Political Studies (1 990),XXXVIII, 502-5 16

The Pertinence of International Relations

FRED
HALLIDAY
London School of Economics and Political Science
Established as a distinct academic discipline at the end of the second world war,
International Relations has above all been concerned with analysing relations between
sovereign states - in the first instance, the causes of war between them and alternative
forms of cooperation. Throughout its history, IR has been dominated by realism,an
approach based on a juridical totalizing concept of the state. This denies the relevance
of factors located within polities and societies and stresses the primacy of security
issues in inter-state relations. More recent work in the field has sought to analyse the
interaction of the domestic and the international and to explore the interaction of
security with other, most evidently economic, factors. The relation of 1R to political
science is defined by the shared concern with the pertinence of the international; that
is, how far specific political and social systems are, and are not, affected and determined
by factors beyond their frontiers and how these forms of international influence are
changing in the contemporary world.

Introduction
International Relations (IR) has had an uneasy, marginal when not residual,
place in the study and teaching of the social sciences. Unduly defensive about its
own methodological and disciplinary strengths, IR has, in the main, been treated
as an appendix to other, more respected, subjects. National polities, economies
and societies have been the main focus of these disciplines: the international has
been an additional element, an option for students, a penultimate chapter for the
scholar.
The dramatic change in status of the international in the past decade or two
has only compounded this, since much of the apparent recognition of the
international is itself misconceived: now that it has become fashionable to stress
the pervasiveness of the international and the decline of national specificity,this
neglected dimension has become the property of all. Banishment has given way to
promiscuity. The problem of identifying the scope of International Relations has
been compounded by two further problems: one is the confusion of IR with the
contemporary, and not least with questions of policy; the other is the almost
complete invisibility within broader social science and intellectual culture of IRI
theory as such. The average reader of the TLSor the New York Review of Books,
cognizant at least of the names of Rawls and Nozick, Derrida and Foucault,
Keynes and Hayek, would be hard pressed to name a single theorist of IR.
Neither of these approaches - denial and overstatement - does justice to a
question which is common to all social scientists; namely, the interaction of
national and international, internal and external. Nor does the ahistorical
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FREDHALLIDAY

503

conceit, propounded by much of the recent literature, that internationalization

is a product of increased interdependence in the post-war period. This interaction
is not a new problem: internationalization did not begin with post-war
immigration, the EC and the multinational corporation. There is no national
history of Britain - from Julius Caesar, St Augustine, through 1066, the
Reformation, the emergence of the modern state, empire and world war, the
national and international have always interacted. Equally, there can be no
theory of the economy, the state, or social relations, that denies the formative,
not just residual or recent, impact of the international.
The place of IR within the social sciences as a whole is, therefore, given not by
methodological similarity or by possible realignment with one or other of the
main social sciences, but by the endurance and centrality of this question: the
analysis of how domestic and international factors interact and how this
interaction changes over time. The growing recognition within other social
sciences of the importance of the external is being matched by a recognition
within IR of the impossibility of treating the international in isolation from
domestic processes. It is here, above all, that the potential for interdisciplinary
work involving IR rests and with it the possibility of a more appropriate
definition of IRs relationship to the social sciences as a whole.

Three Focuses of Enquiry

The field of analysis of International Relations comprises three interrelated
issues: relations between states; transnational, that is, cross-frontier relations
involving non-state actors and forces; and the international systemas a whole.
Defined in this way, issues of international theory and analysis have been present
throughout much of classical political thought. Thucydides on the causes of war,
Machiavelli and Hobbes on the nature of power, Grotius on international law,
Kant and Marx on preconditions for cosmopolitanism are but some of the most
obvious antecedents. These considerations were, however, part of a broader
theoretical endeavour - of history, law, philosophy, political theory - and only
rarely emerged as reflections upon a distinctive analytic subject-matter, the
misnamed international. As a separate academic discipline, International
Relations is but 70 years old. The study of international relations began in the
aftermath of the first world war, focusing on the factors precipitating war and the
means to prevent it. It was in that period that the first British chairs and
departments were established - at Aberystwyth, LSE and Oxford -while in the
non-academic realm the Royal Institute of International Affairs was set up to
guide public policy. Contemporaneously and for similar reasons, academic
departments and the Council on Foreign Relations were established in the US.
The three constituent elements of IR - the inter-state, the transnational and the
systemic - allow of many specializations and variant theoretical approaches. IR

The term internationalwas coined by Bentham in1780 to denote legal ties between states and is
confusing in two respects. First, relations between states are not identical to relations between
nations:the idea that states represent nations is, in most cases, a fiction. Relations between nations,
i.e. inter-ethnic relations, whether within or across state boundaries, are a quite separate topic. In
current usage a further confusion has arisen, evident in the international section of any newspaper:
this covers both inter-state relations as such and what can be termed the internal, domestic, affairs of
other states. This latter ambiguity is one of the reasons for the widespread confusion of IR with
comparative politics.

