Theories of International Relations

Scott Burchill, Andrew Linklater, Richard Devetak

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230362239
• eBook ISBN: 9781350311718
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The 5th edition of this best-selling textbook provides a systematic and comprehensive introduction to the main theoretical approaches in the study of international relations. While maintaining focus on the core theories and assessing the importance of theory in the study of International Relations, this edition has been updated throughout to take account of major events and developments, such as the Arab Spring and to reflect the developments in the field, including new material on neo-realism and neo-liberalism, post-colonialism and cosmopolitanism. Each chapter is written by a leading expert on the theory, elucidating the concepts and its application to field coverage whilst maintaining an objective perspective in their evaluations. This text can be used as reference work for particular theories, or as a tool to learn the use and importance of theory, as well as the particulars of each school of thought. This text is accessible to students on courses across the world, and it assumes no prior knowledge of any of the theories, making it the ideal companion as students begin studying theories of International Relations, whether at undergraduate or Master's level.

1	Introduction

SCOTT BURCHILL AND ANDREW LINKLATER

Frameworks of analysis

From its inception as a separate field of study, International Relations has been the site of major theoretical debates. (We follow the academic convention of using ‘International Relations’ to refer to the discipline, and ‘international relations’ to refer to the structures, processes, episodes and events that the discipline investigates.) Two of the foundational texts in the field, E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis (first published in 1939) and Hans Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations (first published in 1948) were works of theory in three central respects. Each developed a broad framework of analysis which distilled the essence of international politics from disparate events; each sought to provide future analysts with the theoretical tools for understanding general patterns underlying seemingly unique episodes; and each reflected on the forms of political action which are most appropriate in a realm where the struggle for power was pre-eminent. Both thinkers were motivated by the desire to correct what they saw as deep misunderstandings about the nature of international politics lying at the heart of the liberal project – especially the belief that the struggle for power could be tamed by international law and the idea that the pursuit of self-interest could be replaced by the shared objective of promoting security for all. Not that Morgenthau and Carr thought the international political system was condemned for all time to revolve around the relentless struggle for power and security. Their main claim was that all efforts to reform the international system, which ignored the struggle for power, would quickly end in failure. More worrying in their view was the danger that attempts to bring about fundamental change would compound the problem of international relations. They believed the liberal internationalist world-view had been largely responsible for the crisis of the inter-war years.

Many scholars, particularly in the United States during the 1960s, believed that Morgenthau’s theoretical framework was too impressionistic in nature. Historical illustrations had been used to support rather than demonstrate ingenious conjectures about general patterns of international relations. Consequently, the discipline lagged significantly behind the study of economics which used a sophisticated methodology drawn from the natural sciences to test specific hypotheses, develop general laws and predict human behaviour. Proponents of the scientific approach attempted to build a new theory of international politics, some for the sake of better explanation and higher levels of predictive accuracy, others in the belief that science held the key to understanding how to transform international politics for the better.

The scientific turn led to a major disciplinary debate in the 1960s in which scholars such as Hedley Bull (1966b) argued that international politics were not susceptible to scientific enquiry. This is a view widely shared by analysts committed to diverse intellectual projects. The radical scholar Noam Chomsky has claimed that in international relations ‘historical conditions are too varied and complex for anything that might plausibly be called “a theory” to apply uniformly’ (1994: 120). What is generally known as ‘post-positivism’ in International Relations rejects the possibility of a science of international relations which uses standards of proof associated with the physical sciences to develop equivalent levels of explanatory precision and predictive certainty (Smith, Booth and Zalewski 1996). In the 1990s, a major debate occurred around the claims of positivism. The question of whether there is a world of difference between the ‘physical’ and the ‘social’ sciences was a crucial issue, but no less important were disputes about the nature and purpose of theory. The debate centred on whether theories – even those that aim for objectivity – are ultimately ‘political’ because they generate views of the world which favour some political interests and disadvantage others. That dispute has produced very difficult questions about what theory is and what its purposes are. These questions are now central to the discipline – more central than at any other time in its history. What does it mean it to speak of a theory of international politics?

Diversity of theory

One purpose of this volume is to analyse the diversity of conceptions of theory in the study of international relations. Positivist or ‘scientific’ approaches remain crucial, and are indeed dominant in the United States, as the success of rational choice analysis demonstrates. But that is not the only type of theory available in the field. An increasingly large number of theorists are concerned with a second category of theory in which the way that observers construct their images of international relations, the methods they use to try to understand this realm, and the social and political implications of their ‘knowledge claims’, are leading preoccupations. They believe it is just as important to focus on how we approach the study of world politics as it is to try to explain global phenomena. In other words the very process of understanding and explaining world politics itself becomes a vital object of inquiry.

Steve Smith (1995: 26–7) has argued that there is a fundamental division within the discipline ‘between theories which seek to offer explanatory [our emphasis] accounts of international relations’, and perspectives that regard ‘theory as constitutive [our emphasis] of that reality’. Analysing these two conceptions of theory informs much of the discussion in this introductory chapter. In addition, theory now also embraces cognate fields such as historical sociology and international political theory, which have made their own distinctive marks on the study of international relations.

