How love orders: an engagement with disciplinary International Relations
| Date | 01 March 2024 |
| Author |
E
JR
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https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661231190238
European Journal of
International Relations
2024, Vol. 30(1) 203 –226
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/13540661231190238
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How love orders: an
engagement with disciplinary
International Relations
Liane Hartnett
The University of Melbourne, Australia
Abstract
Love plays an important role in the normative production and sustenance of order.
Historically implicated in imaginaries of order, it has been evoked to constitute
community, legitimate coercion and (dis)empower. Put differently, love provides the
affective glue that binds groups, frames feelings to enable and constrain action and
is integral to the workings of power. Love can be evoked and governed for various
political ends. Complicating accounts of love as a positive emotion, this article uncovers
love’s neglected history in disciplinary International Relations (IR) as an ideological
mask that conceals its implication in violent worldmaking projects of empire, war and
domination. To illustrate this, it identifies three ideal-typical – or Hegelian, Augustinian
and Nietzschean – logics that exemplify love’s ordering work and examines how they
find expression in the work of three leading figures of disciplinary IR, namely Alfred
Zimmern (1859–1957), Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) and Hans Morgenthau (1904–
1980).
Keywords
Love, order, Alfred Zimmern, Reinhold Niebuhr, Hans Morgenthau
Love has long animated visions of international order. A close engagement with the inter-
national thought of leading, historical figures of disciplinary or canonical International
Relations (IR) and their underlying logics bears witness to this. Indeed, the liberal inter-
national architect of international institutions, Alfred Zimmern (1879–1957), mobilised
a Hegelian logic of familial love to envision the Commonwealth and the League of
Nations. The Christian realist commonly invoked to justify US wars, Reinhold Niebuhr
Corresponding author:
Liane Hartnett, John Medley Building, School of Social and Political Sciences, Faculty of Arts, The University
of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia.
Email: Liane.Hartnett@unimelb.edu.au
1190238EJT0010.1177/13540661231190238European Journal of International RelationsHartnett
research-article2023
Original Article
204European Journal of International Relations 30(1)
(1892–1971), appealed to an Augustinian logic of sacrificial love – agape or caritas – to
legitimate US involvement in the Second World War. And the classical realist and fore-
most theorist of power, Hans Morgenthau (1904–1980), evoked a Nietzschean logic of
love as yearning or eros to conceive of an existential ethic for a nuclear age. Taken
together, their diverse accounts of love lend credence to three claims. First, along with
the first wave of literature on love (Hartnett, 2022; Krystalli and Schulz, 2022; Pin-Fat,
2019) and political emotions (Bleiker and Hutchison, 2008; Crawford, 2000; Mercer,
2006), they unequivocally affirm that love and emotions matter to IR.1 Second, they
gesture towards intellectual history, in general, and disciplinary IR, in particular, as
important and largely untapped resources for theorising love. Third, in their disparity,
they assert that while love may well be a polymorphous, polysemous, political phenom-
enon that derives meaning-in-use (Hartnett, 2022), in its varied meanings and forms, it
nonetheless performs the work of order.2
That love performs the work of order – or to build on Hedley Bull’s (2012) parsimoni-
ous formulation – supplies meaning or purpose to international political arrangements is
evident in its normative work. Love’s ordering work is normative in two senses (Hartnett,
2022). In a rather anodyne sense, the act of caring for a subject or object entails the work
of valuing, ordering, assessing and adjudicating. In a more overt, prescriptive sense – and
owing to the importance afforded to love as a moral emotion in Western religious and
humanist thought at least since modernity (May, 2012) – love has served as an ideal and
has been evoked as a standard to prescribe how to think and act. Put differently, love
orders because it performs constitutive work and is a form of productive power. This is
because it both structures circles of concern and the hierarchies that pervade them and
shapes subjectivities. Love’s work can be evoked and governed for various political ends
and consequently forms part of what Andrew Phillips (2010) describes as the ‘normative
complex’ that shapes and sustains international order. Seeking to shed light on love’s
implication in this ‘normative complex’, this article engages with disciplinary IR and
asks: how does love order?
Love is under-theorised in the IR literature on emotion and order. In asking how love
orders this article makes three contributions to this scholarship. First, it offers a theoretical
schema for understanding and explaining love’s normative ordering work and its implica-
tion in the international. In sum, it claims that love ‘constitutes community’, ‘legitimates
coercion’ and ‘(dis)empowers’. Given love’s work, in practice, entails a range of other
emotions – whether this is loyalty to a community, contrition for coercion or loneliness
that animates a desire to dominate – it also offers insight into the broader affective-norma-
tive dynamics of order. Second, via an engagement with intellectual history and discipli-
nary IR, this article uncovers love’s historical implication in visions of international order.
Treating disciplinary IR as a repository of insights into ‘imaginaries of order’,3 it identi-
fies three ideal-typical – or Hegelian, Augustinian and Nietzschean – logics that permeate
IR and examines how they find expression in the international thought of three leading,
historical figures of disciplinary IR, namely Alfred Zimmern, Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans
Morgenthau. These logics and evocations do not provide an exhaustive account of love’s
plurality and polyvalence. Instead, they point to a long and neglected history of emotion
in IR theorising and offer insights into disciplinary IR’s uses of love. Third, and to this
end, this article reveals how love has served as an ideological mask for power. Complicating
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