first review www.theglobalsite.ac.uk 2001

Gerard Holden

American science?

Robert M.A. Crawford and Darryl S.L. Jarvis (eds), International Relations – Still an American Social Science? Toward Diversity in International Thought, State University of New York Press, Albany 2001, 394pp.

The intradisciplinary debate about IR’s own history, geography, and sociology may be something of an acquired taste, but it is producing a widening stream of publications both on aspects of the history of the American or Anglo-American mainstream and on the production of knowledge in smaller, non-anglophone IR communities. Robert Crawford and Darryl Jarvis’s edited collection takes as its starting-point Stanley Hoffmann’s 1977 Daedalus article, ‘An American Social Science: International Relations’, which it also usefully reprints, and develops from there into a substantial contribution to the intradisciplinary literature. In addition to Hoffmann’s article, an Introduction by Crawford, and a Conclusion by Jarvis, there are 15 further chapters by a range of mainly Canadian, Australian, and British authors – the book has already been nicely characterized by Knud Erik Jørgensen (in his review for Millennium) as a case of ‘the Commonwealth strikes back’. Perhaps inevitably, the book is uneven and some chapters drift away from the main theme to some degree, but no contribution is less than stimulating. One criticism that can be levelled at the volume is that it tries to deal with two related but distinct issues, the pursuit of IR in different national communities and the question of whether a distinct field identifiable as ‘the international’ exists, without doing enough to clarify the relationship between them. I shall return to this point later.

Even though Hoffmann’s article has over the years been much cited and has exerted a good deal of influence, a brief recapitulation may be useful here as a way of refreshing memories and persuading sceptics that there is an issue to be addressed. Hoffmann argued that the preoccupation of US IR specialists after 1945 with power and national interests, and the seminal role Hans Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations came to play, could be explained by three main factors: (1) Intellectual predispositions, the most important of which were a belief in scientific problem-solving and the ‘exact sciences’, plus the role of immigrant scholars who had both philosophical training and personal experience of Europe’s mid-20^th century catastrophe; (2) the political preeminence of the USA in world affairs after 1945, which led to a fascination with power on the part of social scientists and a demand from policymakers for the advice scholars had to offer; and (3) institutional arrangements and the opportunities provided by a nexus of relations between the worlds of power, academia, and research foundations. 30 years later, Hoffmann concluded, the result was a discipline that had failed in its aspiration to become a science, was preoccupied with the requirements of immediate policy advice, and had not identified a middle way between „irrelevance and absorption’. He advocated greater distance, a retreat from policy science towards history and traditional political philosophy.

Much has certainly changed since 1977, and even Hoffmann’s historical analysis is not universally accepted. For example, some recent contributions on disciplinary history have questioned whether there really was such a close connection or correspondence between Morgenthau’s realist maxims and the actual conduct of US foreign policy. Even so, it is testimony to the importance of Hoffmann’s article, almost 25 years after its publication, that some of the best chapters in Crawford and Jarvis’s collection are those that address themselves most directly to his theses and reexamine them in the light of evidence from the American and some non-American IR communities. Robert Crawford’s Introduction reminds the reader that both Morgenthau and Hoffmann were immigrants who themselves helped to bring intellectual diversity to the American discipline. He argues that Morgenthau’s own scepticism about ‘science’ tends to be forgotten, while Hoffmann himself subsequently seemed to abandon the search for anything other than a scientific foundation for the discipline. Molly Cochran provides an absorbing exploration of what the term ‘American social science’ might mean, arguing that even though Hoffmann’s description of the social science tradition American IR grew out of and adopted is correct, there are other traditions even within American social science which could still provide the basis of an alternative conception of the discipline. The one Cochran presents is John Dewey‘s pragmatism, which she summarizes as resting on the idea of ‘warranted assertability’ rather than authoritative knowledge and having the potential to build bridges between empirical and normative, positivist and post-positivist, and rationalist and reflectionist camps. Cochran may be overoptimistic about the prospects of persuading disciplinary lions to lie down pragmatically with lambs, but this does not mean her proposal should be rejected in advance of the attempt. In the chapter most directly concerned with contemporary American IR, Kim Richard Nossal has laboured heroically to compare 14 (fourteen!) American introductory IR textbooks published between 1996 and 1998, and finds a fundamental Americocentrism, a general ignorance of or lack of interest in the rest of the world, and a privileging of hegemonic stability theory as the discipline’s supposed centre of gravity. However, readers unfamiliar with these works will require more guidance than Nossal provides: what proportion of textbooks published during that period does this represent, and are these the most widely purchased or recommended?

