Understanding International Relations

Chris Brown

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781137611703
• eBook ISBN: 9781350311695
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The fifth edition of this bestselling textbook offers a comprehensive and engaging introduction to International relations and has been fully updated to cover the dramatic changes in recent world politics. Written in the author's unique and engaging style, the text explores everything from foreign policy and security to global governance and the global economy, to show how the theories and concepts Brown outlines are the only way to make sense of contemporary issues and events. With reference to such diverse events as Brexit, the Russian armed conflict in Ukraine, the financial crisis, the rise of China, and the challenges of identity politics, the author expertly shows how the range of theories presented in the book allow for an understanding of the destabilising events and developments that characterise global politics today, and will continue to do so in the future. This text remains the definitive guide to understanding international relations, and is suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate students of international relations at any stage of their studies. New to this Edition:
- Thoroughly updated to showcase the breadth of the latest research and key thinkers in international relations theory.
- Entirely rewritten chapter on the development of human rights and international criminal law.
- Brand new chapter that offers a sophisticated and up-to-date analysis of the current state of world politics.

1Defining International Relations

Introduction

This book is an introduction to the discipline of International Relations; ‘International Relations’ (with initial capitals – here frequently shortened to IR) is the study of ‘international relations’ (lower case). The use of upper and lower case in this way has become conventional and will be employed throughout this book. But what are ‘international relations’? A survey of the field suggests that a number of different definitions are employed. For some, international relations means the diplomatic–strategic relations of states, and the characteristic focus of IR is on issues of war and peace, conflict and cooperation. Others see international relations as being about cross-border transactions of all kinds, political, economic and social, and IR is as likely to study trade negotiations or the operation of non-state institutions such as Amnesty International as it is conventional peace talks or the workings of the United Nations. Again, and with increasing frequency in the twenty-first century, some focus on globalization – studying, for example, world communication, transport and financial systems, global business corporations and the putative emergence of a global society. These conceptions obviously bear some family resemblances, nevertheless, each has quite distinct features. Which definition we adopt will have real consequences for the rest of our study, and thus will be more than simply a matter of convenience.

The reason definitions matter in this way is because ‘international relations’ do not have any kind of essential existence in the real world of the sort that could define an academic discipline. Instead, there is a continual interplay between the ‘real world’ and the world of knowledge. The latter is, of course, shaped by the former, but this is not simply a one-way relationship. How we understand and interpret the world is partly dependent on how we define the world we are trying to understand and interpret. Since it is always likely to be the case that any definition we adopt will be controversial, this presents a problem that cannot be glossed over. Some of the difficulties we face here are shared by the social sciences as a whole, while others are specific to International Relations. The arguments are often not easy to grasp, but the student who understands what the problem is here will have gone a long way towards comprehending how the social sciences function and why IR theory is such a complex and difficult, but ultimately very rewarding, subject for study.

It is generally true of the social sciences that their subject matter is not self-defining in the way that is often the case in the natural sciences. An example may help to make this clear. Consider a textbook entitled Introductory Myrmecology. This will, on page 1, define its terms by explaining that myrmecology is the study of ants, which is unproblematic because we know what an ‘ant’ is. The classificatory scheme that produces the category ‘ant’ is well understood and more or less universally accepted by the relevant scientific community; anyone who tried to broaden that category in a dramatic way would not be taken seriously. There is a scientific consensus on the matter. Ants do not label themselves as such; the description ‘ant’ is given to them by scientists, but since everyone whose opinion counts is of one mind in this matter, we need have no worries about forgetting that this is so. We can, in effect, treat ants as though they did, indeed, define themselves as such. By contrast, there are virtually no areas of the social sciences where this kind of universal consensus can be relied on to define a field. Perhaps the nearest equivalent is found in economics, where the majority of economists do agree on the basics of what an ‘economy’ is and therefore what their discipline actually studies; however, it is noteworthy that even here in the social science that most forcefully asserts its claim to be a ‘real’ science, there are a number of dissidents who want to define their subject matter in a different way from that approved of by the majority. These dissidents – ‘political economists’ for example, or ‘Marxist economists’ – are successfully marginalized by the majority, but they survive and continue to press their case in a way that somebody who tried to contest the definition of an ant would not.

