Towards A New International Relations Paradigm

By Uditha Devapriya –MARCH 4, 2021

Uditha Devapriya

For far too long, international relations has occupied itself with major powers and major players. Clearly, we need a new paradigm to help countries like us to come up with, and formulate, foreign policy more easily and cohesively. It’s not that theorists have ignored small countries, of course; they have ignored even big players that don’t fit in their conception of the world. China is the big example here, followed by Russia and, to an extent, India. International relationists, whatever ideology they subscribe to, take it for granted that states are the fundamental, ultimate unit of analysis, that world order is governed by the relationships between these units, and that those that can extend their economic-military clout end up calling the shots.

This, of course, is the Realist approach to the subject. Yet even the other approach, the Idealist one, while differing somewhat from the Realists, is rooted in the same conceptual framework. If Realists believe – and for the sake of brevity I will simplify things here – states which possess power prevail over others, Idealists believe states which subscribe to moral ideals will eventually lead the way. As one news anchor put it the other day, Realists believe the world is a jungle and believe it remains a jungle, while Idealists believe the world is a jungle, but think it can be turned into a garden. Yet even fervent Idealists believe in the dominance of some states over others. This is Orwellian idealism: some states are more equal than others…

What problems does international relations face, as an academic discipline? Apart from those conceptual frameworks within which it operates, there are, the way I see it, two broad issues: of historiography, and of contextualisation. To put it pithily, and borrowing from Brian C. Schmidt’s often overlooked 1994 essay on the theme (“The Historiography of Academic International Relations”), international relations (IR) theorists rely on the same historical tradition in their discipline, one which follows the same trajectory and extends from Classical Athens, and assume that theory is or should be based on, and shaped by, external factors.

Most textbook accounts of the subject (to mention a few authors: Jack Donnelly, Ian Clark, Korab-Karpowicz, and Stanley Hoffman) trace it from Thucydides’s version of the Peloponnesian War and, more importantly, the encounter between the Athenians and the islanders of Melos. Apocryphal as it may be, the Melian Dialogue has, since its exposition by Thucydides, served as a classic case of states bending their relations with other states to the diktats of power; thus while shaping the trajectory of IR as a discipline, it has also provided the framework for Realists. From there scholars trace the history of international relations to Machiavelli (15th century Italy), Hobbes (17th century England), the founders of modern international law (17th century Holland and Spain), Kant and Hegel (18th century Germany), down to Marx. Even Nietzsche (also Germany) tends to be included in the pantheon, as he still does.

In the 20th century the subject underwent three great debates: between realists and idealists in the interwar period, between scientific theorists and historicists in the Cold War period, and between positivists and post-positivists during the transition between the post-Cold War period and the new millennium. To explain these schools more clearly: scientific theorists believe in applying concepts from the hard sciences and from psychology to explain foreign policy, while historicists believe in keeping to a historical perspective when rationalising policy; positivists retain the state as the fundamental unit of foreign policy analysis, while post-positivists prefer to factor in non-state actors, and indeed non-state issues like gender and class, when writing on the subject. These finer details, however, should not blind us to the fact that almost all of them take for granted the same academic tradition.

How are we to classify these different approaches and at the same time offer a near universal yet non-totalising critique of them? In 1966, Martin Wight wrote an essay (“Why is there no international theory?”) where he sourced international relations to a) Christian theologians like Erasmus, b) Machiavellians like Machiavelli (obviously), but also the Nazi-supporting Friedrich Meinecke, c) philosophers and historians like David Hume and John Stuart Mill, and d) statesmen and diplomats, too numerous to name or list down here. These are, of course, in addition to the Ancients: Thucydides, along with Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero. Is it just me, or are all these writers, all these examples, white, male, and predominantly upper class or bourgeois?

To admit that they are, of course, is to admit to one way of critiquing them: that IR theory, or rather its trajectory, tends to tilt in favour of an all-white, all-West, and all-male scholarship. To dismiss them because they are all these things, however, is not the point. Brian Schmidt offers a more nuanced critique: taking the premise that IR theory is rooted in a fundamentally Eurocentric worldview, he argues that more often than not, scholars resort to an imagined academic tradition ranging from 5th century BC Greece to 20th century AD USA when validating or “legitimating” their approach to the subject. Hedley Bull’s threefold classification of IR practitioners and theorists, as Hobbesian-realists, Kantian-universalists, and Grotian-internationalists, confirms for me Schmidt’s critique, because Bull’s assumption here is that what worked for Hobbes, Kant, and Grotius in their time will work for the international system for all time. Gunnell (Between Philosophy and Politics: The Alienation of Political Theory) puts it better when he contends that political theory, in general, has engendered a built-in historical “self-image”, in turn built on an imagined great tradition. It is this tradition that Schmidt, and other IR theorist-dissidents, has critiqued.

Schmidt’s second critique flows from his first. International relations theorists, while dwelling excessively, and to the point of obsession, on a neatly drawn trajectory from classical Greece to post-Cold War USA, attempt to approach their discipline based on how well it relates to its external milieu; in other words, the impact of certain societal and historical factors on individuals, schools of thought, and academic disciplines. It is this approach that scholars like Stanley Hoffman take when they observe that the resurgence of IR theory in the United States after the First World War resulted from a convergence of three factors, including political circumstances. Thus containment, as a countervailing strategy against the Soviet Union, became the cornerstone of US foreign policy because theorists needed a rationale to sustain the US’s new role as the global superpower. To put it pithily, what’s good for the US is good for the discipline, and what’s good for the discipline is good for the US.

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