The Strange Death of Liberal International Theory

The Strange Death of Liberal International Theory

3. Classical International Theory and the Anxieties of Politics

For a field so long dominated by realist scepticism, it is curious that the constitution of the discipline of international relations may reasonably be described as the last of the great enlightenment intellectual projects. The self-confidence of European civilization and the nineteenth century faith in reason and progress were shaken to the core by the senseless violence and devastation of the First World War. Yet one of the responses to this crisis was the establishment of a new academic discipline, one charged with understanding the dynamics of international politics with a view to changing them. Nowhere was this better expressed than in the Trust Deeds of the first the Chair in International Politics, the Woodrow Wilson Chair at Aberystwyth. The Deeds define International Politics as `Political Science in its application to International Relations with special reference to the best means of promoting peace between nations'. At its birth, therefore, the modern discipline of international relations was envisaged as both an explanatory project and a normative one - analysis was to be alloyed to ethics. This conjoining of scientific inquiry with normative reasoning was driven by the imperatives of practical political engagement, imperatives fuelled by the spectre of European conflagration.

Nowhere is this understanding of the purpose of international relations more clearly articulated in than in Carr's celebrated work, The Twenty Years' Crisis. Until recently, Carr's thought has been squeezed into the Spartan mould of realist scepticism and materialism, a strategy that sadly still finds expression.⁷ The poverty of such an interpretation has been highlighted by a wealth of new work on Carr's thought, work that stresses the complexity of his ideas about the nature of international relations as a political science and about the essence of politics as a field of human action.⁸

Carr is traditionally understood to have called for a science of international politics, a science purged of the utopianism of Wilsonian internationalism. His contempt for the supposed naivety of interwar idealism is well documented, as is his critique of the Wilsonian project. Neither critique, however, led him to a position of unalloyed realism. The Twenty Years' Crisis calls for a discipline situated at the intersection of realism and utopianism. `Political science', Carr insists, `is the science not only of what is, but of what ought to be.'⁹ While the physical sciences might plausibly seek to separate the analysis of facts from the purpose of study, the human sciences cannot. `The purpose is not, as in the physical sciences, irrelevant to the investigation and separable from it: it is itself one of the facts.'¹⁰ Carr upholds this as a general epistemological truth, and he argues that international relations will never be a `mature' science until it recognizes the need to bring the empirical and the normative into dialogue. `Mature thought', he writes, `combines purpose with observation and analysis. Utopia and reality are thus the two facets of political science. Sound political thought and sound political life will be found only where both have their place.'¹¹

This vision of international relations as a discipline reflects Carr's understanding of politics itself. Carr devotes an entire chapter of The Twenty Years' Crisis to `The Nature of Politics', and although he is often placed in the same realist category as Morgenthau, his conception of politics has little in common with simplistic notions of a `struggle for power'. Competition for power is certainly an important part of politics, as is gain-seeking behaviour, but so too is moral deliberation and action. Carr insists that `Politics cannot be divorced from power. But the homo politicus who pursues nothing but power is as unreal a myth as the homo economicus who pursues nothing but gain. Political action must be based on a coordination of morality and power'.¹² So not only should international relations as a political science concern itself with both empirical analysis and normative reflection, its subject matter - political relations among sovereign states - lies at the intersection of the material, manifest primarily in the struggle for power, and the moral, which concerns the purposes of political action. Carr's vision is of a discipline that is thus doubly political: by embracing both analysis and ethical reflection it is itself an act of politics, and by excavating the relationship between reality and utopia it probes to the heart of the political in international relations.

In the conventional genealogy of international relations theory, the first great debate pits Carr, the sceptical realist stripped of all of the complexities noted above, against the naive liberal internationalists of the interwar period, of whom Norman Angell is the most notorious. This interpretation is fuelled by Carr himself, who explicitly set out in The Twenty Years' Crisis to demolish the `pure aspiration' of Angell and others. Yet, just as the characterization of Carr as an unalloyed realist is misleading, so too is the depiction of Angell and other liberal internationalists as ungrounded utopians. Though important differences distinguish Carr's thought from that of his liberal protagonists, the liberal vision of the discipline of international relations and the underlying conception of politics shares much in common with Carr's.

