Abstract
If the study of international relations in the 1970s was characterized by a breakdown of its three centuries of concern with the problems of peace, war, and order, scholarship in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century has confronted an explosion of theoretical ferment and philosophical disagreement. It is often punctuated by hyperbole and by the loss of a unified scholarly craft. This essay looks at the scene, notes incompatibilities, and laments some of its excesses.
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Notes
- 1.
This text was first published as: “Along the Road of International Theory in the New Millennium Four Travelogues,” Chap. 3, pp. 73–99 in Robert M.A. Crawford and Darryl S.L. Jarvis, eds., International Relations—Still an American Social Science?. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001. The permission to republish this text was granted on 12 March 2015 by Sharla Clute, SUNY Press in Albany, NY.
- 2.
An analogy can be made between the current ideological hegemony of global capitalism and the religious hegemony of the Church in Europe during the mediaeval era (Deibert 1996).
- 3.
Change does not imply innovation. The major themes of international theory over the past three centuries have remained notably similar, even if the vocabularies and styles differ. For an essay that examines the underlying similarities in the field over an extended period of time, see Gabriel (1994).
- 4.
In some cases, questions of identity may affect politics, although I suspect they have been largely overemphasized. In much of the contemporary theoretical literature, in contrast, the sources, nature, and consequences of identity are becoming more important than interests and ideas in the framing of foreign policy and its analysis. But if we think that the concept of “national interest” was vague and subjective, problems of identity are infinitely more complex.
- 5.
Commonly acknowledged as one of the greatest scholars of international relations of the twentieth century, Quincy Wright’s works are rarely cited today. Beck (1996: 120, n. 13) reports that in a “job talk” he attended given by an applicant from a major graduate program in the United States, the candidate, whose theoretical focus was the problem of war, acknowledged that he had not read any of Wright’s works. Forgetting is not confined to some post-modernists, though they may be the only ones to adopt a deliberate strategy of erasure.
- 6.
There is an inconsistency in some critiques of ‘orthodoxy.’ On the one hand, they promote the value of ‘inclusiveness’ and open-minded dialogue. On the other, they deny any legitimacy to ‘orthodox’ representations and explanations of international politics. The purpose of the critiques is not to amend, but to destroy, particularly all versions of Realism. For example, see George (1994) and Bleiker (1995).
- 7.
One wonders how many critics of Realism have actually read Morgenthau’s works. Many ritual denunciations reveal a serious lack of familiarity with his oeuvre.
- 8.
Candidates include Quebec, the formal partition of Somalia and Sudan (already de facto), Myanmar, Northern Ireland, Bougainville, Taiwan, Bosnia, and Cyprus.
- 9.
Some anecdotal evidence supports the claim. Figaro, a major national daily in France, in its edition of May 19, 1995, contained less than one-half page of foreign news in a total of thirty-nine pages for the issue. CNN’s “Prime News” on May 29, 1997 contained only 10 seconds of news that did not directly involve the United States. CNN’s World News of the same date, a 1 hour review of the day’s events, contained not a single item of news about events outside of the United States. At the time, elections were going on in France and Canada, the new president was sworn into office in the Congo, and many other foreign items in the New York Times of that date were not even mentioned.
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Holsti, K. (2016). Along the Road of International Theory in the Next Millennium: Four Travelogues. In: Kalevi Holsti: A Pioneer in International Relations Theory, Foreign Policy Analysis, History of International Order, and Security Studies. SpringerBriefs on Pioneers in Science and Practice, vol 41. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26624-4_6
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