504

The Pertinence of International Relations

today comprises as sub-fields, in addition to international theory as such (that is,

the theorization of these three elements), strategic studies, conflict and peace
studies, foreign policy analysis, international political economy, international
organization, and a group of normative issues pertaining to war, obligation,
sovereignty, rights. To these analytically distinct sub-fields must be added the
range of regional specialisms where theoretical approaches are applied to, and
refract, the study of individual states and groups of states: Soviet and American
foreign policy, Western Europe, British foreign policy, the international relations
of the third world, and so forth, In the 1980s alone a range of new international
issues have been incorporated into the analytic compass of the subject and taught
as distinct courses: sea-use and ocean politics, women and the international
arena, the international relations of the third world, ecological questions,
international dimensions of communication, to name but some.
Today IR has a distinctive presence in the British social sciences. There are
separate departments of IR in half a dozen universities and polytechnics: 14
universities and 3 polytechnics offer degree courses wholly or in part concerned
with IR, and some IR is taught in a larger number of politics department^.^ With
a growing public interest in matters international, student demand has risen
considerably and enabled an expansion in teaching provision: for example, the
LSE department, the largest in Western Europe, went from 12 to 18 permanent
staff during the 1980s. This British expansion has taken place, however, very
much under the shadow of its North American counterpart. The subject is
dominated, to a degree even greater than political science and other cognate
disciplines, by US literature and US concerns. As in other areas, this has a dual
effect, broadening the range of debate and reference, and introducing alternative
theoretical standpoints but, on other occasions, making the subject unnecessarily
modish in its agenda, and unduly diverted by an empiricist concept of
scientificity. The dominant journals - World Politics, International Organisation, International Studies Quarterly in the academic field, Foreign Affairs,
Foreign Policy in the area of public policy - are produced in the US. But there
is a flourishing field of UK-produced journals - Review of International
Studies, Millennium, International Affairs. The US-based International Studies
Association (ISA) has its counterpart in the UK professional body, the British
International Studies Association (BISA) founded in 1978. In 1989 the ISA and
BISA held their annual conferences jointly in London, attended by over 1,800
delegates.
While IR, in its literature, idiom and concerns remains predominantly an
Anglo-American discipline, it was evident at the 1989 ISA/BISA conference that

* For overviews of the subject, see Margot Light and A. J. R. Groom (eds), International
Relations: A Handbook of Current Theory (London, Frances Pinter, 1985); Steve Smith (ed.),
International Relations: British and American Perspectives (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1985); special
issue of Millennium, 16:2 (Summer 1987), re-issued in revised form as Hugh Dyer and Leon
Mangasarian (eds), The Study oflnternarional Relations: The State ofthe Art (London, Macmillan,
1989). In this paper, as in other articles on IR, I owe a special debt to the work of my colleague
Michael Banks, who has provided a unique overview and assessment of the subject: see, for example,
his The inter-paradigm debate in Light and Groom (eds), International Relations.
A survey of British universities offering degree courses in IR in 1987 found that the following did
so: Aberdeen, Birmingham, Bradford, Keele, Kent, Lancaster, LSE, Reading, St Andrews,
Southampton, Surrey, Sussex, UCW Aberystwyth, Warwick. There is also a strong department at
North Staffordshire Polytechnic. About 500 university students a year graduate in IR.

