International Relations Theory Today

Ken Booth, Toni Erskine, Ken Booth, Toni Erskine

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781509508341
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

International Relations (IR) theorists speak with conviction, and often passion, to the global condition of human society. The result is an important, dynamic and often deeply divided field. This long-awaited new edition of International Relations Theory Today offers undergraduate and postgraduate students an essential guide to the complex terrain of IR theory and the key questions on its agenda.

With chapters by 25 prominent and provocative IR theorists, the book reveals the intellectual excitement - and turmoil - of theorizing world politics. It reflects the conflicts and tensions around the profound challenges facing the contemporary world, such as climate change, globalization, nuclear proliferation, and economic and political injustice and conflict, while also expressing hope that we can better understand, and respond to, these challenges.

Above all, this book demonstrates the significance of thinking theoretically about international relations and developing the tools not merely to describe but also to explain, analyse, prescribe and possibly re-imagine the global political landscape. As the world comes face-to-face with historic challenges over the coming decades, International Relations Theory Today will help its readers to participate more effectively in debates about the most important global political dilemmas of our time.

PART I
Contestations

CHAPTER 1
Five Generations of IR Theory

Nicholas Onuf

Steve Smith’s lead chapter in this book’s first edition continues to be important, and not just as a monument to its moment. I make no effort to update his ‘genealogy of International Relations theory’. As Smith (1995: 6) observed, a genealogical approach ‘analyses both descent and emergence’. He proposed a Foucauldian genealogy ordered by reference to ‘ten self-images of international theory’ (ibid.: 7), the chronological ordering of which is barely discernible. I offer instead a genealogy of IR theory in the more conventional sense of the term genealogy, one that is ordered by generations, each descending from the one before, each distinctive in its general features. Any such genealogy is openly chronological.

Generations

To say that each generation is distinctive implies that it is a social unit, or whole, with emergent properties not directly attributable to the aggregate of its constituent human beings. Obviously generations consist of separate human beings with diverse sensibilities and experiences; a few individuals can seem to give a generation its distinctive stamp. Yet generations are complex developments contingently linked to what appears to have gone on in the world. All the same, generations are social wholes because people say they are. Granted distinctive properties, such as the capacity to adapt to circumstances, generations seem to emerge, one after the other, in a regular, even necessary succession.

Everyone has a determinate place in some generational genealogy by virtue of having parents who in turn had parents. If we take teacher-scholars and their apprentices as analogous to parents and their children, then every scholar, having once been a student, has a specific, personal genealogy more or less corresponding to the genealogy of only a few of the many scholars linked by common concerns and procedures in a field of study. Scholars often informally identify themselves by generation in some more general, inclusive scheme. Fields of study, such as IR, are themselves relatively autonomous, stable, and enduring social wholes – enough so that many of us in the field see it as characterised by a succession of human generations. I characterise IR in these terms fully aware that some readers will see a different generational pattern warranting an altered or even an alternative scheme. They may not agree with the way I locate them, myself and everyone else in a generational scheme, but they know what I am doing. In short, this essay is the story of a social whole that includes me, a we that changed with me over many decades.

However schematised, generations have markers locating them in time and perhaps distinguishing them on other grounds. The standard marker is a twenty-year interval, give or take, culminating in adulthood. In traditional societies, generations are typically shorter, and they are ceremonially marked. In our late modern society, a generation may be extended while people complete their formal education; ceremonial occasions continue to mark personal genealogies. However marked, coming of age means entering one’s social unit as a full member. It does not mean taking over. Another generation must emerge before the generation coming of age a generation ago can shove the generation preceding it into the honorific status of elders. These last provide cover and perhaps legitimacy for the generation assuming its place.

By convention, there is a founding generation. We in IR speak of generations, however loosely, by invoking major events in the world: the two postwar generations, the Cold War generation, the post-Wall generation. If 1919 marks the field’s beginning and launches the first postwar generation (on this familiar if problematic claim, see below), then 1946 marks the emergence of a second postwar generation. The mid- to late 1960s (I use 1969 as a marker) saw a third generation take over the field during an apparently endless superpower standoff, and 1989 marks the ascendancy of the fourth generation. The requisite twenty-some years having passed, we should already be seeing signs of a fifth generation consolidating its position, even if there is no obvious marker.

