International Relations and Its DiscontentsAuthor(s): Fred HallidaySource: International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-), Vol. 71, No. 4,Special RIIA 75th Anniversary Issue (Oct., 1995), pp. 733-746Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Royal Institute of International AffairsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2625095 .Accessed: 10/03/2011 10:53

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International relations and

its discontents

FRED HALLIDAY

In this review of the health and prospects of the contemporary study of international relations, the author identifies the criteria by which the discipline may justify its existence and distinguishes thesefrom invalid standards, notably a misconceived appeal to 'scientffic' procedure and goals or a demandfor immediate relevance. He asserts the centrality both of theoretical work and of engagement with historical and contemporary actuality, and, with Dahrendorf; the inevitability and desirability of a tension between reflection and practice. He then examines the response of the discipline to two major challenges of recent years-the collapse of communism and the process of globalization'-and notes ways in which it may constructively develop both in

fulfilling the criteria of academic adequacy and in responding to the challenges of the contemporary world.

Branches of the social sciences are like nations: to the contemporary observer, they purport to be given, reflections of natural, eternal, divisions.To justify their existence, the social sciences taught in the universities of today claim to correspond to objects of study that exist objectively in the outside world. In this perspective, the academic study of international relations corresponds to something given, undeniably objective, in the 'real' world: relations between states.Yet, as with nations this appearance of solidity and correspondence with reality is deceptive. In the first place, the social sciences have not always existed, any more than nations have: they have come into existence over the past century or two, in response to changes, and in particular to challenges, in modern society and in the world as a whole. The occasion for the emergence of a branch of the social sciences is not so much that there is something to study, but rather that there is a challenge, a problem, a crisis to be addressed.

The subject-matter of international relations-relations between states, war, power, the intersection of military and economic interests, the ethics of dealing with foreigners has existed for some thousands of years. Reflections on it, of greater or lesser centrality to the philosophies of the epoch, subsumed under

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the term 'classical theory', go back a good two millennia, and not exclusively in the Western world.' In September I995 we celebrated the two-hundredth anniversary of the publication of one of the most influential, and pithy, works of theory, Immanuel Kant's thirteen pages on Perpetual peace. The emergence of a distinct field of academic study after the First World War, and of policy institutes such as Chatham House and the Council on Foreign Relations, reflected not the discovery of the subject, but rather a sense of concern at the breakdown of international order, especially the long peace of the nineteenth century, and the puzzlement at the fact that industrialized Western societies, far from making war obsolete, had, it seemed, made war central to their interaction.

The analogy with nations concerns not only origin but also demarcation. For, as with nations, what appear to be natural, permanently existing, boundaries between areas of study are, on closer examination, themselves often arbitrary, reflecting where combatants once fell in exhaustion, where officials drew lines, where movements of ideas happened to stop. Over time these boundaries change, as do the inhabitants of the disciplines concerned. Thus many of the themes of classical political philosophy, not least inescapable reflections on human nature, are to be found in international political thought. Much of what is today the concern of international relations-power politics in a broad sense, and the relation of this to natural resources and to space-was once the prerogative of geography. It is a matter of special discomfort to some, for creative interaction to others, that many a contemporary topic seems to fall across boundaries-nationalism, ecology, migration being obvious examples.

The development, past and future, of the academic study of international relations is, therefore, part of the development of social science as a whole, itself a reflection of broader challenges and shifts in our society.What appears to be a self-contained, objective reflection on a naturally given subject area is neither as detached, nor as timeless, as may appear. We are not dealing with a fixed object or content matter: as with nations, the question is not whether change is occurring, and whether boundary changes or external commerce is desirable, but rather what aspects of the past can and should be preserved and how these changes and interactions can better be managed. Equally the relation of this academic study to policy issues in the external world is never stable: as Ralf Dahrendorf has recently argued so well, it is both inevitable and desirable that this relation, of reflection to practice, should be one of tension.2

For surveys of this body of thought, much of it intertwined with general reflections on history and political and economic theory, see Martin Wight, International relations theory: the three traditions, Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter, eds (London and Leicester: Leicester University Press, I99I); Howard Williams, International relations in political theory (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, I992); F.J. Hinsley, Power and the pursuit of peace: theory and practice in the history of relations between states (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I963); Evan Luard, Basic texts in international relations: the evolution of ideas about international society (London: Macmillan, I992).

2 Ralf Dahrendorf, LSE: a history of the London School of Econotnics and Political Science 1985-1995 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, I995). For a range of views on the academic-policy relations see Christopher Hill and Pamela Beshoff, Ttvo worlds of international relations (London: Routledge, I994).

