International Relations Theory

A Critical Introduction

Cynthia Weber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000065817
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría de la filosofía

The fifth edition of this innovative textbook introduces students to the main theories in International Relations. It explains and analyzes each theory, allowing students to understand and critically engage with the myths and assumptions behind them. Each theory is illustrated using the example of a popular film.
Key features of this textbook include:

• Discussion of all the main theories: realism and neorealism, idealism and neoidealism, liberalism, constructivism, postmodernism, gender, globalization, neo-Marxism, modernization and development theory, environmentalism, anarchism, and queer theory.
• A new chapter focused on global LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans) theory and queer theory, Hillary Clinton's policy myth that "gay rights are human rights and human rights are gay rights, " and the film Love is Strange.
• Innovative use of narrative from films that students will be familiar with: Lord of the Flies, Independence Day, Wag the Dog, Fatal Attraction, The Truman Show, East Is East, Memento, WALL-E, The Hunger Games, and Love is Strange.
• An accessible and exciting writing style, boxed key concepts, and guides for further reading.
• A comprehensive Companion Website featuring a complete set of lectures for every major theory and film covered in the textbook, additional workshop and seminar exercises, slides to accompany each lecture, and an extensive bank of multiple-choice, short-answer, and essay questions and answers for every chapter.

This breakthrough textbook has been designed to unravel the complexities of international relations theory in a way that gives students a clearer idea of how the theories work, and of the myths associated with them.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Culture, ideology, and the myth function in IR theory

• Culture
• Ideology
• The myth function in IR theory
• Why myths?
• Plan of the book
• Suggestions for further thinking

International politics is a huge field. It explores everything from wars to revolutions to global gender inequalities to demands for international human rights to international trade. To try to make sense of international politics, we often turn to International Relations (IR) theory. IR theory makes organizing generalizations about international politics. IR theory is a collection of stories about the world of international politics. And in telling stories about international politics, IR theory doesn’t just present what is going on in the world out there, but it also imposes its own vision of what the world out there looks like.

We use IR theory to make sense of the world of international politics. But how do we make sense of IR theory? Of course, we can learn all the stories IR theory tells us about the world. We call these stories IR traditions and name them neorealism, neoidealism, historical materialism, constructivism, gender, globalization, neo-Marxism, modernization and development theory, environmentalism, anarchism, and global LGBT studies. But just learning the stories IR theory tells doesn’t tell us much about IR theory itself. It doesn’t tell us, for example, how IR theory works. What makes the stories IR theory tells about international politics so compelling? What makes the stories IR theory tells about the world of international politics appear to be true?

My answer is that IR theory—a collection of stories about international politics—relies upon IR myths in order to appear to be true. What is an IR myth? An IR myth is an apparent truth, usually expressed in slogan form that an IR theory relies upon in order to appear to be true. IR myths, in other words, are the building blocks of IR theory, of the stories IR theory tells about the world of international politics. They are that part of the story that is so familiar to us that we take it for granted. And our taking IR myths for granted is necessary for IR theories to appear to be true.

For example, think of the slogans “international anarchy is the permissive cause of war” and “there is an international society.” Such slogans are IR myths. Realists rely upon the knowledge that “international anarchy is the permissive cause of war” to explain why sovereign nation-states inevitably find themselves in conflict with one another and why balance of power politics is the key to managing such conflict. Idealists, in contrast, rely upon the knowledge that “there is an international society” in order for them to be able to tell their stories about progress among sovereign nation-states on a global scale to the point that conflict among them might be transcended. If we questioned these IR myths, then the stories told by IR traditions like realism and idealism would not necessarily appear to be true.

Why do I refer to these building blocks of IR theory as IR myths? Is it because I believe that IR myths—like myths generally—are false? Absolutely not! IR myths may be true, and they may be false. The truth or falsity of an IR myth is not important for understanding how IR myths function as the building blocks of IR theory. So why call the building blocks of IR stories IR myths? I call them IR myths because of the “mythologizing function” or “myth function” they perform. It is the myth function of these building blocks of IR theory that makes the stories told by IR theory appear to be true.

What is the myth function in IR theory? How do IR myths make an IR theory appear to be true? And why is it important for us to study the process by which IR myths make IR theories appear to be true?

These are the questions I address in this chapter. I do so by considering IR theory’s relationship to three concepts—culture, ideology, and the myth function in IR theory.

Culture

Raymond Williams, a pioneer in the field of cultural studies and cultural theory, noted of the term culture that it is “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language” (Williams, 1983: 87). Williams has a point. Culture is one of those terms that everyone seems to understand, but no one seems to be able adequately to define.

Often, when we think of culture, we think of traditional arrangements within particular states or societies. For example, we may say that there is something called US culture or UK culture. But this way of thinking about culture suggests that there is something stable, identifiable, and generalizable that we can point to as a culture. When we unpack a term like “US culture,” we find so many contradictions, incompatibilities, and complexities within it that the term itself seems to mean little. For example, how can we meaningfully make sense of the militia movement, the religious right, rugged individualism, and anticapitalism not to mention regional, rural, class, race, sexuality, and age “subcultures” collected under the one term “US culture?” Not very easily.

