Abstract
Most theories of international relations have a central concern with historical change. Surprisingly, however, few have seriously addressed how we should identify and measure change. This selection is intended to begin a serious examination of this problem.
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Notes
- 1.
This text was first published as: “The Problem of Change in International Relations Theory,” Chap. 1, pp. 23–43 in Yale H. Ferguson and R.J. Barry Jones, eds., Political Space: Frontiers of Change in a Globalizing World. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2002. The permission to republish this text was granted by on 12 March 2015 by Sharla Clute, SUNY Press in Albany, NY.
- 2.
Stanley Hoffman, “An American Social Science: International Relations,” Daedelus (1977). 57.
- 3.
John Ruggie, “Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations,” International Organization 47. no. 4 (1993): 140–174.
- 4.
Barry Buzan and R.J. Barry Jones, eds., Change and the Study of International Relations: The Evaded Dimension (London: Frances Pinter, 1981), 2.
- 5.
Yale H. Ferguson and Richard W. Mansbach, The Elusive Quest: Theory and International Politics (Columbia, SC. University of South Carolina, 1988).
- 6.
See, for example, K.J. Holsti, “The Post-Cold War ‘Settlement’ in Comparative Perspective,” in Discord and Collaboration in a New Europe: Essays in Honor of Arnold Wolfers, ed. Douglas T. Stuart and Stephen F. Szabo (Washington, DC: The Paul H Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, 1994), 37–70 See also Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
- 7.
See, for example, Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (London: Macmillan, 1977), Chap. 10. See also John J. Mearsheimer, “Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War,” International Security 15, no. 1 (1990): 5–56.
- 8.
See, for example, Emmanuel Adler and Beverly Crawford, eds., Progress in Postwar International Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
- 9.
R.B.J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), x.
- 10.
Strange, Retreat of the State, 3.
- 11.
Ibid., 175.
- 12.
James N. Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), Chap. 2.
- 13.
Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics, Chap. 1.
- 14.
James N. Rosenau, Along the Domestic-Foreign Frontier: Exploring Governance in a Turbulent World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 7.
- 15.
Yoshikazu Sakamoto, “A Perspective on the Changing World Order: A Conceptual Prelude,” in Global Transformation: Challenges to the State System, ed. Yoshikazu Sakamoto (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 1994), 15, 16.
- 16.
Rey Koslowski and Friedrich Kratochwil, “Understanding Change in International Politics: The Soviet Empire’s Demise and the International System,” International Organization 48, no. 2 (1994): 215–248.
- 17.
Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics.
- 18.
Sandra Harding sums up this view: “ Coherent theories in an incoherent world are either silly and uninteresting or oppressive and problematic, depending on the degree of hegemony they manage to achieve. Coherent theories in an apparently coherent world are even more dangerous, for the world is always more complex than such unfortunately hegemonic theories can grasp” (Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism [London: Milton Keynes, 1986], 164). For similar sentiments, see Richard Ashley and R.B.J. Walker, “Reading Dissidence/Writing the Discipline: Crisis and the Question of Sovereignty in International Studies,” International Studies Quarterly 34 (September 1990): 367–416. See also Jim George, Discourses of Global Politics: A Critical (Re)Introduction to International Relations (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995).
- 19.
See, for example, Thomas E. Patterson, “Time and News: The Media’s Limitations as an Instrument of Democracy,” International Political Science Review 19, no. 1 (1998): 55–68.
- 20.
See, for example, R.J. Barry Jones, “Concepts and Models of Change in International Relations,” in Change and the Study of International Relations, ed. R.J. Barry Jones and Barry Buzan (London: Frances Pinter, 1981), 11–29.
- 21.
As quoted in Ruggie, Territoriality and Beyond, 148.
- 22.
James Der Derian, “Post-Theory: The External Return of Ethics in International Relations,” in New Thinking in International Relations Theory, eds. Michael Doyle and John Ikenberry (Boulder, CO; Westview Press, 1997), 54–76.
- 23.
Ian Clark, Globalization and Fragmentation: International Relations in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
- 24.
Even in contemporary Japan, official dates are recorded not according to the Western calendar, but to the year of the emperor’s reign.
- 25.
This list is not necessarily exhaustive. It does not include the jargon of contemporary debates, such as ‘shift,’ ‘move,’ or ‘moment.’ These terms are so nebulous that they cannot add to conceptual clarity.
