International Relations Then and Now

Origins and Trends in Interpretation

A.J.R. Groom, Andre Barrinha, William C. Olson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429590405
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Arms Control
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The new edition of this classic history of International Relations has been completely revised and updated throughout and remains a major guide to the intellectual lineage and development of the field.

In International Relations Then and Now the authors examine the historical antecedents and the emergence of theories of the state system during the 18th and 19th centuries culminating in the short-lived League of Nations. They look at the foundation of International Relations as an academic discipline and the competing theories that emerged within it. In an entirely new part to this volume, they also consider contemporary developments within the theories and methodologies of International Relations, including feminism and postcolonialism.

International Relations Then and Now is an indispensable text for students and scholars interested in the history of the development of International Relations.

Part I

‘Then’

The formative years

1 The antecedents

When a new academic endeavour, approach or a field emerges it is likely that there will not be a specific moment at which it came into existence. Instead there is a process which contains some benchmarks such as particular events. In the chapters that follow we shall identify such benchmarks as part of a process that goes back to the Ancient worlds not just of Europe but the antecedents in Asia, the Manchu world and elsewhere. Gradually the focus comes to Europe as far as International Relations (IR) is concerned, which reveals well-known milestones such as the symbolic but largely mythological Peace of Westphalia of 1648.¹ Thus, the disparate factors and experiences come together to form what we hope is a coherent chronology as IR emerges, takes shape and makes its mark. So let us, briefly, turn first to the antecedents from ancient worlds.

Masterpieces of the past cannot be ignored by the serious student seeking insights into the understanding of contemporary international relations. Even in Pharaonic literature, we can find references to the Kadish treaty during the era of Ramses II that reflects some of the modern concerns in international society.²

Ancient diplomacy and philosophy

Any orthodox reading of the ancestors of IR scholars usually starts with a reference to the History of the Peloponnesian War, the work of the famous Athenian historian and general, Thucydides. His account of what was one of the defining periods in the history of Ancient Greece could well have been entitled the ‘diplomacy’ of the Peloponnesian war. Inasmuch as Thucydides developed no systematic theory of interstate relations, its principal value for our purposes lies in his description of the negotiations, the policy alternatives, the strategic concepts, the diplomatic skills (or lack of them) exhibited by plenipotentiaries as Athens tried first to avoid the war and then to win it. Important and lasting elements of IR are to be found in Thucydides’ writing, notably lessons which derive from the confrontation of land power and sea power in geographical terms.³

A number of other classical Greek authors delved into topics and approaches that are central to today’s discipline. For instance, the view that ‘man is the measure of all things’ is attributed to the sophist Protagoras, an antecedent of contemporary behaviouralist thought, especially in relation to perception and images. When Socrates proclaimed himself to be ‘a citizen of the world,’ he shared the cosmopolitanism of the Stoics. Although he showed little interest in inter-state relations except by implication, Aristotle demonstrated the connection between ethics and politics which preoccupies many writers today, and Plato anticipated Machiavelli, Hobbes and Hans Morgenthau in his realism, “firmly representative of the collective Greek mind in apparently recognizing that war remained a central, if tragic, feature of international life.”⁴ Despite their philosophical differences, both Plato and Aristotle recognised that a consequence of unequal size among city-states was that “the strong would normally strive to become stronger and the weak seek to avoid becoming weaker.”⁵ Their contradictory views of justice between states led to schools of philosophy that prevailed for centuries. As Fred Parkinson has put it in his Philosophy of International Relations, this “cleavage between the normative and the empirical runs right through the history of thought in international relations.”⁶

The Asian legacy should also be taken into consideration. As early as 771 BC the important principle that treaties should be regarded as being between equals was recognised in China. During the ‘Age of Philosophers,’ Confucius (551–479 BC) and later his principal follower, Mencius, tried to promote government by moral value. In the fourth century BC there appeared the first more or less systematic treatise on interstate politics ever written, The Book of the Lord of Shang, or Kung-sun Yang, the exact date of which is uncertain because many Chinese scholars and statesmen over a period of time apparently contributed to its final form.⁷ In paving the way for the Ch’in dynasty, which ended in 221 BC, this great work, while promoting the rule of law to govern the relations of princes, precluded any role for an informed public in government. In the discipline of military science, the views of another Chinese thinker, Sun Tzu,⁸ are cited even today, both in terms of strategy and tactics.

