Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

Understanding International Relations

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issues in international organizations and elsewhere becomes a significant
subject for study. In some issue areas there may actually be a quite clear-cut
route for promoting items to the top of the agenda – such issue-areas may
actually be characterized by quite a high degree of international order; they
may constitute regimes. A regime is to be found where there are clearly
understood principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures around
which decision-makers’ expectations converge in a given area of interna-
tional relations (Krasner 1983: 2). The politics of regimes is an interesting
feature of pluralist analysis which will be explored in greater detail in
Chapter 7 below.
In the mid-1970s pluralism seemed to be in the process of establishing
itself as the dominant approach to the theory of International Relations.
Traditional realism looked decidedly passé. Pluralism had preserved some of
the more convincing insights of realism, for example about the importance of
power, while offering a far more complex and nuanced account of how these
insights might be operationalized in international political analysis. Indeed,
some of the most convincing critiques of pluralism came from the so-called
‘structuralists’ who stressed the extent to which the pluralists were modelling
a rich man’s world – their account, examined in more detail in Chapter 8,
stressed the dependence of one group of countries upon another rather than
their interdependence, and argued that the poverty of the poor was directly
caused by the wealth of the rich. The alleged chain of exploitation that linked
rich and poor, the development of underdevelopment that had over the
centuries created present-day inequalities, was the focus of these writers.
However, pluralists were able to respond that on their account of the world
‘mutual dependence’ did not amount to equal dependence and the structural-
ists were simply describing a special case that could be subsumed under the
complex interdependence model. All told, in the mid-to-late 1970s pluralism
looked like a research programme that was in pretty good shape.
Development of IR Theory
37
Further reading
The history of theories of international relations from the Greeks to the present
day is well surveyed in David Boucher, Political Theories of International
Relations (1998); Brian Schmidt’s The Political Discourse of Anarchy:
A Disciplinary History of International Relations (1998) is a pioneering work
of disciplinary historiography. Hidemi Suganami, The Domestic Analogy and
World Order Proposals (1989), offers a useful history of how the ‘domestic
analogy’ (seeing relations between states as directly comparable to relations
within states) has been used to conceptualize international relations since 1814.

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38
Understanding International Relations
To fully understand the evolution of theory in the first half of the last century
it is necessary to form a view about the causes of the two world wars and the
crises of the 1930s. William Keylor, The Twentieth Century World: An
International History (1992), is the best available overview. James Joll, The
Origins of the First World War (1984), synthesizes the debate on the origin
of the war; and H. Koch (ed.) The Origins of the First World War (1972)
provides extracts from the key controversialists. A. J. P. Taylor’s famous work,
The Origins of the Second World War (1961), the thesis of which is that Hitler’s
diplomacy was not significantly different from that of previous German lead-
ers, is now widely regarded as unsatisfactory; current thinking is summarized in
E. M. Robertson (ed.), The Origins of the Second World War: Historical
Interpretations (1971), and G. Martel (ed.), The Origins of the Second World
War Reconsidered: The A. J. P. Taylor Debate after Twenty-Five Years (1986).
D. C. Watt’s How War Came (1989) offers a measured account of the diplo-
macy of the last year of peace and is equally valuable on appeasement, as is Paul
Kennedy, The Realities Behind Diplomacy (1981). Christopher Hill, ‘1939: the
Origins of Liberal Realism’ (1989), is a fine combination of history and theory.
Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II
(1994), is the best single-volume account of the history and diplomacy of the
Second World War.
A collection of essays on the liberal internationalists of the inter-war period,
David Long and Peter Wilson (eds) Thinkers of the Twenty Years Crisis:
Interwar Idealism Reassessed (1995) provides for the first time a convenient,
sympathetic and scholarly account of these writers. Wilson’s The International
Theory of Leonard Woolf (2003) is a valuable re-examination of the work of
one of the most prolific yet overlooked liberal thinkers of the early twentieth
century. Apart from the works of classical realism by Niebuhr, Spykman,
Kennan and Carr cited in the text, attention should be drawn to Herbert
Butterfield, Christianity, Diplomacy and War (1953), and Martin Wight, Power
Politics (1946/1978). Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations has been through
a number of editions; it is still worth reading, but the most recent (1988) heavily-
cut version is to be avoided. Of recent works by classical realists, by far the
most distinguished is Henry Kissinger’s monumental Diplomacy (1994).
These works are discussed in a number of valuable studies: book-length
works include Michael J. Smith, Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger
(1986); Joel Rosenthal, Righteous Realists (1991); A. J. Murray, Reconstructing
Realism (1996); and Jonathan Haslam, No Virtue like Necessity: Realist
Thought in International Relations since Machiavelli (2002). Less sympathetic
but equally valuable is Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society (1994).
Martin Griffiths, Realism, Idealism and International Politics: A Reinterpretation
(1992), argues that the so-called ‘realists’ are actually, in a philosophical sense,
idealists. Chapters by Steven Forde and Jack Donnelly on classical and twentieth-
century realism, respectively, are to be found in Terry Nardin and David Mapel
(eds), Traditions of International Ethics (1992); Donnelly has followed this up
by Realism and International Relations (2000). On Morgenthau, Peter Gellman,

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Development of IR Theory
39
‘Hans Morgenthau and the Legacy of Political Realism’ (1988), and A. J. Murray,
‘The Moral Politics of Hans Morgenthau’ (1996), are very valuable. On Carr,
the new edition of Twenty Years Crisis (2001) edited with an extended introduc-
tion by Michael Cox makes this core text much more accessible; essays by Booth
and Fox cited in the text are crucial; see also Graham Evans, ‘E. H. Carr and
International Relations’ (1975), and Peter Wilson, ‘Radicalism for a Conservative
Purpose: The Peculiar Realism of E. H. Carr’ (2001).
On the debate over methods, Klaus Knorr and James Rosenau (eds)
Contending Approaches to International Politics (1969) collects the major
papers, including Hedley Bull’s ‘International Theory: the Case for a Classical
Approach’ and Morton Kaplan’s equally intemperate reply ‘The New Great
Debate: Traditionalism vs. Science in International Relations’. The best account
of what was at stake in this debate is to be found in Martin Hollis and Steve
Smith, Explaining and Understanding International Relations (1991). Bull’s
critique is probably best seen as part of a wider British reaction to American
dominance of the social sciences in the 1950s and 1960s, but it has some affini-
ties with more sophisticated critiques of positivism such as Charles Taylor,
‘Interpretation and the Sciences of Man’ (1971), or William E. Connolly, The
Terms of Political Discourse (1983).
Many of the leading ‘pluralist’ writers of the 1970s became the ‘neoliberal
institutionalists’ of the 1980s, and their work is discussed in the next chapter;
the third edition of Keohane and Nye’s Power and Interdependence (2000)
clarifies their relationship with realism.
At something of a tangent to the preceding readings, but very much worth
looking into due to their significance for future IR theorizing, are contemporary
works on human nature. Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (1989) is the classic
here, but The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2003) by
Steven Pinker is more clearly relevant to our subject – see especially Chapter 16
on Politics and Chapter 17 on War. Bradley Thayer has made one of the first
attempts to apply post-Dawkins evolutionary theory to realism – see ‘Bringing
in Darwin: Evolutionary Theory, Realism and International Politics’ (2000).

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