Contrary to the common interpretation, Angell did not believe in the power of the ideal over the real.¹³ The central theme of his writings is a call for greater consistency between ideas and facts, which he believed had become dangerously attenuated. His life's work, and the basic aim of The Great Illusion, was to demonstrate that the conventional wisdom of the time, which saw national wealth accumulation as a zero-sum game and military conquest as the principal means of enriching the state, as fundamentally incompatible with the realities of a modern, interdependent world economy. Prevailing ideas encouraged war as a path to national aggrandizement, whereas international economic realities made such strategies futile and self-destructive. Angell never articulated a systematic vision of international relations as a political science, but his work amounts to a passionate call for the `rational' study of world politics, in which the normative goal of national and international peace and security is pursued in a manner consistent with economic realities. This approach was also evident in his attitude towards national defence and peace, where he advocated a balance between the pragmatism of the `practical man' and the ethics of the `pacifist'. He argues thus:

It seems fatally easy to secure either one of two kinds of action: that of the `practical man' who limits his energies to securing a policy which will perfect the machinery of war, and disregard anything else; or that of the pacifist, who, persuaded of the brutality or immortality of war, just leaves it at that, implying that national defence is of no concern of his. What is needed is the type of activity which will include both halves of the problem... To concentrate on either half to the exclusion of the other half is to render the whole problem insoluble.¹⁴

Like his understanding of international relations as a scholarly endeavour, Angell's conception of politics is less systematic and accessible than Carr's. The key to understanding his conception is the importance he ascribes to the constitutive and strategic importance of ideas in shaping policy-relevant behaviour. In contrast to contemporary liberal rationalists, from Keohane to Moravcsik, Angell stresses the importance of principled and causal beliefs in the definition of national interests. Beliefs, well founded or not, provide people with the answers to the question `what do we want?' Such beliefs can be changed, through public learning and debate, hence Angell's life-long commitment to educating the `public mind'. Ideas also enter the equation at the level of strategic thought - 'how do we get what we want?' The truism of the time, that the best way to enrich the state was through warfare, was for Angell nothing other than an idea, no more or less fixed than any other belief. Implied throughout his work is the notion that politics resides at the controversial junctures between rival ideas of the national good, and between competing purposive and instrumental ideas and the factual bases of the international political economy. Debate about what constitutes the morally correct end and strategy, and about the relationship between this and empirical realities, is the essence of politics, and this is the terrain in which Angell himself engaged. Unlike Carr, who posited an enduring dialectical relationship between utopianism and realism, for Angell the relationship between the two was mediated by a perpetual contest between reason and unreason. If the former prevailed, there was some hope of a reconciliation between morality, defined as the well-being of all, and reality, which in his favoured area was the incompatibility of warfare and such well-being.¹⁵

It is clear from the preceding discussion that classical international theorists, of both realist and liberal persuasions, located the fledgling discipline of international relations at the most difficult of junctures, at the interstices of empirical analysis and ethical reasoning. This location was justified because of the dual nature of international relations as a political science: it was political in the sense that it was expected to help provide solutions to the pressing political dilemmas of the day, dilemmas in which the is and the ought were inextricably intertwined; and in the sense that the analysis of international politics demanded an appreciation of the relationship between brute material facts and debate about the good. The intellectual and practical difficulties of locating the new discipline at such a juncture were fully apparent to both Carr and Angell. If Carr is a realist in any genuine sense of the word, it is because he rejects the comfort of expelling either power or morality from politics or political science. `We have now therefore to analyze the part played in international politics by these two cardinal factors: power and morality.'¹⁶ Angell had greater faith in the capacity of reason to reconcile the real and the right, but the emphasis he placed on the battle between rationality and irrationality left him far closer to Carr than either would have admitted. As J.D.B. Miller observes, Angell is best characterized not as a utopian but as a `scholar-activist - the person who passionately desires a particular goal (in this case, peace) but finds the way to the goal difficult and sometimes unacceptable in human terms in spite of intellectual conviction'.¹⁷

7 See Legro and Moravcsik, `Is Anybody Still a Realist?', 24 International Security (1999) 5-55. In this article, Carr is associated with Morgenthau and Waltz as an archetypal realist, a scholar who articulated the core ideas of realism as a scientific paradigm. Curiously, though the writings of Morgenthau and Waltz are cited in support of this claim, no references are provided to Carr's many works.

8 See, for example, Charles Jones, E.H. Carr and International Relations: A Duty to Lie (1998); Tim Dunne, Inventing International Society (1998); and Linklater, `The Transformation of Political Community: E.H. Carr, Critical Theory and International Relations', 22 Review of International Studies (1997) 321-338.

9 E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis: 1919-1939 (2nd ed., 1946) 5.

10 Ibid, at 4.

11 Ibid, at 10.

12 Ibid, at 97.

13 On Angell's thought, see David Long and Peter Wilson (eds), Thinkers of the Twenty Years' Crisis (1995); and J.D.B. Miller, Norman Angell and the Futility of War (1986).

14 Norman Angell, The Great Illusion 1933 (1933) 327-328.

15 Ibid; and Norman Angell, The Foundations of International Polity (1914).

16 Carr, supra note 9, at 101.

17 J.D.B. Miller, `Norman Angell and Rationality in International Relations', in Long and Wilson, supra note 13, at 118.

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