While I concede that there is some merit in each
of these accounts, neither sufficiently captures the
nature of the disputes that occurred during the 1950s
and 1960s. One way of coming to grips with this
period is to view the events in terms of Gunnell’s
framework of the orders of discourse. A crucial
issue that informed the behavioral debate was the
problem of IR’s cognitive authority as a secondorder discourse. It increasingly became the case,
especially within the American context, that science
provided the model for achieving the authority of
knowledge, and the quest during the 1950s and
1960s, as well as before and after this period, was to
emulate what were believed to be the canons of
inquiry in natural science. The commitment to
achieving a body of knowledge about international
politics that was scientifically credible and that
could command practical authority has always been
a defining goal of the field. What has changed
over the course of time is the content of the idea
of science.
One of the consequences of neglecting a careful
study of the history of the field has been a failure to
recognize adequately the work of the members of
the Chicago School of political science. In the
1920s and 1930s, Harold Lasswell, Charles
Merriam and Quincy Wright believed that they
were at the forefront of developing a universal
science of politics (Fox, 1975; Kahler, 1997). As
William T.R. Fox has noted, when World Politics
began publication in 1948, there were two very different schools of thought reshaping the academic
study of IR: the realist school and the school led by
Merriam, which ‘had its roots in homegrown
American political science, in pluralist pragmatism,
and in an abiding faith in the power of the human
intellect gradually to create a better world’ (1975:
597). The Chicago School’s idea of a science of
international politics was one that viewed international relations as merely a single subdivision of
a more inclusive approach that focused on the role
of power across a broad range of associations from
the local to the global level.
There are a number of explanations of why the
idea of science that the bahavioralists brought to the
field during the 1950s and 1960s largely centered
on the concept of an international system (Kaplan,
1957; Rosenau, 1969). The idea of a system was
central to the behavioral movement, but its application to IR took on a number of distinctive and problematic properties. Within political science, the
systems approach (Easton, 1953) was meant to
replace the study of the state, which the behavioralists deemed to be archaic and contributing to the
backwardness of the discipline. Yet within IR,
where the influence of the behavioral persuasion
arrived late and where the theory of realism was
dominant, the adoption of the concept of a system
did not supersede the focus on the interaction of
states, since it would have risked the very identity
of the field (Little, 1978, 1985). The properties
accorded to the ‘international system’ were largely
derived from a detailed, and increasingly quantitative, analysis of the units (states) (Buzan and Little,
2000). The systems approach gave rise to what has
been termed the ‘level of analysis problem’, which
involves the question of the relative weight that
should be attributed to the units as opposed to the
system as a whole (Buzan, 1995; Hollis and Smith,
1991; Singer, 1969). Waltz’s (1979) later attempt to
construct a systems theory was based on the model
of microeconomics, which sought to overcome the
problem of reductionism that he attributed to the
earlier generation of systems thinkers. It would
appear that Buzan and Little (2000) are correct to
argue that the concept of an international system is
deeply contested, and I would suggest that carefully
examining the period that has been construed in
terms of the second debate might add a sense of
clarity to the present conversation.
Whether or not we accept the idea that a ‘great
debate’ took place, it is important that we do not
de-emphasize the consequences that the increasing
attachment to scientism had for the development of
ON THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF IR
the field. First, it has resulted in IR surrendering
its intellectual autonomy to a number of cognate
fields that appeared, for whatever reason, to be more
scientific. This is plainly, and I would argue unfortunately, the case today with the field’s fascination
with, and incessant borrowing from, microeconomic
models of analysis. Second, the commitment to
science contributed to a growing rift between the
American scholarly community, which sought to
emulate the positivist approach to knowledge, and
much of the rest of the world that remained deeply
suspicious of studying international politics in this
manner. The members of the English School,
Hedley Bull, Herbert Butterfield, John Vincent,
Martin Wight and others, were, for example, ‘skeptical of the possibility of a scientific study of
International Relations’ (Dunne, 1998: 7). They
chose to focus on what they termed an ‘international
society’ that involved the study of history, culture,
religion and philosophy (Dunne, 1998; Epp, 1998;
Grader, 1988; Little, 2000). Yet their work, as well
as most of the scholarship from Britain, was, until
recently, almost completely ignored by American
scholars. A third consequence was a divorce
between political theory and international relations
theory (Boucher, 1998). Just as the history of political thought became a focal point of attack by behavioralists in political science, the idea that the study
of international political theory could advance the
scientific credentials of the field was rejected.
Fourth, the bifurcation of political theory and international theory had the effect of marginalizing
normative concerns and contributed to what Steve
Smith has termed the ‘forty-years detour’ whereby it
became ‘simply old-fashioned, and very unacademic, to introduce normative concerns into analysis
unless they were themselves to be the objects of
analysis’ (1992: 489). The field has only recently
begun to recover from this detour and has rediscovered normative international political theory.
The limitations of utilizing the ‘great debates’
framework for understanding the history of the field
is plainly apparent when we come to the 1980s and
the so-called ‘third great debate’. As the field has
become increasingly pluralistic, perhaps owing, in
part, to its institutional growth, there seems to be a
plethora of debates. In addition to the two versions
of the ‘third debate’ mentioned earlier, the interparadigm and post-positivism debates, there is the
debate between neorealism and neoliberalism
(Baldwin, 1993; Kegley, 1995); between rationalists and reflectivists (Keohane, 1988; Walker,
1989); between rationalists and constructivists
(Katzenstein et al., 1999; Ruggie, 1998; Wendt,
1999; see also Fearon and Wendt, Chapter 3 in this
volume); between ‘offensive’ and ‘defensive’ realists (Mearsheimer, 1994/1995; Schweller, 1996);
and between communitarians and cosmopolitans
(Brown, 1987, 1992; Hoffman, 1988). Yet this
15
listing only begins to scratch the surface, since
there are also numerous debates within specific
approaches such as constructivism, feminism,
realism and post-structuralism.
Although it is difficult to provide an adequate historical perspective on these more recent developments, it is simply impossible to lump all of these
controversies under one grand master debate. No
matter what general characteristics we assign to the
debate, it would not help us to understand the most
recent history of the field. Waever has suggested
that one way to get beyond the confusion of viewing recent developments in terms of a singular third
debate is by acknowledging that we have entered a
‘fourth debate’ (1996). Here Waever, like several
others in the field (Lapid, 1989; Smith, 2000;
Vasquez, 1995), suggests that we make a sharp differentiation between, on the one hand, approaches,
such as critical theory, post-structuralism, postmodernism and specific versions of constructivism and
feminism, that fall under the post-positivism label
and, on the other hand, the mainstream, which he
argues is wedded to a rationalist orthodoxy. The latter is seen as resulting from what Waever (1996)
terms a ‘neo-neo synthesis’ in which, during the
1980s, neoliberalism and neorealism essentially
became indistinguishable on the basis of their
shared commitment to a rationalist research program. This view of a ‘neo-neo-synthesis’ is more
popular outside the United States than within,
where neoliberalism and neorealism continue to
represent the basic divisions within the field despite
the new emphasis on constructivism.
Post-positivism has sparked a considerable
amount of meta-theoretical reflection on the current
identity and composition of the field. The activity
of reflecting on the nature of theory has come to
comprise a significant component of the discourse in
IR. As in other fields where the challenge to positivism has been mounted, post-positivists in IR
view the traditional epistemological foundations of
the field, often assumed to emanate from the
Enlightenment, as no longer a philosophically
defensible basis for making authoritative judgments
about validity in political inquiry. In this manner,
‘post-positivism has placed the scientific study
of world politics in a serious crisis’ (Vasquez, 1995:
234). Many of these ‘alternative’ or ‘dissident’
approaches seek to deconstruct the traditional positivist foundations of the field and to embrace a radical anti-foundationalism that can enable multiple
voices or perspectives to be heard. This is seen by
some as leading to a major restructuring of IR,
allowing for additional space in which to think
about the issues that currently comprise the subject
matter of the field (George, 1994; George and
Campbell, 1990; Neufeld, 1995). For others,
post-positivism, and postmodernism in particular,
has raised fears about relativism, as the loss of
16
HANDBOOK OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
an epistemological foundation is believed to
undermine the authority of scholars to provide
transcontextual grounds for truth (Rosenau, 1990;
Vasquez, 1995).
While there is little doubt that various postpositivist approaches have contributed to the field’s
pluralistic character, generated an expansive body
of interesting literature, and forced the field to confront a host of new meta-theoretical questions, how
large an impact they have made on the mainstream
core of the field is still not clear. Like previous
‘alternative’ approaches, the main object of
the post-positivist critique has been realism, yet
realism, in one form or another, survives and continues to provide what many would argue to be the
initial essential assumptions for explaining international politics as it has been traditionally defined by
the field of IR (Grieco, 1997; Jervis, 1998;
Mearsheimer, 1994/5). This can partly account for
why, of all the alternative approaches that have
entered the field since the early 1980s, Wendt’s particular conception of constructivism, which accepts
many of the assumptions of realism, is the approach
being taken most seriously by the mainstream
today. To the dismay of some of the critical scholars in the field, Wendt (1999) claims that his version of constructivism is able to entertain the role of
ideas, norms and the process of identity-formation
while at the same time subscribing to a realist
world-view and a positivist epistemology. In this
manner, some of the most recent literature on the
state of the field is heralding constructivism as the
field’s newest approach or paradigm to the study of
international politics (Katzenstein et al., 1999;
Walt, 1998).
CONCLUSION
Although there is a general sense that we already
know the field’s history, l have attempted to demonstrate that there are many problems with the conventional story about how the field has developed.
Some of the more recent work on the history of IR
suggests that many of our dominant understandings
of the field are nothing more than myths (Booth,
1996; Kahler, 1997; Wilson, 1998), and one of the
problems with such myths is that they often not
only misrepresent the past but continue to misinform the present. Research on the history of the field
is not simply an exercise in antiquarianism but an
attempt to increase our capacity to examine critically the contemporary nature of the field by an
understanding of the intellectual roots from which it
has evolved. There is an intimate link between disciplinary identity and the manner in which we
understand the history of the field. For a field that
appears to be perpetually consumed by identity
crises, careful attention to some of the previous
identities by which we were possessed would
represent a fruitful research agenda. There is ample
opportunity for the diverse approaches in the field
to explore their own intellectual roots and, thereby,
to recognize some of the continuities between the
past and the present. Such an exercise might even
help to prevent the tendency for the field to proclaim something quite old as new.
In order for the investigation of the history of the
field to receive the same intellectual respect as other
areas of research, more attention should be placed
on the theoretical and methodological assumptions
involved. The absence of such attention in much of
the existing literature on the history of the field has
served to reinforce the view that the history of IR is
self-evident or trivial. One example is the explicit as
well as implicit contextualism that has informed so
many of the orthodox accounts of the field’s development. Although it is often suggested that the
external context provided by ‘real world’ political
events can be conceived as an independent variable
that explains the character of the field at a specific
historical juncture, the actual link between the two
is seldom as straightforward and self-evident as it
might appear. The relationship between external
events and the internal disciplinary response manifested in conceptual or theoretical change must be
empirically demonstrated and not merely assumed.
Although IR is conceived as an academic enterprise
devoted to the study of international politics, this
does not automatically imply that the exogenous
events that comprise the subject matter at any given
point in time can explain what happens inside the
field. From the point of view of disciplinary history,
the crux of the issue should be how the field has, or
has not, responded intellectually to external factors
rather than how these factors can account for the
dynamics inside the field. And more attention
should be placed on the internal context of the field
such as its setting in the university system, sources
of funding and professional norms. An internal as
compared to an external focus may well help to
account for the distinct national differences in how
the field has developed.
While I have suggested that it might, for various
reasons, be beneficial for the various approaches or
schools of thought in the field to chronicle their own
discursive development, this does not mean that disciplinary history should merely serve as a vehicle for
legitimation and critique. As Gunnell has stated,
truth is very often more convincing than fiction and
carries as much critical force (1991). Although there
might be a tendency for histories of the field to be
presentist, it has become obvious that this often
results in serious distortions. Rather than seeking to
say something authoritative about the field’s present
character, it might be more useful to attempt to say
something definitive about the field’s past.
It is quite evident that a number of different
approaches and methodologies can be used to
ON THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF IR
recover the disciplinary history of IR. While I have
elsewhere advocated a historiographical approach
that can be described as a critical internal discursive
history (Schmidt, 1998a, 1998b), Guzzini (1998)
advocates a historical sociological approach, Waever
(1998) embraces a sociology of science view, and
Smith (1995) advocates a genealogical method
informed by the work of Foucault. There is room for
all these approaches and more, but the important
point is that disciplinary history can be a vehicle in
fostering critical insights and opening additional
space in which to think about the central dilemmas
that continue to confront the study of international
politics. These insights, however, depend on dispelling the misconceptions that have plagued past
work on the history of IR.
Notes
I wish to thank John G. Gunnell, Steve Smith and the editors for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier
versions of this chapter.
1 The abbreviation IR refers to the institutionalized
academic field of international relations.
2 The eight root disciplines included international law,
diplomatic history, military science, international politics,
international organization, international trade, colonial
government and the conduct of foreign relations. The disciplines with a world point of view included world geography, world history, psychology, sociology, language
and biology.
3 Waever, 1998 provides a very useful discussion of
the evolution in IR in Germany, France, the United
Kingdom and the United States.
4 Although few in number, there is a growing body of
literature that examines the development of IR from
within a specific country setting. For example, the edited
volume by Hugh C. Dyer and Leon Mangasarian (1989)
includes chapters on the study of IR in the former
Soviet Union, China, Brazil, the Federal Republic of
Germany, South Africa, France, Japan, Italy and the
United Kingdom among others. Other examples of this
undertaking include Chan, 1994; Groom, 1994; and
Jorgensen, 2000.
5 The first generation of self-ascribed academic realists and their most influential work included: E.H. Carr
1939; George F. Kennan, 1951; Hans J. Morgenthau,
1948; Reinhold Niebuhr, 1940; Frederick L. Schuman,
1933; Georg Schwarzenberger, 1941; and Nicholas J.
Spykman, 1942.
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Millennium - Journal of
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The Big Bangs of IR: The Myths That Your Teachers Still Tell You about 1648
and 1919
Benjamin de Carvalho, Halvard Leira and John M. Hobson
Millennium - Journal of International Studies 2011 39: 735 originally published online 24
March 2011
DOI: 10.1177/0305829811401459
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MILLENNIUM
Journal of International Studies
Article
The Big Bangs of IR:
The Myths That Your
Teachers Still Tell You
about 1648 and 1919
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
39(3) 735–758
© The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.
uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0305829811401459
mil.sagepub.com
Benjamin de Carvalho
Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), Norway
Halvard Leira
Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), Norway
John M. Hobson
University of Sheffield, UK
Abstract
International relations as we know them emerged through the peace of Westphalia, and the
discipline of International Relations emerged in 1919 and developed through a First Great Debate
between idealists and realists. These are the established myths of 1648 and 1919. In this article
we demonstrate how historical and historiographical scholarship has demolished these myths, but
that the myths regardless are pervasive in the current textbooks that are used in teaching future
IR scholars. Disciplinary dialogue seems to have failed completely. Based on a detailed reading
of the myths and their perpetuation, we discuss the consequences of the discipline’s reliance
on mythical origins, why there has been so little incorporation of revisionist insight and what
possibilities there are for enhancing the dialogue.
Keywords
empire, Eurocentrism, First Great Debate, historiography, historical sociology, IR Theory,
textbooks, Westphalia
Corresponding author:
Halvard Leira, NUPI, PB 8159 Dep., N 0033 Oslo, Norway
Email: Halvard.Leira@nupi.no
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736
Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39(3)
Introduction
When we were first introduced to the discipline of International Relations (IR) some
15–20 years ago, we were presented with stories of the origin of the discipline’s subject
matter and development, all of which appeared to be complete and settled as if it was all
carved in ancient stone. The years 1648 and 1919 figured centrally then as the formative
moments comprising, as it were, the ‘big bangs’ of the discipline. The small towns of
Münster and Osnabrück in Westphalia were presented as the place where the big modern
idea of the sovereign state and the anarchic states-system exploded into being and where
the life of empires and other hierarchical political formations ended, while 1919 was
presented as the year when the discipline itself exploded into existence with IR scholars
becoming for the very first time enthused with theorising about the international as a
subject matter in its own right insofar as it constituted an autonomous domain. But in the
ensuing years we observed the discipline evolve and, in the process, we encountered a
growing number of revisionist attempts that sought to problematise both 1648 and 1919,
helping cumulatively, albeit ‘sacrilegiously’, to recast these canonical dates into little
more than myths.
Historical and historiographical discussions began to take root in the discipline and
have gained a not inconsiderable momentum of their own, seeking to debunk old myths
while offering up alternative, not to mention rich and detailed, accounts of the complex
processes of sovereign state formation and the origins of the discipline. But when turning to teaching the discipline ourselves, and having had to make an informed choice
over which textbooks students would use as a foundation to knowledge of international
politics, we were dismayed to find that most of the historical and historiographical
insights of the last two decades have barely been incorporated. And thus the lamentable
situation emerges wherein because the mainstream of the discipline has failed to enter
into any kind of dialogue with these revisionist works so the myths of yesteryear are
perpetuated in the minds of generations of students as they in turn embark upon their
journeys into the world of IR.
This is surprising, at the very least, in the context of ‘1919’ given the substantial
meta-theoretical and theoretical opening up of the discipline that occurred after 1989,
and perplexing given the considerable efforts that have been made by revisionist scholars
to establish just such a dialogue. That the dialogue between the mainstream and the revisionist scholars on the emergence of sovereignty seems to be further away than ever is
not entirely surprising given the heavily presentist nature of the discipline.1 But this article will make the case that this lack of dialogue between the left and right hands of the
discipline concerning history and historiography is highly detrimental to the discipline
and its ability to make sense of the subject matter that it purports to have unique expertise
in. Here we shall confront and reconstruct the two central myths or ‘mythical big bangs’
of the discipline – specifically the ‘myth of 1919’ and the ‘myth of 1648’. The latter
1. For a related argument, see Duncan Bell, ‘Writing the World: Disciplinary History and Beyond’,
International Affairs 85, no. 1 (2009): 3–22; and more generally, J.M. Hobson and Stephen Hobden,
‘Conclusion: On the Road towards an Historicised World Sociology’, in Historical Sociology of
International Relations, eds S. Hobden and J.M. Hobson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
265–85.
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de Carvalho et al.
provides a foundational myth about the sovereign state, the anarchic states-system and its
underlying principles and institutions, while the former provides a foundational or originary myth about the discipline itself.
The myth of 1648 is detrimental because it provides a distorted view of how the
modern sovereign state and states-system came into being – and thus of the naturalness
and quality of the basic units that IR takes for granted, the result of which is to produce
a rigid statist ontology that is ill-equipped to handle the challenges of global governance,
suzerainty, empire and international hierarchy. The myth of 1919 is detrimental in at
least four fundamental ways: firstly, because it presents the discipline as an ahistorical
extrapolation backwards of current developments and concerns in international relations;
secondly, because it allows for a reading of the historiography of the discipline where
certain theoretical perspectives win out due to their ability to best explain the so-called
‘real world’; thirdly, because it glosses over the Eurocentric and racist foundations of the
discipline by providing a Whiggish reading of the discipline’s birth on the one hand,
while, on the other, providing an empiricist epistemology that is ill-equipped to handle
the many-faceted and constantly changing challenges that confront the discipline today;
and, fourthly, and following on directly from the third, is the problematic assumption that
IR underwent a miraculous virgin birth that occurred almost overnight in 1919 following
a gruelling 48-month gestation period on the blood-drenched battlefields of Europe.
In brief, as we explain in this article, these are myths of what we study and how we
study it and, as such, it matters a great deal that the discipline continues to perpetuate
them. As we shall see, perhaps the two key interrelated lowest common denominators of
these two myths is a shared Eurocentric metanarrative on the one hand, and the elision
of the role of empire in the theory and practice of IR on the other. In order to build our case
the article proceeds in three main parts. The first two sections consider each of the myths
in turn, beginning with a brief exploration of how the myths have been repeated in older
textbooks before moving on to explore the various revisionist readings and closing
with a survey of the state of play in more recent textbooks which reveals how the myths
continue to be perpetuated. Finally, we close the article with our Conclusion where we
consider why IR has been so reluctant to enter into dialogue with its own history, while
also reflecting on the consequences of a continued reliance on these myths and whether
it is possible to initiate a proper dialogue that could at least go some way to ameliorate
the situation. That said, though, we in no way wish to imply that we have ‘got it right’,
given that this would presuppose a mind–world duality which we do not subscribe to.2
What we are trying to do, however, is to open up a thinking-space which is necessarily
closed down by the traditional myths, while also shedding light on how the myths operate
as ahistorical-political constructs.
Before we begin our ‘journey of rediscovery’, however, a few words are in order
concerning the textbooks and our rationale for selecting them. We contend that textbooks
are highly important to the general understanding of IR, not only for students, but also
for the professionals of the discipline. A predictable consequence of the tendency of the
discipline to devolve into increasingly specialised pockets of research is that most active
researchers become increasingly reliant on textbook-knowledge of issues that are not
2. Cf. Patrick T. Jackson, The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations (Milton Park: Routledge, 2010).
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Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39(3)
directly related to their own areas of specialism. While textbooks tend on the whole to go
uncited, nevertheless they are vitally important in generating, as it were, a kind of lowest
common denominator that usually passes for the ‘common sense’ of the discipline. And,
despite the point that there are indeed some excellent textbooks available, many of which
we examine in this article, nevertheless considerations of availability, popularity/frequency of usage, price and name/author-recognition are often the decisive factors in their
adoption. The act of choosing appropriate textbooks is also made more difficult by the
lack of serious comparative reviews of them in the leading journals in the discipline.
And this, in turn, is often a function of the fact that textbooks have an importance that
is seriously undervalued and underestimated, with journal articles and monographs
weighted far more heavily in promotion rounds as well as research measurement indicators such as the UK’s Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) or Research Excellence
Framework (REF).
In the absence of any comprehensive and up-to-date data set on the usage of different
textbooks, our choice of which ones to review has necessarily been somewhat eclectic.
While we have attempted to cover the most widely-used textbooks, we have also tried to
provide a broad overview. Our first choice, based on the centrality of the English
language and the US and the UK as the sites of some of the leading universities in the
discipline, was to focus on English-language textbooks, particularly those used in the US
and the UK. For initial guidance we used a combination of the bestseller and relevance
lists for International Relations textbooks, found at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.3
Combining the results provided us with a list of books, most of which are on their third
or even higher editions, thereby implying a continuous market for them.4 Nevertheless,
the number of online sales is at best only a rough guide to what students read and what
can be found on curricula. To this initial list we thus added books that we have personally
encountered as well as those that are known to be either in wide use or held in high
esteem. However, because a number of textbooks that were consulted did not engage
either with the myth of 1648 or the myth of 1919, for the sake of space we have chosen
not to cite them here.
An Ontological Big Bang: The Myth of 1648
The ontology of IR, of course, starts with Westphalia. For IR orthodoxy has conventionally (and conveniently) dated the ontological emergence of the sovereign state, the
anarchic states-system and the interrelated end of the suzerain/heteronomous order of
the Respublica Christiana to the end of the Thirty Years’ War and the Treaties of
Westphalia in 1648.5 But this account has recently been subject to a growing number
3. Because these lists are updated hourly it should be noted that we consulted them at irregular intervals
during the autumn and winter of 2010/11.
4. And as far as possible we have consulted the current editions of the selected books. While a comparison of
the same books across editions could potentially yield valuable additional insight, we have left this aside
for reasons of space.
5. The Peace of Westphalia consisted of two relatively similar treaties: the Treaty of Münster (Instrumentum
Pacis Monasteriensis or IPM) and the Treaty of Osnabrück (Instrumentum Pacis Osnabrugensis or IPO).
Sweden participated in the negotiations in Osnabrück and guaranteed the treaty, while a French delegation
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de Carvalho et al.
of persuasive historical and historiographical revisions, the cumulative result of which
is the relegation of the traditional story of the emergence of the statist ontology of IR to
the status of a myth. Authors such as Benno Teschke, Stephen Krasner and Andreas
Osiander figure prominently among these ‘myth-busters’, and their attempts have been
published in prominent IR journals and by established university presses.6 The key
feature of these revisionist accounts is the argument that neither the modern state nor
the anarchic states-system originated in 1648, and that the enshrining or initiation of
sovereignty was all but missing within the Treaties of Westphalia, which in fact comprised a constitutional document for the Holy Roman Empire (HRE). From these accounts
alone one would anticipate that IR might at least begin to depart from the cosy
Westphalian account.7
Critically, the ‘Westphalian axiom’ is so entrenched that one need not look too far to
find examples of it. No less a figure than Hans Morgenthau, for instance, writes in
Politics among Nations that ‘the Treaty of Westphalia brought the religious wars to an
end and made the territorial state the cornerstone of the modern states system’.8 Leo
Gross refers to the Peace of Westphalia as ‘the end of an epoch and the opening of
another’,9 while, likewise, Adam Watson tells us that ‘[t]he Westphalian Settlement legitimized a commonwealth of sovereign states’.10 Last but not least, David Held informs us
that the Peace of Westphalia ‘entrenched, for the first time, the principle of territorial
sovereignty in inter-state affairs’.11 Either way, though, such references have abounded
throughout the IR canon.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
was present in Münster and guaranteed that the treaty was to be followed. The Holy Roman Emperor
and a number of representatives from different political units of the Empire were parties to the treaties.
There are a number of translations and editions of the treaties, many of which are available online. The
most authoritative editions, however, can be found on the website Acta Pacis Westphalicae (‘Document
edition of the Peace of Westphalia’), available at: http://www.pax-westphalica.de. Last accessed March 11,
2011. The treaties of Westphalia are also sometimes taken to include the settlement of the Eighty Years’
War between Spain and the Netherlands, as it was also negotiated in Münster. That treaty, however, was
signed on 30 January, while the Treaty of Münster traditionally referred to was signed on 24 October.