FREDHALLIDAY

505

there is an increasing intellectual and institutional presence in Western Europe

and in some areas of the third world. This growth of an international community
has led some writers, such as Kal Holsti, to warn of a growing fragmentation of
the ~ u b j e c t .Others,
~
such as Ekkehart Krippendorff, have criticized the
predominance of US literature and concerns within the field.5 Given this
internationalization and the diversity within each country, it would be mistaken
to treat the work produced in the UK as a bloc of national output. There are,
none the less, areas in which a distinct contribution has been made by scholars
working in the UK: the English school of realists including Carr, Wight, Bull
and Northedge; the work in international political economy initiated by Susan
Strange; the world society school generated by John Burton; the contributions
to foreign policy analysis by James Barber, Joseph Frankel, Christopher Hill,
Steve Smith and others6 To each of these we shall return later. British-based
scholars have also made major contributions to fields of regional foreign policy the USSR, China, Western Europe, the third world.
The Rise of Realism

The growth and variation in subject-matter within IR, already alluded to,
parallel an evolution in theoretical approaches. In its initial phase, IR sought to
distinguish itself from those disciplines out of which it had emerged: thus it
was distinct from international, that is, diplomatic, history in its comparative
and theoretical approach. In a development comparable to the emergence of
political science from constitutional theory, it separated from international law
in adopting a positivist rather than normative approach and in analysing
dimensions of international interaction beyond the legal. It was distinguished
from political science as such in seeking to combine the political with the
economic and military and in taking as its object of analysis not the internal
political system of any one country, but the international system itself, one
distinguished above all by the lack of sovereign authority and the greater
salience of violence within it. Its theoretical evolution has none the less
involved continued interaction with, and borrowing from, these disciplines as
well as a growing interaction with other social sciences, notably economics.
Indeed, the development of IR, like that of all social sciences, is a product
of three concentric circles of influence: change and debate within the subject
itself, the influence of new ideas within other areas of social science, and the
impact of developments in the world itself. Once it had overcome its early
protectionist phase, IR was able more openly to learn from other areas of social
science, as well as to contribute to them. The recent interest of historical
sociology in the dominance of strategic and war-making concerns within state
-ormation, and of the degree to which international rather than exogenous
Kal Holsti, The Dividing Discipline (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1985).

Ekkehart Krippendorff, The dominance of American approaches in I R , in Hugh Dyer and

Leon Mangasarian (eds), The Study of Znternational Relations (London, Macmillan, 1989). One of
the difficulties in assessing the US contribution to IR is that it is much more diverse in approach, and
inclusive of alternative theories, than the orthodox disciplinary presentation of it would suggest.
See Light and Groom (eds), International Relations and Smith (ed.), International Relations. See
also, Christopher Hill, The study of international relations in the United Kingdom, in Hugh Dyer
and Leon Mangasarian (eds), The Study ofInternarional Relations (London, Macmillan, 1989).

506

The Pertinence of International Relations

factors have shaped state development, is one pertinent example of this latter
proce~s.~
If IR had a parental discipline, it was not so much history or political science as
international law. In continental Europe, this pattern prevails in many
departments. In its initial phase, after the first world war, IR adopted a
predominantly legal approach, today erroneously presented as utopianism or
idealism. This school, of peace through law, arose in part out of Wilsonian
liberalism and sought to limit or prevent war by international treaty, negotiation
procedures and the growth of international organizations, notably the League of
Nations. With the crises of the 1930s, idealismgave way to realism, initially in
the work of E. H. Carr (whose The Twenty Years Crisis, was published in
September 1939) and later in the work of a range of US-based writers, including
Hans Morgenthau, Henry Kissinger and Kenneth Waltz. They took as their
starting point states pursuit of power, the centrality of military strength within
that power, and the enduring inevitability of conflict in a world of multiple
sovereignty. While not denying entirely a role for morality, law and diplomacy,
they laid greatest stress on armed might as an instrument of maintaining peace.
They believed that the central mechanism for regulating conflict was the balance
of power, through which undue strength of one state would be compensated for
by increased strength or expanded alliances on the part of others: this was
something inherent in the system but also capable of conscious promotion.
In a parallel development, a group of realists on this side of the Atlantic
developed what came to be known as the English School: Charles Manning,
Martin Wight, Hedley Bull and Fred Northedge emphasized the degree to which
the international system was anarchical; that is, without a central ruler. They
saw it not as straightforward chaos but as in a certain sense a society; that is, a
group of states that interacted according to certain conventions. These included
diplomacy, international law, the balance of power, the role of the great powers
and, most controversially, war itself.*This school has continued to produce work
of consistent quality, evident in the writings of Alan James, Michael Donelan,
James Mayall, Adam Watson and others.
With the growth in academic study of international relations after the second
world war, realism became the dominant, if not sole, approach to the subject. It
possessed a powerful and comprehensive explanation of international relations