Meanwhile, far to the South and West in India, Prime Minister Kautilya (321–296 BC), known as ‘The Crooked’ because of his explicit rejection of any place for morality in politics, produced an influential treatise entitled Arthashastra. Adam Watson in his helpful and succinct analysis of Kautilya’s thought⁹ points to the fusion of Indian practice and Persian scope and concept. Kautilya’s manual anticipated that of Machiavelli some fifteen centuries later. Behera used Kautilya’s work to speak critically of IR as a discipline, stating:

The impoverishment of traditional IR’s political thought becomes further evident on its chosen ground – political realism – that it does not recognise our own Indian political philosopher, Kautilya, as “the father of realpolitik.” Kautilya is not taught in any “principal IR theory courses.”¹⁰

Watson writes “he described . . . the relations between one ruler and another, and explained how a prince, whom he called the conqueror, might exploit the pattern to bring all India into a Persian type of empire.”¹¹ This was an imperial system not a system of competing states. Watson identifies Kautilya’s precepts including that in which:

[a]ny state that touches yours must be considered an enemy, because that is where you want to expand and because he may want to expand against you. Any state beyond the enemy, who touches him but not you, can be considered your friend.¹²

In short, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Kautilya was a master at pointing to the chain effect of alliances as one set of protagonists having an impact upon another.

While Kautilya had a tool box full of dirty tricks, Watson points out that Kautilya, nevertheless:

[s]tresses that peace should be preferred to war, and peace should even be preferred to armed and watchful neutrality in wars between other kings . . . If by the use of bribery or in any other way a king can attain his goal while avoiding the actual use of force, then that king is reaching his goal on the cheap.¹³

Kautilya advocated a lenient policy of occupation apart from the defeated king for whom there was no place. Otherwise it was a “very substantial local autonomy, leaving the local legitimacies as far as practical intact.”¹⁴

In contrast to this somewhat cynical guide came the dramatic renunciation of armed conquest by the Emperor Asoka (265–238 BC) after leading his forces to one of the bloodiest victories in early Indian history. Converted to Buddhism, Asoka then advocated conquest by persuasion and reason. Although regarded as a wise emperor, his exemplary reign unfortunately was followed by centuries of violence and conflict.¹⁵ In the longer run, that compilation of Hindu wisdom over the centuries, the Bhagavadgita, justifies the reconciliation of actual participation in war with spiritual peace.

Antecedents of religious thought

In the Biblical tradition, the Old Testament represents a literature rich in political insights. The international relations of the children of Israel rested upon deep philosophical and religious foundations. Christ’s critique of Rome, as set forth in the majestic yet simple form of the Sermon on the Mount, provided a guide to political behaviour, however seldom it may have been followed by those in power throughout history. The devotion to peace of early Christians, who believed in cooperation, underwent transformation by the third century AD when St Augustine considered the possibility of ‘just war.’

Much later, after the seventh century AD, the Koran provided many political guidelines for followers of Mohammed, such as for making peace, the observation of treaties, and militancy in the spread of Islam. Knutsen, in his History of International Relations Theory, acknowledges that “the Islamic perspective of world politics was mitigated by pragmatism” inherent in their understanding of the world with “peaceful relations and cultural and commercial ties . . . Muslim scholars embraced the ancient Graeco-Roman heritage . . . By keeping alive arguments that were lost in the West, they maintained a tradition . . . [they] went beyond the texts.” They fitted older ideas to new contexts by fusing ideas from the Greco-Roman world with the Koran.¹⁶ For instance, in tenth-century Persia, the Muslim philosopher Al-Farabi saw politics essentially as a struggle of each against all.¹⁷ Another Islamic philosopher and thinker, a North African born in Tunis who lived in ‘Moslim Spain,’ Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), argued that “while human civilization requires political leadership for its organization,”¹⁸ it seems also true that “savage nations are better able to achieve superiority than others.”¹⁹

From the point of view of what might be termed the ‘linear’ development of ideas about international relations, however, it is Europe that really matters in terms of how world politics as we conceptualise it today emerged. The legacy of the European nation-state system, despite many variations, has essentially been adopted as the world system in our time. The ‘Christian’ period of world politics was not particularly peaceful. Europeans lived in the Holy Roman Empire, which belied all three terms that made up its title. Yet in the thirteenth century, St Thomas Aquinas saw the world as reflecting God’s plan, which mortals must endeavour to comprehend and to which their temporal affairs must conform.²⁰ Aquinas embraced Augustine’s notion of a just war in which there is the authority of a sovereign in whose command the war is being waged (not a private dispute), a just cause and a right intention.²¹ It was in that same century that Europe saw what was perhaps the first of its many peace plans, that of Pierre Dubois (1250–1320) seeking to pacify Europe by enhancing the power of France at the expense of other states in order to recover the Holy Land.

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the First Edition (1991)
• Acknowledgements
• Part I ‘Then’: the Formative Years
• Part II Towards ‘Now’
• Index