What's the Point of International Relations?

Synne L. Dyvik, Jan Selby, Rorden Wilkinson, Synne L. Dyvik, Jan Selby, Rorden Wilkinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351782074
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Internationale Beziehungen

What's the Point of International Relations casts a critical eye on what it is that we think we are doing when we study and teach international relations (IR). It brings together many of IR's leading thinkers to challenge conventional understandings of the discipline's origins, history, and composition. It sees IR as a discipline that has much to learn from others, which has not yet lived up to its ambitions or potential, and where much work remains to be done. At the same time, it finds much that is worth celebrating in the discipline's growing pluralism and views IR as a deeply political, critical, and normative pursuit.

The volume is divided into five parts:

• What is the point of IR?

• The origins of a discipline

• Policing the boundaries

• Engaging the world

• Imagining the future

Although each chapter alludes to and/or discusses central aspects of all of these components, each part is designed to capture the central thrust of the concerns of the contributors. Moving beyond western debate, orthodox perspectives, and uncritical histories this volume is essential reading for all scholars and advanced level students concerned with the history, development, and future of international relations.

Part One
What’s the point of IR?

1
What’s the Point of IR?

The international in the invention of humanity

Ken Booth

When IR (uppercase and abbreviated) was born as an institutionalized academic discipline in 1919, its founders had two broad objectives: to conduct teaching and research into the manifold dimensions of international relations, and to contemplate a better future for humanity. These broad and momentous aims, for me, remain the point of IR nearly a century later, though obviously much has changed in the world. Critical to my argument is the profound causal significance of actually practiced international relations (lowercase and unabbreviated).

Born into international relations

We are children of international relations. Before any of us become students, teachers, and researchers of IR, the scaffolding of our being has been constructed by international history: this includes our chances of surviving birth, our first language, the culture into which we are socialized, the nation into which we are politicized, our economic prospects and musical tastes, and much more. The scaffolding may be rearranged, but never dismantled.

Individual identities (central to our social being) and our DNA (basic to our material being) are to a significant degree the outcomes of wars, power plays, diplomatic deals, trading arrangements, migrations, and all the structures, processes, events, attitudes, and behavior that have constituted “international history” broadly defined. Whether languages – shapers of thought as well as means of communication – have declined or flourished has been closely correlated with the exercise of political power. The worldwide prominence of English is not the result of a global urge to read Shakespeare in the original; it is a consequence of British and US geopolitical power over recent centuries. Likewise, the mix of DNA across distant populations is not simply the result of the range of Eros’s arrows: we are a genetically multi-bred species because of the frequent-flyer status achieved by Eros (and barbarians) along the invasion paths, trading and migration routes, and imperial highways and seaways that have been the stuff of international relations.

It matters to us individually whether the roll of the cosmic dice placed our parents and developing selves into what international history has constituted as “Afghanistan” as opposed to the “United States,” or “Russia” as opposed to “Uruguay.” Specific developments play key parts. But for twists in the Second World War, I may not have been born; but for the story of the British Empire, I would surely not have a daughter-in-law from Kenya or a beloved grand daughter whose own international history means that before she can speak properly she is experiencing life through three languages. Consider your own biography and the role international history has played in what you have thought and think, done and not done, and indeed what you are able to think and do and say.

My argument is not deterministic. I am not asserting that humans are merely the ventriloquist’s dummies of international history: but I do claim that what as individuals we were, are, and might become is traceable – sometimes to a profound degree – to the patterns of international history. Even how this chapter is read will in part be shaped by one’s situatedness within the international.

Kenneth Waltz, IR’s most influential theorist in recent decades, was not a structural determinist, but he did argue that the structure of the international system (anarchy, an uneven distribution of power, and units seeking to survive) has impressive “causal weight” (1959, 159–238; 1979, 38–101), and as such helps explain “big and important things” like war and peace (2008, 43). I accept the general thrust of this argument, but do not think Waltz pushed it deeply enough. Yes, system structure does help account for (but not determine) “big and important things,” but its “causal weight” also shapes what I call “little and important things,” like we children of the international (Booth 2014a, 4–5). In this convergence of the generally top-down concerns of structural realism since the late 1970s, and the generally bottom-up concerns of so-called alternative approaches to IR since the late 1980s, we can appreciate better the full causal power of the international on human society globally. My response to the provocation “What’s the point of IR?” therefore begins with the causality of international relations in the manifold lifeworlds of humanity.

