Abstract
In recent decades, intensive attempts emerged to introduce a new Global International Relations (GIR) research programme related to the post-colonial critique of western dominance and its efforts to overcome the current geopolitics of knowledge. Even though several regional and national approaches have been included in GIR, the integration of semiperipheral IR thinking is only in its early stages. Some of them still remain almost neglected within the GIR context. In response to this challenge, this paper aims to introduce the IR thinking produced in Central Europe (CE) by four semi-peripheral nations – Czechs, Hungarians, Poles and Slovaks – into the GIR framework. It highlights the specifics of the region that should be reflected in GIR as a genuinely global discipline. We address the specific position of Central Europe close to the West but, for various reasons, never fully integrated into its core and the related epistemological uncertainty of how to study regional realities. Simultaneously, we search for those regional CE ideas that would be more generally applicable in the study of international relations and, at the same time, mirror the unique experience of an area with not only close ties to the West in terms of civilisation but also a long tragic history.
In his famous 1977 analysis of the American origins of the International Relations (IR) discipline, Stanley Hoffmann pointed out the embeddedness of IR scholarship in the USA’s rapid rise after World War II. Also, he called for a distance from a superpower perspective towards ‘that of the weak and the revolutionary’ in the future. 1 Since then, interest in non-US IR scholarship has been steadily increasing. Recently, a growing part of the IR community has been calling for a new, inclusive research programme, which is mainly referred to as Global IR (GIR). The programme is expected to be much more sensitive to regions, race and other specificities compared to the dominant universalist IR paradigms. 2
So far, the path towards GIR has closely related to the post-colonial critique of western dominance and its efforts to overcome the current geopolitics of knowledge. There has been strong criticism of the system in which the theory-producing core dominates the periphery, 3 including the pedagogical process. 4 The intensive discussion on ‘bringing the Rest in’ 5 has increased the attention given to the emancipation of local (homegrown) and regional IR. Insights from countries 6 and regions of the Rest 7 have been enriching the dialogue within the IR discipline, supporting pluralism and contributing to a more complex understanding of IR.
However, the emerging research agenda tends to adopt the Cartesian binaries of the West and the Rest, Global North and South, core and periphery, etc., against which it was originally aimed. 8 These are often reductive 9 and, as Katzenstein noted, ‘conceal more than they reveal’. 10 Moreover, the excessive focus on surmounting the epistemic divides and coping with ‘geo-epistemological obstacles’ 11 then prevents the discipline from becoming truly global and accepted around the world. 12 Some regions that do not fit well to these Cartesian binaries still remain neglected and detached from the context of the emerging GIR research programme. 13
This is true for the former Eastern Bloc, which has been extensively studied from the perspective of non-Western IR, but not within the GIR research agenda. As a result, much has been written about the delayed emancipatory efforts of the IR schools in this post-communist area, the (re)construction of their institutional backgrounds after the end of the Cold War, specifics of publishing outputs, and conformity with and/or deviations from the Western standards. 14 However, a deeper discussion on their inclusion in and possible contribution to GIR is still missing.
This paper focuses on the IR theorising produced in Central Europe (CE) by four nations – Czechs, Hungarians, Poles and Slovaks – with a twofold aim. First, the paper examines CE’s position in the IR discipline derived from close ties to the West in terms of civilisation, but also a long tragic history of foreign domination, marginalisation in the Western imagination, and specific relationship with the West. 15 Second, it searches for those regional CE ideas that would be more generally applicable in the study of GIR and, at the same time, mirror the unique experience of the geographic area.
Thus, under the logic of the emerging GIR agenda, we address the following two research questions: (1) How is CE IR thinking related to its Western counterpart and what does that mean for its inclusion and further development within GIR? (2) How could CE contribute to the existing knowledge and enrich the GIR programme? At the same time, we do not attempt to create any variant of regionally-specific IR scholarship or a regional IR school which would contradict the GIR inclusiveness, integrationist aspirations and pluralistic universalism.
To fulfil the aim, the article is structured as follows. Section one introduces the theoretical background of our research and explains key methodological choices, in particular the use of the contrapuntal reading of IR proto-theory and discipline in CE and the West as two distinct voices of a single IR composition. Sections two and three move to the common origins of these voices in Medieval European thinking and growing divergence after the decline of the CE kingdoms. The subsequent two sections capture the rise of CE scholarship in the 19th century and the inter-war period, alternating tendencies of divergence (or dissonance, as we call it in the remainder of the text in keeping with the contrapuntal reading terminology) and rapprochement with the Western IR voice and incorporation into the emerging IR discipline. They also highlight CE IR topics resulting from unique regional experience. Section six focuses on the CE’s shift to the margins connected to the severe detachment of CE IR scholarship from the Western one during the Cold War. The last section addresses the tendency of CE scholars to try to ‘catch up’ with the West over the previous three decades. The article concludes that scholars from the region could benefit from the incorporation of their thought into GIR, but this requires the reconsideration of the position of non-Western but eurocentic IR schools within the GIR programme. The potential CE contribution to GIR is identified in the specific understanding of power balancing and the concepts of ‘in-betweenness’, ‘non-self-evidentness’ and the ‘zone of danger’.