The first point to make in this context is that constitutive theories have an increasingly prominent role in the study of international relations, but the importance of the themes they address has long been recognized. As early as the 1970s, Hedley Bull (1973: 183–4) argued that:

the reason we must be concerned with the theory as well as the history of the subject is that all discussions of international politics … proceed upon theoretical assumptions which we should acknowledge and investigate rather than ignore or leave unchallenged. The enterprise of theoretical investigation is at its minimum one directed towards criticism: towards identifying, formulating, refining, and questioning the general assumptions on which the everyday discussion of international politics proceeds. At its maximum, the enterprise is concerned with theoretical construction: with establishing that certain assumptions are true while others are false, certain arguments valid while others are invalid, and so proceeding to erect a firm structure of knowledge.

This quotation reveals that Bull thought that explanatory and constitutive theory are both necessary in the study of international relations: intellectual enquiry would be incomplete without the effort to increase understanding on both fronts. Although his comments were made in the early 1970s, it was not until later in the decade that constitutive theory began to enjoy a more central place in the discipline, in large part because of the influence of developments in the cognate fields of social and political theory. In the years since, with the growth of interest in international theory, a flourishing literature has been devoted to addressing theoretical concerns, much of it concerned with constitutive theory. This focus on the process of theorizing has not been uncontroversial. Some have argued that the excessive preoccupation with theory represents a withdrawal from an analysis of ‘real-world’ issues and a sense of responsibility for policy relevance (Wallace 1996). There is a parallel here with a point that Keohane (1988) made against post-modernism, which is that the fixation with problems in the philosophy of social science leads to a neglect of important fields of empirical research.

Critics of that argument maintain that it rests on unspoken or undefended theoretical assumptions about the purposes of studying international relations, and specifically on the belief that the discipline should be concerned with issues which are more vital to states than, for example, to civil society actors aiming to change the international political system (Booth 1997; Smith 1997). Here it is important to recall that Carr and Morgenthau were interested not only in explaining the world ‘out there’ but in making a powerful argument about what states could reasonably hope to achieve by way of ending the competitive world of international politics. Smith (1996: 113) argues that all theories do this whether intentionally or unintentionally: they ‘do not simply explain or predict, they tell us what possibilities exist for human action and intervention; they define not merely our explanatory possibilities, but also our ethical and practical horizons’.

Smith questions what he sees as the false assumption that ‘theory’ stands in opposition to ‘reality’ – conversely that ‘theory’ can be tested against a ‘reality’ which is already ‘out there’ and knowable without any theoretical assumptions (see also George 1994). The issue is whether what is ‘out there’ is always theory-dependent and invariably conditioned to some degree by the language and culture of the observer and by general beliefs about society that are tied to a particular place and time. And as noted earlier, those who wonder about the purpose of theory cannot avoid the fact that analysis is always theoretically informed and likely to have political implications and consequences (Brown 2002). The growing feminist literature in the field discussed in Chapter 10 has stressed that argument in its claim that many of the dominant traditions are gendered, in that they reflect specifically male experiences of society and politics. Critical approaches to the discipline, which are areas discussed in Chapters 7 and 8 have been equally keen to stress that there is, as Nagel (1986) has argued in a rather different context, ‘no view from nowhere’.

To be fair, many exponents of the scientific approach recognized this very problem, but they believed that natural science made it possible for analysts to rise above the social and political world they were investigating. What the physical sciences had achieved could be emulated in social-scientific forms of enquiry. That is a matter to come back to later. But debates about the possibility of a science of international relations, and disputes about whether there has been an excessive preoccupation with theory in recent years at the cost of policy-relevant analysis, demonstrate that scholars do not agree about the nature and purposes of theory or concur about its proper place in the wider field. International Relations is a discipline of theoretical disagreements – a ‘divided discipline’, as Holsti (1985) once called it.

Contested nature

Indeed it has been so ever since those who developed this comparatively new subject, in the Western academy in the aftermath of World War I, first debated the essential features of international politics. Since then, but more keenly in some periods than in others, almost every aspect of the study of international politics has been contested. What should the discipline aim to study? Relations between states? Growing transnational economic ties, as recommended by early twentieth-century liberals? Increasing international interdependence, as advocated in the 1970s? The global system of dominance and dependence, as claimed by Marxists and neo-Marxists from the 1970s? Globalization, as scholars have argued in more recent times? What role should be the study of gender and the investigation of questions of identity and differences have in the field? These are some examples of how the discipline has been divided on the very basic question of its subject matter.

How, in addition, should international political phenomena be studied? By using empirical data to identify laws and patterns of international relations? By using historical evidence to understand what is unique (Bull 1966a) or to identify some traditions of thought which have survived for centuries (Wight 1991)? By using Marxist approaches to explain the influence of production, class and material inequalities on world politics? By emulating, as Waltz (1979) does, the study of the market behaviour of firms to understand systemic forces that allegedly make all states behave in much the same way? By claiming, as Wendt (1999) does in his defence of constructivism, that in the study of international relations it is important to understand that ‘it is ideas all the way down?’ Those are some illustrations of fundamental differences about the appropriate methodology or methodologies to use in the field.