- 26.
James Goldgeier and Michael McFaul, “A Tale of Two Worlds: Core and Periphery in the Post-Cold War Era,” International Organization 46, vol. 1 (1992): 467–492; Max Singer and Aaron Wildavsky, The Real World Order: Zones of Peace/ Zones of Turmoil (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, 1993); Koslowski and Kratochwil, “Understanding Change in International Politics.”
- 27.
Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” National Interest (Summer 1989): 3–18.
- 28.
Samuel Huntington, “The Coming Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72: 22–49.
- 29.
Alain Minc, Le Nouveau Moyen Age (Paris: Gallimard, 1993).
- 30.
Goldgeier and McFaul, “Tale of Two Worlds”; Singer and Wildavsky, Real World Order, Minc, Nouveau Moyen Age; Robert D. Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy,” The Atlantic Monthly (February 1994): 44–76.
- 31.
Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Berkeley and Los Angeles. University of California Press, 1987), 33–34.
- 32.
Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics.
- 33.
K.J. Holsti. “International Relations Theory and Domestic War in the Third World: The Limits of Relevance” in International Relations and the Third World, ed. Stephanie G Neuman (New York, St. Martins, 1998), 104–109.
- 34.
Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984): Peter Haas, Saving the Mediterranean: The Politics of Environmental Cooperation (New York Columbia University Press, 1990); Martha Finnemore, National Interests in International Society (Ithaca, NY. Cornell University Press, 1997).
- 35.
Ned Lebow, “The Long Peace, the End of the Cold War, and the Failure of Realism,” International Organization 15, no. 2 (1994): 276.
- 36.
Sociology on a world scale, see Julian Saurin, “The End of International Relations? The State and International Theory in the Age of Globalization,” in Boundaries in Question: New Directions in International Relations, eds Andrew Linklater and John MacMillan [London: Pinter Publishers, 1995], 257.
- 37.
The lack of agreement on the scope of the field is reflected in Jim George’s critical survey of the field. He implies that the attempt to describe and explain the behavior of states is not a high-priority intellectual activity because it is ‘framed’ in a “closed modernist discourse” based on positivism and state-centrism. Resistance to ‘brutality’ at the “everyday, community, neighborhood and interpersonal levels” is the proper focus of the field in his view. We should study family violence rather than interstate or intrastate wars (George, Discourses of Global Politics, 116, 1991, 214–215).
- 38.
Bull, The Anarchical Society, 13, 67, 71. I do not adopt the teleological aspects of this definition, because institutional growth, development, and decline are not always accounted for by common purposes.
- 39.
K.J. Holsti, The State, War, and the State of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Chaps. 2–3. See, for example, Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics-, Ruggie, Territoriality and Beyond; Strange, Retreat of the State; Christopher Clapham, “Degrees of Statehood,” Review of International Studies 24, no. 2 (April 1998): 143–158.
- 40.
There is no consensus on the meaning of the term institution. I prefer Bull’s version because it refers to ideas and practices as well as to rules. An important analysis of the concept of international institutions is in Wendt and Duvall. They contrast the “English School” notion of institutions—similar to the idea of Gemeinschaft—with the neorealist notion that is akin to Gesellschafi. Wendt and Duvall emphasize that institutions both regulate practice and are constituted through practices. ‘Fundamental’ institutions “represent the shared intersubjective understandings about the …preconditions for meaningful state action” and are thus more than simply the results of calculations of state interests or the desire to reduce transactions costs (Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, “Institutions and International Order,” in Global Changes and Theoretical Challenges, eds. James N. Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel [Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1989], 53). Kratochwil also emphasizes the combination of practices and norms (Friedrich Kratochwil, Rules, Norms and Decisions: On the Conditions of Practical and Legal Reasoning in International and Domestic Affairs [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989], 64).
- 41.
Adam Watson, The Evolution of International Society: A Comparative Historical Analysis (London: Routledge, 1992).
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Holsti, K. (2016). The Problem of Change in International Relations Theory. In: Kalevi Holsti: A Pioneer in International Relations Theory, Foreign Policy Analysis, History of International Order, and Security Studies. SpringerBriefs on Pioneers in Science and Practice, vol 41. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26624-4_5
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