Reading the CE and Western IR voices contrapuntally within the GIR
In general terms, the GIR programme encourages inclusive knowledge construction, combining revised Western theories with approaches, concepts, interpretations and explanations originating outside the West. However, despite the intensity of the debate, the notion of Western IR appears ambiguous in this exercise. Typically, its social constructions are linked to institutions (universities, research centres, publishing houses, etc.) located in the Anglo-American geographic area or, more broadly, in North America and Western Europe. 16 It is usually combined with the distinctive elements of the intellectual production, like modes of knowledge and theory creation, methodologies, disciplinary history, including its key narratives, myths and concepts. 17
Thus, in this article, we start from the Cold War understanding of the West in CE as North America plus Western Europe. Nevertheless, in terms of content, we narrow the framing of Western IR to scholarship rooted in Western philosophy, political thought and the tradition of social theory and practice. This leads us first to the IR theorising which emerged from a Eurocentric view of European history (later extended to a transatlantic perspective), which, in many regards, CE actually shares. But still, when we juxtapose the IR theorising arising from the CE experience to the traditional genealogy of IR organised around the disciplinary myths of the Peace of Westphalia, the 1919 formation of the discipline, and the ‘great debates’, 18 many differences become obvious. The same is true for key categories of the universalist and system-oriented IR approaches that originated in the West, in particular the state, sovereignty and the balance of power, which then become central to our research.
The juxtaposition links our research with the historicist approach to GIR, which responds to the criticism that history (or its significant and integral parts outside the West) are neglected in the IR discipline. 19 This approach often turns to the past and investigates the construed political position of non-Western regions and their IR theorising in relation to the West. While doing so, it usually starts from a critique of the West-centric interpretation of how the international system evolved. In particular, it addresses the overemphasis on the Peace of Westphalia, 20 the (mis)interpretation of the sovereignty principle as a solely European invention, and the lack of extra-European context in conventional IR narratives. 21 The critique mostly begins with the Enlightenment era, during which images of the West and its counterparts were created. Nevertheless, alternative interpretations also appear that turn back to Antiquity and the Middle Ages to highlight the West’s ideational, cultural, political, social and economic ties to other regions. 22
Although the historicist approach has so far dealt primarily with the negative disciplinary consequences of Western expansionism outside Europe, there are at least two reasons to use it for the study of regional and local IR some parts of Europe, including CE. First, rather than a geographical term, it captures Europe as a social construct closely linked to the Western imagination during the Enlightenment era. This construct places substantial parts of Europe, from the Baltic to the Balkans and from Bohemia to Russia, in an ambiguous mid-position on the imaginary map. Herewith, it creates a Second World with many political, economic, social and cultural links to Western Europe and some signs of the ‘Orient’ simultaneously. 23 Second, due to their mid-position with all the political consequences, these parts of Europe became a blind area for many scholarly disciplines, 24 including IR theorising. The prevailing state-centrism in IR strengthened this invisibility. Several local nations found themselves left out of IR analyses in large multi-ethnic realms. Even after regaining independence, they remained hidden in the middle and small states categories, which, according to some IR scholars, particularly neorealists, ‘do not matter’ and ‘can be ignored in calculating the configuration of effective power relations’. 25
To reinvent the neglected CE IR scholarship and interpret its relation to the western IR, we adopted, in accordance with some previous research on GIR, 26 the method of contrapuntal analysis. The method borrows from music, where contrapuntal melodic interactions of the individual voices have been achieved in many different ways over the centuries. Similar to music, it draws on the assumption that in GIR the voices counterpoint, intertwine and integrate, 27 come to the fore and recede, become louder or quieter, or are silenced.
When interpreting the interaction of voices, musicologists usually focus on both their horizontal and vertical relationships. The horizontal dimension captures how voices develop, move and alternate themes. This approach dominates the contrapuntal analyses in IR, which focus on the production and genealogies of concepts, 28 formation of discourses, narratives and other forms of practices 29 or representations. 30 The starting point, however, is the idea that the voices are independent of each other and evolve separately.
