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The ISN is currently on its Christmas vacation. For the week commencing the 26th December we will be publishing an assortment of ISN Insights and partner content. The ISN’s Editorial Plan will return on the week commencing the 2nd January, when will consider “The State in a Globalizing World.”
Until then, the ISN wishes you a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year.
The other day I was re-reading what should perhaps be on every politics student’s bookshelf, Coercion, Capital and European States: AD 990-1992 by Charles Tilly. In this book Tilly examines what formed the modern state by looking at the impact of Europe’s violent history. In contrast to other theories like the idea of a social contract, Tilly argues that: “War wove the European network of national states, and preparation for war created the internal structures of states within it.” The European welfare state as we know it today, Tilly argues, occurred as an inadvertent spin-off from rulers’ bargaining with subject populations when seeking to extract the means to wage war. In exchange for giving up their most valuable resources (sons, lands, weapons, animals), citizens were granted civil rights, social benefits and protection by the state in return.
Throughout the more than 200 pages of historical anecdotes, AD 990-1992 develops a convincing argument that it was indeed rulers’ zeal for developing and adapting to new types of war – thus changing the nature of political-bargaining – that pushed state-transformation. For example, in Revolutionary France the public only agreed to mass disarmament and conscription in exchange for rights of civil suit, local assembly and social benefits.
The first important contributor to ‘international’ thought is usually considered to be Thucydides. Though Herodotus is the “father of history” and it was Socrates that first brought philosophy ‘down from the heavens’ and into the agora, Thucydides was the first to deal with the relations among and between political communities in a theoretical manner.
Man, the State and War: an IR classic. Image: Bookworship.com
“Since war begins in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.”
Introduction
In June of 2009, the journal International Relations devoted an entire issue (in two parts) to a man it described as “The King of Thought.” The occasion was the 30th anniversary of the publication of Theory of International Politics and the 50th anniversary of Man, the State and War. As Ken Booth wrote in the issue’s introductory essay: “…the justification for a project to celebrate and re-examine these classic books needs little elaboration. Nor is the stature of their author in any doubt, as is testified by the following recent endorsements by leading figures in the field: ‘Kenneth Waltz is the most important international relations theorist of the past half century’ (John J Mearsheimer); ‘Kenneth Waltz is the pre-eminent international relations theorist of the post-World War II era’ (Stephen M Walt); and ‘Kenneth N Waltz is the pre-eminent theorist of international politics of his generation’ (Robert O Keohane).” “Intellectually speaking,” Booth continues, “we are all Waltz’s subjects, whether we be loyal disciples, friendly critics, or rebellious opponents: the discipline defines itself in relation to the authority of his work.”
In his 2009 book Aesthetics and World Politics, Roland Blieker made some controversial observations. Traditional forms of IR theory, he argued, exhibit “a masculine [aesthetic] preoccupation with big and heroic events: wars, revolutions, diplomatic summits and other state actions.” This, he claimed, was “supplemented with the scientific heritage of the Enlightenment…[with] the desire to systematize, to search for rational foundations and certainty in a world of turmoil and constant flux.” As one form of representation among many, then, IR theory by definition has aesthetic commitments, but — preoccupied with the ‘scientific’ imperative of representing as ‘mimetically’ (and absently) as possible – it has usually been blind to them.
What then, we should ask, are these hidden aesthetic commitments? And what have been the consequences of hiding them? One way of getting at this is by considering the dominant spatial representations of the world—i.e., the world maps — with which traditional IR theory corresponds. A world map is a way of conceptualizing the human condition as a whole. Maps of the world may be especially relevant to the study of international relations because (as Chris Brown has written) the study of international relations seeks “to build theory on the broadest canvas available” – an orientation that is perhaps its distinctive feature.
Today’s world maps are romantic; they suggest that what matters are the big and heroic: mountains, oceans, deserts, cities and national borders. And, in faithful positivist fashion, they seek to represent as ‘mimetically’ as possible, specifying magnitudes for mountains and cities and proportionally representing their relative positions. Some of the nicer globes even try to make the mountains the right height. A cursory survey of surviving medieval mappa mundi makes for instructive comparison. Some such maps already focus on the big and heroic, but a key difference is the treatment of space: not exactly absolute and homogeneous when ships, Krakens and the like are the size of Great Britain; and imaginary, undiscovered, or theological places exist alongside real, known, sublunary ones. The influence of the pictures of the world furnished by our globes and global positioning satellites on the pictures of the world furnished by IR theory is perhaps too obvious — yet remains poorly understood.