A genealogy marked, indeed shaped, by successive generations is hardly the standard view of IR’s evolution (a term appropriate to any scheme of generational descent). Brian Schmidt (2012: 11–13) has usefully emphasised competing views: external events (world wars, the Cold War, the Berlin Wall) have decisively shaped the field’s development; internal dynamics manifest in Great Debates and landmark publications are chiefly responsible. A generational genealogy tips in favour of internal dynamics. At the same time, a generational genealogy acknowledges that large events deeply affect the generation then coming of age and gives its members a sense of shared experience unlike that of generations before and after – even a sense that such events define their generation. Indeed, it could hardly be otherwise in a field of study in which ‘current events’ have always inflected its subject matter.

House and field

Most students come to the field because they are interested in current events. And yet, one of the first things their teachers tell them is that IR emerged as a field only when scholars stood back from current events in order to make sense of the big picture. Standing back enables observers to look for some things that do not change. More especially, observers have an opportunity to look for some big things – not events at all – that do not change (or do so only very slowly) but do seem to be implicated in whatever is changing in the flow of events. In short, the field as such demands attention to events, whether current now or at some earlier time. It also demands that we sort, arrange, and explain them by reference to a framework, or an ensemble of relatively fixed elements, that we take to be generally useful in making sense of at least some of what transpires in the world.

As students, we are introduced to these frameworks early on. They have names, many ending in ‘ism’ – realism, liberalism, constructivism – suggesting that they resemble ideologies and religions with established doctrines and many adherents. We quickly come to realise that our teachers favour one or another of them. Young, impressionable, and anxious for approval, we often adopt our teachers’ favoured frameworks and call them what they do: conceptual frameworks, theoretical frameworks, or just theory, as in realist theory, critical theory, or feminist theory.

As teachers and scholars ourselves, we spend many years learning the strengths and weaknesses of the framework that we have adopted. Our peers recognise our mastery of its intricacies and our contributions to its improvement. By then we are a generation older than our students (and a generation older than we were as students). Over that interval, much has changed in the world, and so has what we study. What tends not to have changed very much at all is our commitment to a framework that has itself changed but little.

Indicatively, scholars in their forties (let’s say, late thirties to early fifties) and at the height of their powers wrote most of the books mentioned here. Their students heard about their teachers’ teachers, but what these students internalised and emulated is what their teachers have done as scholars. Even if scholars in the field are disposed to see each generation as somehow new and different, they do not routinely see each generation inventing or discovering a theoretical framework. What has changed is the way each generation applies available frameworks to the circumstances of its time. In the field’s generational genealogy, there is one exception to this general pattern, perhaps reflecting the familiar dynamic of a child’s rejection of parental authority, and this exception is to be found with the emergence of the fourth generation of scholars.

Scholars in the fourth generation learned their craft in a tumultuous time for the social sciences. Many maturing scholars turned away from their teachers and adopted frameworks from continental social theory and philosophy. Why they were dissatisfied had something to do with events, but not chiefly what were then current events. Instead the social turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s seems to have had lasting effects, including a cumulative disquiet with modernity and a visceral dislike of positivist science. The emergence of critical, feminist, constructivist, postcolonial, and postmodern frameworks is closely related to these events, and not to the end of the Cold War, as is so often asserted.

Relatively durable theoretical frameworks variously relate to each other by virtue of overlapping foundational claims, unexamined conceptual vocabularies, attempts at reconciliation, and a common commitment to a subject matter most typically called IR or world politics. Frameworks, fields: these are metaphors well suited to a generational genealogy. Frameworks constitute the house of theory, if only because we insist on putting them together – however awkward the arrangement. A ramshackle house it is, indeed perhaps a compound of dwellings, located in a field of study. We who dwell in the house called IR theory choose the crops, make the tools, and work the land we claim for ourselves – together.

