Ahistoricism
Since its emergence after the First
World War, the discipline of international relations has been focused on
contemporary history and current policy issues. The fast-moving nature of the
subject, and the demand for expertise on current events, encourage a forward-
rather than a backward-looking perspective. Consequently rather few specialists
within the discipline have had either a broad historical knowledge or an
interest in acquiring it. Even amongst historians, only a few grand historians such
as W.H. McNeill have mastered the vast panoply of knowledge that is necessary
to thinking about the development of the international system from the beginning.
Only in historical sociology has there been something of a fashion to acquire a
wide-ranging historical perspective (Mann, 1986; Anderson, 1974a and b; Tilly,
1990; Wallerstein, 1984, 1991; Gills and Frank, 1992; Frank, 1990), but neither
this work nor that of the grand historians fits easily into the framework of international
relations. Different disciplines have different concerns, and that makes it
hard to transfer knowledge over the already formidable barriers of
communication that divide one academic specialism from another.
To the extent that international
relations has generated its own historical side, it has done so in very
selective ways. History has to some extent been mined for comparative
statistics (e.g., the Correlates of War project), and for comparative cases
(the Anglo-German naval arms race before the First World War). There is some
willingness to investigate modern European history as the precursor and source
of the contemporary global system (Holsti, 1991), and Ruggie has used the medieval
period in Europe to question Waltz's arguments about what is and what is not
relevant to understanding the political structure of the international system (Ruggie,
1983, 1993). But the study of European history does not easily lead to basic questions
about the origins of international systems, because such a system is obviously
and firmly in existence in Europe throughout the modern period.
Occasionally, authors will raid
further back and further afield, but these forays are guided more by the search
for particular parallels with the modern European experience than by any
interest in capturing the character of the international system in history
overall (Holsti, 1967, ch. 2; Watson, 1992; Wight, 1977). As a consequence, the
few historical times and places that resemble the international anarchy of
modern Europe get a disproportionate amount of attention, most notably classical
Greece, Renaissance Italy, the "warring states" period in China
during several hundred years of the first millennium BC, and to a lesser
extent, "warring state" periods in South Asia. As far as we are
aware, nobody has yet attempted to write a global history of the international
system in its own right.
Eurocentrism
The tendency toward ahistoricism in
international relations blends subtly into a powerful Eurocentrism in the very
conception of the international system. On one level this is an understandable
ethnocentrism: the discipline of international relations was founded by, and is
still dominated by, Europeans and North Americans, and it is only natural that
it therefore reflects their perceptions and concerns. But there is more to this
Eurocentrism than the cultural biases of most of its writers. There is also the
undeniable fact that the European international system emerged from the obscure
and backward corner of its feudal period to conquer or dominate the whole
planet. During the several centuries of its imperial ascendancy, Europe forcibly
and durably transplanted its own forms and principles of political and economic
organization worldwide, in the process overrunning not only a host of barbarian
tribal peoples, but also all five ancient centres of civilization. The Europeans
unquestionably created the first global international system by bringing all
parts of humankind into regular economic and strategic contact with each other for
the first time. They occupied whole continents and stamped upon them a system of
territorial boundaries, trading economies and colonial administrations. The few
places that they did not reduce to colonial status (Japan, Siam, Persia,
Turkey, China) were forced to adapt to European models in order to preserve
themselves.
When they withdrew, the Europeans
left behind them a world remade, often badly, in their own image. The global
economy that they had forged, with all of its inequalities and uneven
development, remained intact and took on a life of its own. Decolonization made
colonies into sovereign states. In the process it sowed universally the
dragon's teeth of two contradictory political principles--the territorial state
and nationalism--that the Europeans had successfully transferred across almost
every cultural boundary. During the two decades that marked the bulk of the
decolonization process (1945-65), the world was transformed from a system largely
defined or dominated by a handful of mostly European imperial states (plus Japan
and the United States), into one divided into more than 150 states, and dominated
by the principle of sovereign equality.
