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Introduction
International Relations (IR) has had an uneasy, marginal when not residual,
place in the study and teaching of the social sciences. Unduly defensive about its
own methodological and disciplinary strengths, IR has, in the main, been treated
as an appendix to other, more respected, subjects. National polities, economies
and societies have been the main focus of these disciplines: the international has
been an additional element, an option for students, a penultimate chapter for the
scholar.
The dramatic change in status of the international in the past decade or two
has only compounded this, since much of the apparent recognition of the
international is itself misconceived: now that it has become fashionable to stress
the pervasiveness of the international and the decline of national specificity,this
neglected dimension has become the property of all. Banishment has given way to
promiscuity. The problem of identifying the scope of International Relations has
been compounded by two further problems: one is the confusion of IR with the
contemporary, and not least with questions of policy; the other is the almost
complete invisibility within broader social science and intellectual culture of IRI
theory as such. The average reader of the TLSor the New York Review of Books,
cognizant at least of the names of Rawls and Nozick, Derrida and Foucault,
Keynes and Hayek, would be hard pressed to name a single theorist of IR.
Neither of these approaches - denial and overstatement - does justice to a
question which is common to all social scientists; namely, the interaction of
national and international, internal and external. Nor does the ahistorical
0032-32 17/90/03/0502-l5/%03.000 1990 Political Studies
FREDHALLIDAY
503
The term internationalwas coined by Bentham in1780 to denote legal ties between states and is
confusing in two respects. First, relations between states are not identical to relations between
nations:the idea that states represent nations is, in most cases, a fiction. Relations between nations,
i.e. inter-ethnic relations, whether within or across state boundaries, are a quite separate topic. In
current usage a further confusion has arisen, evident in the international section of any newspaper:
this covers both inter-state relations as such and what can be termed the internal, domestic, affairs of
other states. This latter ambiguity is one of the reasons for the widespread confusion of IR with
comparative politics.
504
* For overviews of the subject, see Margot Light and A. J. R. Groom (eds), International
Relations: A Handbook of Current Theory (London, Frances Pinter, 1985); Steve Smith (ed.),
International Relations: British and American Perspectives (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1985); special
issue of Millennium, 16:2 (Summer 1987), re-issued in revised form as Hugh Dyer and Leon
Mangasarian (eds), The Study oflnternarional Relations: The State ofthe Art (London, Macmillan,
1989). In this paper, as in other articles on IR, I owe a special debt to the work of my colleague
Michael Banks, who has provided a unique overview and assessment of the subject: see, for example,
his The inter-paradigm debate in Light and Groom (eds), International Relations.
A survey of British universities offering degree courses in IR in 1987 found that the following did
so: Aberdeen, Birmingham, Bradford, Keele, Kent, Lancaster, LSE, Reading, St Andrews,
Southampton, Surrey, Sussex, UCW Aberystwyth, Warwick. There is also a strong department at
North Staffordshire Polytechnic. About 500 university students a year graduate in IR.
FREDHALLIDAY
505
The growth and variation in subject-matter within IR, already alluded to,
parallel an evolution in theoretical approaches. In its initial phase, IR sought to
distinguish itself from those disciplines out of which it had emerged: thus it
was distinct from international, that is, diplomatic, history in its comparative
and theoretical approach. In a development comparable to the emergence of
political science from constitutional theory, it separated from international law
in adopting a positivist rather than normative approach and in analysing
dimensions of international interaction beyond the legal. It was distinguished
from political science as such in seeking to combine the political with the
economic and military and in taking as its object of analysis not the internal
political system of any one country, but the international system itself, one
distinguished above all by the lack of sovereign authority and the greater
salience of violence within it. Its theoretical evolution has none the less
involved continued interaction with, and borrowing from, these disciplines as
well as a growing interaction with other social sciences, notably economics.
