Academe is perceived by many as an ivory tower, a place to which scholars retreat from the real world of stress and strife. To some members of the fraternity, however, it provides a crucial setting in which intellectual resources can be mobilized to attack the great ills that beset the planetâpoverty; disease; injustice; and conflict, crisis, and war. To a young Canadian student in the mid to late 1930s and early 1940s, world politics seemed distant yet compelling. The first awareness from afar was the Spanish Civil War and Munich, symbols of Western self-delusion and surrender, events that were puzzling and troubling then and long after. The years of death and destruction on a cataclysmic scale that followed, World War II (WWII), as evil forces swept through Europe and Asia challenging the foundations of a civilization which, in word if not always in deed, placed a high value on human and national rights, strengthened an emerging conviction that systematic knowledge of world politics could contribute, however modestly, to the restoration and enhancement of these values.
An initial encounter with International Relations (IR) as an academic discipline was the stimulating environment of Yale University in the mid to late 1940s, where the Realism of Nicholas Spykman (1942, 1944) and Arnold Wolfers (1940) held sway at the Institute of International Studies; where William T.R. Fox (1944), and Bernard Brodie (1946) and their colleagues, were expounding the novel concepts, The Superpowers and The Absolute Weapon; where Klaus Knorr was developing his ideas on international political economy and power (later published in 1956 and 1975); and where Hajo Holborn (1951) illuminated the diplomatic history of the inter-world war period. But even prior to that exposure at Yale, then the only university in North America offering a PhD program in IR, I had been influenced by several pioneering works in the field: Quincy Wrightâs magisterial A Study of War (1942); two seminal Realist critiques of Utopianism, E.H. Carrâs The Twenty Yearsâ Crisis (1939) and Hans Morgenthauâs Scientific Man Versus Power Politics (1946); and the first power-oriented treatise on world politics, written by a younger member of the âChicago Schoolâ, Frederick L. Schumanâs fascinating International Politics: The Western State System and the World Community (1933), then in its third (1941) edition. This initial attraction to world politics overlapped with the other early strand in a studentâs intellectual development.
It was at McGill University during the early 1940s that an undergraduate first became aware of the human condition in the colonial world, primarily through a book that cast a searchlight brilliantly on the crown jewel of the British Empire, Rajni Palme-Duttâs India Today (1940). That work, superimposed on an emerging feeling about the innate injustice of the centuries-old domination of non-white peoples by Western imperialist powers, drew one irresistibly to what later became known as the Third World. The analytical perspective of Palme-Duttâs Marxism pervaded the following years at Yale, 1946â49. Its influence continued through a first direct contact with the Indian subcontinent in 1951â52 but waned as the ideologically inspired policies advocated by Indiaâs competing Marxist, Leninist, and Maoist parties seemed increasingly irrelevant to the immense tasks confronting India and other Third World peoples in transition from tradition to modernity. Moreover, the doctrinaire mind-set that underpinned their Moscow- or Beijing-oriented postures violated the high value that I have always placed on independence of thought.
A lengthy fascination with South Asian domestic politics, IR, and history, for more than two decades, began with doctoral research on the struggle over the Indian princely State, Jammu and Kashmir, between India and Pakistan, the successors to the near-two-century British Empire of India, 1757â1947. From the perspective of more than six decades, the dissertation phase was a valuable formative experience. The original topic was very ambitious, namely, a comparative analysis of British rule in India and Palestine, with special reference to the triangular relationship among the paramount power and the two community-nations-in-the-making, Hindus and Muslims, in the subcontinent, Arabs and Jews in the Holy Land. However, ambition was excessive: the IR legacy of the âend of empireâ in South Asia, that is, the India/Pakistan conflict over Kashmir, became the focus of the entire dissertation and my first book on that unresolved conflict. To unravel the mysteries of that conflict required area specialization and field research. This seemed to me then, and over the decades, an important path to knowledge about world politics. Thus, I became immersed in the politics, economics, and international relations of South Asia throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s.
The counterpart phase of this first intellectual odyssey unfolded in teaching at McGill University and half-a-dozen books from 1953 to 1969, including a political biography of Nehru (1959) and its sequel (1966). I was drawn to the technique of biography partly by an affinity with his ideas and admiration for his roles. This work was also, as cited in the Preface to my Nehru: A Political Biography, âan attempt to view the then-still-unfinished Asian Revolution in its Indian setting. Many persons played a notable role. But only one, Jawaharlal Nehru, links the years of promise and fulfillment, of nationalist agitation and national reconstruction. Indeed, the life of Nehru is admirably suited to serve as the binding thread in a study of recent Indian history and politics. Hence, I have employed the technique of biography to shed light on political events, ideas, and movementsâ (vii). The Preface to that political biography noted four objectives of this quest for knowledge: âIf this book provides some clues to the tortuous course of recent Indian history and politics it will have served one major purpose. If it succeeds, at least in small measure, in making Nehru more intelligible to his admirers and critics alike, it will have served another. If it provides some insight into the role of the outstanding individual in history, it will have accomplished a third goal. Finally, I hope that it may contribute to the understanding of the State of mind âamong the uncommitted billionââŠ. My concern is with the living, with the actions of statesmen when and as they take place, and with their implicationsâ (viii).