For the most part international
relations specialists have, with some justification, treated this process as the
transformation of a European international system into a global one. Riding on
the wave of a decisive advantage of power, the Europeans first expanded their
own regional system into a global one. When their power waned, the European
withdrawal left behind a world remade into a version of the European political
order. Its basic units were sovereign states, its overall political structure
was anarchic, and the inconveniences of this political fragmentation were moderated
(though by no means solved or eliminated) by elements of international society
in the form of a body of shared rules, laws, diplomatic practices, norms and organizations.
This perspective enables one, again with some justification, to use the
European imperial era to fuse modern European history (from circa 1500 onwards)
with contemporary global history (from 1945 onwards) and to see the two as a
single and continuous historical phenomenon.
But this fusion has two much less
justified consequences. First it makes it easy to privilege the position of
feudalism, and to a significant extent also the classical Graeco-Roman
civilization, in the overall picture of world history. Since Graeco-Roman
civilization and feudalism were the antecedents of what became all-conquering European
power, they easily slip into the position of seeming also to be the antecedents
of the modern international system. Unless one takes pains to acquire the
countervailing knowledge, it is easy to assume that classical civilization
ended with the fall of Rome, and that the world
slipped into the "dark" (albeit eventually fertile) age of feudalism.
This bias reinforces the second unjustified consequence, which is the virtual
exclusion of non-European history before the expansion of European power.
Feudalism was of course a local phenomenon. Only Japan experienced anything
similar to it (Anderson, 1974b: 397-431). While Europe was immersed in
constructing a slow synthesis between the incoming barbarian peoples and the
pervasive remnants of Graeco-Roman culture, the rest of Eurasia, and parts of
the Americas, continued with a much older pattern of rising and declining empires,
city states, and periodic waves of barbarian invaders. This pattern stretched
back for more than 4,000 years before the beginning of the European expansion,
and for more than 2,000 years before the emergence of Graeco-Roman civilization.
It was eventually crushed out of existence between the sixteenth and nineteenth
centuries by the rising power of European states.
It is this much wider history, along
with European feudalism, that constitutes the real antecedent of the
contemporary global international system. Indeed, one can only explore the
origins and significance of the idea of international system by comprehending
its non-European dimension. Such comprehension requires more than merely
selecting the handful of times and locations from the ancient and classical era
during which anarchic structures similar to modern Europe's briefly held sway.
It means addressing the whole sweep of ancient and classical history in terms
of international system, and asking just what kind of system(s), if any,
existed before the Europeans subordinated everything to their own anarchic
model. Only by following this course can one bring the historical record to
bear on the question of what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for an
international system to come into being. Without considering that record, one
has little incentive to consider basic questions such as the role of changes in
interaction capacity in the development of both political units (city states,
national states, empires, barbarians) and international systems (interaction
capacity = the level of transportation, communication, and organization
capability in the system [Buzan, Jones and Little, 1993: ch. 4]). Neglect of
such questions defines the current position within the discipline and is one of
the costs of its ahistorical and Eurocentric perspective.
Anarchophilia
The third reason why basic
questions about the core concept in the discipline remain not only unaddressed, but almost
unasked is anarchophilia, which is very much a consequence of ahistoricism and
Eurocentrism. By anarchophilia, we mean the disposition to assume that the
structure of the international system has always been anarchic, that this is
natural, and (more selectively) that this is a good thing. These assumptions are
strong in realism, and very strong in neorealism. Waltz does not attempt to give
an account of the origins of the international system, but in his theorizing he
talks in timeless terms, saying that: "international-political
systems...are formed by the coaction of self-regarding units. International
structures are defined in terms of the primary political units of an era, be
they city-states, empires or nations" (Waltz, 1979: 91). It is easy to
accept this as an account of the whole history of the international system,
starting from whenever the first units began to coact. If one's knowledge of history
is largely Eurocentric, nothing contradicts it since Europe's international history
has been anarchic. Within a Eurocentric perspective, one might be embarrassed by
the apparent hierarchical universalism of the Roman Empire, but this subject is
rarely addressed (Buzan, Jones and Little, 1993: section II). Supporting episodes
of anarchy from Sumeria, China, Greece, India and Italy can be used to bolster
the assumption that anarchy has everywhere been the norm of international
relations.
