Abstract
The origin of international relations (IR) as an academic discipline began in the UK after World War I, as part of the liberal internationalist reaction that also led to the formation of the League of Nations. Three university chairs in Britain were endowed by two entrepreneurs, who took the view that if internationalism was to replace nationalism, the world could then be spared the kind of carnage that resulted from the Great War. The cause of war, according to them, was the illegitimate nature of many of the then-existing regimes. If the dynastic rulers in Europe gave way to democracies, they thought, then the days of secret diplomacy, alliances and conflict would come to an end. And to the then novel idea of self-determination was added the concept of collective security.
There was of course a prehistory to this in the evolution of the concept of an international law. Such political philosophers as Immanuel Kant addressed the problem of war and peace late in their careers and in the margins of their major works, to say nothing of Herodotus and Thucydides, our own semi-mythical Chanakya, Machiavelli, and Hugo Grotius, all of whom studied the nature of political relations and tensions between nations.
The first chair in Britain was in Aberystwyth University funded by David Davies, who was a steel tycoon, and then one each in Oxford and the London School of Economics (LSE) were funded by Montague Burton, a successful tailor. The underlying assumption was that since World War I was a product of irrational national rivalries between sovereign states, peace could be secured by rational and international cooperation. The study of IR from this perspective, it was hoped, would help to secure this objective. Liberal internationalists hoped for two methods to result in this better world; a collective security system and greater functional integration.
These efforts, however, failed as a project for much the same reasons as did the League of Nations itself, yet never completely withered on the vine. The three British departments clung to their vision, though they were starved of resources until the mid-1960s, when the expansion of British higher education allowed for a modest revival. The objectives, then as now, were the same normative ones: to understand the underlying forces behind power politics, to provide a rational alternative to competitive power, and to inspire a new kind of political and economic leadership. The horrors of World War II led to a view that the use of force in international affairs was no longer as legitimate as it was held to be before 1914.
In the mid-twentieth century, economics became the most influential of the social sciences and had its due impact on IR, first in the guise of a course on international political economy at the LSE. This was in the teeth of opposition, since the purists of the Adam Smith tradition wanted no dilution in what they regarded as the first and foremost social science. They were in fact in good company, since the Covenant of the League of Nations had ignored the role of economics entirely. Nor did Hedley Bull consider the role of economics in his account of the international order.
Meanwhile, the USA took to the subject of IR with its characteristic zest, as usual identifying its solipsistic interests with those of the world as a whole. There were two main reasons for this. First, once it was clear that isolation was no longer a policy option for the USA, US administrations looked around for professional advice—particularly with the onset of the Cold War. The new all-powerful presidents needed their own Machiavellis, a role enthusiastically filled by the likes of George Kennan. Second, there had been an influx of prewar and postwar intellectual refugees to the USA—the most prominent in the political sciences being the German Hans Morgenthau—who were horrified at what they regarded as the naïve misunderstanding of power politics prevalent in the USA. These intellectuals expanded their influence rapidly in major US universities, establishing the dominance of “realism” in the field.
At around the same time, the US academia came up with conflict resolution, game theory, area studies, and multidisciplinary social research focusing on specific geographic regions or ethnically defined areas, typically drawing on such disciplines as political science, history, sociology, ethnology, geography, linguistics, literature and cultural studies. These researches provided a fertile field for the development of databases for the use of US academics, but inevitably also for the rapidly expanding US intelligence community, which made good, and usually malevolent, use of both such scholars and scholarship.
A Discrete or Interdisciplinary Discipline?
Thus came the question: is IR an interdisciplinary field or a subject in its own right? Its origins in Britain were essentially the former, including international law, history, and economics, but the Americans laid down the view that the presence and labors of stray experts like Hedley Bull in Australia, and a few others in Europe, were neither sufficiently interconnected nor adequately focused and therefore did not constitute a discipline per se.
Despite its overall scholarly and financial dominance, the early US obsession with attempting to follow the lead of the natural sciences and create a predictive social science of IR led to a divide between how the subject developed in the USA and elsewhere, where the primary aim has always been to better understand the complexities of international politics rather than to attempt to fashion government policy along scientific lines. However, the objective, then as now, in the USA was to clothe its global ambitions with legal and academic principles.
The pacific community of mankind yearned for by the disciples of the then new discipline of IR did not arrive to fill the hiatus caused by the delegitimization of the use of force. However, some new concepts did emerge, such as noninterference in the domestic jurisdiction and internal affairs of other states, and were duly incorporated in the Charter of the United Nations (UN). The end of World War II and the UN Charter gave the liberals a second opportunity to assert themselves, though the Charter also took the realist view into consideration by giving the UN Security Council responsibility for maintenance of peace and its five permanent members the veto, and recognized the role of economic development and welfare as supportive elements for world order.