Indeed, the development of IR, like that of all social sciences, is a product
of three concentric circles of influence: change and debate within the subject
itself, the influence of new ideas within other areas of social science, and the
impact of developments in the world itself. Once it had overcome its early
protectionist phase, IR was able more openly to learn from other areas of social
science, as well as to contribute to them. The recent interest of historical
sociology in the dominance of strategic and war-making concerns within state
-ormation, and of the degree to which international rather than exogenous
Kal Holsti, The Dividing Discipline (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1985).
506
factors have shaped state development, is one pertinent example of this latter
proce~s.~
If IR had a parental discipline, it was not so much history or political science as
international law. In continental Europe, this pattern prevails in many
departments. In its initial phase, after the first world war, IR adopted a
predominantly legal approach, today erroneously presented as utopianism or
idealism. This school, of peace through law, arose in part out of Wilsonian
liberalism and sought to limit or prevent war by international treaty, negotiation
procedures and the growth of international organizations, notably the League of
Nations. With the crises of the 1930s, idealismgave way to realism, initially in
the work of E. H. Carr (whose The Twenty Years Crisis, was published in
September 1939) and later in the work of a range of US-based writers, including
Hans Morgenthau, Henry Kissinger and Kenneth Waltz. They took as their
starting point states pursuit of power, the centrality of military strength within
that power, and the enduring inevitability of conflict in a world of multiple
sovereignty. While not denying entirely a role for morality, law and diplomacy,
they laid greatest stress on armed might as an instrument of maintaining peace.
They believed that the central mechanism for regulating conflict was the balance
of power, through which undue strength of one state would be compensated for
by increased strength or expanded alliances on the part of others: this was
something inherent in the system but also capable of conscious promotion.
In a parallel development, a group of realists on this side of the Atlantic
developed what came to be known as the English School: Charles Manning,
Martin Wight, Hedley Bull and Fred Northedge emphasized the degree to which
the international system was anarchical; that is, without a central ruler. They
saw it not as straightforward chaos but as in a certain sense a society; that is, a
group of states that interacted according to certain conventions. These included
diplomacy, international law, the balance of power, the role of the great powers
and, most controversially, war itself.*This school has continued to produce work
of consistent quality, evident in the writings of Alan James, Michael Donelan,
James Mayall, Adam Watson and others.
With the growth in academic study of international relations after the second
world war, realism became the dominant, if not sole, approach to the subject. It
possessed a powerful and comprehensive explanation of international relations
Examples of the interaction between historical sociology and the international include John
Hall, Powers and Liberties (Harmondsworth, Pelican, 1986) and Michael Mann, The Sources of
Social Power, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988). Discussion of the implications
ofthis work for IR in Fred Halliday, State and society in international relations: a second agenda. in
Hugh Dyer and Leon Mangasarian (eds), The Study of International Relations (London, Macmillan,
1989) and Anthony Jarvis, Societies, states and geopolitics: challenges from historical sociology.
Review of International Studies, 15:3 (July 1989).
* Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977) is the most lucid
exposition of this view. For a critique see Roy Jones, The English School of international relations: a
case for closure, Review oflnternational Studies, 7 :I (1981).
Alan James, Sovereign Statehood (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1986) and his counterattack against recent developments in IR, The realism of Realism: the state and the study of
International Relations, Review of International Studies, I5:2 (July 1989); Michael Donelan (ed.),
The Reason of States: A Study in International Theory (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1978);James
Mayall (ed.), The Community of States: A Study in International Political Theory (London, George
Allen & Unwin, 1983); Adam Watson and Hedley Bull (eds), The Expansion of International Society
(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984).
FREDHALLIDAY
507
and conflict. It accorded with the terms in which international affairs were
discussed in much public debate. It had received a powerful, apparently
incontrovertible, affirmation from the events of the 1930sand their consequences.
At the same time, it would appear probable that the increased concern of political
science in the 1930s with power and the processes by which it is allocated, as
distinct from formal constitutional procedures (Merriam, Lasswell), compounded this power politics trend within the study of international relations.