In contrast, CE IR comes from very similar historical, social and cultural backgrounds as its Western counterpart but simultaneously reflects a significantly different experience. Therefore, to study their mutual relation, we adopted the less frequent vertical perspective concentrated on the harmony of voices 31 or, more precisely, the alternation of their consonance and dissonance. In many musical styles, this alternation and increased and decreased tension between voices give shape and direction to the compositions and co-create their aesthetics and functionality. As this dynamic also works in multiple fields of analysis and practice, 32 it must also be considered an alternative engine while creating GIR. We believe that the vertical perspective could be useful also when reinterpreting the relationship of the CE IR and various non-Western approaches. However, this goes beyond the scope of this paper.
According to Hutchings, 33 it is dissonance and its reflection that works as a catalyst for the creative cultivation of self and constructive cooperation with others. Therefore, it became the central concept for our research. In contrast to CE IR, which focuses on global institutions and power structures of knowledge production in the field and the (limited) ability of the regional scholars to join them, 34 we concentrate on ideas (topics) 35 of CE and Western IR. While doing so, we operationalise dissonance as (1) divergences in the topics that translate into differences in theoretical perspectives and concepts used in CE and Western IR; (2) divergent perspectives on the same topics resulting in the different grasp of the same theories and concepts.
To identify the seminal works of the regional IR scholarship, we draw on a few existing historiographies of CE political thinking and IR. 36 Using references in these works, we snowball other significant texts produced in the region. This approach has led us to the following three types of authors. First, we focus on scholars with a primary background in other disciplines, such as history, law or sociology. Their involvement has persisted in CE longer than in the West, mainly due to the constraints that the Cold War caused to the development of the field in the region. Second, we include elite intellectuals and thinkers who promoted the political interests of CE nations and whose work, thus, intersected with their political practice – this connection, which resulted in both successful political careers and numerous persecutions, also belongs to the typical features of the region. 37 Third, only in the most recent period, we could include scholars both educated and anchored solely in IR, who write either in national languages and/or in English. Their books and papers were found in the international databases Web of Science, Scopus and the search engine Google Scholar.
The common origins of Central European and Western IR proto-theorising
Unlike the conventional state-centric IR historiography, which starts from the situation in Europe after the Peace of Westphalia, the contrapuntal reading of CE and Western IR has to go back to the Middle Ages to reveal their common background. The then CE and Western IR proto-theorising developed in a single cultural space connected with European philosophy and religious traditions, as well as the membership of its key representatives (Stanislaw of Sakrbmierz, Pawel Wlodkowic and John Huss) in European intellectual networks. The use of Latin as a common intellectual language facilitated connection but was not a necessary condition. Rather, various forms of intellectual ties between elites played a more important role and were supported by education as well as CE polyglossia. Intensive communication with the rest of Europe has been documented, as well as cultural and academic exchange. 38
This way, early IR soft theoretical considerations emerged alternately on both sides, CE and the West. They dealt with phenomena like just war or the peaceful co-existence of Christian and non-Christian polities. 39 In the early modern era, they spread beyond regional borders during academic, diplomatic or, sometimes, exile tours of the CE leading humanists and their intensifying involvement in literary networks. 40
For example, the categorical condemnation of aggressive wars by Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski would later be reflected by Jean Bodin and Hugo Grotius. 41 Also, his treatise on the art of ruling gained some popularity in English political discourse during the Elizabethan era and even reached the US Founding Fathers. 42 John Amos Comenius’ considerations of perpetual peace and better organisation of humanity, which emerged during the Thirty Years’ War and shortly after its end, would later inspire classical German philosophy. 43
Several elements of this initial connection persisted even after the Peace of Westphalia, although, with the exception of Poland, the CE nations could not participate in the Westphalia settlement as a full-fledged actors. With the rise of the West European powers, national languages gradually replaced Latin. However, common knowledge of the German language in CE enabled intellectual exchange with German countries and mediated contact with other West European areas through translations. Thus, the perception of German Aufklärung and French Enlightenment thinking was intensive in CE. 44 The opposite direction of ideational exchange remained open and extended by more frequent travels of the Enlightenment intelligentsia and newly emerging scientific networks and academic societies. 45
But still, as CE intellectual elites were weakened by adverse political development, their voice became rather reactive than pro-active in relation to the Western one. The oppression of the CE nation in multi-ethnic Habsburg and Russian empires resulted in the initial moments of dissonance. The first IR concepts, divergent from those produced in the West and related to fear and anxiety, emerged.