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The functions of social science

The discipline of international relations has to be judged by the same criteria as other social sciences, and its future development set against the challenges which the world poses for it. There are, broadly speaking, four justifications for such an academic discipline. In the first place, there is the training of the mind: to justify its existence, the study of this particular subject at university level has to contribute to a general intellectual formation, in terms of ability to think clearly and conceptually, formulate ideas in a concise manner and think independently. This is the criterion traditionally given for a classical education and transposed to the study of modern social science. If an undergraduate training in international relations cannot make students think and write in a rigorous manner broadly comparable to those who study history or economics, sociology or politics, then it should not be taught.

The second criterion is that of the production and transmission of a body of theory: facts on their own are dumb, and it is the task of social science to organize them into conceptual systems and of those who teach social science to transmit such theory to students. The task is one of producing a coherent conceptual system that is capable of generating novel explanations, and of then making available to an academic audience such a body of ideas and literature, one that they would not conventionally encounter. There is plenty of bad theory, waffle unrelated to conceptual precision or substantive analysis: but theory can and should place in a more demanding and precise context the issues that may arise in a contemporary life and which would otherwise be treated as if they lacked any conceptual history or depth., Such a transmission may involve much that is contemporary, but must include that part of the classical tradition that remains of pertinence. Above all it should challenge common sense, received opinion that takes as given or straightforward that which is neither.

Third, academic study should involve training in a particular area of professional expertise, a preparing of students for work in, in this case, international organization and foreign policy. Fourthly, it should provide knowledge that is pertinent to the resolution of contemporary issues-to discussion and formulation of public policy. If it is important to register this as one of the functions of academic study, it is equally important to point out that it cannot be the sole or in many cases the primary justification: there is a distinction between a broad relevance to contemporary issues and commentary on what is of most immediate importance. Here we need to bear in mind Dahrendorf's warning on a necessary tension. If we should avoid the conceit of

Hence the perennial dispute between the international historians and the international relations experts. The story goes of the international historian who upbraids his IR colleague: 'If you know so much about international affairs, where are your archives?'The reply: 'If you know so much about international affairs, where are your ideas?'

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being wholly abstracted from contemporary events and changes, it is often by being less involved in immediate debate that a social science can contribute most to the elucidation of policy issues. Economists are not employed primarily to predict tomorrow's stock market quotations, any more than sociologists are in the first instance trained to comment on the most recent murder. For IR specialists, whether involved in theory or in area studies, the same necessary caution apphles.

An interim report on international relations after three-quarters of a century, with the discipline's future development in mind, would present a mixed picture.4 In terms of university presence, international relations has established itself well in the English-speaking world and is gaining ground in continental Europe and some areas of the Third World. Student demand has been especially high in the past decade. The themes of international relations, notably relations between states and the interaction of state power with other more 'structural' forms, have become central to much contemporary social science debate, notably in the debate on 'globalization'. Within the discipline itself there is a mood of theoretical effervescence, a series of conceptual debates, more or less related to what is occurring in other branches of social sciences. The issues in dispute within the subject are in many cases of undoubted intellectual and policy substance: Can the international system function without a boss, a hegemon? How far is the state being overtaken? Do democracies go to war with each other? What are the implications for a world of sovereign states, and of governments bound by domestic constituences, of planetary ecological crisis?

Yet there are grounds for concern on each of the four criteria enunciated above. On the more strictly academic criteria there are several difficulties. The core components of teaching on international relations-classical and contemporary theory, international institutions, war and peace, plus knowledge of international history and international law-can provide a training, in its own terms, as rigorous and informative as that of any other social science.Yet as a result of excessive preoccupation with contemporary ideas, a lack of adequate grounding in the social sciences in general and a depreciation of history, intellectual and political, the balance has shifted away from such a concern with the education of the mind. Equally, in the realm of theory itself the picture is a very mixed one. Classical theory retains a hold in the academic

4 A robust, sceptical look at this literature, viewed as a conflict between 'traddies' and 'trendies', is given by my colleague Geoffrey Stern,'International relations in a changing world: bucking the trendies', The World Today 5I: 7,July I995. For general surveys of the contemporary academic discipline see A.J. R. Groom and Margot Light, eds, Contetnporary international relations: a guide to theory (London: Pinter, I994); William C. Olson and A.J. R. Groom, International relations then and now: origins and tretnds in interpretation (London: Routledge, I99I); Ken Booth and Steve Smith, eds, International relations theory today (Oxford: Polity, I995); Fred Halliday, Rethinkitng international relations (London: Macmillan, I994). Contemporary developments may also be followed in the relevant academic journals, including Reviewv of Intertnational Studies, European Journal of Intertnational Relations and Millenniun:Journal of International Studies in the UK; International Studies Quarterly and Internatiotnal Organization in the USA; Zeitschrftftfr internationale Beziehunigen in Germany.

