International Relations: The Story So Far

Truth

Truth is ultimately inaccessible, but an everyday necessity. ²⁰ What might be called pure or absolute truth is beyond the limits of less than omniscient humans, but striving for truth is not. ²¹

Throughout this article, I have and will continue to make a crucial distinction between ‘the past’ and ‘history’. The former refers to the ultimate inaccessibility of the pastness of the past, whereas history is what historians write or declaim about the past in the pursuit – we hope – of truthfulness. Being a historian is to engage in the pursuit of knowledge about the past (ostensibly for its own sake), as opposed to using it to further political or other advantage. Nationalism and the writing of history, for example, have long been deeply entangled: nineteenth-century Germany is not the only country where, in Lynn Hunt’s words, ‘history grew as an academic discipline in tandem with nationalism’. ²²

Truthfulness is a discipline, available to all who want to pursue knowledge. It consists of what Bernard Williams called ‘Accuracy’ and ‘Sincerity’, duly capitalised to show their significance. Truthfulness so-described is synonymous with the traditional academic norms, indeed virtues, such as respect for evidence, logic and unprejudiced engagement with alternative viewpoints. In our professional commitment to truthfulness, we should appreciate that our academic work is situated in time and place. Our ideas have contexts and inclinations. Robert Cox influentially but incompletely wrote (for students of IR) ‘theory is always for someone and for some purpose’. ²³ This proposition, while important and insightful, was incomplete because it lacked the situational rider: completion requires the ending ‘and is by someone from somewhere’. ²⁴ The Cox proposition, together with its rider, can easily lead to disagreements between scholars about the past, but this is not inconsistent with Williams’ commitment to truthfulness. As he noted, ‘every statement’ in a narrative can be true to truthfulness, ‘and it can still tell the wrong story’. ²⁵ This is a warning in particular against those whose reductionist theories tell us how the past must have been. ²⁶

What have been called ‘truth wars’ go far beyond the academy. George Orwell saw their meaning in the pursuit of political power. His dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four depicts the ‘Ministry of Truth’ as a factory for the production of lies ‘which [were] passed into history and became truth’. Power over history, he was arguing, is a form of politics by other means. He wrote, ‘Who controls the past … controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’. ²⁷ Today’s politics, seemingly everywhere, involve the strategic deployment of history and confirm the significance of Orwell’s insight.

With absolute or pure truth about the past being inaccessible, we are left with interpretation. Among scholars in IR, none has written about this more incisively or influentially than E.H. Carr, though he was not the inventor of the idea of interpretation. In What Is History? Carr rejected the ‘cult of facts’ approach, arguing that what became understood as historical facts were those chosen by historians as interesting or important. ²⁸ Interpretation, involving the selection of appropriate facts, is the way the great theoreticians of history, such as Karl Marx, tell us how the past must have been. ²⁹

History is interpretation but not all interpretations are equal. Some are more in correspondence with empirical knowledge, some are more logical, some are more coherent and some blend the micro- and macro-picture more persuasively. Referring to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Williams underlined this general point with a good story: ‘As Clemenceau famously said at Versailles to a German who had wondered what future historians would say about all this, “They won’t say that Belgium invaded Germany”’. ³⁰

Time

We keep learning that time is not as straightforward as the ticking clock suggests, yet chronology is history’s scaffolding. Time is tricky.

In a recent work of memoir and history, Beneath Another Sky: A Global Journey Into History, Norman Davies seems enticed by discovering differences rather than recognising congruities in the world. He expresses fascination at the concept of time held by Maoris. ³¹ Europeans, he argues, ‘tend’ to stand in the present and look to the future, with the past behind them. Maoris, he argues, traditionally faced the past (understood as ‘the days in front’) while the future is ‘what is behind’; at the same time, they walked ‘backwards into the future’. This is interesting, but not as significant as is implied. There is not Another sky; there is only one, with multiple observation points and ways of perceiving it.

In a recent work of physics, The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli helps us learn, or struggle to learn, that the meaning of time varies across the universe: it passes more quickly in the mountains than at sea level. ³² Such knowledge is mind-bending, and difficult to comprehend, but such a counter-intuitive perspective on ‘time’ does not help a student of IR to think about how to make the United Nations (UN) work better, or whether Brexit is or is not, to use a debased phrase, in ‘the national interest’ of the citizens of the United Kingdom. It is not a surprise, therefore, to know that when Albert Einstein was asked, shortly after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, ‘Dr. Einstein, why is it that when the mind of man has stretched so far as to discover the structure of the atom we have been unable to devise the political means to keep the atom from destroying us?’ the key theorist of relativity replied, ‘That is simple my friend. It is because politics is more difficult than physics’. ³³

In a recent work of philosophy, How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy, Julian Baggini argues that though time is generally understood as linear in the lived world, ‘ordered into past, present and future’, it has for much of human history been understood as cyclical: ‘The past is also the future, the future is also the past, the beginning also the end’. ³⁴ This take on time is not unfamiliar to IR students, for in the flows of international history, the linear/circular imaginaries have been embedded in IR’s two main theoretical traditions since 1919: liberalism and realism, respectively. The latter is a theory of repetition, understood mostly in relation to human nature fundamentalism or the structural condition of anarchy; the former is associated with notions of progress.

Importantly, Baggini shows that the distinction between ‘linear and cyclical time’ in different places and in different eras is ‘not always neat’; it operates in ‘strands’ producing a ‘hybrid’. ³⁵ Into this complex picture, there is a case for comparing the notion of time in IR with the description of ‘dreamtime’ in Australian Aboriginal culture, where ‘past, present, future [are] all present’ in the same place. Whatever their school of theory, there has been an element of operating in similar ‘hybrid time’ on the part of most students of IR.

Our discipline is interested in the future, a time framed through lenses both sharpened and dulled by history. In the 1970s, Yehezkel Dror, an Israeli academic focusing on strategic studies, put it like this: ‘“Was” Equals “Is” Equals “Will be”’. ³⁶ He was drawing attention to the complex interplay between articulated and unarticulated thoughts about the past, present and future, but with a circular dynamic. This view was memorably expressed by a character in a novel about slavery and memory: ‘the future is just the past waiting to happen’. ³⁷ In the literature of IR, this perspective is influentially embodied in John Mearsheimer’s mantra: ‘Back to the Future’. ³⁸

For many, and not just ‘traditional’ Maoris, the past has a particular weight in our engagement with time. Since I first came across it, I have thought on many occasions of the line by William Faulkner: ‘The past is never dead, it is not even past’. ³⁹ This insight is sometimes relevant for students of IR in relation to the very distant past. In his Medieval Foundations of International Relations, William Bain and his contributors make the case that the Middle Ages (approximately the fifth to the fifteenth century) does more than exercise a variety of influences on the present. ⁴⁰ As Nicholas Rengger puts it, ‘the modern itself – including modern international relations – is shot through with ‘the medieval’, and that if we are trying to grasp the general problems that beset us now, we have to understand their root and, indeed, the extent to which our problems may still, in some sense, be ‘medieval’ problems’. ⁴¹

A different perspective on the relative weight of ‘past’ and ‘present’ is central to Carr’s What is History? It is the view that all history is contemporary history. Lynn Hunt, in History: Why it Matters also argues that the past is interpreted primarily through the lenses of the present. Furthermore, she adds that in recent decades the centre of gravity of the discipline of history ‘has shifted towards the present’. ⁴² The same is undoubtedly true in the teaching rooms of IR, in the pursuit of ‘relevance’. But presentism is not wholly negative in Hunt’s view. Indeed, she argues that we all need a ‘dose’ of presentism, because ‘history would have no interest at all if it did not speak to our present day interests’. ⁴³

One danger of presentism is that if the past is simply seen as a source for trying to discover the ‘lessons of history’, in order to intervene in contemporary issues, the gap between history and the past will expand. Another risk of overdosing on presentism is the scope it gives for hindsight bias (sometimes called ‘creeping determinism’). Those who lived in the foreign country of the past were living life forwards, not knowing what would happen, but historians recreate what happened backwards, knowing the outcome. Our view from the present and our theories of how things happen give us a biased interpretation of the past, and how things turned out. As a result, the past appears more predictable, more determined, than it actually was. Under the influence of hindsight bias, events, especially major ones, come to be seen as having an inevitability about them. History becomes over-determined.