The incipient dissonance and the concepts of ‘in-betweenness’ and ‘zone of the danger’
At the end of the Thirty Years’ War, the gravitational centre of European thinking moved westwards. Eastern Europe, including Poland and the lands of Bohemia and Hungary, was being ‘reinvented’ by prominent Western Enlightenment thinkers at that time as ‘the Orient of Europe’. 46 The (unscientific) imagining and mapping of the region did not result in the entire and definitive ‘otherness’ of CE peoples, as was the case of the ‘Orient’ construct. Nevertheless, they occupied a middle position between (Western) European civilisation and (‘Oriental’) ‘barbarians’. 47
At the same time, the region faced permanent political and military pressures from the West and the East. A deluge of wars with harmful effects on their economies and societies, in which Hungarians and Poles became entangled, turned to important ideational and material factors influencing the future position of CE in European politics and IR thinking. The in-betweenness and experience of oppression were widely reflected in the post-Westphalian IR considerations marked by fear, anxiety and sometimes even hysteria. 48 As Masaryk later put it, the CE voice came from, ‘the zone of political danger’ or ‘the danger for the peace in Europe’ where ‘the big nations threatened small nations defending their independence’. 49
The CE scholars had to deal with the extreme exposure of the region to the great powers’ ambitions with severe consequences for the population: plunder of war, forced transfers, splitting of families, pressures to change language and identity and mass murder in extreme cases. In addition to outside tensions, the region also became a theatre of mutual clashes and power struggles, internal disunity and religious splits. It distanced CE from the conventional IR thinking about sovereign states and their national interests that was beginning to develop in the Western European powers.
Unlike the power-centric considerations emerging in the Western Europe, the idea that the nation’s existence was not self-evident became widespread in CE. This notion has increased the popularity of a specific genre of proto-theoretical IR thought called ‘apologia’. These texts first justified local languages and later focused on the survival and persistence of entire nations. The anonymous compilation file The good land that is Bohemia of 1754, Anton Bernolák on Slovaks and Slovakian, and the Warnings for Poland by Stanislaw Staszic are a few illustrative examples of this phenomenon.
Furthermore, the reflection of in-betweenness, supported by the ongoing contact and perception of Western ideas, 50 strongly influenced the later regional theoretical conceptions of the place CE nations occupy and the roles they play in European politics. In general, two main branches of thought emerged from this feeling. The first branch emphasised the necessity of bringing both Eastern and Western European areas together. Related concepts included bridges, channels, intermediaries or, in the case of Hungary, a ferryboat constantly moving between both regions. 51 The second branch stressed the need to protect the Western parts of Europe from clashes with the Eastern powers. In Hungary and Poland, they translated to the notion of the bastion or messiah nation protecting the West from Eastern barbarians. In contrast, as the most western Slavic nation, Czechs portrayed themselves as a dam against the German threat and a wedge between German lands able to withstand this challenge from the seventh century onwards. 52
In general, the dissonance of the CE and the Western IR voice resulted from CE becoming an object of great power games after the Peace of Westphalia. Transfers of sovereignty and territories, regardless of the interests and needs of the population, and the related political pressures, provoked fear and the emotion of danger. Facing oppression during this period, regional IR thinking shifted from general questions of peace and war to more specific national existence and survival concerns. Additionally, the restoration of state sovereignty became a significant issue. 53
Between rapprochement and dissonance in the 19th century
During the 19th century, the diffusion of ideas between Western and Central Europe included all progressive ideologies that preceded the emergence of the IR discipline – liberalism, socialism, nationalism and ‘scientific racism’. 54 Among these ideas, the nationalist and revolutionary ones resonated the most intensively for practical reasons. Their absorption in CE boosted the period of national rebirth, accompanied by increased national consciousness, growing interest in national cultures, languages and traditions, and more frequent requirements for freedom from alien domination. 55 However, despite the enormous struggle that resulted in a series of rebellions and insurrections, it was only after the end of World War I that the four CE nations finally achieved the renewal of their independent statehood.
Working in multinational dynastic empires, the CE 19th-century thinkers addressed the relations between nations rather than states and the nation’s actorness. In particular, the following areas of interest came to the fore 56 :
(1) national renaissance from what was considered the CE nations’ dark ages and the related identity building, including support and development of national cultures and languages;
(2) internal settlement of the monarchies guaranteeing their rights and equity with the ruling peoples;
(3) the relations to ‘neighbouring’ populations, some of which shared, in fact, the same territories;
(4) the historical role of individual CE nations in European politics reflecting linguistic and religious fault lines and a specific position at the heart of Europe.
