Fifty Key Thinkers in International Relations

Martin Griffiths, Steven C. Roach, M. Scott Solomon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415791762
• eBook ISBN: 9781135972738
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Now in its second edition, Fifty Key Thinkers in International Relations has been thoroughly updated with several new entries and a new preface to reflect the latest developments. There are new sections on Constructivism, International Political Theory, and English School, as well as a range of new thinkers. They include:

• Samuel Huntington
• Christine Sylvester
• Jürgen Habermas
• John Rawls
• Barry Buzan

Fully cross-referenced throughout, this book has everything for students of politics and international relations or indeed anyone who wants to gain an understanding of how nations can work together successfully.

REALISM

Relations among states take place in the absence of a world government. For realists, this means that the international system is anarchical. International relations are best understood by focusing on the distribution of power among states. Despite their formal legal equality, the uneven distribution of power means that the arena of international relations is a form of ‘power politics’. Power is hard to measure; its distribution among states changes over time and there is no consensus among states about how it should be distributed. International relations is therefore a realm of necessity (states must seek power to survive in a competitive environment) and continuity over time. When realists contemplate change in the international system, they focus on changes in the balance of power among states, and tend to discount the possibility of fundamental change in the dynamics of the system itself. The following key thinkers all subscribe to these basic assumptions in their explorations of the following questions: (1) What are the main sources of stability and instability in the international system? (2) What is the actual and preferred balance of power among states? (3) How should the great powers behave towards one another and towards weaker states? (4) What are the sources and dynamics of contemporary changes in the balance of power? Despite some shared assumptions about the nature of international relations, realists are not all of one voice in answering these questions, and it would be wrong to believe that shared assumptions lead to similar conclusions among them. In fact, there is sharp disagreement over the relative merits of particular balances of power (unipolarity, bipolarity and multipolarity). There is also much debate over the causal relationship between states and the international pressures upon them, and the relative importance of different kinds of power in contemporary international relations.

RAYMOND ARON

Raymond Aron was born in 1905 in Paris, the same year as Jean-Paul Sartre. They were both educated at the elite school Ecole Normale Supérieure, which also produced such authors and politicians as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Leon Blum, Georges Pompidou and Michel Foucault. Although Sartre’s name was usually much better known, in part because Aron’s Gaullism and staunch anti-communism made him a pariah among French left-wing intellectuals from the 1940s to the 1970s, his reputation has risen since his death in 1983 in comparison with that of his old sparring partner.

Aron’s work is too complex and extensive to lend itself to a neat summary. He was a journalist as well as a sociologist, and the range of his intellectual interests went far beyond the concerns of most students of international relations. In the field of international relations, Aron is best known for his book Peace and War, which first appeared in English in 1966. In addition to this book, the discursive range and historical depth of which did not make easy reading for students in search of a master key to unlock the apparent contingencies of interstate relations, Aron is also remembered for his incisive analysis of the dilemmas of strategy in the nuclear age. While it is not unfair, as we shall see, to classify him within the realist school of thought, it is also important to appreciate some of the main differences between his approach to the study of international relations and that of North American realist thinkers.

As a French Jew who had spent some time in Germany just before Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s, Aron’s reaction to the rise of fascism in Europe and Stalinism in the Soviet Union set him apart from most French intellectuals in the postwar era. Despite his philosophical training in the abstract theories of history contained in the works of Marx and Hegel, his abhorrence of utopian thought and totalitarianism in all its forms lent an air of critical pessimism to his writing and a refusal to entertain the possibility that politics could ever be an appropriate arena for promoting particular versions of the good life by force at the expense of others. In 1978 he wrote that:

[t]he rise of National Socialism…and the revelation of politics in its dialogical essence forced me to argue against myself, against my intimate preferences; it inspired in me a sort of revolt against the instruction I had received at the university, against the spirituality of philosophers, and against the tendency of certain sociologists to misconstrue the impact of regimes with the pretext of focusing on permanent realities.¹

This experience instilled in Aron a commitment to liberalism and an admiration for the work of Max Weber, rather than the utopianism and historical materialism of Marx that inspired other European intellectuals similarly disenchanted with progressive evolutionary theories of history (see in particular his book The Opium of the Intellectuals, published in 1955). A prudent approach to the theory and practice of politics lay in the acknowledgement of different of and often incompatible political values, and therefore in the availability of and competition between divergent interpretations/ideologies that privileged some at the expense of others. Particular interpretations could be analysed critically in terms of their internal consistency, as well as their compatibility with existing social and political structures, but it would be utopian to believe in the use of reason to transcend such competition.

Informed by this outlook, much of Aron’s work focused on the nature of industrialization and the viability of different ways of promoting it in capitalist and allegedly ‘socialist’ societies. He was one of the first to argue that the Soviet model of central planning, while it facilitated forced industrialization, was not appropriate for running an ever more complicated industrial society.² In principle, he defended Western, liberal capitalism against its leftist critics as the best means of combining economic growth with some measure of political freedom and economic redistribution. While recognizing the fact of class conflict, he never believed in the idea that ‘the working class’ was either sufficiently homogeneous or motivated to revolt against the inequities of capitalist society. If capitalist societies could combine the search for profits with some measure of welfare and redistribution, he saw no reason why the conflict between workers and capitalists should be zero-sum. Indeed, he hoped that in the longer term such societies could moderate ideological competition, although he worried about the dominance of pressure groups in weakening the democratic process and depriving liberal states of sufficient ‘steering capacity’ in the interests of the society as a whole.