In the case of most of the other social sciences, even the incomplete level of consensus achieved by the economists does not exist. Thus, for example, in political science the very nature of politics is heavily contested: Is ‘politics’ something associated solely with government and the state? We often talk about university politics or student politics: Is this a legitimate extension of the idea of politics? What of the politics of the family? Much Western political thinking rests on a distinction between the public realm and private life – but feminists and others have argued that ‘the personal is the political’. This latter point illustrates a general feature of definitional problems in the social sciences – they are not politically innocent. The feminist critique of traditional definitions of politics is that their emphasis on public life hid from view the oppressions that took place (and still take place) behind closed doors in patriarchal institutions such as the traditional family, with its inequalities of power and a division of labour that disadvantages women. Such critiques make a more general point; conventional definitions in most of the social sciences tend to privilege an account of the world that reflects the interests of those who are dominant within a particular area. There are no politically neutral ways of describing ‘politics’ or ‘economics’, although this does not mean that we cannot agree among ourselves to use a particular definition for the sake of convenience.

What does this tell us about how to go about defining international relations/ International Relations? Two things. First, we have to accept that if we can find a definition it will be a matter of convention; there is no equivalent to an actual ant here – ‘international relations’ does not define the field of ‘International Relations’; rather, scholars and practitioners of the subject provide the definition. Which actions we take to be the subject matter of International Relations is not something that is self-evident, but rather requires a contribution from the analyst. Second, while it may make sense for us to start with the conventional, traditional definition of the subject, we should be aware that this definition is sure to embody a particular account of the field, and how it does this is unlikely to be politically neutral. Instead, what we can expect is a definition of the field that, while purporting to be objective – simply reflecting ‘the way things are’ – is actually going to be, perhaps unconsciously, partisan and contentious. It follows that, having started with the conventional account, we shall have to examine its hidden agenda before moving to alternative definitions, which, of course, will in turn have their own hidden agendas.

There can be little doubt that the conventional definition of the field is that given first in the opening paragraph of this chapter, namely that IR is the study of the relations of states, and that those relations are understood primarily in diplomatic, military and strategic terms. This is certainly the way in which diplomats, historians and most scholars of IR have defined the subject. The relevant unit is the state, not the nation; most states may nowadays aspire to be nation-states, but it is the possession of statehood rather than nationhood that is central – indeed, the term ‘interstate’ would be more accurate than ‘international’ were it not for the fact that this is the term used in the United States to describe relations between, say, California and Arizona. Thus the United Kingdom fits more easily into the conventional account of international relations than Scotland, or Canada than Quebec, even though Scotland and Quebec are more unambiguously ‘nations’ than either the UK or Canada. The distinguishing feature of the state is sovereignty. This is a difficult term, but at its root is the idea of legal autonomy. Sovereign states are sovereign because no higher body has the right to issue orders to them. In practice, some states may have the ability to influence the behaviour of other states, but this influence is a matter of power not authority (on which see Chapter 5).

To put the matter differently, the conventional account of international relations stresses the fact that the relationship between states is one of anarchy. Anarchy in this context does not necessarily mean lawlessness and chaos; rather, it means the absence of a formal system of government. In international relations there is no formal centre of authoritative decision-making such as exists, in principle at least, within the state. This is why stress is placed traditionally on diplomacy and strategy; while the term ‘international politics’ is often used loosely in this context, international relations are not really political, because, again for traditional reasons, politics is about authority and government, and there is no international authority in the conventional sense of the term. Instead of looking to influence government to act on their behalf, participants in international relations are obliged to look after their own interests and pursue them by employing their own resources – we live in, as the jargon has it, a self-help system. Because it is a self-help system, security is the overriding concern of states, and diplomacy, the exercise of influence, exists in a context where force is, at the very least, a possibility. The possibility that force might be exercised is what makes the state – which actually possesses and disposes of armed force – the key international actor. Other bodies are secondary to the state, and the myriad other activities that take place across state boundaries, economic, social, cultural and so on, are equally secondary to the diplomatic–strategic relations of states.

