Insecurity was the order of the day. Nowhere was this more visible than in post-war Europe, where economic recovery was proving difficult and the pre-war balance of power had been overturned by the defeat of Germany and the enormous territorial gains made by the USSR.
Even if the USSR had no plans to invade Western Europe — and there is little evidence indicating that it did — there was every need to restore the health of European economies and the political self-confidence of individual states.
Many Western policy-makers saw no reason to trust their Soviet counterparts. This was certainly the view held by the USA and the UK by , and by early the idea was truly embedded. This very new kind of war would be conducted in a bipolar world where power was polarised in the hands of two nuclear-armed superpowers. First Europe and later many other regions of the world divided into blocs, one pro-Soviet and one pro-American.
The Cold War was to have all the features of a normal war except — it was hoped — for direct military confrontation. Unsurprisingly, this state of affairs had a profound impact on the way an emerging generation of increasingly American IR scholars thought about IR.
These rising thinkers saw themselves living in dark and dangerous times, making them extraordinarily tough minded. The vast majority of them continued to believe that diplomacy and cooperation were possible, even essential, in a nuclear age. Nevertheless, most were decidedly pessimistic. Having witnessed the outbreak of two global wars, one world depression, the rise of fascism and a confrontation with an expanded communist threat — often equated with fascism in official US minds — many analysts of world politics came to look at the world through a particularly dark prism born of harsh experience.
Pay special attention to who is considered an international actor, why they act the way they do, and what kind of international system they inhabit. The hugely influential American writer Hans J. Morgenthau, himself a Jewish exile from Nazi Germany, set the tone for this kind of thinking in his highly influential textbook Politics among nations Morgenthau was neither a natural conservative, nor uncritical of US foreign policy.
Lessons had to be learned, and if history taught anything it was not that we could build a better world based on new principles — as interwar Liberals had suggested prior to the Second World War. Rather, Morgenthau believed that we should be trying to build a more orderly world by learning from the past. This distinction between building a better world and a more orderly one continues to separate Liberals and Realists to this day. However, he pointed out that it controlled a land mass stretching across 11 time zones, had a formidable army that had just defeated Nazi Germany, and was bound to want to convert this power into greater global influence.
Kennan — termed a long-term and patient containment of Soviet ambitions. In this way, some form of stability could be restored to the world. States might one day learn to work with each other but, for Morgenthau and Kennan, that day lay in the distant future.
For the time being, it was better to plan for the worst case scenario on the assumption that by doing so the worse might never come to pass. This no-nonsense way of thinking about the world seemed logical and sensible, and called itself Realism — surely one of the most effective branding exercises in the social sciences. Within the Realist framework there was room for disagreement. Others arrived at another, equally erroneous, conclusion: that the confrontation would never end at all!
For many, what began as a dangerous global competition gradually evolved into what the structural Realist Kenneth Waltz regarded as an essential stabilising element in the anarchic international system.
Two superpowers, he argues, were better than one hegemon or many great powers in terms of creating a balanced international situation. The Cold War simplified world politics and, in doing so, made it far more predictable. Waltz concludes that in an international system without a supreme ruler — an anarchic international system — the see-saw of Cold War bipolarity was responsible for bringing some order to relations between the superpowers.
Waltz is not alone in this view. Remember, this was before the fall of the Berlin Wall in and disintegration of the Soviet Union two years later. Though Realism is normally identified as the dominant tradition in IR, it has never held the field alone. For Liberals, interdependence — mutual dependence on one another for social and material goods — provides the best foundations on which we can build a more peaceful world.
Increasing interdependence, they argue, means that states are not absolutely sovereign insofar as they remain vulnerable to transnational forces. This is not to deny the continued importance of the state and power in IR. However, in a world in which the USA appears to be losing its capacity to lead from a position of hegemonic strength, Liberals argue that additional means must be sought to guarantee the stability and improvement of the international system.
Their analysis, therefore, includes an expanded set of international actors, focusing also on the role of multinational corporations MNCs , nongovernmental organisations NGOs and intergovernmental organisations IGOs.