The related discourse displayed significant variability given not only by its complexity but also by the epoch’s turbulent political developments and each nation’s specific position in the respective multinational and multilingual empire. 57 Furthermore, it also revealed the specific type of nationalism, which arose from the unique regional context. It further deepened the culture of vulnerability and continuous fear of external enemies rather than political institutions and venerable political traditions as was typical for Western Europe.
Over time, the defensive nature of nationalism intensified with the spread of the German racist theories, particularly those on the impending struggle between the Teutons and the Slavs. 58 Among the Czechs, Poles and Slovaks, these theories were challenged by the concepts of Pan-Slavism. On the other hand, they were anticipated in the growing antisemitism, 59 based on the notion of Europe as a Christian cultural entity. 60
The intersection of the ideational landscape with material conditions of multinational empires resulted in several new branches of proto-theoretical IR thinking. First of all, the context gave birth to the very initial small nation/small state considerations by the Czech and Slovak intellectual and political elites. Slovaks, who could not draw upon the tradition of the formerly independent kingdom, focused primarily on nation-building and recognition of the nation and its language within the Hungarian part of the empire. Facing both growing Hungarian and German nationalism, they also shared the idea of Slavonic solidarity and cooperation. The Czech IR considerations started with the critique of smallness as a source of intellectual limitations and an obstacle to humanity and world citizenship, which, under the influence of German philosophy, were understood as an ideal of a nation’s life. Subsequently, such ideas were developed in the search for the meaning of existence and the main task of the nation. The patterns of co-existence with other nations were seen in the principles of cooperation and mutuality. 61
Poles often returned to the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth tradition and called for its restoration. However, in the late 19th century, this sentiment was replaced with growing nationalism nourished with fear from German racism, the ever-stronger Russification and the growing Ukrainian challenge in the Habsburg-controlled part of Polish territory. At the same time, the romantic imagination of the multi-ethnic co-existence within the Commonwealth was replaced with the narrow idea of single Polish ethnos. 62
Towards a single IR discipline in the inter-war period?
It is a paradox that in the inter-war period, traditionally considered the founding years of the IR discipline, the intensifying connection of CE and Western theorising was boosted by the inability of the Western powers to find a stable settlement for the CE region. The newly independent Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary appeared in a precarious position with Germany, the anti-status-quo power in the West, and Bolshevik Russia in the East of Europe. Thus, they faced problems with borders. Simultaneously, they had to cope with a lack (or insufficiencies) of institutions and population composition with no single national consciousness. 63 This translated into many domestic and foreign policy challenges and was widely reflected in their scholarly conceptions of IR. Typically for CE, where the national elites were relatively small, 64 the IR conceptions were now significantly designed by politicians – Edvard Beneš, Milan Hodža, Roman Dmowski, etc.
The intensive engagement in creating a new post-world war architecture, combined with the attempts to solve their problems, resulted in several innovative contributions to the IR debates of that time. First, it gave birth to new ideas of regional cooperation, including economic unions, security alliances and visions of a Danubian federation. 65 Furthermore, several Polish and Czechoslovak scholars became active proponents of the League of Nations, its system of collective security and mutual guarantees against aggression. 66
Similarly, early realist considerations flourished in CE during this peculiar period. They related primarily to the balance of power after World War I and emphasised the importance of regional stability in CE for its sustainability. 67 But, unlike their Western colleagues, the early realists in CE were able to integrate many liberalist ideas. Only later, the League of Nation’s failures and the crisis of the Versailles system in Europe translated into growing scepticism about the power of international institutions and the shift to classical realism, such as that of Adolf M. Bochenski and Jerzy Giedroyc. 68
Last but not least, the importance of territoriality in the Post-World War I settlement intensified interest in geopolitics. In Czechoslovakia, the discipline developed face-to-face with proliferating German expansionism, to which it was necessary to create an alternative. 69 Still, it also drew on other incentives, particularly French ones. Hence, Czech scholars challenged doubts about the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the new CE states. 70 Hungary, which lost the war, went through a short period with Bolshevism and experienced the Trianon trauma, and territorial irredentism was widespread. 71 Territorial redistribution considerations emerged in Slovakia hand in hand with secessionist tendencies from a state (Czechoslovakia) with a Czech majority. 72
Next to the contribution to newly emerging IR approaches, the necessity to draw attention to the specific situation of each nation in the unstable Post-World War I settlement boosted a new wave of both practical and scholarly communication with other states, mainly great powers. Contacts between scholars from the CE region and Western countries were newly intensified through International Studies Conferences organised by the Institute of International Cooperation of the League of Nations initiative from 1928 onwards. 73 The CE national IR specialists responded to the first International Studies Conference meeting in Berlin. They established national coordinating committees for international studies that grouped the representatives of domestic institutions involved in international studies teaching and research. 74
