Intellectuals and international relations.(Foreign Affairs)

IN UNIVERSITIES the discipline of International Relations is a new activity. It is odd that this should be so, for study and debate about relations among states or empires goes back as far as the earliest written records of ancient societies. For instance it would be difficult to argue that Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War is not a study of relations between states in peace and war. Confucius, too, was much concerned with relations among princes.

But the twentieth century has seen a proliferation of social studies of all kinds, and organised them into separate "disciplines", often devoted less to dispassionate study than to debating immediate problems. From its beginnings International Relations was one of these. It emerged from the established fields of history and law into what is most often a discussion of contemporary issues.

The first chair of an independent discipline of international politics was created in 1919 at Aberystwyth, and its first holder was Professor Sir Alfred Zimmern who, a number of years later, left Aberystwyth to take up another foundation chair in the subject, the first Montagu Burton Professorship of International Relations at Oxford.

Working in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Zimmern was very much an idealist in the mould of his contemporary, the US President, Woodrow Wilson. He believed deeply in the mission-oriented Wilsonian approach that has suffused so much of international relations studies ever since: the search, on the basis of the self-determination of peoples (1), for peace and conflict resolution. Ever since Zimmern, a central concern of international relations scholars has been the resolution of differences on the basis of these two principles, with international order resting not only on the traditional tools of diplomacy and inter-state treaties but also, and strongly, on the creation of powerful international laws and institutions.

But that effort, from its beginnings, has been based on a profound and probably insoluble contradiction that has caused increasing philosophical and practical difficulties for its devotees. It has been like a house built on a geological fault-line. Wilson's approach to ensuring peace might mean the invention of a League of Nations to keep the peace and avoid another world war. But the units of the Wilsonian construct were national: nation-states, separate and sovereign. Neither the League nor its successor, the United Nations, has had any authority over individual states and neither has been able to do more than use moral and political persuasion against recalcitrant sovereigns, unless its officers could persuade major state members to act on its behalf. Indeed, the United States itself famously (or, depending on one's point of view, notoriously) refused to have its decisions fettered even by joining the very League for which Wilson had worked (2).

That contradiction remains unresolved. The process by which new states were brought into independent and sovereign being by the dissolution of the old empires between 1918 and the 1960s, especially in Asia and Africa, was quite often encouraged by the former imperial powers themselves. They had become tired of the economic, let alone the political, costs of looking after the colonial peoples. At the same time, one need hardly point out that the movements of "national liberation" in regions like East and South-East Asia, or the Middle East, movements with which very many people in the West deeply sympathised, rested critically on Wilsonian ideas of national self-determination and the proposition that identifiable ethnic and linguistic groups were entitled, as a matter of course, to run their affairs in a state of their own, governed by their "own" people. That reflected a universalist approach inherent in American thought and policy from the Declaration of Independence onwards (3).

Once established, moreover, the new states have insisted on nothing more strenuously than their sovereign status and rights. They have almost invariably been highly suspicious of any idea that those rights should be subordinated to the votes or decisions of any outside party, let alone any international entity. Indeed, well before the end of the twentieth century it had become a matter of debate whether even the trade and aid policies of the major and advanced powers might not amount to damaging new forms of "colonialism" (4).