The Theory of International Relations

Abstract

The Science, or as others prefer to call it, the study of international relations is one of the youngest members of the family of the social sciences. Its independent status has not yet been fully recognized by all academic circles and many historians and international lawyers would consider it to be trespassing on their respective fields of study. This is especially true for Europe.

Discipline admonished: On International Relations fragmentation and the disciplinary politics of stocktaking

“…Others, like Kenneth W. Thompson (1952: 443), argued that while IR was still far from an independent discipline, there were promising trends towards disciplinarity centred around ‘international politics’ with ‘political idealism and political realism [as] the major competitors for recognition as the theory of international behavior’. Another observer of mid-century IR, Piotr Wandycz (1955: 193, 202), also argued that the realist–idealist dichotomy was currently ‘fashionable’ and that a ‘great debate’ was in ‘full swing’, but also that this dichotomy obscured rather than clarified the overall picture and ignored that few thinkers were consistently realist or idealist. At the same time, however, Dwight Waldo (1956: 59) retrospectively identified a movement from idealism towards realism in the interwar period, but saw contemporary IR as marked by the growing reception of behaviouralism and a growing interest in theory, and held that ‘the eclecticism and expansionism of current international relations must be emphasized’.…”

“…In a metaphor reminiscent of today’s admonition against fragmented islands and camps, Hoffmann (1959: 348) warned that ‘Theories of international relations are like planes flying at different altitudes and in different directions’. Indeed, it was ‘the Theory of International Relations’ that came to be seen as the raison d’etre of IR as a separate discipline or field of inquiry (Wandycz, 1955: 12; see also Guilhot, 2008). When IR was subsumed as one of four sub-disciplines under political science in the late 1950s, this shelved the disciplinarity and homelessness problem to some extent (but did not solve it as IR continues to have a strong sense of independent disciplinarity) (Wæver, 2013: 310).…”

The construction of an edifice: the story of a First Great Debate

“…48 Piotyr Wandycz reiterated this line of critique several years later when he noted that the divide between realism and idealism was a 'fashionable' way of discussing international thought. 49 He opposed this dichotomous view of international relations on the grounds that it tended to polarise work that rarely fits neatly into either of these categories. Wandycz argued that the works of Carr and Morgenthau ought to be seen as an attempt to discuss the 'relationship between theory and practice, idealism and realism'.…”