Abstract
The traditional understanding of the origins of international relations (IR) is on the ropes. The old vision of a discipline that was born under an idealist star and matured through a first ‘Great Debate’ is no longer credible. This article offers an alternative understanding: viz. that a scholarly study of IR emerged during the decades prior to World War I, that the emergence represents an international movement, and that it was occasioned by major changes in Great Power economic and political affairs. By posing a few simple questions — who were the first scholarly IR-authors? where and why they write? — this article identifies some of the formative forces that produced the first (now largely lost) generation of IR scholars. It proposes a historically grounded, alternative to our traditional (largely British and mythological) understanding of early IR scholarship.
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Notes
Carr's account relies on few concrete examples of contemporary IR scholars. He omits the diversity of pre-war scholars and he misses the plurality of their arguments. He overlooks the most influential British authors of the previous generation — among them were Woolf (1916), Dickinson (1916) and the several contributors to Grant et al. (1916). He disregards non-British authors — apart from a handful of long-dead Continental philosophers, he neglects the early Continental contributors like Leroy-Beaulieu (1874) in France and Treitschke (1913) in Germany. He cavalierly overlooks American authors like Mahan (1889, 1897) or Reinsch (1900, 1902, 1907, 1911). His quick comments on international law disregards developments that had taken place since the late 1800s (see e.g. Lorimer, 1884).
For example, in Brian Schmidt (1998).
Other states, with Germany and the USA in the lead, began to exhibit faster rates of industrialization — and, soon, faster rates of economic and military development. By 1870 Germany had outstripped France in coal production. By 1872, Germany had trounced France in the quick and decisive Franco–Prussian war. Between 1872 and 1890 the Germans came to overshadow France in industrialization and to catch up with Britain.
As discussed famously by Stein Rokkan (1970).
Germany and USA staked out very different paths: Germany built its nation around the concept of a cultural community. The USA founded its nation on active participation by rational individuals endowed with rights and protected by political institutions. The German historian Friedrich Meinecke (1908) observed this distinction and argued that as countries develop — as their local communities were connected by roads and rails and growing traffic and integrated into large, overarching units — they will develop either into a Staatsnation or into a Kulturnation.
The French sociologist Ernest Renan had noted this development as early as 1882. He had warned his fellow Frenchmen against making a most ‘serious error’ by ‘confusing race and nation, and attributing to ethnic or rather linguistic groups the kind of sovereignty analogous to that of peoples’.
The runaway success of Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883), marked the turning of the tide. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1886) consolidated the trend and turned attention towards exiting adventures in colonial setting. His success was quickly followed up with other colonial yarns by himself and by other authors. One of these was Kipling, whose popularity was enormous and his influence on the British outlook was “simply prodigious, according to Edmund Gosse (1899).
Henry M. Stanley's book How I Found Livingston (1872) was a bestseller through the 1870s. Books that described the tragedy of General Gordon's death at Khartoum (1885) affected the popular imagination so strongly that it created a near-insatiable interest in books on the Sudan.
As a measure of the impact of their reports, it must be noted that vivid eyewitness dispatches would, on several occasions, inflame the public mood to such a degree that it would force upon governments a new kind of foreign-policy activism. For example, in the case of the European outcry against the Ottoman massacres of Armenians in the 1890s.
On nationalism, see Renan (1992). On the patterns of war and colonialism, see the two books by Paul Leroy-Beaulieu (1869, 1874).
Among the major American magazines that regularly included discussions of international events were the Atlantic, The Forum, Harper's and The North American Review.
A most important journal wasPolitical Science Quarterly, whose first issue was published by the Political Science Department of Columbia College (later Columbia University) in 1887. The establishment of the American Political Science Association with its influential journal, American Political Science Review (in 1906) marked an important event in this regard.
This, in turn, may provide an unexpected clue to the much-debated question of why IR, when it finally emerged full-blown in the wake of World War I, was a distinctive English-language discipline.
Reinsch (1903) wrote a review of Hobson's book in which he stated that Hobson's argument was hardly original.
The argument presented by Angell is hard to miss. His message is simple and sharply written. Yet it was twisted and turned and misrepresented to such an extent that Angell after a while came to be associated with simplistic, peacenik opinions which was vastly different from his own — to the degree that Angell is mentioned in IR literature, he is regularly made to represent the naïve view that war is inevitable. His argument was, in fact, precisely the opposite!
Angell (1910) delivered a destructive salvo against the realist argument. Admiral Mahan (1912) gave Angell's book a negative review, to which Angell (1912) responded with another fearsome criticism. This exchange of learned scholars, each self-conscious about his own theoretical underpinnings, is probably the closest to a first ‘Great Debate’.
A longer list is presented in Angell (1951, 169).
Several authors tried to account for the causes of the Great War — for example, Brailsford (1914), Toynbee (1915), Woolf (1916), Dickinson (1916), Howe (1916) — and define the preconditions for a stable peace — like Angell (1914), Woolf (1916), Zimmern (1918), Heatly (1919), Kerr and Curtis (1923).
Dickinson (1973, 190) writes about this depression in his autobiography. When he received the news of war, it triggered in him a ‘dumb, impotent feeling of the gulf between nature, the past, all beautiful true and gracious things and beliefs, and this black horror…’ He was 52, and knew that he was too old to enlist. So he decided to contribute by doing what he did best: Think, write, educate and organize study groups:
I devoted myself, as far as there was any opportunity for such work, to propaganda for a league of nations. Already … in the first week or two of the war, I had jotted down on a piece of paper two schemes for such a league. As soon as I got to town (still in August), I went round to a few people who might be interested and we got together the committee that Lord Bryce finally joined. We drew up the first plan formulated in England, circulated it to a number of people, received criticisms, amended, and finally published it (in 1917 as Proposals for the Prevention of Further Wars).
Other people with similar experiences have written similar memoirs. Among these are Norman Angell (1951) and Leonard Woolf (1963).
These two texts had an immense importance for the way British academics and politicians would come to think about these issues of war and peace. Woolf and Webb had really produced the first detailed study of a League of Nations — the first description of the structure of such a body — and it was used extensively by the Foreign Office in its preparations for the British proposals for a League of Nations laid before the Peace Conference at Versailles.
They were all concerned about the causes of war and the preconditions for a lasting peace. During the early part of the war, this movement contained two competing groups that both advocated the establishment of a league of nations: One was the League of Nations Society, which included Lord Bryce, Lowes Dickinson, John A. Hobson, Henry N. Brailsford, Leonard Woolf and others. The other group named itself the League of Nations Association; it included among others Lionel Curtis and H.G. Wells. After some initial competitive moves, the two groups were sensibly united in the League of Nations Union.
Beales (1931, 285) notes that Leonard Woolf stood head and shoulder above the rest in the flurry of war-time discussions about the preconditions for a lasting peace. Woolf's two reports (Woolf, 1916) were according to Beales (1931) the most important contributions on the subject between 1914 and 1918.
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