International Relations in France

Writing between Discipline and State

Henrik Breitenbauch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415630047
• eBook ISBN: 9781135044282
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why is the French International Relations (IR) discipline different from the transnational-American discipline? By analysing argument structures in research articles across time, this book shows how the discipline in France is caught between the American character of the discipline and the French state as regulator of legitimate forms of expression. Concretely, French research arguments are less explicit about what their propositions are and what academic discussions they draw on and add to than their transnational-American counterparts.

Based on a comparative case study of French and American IR research from 1950 to 2011, the book is a major contribution to the meta-IR literature on global, regional and national traditions of IR. The challenge to the French discipline of whether and how to position itself in relation to the evolving American discipline is in many ways exemplary for other non-American national IR disciplines, and the choices as well as the structural conditions underlying the French case are relevant to all non-Western disciplines.

The comparative analysis moreover reveals that the modern American discipline -- what is considered as recognisable social science -- takes shape only during the 1970s. The book thus offers new knowledge about the discipline's international development as such. Both case and methodology are interesting to larger audiences outside IR, in the history and sociology of social science, contrastive rhetoric, as well as French and cultural studies.

1
Introduction and method

Il est difficile de mesurer tout ce que notre culture et nos structures mentales doivent, en bien et en mal, à cette souveraineté de la dissertation. Mais il est évident que tout examen critique, toute analyse historique de notre univers intel-lectuel devrait passer par là.

Gérard Genette¹

Introduction

In the interwar years the issue of a discipline of International Relations was widely discussed in the international setting of the Zimmern Committee as part of the activities in the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation under the auspices of the League of Nations. And here, among many other voices representing various views on the nature, limits and character of a discipline of IR, we find Jacques Lambert, member of the Committee and Professor of Law at the University of Lyon. Lambert observes:

The organization of studies and research in the matter of international relations is dominated, in France, by the fact that the quasi-unanimity of those consecrated to it do not employ the terms international relations and refuse to see in the questions normally classified under this heading the object of a distinct science.²

Many things have since changed in France, where the term “les relations internationales” is certainly a successful category for titles of journals, books, university courses and even degrees. Nonetheless, this reticence towards the idea of a “distinct science”, or at least a particular academic discipline of IR has, along with Lambert’s disjunction between the classification and its practices, been persistent in France. One French IR specialist with an explicit and extensive engagement with the legacy and debates of the wider transnational-American discipline of IR, Dario Battistella, points out as much in the introduction to the 2003 edition of an introduction to IR theory: “neither IR nor theories of IR seems to find favour in the sight of the French university.”³ As the explicit goal of that volume was to counter this sometimes deliberate scepticism with regard to the IR theory project inside French IR, it is perhaps possible to draw an optimistic lesson from its extended and rewritten 2009 edition. More than a comprehensive and reflexive textbook on IR, this volume also engages the legacy of the French IR tradition – especially but not exclusively the work of Raymond Aron – with the long development of international thought, especially since the Second World War and up to and including the constitutive debates of the discipline of today.⁴ In doing so, Battistella begins to bridge a gap that has more often than not divided the French and transnational-American traditions.

It is in the decades following the Second World War – well before the current “present” of the IR discipline was formed or any of the constituent elements in terms of theoretical and empirical research focuses, perceptions of adequate methodology or even the fundamental hierarchy of IR journals had crystallised – that IR was on its way to becoming an established subject in teaching and research on the other, American, side of the Atlantic. If Frenchmen had for centuries studied, described and constructed “the international” through writings on war, diplomacy, statecraft, international law, history and anthropology, this particular institutionalised approach to an identified area of political reality was met with some reserve in France. During that period, the then young Alfred Grosser, historian by training and political scientist in this case in practice, published in the Revue française de science politique a critical review of six American IR teaching manuals as a way of addressing that particular way of approaching the international phenomenon of which these manuals were an example.⁵ Grosser’s article became the first to ask a question which is still haunting the discipline more than half a century later and which is at the heart of not only this book but the series of which it is part: “L’étude des relations internationales: spécialité Américaine? [The study of International Relations: an American speciality?]”. The article and its question was a main source of inspiration for Stanley Hoffman’s 1977 article, which arguably was the beginning of the ongoing meta-debate about the nature and character of transnational-American IR.⁶ In a sense, the French discipline is a classic case of the challenge which the existence of the transnational-American discipline poses to globally local, national traditions of IR. How – if at all – to deal with the themes, assumptions, standards, questions and approaches offered and proffered by this larger international network? In the French case, as elsewhere, the answer may have had less to do with the set of transnational intellectual agendas than with the institutionalised approaches and themes of research already established at home.

