European Approaches to International Relations Theory
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European Approaches to International Relations Theory

Jörg Friedrichs

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eBook - ePub

European Approaches to International Relations Theory

Jörg Friedrichs

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About This Book

A well-established community of American scholars has long dominated the discipline of international relations. Recently, however, certain strands of continental theorizing are being introduced into the mainstream.

Thisis a critical examination of European approaches to international relations theory, suggesting practical ways of challenging manistream thought. Freidrichs presents a detailed sociological analysis of knowledge production in existing European IR communities, namely France, Italy and Scandinavia. He also discusses a selection of European schools and approaches.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2004
ISBN
9781134319725

1 International Relations

Still an American social science?
To those familiar with the academic sociology of the discipline, the title of the present Chapter sounds like an evergreen. Echoing the headline of Stanley Hoffmann’s famous article ‘An American social science: International Relations’ (1977), over the last ten years as many as three publications have been entitled ‘International Relations: still an American social science?’ (Kahler 1993; S. Smith 2000a; Crawford and Jarvis 2001). Since the 1950s, when Alfred Grosser posed the provocative question whether International Relations was becoming an ‘American specialty’ (1956), the classification of the discipline as an American social science has come to be accepted by an increasing majority of scholars all over the world. Of course, this did not prevent a critical minority of scholars from waging fierce emancipation struggles against what they perceived to be intellectual oppression by American hegemony and American ethnocentrism (Booth 1979; Gareau 1981, 1982, 1983; Alker and Biersteker 1984; Krippendorff 1987). Others have criticized the idea of an American hegemony over the discipline as a distorting image which is part of the problem rather than part of the solution (S. Smith 1987; Jørgensen 2000; Groom and Mandaville 2001). In the face of these controversies, some scholars tried to expose the status of IR as an American social science to empirical scrutiny (Holsti 1985; Goldmann 1995; Wæver 1998a).
There is obviously no conclusive answer at hand whether or not International Relations is still an American social science. Nevertheless, the present chapter tries to clarify at least some points of contention. In the first section I collect empirical evidence that there is indeed an American hegemony over the discipline as a whole. The comparative analysis of citation patterns in IR textbooks shows a structural bias in the pattern of intellectual communications with the American community of scholars at the centre. Accordingly the American hegemony over the discipline may be described in terms of structural preponderance. The second section goes beyond the comparative analysis of citation patterns and deals with the social production and reproduction of American hegemony. Given the conversion of the field into an ‘American social science’ in the late 1940s and early 1950s, I examine three stabilizers of American hegemony for the years to come: the use of English as a lingua franca, the process of editorial selection, and the sheer size of American IR. In the third section I examine the ways by which the hegemony of the American mainstream is socially constructed by International Relations scholars. From a brief discussion of the field’s historiography it becomes evident that the prevailing self-image of International Relations as an American social science is itself an important stabilizer of American hegemony.
Does the intellectual hegemony exercised by the American mainstream require a merciless emancipation struggle on the part of the academic peripheries? As I point out in the fourth section, things are not that simple. At least from the standpoint of the European semi-peripheries, intellectual hegemony is not necessarily and not exclusively a bad thing. In order not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, it is paramount for European IR communities to develop a somewhat more sophisticated strategy than simply to rage against intellectual imperialism. In the fifth section of the chapter, I suggest that the best way for European scholars to serve their interests would be to (re)invent International Relations after their own image. In so far as the myth of an erratic US hegemony over the discipline is not independent from the phenomenon that it is supposed to describe, European scholars should strive to overcome the tales that textbooks tell about the identity of the discipline as an American social science. They should become more aware of the factually existing European approaches to International Relations theory and revisit the standard account of disciplinary historiography. In a certain sense, International Relations is as much an American social science as IR scholars behave and view each other as American social scientists. As an alternative, in the conclusion of the chapter I provide some outlines of a strategy for the western European communities of IR scholars to overcome their status as dependent academic peripheries.

