The Future of International Relations

Masters in the Making?

Iver B. Neumann, Ole Waever

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415144070
• eBook ISBN: 9781134762194
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book presents the state of the art of international relations theory through an analysis of the work of twelve key contemporary thinkers; John Vincent, Kenneth Waltz, Robert O. Keohane, Robert Gilpin, Bertrand Badie, John Ruggie, Hayward Alker, Nicholas G. Onuf, Alexander Wendt, Jean Bethke Elshtain, R.B.J. Walker and James Der Derian. The authors aim to break with the usual procedure in the field which juxtaposes aspects of the work of contemporary theorists with others, presenting them as part of a desembodied school of thought or paradigm. A more individual focus can demonstrate instead, the well-rounded character of some of the leading oeuvres and can thus offer a more representative view of the discipline. This book is designed to cover the work of theorists whom students of international relations will read and sometimes stuggle with. The essays can be read either as introductions to the work of these theorists or as companions to it. Each chapter attempts to place the thinker in the landscape of the discipine, to identify how they go about studying International Relations, and to discuss what others can learn from them.

1
Figures of international thought:
introducing persons instead of paradigms

Ole Wæver

‘Masters in the Making’ was the original working title for this volume. No Europeans reacted negatively to this, but almost every American objected on grounds of political correctness—‘master’ carries connotations of dominance, hierarchy, submission, control, and a whole metaphysics being negated these years, from dominance over nature to dominance of one sex over another. Even for those not troubled by such issues, the idea of crowning a dozen theorists among a dynamic multitude of the competing, and ‘juridically’ equal, seemed offensive. We were thinking of this book in part as a sequel to Kenneth W.Thompson’s Masters of International Thought (1980). After the great, unchallenged masters of the early and mid-twentieth century, with whom he dealt there come the Masters in the Making. Or so we thought. Wrongly it seems. No more masters! America seems, however, not to be totally in the throes of political correctness. Thompson has extended the series backwards in time, while we are extending it forward. In 1994 he published a book entitled— Fathers of International Thought!

This book can then be seen as the one in the series dealing with the writing of International Relations (IR) in a period where the image of master (not to speak of father) has become problematic. Therefore we address figures of thought—an ambivalent phrase, which may refer to patterns of projects in the academic landscape, or to the individual figures who after all move around there. The resistance to our original title was not accidental. Ours is a time of crisis for images of supreme authors mastering not only their own work but also a whole discipline. That something is in crisis, however, should hardly make it uninteresting. To the extent that something like persons or authors—or persons aspiring to be authors—is still around even in IR, how do they operate?

This book aims to present the state of the art of International Relations theory through a critical reading of twelve central theorists. By focusing on theorists and their collected works, we break with the usual procedure in the field, which reserves this method for theorists long dead and rarely treats contemporary theorists as entities interesting in and of themselves. At most, aspects of their work are juxtaposed with those of other theorists and presented as a ‘school of thought’. One aim of the project is to demonstrate the well-rounded character of some of the leading oeuvres in the field, and to break with the tendency to present it as consisting of a number of disembodied ‘schools’ or ‘paradigms’.

Why should this be of interest to more than twelve readers? In addition to providing a condensed and accessible discussion of the voluminous writings of these twelve scholars, it also has a more general value: there is a certain ‘existential’ dimension to doing IR.Usually, someone working in IR aims at some kind of coherence at the same time as striving to make complex and novel moves across established lines. All theorists make personal choices and the ability to retain an integrated academic persona(lity) is not secured once and for all by picking a ‘position’. The traditional presentation of IR in terms of ‘paradigms’ or ‘schools’ obscures this since the writings of complex authors are often cut up and treated in separate sections. Only those who fit unequivocally into one box will be treated as whole persons—and most writers do not see themselves as operating within one of the boxes. As an academic person one would therefore learn more from tracing other unboxable persons in their trajectories through the discipline. New-comers will be at a loss regarding lessons at the personal/academic level with the dominant self-representations of the discipline (paradigms, schools). With the approach adopted by this book, it becomes possible to learn from how others have made their own hard choices, paying the costs and achieving their gains.