Behaviouralism and its Challenge
The dominance of realism began to be challenged in the 1960s and has remained
under pressure ever since. From the early 1960s onwards, behaviouralism
constituted an alternative to orthodox IR as it did to other branches of the social
sciences at both the methodological and conceptual levels. Thus the new
scientificschool of IR, almost wholly based in the US, sought to get away from
the traditionalists use of history and orthodox political terms such as state to a
new, quantifiable, study of international processes and interactions. Karl
Deutsch studied the growth of international communications; James Rosenau
focused on informal interactions, transnational linkages, between societies that
bypassed orthodox state-to-state relations; Morton Kaplan developed more
scientific theorizations of the international systems. A wide-ranging and often
acerbic debate between traditionalists and behaviouralists in IR took place,
mirroring in substance and tone many of the themes raised in the parallel
discussions within political science. Bernard Cricks strictures on US political
science found their parallel in IR. In this exchange, in which both sides rather
overreached their philosophical and methodological competences, the English
school stood firmly for history and judgement against what was seen as the
vulgar and mistakenly scientificapproach of American political science.
The overall attempt by the behaviouralists to supplant traditional IR failed in
two key respects. First, realism, and its later variant neo-realism, remained
the dominant approach within the academic and policy-related study of
international relations. Secondly, the very theoretical challenge posed by
behaviouralism, to supplant the pre-scientific study of the state and other
conventional, historical concepts with a new scientifictheorization was not taken
far enough, above all because it failed to provide an alternative theorization of
the state itself. In the end behaviouralism became an adjunct, rather than an
alternative to, the orthodox state-centred approach. None the less, out of the
behaviouralist challenge and later theorizations of transnational and systemic
factors, a number of major new sub-fields developed within the discipline, three
of which merit special attention: foreign policy analysis, interdependence and
international political economy. Thus, if realism and neo-realism remain
predominant, they no longer have an intellectual or institutional monopoly
within the subject.
Foreign policy analysis, the study of the factors determining foreign policy
outcomes and decisions in particular, was an ambitious and in many respects
successful attempt to challenge the core tenets of realism. In seeking to analyse
I n This debate is resumed in Klaus Knorr and James Rosenau (eds), Contending Approaches to
International Polifics (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1969). See also the debate between
James Rosenau and Fred Northedge in Millennium, 15 (1986).
508
how foreign policy is made, it rejects some of the central premises of realism: that
the state can be treated as a unitary actor; that it can be deemed to act rationally,
to maximize power or defend a national interest; that the internal character and
influences of a country can be treated as not relevant to the study of its foreign
policy - this latter a favourite claim of Waltzs in particular. Instead, foreign
policy analysis examined the composition of the foreign-policy-making process first in terms of bureaucratic and individual fragmentation and rivalry within the
state itself, then in terms of the input of broader elements within the polity,
including legislatures, the press, public opinion and ideology. This approach
opened up the possibility of something that had been precluded by realisms denial
of the relevance of internal factors, and which brought it into fruitful interaction
with work in political science, namely the comparative study of foreign-policymaking and of the ways in which different constitutional, historical and social
endowments affect the formulation and implementation of foreign policy. The
conclusion reached on this route, in international as much as in more domestic
investigations, was that the premise of rationality had to yield, in the face of
bureaucratic infighting, unintended consequences, individual and group delusions,
group think and so forth. The presupposition that states could be treated as
rational power maximizers and calculators of a national interest was shown to be
an inadequate, and often diversionary, basis for analysing foreign policies.
The most important challenge of foreign policy analysis was, however, to
realisms claim that states could be treated uniquely as units in an environment,
without reference to their internal structures and changes therein. What foreign
policy analysis sought to show was not only that its approach, incorporating
domestic factors, could provide a more persuasive account of the making of
foreign policy, and of its irrationalities, but also that it was necessary to identify
the ways in which the domestic environments and processes of countries were
affected by external factors, whether or not the state was involved in this
interaction. This was evidently the case with economic processes - changes in the
world price of oil had effects on countries whatever governments chose to do and also with a range of ideological and political ones. Societies were increasingly
interacting in ways that were transnational rather than interstate and these
linkages were in turn having an impact on foreign policy. Faced with such
external challenges and influences, states acted to accommodate or pre-empt,
depending on circumstances. Foreign policy analysis, born out of the behaviouralist rejection of institutional concepts, did not develop the theory of the
state itself. It therefore failed to take the opportunity which later, historical
sociological, literature was to benefit from, of a comprehensive, combined,
analysis of the internal and external roles of states. Yet it was foreign policy
analysissgreat achievement to have opened this question up and made it possible
to examine the internal-external relationship in a new light.
