Rethinking International Relations Theory

Martin Griffiths

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781350311688
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

International Relations (IR) theory has seen a proliferation of competing, and increasingly trenchant, worldviews with no consensus on how to evaluate their relative strengths and weakness. This innovative new text provides an original interpretation of how best to navigate the clash of perspectives in contemporary IR theory. The book provides a systematic overview of the main worldviews – such as realism, liberalism, and constructivism – and their associated theoretical underpinnings. Placing liberal internationalism at the heart of the debate, it argues that the main division in IR theory is between liberal internationalism and its critics. Griffiths examines both the strengths and weaknesses of liberal internationalism as a worldview, and also explores the competing worldviews that have been generated by the perceived flaws of this perspective. Examination of crucial policy issues is incorporated throughout the text, restoring the relevance of theory for those who wish to understand those policy issues. Moreover, this book revitalises the raison d'être of contemporary IR theory and shows the role it can play in making sense of the twenty-first century.

1

Introduction: Conquest, Coexistence and IR Theory

As an academic field of study, International Relations (IR) became an autonomous area of inquiry in 1919 when the University of Wales created its Department of International Politics and Georgetown University in the United States (US) created its Department of International Relations. The field was (and to some extent still is) devoted to the explicit study of how the system of states could be made to work more effectively to enhance the power of law, peacefully manage interstate affairs, preserve order and minimize the prospects of war. The words ‘relations’ or ‘affairs’ (as in ‘foreign affairs’) are meant to signify that the field encompasses more than just politics. The field is closely tied, administratively if not academically, to political science departments (and in some cases history or law departments, from which IR can be said to have originated, particularly from the subfields of diplomatic history and international law, although international economics might also be added to the chronology). In most universities, IR is simply treated as a subdiscipline of political science, or is part of a policy studies degree, a public administration degree, a peace studies degree or a security studies degree. Sometimes the labels of ‘foreign affairs’ or ‘international studies’ are preferred by those who shun the IR label as insufficiently ‘interdisciplinary’. IR is, however, a heterogeneous area of study. It has borrowed and will continue to borrow ideas from fields as diverse as sociology, philosophy, psychology and cultural studies. Moreover, IR has always been a policy-oriented discipline. The field seeks not only to analyse foreign policy (especially American foreign policy) but to help formulate it. This has led, as one might imagine, to various debates (sometimes called ‘great’ debates) about ways of thinking in IR. The content and character of those debates have divided the core of the discipline (IR theory) into a diverse number of competing schools of thought, or, as I shall call them, ‘worldviews’.

This book is a critical examination of the main worldviews that underpin contemporary International Relations theory. In this introductory chapter, I explore both the reasons for such diversity and two responses to it, which I will term ‘conquest’ and ‘coexistence’. The first response, conquest, opposes diversity and seeks to overcome it by privileging one particular worldview. The other, coexistence, is one that finds no good reason to privilege any particular worldview, and attributes a positive value to diversity and pluralism.

The chapter proceeds as follows. First, I provide a brief, and fairly conventional, overview of the main worldviews in IR: realism and liberalism. Second, I distinguish between two dimensions of a worldview, and between worldviews and empirical theories that either support or undermine them. Third, I provide a brief historical overview to account for the proliferation of worldviews in the field and the lack of consensus regarding the appropriate criteria for comparing and evaluating the merits of competing worldviews. Fourth, I set out the main arguments associated with conquest and coexistence between competing worldviews. Finally, I set out my own argument. I claim that one particular theoretical perspective in the study of international relations, liberal internationalism, dominates IR theory, and that its strengths and weaknesses constitute the central and enduring great debate of IR theory. Understood in this way, the book ‘rethinks’ IR theory as both pluralistic and dialogical.

Realism, Liberalism and the Rest

A worldview is a broad interpretation of the world and an application of this view to the way in which we judge and evaluate activities and structures that shape the world. ‘In simpler terms, our worldview is a view of the world and a view for the world’ (Phillips and Brown 1991: 29). Writers use different terms to refer to the various worldviews that vie for dominance in the field, but there is little doubt that realism and liberalism are the dominant worldviews.