What is wrong with this state-centric (an ugly but useful piece of jargon) definition of the subject? Placed in context, nothing very much. There is indeed a world that works like this, in which diplomats and soldiers are the key actors, and there are parts of the world where it would be very unwise of any state not to be continually conscious of security issues, for example in the Middle Eastern ‘arc of conflict’. Moreover, it is striking that even those states that feel most secure can find themselves suddenly engaged in military conflict for reasons that could not have been predicted in advance. For example, few predicted in January 1982 that Britain and Argentina would go to war over the Falklands/Malvinas later that year, or that an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in January 1990 would lead to a major war in the Gulf in 1990–1, but it is the nature of the international system that it throws up these kinds of surprises.

For all that, physical violence and overt conflict are nowhere near as central to international relations as the traditional description of the subject would suggest. Most countries, most of the time, live at peace with their neighbours and the world at large. Transactions take place across borders – movements of people, goods, money, information and ideas – in a peaceful, routine way. We take it for granted that a letter posted in Britain or Australia to Brazil, the USA or South Africa will be delivered. Using the internet we can order a book, a CD or a download from another country, confident that our credit card or PayPal account will be recognized and honoured. A cursory examination of the nearest kitchen, wardrobe or hi-fi rack will reveal goods from all around the world. We plan our holidays abroad without much thought to the formalities of border crossing, although we think of this more than we used to, before foreign tourists became legitimate targets in the minds of some terrorist groups. What is truly remarkable is that we no longer find these routine transactions remarkable, at least not within the countries of the advanced industrial world. These developments seem, at least on the surface, to be very positive, but there are other things that happen across borders nowadays that are less welcome – such as problems of pollution and environmental degradation, the drugs and arms trade, international terrorism and other international crimes – which pose threats to our security, although not in quite the same way as war and violent conflict.

What implication does this have for a description of the discipline of International Relations? There are several possibilities here. We might well decide to remain committed to a state-centric view of the discipline, but abandon, or weaken, the assumption that the external policy of the state is dominated by questions of (physical) security. On this account, states remain the central actors in international relations. They control, or at least try to control, the borders over which transactions take place, and they claim, sometimes successfully, to regulate the international activities of their citizens. They issue passports and visas, make treaties with each other with the intention of managing trade flows and matters of copyright and crime, and set up international institutions in the hope of controlling world finance or preventing environmental disasters. In short, national diplomacy goes on much as in the traditional model, but without the assumption that force and violence are its central concerns. Most of the time, ‘economic statecraft’ is just as important as the traditional concerns of foreign policy management, even if it tends to be conducted by the ministry responsible for trade or finance rather than external affairs.

A problem with this account of the world of international relations is hinted at by the number of qualifications in the above paragraph. States do indeed try to do all these things, but often they do not succeed. Too many of these cross-border activities are in the hands of private organizations such as international firms, or take place on terrain where it is notoriously difficult for states to act effectively, such as international capital markets. Often, the resources possessed by non-state actors – nongovernmental organizations – are greater than those of at least some of the states that are attempting to regulate them. Moreover, the institutions that states set up to help them manage this world of complex interdependence tend to develop a life of their own, so that bodies such as the International Monetary Fund or the World Trade Organization end up out of the control of even the strongest of the states that originally made them. Frequently, states are obliged to engage in a form of diplomacy with these actors, recognizing them as real players in the game rather than simply as instruments or as part of the stakes for which the game is played. For this reason, some think the focus of the discipline should be on cross-border transactions in general, and the ways in which states and non-state actors relate to each other. States may still be, much of the time, the dominant actors, but this is a pragmatic judgement rather than a matter of principle and, in any event, they must always acknowledge that on many issues other players are in the game. International relations is a complex, issue-sensitive affair in which the interdependence of states and societies is as striking a feature as their independence.