Many of its theorists accept a good deal of what Realists have to say about power and the competitive, anarchic character of IR. Realism, argues the ES, cannot explain why states — even ones as hostile to each other as the USA and the USSR — work together, engage in diplomacy, and thereby generate forms of international order in an otherwise anarchic system. Both are historically changeable, varying over time and space.
Its institutions have evolved over time away from the use of force as a legitimate means of 22 Chapter 1: The twentieth century origins of international relations conflict resolution. This does not mean that war in Europe is impossible, but only that it is made less likely as an alternative means of conflict resolution — mainly via the European Union EU — become available and accepted. For now, it should suffice to note that whereas Realism sees IR as conflictual and Liberalism sees it as cooperative, the ES leaves the answer open.
International societies can be cooperative or conflictual, depending on when and where you look. Furthermore, institutions evolve over time, changing the character of the international societies that they describe.
Analysing the character and evolution of international institutions therefore remains the main object of ES research. As the Cold War progressed, issues arose for which Realists and Liberals had few answers.
In the s, a new generation of critical theorists began to question global power structures rather than merely taking them for granted. Few of these thinkers traced their intellectual roots directly back to IR. The overwhelming majority were either historians of US diplomatic history dissatisfied with standard accounts of American conduct abroad, or radical economists with an interest in the Third World and its discontents.
Through the efforts of these thinkers, critical theories born in other branches of the social sciences began to have a major impact on the generation of IR scholars who entered the field in ever-larger numbers. In a related development, the s saw an upsurge of interest in what became known as International Political Economy IPE. This branch of IR seeks to explain links between the international economic and political systems.
The collapse of the post-Second World War Bretton Woods economic system in , perceptions of relative US economic decline, and a general recognition that one could not understand IR without at least having some knowledge of the material world forced some in IR to come to terms with economics, a branch of knowledge of which they had hitherto been woefully ignorant.
But even a little knowledge of international economics had its advantages. For, if the US was in decline — as some were already arguing in the s — a new form of world order had to be forged. These challenges to Realism have risen to greater prominence since the end of the Cold War in That said, Realism remains very much at the heart of the discipline, particularly in the USA where it originated. Other attempts to dethrone this academic heavyweight have met with only limited success. Moreover, even while Realism has come under increasing attack, the USA has become the uncontested centre of our academic discipline.
US resources, its ability to attract some of the best and the brightest from Europe and farther afield, and the appearance of having influence in the corridors of US power have made American IR look like an especially robust animal compared to its rivals elsewhere, making the USA an intellectual, if not political, hegemon.
The end of the Cold War was an unexpected and almost entirely peaceful revolution in world politics. We will look at this event in more detail in Chapter 3. For the time being, however, we need to consider its impact on IR as an academic discourse.
List the terms and your answer in the space below. The fall of the Berlin Wall in and the collapse of the Soviet Union in shattered the stability of the Cold War international system, plunging IR scholars into an intellectual crisis as they tried to come to terms with the end of bipolarity.
Many began to question old certainties and think about the shape of the post-Cold War world. These are qualitatively different from their classical and statist predecessors, and include issues such as human rights, crime, and the environment.
It also reinforced a shift towards new kinds of theory and more issues relating to international ethics, some of which we will look at in Chapter 6. To get a sense of this shift, it is worth comparing a standard IR textbook written during the Cold War with one produced after The former normally begins with a few well-chosen observations about the origins of Cold War following the Second World War, continues with a lengthy discourse on the foreign policies of the two superpowers, talks about key concepts, such as sovereignty and polarity, spends some time on the balance of power and the role of nuclear weapons, and probably concludes with a general discussion about why the world will not change much over the longer term.
A textbook written after , on the other hand, generally has very little to say about the Cold War except in an historical background context. Thus, the USSR and superpower rivalry will not be included for obvious reasons , while new topics — globalisation, failed states, the role of religion, and non-state actors — give the subject a new feel. In some of the more theoretically daring studies authored after the Cold War, the focus has shifted away from the study of states and the notion of a well-structured international system whose laws can be discovered by careful analysis.
Instead, many now emphasise the role of non-state actors and the apparent absence of a coherent international structure in the new, uncertain, post-modern world of the s and early twenty-first century. After fighting for many years to get recognition as a subject in its own right — a fight it continues to wage in many countries in continental Europe — IR in an age of globalisation has become increasingly popular with students in the twenty-first century.