The mind of a historian cannot entirely escape the chronological situatedness that comes from being a historian. How could anybody reflect on the international history of the second half of the twentieth century, for example, and put completely aside the knowledge of the rise of the Nazis, the Second World War, the Holocaust and the dropping of the first atomic bombs?

Teleology

Franjo Tudjman, first President of independent Croatia, believed that ‘Nations are the irreplaceable cells of the human community’. ⁴⁴ Charles de Gaulle, leader of the French Resistance in the Second World War and founder of the Fifth Republic, wrote that ‘All my life, I have had a certain idea of France’, and he advocated a ‘Europe of Nations’. ⁴⁵ For de Gaulle, the nation represented the supreme level of political loyalty and decision-making. Such nationalists consider the consolidation of the so-called nation-state, and its global spread, as the rational working out of history. This has been one of the most powerful teleological readings of history in the past century.

Teleology concerns purpose in the shaping of the past. Purpose-driven history is understood as determined rather than open, with its path set by God, Reason, Spirit, material forces, the national principle or other drivers. The path established by whatever purpose might have forks in it, but the destination remains constant.

There is an alternative ‘open’ conception of history. This is popularly characterised in its loosest fashion in the multi-attributed adage ‘History is just one damn thing after another’; this is the view that the past could plausibly have taken any number of different turns, but it took the turns it did. Also ‘open’ but not as random as the ‘one damn thing after another’ school is an approach to history sympathetic with the ‘structuration’ theory of Anthony Giddens. ⁴⁶ History here is a process made up of structures and agents, momentum and decline, trajectories and retreats, consolidations and collapses, resistance and replication, memes and misses, and other dynamics pushing and pulling under the circumstances of the time. Neither determined nor random, this approach was expressed most pithily among IR scholars by Kenneth Boulding when he used to say, ‘We are as we are because we got that way’. ⁴⁷ The idea that the past could have taken different trajectories as a result of the openness of history, and the capacity of humans for individual and collective choices under different conditions, has been argued from a variety of theoretical perspectives.

From historical sociology, Mike Featherstone has argued that human societies globally could have taken different pathways and ended up somewhere other than where we are today. Among the trajectories he mentioned are ‘imperial hegemony’, a ‘universal proletariat’, a global ‘form of religion’ and the outcome of a ‘world-federalist movement’. ⁴⁸ Taking the long view, it is too soon in history to definitively rule out any of these, even if most at this point sound fanciful. From brain science, Steven Rose has triumphantly challenged the idea that the human future is a prisoner of human nature fundamentalism with the adage ‘biology … sets us free’. ⁴⁹ And from critical theory, Seyla Benhabib suggests that the Frankfurt School completed aspects of Kant’s ‘critique of pure reason’, arguing that while humans cannot establish with ‘theoretical certainty’ that we have free will, neither can the claim be proved wrong. It therefore ‘remains open to us to act with a practical faith that we are free’. Through the ‘critical exercise of reason’, we can escape a multitude of ‘false beliefs’ and build a different future. ⁵⁰

Together, such approaches lead to the conclusion – persuasive to me – that the story of the global-we as a community of fate could have taken different paths and be heading, today, in a very different and not necessarily more benign direction. Humans have had, and continue to have, the freedom to be differently global, including being differently ‘international’. However, once momentum is established in a particular set of directions – Charles Darwin’s first sketch of his tree of life is a visual simile – history shows that powerful structures and their associated practices and attitudes create new realities that seem to limit the scope for redirection. This is the meaning of Marx’s timeless observation: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves’. ⁵¹

That international history could have had different outcomes is the challenge posed by counterfactual history. This genre deserves more attention than it receives. It contributes to the debate about closed versus open history, including addressing the question ‘How open is open?’ And it can be a real spark to our imaginations. Counterfactual history flourishes less than it might because the traditionalist core of the history discipline regard it as somewhat frivolous, a distraction from the serious task of concentrating on the text. The best counterfactual history is very serious. Yet, the critics remain trapped in a tautological teleology, accepting that what happened had to happen because its purpose was to happen. ⁵²

There is no more persuasive and serious book on counterfactuals, carefully argued and richly illustrated, than Richard Ned Lebow’s Forbidden Fruit. ⁵³ He postulates that with a few small and plausible twists the events in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 could be replayed, and as a result, the trajectories of the twentieth century could have been very different. The particular combination of international circumstances that shaped the key decisions that fateful summer, he argues, would not have been in place a few years later. In particular, Germany would not have been in a military position in 1917 to have sensibly contemplated the offensive strategy against France that seemed to make sense in July 1914. Had the Great War not taken place, Lebow speculates whether the Bolsheviks would have been successful in Russia in 1917. Would the Nazis have risen and set forth on the route to starting the Second World War and pursuing the Holocaust? Would the Cold War have occurred? Might long-standing rivalries have declined? And what about all the people who would have been alive but for the war, and in a quite different world with alternative frames of reference? A radically different international history is conceivable had that day in June 1914 turned out differently. ⁵⁴ These are bold claims, but no more so than the unprovable alternative: what happened had to happen, when and as it did.

An idea of progress in human life is compatible with both closed and open conceptions of history, and neither is inconsistent with the view that progress has been associated with Christian eschatological thinking. Baggini summarises much traditional thought by arguing that in the West ‘linear time is associated with the idea of progress which reached its apotheosis in the Enlightenment’. Before that time, he suggests that people looked backwards to find their ideals, but with the Enlightenment came a forward-looking view towards ‘a happier future’. ⁵⁵ John Gray shares the view about the relationship between belief in progress and ‘the Christian eschatological religious world view’. He has also been a prominent critic of both the Enlightenment’s ostensible optimism about a happier future, and the related commitment to the idea of progress. ⁵⁶ Such criticism of the Enlightenment is misplaced. Detailed studies of the period reveal a complex picture of fierce debating, not universal naïve optimism. ⁵⁷ The record also throws into doubt Gray’s dismissal of ‘progress’. One can agree that ‘No thread of progress in civilization is woven into the fabric of history’, but this argument cannot be sustained by ahistorical arguments based on one-liners such as ‘old evils return under new names’, Generalisations like this imply both a law of history and that ‘evils’ such as slavery and torture have essentially the same meaning as in previous centuries. Gray’s critique of the idea of progress is too individualistic. It may be that human beings ‘are no more reasonable than they have ever been’, but in many places their attitudes and behaviour in relation to slavery and torture are radically different. As the old argument goes, individual humans are not naturally wiser than the previous generation, but their institutions might be. There are, for sure, many examples of regressive attitudes and behaviour in the world, but not everywhere. Today slavery and torture exist in a context of institutions, including international institutions, dedicated to their control and eradication. Such institutions at some point may collapse, but many have had long lives and are held together by strong threads.

