History and International Relations

From the Ancient World to the 21st Century

Howard LeRoy Malchow

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350111660
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: World History

This updated and enhanced second edition of History and International Relations charts the foundations, development and use of International Relations from a historian's perspective. Exploring its engagement with the history of war, peace and foreign relations this volume provides an account of international relations from both western and non-western perspectives, its historical evolution and its contemporary practice. Examining the origin of dominant IR theories, exploring key moments in the history of war and peace that shaped the discipline, and analysing the Eurocentric nature of current theory and practice, Malchow provides a full account of the relationship between history and IR from the ancient world to modern times. To bring it up to the present day and provide new ways for students to grasp the history of IR, this new edition includes:
-An updated final chapter reflecting on the practice of IR in a post 9/11 world
-New scholarship and sources in IR practice and theory published since 2015
-A time line charting the evolution of International Relations as a discipline
-A new glossary of terms
-Expanded section on IR theory and practice in the ancient world and early Christian era
-Greater incorporation of IR practice and theory in non-western ancient, medieval and modern worlds History and International Relations is essential reading for anyone looking to understand international relations, diplomacy and times of war and peace in a historical context.

PART I

IR: THE HISTORY OF A DISCIPLINE

Students of History are by nature and training prone to put any phenomenon—a social fact, an idea or ideology, a personality, a political act, an economic decision, or even a whole academic discipline—into its own formative historical (i.e., cultural and temporal) contexts, what Gordon Craig called its milieu et moment. As we shall see, this can be a useful approach, and one that gives historians good ground from which to challenge what they may regard as the more hubristic claims of ahistorical, deductive IR theory. Such “historicism,” of course, if taken to its logical extreme—though few practicing historians would do so—may threaten to reduce all thought and action to exceedingly complex forms of material determinism, a kind of chaos theory of social and political life. This is especially disliked by some historians of ideas who argue that a “sociology of knowledge” approach reduces the universality of great ideas and the debates they have sparked down through the ages. Something of the same tension prevails in Political Science, where those scholars of a great tradition or canon of political thought find little common ground with either behavioralism, which risks treating ideas only as functional choices, or systems theory, which may relegate the thought and action of the individual “unit” to an inferior and inconsequential level.

In fact, to argue that thoughts and actions are enmeshed in their historical contexts need not necessarily deny a degree of autonomy to the individual actor—the degree being the issue. Most historians of change find themselves exploring just that territory defined by the tension between the constraints that the past imposes and the propelling forces for change, between the inertia or stasis of the system and the agents of movement and innovation; in the life of a scholarly discipline, between the hold of certain theories or paradigms and the social-historical forces—including ideas—that unsettle them. In attempting to understand the emergence and development of the discipline of IR, we shall therefore employ the perspective of both the historian and the sociologist, without losing sight of the autonomous power of ideas to shape the development of the discipline’s “discourse.”

There are two ways one may consider the passage from one commanding theory (i.e., a convenient explanatory abstraction) to another in the discipline of IR or in any other social science. The first is to view the field as one in which knowledge evolves the way positivists used to regard progress in the natural sciences, in a linear, if often dialectic, fashion. Here progressive change is the result of building from one (proved and elaborated or disproved and discarded) theory to another, from serially generated hypotheses. This internal discursive approach views the discipline of IR through its successive Great Debates. One may feel that this is the way social science should operate, and yet it risks isolating intellectual change from larger constraints and forces. Another approach follows the logic of Thomas Kuhn’s work on scientific revolutions (Kuhn, 1962), and will regard a theory as “working,” that is satisfying the discipline’s needs and generating ever-diminishingly productive research agendas until the burden of defending it against contrary evidence or in the face of a significant alteration in its social-cultural context becomes so great that it suddenly fails to satisfy—that is, it fails to secure research grant money or is marginalized in introductory textbooks.

The historian, often the same historian, can find him- or herself on either side of this problem. Many who, like Carr, value the idea of progressive, evolutionary change are also (like Carr) committed to the view that intellectual fashions, even in the sciences, are to some degree the product of their times. That is, they are to this extent contextualists who are suspicious of viewing presently dominant ideas as the logical and positive outcome of past struggles with error (a variety of Whig history) and thus are unlikely to regard any theory as simply the outcome of a long intellectual vetting process.

