Great Debates in International Relations: A Short Introduction
International relations, considered as a discipline, is articulated through different great debates that explain its historical evolution. That’s what we’re discussing here.
Today, I want to speak to you about the historical evolution of the international relations discipline. Most IR handbooks don’t address this matter; instead, they provide a conceptual approach by discussing different theories. There is nothing wrong with that, but we shouldn’t dismiss the historical dimension of the discipline if we want to get the big picture. After all, we’re dealing with events in the theoretical field that we can’t separate from their historical and international context. Otherwise, we would overlook the specific conditions in which these debates arose.
Although I have already commented on this topic on another occasion, now I want to go into more detail and expand the discussion I started in the last video.
So, I’m going to address the four great debates and provide a general idea of each stage of the discipline in its historical evolution.
The structure of this analysis is straightforward: four debates. I’ll discuss them one by one, and at the end, I’ll consider the current situation of the discipline.
The first debate
The first debate was between liberals and realists. That is an a posteriori categorization because these authors weren’t known by those names at the time. However, it’s a useful distinction to discuss the beginning of the discipline.
In this respect, it’s important to stress the fact that the Great War had changed the international stage completely. Such a traumatic experience made Western elites aware of the need to prevent another carnage. For this reason, the Woodrow Wilson Chair was launched at the University of Wales. That was the outset of the IR discipline, which aimed to educate the political elite in a culture of peace. Similar initiatives took place in other countries and faculties, and a new community of scholars specialized in international affairs was born.
The leading figures of this initiative held a pacifist stance and were firm advocates of the peaceful resolution of conflicts between countries. They considered international law and international organizations the most suitable means to prevent war. They believed in good faith to reach agreements and solve international disputes. For all of this, they were considered utopians and liberals. Moreover, they thought peace would come about through the replacement of the classical balance of power that dominated international affairs by a system of collective security, which included the idea of the rule of law. In this way, states would transfer domestic concepts and practices to the international sphere. Central here was a commitment to the nineteenth-century belief that humankind could make political progress by using reasoned debate to develop common interests.
This point of view may be considered naïve, as it was by their intellectual opponents, namely, realist authors. That is the case of Edward Carr, the British diplomat, who pointed out the weakness of this stance. In this way, he became a forerunner of contemporary realism.
We can’t deny the good intentions of those authors and scholars who set up IR as a separate academic subject. The desire to avoid another catastrophic mistake like the Great War was a deep concern, and it boosted their efforts to prevent humankind from repeating such a stark scenario. All of this was a powerful stimulus to develop what we now call liberalism in IR theory.
The main conclusion liberal authors drew from the Great War to develop their point of view was the failure of the theory of the balance of power. They thought such an obsolete theory had led the world to war. The international system based on military alliances had provoked that carnage. They believed they knew how to prevent another war: by reforming the international system and the domestic structures of autocratic countries. To do so, they considered it necessary to expand democratic and liberal values to establish democratic systems worldwide. These ideas were summarized in President Wilson’s Fourteen Points. From then on, scholars, politicians, and other influential individuals developed them in academia, but also in the international realm with the foundation of the League of Nations.
In sum, the idealist intellectuals’ stance can be summarized as follows: it’s the conviction that, through a rational and intelligently designed international organization, it should be possible to put an end to warfare. And by doing so, it would be possible to achieve permanent peace.
Nevertheless, realist authors disagreed with this point of view, as they strongly believed power politics ruled international affairs and that every state pursued its national interest above anything else.
They confronted their view with the idealist stance in the 1930s when the international situation was sliding towards a new war. If liberals advocated appeasing the imperialist aspirations of totalitarian regimes, realists put forward a quite different approach. In this way, Carr was the sharpest critic of liberal IR thinkers. He argued that these thinkers misread the facts of history and misunderstood the nature of international relations. Insofar as liberals believed relations could be developed based on the harmony of interest between countries and people, they were completely wrong.
On the contrary, Carr stated that we should assume there are profound conflicts of interest both between countries and between people. So, the fact that some people and some countries are better off than others is clear evidence that they will try to preserve and defend their position. As a result, international relations are about the struggle between such conflicting interests.
Carr was probably the most remarkable realist author before WWII. Still, others had an important and long-lasting influence, such as Hans Morgenthau. Morgenthau made an outstanding contribution to developing realist theory. In this respect, he based his view on human nature as the foundation of international relations. Humans, he argued, are self-interested and power-seeking, which makes aggression a likely outcome.
Naturally, the international background to draw such a conclusion was favorable. Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, alongside militarist Japan in the Far East, were clear evidence that led these authors to hold this view. Then, international relations became understood as a permanent struggle for power. As Morgenthau himself said, whatever the ultimate aims of international politics, power is always the immediate aim. That is because there is no world government, and anarchy prevails in world politics. Facts seemed to confirm this perspective in the 1930s and 1940s.
In sum, realist authors reached the opposite conclusion to liberals: the pursuit of balance of power is the best way to preserve peace and prevent war.
The second debate
The first great debate finished with WWII. After 1945, and more specifically in the 1960s, a new discussion emerged that had an intellectual character. It had more to do with methodology. It was the result of the increasing importance of new methods brought into the social sciences to study human phenomena. In this way, different scholars tried to study international relations with a scientific approach. This view clashed with the opposition of the first generation of IR scholars, who were trained as historians or academic lawyers, as well as former diplomats or journalists. They had a humanistic and historical approach to the study of IR. This perspective was rooted in philosophy, history, and law.
They took into account normative considerations and dealt with moral questions, insofar as these are deeply embedded in the study of international politics. The reason is simple: the deployment and use of power in human relations always have to be justified and can never be entirely divorced from normative considerations. For this approach, these authors were referred to as traditionalists.