When it came to the study of international relations rather than industrialization per se, Aron was inspired by the work of Hobbes and Clausewitz. To some extent, he shared the realist view that there was a fundamental difference between domestic and international relations, and that this difference should be the foundation for all international theory. For Aron, foreign policy is constituted by diplomatic–strategic behaviour, and international relations takes place in the shadow of war. By this, he did not mean that war was always likely, but that the legitimacy of violence to secure state goals was shared among states, and it could not be monopolized as it had been within the territorial boundaries of the state. In his most famous phrase, international relations is ‘relations between political units, each of which claims the right to take justice into its own hands and to be the sole arbiter of the decision to fight or not to fight’.³

Of course, such an argument seems to place Aron squarely within the realist camp, but on closer examination Aron’s work is far more subtle than that of, say, Hans Morgenthau or Kenneth Waltz. While he agreed with Morgenthau that international relations was in some respects a struggle for power among states, the concept of power was too nebulous to serve as a master key for understanding international relations. Similarly, while he would agree with Waltz that the milieu of international relations was a unique structured environment, the latter did not determine state goals. Indeed, state ‘goals’ could not be reduced to a simple formula at all:

Security, power, glory, ideas, are essentially heterogeneous objectives which can be reduced to a single term only by distorting the human meaning of diplomatic strategic action. If the rivalry of states is comparable to a game, what is ‘at stake’ cannot be designated by a single concept, valid for all civilisations at all periods. Diplomacy is a game in which the players sometimes risk losing their lives, sometimes prefer victory to the advantages that would result from it.⁴

In the absence of a simple formula to predict state goals, the best one could do as a thinker, diplomat or strategist is to attempt an understanding of state aims and motives on the best evidence available. Peace and War may be disappointing for those in search of ahistorical generalizations, as it is at best a collection of partial hypotheses based on the ways in which states influence one another in light of different historical eras; the ‘material’ constraints of space (geography), population (demography) and resources (economics); and the ‘moral’ determinants arising from states’ ‘styles of being and behaving’.⁵ International theory, for Aron, ought not to try and privilege any one of these categories over the other, but to blend all three in a historically sensitive attempt to chart processes of change and continuity over time in the interaction of such ‘determinants’. If this is the case, while it may make sense to compare historical eras characterized by, for example, bipolar and multipolar configurations of power, hypotheses concerning their relevant stability could only be tentative in light of the fact that one cannot ignore the character of particular states within a distinct era. Whether the states share certain values or common interests may be just as important as how they stand in relation to one another on some quantitative scale of ‘power’. Similarly, much of Peace and War is devoted to reproducing and analysing the weakness of a number of schools of thought that, in Aron’s view, exaggerate the influence of environmental factors, such as geopolitics and the Marxist–Leninist theory of economic imperialism, as causes of war. Aron points out, for example, that the ‘excess capital’ of France – which according to the theory would require overseas colonies to be invested in – usually went to South America and Russia rather than North Africa. Moreover, he suggested that there was no good reason why home markets should not expand indefinitely to absorb any ‘excess production’ of the advanced capitalist states. In contrast, he emphasized traditional interstate rivalry as the main ‘cause’ of war.

The final part of Peace and War is taken up with the question of how the international system has changed in the post-1945 era. Here he is particularly interested in whether nuclear weapons have fundamentally changed strategic thinking about the role of force in foreign policy. In this book and elsewhere, Aron showed a keen awareness of just how ambiguous the evidence was, as well as the central dilemmas facing the strategy and ethics of statecraft in the nuclear age.

On the one hand, he recognized that nuclear weapons are fundamentally different from conventional weapons in that their destructiveness, speed of delivery and limited military utility require that they be used to deter war rather than fight it. For the first time in human history, nuclear armed states had the ability to destroy each other without having to defeat their opponents’ armed forces. As soon as the superpowers were in a condition of mutually assured destruction (a condition reached by the late 1950s), they were in a condition of what has come to be called ‘existential’ deterrence. Each side had the capability to destroy the other totally in a retaliatory second nuclear strike, and the extreme sanction and fear of escalation were sufficient to deter each other from ever embarking on a first strike. For Aron, this existential condition was secure as long as neither superpower could destroy the other’s retaliatory capability in a nuclear attack, and as long as no iron-clad defence against nuclear weapons could be constructed. The effectiveness or credibility of nuclear deterrence did not rely on complex strategies or doctrines employed by either side to make the other certain of what would happen should direct conflict break out between them. The credibility of deterrence lay in the weapons themselves, not in the attempts by states to think of nuclear war in conventional terms, and Aron severely criticized nuclear planners and game theorists in the United States for thinking otherwise. As with his exhortations regarding the inherent limitations of international theory in general, Aron insisted that nuclear strategy could never become anything like an exact science.

On the other hand, if Clausewitz was of limited help in thinking about the conditions under which nuclear war could be fought and ‘won’, the greater stability there was in deterrence between the United States and the Soviet Union (notwithstanding the arms race between them), the less there was at lower levels in the international system. The superpowers themselves could be tempted to use conventional weapons in their ‘proxy’ wars, unless this gave rise to fears of escal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Realism
• Liberalism
• Constructivism
• Critical Theory
• English School
• Postmodernism
• Feminism
• International Political Theory/International Ethics
• Historical Sociology