Here we shall present the history of IR as a discipline, and the major debates of the field in their times, not with an eye to dismissing all theoretical constructions as so much history, but to give us a better means of understanding why certain theories gained power and acceptance when they did, and how it is that one idea or set of ideas may have compelling force in a certain environment and lose its hold on the scholarly imagination in another.

Recommended readings

There is a growing literature on what one scholar calls IR’s new “subfield” of the study of the “history, identity, and self-legitimation” of the discipline. See Gerard Holden, “Who Contextualizes the Contextualizers? Disciplinary History and the Discourse about IR Discourse,” Review of International Studies 28 (2002), 253–70. For a contextualizer’s point of view, see Chris Brown’s Understanding International Relations (2001), ch. 2. Brian C. Schmidt, in The Political Discourse of Anarchy (1998), on the other hand argues for a narrower “internal discursive” approach. The debate about how or whether to sociologize the history of IR, sparked by Ole Waever in a provocative article in 1998, can be further explored in a special “Forum” on IR “as a complex social field” in the International Studies Review 18 (2016).

For a critique from a sociological perspective of the Kuhnian understanding of paradigm breaks in IR theory, see P. T. Jackson and D. H. Nexon, “Paradigmatic Faults in International-Relations Theory,” International Studies Quarterly 53, 4 (December, 2009), 907–30. On the reception of Kuhn in IR more generally, see Nicolas Guilhot, “The Kuhning of Reason: Realism, Rationalism, and Political Decision in IR Theory after Thomas Kuhn,” Review of International Studies 42 (2016), 3–24.

CHAPTER 1

THE DISCIPLINE OF IR FROM THE FIRST WORLD WAR TO THE EARLY COLD WAR

The “great debates” tradition

Introductory textbooks and courses commonly present the history or field of International Relations as a series of “great debates.” There is considerable practical advantage in this approach. For students it reduces the plethora of IR theory and practice to a more easily assimilable main story. It is congenial both to many historians who are trained to think in terms of narrative and evolutionary development, and to many political scientists who view the field as a social science advancing by a process of hypothesis and counter-hypothesis. In a larger sense, it confirms the boundaries of the discipline and gives it manageable intellectual coherence and an organizing principle. Moreover, a vigorous debate will itself promote research agendas (either to substantiate a provocative thesis, or to demonstrate its weaknesses), and thus the discipline is moved along and focused, even if a majority of IR practitioners follow other lines of analysis. We must, however, also be sensitive to the way the great debate approach advances a too tidy construction of the field as a series of binary confrontations. The great debate tradition has been subjected to increasing criticism for its oversimplifications and misleading juxtapositions of somewhat artificially constructed “schools” of thought, and what some regard as its ulterior purposes. It has been suggested that it exaggerates the power and influence of a “dominant” theory or method, suppressing the great variety of IR work, and that it misleadingly suggests progression from one commanding paradigm to another when in fact the field is much more multi-directional, and “defeated” approaches often retain much vitality and traction.

That IR is, as a social science, somewhat unique in its need severely to reduce and order its intellectual life in this manner may also suggest a degree of self-consciousness and defensiveness about its intellectual location and justification. Certainly the widely popularized representation of “the First Great Debate”—that supposedly between (naive) “Idealism” and (hardheaded) “Realism”—as a foundational moment for IR promotes the image of a useful “science” being born. And at the end of our story, in the current, early twenty-first century era of fragmentation and contestation, of the emergence of a host of challenges to mainstream IR theory and practice, the great debate tradition offers, in the absence of any satisfying unified theory, a linear structure of sorts to which the discipline may cling. Some would argue, however, that it is likely that the tradition of great debates will simply collapse under the weight of its own pretensions. One IR scholar caustically observed at the end of the last century, “[n]ot only were these great debates little more than propaganda, pressed into service by academics looking to legitimize their profession, but the explanation for the winners and losers is wrongly attributed to changes ‘out there’ in the world of politics” (Dunne, 1998, 349).

