Karl Deutsch and International Relations

I was a graduate student at Yale University in the early 1960s, and Karl Deutsch was my most inspiring professor. This is saying a lot because I took or audited courses with Harold Lasswell, Robert Dahl, Robert Lane in political science, Hajo Holborn and Fritz Stern in history, and Irving Janis in psychology. Karl was riveting in the first instance for his persona. He was tall, macrocephalic with a huge sloping forehead, and blond but balding hair. He squinted with baby blue eyes through thick lenses set in avant la mode thin wire rims, and spoke rapid fire on any and every subject in an ‘overhelming’ German accent. Karl did not have the largest head in the department; Harold Lasswell was so oversized that he had to have his hats made by a bespoke haberdasher in New York. These two big heads, literally and figuratively, anchored the International Relations (IR) field at Yale, and Lasswell also had a law school affiliation.

Karl was not a gifted lecturer but always had the rapt attention of his student audience. His seminar on International Relations was not organized around distinct paradigms, as so many contemporary IR courses are. Rather, it emphasized theoretical literature that Karl found promising: systems theory, Talcott Parson’s action theory, and quantitative work on the balance of power, war, nationalism, and political and economic development. He ran his seminars as lectures and talked more or less without notes in a seemingly disordered way. The disorder was a function of his fertile imagination that prompted him to make novel connections across disparate research literatures, discover new lines of inquiry that he felt the need to share in the form of propositions and even proto-theories he thought worth exploring.

What Karl undoubtedly had envisaged as a coherent, even linear, Bauhaus-style presentation ended up more Rococo, as it was jocular, fluid, and full of intellectual embellishments and digressions. These digressions were as stimulating as the subject of the lecture, and sometimes we deliberately provoked them through our questions. He enjoyed our questions because they provided feedback – at the time his favored concept – on our understanding and reaction to his lectures and assigned readings. I suspected that he also welcomed questions because they provided a challenge akin to that of a jazz musician given the opportunity to improvise.

Karl would occasionally depart from the day’s subject when something dramatic happened in the world, or just locally. The seminar after Kennedy’s assassination was a spellbinding narration about how assassinations had been used historically to destabilize governments, and some of the reasons why this succeeded or failed. On another occasion, the son of another Yale professor had died in an automobile accident. Karl began the seminar with a short lecture to us about how important it was to spend time with our children and not become consumed by professional commitments. He confided to us that he frequently took his daughters to the movie theater to see Westerns. I later learned from one of them that it was Karl who loved cowboys and Indians and dragged his kids along.

I established a good rapport with Karl. I used his theory of nationalism as a framework for studying African-American politics and went to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in the fall of 1963 to conduct a survey and interviews. The research proved hazardous and the local Federal Bureau of Investigation convinced me to leave town after a threat against my life had been made. Karl liked my paper and offered me a summer research assistantship helping prepare a bibliography on nationalism. I spent the summer in New York, using the United Nations library and New York Public Library. There were relatively few works at the time directly on nationalism, and the bibliography eventually turned into a broader one in history and International Relations that included works that might somehow be relevant to the study of nationalism.

Karl would have become my thesis supervisor had I not run afoul of Prof. David Nelson Rowe, director of the International Relations Program, in which I was enrolled. In 1964, I had taken the lead in organizing students against the Johnson Administration’s growing involvement in Vietnam. Rowe was born in China, son of missionaries, had an almost life-size portrait of Chiang Kai-chek in his office, and was very right wing in his politics. He graded and failed me on my International Relations comprehensive examination. Karl was on leave, and would otherwise have marked the test. He later confronted Rowe and then intervened with President Kingman Brewster, who made sure I stayed enrolled as a student – otherwise, I would have been drafted – and continued my fellowship.

Karl arranged for me to enter a semester later in the new PhD program at the Graduate Center of City University of New York, where I worked with John Herz, Ivo Duchacek, John Stoessinger, and Isaiah Berlin. He acted as an informal advisor, and we kept in touch over the years. He offered me emotional and intellectual support throughout my ordeal at Yale and later wrote letters of support to the several institutions where I applied for an assistant professorship.