It is not clear whether this is because the end of the Cold War brought increasing opportunities for travel, greater international contact between academics and students, or because it brought a growing recognition that what happens in one part of the international system is bound to impact on every other part.
Whatever the reason, there is little doubting the growth of the discipline. IR in the twenty-first century, with its many world-class departments, recognised international associations, plethora of journals, global league tables, and intellectual superstars, has never looked in better shape.
Meanwhile, IR — which looks at the state of the world today — is on the rise. One thing, however, remains unchanged. Academic IR still revolves around an American axis.
Interest in the USA as the last superpower remains high, and American scholars continue to exert an enormous — some would say disproportionate — influence on the field. Of course, one should not exaggerate. Moreover, there is a rising number of major powers in the world for scholars to consider, including the EU — a focus of much lively discussion since the s — and China — forever on the rise.
Whether this interest, sometimes bordering on the obsessive, is likely to go on forever is not entirely certain. However, as the first decade of the twenty-first century has given way to the second, the USA and its academics have continued to exert a powerful pull on all those around them.
The Cold War was a competition between US and Soviet institutions, with each side trying to make their preferred behaviours and norms the accepted bases of international society.
The Cold War was the result of insufficient interdependence between post-war US and Soviet spheres of influence. The Cold War was an expression of the deep power ambitions that continue to define competition between states in the anarchic international system.
The Cold War was a means by which dominant socioeconomic classes imposed their economic and political dominance on less economically developed groups around the world. Why has IR been dominated by Realist ways of thinking about the international system since the end of the Second World War?
What are the main challenges to Realism? What is the proper subject matter of IR? They did so in many ways, some explicit and some implicit, but the qualifications matter less than the general fact…This was a unique development in world history.
For the first time, one civilization established itself as a leader worldwide. The Penguin history of the world. Essential reading Armstrong, D. Further reading Bull, H. And R. But how did the international system arrive at that point? Was it an inevitable outcome of historical events? And what forces produced an international system that, by the outbreak of the First World War, was dominated by Europe and Europeans?
In this chapter, we will try to answer some of these questions by looking at the history of IR — a branch of history called international history IH. We will not be able to cover the whole of IH in one chapter. Nor do we need to. Instead, we will focus on a few specific instances that will inform your understanding of current events.
It is vitally important to look at the present through the prism of the past. This is partly because we need to understand the deeper sources of what became the extended crisis of the twentieth century, and partly to alert students of world politics to something they should never lose sight of: although nothing stays the same forever, some of the key problems in world politics have remained remarkably durable. Before looking at a few events from international history, we first need to think about the notion of the international itself.
There are two rather different answers to this fundamental question. Both terms are therefore intimately connected to ideas of the nation and the state. According to this line of historical reasoning, we can only begin to think of the international — and IR — after the rise of sovereign states in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe. According to this definition, the international can therefore be understood as a description of the state system, first developed in post-Reformation Europe, inhabited by autonomous political units, and organised according to a collection of shared principles and practices such as sovereignty and non-intervention.
These principles and practices — known as institutions by members of the ES — bring some level of order to IR in what is otherwise an anarchic system. This institutional order, based on shared principles and practices, is what Hedley Bull refers to as international society.
As we will see later, this view of international history has much to recommend it. However, we need to be sensitive to the fact that other forms of interaction and exchange existed between all sorts of political, social and economic groups — tribes, clans, ethnic groups and cities — long before the fifteenth century and well outside the boundaries of Europe.
Complex systems of interacting groups developed as far apart geographically as imperial China a civilisation stretching back 5, years , the Middle East whose civilisations stretch back even further , and Africa the most likely cradle of our species. International relations did not emerge, fully-grown, with the birth of the modern European state system around in the sixteenth century. States — as we shall argue throughout this course — are crucial to explaining much of what has happened in world politics for the last years.