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International relations and its discontents

field, and is in certain respects making a comeback: it would seem that the end of the Cold War has been good for enquiry into fundamental questions. Nowhere is this more so than in the field of ethical issues in international relations: human rights, obligation, transnational ethics, justice.5 Theory is, moreover, developing in some creative new areas: the growing investigations of the intersection of politics with economics, a revived 'international political economy', is one;6 a recognition, long delayed, of the importance of issues of gender in the field of international relations is a second;7 the investigation of how forms of state organization and of interstate interaction have changed over time, and of the intersection of these with domestic changes, is a third;8 a concern with the implications of the ecological issue-in terms of law, interstate cooperation and/or conflict, responsibility for a 'global commons'- is a fourth.9

Yet side by side with these creative advances one may note other trends that serve to dissipate these positive developments, to confuse the student and to obfuscate the theoretician. One is what may, in broad terms, be called 'scientism'-the application to the social sciences of a model of 'scientific' analysis that is inapposite for the social sciences and which may well be irrelevant to much of natural science as well. If politicians live with the ideas of long-dead economists, writers on international relations seem to do the same with the ideas of long-dead philosophers of social science, early nineteenth- century writers for whom the scientific is to be equated with the quantifiable,

Among a very large literature one may note Janna Thompson,Justice and world order: a philosophical inquiry (London: Routledge, I992); Charles Beitz, Political theory and international relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, I979); Onora O'Neill, Faces of hutiger (London: Allen & Unwin, i986); Chris Brown, International relations theory: new normative approaches (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, I992);Terry Nardin, Morality and the relations of states (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, i983).

6 The revival of 'international political economy' reflects a convergence of two initially disparate trends: on the one hand, a concern born of frustration with both orthodox politics and orthodox economics at the separation in theory of two fields closely interlocked in reality; on the other, the application to international relations of Marxist theories of interstate and north-south relations. The work of Robert Gilpin (T7te political economy of international relatiotns, Princeton: Princeton University Press, i987) and Susan Strange (States and tnarkets: atn introduction to international political economy, London: Pinter, i988) is exemplary of the first; that of Stephen Gill (American hegemony and the Trilateral Commission, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I992) and of Kaes van der Pijl (The makinig of an Atlantic ruling class, London:Verso, i984) of the second.

7 Among a large literature see V Spike Peterson and Anne Sisson Runyan, Global gender issues (Boulder, CO, Oxford:Westview, I993); Marysia Zalewski,'Well, what is the feminist perspective on Bosnia?', International Affairs 7I: 2, April I995; Rebecca Grant and Kathleen Newland, eds, Gender an(d international relations (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, i99i).

8 Justin Rosenberg, The etmpire of civil society (London:Verso, I994); Richard Little,'International relations and large-scale historical change', in Groom and Light, eds, Contemnporary international relations.

9 See the issue of International Affairs on 'Ethics, the environment and the changing international order', 7I: 3,July I995; Ian Rowlands and Malory Greene, eds, Global environmnental chatnge and international relations (London: Macmillan, I992); OranYoung, International cooperation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, i989); Caroline Thomas, The environtnent in international relations (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1992).

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the predictable, the regular. History is irrelevant to such investigations, except when it provides a longitudinal data set. Enormous amounts of effort, and money, are devoted to projects that are, from a substantive point of view, a distraction-correlating in quantitative terms the causes of war, or alliance breakdown, or nationalist upsurge. Such scientism is particularly strong in the country that dominates the study of international relations, the United States of America; from the behavioural revolution of the 1950S through to the current predominance of rational choice theory mainstream social science, to the detriment of the United States and much of the rest of the world, has been dominated by such methodologies.Io This has also confirmed a gap, cultural, historical and intellectual, between the mainstream US and European approaches, the former fixated on such 'scientific' approaches, the latter all too often stubbornly traditionalist: it is an irony that the discipline devoted to the study of international and global trends should increasingly be falling victim to what one may only term intellectual spheres of influence."

