Teaching World Politics

Contending Pedagogies For A New World Order

Lev S. Gonick, Edward Weisband

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367304980
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000313963
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this volume, scholars and teachers share ideas about new ways to teach history, culture and theory, as well as new topics such as gender, information flows and discourse. This book is the product of a series of roundtable discussions conducted under the auspices of the Annual Meetings of the International Studies Association. At both the 1991 Meetings in Vancouver and the 1992 Meetings in Atlanta we were extremely gratified by the response to our roundtables on Teaching World Politics in the 1990s.

Part One
Realism, Neorealism and Hyperrealism: The Changing Scripts of World Politics

1
The Production and Transmission of Knowledge About International Relations: The Disheveled Discipline

J. Martin Rochester

The Nexus Between the Production and Transmission of Knowledge

The two main objectives of academic professional pursuits are the production and the transmission of knowledge. The second of these engages other scholars and academics, policymakers, occasionally the public at large, and invariably students — academia's primary consumers — in a discourse over the nature of truth, meaning and significance of knowledge. This writing focuses on the production and transmission of knowledge as it relates to students, particularly undergraduates, within the context of the study of world politics, which today finds itself challenged to keep pace with rapidly changing developments. My observations are based primarily on American experience, although I believe they have broader relevance.

The relationship between knowledge production and knowledge transmission rarely has been the subject of serious scholarship itself, since research and teaching have tended to be treated as rather separate enterprises. Each has occupied its own particular domain and has required distinctive skills. Thus there has arisen "a tension on most campuses over their [relative] priorities."¹ The resulting fact is that, with the exception of schools of education, pedagogy tends to be viewed as an unworthy subject of scholarly inquiry by faculty at 'research universities', while faculty at 'teaching-oriented' institutions tend not to engage in research, pedagogical or otherwise. Hence, insufficient professional discussion occurs regarding the connections between the production, transmission, and, ultimately, the consumption of knowledge.

Despite this, teaching and research, in fundamental ways, are inseparable. As Kenneth Boulding once remarked, "When one prepares to walk into a classroom and asks 'what shall I teach?', one must first ask 'what do I know?'"² Solid teaching is premised on solid scholarship, which means that teachers must at least keep up with the latest theoretical and empirical advances reported in the scholarly literature. Solid scholarship is defined by the capacity to raise and answer important new questions in a manner that adds to the reliability of our knowledge — that is, to have something worth conveying ('teaching'). Ernest Boyer has written about 'the new American scholar', calling for a new mutuality between research and teaching and a renewed commitment to linking the two. This would help to impart a novel seriousness of purpose to both activities as elements of a common endeavor within the institutional constraints typically found at colleges and universities.³ Indeed, as the frontiers of knowledge expand, and as the world situation changes, new approaches and perspectives would find their way expeditiously into textbooks and other educational materials.

Such observations apply to the study of world politics as much as they do to any research and teaching field. In the 1980s, World Politics as an academic field was characterized as a 'dividing discipline', with 'hegemony' competing with 'diversity'.⁴ In the 1990s, the field might be characterized as 'disheveled'. In the words of George Will:

One thing is certain: we have never seen a year like 1989. Only the Reformation is remotely comparable to today's gale-force intellectual winds and loud cracking of institutional foundations. No year, even in the 16th century, ever swept so many people or such complex societies into a vortex of change. Nineteen eighty-nine has been the most startling, interesting, promising and consequential year, ever.⁵

Even if Will is perhaps overstating or prejudging the historic significance of recent events, many scholars nonetheless are having to come to grips with this reformation in their theoretical formulations while many instructors are having to do likewise in their lesson plans; more than one manuscript and one lecture has been affected. What is one to make of these changes? What do we know today about world politics? What do we teach?

Uncertainty Over What We Know About World Politics: The Ghost of Morgenthau

Clearly, world politics historically has always entailed change. Indeed, developments throughout the postwar era have appeared to represent major transformations in the political relations among states. Writing in the 1970s, Ernst Haas referred analytically to growing "turbulence in world politics."⁶ Around the same time, James Caporaso noted that "since the end of World War II there have been some profound changes in the structure of the international system,"⁷ Editors of a volume dedicated to the explanation of "change" published early in the 1980s declared that "the international system has undergone profound changes since World War II."⁸ Change, then, has been a familiar theme and commonplace observation in the study of postwar politics. And yet, for all the attention given to the volatility of the international system in the atomic age, there were certain categories one could confidently rely on year after year to anchor one's analysis of world affairs: the 'East-West conflict', the 'nonaligned nations/and 'Third World', and other constructs associated with a predominantly 'bipolar' order. True, some pointed to 'discontinuities' and 'subsystems' below the surface of a bipolar world; but, for the global system as a whole, the established units of analysis tended to retain their currency for decades.⁹ These categories arguably have now been rendered almost useless.