The question this book aims to answer is therefore how and why the French tradition of studying International Relations is different from the transnational-American discipline. The ambition is to pose and respond to this question in a way that will be of relevance to an audience larger than the immediate community of International Relations specialists.

For both kinds of readers it is fitting to note that in these kinds of analyses, international relations relates to the political phenomena whereas the capitalised version (IR for short) refers to the institutionalised academic approach to studying such international relations. This distinction is not trivial, but paramount. A social scientific approach to the issue of the academic discipline of IR must be grounded outside that discipline, which studies international relations. The argument here is therefore a contribution both to the meta-IR debate about the paradoxical lack of internationalisation (or globality) in the presumed international discipline and to the new generation of social science studies of social (science) knowledge production.

Hence, these ordered lines of letters are both International Relations and sociology of science. To speak of these words that you read is an estrangement effect, staged to introduce the kind of text-close practice-sensitivity to the machinations of what it is that we do when we do social science that is the recurrent theme of much of what follows. Too often these menial concretions and their craft are glossed over, wilfully forgotten by the everyday magic of having achieved scientific status by virtue of operating through conventionalised forms of expression and subsequent peer review. How we introduce, structure and justify arguments, not in the ethereal theory of philosophy of science, but in concrete writing for a particular academic publication; the things that are at the heart of the trade of the social scientist, sometimes explicitly resumed in guides to writing PhDs, sometimes implicitly transferred by supervisors and peers at conferences and joint critiques of drafts: these acquired abilities to follow certain schemes, putting the specific pieces of an argument in a certain order, allocating certain kinds of information to footnotes following a specific style guide, all that and more pertains to the stuff that we see when we open the black box of knowledge production.⁷

The analysis therefore poses its question in a way that will not only bring light and attention to the French case as an important national subset of the global institutionalised traditions for studying the international. The analysis will also demonstrate the productive feasibility of a form-based approach to the social scientific study of social science practice as a specific kind of social knowledge production.

As part of this first chapter we discuss why studying IR in France is both an interesting and timely exercise – in itself and as part of the wider meta-debate in the transnational-American discipline. This is done in two steps where the first deals with French IR in itself and the second with French IR as an example of variance in the wider discipline. We then present the general reasoning behind the structure of the analysis in terms of levels of analysis and how these fit together in a coherent research design. Given these general outlines we then discuss the particular methods used, review concrete findings and, finally, present an overview of each chapter as a prolegomena to the analysis itself.

The paradoxical case of French IR

Why explore the case of French IR? For three, partially overlapping, reasons. The French case is first of all very interesting in the context of the meta-IR debate over the (not so) international character of the International Relations discipline. In spite of being Western (and as such part of the ‘core’ in the global core-periphery logic of the meta-IR debate), the French have not been an integrated part of the overall transnational-American discipline. French researchers have in fact – as we shall see below – published rather less in journals of transnational-American IR than, for example, their Scandinavian colleagues, and much less than one would expect when accounting for the comparative material base. Examining what Friedrichs calls that country’s “strategy of self-reliance” with regard to the transnational-American discipline is therefore interesting. Using the word strategy of course implies a conscious choice. So such a proposition necessarily begets the question of whether the relative non-integration really was a choice or rather a result of how local conditions and perceptions of social and political science shaped practices so far as to be incommensurable with those of the transnational-American discipline?

If this international context of the case is the first reason for studying French IR, then the second reason has to do with those local conditions and perceptions. French IR in fact is a fine example of how a low degree of differentiation of scientific practice from societal practice – in terms of argumentative forms and standards of evaluation – is, if not determining, then at least correlated with a relatively low degree of professional differentiation of the proto-discipline itself. There may be other such cases, but French IR in this way serves to construct and assess an analytical framework for examining differentiation of disciplinary scientific practice from societal practices (academisation) as well as from other disciplinary practices (disciplinary specialisation).

The third reason for the pertinence of studying French IR stems from the first two. The peculiar case of French IR contains a paradox. On the one hand there are strong individual contributions of great value for the transnational-American discipline because of their distinctive traits and relative added value. On the other hand, there is the relative lack of institutional and institutionalised success for a budding proto-discipline of IR in a country as immersed in world affairs as is France. French IR presents us with a paradox in other words for its successful individual contributions not in spite but because of the relative institutional weakness.⁸