Adam Watson has opened an indirect
attack on this assumption. Building on the tradition of Martin Wight (1966,
1977), he uses history to study international society. He concludes that much
of the international history of the last 5,000 years has not been anarchic, but
has ranged across a spectrum with anarchy at one end, empire at the other and
hegemony, suzerainty and dominion in between (Watson, 1992: esp. chs. 1 and
12). Moreover, he argues that both anarchy and empire are extreme conditions,
the natural instabilities of which tend to push the norm into the middle ranges
of the spectrum. Watson is one of the few writers to bring extensive historical
knowledge into the debate about international relations, and his work forces us
to reconsider the anarchic assumption. It raises the possibility that even the
most abstract and successful theoretical development in the discipline has been
profoundly, and probably unwittingly, shaped by an undue reliance on the
peculiarities of the European and contemporary experience.
* * *
This powerful argument is very persuasive in most respects, but I balk at accepting fully
their critique of “Eurocentrism.” Because of Europe’s plurality and the revival
of letters in the fifteenth century, there is a marvelous record of reflection on
and exploration of the interactions of states and peoples that no other civilization
has produced in such abundance and over such a long period of time—a very rich
but now virtually ignored object of study among IR scholars. This literature is important not only because of its
considerable philosophical merits but also because it confronts a series of
questions—the significance of navigation, printing, gunpowder and the revival of letters in the 1500s; standing armies, public credit, commerce, colonization,and the new philosophy in the 1700s—that helped define modernity and that
anticipate many concerns of a postmodern age. The injunction
against “Eurocentrism” can have no other effect than to slight what is already
a very neglected topic of investigation. When was the last time anyone in IR
assigned Guicciardini or Montesquieu?
So, too, I think Buzan and Little exaggerate the extent to which
the current international order was simply imposed on others. Other civilizations,
such as China and India, have found the concepts of international law to be
easily digestible within a framework that allows for the pursuit of their
respective interests. China, for instance, has a doctrine of nonintervention and
state sovereignty that is perfectly intelligible within the framework of the UN
charter and, indeed, of older conceptions of international law, and holds to it more devoutly than the United States. Subscription
to such doctrines in China’s case does not represent a form of alien imposition,
though such ideas did not originate in the Middle Kingdom. Robert Jackson’s characterization of this relationship is more persuasive. Nationalism in the formerly colonial world did not need special instruction from European ideologies to feel both indignity at alien rule and a consequent sense of common peoplehood; nationalism was less an imposition than an inevitable product of their interaction.
It is odd that the authors should charge ahistoricism on the
IR discipline and then complain of its elevation of the feudal period and
misguided attention to the Greco Roman heritage, since ex hypothesis (and in fact) the discipline has little interest in
the history of state interaction before the nineteenth century. Even ambitious
works (like John Mearsheimer’s Tragedy of
Great Power Politics or Michael Mandelbaum’s The Ideas That Conquered the World) do not venture past the French
Revolution. Rome, whose experience was once so important in the development of international
thought and to the whole complexion of modernity, is ignored, as Buzan and
Little rightly observe. Buzan and Little’s far greater historical reach is a
huge boon to the study of IR and the understanding of international systems, but they plow relatively uncultivated ground.
The book for which the above essay forms something of a précis
is Barry Buzan and Richard Little, International
Systems in World History: Remaking the Study of International Relations,
published by Oxford University Press in 2000.
From the blurb:
"This text tells the 60,000 year story of how humankind evolved from a scattering of hunter-gatherer bands to highly integrated global international political economy. It traces the evolution of ever-wider economic, societal and military-political international systems, and the interplay between these systems and the tribes, city states, empires, and modern states into which humans have organised themselves. Buzan and Little marry a wide range of mainstream International Relations theories to a world historical perspective. They mount a stinging attack on International Relations as a discipline, arguing that its Eurocentrism, historical narrowness, and theoretical fragmentation have reduced almost to nothing both its cross-disclipinary influence and its ability to think coherently about either the past or the future. Seeking to emulate and challenge the cross-disciplinary influence of the world systems model, the book recasts the study of International Relations into a macro-historical perspective, shows how its core concepts work across time, and sets out a new theoretical agenda and a new intellectual role for the discipline."