Another prominent trend in IR theory today is that which is broadly termed 'post-modernism'.I2 This current, flourishing in several branches of the social sciences, originated in the widespread philosophical revolt that developed in France from the I960s onwards against the claims of a prevailing modernism, whether in orthodox rationalist or Marxist forms. For post-modernism it is reason itself that has to be challenged, as have claims of a single 'grand narrative', in history, or claims of a single, privileged observer. Post-modernism welcomes a multiplicity of viewpoints, denies the claims of reason, and celebrates relativism in ethics. Some of its arguments merit attention: it is right to point to the links between what is said and the interests of the person saying

'? As Susan Strange characteristically put it in her presidential address to the I995 Chicago International Studies Association Convention: 'Aping economists would only be excusable if the results of such borrowings were significantly better than qualitative judgements of highly complex and dynamic situations based on comparative analysis across time and space and across sectors of economic activity. Just because economists have enjoyed for most of this century a totally undeserved reputation for predictive power is no good intellectual reason for trying to imitate them.' For one critique of the application of concepts of rationality to international relations see James Richardson, 'History strikes back: the state of international relations theory', Australian Journal of Political Science 29: i, March I994, pp. I79-87. Many of the criticisms applicable to scientism in IR were made long ago in the classic work of Bernard Crick, The American science of politics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959). For an earlier warning on this see Kal Holsti, The dividing discipline: hegetnony and diversity in international theory (London: Allen & Unwin, I987). In the I96os a battle of methodologies was conducted between the American 'scientific' approach, based on quantification and prediction, and the British 'historical' one, based on 'judgement': neither side emerged with much credit, and no intellectual progress was made. The contending positions are given in Klaus Knorr and James Rosenau, eds, Contending approaches to international politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, I969). These theories are surveyed in Chris Brown,'Critical theory and postmodernism in international relations', in Groom and Light, eds, Contetnporary internationial relatiotts, and "'Turtles all the way down": anti-foundationalism, critical theory and international relations', Millenniutn 23: 2, Summer I994.While Brown himself warns against erecting a single school of thought that can be labelled 'post-modernism', this is not a sustainable defence: the authors conventionally presented in this field do, as much as any theoretical school, present a set of common themes and fight similar battles. Avoidance of laudatory self- reference is not one of post-modernism's most evident virtues. For a recent article that upholds the idea of a common approach see Molly Cochran,'Postmodernism, ethics and international political theory', Revietv of International Studies 2I: 3,July I995.

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it; it is creative in the ways in which it draws attention to the roles of symbol, discourse and meaning in international relations; its suggestion of multiple identities is important.Yet, in international relations as elsewhere in the social sciences, it far too often leads to confusion, to an inflation of claims about discourse, and to a paralytic relativism. It can also, to apply a good old-fashioned criterion, explain very little. Too often captured by verbal conceit, a contrived 'heteroglossia', post-modernism is in the end a blind alley, most of whose valid claims have been made elsewhere and before.'3

If influencing and informing public debate, and policy formation, is also a criterion, if not the only one, then it has to be said that for much of its history the academic study of international relations has failed.This is true not only for policy studies institutes, but also for the more general recognition, or rather lack thereof, of the strengths of the academic, and theoretical, approach itself. In the relevant areas of public life, most practitioners or the average reader of the Times Literary Supplement or the New York Review of Books are aware of the contributions of, say, law or economics, but few believe this is so in the field of international relations. For most of those who make foreign policy, the theoretical world of IR is an alien, and irrelevant, field, if not indeed one of whose very existence they are unaware. After more than a decade teaching IR in a university department, I have come to the sorry conclusion that virtually everyone one meets in the world beyond, academic or other, believes that the academic study of international relations is a sub-field of news commentary. It is easy here to place major responsibility on the abstruseness of theory: yet theory has, of necessity, to be removed from immediate practicality, in international relations as much as in economics or law. The discipline is not short of a classical corpus of theory or of contemporary, substantive and relevant debates. What is more worrying is that a misuse of theory, and of academic distance, and an indulgence in second-rate musings to generate bodies of writing that lack either theoretical discipline or practical import, has been compounded by an enduring suspicion within the policy-making world of any but the most subaltern ideas and theoretical perspective. The world of international affairs is a carnival of the bluff and philistine. Yet if the greatest function of an academic discipline is to enable the individual to challenge such common sense, in the case of IR this would appear to be an even more forlorn task than elsewhere.

