Progress, History and Identity in International Relations Theory: The Case of the Idealist-Realist Debate

Abstract

This article examines the link between disciplinary identity formation, history creation and progress by undertaking an excavation of the idealist-realist debate in International Relations theory. I demonstrate how the debate was framed by the realists, who constructed a unified `idealism' temporally located in the interwar period to be the straw man for the justification of their theories and the starting point for construction of the realist identity. The unified paradigm of `idealism' turns out to be a multiplicity of discourses running throughout the first half of the 20th century. As those discourses intersected with `utopian' realism, two in particular became central to realist identity. The world federalism discourse became the unacknowledged, implicit goal of realism as the realists simultaneously constructed it as the explicit and sole goal of the `idealists'. The sovereignty/anarchy discourse became the lived ideal made real through power for the realists who suppressed any mention of this discourse during the `idealist', `interwar' years. I argue that the appropriation of these two discourses by realism is the reason that the narrative history of the discipline requires us to forever remember realism's progressive victory over `idealism' in the First Great Debate.

Interdisciplinarity and International Relations

“…The major target of the new historiography was the questioning of the realistidealist debate: the event that was meant to have ushered in and affirmed the realist ascendancy after the Second World War (Wilson, 1998;Ashworth, 1999Ashworth, , 2002Thies, 2002). All four of these works argued that there had never been a realist-idealist debate, arguing that there was no evidence in the academic literature of a debate between a group calling themselves realists and a dominant idealist paradigm.…”

Interwar Internationalism, the British Labour Party, and the Historiography of International Relations

“…Instead, it has been interpreted as the final word by which realism, the superior theory, came out on top from the debate with naïve interwar idealism. Symptomatic of disciplinary history in general, in realist texts idealism often amounts to no more than a real or imagined man of straw (Thies, 2002). This approach seems to have made a wider impact in the discipline.…”

Nationalism and Internationalism in the Study of International Relations, 1900–1939

“…1., v.; For more examples, see Schmidt, ‘Introduction’, 4–5. For explanations of their continued prevalence, see Thies, ‘Myth, Half‐Truth, Reality, or Strategy?’, 125.…”

“…Thies, ‘Progress, History and Identity in International Relations Theory’, 156; Thies, ‘Myth, Half‐Truth, Reality, or Strategy?’, 124.…”