The Study of International Relations in France

Abstract

For many years analysis of international relations within the French academic community has been — and to a large degree remains — a spe­cialisation subsumed within the more traditional and well-established disciplines of Law, History and Economics. Those writers who, in the 1960s, introduced International Relations into academic debate within France came predominantly from one of these three backgrounds. The majority of these scholars remained within the framework of these well-defined disciplines and their degrees, careers and clearly articulated curricula. It was under these conditions in the 1960s and 1970s that a number of International Relations textbooks were published, which though presented as new, were little more than up-to-date variants of traditional scholarship in the subjects of international public law and international organisation already offered to students of Law.