Abstract
‘International Relations’ is a young social science discipline. It harks back to the end of the First World War, when, on 30 May 1919 at the instigation of the US President Woodrow Wilson, the American and British delegations at the Paris Peace Conference resolved to establish academic institutions in their respective countries with the aim of undertaking scholarly inquiry into international politics. This new discipline was to be devoted to studying the causes of war to pre-empt the widening of international conflicts into wars.1 At that time, the international system still virtually mirrored the European states system, by then expanded to include the USA. This international system and its subsequent developments became the object of study of the new science.2 This situation altered substantially after the Second World War. The emergence of this system and its globalisation has already been outlined in the Introduction. Whereas, prior to the Second World War, the European powers had been designated ‘great powers’, after the war the United States of America and the Soviet Union, who had emerged from the war as superior powers, were now ascribed the new designation of ‘superpowers’. This historical context gave rise to a new configuration of the international system characterised by ‘bipolarity’ (Kaplan).
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Notes and References
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Tibi, B. (1998). The Science of International Relations: Between Globalism and Regionalism. In: Conflict and War in the Middle East. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371576_2
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