Persons—volumes of work carrying an identical signature—are points where numerous cross-pressures meet; different academic projects and discourses combine with numerous extra-academic factors. We do not claim that an oeuvre is a natural unit marked by homogeneity and coherence (cf. Foucault 1971; 1972 [1969]: 23 ff.), but nor are the famed ‘paradigms’ or any other of those units usually chosen for introducing the discipline. Persons furthermore have the advantage of being cross-points of a special kind. However much we have learned about the decentring of the subject or the death of the author, given a mixture of academic conventions of attribution and culturally and legally enforced notions of selfhood we all probably have to operate with the fiction of a self making decisions and being in some sense responsible for the result. A book organized around central theorists of the day should offer a novel—or neo-traditional— entrance into the field of International Relations.

At the same time as we attempted an intervention in the debates about how to read our discipline, it was also obvious to all those involved with the project that this book could be useful in a simpler sense, as a short-cut to some difficult writers. Therefore, one of the criteria for selecting authors has been that there should be some puzzle (how can Gilpin the political economist be also Gilpin of War and Change in World Polities?) or some simple difficulty in understanding the project (Alker? Onuf ? Walker?). Thus, each chapter offers a critical introduction to and an original interpretation of an important writer. Whether it is the development over time of this person’s work or some continuing dilemma which can be seen as shaping the work, each chapter has a plot of its own, beyond the ones offered by the ‘object author’ in the writings.

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF SELECTION

However, if focusing on theorists rather than on schools makes it easier to represent the discipline in some respects, it makes the task of picking representative theorists a crucial one. Although we have included a handful of theorists who would be on most people’s lists, we admit to a certain bias in favour of people who are attacking International Relations theory from fresh angles, and who have not yet been unequivocally accepted as masters of the trade. We have tried to select the theorists with the crispest profiles in the field. The criterion for being a ‘Master in the Making’ follows from the definition of a ‘master’. Quite conventionally, a master can be seen as an author whose work remains in print and is still debated decades after his death. According to this criterion even Waltz is not a master; we cannot know yet. In contrast, Morgenthau and Bull are.¹ Whether our objects of study are then actually destined to become masters cannot be settled at present.² And since we prefer to overrepresent those that are even more ‘in the making’, every reader will undoubtedly be sceptical about some of our choices. This was deliberate; we want to present some of the stronger candidates from the newest approaches.

This cut-off point establishes a correlation of three different measurements. First, there is the basic definition related to the restricted notion of a ‘master’ (and thereby the expanded category of ‘in the making’). Second, our authors are not generally treated elsewhere as authors. There are several articles and books on Morgenthau and Bull, for example, but even a much discussed author like Waltz has not been treated in this manner. There is much debate on Theory of International Politics, a number of critical articles, but no treatment of his whole oeuvre (except two chapters in Griffith 1992, there as part of Griffith’s own project). Keohane is often quoted in introductory chapters to empirical studies, but where do you get an overview of his development and the nature of his enterprise as such? Most of the others are not dealt with at all in the literature. The third ‘criterion’ is that despite the existence of a related exercise, Kenneth Thompson’s Masters of International Thought, which covers the preceding generation of IR masters, including such authors as Aron, Wight, Morgenthau, Deutsch, Mitrany, Wolfers and Herz, he describes none of our figures. Our book takes up the discipline where Thompson’s left it.³

Still, these criteria do not produce anything close to an essential list containing exactly these twelve figures. Waltz could appropriately have been paired with Ernest Haas who has published throughout much the same period, influenced the discipline enormously and in many ways operated very differently from Waltz; for instance, he has revised his own position and fields of interest much more drastically and continuously. One could put a string of questions on the lines of ‘Why NN and not MM?’ Why not Kratochwil, instead of either Ruggie or Onuf, why not Ashley instead of Walker,⁴ why not Enloe instead of Elshtain, why not Smouts instead of Badie? To several of these questions there are no answers other than pragmatic ones relating to the necessity of choice and the availability of authors qualified and motivated to write on these figures. We hope that each of the chapters will convince the reader of the merits of the choice.⁵ Still, at the end of this process, there are regrets; the biggest is probably the absence of a neo-Marxist such as Wallerstein, Cox, Gill, or Rosenberg (depending on the point one picks out on the line from ‘master’ to ‘in the making’).⁶ The difficulty of selecting only twelve, the inevitable giving of offence and the predictability of criticism—beyond optimistically suggesting that the discipline is vital enough to produce a higher number of interesting figures—all suggest there should be a second volume, although the current editors will probably be too battered from the reactions to volume 1 to dare to edit a successor. Finally, we are not claiming that these twelve are the Masters in the Making—they are some of the most important, but surely there are others.