Although recent developments in world politics have manifested a tumultuous, topsy-turvy quality, such convulsions can be understood in retrospect as the culmination of a longer-term pattern involving steady erosion of the postwar international order traceable back to its beginnings. The tidy bipolar imagery of an international system organized around two competing superpowers leading two relatively cohesive ideologically-grounded blocs rested on a flimsy foundation from the start. Fissures became apparent as early as the 1950s — with the beginnings of nuclear proliferation, the emergence of a third 'bloc', the loosening of the Western and Eastern alliances fractured by the twin Suez and Hungarian crises of 1956, and assorted other fault-lines. Fissures widened into cracks during the 1960s and 1970s. The North-South axis of conflict began to compete for attention with East-West issues. The Communist Chinese experienced mounting hostility with their Soviet brethren, while Greece and its NATO ally Turkey engaged in open warfare. U.S. superpower credentials were called into question in Vietnam (an American president stating he could not understand how "the greatest power in the world" was unable to defeat a "band of night-riders in black pajamas").¹⁰ American power was also called into question in the Middle East, where a group of underdeveloped countries, many of which were tiny 'statelets' and all of which were devoid of the assets traditionally associated with power, managed momentarily to bring the Western world to its knees by quadrupling the price of oil.¹¹

Cracks turned into gaping trenches during the 1980s, well before the end of the decade, with the Soviet Union's Vietnam-style failure in Afghanistan and the U.S. becoming the chief debtor state in the world. At the same time, West Germany and Japan flirted with being the leading exporter and foreign aid donor respectively. Consequently, power structures within the international system were rendered practically unintelligible.

As I have noted, the forces of change did not go unnoticed by students of world politics in this pre-Gorbachev era. For example, Morton Kaplan distinguished between 'loose' and 'tight' bipolarity,¹² Richard Rosecrance discerned 'bimultipolarity'¹³ within the system, and Stanley Hoffmann found 'polycentrism' and multiple 'game boards'¹⁴ to be the order of the day. A general sense persisted, however, that the 'postwar system' would remain stable in many of its essential elements through the next century. That is, until the fall of the Berlin Wall toppled such illusions of stability.

As the new 'post-Cold War' order haltingly takes shape, certain elements are coming more clearly into focus. Previous trends in the direction of a more complex international system are becoming more pronounced and accelerated. First, there exists a growing diffusion and ambiguity of power. This is manifested by the decline of the United States as a hegemon as well as the internal and external problems of the "other" superpower, the continued rise of Japan as a financial and political power, the challenge posed by a strengthened European Community preparing itself for 'Europe 1992' while adjusting to a newly reunited German state, and the proliferation of 'mini-states' capable at times of frustrating the will of major actors. Secondly, there exists a growing fluidity of alignments, as suggested by the depolarization of the East-West conflict as East bloc states move ideologically toward the West while West-West economic competition threatens to become a serious axis of conflict. Additionally, the North-South conflict is losing its defining character as increasing diversity among NICs, OPEC states, Fourth World countries and other LDCs makes Southern solidarity harder to sustain.¹⁵ All the while, greater localization and regionalization of politics related to ethnicity percolates below the global level. Thirdly, there now exists ever more intricate patterns of interdependence, associated with an expanding agenda of concerns (economics, ecology, technology, etc.) and a broadening conception of 'national security' beyond traditional military considerations. Finally, there exists a growing role for nonstate actors along with increasing linkages between subnational, transnational and intergovernmental levels of activity, despite the fact that national governmental budgets and state apparatuses resist shrinkage.