Within the discipline of IR, the idea of progress has been contentious. There are sound, including empirical, reasons for arguing that progress is indeed possible in international relations. In making such a claim, however, it is necessary to define what is meant by ‘progress’, accept that continued progress is never guaranteed, remember that regression is a possible future and understand that progress in practice cannot evolve universally at the same time. ⁵⁸

Examples of what might be called progress, showing how conditions of possibility may expand, include predictable peace between some states; the spread and embedding of ideas about social justice; the densification of networks of states seeking degrees of cooperation; greater international attention to issues relating to development, gender, children and race; and evidence of widespread identification through global social movements and individual attitudes with ideas of global citizenship. ⁵⁹ There are grounds for rational hope about progress but not optimism. Like pessimism, optimism of any kind is not realistic. It tells us how the future will be, not what it might or could be.

Building rational hope about a better world, rather than intellectualising temperamental implications, is a challenge facing both those identifying with critical approaches to IR, and identifiers with the mainstream. In the case of critical schools, the challenge is to recognise that a better world cannot be achieved without more realism about the present one. Critical thinkers, seeking ideas about the global challenges facing us as we approach the middle of the twenty-first century, might be surprised by the breadth and relevance of the ideas put forward by those William Scheurman calls ‘progressive realists’. These ‘realists for global reform’ offered comprehensive and far-sighted ideas about world order in the global crisis in the middle of the twentieth century. ⁶⁰

If critical approaches in IR would benefit from embracing the work of key realists, mainstream approaches would benefit from rethinking their rejection of what for much of the past century has been dismissed as being ‘utopian’ – for many the ultimate calumny to throw at an IR scholar. The realism and vision of the ‘progressive realists’ underlines the rationality of escaping old labels. The philosophical basis for this argument has been put with clarity by Raymond Geuss. He argues that a proper understanding of realism refuses to accept what is ‘socially defined at any given moment to be the final and unquestioned framework for thought or action’. ⁶¹ Realism and utopia are not alien concepts.

Without silo-escaping by both mainstream and critical approaches, it is difficult to imagine academic IR contributing much to a secure and progressive global future. A progressive contribution requires realism about the present and open-mindedness about the future. Incredible things can and have happened in international history. In her study of the failed ‘industrial dreamworld’ advanced in their different ways by capitalism and communism in the twentieth century, Susan Buck-Morss has argued that there remains space for dreaming, but imaginings will be as far as things go if old power structures remain intact. At the same time, she argued that new ways of thinking about politics would have more ‘promise’ if they ‘did not presume the collectivity that will receive them’. Crucially, she maintained, human societies ‘freed from the constraints of bounded spaces and from the dictates of unilinear time, might dream of becoming, in Lenin’s terms, “as radical as reality itself”’. ⁶²

Texture and transformation

A recurring general concern in the study of the past has been the puzzle of continuity and change as discussed in the introductory article to this Special Issue by William Bain. ⁶³ He shows that these familiar concepts are far from being unproblematic. Neither are my almost synonymous alternatives: texture and transformation. I prefer these terms, however, because they have somewhat more resonance in the literature of international relations.

‘Texture’ is the term Kenneth Waltz favoured when drawing attention to the distinctive patterns or repetitions running through the history of international relations, and indeed other types of relations under anarchy. ⁶⁴ As a result of such patterns and repetitions, we have a ‘time-transcending’ understanding of the situations, dilemmas, pressures and emotions experienced by individuals, peoples, diplomats, soldiers and leaders in the past. Two and a half thousand years later, we can, for example, read Thucydides on the Peloponnesian Wars and identify with decision makers and recognise the dynamics in their conflicts. ⁶⁵ We can understand why a former Minister of Finance in Greece, Yanis Varoufakis, chose in 2016 to use the punch-line of the ‘Melian Dialogue’ to frame his interpretation of the confrontation between the Syriza government in Greece and the rest of the Eurozone: And the Weak Suffer What They Must? ⁶⁶ We can understand that the struggles over territory between France and the Holy Roman Empire in the 1520s, like those between the leaders of Israel and Palestine nearly 500 years later, were not the result of diplomatic misunderstandings but of clashes of the most basic interest regarding the ownership and occupation of territory. We can understand why great emergencies make ‘strange bedfellows’, such as the alliance between Churchill and Stalin in face of Nazi aggression, and Reagan and Gorbachev anxious about the risks of nuclear Armageddon. And we can understand how cruelty in international relations (war) and actions that are antisocial or criminal in normal life (lying and spying) can be accepted as politics by other means.

Texture does not preclude change. The League of Nations, created in the aftermath of the Great War, was the precursor of the UN, created at the end of the Second World War. The framers of the UN sought to learn from the supposed mistakes of the League, and so made some significant changes, but there was existential continuity: both signified an international commitment to maintaining a more or less global multipurpose organisation. Despite rhetoric in the UN Charter’s Preamble (‘We the peoples’), the organisation was structured around states, with the major powers – the victors of 1945 – having special rights, notably the veto. The development of the UN included an approximate four-fold increase in membership, mostly newly independent former colonies. This growth ensured the UN over time having a wider agenda than in the late 1940s, with much of it reflecting the interests of these new members. These changes, so far at least, represent a development in the character of the UN, not a radical transformation in the nature of the present era’s global multipurpose organisation. We could only start talking about the latter if the structures and expectations of 1945 were overturned in such key areas as United Nations Security Council (UNSC) membership, the access of ‘We the peoples’ to decision-making, the rights and responsibilities of sovereignty, and the institutionalising of more government than governance in the running of global affairs.

As these illustrations show, some change within texture can be in the service of statis (Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose), while ‘continuity’ on the surface can obscure the shifting of tectonic plates below. An illustration of the former is the way the leading powers in the UN have accepted ‘reform’, but without imperilling their dominant roles; an illustration of the latter was the collapse of the Soviet empire between the death of Brezhnev and 1991. At the root of the change/continuity semantic complexities is a simple fact. Fundamentally, all is change: it is the only evidence of life. ⁶⁷

Texture is not inconsistent with change, therefore, nor does it rule out an open conception of history. Texture expresses the power of structures, material and ideational, but however constraining these might be, humans are not without agency to change them. This conception of the flows of history was brilliantly encapsulated in one of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Notebooks (1887): ‘The fact that something happens regularly and predictably does not mean that it happens necessarily’. ⁶⁸

The idea of transformation in international relations confronts us with an old philosophical puzzle: when does a succession of grains become a heap? ⁶⁹ In social science, it is usually discussed in relation to the piling up of ‘anomalies’ shifting a paradigm, and in ordinary language, transformation means something akin to ‘a game-changer’, a significant shift in the way things have been done or thought.

Identifying radical shifts in the past invariably attracts controversy about history’s ‘Big Bangs’, ‘turning points’ and ‘periods’. But everything has a pre-history, and everything is change, and so I share and generalise the advice of Tim Blanning that all dates defining periods of history are arbitrary, ‘but some dates are more arbitrary than others’. ⁷⁰ If it is difficult to agree on the shape of the past, identifying shifts moving from the present to the future is all the more challenging. Not surprisingly, academic and think-tank cottage industries have grown to meet the challenge. Anxious for ‘relevance’ and ‘impact’, they generally struggle to be just ahead of the conventional wisdom of the day.

