The Security Dilemma in International Relations: Background and Present Problems
| Published date | 01 December 2003 |
| Author | John H. Herz |
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117803174001 |
| Date | 01 December 2003 |
| Subject Matter | Journal Article |
International Relations Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), Vol 17(4): 411–416
[0047–1178 (200312) 17:4; 411–416; 038930]
The Security Dilemma in International Relations:
Background and Present Problems
John H. Herz
Editor’s Introduction
John Herz wrote a number of influential books and articles for students of
International Relations in the 1950s. He is best known for coining and elaborating
the concept of the ‘security dilemma’, which has been a focus of fruitful research
ever since.
At the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association in February
2003 (in Portland, Oregon), Professor Ned Lebow organized a panel entitled ‘50
Years of the Security Dilemma: In Honour of John Herz’. At the opening of the
meeting, Professor Lebow read out a long e-mail from John Herz, which is
reprinted (slightly edited) below. It represents Professor Herz’s half-century
reflection on the security dilemma; it is part history of ideas, part argument about
why the concept is more relevant than ever. We are very pleased to print this
historical document by a figure who has played an important part in our subject’s
history.
John Herz was born in 1908. He studied law and political science in Weimar
Germany and, after the Nazi takeover, specialized in International Relations at the
Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. In 1938, as a Jewish
German, he emmigrated to the USA. From 1938 to 1941 he was a Fellow at the
Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. He was one of a number of refugee
scholars who were welcomed as faculty members at black colleges and uni-
versities. A recent documentary film about their experiences, entitled From
Swastika to Jim Crow, includes interviews with Professor Herz. He taught at
Howard University and during the war worked in the Office of Strategic Services.
Afterward, he served in the Department of State, mainly on the reconstruction of
German democracy. For his contribution to the revival of democracy in Germany,
he was later awarded the Medal of Merit from the President of the Federal
Republic of Germany. From 1952 until his retirement in 1979, he was on the
faculty at City College, NYC. He also taught at Marburg University and the Free
University of Berlin, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Columbia
University, the New School for Social Research, and the CUNY Graduate School.
Herz’s scholarly work has been equally divided between comparative politics
(chiefly German affairs) and international politics (chiefly theories of international
relations). His first book, The National Socialist Doctrine of International Law,
was published in German in Zurich in 1938. His Political Realism and Political
Idealism (1951) won the Woodrow Wilson prize of the American Political Science
Association and is recognized as a major contribution to political theory. Other
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