Karl grew up in a secure family in an insecure country. Born in 1912 in Prague, in what was still the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his formative experiences were in the newly independent Czechoslovakia. His family was Jewish, German and Czech speaking, and professional. His father was an optician who owned a shop on Wenceslas Square, and his mother became a Social Democratic politician and member of the Czechoslovak parliament. Initially committed to studying optics, Karl attended the German-speaking University and took a leave to spend 2 years in England. He and his wife Ruth Slonitz returned to Prague. He entered the Czech-speaking Charles University as the German university had come under the influence of the Nazi student organization. In 1938, he received a doctorate in jurisprudence.

Karl and Ruth left Prague for a visit to the United States and decided not to return after the Munich agreement in November of that year. Harvard offered him a fellowship and he would ultimately receive a PhD from that institution in 1951. His dissertation became the path-breaking Nationalism and Social Communication, published in 1953 by the MIT Press. During the war years, he worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and attended the San Francisco conference where the United Nations was created.

The Research and Analysis branch of OSS employed over 900 American and refugee scholars from the social sciences and humanities. German political scientist Franz Neumann, formerly associated with the Frankfurt School, helped to recruit a number of German and Central European colleagues, among them Herbert Marcuse, Otto Kirchheimer, John Herz, and Karl Deutsch. OSS also employed historians Felix Gilbert, William Langer, and Hajo Holborn, later Karl’s colleague at Yale. The State Department cafeteria had the best cheap food in downtown Washington, so groups from OSS would walk over, show their IDs, and eat together. One day, some half dozen of them, including Karl and John Herz were dining and conversing in German. They were suddenly surrounded by armed military police and arrested on the suspicion of being German spies. Boston-born historian and World War I veteran William Langer explained that if they were German spies, they would hardly speak German in the State Department cafeteria! The MPs were not convinced and ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, head of OSS, had to arrange for their release.

Karl began teaching at MIT in 1943 and remained there until 1956. He taught at Yale from 1956 to 1967 and at Harvard from 1967 until his death in 1992. For a decade, from 1977 to 1987, he served as director of the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung. Karl trained an impressive cohort of graduate students at these several institutions. He got on well with his students and colleagues, but was portrayed as a Doctor Strangelove doppelgänger in a 1966 novel, Tell the Time to None. Written by Helen Hudson, wife of colleague Robert Lane, it cast a pall over departmental relations and was rumored to be one of the reasons Karl left the next year for Harvard.

Karl was an amalgam of several intellectual traditions and struggled all his life to synthesize them. He thought of himself as a scientist and felt happiest when grappling with intellectual problems. The puzzle that engaged his attention throughout his life was the phenomenon of nationalism. In what way was it a response to the modern world? On what basis did nationalities form? And how might national identifications be muted, superseded, or somehow finessed to build international cooperation and peace? These concerns are hardly surprising as Karl was born into a multi-ethnic empire on the eve of its collapse and grew up in a successor state where relations between Germans and Czechs and Czechs and Slovaks became increasingly embittered and would be responsible, or at least provide the pretext, for Czechoslovakia’s destruction. Ernest Gellner, another Jewish Czech refugee, a decade younger than Karl, would also devote much of his academic career to the study of nationalism. ¹

Karl felt part of the Austro-Marxist tradition, although by the 1950s he was neither Austrian nor Marxist. Austro-Marxism was a variant of socialism that developed in the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and continued in postwar Austria until violently suppressed in 1934. Otto Bauer succeeded Victor Adler as leader of Austria’s Social Democratic Party and was its great theoretician, especially on the question of nationalism. He sought to reconcile nationalism and socialism through the ‘personal principle’, which reconceived multi-ethnic states as associations of persons whose bonds were independent of territory. ²

Karl’s work on nationalism did not build directly on Bauer but also sought to find some form of association that would transcend national commitments and provide a more secure basis for interpersonal and interstate relations. One reason for this may have been Bauer’s socialist idealism and his belief that individuals should be free to associate with any nationality they chose. Bauer chose to be German, downplayed his Jewish background, and had the good fortune to die in 1938 before having to face the consequences of this delusion.