Due to the expansion of the discipline after WWII, government agencies and private foundations in the US were willing to support scientific IR research. In that way, they could justify such support as being in the national interest. This process boosted the emergence of a new generation of IR scholars who adopted new methods to approach the study of world politics. Usually, they had a different intellectual and academic background. They were political scientists, economists, and sometimes mathematicians or natural scientists. That brought about a new trend inside IR known as behavioralism. It was a novel methodology that endeavored to be scientific in the natural-science sense of the term.
The goal of this new generation of scholars was to formulate objective and verifiable laws to explain the international world. To do so, they resorted to methods taken from the natural sciences. They collected empirical data about international relations that could be used for measurement, classification, generalization, and validation of hypotheses. They were looking for scientifically explained patterns of behavior. In short, they put forward a new method of studying IR.
In this respect, behavioralism was more interested in observable facts and measurable data, in precise calculation, and in the collection of data to find recurring behavioral patterns—namely, the “laws” of international relations. According to behavioralists, facts are separate from values, because the latter can’t be explained scientifically.
As James E. Dougherty and Robert L. Pfaltzgraff summarized:
“The hypothesis must be validated through testing. This demands the construction of a verifying experiment or the gathering of empirical data in other ways… The results of the data-gathering effort are carefully observed, recorded and analyzed, after which the hypothesis is discarded, modified, reformulated or confirmed. Findings are published and others are invited to duplicate this knowledge-discovering adventure, and to confirm or deny. This, very roughly, is what we usually mean by the “scientific method”.”
The third debate
The third debate emerged when realist theory showed its weakness in explaining certain phenomena. However, we can’t separate this debate from the critical influence of Thomas Kuhn’s work on scientific revolutions. In this way, his contribution was remarkable in paving the way for this debate and shaping the framework of the discussion. The concept of paradigm was brought into this field, and scholars began to use it to refer to different schools of thought in IR.
I don’t want to go into depth to discuss the concept of paradigm in detail. In general, it refers to the existence of different theoretical universes based on different assumptions. Consequently, they follow different logics in their interpretation of reality and, by doing so, they also develop their respective languages. For this reason, the results of their research can’t be compared.
Besides this, we find important international historical events during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. At that time, there was a good deal of international interaction concerning trade and investment, travel and communication, and similar issues, which were especially prevalent in the relations between the liberal democracies of the West. In this context, liberals tried to formulate an alternative to realism by avoiding the utopian excesses of earlier liberalism. That explains the emergence of a new paradigm: interdependence, or transnational theory.
We find scholars such as Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, who developed this paradigm by arguing that relationships between Western countries are characterized by complex interdependence. There are many forms of connection between societies, in addition to the political relations of governments, which also include transnational links between business corporations. They emphasized these relations, the role of the economy, and other actors beyond the state. Furthermore, they stressed the importance of complexity on the international stage. They focused their attention on cooperation dynamics and the role of international organizations.
This new line of thinking included in its analysis other actors such as transnational corporations, NGOs, international organizations, and so on. That contrasted with the realist approach, which stressed the importance of states and focused on security matters. While realists based their view on international anarchy, national interest, and the struggle for power, interdependence theorists studied cooperation. More specifically, they analyzed how international organizations deal with common issues and facilitate agreements in different realms such as shipping, aviation, communication, and so forth. In fact, they reached a very different conclusion, stating that interests can favor cooperation instead of rivalry and conflict.
Besides the interdependence paradigm, another theory challenged realist hegemony: neo-Marxist or dependency approaches. In general, this school wasn’t strong enough to be a serious threat to realism, due to its inner weaknesses. The existence of multiple trends made it entangled in peripheral discussions within the discipline. However, this trend stressed the importance of the economy. Their point of view was based on exploitation and dependency relations between the North and the South. For these authors, economy, capitalism, and class structure were their primary concerns, and social classes, corporations, social movements, and so forth were the most important actors.
The fourth debate
The fourth debate is hard to explain. This video is just an introductory approach to the historical development of the discipline, so I’m going to set forth the most relevant facts of this last debate.
First of all, it’s essential to describe the events that predated this debate, as they were critical in its later development.
So, we have to start with the situation of the discipline in the 1980s. At that time, there was a fruitful debate between neorealism and neoliberalism. Although they based their interpretations on very different assumptions, they ended up blending into a new theoretical trend. This trend was rationalism, because both shared the importance they gave to interest as a critical factor in the behavior of international actors. This made the merger possible.
Nevertheless, in the late 1980s, a new set of theories emerged, drawing on concepts and notions from other disciplines such as sociology and philosophy. I’m talking about constructivism and postmodernism, but also other approaches that stood out for their criticism of positivism. They criticized the fundamentals of science and, more specifically, of IR as a discipline. They questioned everything and introduced a debate about epistemological and ontological issues. This debate took place in the 1990s.
The debate was bitter. It was a confrontation between rationalism and reflectivism. That is to say, between those who gathered around some classical notions about the discipline, rooted in rationalism and positivism, and those who belonged to different schools of thought that rejected the prevailing rationalist standpoint in the subject. These scholars questioned the process of theorization, arguing that it has political implications and therefore cannot be neutral. At the same time, they advocated for a post-positivist methodology rooted in the humanities. They claimed reality is primarily a social construction. For this reason, knowledge is a social convention, because reality is made of ideas, symbols, meanings, discourses, and so forth.
Current situation
This debate didn’t have a winner and left the discipline in a permanent crisis that has only recently been overcome. The result has been the acceptance of a situation of theoretical pluralism in IR.
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