The shock of the old

Some of the language used earlier – wars, diplomatic deals, power plays – will no doubt attract weary criticism from those colleagues who specialize in outing what they regard as old thinking in a new world. Yet, the real shock of the old these days is not allegedly anachronistic IR-talk, but the extent to which actually practiced international relations are characterized by business as usual. Waltz rightly warned of the need to remember the persistence of the historic “texture” of international relations when tempted by images of radical change (1979, 66).

Starting in the late 1980s, the traditional concerns and approaches of mainstream (realist and liberal) IR were attacked by critics over impressed by the power of globalization and the ideas of recently discovered social theorists. Existing “IR” (obligatory scare quotes here for those critics) was challenged in two directions: its agenda was seen as increasingly out of touch, and its canon was regarded as being in urgent need of renewal (and preferably from somewhere else than within the established discipline). Whatever was touched in the 1990s by these Midases of Change turned into “beyond,” “post,” “new,” or “end of.”

The dazzle of change was such that sections of the discipline thought that the days of IR were numbered. James Rosenau influentially argued that world affairs were becoming “postinternational” (1990, 6). He wrote: “The very notion of ‘international relations’ seems obsolete in the face of an apparent trend in which more and more of the interactions that sustain world politics unfold without the direct involvement of nations or states.” International relations/IR certainly had to take account of globalization: relations across borders are always affected by powerful developments in world politics, whether these are influential ideas (like religion) or substantial material changes (as with modern information technology). But Rosenau’s prediction went too far. It did not follow that the globalization of world politics meant the obsolescence of IR (Booth 2014a, 94–7; Booth and Erskine 2016, 4–5).

Many of us were tempted, at some point, to exaggerate the penetration of globalization, but facts on the ground regularly demonstrate that human society globally is far from “postinternational.” Indeed, the way globalization has inflamed issues at the heart of international relations – sovereignty, authority, and identity, for example – shows that globalization is stubbornly embedded in a world politics in which “the direct involvement of nations or states” remains a defining feature. Daily headlines shout this out: Putin’s ambitions for Russian power! North Korea’s nuclear bluster! Prioritizing “the national interest” in economic negotiations! Another failure in climate change conferences! Global levels of militarization at $1,676 billion!

Refugees provide particularly poignant evidence of the continuing grip of historic international dynamics. The refugee crisis in Europe since 2015 trumpets the shock of the old, even in a continent that seemed to be moving toward being “post-sovereign” and “post-national.” Refugees are today’s tragic canaries in the mine, recording the health of the international through the impact on their minds and bodies of wars, geopolitical ambitions, sovereign control, local tyranny, failed states, armies and navies, borders and border guards, passport officials, foreign ministries, nationalism, mistrust, identity politics, collective-action problems, citizenship, international organizations, sovereignty, and on and on: in other words, the historic textures of international relations. Yet within this picture is also evidence of the more humane potentialities of life under anarchy: the aspiration for better cooperation between governments, respect for individuals and meeting human rights standards, and offers of cosmopolitan hospitality. In a pre-EU world – before “everyday Europe” (McNamara 2015) – surely the crisis and humanitarian distress would have been even worse at this (still early) stage of this refugee story.

My argument about the shock of the old is not therefore that change is impossible in international relations, but rather that the present, like the past, contains a great deal of historic “texture.” The international level of world politics continues to be headline-making on “big and important” things, while exercising profound influence on “small and important” things. As I have argued many times, those of us who want to build a better world will never achieve it by being unworldly about this one.

Fields, disciplines, and virgin births

Those who disparage the causal impact on human lifeworlds of states and nations and other international variables contribute to an impression of IR as an increasingly backward and marginal discipline. In contrast to the time when IR was the academic playbook of the Cold War, the view took hold in some schools of thought that the discipline of IR was on borrowed time. Unlike older, publicly prominent, and more self-confident social sciences and humanities, IR has generally been ignored by the outside world when not disparaged by hyper-globalizers. At the same time a surfeit of self-criticism and embroilment in its own theory wars has encouraged excessive introspection and the cultivation, among some, of an intellectual inferiority complex. If the academic project of IR is not to fade away – a quite irrational outcome – its proponents must be clearer about what, who, and why we are. For this, we need to go back to the beginning.