Marx boldly observed in 1848 that ‘All that is solid melts into air … and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind’. ⁷¹ These remain powerful words, and an inspiration to think about our own era’s ‘Great Reckoning’. ⁷² They also suggest that to deserve the label ‘transformation’ the bar of change has to be set high. One attempt for students of IR is in The Nation-State and Global Order by Walter Opello and Stephen Rosow. Four ‘great’ or ‘primary’ transformations are identified in ‘politico-military’ rule since the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. ⁷³ First, the movement from the ‘heteronomy’ of the ‘coexisting and competing’ forms of the medieval world (including city-states, fiefdoms and empires) to the ‘homonymous’ system of ‘territorially segmented sovereign states’ associated with the Peace of Westphalia. Second, the ‘imposition of the state and the European states-system’ across the world as European powers, confronting traditional empires and various tribal peoples elsewhere, established spheres of influence and then colonies which in effect ‘extended the European states-system’. Third, movement from a ‘mixed global-system’ (sovereign states in Europe/colonial empires outside) to the current global order, where sovereign territorially segmented states are the only ‘legitimate and acceptable’ form of politico-military rule. Fourth, the spread of the idea of the nation-state, which began at the end of the eighteenth century and is still continuing. The goal of ‘self-determination’ became legitimised and globalized, with ‘nations’ demanding ‘their own sovereign states’ and associated ‘rights and privileges’. Finally, they ask whether the world is experiencing another great transformation, to ‘a new global order’ in which the sovereign territorial state will no longer be the ‘dominant form’ of politico-military rule. Their conclusion is guarded: while the conception of the Westphalian state, including its ideals, ‘has not been rejected by most … it is being challenged by many’.

For students of IR, the puzzle about grains and heaps in relation to the future of the states-system was challenged at the very end of the Cold War by Francis Fukuyama’s controversial thesis about The End of History. ⁷⁴ The essay version of the thesis, subsequently expanded into a book, was published in 1989. Stripped to its skeleton, the thesis claimed that all the great political and economic questions of the century had been settled with the defeat of communism: history was now simply a matter of managing liberal (capitalist) democracy. Almost simultaneously, John Mearsheimer wrote an equally controversial article, though not one as famous, except within the IR discipline itself. And his title was equally provocative: ‘Back to the future: instability in Europe after the Cold War’. ⁷⁵ The stripped down version of this thesis warned optimists that Europe after the Cold War would not move to a new age, but would revert to traditional attitudes and behaviour: the United States would lose interest in Europe, aggressive Russian behaviour would revive, the European Union (EU) would eventually collapse, and there would be a revival of traditional competing nationalisms in Europe. Nearly 30 years since these controversial positions were set out and debated, is there any doubt now which thesis deserves the prize, at least for mid-term forecasting – Mearsheimer’s emphasis on texture or Fukuyama’s on transformation? So far, Mearsheimer’s mantra, ‘Back to the Future’, has the heft.

There are sound reasons for being parsimonious about attaching labels such as ‘transformation’, or ‘end of’ when contemplating ‘eras’: existential changes do not come along like London buses. ⁷⁶ Being parsimonious is a guard against being dazzled by the new – perhaps a particular temptation or ‘preoccupation’ of the IR discipline. ⁷⁷

This discussion of texture and transformation, following other puzzles involved in shaping the past, underlines the difficulty and dangers of trying to impose a single master explanation of ‘the international’. Not discussed, as too obvious, is the fact that the closer we approach a master explanation (such as ‘power’, ‘race’ or ‘human nature’), the closer we get to something that ‘explains everything, and therefore nothing’. The essential complexity of international history – ‘messiness’ is not too unscholarly a word – is evident in John Darwin’s After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires 1400-2000. The book is an exploration of empire over six centuries, empires built to last, and whose successes and failures helped shape the world today, and into the future. Darwin recognises that there have been ‘grand themes’ in the past, but detects no ‘neat’ chronology, or geography, or history of empire. He insists that we should not see the past as an everlasting ‘present’, but grasp it as always changeable snapshots. Above all, his account has ‘little in common with those road maps of history on which ideologues (of every persuasion) draw their straight lines’. ⁷⁸

Situatedness

It was one of the achievements of the Frankfurt School that the prized goal of ‘objectivity’ towards the social world was decisively questioned. It was argued that the most scholars can achieve, grounded as we all are in ‘lived lives’, is a degree of critical distance.

Situatedness exerts its pull on the thinking of researchers not only through the time and place we inhabit but also through our individual character and concerns in relation to our approach to our work. Beate Jahn’s article on liberalism shows the significance of time and place when considering ideology and ideological change. ⁸⁰ After 1945, she argues, ideologies shaped ‘the very structure’ of the Cold War – the ‘First’, ‘Second’ and ‘Third’ Worlds – and generated within them the politics of resistance, new ideologies and far-reaching change. Exercising critical distance struggled in an ideologically swamped global context in which, as Jahn puts it, the mindsets of others were deemed to be ‘ideological’, while one’s own was understood as being beyond politics. Meanwhile, she argues, divisions have continued to open up within religions through the past century, between those for whom life as a whole is a religious experience (a ‘lived religion’) and those whose morals and customs have morphed into ‘tradition’, ‘community’ and ‘faith’. Where one stood in some parts of the world became more complex than ever as, in Jahns’ words, ‘The shifting power relations between liberal ideology and religion … transformed the former into political theology and the latter into theological politics’.

Focusing down to the situatedness of the individual scholar (her own research), Cecelia Lynch writes that she ‘deferred’ attention on a certain issue – in this case race – because of contingent factors in specific pieces of work. ⁸¹ Such deferrals, in recollection, are something which many researchers – certainly myself – will recognise and somewhat regret about aspects of our own work.

Situatedness shapes the intensity and perspective observers give to particular issue areas. Ayse Zarakol’s article asks us to consider whether the Western discourse about ‘the Rest’ and its ‘rise’ might actually tell us more about the self-anxieties of ‘the West’ looking on, rather than the realities unfolding across the world outside. ⁸² This way of seeing was once described with beautiful simplicity by Anaïs Nin: ‘We see things not as they are but as we are’. ⁸³

Theory and practice

The vast majority of students of IR over the discipline’s century have been concerned with the practice of international relations; vanishingly few of us would consider our goal to be ‘pure’ theory – whatever that means in IR. Chris Brown has identified his own work as ‘Applied Political Philosophy’, ⁸⁴ and this informs his article on ‘The Promise and Record of International Institutions’, ⁸⁵ beginning with the disappointments following the great aspirations at the end of the Great War. A disconnect opened up between new thinking that attempted to ‘reset’ the institutions governing relations between states and what actually transpired: within 20 years, there was another and more destructive world war; within 40 years, there was a Cold War threatening very human survival; and within 100 years, while an ‘aspiration to create a more rule-governed world remains strong’, Brown concludes that ‘the fate of the liberal internationalist ideas set in train in 1919 remains in the balance’.

The disconnects after 1919 between liberal hopes and power-political behaviour are plentifully illustrated throughout the collection. In negotiating the politics of disconnect, language is shown as having multiple political uses in attempting to paper over cracks between theory and practice. Focusing on the ethics of equality in relation to race, Lynch criticises political practitioners and scholars for ‘assuming its importance but refusing, suppressing or deferring its enactment’. The buzzword ‘partnership’ was deployed when formal independence from colonial control became everyday dependencia. Discussing the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) commitment, Tim Dunne and Nicholas Wheeler point to claims of ‘double standards’ on the part of leading Western powers, and the deployment of a ‘self-serving morality discourse’. ⁸⁶ Andrew Phillips draws attention to Inis Claude’s account of the ‘semantic debasement’ of the idea of ‘collective security’ between its origins in the League of Nations and its deployment by the Western powers after 1945 – to mean almost exactly the opposite. ⁸⁷ Words are easier than actions, and the museum of international relations is packed with the artefacts of disappointment and their associated vocabularies.

Human rights are an area where a disconnect between theory and practice is always contentious. Dunne and Wheeler show that although human rights after 1948 became a ‘powerful symbol of an emerging cosmopolitan community’, there is a different picture. In practice, they say, ‘the combined impact of all the human rights proclamations, declarations, conventions and resolutions have fallen well short of the hopes of countless intellectuals and activists’. Their article offers explanations of the disconnect between the hopes for ‘Great Transformations’ and what many have characterised as ‘Great Illusions’. The authors themselves, while appreciating the negative interpretations, consider the ‘human rights project’ as a journey, and one that has achieved positive ‘landings’. These are said to show that the project ‘continues to offer the hope of moving towards a global order characterised by greater justice and equity’.

