Émigré Scholars and the Genesis of International Relations

A European Discipline in America?

F. Roesch, Kenneth A. Loparo, Felix Rösch

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137334688
• eBook ISBN: 9781137334695
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This is the first Anglophone volume on émigré scholars' influence on International Relations, uniquely exploring the intellectual development of IR as a discipline and providing a re-reading of some of its almost forgotten founding thinkers.

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Introduction

Breaking the Silence: European Émigré Scholars and the Genesis of an American Discipline

Felix Rösch

Émigré Scholars and the Genesis of American International Relations: A European Discipline in America? invites students of International Relations (IR) to return to the discipline’s modern foundation during the early and mid-twentieth century and to reconsider the contribution of Continental European émigré scholars. Its intention is to break the silence that has befallen émigré scholarship in Anglophone IR, since the dominance of American positivism (Maliniak 2011: 439) has been challenged by various forms of critical scholarship. Generally, these challenges do not consider the Continental European context in which many of the early IR scholars were socialised. In reconsidering the lives and thoughts of émigré scholars, IR students will find three aspects particularly beneficial: they are encouraged to question the usual trajectories of IR as an American discipline, to reflect upon émigré scholars’ thought as an enrichment of world political theorising in the twenty-first century, and to enhance discussions of intercultural knowledge exchange by moving beyond conceptualisations of imposition towards amalgamation.

Ever since Stanley Hoffmann’s landmark paper in 1977, the image of IR as a predominantly American discipline has turned into a commonly accepted truism. Since then, many contributions have appeared which, although critically engaging with this image, have helped to further solidify it (cf. Krippendorff 1989; Kahler 1993; Wæver 1998; Smith 2000, 2002; Crawford and Jarvis 2001; Kristensen 2013). Certainly, one of the reasons why IR scholars find the image so persuasive is that it seems to coincide with reified reality. Ole Wæver (1998) demonstrates that many of the leading journals, associations, publishers, think tanks, and funding bodies in the discipline reside in the United States. A further reason might be that for most of its history the discipline has been “driven by demand”, as Miles Kahler (1997: 22) notes, meaning that its close ties with the state machinery in the United States not only confined its ontological and epistemological outlook, but also provided it with a more solid institutionalisation than anywhere else. This image, however, does not match historical evidence, for we know that first institutionalisations in the form of university chairs and think tanks actually occurred in Great Britain (Suganami 1983; Cox and Nossal 2009). Nor does it reflect academic geographies: Peter Kristensen (2013: 2) recently stressed that IR is, in comparison to other social sciences, “one of the least U.S.-dominated” sciences and that, although contributions from the United States are still significantly higher than those from other world regions, most emerged from elite university networks in New England and the Midwest.

Although these criticisms challenge the dominant image of IR as an American discipline, they still do not fundamentally call it into question. Studying the contributions of émigré scholars, by contrast, enables IR students to gain a more nuanced understanding of the discipline’s history, as many were originally from Continental Europe (Palmer 1980: 347–348). Karl Deutsch, Stanley Hoffmann, Hans Morgenthau, John Herz, and Arnold Wolfers are so intimately connected with the foundation and institutionalisation of IR in the United States that it is often forgotten that all of them were émigrés. Also, scholars like Hannah Arendt, Eric Voegelin, Franz Neumann, and Waldemar Gurian, though not considered to be IR scholars, influenced the discipline to varying degrees (e.g. Kielmannsegg, Mewes, and Glaser-Schmidt 1995; Lang and Williams 2005). At this point, however, a caveat needs to be voiced. This volume cannot provide a comprehensive study of all émigré scholars who have influenced IR, nor does it intend to.¹ Rather, Émigré Scholars and the Genesis of American International Relations contributes to a still relatively limited body of Anglophone literature (Jørgensen 2000; Friedrichs 2004; Jørgensen and Knudsen 2006) that acknowledges the European contribution to the institutionalisation of IR and, in particular, invites IR students to return to some of its more forgotten thinkers.