Other contributors move away from the US to look at other communities. Tony Porter is sceptical of the whole idea of national perspectives, saying he can find no evidence of any coherent or distinctive Canadian approach to IR. Mark Neufeld and Teresa Healy are more inclined to recognize Canadian specificity, particularly in the area of critical and feminist IR theory. Robert Crawford argues that American and British IR are „essentially different disciplines’ (p. 239) because of British resistance to any exclusively ‘scientific’ approach and the British tendency to treat the field as an interdiscipline. Crawford makes a good case for this strong claim, but is perhaps a little reluctant to spell out the consequences of the argument – beyond saying that there appears to be room for more than one version of truth in the study of international relations. Presumably, it would follow that calls for more transatlantic dialogue are well-meaning but likely to lead to nothing more fruitful than would be achieved by, say, a dialogue between physicists and literary theorists. Which of course might be beneficial to all concerned, but is not the sort of thing many people will be inclined to devote their energies to.

The book also takes up the question of non-anglophone IR, but these contributions are disappointing. Needless to say the editors know very well, and Jarvis himself points out in his Conclusion, that they have published their book in English, with an American university press, in a series edited by an American scholar (James Rosenau); it would be missing the point to criticize them for this. But even so, the attempt to address non-anglophone IR is half-hearted. With so many Canadians involved it would surely have been possible to find someone to write an account of the relationship between anglophone and francophone work within Canada, but we get no more than scattered comments in a couple of chapters. Chris Brown writes insightfully about the neglect of continental political theory by English-speaking liberal intellectuals, and goes on to argue for greater American parochialism as an antidote to the mistaken universalism of the mainstream US commitment to rational choice approaches – which, he says, are fairly marginal within European social science. However, the admittedly witty title of Brown’s chapter, ‘Fog in the Channel: Continental International Relations Theory Isolated’, raises expectations on the part of the reader that the author is going to say something about ‘continental IR theory’. He does not, and does not appear to have read anything more recent than Morgenthau that might be thus classified. Brown also manages within the space of a few pages to misspell the words Ancien Régime (‘ancient régime’), Rechtsstaat (‘Rechtstaat’), bête noire (‘bête noir’), and, bizarrely, Clemenceau (‘Clemanceau’). All of which suggests that even if the authors and editors of a book do not know any foreign languages, it is a good idea to find a copy-editor who does.

The one substantial contribution on the non-anglophone world is A.J.R. Groom and Peter Mandaville’s chapter on what they call ‘The Continental Experience’, which sounds rather like a bed and breakfast weekend in Count Dracula’s castle. Groom and Mandaville provide a valuable survey of the institutional history of the global discipline and of some of its contemporary European institutional and intellectual structures. They argue that European IR is every bit as good as its North American counterpart and manifests much greater diversity, and further that we are at present witnessing a decline in North American hegemony and a trend towards the consolidation of a nascent ‘European IR community’. They also explore some questions of language, suggesting that the work of continental scholars is likely to be translated into English only if it is seen to address the central debates of the English-speaking world, while the need to express oneself in English can lead for some to a loss of nuance and complexity. There is much food for thought here, though one could look at this another way by stressing how well many ‘continentals’ speak and write English (some of them do not need translators), which resolutely monoglot Anglos frequently fail to appreciate, and pointing out that English performs a necessary mediating function because, for example, few French IR scholars read the German literature and few German scholars read the French literature. Furthermore, the British academic world is more open to scholars from other countries and traditions than is France or Germany, for reasons that are not purely linguistic.

The main weakness of Groom and Mandaville’s chapter is, I think, that the evidence presented on contemporary continental Europe is rather sketchy and the reader gets very little sense of whether and how specific indigenous intellectual traditions might be shaping this community or communities. This is, after all, a question that would have interested Hoffmann. Rather than leave this as a general complaint, I shall try to give an example or two of the kind of more specific question that will need to be examined in future if studies of this type are to move beyond the broad-brush survey genre. If one compares recent work from Anglo-Saxon and from German-speaking IR which draws on the Critical Theory tradition for inspiration, one notices some significant differences. Anglo-Saxon „Critical’ IRists (Andrew Linklater, for example) continue to use this tradition as a basis for a long-term prescriptive and emancipatory project, while contemporary German-speaking Habermasians (mostly writing in Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen, but see also Thomas Risse’s recent article in International Organization) use this tradition as an analytical tool which they hope will help them explain the outcomes of successful international negotiations. This is not to say that one approach is better than the other; the point is that they are doing two different things with parts of the same tradition. (For what it is worth, my own view is that these Anglo-Saxon contributions seem to dissolve into unsatisfactorily vague calls for some kind of emancipatory global ‘dialogue’, while the German-speaking authors stick so closely to Habermas’s theory of communicative action that their argument stands or falls with that theory.) One can also observe differences in the way IR communities deal with concepts like ‘culture/Kultur/culture’, and which themselves partly reflect idiosyncracies of national or linguistic intellectual culture, for want of a better term. Further questions are likely to appear if different communities are examined more closely. I am for the moment doing no more than suggest that the ways in which different authors and/or communities take up and develop specific questions and theoretical traditions will need to be looked at more closely, but am also pointing out that this will be a pretty difficult undertaking, requiring detailed knowledge of intellectual history, of individual IR communities, and of the ways in which traditions and communities interact.