In fact, this theme runs through the literature on French IR, be it from within the meta-IR debate or within the domestic French discussions. The French auto-analyses are an interesting starting point. From the earliest estimates of research practice in the field (which can meaningfully be said to address modern IR), via the ongoing meta-reflexions of the French researchers themselves, to later official and semi-official reports, there is a common trait of negativism: e.g. early pessimism with regard to the possibility of making a discipline proper out of a field of study or reality (Lambert 1936); early sombre reviews of the state and quality of IR research in France (Aron 1950; Renouvin 1950); critical evaluations of the practiced methodology and value of research (Merle 1983); via a fairly pessimistic review of the state of political science including IR in France (Favre 1996) to a number of academic articles and official reports after the turn of the millennium (including Heisbourg 2000 and Bauer 2008).⁹ The reports are interesting, not least because they make official the concern with the relative institutional weakness of IR in France, but also because they show how the development of the academic study of IR in political terms can be linked up with a wider national capacity of strategic and international thinking.

These negative assessments with regard to the relative institutional success of the French IR discipline are linked with the original observation by Jacques Lambert above. Pierre Favre is the leading historian and analyst of French political science. His report is a study of the state of the discipline of political science in general, based on a factual review of the institutional status of political science in France, including institutions, researchers, associations, journals, libraries, teaching and thesis subjects.¹⁰ Favre’s main conclusions are that French political science may be strong on political sociology on France, yet is weak in knowledge production in almost any other sub-field, including IR; methodological debates and specifically quantitative and modelisation-based studies are almost or completely absent; that there is a strong institutional imbalance between Paris and the provincial institutions; and that there is almost no international cooperation in terms of research or co-publications; and finally that French political science has a very low degree of “social reconnaissance”, i.e. status as a legitimate and welcome provider of information in the public sphere.¹¹ Concerning IR he notes a “lack of specialization in international relations”, characterised by “weakness nowadays”, just as there is a “rarity of experts on international relations”:¹²

The [French IR] specialists thus think that in spite of the existence of some useful journals there is not yet in France any journal with a level comparable to the big Anglophone IR journals like International Organization, World Politics or International Security. This is a supplementary indication of the feeble development of International Relations in French political science.¹³

Indeed, this absence of communal core disciplinary elements is echoed in the continuous connection between interdisciplinarity in institutional and cognitive terms. In a state of the field review, Jean-Jacques Roche emphasises the interdisciplinary character of this “crossroads discipline” with “persistent weaknesses”.¹⁴ As he notes, one effect of the low degree of disciplinary institutionalisation of International Relations in France is also a lack of monopolisation of international relations for the political science internationalists.¹⁵ Mathieu Chillaud speaks of the troubles which follow from the inconsistency of a cross-cutting discipline. He points out how the “failure” of constituting an “autonomous discipline” has had the functional effect that French IR has been in a continuous state of having to

justify its borrowing from other fields. The absence of rigour in IR work lies precisely in its incapacity to demarcate its object of study and consequently to structure a specific knowledge base on which an academic corpus may be built.¹⁶

Chillaud and Roche both describe how institutionalisation has actually proceeded in positive terms since the turn of the millennium – and Favre’s sombre report – but both add notes of caution. For Chillaud, in spite of such progress, French IR still “suffers in its disciplinary status from a deep lack of homogeneity. This excessive compartmentalisation of IR means that each discipline sees the topic as subordinate and is reluctant to claim a monopoly over the field.”¹⁷

In another stock-taking exercise, John R. Groom too calls attention to the correlation between the cognitive interdisciplinarity with regard to IR in France and its “feeble institutionalization”. For Groom, “pluridisciplinarity” can be explained by the former: “Not being recognized as a discipline, [International Relations in France] have developed on a more interdisciplinary basis and in more unexpected venues. In this way, the weak institutionalization can be said to have had positive effects.”¹⁸ Groom’s positive assessment is a fairly solitary voice, but it in effect follows the same path as the paradoxical case argument here – that good things have in fact come from the low degree of institutional success.

Nevertheless, the main point is here the emphasis on the special fate of IR in France. As argued by, for example, Klaus-Gerd Giesen, the long history of IR in North America and Germany is one marked by a “highly valued and mandatory specialization and professionalization of the so-called sub-discipline of International Relations”, whereas in France this trend is “hardly” seen and is even “frowned upon”.¹⁹ A further suggestive indicator of the status of French IR in general and within French political science in particular is the chapter on international relations in the monumental, four-volume Traité de science politique (Grawitz and Leca 1985), which seeks to synthesise political science’s debates and f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction and method
• 2 Theory: legitimate forms of expression
• 3 Less Lego: French IR origins and arguments in a comparative perspective
• 4 Close readings: dissertational patterns versus Lego science
• 5 Writing like a state
• 6 Conclusion: French IR and social science writing between state and discipline
• Notes
• References
• Index