The controversy about progress being possible in international relations but not guaranteed or non-reversible was outlined earlier. Various articles offer snapshots of reasons to be cheerful, suggesting progressive developments in the manner in which various ‘aporias’ have at least been recognised and brought onto the agenda: in the declaration and expansion of Millennium Development Goals, in the extension of networks of law hinting at an emerging ‘global polity’, and in the delegitimization of war. Several positive developments were not discussed much, but rather taken for granted. These included some former enemies living in peace and the growth of global social movements active in promoting world order values such as environmental sustainability, human rights and peaceful change.

In considering the disconnect between theory and practice, it is always crucial to ask, ‘whose theory and whose practice?’ This is imperative in relation to nationalism, for the earlier discussion of teleology noted the power of the identification of the nation-state principle with the working out of history’s purpose. Here, the legitimation of the doctrine of the self-determination of peoples famously expressed in President Wilson’s Fourteen Points of January 1918 was pivotal. Self-determination, it was asserted, ‘is not a mere phrase; it is an imperative principle of action’.

For some, this was a battle cry, for others a disaster. Michael Cox’s article ⁸⁸ identifies Arnold Toynbee, a noted philosopher of history and (Chatham House-style) polymath as one of the latter. Toynbee expressed the hope that the ‘habit of nationalism’ could be broken. Many passionately believed otherwise, of course, and sought to employ nationalist rationales to challenge existing orders. The most notorious and dangerous in the Interwar years were the Nazis in Germany and the Fascists in Italy. They were eventually ‘broken’, at enormous cost in blood and treasure, but the ‘habit’ globally was not. Cox describes the persistence of nationalism through the Interwar years, through the Cold War and afterwards, down to the populism and dangers it poses to world order today. Steve Bannon, former White House strategist and controversial right-wing figure, is quoted telling nationalists around the world in 2018 that ‘history is on our side … Every day we get stronger and they [‘globalists’] get weaker’.

The shock of the old

The ‘shock of the old’ describes the realisation by the start of the new millennium, in face of the assertions of hyper-globalisers, global hypers and post-IRers, that actually-practised international relations consisted of a great deal of business-as-usual. ⁸⁹ Our own situatedness in a middle-class globalised profession tends to distance academic IR from the daily lives of the vast majority of the world’s population, for whom the old realities are the only ones they know: states and their interests, nations and nationalism, borders and their power, capitalism and its demon genius. The need for a reality reset is tragically and visible daily in the lives and deaths of the 65.6 million ‘displaced’ people in the world; ⁹⁰ in the rise of nationalist populism (‘America First’ and even ‘NZ First’ slogans); in the nationalising, genderising, and often radicalising of children; in the posturing of ‘Big Men’ in big countries (Modi, Putin, Trump and Xi) and their counterparts in small states; and in insistent statist demands (in the nativist dogma of UK Brexiteers, ‘to take back control’). At the end of the first century of academic IR, there is a strong case for arguing that the strengths of the historic strands making up the texture of the states-system remain almost as robust as they were in 1919, though there are also countervailing voices.

Running through Terry Nardin’s article is the view that the threads of continuity remain strong within apparent changes in the international legal order since 1919. ⁹¹ While arguing that there have been some striking innovations, and much talk of change over the century, he concludes that the ‘contours’ of international law in 2019 are nevertheless in many ways the same as in 1919. Not only does the structural significance of the ‘system of states’ remain powerful in shaping particular state interests, he also underlines the robustness of the system itself: individual states disappear and new states arise, but the system of states carries on.

The texture associated with structures is inseparable from the processes that replicate them. Stacie Goddard, Paul MacDonald and Daniel Nexon explain, in ways that would shock those whose reading of IR stopped in the 1990s, how statecraft remains robustly at the heart of most major debates in the discipline. ⁹² They argue that statecraft in its multiple and sometimes ‘fragmented’ manifestations, and under various names, continues to occupy ‘the center of the study of international relations’; they also show its significance in diplomatic and other practices. In making the latter case, that ‘statecraft’ (understood by the authors as ‘repertoires’) is not simply reactive to structure, but causal, the authors converge with the Historical Sociology perspective acknowledging the ‘mutually constitutive, interactive processes involved in the formation of nation-states and the global states-system’. ⁹³ A similar co-constituting argument is made in a different context by Daniel Drezner in relation to technological change over the century. ⁹⁴ He argues that technology is ‘not merely an independent variable in international relations’: importantly, there are ‘reciprocal effects’. That said, Drezner’s article fully recognises the robustness of systemic effects.

We are often tempted to believe that technological innovation, especially of a radical kind, is both a driver and evidence of real transformation in international affairs. This does not seem to have been the case in the ‘great’ transformations of the last 1000 years, identified by Opello and Rosow earlier. Historically, the states-system seems to have domesticated technology rather than innovation overthrowing established orders. The temptation is to think that the past century has been different, with such amazing innovations as the ‘nuclear revolution’ and the connectivity of the Internet. Drezner’s analysis gives us pause. He advises caution about seeing innovation as being ‘as transformative as technology enthusiasts believe’. While a particular line of innovation initially ‘might provoke exaggerated expectations of both benign and less benign outcomes’, he advises that ‘over the long term very different verdicts might emerge’. Drezner cites the experience (so far) with nuclear weapons and the Internet as examples. Furthermore, viewing the century as a whole, he writes that ‘it is worth noting that almost every political effect of technology’ we worry about today ‘would have applied with equal force in 1919’. Innovation, he suggests, creates ‘temporary uncertainties’ rather than radical transformation: ‘Over time, human beings adapt’.

The shock of the old is apparent throughout this Special Issue. In addition to the articles just referred to, it was evident in Cox’s discussion of the old and sometimes ancient ideas informing (and misinforming and constructing and re-constructing) nationalisms after 1919; in Jahn’s discussion of the historical dynamics relating to liberalism having ‘called ideology into being’, like ‘the sorcerer’s apprentice’, but having ‘lost control of its own creation’; in the discussion by Dunne and Wheeler of the tensions between relativist values and universalist conceptions of human rights; and in Brown’s seeing the three major powers today as reminiscent of ‘the great powers of the pre-1914 world’. It is time to recall the earlier quotation of Faulkner, about the past not being dead – ‘not even past’. The sounds of the Great War still echo. Looking back from 2019 and unpicking the texture of the past century, one often feels that the origins, issues and outcomes of 1914–1918 were indeed only yesterday. Emotionally they were. After all, it is only 10 years since the death of Harry Patch, the United Kingdom’s last survivor of the pastness of the daily outrages of the Western Front.

Outrages over the past century constitute important strands in the texture of international history, and they feed the internalisation of negative understandings of ‘human nature’, the ‘human condition’ and ‘human ‘history’. One illustration of this, Lynch’s discussion of the ‘moral aporia’ of race, cites academics and governments as guilty parties. Dunne and Wheeler begin their survey of human rights with the thought that, as we intellectualise, ‘yet the bodies keep piling up’. Progress, carefully considered, is possible, but the history of the international over the past century exposes how resistant the system of states has been to progressive, emancipatory goals. Too often sovereignty has given authority to inhumanity, and too often the nation-state has functioned as a petri dish for injustice.