See Stephen D. Krasner, ‘Westphalia and All That’, in Ideas and Foreign Policy, ed. Judith Goldstein
and Robert O. Keohane (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 235–64; Stephen D. Krasner,
‘Compromising Westphalia’, International Security 20, no. 3 (1995): 115–51; Stephen D. Krasner,
Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Andreas Osiander,
The States System of Europe 1640–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Andreas Osiander,
‘Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth’, International Organization 55, no. 2
(2001): 251–87; Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648 (London: Verso, 2003). See also: Claire Gantet, ‘Le
“Tournant Westphalien”: Anatomie d’une Construction Historiographique’, Critique internationale 9
(2000): 52–8; Benjamin de Carvalho, ‘Den westfalske fetisj i internasjonal politikk: Om den suverene stat
og statssystemets opprinnelse’, Internasjonal Politikk 63, no. 1 (2005): 7–34; and Benjamin de Carvalho,
‘Keeping the State: Religious Toleration in Early Modern France, and the Role of the State’, in European
Yearbook of Minority Issues, I (2001/2) (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), 5–27.
Tracing the origins of the Westphalian myth falls beyond the scope of the present work. For attempts to
trace the myth, see Osiander, ‘Sovereignty’; de Carvalho, ‘Den westfalske fetisj i internasjonal politikk’.
Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 6th edn (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985), 254.
Leo Gross, ‘The Peace of Westphalia, 1648–1948’, American Journal of International Law 42, no. 1
(1948): 28.
Adam Watson, The Evolution of International Society (London: Routledge, 1992), 186.
David Held, Democracy and Global Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 77.
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‘Westphalia and All That’: Debunking the Myth of 1648
The texts of the treaties signed in Münster (IPM) and Osnabrück (IPO) on 24 October
1648 tell a very different story to the conventional narrative. Far from inaugurating the
era of sovereignty, the Westphalian settlement turned out to be a momentary retreat
from an already established idea of a modern system of states, constituting instead the
recapitulation of an earlier and more feudal and medieval heteronomous order. Indeed,
the idea that rulers had final authority over their territory – which followed more from
the Reformation than any other event, and which had been so clearly enunciated in the
Preamble to the English Statute of Appeals (1534) as well as the Peace of Augsburg in
1555 – was actually limited by the treaties of 1648.
Indeed, the Peace of Westphalia constituted a step back from an already established
idea (and to some extent practice) of state sovereignty; itself the product of decades of
political practice, political theory and even the internal order of the HRE as sanctioned
by the Peace of Augsburg a century earlier, in 1555. For the Peace Treaties of Westphalia
make no mention of sovereignty or cuius regio, eius religio. Indeed, where the Treaty of
Augsburg gave the polities of the HRE the right to choose their own confession, this right
was retracted in 1648. The result of this was the reversion to the status quo ante, to a date
arbitrarily set to 1 January 1624, such that religion was no longer something over which
rulers within the HRE could decide upon.12 Thus, with respect to religion, ‘Westphalia
was less consistent with modern notions of sovereignty than Augsburg, which had been
concluded almost a century earlier’.13 Nor was Augsburg a European-wide treaty. The
principle of cuius regio, eius religio was a principle which in 1555 was valid only for the
internal affairs of the HRE.14 Thus, both the treaties of Augsburg and Westphalia have
been misread by the scholars of IR as applying to Europe in general, as opposed to the
HRE in particular. It might, however, be claimed that Westphalia entailed the right of
states to have their own foreign policy and to join alliances. But this, it turns out, applied
only to the polities of the HRE,15 and was in any case not a new initiative. Moreover, this
right had in fact been retracted during the Thirty Years’ War through the 1635 Peace of
Prague.16
A complementary claim of the ‘1648 myth’ is that it entailed the defeat of the Holy
Roman Emperor’s universal aspirations. The orthodoxy in IR has generally presented the
Thirty Years’ War as a war between two main parties. These comprised the representatives of an imperial or universalistic order, mainly the Holy Roman Emperor and the
Spanish king, who were loyal to the Pope on one side, and the representatives of a more
particularistic and anti-hegemonic order advancing the modern idea of state sovereignty,
12. Art. V, 2 IPO and §47 IPM. While the Peace of Westphalia confirmed the Treaty of Augsburg, this was
nevertheless done with a few reservations, as it stated that the Peace of Augsburg was not to be valid with
respect to ‘certain Articles in the said Transaction [Augsburg] which are troublesome and litigious’; see
Art. V, 1 IPO and §47 IPM.
13. Krasner, ‘Westphalia and All That’, 244.
14. Even so, the principle of cuius reigo, eius religio of 1555 was not consistent with sovereignty. The
Reformed Confession, Calvinism, was not recognised at Augsburg.
15. Art. VIII, 2 IPO and §63 IPM.
16. Randall Lesaffer, ‘The Westphalian Peace Treaties and the Development of the Tradition of Great
European Peace Settlements Prior to 1648’, Grotiana 18 (1997): 71–95.
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de Carvalho et al.
mainly France, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands, on the other side.17 But some
revisionist accounts of the Thirty Years’ War have questioned in a number of ways
whether the war was actually about containing the universalistic ambitions of the
Habsburgs. Firstly, the Emperor was already weakened when the war broke out in 1618,
and the Habsburg Empire was already divided politically and militarily between a
Catholic alliance, the League, and an anti-Catholic alliance, the Union. In the early stages
of the war, the potential consequences of Habsburg collapse were more feared in Europe
than was their hegemonic ambition.18 Secondly, the interventions of Denmark, Sweden
and France were motivated more by their desire to take advantage of the weak position
of the Habsburgs than by a fear of their hegemonic aspirations.19 What kept the war
going was not that the Habsburgs represented a threat or that they had universal aspirations. Indeed, ‘[t]he war was not fought because the Habsburgs were straining to expand
their role, but because other actors were seeking to diminish it’.20
All in all, then, the Treaties of Westphalia do not tell a clear-cut and neat story of
transformation. Rather, they are better understood within a very complex story of
advances, setbacks and messy entanglements of feudal suzerainty with some rare elements of what we now call modern state sovereignty. Illustrating the feudal (as opposed
to sovereign) character of Westphalia is the point that both France and Sweden were
awarded fiefdoms over several territories formerly under imperial jurisdiction, with the
Swedish monarch being made a vassal of the emperor.21
This emphasis that we accord the HRE provides a clue that enables us to finally
bring into view the hitherto invisible elephant in the room of ‘1648’: that of hierarchy
both inside and outside Europe. For while elements of hierarchy continued within
Europe, so imperial hierarchy developed outside of it, notwithstanding the point that
within the various countries of Europe domestic sovereignty was compromised in some
way or another right down to the early 20 century.22 The typical Eurocentric conflation
of Europe and the world leads to the problematic assumption that sovereignty soon
became a universal feature of world politics once the big bang of political modernity
had exploded at Westphalia. But such an emphasis necessarily obscures the existence of
various hierarchical international political formations, especially of an inter-civilisational nature, that have existed not just in the pre-1648 era,23 but above all within the
post-1648 ‘anarchic’ era. The immediate problem here is that the post-1648 era witnessed a proliferation of international imperial-hierarchies, which comprised a series of
17. See for instance Torbjørn Knutsen, A History of International Relations Theory (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1997), 85; David Boucher, Political Theories of International Relations (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998), 290; Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1995), 32.
18. Osiander, ‘Sovereignty’, 253–4.
19. Ibid., 255–8.
20. Ibid.
21. Art. X, 15 IPO.
22. J.M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), ch. 12.
23. These would necessarily include a range of Eastern formations that were the leading ‘powers’ in the world
such as the Ottoman Empire and the Chinese tribute system, as well as the much weaker regional power
of medieval Christendom.
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single sovereign colonial powers, each of which stood atop a conglomerate of dependent non-sovereign polities. And, no less significantly, it was not until well into the
postcolonial era, indeed the final two decades of the 20th century, that the sovereign
state became the generic political unit of the global system – even if there are all
manner of imperial legacies that have continued on into the 21st century. In short, international hierarchies, albeit under anarchy, have been the norm in world politics in the
last 400 years, the sovereign state the bare exception.24
In sum, then, neither sovereignty nor the anarchic international system originated
at Westphalia. Indeed Westphalia has been awarded a weighting that its limited achievement simply cannot bear. Ultimately, the emergence of sovereignty and the anarchic
states-system were the result of a long process of change rather than a clear-cut break
with the feudal system of Christendom that occurred in the space of one year following
a gruelling 30-year gestation period on the bloodied battlefields of Europe.25 As we have
shown above, in spite of the many references to the Westphalian birth of the statist
ontology of IR, scrutiny of the treaties themselves and revisionist scholarship published
over the last two decades make a strong case for relegating that story to the world of
myth-production, while simultaneously requiring us to be at least wary of the tales that
textbooks have for so long told us. But given the weight of the arguments and the central
place 1648 has been accorded in historical debates about the discipline, one could reasonably expect this wariness, if not an outright rejectionist proclivity, to have trickled
down to more recent texts and textbooks.
What Our Teachers Still Teach Us about Westphalia
Given that textbooks are updated more frequently than ever, one might assume that part
of the rationale for this would comprise the need to take into account not only the latest
developments in international politics, but also the core debates about the discipline of
IR. Certainly some of the texts and textbooks have taken parts of these revisionist
analyses into account. Notably, in a 2007 textbook, Heather Rae asserts that:
There is much debate over exactly when the process of early modern state formation started,
with some scholars looking as far back as the eighth or tenth century. Others cite the early
fifteenth century, with the convening of the Council of Constance of 1414–1418, treaties agreed
upon at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, or the eighteenth century as the most significant dates
in the development of the state.26
24. J.M. Hobson and J.C. Sharman, ‘The Enduring Place of Hierarchy in World Politics: Tracing the Social
Logics of Hierarchy and Political Change’, European Journal of International Relations 11, no. 1 (2005):
63–98. See also Darel E. Paul, ‘Sovereignty, Survival and the Westphalian Blind Alley in International
Relations’, Review of International Studies 25, no. 2 (1999): 217–31; Barry Buzan and Richard Little,
‘Why International Relations Has Failed as an Intellectual Project and What to Do About It’, Millennium
30, no. 1 (2001): 19–39.
25. See for instance Joseph R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1970); Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1994); Teschke, Myth of 1648.
26. Heather Rae, ‘Theories of State Formation’, in International Relations Theory for the Twenty–First
Century, ed. Martin Griffiths (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 124.
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de Carvalho et al.
Another good example is found in a 2005 textbook: ‘What we would now recognize as
the modern state system gradually evolved in Northern Europe between 1500 and 1688
and was consolidated by the rise of nationalism in Europe between 1800 and
1914’.27 Moreover, the 2010 textbook by Keith Shimko hints at a more nuanced understanding of the emergence of sovereignty:
Although 1648 is a convenient dividing point, the modern state system did not just appear
overnight in that year: The world of 1647 did not look much different from the world of 1649.
The emergence of the modern state was in reality a slow, gradual process driven by several
important economic, religious, and military developments that eventually undermined the
feudal order and replaced it with a new way of organizing European politics.28
But this hint leads the reader only into a cul-de-sac given that four pages later she will
read that ‘[w]hat the treaty established was the modern notion of sovereignty – that rulers
were not obligated to obey any higher, external authority’,29 that ‘the modern sovereign
state emerged from the maelstrom of the Thirty Years War and the Peace of Westphalia
(1648)’, and that ‘[t]he idea of national sovereignty was codified in the peace of
Westphalia (1648) as the only feasible solution to the religious conflict that gave rise
to the bloody Thirty Years War (1618–1648)’.30 Similarly, Paul Viotti and Mark Kauppi
tell us that ‘[t]he peace agreement at Westphalia in 1648 helped solidify the trend of
increasing power to the modern state at the expense of other political forms.… With the
realignment of territorial borders, the notion of the sovereignty of the state also came to
the fore’;31 and, moreover, that ‘[t]he prince or sovereign authority could even determine
the religion of the inhabitants of a state’.32
Overall, this tension between an account that is sensitive to the revisionist scholarship
of international politics while simultaneously maintaining the mythical story of 1648 is
symptomatic of many of the textbooks. Moreover, in the process many administer a
strong dose of classical realist ontology, to wit: ‘The Treaty of Westphalia (1648), more
than any other event, demarcated the change between the old and new systems. With the
sovereign state at its center, this newly evolving system is anarchical’.33 Or again, Russell
Bova tells us that Westphalia ‘laid the foundation of the anarchic system of sovereign
states that structural realists still emphasize today. Inherent in this new anarchic era were
all the consequences – self-help, security dilemmas, wars – that those realists might
anticipate’.34 And, again, ‘the 1648 peace of Westphalia … marked the birth of the modern international system.… [T]he dissolution of the empire cleared the way for the
27. Jill Steans and Lloyd Pettiford with Thomas Diez, Introduction to International Relations: Perspectives
and Themes, 2nd edn (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005), 117.
28. Keith L. Shimko, International Relations: Perspectives and Controversies, 3rd edn (Boston: Wadsworth,
Cengage Learning, 2010), 4.
29. Ibid., 8.
30. Ibid., 217, 243.
31. Paul R. Viotti and Mark V. Kauppi, International Relations and World Politics, 3rd edn (Upper Saddle
River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007), 63–4.
32. Ibid., 70.
33. John T. Rourke, International Politics on the World Stage, 11th edn (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2007), 60.
34. Russell Bova, How the World Works (New York: Longman, 2010), 45.
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Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39(3)
emergence of sovereign political units within the old empire.’35 That the HRE was not
dissolved until 1806 and coexisted with other European polities – be they states, empires
or other units – clearly does not figure in the story that the discipline tells its youngest
disciples.
Even some of the very best textbooks repeat the standard 1648 mantra.36 Thus, in spite
of some passages suggesting to the reader that there may be an issue of contention about
the meaning that should be accorded to 1648,37 we can still read in the book known to
most British IR students as ‘Baylis and Smith’ that ‘[t]he Westphalian Constitution of
World Order: The Peace Treaties of Westphalia and Osnabruck (1648) established the
legal basis of modern statehood and by implication the fundamental rules or constitution
of modern world politics’.38 The book also exhibits a text-box underlining what it sees as
the key elements of this constitution: territoriality, sovereignty, autonomy – to wit: ‘[i]n
codifying and legitimating the principle of modern statehood the Westphalian Constitution
gave birth to the modern states-system’.39 Yet another textbook by Oxford University
Press tells the students a story of pre-Westphalian chaos, relieved in 1648 by the advent
of the modern state:
This treaty established the important principle of sovereignty that remains the foundation of
contemporary international politics. In an obvious blow to the Church, this meant that kings
could decide domestic policy, such as the official religion within their domains, free from
outside interference. The principle of sovereignty recognized in the peace of Westphalia
represents an essential element in the creation of the modern nation-state.40
This view is no less predominant in US textbooks. Thus, for example, in spite of
acknowledging that the treaties of Münster and Osnabrück did not enact the principle of
sovereignty as we know it, Joseph Nye and David Welch seem to have mistaken the
Treaty of Westphalia for that of Augsburg:
The Peace of Westphalia effectively entrenched the principle of cuius regio, eius religio,
whereby each ruler would have the right to determine the religion of his or her own state. The
treaties did not amount to a full endorsement of the principle of state sovereignty as we know
it, as they contained rights of intervention to enforce their terms.41
To Nye and Welch, the ontology of IR after 1648 is nevertheless statist: ‘For most of the
Westphalian era, sovereign states had only to worry about other sovereign states’.42 But
35. Ibid., 44; also 9, 42.
36. This problem is not, however, exclusive to English textbooks. One Norwegian introductory text, for
example, tells us that ‘the principle of sovereignty … was ratified at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648’; Jon
Hovi and Raino Malnes, eds, Anarki, Makt og Normer, 2nd edn (Oslo: Abstrakt forlag, 2007), 32.
37. John Baylis, Steve Smith and Patricia Owens, eds, The Globalization of World Politics, 4th edn (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008), 46–7.
38. Ibid., 23–4.
39. Baylis et al., Globalization of World Politics, 23–4.
40. Steven L. Spiegel, Elizabeth G. Matthews, Jennifer M. Taw and Kristen P. Williams, eds, World Politics
in a New Era, 4th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 59.
41. Joseph S. Nye and David A. Welch, Understanding Global Conflict and Cooperation, 8th edn (Boston:
Longman/Pearson, 2011), 72.
42. Ibid., 307.
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de Carvalho et al.
overall, given that the 1648 myth is repeated in all IR textbooks that deal in some
way with the origins of sovereignty, our survey is necessarily representative even if it
only scratches the surface of the massive IR textbook market. Accordingly, in the interests of space, we provide an extended footnote of other notable examples.43
Even our short tour of widely used IR textbooks produces a clear verdict: the traditional tale of the ontological ‘big bang’ of IR has not given way to recent historiographical scholarship. What is written about Westphalia is seldom referenced; 1648 is doxa. It
just is. Finally, while we shall consider why this remains the case in the conclusion, one
of the key lowest common denominators of the myths of 1648 and 1919 is an underlying
Eurocentrism. For what is almost never questioned in the stories of the rise of the sovereign state – either in orthodox or critical IR scholarship – is the assumption that it
was entirely a product of European exceptionalism and was created by the Europeans all
by themselves. But, as has been argued elsewhere, this elides the considerable extraEuropean influences that helped promote sovereignty, including those from China, India
and the Middle East, as well as through the imperial encounter with the Americas after
1492.44 And just as the issues of imperialism and Eurocentric thinking have been ignored
in the 1648 story, so their ‘recessive presence’ in the conventional ‘1919 story’ is something that we shall resuscitate in the next section.
An Epistemological Big Bang: The Myth of 1919
The myth of 1919 is a less distinct myth than that of 1648, not least because it has a
number of prongs to it. The usual context in which it emerges within standard textbooks is as an appendage to the First Great Debate that was allegedly conducted
between ‘idealists’ and realists. Indeed, standard introductions recount the lineage of
the discipline in terms of the three great debates, with the first one emerging after the
‘birth of the discipline’ in 1919. That said, the myth of 1919, important though it is
within the self-image of the discipline, is one that is overall recounted less often than
its ‘1648 twin’.45 In what follows we shall cover textbooks even though we will also
argue from personal experience and anecdotal evidence given that the myth of 1919 is
more commonly transmitted through the classroom than through the textbook.
The myth of 1919 consists of three interrelated elements: firstly, that the discipline
was born in 1919; secondly, that the discipline was born out of the calamities of World
War I and was established as an idealist attempt to solve the problem of war; and, thirdly,
43. See, for example: Karen A. Mingst, Essentials of International Relations, 4th edn (New York: W.W.
Norton, 2008), 24–5; Henry R. Nau, Perspectives on International Relations: Power, Institutions, and
Ideas (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2007), 56; J. Martin Rochester, Fundamental Principles of International
Relations (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2010), 19, 33, 36; Joshua S. Goldstein and Jon C. Pevehouse,
International Relations, 9th edn (New York: Pearson Longman, 2010), 60, 61; Michael G. Roskin and
Nicholas O. Berry, IR: The New World of International Relations, 7th edn (Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008), 5–6.
44. J.M. Hobson, ‘The Other Side of the Westphalian Frontier’, in Postcolonial Theory and International
Relations, ed. Sanjay Seth (London: Routledge, 2011); J.M. Hobson, ‘Provincializing Westphalia: Eastern
Origins of Sovereignty in the Oriental Global Age’, International Politics 46, no. 6 (2009): 671–90.
45. Cf. Brian C. Schmidt, ‘Lessons from the Past: Reassessing the Interwar Disciplinary History of
International Relations’, International Studies Quarterly 42, no. 3 (1998): 433–59, and esp. 438.
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that interwar idealism lost out to realism in a First Great Debate, due to idealism’s failure
in theory and practice either to prevent or explain the increasing interstate violence of
the 1930s that culminated in World War II. The myth is a fully externalist account of
the origins and early development of the discipline, based on a Whiggish reading that
posits the notion of continuous progress towards both a better understanding of the
international system and a solution to the problem of war.
In contrast to the myth of 1648, the myth of 1919 is of much more recent origin, given
that there was very little historiographical consciousness within the discipline until the
publication of The Aberystwyth Papers in 1972.46 As Jack Donnelly notes, even as late as
the early 1980s the standard overview of the discipline only started with the classical
realists of the post-war generation, in effect creating an abbreviated foundational myth.47
The key figure that is most closely associated with this foundational myth – the classical
realist, E.H. Carr – would nevertheless fit seamlessly into the myth of 1919 when the
earlier history of the discipline was rewritten. Realism was the dominant theoretical
approach in International Relations by virtue of its embrace of positivism as a means of
explaining the so-called ‘realities’ of international relations, rather than founding its
analysis on an a priori ‘idealist-political’ foundation. That historiographical interest was
piqued for the first time around 1970 is due to various factors. It was partly a result of the
50th anniversary of the founding of the first IR chair at Aberystwyth; partly an aftermath
of the methodological differences of the 1960s that was later codified as the Second
Great Debate;48 and partly a result of the inspiration from Kuhn and the idea of scientific
paradigms. The immediate result was to extend the history of the discipline further backwards to 1919, and to incorporate a ‘misguided generation’ of ‘idealists’ which had been
triumphantly swept away by the rising tide of classical realism, with E.H. Carr and Hans
Morgenthau riding its crest. This early historiography was thus largely an exercise in
reaffirming the dominance of realism in general, presenting its victory in the more exotic
philosophy of scientifism.
From the early 1980s, the discipline (and its dominant realist strand) was subjected to
a rising tide of criticism from a range of alternative theories, particularly with the advent
of the Third Great Debate (sometimes referred to as the Fourth Great Debate). By presenting the ongoing discord as another moment in a procession of ‘great debates’ so it
was possible to normalise dissent. That is, deep-rooted debates are thought to be a normal and healthy intellectual way in which disciplinary knowledge progresses. The final
codification of the myth of 1919 and the First Great Debate was thus a result of a number
of disparate claims of status that emerged in the Third (or Fourth) Great Debate.49
46. Brian Porter, ed., The Aberystwyth Papers: International Politics 1919–1969 (London: Oxford University
Press, 1972); cf. Peter Wilson, ‘The Myth of the First Great Debate’, Review of International Studies 24,
no. 4 (1998), 1–15, esp. p. 8.
47. Jack Donnelly, ‘Realism and the Academic Study of International Relations’, in Political Science in
History, eds James Farr, John S. Dryzek and Stephen T. Leonard (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), 175–97, esp. 181.
48. Joel Quirk and Darshan Vigneswaran, ‘The Construction of an Edifice: The Story of a First Great Debate’,
Review of International Studies 31, no.1 (2005): 89–107.
49. The Third Great Debate, which saw positivism come under sustained attack by post-positivists, is referred
to as the Fourth Great Debate only when the 1970s’/1980s’ ‘inter-paradigm debate’ is elevated to the status
of a ‘great debate’.
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‘1919 and All That’: Debunking the Originary/Foundationist Myth
of the Discipline
At the very time that the myth of 1919 was being expanded it was also being challenged
at its very core. Of particular note here was a critical interrogation of E.H. Carr as well
as the Utopians/idealists/liberals that he so forcefully challenged. The first stabs were
directed at Carr’s realism, with a number of writers suggesting that he was less of a
realist than previously believed, or even that he was not a realist at all.50 The perception
of Carr was challenged from internalist, externalist and contextualist perspectives, stressing the polemical, political and dialectic character of The Twenty Years’ Crisis and its
debts to a Mannheimian reflexivist sociology of science.51 Indeed, it would be fair to say
that much of what he wrote had a certain Marxian quality to it. Either way, although no
consensus has been reached on how best to characterise Carr, the large majority of those
who have dealt with his work in any systematic fashion agree that the label ‘realist’ fits
rather awkwardly.52
While Carr was put under closer scrutiny, the ones who were supposed to be his
erstwhile opponents were simultaneously placed under the analytical microscope. The
end of the Cold War led to renewed interest in the theories that had been developed
before 1947, with a boost for liberal theorising after 1989 leading to a revived interest in
liberal theorising before 1939. The immediate result was a wide-ranging reconsideration
of the ‘idealists’, revealing a breadth and diversity of thought that had been completely
glossed over by the myth of 1919.53 Increasingly, writers dropped the terms ‘Utopian/
idealist’ and began applying the label ‘liberal’ (or some variety of it) to the writers of the
interwar period.
To this can be added two further points concerning the myth of ‘idealism’: firstly, that
the so-called idealists frequently argued positions that had much in common with certain
realist precepts. Most notably, as Leonard Woolf put it, summarising Norman Angell: ‘It
50. Cf. Ken Booth, ‘Security in Anarchy: Utopian Realism in Theory and Practice’, International Affairs
67, no. 3 (1991): 527–45; Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1998), 159–68; J.M. Hobson, The State and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 55–61.
51. See, for example, Charles Jones, E.H. Carr and International Relations: A Duty To Lie (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998); Wilson, ‘Myth of the First Great Debate’; Peter Wilson, ‘Carr and His
Early Critics: Responses to the Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1939–46’, in E.H. Carr: A Critical Appraisal, ed.
Michael Cox (London: Palgrave, 2000), 165–97.
52. One exception that proves the revisionist rule is Seán Molloy, who reaffirms Carr as an important realist,
albeit one of a very different kind than most later realists. Paradoxically, although confirming Carr’s
realism, Molloy contributes both to the re-evaluation of Carr and the undermining of the myth of 1919; see
his The Hidden History of Realism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), ch. 3. We thank Luke Ashworth
for this reference.