All we can do for now is to repeat the principles we used to judge every candidate: any potential ‘master’ should present a puzzle for the author of the chapter to have something to sort out, and for the student/reader to feel a need of secondary literature purely for the purpose of understanding the figure. It also weighed if there was controversy around the figure; for example, if the author was read very differently by different subcultures. Furthermore, the work should be of importance in the discipline. Importance here does not mean that we pass a positive judgement on it, but that it satisfies what Vincent Descombes has called the ‘noise principle’ (1979): being talked about. For instance, the selection of Alexander Wendt could be questioned because he has published comparatively little, but his two main articles have sparked so much interest and have led so many others to label themselves constructivists and relate to structure-agency questions, that his relevance is established by academic practice.

Inconsistency is not the only criterion for inclusion! There are authors among our twelve who work quite clearly along one path, or who stay within one problematique; but then their work is either extremely complicated, and thus in need of elucidation, or may arouse questions regarding its location in the discipline. Or we simply felt that there was an interesting story to be told about this particular career, the academic choices made, and the lessons to be learned.

All of Thompson’s ‘Fathers’ and ‘Masters’ of International Thought were male. Among the current Figures of the discipline, the Masters in the Making, there are eleven men and one woman, and among those who portray the figures here, the master-makers, the ratio is eight men to five women. A positive interpretation would be that this looks like an exponential curve. A negative one is certainly possible as well.

The relative dominance of Anglo-American IR might well have led us to include not only a French but also a German (yes, there are a few candidates) and especially some non-western authors. We felt, however, that this could be (read as) the token symbol of political correctness, whereas the present selection includes people who are central to the discipline as it operates today—not only our ideal of who ought to be read. Though it would have been nice to have had a chapter on Mazrui or Inoguchi.

CONTENT AND CHARACTER OF THE CHAPTERS

The main body of this book consists of twelve parallel chapters each dealing with one figure in contemporary IR. The chapters are not excessively standardized. To impose a pattern would be artificial since the different works range very widely in format. Some of the theorists have written numerous books and articles in different fields, in which case the chapter needs either to deal with the different subfields and investigate how they relate (Elshtain, Gilpin), or to do a chronological investigation of the evolving work (Badie, Ruggie, Alker and others). Others have one major book on which the presentation focuses (Walker, Onuf) with the rest of their work used to put this book in perspective. In these cases diachrony seems less interesting. In one case, Wendt, there are mainly two —very famous—articles he wrote, and the chapter on him becomes more of an essay in its own right discussing constructivism through the dilemmas with which Wendt was struggling. Because there is an established, almost ritualized debate about Waltz, the chapter, in order to keep its focus on him, not on the debate, takes an original road into Waltz’s work by asking where Waltz stands in terms of philosophy of science and suggesting one reads him in parallel with Popper. The chapters on Waltz and Keohane raise the question of what their dominance says about the field in general, and about the type of theorizing that is most valued within the discipline in particular (or maybe: in the one case the kind of theorizing that makes yours a position to which everyone is forced to relate—mostly critically; and in the other case the kind that makes up the type o...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES
• TABLES
• CONTRIBUTORS
• FOREWORD
• SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
• 1. FIGURES OF INTERNATIONAL THOUGHT: INTRODUCING PERSONS INSTEAD OF PARADIGMS
• 2. JOHN VINCENT AND THE ENGLISH SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
• 3. KENNETH WALTZ: A CRITICAL RATIONALIST BETWEEN INTERNATIONAL POLITICS AND FOREIGN POLICY
• 4. ROBERT O.KEOHANE: A CONTEMPORARY CLASSIC
• 5. ROBERT GILPIN: THE REALIST QUEST FOR THE DYNAMICS OF POWER
• 6. BERTRAND BADIE: CULTURAL DIVERSITY CHANGING INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS?
• 7. JOHN G.RUGGIE: TRANSFORMATION AND INSTITUTIONALIZATION
• 8. HAYWARD ALKER: AN EXEMPLARY VOYAGE FROM QUANTITATIVE PEACE RESEARCH TO HUMANISTIC, LATE-MODERN GLOBALISM
• 9. NICHOLAS G.ONUF: THE RULES OF ANARCHY
• 10. ALEXANDER WENDT: A SOCIAL SCIENTIST STRUGGLING WITH HISTORY
• 11. JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN: TRAVERSING THE TERRAIN BETWEEN
• 12. R.B.J.WALKER AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: DECONSTRUCTING A DISCIPLINE
• 13. JAMES DER DERIAN: THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF THEORY
• 14. CONCLUSION