After the First World War, there was widespread optimism about international relations. Within the emerging discipline of IR, those who expressed such ideas were criticised for embracing ‘utopianism’. After the Second World War, optimism was not totally absent in the discipline, but the balance of power had decisively shifted from varieties of ‘internationalism’ to realism. Prominent public figures, and some academics largely outside the discipline, advocated atomic disarmament and even world government. In relation to its impact on debates about core issues in international relations in the past decade, special note should be given to the widely endorsed work of Steven Pinker, a distinguished psychologist and leading public intellectual. His first major work directly relevant to the big IR questions of the past century was The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity (2011) ⁹⁵ In it, his study of trends in all kinds of violence led him to conclude that violence has been declining, historically, whether in domestic contexts (crime) or between states (war). His follow-up volume, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress (2018), updates the trends, elaborates the central theme and has been lavishly praised: ‘My new favourite book of all time’ says Bill Gates. ⁹⁶

In a discussion of Pinker’s first volume, David Cannadine expressed regret at the lack of attention given by his fellow historians to such concepts as ‘common humanity’. He noted that those who have addressed these matters, like Pinker, have been from other disciplines: psychology, behavioural science, biology and sociology. ⁹⁷ Cannadine could have added IR scholars to his fellow historians, for we also seem generally drawn to the darker rather than to the more collective and progressive aspects of global potential.

There is, for example, no Pinkeresque optimism in the collection of articles in this Special Issue, offering a robust defence of Pinker’s confident predictions from his trends about declining violence. The nearest is Colin Wight’s view that Pinker is ‘broadly correct’ if one focuses on the trends, but that trends take us only so far, and ‘the signs on the horizon are not promising’, especially in the international realm. ⁹⁸

While optimism is in short supply, the contributors to this collection suggest various developments signifying transformative potential. These include Brown’s conception of trends towards a ‘global polity’, Phillips’ recognition of ‘cosmopolitan’ latency in the UN, the delegitimization of war discussed by Nardin and Wight, and the historic significance of bringing human rights into relations between states as discussed by Dunne and Wheeler.

The jury is still out

Various potential or actual transformations are suggested in every article in the collection, but all contain qualifications and warnings. We are in an era of grains and heaps: ultimately, time will tell, but not without a great deal of disputation.

Wight’s article has the longest theoretical discussion of the complex relationships between change and continuity in the collection. At the centre of his argument is the view that we must reject the idea of seeing continuity and change as ‘opposites’. It is explained that they are, instead, ‘inextricably linked’, indeed ‘co-dependent’. Change, for example, can only be understood ‘within a horizon of continuity’ and outside of this horizon ‘change is only difference’. Relating this to future violence in international relations, Wight concludes that ‘the lens’ of 1919–2019 means that violence may change, but ‘the form it takes’ will only be recognisable as change because ‘violence continues to have the first and last word’.

Equally cognizant of the complex linkages between continuity and change, Nardin’s discussion of international law warns that focusing on ‘doctrinal continuity’ can lead to changes being overlooked, ‘even big ones’. He illustrates this with reference to the ‘significant’ change in legal doctrine after 1919 in the right of states to make war. But he offers a counter-example, where assumptions of change trumped continuity. His illustration here focuses on various expectations that ‘the world was about to enter a new age’ as a result of the rise and fall in ‘the distribution of economic and military power’. In the event, the international legal order was not overturned, leading Nardin to propose that we might presume that the existing order ‘will survive new challenges’ in future. There may be change in terms of scale, but not of conceptual innovation.

A similar warning is offered by Zarakol, cautioning against too much preoccupation with change and what is novel, leading to failures in appreciating continuities. This risk is illustrated by Western responses to the ‘rise’ of the BRICS, and the associated rise of cottage industries focused on IR’s latest obsessions with the new.

When it comes to ‘great’ transformations over the past century, of the type discussed earlier, the articles in the collection are cautious. One explicit discussion of possible radical change is Brown’s embryonic ‘global polity’. His key indicators of transformation are the ever-denser network of international organisations, the search for cooperative solutions to common problems, and a reconceptualising of the duties as well as rights of sovereignty. This ‘global polity’ is said to reflect ‘the hopes of 1919 rather more accurately than institutions such as the League of Nations and the United Nations’. Recalling ‘a catchphrase of the 1930s, Brown notes the aim of ‘a world governed by Law not War’. But the ‘global polity’ is embryonic, and he asks whether the ‘liberal expectancy’ will come to pass, because ‘there are signs that limits to cooperation are being reached’.

One bellwether is the future of human rights. This is central to the article by Dunne and Wheeler, who pose the issue in relation to ‘Illusions’ or ‘Transformations’. To many, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was a ‘foundational moment’: to many others it was a liberal project imposed by the West on the rest. The authors fully recognise that the ‘universalist promise of the UDHR was almost immediately limited by diplomatic practice’, but add what is often overlooked, namely the way the language of human rights has been used by human rights activists in the developing world and eastern Europe, and by some governments and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs), ‘to hold governments accountable for their human rights records.

As ever, ‘security’ – a claimant for the century’s key IR concept – is crucial in shaping attitudes and behaviour promoting or resisting change. Phillips takes a panoramic perspective on a ‘succession’ of ‘global security hierarchies’ since 1919, and deems them ‘one of the most significant developments’ in world politics. These ‘authoritative arrangements’ are described as ‘global in scope’, tasked with ‘mitigating international security challenges’, and part of the foundation of the LIO. Once informed by ‘overt hierarchies of race and civilization’, Phillips argues that ‘more unequivocally cosmopolitan alternatives’ have emerged. These are now under challenge from the ‘parallel globalization’ of illiberal forces, notably the claims of nationalists and sovereigntists. The global context is a ‘new geography of vulnerability’, which for some pushes rational security thinking towards modes of global cooperation, but Phillips postulates that cooperation will be regional ‘if at all’, and the likely effectiveness of even this way ahead ‘remains open to question’.

At the heart of security thinking, for many, remains the danger of war – the ‘peculiar institution’ of international relations whose eradication inspired the discipline’s institutional moment. ⁹⁹ War is an aspect of political violence, and eradicating political violence is an impossible goal according to Wight. Violence, he argues, represents ‘the first and last word’ in politics, and ‘a world without violence would be a world without politics’. But if a world without political violence is ‘inconceivable’, does this necessarily rule out progressive restraints on that dimension of political violence called ‘war’? This distinction gives Wight some scope for hope. Considering war and its potential limitation, he writes, ‘The control of violence on the one hand and the ability to hold those who employ it to increasing moral and legal standards is perhaps one of the most significant transformations in international relations from 1919-2019’.

Wilson’s famous rallying-cry a century ago – ‘The war to end all wars’ – became a source of bitter irony in the light of the numerous wars that have taken place since. The earlier discussion around the Pinker thesis and its critics is only the tip of the iceberg regarding the deep divisions about the origins and possible eradication of war. Another recent and controversial contribution to the debate is The Internationalists by Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro. ¹⁰⁰ The book discusses the transformative delegitimization of war following on from the (much ignored, much scoffed at) Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928. The book contrasts the ‘old world order’ and the ’new world order’. In Nardin’s reading of the argument, ‘the doctrinal outlawry of war has become a settled principle of international law’, and this delegitimizing of war ‘as an instrument of foreign policy’ is ‘potentially world-transforming’. However, he adds that ‘great changes, like small ones, can be undone’. Wight is more forthright in his critique of the Hathaway and Shapiro claim that Kellogg-Briand was one of the ‘most transformative events of human history’. He considers the argument to be a ‘paradigmatic example of a significant event as transformative argument pushed too far’. At the base of his critique is the failure of the authors to understand the fundamental relationship between politics, law and violence: ‘Politics only bends to the will of the law’, he asserts, ‘until the law no longer serves the interests of the political’. In short, ‘the ultimate source of law is the political and the political … is constituted by violence and its possibility’.