53. See, for example, David Long, ‘J.A. Hobson and Idealism in International Relations’, Review of
International Studies 17, no. 3 (1991): 285–304; David Long and Peter Wilson, eds, Thinkers of The Twenty
Years’ Crisis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Schmidt, ‘Lessons from the Past’; Cameron G. Thies,
‘Progress, History and Identity in International Relations Theory: The Case of the Idealist–Realist Debate’,
European Journal of International Relations 8, no. 2 (2002): 147–85; Brian C. Schmidt, ‘Anarchy, World
Politics and the Birth of a Discipline: American International Relations, Pluralist Theory and the Myth of
Interwar Idealism’, International Relations 16, no. 1 (2002): 9–31; Lucian M. Ashworth, ‘Where Are the
Idealists in Interwar International Relations?’, Review of International Studies 32, no. 2 (2006): 291–308.
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is not human nature … which makes war “inevitable”. War in the modern world springs
from what has been aptly called the international anarchy.’54 Indeed, Kenneth Waltz
could not have put it much more succinctly himself. And secondly, far from ignoring
power in favour of purely utopian sensibilities many of the so-called idealists, as we shall
argue very shortly, actively supported the cause of European imperialism in general and
especially British imperialism in particular.
If the idealists were not idealists and Carr was not exactly a realist, the next step
was to denounce the idea of a First Great Debate between these so-called Manichaean
combatants as but a myth.55 While Carr’s book certainly created reaction at the time,
there was, however, no wide-ranging debate and certainly no feeling that any ‘idealist’
position had been demolished.56 Likewise, surveying the interwar period more generally,
one can obviously find debates, but nothing resembling a ‘great debate’ between liberals
and realists.57 More plausible would be the claim that there were debates between different
approaches to politics in general, some of which would feed into post-World War II realism as well.58 The process of defining ‘realism-triumphant’ against ‘idealism-defeated’
in the immediate post-World War II years was not so much about an actual debate
between these two ‘genres’, but rather constituted a political move that sought to enshrine
a specific foreign policy as well as to insulate the field of international politics from
behaviouralist political science.59 And, not least, it relied on the politics of amnesia – that
is, of forgetting much of the non-realist research that had been undertaken.60
With historiographical attention escalating after 1989 even the dating of the birth of
the discipline came under heavy challenge. There can be found many important antecedents for disciplinary IR, starting in the last two decades of the 19th century, particularly
in debates regarding imperialism, geopolitics and trade. The three key scholars of note
here are Brian Schmidt, Robert Vitalis and Torbjørn Knutsen. While Vitalis argues that
IR became institutionalised around 1910, Knutsen specifies the 1890s, while Schmidt
claims that its institutionalisation was secured in 1880 when the study of IR began within
the first Political Science Department in the US that was opened at Columbia University
by John W. Burgess.61 To this Schmidt adds the claims that IR was advanced by the study
54. Leonard Woolf, ‘Introduction’, in The Intelligent Man’s Way to Prevent War, ed. Woolf (London: Victor
Gollancz, 1933), 10–11; Norman Angell, ‘The International Anarchy’, in Woolf, Intelligent Man’s Way,
19–66; See also, for example, G. Lowes Dickinson, The International Anarchy, 1904–1914 (London:
George Allen & Unwin, 1925).
55. Wilson, ‘Myth of the First Great Debate’; Andreas Osiander, ‘Rereading Early Twentieth-Century IR
Theory: Idealism Revisited’, International Studies Quarterly 42, no. 3 (1998): 409–32.
56. Wilson, ‘Carr and His Early Critics’.
57. Lucian M. Ashworth, ‘Did the Realist–Idealist Debate Really Happen? A Revisionist History of
International Relations’, International Relations 16, no. 1 (2002): 33–51.
58. Thies, ‘Progress, History and Identity’; Quirk and Vigneswaran, ‘Construction of an Edifice’.
59. See Nicolas Guilhot, ‘The Realist Gambit: Postwar American Political Science and the Birth of IR Theory’,
International Political Sociology 2, no. 4 (2008): 281–304; see also Stanley Hoffmann, ‘An American
Social Science: International Relations’, Daedalus 106 (1977): 41–59.
60. Samuel Barkin, ‘Realism, Prediction and Foreign Policy’, Foreign Policy Analysis 5, no. 3 (2009):
233–46.
61. Brian C. Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998); Robert Vitalis,
‘Birth of a Discipline’, in Imperialism and Internationalism in the Discipline of International Relations,
eds David Long and Brian C. Schmidt (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005), 159–81; Robert Vitalis, ‘The
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of colonial administration after about 1900 and that the world’s first IR book emerged
in 1900 – Paul Reinsch’s World Politics at the End of the Nineteenth Century.62 Vitalis
adds to this a series of developments in the consolidation of the discipline, not the least
of which is the establishment of the Journal of Race Development in 1910; a journal
that was renamed Foreign Affairs in 1922.63 While the concern with Eurocentrism and
racism exists, albeit in rather latent form, within Schmidt’s analysis and in rather more
explicit form in Knutsen’s, it is, however, a central component of Vitalis’s work. For it is
his key claim that the discipline’s rationale was founded on a racist ‘white supremacist’
outlook.64
While this fascinating avenue concerning the pre-1919 origins of the discipline could
be explored as a whole article in itself a few points are noteworthy, not least so as to
provide a bridge to the ensuing discussion. Above all, while 1919 is by no means an
insignificant moment in the development of the discipline, in a way the onus of proof
should more properly lie with those who wish to support the 1919 birth date claim. For
it seems curious, if not a product of wishful thinking, to believe that the infant discipline
all of a sudden sprung up out of nowhere in some kind of miraculous virgin birth in
one year. Three points in particular avail themselves here. Firstly, many of the scholars
we associate the interwar period with were writing in the two decades prior to 1919,
including John A. Hobson, Norman Angell, Harold Laski and, not least, Woodrow
Wilson. And many of the ideas that they developed in the interwar period had been
formulated well before 1919. Secondly, if we accept the point that many of the interwar
theorists drew on Hobson’s 1902 book,65 whether this be the critique of what Hobson
called ‘insane’ imperialism that is found in Laski, Brailsford, Bukharin and Lenin, or
equally the support of ‘sane imperialism’ that is found in Wilson, Zimmern, Angell and
Buell, then the image of 1919 is necessarily blurred or muted. Thirdly, and most importantly of all, the very Eurocentric and racist narratives that underpinned the majority of
interwar scholarship emerged in the 18th century and especially the 19th, thereby bringing the pre-1919 intellectual context much more into the foreground of our revised picture of 1919. How then did these metanarratives infect interwar scholarship and what is
the significance of this claim for our overall argument about 1919?
To answer the second part of this question first, bringing the ‘dark side’ of the discipline into the open necessarily punctures the ‘noble myth’ of the birth of IR that Carr’s
reading bequeaths the discipline. Carr’s legacy very much remains with us today, with the
belief that the discipline was born in 1919 when the world’s first department of International
Politics was established at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Moreover, on the
atlas of ideas Aberystwyth and Versailles are in effect presented as twin towns. For both
62.
63.
64.
65.
Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture: Making Racism Invisible in American International Relations’,
Millennium 29, no. 3 (2000): 331–56; Torbjørn L. Knutsen, ‘A Lost Generation? IR Scholarship before
World War I’, International Politics 45, no. 6 (2008): 650–74; Torbjørn L. Knutsen, ‘En tapt generasjon?
IP-fagets utvikling før første verdenskrig’, Internasjonal Politikk 65, no. 3 (2007): 9–44.
Paul S. Reinsch, World Politics at the End of the Nineteenth Century, as Influenced by the Oriental
Situation (New York: Macmillan, 1900); Schmidt, Political Discourse, 70.
Vitalis, ‘Birth of a Discipline’, 166. Schmidt also sees the study of colonial administration as important;
Political Discourse, ch. 4.
Vitalis, ‘Birth of a Discipline’; Vitalis, ‘Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture’.
John A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938/1968).
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are thought to have initiated noble ideas and practices that sought to set the world on the
path to peace following the carnage of World War I. In this reading, then, IR is presented
as a noble discipline that was born in order to solve the tragedy of war for the benefit of
all peoples. While we do not wish to denigrate the importance of Aberystwyth in the
progress of IR as a discipline, nevertheless the overall noble image obscures an ‘inconvenient truth’: that the overwhelming majority of international theory throughout its existence has been imbued with a specific moral/political purpose – to defend and promote
Western civilisation – and that the narratives of the discipline have in one way or another
always constituted a ‘West Side Story’.66 In the process, the deep paradox emerges wherein
the discipline’s prevailing mythical self-image can only be maintained through a deep
structural amnesia that coexists with a highly selective recollection of the discipline’s
‘origins’.
In the external events-context we argue that international theory in the interwar period
emerged in the context not simply of World War I, but also in the milieu of the colonial
racial revolt against Western imperialism that took off in the interwar period, with the
year 1919 marking the launch of the enterprise known as the empire strikes back. Far
from expressing a highly optimistic vision of a coming peace, much of the liberal and
left-liberal interwar scholarship exhibited or reflected a deep sense of anxiety in the
Western imagination as the fault-lines of the West’s imperial hegemony appeared to be
cracking. As noted above, far from fatally ‘ignoring power’, many such scholars sought
to maintain an imperialist hierarchy of racial and/or civilisational power of the West over
the East. Nevertheless, while there was also a significant group of anti-imperialists, it is
significant that most of these thinkers still worked to defend the West because their
writings were founded on various Eurocentric or racist metanarratives, as opposed to
some kind of universalist cultural pluralism that yielded a tolerance of the Other. On the
imperialist side these comprised a paternalist Eurocentrism (e.g. Zimmern, Angell,
Woolf and Murray), and an offensive racism (as in Wilson and Buell), while on the antiimperialist side these comprised an anti-paternalist Eurocentrism (e.g. Laski, Brailsford,
Lenin and Bukharin), and a defensive racism (e.g. Stoddard and Grant).67
While space, of course, precludes a detailed discussion here, it is worth summarising
a few key figures to support our case. Woodrow Wilson is, of course, thought of as one
of the discipline’s founding icons, simultaneously doubling up as the founding father of
20th-century liberal internationalism. But Wilson’s academic writings were steeped in
explicit scientific racism of a neo-Lamarckian nature.68 And they reveal the point that for
Wilson self-determination was to be granted only to the (relatively) civilised Eastern
Europeans but should be withheld from the non-white races. For it was vital to maintain
imperialism, albeit the internationalised variety that was institutionalised by the League
of Nations Mandate System, so that the inferior races could be brought to maturity
66. John M. Hobson, ‘The Myth of International Relations: Constructing Eurocentrism and International
Theory, 1760–2010’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
67. For a full discussion of all these writers, see Hobson, ‘Myth of International Relations’, ch. 6.
68. See especially the following publications by Woodrow Wilson: ‘The Reconstruction of the Southern
States’, Atlantic Monthly 87, no. 519 (1901): 2–11; ‘Democracy and Efficiency’, Atlantic Monthly 87,
no. 521 (1901): 289–99; A History of the American People, V (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1902); The
State (New York: D.C. Heath & Co., 1918).
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de Carvalho et al.
through gaining the right sort of ‘character’ that was in turn the necessary prerequisite for
the future awarding of self-determination. This reflects his key argument that was central
to his book The State: that constitutional political development is something which
occurs only over a very long period of time. It was precisely this gradualist idea that
underpinned his advocacy of the League of Nations Mandate System. Of course, while
Wilson is famous in IR for his enunciation of the concept of self-determination, it is less
well known that he turned round almost immediately and issued a denunciation of it as
far as the colonies were concerned. For clearly regretting the fact that he had inadvertently let the self-determinist genie out of the imperialist bottle (as his adviser Colonel
House had warned him), he asserted on 9 May 1919, in the context of the anti-colonialist
upheavals that raged around the colonial world, that he was disturbed by
the unqualified hope that men have entertained everywhere of immediate emancipation from
the things that have hampered them and oppressed them. You cannot in human experience rush
into the light [of self-determination].… You have to go through the twilight into the broadening
day before the noon comes and the full sun is on the landscape.69
More generally, the essential formula of maintaining imperialism, especially British
imperialism, through the Mandate System formed the normative lynchpin of many interwar books that are normally associated with the so-called idealists.70 Of course, it is
certainly the case that for these advocates the Mandate System represented something
new and that it offered up the possibility that the colonies would not be exploited as
they had done when national-imperial control was ‘absolute’ and ‘unregulated’. Indeed,
it is this which defined that which Hobson called ‘sane’ imperialism against the ‘insane’
imperialism of the previously unregulated national forms of imperialism. Nevertheless,
it was still very much a form of imperialism that worked from precisely the same premise
that the old idea of the civilising mission rested upon: the notion that the non-Western
peoples were in one way or another inferior and could only be brought into civilisation
under Western tutelage and only once the ‘correct and rational’ Western institutions had
been delivered. The only real difference lay with the ‘form’ or ‘method’ by which these
superior Western institutions would be delivered.
Finally, the common association of Eurocentrism and racism with imperialism elides
the point that these discourses also yielded anti-imperialist visions. The extreme case,
which can be used to support this point, is found with the interwar scholar Lothrop
Stoddard, who embraced an anti-imperialist Eugenics. In a string of books he argued that
white supremacy was under severe threat following World War I, which had succeeded
only in undermining and dividing the white races, and which in turn came at the very
same time when the coloured races – specifically the Yellows and (Islamic) Browns – were
69. Wilson cited in Erez Manuela, ‘Dawn of a New Era: The “Wilsonian Moment” in Colonial Contexts and
the Transformation of World Order, 1917–1920’, in Competing Visions of World Order, eds Sebastian
Conrad and Dominic Sachsenmaier (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 147.
70. See, for example, Alfred Zimmern, The Third British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926/1934);
Norman Angell, The Defence of the Empire (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1937); Leonard Woolf, Imperialism
and Civilization (London: Hogarth Press, 1928/1933); Raymond L. Buell, International Relations (New York:
Henry Holt & Co., 1925).
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Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39(3)
rising with a vengeance.71 His was a ‘defensive’ variant of scientific racism, for his key
point was that the white races needed to restore their unity and protect their homelands
(what he called the ‘inner dikes’) from the rising tide of colour. This could best be
achieved by ending Western imperialism in Asia on the one hand, while blocking the
‘colored immigration peril’ by erecting prohibitive immigration controls on the other.
This was vital because if the coloured races were to enter the citadel of the white West,
they would flood the gene pool with inferior and contaminating influences that would
inevitably lead to white racial degeneration. And to close this discussion more generally,
while the anti-imperialist Eurocentrics provided an entirely different rationale for the
critique of imperialism, and were indeed highly critical of the West, nevertheless the
Eurocentric give away lies in the point that they reified the West and denied the East
agency.72
What our Teachers Still Tell Us about 1919
Turning now to current textbooks, a large number omit historiography altogether. In
those which do include disciplinary history, the most obvious change in tenor over the
last two decades has been the shift from ‘idealist’ to ‘liberal’ as the moniker for the
theories of the interwar years. This move is by no means all-encompassing, but a growing
number of scholars seem to agree that the term ‘liberal’ is more appropriate. This development has quite obviously been related to the concurrent attempts at cementing presentday liberalism as a solid, permanent and viable competitor to realism that enjoys its own
long lineage. Significantly, one does find comments on how idealism was a term that
realists constructed to discredit their opponents,73 even though some still see the unreconstructed term as applicable.74 Others have noted the changing nomenclature, though
without pushing it through to its conclusion:
The body of theory known typically today as liberalism went by the term idealism for most of
the twentieth century…. After World War I demonstrated the horror that humans could wreak
on each other, idealists sought to create institutions that would mitigate violence and greed….
World War II, and especially the Holocaust, as well as the collapse of the League of Nations,
effectively undermined idealist theory.75
From this perspective, liberalism is not a retroactively specific term for the interwar
writers given the assumption that they were idealists; and, moreover, the relation
71. See the following books by Lothrop Stoddard: The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920); The New World of Islam (London: Chapman and Hall, 1922);
Clashing Tides of Colour (London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935). We are particularly grateful to Robert
Vitalis for alerting us to Stoddard’s anti-imperialism.
72. Hobson, ‘Myth of International Relations’, ch. 6.
73. For example: ‘Modern realist theory developed in reaction to a liberal tradition that realists called
idealism’; Goldstein and Pevehouse, International Relations, 44.
74. Shimko, International Relations, 43.
75. Jeanne K. Hey, ‘Power, Conflict, and Policy: The Role of Political Science in International Studies’, in
International Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Global Issues, eds Sheldon Anderson, Jeanne
K. Hey, Mark A. Peterson and Stanley W. Toops (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2008), 25, 27.
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de Carvalho et al.
between the world wars and theoretical change remains unquestioned – thus after
idealism collapsed, Morgenthau codified realism.76
The twin beliefs that the discipline was born in 1919 and that there was a subsequent
transformation away from interwar idealism in 1945 are still taken more or less for
granted. Thus, we are still told that ‘International Relations was born out of the human
tragedy of war’,77 and that ‘Realism … developed after World War II as a response to the
failure of the interwar period’s (1919–1939) idealism’.78 A more elaborate narrative
deserves to be quoted more extensively:
In the twentieth century the idealist paradigm was most closely associated with Woodrow
Wilson and the other thinkers who were prominent in the interwar period…. Idealism’s reign as
the dominant paradigm ended with its failure to anticipate and prevent World War II…. It was
the idealists’ failure to comprehend the forces leading to World War II that gave rise to realism
79
as the dominant paradigm in the immediate postwar period after 1945.
In the same textbook, the student of IR is informed that ‘[i]t was out of the ashes of
World War I that idealists claimed to have learned certain lessons about the dynamics of
international relations and what was needed to prevent another major war’.80 In this
imaginary, then, idealism equals Wilson; idealism is in effect a ‘paradigm’; and it was
eclipsed by realism due to its inherent intellectual and political failure. This trotting out
of the old 1919 myth could hardly be less attuned to the last two decades of historiographical research. And when we are told that ‘[i]n the period between World War I and
World War II, the major challenger to the realist perspective was idealism’, it is surely
as if the last two decades of revisionist scholarship had never happened. Or, to put it
differently: the maintenance of the 1919 myth presupposes the assumption of the ‘revisionist myth’.81 Thus we have to conclude that the notion of something called idealism
still persists in the IR imagination, even if slightly less unproblematically than before,
and that the wholly exogenous/external events story of the emergence of the discipline
and of idealism in 1919 as noble responses to World War I, as well as subscribing to
the victory of realism in 1945 following the carnage of World War II, still remain largely
uncontested within current IR textbooks.
For this reason it is not surprising to learn that the idea of a First Great Debate is still
nurtured as well. This is a staple of IR textbooks and is found even in the very best ones.
Thus, Robert Jackson and Georg Sørensen, in what is an otherwise exemplary textbook,
tell us:
There have been three major debates since IR became an academic subject at the end of the
First World War and we are now in the early stages of a fourth. The first major debate is
76. Ibid., 25, 27. Moreover, according to Roskin and Berry, Morgenthau ‘founded the “realist” school of
international relations’; The New World, 27.
77. Steans and Pettiford with Diez, International Relations, 229.
78. Spiegel et al., World Politics, 35.
79. Rochester, Fundamental Principles of International Relations, 19, 21.
80. Ibid., 19, 21.
81. See the discussion in Bova, How the World Works, 20.
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Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39(3)
between utopian liberalism and realism…. The first major debate was clearly won by Carr,
Morgenthau, and the other realist thinkers.82
While avoiding the term ‘idealist’, this narrative sticks to the counting of debates, sees
Carr as an unproblematic realist, and the realists as winners of a debate that it has been
persuasively argued never in fact happened. Placing the debate a little later, Viotti and
Kauppi, while giving a valuable and balanced introduction to the work of John Herz,
maintain that Herz and Morgenthau ‘found themselves in the center of a great realist–
idealist academic debate’.83 And even among scholars who are attuned to the revisionist
historiographical literature, we still find references to the First Great Debate. Another
otherwise exemplary textbook, having noted the problems inherent in the discussion of
the great debates, tells us that ‘[s]ome of the debates, however, were genuine…. The first
debate refers to the exchanges between the realists and idealists before, during and
immediately after the Second World War’.84 But as our survey of the revisionist literature
suggests, it is not an inconsiderable irony that the interwar exchange between realists and
idealists is held up as an example of one of the genuine debates within the discipline.
Others, however, simply ignore the revisionist historiography altogether. Peu Gosh, in
an introductory text aimed at the Indian market, tells us that:
When the Second World War (1939–1945) finally broke out, the idealists were blamed for their
utopian thinking and their legalistic-moralistic assumptions were alleged to be far from the
realities of power politics. IR soon came to be occupied with a critique of liberal idealism and
out of this emerged a new paradigm – Realism, sometimes also known as Realpolitik – an antithesis to Idealism…. This was the emergence of the first ‘Great Debate’ in IR in the post-World
War II period.85
With its externalist approach, its lumping of idealists into a single category, its stark
dichotomising and the reference to ‘the first “Great Debate” in IR’ (after World War II),
this text could just as well have been written 20 years ago.
That it is nevertheless not impossible to write textbooks with a more principled nod to
the revisionist historiography is demonstrated by Richard Devetak when he notes that
‘the very idea of narrating the discipline’s history as a series of “great debates” is questionable’; though notably, he adds: ‘Even so, it is important for students to learn how the
discipline has told stories about itself, which is why I persist with the narrative’.86
Nevertheless, a reflexive approach seems to us to be the only viable one – both recalling
the disciplinary grand narratives and simultaneously deconstructing them.
82. Robert H. Jackson and Georg Sørensen, Introduction to International Relations: Theories and Approaches,
4th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 30, 38.
83. Viotti and Kauppi, International Relations, 90.
84. Milja Kurki and Colin Wight, ‘International Relations and Social Science’, in International Relations
Theories: Discipline and Diversity, eds Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki and Steve Smith (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007), 15–16.
85. Peu Gosh, International Relations (New Dehli: PHI Learning, 2009), 6.
86. Richard Devetak, ‘An Introduction to International Relations: The Origins and Changing Agendas of a
Discipline’, in An Introduction to International Relations: Australian Perspectives, eds Richard Devetak,
Anthony Burke and Jim George (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 10.
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de Carvalho et al.
There are obviously also examples of writers taking the insights of the revisionist
historiography to heart, but overall it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the impact has
been marginal. Even those who show knowledge of the revisionist literature tend to
provide cursory or even obligatory nods to it often by inserting various conditional
adjectives such as ‘alleged’ and ‘so-called’ in front of the offending nouns. The one area
where some progress has been made has been in the reassessment and rebranding of the
motley crew previously known as utopians or idealists. In conjunction with the ongoing
construction of a liberal body of theory to rival realism, interwar scholars have acquired
a new name, and more attention has been paid to them. But even so, this has been done
through an ahistorical extrapolation backwards of the present idea of liberalism so as to
impute its presence there at the ‘birth’ of the discipline. And because the substitution of
liberalism for idealism allows for the perpetuation of the myth under a different name,
and glosses over the pluralism of interwar theorising, so we conclude that this can only
really count as a step backwards rather than a progressive move forwards.
Conclusion: Why Does the Discipline Continue
to Hold These Myths to Be Self-evident Truths?
In the light of our analysis we feel it warranted to conclude that conventional modern IR
works on the basis of a false prospectus in relation to its key foundationist assumptions.
And despite the point that the discipline has got its ontological and epistemological
geneses twisted, the pervading myths still persist. This then gives rise to the conundrum
as to why this false prospectus persists despite repeated attempts to prosecute the myths
in the revisionist court of IR scholarship. Here we consider a number of possible reasons
taking each of the myths in chronological order.
Firstly, it could be argued that like most research articles, the historical literature on
1648 is barely read. But this can be discounted on the grounds that the key revisionist
articles and books are cited hundreds of times, and even the more specialised literature
on the myth of 1919 is cited more than 50 times. Even so, this only deepens the puzzle
given that while the works are cited, their insights are not taken on board. A second
possible reason is that under conditions of extreme specialisation, and with books and
journals proliferating in ever more daunting numbers, IR scholars often find that they
have little choice but to rely on standard textbook discussions in areas that they themselves do not research. One consequence of this is not infrequently that new editions of
a particular textbook tend to be updated by way of adding either a few recent citations or
by adding a new chapter on the latest event or theory of significance. Accordingly it is
not surprising that the historical aspects of the discipline tend to get left behind, not least
because these are neatly packed away in the filing cabinet of ‘settled knowledge’.
A third partial explanation, related to the previous one, is IR’s inherent tendency
towards presentism. History, as a matter in its own right, is of little or no interest to much
of the discipline. Often it appears as little more than a useful site or shallow quarry from
which can be garnered or sifted certain facts which are brought out into the open and
held up triumphantly to confirm certain ‘present truths’ that are pertinent to a particular
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theory.87 Accordingly, a deeper engagement with historical matters becomes surplus
to requirements – for ‘that is what they do in History or other related disciplines’. It
would seem that much of IR would happily go along with Henry Ford’s historophobic
assertion that ‘[h]istory is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition.
We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the
history that we make today’.88 Thus when seen through this angle it is not surprising
that the rich historical gems that lie deep beneath the surface of these shallow quarries
lie undisturbed.
The problem of presentism leads directly into a fourth explanation: that one reason why
these historical insights are ignored is the fact that they represent radically different perspectives or ‘takes’ on the discipline that necessarily confront the normalised and settled
subject matter. The myths have had a tremendous function in disciplining our thinking
about fundamental issues in international politics, ‘normalising’ it as common sense
and providing the parameters or outer boundaries within which the disciplinary field is
contained or homesteaded. A genuine commitment to revisionism would necessitate a
reconceptualisation of many of the fundamental frameworks of the discipline, as well as
the need to reset its parameters or boundaries, not to mention invalidating the past as a
(re)source from which we can pick historical data points at our leisure. This itself has
several ramifications, one of which is that the Westphalian myth serves as a matter of
intellectual convenience providing a simple and tidy story about the origin of sovereignty
and the anarchic states system.89 But in so doing it effects an ahistorical temporalist sleight
of hand, wherein 1648 marks the boundary of an endless and synchronic present, separated from the temporal Other of the pre-1648 era, which comprises the world where
‘there be imperial dragons and hierarchical demons’.