13 Perhaps the best of many ripostes to this current, and its 'methodological hypochondria', is Ernest Gellner, Postmodernistn, reason and religiotn (London: Routledge, I992). One of the most common claims today is that we need to listen to hitherto marginalized and 'non-Western' voices in international relations, and that the conventional curricula ofWestern universities ignore such voices. This is a point well worth making, but with three significant caveats: first, there is no reason to assume that those who speak 'for' the non-Western world, or for one particular country within it, are any more representative of what people as a whole in that country think; second, listening to such voices does not entail automatic acceptance of what they say-there is much spurious invocation of the indigenous, and conspiracy theory, in what passes for 'non-Western' analysis; thirdly, the content of much of what passes for alternative views in international discourse is, on closer examination, recycled Western ideas-Mao, Khomeini and Gandhi, let alone Castro and Guevara, would bear this out. Nothing illustrates these three points more than the core concept of anti-Western revolt itself, namely nationalism.

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The end of the Cold War

To these challenges of theory have, in recent years, been added those of the real world itself, in particular two: the collapse of communism and the consequences thereof; and the growing conviction, across several social sciences and in public debate itself, that the hitherto established bedrock of analysis, the nation-state, is now being eroded. If neither of these need, on closer examination, entail the consequences sometimes associated with them, they nonetheless present significant challenges to established ideas.

The ColdWar was, at first sight,'good' for international relations: if the failure of the League of Nations and the Second World War had done much to establish the 'realism' of an E. H. Carr and a Martin Wight as the dominant approach within the academic field, the Cold War, a conflict in which all societies appeared to be overshadowed by the danger of interstate nuclear war, certainly reinforced the importance of the 'international' within universities.Yet there was a sense in which the discipline flourished not so much by engaging with the Cold War as by denying its peculiar quality: for in realist thought, the Cold War was but another chapter in the gloomy saga of great power rivalry, distrust and perfidy, a continuation of a historical pattern going back to Thucydides and hence requiring no distinctive analysis at all. One can look almost in vain through the standard textbooks and discussions of international relations during the 195os and Ig6os for any discussion of what the Cold War itself was about.The sub-field of strategic studies apart-itself a pursuit marked more by spurious extrapolations of supposedly rational behaviour than by any knowledge of history-the discipline remained rather silent on this, with the notable exception of Raymond Aron. Since it was all in Machiavelli, there was nothing else to say. It was therefore significant that the man who, more than any other, should have combined an academic interest in the subject with practical involvement should have ended by writing a book that merely restated, albeit in elegant vein, the verities of balance of power theory14: aphorism in form concealed stasis in ideas.

The sudden collapse of communism has posed a range of practical issues on which students of international relations are asked to comment-nationalism, migration, proliferation, secession among them. But there are other, more theoretical, challenges as well. One is that of prediction: surely we all made fools of ourselves by failing to see what would happen in I989 and 9ggi? One answer to this has been that of the historians, who argue that these events have shown how little can be produced by theorizing, and that we should return to narrative.'5 This is, however, another example of a misformulated debate: here we are, once again, in the grips of a false idea of science. The argument that

' Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (London: Simon & Schuster, 1993). '5 John Lewis Gaddis, 'International relations theory and the end of the Cold War', International Security

I7: 2, I992-3.

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social science should predict, because if it does not it fails to meet the criterion of 'science', is doubly unfounded. On the one hand, there is no reason why social science should imitate natural science in every respect; on the other, natural science itself has increasingly moved away from the test of prediction, and some branches (evolutionary biology being an obvious example) make no pretence to do so.'6 The argument that science should explain, not predict, is relevant to much of both social and natural science. If some social sciences can predict, demography being a case in point, most cannot and should not.'7

If the proper goal is explanation, not prediction, then another, more pertinent, challenge emerges, that of explaining why the Soviet system fell when it did. Obviously, no explanation can be purely international, but nor can analysis confine itself solely to what happens within countries, even within the decisive country in the whole story, the former USSR. For the failure of communism was in several respects an international one: first, in the failure to spread world-wide and in the attendant loss of optimism and legitimacy that followed; then in the failure to build up an effective alliance system to rival that of the West; then the gradual, and increasingly visible, erosion of competitiveness, civilian and military, with the West."8 In the end communism collapsed not because it failed in any absolute sense-its peoples were in the main neither in revolt nor starving-but because of the perceived failure to compete, and to have any long-term prospect of successfully competing, with the West. An explanation of that collapse would have to look both at the general entropy of the Soviet system, and at the perceptions and decisions of its leaders, but also at the way in which a range of international factors affected them.

