Introduction to International Relations, An

Philip Alan Reynolds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315504155
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A classic textbook on international relations updated to take account of recent research and the consequences of the end of the cold war. Covers both foreign policy analysis and the international environment. Introduces students to methodology and international relations and looks at the important role now played by multinational corporations and at the independences that have formed in the last two decades.

PART I

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

What is International Relations?

Knowledge is a unity. Total understanding of any aspect of existence is impossible without total understanding of all other aspects. So man cannot achieve more than partial understanding of anything, though this partial understanding may often be sufficient for all practical purposes of behaviour, decision and action. But even this partial understanding may be achieved only by breaking the universe of knowledge into pieces the size of which the human mind is able to comprehend and manipulate. The further the range of mankind’s knowledge is extended, the more difficult it becomes for a single mind to be master of more than a diminishing segment of it. Hence the increasing fragmentation of knowledge in past decades, the emergence of ever more, and ever narrower, specialisms. Yet the expansion of knowledge has brought with it heightened awareness of the interrelatedness of the segments into which it is artificially divided. It is thus widely recognized that narrowing specialisms cause loss of opportunities for greater understanding.

A solution to this problem is as yet hard to conceive, although it may well come from the mechanical storing of facts and information on a gigantic scale, with virtually instant access as required, thus freeing the human mind to work on principles and hypotheses and their interrelationships. So far as international relations is concerned, the assembling of relevant information and data has not yet proceeded very far, although the size of the data bank that might eventually be needed is beginning to be perceived.

The purpose of the foregoing is to make the obvious point that any delimitation of a field of knowledge which is then called international relations involves the making of arbitrary divisions: by some not absurd definitions of international relations the whole of human behaviour would fall within its field; and since human behaviour is affected by the physical, chemical and biological conditions of its environment, an attempt fully to explain, and not simply to describe, international relations so defined would have to range over the totality of human knowledge.

The ancient Greek philosophers did indeed do almost that. The political treatises of Plato and Aristotle derived from intellectual contexts that included all the scientific, aesthetic and spiritual understanding that was available in the Greek world. There certainly was not any suggestion of the division into ‘political theory’ (concerned with the purposes for which people organize themselves into political groups, and the kinds of organization best adapted to serve these purposes) and ‘government’ (concerned with study of the different ways in which people do in fact order their political affairs in a variety of social and cultural contexts) which has been characteristic of much political science (if science is an appropriate word) in this century. Still less were there any separate conceptions of human behaviour which might be labelled ‘sociology’, or ‘economies’, or ‘international relations’. When the attempt is made, therefore, to define a field of study which may be called international relations, it is made in the knowledge that the definition is arbitrary and is also, in terms of human history, of very recent origin. The purpose of the attempt at definition is to delimit an area of human behaviour which will be small enough to be intellectually manageable and which will exclude as little as possible of other aspects or conditions of human behaviour which are significantly relevant to it.

This attempt is new. It is of course true that many of the historic political thinkers, Dante, Machiavelli, Grotius, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Marx and Lenin among them, had much to say that is of relevance to what is now called international relations; but their observations were almost all directed to particular purposes, whether to advance the interest of a ruler (Machiavelli), to reduce or eliminate organized armed violence among human groups, usually known as war (Rousseau, Kant), or to stimulate and sharpen class conflict and so advance towards the historic goal of communism (Lenin). What they had to say, in other words, was based on various ethical assumptions, and they prescribed behaviour in order to achieve purposes presumed to be desirable.

This method and approach continued in the first decades of this century. The stimulus to new enquiry came from the horror and seemingly senseless slaughter of the first world war. Man’s capacity for mass murder had reached such a level that the need to discover means of preventing such organized armed violence in the future seemed imperative. This was the inspiration of the work first undertaken, under the title of international politics, at Aberystwyth in Wales, soon to be followed in London and in many United States universities under the name of international relations, subsequently in Scandinavia, and more slowly on the mainland of Europe. The purpose of the study was to find ways of organizing peace; states ought to behave in accordance with the same moral principles that guided individual conduct; in order to encourage, persuade or compel them to do this the common interest of the peoples of the world in peace and prosperity should be given institutional expression on a global scale. The assumptions were that the foundations of group morality are the same as the foundations of individual morality, that a global common interest in peace existed, and that the way to preserve peace was to create international institutions.

These assumptions came under devastating attack first from the evidence of human behaviour, and secondly from academic analysts led by E. H. Carr¹ and Hans J. Morgenthau.² No political system commands total support of all its members all the time; but for any system to survive it must command the active support of some politically significant members some of the time, the acquiescence of most members most of the time, and a residual coercive power to constrain the remainder or to handle temporary crises. In the global system none of the politically significant members was prepared to give active support to international institutions that limited their sovereignty, few of the other members were prepared to acquiesce in directions given by such institutions, and few were prepared to assign residual coercive power to them. The creation of institutions when the conditions necessary to their success were absent was bound to end in failure and disillusion. Moreover peoples all over the world saw themselves primarily as Frenchmen or Japanese or Egyptians, not as citizens of the world community of mankind, and they expected their rulers to advance the interests, the influence and wealth of ‘France’, ‘Japan’ and ‘Egypt’. There might be different interpretations of what these interests were, and how they best might be advanced; but this was what rulers were there for and this was what they ought to try to do. It therefore did not follow that moral principles which might be appropriate for individual behaviour must also be appropriate for state behaviour: the business of state governors was to promote the interests of their peoples as best they might in the world as it was.

