The origins of disciplinary International Relations (IR) are often said to be located in the global crises of the twin world wars of the twentieth century. The horrors of World War I fostered optimism, expressed as liberal faith in the problem-solving capacities of new international institutions like the League of Nations. World War II announced the death of these dreams and ushered in more pessimistic accounts of the human condition, often framed as incipient tragedy. Post-war scholars of IR were thereby lured away from grand projects of utopian transcendence to more hard-nosed assessments of human proclivities and possibilities. As many authors have identified, this narrative has its limits, but in its latent warnings against grand historical gestures its resonance persists. 1 Critiques of the present day in IR are infused with disaffection at attempts to make the future meaningful, less dangerous, or inevitably better. These critiques intersect with, and are bolstered by, a general impression that the international realm is consumed by a wide variety of crises, many apparently intractable. Commentators lament a sense of unfolding global catastrophe, from cyber insecurity and technological dystopia to narratives of ecological degradation; from the abandonment of migrants to the sea to the complexities of metastasising civil wars; from the resurgence of geopolitical and nuclear risks to the empowerment of demagogic forces and the widespread erosion of democracy.
The so-called liberal international order which arose after the end of World War II seems to be under particularly intense pressure. Faced with ecological, technological, economic, social and political crises, there is a growing awareness that history did not end with the fall of the Iron Curtain; we just werenât paying attention. From both left and right there emanates a strong suspicion that âthings are getting worseâ and that little can be done to prevent further deterioration. Faith in the future of the global is dissipating and may soon decompose entirely. The nation-state finds itself caught between simultaneous globalising and disaggregating economic, social and political pressures. This appears to be resulting in further erosion to the tentative architectures of global governance, along with the slowly evaporating international hegemony of the United States. Post-war hopes of a âglobal villageâ bound together in digital harmony would seem to be dying also. So too the Earth beneath our feet, its carrying capacity failing in a putative Anthropocene that reifies our role as an irresistible geochemical force. We have reached an inflection point, beyond which liesâwell, what exactly?
Perhaps this intuition of foreboding should not surprise us: IR is informed by a broad tradition in which modernity is crisis. The perpetual cycle of destruction and rebirth is central to pessimistic critiques of the Enlightenment after Adorno and Horkheimer, just as it is to reactionary traditionalism and its associated strands of cultural and racial pessimism . 2 To some extent this is because pessimism is associated with forms of historical thinking which are politically ambiguous, and which have therefore been seen as useful to thinkers of the Left or Right. 3 Pessimism has often been attached to cyclical understandings of history, in which social formations are fated to revolve endlessly back to more primitive structures. Pessimism about historical change has thus been bound up with complex intellectual histories of decadence, whose narratives of cultural decline loop inevitably back to social possibilities determined already in the romanticised past. 4 Reactionary pessimisms have been reactivated in our own time, most notably as a tool of populism . 5 For some, the âheartbroken, furiousâ knowledge that â[h]ope is precious; it must be rationedâ, is rooted in reflection upon the failures of the European revolutionary projects of the twentieth century. 6 Yet at the same time, the white nationalist right which characterises the sometimes violent rise of populism in Europe and the United States has also arisen from a sense of disaffection with the status quo and a loss of hope in the sustainability of the architectures of tradition. 7
Our age has perhaps its clearest expression in the mood of rising pessimism: pessimism as zeitgeist, as it were. It is apparent that this pervasive pessimism is inherent to various political projects and takes multiple formsâcynical, reactionary, fatalistic and acquiescent. Consistent with this attitude is the frequent association of our own time with the inter-war period in Europe, when, as Richard Overy observes, pessimism was âhighly contagiousâ. 8 For IR, this has important consequences. Principally, can contemporary pessimism serve our intellectual project without collapse into fatalism, cynicism, acquiescence or reaction? Part of the answer must relate to how IR views the potential for any form of emancipatory progress. Pessimism tends to cleave towards regressive readings of change. In IR, the loss of hope in the future of the liberal order, and in social science , might easily be tied up with a loss of hope in disciplinary progress itself, thereby evoking a âpostâ-critical project. 9 Pessimistic rejections of the liberal historiography recurrent in Critical IR resonate uncomfortably with the pessimisms articulated by reactionary movements worldwide, particularly those which claim globalised liberalism is little more than a cover for imperialism or cultural colonialism, as evidenced in recent diatribes by the likes of Steve Bannon, Vladimir Putin and Viktor OrbĂĄn. Pessimism in IR is imbricated with a wider loss of faith in modernity and even in democratic political engagement. It may thus place the critical project in IR scholarship, itself often rooted in anti-liberalism, into inadvertent alliances with nostalgic anti-modernism and nationalist populist statism.