However, world history clearly shows that, for many centuries, it was not sovereign states that engaged in diplomacy, warfare and economic exchange. Rather, this role was often filled by great empires like the Egyptian, the Persian, the Roman, the Mongol, and even the Mayan and the Aztec. Moreover, when states did finally emerge out of the shadow of these empires, they did so with the help of those who had gone before; not just from the Greeks and the Romans, but also from many parts of the nonChristian world.
Stop and read sections 2 and 3 of Chapter 2, pp. Make a special note of institutions that develop in a number of different international societies. City-states, Oracles How? Arbitration, Diplomacy proxenia , Rules of War, Sanctity of Treaties Indian Chinese Roman Christian Islamic European expansion We should be more than a little critical of the ways in which some writers have traditionally thought about IR: largely through European eyes, and mainly as something that only became seriously interesting when states emerged as the main actor in world affairs.
IR does not begin and end with the rise of European states. Students of world politics must nevertheless confront an incontrovertible fact: that at some point between the late fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, Europe — initially around the Mediterranean and later in states bordering the Atlantic Portugal, Spain, the UK, Holland and France — began to evolve in ways that changed the course of European and world history.
In a very important sense, there was no such thing as a truly interconnected world before Only after the period of European exploration and expansion beginning at the turn of the sixteenth century can we begin to conceive of such an entity emerging.
As one of the great historians of world history, J. Roberts, has argued, the age of a true world history — and by implication the history of global IR — starts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and continues for another years, by which time European domination of the globe was complete. The sources of this dynamic expansion have been hotly debated. Some have suggested a more economic reason: the rise of capitalism. According to this thesis, it was no coincidence that as feudalism began to break down and capitalism began to rise in its wake across Western Europe, it was this region — rather than China or the Islamic world — that broke free from the pack and pushed outwards in an extraordinary bout of expansion.
Debates about the driving force behind the rise of the West will, no doubt, continue. Of one thing we can be certain: whether for cultural, religious, political or economic reasons or some combination of all four , the states of Western Europe no longer simply waited for things to happen to them. Instead, they went out to make things happen to others. It spawned a vast commerce in African slaves that spelled disaster for millions and created vast fortunes for the few who lived and prospered from the unpaid labour of others.
It fostered invention and innovation, revolutionised communication, gave birth to modern geography and cartography — in fact to much of modern science itself.
Its consequences were certainly not neutral from the point of view of global relationships. In terms of the distribution of power, it reinforced existing global inequalities. Significantly, few Europeans of the day opposed expansion and colonialism. Even liberals and more than a few socialists were counted among their supporters, arguing well into the early part of the twentieth century that there was something distinctively progressive about an economically and culturally superior Europe helping those less fortunate to join the modern world.
European hegemony Stop and read section 4 of Chapter 2, pp. Historical institutions Bull, H. The anarchical society: a study of order in world politics. There was opposition — first when the 13 American colonies defeated and expelled the British Empire in the late eighteenth century, and again when many of the nations of Latin America expelled the Spanish and the Portuguese empires in the nineteenth century. Indeed, its revolutions left the old European ruling class intact and states such as the USA and the UK more deeply involved in Latin American affairs than they had been before the expulsion of Iberian power.
Dynamic expansion made Europe the centre of a world. This revolutionary transformation — like any great revolutionary transformation — did not occur without a great deal of organised violence, initially directed against those who were being subjected to European rule and then against competing European powers. Great Britain and Spain, for instance, were bitter enemies throughout the sixteenth century. Their long war, which concluded rather dramatically with the destruction of the Spanish Armada in , was followed by struggle between the Dutch and the English.
The Anglo—Dutch commercial conflict was overtaken in the eighteenth century by a long struggle between Great Britain and France. This struggle continued on and off for just under a century, was fought across three continents, and only came to a close after their extended struggle for European and thus world domination ended with the defeat of Napoleonic France at the hands of a grand coalition — comprising Russia, Prussia, Austria—Hungary and Great Britain — in Activity It has been argued that European imperialism led to two distinct international societies: one within Europe and the other covering the rest of the world.
Complete the table below thinking about how international institutions differed when applied inside and outside of Europe during the era of European imperialism. Social function Institutions among European states Communication Diplomacy Enforcement Treaty making, war Property Mutual non-intervention, sovereignty Institutions between European and non-European actors From the Long Peace to the Great War This extended period of competition to determine the dominant actor in world politics, stretching from around to , continues to exercise a great deal of fascination for IR scholars.