This leads us to the second aspect entailed in the invitation to study the contribution of émigré scholars to IR. Gaining a more detailed understanding about the institutionalisation of the discipline would in itself be an interesting historical exercise, but it would not give us sufficient justification for why we, as IR students, should return to their thought. Particularly, however, the revival of classical realism (cf. Lebow 2003;Williams 2005, 2007;Molloy 2006;Tjalve 2008; Jütersonke 2010; Scheuerman 2011) – and many of these émigré scholars can be aligned to classical realist thought – demonstrates that turning to émigré scholars’ thought is also beneficial for current international political theorising. Despite their thought being manifold and diverse, émigré scholars stressed the human condition of politics, as further elaborated elsewhere (Behr and Rösch 2012; Rösch 2013), due to their common intellectual maturation in Continental European humanities as well as the experiences of the Shoah and forced emigration. Their thought offers an insightful critique of modernity and enables IR scholars to gain a more reflective understanding about the current crisis of democracy, as it questions tendencies of depoliticisation through dehumanisation in the form of technologisation, bureaucratisation, ideologisation, and “scientification” (Behr 2010; also Levine 2012: 46–51).

Two recent examples help us to appreciate the underlying potentialities of their thought, although this is not to argue that IR students can detect some “timeless wisdom” within émigré scholars’ work that acts as the deus ex machina through which world political problems can be solved. Rather, their work needs to be studied in the manner of a “contemporary reconstruction” (Steele 2013: 741). Returning to the thought of émigré scholars can help to free the thought of IR students by providing the space to imagine different epistemologies, ontologies, and methodologies within IR, and/or inspire critical appraisals of the current situation. In this sense, William Scheuerman (2011) demonstrates that the thought of émigré scholars can contribute to a rethinking of alternative political communities beyond the nation state, as many of them were convinced of its obsolescence and argued for a world community instead. This provides refreshing new ways to unwrap the dominance of positivistic discourses within cosmopolitanism, as it coincides with Hartmut Behr’s (2014) conceptualisation of phenomenological peace. By questioning common universalist and essentialist understandings of peace, Behr argues for an acceptance of difference, as an engagement with the other helps to establish mutual understanding. Hence, studying émigré scholarship furthers an understanding of “the human difference in which the universal resides [as it] remains communicable by human beings, though only in the name of the other” (Goetschel 2011: 84). In addition, their thought also enhances our knowledge about the influence of emotions on political decision-making (cf. Schuett 2007; Solomon 2012; Ross 2013; Rösch 2014), helping to close a research gap in the discipline, as depicted by Roland Bleiker and Emma Hutchison (2008: 115).

However, their thought is not only of interest for classical realists; it also feeds into critical theory discourses (e.g. the special issue of International Politics 2013 and the special section in Zeitschrift für Politik 2013, issue 4) and it nurtures, as mentioned, current IR discourses on emotional and theological questions (cf. Molloy 2013; Sandal and Fox 2013; Troy 2013). This wide contribution is made possible by the diverse intellectual spectrum of émigré scholars. No émigré was a trained IR scholar, and many were not even political scientists but had backgrounds in philosophy, law, geography, history, or sociology; some, like Karl Deutsch, even in the natural sciences. This disciplinary pluralism reminds students that IR was not an intellectually entrenched discipline as it is today (for discussions of early IR, see Kleinschmidt 2000; Ashworth 2009, 2013). It also encourages us to recreate this interdisciplinarity, as this enlarges our perspective of, and ability to engage with, IR theorising. In this sense, this volume is not to be considered merely as a further contribution to the revival of classical realism; rather, it is an exercise in émigré scholars’ thought that invites IR students to critically engage with it in order to unearth fresh insights about some of the most pressing problems of world politics in the twenty-first century, ranging from security issues to environmental questions of sustainability.

Inviting IR students to move beyond restrictive thinking of dichotomic theories or schools leads us to the third beneficial aspect of studying émigré scholarship. It stimulates IR students to rethink the discipline’s sociology of knowledge, giving way to a more refined set of epistemologies by considering one of the central elements of world politics: intercultural knowledge exchange. So far in IR, our understanding of this element has been particularly advanced by critical, particularly postcolonial, scholarship. Their contributions (cf. Halperin 2006; Bilgin 2008; Kayaoglu 2010; Hobson 2012; Vasilaki 2012) have demonstrated that many of these encounters were imposing knowledge from Western on to non-Western cultures, fortifying a Eurocentric outlook on world politics, and merely led to the mimicry of Western decision-making processes. Studying émigré scholarship, by contrast, adumbrates a further layer of knowledge exchange. Critically engaging with, but accepting, intellectual differences enabled émigré scholars to thematically adjust their thought to their new environment without renouncing their distinctive European form of scholarship that set them apart from their American peers. Studying this knowledge amalgamation encourages IR students to open up new spaces to reflect on world politics through collective actions spanning different cultures. Hence, in consideration of the intellectual and cultural diversity of this volume’s contributors, this book is an invitation to study, imagine, and create world politics through (self-)reflective and sceptical, though unprepossessing, knowledge exchanges, in order to transcend the dichotomic, sectarian, and essentialist thinking that characterises much of the discipline to date.