The key question remains whether we are witnessing merely the end of the postwar era and the transformation of the international system back to the more normal historical pattern of full-blown multipolarity. In this case, scholars (and teachers) can continue to rely on the state-centric paradigm with its focus on national interests, state sovereignty, power, and international anarchy. On the other hand, are we in the midst of a more fundamental and epic transformation that involves nothing less than the unraveling of the very fabric of the Westphalian state system itself? If so, there is a need for an entirely reconstituted framework for understanding and interpreting world order. The 'neorealist' school tends to seize upon the fragmentation of the postwar power and alignment structure to argue that the déjà vu scenario is correct, i.e. the international system is returning to an earlier condition, and bears particular resemblance to the early twentieth century, replete with the absence of any hegemonic stability and mounting Balkan ethnic conflict.¹⁶ Others, notably 'neoliberals', point to the phenomena related to interdependence, transnationalism and intergovernmentalism and suggest otherwise, i.e. the international system is experiencing unprecedented complexity and is heading toward, as one writer puts it, a 'bifurcated global politics' torn between state-centrism and 'multi-centrism', calling for a wholly new 'post-international politics' paradigm ¹⁷

Both schools of thought have merit in their alternative readings of the workings of the international system. Important dramas are being played out between the forces of regionalism and globalism, nationalism and transnationalism, security and welfare, and order and change. While these represent ongoing historical dramas, the curtain appears to be rising on a new political scene. How various tensions will be resolved is hardly certain.

There are countervailing trends in the direction of both integration and disintegration. The former is evidenced by German unification, the Europe 1992 campaign, the continued proliferation of NGOs and IGOs at both the regional and global levels in addition to the spread of multinational corporations,¹⁸ and the signing of more international agreements since 1945 than in the previous 2000 years combined (including the conclusion of a single treaty signed by virtually every state governing virtually every human activity on 70 percent of the earth's surface).¹⁹ Disintegration, however, is manifested not only by the fragmentation of the postwar power and bloc structure, but also by the continued proliferation of 'microstates' as an extension of the postwar decolonialization process, with disintegrative tendencies expected to be accelerated further by the subnational ethnic conflicts in Eastern Europe and the former USSR.²⁰ Thus, we are left with the puzzling paradox of growing disintegration amidst a world that is arguably more integrated than ever. There are, of course, more than two schools of thought surrounding the current debate over the nature of change in world politics. As noted at the outset, the discipline has been characterized in many respects by growing 'diversity', represented not only by neorealism and neoliberalism, but also by different perspectives introduced by Marxism and post-modernist feminism.

Neorealism is likely to prevail in the paradigmatic struggle with neoliberalism and other challengers, however, because it provides a compelling enough framework for grappling with the facts of international life. It also meshes comfortably with the conservative bent of the 'IR establishment' — the definers of the discipline — which tends to see the world through the lenses of the larger societal establishment upon which it depends for its sustenance. While it may be true at times that "academic pens . . . leave marks in the minds of statesmen with profound results for policy," the relationship is more commonly reversed.²¹ That is, the scholarly community tends to take its cues from the policymaking community. It is the latter, in concert with other elites outside academia, whose worldview or 'relevant universe' generally dictates governmental and foundation funding programs, which in turn shape major research agendas at prestigious universities, whose faculty set the standards for what is publishable and take the lead in recruiting and training the next generation of the professoriate. Though at any moment we in academe may be leaving an imprint on young minds belonging in some cases perhaps to future poiicymakers, the images of the world they leave the classroom with are likely to owe their origins to board rooms or state rooms and other such bastions of learning. To the extent that American scholarship has dominated the development of world politics as a field of study since World War II, it has been particularly through the eyes of the U.S. establishment — through the eyes of 'a great power' — that much of what has passed for international reality has been captured.

The conservativism of the international relationist fraternity that stems from external pressures driving scholars to pursue research programs consistent with established political values is reinforced by other pressures operating within the discipline itself. In fact, conservative leanings may be more a function of the latter pressures, having to do with the sociology of the profession, than it is a function of politics and ideology. Kuhn's well-known arguments about the structure of scientific revolutions and the forces of inertia that inhibit paradigmatic change apply very clearly to the study of world politics. One can argue that the staying power of realism is attributable to 'the ghost of Morgenthau' — the strong empiricist-positivist tradition spawned by Politics Among Nations, with its emphasis o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• About the Contributors
• Introduction: Framing the Terms of Discourse
• Part 1 Realism, Neorealism and Hyperrealism: The Changing Scripts of World Politics
• Part 2 Reality Without Realism: Pedagogical Constructions with a Human Face
• Part 3 Classroom Pegagogics
• Part 4 Normative Pedagogies in World Politics: Justice and Conviviality