Intellectual hegemony as structural bias

When determining whether and to what extent International Relations is an American social science, one can detect asymmetries in the patterns of scholarly ‘production’ (prevalently in the USA) and ‘consumption’ (prevalently elsewhere). This route was taken in the mid-1980s by the Canadian scholar Kalevi Holsti, who relied on statistical evidence to demonstrate the worldwide intellectual hegemony of American IR (1985).
The starting point of Holsti’s analysis is an ideal-typical distinction between an international community of scholars and a discipline organized on hierarchical communication as two possible patterns of intra-disciplinary intellectual exchange. The model of an international community of scholars ‘would include at least two related characteristics: (1) professional communication between researchers residing in different and separate political jurisdictions; and (2) a reasonably symmetrical pattern of “production” and “consumption” of theories, ideas, concepts, methods, and data between members of the community’; by contrast, a discipline organized on hierarchical patterns of communication ‘would be characterized by a few producers and many imitators and consumers, with knowledge flowing mostly downward from centre(s) to peripheries’ (Holsti 1985: 203). Needless to say, neither of the two models can be found in its purest form in the real world of academic communications. Notwithstanding, it is probably fair to say that Mathematics is a good approximation to an international community of scholars, whereas Social Science in general and International Relations in particular come dangerously close to a discipline organized on hierarchical communication.
Hierarchy seems to be a hallmark of international politics and theory. Most of the mutually acknowledged literature has been produced by scholars from only two of more than 155 countries: the United States and Great Britain. There is, in brief, a British–American intellectual condominium.
(Holsti 1985: 103)
To substantiate the hypothesis of a British–American intellectual condominium, Holsti analyzed the reference sections in a rather diversified sample of textbooks. On the basis of this statistical body of evidence, Holsti drew a picture of centre–periphery relationships between the American and (although to a much lesser extent) British International Relations community on the one hand, and the rest of the world on the other. According to the picture painted by Holsti, there was a dominant American core, a declining British semi-periphery, and a galaxy of dependent academic peripheries. The peripheries were importing their theoretical wisdom mainly from the centre, whereas in the ‘British–American intellectual condominium’ there was hardly any awareness of what was going on in the peripheries. A substantive intellectual exchange among the peripheries was not taking place.
As may be seen from Figure 1.1, American textbooks before 1981 were almost exclusively reliant on domestic scholarship. In all other cases, with the exception of Japan and India, by contrast, references to domestic scholarship were less frequent than references to authors from the USA. Even British authors relied more heavily on literature from the USA than from the UK. Communications in IR did indeed resemble a pattern of centre–periphery relationships: penetrated peripheries gravitating around a relatively self-sufficient centre, obsequious to the centre and poorly related to each other. The authors of American textbooks were importing hardly any scholarship from abroad. By contrast, textbooks in the peripheries were strongly dependent on scholarship from the United States. In hardly any cases was there a significant exchange of scholarship from one periphery to the other. The only significant difference among the peripheries consisted in the varying degree of self-sufficiency: relatively high in the cases of Japan and India, medium in the cases of Great Britain and France, and low in the cases of Korea, Canada, and Australia (Figure 1.1).
Incidentally, it would have been more accurate had Holsti diagnosed a straightforward American hegemony rather than a British-American condominium. The assumption of a British-American condominium is hardly confirmed by the statistical evidence: the British share in American textbooks is 7 per cent, whereas the American share in British textbooks is 54 per cent. To be sure, Steve Smith has observed that
Figure 1.1 Citation patterns in IR textbooks (before 1981, in per cent).
Figure 1.1 Citation patterns in IR textbooks (before 1981, in per cent).
Source: Holsti 1985.
[t]he UK IR profession has a very ambiguous relationship with the development of a European IR community. On the one hand, there are those who want to create a counter-hegemonic IR in Europe; on the other, there are those who do not want to go down this road precisely because it threatens the cohesion of the Anglo-American intellectual tradition by involving other very different intellectual communities and traditions. . . . Just as UK foreign policy-makers face choices about the UK’s relationship with Europe and the US, so, in an interesting twist of fate, does the UK’s IR community.
(S. Smith 2000a: 298, 300)