Immersion in South Asiaâthree intense periods of field research (1951â52, 1955â56, 1964â65) and a dozen shorter visits, from 1951 to 1974âhad several other spin-offs for the continuing study of world politics. Perhaps the most memorable experience was a six-week journey in a third-class train compartment, sleeping bag in hand, to the furthest reaches of India, permitting daily contact with the Indian village, still the heart of its civilization. The South Asia experience also provided a stimulus for an initial foray into what became an enduring intellectual interestâinternational systems. Close observation of that regionâs international politics during the 1950s triggered a conceptualization of a subordinate system, primarily geographic in scope, with two or more actors engaged in intense interaction, conflictual and/or cooperative, and deeply penetrated by major powers from the dominant system of global politics (Brecher 1963b). A decade after its initial formulation, by which time my area interest had extended to the Middle East, the concept of system became the organizing device for an analysis of Israelâs foreign policy as a system of action (Brecher 1972). And 25 years later, after redefining an international system, it served as one of the two âlevels of analysisâ in a continuing quest for knowledge about crises in the 20th century and beyond (Brecher and Wilkenfeld 1997). This lengthy path was influenced by the seminal books of Karl Deutsch (1963) and Morton Kaplan (1957).
Another intellectual legacy of the South Asia phase was the concept of interstate protracted conflict, initially triggered by the reality of Indo/Pakistani relations, from the carnage that attended the partition of the subcontinent in 1947, through three wars (1947â48, 1965, and 1971), frequent crises, and disputes that penetrated economic, social, political, and religious domains in their early decades of independence. Yet it was not until a no-less deep encounter with the Arab/Israeli conflict in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s that the significance of interstate protracted conflict as a profound contextual influence on world politics became a major focus of later research (1984, 1997 [the latter with Jonathan Wilkenfeld], and 2016).
Another benefit of field research in South Asia was an early recognition that world politics is not synonymous with relations among the major powers, which has meant for most Western scholars the bipolar conflict between East and West from the end of WWII to the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. The centrality of the two superpowers, the USA and the USSR, I became convinced very early, is a necessary starting point for the analysis of world politics since 1945. However, in the hands of the âglobalistsâ, from Morgenthau (1948, 1951) to Stanley Hoffmann (1965, 1978, 1986), Henry Kissinger (1979, 1982), and Kenneth Waltz (1964, 1979), it became the exclusive focus of attention, as expressed, for example, in a simplistic dichotomy of international systemsâmulti-polarity (many centers of world politics, before WWII) and bipolarity (two centers, since the end of WWII).
Those who ventured forth from the ivory tower could not but be struck by the existence of another domain of interstate conflict and cooperation which, although on the periphery of the dominant system of international politics in terms of geography, military power, and economic development, is an essential component of a comprehensive paradigm of world politics. Just as the Third World became an integral part of the analytical restructuring of international political economy, so too, Polycentrism and the dispersion of decisional centers from the early 1960s onward merits recognition in a restructuring of a world politics paradigm. The failure to do so adequately led to grave distortions and lacunae in the dissection of global politics in the late 20th and early 21st centuries (Brecher and Patrick James 1988; Brecher, James and Wilkenfeld (1990), Brecher 2008).
In terms of a long association with Indian Studies, an especially gratifying contribution was my role as founder of the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute in 1965 (formally launched in 1968) (Brecher 1990). The institute began with four membersâMcGill, the University of Toronto, and of British Columbia, along with the National Library of Canada. Today, there are programs on Indian Civilization at more than 30 institutions of higher learning across the breadth of Canada and a comparable presence among Indiaâs universities.
It has been a great good fortune to live in intimate contact with diverse peoples and cultures in several lands. This began in anglophone-francophone-allophone Montreal, with its mosaic of ethnic groups. This was followed by three years at Yale in the aftermath of WWII, among older, stimulating students and a talented faculty, noted above, among them Harold Lasswell, whose earlier innovative books on the psychology of politics, such as World Politics and Personal Insecurity (1935) and Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (1936) opened up new vistas and allowed us âto drift and dreamâ in his un...