Different explanations have been advanced to explain this period, often referred to as the Long Peace. These have ranged from the diplomatic efforts put in by the major powers at the peace conference at the Congress of Vienna; through war weariness a believable hypothesis given that at least five million died across Europe between and ; to the notion that, whatever else might have divided them, the major powers after shared some common values and interests that drove them to resolve most of their differences through diplomacy rather than costly wars.
In this analysis, the key factor is not so much the existence of a balance of power between European states — though that was highly significant in Europe itself — but the structural imbalance that grew up between Great Britain and the rest of the European powers.
Unlike France, or so the hegemonic stability argument goes, Britain never sought to control mainland Europe, focusing instead on increasing its influence in the non-European world. It did so by doing what Britain seemed to do best: pushing ahead industrially; exporting increasing sums of capital to all corners of the globe; underwriting world trade through its overwhelming naval superiority; and teaching others the benefits of commerce and industry over more dangerous — and less profitable — pursuits such as war and conquest.
Learning question In one or two sentences, do you think that the presence of a hegemonic state makes international society more or less prone to war? What examples would you use to justify your argument? Several different schools of thought exist. One sees the Great War as an inevitable consequence of change in the European balance of power following the unification of Germany in and its rapid emergence as a serious economic and military challenger to the status quo. It remains a commonly held view — especially influential in IR — that the rise of new powers will lead to increasing tensions between great powers, which over time are more likely lead to war than anything else.
Others argue that the breakdown of the Long Peace could only occur within a larger set of changes that were taking place in the international system.
According to this thesis, we should focus less on power shifts 35 11 Introduction to international relations brought about by the rise of a single state, and more on the by-products of the global struggle for influence between the various great powers. In other words, the key to understanding the collapse of the old order may be found in the processes of capitalism and imperialism.
This remains the view of most Marxists, espoused in a pamphlet — Imperialism — by the great revolutionary V. The end of the Long Peace was therefore no accident. Finally, there are many in IR who insist that the Long Peace was only possible so long as weapons technology remained relatively primitive. The coming of the industrial revolution, and with it new naval technologies, improvement in munitions and a rapid acceleration in the destructive capacity of arms, changed the way states fought, making new forms of war possible and, by definition, more destructive.
This thesis claims that technology made war far more likely as one state after another began to invest heavily into these new weapons of death.
This arms race may not, in and of itself, explain what finally happened in Nevertheless, the rapid build-up of modern military technology, in a world where war was still regarded as noble and heroic, made armed conflict more likely, increasing the insecurity of states great and small. Activity One of the goals of this chapter is to show how IR theory can be used to make sense of the past.
Using what you have learned about Realism, Liberalism, International Political Economy, and the English School, how do you think each school of thought would account for the beginning of the First World War?
Provide a brief one- or twosentence thesis statement for each of the following approaches. Some have even wondered whether the First World War need ever have happened at all. This approach — going under broad heading of counter-factualism — makes one major theoretical claim: that just because things happen in international affairs, it does not mean that they were inevitable.
Even as we look for the causes of certain events, we need to remain sensitive to the fact that we are doing so after the events in question. Inevitability only exists in retrospect, and any claim that any event had to occur as it did should be viewed with a highly sceptical eye. This issue has been raised in relationship to the First World War by Niall Ferguson who has been especially controversial in terms of rethinking Whether Ferguson is right or is merely being mischievous is an issue that cannot be settled here.
However, he does raise a crucial question that we will explore further in the chapter on war: namely, how IR should set about explaining the outbreak of wars and what methods we should employ to best understand why wars happen. The pity of war: explaining World War One. Of one thing we can be certain, however, and here we can agree with Ferguson: the First World War marks the end of one epoch in world politics and the beginning of another.
As we saw in the first chapter of this subject guide, the First World War was only the first of three great wars that came to define the twentieth century. In many ways, however, it was the most significant, not because it was the bloodiest the Second World War lays claim to that dubious distinction or the longest the Cold War was 10 times as long , but because of the dramatic changes that it left in its wake.