‘Hardening of the categories’

It is not necessary to be the most radical of constructivists to appreciate Nicholas Onuf’s general argument that reality is talked into existence through the language agents use to express to each other their ideas about the patterns in their minds’ eye. ‘In giving form to the world’, he wrote, ‘the mind makes the world real – in our heads. And yet the world appears to exist, more or less as we sense it, outside the mind’. ¹⁰¹ In our heads, as observers of international relations, we are undoubtedly prone to a ‘hardening of the categories’. ¹⁰² Categories structure mindsets, and the most influential memes help make the global social milieu real. Congruous attitudes and behaviours then follow, stretching from the closest human identifications to the most harm-laden human inhumanities. We live and often die in categories.

Categories that were constructed in our heads and hardened in the practices of international affairs in the past century include revisionist/status quo powers, capitalists/proletarians, the nation/foreigners (‘aliens’), great/small powers, haves/have-nots, West/East, North/South and ‘Global North’/‘Global South’, rich/poor, White/Black, first/second/and third worlds, developed/developing world, the West/Rest, my religion/your religion, and, for me, the tragic category error of self/other.

Some of these categories are prominent from time to time in the collection. From the Interwar years, Nardin reminds us of the different worldviews that arose as a result of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917. The spread of revolutionary categorisations led Mussolini to employ the proletarian/capitalist distinction to counterpoint the ‘proletarian nations’ of Europe (which he claimed included Italy) with the more powerful and richer capitalist states. From the early post-Second World War years, Phillips explains how the category of ‘the West’ became hardened. Its evolution depended on ‘three core propositions’: a shared ‘Western civilization’, uniting North America and Western Europe; shared postwar responsibilities in maintaining peace and security, and expectations about extending the benefits of ‘civilisation’ to non-European peoples; and the institutionalisation of security and economic cooperation among the Atlantic/Western states. By such steps, and plenty more before and after, an ‘intellectual’ identification with a set of ideas hardened into a power bloc that became an international entity, distinct from ‘the East’, or the ‘communist bloc’, or the ‘Rest’.

Categories might harden and persist, but Zarakol shows that sometimes they are subject to ‘discursive shifts’ that change meanings. The focus of this claim is the ‘West’ and the ‘Rest’, and the notion of ‘rising powers’. Zarakol argues that the West traditionally categorised the ‘non-West’ as ‘primarily … a source of international problems and a developmental problem’. In recent decades, however, these old labels shifted with a recognition that some non-Western states were considered to have ‘agency in the international system and … [be] potential partners for the West in global governance’. The shift, Zarakol argues, may have had much to do with ‘Western hype’, US anxieties and US debates about its own decline. Even so, it helped a ‘structural shift’ both in West/Rest relations and in the self-images of non-Western powers.

Categories conceal as well as construct. They can lead to forgetting, marginalising or being hidden; each of these outcomes can be as significant as being remembered. In other words, aspects of the past can be categorised out.

One of the features of historical research in recent decades has been the uncovering of pasts that have received such treatment. In IR, Lynch makes this case explicitly in relation to the marginalising of race. But race and racialisation certainly do not ‘present the only moral aporia’ in the discipline and related practice, and Lynch notes that wider ‘intersectional analysis’ would reveal other ‘moral contradictions’. Without doubt, IR until the 1980s marginalised many dimensions of world politics (notably gender, class and post-coloniality) that subsequently have been addressed, if not always adequately. It will surprise some to read from Dunne and Wheeler that the ‘first book length treatment’ of human rights to have a ‘significant impact’ on IR appeared only as late as 1986. For sure the literature of IR has become richer in recent decades, but whether in 2019 it offers more compelling and workable answers to the most basic and enduring questions of human relations at the international level remains an open question.

Several articles point to specific events or ideas in the past that have been almost forgotten or certainly marginalised (the Kellogg-Briand Treaty and the Military Staff Committee established by the UN Charter for example). The idea of a hidden international history raises questions about the possibility of different ‘trajectories’: What if? Alternative international histories of 2019–1919 demand to be written, as was suggested in the earlier defence of counterfactual history. This is not to imply that the outcome in 2019 would necessarily have been a better world; one alternative history could plausibly have been a superpower nuclear war ending in a global ‘nuclear winter’. But it is worth speculating – recalling Lebow’s rewriting of the summer of 1914 – about plausible changes that could have resulted in different conditions of possibility in subsequent decades. While accepting that there can be no year zero in history, a different outcome in 1914, or 1933, or 1963, or 2000, or 2016 would have led to later decisions being made under different circumstances. What if the Nazis had been defeated in the German elections, or if John F. Kennedy’s assassin had missed his target, or if Al Gore (who won the popular vote) had been a more savvy candidate for President, or if David Cameron had not turned an intra-Conservative Party tussle into a threat to the uniquely successful international project of the EU? And so on. To adjust the one-liner of Boulding, quoted earlier, we are as we are because we humans let things get that way.

‘Back to the future’

‘Where are we going?’ was not the explicit theme of this Special Issue, but in different ways Mearsheimer’s mantra has been a constant refrain in relation to an important transformative development at present, namely, the decline and possible collapse of the LIO. The LIO is the rules-based order which advanced after the Great War, and then consolidated after the Second World War into the dominating global politico-economic order since that time.

The challenges to the LIO are touched upon in most of the articles. The risks arise from authoritarianism, nationalism, populism, and the alleged decline in the willingness of the anchor of the LIO, the United States, to perform its role. Meanwhile, China’s ‘peaceful rise’ is now seen to have taken on a more threatening reality. The language of diplomacy between the Great Powers – a phrase that itself seems a throwback to a different time – again demands attention, even if the words are transmitted via Twitter. The analogy of the 1930s, in general if not detail, has to be taken seriously. ¹⁰³

The fate of the LIO, as just suggested, is tied up with the future role of the United States in international affairs. Will it be ‘anther American century?’ Zarakol’s article traces the debates about US ‘overstretch’ (or not) and its ‘decline’ (or not) in recent decades. US foreign policy will have decisive implications for the future of the LIO and, in Cox’s words, even of ‘the idea of a unified West’. Cox underlines the consensus of the Special Issue with his troubling picture of our ‘uncertain times’. He observes those putting ‘the narrow interest of the nation above those of the wider global community’ and sees them growing in influence. He fears that their ascendancy could be ‘just as damaging to the peoples of the world’ in the present century as they were in the previous one. Nonetheless, he has not entirely given up on the LIO or the West, but stresses that ‘there is little room for complacency about the future’.

The global imaginary

The phrase ‘the global imaginary’ is at the heart of Or Rosenboim’s article titled ‘State, Power, and Global Order’; its theme is the growth of ‘a political vision that encapsulated the world as a whole’. The article explores the issue, history and reality of ‘how to see the world’, tracing the development of thinking about ‘political space’ and reflecting on the discipline’s ‘spatial categories’ ¹⁰⁴

Rosenboim’s account is of an expanding ‘global imaginary’. Crucially, she argues that the nation-state model, once regarded as ‘the new modernity’, has been progressively challenged through the past century, and her historical analysis ‘gives rise to doubts’ about the teleological approach ‘that conceptualises modernity in terms of statehood’. In a key sentence, she writes, ‘The global political space embodies an alternative account of modernity, that challenges the idea that the territorial nation-state represents the final stage of human progress’. This view, of course, is directly contrary to those discussed earlier who understand the global spread of nation-states in teleological terms.