But still, 20 years was not enough time for CE IR to reconnect with the West as it did in the early days nor to form a fully-fledged and respected alternative to it. It can be demonstrated by the outputs of the 1938 International Studies Conference in Prague. Following the debate launched at the previous two sessions, an essential part of the discussion, framed by General Rapporteur Alfred Zimmern, concentrated on what university teaching of IR should encompass. The submissions of Czechoslovak and Polish delegates diverged from the mainstream of contributions dealing with politics, law and diplomatic history. Following the regional IR theoretical orientation of the CE nations, they emphasised the importance of collective or social psychology. 75
It is symbolic that the book by Bailey titled International Studies and Modern Education was disseminated among conference participants, classifying the IR national schools into four categories based on maturity. Only the USA and Great Britain were ranked in the first category, with considerable opportunities for IR study. Poland and several Western states appeared in the second rank of countries with an influential institute or a small group of institutions. Hungary and Czechoslovakia were part of the third tier with some facilities but no systematic incentives for IR research. 76
Muting of the CE IR voice during the Cold War
Although severely hit by World War II, 77 the CE IR communities restored their research agendas. Moreover, for the second time in a quarter of a century, they could respond to the challenge of the new post-war settlement with further analyses of the balance of power, peace in Europe 78 and international institutions, in particular, the United Nations. 79 However, the initially progressive evolution was forcefully constrained after the communist coup d’états in CE countries and the outbreak of the Cold War. 80 IR specialists within CE countries had to conform to Marxism-Leninism as the official paradigm. 81 As the possibilities of research in IR strongly correlated with the tense atmosphere in East-West and domestic environments, the dissonance between the CE and Western IR scholarships not only grew but the voices started to split. For several decades they managed to maintain contact only with great difficulty.
To some extent, CE scholarship reflected pieces by key Western authors such as Morgenthau, Aron, Wright and Hoffman. 82 The disciplinary debates between realism and idealism or on the scientific foundation of the discipline, also found their echo in regional publishing. 83 From the Marxist-Leninist perspective, CE IR scholars elaborated on similar topics as their colleagues in the West – peace and peaceful co-existence, security, disarmament, development, etc. 84 Nevertheless, the loss of academic freedom and flexibility complicated the relations of CE scholars with their Western colleagues. Despite common platforms, such as the International Political Study Association, its world congresses and research committees or the International Peace Research Association (IPRA) conferences, the CE voice weakened and became marginal in relation to Western IR scholarly production.
The growing gap and increasing dissonance between Western and ‘official’ CE IR scholarship could not be bridged even by émigrés from CE who joined Western academic communities. They were considered traitors and/or enemies by the socialist regimes and, thus, prevented from contact with domestic IR communities. Scholars in CE countries could access and follow their publishing outputs only under specific pretexts, notably that of challenging them officially for Western bias and the misinterpretation of developments in the region. 85
The émigré scholars usually combined the contemporary Western IR approaches with a deep knowledge of regional CE realities 86 and apparently tended to focus on critical CE topics, particularly that of the balance of power and the consequences of power shifts for smaller nations. 87 Most of them were either promoted from their previous careers to senior academic posts as outstanding practitioners or, more commonly, integrated into Western IR after the completion of their PhD degree at a Western university. To give some examples, Josef Korbel, a former Czech diplomat and a member of the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan, contributed to the establishment of international studies at the University of Denver. Zbigniew Brzezinski and George Liska became prominent representatives of American realism in their time. 88 Vendulka Kubálková started as a specialist in Marxism in England but moved to the Miami constructivist school in the early 1990s.
In addition, IR issues provoked interest also among émigré experts in other fields of expertise. This way, János Lukács/John Lukacs conveyed CE people’s power game and war experience to the western audience and contributed substantially to mapping the history of the Cold War. 89 Czeslaw Milosz and Milan Kundera were the most famous proponents of the belongingness of CE nations to the West 90 and also pointed to the complexity and intricacy typical for the mutual relations of CE and the West, which they captured with concepts like ‘captive minds’ 91 or ‘non-self-evident nation’. 92 These branches (especially the non-Marxist ones) brought some innovative perspectives to the primary IR debates (e.g., that on the balance of power) and further developed several unique CE topics. Yet they were too few and bland to establish themselves as a full-fledged alternative to Western IR or even a considerable school of IR.
How to develop the CE IR voice from the end of the Cold War onwards?