There are, of course, neighbouring houses, older and, from afar, apparently better built, whose frameworks we have adapted for our own use. They are located in fields whose further reaches we would have as our own. Early in our generational genealogy, international law and institutions and diplomatic history were our immediate neighbours, with behavioural political science also in the area. For generations we have fenced off the field with minimal attention from our neighbours. At the same time we have fenced off subfields – foreign policy, international development, international environmental studies, international ethics, international political economy, security studies – and used available frameworks to build houses within them. None emerged in step with the descent of generations but, rather, in the space within generations.

Early settlers: first generation, 1919

Genealogies must have a beginning, a point from which to mark branching lines of descent. We often hear that the endowment of a professorial chair at Aberystwyth in 1919, as a response to a devastating world war, marks the ‘birth of the field’ (Schmidt 2012: 4; also see Schmidt 1998) (Schmidt has done much to qualify this familiar claim). The case for 1919 as the beginning is bound up in the metaphor of birth. IR was a new field of study, institutionalised as such.

Institutionalisation is a process, not an event in the usual sense. This process took place in the two decades between 1919 and 1939. The work of an unheralded generation of scholars in the UK and the US, it was substantially limited by the impact of economic hardship on university life. In effect, these scholars built sheds out of scrap materials littering the margins of established fields. They proclaimed the virtues of interdisciplinarity, not just because it was expedient to do so. In the process they distanced themselves from any one house of theory. The founding of the first professional schools of international affairs (Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, 1919; the Institut de hautes études internationales in Geneva, 1927; and Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, 1933) reflected and reinforced this atheoretical tendency.

IR had no house; there was no IR theory. Nothing makes this clearer than a closer examination of events in 1919. In the early months of that year, diplomats at the Paris Peace Conference drafted the League of Nations Covenant to institutionalise a collective security system requiring the active support of the major powers. Denied US support, the system failed spectacularly, not just discrediting collective security as an institutional apparatus but inviting the specious charge that collective security is a utopian fantasy.

Like the balance of power, collective security is social practice lending itself to conceptual elucidation. Both would have provided timbers for the house of IR theory if there had then been a house under construction. In the case of collective security, these timbers trace back to Hobbes; government leaders and social activists discussed them during the war. The US would likely have accelerated its eventual global ascendancy by participating in the League’s collective security arrangements.

Late in 1919, John Maynard Keynes published a polemical memoir he called The Economic Consequences of the Peace, based on his experience with the British delegation to the conference. Ignoring collective security, Keynes assessed the punitive economic provisions of the Allies’ treaty with Germany – ‘the Carthaginian Peace’ – and the ‘increased probability of a subsequent Revanche by Germany’ (1920: 35). Here, again, we see elements of theory – rational action judged by long-term consequences, and the psychology of honour and revenge in status-ordered societies – but no house in which to frame them.

In the 1930s, revanchist Germany prompted increasingly heated discussion of the consequences of the peace. Appeasement was the policy issue. Considering this issue more abstractly as a problem of ‘peaceful change’ put it in an expressly theoretical context – the relations between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ (Dunn 1937). How peaceful change could be implemented was not a question that one or another theoretical framework could answer. Instead this question provoked speculation about the sources of behaviour, including envy, anger, and pride.

A systematic framework for investigating the sources of behaviour, Harold Lasswell’s World Politics and Personal Insecurity, had already appeared in 1935. Lasswell was a leader in the behaviouralist movement in political science, itself arising in the 1920s as a reaction to the prevailing emphasis, both descriptive and prescriptive, on law and institutions. Behaviouralists shifted emphasis from formal arrangements to fluid processes, from prescription to diagnosis. Even if the field was not yet ready for this daunting book, it is nevertheless evidence of an impending turn to theory. That same year Nicholas Spykman formed the Institute of International Studies at Yale University with Frederick Dunn and Arnold Wolfers. C. A. W. Manning had already assumed a chair in IR at the London School of Economics. Both Manning and Dunn were active in League-sponsored International Studies conferences in the 1930s and were supported in this work by the Royal Institute of International Affairs (founded 1920) and the Council on Foreign Relations (1921).

Both institutions straddled the divide between policy advice and scholarly pursuits. In 1939, E. H. Carr pu...