For this reason, theorists who think about what culture is have tried to come up with less static and more open definitions of culture. These definitions focus on how culture is related to meaning rather than trying to pin culture to a particular place at a particular time, like the contemporary US (see Box 1.1). According to Stuart Hall, this is because “culture … is not so much a set of things—novels and paintings or TV programmes and comics—as a process, a set of practices,” what others have called “signifying practices” (Hall, 1997: 2; Storey, 2012: 2). For Hall, “culture is concerned with the production and the exchange of meanings—the ‘giving and taking of meaning’—between members of a society or group” (1997: 2). Or, as John Hartley defines it, culture is “The social production and reproduction of sense, meaning, and consciousness” (in O’Sullivan et al., 1994: 68). Culture has to do with how we make sense of the world and how we produce, reproduce, and circulate that sense.

Box 1.1 What is culture?

“Culture is concerned with the production and exchange of meanings—the ‘giving and taking of meaning’—between members of a society or group” (Hall, 1997).

“The social production and reproduction of sense, meaning, and consciousness” (John Hartley, in O’Sullivan et al., 1994).

“An ensemble of stories we tell about ourselves” (Geertz, 1975).

We circulate our sense about the world in many ways, and one of the ways we do this is through stories. This is why another cultural theorist, Clifford Geertz, described culture as “an ensemble of stories we tell about ourselves” (Geertz, 1975: 448). For Geertz, these stories are not always conscious. They can be composed of beliefs we consciously hold as well as of habits we unconsciously perform. Cultural stories are composed of both sense (consciousness) and common sense (unconsciousness). Common sense is what we know but don’t think about, what Roland Barthes described as “what-goes-without-saying” (Barthes, 1972: 11).

Studying culture understood as “sense making,” “signifying practices,” or “an ensemble of stories, beliefs, and habits” means we have to pay attention to how meanings are made. We must think about how meaning making relies upon what is said and what goes without saying. And we must recognize that cultures aren’t just “there,” fully formed for us to study. Indeed, it may be impossible for us to identify “cultures” as objects of study at all. Studying culture means looking at how what we objectify as “culture” is made. And part of what makes culture and helps to distinguish some “cultures” from other “cultures” are cultural practices that produce, organize, and circulate meanings through stories told about the world.

IR theory can be studied as a site of cultural practice. IR theory is “an ensemble of stories” told about the world it studies, which is the world of international politics. Studying IR theory as a site of cultural practice means being attentive to how IR theory makes sense of the world of international politics. We have to ask of IR theory: How do the stories it tells about the world of international politics become sense and common sense? And why do we take for granted the sense IR theory makes of our lives in relation to international politics?

My answer to these questions is that IR theory relies upon IR myths in order to transform its culturally produced stories about the world into common sense about the world that we take for granted. But before we explore this process in detail, let me introduce another important concept that plays a part in this process. This concept is ideology.

Ideology

Unlike the term culture, ideology is a term for which formal definitions confidently abound (see Box 1.2). The most common way ideology is defined is as “a fairly coherent and comprehensive set of ideas that explains and evaluates social conditions, helps people understand their place in society, and provides a program for social and political action” (Ball and Dagger, 1995: 9). It is a ready-made set of meanings and interpretations that can help us to make sense of our world and tell us how to act in relation to our world.

Box 1.2 What is ideology?

Conscious ideology: “a fairly coherent and comprehensive set of ideas that explains and evaluates social conditions, helps people understand their place in society, and provides a program for social and political action” (Ball and Dagger, 1995).

Unconscious ideology: ideology that is not formally named and that is therefore difficult to identify. It is the common sense foundation of our worldviews that is beyond debate.

This way of defining ideology assumes that all ideologies are consciously held. And many are. Examples of “conscious ideologies” are liberalism, conservatism, socialism, feminism, ecologism, and even vegetarianism. Conscious ideologies are easily identifiable. We know what they are, and we can subscribe to them or reject them.

While conscious ideologies like liberalism and conservatism are powerful because they can politically mobilize people and “raise consciousness” about political situations, another type of ideologies—“unconscious ideologies”—are arguably even more politically powerful. Unlike neatly packaged, easily identifiable, named ideologies, unconscious ideologies lack proper names. This makes us less likely to be able to identify them as ideologies. This is why they are also called “anonymous ideologies” (Barthes, 1972).

An example of an unconscious ideology is “boys will be boys.” It would be difficult to attribute this ideology to anyone, in particular, both because no one person or one ideological tradition claims it as their own and because it appears to those who hold it to be “just the way things are” or the way things ought to be. In this sense, unconscious ideologies are “profoundly unconscious” (Althusser, 1969). We use them to help us make sense of our worlds, very often without realizing it. And because we don’t realize we hold unconscious ideologies or use them to make sense of our worlds, we very rarely interrogate them. We very rarely ask difficult questions about them that might upset them as common sense (see Box 1.3).

Box 1.3 Examples of conscious and unconscious ideologies

Conscious ideologies	Unconscious ideologies
Liberalism	Boys will be boys
Conservatism	America has a classless society
Socialism	English people are white
Feminism	Everyone I know is straight

If conscious ideologies are those ideologies packaged as programs for political action that we debate in the political arena, unconscious ideologies are the foundations of our ideological and political thinking that we place beyond debate. Unconscious ideologies, in other words, “go without saying.” We don’t like to have our unconscious ideologies—our common sense—articulat...