Realism

The worldview of classical realism (sometimes called the ‘power politics’ school) is derived from the following works: Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (written approximately 500 BC); the ancient Greek Thucydides (History of the Peloponnesian War, 431 BC); Machiavelli (The Prince, 1513); Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651); Rousseau (The State of War, 1755); Clausewitz (On War, 1827); E.H. Carr (The Twenty Years Crisis, 1939); and Hans Morgenthau (Politics among Nations, 1948). Other contributors of note would include Cardinal de Richelieu who, during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), coined the phrase raison d’état, a French term meaning a state’s goals and ambitions (synonymous with the phrase ‘national interest’); and Otto von Bismarck, who coined the term Realpolitik (German for ‘politics of reality’) as the Iron Chancellor of Germany from 1871 to 1890. Famous ‘realist’ phrases include ‘the strong do what they can and the weak do what they must’ (Thucydides) and ‘better feared than loved’ (Machiavelli). Morgenthau’s (2005[1948]) book is regarded as a classic in the field, and Henry Kissinger is usually credited with introducing classical realism into American foreign policy from 1969 to 1977 as US national security advisor and secretary of state. Morgenthau’s (2005[1948]) definition of power is probably the most commonly cited meaning of the term across all social sciences: power as the possession of control or command over others, the will to make others do what one desires.

Morgenthau’s theory of realism in international relations is based on a synthesis of six principles, as follows (2005: 4): international relations are governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature; the main signpost of political realism is the concept of interest defined in terms of power; interest defined as power is an objective category which is universally valid, although its exact meaning may change with time and circumstance; there is an irreducible tension between morality and the requirements of successful political action; political realism refuses to identify the moral aspirations of a particular nation with the moral laws that govern the universe; finally, international politics is an autonomous sphere that needs to be analysed as an entity, without being subordinated to any other sphere of human concern.

Realism is a powerful worldview, made up of a series of assumptions about how states and the international system work. A few major assumptions are central to realism. First, realists assume that the international system lacks a central authority and that individual states are the system’s primary actors. Second, in this anarchic context, all states are centrally concerned with their safety and survival, and set about trying to secure them in the most efficient way they know how. Third, whether for that security-seeking reason or as the result of predatory agendas, states sometimes have territorial ambitions towards other states and are prepared to use force to act on them. These core assumptions go a long way to establishing a way of seeing the world, but they do not specify a number of things. They do not, for example, tell us how countries do or should measure levels of threat to their safety or survival, nor do they identify the most effective strategies for addressing a given level of threat. Moreover, they do not specify exactly how states do or should feel about interstate cooperation. And they tell us very little about the behaviour of non-state actors. Different variants of realist thinking are distinguished by the supplementary assumptions they add to address these and other issues.

Liberalism

As a worldview, classic liberalism is most directly traceable to John Locke (1632–1704), the French philosopher Voltaire (1694–1778) and American founding father Thomas Paine (1737–1809), but most scholars would agree that Locke should probably come first in importance. In contrast to conservatism, the meaning of the word ‘liberal’ traditionally refers to someone who is free, noble and generous, and has a commitment to tolerance and individuals’ right to self-determination. In general, liberals usually defend constitutional government, representative democracy and the collective rule of law. Their core beliefs tend to derive primarily from the idea that free individuals (if given economic and intellectual liberty) can and should form the basis of political order, without the need for government regulation, other than the government’s responsibility to protect the individuals making up that order. Adam Smith (1723–90) expressed Lockean theory as laissez faire economics, where individuals structure moral and economic life without direction, enlightened self-interest harmonizes with the public good (the ‘invisible hand’) and countries which leave individuals free to follow their own initiative would be the strongest. Liberal internationalism is the name given to strands of thought connected with ‘commercial’ liberalism (the linking of free trade with peace), ‘republican’ liberalism (the linking of democracy and peace) and ‘regulatory’ liberalism (theories of international cooperation), and opposed to anti-capitalist ideologies such as Marxism and some variants of critical theory.

The four core beliefs of liberal internationalism in IR include the following. First, peace can best be secured through the spread of democratic institutions on a worldwide basis. Second, liberalism holds that state preferences, rather than state capabilities, are the primary determinants of state behaviour. Preferences may vary from state to state, depending on culture, economic system and type of government. Governments make war, however, not people, so the best hope for peace is democracy (as the highest form of expressing the popular will of the people who will surely choose peace – a self-evident proposition based on reason and natural law). Third, the rule of law is just as applicable to states as it is to people, and a voluntary system of international organizations ought to exist fulfilling the functions of a legislature, an executive and, most of all, a judiciary, while preserving tolerance for as much freedom and independence among states as possible. Fourth, just as it is always possible to identify aggressors and belligerents, it should always be possible to put together an effective coalition of law-abiding states to oppose such violators. Liberal internationalism is therefore part of the ideational foundation on which organizations such as the League of Nations and the United Nations were built.