The silence of Anglophone International Relations

Despite this potential of émigré scholarship, Anglophone IR remained relatively silent about their contribution. To date, there is no comprehensive study about émigré scholars in IR. We merely find single contributions scattered in anthologies, often focusing on social sciences at large (Neumann et al. 1953; Coser 1984; Krohn 1993; Söllner and Ash 1996; Kettler and Lauer 2005; FaIR Schulz and Kessler 2011). Having this wider focus, these anthologies, which were often edited by German and/or émigré scholars, did not attract the kind of interest in IR that they deserved. Consequently, much of what the discipline knows about émigré scholars is still limited to autobiographical contributions (cf. Brecht 1966; Herz 1984; Morgenthau 1984; Bendix 1986),² although first steps are being made towards a more profound appreciation (Guilhot 2011). By contrast, in neighbouring disciplines, particularly history and literature, émigré scholarship received wider attention. Two classifications – Beitragsgeschichte and Schicksalsgeschichte (Epstein 1991) – help to summarise the state of research.

Initially, contributions as Beitragsgeschichte mainly concentrated on dichotomic studies of loss and gain, stressing either the remarkable career of particular émigrés in the United States or the so-called “brain drain” that Europe experienced from the late 1920s onwards. This focus led to a concentration on the elaboration of the remarkable careers of some émigré scholars and primarily produced single case studies. The merit of such studies was, next to the exemplary elaboration of particular cases, the excavating and securing of primary resources. This archival material is still an invaluable source for a profound elaboration of the thought of émigré scholars, as demonstrated in Christoph Frei’s (2001) and Scheuerman’s (2009) Morgenthau monographs or Elizabeth Young-Bruehl’s (1982) Arendt biography.

This securing of archival material fostered a more profound discussion of émigré scholarship in the form of Schicksalsgeschichte, as the research agenda shifted towards processes and contingencies of change. It was realised that single case studies in themselves would not be sufficient to depict the collective phenomena that émigré scholars experienced. To overcome this shortcoming, a number of scholars, particularly in the field of German-speaking politics and IR, drawing on long-standing insights of exile studies, have advanced the concept of acculturation (cf. Söllner 1987, 1996a; Srubar 1988; Barboza and Henning 2006; Puglierin 2011; Thümmler 2011; Schale, Thümmler, and Vollmer 2012). Introduced by Herbert Strauss (e.g. 1991) and further elaborated by Alfons Söllner and Mitchell Ash (1996), this concept allows one to transcend discussions of émigré scholarship in terms of loss or gain by considering their specific life-trajectories. This analytical focus allows the capturing of collective phenomena by considering the mutual interplay of émigré scholars and the “host” academic culture. Hence, it enables the consideration of the influence that émigré scholars had with their research agenda and distinct experiences as well as the influence of the American academic culture on émigré scholars’ research agenda.

However, not all the possibilities of the concept of acculturation have been exhausted. On the one hand, these acculturation studies are often historic sketches, and, with the exception of Söllner’s monograph (1996a), they do not focus on a specific discipline. Therefore, this makes it difficult for IR students to see beyond them or even recognise a bigger picture in terms of common experience and particularly overlapping thematisations of socio-political issues. Yet, even then their collectivity is merely apprehended in a spatial, often institutionalised context, rather than in and as a historic–semiotic network. On the other hand, these studies often focus, as the terms change and Schicksal (fate) suggest, primarily on the aspect of the actual emigration. This is obviously of importan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Breaking the Silence: European Émigré Scholars and the Genesis of an American Discipline
• Part I: Émigré Scholars and the Problem of Translating Knowledge
• Part II: Émigré Scholars and the Genesis of American International Relations
• Part III: Émigré Scholars and their Historic-Semiotic Networks in the United States
• Index