Interdependence and its Critics
It was in this context that there emerged the distinct approach based on
interdependence, a concept used to focus on how societies and states were
Christopher Hill and Margot Light, Foreign policy analysis, in Margot Light and A. J. R.
Groom (eds), Inrernationaf Retarions (London, Frances Pinter, 1985).
FREDHALLIDAY
SO9
510
The Pertinence
of
International Relations
The central issue raised by interdependence concerned the role of the state and
how far changes in the international system had indeed reduced, as distinct from
altered, this. A similar question was raised in a traditional but very much ongoing
field, that of international organization, where the growth of new supranational
bodies, notably the UN and the EC, appeared to modify the sovereign powers of
member states. If the initial expectation that the EC would constitute a new state,
with appropriate powers and legitimacy, was equally discarded by the late 197Os,
the constraints which Community policies placed upon member states across a
wide range of policies did amount to a reduction of previous areas of state
independence. It was in the context of such investigations that many of those who
had begun by advocating interdependence shifted to a new set of issues, those
broadly comprised by the subject international political economy. This has been
defined as the reciprocal and dynamic relation of the pursuit of wealth and
power and involves, as the revived term political economy indicates, a study of
the interaction of political and economic forces, without granting prior
supremacy to either.
As one of the leading figures in this field, Susan Strange, has argued, much
discussion of international politics had proceeded without reference to economic
processes and preconditions, and international economics operated without
~
reference to the enduring and ever-assertive role of s t a t e ~ . International
political economy has acted as a corrective to much of the simplistic internationalization literature common in the 1970s and 1980s. It has stressed that
states, while challenged by changes in the international system, also adapt to
them, seek to take advantage of them (for example, in communications), and
continue to provide the indispensable political, legal and military context for the
operation of economic and market forces. Despite the reduction in some forms of
macroeconomic intervention, states still remain powerful economic actors in
their own right - as employers, taxers, regulators, determinants of interest rates
and money supply, and, not least, promoters of deficits and managers of debt.
At the same time as, in criticism of economists and of those who overstate the
extent of internationalization, she emphasized the role of states, Strange also, in
answer to conventional theorists of realism, denied the autonomy of states and
individual states power within the international system, by developing the
concept of structural power. She criticized Marxism for focusing only on
production, to the detriment of other forms of economic activity and power. At
the same time, she also criticized the traditional realist view of power as
relational, that is, as between two states, in favour of a concept of structural
l4 Susan Strange, International economics and international relations: a case of mutual neglect,
International Aflairs, 48:2 (April 1970); and States and Markets. An Introduction to International
Polifzcal Economy (London, Pinter Publishers, 1988).
FREDHALLIDAY
51 I
power, given by the operation of an international system. Strange argued that the
activities of individual states and economies were being increasingly constrained
not by an asymmetric capitalist international system but by four overlapping
systems of power. One, the security system, was the core of traditional, realist IR.
The other three were the systems ofproduction, finance and knowledge, the latter
including science and technology, culture and life-style. One of the most striking
arguments of her States and Markets is that the growing importance of the
knowledge structure forms an important constituent of continued US hegemony.
The overall power of a state is a function of its position in the four structures. If it
is not clear what the subjects of structural power are - states or the structures
themselves - this theorization none the less represents a powerful revision of
traditional views of power politics.