And just as one can distinguish between different types of realism, so one can distinguish between different strands of liberal internationalism. A key distinction is between those liberals who are interventionist and liberals who are non-interventionist. The first school, interventionists, believes, as did Woodrow Wilson (US President from 1913 to 1921), that war on behalf of the liberal ideal may occasionally be necessary to rid the world of illiberal and persistent opponents. Although progress is historically inevitable, sometimes it is necessary to help it out. Liberal interventionists are especially opposed to totalitarianism in all its forms. The second school, non-interventionists, believes that liberalism should spread on the basis of historical inevitability alone, without any help by its adherents, particularly its most prominent proponent, the United States of America. Non-interventionism should not be confused with isolationism, however, whereby the latter is technically the avoidance of alliances altogether. Instead, non-interventionists usually advocate containment for the ultimate defeat of the enemies of liberalism, whether they are authoritarian states or terrorists.

Worldviews and Theories in IR

As can be seen from the brief sketch of the two main worldviews of realism and liberalism in the study of international relations, worldviews have two interdependent dimensions. The first dimension is ontological. Simply put, worldviews contain fundamental assumptions and presuppositions about the constitutive nature of international relations. Such assumptions or beliefs are our most fundamental thoughts about the nature of ‘reality’ in this particular domain or field of activity. As Dessler (1989: 445) points out, ‘an ontology is a structured set of entities. It consists not only of certain designated kinds of things but also of connections or relations between them.’ Worldviews do not reflect the world. Rather, they represent it, as it were, constraining our vision but also enabling us to develop a language of concepts and terms that in turn makes it possible to talk intelligibly about international relations. As Gunnell (1987: 34) argues, worldviews ‘are not instruments for understanding given objects. To describe, explain, or evaluate something is to appeal, at least implicitly, to an articulation of what kind of thing it is.’ The second dimension of worldviews is evaluative, providing the basis for judging and prescribing institutional arrangements and principles of conduct with regard to or within the parameters of international relations. The importance of the distinction, and the relationship between ontology and advocacy, has been noted by the philosopher Charles Taylor (1989: 160) in the context of political theory.

On the one hand, they are distinct, in that taking a position on one does not force your hand on the other. On the other hand, they are not completely independent, in that the stand one takes on the ontological level can be part of the essential background of the view one advocates … taking an ontological position does not amount to advocating something; but at the same time, the ontological does help to define the options which it is meaningful to support by advocacy. This latter connection explains how ontological theses can be far from innocent.

Thus if one believes that international relations take place in an environment that requires states to maximize their power relative to other states, as some realists argue, it makes little sense to advocate cooperation among states if this requires them to act against their core interests. Similarly, if one believes that international relations are structured in ways that systematically impede any attempt to moderate the inequities of global capitalism, as some Marxists argue, then ‘free trade’ will be seen simply as a way to avoid focusing on the real problem.

Worldviews are not empirical theories, although these terms are often conflated in the field of IR. An empirical theory is an explanation of an event, or – more usually – of a pattern of events. Why did the United States invade Iraq in 2003? Why do wars take place? Why are some countries rich and others poor? To engage with such questions is to enter the world of empirical IR theory. In contrast, worldviews shape the questions we ask, and provide some of the key interpretive concepts that are employed to build theories. But they are not identical. A worldview is a distinctive set of ideas and arguments about international relations. Each worldview examined in this book embodies a discrete set of concerns, for example security, wealth, liberty or social justice. Each worldview also sustains, and is reinforced by, a body of causal reasoning about how international relations work, particularly in ways deemed relevant to explaining the identified concerns. Each worldview thus highlights certain types of issues, actors, goals and types of relationships while ignoring or deemphasizing others.