Whether or not the Cold War was a distinctive kind of conflict, many would now argue that with the collapse of communism the world is returning to a pre-Cold War, if not pre-i914, condition. Much has been written on the ways in which the world has 'gone backwards' with the end of the Cold War, in the case of one writer at least back to the middle ages.There are at least some senses in which the collapse of communism has, if not taken us back to an anterior age, then in addition to reviving historical claims and symbols posed very

,6 Rom Harre, The phiilosophiies of science (London: Cambridge University Press, I972); A. F. Chalmers, 14iat is this tihing called science? (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, I982).

7 The position that the task of social science is to explain has come under challenge from another position, namely that which claims that explanation as such is impossible, given the participation of the human subject, and that we must therefore confine ourselves to understanding. This approach, broadly known as hermeneutics, may however carry its own dangers, surrendering any claim to objectivity in an exaggerated deference to the subjectivity of interpretation. For arguments in favour see Steve Smith and Martin Hollis, Explainitig anad understanditng international relations (Oxford: Clarendon, I99I), Ch.4, and Alexander Wendt,'The agent-structure problem, in international relations theory', Ititerntatiotial Organization 4I: 3, Summer I987. One irony of this approach is that the father of'understanding' in social sciences, Max Weber, was in regard to international relations an advocate of a remorseless rationality and objectivity. There may be room for competing theories of, say, the origins of nationalism or the causes of war, but this may have little to do with the participation of the theorist involved in these activities.

,8 I have gone into this in greater detail in Chs. 8-iO of Rethinkitig international relatiotns.

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sharply some classical questions in international relations. One is that of the right of nations to self-determination, and the conditions under which the international community recognizes such a right: despite the commitment to that principle in the UN Charter, the map of the world corresponds less to any pattern of self-determination of (already existing) peoples than to the effects of accident, war-weariness and the ability of states to create nations within frontiers so arrived at. A second classical issue that is very much on the agenda is that of conflict between great powers: we are in a situation where, for the first time in a century, military conflict between great powers is neither taking place nor being prepared for, yet it is uncertain whether this is a phase that can endure. There are those who, arguing from history as much as from logic, assert that no such abstention can last, and that the disputes over trade and influence that we already see will lead to a revival of all-out military competition and blocs.'9 Others would point to the ability of developed democratic states to manage their differences without recourse to war, or the threat thereof.20 It is far too early to be confident which of these two eventualities will prevail.Two hundred years since Kant's pages on Perpetual peace were published, this remains a vital question.

Debates on the state: globalization and individual rights

In contrast to claims that we are returning to the past, there are others who claim that we are now in a distinctly new international system, above all because of what is termed 'globalization' and the growth of'global' problems, especially ecological ones. 2' This coincides with a greater interest, on the part of analysts of international relations, in the political economy and sociology of international relations-in how the political unit, the state, interacts with the structures of economic power, and with the social trends, including those of culture, and the problems of the 'global commons' that are developing at the international level. The argument for globalization is often put: changes in world trade, finance, communications and media mean that the state has lost its power to manage, and to insulate its own societies, while old identities in terms of these separate nation-states are being eroded. We live in a world of growing

'9 Richard Rosecrance, 'A new concert of powers?', Foreign Affairs 71: 2, Spring 1992;John Mearscheimer, 'Back to the future: instability in Europe after the Cold War', International Security 15: i, Summer I990; Robert Harvey, The return of the strong (London: Macmillan, 1995). Other pessimisms include Alain Minc, Le nouveau Moyen Age (Paris: Gallimard, 1993) and Samuel Huntington, 'The clash of civilisations?', Foreign Affairs 72: 3, Summer 1993.

20 Michael Doyle,'Liberalism and world politics', American Political Science Review 80: 4, December I986; for arguments against see Robert Latham,'Democracy and war-making: locating the international liberal context', Millennium 22: 2, Summer 1993, and Raymond Cohen,'Pacific unions: a reappraisal of the theory that "democracies do not go to war with each other"', Review of International Studies 20: 3, 1994.

2' For representative discussions see Joseph Camilleri and Jim Falk, The end of sovereignty? (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1992) and Leslie Sklair, Sociology of the global system (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, I99I).