But be that as it may, Holsti’s empirical findings from the mid-1980s do not provide any clear and conclusive evidence that British and American IR are on an equal footing in the direction of the field.1
It is interesting to ask what direction the communication patterns have been moving in more recent years. Although a close examination of that question would go beyond the scope of the present study, it is nevertheless revealing to look at the reference sections of a limited sample of more recent European textbooks.2
As may be seen from the statistical evidence presented in Figure 1.2, in the early 1990s the big European IR communities became more reliant on their own scholarly production. British, French and German textbooks were referring in the first place to domestic scholarship. Literature from the USA had become less predominant; scholarship from the UK was playing a significant and maybe even increasing role in France and in Germany; references to other peripheries, by
Figure 1.2 Citation patterns in European IR textbooks (1988–95, in per cent).
Figure 1.2 Citation patterns in European IR textbooks (1988–95, in per cent).
Source: own research.3
contrast, were still the exception rather than the rule (amounting in no case to more than 14 per cent).
By the 1990s the large European IR communities had apparently reached the critical mass necessary for them to rely mainly on their own production. Nevertheless this hardly increased the intellectual exchange among different IR peripheries. In so far as European textbooks quote foreign scholarship at all, it is almost exclusively American – and to a lesser extent British – scholarship that they quote. This suggests that there is still a significant centre–periphery relationship between American IR and its European counterparts, even if it is true that the citation patterns in British, French and German textbooks have grown increasingly parochial.4
Despite the apparent trend towards parochialism, the statistical record suggests that the intellectual hegemony of the American mainstream is still upheld by a set of centre–periphery relationships. But what is a centre–periphery relationship? In spatial terms a centre can be defined as a ‘privileged location within a territory’. By logical extension, centre–periphery relationships are
a spatial archetype in which the periphery is subordinate to the authority of the centre. Within this archetype the centre represents the seat of authority, and the periphery those geographical locations at the furthest distance from the centre, but still within the territory controlled from the latter.
(Rokkan and Urwin 1983: 2, 6; cf. Rokkan et al. 1987; Flora et al. 1999: 108–21)
One proviso is in order right from the outset: intellectual hegemony is at least as much a social as a geographical phenomenon. Due to its obvious superficiality, the spatial understanding of centre and periphery can only serve as a first
Figure 1.3 Centre–periphery relationships in academic IR.
Figure 1.3 Centre–periphery relationships in academic IR.
Source: adapted from Galtung 1971: 84.
approximation and must be refined to fit the specificities of intellectual hegemony in an academic discipline.
For the purposes of this study, centre–periphery relationships are better represented in terms of Galtung’s famous structural theory of imperialism (cf. Figure 1.3). The theory distinguishes between an imperialist centre and a plurality of dependent peripheries. Internally, the centre is subdivided into a ‘centre of the centre’ and a ‘periphery of the centre’. In the same way, the peripheries are subdivided into a ‘centre of the periphery’ and a ‘periphery of the periphery’. Galtung claims that the ‘centre of the centre’ maintains intense and mutually advantageous bilateral relationships with the ‘centres of the peripheries’, whereas the ‘periphery of the centre’ and the ‘peripheries of the peripheries’ tend to be cut off from each other despite the potential harmony of their interests.5 It is easy to see what this would mean for the asymmetrical relationships within the IR discipline: In most countries of the peripheries a significant minority of leading scholars is closely collaborating with the American mainstream, whereas the rest of the discipline tends to be cut off from other academic peripheries – i.e. both from the academic periphery within the United States and from the academic peripheries in other countries.
Supposing that such a centre–periphery configuration is really in place in an intellectual field, we would indeed expect a structural bias in communications as diagnosed by Kalevi Holsti for the academic discipline of International Relations (1985: 145): ‘The pattern of scholarly exchange is such that a core generates the vast majority of work in international theory, peripheries “consume” that work, but the core remains very poorly informed about the activities of scholars in the peripheries’. Although it is probably fair to say that the European communities of IR scholars are, strictly speaking, semi-peripheries rather than peripheries (Giesen 1995: 142), we should observe something like the following pattern of professional communication:
  1. The transactions among European IR (semi-)peripheries are negligible in comparison with their consumption of literature from the United States.
  2. The transactions within one and the same European (...

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