But it is precisely at this point where we confront perhaps the profoundest paradox.
For painting the pre-1648 era as one in which imperial hierarchical formations dominated enables Eurocentric scholars to sanitise the post-1648 era of its imperialism and the
very Eurocentric metanarratives upon which this has been founded. But the paradox
emerges in the point that much of IR embodies a Eurocentric imperialist narrative of the
creation of modern world politics, of which 1648 provides the initial moment. That is, in
the Eurocentric imaginary, 1648 constitutes the first step of the two-step Eurocentric big
bang theory of modern international relations. The first step entails the single-handed
creation of the sovereign state, which could only have occurred in Europe owing to its
civilisational exceptionalism. And having created sovereignty in the absence of nonEuropean help and non-European encounters, so the second step flows on ineluctably,
where Europe expands outwards and graciously bequeaths sovereignty and Europe’s
panoply of civilised and rational institutions to the inferior Eastern societies, thereby
remaking, as far as possible, the world in its own image. To break with this imperialist
imaginary, upon which the myth of 1648 ultimately rests, is to fundamentally confront
87. See the discussion in J.M. Hobson and George Lawson, ‘What Is History in International Relations?’,
Millennium 37, no. 2 (2008): 415–35; also Leonard Seabrooke, ‘Why Political Economy Needs Historical
Sociology’, International Politics 44, no. 4 (2007): 390–413.
88. Interview in Chicago Tribune (25 May 1916).
89. On this point, see Osiander, ‘Sovereignty’, 266.
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de Carvalho et al.
the Eurocentric identity of the discipline. And given that such a leap is one that would be
too confronting for most, it might well be this problem which ensures that the revisionists
are often seen but rarely heard.
This Eurocentric identity-problem also lies behind the myth of 1919, which argues
that the discipline was born on the back of a painful 48-month gestation period on the
blood-drenched battlefields of Europe. For it is this tragic external event that furnishes
the Whiggish reading of the birth of the infant IR and the development of the interwar
idealist adolescent, blessed as it was with the noble if not utopian purpose of finding
ways to solve the universal problem of war for the benefit of all peoples. But when the
birth-year becomes stuck or frozen in this way, despite repeated attempts to budge or
thaw it, then this provides a clear pointer to the possibility that there is an identitybased function that lurks beneath the ‘sovereignty of 1919’. This, we suggest, lies in
the point that 1919 provides the IR community with a heart-warming rendition of the
basis or function of their discipline: to find ever-better ways to solve the universal
problem of war. But resuscitating the dark side of the discipline that lies deeply sublimated within the deep recesses of the IR imagination, as inter alia we have done in
this article, is vital not just to complete our narrative, but also to alert our readership
to the need to question the very noble identity of the discipline that has been cherished
for too long. For if these temporal boundaries have been set on the basis of a provincial
European myth, rather than the universal aspirations which the discipline upholds, it
is surely high time that these boundaries be transgressed and their border controls
disbanded. Naturally, though, to tamper with the most cherished and heart-warming of
Whiggish self-beliefs is extremely confronting. But it is necessary because while most
myths in life are constructed precisely to make us feel good about ourselves, they
often entail all sorts of detrimental consequences that are ignored or simply denied and
covered up. For myths can be used in different ways and serve different functions. On
the one hand, their quotidian or everyday meaning of myths are stories commonly held
to be true, but which are not. On the other, myths can be anchors or ‘building blocks’
for thinking and theorizing, or ‘the frame into which other phenomena are fitted and
then interpreted.’90 Our argument about the myths of 1648 and 1919 is that these are
myths in both ways. While they are stories held to be true which turn out to be false,
they have also served as a matrix for further thinking in IR. This might be one of the
reasons why they have proved so difficult to dislodge.
How, then, might we begin to dismantle the border controls that characterise 1648
and 1919 within the discipline? Or, put differently, what are the prospects for bettering
the record and for getting the discipline to self-reflexively engage with its own history?
We urge a strong commitment to dialogue. Disciplinary dialogue can only work if we
no longer accept short hands from students and colleagues that are often relayed through
textbooks and lecture notes. There needs to be constant vigilance about references to
the Westphalian sovereign states/states-system, to idealists and the great debates, and to
the birth of the discipline. As lecturers and textbook-writers we should not fear that the
90. Martin Hall, ‘The Fantasy of Realism, or Mythology as Methodology’ in Harry Potter and International
Relations ed. Daniel H. Nexon and Iver B. Neumann, (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 178.
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758
Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39(3)
students would thereby lose faith in the discipline, but rather understand our endeavour
as a dynamic one where dialogue helps us to gain new and richer understandings of
international phenomena. The discipline of IR might more profitably spend its time in
taking intra- as well as extra-disciplinary dialogue seriously in order to end the
Sisyphean process of endlessly repeating the same old tired mantras. But, ultimately,
although most of the revisionist literature fails to confront Eurocentrism, a large part of
our argument has been that it is precisely this which needs to be disbanded before we
can adequately dismantle the border controls that police the myths of 1648 and 1919,
thereby enabling the discipline to finally move on beyond its intellectual prison of its
extant Sisyphean prison.
Acknowledgements
We would like to extend thanks to the two anonymous reviewers, and especially to Luke Ashworth,
Robert Vitalis and Iver B. Neumann, for many vital pointers. We are also grateful for comments
received at the 2010 Millennium Conference on Dialogue where the first draft of the article was
presented. Of course, the usual rider applies. Benjamin de Carvalho and Halvard Leira are also
grateful for funding from NUPI’s Centre for Global Governance.
Author Biographies
Benjamin de Carvalho is a Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Institute of
International Affairs (NUPI), Norway.
Halvard Leira is a Research Fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs
and Associate Professor (II) at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences.
John M. Hobson is Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of
Sheffield, UK.
Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at Panteion Univ of Political on September 22, 2014
International Organization Foundation
The Sociology of a Not So International Discipline: American and European Developments in
International Relations
Author(s): Ole Waever
Source: International Organization, Vol. 52, No. 4, International Organization at Fifty:
Exploration and Contestation in the Study of World Politics (Autumn, 1998), pp. 687-727
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2601355
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Christian Büger
European University Institute
Christian.bueger@eui.eu
Paradigms, Cultures and Translations: Seven Ways of Studying the
Discipline of International Relations
Draft paper for presentation at the ‘Annual Conference of the International Studies Association’, Chicago,
February 2007; in the panel ‘Turning a reflexive eye on the IR discipline III: The IR Discipline as (Open) Social
System’; Thursday 10:30 - 12:15
Draft paper, comments more then welcome!
1. Situation Knowledge Production: Why a Sociology of IR?1
"The way the profession remains strangely quiet, almost silenced, […], makes this a
particularly relevant time to enquire into the links between theory and practice"
(Steve Smith 2002: 233)
“The predominant, essential character of the university is generally considered to
reside in its ‘self-governance’: this shall be preserved. But have we also fully
considered what this claim to the right of self-governance demands of us?
Self governance means: to set ourselves the task and to determine ourselves the ways
and means of realizing that task in order to be what we ourselves ought to be. But do
we know who we ourselves are […]? Can we know that at all, without the most
constant and most uncompromising and harshest self-examination?”
(Martin Heidegger 1991 [1933]: 29)
Similar to other social science disciplines, International Relations (IR) is facing these days a
growing range of critics accusing it for being a useless discipline. Whether these critics come
from the inside or from the outside, they attack the very heart of the discipline. If an autonomous
discipline of international relations is a useless project, why should it persist? The cynic might
argue that the problems addressed by IR, such as international cooperation, war and peace are
persistent to a degree that also in future all sorts of social knowledge that can be made available
will be needed. This is however an argument that drives IR into arbitrariness and does not justify
the resources the members of the project have been granted, or the existence of a master
programme in IR (or even IR theory). The positivist scholar might argue for the superiority of
the formalized knowledge that an academic discipline can provide. Given that it is a conventional
wisdom also among politicians these days, that academics rarely speak in the name of truth and
scholastic knowledge has offered little problem solutions, how to justify the existence of an
For comments on an earlier version of this paper I like to thank Peter Wagner and the participants of his
seminar “Whither the European social science? The sociology of forms of social knowledge applied to
Europe”, European University Institute, Winter 2006. Further I like to thank Frank Gadinger, as much of
what is presented here draws on our earlier discussions.
1
C. Büger – Seven ways of studying IR
autonomous discipline of international relations instead? Heideggers quote is suggestive in this
context. Firstly, he reminds us that the contemporary situation, or crisis as we might call it, is not
a novel situation. Secondly, he identifies a strategy of coping with the situation and defines a
concrete task: Defending self-governance requires the “constant and most uncompromising and
harshest self-examinations” by which scholars define their tasks and ways and means to fulfil
them.2
If we take this perspective, how has the project of IR examined itself?3 The majority of scholars
have opted for the path of examining the project by means of epistemological debates. Can we
consider these debates and examinations as the harsh and uncompromising kinds Heidegger calls
for? I suggest this is not the case. A focus on ideal types of producing knowledge and how it
represents reality, sidelines, undermines, and neglects decisive components of a disciplinary
project. Science is first and foremost a social practice. Science is materially and socially situated; it
requires material, financial and human resources; it is structured by socialization and
disciplinarization; it requires knowing subjects, who are gendered, marginalized or authorized; it
is negotiations about relevance, significance, instruments and methods; it requires a range of
institutions and techniques, and it is also a political practice involving ethical considerations of all
sorts.4 These are some of the forces and dimensions that have been identified by the sociology of
science. Hence if we attempt to follow Heidegger’s path, what is required is a systematic
alternative to the so far dominant epistemological reflections. This alternative consists in the
sociology of science perspective.
And indeed, if something has flourished in recent years, then it is a growing interest in studying
the project of IR in a sociological fashion. The past, presence and future of the discipline as one
way of studying ‘the international’ and problems of world politics has been of growing interest. A
nascent number of studies have re-told the early history of the discipline, provided different
readings of its birth and evolution. Scholars have become increasingly concerned how the
structure, mechanisms and practices of the discipline have shaped the way the international is
thought. Although the majority of these studies focus on methodological or pedagogical
The other alternatives might be to either leave the examination of IR to these bureaucratic evaluation
programmes that are currently already permeating the sciences globally, or to retain from any justification
and give up the idea of a scientific study of IR.
3 My question is not referring to examination techniques such as peer review. While this is the standard
technique used to judge (examine) about the quality of scientific work, with its own problems (see
Hellmann and Müller (2004)), it refers to the examination of individual or smaller groups work. I refer to
collective endeavours.
4 Problems of scientific practice arise, for instance, when a librarian has not managed to organize literature
needed in time, which was the case for me, and led to the exclusion of some major works from my
discussion.
2
2
C. Büger – Seven ways of studying IR
practices, in recent years, scholars have stressed the significance of other practices, institutions
and structural and environmental factors. Taken together, these studies present a new wave of
self-examinations: Self-examinations of how the discipline studies its issues, what it has achieved
and how it limits and enables its members. Disciplinary sociology as a significant field of inquiry
and as alternative to epistemological reflections has emerged.5 It would however be an
exaggeration to claim that disciplinary sociology has reached the core of the discipline.
As for the case of epistemological reflections6 there is a certain danger inherent to these
reflections, the danger of becoming an esoteric disciplinary island, where as David Newsom has
stressed it in a different context “even the humour is for members only”. As Pierre Bourdieu puts
this “Sociologists must avoid the temptation of indulging in the type of reflexivity that could be
called narcissistic, not only because it is very often limited to a complacent looking-back by the
researcher on his own experience, but also because it is its own end and leads to no practical
effect” (Bourdieu 2004:89, emphasis in original). Disciplinary sociology would be rather useless, if
it only focuses on the discipline in a closer sense and does not address the broader disciplinary
contexts such as the relation of the discipline to politics and society.
Jürgen Habermas (1978:13) has argued that reflections on science should be at least composed of
three elements: 1) empirical research on the organisation of scientific and technological progress;
2) reflexive analysis of the social situations (gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhang) in which science
is institutionally and methodological embedded and which decides the same time about the usage
of scientific created information’s; 3) the preparation of the practical usage of knowledge
(Erkenntnis) to be translated into technology and strategies as well as into communicative praxis.
Hence according to Habermas studies of science should reflect on the constitutive conditions of
knowledge production, on the organisation and practices of knowledge production and on
institutions and practices by which the knowledge is used, disseminated and put into praxis.
Bourdieu argues in the same spirit, when he claims (in a more wordy way):
"Practical reflexivity can take on its full force only if the analysis of the implications and
presuppositions of the routine operations of scientific practice is taken further into a genuine
critique (in Kant's sense) of the social conditions of possibility and the limits of the forms of
thought that the scientist ignorant of those conditions unwittingly engages in his research and
which, unknown to him, that is to say, in his place, perform the most specifically scientific
operations, such as the construction of the object of science." (Bourdieu 2004: 90)
I outline my understanding of the terms ‘disciplinary sociology’ and ‘sociology of IR’, I use
interchangeable, below.
6 Peter Mayer (2003) provides a nice example, when he argues ironically that one of the reasons of why
epistemological debates continue might lay in the fact that scholars engaged in it have invested so many
resources that debates need to continue for a sufficient pay-off
5
3
C. Büger – Seven ways of studying IR
These interrelated tasks are what a disciplinary sociology of IR needs to address. This does not
mean necessarily to follow the path outlined by Habermas (in Theorie und Praxis and Erkenntnis und
Interesse), or by Bourdieu (in Homo Academicus and Science of Science and Reflexivity).7 Rather the field
of science studies invites us to make use of their different, concepts, theories and results.
If these are the tasks, what needs to be done, in what way has the project of international
relations tackled these? If sociology of science is the path to go how far did IR researchers
walked on it so far? Or to phrase it with Heidegger’s words, what is the quality of the selfexaminations conducted by disciplinary sociology, are they as harsh and uncompromising
Heidegger calls for?
Overview of the paper
In this paper I attempt to address these questions in examining the self-examinations of the
disciplinary project of international relations. The objective of this paper is to read IR‘s
disciplinary sociology in the context of the broader sociology of (social) science discussions. Such
a strategy helps to identify what kind of analytical choices scholars have made, what their implicit,
silent assumptions are and where the strength and weaknesses of the contributions are. The
imperative behind such a discussion is to foster a needed dialogue between IR and sociology of
science (Wæver 1998) in order to improve the current discussion and future research. Although
disciplinary sociology in IR has meanwhile reached a quantitative level that is unique if compared
to reflections on political science in general and to other fields studying political phenomena,
many of these reflections have demonstrated an astonishing resistance to engage thoroughly with
the sociology of science. The primary tasks of this paper are hence: First, to identify and
systematize disciplinary self examinations; second, to suggest paths by which the examinations
can become as harsh and uncompromising as needed.
[As side-product, and a secondary task, taking disciplinary reflections as an object of analysis
might lead us to interpretations of what this thing called IR is, as the narratives produced by
disciplinary sociology are not only descriptive but also prescriptive. They are accounts of what IR
is, and what it is not, of what it should be and what it shouldn’t, of where it comes from and
where it should go. To use Heideggers words, they are attempts to determine what “we ourselves
ought to be”. Such a discussion might thus contribute to understand what IR is, what its place in
the world is and how it relates to other cultural spheres. On purpose I am using here the word
I would rather argue that both Habermas and Bourdieu have failed in their own standards. This is,
however, a different discussion.
7
4
C. Büger – Seven ways of studying IR
might, as my discussion builds up on a selective reading of the literature and is limited to studying
texts, rather then practices.]
The following section two, firstly, provides an overview of science studies traditions as a
background. Secondly, I shall conduct an inventory of IR’s disciplinary sociology, identify seven
ways of studying IR, thirdly, criticize the achievements of the seven ways in the light of the
described challenges and conclude in sketching persistent problematiques in IR’s disciplinary selfexaminations. Section three is a sketch on how to proceed with disciplinary self-examinations
from a Cultural Studies of Science perspective and section four a summary combined with a note on
self-reflexivity.
2. Examining self-examinations: Sociology of Science and IR’s disciplinary sociology
If we start from a wide understanding of the term ‘self-examination’ we might include a wide
array of studies. To some degree any study summarizing the state-of-the-art of a disciplinary
subfield or critically judging about existing literature is a self-examination. This would be however
a too broad and rather un-operative, useless understanding for the purpose of this paper. A more
narrow notion is used here. I consider as self-examinations, those studies that are a) written with
the objective to conduct self-examinations, b) relate themselves in some way to the project of
disciplinary sociology, signified by a degree of reflexivity on the issue and are c) build to some
degree on empirical observations, hence are not limited to the discussion of metaphysical
problems.8 Further, I assume that contributions to disciplinary sociology set up a relation to the
discussions in the sociology of science. Such a relation can be composed of either a quoting
strategy or the direct usage of concept, models and results of the sociology of science.
Sociology of Science: Four traditions
As a background for my following discussion, and given that most IR researchers are not familiar
with sociology of science, let me explain what I understand by it. Sociology of science is
conventionally split into four traditions.9
Hence prominent state-of-the-art articles and edited volumes, some would expect from an appraisal of
self-examinations, are excluded from my discussion.
9 For such a separation and general introductions see Bourdieu (2004: 4-31), Felt, Nowottny and Taschwer
(1995), Lynch (1993:39-116), Rouse (1992), and Law (2004) on methods. Despite otherwise noted, these
are the hinterland of the following discussion. For an exceptionally concise and short summary of myths
about science and science studies findings see Traweek (1996).
8
5
C. Büger – Seven ways of studying IR
1) A functionalist wing in the footsteps of Robert Merton, primarily interested in the institutions
of science and the identification of social norms that should govern science. Mertonians work in
the frame of a separation of labour in which the past and the ‘reconstruction of progress’ is the
meal for the historians, a philosophy of science is responsible for scientific content and concepts,
and what is left, or cannot be explained otherwise, falls in the realm of the sociologist.
2) With the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s seminal Structure of Scientific Revolution such a separation
was successfully challenged and research developed historically after Kuhn builds up on the
assumption that research on the sciences needs to integrate time, content and any social
dimension of the sciences. I am hence speaking in the following of post-Kuhnian thought when
research does reject an implicit or explicit frame of a separation of labour. In marking this
difference, scholars prefer the term of ‘science studies’10 over the term of ‘sociology of science’ to
highlight that any studies of scientific practice is a transdisciplinary project (Weingart 2003) and
not a ‘sociology of’. Accordingly I will use this label, science studies, in the following.11
Kuhn’s major contribution (and those following in his lines) is twofold. First he successfully
challenges the idea that the development of science is a continuous process. In introducing the
concepts of normal science and revolutionary shifts, he demonstrated the discontinuities and
breaks that mark the history of science. Second, Kuhn re-introduced the idea of a scientific
community12. He argued that scientists form a closed community whose research draws on a
well-defined range of problems and who use methods adapted to this work. Instead of
determined by the rules as set out by philosophers of science, or the norms suggested by
Mertonians, scientific practices are attempts to solve concrete problems, regarded as ‘puzzles’.
For Kuhn the problems stem from what he called ‘paradigm’ or ‘disciplinary matrix’: A set of
scientific achievements, theories and methods that are taken for granted. The actions of scientists
are hence determined by paradigms, and the community becomes indistinguishable from this
paradigm. Kuhn was not only criticized for his under-specification of the concept of paradigm,
but also for cutting of the scientific group from any external world. Although it is Kuhn’s merit
to have brought back the idea of scientific community governed by a central norm (paradigm)
10 Other conventionally used terms are ‘social studies of science’ or ‘science and technology studies’. Both
highlight distinct features, while the former wants to preserve the notion of explicit social explanations of
science, the other stresses that science and technology cannot be separated. However, I came to prefer the
term ‘science studies’ as the most neutral one, while ‘sociology of science’ is the most popular term.
11 Consequently I also would prefer to speak about ‘IR studies’, instead of ‘disciplinary sociology’ or
‘sociology of IR’, however I am afraid this would cause even more confusion.
12 I am using here “re-introduced”, given that Kuhn largely copied his concept of scientific communities,
although rephrased under the label “paradigm”, from the work of Ludwik Fleck, that was largely
forgotten. See Felt, Nowottny, Taschwer (1995: 127-128) and the historical reconstruction in Schäfer and
Schnelle (1980).
6
C. Büger – Seven ways of studying IR
and drawing attention to the discontinuities of scientific history, with this problems Kuhn fell
back behind earlier more sophisticated thought.13
3) A third tradition, the ‘strong programme’, sets up on such a critique of Kuhn’s work. This
tradition is associated with the work of scholars conventionally referred to as the Edinburgh school
following the writings of David Bloor and Barry Barnes and the Bath group following Harry
Collins. The seminal work in this context is Bloor’s Knowledge and Social Imagery, first published in
1976. To construct a conclusive theory of scientific knowledge, Bloor argued for four major
principles that should be followed: 1) causality: any proposed explanation must be causal; 2)
impartiality: the researcher must be impartial towards the ‘truth’ or ‘falsehood’ of any assertions
made by the actors studied; 3) symmetry: the same means must be used to explain both beliefs
considered to be true by the actors and those judged to be ‘false’; 4) self-reflexivity: in principle
science studies must be open to the same treatment as those sciences studied. Given the notion
of causality is interpreted even by Bloor himself widely as also including ‘understanding’, these
principles form the core principles of any contemporary science studies.14
Besides outlining these core principles for science studies, the merits of Bloor, Barnes, Collins
and followers lay in clearly showing empirically the underdetermination of any theory by data. As
case studies exemplify, belief preferences, tactics of persuasion, opportunistic strategies and local
conditions such as equipment and procedures define to a considerable degree the outcome of
scientific practices. Further, controversies are rarely solved by evidence or by rational means.
Controversies come to be settled by diverse strategies of boundary drawing and of persuasion or
even by dishonest means. Hence in this tradition scientific achievements are better explained by
social ‘factors’.
The strong programme has however, been criticized for failing to address the wider (external)
environmental conditions shaping scientific actions. Much the same as Kuhn did, a given
autonomy of science was assumed, the attention was centred on the immediate local environment
of scientists and a wider context largely ignored. The main criticism is however that researchers
have overstretched the “social” explanation in a way in which the object of analysis does not
matter anymore.15
For instance the related work of the sociology of knowledge by Karl Mannheim or, as mentioned
already, the work of Ludwik Fleck.
14 Nonetheless there is considerable disagreement about the meaning of these principles, see the
discussions in Pels (1996) and Latour (2005).
15 Such an interpretation led to what has to become known as the science wars. See Latour (1999, chapter
one) and Topper (2005) for provoking discussions of the science wars. While Bruno Latour offers a ‘truce’,
Keith Topper shows how the science wars find their parallels in political science’ Perestroika Movement.
13
7
C. Büger – Seven ways of studying IR
4) A fourth tradition initially took the perspective of the strong programme as starting point and
used it to conduct ethnographic studies of scientists in action. Researchers moved closer to the
sites where scientific knowledge was produced and followed scientists minutely. The key finding
was that
“we cannot start from a particular division between systems like the one between the scientific
community and the rest of the social context and then determine their interaction. As direct
observation studies of scientific work indicate, the social context of scientific work is both more
restricted and extended than the notion of a speciality community suggests. It is more restricted
(more local) in that researchers draw upon a variety of variables that are situationally contingent.
For example, their decisions may be influenced by measurement instruments which happen to
stand around in the laboratory, or by arguments which come up in a technical discussion. The
context of scientific work must be defined more broadly than previously suggested in that these
variables and arguments are not, in principle, limited to (bounded by) the scientific community.
Direct observation of scientific work suggests that laboratory operations are embedded within
transscientific fields of interaction and discourse. Transscientific fields are not logical classes
whose members share specific characteristics. They are constituted by what is transmitted
between agents; they come through actual or potential (discursive) interaction and
communication relevant to what happens in the laboratory. “ (Knorr Cetina 2005 [1983]: 191)
The local is translated to the global and the other way around in specific sites such as the
laboratory.16 To give an illustration what and how these researchers studied scientist actions,
consider the box below, which is part of an excerpt of an interview John Law and Michael
Williams (1982) conducted with two groups of scientists (studying the capacity of polymers to
stimulate the uptake of substrate by cells):
Box 1: Interview excerpt, reproduced, without permission, from Law and Williams (1982: 535)
16
I shall discuss shortly if political science has laboratories or not below (7).
8
C. Büger – Seven ways of studying IR
Both groups under study were attempting to write a publication together. What Law and
Williams identify is how scientists attempt to produce a paper that has the maximum impact and
is perceived by their colleagues as both reliable and relevant. Law and Williams conclude that
scientists in many ways behave like entrepreneurs: they conduct market research, evaluate the
relevance of their study to this group or that and then “are trying to array people, events, findings
and facts in such a way that this array is interpretable by readers as true, useful, good work, and
the rest.” (Law and Williams 1982:537). In sum these scientists arrange a network (array or
transscientific field) of resources (events, findings and facts) and people (earlier researcher, the
readers and themselves, the authors). That those networks are not necessarily composed of
scientific resources and people, becomes clear already from the above interview excerpt, as the
scientists have already in mind future funding. While funding is an obvious link, others have
shown how wide the repertoire of resources and people decisive for scientific research can be.