Not surprisingly, the new discipline was dominated until the late Cold War by the leading power, the USA, the standard bearers being European immigrants like Morgenthau. There was still no great demand from other governments for similar expertise. However, by the 1970s, clearly defined groups of IR scholars had come into being, including in a few newly independent nations such as India, though often isolated in various departments of political science or government-financed institutions. Other social sciences also suffered the same problems of definition, and eventually, it became fashionable in the USA to refer to IR as a discrete field.
At a time of the capitalism–communism ideological conflict, the withdrawal of Europe from world policies, the closer integration of Europe, and the ominous spread of nuclear weapons, this new discipline was given a fillip and became more demand-driven. The insights of scholars in IR became important, along with the conclusions of multidisciplinary academics and chroniclers who were engaged in looking for truth and probability.
From the Cold War Years to Present Times
The Cold War did not entirely obliterate the attitudes of the liberalists, but it certainly strengthened the hand of the realists in the study of IR. This was overwhelmingly a US enterprise. George Kennan, with his famous ‘long telegram’ and containment theory, and Morgenthau, were the principal theoretical justifiers. Later on, containment was tempered by Henry Kissinger to show that nuclear deterrence also necessitated détente and peaceful coexistence, but détente for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) meant having bilateral nuclear weapons arms control agreements, whereas for the USA it meant freezing the status quo. This could be interpreted as US machtpolitik added on to realpolitik, since it left the unequal balance in world affairs undisturbed.
On the eastern side of the Atlantic, Britain’s E. H. Carr, a former diplomat, was the principal proponent of the view that power was the clinching moral argument, although the nuclear deterrence theory suffered from being problematic from an ethical point of view, since it meant targeting whole populations to provide national security. Nevertheless, the realist approach did not wholly dismiss the prospects of international cooperation, though it stressed that a nation’s first priority was always the welfare and security of its own population.
Increasingly, the field of IR has become interrelated with international law, and the current salience of human rights law and humanitarian law has rendered this even more necessary. The boundaries of definition have inevitably pushed IR outwards to embrace new territories, such as the environment, feminism and postmodernism. The basic question however, remains: is the concept of a world community a realizable goal or a dangerous illusion? This poser represents the basic tension between liberalism and realism.
Another central issue in the ongoing debate in IR studies is whether cooperation is restrained by the nature of sovereignty, and cannot be advanced beyond the limits of coexistence and voluntary cooperation between states. Boutros Ghali, as UN Secretary General, produced An Agenda for Peace in 1992, which suggested that sovereignty could be qualified not only by the strong imposing their will on the weak, but rather by voluntary commitments to uphold the rule of law and human rights. He followed this thesis with An Agenda for Development in 1995. Perhaps both documents were a classic overestimation of liberal optimism. The concepts of humanitarian intervention and the Responsibility to Protect doctrine now appear to have run their course with the establishment of thinly veiled, and inevitably failed, Western protectorates in places as far apart as Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Chile, though it needs to be underlined that the protection of minorities in the process of democratization is a development that needs to be promoted and enhanced.
Then there is the issue of utopian global justice in the form of the redistribution of global wealth, which has an unequal distribution of protagonists in the developed Western countries and the developing South. Even so, this question might find a greater degree of global consensus than convergence on a universal human rights culture. How important will the compliance of major emerging states like China be to such causes? Will there be any degree of compliance at all from the losers as a result of globalization, for inevitably there will be many such losers?
However, the case for non-US voices in these endless debates coursing through the study of IR has never been stronger. It is fortunate that the USA itself has a strong self-critical tradition deeply suspicious of central power, but in the balance against this is its never-ending quest for certainty and its absolute security, to the extent that it ignores the UN, an institution originally designed to protect Western values, whenever it considers that body to be superfluous to its geopolitical requirements.
Yet the liberalism of the end of World War II should not be abandoned, because the role of historical international diplomatic practice and international norms are the only antidote to the positivist–realist social science justification for US power, and that of the increasing number of populist–nationalist ideologues in every part of our planet. The three motor forces of military, knowledge and finance form the default setting for the study of IR, and the liberal gains, such as they were, were quickly superseded by the patterns of conflict and the choice between universal anarchy and universal domination. Nationalism very soon regressed into the character of expansionism. The optic from Washington or Berlin or Moscow or Beijing will always necessarily be different from that of Delhi or Pretoria, Cairo or Brasilia, and contra-factual theorists will hold to the view that random events can have more fateful and consequential outcomes than the calculations of statesmen or the academic scenarios played out in university settings.
The al-Qaeda-inspired terrorism of the early 2000s and the later rise of the Islamic pseudo-Caliphate state led to a considerable departure from the fixed positions of the Cold War period and once again drew attention to the folly of preparing to fight on the tactical strategies of the last war. Neither the liberal nor the realist approaches to IR prepared anyone for a coherent response to the new challenges of global terrorism. The debate now had to be about substance rather than theory or method. Therefore, Stanley Hoffman’s opinion in 1977 on the discipline of IR is still relevant: rather than pursue certainty or absolute security, “international relations should be the science of uncertainty, the limits of action, of the ways in which states try to manage but never succeed in eliminating their insecurity.”