The conventional approach that locates the birth of the discipline in a supposed confrontation in the thirties and forties between Idealism and Realism has also been challenged by an American political scientist, Brian C. Schmidt, who argued, first, that the academic origins of IR, narrowly construed, are to be found in the earlier development of late nineteenth-century American political science, and, second, that “a critical internal discursive history” of these ideas can tell us more than can any attempt to “contextualize” (i.e., to historicize) them (Schmidt, 1998). This of course stirs a number of long-familiar feuds—over assumptions of American intellectual hegemony, the discipline’s relation to American Political Science, and, especially, the relation between ideas and their social, cultural, and historical contexts. Contextualizing phenomena is of course what most historians do. It is engrained in our epistemology, and is arguably what we best bring to the table, assuming—unlike Schmidt—that IR is, and ought to be, interdisciplinary. Most, if not all, historians would probably agree that to narrow our understanding of the field to (part of) its internal discursive tradition, much less to assume that that tradition is essentially to be found within and constrained by that of American Political Science, severely reduces the real and potential pluralism of our understanding of the relations of states, peoples, and cultures.

In our unapologetic attempt here to historicize the development of IR, it will of course be necessary to contextualize those conflicting discourses that the discipline as a whole seems to privilege as significant markers. At the very least the great debate tradition allows us to enter the discipline as historians, to examine and perhaps contest the ways in which a significant part of the field has represented itself. The great debates may be somewhat dubious constructs, but nevertheless they represent much of what practitioners of IR regard as the red meat of their chosen field, and, as even one European critic (Ole Waever) admits, there is simply “no other established means of telling the history of the discipline” (Waever, 1998, 715).

The foundation years

The division of history into periods is not a fact, but a necessary hypothesis or tool of thought … dependent for its validity on interpretation. [E. H. Carr, What Is History?, 76]

While some would argue, accurately enough, that the scholarly origins of a field of international relations reach back into the late nineteenth century, in the Anglo-American establishment of politics as an academic discipline and in the teaching of international jurisprudence, and that many of those scholars who were prominent in interwar IR discourse had begun publishing their work in these fields well before 1919, nevertheless it is useful to begin a narrative of the institutional foundation of what was self-consciously styled “International Relations” in the aftermath of the Great War.

The first academic chair in International Relations was established in 1919 at the University of Wales at Aberystwyth (and named the next year the Woodrow Wilson Professor of International Politics). It was founded by a wealthy Welsh businessman, a pacifist, “in memory of the fallen students of our University for the study of those related problems of law and politics, of ethics and economics, which are raised by the prospect of a League of Nations and for the true understanding of civilizations other than our own” (John et al., 1972, 86). Other chairs followed at the universities of Oxford, London, and Edinburgh. By the thirties, such positions and programs were being encouraged elsewhere by an International Studies Conference (under the League’s Committee of Intellectual Co-operation), though the field took deepest root in the Anglo-American world where it was nourished often by the same concerned citizens who had promoted the “democratic control” of foreign policy and the idea of a League of Nations.