For instance, Bruno Latour gives over his writings vast evidence of how economic interests,
concerns of politicians (such as national security concerns) and scientific interests merge and
become assembled in one network. For instance, the work of Frederic Joliot trying to reduce the
absorption speed of neutrons to make use of nuclear power, is a good case for such a network. A
network of Zairian miners (providing the uraniumoxid), French import companies (importing the
material), German scientific research, leading to the threat for the French war ministry that the
Nazi Regime could use nuclear energy earlier, spies identifying this threat, and, of course, a
research team at the Collège de France, etc. These are only parts of the networks Latour (1999)
identifies. To understand what is going on in this network, protagonists of this wing of science
studies, made use of the notion of translation as developed in the sociological writings of Michael
Serres. According to Callon (1986:197), translation in this sense can be understood in the
following way17:
“translation postulates the existence of a shared field of meanings, preoccupations, and interests.
[…] If it concedes the existence of divergences and irreconcilable differences, it nevertheless
affirms the underlying unity of distinct elements. To translate it to create convergences and
homologies out of particularities”
What came to be known initially as laboratory studies or laboratory constructivism is today much more
difficult to grasp by a unifying label. The protagonists of this ethnographic way of studying
science, just discussed, have developed their thoughts into what has become known as Actor-
17
See further on the notion of translation Callon (1986), Callon and Latour (1981), Latour (1999, 2005),
9
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Network Theory.18 Others advocate for an ‘ethnomethodology’ of science (Lynch 1993). In the U.S.
context the more integrative denomination of “cultural studies of science” (Rouse 1992) has been
established for describing the ongoing work in this tradition. Rouses stresses with this signifier
that the study of sciences should be understood as part of other attempts that focus on the
emergence of meaning within human practices.19
Summary and back to IR
To take Bloor’s principle of self-reflexivity serious, my short introduction of science studies
should not be understood as a narrative of intellectual progress. In the footsteps of all four
traditions sketched, contemporary science studies research is produced. I have conducted this
discussion to make clear what the relations of IR’s disciplinary sociology to science studies in
principle can be. I suggest that the four traditions are the major resources disciplinary sociology
can draw on. This does not mean that these are the only resources available from science studies.
Science studies has developed as such a lively field of research that it is nearly impossible for an
informed dilettante to provide any comprehensive overview. Consequently if IR has picked up
any other line, than discussed, we should be happy about it. Nonetheless the discussed traditions
are, in some way, the minimum we would expect IR has made use of, if the idea of a disciplinary
sociology is taken serious.
What becomes, however, already visible from my short science studies discussion is that if the
tasks I identified with Habermas and Bourdieu – to reflect on the organisation of knowledge
production, the environmental conditions shaping knowledge production and usage and the
translation of knowledge into praxis as well as the interactions between politics and science – are
to be followed, we need to pay close attention to the last tradition of a ‘cultural studies of
science’. That there is a need to turn to the perspective outlined by this programme I will
(hopefully) develop in section three.
So far I argued in following Heidegger that there is a need for self-examinations to cope with the
current pressures put on IR. I argued that self-examinations which devote themselves exclusively
to the discussion of epistemological problems are not sufficient in this regard. Instead, I stressed
that self examinations are best conducted in the spirit of reflexivity induced by a sociology of
science. Such a reflexivity should however avoid becoming narcissistic, through paying attention
See Latour (1999, 2005: 9-12) and Law (1999) for a discussion of these terms.
Latour (2005) has made a similar move when he speaks of that the social interpretation of the sciences
might have failed, but has led to a complete new understanding of what constitutes the social. Latour (e.g.
in his Parliament of Things) and many other have consequently meanwhile moved far beyond “only”
studying science.
18
19
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to the organisation and conditions of knowledge production as well as the translation of
knowledge into praxis. Finally, I outlined shortly on which major resources from science studies a
disciplinary sociology of IR can draw upon. Now let us move to the question of how IR has
conducted self-examinations by disciplinary sociology.
Seven ways of studying the discipline
In 1998 Ole Wæver has argued quite strongly that “the relationship between IR and sociology of
science is virtually nonexistent” (Wæver 1998:692). In focussing primarily on histories of the
discipline, he stressed that those “are usually not based on systematic research or clear methods.
They are, at best, elegant restatements of 'common knowledge' of our past, implicitly assuming
that any good practitioner can tell the history of the discipline” (Wæver 1998:691). Five (six?)
years later, the situation did not look much different for him (Wæver 2003). Wæver’s pessimistic
assessment needs to be however understood as an argument for strengthening the link between
IR and Sociology of Science. While this warmly welcomed, I would suggest more caution in
making such a claim. First, IR’s constructivists have drawn in many ways on science studies,
(maybe most prominently on Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality and Ian
Hacking’s The Social Construction of What?), this however has been done in an epistemological or
ontological way20, rather than in an self-examination way, as understood here. Second, Thomas
Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolution has considerably shaped IR discussions. One is rather
tempted to say that Wæver’s claim is right in the sense that the signifier ‘sociology of science’ and
‘science studies’ do not exist in IR – it seems that in IR everything that ever has been written on
science, runs under ‘philosophy of science’. In many ways IR scholars heavily trained in
epistemology debates, tend, whenever they are faced with the sociology of science, to see only
philosophy of science, as this is what they are familiar with.
Nonetheless, Wæver’s claim can be used to ask in what way IR’s disciplinary sociology has
actually made use of sociology of science. If we follow broadly the tasks set out by Habermas and
Bourdieu, this means primarily how IR has used post-Kuhnian (science studies) thoughts, as
these are the resources addressing these issues. I shall question the achievements of the
disciplinary literature has made in settling the three tasks and in providing the necessary means of
reflexivity in the Heideggerian sense. [Further if I follow my secondary target in gathering some
knowledge about the self-image of the discipline by studying self-examinations, attention needs
to be paid on how IR scholars construct their object of study.] In sum to reflect on the selfexaminations of IR’s disciplinary sociology, I suggest to address the following questions:
20
The epistemic community approach, for instance, claims to make use of Kuhn and Fleck.
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1) How has IR mobilized the resources of the sociology of sciences so far? Is Ole Wæver
diagnosis adequate?
2) In what way has IR coped with the three tasks set out by Habermas and Bourdieu?
3) What were the reasons for doing sociology of IR? Autonomy preservation in a
Heideggerian sense?
4) [What subjects of objectification have been studied? What are the ‘ourselves’ in the study?
What is the underlying model of science?]
I shall start with an inventory of disciplinary sociologies.21 Rather then discussing every single
self-examination, I conduct a clustering. The categories are constituted by the networks of
articles, scholars citing each other and similar problems being addressed by similar means. My list
is not meant to suggest any hierarchical order or a historical narrative. The main purpose of the
list is to demonstrate what a lively field disciplinary sociology is and to provide an initial
assessment in the light of the above questions. Such an approach has, of course, its own
shortcomings. Given that my perspective is wider than what is usually understood as disciplinary
sociology, this comes at the cost of depth. My reading is selective; I will not be able to do justice
to all the works I refer to; etc.
I suggest that disciplinary sociology can be usefully ordered in seven categories – seven ways of
studying the discipline. However, categories overlap and the list is open ended.22
1) The textbook and aesthetic genres
The most conventional way of examining the discipline is to be found in the format of textbooks.
Textbooks attempt to provide overviews for newly arriving students and external (academic or
non-academic) consumers. In their objective textbooks differ from other genres of literature.
In his classic 1935 study the Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact , Ludwik Fleck differentiated
between three types of scientific practice that manifest themselves in three different genres of
scientific publications. Fleck argued that the three types differ over the Erkenntnisziele (epistemic
goals) they follow and how they relate to non-community members – what Fleck called exoteric
communities in contrast to esoteric communities of scholars.
Textbook science – Fleck spoke of Populärwissenschaft (popular science) – forms one type.
Textbook sciences are constituted of these research practices which are the closest related to
exoteric communities. Their key objective is Anschaulichkeit (a term difficult to translate: maybe
imaginary clearness?), to develop images and symbols of a research object to make it
I use the plural on purpose here. As the perspectives I discuss are, although related, very different.
Several works did not find their space here, but might in a future version of the paper. Most notably
those are studies from feminism, and subfields of IR. (see also Fn. 4).
21
22
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comprehensive for exoteric communities. Rather then being interested in specific evidence of
detailed components, the goal is to provide knowledge of an object by providing imaginaries.
Fleck contrasted this type of research practice with two others, Fachwissenschaft in Handbuchform
(specialized science in handbook format) and Zeitschriftenwissenschaft (journal science). The latter
types focus on evidence and detail, but yet differ. The objective of handbook science is to
provide critical summaries into an ordered system. Journal science is of a personal and
provisional character. According to Fleck journal science follows individual standpoints and
personal working methods in a way that an addition of articles do not make up a unified organic
whole. Articles are incongruent and contradictory. However, research articles are always related
to handbook science, as they usually relate themselves to a unified whole, in providing a state of
the art section or in ‘making a contribution to the literature’. This kind of science is none the less
always tied to an individual and his work, which becomes obvious in the usage of terms such as
“I am” and a defensive style of reasoning such as “I attempt to show”, etc. In contrast handbook
science is de-personalized, detached from personal opinions and works. Therefore terms such as
“it is”, etc. are used.23
Fleck’s highlights the different objectives of research practices and that they are related to
different audiences. His distinction is useful as it, first, stresses that textbooks are a very different
genre then other forms of science and usually not address the esoteric community. Hence we
shall not expect a high degree of reflexivity or a sophisticated usage of science studies from IR
textbooks. Nonetheless, also textbooks are in need of an ordering device, which in principle can
be drawn from science studies resource. Second, some of the publications in my inventory come
in the format of handbook science (Schmidt 2002?), the majority is, however, journal science.
a) IR textbooks usually start either with a certain definition of the object of analysis of IR (what is
international relations?), with an introductory discussion of what theory is or can be, or with a
short historical narrative of what has been, in the view of the authors, the important steps in the
development of the discipline.24 These introductions also provide the ordering device of the
books. Either, the device is the history of world politics, and IR developments are described as a
(causal) reaction to world political events. Or, some interpretation of Kuhn’s ‘paradigm’ is used
as a more sophisticated version of speaking about theory. Then, or, if the ordering device is more
In Science in action Latour (1987) makes a quite similar argument, he speaks of the construction of facts
and blackboxing. For an argument of the importance of handbooks and state-of-the-art sections to
understand scientific practice, see my discussion of Rouse in section three. Rouse stresses that these are
means by which the narrative structure constitutive of science is reconfigured.
24 See the discussion in Wæver (2004) and in Enterline (2004). Notable exceptions I ran across are:
Cynthia Weber’s recent introduction that uses the concept of ‘myths’. Greg Fry and Jacinta O’Hagans’s
edited volume (2000) which uses the notion of “images of world politics”. Ole Wæver and Iver
Neumann’s volume on IR’s Masters in the Making.
23
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explicit historically, we get the well known stories of great debates and phases of hegemony
(Smith 1995). In contrast to single authored, edited textbooks usually start with a short
introductory essay in which a thesis about the development of the discipline is presented and the
following contributions are vaguely sorted into that. Peter Wagner (2001:3) gives us a well
reasoned critique of such approaches when he argues that these
"adopt a perspective, in more or less concealed guise, in which all prior debates and disputes
gradually and possibly unevenly, but equally unfailingly, lead to the state of conceptual and
empirical accomplishment that has been reached in the present. The authors of such accounts
are often active practitioners of the social science rather than historians of ideas or sociologists
of knowledge and the sciences. As such, they find it – understandably – difficult to imagine a
higher state of knowledge being attained at times other than their own, be it in the past or in the
future.(3)
As we will see in the following, this is however not only a problem that arises in textbooks.
Rather it is a common device to construct a state-of-the art as a trajectory of events, paradigm
dominance and great debates.
b) Disciplinary self examinations also come in a format not considered by Fleck. Thus we might
add a fourth genre of more sublime character, a genre that can be called a ‘commemorating’ or
‘aesthetic’ account. Such a type includes speeches given at anniversaries celebrations of an
academic association or, plenary speeches by newly elected presidents of associations, for
instance the ISA presidential speech. This genre is textbook science oriented, as highly imaginary
tools are used, but it differs as primarily the esoteric community is addressed. Similar to
handbook science it attempts to order and organize scientific developments, but yet it is most
often highly personal in character. In difference to article science it is less oriented at evidence
and engages in more aesthetic or artful reasoning. Beside speeches, examples of this kind are to
be found in the Pieces of our Craft section of International Studies Perspectives. Although these accounts
are telling, especially if made into an object of analysis in its own, we will not expect that they
engage with science studies, although some of them might implicitly.
2) Progress Assessments and ‘Paradigm Battles’
Thomas Kuhn’s work has not only heavily influenced the practice of writing textbooks, but led to
a real cottage industry of attempts to describe and to judge about the intellectual progress of IR.25
See the related contribution of Elman and Elman, Keohane, Vasquez, Hellmann (ed.), which I do not
(yet) explore in full detail here. See also Guzzini (1998: 1-12).
25
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While some scholars attempt to apply Kuhn’s approach to IR, contemporaries have been more
interested in the Kuhn-Lakatos exchange and discovered the toolbox of Lakatos’ Methodology of
Scientific Research Programmes. If we are tempted to search for a reason, why IR has been more
interested in philosophy of science rather than science studies, we find one of the crossroads
here: In contrast to the Kuhn-Lakatos exchange, the Kuhn-Bloor-exchange, so important for the
development of science studies, was never introduced to IR.
Kuhn’s role in IR starts to get problematic with the inflationary use of the term paradigm in
which it has gradually lost its Kuhnian meaning (e.g. Legro and Moravcik 1999, Smith 1995 ) and
the discovery of Kuhn’s concept of incommensurability to mark boundaries between different IR
‘theories’26. Rather than understanding IR as a scientific community governed by the paradigm of
studying global politics and trans- or interstate relations as “international relations” – and not as
macrosociology or international law– the term paradigm was now understood as referring to
theories. While it was difficult to argue for revolutionary shifts in IR given the continuing
multiplicity of research approaches, when ‘realism’ lost the cold war, the ‘demise’ of ‘realism’,
provided the opportunity to do so. Nonetheless realists are fortunately still with us. Although it is
doubtful if the Kuhnian concept of scientific communities ever reached IR, the move to Lakatos
triggered by Kuhn, even worsened the situation. Lakatos’ Methodology was initially introduced as a
more reflective, methodological way to appraise if the “work is getting any better” (Elman and
Elmann 2002:1) As Frank Gadinger (2002) has shown in his examination of applications of
Lakatos in IR, Methodology transformed into a “discursive weapon”. Instead of gathering
knowledge of the social processes and practice constitutive of IR and ‘causing’ its development,
studies were primarily interested in claiming this or that ‘research programme’ ‘degenerative’ or
‘progressive’. Whether the critics of this “paradigmatism” (Hellmann) might have meanwhile
triumphed or not, several protagonists in this debate have developed their thoughts further and
provided key contributions in other ways of studying IR.27
3) Emancipation of Non-American IR: Leaving Stanley Hoffmann’s shadow.
A third way of studying IR is centred on the quest if the discipline is structured by a ‘hegemony’
of U.S. IR. Scholars either criticize the discipline for being to American, or demonstrate, with
obvious emancipative intentions, that IR is practiced in Non-American sites very differently. The
standard reference is Stanley Hoffmann’s (1977) initial diagnosis of an ‘Americanness’ of IR.
Hoffmann’s contribution is today seen as innovatively (e.g. Jœrgensen 2000, Smith 2002, Wæver
When I here and in the following refer to the term ‘theory’ I mean a system of statements (a narrative)
that is intelligible and considered to be significant, see my following discussion in section three.
27
This is quite obvious if we trace the writings of Steve Smith and Ole Wæver:
Paradigmatism+Hoffmann=recent disciplinary sociology?
26
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1998) as he related the emergence of IR to specific interests of the U.S. policy elite (leaders
looking for some intellectual compass) and identified three institutional ‘factors’, of why the IR
developed in the U.S. and not in Europe: 1) the link between the scholarly community and
government, which meant that academics and policy-makers moved back and forth between
universities and think-tanks, and government; 2) the existence of wealthy foundations which
linked the kitchens of power" with the "academic salons", and thus could create a "seamless
pluralism to link policy concerns of government to the academic research community”; 3) the
fact that the universities were flexible and operated in a mass education market which allowed
them to innovate and specialize in their research activities, they were able to respond to the
demands of government in a way that was impossible in the European University sector of the
time. Such an understanding is seen as innovative as Hoffmann acknowledged the interrelation
between politics and IR in an elite network, funding as an important device and the structure of
an educational system. Hoffman’s thesis was largely rediscovered in the late 1980s and 1990s
(Smith 1987, Krippendorff 1987)28. From a contemporary perspective this led to three ways of
responding to Hoffmann’s argument.
a) With only minor changes in the argument, Steve Smith has discussed a diagnosed
ethnocentrism of IR over several articles (1987, 2000, 2002, 2004, etc.). For Smith IR is still tied
to the interests of American foreign policy elites, much the same way as Hoffmann described it.
This is considered to be problematic as it favours a distinct view of what international relations
and IR is, and what and how it should be studied. In his most recent contribution (2004), he
investigates how IR treats questions of violence and concludes “that the discipline’s definition of
violence looks very closely linked to the concerns of the white, rich, male world of the power
elite” (Smith 2004:510). Smith claims to make use of a sort of genealogy a la early Foucault. His
method is describing the development of IR theorizing and then linking it to other discourses. A
range of other authors have meanwhile used different data and methods. Nosal (2001), for
instance, has focussed on 14 U.S. textbooks to identify what visions of the world shape IR. He
concludes that these texts “portray the world to their readers from a uniquely American point of
view” (Nasal 2001:l.p.). Others also focussed on IR publications but did so by statistical means
(Wæver 1998, Friedrichs 2004, and earlier Holsti 1985). These statistical analyses claimed that
there is indeed an American hegemony, but that there is an evolving European counterhegemony (a drifting apart). Statistical analyses however face a not easy solved methodological
problem of nationalism, implied through the memberships of scholars and institutions in multiple
28
See Smith 1987, fn.2 for related studies re-discovering Hoffmann.
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communities.29 For instance, is a scholar who has made his career in the U.S academia, but is
German in citizenship and mother-tongue, a European, a German or an U.S. scholar? Is a scholar
with U.S. citizenship, based at a Scandinavian University, publishing mainly in European outlets
an American scholar?
b) Others have responded to the Hoffman quest by mobilizing the concept of schools (see
Wæver’s (2004) discussion of this concept). Most visible advocates of an ‘English school’ have
stressed that such a perspective must be returned to the discipline (e.g. Buzan 2001, Dunne 1995,
1998). In contrast to the above discussed texts, these authors where less interested in interpreting
the discipline but to do something about the American hegemony, what Buzan (2001) called
interestingly “self referential reflection”. While Smith, Dunne and others attempt to secure that
the British IR tradition is preserved and the US academics will continue to listen to British voices,
a range of case studies has sought to show that there is even other than Anglo-Saxon IR
scholarship.
c) National Community Studies
Numerous studies have meanwhile demonstrated at which sites IR has grown academically and
how.30 The primary perspective has been on ‘national communities’, usually referred to as those
academics based in a nation state or by the language they publish. The findings where that there
is an astonishing variety of national IR communities, who differ over how they dependent they
are or relate to the U.S., that many interesting achievements have been reached, which stay often
inaccessible for wider audiences as they are not published in English language. These studies face
in many ways the methodological nationalism problem, discussed above. Many of these national
case studies cumulated into more eclectic descriptions of the data the scholar could find or in
narratives in which the scholars describe their own experiences in a national system. To
encounter such a tendency scholars mobilize sociology of science to study IR more
systematically. If we feel comfortable with a national perspective, these have been Danish
contributions in the first place (the Danish way of doing disciplinary sociology?). Let me discuss
two contributions which have reconfigured the study of IR in a more systematic way.
1) Wæver’s 1998 article published in the anniversary issue of International Organizations, was maybe
the first to speak explicitly of a ‘sociology of IR’. Wæver conducted numerous works in this
article: He conducted an analysis of publishing pattern, which let him to the conclusion that
Problems of this kind are discussed in Holden (2004), Wæver (2003).
To numerous to be cited for now, see Jœrgensen (2000:12), Wæver (2003:2) and Holden (2006: 232) for
collections. Studies meanwhile come from all over the world, Asia, Latin America, Europe, Africa?.
29
30
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European and US IR are drifting apart. He developed Hoffmann’s institutional factors further in
mobilizing the ‘discourse coalition model’ developed by Peter Wagner and Björn Wittrock to
conduct more systematic national case studies and sketched how this model makes sense of the
development of France, Germany, UK and US. Finally he introduced the structural model of
Richard Whitley, he is now continuing to develop31. Surprisingly the article was more recited for
its drifting apart thesis and in introducing a national perspective as pivotal. Hence Wæver’s article
should be seen as the key reconfiguration move to national community studies. Nonetheless the
discourse coalition model as a systematic way of relating political, bureaucratic, cultural and
intellectual developments was not picked up in these.
2) While Wæver explicitly used work from the sociology of science, Jœrgensen (2000, 2003,
Jœrgensen and Knutsen 2006) has developed a more eclectic “cultural-institutional” approach –
not as an alternative to Wæver’s interpretation of Wagner and Wittrock, as one would expect, but
in largely ignoring it. Jœrgensen attempts to analyse IR by “connecting” three explanatory
variables to the developments of IR. These three variables are political culture, the organizational
culture of both science bureaucracies and university systems, and the “habits, attitudes and
professional discourse” (Jœrgensen 2002) within the social sciences and humanities. With some
reference to science studies in the latter variable (Bourdieu, Wagner, Gunnarson), he nonetheless
does not argue why such an understanding is superior to others (either Wæver’s discourse
coalitions or maybe even Hoffmann’s three factors). Rather he claims that the three variables are
self-explanatory by pointing to the ‘facts’.
[…]
Despite the work of Joergensen (2000) and Wæver (1998) it is surprising how weak the relations
to science studies are in this network of studies. For instance Friedrich’s book (2004) survives
without reference to any sociology of science (or bibliometric) literature.32 The very recent edited
volume on International Relations in Europe by Jœrgensen and Knudsen (2006), which shows an
explicit concern for scientific institutions33, manages to go along with some references to IR’s
disciplinary history (largely Schmidt 1998, 2002) and a discussion of Ole Wæver use of Richard
Whitley works and Bourdieu’s sociology of science, in one of the chapters (Holden 2006).
See my discussion of way 6.
See also the related critiques of Friedrichs book by Holden (2005) and Stritzel.
33 For instance Lucarelli and Menotti (2006: 48) attempt to identify “Pattern of interaction among
domestic scholars and between them and the external community, and domestic factors that influenced
the current shape of the country’s IR Production”
31
32
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4) The Disciplines Historiographers
Although contemporary studies in the emancipative network (way 3) gives some reference to IR
historiographies, Gerald Holden (2006:226) is right in stating that “historiography and
investigations of non-Anglophone communities have up until now been pursued largely in
isolation from each other”. If this is true, it is an interesting observation as both (way 3 and 4)
originate from the 1970s and 1980s greyzone of textbooks, histories of the discipline and other
state-of-the-art products (a good examples is Holsti 1985). To isolate historiography as distinct
network of studies required much the same reconfiguration work Wæver (1998) and others have
done for the case of the emancipative studies. I would suggest that such a re-shuffling was
initially undertaken by Schmidt (1994) and stabilized through the major books by Guzzini (1998),
and Schmidt (1998), which led finally to the declaration of a historiographical turn (Bell 2001) – a
timely practice.
Historiographies prime interest can be seen in deconstructing the identity of the discipline by
reading its politics of history (most explicitly Thies 2002). The tools have been that of intellectual
history (John Gunnell, Quentin Skinner), rather than of sociology of science. Although Guzzini
explicitly adopts a Kuhnian framework (and might be better put in way 2), his reconstruction of
realism is maybe most widely read among historiographers.
The main case of historiography has been the birth of the discipline and the first great debate34 as
the locus where the narrative (or myth) of International Relations begins. The issue was less if
there was anything such as a first debate, but how the narrative of two camps of scholars led to
the exclusion of interesting scholarship and still defines what the discipline today is, and what it is
not. A comparable case arises for where the birthplace of IR is located, whether it has been
developed out of classical political theory, and hence is a subfield of political theory, whether its
birthplace is the founding of the first chair in international studies in Scotland, and hence is an
academic enterprise shaped by the idea of European universities, whether it was established as
part of the post world war one negotiations and institutionalized as peace research think tanks,
and hence is a an policy-oriented endeavour, or whether it is located in the founding of the
American Political Science Association and hence a professional science in the U.S. sense –
locating the birth of the discipline is political in so far as it implies a distinct vision of what IR is
and what it is not.
From presentism to historiographies internal/external distinction
Besides the already mentioned Ashworth (2002), Quirk and Vigneswaran (2005) and the more fact
oriented Wilson (1998).
34
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The major re-configuring move conducted by Schmidt (1994, 1998) was first in accusing other
history writers of using history primarily as a device for legitimizing or delegitmizing a particular
identity. This is what Schmidt called presentism. Second, he mobilizes Gunnell’s approach to
conduct a more sophisticated historical case study. This seems to be the more important move as
it opened the debate of how history can be studied reflexive35 – and indeed the move which leads
me to speak of historiography as a way of studying IR.
In contrast to earlier studies that claim to have solved the problem by posing “W questions: what
to study, where to study, study by whom?, why study? How to study, what not to study, and what
was left out?” (Holsti 1998: 18). While all these questions are important, how shall they be
answered? For Schmidt, Gunnell’s ‘internal’ approach provided a convincing answer to guide
such a research. What is problematic about Schmidt’s move is that he develops the enemy image
of a (presentist) ‘external’ account and seems not to use, according to Holden (2002), his
approach empirically appropriate. Despite the existing differences between Gunnell and Skinner,
in his recent reformulation Schmidt (2006:257-268) in which the immediate academic
environment is the starting point of research and the job is “to reconstruct as accurately as
possible the history of the conversation that has been constitutive of academic IR” (257),
Schmidt blurs his earlier boundary between an external and an internal in a way that it becomes
indistinguishable. […]
5) Theory and policy discussions
A quite different network of studies conducting self-examinations has arisen around the question
of how the achievements of IR (findings, statements, theories, ‘laws’) relate to processes of
(foreign) policy making.36 The query has been conventionally grasped as examining if and how
foreign policy elites ‘use’ IR products. Albeit the concept of ‘usage’ has proven to be difficult37,
the overall finding was that elites rarely do. The reasons were largely seen in miscommunication,
different language games, logics, systems or weak institutional links. Based on these results
several prescriptions have been developed of how academics can find open ears and by which
For a criticism on Schmidt’s account see Holden (2002) and for a review of further critics Holden
2006:227).