The list is long: the outbreak of the Russian Revolution of and the creation of the USSR; the emergence of the USA onto the world stage; the shift of financial and economic power from London to New York; the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires; the first major stirrings of nationalism in what later came to be known as the Third World; a bitter sense of betrayal in Germany that helped bring Hitler to power 15 years later; new opportunities for Japan to expand its holdings in Asia; and a disastrous economic legacy that made it nigh on impossible to restore the health to the world economy.
Furthermore, though some may not have realised it at the time, the devastation wrought by the Great War unleashed a series of changes that finally brought the age of European global dominance to an end. All of these were outcomes of a war whose fingerprints can be found all over the century that followed.
The First World War, more than any other event, was the mid-wife of the modern world. Chapter vocabulary arms race international history balance of power international society capitalism Long Peace empire nation feudalism state hegemony states-system hegemonic stability zero sum game institutions Sample examination questions 1.
How can international society be both ordered and anarchic? What historical processes were responsible for the evolution of the state as the primary actor in IR? Which best describes the current international situation: a balance of power, or hegemonic stability? Rethinking the Cold War. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, Essential reading Cox, M. Further reading Bennett, A.
Wohlforth, W. Introduction As our discussion of the causes of the First World War makes evident, the theories that we use to organise our knowledge about the world play a determining role in how we perceive and understand history. Marxists focus on the role of the class system and control of the means of production as defining characteristics, while the English School ES points out that war was still a completely acceptable means of conflict resolution in early twentieth-century Europe, making it a key institution in European international society in the years before the First World War.
Theory frames the way that we see the world around us, highlighting and masking different aspects to produce contrasting sets of explanations. This use of theory separates IR from associated subjects like international history IH. Given the vast — some might say infinite — complexity of human history, this weaving requires that we select some facts to include and some to exclude, trimming our empirical evidence to manageable proportions.
This is the function of theory: to simplify the world around us to such an extent that we can make general comments about IR based on a limited number of cases. In this chapter, we turn our attention to the ways in which IR understands one of the most crucial moments of the late twentieth century: the end of the Cold War. The end of the Cold War was a tipping-point, transforming both the international system and IR as an academic subject.
The way we think about the two decades that have elapsed since the fall of the Berlin Wall in and the collapse of the Soviet Union in owes much to what happened before and during those key events. Indeed, many in IR continue to think about the postCold War world in terms of the bipolar global conflict that preceded it, using a variety of theoretical models to understand different aspects of this important period in international history.
This chapter will look at a number of issues related to the end of the Cold War. First, we will consider the difficult problem of prediction, ably illustrated by the fact that not a single expert in IR anticipated the events of and Finally, we will examine the consequences of the end of the Cold War for the international system and IR.
Some see prediction as central to the success of the social sciences, an indispensible tool if we want to control what happens in the world around us. In this sense, prediction is an unavoidable part of IR. Others argue that the complexity of human civilisation and our limited ability to accumulate and process knowledge make accurate prediction impossible. Though it provides interesting food for thought, we do not need to get too involved in this debate to see the difficulties of prediction.
The most immediate evidence is the failure of anyone in IR to see the end of the Cold War coming. Instead, the vast majority of IR scholars and writers were in thrall to theories that failed to account for the possibility that the international order could or would change so completely. One reason was the tendency of scholars in IR to reify international actors and structures — treating dynamic, contested, and evolving systems as if they were static, unified and fully developed.
The problem of reification continues to plague many subfields in IR. This is particularly true with reference to states, which are often treated as stable, cohesive and fully developed actors on the world stage, akin to an individual human being in its ability to speak with a single voice on any given issue. This assumption simplifies the state and allows us to make generalisations about state behaviour, a key goal of IR.
At the same time, it underestimates the likelihood of change, leaving analysts surprised and shocked when states are transformed by events going on inside and outside their borders. His reforms, it was assumed, would not lead to a Soviet withdrawal from Central and Eastern Europe, much less to the collapse of the Soviet system. These international relations books pdf free download will help you the basics of International relations. The last international relations books pdf free download is written by Indian author so you can imagine the quality of content.
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