Nationalism and Social Communication posed the fundamental question of how a nationality became constituted. Why did people form a communal bond that found expression in the desire for political autonomy? Karl provided a two-part answer. Modernization cut people loose from their traditional ties, often moving them physically to cities where they were compelled to make new economic and social ties. Nationalism provided a much-needed form of personal identification and vehicle for social integration. It also conferred practical benefits in a world where competition for wealth and status was intense and best achieved through group membership. National communities could be organized on the basis of language, culture, religion, and territory, but none of these features were determinative. Communities were constructed on the basis of complementary habits of communication that over time led people to share symbols and a sense of common destiny. Communication had the potential to construct a ‘we feeling’ among people and for this reason became the Leitmotiv of Karl’s research agenda.

Nationalism and Social Communication developed the concept of social mobilization, the process whereby people become uprooted from their traditions and become available for new patterns of communication and behavior. Assimilation described the extent to which a population merged with the dominant culture. Karl devised quantitative indicators for both variables and used them to flesh out a 2 × 2 matrix. Countries with no nationality problems had largely assimilated their populations before the era of modernization and its associated processes of mobilization. National movements seeking independence arose when a significant percentage of people were mobilized but unassimilated. To document his argument, Karl used case studies, but also quantitative analyses of mobilization and assimilation in diverse European societies.

Karl was educated in the Kantian tradition. Like so many Europeans of his era, he looked to metaphysical frameworks to make sense of empirical observations and for categories to organize these observations. Along with so many other German refugee social scientists, he was surprised by the narrow empiricism of his American colleagues. He nevertheless collaborated with Michigan’s J. David Singer, arguably the narrowest quantitative researcher in the field of International Relations. His Correlates of War project consisted of data collection on a massive sale in the hope that important relationships would somehow emerge. ³ Karl sponsored a large-scale data collection of his own: The World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators. ⁴ Collecting data of this kind no doubt had its value in the pre-Internet age, but I never read any good articles based on the data. One, by a Deutsch protégé at Yale, sought to group countries into regions based on their similarities in data categories. My graduate cohort thought it downright silly.

Karl was more at home with ‘big thinkers’ like Crane Brinton and like long-time friend and intellectual guru Norbert Wiener. His Nerves of Government, published in 1963, was the most wide-ranging and ambitious of his books, and the one of which he was the proudest. ⁵ It elaborated a conceptual scheme implicit in Nationalism and Social Communication. Karl drew on communications theory, including Wiener’s concept of feedback, to develop a three-tiered model of feedback, the last of which could be analogized to consciousness. Like Plato’s description of the mind in the Republic, Karl intended his model to be equally applicable to individuals and states. It emphasized the importance of learning, defined in terms of modifying behavior, beliefs, or concept of self on the basis of feedback from one’s behavior.

For Deutsch, responsiveness to the environment was the key to survival and growth, concepts that he redefined in terms of cybernetics. Individuals and organizations that did not change were doomed to failure because even the most effective routines would over time become inappropriate as the environment changed. This framework could help explain the differential rates of ‘assimilation’, one of his two key variables. Assimilation depended on the responsiveness of governments to the needs of people, in this case ethnic groups not part of the dominant culture. It depended on information gathering, responsiveness to demands, and feedback about the effects of policies. As organizational change depends on agency, the cybernetic approach to politics was a rejoinder to critics who objected to what they unfairly considered the macro-level determinism of his theory of nationalism. In a more fundamental sense, Nerves of Government sought to alert fellow scholars and policymakers to a conception of government as a potential vehicle of social learning and, accordingly, of intellectual and moral growth. It was no accident that Karl wrote his book at a time when the civil rights movement was developing and the future of his adopted country would turn on the responsiveness of government and public alike to demands for social justice and institutional change.