36 Cp. for the following the existing overviews of the literature in Walt (2005), Eriksson and Sundelius
(2005), Lepgold and Nincic (2001) and our own discussion in Büger and Gadinger (2007a). I further refer
to literature that needs to be added or has not been addressed adequate in my present context.
37 See our critique of the concept of ‘usage’ or ‘utilization’ in Büger and Villumsen (2006), and the related
sociological literature (e.g. Beck and Bonß (1989), etc.). Utilization is a key concern in many studies from
development studies, working in the bureaucratic-academic nexus.
35
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practices results are best communicated.38 Critics have opposed the view that IR should be
produced for elites and called for delivering to civil society and NGO’s instead.39 While initial
approaches have been experience-based, sociology of science perspectives and findings have
been integrated, empirical observations been conducted and conceptualizations moved to the
recognition of interactive pattern.
a) Recent contributions have been shaped to a considerable degree by science studies’
interpretations of an upcoming knowledge society.40 In drawing on his earlier pragmatist works,
for instance, Gunther Hellmann (2007b) uses Peter Weingarts (2001) interpretation of the
consequences of the knowledge society to examine the state of the discipline. Weingart’s system
theory based thesis is that a knowledge society implies several reconfiguration processes between
science and society. Politics is scientifized; the sciences become politicized to a degree that they
cannot escape political influences, medialized and industrialized. Hellmann takes up this thesis and
argues by relying on the case of German IR that contrary to earlier diagnoses of a drifting apart,
IR, politics and the media move closer together. Such a tendency is visible, although (or because,
which is what Hellmann suggests) German IR is more theory oriented and more
professionalized. Hence for Hellmann the social importance of IR’s achievements is largely
determined by the environment that orders science, politics and the media, and structural change
occurring in it, rather than dependent on the actions of individual scientists – what seems to be
the prevalent view in the majority of prescriptions.
b) Given that the interactivity and interconnectivity between science and society is a key issue in
sociology of science, others have relied on these thoughts to study more local cases of the
relation between IR and policy processes. Although the borders of IR now become a critical
issue41, case studies I found (so far) that at least take inspiration in sociology of science are42:
See for instance those practices identified by George (1993). Others argue for a stronger orientation at
an objectivist tradition (Nicholson 2000) or for revising the idea of IR as a planning device (Jentlesson and
Bennett (2003), Zelikow (1994).
39 See for instance Booth (1997) and Smith (2007), the critique of Cox’s understanding in Duvall and
Varadarajan (2003). Contrary to the ‘problemsolvers’ and ‘technocrats’ they oppose, IR’s Critical theorists
have hesitated to show how such an engagement might look like. See for instance the discussion in
(Bühler 2002).
40 This is an issue in Eriksson and Sundelius (2005), Lepgold and Nincic (2001), in the contributions in
Hellmann (2007a), and related in Hellmann and Müller (2004).
41 Many of these studies are either transdisciplinary (more historical or sociological) or stem from IR’s
subfields, such as Critical Development Studies, Peace Research, Strategic Studies, or New European
Security Studies. Although the focus is not immediately on self-examinations and the focus much wider
than on IR, I would include here also much of the work of Didier Bigo and Jef Huysmans on security
professionals, some of the epistemic community studies, for instance Risse-Kappen’s (1994) study on
peace research and the end of the cold war or Emmanuel Adler’s (see 2005) study on the Non38
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ƒ
Inderjeet Parmar’s work (e.g. 2002, 2004) on the role of foundations and think tanks in
the foreign and development policies of Britain and the U.S;
ƒ
Ron Robin’s study (2001) of the relation between the behavioralist revolution in IR, think
tanks such as the Rand cooperation, and the security politics of the early cold war;
ƒ
Philip Lawrence (1996) analysis of the vocabulary of deterrence and the (security studies)
scholars providing it;
ƒ
Adam Edwards and Pete Gill’s (2002) discussion of the discourse of organized crime and
the mutually constitution of scholarship and political interests;
ƒ
Martin Mallin and Robert Latham’s (2001) analysis of the practices of “the interplay of
research, practical innovation, and advocacy” in the case of security scholars;
ƒ
Miroslav Nincic and Joseph Lepgolds (2001) analysis of the cases of Democratic Peace
research and IR Institutionalism in US Foreign Policy;
ƒ
Nicolas Guilholt’s (2005:166-187) study of IR scholars, legitimizing the politics of and
constituting the “field of human rights and democracy promotion”.
In contrast to the other studies discussed (way 2, 3, 4, 5, and early ‘theory and policy discussions’)
concepts of the ‘public’ and/or ‘society’ are of pivotal importance in these works. Whether these
are IR-media relationships (Hellmann, Mallin and Latham), think tanks role in organizing public
consensus (Parmar), or IR’s role in providing the vocabulary to justify policies before a wider
audience (Lawrence, Edwards and Gill, Guiholt). This does not only prove to some degree that it
is sometimes useful to have a look at sociology of science, but is a needed addendum to the
discussion, given that other studies either ignore it (way 2) or reduce the ‘public’ to some
miraculous concept of political culture, which is for instance the case of Joergensen (way 3).
Whether the knowledge society perspective is taken or more local cases are studied, this network
of study contributes to disciplinary sociology in highlighting the dense interactivity of IR, policy
processes and society. Hence what this network addresses are the relation between IR and its
environment and, in so far as prescriptions are produced, thoughts on how theory translates into
praxis are provided.
6) The structural perspective
Proliferation movement. Other works interested in the role of (social science) expertise in global politics
might well be included. See my related discussion in Büger (2007).
42 Some of the studies someone might expect here, I discuss in the frame of the next category.
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A sixth network of self-examination studies I would suggest to consider as a “structural
perspective”. Although there are close parallels to the early usage of Kuhn, the broad assessments
whether the discipline is American, historiographies addressing the development of the discipline
at large, general assessment’s of the disciplines relevance, and the knowledge society narrative, the
studies I discuss in the following conceive IR as a (global) order – hence the term ‘structural’43 –,
are less interested in the Americanness quest and emphasize the functionality of IR. In contrast
to emancipative accounts (way 3) who attempt to enable a cross-community dialogue by
establishing borders between them first (in identifying national communities and describing them
as somehow disentangled from the rest of IR), structural perspectives consider IR as a
transnational ‘discipline’, ‘field’, ‘discoursive structure’ or ‘global network’. In contrast to
historiographies (way 4), who apply in many ways also a structural perspective, the concern has
been much more on the present state of IR research. In sidelining many pieces that could be
relevant in this context, let us consider at least the following two approaches
a) Post-structuralist’s appraisals have come up with an understanding of IR as a discoursive
structure. Scholars such as Roxanne Lynn Doty, R.B.J. Walker, Bradley S. Klein, James Der
Derian and partly Steve Smith stress that IR is not so much a ‘science’ of something, but a
representation of political discourse. Hence IR should be analysed as done with other political
discourses, but IR discourse is seen as an especially significant discourse as it attempts to
objectify and rationalize other discourses of global politics. This understanding is the counterargument to those assuming autonomy of science (and IR). IR is a discoursive structure
embedded in and representative of other discoursive structures. Scholars have hence attempted
to identify the political in the discourses of IR. Findings have been that the representational
discourses of IR draw boundaries, which excludes regions, people and issues from political
discourses or drives them to the margins. Representational practices of IR stabilizes the identity
of societies as ‘Western’, ‘modern’, ‘liberal’, ‘secular’ and ‘democratic’, etc.
Such a perspective is telling as it, firstly, turns the starting point of a sociology of IR upside-down
in not starting with the organizational aspects of knowledge production, but with the translations
between IR’s and political practice. The assumption that there is (or cannot be) an autonomy of
IR, however, comes at the price of ignoring the organizational aspects and many of the power
struggles (post-structuralists are otherwise so interested in) between IR scholars. Such elements
need to be developed if post-structuralists want more then to provoke and instead contribute to
disciplinary sociology. Nonetheless, these post-structuralists make a decisive contribution in
returning the political to a sociology of IR and in opposing a view of IR (and the analysis of it) in
43
Wæver (2003) which I discuss below explicitly talks of a “structural” perspective.
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which an autonomous IR sphere interacts with an autonomous political or social sphere.
Scientific practice, IR practice is political.
b) Ole Wæver’s (2003) neo-functionalist account – in many ways the most sophisticated form of
disciplinary sociology in directly drawing on science studies – is less interested in the political of
IR, and leads us into another direction. In his draft paper that has meanwhile been widely
discussed (e.g. Holden 2006, Hellmann 2007a), Wæver responds to the national versus global
community debate (3) and answers the American hegemony quest by giving us a world-system
style answer in claiming IR to be “a global network centred on US journals, debates and job
markets” (Wæver 2003:4); although IR is trans-national, it is a “trans-national empire plus distinct
national nodes” (Wæver 2003:4): the US is the centre and the further we move away from it, the
more we move into the periphery. Hence he rejects that both quests (the hegemony and
national/global) are relevant ones.
In shortly discussing Bourdieu’s notion of (French) academia as field of power struggles, Wæver
stresses that the study of power effects need to become part of disciplinary sociology44, to
consider power he promises us for the future (has he kept his promise?). Primarily Wæver
discusses what we can learn from Richard Whitley’s (1987) neo-Mertonian The Intellectual and
Social Organization of Science.
Without going into all the details, Whitley’s approach is centred on the idea that science is a type
of ‘work’ distinctly organised. Two principles are pivotal in this organisation, which is the
principle of dependency – scientists need to rely on the works of others to be able to conduct
their work or to gain status– and the principle of novelty or uncertainty – new findings need to
be presented and results cannot be a simple replication of earlier work. Whitley goes further in
arguing that both principles have a “functionalist”, technological and a “strategic” dimension.
The former refers to the degree in which scientists have to rely on equipment and earlier works,
while the strategic dimension covers the way how scientists need to cope with the two principles
to build a reputation. Whitley ends up with a two-by-two table from which he develops different
types (different degrees to which principles and dimensions matter). The typology is used to
compare different sciences. This is movies considered necessary, as Wæver stresses with Whitley,
because many thoughts on the sciences have been too focussed on general statement about
science. Wæver uses the typology to identify which type IR might be. While he finds the
functional dimension in general to be low and the strategic to be high, he concludes that IR’s
Wæver is aware that for Bourdieu the identification of a field is the result of research, not the starting
point, and requires heavy empirical observations on the existence of a common doxa and illusio. Hence he
uses the (for him less theory-laded) notions of a global network or empire, to make his claim of IR as a
multi-level enterprise.
44
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authorization practices (better: reputation gaining mechanisms) are heavily directed towards
theory. Although Waver’s pragmatic game with Whitley is telling, it leaves the readers with
nagging doubts if a disciplinary sociology should be based on a technological functionalist
vocabulary in which scientists seem to do no more then passive reputation maximizing and task
fulfilling, while the rest is determined by the structure of the “intellectual field”. Whether this is
Wæver’s or Whitley’s problem, the imaginary offered here seems to sideline creative agency or
any transformative (political) capacity of a sociology of IR.45
To raise some more criticism: Wæver is well aware that IR is inherently political and structured by
power effects. Although he points into a direction (Bourdieu)46, so far he has however not shown
how the study of power can be integrated into his Whitley framework and into disciplinary
sociology of IR at large. Second, Wæver claims to follow a strategy that starts from an internal
understanding and adds (if necessary) external elements. Hence he follows the opposite
directions the post-structuralists have taken. The problem is nonetheless the same. In starting
from the organization of knowledge production in IR, he either forgets (or did not had the time
so far) to add, or does consider other factors, than those identified by Whitley, to be marginal.
In sum, structural accounts are key contributions for the sociology of IR, trying to implicitly and
explicitly integrate science studies major findings and approaches. Both perspectives discussed
here, nonetheless, suffer from some weaknesses and if a future ‘structural’ perspective is to be
developed it may well be some connection (or muddling together) of those two.
7) Scientific Practice and Professionalization Discourse
Optimistically I suggest adding a seventh category, the study of scientific practice. I say
optimistically because such an approach has not been fully developed for IR, nor has it been used
empirically. Given the growing numbers of advocates for a focus on practice in IR and political
science (Kratochwil (2007), Neumann (2002), Adler (2005), Huysmans (2006), Fischer (2003),
Wagenaar (2003)), the increasing calls to understand IR as scientific practice(s) (this panel?) and
that science studies’ fourth perspective advocates for such an understanding, future studies are to
be expected. The crux about practice theories might be seen in 1) their rejection of any a-priori
position of whether internal or external explanations are to be favoured or wherever such a
In some sense this is a surprising move by Wæver (although understandable from the perspective of his
1998 article which is the starting point of this paper), as he seems to be in his influential writings on
security in favour of agency, rather then technocratic or neo-neo-functionalist theories. Why not a speech
act of IR?
46 I would doubt that a marriage of Bourdieu and Whitley is possible. This is not only difficult as two very
elaborated vocabularies need to be translated to each other, but also because Bourdieu in many ways relies
on a sophisticated version of realism – at least this is my reading of Bourdieu (2004), see the related
criticism in Lynch (2000) and Latour (2005).
45
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boundary should be drawn; and 2) their attempts to balance structure and agency in seeing them
in a mutually constitutive dynamic relation (“global microstructures”, “actors macro-structuring
reality”).47
Poststructuralists have partly taken such a perspective, but they tend to be interested in the longterm structures and orders produced by practice, rather than in practice itself. In our own
proposal for studying IR’s scientific practice (Büger and Gadinger 2007a, 2007b), we drew on
Latour and argued to focus on the practices of concept development, self-governance, boundary
drawing, alliance building, mobilization of the world and public representation. We argued that
these are useful domains by which scientific practice can be ordered and analysed.
Further the study of IR practice is usefully combined with studying local actions and techniques,
such as writing, quoting, presenting, styles of reasoning and publishing, practices of peer review,
etc. Heidrun Friese’s (2001) study, observing the practices of authority construction at a
sociological conference, is noteworthy in this regard. Dvora Yanow (2006) has put forward some
concerns on such a perspective that sets up on laboratory studies. She argued that the laboratory
so decisive for these studies is non-existent in political science. This is, however a very limited
understanding of both, the laboratory, as well as laboratory studies. True, political science is not
operating in a lab, as high energy physics does. But anyone who has ever had trouble with his
printer, email or power point or has been astonished by the results SPSS has produced for him,
will not doubt that contemporary political science is decisively shaped by (social and material, if
we prefer to distinguish it) technology. Also we do not have to search very long for our
laboratory sites, whether these are conferences or advisory projects.48 The history of deterrence
theory is instructive in this regard (Lawrence 1996, Robin 2001).
While these are debates on how to proceed with disciplinary sociology, I shall come back later to,
we should not neglect that meanwhile considerable efforts are made to reflect on scientific work
in outlets such as the section on teaching in International Studies Perspectives or Perspectives on Politics.
Although I did not make the effort to review this literature in detail, the creation of these outlets
and the renewed interest in pedagogical work and career pattern, form a part of a sociology of IR.
Given that teaching makes up not only a major ground of justification for academic IR, but is
time-consuming everyday work, it should not be considered a minor issue. Nonetheless the study
of practice, whether in the format of studying everyday actions or of studying ordered practice is
still in its beginnings.
Many would suggest that also Bourdieu as a major theorist of practice would fit into this. This is
reasonable if it is acknowledged that Bourdieus work is less coherent and better be understood as offering
to different readings, a more structural-objectivist and a more practice-experience oriented. See King
(2000) for such a distinction.
48 See Law (2004) for such an enlarged understanding. Bockmann and Gill’s (2002) discussion of Eastern
Europe as a laboratory for economists is an interesting social science example for this.
47
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Summary: IR’s disciplinary sociology
Even in my limited inventory, sociology of IR proves to be a lively field. The range of scholars
engaged in it and the growing recognition of its results suggest that it is a field of growing
significance. Let me draw some conclusions from this inventory in the light of the questions I
raised.
1) The relation between IR and sociology of science is not non-existent, but (so far?) largely
limited to a) the American reception of the Kuhn-Lakatos exchange, b) some eclecticism citing
sociology of science to make frameworks studying national communities more reasonable, c)
Guzzini’s reading of Kuhn, d) the knowledge society narrative, and e) Ole Wæver’s several
attempts to use the sociology of Randall Collins intellectual networks, Richard Whitely’s
structural account and Peter Wagner and Björn Wittrock’s discourse coalition approach.
To provoke, most scholars seem to be somehow aware that something must have happened in
the sociology of science, since Kuhn, but have hesitated so far to engage with anything out there.
Despite Wæver’s engagement, scholars that at least point into the direction of using sociology of
science (Smith, Holden, who else?) rather tend to rely on social theorists they read anyway (such
as Bourdieu and Foucault), than first to start with reading an introduction to the sociology of
sciences and then decide what is useful for their problem. As a general assessment, one is
tempted to say that, thirty years after the publication of Kuhn’s Scientific Revolutions, the Kuhnian
revolution has still not reached IR.
2) Disciplinary sociology is more then discussions on how to write a good textbook, but also a
wider field then some of the European protagonists want us to believe. It is far more than
complaints about American hegemony, the study of some freaky indigenous IR communities or
the demolition of mythical great debates. Those are topics of disciplinary sociology, but as shown
other thoughts and discourses belong to it as well. This needs to be kept in mind, if it is only to
prevent us from any argument that might be raised in future, of the kind “US IR might be
hegemonic, but we (Europeans) do disciplinary sociology and reflect on what we are”, There is
no need to reproduce the U.S. versus. the rest of the world discussion on a meta-level.49
3) Struggles of how to conceptualize the relations in the trias between knowledge production, its
environment and its translation into praxis, are a significant topic in the sociology of IR. While
Such a tendency is already visible in Steve Smith articles, and also somehow present in Holden’s (2006)
distinction between “Anglo-Saxon historiography”, meaning those doing reflections on the discipline the
American way, vs. “cross-community comparisons”, meaning largely rest-of-the-world authors.
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paradigmatic accounts offer us silence, poststructuralists claim the hegemony of the environment
over knowledge production and the majority of textbooks offers us at least a causality between
events and scientific change, sophisticated thoughts in this regard are:
ƒ
Historiographers addressing this issue as a problem of internal vs. external explanations.
Schmidt (2006: 257) follows Holden (2006) that “the controversy of internal and external,
or contextual is fundamental”. Scholars have failed, so far to actually demonstrate why it
is so fundamental and more then a private debate between Holden’s reading of Quentin
Skinner and Schmidt’s version of John Gunnell.
ƒ
National community researcher as a problem of content vs. institutional environment
ƒ
Largely unconnected from these, theory and policy discussions have raised the issue as a
problem of expertise, as a problem of science-media-politics relations or as a problem of
transforming theory into political praxis.
ƒ
[…]
In sum the interrelationship of organization, environment and translation has been recognized,
yet we are not at the state where scholars went beyond description.
4) Is the sociology of IR narcissistic? The majority of disciplinary sociologies in my inventory stay
detached. If they carry a prescriptive they do not exemplify it reflective. For instance Holden
(2006:231) is right in criticizing the historiographical wing, by arguing that “the paradox of the
argument put forward by Schmidt and others is that they leave themselves open to a ‘So what?’
objection, because they are unable to show why corrections to the conventional historical
narratives matter in any major way for contemporary practices”.50
Those discussions stemming from the theory and policy debates that do provide prescriptions on
how to transform scientific practice are unconnected to the rest of disciplinary sociology. Hence
the whole issue area of how academic outcomes are translated into political practice is absent
from the majority of disciplinary sociology. Those theory and policy discussions that work out
prescriptions are themselves problematic, not only do they randomly build on systematic forms
of observations on the discipline. and they do not exemplify the political nature of their
recommendations.
Despite poststructuralists, disciplinary sociologies advocate for an apolitical view of IR. Politics is
understood as something outside of IR. Scholarly debate about how this ‘external’ influences the
This is not to say that such a case cannot be made, rather to the contrary, and indeed it has been made
partly by Thies (2002).
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‘internal’ (apolitical, value-free?) IR discourses. With such a restricted understanding of politics,
the politics and power-effects inherent in IR’s discourses come out of focus.
Even if disciplinary sociologies want to stay in the frame of any intern/extern distinction, and
wherever this boundary is drawn, they need to acknowledge that from such a perspective a
politics/science relation is threefold: 1) political practice transforms scientific practice, 2)
scientific practice transforms political practice and 3) the practices of scientists are
epistemological and political. Some science studies scholars rightfully stress that it is useful to
speak about capital-‘P’-politics, referring to the politics and policies in a society and small-“p”politics, referring to the politics of scientific practice. These might be a device for disciplinary
sociologies to keep in mind the political of scientific practice. An alternative is to reject any form
of intern/extern, content/context, knowledge/object distinction in recognizing that these
dimensions are interrelated to a degree that they become indistinguishable. If we remember the
case of Joliot discussed by Latour, this is what has been argued in the fourth tradition of science
studies.
A third case of why disciplinary sociologies might be narcissistic arises, when we have a look at
the arguments given by scholars for why they conduct disciplinary sociology. The following
motives can be identified:
ƒ
Legitimizing and de-legitimizing certain ways of doing science or telling the history of the
discipline
ƒ
To mark the boundaries of what is IR and what it is not
ƒ
To reconstruct the identity of the discipline
ƒ
Education purposes
ƒ
To enable “cross-community” communication.
ƒ
We have nothing else to do
ƒ
[…]
All of these are motives that do not guide the sociology of science into an engaged direction.
5) To sum up this discussion a range of pressing problematiques runs through the literature. The
first and most obvious is a low degree of coherence and low connectivity between the different
ways of studying IR and the related networks of literature and scholars. Although national
community studies and historiographers are finding slowly to each other, other disciplinary
sociologies are largely disconnected from this debate.
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Second, much of the studies are conducted to legitimatize or de-legitimatize certain forms of
knowledge production or ways of interpreting the history without providing alternatives of how
to transform scientific practice. Schmidt describes this problematique as the problem of presentism.
Holdens (2006) comment that this is a minor problem needs to be rejected. If we are out for
harsh and uncompromising self-examinations, it is not sufficient to demonstrate that a certain
way of doing IR is ‘degenerative’, a certain reading of IR history is ‘false’ based on the historical
‘facts’, others have failed to study the important issues, have used the wrong methods, that the
wrong knowledge has been produced or scholars have spoke in the name of elites, instead of the
“powerless”. If a sociology of IR is conducted to denunciate, or if it is perceived as such, it is
useless. To some degree it is unavoidable that scholarly arguments, considered to be relevant by
their colleagues, always are justification and de-justification or ‘presentism’. But this can be done
in a reflective way. I would suggest that IR’s disciplinary sociologies can learn in this regard from
a recognition of Bloor’s ‘strong programme’51. The principles of symmetry – statements to be
considered true or ‘false’ by the actors need to be analysed by the same means – and of reflexivity
– means used for analysis should be applicable (and applied) to the analyst – have been explicitly
designed to cope with these problems.
The third and maybe most dramatic problematique are the narcissistic tendencies of disciplinary
sociology. Studies often fail in leaving the self-referential circle. As I discussed above scholars
tend not to recognize the multiple interconnectivities between scientific practice and political
practice. They tend to neglect the importance of the transformative capacity of a sociology of IR.
Further the current prime objects of disciplinary sociology are forms of communities either in the
format of some de-contextualized paradigms/theories or in the format of national communities.
Wævers contribution in this regard, in first clarifying that IR is (and can be) a global network as
well as a local (national) one, and second in advocating for a perspective on the social science of
which IR forms part of, cannot be emphasized enough. To use an analogy introduced by Johann
Heilbronn (XXXX), IR has studied itself as many have studied the foreign policy of a state, in
taking the perspective on the discipline for granted. Instead of recognizing the global politics of
the social science and transnational, transdisciplinary relations, the focus has been on the state,
the discipline. However, the same as a state is part of a system of states, a discipline is part of a
system of disciplines. The same as the system of states (international relations) is shaped by
transnational relations, is the system of disciplines (the sciences) shaped by transdisciplinary
relations. Wæver seems to be aware of this. If his comparative disciplinary sociology will share
Although it has its own shortcomings. Some of the problems I discuss below. For better critiques see
Latour (2005), Pels (1996) and Lnych (2000).
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the same fate as comparative foreign policy studies in IR, is however open to the future. In sum,
there is a need for the sociology of IR to go political, global and local.
3. ‘Cultural Studies of IR ’? Some Suggestions
In my short discussion of science studies, I argued that the fourth tradition of science studies
might be the device by which we can cope with these issues. These are the researchers that have
provided innovative ways to study science, and further claim to have found solutions for some of
the problems just discussed.
In the following I like to elaborate more on the approach of a ‘cultural studies of science’
developed by Joseph Rouse (1996). I do not claim to be able to solve the above discussed
problems – some of them are rather dilemmas and antinomies, than problems –, nor shall I argue
against other concepts that are currently in preparation for usage in IR (for instance in this panel),
or other science studies accounts that might be used for IR in future. I shall sketch how the
argument presented by Rouse is significant in our present context and can open a path for
revising disciplinary self-examinations.