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global structures, or of transnational, but not state-related, structures that escape orthodox control. Some of this activity may be benign (the Eurodollar market); some is not (narcotics trafficking); some (pollution and the erosion of the ozone layer) may threaten our very way of life. Such ideas are not a product of the end of the Cold War, even if the breakdown of that conflict has added to them: from the I970S at least, if not since the i 840s, the theme of 'interdependence' has been much debated, with the suggestion that growing contact between developed countries at least reduces the risk of war, lowers the importance of military issues and diminishes the power of states. Awareness of the crises of the world's ecology dates from the mid-i980s, but this had nothing to do with changes in the USSR. The counter-arguments have, however, lost none of their force: that the historical novelty of all this is overstated-states traded higher percentages of their GNP before the First World War than now, and people migrated more a century ago; that states still retain considerable powers, and are developing new ones; that the shift to coalitions of states, whether formal (EU) or informal (BIS, Group of Seven, etc.), should not be confused with the dissolution of states; that as forms of globalization do develop the response of many is not to identify with new, cosmopolitan structures, but to reassert their own interests and identities-fence-building is a necessary part of peace, intone the realists. Ecological issues pose global problems, but they are not necessarily ones that can, or will, be resolved by thinking in terms of a global community, or even global interest: at best, it is above all states which must agree on, and enforce, agreements to counter the ecological crisis; at worst, or somewhere this side of worst, policies on ecology will reflect as much competition between states as consensus on the global commons.The argument on the disappearance of the state, and on 'globalization', can therefore be seen to re-present not a shared assertion of a new international system, but an exploration of the contradictory processes involved in such selective globalization, and a range of different evaluations, analytic and ethical, of what is involved.22

International relations has always had an ethical dimension, be it in debates on the ethics of war, on the rights and wrongs of intervention or the conflicting claims of states and human rights. Nothing is more prescriptive than the supposedly objective, amoral 'national interest'. What we have seen in the past few years is a strengthening of this ethical interest, as a response to several convergent factors. Human rights, as a legal and philosophical issue, has become more prominent in international debate over the past twenty years, and the issue of intervention has been posed sharply by a number of post-Cold War crises, notably in Iraq, Somalia, Haiti and formerYugoslavia. Debates on these

2' Among many critiques see the first, Kenneth Waltz, 'The myth of national interdependence', in Charles Kindelberger, ed., The internatiotial corporatiotn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971) and one of the most recent, Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson,'The problem of globalisation: international economic relations, national economic management and the formation of trading blocs', Ecotiomy atid Society 21: 4, November I992. If nothing else these arguments should cast doubt on the claim that something called Isovereignty' once existed and is now being lost.

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matters are founded on a contraposition of the morality of states, according to which it is states which are the prime ethical referent and source of order and justice, and a morality of individuals, according to which states must yield to the claims of individuals and to the implicit, egalitarian, redistributive claims arising from such individuals.23 This discussion has now intersected with another, older but now equally vibrant discussion, on the moral foundation of ethics itself-a debate in which defenders of universal, rationally based principles have increasingly been challenged by those who claim that ethics inhere only in specific human groups, communities.24 The state/individual, communitarian/universalist debates are conceptually distinct, but overlap: those who hold to the primacy of individuals would tend to support the argument that there are universalist claims that transcend any broader entity, be it nation, state or community; those who defend the rights of states could well do so on universalist principles, but in a world where nationalism, and its supposed correlate state sovereignty, have become such widespread-indeed, virtually universal-principles, the recourse to national 'tradition' and moral claims framed in national or 'traditional' terms is hard to resist: there are many governments, by no means all in the Third World, who have done so.

Expectations

Against this background, any anticipation of where the discipline of international relations is going in the next quarter century must be phrased with great caution, and must recognize the role of all three formative dimensions of the subject-the evolution of the discipline itself, developments in the other social sciences, and the course of world history. That said, some classical and pessimistic themes seem destined to remain very firmly on the agenda-war, nationalism, commercial conflict. Others will attract the attention of those at the policy end-ecology, migration, terrorism, nuclear proliferation. As already suggested, one overarching question left by the end of the Cold War, that of the prospects for peaceful collaboration between major states, allows of both a pessimistic and an optimistic response. We can envisage a future dominated by new arms races and competition for spheres of influence, with universities in a couple of decades or less providing master's programmes on the break-up of trading blocs and the remilitarization of developed societies. Rising ecological problems may lead to growing conflict between states, at the

23 For the critique of the morality of states see Beitz, Political tlheory atnd itntertnatiotial relatiotns and Thompson, Justice atnd tvorld order, for counter-arguments see Nardin, Morality atnd the relatiotis of states, and the ever-pertinent arguments of Hedley Bull in The atnarchical society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), Chs. 10-14.

24 For statements of the communitarian position see Michael Walzer, Spheres ofjustice: a defetise of pluralistm atnd equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983) and Alasdair MacIntyre, After tvirtue (London: Duckworth, 1981).