Finally, is it possible for scholars to provide neutral forms of analysis, or are all approaches culture-bound and necessarily biased? Is it possible to have objective knowledge of facts but not of values, as advocates of the scientific approach have often argued? Or, as some students of global ethics have claimed, is it possible to have knowledge of the goals that states and other political actors should aim to realize such as the promotion of global justice (Beitz 1979) or ending world poverty (Pogge 2002)? These are some of the epistemological debates in the field, debates about what human beings can and cannot know about the social and political world. Many of the ‘great debates’ and watersheds in the discipline have focused on such questions.

In the remainder of this introductory chapter we will examine these and other issues under the following headings:

•The foundation of the discipline of International Relations

•Theories and disciplines

•Explanatory and constitutive theory

•Interdisciplinary theory

•What do theories of international relations differ about?

•What criteria exist for evaluating theories?

One of our aims is to explain the proliferation of theories since the 1980s, to analyse their different ‘styles’ and methods of proceeding, and to comment on a recurrent problem in the field which is that theorists often appear to ‘talk past’ each other rather than engage in productive dialogue that explores areas of convergence and leads to higher-level synthesis in the field. Another aim is to identify ways in which meaningful comparisons between different perspectives of International Relations can be made. It will be useful to bear these points in mind when reading later chapters on several influential theoretical traditions in the field. We begin, however, with a brief introduction to the development of the discipline.

The foundation of the discipline of International Relations

Although historians, international lawyers and political philosophers have written about international politics for centuries, the formal recognition of a separate discipline of International Relations is usually thought to have occurred at the end of World War I with the establishment of the Woodrow Wilson Chair of International Politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Other Chairs followed in Britain and the United States. International relations were studied before 1919, but there was no discipline as such. Its subject matter was shared by a number of older disciplines; including law, philosophy, economics, politics and diplomatic history – but before 1919 the subject was not studied with the great sense of urgency which was the product of World War I.

It is impossible to separate the foundation of the discipline of International Relations from the larger public reaction to the horrors of the ‘Great War’, as it was initially called. For many historians of the time, the intellectual question which eclipsed all others and monopolized their interest was the puzzle of how and why the war began. Gooch in England, Fay and Schmitt in the United States, Renouvin and Camille Bloch in France, Thimme, Brandenburg and von Wegerer in Germany, Pribram in Austria and Pokrovsky in Russia deserve to be mentioned in this regard (Taylor 1961: 30). They had the same moral purpose, which was to discover the causes of World War I so that future generations might be spared a similar catastrophe.

The human cost of the 1914–18 war led many to argue that the old assumptions and prescriptions of power politics had been totally discredited. Thinkers such as Sir Alfred Zimmern (the first holder of the Chair at Aberystwyth) and Philip Noel-Baker came to prominence in the immediate post-war years. They believed that peace would come about only if the classical balance of power were replaced by a system of collective security (including the idea of the rule of law) in which states transferred domestic concepts and practices to the international sphere. Central here was a commitment to the nineteenth-century liberal belief that humankind could make political progress by using reasoned debate to develop common interests. That was a view shared by many liberal internationalists, later dubbed ‘idealists’ or ‘utopians’ by critics who thought their panaceas were simplistic. Carr (1939/1945/1946) maintained that their proposed solution to the scourge of war had suffered from the major defect of reflecting, albeit unwittingly, the position of the satisfied powers – ‘the haves’ as opposed to the ‘have-nots’ in international relations. It is interesting to note that the first complaint about the ideological and political character of such a way of thinking about international politics was first made by a ‘realist’ such as Carr who was influenced by Marxism and its critique of the ideological nature of the dominant liberal approaches to politics and economics that had become especially prominent in the nineteenth century. Carr thought that the same criticism held with respect to the so-called ‘utopians’, as he called them.

The war shook the confidence of those who had invested their faith in classical diplomacy and who thought the use of force was necessary at times to maintain the balance of power. At the outbreak of World War I, few thought it would last more than a few months and fewer still anticipated the scale of the impending catastrophe. Concerns about the human cost of war were linked with the widespread notion that the old international order, with its secret diplomacy and secret treaties, was immoral. The belief in the need for a ‘clean break’ with the old order was bound up with the view that the study of history was an unreliable guide to how states should behave in future, especially given the increasingly destructive forms of violence that were at their disposal. In the aftermath of the war, a new academic discipline was thought essential to understand and prevent international conflict. The first scholars in the field, working within universities in the victorious countries, and p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the Fifth Edition
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Realism
• 3. Liberalism
• 4. The English School
• 5. Marx and Marxism
• 6. Historical Sociology
• 7. Critical Theory
• 8. Post-structuralism
• 9. Constructivism
• 10. Feminism
• 11. Green Politics
• 12. International Political Theory
• Bibliography
• Index