In his Engaging Science: How to Understand its Practices Philosophically, Rouse makes a case for a distinct
version of science studies by largely addressing philosophers of science. He opposes those
attempts in the philosophy of sciences understanding science as determined by relations to
objects or by distinct methods, as well as science studies’ social constructivist (the strong
programme), who attempt to reduce the sciences to social ‘factors’.52 Those studies form, what
Rouse denominates as the “legitimation project”. Advocates of these perspectives:
“tried to settle questions about the legitimation of scientific knowledge by interpreting the
structure or historical development of the content of scientific knowledge and the ontological
status of its objects. Either the cultural authority and political autonomy of scientific inquiry
have been justified by showing how the content of knowledge is determined and related to the
world or challenged by showing representations are accepted in ways that afford no global
legitimisation.” (Rouse 1996:20-21)
Rouse’ argument should be accessible for the ‘professional-trained IR epistemologists’ as well as
those interested in sociology of science. Rouse puts at the centre of his argument the concepts of
‘significance’ an ‘intelligibly’, ‘practice’ and ‘narrative’, and ‘power’ and argues for an engaged way
In this way Rouse has a similar starting point (problematique) as Richard Whitley, whose work has been
mobilized for IR by Wæver (2003:8, see my discussion of way 6b).
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of doing science studies (“science studies should be understood as engaging scientific practice
rather then just interpreting it” (31)). Hence he promises us a path to circumvent the narcissist
problem, without falling back in to an sophisticated objectivism a la Bourdieu.
With some parallels to better known IR accounts – Iver Neumann’s (2002) concept of practice,
narrative and discourse and the communities of practice idea (developed by Etienne Wengger
(1998) and introduced to IR by Emanuel Adler (2005)53) –, Rouse argues that scientists operate in
an environment of coherence and contest, provided by temporal and continuous restructured
narrative fields, fields which are the grounds to make scientific practices intelligible and
significant.
Significance
Rouse argues that ‘significance’ is the most fundamental epistemological issue, certainly more
fundamental then ‘truth’. Questions of significance govern the codification of achievements,
answer which results should be published, hoe these results should be framed, and how research
should be redirected accordingly. “Foregrounding significance reminds us that most truths about
the world are scientifically irrelevant or uninteresting; recognizing the difference between
important and insignificant claims is indispensable for understanding scientific practice” (21).
Practice
Practice Rouse conceives in a way similar as pragmatism and symbolic interactionism have done.
Practices are patterns of activity in response to a situation. Thus, practices are here understood in
a non-representational way. They are not understood as the concrete doings of human agents by
which agents created meanings, but as the meaningful situations by which doings are meaningful.
As Rouse (1996:38, my emphasis) puts this, “meaningful patterns are not bestowed on the world
by agents or their shared forms of life, but emerge from patterns of interaction within the world”.
Practices are dynamic because patterns only exist by being continuously reproduced. Coherence
and continuity of practice hence depends on the coordination work of multiple persons and
things and the continuous maintenance of it. Such maintenance work is incredible hard work in
the case of scientific practice, as scientists operate in very different environments (local contexts).
Hence there is room for considerable slippage in the ongoing reconstruction the ‘same’ scientific
Although some doubts needs to be raised, if Adler has not misunderstood this concept by stressing the
coherence of communities, over their network, entangled character. If the social is constituted by a
meshed, intertwined plurality of communities organized around one practice, how can there be anything
like an ‘epistemic community’ with shared values, beliefs and common policy project? This problem might
however be well a problem of Wengger’s account as he continues to use the problematic term
‘community’.
53
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C. Büger – Seven ways of studying IR
practice, practices are interpreted very differently, and sometimes the pattern even breaks down54.
Scientific practice thus is catched in a continual tension between significance and incoherence.
Scientists manage this tension by what Rouse calls “the narrative reconstruction of science”.
Narrative
By narrative Rouse does not understand the literary form (a story with a beginning and an end),
but “a way of comprehending the temporality of one’s own actions in their very enactment” (27).
Scientific practices and achievements are intelligible if they have a place within enacted narratives
that constitute a developing field of knowledge, and they are important to the extent that they
develop or transform these narratives (170). The appeal of such an understanding of scientific
practice as narrative reconstruction lies for Rouse in being an alternative to standard view that
scientific work “becomes intelligible and important against a background of a research
community’s shared belief and desires”. Such a view is not plausible as it overstretches
coherence, hence do not consider the interplay between significance and incoherence and cannot
cope with situations in which scientific practice transforms a community’s prior commitments or
changes what counts as the relevant scientific community. Instead of what constitutes a scientific
community, what is its history and future is frequently at stake.55 What is hence in common
among researchers “is a field of interpretative conflict rather than any uncontested commitments
about beliefs, values, standards, or meanings” (172). The future and the past become intertwined
in these constitutive conflicts. “Conflicts of over what is to be the future course of research in
the field […] are simultaneously conflicts over how to interpret its past.” (172). To engage in one
research project rather than another is to (attempt to) reconfigure the story that would make
sense of that project within its historical situation. With similarities to Actor-Network Theory
Rouse also speaks of narratives as “epistemic alignments”: “Skills, models, concepts, and
statements become informative about their objects only when other people and things interact in
constructive alignment with them” (27).
Power and an engaged science studies
54 Which is, for instance often the case, when new things (epistemic objects) emerge that need to be
integrated in the pattern, or a new practice arises. Disciplinary or sub-disciplinary differentiation or the
division between theory-oriented work and policy-oriented work are cases of these. To give a very broad
speculative example the discovery of the object “globalization” (see Fischer 2003) led to a crisis of the
practice of doing international relations and attempts to establish transnationalism studies, and
international political sociology, etc.
55 Rouse provides a telling example: Why are textbooks and state of the art articles continuously rewritten?
If new results have been produced, why not just publish occasional supplements? The answer is they are
ongoing reconfigurations.
33
C. Büger – Seven ways of studying IR
Narratives, alignments and (re)configuration practices are not only device by which significance
and intelligibly is provided, but also constitute a range of power relations. They are narratives of
power in the sense that they establish relations between knowing subjects and give authority to
one or the other. Power is mediate by them and hence needs to be understood as situated, and
dynamic. If this is the case, and this is Rouse next move, it needs to be acknowledged that science
studies do not operate detached or independently from narratives and power relations, but within
them. Science studies are situated in power relations, and this is certainly true for IR’s disciplinary
sociology. When science studies are aware that they are reconfiguration moves themselves, they
have transformative capacity. For Rouse this implies that science studies have to be conducted in
an ethical way, in asking by which narratives and reconfiguration practices, which power relations
become established and who and what (objects, things, practices) become excluded or
marginalized.
Cultural Studies of Science and the disciplinary sociology of IR
In what way this discussion open new (significant? intelligible?) paths for the sociology of IR shall
come under consideration next. These are however some very sketchy initial thoughts that need
to be developed further.
What is this thing called IR? Following Rouse there is now easy answer to this question. IR is no
stable thing but a continuously reconfigured narrative structure. Nonetheless the fact that
multiple people refer to “IR”, signify its coherence, and the debates I discussed over these pages
signify its incoherence. IR is not one thing, but interpreted in different narratives differently. To
paraphrase John Law (2004), IR is not one world, but many. Such a statement implies that there
are not unlimited IR’s. There is no plurality, but multiplicity. Grasping multiplicity is however not
an easy thing and will require much further work.
Should we study schools, national IR’s, or a global IR? For Rouse IR is local, national and global
the same time. An IR practice becomes significant, reliable and is indeed constituted by its
reliance on a narrative field. This can be in principle the narrative of science, of social science, of
social science in Britain, of IR in Norway, of political science in Germany or of global IR – to
give some examples. Hence, instead of asking which communities are more significant (a global
or a national?), the question is one of which practices become intelligible and significant in which
narratives.
34
C. Büger – Seven ways of studying IR
Is IR influenced by internal or external factors, by political culture and ideology? Again, now easy
answer. It does first depend on what ‘IR’ (see above), we focus on. Second, identifying different
alignments and narratives will lead to different networks of IR, and different ways in which
things, objects, etc. are arranged. Again the question is not if IR is influenced by ‘factors’, but
which practices, become significant in relation to which other practices, things, objects,
narratives.
Do we need a disciplinary historiography of IR or a sociology of IR? From Rouses perspective it
becomes clear that both are interrelated. If IR is conceived as a continuously reconfiguring
narrative and if we want to make sense of IR (and transform it based on our results), it will be the
job of a sociology of IR, to study IR practices of reconfiguring its past (historiography), present
and future. If such an endeavour is successful (considered to be intelligible and significant) it will
reconfigure IR and as such will become part of future studies.
How can a sociology of IR be political? It should have become clear that a sociology of IR is not
only describing IR, but producing it. A detached sociology of IR, in which we describe what it is
in ‘fact’ is not possible. A detached sociology of IR, enacts a detached IR – and this is what we
want to avoid? A sociology of IR that neglects power, will leave these power mechanisms intact
that we then talk about at coffee breaks, instead.
If we enact IR by studying it, the question might ultimately boil down to what Annemarie Mol
has called ontological politic, to a question of what IR we politically favour. An IR driven by the
power-effects of professional discourse? An IR in which scholars (we) are task-fullfillers and
reputation-maximizer? An IR independent from society?, etc. However, as Law (2004:67) has put
this,”in an ontological politics we might hope to interfere, to make some realities realer, others
less so.”
4. Conclusion: Paradigms, Cultures and Translations
“Reflexivity is not an epistemological, moral or political virtue. It is an unavoidable
feature of the way actions (including actions performed, expressions written, by
academic researchers) are performed, made sense of and incorporated into social
settings. In this sense of the word, it is impossible to be unreflexive.”
(Michael Lynch 2000: 27)
35
C. Büger – Seven ways of studying IR
"The sociologically armed epistemological vigilance that each researcher can apply on
his own behalf can only be strengthened by the generalizing of the imperative of
reflexivity and the spreading of the indispensable instruments for complying with it;
this alone can institute reflexivity as the common law by the field, which would thus
become characterized by a sociological critique of all by all that would intensify the
effects of the epistemological critique of all by all."
(Pierre Bourdieu 2004: 91)
“What does this mean in practice? The answer is that I do not know.”
(John Law 2004: 156)
Michael Lynch (2000) reminds us that reflexivity is neither a virtue in itself, nor can it be
identified with constructivism or any other critical or radical programme. Reflexivity is an
essential human capacity. The present crisis of IR, marked by calls for useful knowledge,
proposals of ‘going beyond IR’ and nagging doubts about any achievements the sciences can
offer, increases the need to think consequentially (?) on reflexivity towards scientific practice, or
self-examinations as I called it. In other words a debate of how IR wants to reflect on its own
practices is needed.
I argued that epistemological debates and meta-theoretical reflections are neither useful in this
regard. Nor are they, if we follow Peter Wagner’s (2001:86) claim that the present situation “is
probably a historically new experience, but it requires no new epistemology”, even needed.
Instead, I stressed the importance of the currently evolving ‘sociology of IR’. Such a disciplinary
sociology, however, needs to avoid becoming ‘disciplined’ and ‘narcissistic’ by thinking to strict
inside the borders of the discipline. Hence, I highlighted that attempts addressing the
organisation and institutionalization of knowledge production, the institutional conditions
shaping it and the translations between IR and other cultural spheres require attention. Sociology
of science can be in this regard a powerful resource for IR. My inventory of current disciplinary
sociology in IR led to the conclusion that IR researchers have only sparsely connected to these
resources. So far, disciplinary sociology struggles with a range of problematiques in a way that they
are rather unproductive reflectivity, but also inadequate means to cope with the present situation.
I suggested that many of this problematiques cannot be solved, but at least their consequences be
milded by paying more attention to science studies. The principles of the strong programme,
although problematic in itself, can be an initial guidance for future studies to cope with the
problem of legitimization. To circumvent narcissistic tendencies, political consideration should
return to the sociology of IR. There is a need to widen and to limit the perspective the same time.
36
C. Büger – Seven ways of studying IR
In sum, a future sociology of IR needs to go political, global and local. To open such a path for
disciplinary sociology, I sketched that a turn to a ‘cultural studies of science’ perspective, might
equip us to handle these tasks. This is however only one way to go.
To end with some remarks on reflexivity, if the mission outlined in this paper is taken seriously, I
have failed in many regards: Although I suggested that I did address significant problems of
scientific practice, my own focus was on texts alone rather then practice (discoursive practices?), I
did not comply with any principle of self-reflexivity, for instance, in reflecting on my own status,
my own objectives and my position in the field of IR (a PhD student at a ‘European university’?,
a dilettante in science studies?) or in throwing the maybe too harsh and provocative criticism I
raised against existing literature at my own paper; neither did I make use of a coherent science
studies approach (ANT? CSS?), as I called for. When we reconsider the discussion of Law and
Wiliam’s paper on how relevant articles are written, the presentation of the array I assembled,
might even have failed to be considered ‘reliable’ or ‘valuable’ by my ‘colleagues’.
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40
Σύγχρονη Θεωρία Διεθνών Σχέσεων και η Παρακαταθήκη του Hans J. Morgenthau
[υπό έκδοση στο Α. Ι. Μεταξάς (επ.). Πολιτική Επιστήμη: Διακλαδική και Κριτική
Προσέγγιση της Πολιτικής Πράξης. Αθήνα: Σιδέρης]
Εισαγωγή
…Να είσαι ικανός να εργαστείς στην υπηρεσία μιας μεγάλης
ιδέας και ενός σημαντικού στόχου…., έτσι ώστε στο τέλος να
είσαι σε θέση να πεις: Πεθαίνω, αλλά παραμένει κάτι το οποίο
είναι πιο σημαντικό από την ίδια τη ζωή και το οποίο θα
διαρκέσει πολύ περισσότερο απ’ό,τι ένα σώμα – η δουλειά μου.
Αυτή είναι η ελπίδα μου…
Hans J. Morgenthau, 1922 (1984a, σελ. 3).
Δεν χωρά αμφιβολία ότι ο Morgenthau συγκαταλέγεται πλέον στους κορυφαίους στοχαστές
του εικοστού αιώνα και ότι η ελπίδα του τότε δεκαοχτάχρονου νεαρού πραγματοποιήθηκε
καθ’ολοκληρία και με τον πλέον πανηγυρικό τρόπο.1 Το έργο του όχι απλώς άντεξε το
αλάθητο τεστ του χρόνου και την απαιτητική αναμέτρηση με τη λήθη, αλλά η επιρροή του
στη μεταπολεμική συγκρότηση του κλάδου των Διεθνών Σχέσεων είναι τόσο δεσπόζουσα
που ακόμη και οι πολέμιοι της θεωρίας του τού αναγνωρίζουν την ιδιότητα του «θεμελιακού
πατέρα» - ή ακόμη και του «Πάπα των Διεθνών Σχέσεων». Η δε παρακαταθήκη του στην
κατοπινή εξέλιξη του κλάδου είναι τόσο εμβληματική που κάλλιστα θα μπορούσε να
χρησιμοποιήσει κανείς την πορεία του έργου του (τόσο το πώς αυτό επηρεάστηκε από
διάφορα διανοητικά ρεύματα, όσο και το πώς επηρέασε ανά περιόδους την επιστημονική
κοινότητα) ως όχημα για ένα πανοραμικό ταξίδι στην ιστοριογραφική εξέλιξη των Διεθνών
Σχέσεων.
Το καθολικά, λοιπόν, αυτό αναγνωρισμένο του status ως «θεμελιακού πατέρα» και η
αδιαμφισβήτητη συμπερίληψη του έργου του στο πάνθεον των κλασσικών κειμένων θα
μπορούσαν να θεωρηθούν από μόνα τους λόγος επαρκής για να ερμηνεύσουμε το σύγχρονο
ενδιαφέρον στη σκέψη του. Τα πράγματα όμως, όπως συνήθως συμβαίνει, είναι λίγο πιο
σύνθετα απ’ό,τι μια πρώτη προσέγγιση αποκαλύπτει. Παρότι η θεμελιακή συνεισφορά του
Morgenthau δεν αμφισβητήθηκε ποτέ, η επιρροή του έργου του χαρακτηρίζεται από
αξιοσημείωτες διακυμάνσεις. Το Politics Among Nations, που αποτελεί το magnum opus του,
αποδείχθηκε άμεση και τεράστια επιτυχία. Δημοσιεύεται το Σεπτέμβριο του 1948 και μέσα
στον ίδιο μήνα υιοθετείται επίσημα ως το βασικό εγχειρίδιο για τα μαθήματα εξωτερικής
πολιτικής και Διεθνών Σχέσεων από τα Πανεπιστήμια Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia
1
και Notre Dame (Frei, 2001, σελ. 73). Μέχρι τον Απρίλιο του 1949 έχει επίσης υιοθετηθεί
από ενενήντα επιπλέον πανεπιστήμια στις ΗΠΑ (Ibid, σελ. 73). Μέσα σε λίγα χρόνια το
βιβλίο θα αναγνωριστεί ως κείμενο θεμελιακό για την μεταπολεμική συγκρότηση του κλάδου
προσδίδοντας στο συγγραφέα παγκόσμια αναγνώριση και σχεδόν καθολική αποδοχή.
Ωστόσο, η επιρροή του Morgenthau άρχισε να αμβλύνεται στη συμπεριφορική και μετασυμπεριφορική εποχή τόσο λόγω της κυριαρχίας του νεορεαλισμού του Kenneth Waltz, για
τον οποίο ο κλασσικός ρεαλισμός του Morgenthau αποτελούσε μια προ-επιστημονική και
μάλλον αναχρονιστική εκδοχή του ρεαλισμού, όσο και λόγω της τότε δεσπόζουσας
επιστημικής κουλτούρας που καθόριζε ως ύστατο κριτήριο θεωρητικής επάρκειας τα
θετικιστικά επιστημολογικά διαπιστευτήρια και τις συνδεδεόμενες με αυτά μεθοδολογικές
επιταγές. Έκτοτε, η συνεισφορά του αναγνωριζονταν ως κομβική στην εξέλιξη του κλάδου,
αλλά παράλληλα παρωχημένη. Ένα, δηλαδή, σημαντικό επεισόδιο στην ιστοριογραφία των
Διεθνών Σχέσεων, αλλά με περιορισμένη σύγχρονη αξία. Το τέλος, όμως, του Ψυχρού
Πολέμου ήρθε να τροφοδοτήσει ένα ανανεωμένο ενδιαφέρον για τη σκέψη του Morgenthau.
Αυτό που παρατηρείται, ιδιαίτερα την τελευταία δεκαετία, είναι μια συνεχώς αυξανόμενη
τάση «επανανακάλυψης» της συνεισφοράς του και ευρύτερης επαναξιολόγησης της
παρακαταθήκης του. Πώς ερμηνεύεται αυτή η επάνοδός του στο θεωρητικό προσκήνιο;
Όπως εύστοχα παρατηρεί ο Lebow (2007), ιστορικά υπάρχει μια άρρηκτη και
οργανική σχέση ανάμεσα σε διανοητικές και/ή πολιτικές ανακατατάξεις και την απόπειρα
επανάγνωσης και επανεκτίμησης κλασσικών κειμένων. Η περίπτωση του Morgenthau δεν
αποτελεί εξαίρεση σε αυτό τον κανόνα. Αυτό ακριβώς είναι και το κεντρικό επιχείρημα της
παρούσας συνεισφοράς. Ότι, δηλαδή, το σύγχρονο ανανεωμένο ενδιαφέρον για τον
Morgenthau δεν είναι απλώς προϊόν της πλούσιας διανοητικής του παρακαταθήκης, αλλά η
αποκρυστάλλωση ενός φάσματος σύγχρονων διανοητικών και πολιτικών εξελίξεων. Αν
θέλαμε να ακτινογραφήσουμε αυτό το πλαίσιο θα εντοπίζαμε δύο διανοητικές και δύο
πολιτικές εξελίξεις ως τους κυρίως άξονές του (Williams, 2007). Στο διανοητικό επίπεδο, θα
εντοπίζαμε πρώτον την ανάπτυξη και συστηματικοποίηση του ερευνητικού προγράμματος
της ιστοριογραφικής εξέλιξης των Διεθνών Σχέσεων και, δεύτερον, την επανεξέταση των
παραμέτρων της τρέχουσας επιστημολογικής διαμάχης ανάμεσα σε ρεαλισμό και
κονστρουκτιβισμό. Στο πολιτικό επίπεδο, θα εντοπίζαμε πρώτον τη διάψευση του κλίματος
ευφορίας για παγκόσμια μετα-ψυχροπολεμική σταθερότητα και, δεύτερον, τις παγκόσμιες
προκλήσεις που ανέκυψαν με την άνοδο των νεο-συντηρητικών στο Λευκό Οίκο και την
υιοθέτηση μιας παρεμβατικής και «σταυροφορικής» εξωτερικής πολιτικής των ΗΠΑ. Σε ότι
ακολουθεί θα αναφερθούμε συνοπτικά στο περιεχόμενο της κάθε εξέλιξης και τον τρόπο με
τον οποίο επανα-τροφοδοτεί το ενδιαφέρον για το έργο του Morgenthau.
2
Ιστοριογραφία των Διεθνών Σχέσεων και Morgenthau
Δύο από τα βασικά ερευνητικά πεδία του συνεχούς διευρυνόμενου προγράμματος στην
ιστοριογραφία των Διεθνών Σχέσεων είναι αφενός η επανεξέταση των διανοητικών ρευμάτων
που επηρέασαν την σκέψη κλασσικών συγγραφέων που αποτέλεσαν σταθμούς στην εξέλιξη
του κλάδου και αφετέρου η συστηματική μελέτη των εσωτερικών/διανοητικών και
εξωτερικών/πολιτικών συνθηκών που οδήγησαν στην μεταπολεμική συγκρότηση του κλάδου
και την αυτονόμησή του από την γνωσιολογική μήτρα της πολιτικής επιστήμης (για μια
επισκόπηση, βλ. Schmidt, 2002). Και τα δύο αυτά πεδία επιφυλάσσουν ένα σημαίνοντα ρόλο
στον Morgenthau.
Όσον αφορά στο πρώτο πεδίο της επανεξέτασης των ιστορικών μορφών του κλάδου,
μέρος της τρέχουσας βιβλιογραφίας πραγματεύεται την συστηματικότερη ανάλυση του
ευρύτερου φιλοσοφικού και πολιτικού πλαισίου που επηρέασε τη σκέψη τους και, μέσω
αυτής, την εξέλιξη του κλάδου. Για τον Morgenthau άλλοι ισχυρίζονται ότι κύρια διανοητική
πηγή αποτέλεσε ο Nietzsche (βλ., λ.χ., Frei 2001), άλλοι ο Schmitt (βλ., λ.χ., Pichler 1998)
και άλλοι ο Weber (βλ., λ.χ., Turner and Mazur, 2009). Παρότι αυτή η βιβλιογραφία έχει
συνεισφέρει στην ανάδειξη της σημασίας των ευρωπαϊκών ριζών της σκέψης του
Morgenthau, και άρα του σύγχρονου κλάδου των Διεθνών Σχέσεων, διακατέχεται πολλές
φορές από ένα μονοσήμαντο προσανατολισμό ανάδειξης μιας και μόνο διανοητικής πηγής ως
κυρίαρχης. Αυτό που διαφεύγει, λοιπόν, από την τρέχουσα συζήτηση είναι ότι αυτές η
υποτιθέμενα διαφορετικές πηγές μπορεί να αποτελούν επιμέρους συνιστώσες που συγκλίνουν
σε μια κοινή συνισταμένη. Αυτή τη συνισταμένη εντοπίζει ο Τσακαλογιάννης (2011) στο
ευρύτερο διανοητικό πρόταγμα του αντι-διαφωτισμού του μεσοπολέμου και, ειδικότερα,
στους προβληματισμούς που αναπτύσσονται στους κύκλους του Ινστιτούτου της
Φρανκφούρτης (βλ., επίσης Scheuerman, 2009). Το επιχείρημα προσλαμβάνει μια οιονεί
αναθεωρητική χροιά. Ενώ στα πλαίσια της συμβατικής ιστοριογραφίας, ο μεταπολεμικός
ρεαλισμός του Morgenthau παρουσιάζεται ως η κατάληξη μιας ευθείας διανοητικής πορείας
από τον Θουκυδίδη στον Hobbes και στον Machiavelli αυτό που προκύπτει από αυτή την
ανάγνωση είναι ότι οι ρίζες του μεταπολεμικού ρεαλισμού είναι πολύ πιο σύνθετες από τους
προτεινόμενους όρους του συμβατικού αφηγήματος.
Όσον αφορά στο πεδίο μελέτης των συνθηκών που οδήγησαν μεταπολεμικά στην
αυτονόμηση του κλάδου, η τρέχουσα ιστοριογραφική έρευνα επιφυλάσσει και πάλι έναν
πρωταγωνιστικό ρόλο για τον Morgenthau. Χωρίς να μειώνουμε τη σημασία των
εξωτερικών/πολιτικών εξελίξεων στη διαμόρφωση του κλάδου, πρέπει να αναγνωρίσουμε ότι
η ιστορική εξέλιξη και επιστημική ταυτότητα των Διεθνών Σχέσεων έχει σε μεγάλο βαθμό
καθοριστεί μέσα από μια σειρά αντιπαραθέσεων για το τι συνιστά επιστήμη και τη
3
δυνατότητα των Διεθνών Σχέσεων να αναδειχθούν σε μια ακριβή επιστήμη της διεθνούς
πολιτικής σε βάση αντίστοιχη με εκείνη των θετικών επιστημών (Wight, 2002). Το 1946 ο
Morgenthau δημοσιεύει το πρώτο του βιβλίο με τον τίτλο Scientific Man vs. Power Politics
και το οποίο συνιστούσε ένα ριζοσπαστικά εναλλακτικό επιστημολογικό πρόταγμα για τη
μελέτη της διεθνούς πολιτικής από το τότε κυρίαρχο του συμπεριφορισμού. Το βιβλίο
αντιμετωπίστηκε εντελώς εχθρικά. Τόσο εχθρικά που ο ίδιος ο Morgenthau λέει
χαρακτηριστικά ότι ήταν ευτύχημα που είχε εξασφαλίσει τη μονιμότητα μόλις μερικές
εβδομάδες πριν τη δημοσίευση του βιβλίου – μονιμότητα που θα ήταν, όπως συνεχίζει να
εκτιμά, από εξαιρετικά δύσκολη έως αδύνατη αν είχε προηγηθεί η δημοσίευση (Morgenthau,
1984b, σελ. 371). Η εκτίμηση δεν πρέπει να προκαλεί εντύπωση. Μπορεί στο πεδίο των
Διεθνών Σχέσεων ο συμπεριφορισμός να έκανε δυναμικά την εμφάνισή του στα πλαίσια της
λεγόμενης δεύτερης μεγάλης θεωρητικής αντιπαράθεσης τη δεκαετία του 1950, αλλά στο
χώρο της Αμερικανικής πολιτικής επιστήμης η συμπεριφορική επανάσταση είχε αρχίσει από
τη δεκαετία του 1920 και εδραιωθεί την περίοδο πoυ ο Morgenthau θα πήγαινε στο Σικάγο.