Karl differed from many grand theorists in his concern for the empirical. His most influential works Nationalism and Social Communication and Political Community in the North Atlantic Area combine novel frameworks and detailed empirical work. ⁶ The latter is an outgrowth of Nationalism and Social Communication. Published in 1957, it was collaborative project in which Karl wrote the theoretical chapter and historians the case studies. In contrast to World Federalists who believed that a world government was the only way to secure peace, Karl recognized the naive nature of this enterprise but also the encouraging development that in limited regions of the world war between peoples and their states had become all but unthinkable. He was hopeful that such a zone of peace was developing in the North Atlantic region.

Karl defined a security community as ‘a group of people’ believing ‘that they have come to agreement on at least this one point: that common social problems must and can be resolved by processes of “peaceful change”’. ⁷ A few security communities were ‘amalgamated’, in the sense that previously independent states had formed a central government. The American Thirteen colonies were the leading historical example. Amalgamation did not always succeed. The United States had suffered a civil war but maintained the union, while the union of Sweden and Norway had failed, although their separation was peaceful. Sweden and Norway, and the other Scandinavian states, were part of a ‘pluralistic security community’, where member states remained independent but their peoples and governments closely cooperated and believed that any differences between them had to be resolved peacefully. The other great historical example was Canada and the United States. Political Community in the North Atlantic Area analyzed the requirements of pluralistic security communities and how they developed.

Karl’s dream of a peaceful North Atlantic region has come to fruition, and its pluralistic security community has been extended east in the aftermath of the Cold War. Such a community may be in its nascent stages of development in the Pacific Rim. Analytically, the concept of security community is embedded in the International Relations literature and has been further elaborated and applied by constructivist scholars. ⁸

In the postwar era, Jewish refugee international relations scholars adopted varying attitudes toward Germany and Europe. Hans Morgenthau had few postwar contacts with Germany. He increasingly came to define himself as an American. John Herz actively sought out young Germans who came to study in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He was struck by how ‘un-Nazi’ they were and by their thirst for American-style democracy and liberalism. Through the RAND Corporation, he became involved in a project that required elite interviews in Germany during the summer of 1953. He was impressed by the progress made by the Bonn Republic, where a noticeable spirit of tolerance had emerged. ‘As a result of the trip, I could now, somehow, resolve my identity problem through the compromise formula of being an “American of German-Jewish background”’. He made numerous subsequent visits and served as visiting professor at the University of Marburg and the Free University of Berlin. ⁹ He could see ‘developments in both “our” countries of the context of global trends’. As a self-described ‘wanderer’ between his two worlds, Herz made many trips across the Atlantic. In his autobiography, he cites Thomas Wolfe’s observation that ‘you cannot go home again’, but it is also true, he discovered with the wisdom of age that ‘one can never separate oneself altogether from one’s origins even if one wanted to’. He still felt the pull of the Lower Rhine landscapes, where he grew up, and the Black Forest, at the foot of which he began his studies. ¹⁰

Karl had less contact with Czechoslovakia than he did with Germany. In the late 1950s, he collaborated with Lewis Edinger on a project to explore the foreign policy attitudes of West German elites. ¹¹ His continuing involvement with Germany led to his appointment as Director of Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung. For his services, he was awarded the Commanders Cross Order of Merit, with star, by the German Government. Karl’s involvement with Germany was motivated by the belief that a democratic Germany was essential to a peaceful Europe and that professional collaboration and training of younger scholars could help facilitate the emergence of an elite committed to democratic values and practices.

Morgenthau and Herz chose research problems that were substantively important but also critical to developing new and more complex identities for themselves. Karl did this too but differed from Morgenthau in that he did not seek to escape his European roots and from Herz in that he did not try to reconcile seemingly opposed identities. Rather, he sought to supersede his multiple and at times crosscutting identities as Jew, Unitarian, German, Czech, and American by creating the supranational identity of the North Atlantic community. This project, for him, was as deeply personal as it was political. He would be honored, but even more importantly, self-fulfilled, by knowledge of how it has progressed in theory and practice.