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extreme involving sanctions against countries that defy international norms, these latter reflecting all too brazenly the interests of the richer, stronger states. Alternatively, we may see the consolidation and expansion of the region of developed, demilitarized states, the zone of peace or 'Lockean heartland', where previous patterns of competitive interstate behaviour yield to new forms of cooperation.25 Even were the latter to prevail in one part of the world, however, it would leave open the question of how to conduct relations with the other, presumably non-Lockean, regions: we would still be a long way from that situation which Francis Fukuyama, citing Kojeve, was to term 'the realignment of the provinces'.26 Of central relevance here is the issue which Marxist and 'structuralist' writers above all have put on the agenda: the continued existence of economic inequalities in a world of increasing prosperity for some.Whatever the inherent ability of liberal economies to generalize their prosperity across the world, something the last two centuries of growth have failed to do, any such generalization of OECD levels is now all the more difficult because of the ecological costs of industrialization and the spread of car-owning consumerism in the Third World.

If the task of the academic study of international relations is not to anticipate these events, it can nonetheless, to a greater or lesser extent, respond to these changes in the international system and to the shifting perspectives of social science itself. Here there are four broad guidelines which might serve to orientate the discipline and to meet the criteria which were outlined above.27 In the first place, IR should not lose sight of the requirement that it be substantive, i.e. that while theory is a prerequisite, given that facts on their own are of limited utility, it should produce theories which are capable of analysing historical processes and specific issues within them: a pursuit of methodology for its own sake, divorced from the analysis of actual or historical events, will serve little purpose, except further to isolate the subject from a wider public. Issues of methodology and 'metatheory' are important for social sciences, IR included: but they should be discussed where they belong, in philosophy departments. For theory to avoid this pitfall it would do well to meet a second desideratum, namely for writers on IR to be more aware of, and for students to be more literate in, the philosophy of the social sciences in general. Part of the claim to be able to train the mind rests on the degree to which IR as a topic of study can serve to educate students in those issues of method-fact and value, explanation and generalization, causation-which are common to the

2s Max Singer and Aaron Wildavsky, The real world order: zones of peace/zones of turmoil (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, I993).

26 Francis Fukuyama, The end of history and the last man (London: Hamish Hamilton, I992). Among the many discussions of Fukuyama two are of particular interest: Lutz Niethammer's, Posthistoire: has history come to an end? (London:Verso, I992) and Perry Anderson, ed., 'The end of history', in A zone of engagement (London:Verso, I992).

27 An agenda that in some measure parallels this one, and which seeks to link IR to broad conceptions of social theory, is that ofJustin Rosenberg,'The international imagination: IR theory and "classic social analysis"', Millenniumn 23: i, Spring I994.

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social sciences: a factitious exceptionalism, whereby issues of social science methodology are debated as if they were peculiar to the subject, serves neither teaching nor methodological precision. Thirdly, the subject needs to maintain, indeed develop, its relationship with history: hitherto perhaps too concerned to distance itself from the diplomatic history from which it originally emerged, IR needs now to have a more engaged relation with history. A grounding in history is a precondition for a proper theorizing in IR. Equally, an attentive study of history may serve, paradoxically, to rescue IR from the assertion of transhistorical continuities where none exists. If one of the most interesting developments in IR is the examination of how the international system has not been continuously the same since the Pelopponesian wars, the arguments for or against this can only be made through a critical study of history itself. The same applies, a fortiori, to arguments about how 'new' or perennial patterns of contemporary interstate relations are.

Finally, the discipline can strengthen the already evident trend towards examination of the ethical issues in international relations.-8 If one of the most evident features of the contemporary public as well as academic debate is the emphasis on such ethical questions, it is equally striking how lacking in historical depth or theoretical precision these debates usually are: nearly all of the commentary on, say, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait or the Bosnian crisis has been conducted in apparently historically aware terms, as in the invocation of 'appeasement'; yet the debate on the moral issues involved-when and how to intervene, whether to accept one evil to prevent another, our obligations to help other peoples-has been conducted in a moral discourse devoid of any historical dimension. This is not, of course, to say that such a dimension would provide the answers to all moral dilemmas: it would however, serve to inform and enlighten public debate and to sharpen the choices that politicians and voters have to make.

Here, felicitously, the worlds of classical theory and of public policy debate could meet in creative interaction. It would certainly appear, on the basis of the past three-quarters of a century, and not least at this time of much confusion in the international and intellectual spheres, that they need each other as much as ever. International relations exists as an academic subject because of, and in permanent tension with, the world of history and events. This, the most enduring source of discontent, is the one that should above all others be welcomed.

28 See Ken Booth,'Human wrongs and international relations', Itnternational Affairs 7I: iJanuary I995, pp. I03-26.

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