Examples of the interaction between historical sociology and the international include John
Hall, Powers and Liberties (Harmondsworth, Pelican, 1986) and Michael Mann, The Sources of
Social Power, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988). Discussion of the implications
ofthis work for IR in Fred Halliday, State and society in international relations: a second agenda. in
Hugh Dyer and Leon Mangasarian (eds), The Study of International Relations (London, Macmillan,
1989) and Anthony Jarvis, Societies, states and geopolitics: challenges from historical sociology.
Review of International Studies, 15:3 (July 1989).
* Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977) is the most lucid
exposition of this view. For a critique see Roy Jones, The English School of international relations: a
case for closure, Review oflnternational Studies, 7 :I (1981).
Alan James, Sovereign Statehood (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1986) and his counterattack against recent developments in IR, The realism of Realism: the state and the study of
International Relations, Review of International Studies, I5:2 (July 1989); Michael Donelan (ed.),
The Reason of States: A Study in International Theory (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1978);James
Mayall (ed.), The Community of States: A Study in International Political Theory (London, George
Allen & Unwin, 1983); Adam Watson and Hedley Bull (eds), The Expansion of International Society
(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984).

FREDHALLIDAY

507

and conflict. It accorded with the terms in which international affairs were
discussed in much public debate. It had received a powerful, apparently
incontrovertible, affirmation from the events of the 1930sand their consequences.
At the same time, it would appear probable that the increased concern of political
science in the 1930s with power and the processes by which it is allocated, as
distinct from formal constitutional procedures (Merriam, Lasswell), compounded this power politics trend within the study of international relations.
Behaviouralism and its Challenge

The dominance of realism began to be challenged in the 1960s and has remained
under pressure ever since. From the early 1960s onwards, behaviouralism
constituted an alternative to orthodox IR as it did to other branches of the social
sciences at both the methodological and conceptual levels. Thus the new
scientificschool of IR, almost wholly based in the US, sought to get away from
the traditionalists use of history and orthodox political terms such as state to a
new, quantifiable, study of international processes and interactions. Karl
Deutsch studied the growth of international communications; James Rosenau
focused on informal interactions, transnational linkages, between societies that
bypassed orthodox state-to-state relations; Morton Kaplan developed more
scientific theorizations of the international systems. A wide-ranging and often
acerbic debate between traditionalists and behaviouralists in IR took place,
mirroring in substance and tone many of the themes raised in the parallel
discussions within political science. Bernard Cricks strictures on US political
science found their parallel in IR. In this exchange, in which both sides rather
overreached their philosophical and methodological competences, the English
school stood firmly for history and judgement against what was seen as the
vulgar and mistakenly scientificapproach of American political science.
The overall attempt by the behaviouralists to supplant traditional IR failed in
two key respects. First, realism, and its later variant neo-realism, remained
the dominant approach within the academic and policy-related study of
international relations. Secondly, the very theoretical challenge posed by
behaviouralism, to supplant the pre-scientific study of the state and other
conventional, historical concepts with a new scientifictheorization was not taken
far enough, above all because it failed to provide an alternative theorization of
the state itself. In the end behaviouralism became an adjunct, rather than an
alternative to, the orthodox state-centred approach. None the less, out of the
behaviouralist challenge and later theorizations of transnational and systemic
factors, a number of major new sub-fields developed within the discipline, three
of which merit special attention: foreign policy analysis, interdependence and
international political economy. Thus, if realism and neo-realism remain
predominant, they no longer have an intellectual or institutional monopoly
within the subject.
Foreign policy analysis, the study of the factors determining foreign policy
outcomes and decisions in particular, was an ambitious and in many respects
successful attempt to challenge the core tenets of realism. In seeking to analyse
I n This debate is resumed in Klaus Knorr and James Rosenau (eds), Contending Approaches to
International Polifics (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1969). See also the debate between
James Rosenau and Fred Northedge in Millennium, 15 (1986).