Πράγματι, το Πανεπιστήμιο του Σικάγο αποτελούσε τότε το ισχυρότερο «οχυρό» και κύριο
πρωταγωνιστή της λεγόμενης συμπεριφορικής επανάστασης καθιστώντας το έτσι ένα μάλλον
αφιλόξενο χώρο για μια πολεμική πραγματεία ενάντια στον συμπεριφορισμό και τον
ορθολογισμό. Είναι αυτό ακριβώς το πλαίσιο που οδηγεί τον Guilhot (2008) να παρουσιάσει
τη διαδικασία αυτονόμησης του κλάδου των Διεθνών Σχέσεων ως μια στρατηγική κίνηση,
υπό την πρωτοβουλία του Morgenthau, στη διανοητική σκακιέρα της εποχής προκειμένου να
διαμορφωθεί ένας νέος κλάδος που θα αντιστέκονταν στις σειρήνες του συμπεριφορισμού
που είχε ήδη εδραιωθεί ως η κυρίαρχη προσέγγιση στην Αμερικανική πολιτική επιστήμη.
Η αυτονόμηση του κλάδου, για όποιους λόγους και αν έγινε και όποιες ανάγκες και
αν εξυπηρετούσε, σηματοδότησε παράλληλα ένα «διαζύγιο» των Διεθνών Σχέσεων με την
πολιτική θεωρία και φιλοσοφία. Το «διαζύγιο» αυτό είχε βαρύτιμες επιπτώσεις αφού στέρησε
το πεδίο από μια πλούσια διανοητική παράδοση πολιτικής θεωρίας, οδηγώντας τον Martin
Wight στο κλασσικό πλέον άρθρο του το 1966 στο απογοητευτικό συμπέρασμα ότι δεν
υπάρχει ένα ολοκληρωμένο και συστηματικό σώμα διεθνούς πολιτικής θεωρίας. Καθώς τα
τελευταία χρόνια το πεδίο προσπαθεί να επανασυνδεθεί με την παράδοση της πολιτικής
θεωρίας και φιλοσοφίας έχει σημασία να θυμηθούμε τα λόγια του καθολικά αναγνωρισμένου
θεμελιακού του πατέρα: «Παρότι έχω γίνει γνωστός για τις συνεισφορές μου στην εξωτερική
πολιτική…,αποτελεί παράδοξο ότι το κύριο διανοητικό μου ενδιαφέρον από την αρχή της
ακαδημαϊκής μου καριέρας δεν ήταν η εξωτερική πολιτική, ή έστω η πολιτική γενικότερα,
αλλά η φιλοσοφία» (Morgenthau, 1984b, σελ. 381).
4
Τρέχουσες Επιστημολογικές Αντιπαραθέσεις και Morgenthau
Μια άλλη, όπως αναφέραμε, εξέλιξη στο πεδίο των Διεθνών Σχέσεων που τροφοδοτεί το
σύγχρονο ενδιαφέρον για τον Morgenthau έχει να κάνει με την τρέχουσα επιστημολογική
διαμάχη ανάμεσα στο θετικισμό και τον μετα-θετικισμό και, πιο συγκεκριμένα, με μια
απόπειρα επαναχαρτογράφησης του θεωρητικού τοπίου των Διεθνών Σχέσεων και
επαναπροσδιορισμού της διαχωριστικής γραμμής ανάμεσα στο ρεαλισμό και τον μετριοπαθή
κονστρουκτιβισμό.2
Δεδομένου
ότι
η
σχέση
ανάμεσα
στο
ρεαλισμό
και
τον
κονστρουκτιβισμό έχει εμπεδωθεί στο συλλογικό υποσυνείδητο του κλάδου σε όρους σχέσης
μηδενικού αθροίσματος ανάμεσα σε δύο εντελώς αντιτιθέμενες θεωρητικές σχολές, ο
προβληματισμός γύρω από μια δυνητικά διαφορετική μεταξύ τους σχέση αποτελεί
ενδεχομένως ανάθεμα ή τουλάχιστον εκπλήσσει. Το ζήτημα είναι προφανώς πολύπλοκο και
δεν μπορούμε να επεισέλθουμε σε λεπτομέρειες. Θα περιοριστούμε σε δύο σημεία ενδεικτικά
της σχετικής προβληματικής, αλλά και ενδεικτικά του εμβληματικού ρόλου και του πλούτου
της παρακαταθήκης του Morgenthau.
Ας ξεκινήσουμε επισημαίνοντας ότι η καθιερωμένη στη βιβλιογραφία τάση άμεσης
αντιπαραβολής ανάμεσα σε ρεαλισμό και κονστρουκτιβισμό είναι μάλλον αδόκιμη, αφού ο
ρεαλισμός αποτελεί πρωτοβάθμια θεωρία των Διεθνών Σχέσεων ενώ ο κονστρουκτιβισμός
ένα ευρύτερο αφετηριακό επιστημολογικό πρόταγμα. Χωρίς να παραγνωρίζουμε ότι οι
αφετηριακές επιστημολογικές υποθέσεις λειτουργούν περιοριστικά στην όποια εφαρμογή
τους σε επίπεδο πρωτοβάθμιας θεωρίας, το γεγονός παραμένει ότι αν ο κονστρουκτιβισμός
αντιτίθεται άμεσα σε κάτι αυτό είναι ο ορθολογισμός και ο υλισμός και όχι ο ρεαλισμός
αυτός καθαυτός. Η αδόκιμη τάση αντιπαραβολής ρεαλισμού και κονστρουκτιβισμού που έχει
επικρατήσει είναι κατ’ουσία προϊόν της ταύτισης του ρεαλισμού με τη νεορεαλιστική εκδοχή
του που καθιέρωσε ο Waltz. Αποτελεί, όμως, παράδοξο η ταύτιση του ευρύτερου
ρεαλιστικού παραδείγματος με τον ορθολογισμό και τον υλισμό όταν το πρώτο έργο του
θεμελιακού πατέρα της κλασσικής εκδοχής του αποτελεί μια πολεμική πραγματεία ενάντια
και στις δύο αυτές φιλοσοφικές τάσεις (Morgenthau, 1946). Όπως χαρακτηριστικά
ισχυρίζεται ο Jervis (1994, σελ. 863): «Αυτοί που πιστεύουν ότι όλοι οι ρεαλιστές
αντιλαμβάνονται τη γνώση ως ανεξάρτητη από την εμπειρία και το συμφέρον, που θεωρούν
ότι έχουν επιτύχει μια θεμελιώδη ανακάλυψη όταν ισχυρίζονται ότι η ανθρώπινη αντίληψη
για τον κοινωνικό κόσμο είναι σε σημαντικό βαθμό κοινωνικά κατασκευασμένη, και
θεωρούν ότι είναι οι πρώτοι που αντιλήφθηκαν τη στενή διασύνδεση ανάμεσα σε ισχύ και
γνώση δεν έχουν διαβάσει ποτέ το Scientific Man vs. Power Politics». Η παρακαταθήκη,
λοιπόν, του έργου του Morgenthau έρχεται να τροφοδοτήσει ένα τρέχοντα προβληματισμό
γύρω από την οξύτητα της κάθετης διαχωριστικής γραμμής ανάμεσα σε ρεαλισμό και
5
κονστρουκτιβισμό, προσκαλώντας μας σε μια επανεξέταση της μεταξύ τους σχέσης (για τη
σχετική συζήτηση, βλ. ενδεικτικά, Barkin, 2010, Jackson, 2004, Williams, 2004).
Ένα δεύτερο ενδεικτικό παράδειγμα που προσκαλεί και αυτό σε μία επανεξέταση της
σχέσης ανάμεσα σε ρεαλισμό και κονστρουκτιβισμό έχει να κάνει με τις επιπτώσεις της
αναρχίας στο διεθνές σύστημα. Η ίσως πιο διαδεδομένη απόπειρα εφαρμογής του
κονστρουκτιβιστικού επιστημολογικού προτάγματος σε επίπεδο πρωτοβάθμιας διεθνολογικής
θεωρίας έχει να κάνει με το επιχείρημα ότι οι ταυτότητες, και σχετική πρόσληψη του
συμφέροντος, των (κρατικών και μη) δρώντων, δεν είναι προκατασκευασμένες και άρα οι
επιπτώσεις της αναρχίας δεν είναι μονοσήμαντες. Όπως ισχυρίζεται ο Wendt (1999), επειδή
το περιεχόμενο της αναρχίας νοηματοδοτείται από τους συμμετέχοντες στο διεθνές σύστημα
δρώντες, και την μεταξύ τους διάδραση, είναι υποκείμενο ιστορικού μετασχηματισμού. Έτσι,
λοιπόν, εντοπίζει τρεις ιδεατούς τύπους ή «κουλτούρες αναρχίας»: την Χομπσιανή, την
Λοκιανή και την Καντιανή κουλτούρα που εκφράζουν αντίστοιχες διαβαθμίσεις των
επιπτώσεων της αναρχίας στη δια-κρατική συνεργασία (Wendt, 1999, κεφ. 6). Όμως ο
βαθμός πρωτοτυπίας του επιχειρήματος αμβλύνεται αν λάβει κανείς υπόψη ότι ο πρώτος που
εισαγάγει μια αντίστοιχη προβληματική διαχωρισμού των επιπτώσεων της αναρχίας είναι ο
Morgenthau. Παρότι αμφισβητούσε τον μόνιμο και οικουμενικό χαρακτήρα τέτοιων
συστημάτων, θεωρούσε ότι συστήματα όπως αυτό της Ευρωπαϊκής Συμφωνίας μπορούσαν
να αμβλύνουν τις επιπτώσεις της αναρχίας καθώς η διπλωματία μπορούσε να στηριχτεί σε
ένα κοινά αποδεκτό πλαίσιο αρχών και συμφερόντων (Morgenthau, 1946, σελ. 107-8). Υπό
αυτό το πρίσμα δεν θα πρέπει να εκπλήσσει ότι ο Wendt (1999), ο θεωρούμενος πρύτανης
του κονστρουκτιβισμού στις Διεθνείς Σχέσεις, στο magnum opus του αποφεύγει συστηματικά
την θεωρητική αντιπαράθεση με τον Morgenthau, εμφανώς στα πλαίσια μιας απόπειρας
μονοσήμαντου περιορισμού του ρεαλισμού στη νεορεαλιστική εκδοχή του.
Το Τέλος του Ψυχρού Πολέμου και ο Morgenthau
Όταν το Τείχος του Βερολίνου γκρεμίστηκε, η μανιχαϊκή δομή του Ψυχρού Πολέμου πάνω
στη οποία είχε οικοδομηθεί το μεταπολεμικό σύστημα κατέρρευσε. Τα δραματικά γεγονότα
του 1989 και ο ραγδαίος ρυθμός με τον οποίο ξεδιπλώνονταν οι ιστορικές αλλαγές που
σηματοδοτούσαν οι «βελούδινες επαναστάσεις» στην Ανατολική και Κεντρική Ευρώπη
έδιναν την εικόνα ενός συστήματος σε πλήρη αποσύνθεση. Πολλοί, με επικεφαλής τον
Francis Fukuyama, έσπευσαν να προσδιορίσουν τη δομική αυτή αλλαγή του διεθνούς
συστήματος ως το «τέλος της ιστορίας» και να διακηρύξουν το χάραμα μιας νέας εποχής
σταθερότητας και ειρήνης, καθώς η επερχόμενη κατάρρευση της κομμουνιστικής ιδεολογίας
και η συνεχώς αυξανόμενη αλληλεξάρτηση των παγκόσμιων οικονομιών θα οδηγούσε σε μια
βαθμιαία συρρίκνωση των αιτιών του πολέμου. Οι απόψεις του Fukuyama κάνουν αυτόματα
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το γύρω της υφηλίου. Οι θεωρίες περί τέλους της ιστορίας, που άλλοτε αποτελούσαν
αποκλειστική ενασχόληση μιας φιλοσοφικής ελίτ, γίνονται αντικείμενο συζητήσεων σε όλα
τα ΜΜΕ και η εκκοσμικευμένη αυτή παραλλαγή μιας θρησκευτικής τελεολογίας ανάγεται σε
εξωτερική εικόνα της εποχής. Μέσα σε αυτό το διάχυτο κλίμα ευφορίας, ο ρεαλισμός
θεωρείται παρωχημένος καθώς υποτίθεται ότι αδυνατεί να περιγράψει το νέο κόσμο που
ανατέλλει με την επικράτηση της Δύσης, ενώ παράλληλα δέχεται δριμεία κριτική λόγω της
υποτιθέμενης αδυναμίας του να προβλέψει το ειρηνικό τέλος του Ψυχρού Πολέμου και την
μονοπολική δυναμική του διεθνούς συστήματος.
Δεν είναι εδώ κατάλληλος ο χώρος για μια υπεράσπιση του ρεαλισμού έναντι της
κριτικής που δέχθηκε με αφορμή το τέλος του Ψυχρού Πολέμου (για μια συστηματική
ανάλυση, βλ. Wohlforth, 1994/5). Άλλωστε, η ίδια η εξέλιξη των πραγμάτων έδωσε τη δική
της απάντηση στις φιλελεύθερες τελεολογικές δοξασίες, επιβεβαιώνοντας την τραγική φύση
της διεθνούς πολιτικής και τη φορτισμένη από το μεσοπολεμικό φιλοσοφικό κλίμα του αντιδιαφωτισμού ρήση του Morgenthau (1948, σελ. 249) ότι «τα έθνη συναντώνται κάτω από ένα
κενό ουρανό από τον οποίο οι Θεοί έχουν αποχωρήσει». Αυτό που για τους σκοπούς της
παρούσας συμβολής έχει σημασία να παρατηρήσουμε είναι ότι σε απάντηση της κριτικής που
δέχθηκε ο ρεαλισμός άρχισε να αντιλαμβάνεται κάποιους περιορισμούς του μονοσήμαντα
προσανατολισμένου στη δομική ανάλυση νεορεαλισμού και να στρέφεται στην πλούσια
διανοητική παράδοσή του. Στο πλαίσιο αυτό, το έργο του Morgenthau θα αποτελέσει βασικό
εφαλτήριο και διανοητική πηγή έμπνευσης για την ανάδυση της πλέον σύγχρονης έκφρασης
του ρεαλισμού με τη συγκρότηση της νεοκλασικής εκδοχής του που προσπαθεί να εντάξει
αναλυτικά εργαλεία από όλα τα επίπεδα ανάλυσης σε ένα ενιαίο ρεαλιστικό πρόταγμα (για
μια επισκόπηση βλ. Rose, 1998).
Η Άνοδος των Νέο-Συντηριτικών στις ΗΠΑ και ο Morgenthau
Τα τραγικά γεγονότα της 11ης Σεπτεμβρίου σε συνδυασμό με την ύπαρξη μιας ομάδας νέοσυντηρητικών γύρω από τον πρόεδρο Τζωρτζ Μπους οδήγησαν στην υφαρπαγή της
Αμερικανικής εξωτερικής πολιτικής από το δόγμα των νεο-συντηρητικών. Κύριο
χαρακτηριστικό του δόγματος τους ήταν μια εμφανής θεωρητική απέχθεια στην παραδοσιακή
ρεαλιστική πολιτική ισορροπίας ισχύος και μια απερίφραστη υιοθέτηση ιμπεριαλιστικών
πολιτικών ως μονόδρομο για την εξυπηρέτηση του εθνικού συμφέροντος των ΗΠΑ και
εμπέδωσης της παγκόσμιας κυριαρχίας τους (για μια επισκόπηση της διαμάχης βλ. Schmidt
and Williams, 2008). Οι επιπτώσεις της πολιτικής αυτής για την παγκόσμια ασφάλεια και
σταθερότητα είναι πλέον γνωστές. Λιγότερο ίσως γνωστό είναι ότι στον Αμερικανικό
δημόσιο διάλογο η πλέον ηχηρή αντίδραση ενάντια στο νέο-συντηρητισμό και την
επερχόμενη εισβολή στο Ιράκ προήλθε από τους κόλπους του ρεαλισμού, ο οποίος έχει
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αδόκιμα ταυτιστεί από τους πολέμιους του με επιθετικές προτεινόμενες πολιτικές. Αυτό έγινε
εμφανές με τον πλέον δημόσιο τρόπο με μια καταχώρηση στους New York Times της 26
Σεπτεμβρίου 2002 και την οποία υπέγραφαν οι πλέον καταξιωμένοι Αμερικανοί ρεαλιστές.
Μεγάλο μέρος της επιχειρηματολογίας του ανωτέρου άρθρου/καταχώρησης με τον τίτλο
«War with Iraq is Not in America’s National Interest» αντλούσε από τα θεωρητικά διδάγματα
του Morgenthau. Όπως χαρακτηριστικά παρατηρεί ο Τσακαλογιάννης (2011, σελ. 228-9) στο
Επίμετρο της ελληνικής έκδοσης του Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (Επιστήμη και
Πολιτική της Ισχύος):
Λίγους μήνες μετά τη δημοσίευση του ως άνω έργου, στις 14 Μαρτίου 1947, ο
Πρόεδρος των ΗΠΑ Χάρι Τρούμαν εξήγγειλε το περιβόητο «δόγμα» του που
ισοδυναμούσε με την ανάληψη μιας «σταυροφορίας» κατά του κομμουνισμού. Στα
νέα πολιτικά δεδομένα απόψεις σαν και αυτές του Morgenthau πέρασαν στο
περιθώριο, γιατί οι προβληματισμοί που θέτει ο συγγραφέας στο συγκεκριμένο
έργο ήταν διαμετρικά αντίθετοι με τις πολιτικές επιδιώξεις μιας αναδυόμενης
υπερδύναμης. Το Δόγμα Τρούμαν εγκαινίασε μια σειρά από «σταυροφορίες», με
επιστέγασμα τη «σταυροφορία» του Τζωρτζ Μπους του νεότερου κατά του «Άξονα
του Κακού». Τα συντρίμμια της τελευταίας αυτής «σταυροφορίας» έχουν
επαναφέρει στο προσκήνιο προβληματισμούς όπως αυτούς που πραγματεύεται το
Επιστήμη και Πολιτική της Ισχύος.
Αντί Επιλόγου
Ξεκινήσαμε την παρούσα συμβολή σημειώνοντας ότι τα τελευταία χρόνια παρατηρείται μια
συνεχώς διευρυνόμενη τάση επανανακάλυψης των κλασσικών κειμένων του Morgenthau και
επανεκτίμησης της διανοητικής παρακαταθήκης του στις Διεθνείς Σχέσεις. Ισχυριστήκαμε ότι
αυτή η τάση δεν είναι μια αθώα ιστοριογραφική άσκηση αναζήτησης διανοητικών ριζών,
αλλά κατ’ουσία συμπτωματική μιας οιονεί διανοητικής και πολιτικής κρίσης και
προσπαθήσαμε να σκιαγραφήσουμε τους άξονες που την τροφοδοτούν. Αυτό που προκύπτει
από την ανάλυση είναι πως δεν χωρά αμφιβολία ότι κάποιος που βίωσε προσωπικά και
ζυμώθηκε επιστημονικά μέσα σε μια τόσο ανατρεπτική πολιτικά, αλλά και γόνιμη
διανοητικά, ιστορική περίοδο -δημοκρατία της Βαϊμάρης, ναζιστική περίοδος, 2ος
Παγκόσμιος Πόλεμος και, τέλος, Ψυχρός Πόλεμος- έχει ακόμη πολλά να μας διδάξει και να
μας πει όχι μόνο για την ιστορία των Διεθνών Σχέσεων, αλλά και για το μέλλον τους.
Ανδρέας Γκόφας
Λέκτορας στη Θεωρία & Επιστημολογία Διεθνών Σχέσεων
Τμήμα Διεθνών & Ευρωπαϊκών Σπουδών, Πάντειο Πανεπιστήμιο
Ορολογικό Ευρετήριο
Ρεαλισμός, Κονστρουκτιβισμός, Συμπεριφορισμός, Ιστοριογραφία, Επιστημολογία, Νέοσυντηρητισμός, Wendt, Morgenthau, Waltz
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Βιβλιογραφία
Barkin, J. S. (2010) Realist Constructivism: Rethinking International Relations Theory.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Frei, C. (2001) Hans J. Morgenthau: An Intellectual Biography. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana
State University Press.
Guilhot, N. (2008) “The Realist Gambit: Postwar American Political Science and the Birth of
IR Theory”, International Political Sociology, 2(4), pp. 281–304.
Jackson, P. (ed) (2004) The Forum: “Bridging the Gap: Toward a Realist-Constructivist
Dialogue”, International Studies Review, 6(2), pp. 337–52.
Jervis, R. (1994), “Hans Morgenthau, Realism and the Scientific Study of International
Politics”, Social Research, 61(4), pp. 853-876.
Lebow, R. N. (2007) “Texts, Paradigms, and Political Change”, στο Williams, M. C. (ed.)
Realism Reconsidered: The Legacy of Hans Morgenthau in International Relations.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 241-268.
Morgenthau, H. J. (1946) Scientific Man vs. Power Politics. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
Morgenthau, H. J. (1948) Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. New
York: Alfred Knopf.
Morgenthau, H. J. (1984a) “Fragment of an Intellectual Autobiography: 1904-1932”, in
Thompson, K. W. and Myers, R. J. (eds) Truth and Tragedy: A Tribute to Hans J.
Morgenthau. New Brunswick: Transaction Books, pp. 1-17.
Morgenthau, H. J. (1984b) “Bernard Johnson’s Interview with Hans J. Morgenthau”, in
Thompson, K. W. and Myers, R. J. (eds) Truth and Tragedy: A Tribute to Hans J.
Morgenthau. New Brunswick: Transaction Books, pp. 333-386.
Pichler, H. K. (1998), “The godfathers of ‘truth’: Max Weber and Carl Schmitt in
Morgenthau’s theory of power politics”, Review of International Studies, 24(2), pp.185200.
Rose, G. (1998) “Neoclassical realism and theories of foreign policy”, World Politics, 51(1),
pp. 144-72.
Scheuerman, W. E. (2009) Hans Morgenthau: Realism and Beyond. Cambridge: Polity.
Schmidt, B. C. (2002) “On the History and Historiography of International Relations”, in
Carlsnaes, W., Risse, T. and Simmons, B. A. (eds) Handbook of International
Relations. London: SAGE, pp. 1-22.
Schmidt, B. C. and Williams, M. C. (2008) “The Bush Doctrine and the Iraq War:
Neoconservatives Versus Realists”, Security Studies, 17(2), pp. 191-220.
Τσακαλογιάννης, Π. (2011) Επίμετρο, στο Morgenthau, H. J. Επιστήμη και Πολιτική Ισχύος,
μτφ. Π. Τσακαλογιάννης, Αθήνα: Εκδόσεις Τουρίκη, σελ. 205-236.
Turner, S. P. and Mazur, G. (2009) “Morgenthau as a Weberian Methodologist”, European
Journal of International Relations, 15(3), pp. 477-504.
Wendt, A. (1999) Social Theory of International Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Wight, C. (2002) “Philosophy of Social Science and International Relations”, στο Carlsnaes,
W., Risse, T. and Simmons, B. A. (eds) Handbook of International Relations. London:
SAGE, pp. 23-51.
Wight, M. (1966), ‘Why is there no International Theory?’, in H. Butterfield and M. Wight
(eds), Diplomatic Investigations, London: Allen & Unwin, pp. 17–34.
Williams, M. C. (2004) “Why Ideas Matter in International Relations: Hans Morgenthau,
Classical Realism, and the Moral Construction of Power Politics”, International
Organization, 58(4), pp. 633–65.
Williams, M. C. (2007) “Introduction”, in στο Williams, M. C. (ed.) Realism Reconsidered:
The Legacy of Hans Morgenthau in International Relations. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, pp. 1-17.
Wohlforth, W. C. (1994/5) “Realism and the End of the Cold War”, International Security,
19(3), pp. 91-129.
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1
Το κείμενο αποτελεί μέρος μιας ευρύτερης απόπειρας αξιολόγησης της παρακαταθήκης του Hans
Morgenthau με τίτλο Hans Morgenthau και Θεωρία Διεθνών Σχέσεων: Διαχρονικές Αντιπαραθέσεις
και Σύχρονες Κατευθύνσεις, που βρίσκεται στο στάδιο της ολοκλήρωσης.
2
Εδώ υιοθετούμε τον καθιερωμένο διαχωρισμό ανάμεσα σε μετριοπαθή κονστρουκτιβισμό, που έχει
γνωσιολογικό υπόβαθρο, και ριζοσπαστικό κονστρουκτιβισμό, που έχει οντολογικό υπόβαθρο.
Μετέπειτα αναφορές μας στον κονστρουκτιβισμό αναφέρονται στη μετριοπαθή εκδοχή του.
10