With the end of the Cold War, CE countries quickly cut themselves off from the imposed Soviet influence. The ideological burden of Marxism-Leninism was replaced with the ‘back to Europe’ or ‘all roads lead West’ shift, with wide-ranging reforms to state structures guided by Western patterns of political, economic and social life. 93 As in the practice of foreign policy, so too in theoretical IR reflection, a turn towards the West took place. As a result, in the early 1990s, a massive import of Western IR to CE began. Unlike in the Cold War era, in these early stages of restoring the discipline, expatriates who tried to revive IR scholarship in their native lands were instrumental. For example, in then Czechoslovakia, it was the case of George Liska, who published his book State and Foreign Policy in Czech in 1992, 94 or Otto Pick, who returned from the University of Surrey to develop IR at several Czech institutions. But mainly, the re-establishment and development of the discipline were in the hands of domestic authors.
Soon after coping with past grievances and opening up about previously taboo topics, the process of catching up with Western IR began. The seminal texts of Western IR were translated into local languages, which facilitated building up IR scholarship based on the Western model. Moreover, relevant fields of study as well as academic and research institutes targeting independent research in international politics were either re-established or established in the CE region from the 1990s onwards. The Institute for International Relations (Czech Republic) is an illustrative example in this sense. It was established in 1957 as the Institute of International Politics and Economics. After a decade of political liberalisation (the so-called Prague Spring), it fell under the strong ideological influence of the Soviet Union. The fall of the communist regime brought about a complete revival of its independent research. The destiny of the Polish Institute of International Affairs and the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs is almost identical. In the early 1990s, they shed their ideological burden and contributed significantly to importing theoretical approaches from the West. This way, the region got in an intensive touch with major Western IR schools, neorealism, neoliberalism and, expecially, social constructivism.
In the mid-1990s, the CE researchers moved to topics relevant to Western IR, but at the same time practically important for the region, such as European integration, global problems, etc. This shift was also supported by professional organisations, such as the Central and East European International Studies Association (CEEISA). 95 Since the late 2000s, the attempts to join the scholarly debates taking place in prestigious Western academic journals, monographs and edited volumes have been growing. This has brought CE IR researchers to a variety of topics like development policy, 96 energy security as national interest, 97 threats and challenges to democracy, 98 migration, 99 gender equality and feminism 100 and national identity. 101 As in other non-Western IR communities, 102 many contributions have been directed also towards area studies. They mainly provide data and case studies of specific regional developments such as transition, post-communism, democratisation, political challenges, economic transformation, security issues and integration processes. 103 Finaly, considerable attention has been paid to issues critical for CE politics, such as geopolitical location (the position between Germany and Russia), bilateral relations with neighbouring countries 104 and the involvement of major global players in the region. 105
In contrast, attempts to contribute to or challenge the key discpiplinary narratives are still rare. The same is true also for efforts to counter concepts that newly emerge in Western IR and are disadvantageous for the CE area, such as those of the ‘troubled region’ 106 or ‘misbehaving children of Europe’. 107 The ambition to enrich IR by translating the unique geographical experience 108 or employing existing concepts innovatively 109 has intensified only recently. In this sense, the CE IR voice still stands at a certain crossroads emerging from the lack of clarity on what harmony with Western IR to develop further in the future. One option is to strengthen the connection to Western IR (perhaps with the desire to integrate into it and possibly become – to come back to the musical methaphors – a single, unisono, composition one day). The other possibility is to build more on the persisting moments of dissonance and translate them into the specific CE contribution to the IR discipline.
The emerging GIR programme can provide guidance for IR scholars in CE on the later alternative of claiming their place in the field. With its focus on studying ‘regional worlds in their full diversity and interconnectedness’, 110 it shows how various IR voices can productively and constructively coexist. Like in music, it navigates how to translate the dissonance into a new, polyphonic harmony, which is usually the peak of the composition. Moreover, the commitment of GIR to highlight new alternative perspectives and original contributions emerging across the globe largely resonates with the calls from the CE expert community for ‘crossing regional boundaries’ 111 or ‘forgetting emulation and starting to create’. 112 The new innovative CE contributions to GIR can draw on the unique historical experience of in-betweenness, non-self-evidentness of a nation and surviving in the zone of danger. Nevertheless, the CE historical, political and geopolitical realities, as reflected in its proto-theoretical IR thinking, offer much material also to come up with alternative views on concepts established in Western IR, such as the balance of power and sovereignty, but also international institutions, collective security, etc. These views would reflect the ‘reverse-side of the power’ experienced by those who are rather objects than subjects of power games and bear the burdens associated with power changes. Therefore, it is surprising that GIR has not yet received any significant attention in the CE region.