I would now like to return to the wider question raised in a number of chapters, either implicitly or explicitly, of the existence or otherwise of IR as an autonomous discipline. This was not a major concern of Hoffmann’s in 1977, though the question does appear at a couple of points in the article. Crawford says in his Introduction to this volume that the authors have not attempted to deal with the question of what constitutes IR as a discipline, but this is misleading. Some contributors seek to defend the idea of some kind of core subject-matter and to resist the extension of the discipline into regions they regard as secondary or irrelevant, and a larger number are in favour of diversification. Kalevi J. Holsti wishes to prevent disciplinary „hyperfragmentation’ and is sceptical about theoretical developments which erode some kind of basic agreement on what IR is ‘about’. Darryl Jarvis launches himself into a polemic against postmodern feminism in general and Christine Sylvester in particular; whatever one thinks of Jarvis’s argument, it is far from clear what this chapter is doing in the book, though it is evident that Jarvis has been wanting to get this off his chest for some time. Jarvis does nevertheless make the reasonable point that a number of professionally successful academic feminists are nowhere near as marginalized as they claim to be. Jan Jindy Pettman, in her chapter on gender and class, disagrees with Jarvis and problematizes IR as a discipline that is predominantly white, male, and English-speaking. Pettman presents parts of her case persuasively, but she offers no evidence to suggest that feminists are less likely than non-feminists to be native English-speaking monoglots; at one point she comes close to acknowledging this. In addition to Pettman, a number of other contributors express more enthusiasm about the diversification of IR as they deal with issues such as interdisciplinarity (Martin Griffiths and Terry O’Callaghan), historical sociology (James L. Richardson), indigenous diplomacies (Roger Epp), practical moral reflection (Roger D. Spiegele), and Edward Said’s work as a challenge to Samuel Huntington (Pal Ahluwalia and Michael Sullivan). In the more conciliatory Conclusion Jarvis welcomes work on gender and identity as part of the discipline’s diversification.

The problem here is that at some point (and it is obviously very difficult to say when exactly this point has been reached) these contributions from political theorists, feminists, anthropologists, sociologists and perhaps others as well are bound to raise the question of whether meaningful boundaries distinguishing IR from other fields of study can be identified. This is one of the things that worries Holsti, and he is not alone. Is the only conceivable alternative some kind of meta-discipline incorporating all the social and perhaps some of the human sciences, as authors like Immanuel Wallerstein have argued? This idea brings new problems of its own: we cannot all be competent in all conceivable fields.

Mercifully, I do not have to answer these questions here. The immediate problem for Crawford and Jarvis’s book is that it never becomes sufficiently clear what relationship is being posited between the ‘American hegemony’ question and the implicitly or explicitly present ‘boundaries of the discipline’ controversy. Jarvis himself believes that the dismantling of disciplinary borders counts as evidence of declining US hegemony, but is it as straightforward as that? For one thing, there are a number of American ‘critical critics’, though they are not (with the exception of Cochran, I think) represented in this book. Some of them may feel annoyed at their near-exclusion from the ranks of Anglo-Saxon dissent. It may well be that mainstream American IR believes more firmly in the existence of „the international’ than mainstream non-American IRists do, and it may even be the case that beliefs about the boundaries of the discipline are themselves in part academic community-dependent. But we don’t really know, because no-one has yet done a large-scale, systematic study making comparisons across different communities and areas of interest. The most substantial recent survey, Ole Wæver’s 1998 International Organization article (cited by Jarvis in his Conclusion), finds that American IR is being ‘de-Europeanized’ by its commitment to rational choice approaches but does not consider the question of disciplinary boundaries. On the other hand, attempts by scholars working within non-American communities to distance themselves from the US mainstream do not necessarily involve challenging the idea of disciplinary borders. A good deal of recent work inspired by the English School (by Barry Buzan and Richard Little, for example) appears to be motivated by the goal of reconstituting an autonomous discipline of IR as a non-American enterprise. Indeed, this development seems to strengthen Crawford’s case for treating American and British IR as two distinct disciplines.

There is of course a more mundane side to this question which prevents it from getting out of hand. It has been pointed out in the past that there is something curious about the spectacle of people pursuing careers in an academic discipline whose existence they wish to deny. There is no recorded instance of a scholar, no matter how radical s/he may be, responding to the offer of a job in an IR department by saying: ‘I’m sorry, but I couldn’t possibly accept; you see, there is no such thing as international relations.’ Until this begins to happen on a large scale, we are probably stuck with IR.

In conclusion: Crawford and Jarvis have edited a collection which is illuminating about a number of aspects of anglophone IR, weaker where it touches on the non-anglophone world, and rather more centrally concerned with the thorny question of disciplinary boundaries than the editors may realize. The merit of the volume is that it provokes the reader to think about such questions even if it does not provide answers to them. The book is to be recommended; even and especially those who think intradisciplinary meta-reflection is a lot of nonsense will benefit from reading it.