Amongst the many issues debated within the literature on international
political economy, one, the debate on hegemonic stability theory, may be
illustrative of how this investigation of the states-economies relationship has
proceeded. Hegemonic stability theory originated in the work of Charles
Kindelberger, who argued that a liberal international economic regime required
a hegemon, a state dominant in both political and economic terms, able to ensure
the public goods necessary for the systems functioning and to promote and
enforce the rules by which this system operated. Britain in the nineteenth
century and the US since 1945 played such a, beneficial, hegemonic role. The
implication of this theory is that when a hegemonic power declines, as the US has
been doing since the early 1970s, the system as a whole suffers; hence the call by
several writers, notably Susan Strange and Robert Gilpin, for a reassertion of US
hegemony within the international system, for the good of
This theory has been challenged from a variety of standpoints, empirical and
theoretical. Some historians have argued that the Britain-US analogy is invalid.
Flattering as it may be to inhabitants of these islands today to believe it, Britain
was never an economic hegemon in the nineteenth century. Observers of recent
developments are divided as to how far US hegemony really has declined,
especially in the political-military fields. More theoretically, hegemonic stability
theory has been challenged by the former proponents of interdependence, most
notably Keohane in his After Hegemony. In common with others, he has tried to
identify the ways in which an international system can operate according to
certain norms and rules, even in the absence of a hegemon. These norms, rules
or regimes comprise a set of informal, but generally accepted, expectations and
understandings between states and other actors in the international community.
The maintenance of economic growth by the developed countries would be one
example, as would a limited obligation to provide aid to the third world. While a
hegemonic power may be necessary for the initial setting up of a system and the
laying down of its rules of operation, this no longer applies once the system is in
operation. Hence the decline in US hegemony, the reality of which Keohane, in
common with most other US writers, accepts, need not lead to disorder in the
system. Post-hegemonic cooperation is possible and indeed evident. Through a
Is Charles Kindelberger, The World in Depression, 1929-1939 (Berkeley, University of California
Press, 1973).
l6 Susan Strange, Casino Capitalism (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1986); Robert Gilpin, The Political
Economy of International Relations (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1987).
512
FREDHALLIDAY
513
their internal processes, one that could properly be called reductionist, and one
that sought to take both exogenous and endogenous factors into account.*
If neo-realism responded to criticism of realism by reasserting traditional
tenets, others took the analysis of IR even further away from established
orthodoxy. In a radical extension of behaviourism, John Burton in his World
Society and other works developed a theory of international relations based upon
individual needs and the system of issue-related linkages established by such
needs. The international system was, therefore, in Burtons view, a cobweb of
issue-defined interactions, within which the specific structures of military and
state power played a distinct but not exclusive or predominant role. With a
special emphasis upon the resolution of conflict through small-group and
individual mediation, Burtons work broke emphatically with the state-centric
view of international relations by introducing not only an alternative analysis but
also an alternative approach to policy. In a parallel development, the World
Order Modelling Project, Richard Falk developed a theory of alternatives and
oppositions to state power at the international level, based again on human needs
and transnational, non-state, interactions.
The growing relationship of Marxism to IR constituted another, unorthodox,
development in the 1970s and 1980s. As already indicated, Marxisms point of
entry into IR was on the issue of underdevelopment and in many ways it
remained confined to this area. Not only was the alternative, more classical,
Marxist view on development downplayed, according to which it was in
capitalisms interest to develop the third world, but Marxist concepts with
more relevance to the central concerns of IR - on the causes of war, role of
classes, character of ideology - were not applied to international analysis in the
same way. In arguing for the primacy of an alternative agenda - north-south
relations and international structures of exploitation - Marxism left the main
terrain of international relations relatively unscathed. This insulation of IR from
Marxist influence, to a degree perhaps greater than in any other area of the social
sciences, was of course compounded by the predominance of American writing
on the subject, reflecting an intellectual climate from which Marxism was largely
absent.
Only in the 1980s has this situation began to change. Within the writing on
international political economy, there has been an application of Marxist
concepts to analyse the causes and consequences of an increasingly internationalized market and the new forms it is taking. Within the writing on foreign policy
analysis, it has become possible to examine not only how bureaucratic and
constitutional factors affect policy outcomes but also how these are themselves
shaped by broader historical, social and economic factors, including class
factors, within the country concerned. The role of military production sectors in
promoting international confrontation and alarm is one obvious, and not
negligible, example of this.**
2 For an exposition and critique of Waltzs views see Robert Keohane, Neo-Realism andits Cri1ic.r
(New York, Columbia University Press, 1986). For further critique of Keohane and Waltz, see Fred
Halliday, Theorising the international, Economy and Society, I8:3 (August 1989).