Conclusion
In recent decades, the IR discipline has been strongly criticised for its restrictive embeddedness in the Eurocentrically conceived history that neglects the alternative perspectives and experience of the non-European regions. However, extracts taken from European history and translated into the key theoretical approaches and concepts of Western IR are not inclusive even in relation to a number of European communities. In particular this pertains to those who can be considered relatively marginal participants or even objects and victims of the great-power rivalries, games and shifts remain outside the key IR disciplinary narratives. Four CE nations discussed in this paper – Czechs, Hungarians, Poles and Slovaks – living at the intersection great-power interests and a cultural and religious crossroads and having experienced fear and anxiety for long periods in the past, clearly illustrate this phenomenon.
Many non-European communities, facing a similar situation as CE, have been therefore claiming their position in the emerging GIR programme. However, CE has not yet made a clear decision to do so. The reluctance relates to the adjacent geographical position and specific historical trajectory, in which alienation and rapprochement with the West alternate. There has always been a certain gravitation between the CE IR and Western IR voice given by the common historical, philosophical and cultural roots and the co-existence in a harmonious whole at the early stages of their proto-development. Although the initial momentum faded with the loss of independence of the CE kingdoms and their incorporation into larger empires, glimpses of a more intense involvement of CE IR thinkers in the Western debates repeated several times in the course of their development.
The gravitation tendencies also resonate in contemporary CE IR and make many of its representatives continue their efforts to fit into the Western IR. However, until now, this has been done rather through partial contributions to several Western debates, mostly those that intersect with practical interests and needs of CE. The question is whether (and if, to what extent), the involvement of CE scholars could result in significant theoretical shifts in Western IR. At the moment, this is not the case. Even the possible nesting of CE IR into the Western ones seems to be a long run with a very uncertain outcome.
In contrast, the alternative of translating specific approaches and ideas that originated in CE IR into a distinct voice within the GIR framework has not yet been fully explored and exploited. The contrapuntal reading of the CE and Western IR in this article showed that the direction based on the dissonance of the two voices has significant potential. The permanent exposure of CE to great powers’ pressures brought the CE thinkers many innovative insights on topics that resonate in Western IR but do not reflect the CE experience. Various forms of oppression of CE nations in multi-ethnic empires as well as the ‘otherness’ of the region in the West European imagination, moved CE IR theorising from general questions of peace and war to more specific and novel issues of in-betweenness and non-self-evidentness of national existence or the zone of danger. These have been so far elaborated mainly at the proto-theoretical level. A broader elaboration within the IR discipline is, thus, still awaited.
Compared to the fusion with Western IR, developing the CE IR voice within the emerging GIR programme offers more opportunities for the unfolding and visibility of these concepts. However, as many examples already included in the GIR demonstrate, the initiative has to come from scholars from the region. Thus, CE IR scholars need to pay much more attention to GIR in research and pedagogy to make a difference. While doing so, they must map in detail the development and tradition of thinking on internal affairs in the region. Particular emphasis should be placed on the above innovative regional concepts. In addition, the relationship between CE and Western IR regarding the emergence, dissemination and circulation of key ideas must be explored in much greater detail and its Western interpretation challenged. Finally, the CE IR voice has to be placed into the broader context of IR scholarship originating in other (non-Western) parts of Europe and outside Europe. The innovative future-oriented contributions of CE IR to GIR could be based on the intersection of the knowledge thus gained.
Furthermore, by bringing the CE IR voice into GIR, the current oscillation around the dichotomies of West/Non-West, core/periphery, etc., should be deconstrued and replaced with a more complex structure and layers. This could be done through a focus on the same intellectual roots with Western IR, but different experience and partial marginalisation in Western thought, which links CE IR to other IR communities in a similar position. Last but not least, many new impulses could come from the study (contrapuntal reading) of European but non-Western voices on the one side and non-European ones on the other. Their interrelationships have so far been mostly out of the GIR research spotlight. This would probably motivate the CE IR scholars to join the critique of Eurocentrism and challenge it from within. The CE IR theorising belongs to the neglected IR voices that can be considered non-Western but European. In the case of CE, this naturally corresponds with the location at the margin of the West but in the very centre of Europe. In line with GIR’s so-far development, such efforts could result in a pluriversalist interpretation of history much more sensitive to these European communities. At the same time, they would shift the disciplinary history newly interpreted within GIR to greater inclusivity not only regarding non-European IR but also towards insights coming from various parts of forgotten non-Western Europe.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors gratefully acknowledge institutional support from the Faculty of International Relations, Prague University of Economics and Business.
