International Relations: The Story So Far
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117819851261 |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| Author | Ken Booth |
| Subject Matter | Conclusion |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117819851261
International Relations
2019, Vol. 33(2) 358 –390
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117819851261
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International Relations:
The Story So Far
Ken Booth
Aberystwyth University
Abstract
‘The Story So Far’ is the conclusion of the first centenary Special Issue of the journal International
Relations. The issue marks 100 years since the birth of the academic discipline of International
Relations (IR), whose institutional moment was the endowment establishing the Department of
International Politics at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, at the end of 1918, and its
subsequent opening in April 1919. The collection of articles marking this unique event consists of
reflections by a group of leading scholars on themes of continuity and change at the international
level of world politics in that century. The present article considers these reflections in the
context of problematising our attempts to understand the long history and complex dynamics of
international relations.
Keywords
1919, continuity and change, global, international history, international politics, international
relations, peace, texture, transformation, war
In my 1950s grammar school, our ever-ambitious English master was keen that we teen-
age boys escape the traditional curriculum and become familiar with the new wave of
postwar English novelists. Among others, we were led to L.P. Hartley, who in The
Go-Between wrote probably the most quoted first line in any modern English novel: ‘The
past is a foreign country’, he said, ‘they do things differently there’ (my emphasis).1 At the
time, and since, I took these words on face value, as a warning about the unbridgeable
pastness of the past. Reading the book again recently, and after a long career in interna-
tional relations (IR),2 I concluded that Hartley was cleverer than my schoolboy self could
recognise, beyond knowing that he could write a good sentence and devise a compelling
plot. Why did he use the present tense – they do – I wondered, to refer to what people in
Corresponding author:
Ken Booth, Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth SY23 3FE, UK.
Email: kob@aber.ac.uk
851261IRE0010.1177/0047117819851261International RelationsBooth
research-article2019
Article
Booth 359
the past once did? Was it because he knew that our minds can only understand the foreign
doings they did through our own present tense? In other words, was Hartley insisting that
the true pastness of the past is forever locked away, and we who look back do so through
a haze of imperfect evidence and memories, contemporary doings and concerns, future
hopes and fears, and good and bad intentions? History is not ‘bunk’, it is just not true. The
clue is in the title of Hartley’s book: ostensibly, The Go-Between is simply a description
of the role in the plot played by the narrator, but I now think it points to a deeper meaning
of such a role. In addition to being a story-teller about what they did, the title he gave to
the role brings into focus the constant mental toing and froing in our minds as we act as
go-betweens, imperfectly linking what we understand as ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ into
a coherent narrative called history.
Writing relations
Reflecting, as situated go-betweens, on relations between human groups is surely as old
as Homo sapiens. It could hardly be otherwise, in a species whose evolution has been
defined by what anthropologists call ‘sociality’. We will never definitively know when
writing relations first began: we can only ever know ‘the oldest found’ piece of evidence,
never actually the undisputable ‘first’ in the 5000 or so years of the history of writing.
Julian Baggini began his recent global history of philosophy, How the World Thinks, with
the words: ‘One of the great unexplained wonders of human history is that written phi-
losophy first flowered entirely separately in different parts of the globe at more or less
the same time’.3 It is plausible to suggest that the ancient origins of writing relations
began in the same way, and probably in the same places.
Over time, writing relations became a cultural universal. Edward Said has referred to
‘the connections between things’ as more consequential than ‘separation and distinctive-
ness’.4 This is why we can talk – albeit patchily across many centuries and places – about
the cultivation of a field of interest focused on distinct concerns and puzzles about rela-
tions between different human groups.5 While claiming writing relations as a cultural
universal, it is important to avoid both a universalism that assumes, in J. Babb’s words,
that ‘there is only one meaning and purpose to similar ideas everywhere’ and relativism,
‘the view that thinkers and ideas cannot be compared at all because every context is dif-
ferent’.6 As Bruce Janz says, ‘Concepts travel, but not intact’.7
In his ambitious A World History of Political Thought, Babb locates the ‘foundational
thinkers’ about politics between 600 and 400 BCE. His key figures were Buddha,
Confucius and Socrates, though we know most about the thinking of these three remark-
able individuals through the writing of their followers, not themselves.8 The first identifi-
able ‘schools’ of political thought, Babb suggests, emerged between 400 and 250 BCE,
though he wisely warns that it is essential to be wary of ‘neat classification’ distorting the
‘messy reality of the emergence of ideas’.