22 Kaes van der Pijl, The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (London, Verso, 1984) and Stephen
Gills and Barry Law The Global Political Economy: Perspectives, Problems and Policies (Brighton,
Wheatsheaf, 1988).
514
FREDHALLIDAY
515
and nationalist identity have been used to deny the legitimacy of raising these
issues, there is room for considerable engagement by feminism, in practice and
theory, with the claims of nationalism and with its correlate, the presumed
authority of the sovereign
Conclusion
There is much that it has not been possible to touch upon in this overview. The
recent revival of normative theory in IR - as in the work of Charles Beitz,
influenced by Rawls, Andrew Linklater and John Vincent - is one case in point,
examining as it does the reiated issues of obligation and rights in the international
~ o n t e x t .A
~ second area meriting much greater attention is that of rational choice
and game theory as applied to IR, in both realist and foreign policy analysis
varieties.26A third, enduring and rich, area of investigation is that of strategy,
where theoretical and historical analysis, enriched as well as diverted by policy
issues, continues to generate work of high
Despite the failure of the
behavioural revolution to transform IR, any more than it transformed political
science as a whole, there is considerable work in applying mathematical methods
to international issues, a current which, if perhaps oversold in the US, receives
too little attention in Britain.**In common with other areas of the social sciences,
IR has recently been influenced by discourse theory and post-structuralism,
with consequences yet to be a ~ c e r t a i n e dAs
. ~ already
~
indicated, newly produced
work in historical sociology has major implications for IR and in particular its
analysis of states, an interaction which may help the discipline to break out of
the current inter-paradigm impasse.
This essay began by arguing that the relationship of IR to other social sciences
can above all be defined by the joint approach which it, and other disciplines,
could make to issues that were both domestic and international and where it is
possible to identify how far the international did and did not play a determinant
role. Three groups ofjointly relevant topic suggest themselves. The first are issues
of political theory in the older, normative, sense of the term: of obligation
- whether to family, state, or cosmopolitan community; of justice, its
24
For initial discussions of the relationship between feminism and IR, see the special issue of
Millennium, 17:2 (Summer 1988)and the subsequent discussion in Millennium, 18:2 (Summer 1989).
2SCharlesBeitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, Princeton University
Press, 1979); Andrew Linklater, Men and Citizens in the Theory of International Relations (London,
Macmillan, 1981); John Vincent, Human Rights and International Relations (Oxford, Oxford
516
implementation at the national and international levels, and its conflict with rival
values, notably security; of the legitimacy of force and coercion, within and
between states; of the right to resist sovereign states. There are, secondly, a set of
theoretical issues in the more contemporary, analytic sense: the analysis of
power; the relation between political, economic, ideological structures; the
relevance of rational choice models to social and political action, by states,
institutions and individuals within them.
Finally, there is the overarching issue of explaining social and political systems
in the light of both domestic and international determinants. Each level has its
own partial autonomy, yet, as indicated above, the insulation of the two levels of
study, as with political science and IR, has done violence to explanation and
analysis. As already argued, it is not possible to explain the politics of individual
states without reference to a range of international factors, historical and current.
The international is not something out there, an area of policy that occasionally
intrudes, in the form of bombs or higher oil prices, but which can conventionally
be ignored. The international predates, plays a formative role in shaping, the
emergence of the state and the political system. States operate simultaneously at
the domestic and international levels and seek to maximize benefits in one
domain to enhance their positions in the other. The requirements of inter-state
competition explain much of the development of the modern state, while the
mobilization of domestic resources and the internal constraints account for much
of states successes in this competition. Political Science and International
Relations are looking at two dimensions of the same process: without undue
intrusion or denial of the specificity of the other, this might suggest a stable and
fruitful interrelationship.