For a diplomat of the 1900s this would have seemed a radical view of the world, but in fact it stands squarely on the shoulders of the older, traditional conception of the discipline; the underlying premise is that separate national societies are relating to each other just as they always have done, but on a wider range of issues. Other conceptions of international relations are genuinely more radical in their implications. Theorists of globalization, while still for the most part conscious of the continued importance of states, refuse to place them at the centre of things. Instead, their focus is on global political, social and, in particular, economic transactions and the new technologies that have created the internet, the 24-hour stock market and an increasingly tightly integrated global system. Rather than beginning with national states and working towards the global, these writers start with the global and bring the state into play only when it is appropriate to do so.

The more extreme advocates of globalization clearly overstate their case – the idea that we live in a ‘borderless world’ (Ohmae 1990) is ridiculous – but more careful analysts can no longer be dismissed by traditional scholars of IR. The more interesting issues nowadays revolve around the politics of globalization: Are these new global trends reinforcing or undermining the existing divide in the world between rich and poor? Is globalization another name for global capitalism or, perhaps, in the cultural realm, Americanization? One radical approach to IR, sometimes called structuralism or centre–periphery analysis, has always stressed the existence of global forces, a world structure in which dominant interests/classes, largely, but not entirely, located in the advanced industrial world, dominate and exploit the rest of the world, using economic, political and military means to this end. From this neo-Marxist viewpoint, rather than a world of states and national societies, we have a stratified global system in which class dominates class on the world stage, and the conventional division of the world into national societies is the product of a kind of false consciousness that leads individuals who make up these allegedly separate societies to think of themselves as having common interests, as opposed to their real interests, which reflect their class positions. Clearly, this vision of the world has much in common with that of globalization, although many advocates of the latter have a more positive view of the process, but ‘structuralist’ ideas have also fed into the somewhat confused ideology of many of the new radical opponents of globalization. One further consideration. What is sometimes referred to as the ‘first globalization’ took place at the end of the nineteenth century, but collapsed with the outbreak of war in 1914. Will the second globalization end in the same way, perhaps a casualty of the ‘war on terror’ or of the emergence of major states apparently determined to kick over the apple cart, such as President Putin’s Russia?

These issues will be returned to at various points later in this book, but by now it ought to be clear why defining International Relations is a tricky business, and why no simple definition is, or could be, or should be, widely adopted. Each of the positions discussed above has a particular take on the world, each reflects a partial understanding of the world, and if any one of these positions were to be allowed to generate a definition of the field, it would be placed in a privileged position that it had not earned. If, for example, a traditional definition of IR as the study of states, security and war is adopted, then issues of complex interdependence and globalization are marginalized, and those who wish to focus on these approaches are made to seem unwilling to address the real agenda. And yet it is precisely the question of what is the real agenda that has not been addressed. On the basis that there must be some kind of limiting principle if we are to study anything at all, we might agree that IR is the study of cross-border transactions in general, and thus leave open the nature of these transactions, but even this will not really do, since it presumes the importance of political boundaries, which some radical theorists of globalization deny. Definition is simply not possible yet – in a sense, the whole of the rest of this book is an extended definition of international relations. However, before we can approach these matters of substance, we must first address another contentious issue, namely the nature of ‘theory’ in International Relations.

Perspectives and theories

This is a ‘theoretical’ introduction to International Relations. We have already seen the difficulty involved in defining the latter term, so can we do any better with ‘theory’? As always, there are both simple and complicated definitions of theory, but on this occasion simple is best – unlike defining ‘international relations’, where simplicity is misleading. Theory, at its simplest, is reflective thought. We engage in theorizing when we think in depth ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the Fifth Edition
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Defining International Relations
• 2 The Development of International Relations Theory in the Twentieth Century
• 3 International Relations Theory Today
• 4 Agency, Structure and the State
• 5 Power and Security
• 6 The Balance of Power and War
• 7 Global Governance
• 8 The Global Economy
• 9 Globalization
• 10 The International Politics of Identity
• 11 The Individual and International Relations
• 12 International (Dis)Order Today
• Bibliography
• Index