History and Structure in the Theory of International Relations

I. In this paper, I refer to international relations as an academic discipline; to world politics as an array of political processes that extend beyond the territoriality and competence of single political communities and affect large proportions of humanity; and to inter-state relations or the politics of states-systems as the narrower array of practices constituted through interactions between states. All these terms are highly problematic in ways that serve to underline the significance of questions about the character and location of political community in the late twentieth century. International relations, for example, reifies a specific historical convergence between state and nation; references to states systems tend to encourage a conflation of accounts of the state as a territorial space and as governmental apparatus; while world politics is used to refer to global political processes that largely escape prevailing analytical categories. The horizons of our language in this respect reflect the limits of traditions of political analysis that depend on a distinction between community within states and non-community (relations, anarchy, war) between them. For brief elaborations of this argument - which forms the subtext of the present paper - see R.B.J. Walker , State Sovereignty, Global Civilisation and the Rearticulation of Political Space (Princeton, NJ : Center of International Studies, Princeton University , World Order Studies Program Occasional Paper No. 8, 1988 ) and R.B.J. Walker , 'Ethics, Modernity and the Theory of International Relations', paper presented at the Conference on New Directions in International Relations: Implications for Australia, Australian National University, Canberra, 5-17 February 1989.

Robert O. Keohane , 'International Institutions: Two Approaches ', International Studies Quarterly (Vol. 32, No. 4, December 1988), pp. 379-96. See also Robert O. Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).

Typical discussions include Richard J. Bernstein , The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976); Brian Fay , Critical Social Science (Cambridge: Polity Press , 1987); John G. Gunnell , Between Philosophy and Politics: The Alienation of Political Theory (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986); and William E. Connolly , Political Theory and Modernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988).

The main papers from this debate were collected in Klaus Knorr and James N. Rosenau (eds.), Contending Approaches to International Politics ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969).

Hedley Bull , The Anarchical Society ( London: Macmillan, 1977). Cf., Friedrich N. Kratochwil , Rules, Norms and Decisions ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Richard K. Ashley , 'Living on Border Lines: Man, Post Structuralism and War', in James Der Derian and Michael Shapiro (eds.), International/Intertextual Relations: The Boundaries of Knowledge and Practice in World Politics (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1989), Richard K. Ashley , 'The Geopolitics of Geopolitical Space ', Alternatives (Vol. 12, October 1987); and Richard K. Ashley , 'Untying the Sovereign State: A Double Reading of the Anarchy Problematique', Millennium (Vol. 17, No. 2, Summer 1988).

The most instructive formulations of the realist-idealist distinction remain E.H. Carr , The Twenty Years Crisis, 1919-1939, Second Edition (London : Macmillan, 1946); and Hans J. Morgenthau , Scientific Man Vs. Power Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1946). They are especially instructive when read not as founding texts of the theory of international relations but as belated formulations of dilemmas associated with early twentieth century German historicism as these dilemmas were mediated through the work of Karl Mannheim and Max Weber. See, e.g., Stephen P. Turner and Regis A. Factor , Max Weber and the Dispute over Reason and Value (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984).

See, e.g., the relatively accessible discussions in R.J. Holton , The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: Macmillan, 1985) and Michael Mann , The Sources of Social Power, Volume 1 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

It is the most interesting, I have argued elsewhere, because it clarifies the connection between the contemporary usages of categories like realist and idealist and the early modern spatio-temporat resolution of questions about the possibility of political community offered by the principle of state-sovereignty, a resolution that is also constitutive of international relations as a field of enquiry. See R.B.J. Walker , The Prince and The Pauper: Tradition, Modernity and Practice in the Theory of International Relations' in Der Derian and Shapiro (eds.), op. cit.

Robert Gilpin , The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); Immanuel Wallerstein , 'The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis', Comparative Studies in Society and History (Vol. 16, No. 4, September 1974); Robert W. Cox , Production, Power and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); and Stephen Gill and David Law , The Global Political Economy: Perspectives, Problems and Policies ( Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1988).

See the important analysis in Friedrich Kratochwil and John Gerald Ruggie , 'International Organisations: A State of the Art on an Art of the State', International Organisation (Vol. 40, No.4, Autumn, 1986).

II. For a more extended discussion see R.B.J. Walker 'Realism, Chance and International Political Theory', International Studies Quarterly (Vol. 31, No. 1, March 1987 ); and 'The Territorial State and the Theme of Gulliver', International Journal (Vol. 39, Summer 1984).

In international relations the adequacy of these images become especially important in the literature on systems analysis. For a helpful discussion see Richard Little , 'Three Approaches to the International System: Some Ontological and Epistemological Considerations', British Journal of International Studies (Vol. 3, No. 1, October 1977)

On this theme see especially Der Derian and S hapiro (eds.), op. cit., and Michael Shapiro The Politics of Representation (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).

Keohane, op. cit..

For an argument to this effect see Walker The Prince and The Pauper', op cit.