There was not, in other words, a common interest in peace – or at least no such common interest was universally perceived. To the peoples of the United States, or Britain, or France, who were reasonably prosperous, were politically influential, and were able to get or had got much of what they wanted (even if this was, as in the United States case, merely to be left alone), it was preferable that things should remain much as they were; but to the peoples (or at least the leaders) of the Soviet Union, of Nazi Germany, or of India, the world was not the kind of place that they wanted it to be. The Soviets were changing their own society, and thought that the rest of the world had to be similarly changed; the Germans resented their defeat in war, resented the constraints and territorial losses that the treaties of 1919 had imposed upon them, and thought – at least some of them did – that they were a superior race with a right and duty to rule the world; the Indians were beginning to be aware of, and to chafe at, their colonial status. If war was the best or the only way of changing the world, then war it must be. International peace and security, that is to say (as Morgenthau put it), is the ideology of satisfied powers.³

The second world conflict, after an interval of only twenty years, was taken to show the inadequacy of previous assumptions. The study of international relations now moved from consideration of the best ways of doing what it had been mistakenly assumed everyone wanted to do, to consideration of what peoples really wanted, why they were organized into particular kinds of groups, and why these groups corporately behaved in the way they did. Defined in this way international relations could be seen to subsume all the established or developing social sciences – sociology, social anthropology, economics, demography, political science, human geography, psychology and social psychology – not to mention the support required from moral and political philosophy, history and law.

Clearly such a study would not meet the requirement of manageability. Equally clearly the study of global relationships has become of steadily increasing importance as science and its technological applications have brought peoples round the world into closer and closer contact with each other. The past forty years have accordingly seen the emergence of numerous theories aimed at determining the significant elements or variables in these relationships in order that the mass of data may be organized in ways that will be meaningful and so will help understanding of what happens and why.

Until recently the theories fell into two main categories. The first of these contained theories and methods of analysis which focused on the behaviour of those individuals, groups, or organizations that are major actors on the international stage. This may be called micro-international relations. In the second category were theories which conceived international relations as sets of interactions of many different kinds and which concerned themselves primarily with the nature of the interactions and their interrelationships, and how and why and in what senses they changed or remained stable. This may be called macro-international relations. Parts II and III of this book follow this distinction between micro and macro, but Part IV goes beyond the distinction and explores the work of more recent analysts who take the view that the distinction excessively misrepresents the world as it has developed in the past two decades.

Before going further it may be worthwhile to compare the study so conceived with diplomatic or international history, and politics or political science, two studies which are closely linked to international relations but which differ in their methods or in the questions to which they seek answers.

Historians recognize that their approach to the problems they find interesting, and the issues and the evidence that they select as being significant, will be much influenced by the social context within which they have themselves developed; but they will none the less endeavour to present, within the framework of their interests, as objective an account as they can of the course and cause of events in the period or problem which they are studying. They may or may not attempt to draw from their study lessons that they think appropriate (Burnet described his intention as being ‘to give such a discovery of errors in government, and of the excesses and follies of parties, as may make the next age wiser by what I tell them of the last’⁴), but they will not normally endeavour to quarry historical records and sources in order to produce general statements about human behaviour which are universally applicable. Many students of international relations are, however, concerned to do precisely this. Many, not all. Some maintain that human behaviour is so individual, irrational and inconsistent as to be unpredictable, and the pretence to establish ‘laws’ is accordingly spurious and dangerously misleading.⁵ In terms of achievements in this direction so far, and of the excessive claims that have sometimes been made, the argument is not without force. But the argument is occasionally misdirected. In some senses historical events are unique, but all have aspects which are similar or comparable, and the task is correctly to identify the recurrent variables. It remains unlikely that an individual response to a particular situation will ever be predictable; but it is much less unlikely that the various consequences of different courses of action, or the general outcome of a set of interactions, may become predictable with a sufficient degree of probability attached to the prediction to make it worth having. To borrow an analogy used in a different context: ‘I know that if I have a kettle of water at 100 degrees centigrade, it will be boiling. I know also in terms of the amount of heat I am applying to the kettle of water in the form of the gas underneath it, the rate at which molecules of water will be converted to molecules of steam…. But when I look at the separate molecules of water, each of which is at 100 degrees centigrade, I have no way of predicting which will be the next molecule of water to transform into steam.’⁶ In fact, when Professor Rivett in that quotation said, ‘I know’, he meant ‘Innumerable experiments have confirmed the hypothesis that under certain conditions the application of a certain amount of heat to water will convert it to steam, and thus have established so high a degree of probability that it will happen that I can act on the assumption that it will and for all practical purposes can say “I know”.’ But no scientific ‘law’ offers more than probability, for all involve some approximations or exclude some variables, and no number of demonstrations in the past that two variables interacted in a certain way can prove that they must interact in that way in the future. The problem in the social sciences (which may be insoluble) is whether, and if so how, significant variables may be identified, and having identified them, how they may be specified with adequate precision, and hypothesized relationships among them tested in order to establish a sufficient degree of probability for action to be based on the hypothesis. I shall return to this problem in the latter part of the book.⁷

Thus the work of some scholars in the field of international relations (those indeed who initially brought most enlightenment to the subject) is not altogether dissimilar to that of some historians; but the work of others is wholly different in object and method.⁸ The comparison with politics is of another kind. As the study of politics has grown, so has the number of definitions of it. Quincy Wright differentiated four: the art of operating the state, the government, or a party; the art of organizing group power, or will, or unity; the art of achieving group ends against the opposition of other groups; the art of making group decisions.⁹ John Plamenatz introduced the normative element when he wrote about the systematic examination of how governments ought to behave and what their purposes are (the study also including theories about how and why institutions and governments behave as they do, a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface to the First Edition
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the Third Edition
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Micro-international Relations
• Part III Macro-international Relations
• Part IV Micro—macro Linkages
• Further Reading
• Index