In America, as in Britain, popular reaction against the unprecedented scale of slaughter during the war and the failure of traditional diplomacy to prevent it—indeed the complicity as many saw it of traditional diplomacy in bringing it about—provided a strong motivation among some, often wealthy men of liberal conscience, to endow institutions that would work to ensure that the next generation’s New Diplomacy might see, as President Wilson had demanded, “not a balance of power, but a community of power.” The progressive Foreign Policy Association (founded in New York in 1918) aimed to inform the general public, while the more elitist Council on Foreign Relations, like its counter-part in Britain, Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs), was established in 1923 along lines agreed upon at a meeting of British and American scholarly “experts” at the Paris Peace Conference. The new Social Science Research Council, initiated the same year by political scientists to bring scholars together on issues of “public concern,” soon came to include sociologists, anthropologists, economists, psychologists, and historians (coining, it is said, the first use of the term “interdisciplinary”) and set up among its various permanent committees one dealing with International Relations. At Tufts University in Massachusetts, Austen Barclay Fletcher left, on his death in 1923, a substantial legacy for a new school of “law and diplomacy” (somewhat belatedly established in 1933) where graduate education would emphasize a “fundamental and thorough knowledge” of international law. In 1924 plans were launched at Johns Hopkins University to establish a School of International Relations (it was named for Wilson’s ambassador to Britain, Walter Hines Page, and opened in 1930) to support research in foreign relations. In 1928 an interdisciplinary Committee on International Relations was founded at the University of Chicago, which became a major center for IR thought and teaching through the interwar years and beyond (the Political Science department at Chicago was especially oriented toward a “scientific approach” to politics). The same year the Rockefeller Foundation helped establish a Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations (known after 1933 as simply the International Studies Conference). In fact, American philanthropic institutions like the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Ford Foundation were important promoters of the new discipline and of liberal internationalism generally among foreign policy elites both in America and abroad.

The new field drew heavily from those scholars, like Quincy Wright (who helped found Chicago’s Committee on International Relations), who had expertise in international law—reflecting the general surge of interest in international jurisprudence that followed the establishment of the League of Nations and the Permanent Court of International Justice. Many of the founding IR scholars were liberals¹ with a concern and hope that the international anarchy of the pre-war world might be to some degree co-operatively reformed, ordered, and regulated. Beyond those with an academic interest in international law, the field attracted many with foreign service experience, either career diplomats like E. H. Carr or those who had done temporary service as experts, like the historian Charles Webster (1886–1961), the second holder of the Wilson Chair at Aberystwyth.

Historians were prominent among the founders of the discipline in the twenties and thirties. Often these had a strong interest in the “national ethnicities” of pre- and post-war Europe or in international law and, significantly, had served as advisors before and during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919—marking the first time that the foreign and intelligence services heavily recruited university dons in preparation for a major international conference. Such experience itself may have helped coalesce an interest subsequently in organizing a discipline and educational institutions that would both generate practical knowledge for public policy debate and give scholars, many of whom felt shoved aside or ignored in Paris, a greater influence.

When Quincy Wright published (in the midst of the next world war) the results of his long-running historical, social, and psychological investigation into the causes and nature of war, he prefaced it with the observation that it had been “begun in the hopeful atmosphere of Locarno [1926]” and addressed it to “those who are opposed to war-in-general, probably a majority of the human race” (Wright, 1942, I, 3). The fact that many of the British and American academics who worked to establish IR programs, research projects, and journals in the twenties and thirties were committed to international organizations like the World Court at the Hague, the International Labor Organization, and the League of Nations and were often prominent in movements to promote peace and international cooperation makes it tempting to characterize the discipline in its foundation years as “idealist” or, in Carr’s well-known language, “utopian.”

And yet we should hesitate to accept a reading of this era as simply one of wooly wishful thinking that ended inevitably in appeasement, war, and the collapse of idealism and of the League as an effective instrument of international cooperation. If the idea of a First Great Debate, retrospectively established by Realists after the Second World War, is set aside, we can perhaps get a clearer view of the institutional and theoretical origins of the discipline as it emerged in both Britain and the United States. While many of its founders were no doubt inspired by “the spirit of Locarno” and the prospect of an end to all war through new international institutions, the discipline as a whole can hardly be said to have been based on Quaker pacifism or an anticipation of the “perpetual peace” of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. Drawing on a long history of thought and some practice, IR scholars in the interwar years were engaged in exploring quite concrete issues of how force might be applied by the international community to achieve “collective security,” how international law should be developed by post-war international institutions, and how sovereign states related to a newly democratic (it was hoped) society of nations. It would be wrong historically to ignore, as the great debate tradition does, the considerable divergence of liberal opinion on issues such as the use of force or the need to address the grievances of what Carr called the “revisionist” powers. Interwar IR scholarship suggests a host of little and large debates growing out of the problematic of adapting international law to contemporary circumstances.

As a scholarly enterprise, interwar IR meant bringing to the fore...