International Relations Studies in India
Turning to more parochial matters, in India the field of IR has a much shorter history than 100 years. The Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA) can claim to be the first independent think tank of India with Indian roots. It was preceded by the Indian Institute of International Affairs (IIIA), but the ICWA’s founding was based on the premise that the IIIA was not wholly Indian, as it was influenced by the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London. The ICWA has seen many highs and troughs (especially a dismal period during the tenure of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi from which it took time to recover) but has regained its pre-1962 reputation, when foreign diplomats and scholars sought admission to its facilities.
The IR department in Jadavpur University was founded in 1956, shortly after the Indian School of International Studies (ISIS) was established within the ICWA in 1955 and functioned like a university department with an affiliation to Delhi University. The ISIS later became part of Jawaharlal Nehru University when that central government institution was incorporated. However, the department of IR at Jadavpur University was the first bona fide stand-alone specialized discrete university department, the brainchild of the Vice Chancellor Triguna Sen and Prithwish Chakraborty, the first chair holder to head the department.
Now, there are IR disciplines in Jindal and Jamia Millia in Delhi and many others of varying capabilities across India; these sometimes clothe themselves in different nomenclatures like area studies and peace and conflict studies. They are housed in Bangalore, Gandhinagar, Mumbai, and other state capitals, but not invariably, since important capitals like Chennai and Hyderabad, and the entire Northeast, seem to have none. The External Affairs Ministry has tried to inject some life into these university departments by dispensing some modest amounts of money but in an incoherent and spasmodic manner without a lasting effect. It is understood that even these modest subventions have now largely come to an end, or are provided with such hedging restrictions that they are no longer meaningful.
University departments are strangely much fewer than the multitude of think tanks that exist across the nation by different names, though it ought to be the other way round. It is doubtful if any Indian readers will be familiar with the US Diplomatic Courier magazine of Pennsylvania University. This journal publishes an annual league table of think tanks across the world, which makes for interesting, though advisedly skeptical, reading. In the top spot for 2018 it is not surprising to find Brookings USA, but more of a surprise is that while USA tops numerically, with 1,871 think tanks in 47 out of its 50 states, India is second with 509, followed by China with 507. The UK has 321. Only 12 countries are shown to have 100 or more think tanks.
This seems to suggest that in India there is enough money available for the sustenance of think tanks, though not for university departments. When it comes to quality, however, it might be an altogether different story. Of the first 100 ranked think tanks, Observer Research Foundation (25) and Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis (27) are in the top 50, the Indian Council for Research in International Economic Relations, the relatively new Centre for Civil Society, and the Tata Environmental Research Institute are in the second 50, and that is that. All five, curiously, are located in New Delhi.
Of course, there is no need for anyone to take any notice of a list drawn up by the University of Pennsylvania. However, it does confirm suspicions about the general utility, outreach and policy impact of our think tanks and the remarkable absence of quality outcomes from them. Most countries cannot compete with the ease with which the spoils system in the USA enables academics, politicians and government officials to move in and out of the Washington decision-making circuit, but the limited merit of the Diplomatic Courier listing is that it serves as a reference point to reveal the abyss in India between the government and the academic and think tank expertise.
In 1964, at Cairo, at what was known as the Second Non-aligned Conference, Dr. A. Appadorai from Delhi University was included in the Indian delegation, and thereafter began a trend for including someone to represent Indian academia or civil society at the UN General Assembly, but these forays were obviously more for the personal benefit of the the academic concerned and to meet the requirements of government patronage than for the enlightenment of the delegation or the government, or for subsequent analysis. The person at the UN is given a speech to read in one of the committees, which he or she duly delivers, and then, realizing accurately that his or her presence was in every way superfluous to requirements, he or she spends the rest of the months socializing agreeably with the Indian diaspora.
There is lamentable unawareness in Indian government circles of the fruitful debate of ideas and policies that interactions with academia can provide, especially with bona fide university IR departments. Some think tanks have the advantage of geographical proximity to the centers of power, but their personnel and products have always been of inconsistent and unpredictable quality.
Being obsessed with the immediate past or even the present is an occupational hazard in the profession of IR studies, but it has to be said that without some regard for immediate concerns, the discipline will soon lose its influence. We have to remember that Raymond Aron was in his day job, so to speak, a weekly columnist for Le Figaro. Few outside the ivory towers had heard of A. J. P. Taylor until he appeared on television, which he did without notes and with precise timekeeping, from 1956 till 1985, earning the distinction of delivering several lecture series on his own. It would be refreshing and rewarding to find more IR specialists from Indian universities breaking into the closed circle of writers of regular columns for Indian newspapers and online news channels, and appearing on television to replace our vacuous politicians and the greying tribe of retired diplomats.