The explicit recognition of an allegedly broad diversity of worldviews has only emerged over the past decade or so (see, in particular, Dunne et al. 2010; Steans and Pettiford 2005). For much of the twentieth century, what Smith (1995: 7) calls a ‘typology of the discipline … a way of pronouncing on what are the “key” debates and positions within it’ not only silenced or marginalized particular worldviews, but also distorted those worldviews that were accepted as legitimate members of whatever typology was popular at a particular point in time. A good example of the distorting impact of typologies on the worldviews contained within them is the complex history of political realism, which most scholars identify as the dominant worldview in IR theory. Realism contains an identifiable set of core principles, but the realist worldview is itself an ideal-type, and it is important to recognize the limitations of trying to ‘fix’ the status of realism within a discipline whose very identity as a social science is continually debated. An ideal-type is an abstract construct that extracts and reproduces the main elements in a diverse body of literature. As such, it is not a mirror image of that literature, and it is not obvious how best to engage in the process of extraction and reproduction. It depends on the kinds of problems being investigated, the research interests of those who engage in the process and the context within which realism is contrasted to other competing approaches to the study of international relations. That context is not itself static, nor is it uncontested. If, therefore, one should be wary of the ways in which IR has framed its debates in the past, and if the proliferation of worldviews in recent years is partly a consequence of the failure of any single disciplinary ‘self-image’ to generate sufficient consensus in the field about the relevant criteria for adjudicating between worldviews, are we left with a mere Babel of global voices? On what basis is one worldview superior to the others? Must we even choose? And, if we must choose, is the conversation over? These questions dominate discussions of contemporary IR theory. Two broad responses are available, conquest or coexistence.

Conquest or Coexistence?

The first response is self-evident. One worldview is right and the others are wrong. Or we could express it in more subtle terms: each worldview may generate interesting insights, but one of them is far superior to the others. It is certainly not difficult to find numerous attempts to defend a particular worldview by attempting to demolish its competitors. Often such ‘demolition derbies’ make for entertaining reading, but they usually generate more heat than light. As Holsti remarks (2001: 86), ‘uncivil wars among scholars, like those within states, tend to be long, nasty and brutish’. A plurality of worldviews is simply a fact in the study of international relations. There are three main reasons for this.

First, the subject matter of international relations is simply vast. War, demographic change, state-making, global warming, unequal development, nationalism, the ‘war on terror,’ international organization, shifts in power between the United States and China – the central issue or problem that should dominate the research agenda in this field is by no means clear. It is worth recalling that IR – as an autonomous field of study in political science – is a twentieth-century invention that began on the margins of the broader study of politics. As Armstrong (1995: 362) observes, it developed as a distinct discipline ‘both as a response to events like the two World Wars and the Cold War and because there were certain phenomena – war, diplomacy, strategy, international law, the balance of power, the numerous ramifications of sovereignty – that were inadequately, or not at all, treated elsewhere in the social sciences’.

If the problem of war was the chief justification for a separate discipline of IR, generating a hierarchy of issues for the discipline to study, that is no longer the case in the twenty-first century. Today, a whole host of issues compete for our attention, and it could be argued that one reason for the proliferation of worldviews is the proliferation of issues that each worldview seeks to privilege. Thus for realists, war between states remains the central problem. For liberal internationalists, the unequal distribution of political freedom for individuals is the problem. For Marxists, the central issue is the injustice of global capitalism and the stratification of class on a global scale. For critical theorists, it is the needless suffering caused not just by capitalism but also other dynamics of modernity at the global level (see Roach 2008). Constructivists focus less on substantive issues than on the broader problem of how changes in states’ identities and interests can shift the culture of international relations from one of conflict to one of cooperation. Members of the ‘English School’ are broadly united by a shared concern with the history, dynamics and future of something called ‘international society’. Feminists are inspired by the ideal of gender equality, and outraged by the globa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction: Conquest, Coexistence and IR Theory
• 2 Liberal Internationalism
• 3 Democratization: Republican Liberalism versus Commercial Liberalism
• 4 Self-Determination: Republican Liberalism versus Regulatory Liberalism
• 5 International Organization: Commercial Liberalism versus Regulatory Liberalism
• 6 The Conservative Critique: Realism
• 7 The Radical Critique: Critical Theory and Cosmopolitanism Critical Theory
• 8 Middling, Meddling, Muddling? Three Via Medias
• 9 Conclusions
• References
• Index