A fi eld in academic life is an area of study relating to a particular activity, including thinking. In this regard, IR is a field focusing on a complex of relations across borders – which by definition requires input from multiple disciplines. An academic project is a collective intellectual endeavor in a university context. Institutionally, such a project may seek to develop a field into a discipline. A discipline in the traditional European sense is a distinct and systematic branch of learning, with an associated professional infrastructure. (This understanding of “discipline” is more helpful than the restrictive definition equating the word with one particular methodology.) A subject in a university (a particular course of study) is generally synonymous with a discipline. These distinctions – fi eld, project, and discipline/subject – are logically related temporally: a project develops a field into a discipline through the establishment of departments, teaching programs, specific syllabuses, student specialisms, research projects, a professional hierarchy, subject associations, and so on.

It is often impossible to pinpoint the moment when an academic field is “invented,” except in the natural sciences, where the invention may be literal. In the case of IR, we can never know when humans first started discussing the how and why of relations between distinct units (nomadic family groups and tribes, and then the first static forms of political association). What can be dated, though, are the existing written records over the millennia about the issues arising from the interactions between early civilizations, city-states, kingdoms, and empires. Over time, a field was marked out (Luard 1992 is an introductory collection) by the following, among numerous others: Mo Tzu (“Warfare Harms the State which Conducts it as Well as Mankind as a whole”) in ancient China, Diogenes (the moral responsibilities of a “citizen of the world”) in ancient Greece, Kautilya (“The Strategy by which Rulers should Protect their Interests”) in ancient India, and Ibn Khaldun (theory of social conflict) in the Islamic world. The significance of this snapshot in relation to my overall argument is that a thoughtscape of relevant “international” concerns grew over the millennia, that it grew in different locations, and that its concerns were cross-cultural (see Bilgin 2016 on “multiple beginnings” and “connected histories”).

The field was cultivated and expanded, and like much else in the century before the Great War saw a step-change in productivity, dominated by Europe. As ever, the field was written by the winners. Key writers and concerns included Clausewitz on war, Mazzini on nationalism, Marx on the proletariat, and Meinecke on raison d’etat. Recent disciplinary history has brought to the fore somewhat neglected nineteenth-century issues and writers – on empire, liberalism, and race relations, for example (Long and Schmidt 2005; Hobson 2012; Vitalis 2015).

Despite this picture of an ancient – if not necessarily self-conscious – field, some disciplinary historians have questioned the value of trying to explain “the history of the field” by reference to “a continuous tradition” reaching back to the ancient Greeks (Long and Schmidt 2005, 8). We can leave aside the challenge implied by the word “continuous,” for history reveals an abundance of political, if not scholarly, talk about international concerns. More importantly, I want to go beyond simply claiming that an identifiable “field” of international concerns developed from ancient and multiple sites to propose that IR’s agenda represents a “human universal,” entirely comparable to other universals of behavior and language (see Donald E. Brown’s list in Pinker 2002, 435–9). Evidence for IR’s thoughtscape as a human universal is based on the engagements across time and space with issues relating to anarchy, balance of power, cosmopolitanism, domination, human nature, interdependence, law, mistrust, nationalism, peace, responsibility, uses of power, stratagems, security, sovereignty, statecraft, and much more. Recent work on “worlding” IR (for example, Tickner and Wæver 2009) does not undermine the idea of this “international” agenda as a human universal; it is a reminder instead that a productive field requires “Many Maps, Many Windows,” as Mary Midgley claimed for knowledge in general (2003, 26–8, 29–35).

The discussion so far has emphasized that a thoughtscape of speculation about relations across borders stretches back millennia; that it makes no historical sense to claim that thinking about the international was “invented” in a particular place at a particular time and that a somewhat coherent field became marked out because of the universal significance of the compelling agenda of human group interaction under anarchy. Academic disciplines like IR do not miraculously emerge from nowhere. The makers of modern IR were multiple, culturally diverse, geographically disparate, and stretch back through the centuries. They provided a complex intellectual DNA, determining that at the moment of institutionalization, when IR became a disciplinary project, it was not a virgin birth.

“It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at”

If the first talk about relations between human groups is lost in time, the institutional moment is not. IR as a discipline was born in 1919, though some scholars question this “standard story” (Long and Schmidt 2005, 6), and one sometimes hears the phrase “the myth of 1919.” Such revisionism suffers from critical flaws:

First: Semantic imprecision. New intellectual history is always welcome, but the most urgent need is conceptual clarity. David Long and Brian C. Schmidt (2005, 6) refer to the relationship of the Great War and “the genesis of the field or discipline” (emphasis add...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of abbreviations
• About the contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: asking questions of, and about, IR
• PART ONE What’s the point of IR?
• PART TWO The origins of a discipline
• PART THREE Policing the boundaries
• PART FOUR Engaging the world
• PART FIVE Imagining the future
• Index