Texts from ancient China, Greece and India, and later from the Middle East and
Europe, attest to overlapping concerns with writing what appear as increasingly recog-
nisable ‘international’ relations. Some ancients and early moderns wrote about topics
such as war as a necessity, war and ethics, war and politics, power and order, war as
irrationality, justice among states, the character of peace, the duty of rulers, human nature
360 International Relations 33(2)
and conflict, the causes of war, nationalism and conflict, states and their interests, mili-
tary strategy, rights, just war ideals, military power, the value of territory, intervention
and non-intervention, imperialism, the costs of war, the meaning and conditions of peace,
the balance of power, diplomacy, cooperation and so on.9 Readers will immediately rec-
ognise that these primaeval issues remain essential (if not complete) features of a sylla-
bus in any up-to-date IR programme.
For most of the human past, inter-group interconnections were pre-international, with
relations taking place between families and tribes, as hunter-gatherers and nomads. We
cannot know with certainty what life was like in the notional ‘state of nature’. The lim-
ited archaeological evidence tempts researchers, when contemplating ‘pre-historical’
inter-group relations, to project their own contemporary assumptions backwards. A
researcher’s contemporary views about ‘human nature’, ‘gender’ or ‘society’ shape inter-
pretations about what they did in inter-group politics in the state of nature.
With the development of agriculture came the trend to settled communities in politi-
cally defined territories, and in the past 25 centuries or so, political units emerged that
were sufficiently like our own that we can include them in our contemporary disciplinary
conception of ‘the international’. However, nations and states as presently understood as
the defining agents of that international appeared only yesterday in historical time. Very
roughly (depending on one’s definition of a ‘generation’) about 16 generations have
passed since the origins of the Westphalian state, and 10 generations since the rise of
modern nations. This is out of the 5–10,000 generations of Homo sapiens.
Although ancient political units were markedly different in scale and ideology from
those comprising the international level of world politics over recent centuries, certain
behavioural dynamics have been common. Whatever the era, the struggle to maintain or
improve security has been essential, for without a degree of sustained security, social life
is impossible. A society’s long-term survival depends on its capacity to bring up its
young. Under different manifestations of anarchy and hierarchy, groups developed varie-
ties of self-help over time, characterised by diplomatic and other forms of cooperation,
the full range of conflictual relations, defensive and offensive strategies and a default of
mistrust under the shadow of future uncertainty.
Homo sapiens internalised a spectrum of views about inter-group potentialities, but
fear rationally weighted the attitude and behaviour of groups towards the cautious, mis-
trusting and power-seeking end of the drive for survival and security, rather than the
irenic. Such a mind-set was critical in shaping and embedding negative understandings
of what became reified as ‘human history’, ‘human nature’ and ‘the human condition’.10
There were always other understandings within the minds of Homo sapiens (the so-
called Wise Man). These included cosmopolitan imaginaries about collective we-ness,
religious beliefs about the children of God and cooperative political structures aimed at
creating security with rather than against others: but in a species divided by ethnicity,
culture, language and the rest, the modalities of fear (including the drive to accumulate
and protect power) tended to dominate inter-group relations.
By the early years of the twentieth century, writing international relations, broadly
defined, covered an extensive field, even if its soil was not deep. The catalyst for turning
this field into a coherent academic discipline – indeed project – was the cataclysm of the
Great War of 1914–1918. The actual institutional moment for the disciplinary project
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