Why Now?
The context for this edited volume, then, is the pessimistic mood which seems to have captured contemporary international politics. Pessimism about the international, as in other areas of social science , has often been regarded as a disreputable attitude to the human condition, incapable of generating positive social and political programmes. 10 Pessimism, after all, is supposed to have an inimical relationship to hope. Key theories of IRâincluding realism, liberalism and critical theoryâare riven with pessimistic readings of human nature and of history, yet the character and possibilities of their pessimisms are too rarely interrogated or disassembled. The loose group assembled under the label of Critical IR has been defined by a rejection of transcendent projects in the name of a progressive vision. Pulling out from the broader critical tradition that rejects transcendent thought in light of the experience of World War II, Critical IR has long been pessimistic about the promise of social science precisely so as to advance human emancipation. 11 In IR today, pessimism as an intellectual mode is particularly widespread and distributed across intellectual traditions declaiming the collapse of the liberal order. Realist, critical, poststructuralist, post- and de-colonial critiques of IR are all inflected with pessimism about the future, and about the promise of the extant liberal order were it to survive.
This raises the question of whether IR as a discipline may be too rooted in pessimism or even perhaps irrevocably tied to it. Is pessimism fundamentally opposed to the loftier intellectual ambitions of IRâa hope to end or limit war, a hope to better manage global resources, or a hope to foster more international cooperation in protecting the rights of the individualâin giving rise to conservativism and suggesting a range of agency-eroding qualities? Has pessimism been IRâs inescapable condition of possibility? If our answer to the latter query is in the affirmative, this raises important questions for the field. How can we escape the risks of fatalism and complacency that can attend pessimisms? How does pessimistic critique relate to the hope that has been central to the modern tradition since the Enlightenment, and how may this be linked to nostalgic or reactionary critiques of the modern which have returned in force today? How can we or others deploy pessimism about the world to give us hope? One set of issues here relates to whether pessimism can be a resource or is always a limit to any intellectual endeavour. Pessimism appears to be bound up with an unravelling of ontology, which is to say an unwinding of faith in the liberal institutions and attitudes that were previously relied upon to govern IR. Is pessimism then a door to new ways of being and seeing the international? Might pessimism re-animate emancipatory international political projects? IR has always sought to make the future meaningful. To ask what pessimism means specifically for IR scholars and scholarship, and in particular those working in the critical tradition, is also to ask: Is the discipline of IR doing well in the face of apparent global breakdown on all fronts? Is it in need of a good dose of pessimism about itself? After all, a certain pessimism about knowledge itself is part of the energy which drives all intellectual growth and opens up new avenues for thought and theoretical production.
This edited volume examines how the analysis of pessimism in IR might proceed, and we hope will launch a wider research agenda which takes these questions forward. It is likely that we as IR scholars, and the ways in which we have developed as a discipline, have some responsibility for the causes of contemporary pessimism. This would suggest that the pervasiveness of a pessimistic mood today is a resource that IR can and must channel or seek to capture in developing its future analyses and intellectual efforts. If pessimism has unique power in thinking about the state of the world today, perhaps IR scholars have particular responsibility to be pessimistic, so that there can be hope. No doubt, pessimists are part of the crisis of our time. Pessimism can and does act as an excuse for intellectual failure, as well as a justification for unpalatable politics. It is clear th...