While arguing that the global imaginary reveals an alternative account of modernity, Rosenboim’s article does not draw a straight (or any) line leading towards world government, the ultimate centralising of power in global space. Her historical account does suggest, in the light of the ‘global imaginary’, a ‘progression towards global political and economic order’ – which is not the same thing. Certain ideas are discussed that recognise ‘the potentially world-changing rise of a different political space’, including, for example, the notion of functionalism which was once advanced by leading figures in IR such as David Mitrany and E.H. Carr. Their expectation was that the meaning of established boundaries could be changed as part of moving towards a more harmonious world order.

The transformation of imaginaries into the daily politics of the international requires new identities and institutions. Referring to the ‘progressive realists’ mentioned earlier, Rosenboim specifies Hans J. Morgenthau and John H. Herz and their realisation that ‘genuine realism’ required changes in ‘minds and attitudes’. ¹⁰⁵ (For E.H. Carr, another of the ‘progressive realists’, Cox reminds us that the construction of a ‘post-national order’ must be part of the same project.) Speculating whether such far-reaching changes may happen, Rosenboim sees the ‘interplay’ of particularity and universality in the global imaginary being undermined today by the resurgence of ‘state-centric political nationalism’. Such developments challenge ‘the legitimacy of … global political space’.

Despite the clear sense of several contributors that political space became ever more recognised in global terms over the century, radical thinking about changing the organisation of power in that space has not prospered. Rosenboim reminds us that sophisticated thinking has occasionally taken place about world government in the past. These days however there is not much interest in the topic in the discipline, and even less outside. Thomas Weiss a decade ago pointed to the professional inhibitions on working on a topic as apparently distant, irrelevant and utopian as world government. ¹⁰⁶ He showed how it has effectively been taken off the academic agenda since the 1930s and 1940s, when it was a topic of informed and serious debate. For Weiss, and many others, the need to recover this topic is even more urgent in the early decades of this century than it was in the middle of the previous one.

Turning the ‘global imaginary’ as political space into a global-we as a human community of values would indeed be a great transformation. Human rights would have a key role, and in this regard many students of IR would be surprised that E.H. Carr – a seriously misunderstood ‘realist’ – can be called up in support. Carr was a more significant figure in human rights than is generally recognised, as Dunne and Wheeler show by his United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) work in 1946–1947. Less surprisingly, Carr pressed for the realisation that ‘ideals cannot change political practice until they are concretized into political institutions’, and less surprisingly still, he warned that such institutions would inevitably fall short of their ideals.

The de Madriaga challenge

At the end of the 1920s, the distinguished Spanish diplomat Salvador de Madriaga confronted disarmament idealists with a simple but devastating proposition. Although directed specifically at a headline issue of the day, disarmament, it got to the heart of the IR problematique.

‘The problem of disarmament’, de Madriaga wrote, ‘is not the problem of disarmament. It really is the problem of the organisation of the World Community’. ¹⁰⁷ The word ‘disarmament’ in this statement could be replaced by many other ‘problems’ in international affairs, from the ancient challenge of the security dilemma to the impending challenge of ‘climate chaos’. The attempt after 1919 to ‘reset’ what de Madriaga called the ‘World Community’ did not produce a harmonious world, and his challenge remains in the even more urgent circumstances of human interconnection in 2019. ¹⁰⁸

This urgency arises from the convergence of global and traditional dangers – the Great Reckoning facing humanity in the present era. ¹⁰⁹ The rational answer to the de Madriaga challenge points to extending cosmopolitan values from a global solidarity goal only, to an identity plus institutional project, recalling Carr’s advice about values needing institutions to carry them forward. Such ideas have had some traction, in face of traditionalist forces. Phillips argues that ‘authoritative arrangements … global in scope and dedicated to mitigating international security challenges’ have ‘progressively broadened in the inclusivity of their security referents’. Over the decades, he considers that ‘explicitly racist and civilizational’ approaches have ‘given way to more cosmopolitan visions of security hierarchy’. This has also been accompanied by more ‘holistic’ conceptions of security. Further progress towards inclusivity and ambitious arrangements are now ‘in tension’ with nationalism, statism and ‘the recent worldwide resurgence of illiberal forces’. As a result, ‘the prospective longevity of today’s UN-centric cosmopolitan global security hierarchy’ is threatened.

Almost wherever we look, we do not seem to be in good shape to meet de Madriaga’s challenge: have we, globally, reached the limits of cooperation and solidarity? The immediate past does not bode well for a positive answer. David Goodhart argued that in 2016 the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump in the United States marked ‘not so much the arrival of the populist era in western politics but its coming of age’. ¹¹⁰ His book introduced newly hardened categories which resonate more widely than the book’s UK focus. Goodhart labelled two ‘new tribes’: the ‘Anywheres’ and the ‘Somewheres’. He defines them as those who see the world from ‘Anywhere’ (crudely, the elites), and those with ‘ascribed’ identities related to ‘group belonging and particular places’, who see the world from ‘Somewhere’ (crudely, non-elites).

A few months before the book was published, the British Prime Minister Theresa May had told the Tory Party Conference: ‘if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means’. May was widely criticised in the United Kingdom, by empirical evidence that approximately half of UK citizens thought themselves ‘global citizens’ before being citizens of the UK and by champions of multiple identities. ¹¹¹

Such categories, before they harden further, raise questions for students of IR about situatedness and scholarship. Who or what is the ‘somebody’ and ‘something’ for whom we think? The power of the ‘global imaginary’ logically requires us to embrace Henry Sidgwick’s notion of adopting ‘the point of the view of the universe’. ¹¹² Research leads us to know that ‘Grey is the colour of truth, not red, white and blue’. ¹¹³ And the ideal of a university tells us that a campus should not be a refuge for tribes, but the home for citizens of everywhere.

Never say never

The story of international relations so far, with its textures and transformations, continuities and changes, is for me an account above all of never say never. The articles collected in this Special Issue reveal over the past century the ostensible ‘end’ of this or that (ideology, religion, and nationalism for example) and then their return. They describe the building in the past century of institutions that were once unthought or merely dreams (such as a universal human rights regime, global multi-functional organisations or the norm of democracy). They postulate the growing reality of the global context. They show that progress is achievable beyond scientific and material improvement, even if it is not guaranteed or bound to be permanent. And they confirm that ‘humanity’ is a process, not an end-point.

As academic go-betweens, we write relations as fatalists, mitigators or transcenders, ¹¹⁴ in a discipline with ‘a focus but not a periphery’. Our discipline has a role in contributing to the stock of thinking about the invention of humanity; we have a record of some work to be proud of, but plenty more to do, including continuing to address the agenda of 1919. In geological time, humanity has just arrived on the stage and without a settled script. We may have just entered the stage but the Anthropocene scenario and its rising chorus is exerting unique demands on us to act globally and collectively. This is one reason why studying the past is so essential, not to deliver precise ‘lessons’ but to encourage perspective on what we face. There is no hiding place, not even in space. ¹¹⁵

We have a duty as academic go-betweens in shaping the past as part of shaping the future, through lenses glazed by our concerns about the great reckonings of the present. My earlier discussion of writing relations and interpreting the past came down on the side of complexity rather than reductionism, on multiple trajectories rather than single purposes, and on anti-determinism as opposed to closed understandings. This is not the most comfortable conclusion, but I do find something inherently hopeful in the very messiness of it all. I am therefore drawn to interpretations such as John Darwin’s discovering an absence of ‘straight lines’ in his history of empire, ¹¹⁶ and Quentin Skinner’s appreciation of existing values as the undetermined outcome of ‘a series of choices made at different times between different possible worlds’. ¹¹⁷ This means, even if there is no year zero to ease the making of our own history, there will always be spaces for the exercise of free will, opportunities for human agency and solidarity, and the scope to create more favourable conditions of possibility for the construction of an emancipated humanity in a sustainable world.