508

The Pertinence of International Relations

how foreign policy is made, it rejects some of the central premises of realism: that
the state can be treated as a unitary actor; that it can be deemed to act rationally,
to maximize power or defend a national interest; that the internal character and
influences of a country can be treated as not relevant to the study of its foreign
policy - this latter a favourite claim of Waltzs in particular. Instead, foreign
policy analysis examined the composition of the foreign-policy-making process first in terms of bureaucratic and individual fragmentation and rivalry within the
state itself, then in terms of the input of broader elements within the polity,
including legislatures, the press, public opinion and ideology. This approach
opened up the possibility of something that had been precluded by realisms denial
of the relevance of internal factors, and which brought it into fruitful interaction
with work in political science, namely the comparative study of foreign-policymaking and of the ways in which different constitutional, historical and social
endowments affect the formulation and implementation of foreign policy. The
conclusion reached on this route, in international as much as in more domestic
investigations, was that the premise of rationality had to yield, in the face of
bureaucratic infighting, unintended consequences, individual and group delusions,
group think and so forth. The presupposition that states could be treated as
rational power maximizers and calculators of a national interest was shown to be
an inadequate, and often diversionary, basis for analysing foreign policies.
The most important challenge of foreign policy analysis was, however, to
realisms claim that states could be treated uniquely as units in an environment,
without reference to their internal structures and changes therein. What foreign
policy analysis sought to show was not only that its approach, incorporating
domestic factors, could provide a more persuasive account of the making of
foreign policy, and of its irrationalities, but also that it was necessary to identify
the ways in which the domestic environments and processes of countries were
affected by external factors, whether or not the state was involved in this
interaction. This was evidently the case with economic processes - changes in the
world price of oil had effects on countries whatever governments chose to do and also with a range of ideological and political ones. Societies were increasingly
interacting in ways that were transnational rather than interstate and these
linkages were in turn having an impact on foreign policy. Faced with such
external challenges and influences, states acted to accommodate or pre-empt,
depending on circumstances. Foreign policy analysis, born out of the behaviouralist rejection of institutional concepts, did not develop the theory of the
state itself. It therefore failed to take the opportunity which later, historical
sociological, literature was to benefit from, of a comprehensive, combined,
analysis of the internal and external roles of states. Yet it was foreign policy
analysissgreat achievement to have opened this question up and made it possible
to examine the internal-external relationship in a new light.
Interdependence and its Critics

It was in this context that there emerged the distinct approach based on
interdependence, a concept used to focus on how societies and states were
Christopher Hill and Margot Light, Foreign policy analysis, in Margot Light and A. J. R.
Groom (eds), Inrernationaf Retarions (London, Frances Pinter, 1985).

FREDHALLIDAY

SO9

becoming increasingly interlinked and what the consequences of this process

were. The development of the literature on interdependence illustrates well the
opportunities, and pitfalls, of recognizing the domestic-international connection: while it provides a context for examining this, it has often led to a
simplification of the relationship and a facile assertion that all is now
interdependent.
Interdependence originated as a concept in economics, where it had a
comparatively clear meaning, according to which two economies were interdependent when there was a rough equality of power between them and when
their mutual interaction was such as to make each significantly vulnerable to
actions by the other. Interconnection produced vulnerability and hence acted to
restrain what others might do. In its classical form, this was the idea that
increasing trade between nations would strengthen peace, an idea common prior
to the first world war but often heard since. In its 1970s formulation, and
especially in the work of Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, it rested on three
propositions: that the state was losing its dominant position in international
relations to non-state actors and forces, such as multinational corporations;
that there was no longer a hierarchy of international issues, with military and
strategic affairs, high politics, at the top and economic and welfare issues, low
politics, further down; and that military power was losing its salience in
international relations. Even if the realist view of a state-centric strategyorientated world had been true of an earlier epoch, this was no longer the case, as
old barriers broke down and economic and political forces paid less and less
attention to the state.
Interdependence theory was criticized from a number of perspectives. Waltz
argued that it was historically misconceived, since interdependence had in many
respects been greater in earlier periods than in the present.I3Waltz and others saw
increased interaction as a stimulant of conflict: good fences make good
neighbours they reminded us. Northedge and Bull contested the view that it was
either true or desirable for states to lose control over populations, or to cede
responsibility for managing international affairs: for all the talk of global issues
and the universal commons, it was states who, for better or worse, remained
responsible for resolving these questions, of peace, famine, ecology. Individuals
identified as much as ever with the state and looked to it to perform security,
representation and welfare functions. Marxists pointed out that interdependence
applied, at best, to a small group of developed western countries and that its
application to north-south relations concealed asymmetries of power and wealth
that the system was compounding. The idea of interdependence was also dented
by the deterioration in international relations in the latter part of the 1970s and
early 1980s: it appeared less evident, in both east-west and third world contexts,
that military power had lost its salience; international relations seemed to be
concentrated once again and in a rather traditional manner on states in general,
and great powers in particular; the supercession or circumvention of the state
appeared in many cases to take a malign form, rather than the benign one
Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye (eds), Transnational Relations and World Politics (Cambridge,
MA, Harvard University Press, 1971).
Kenneth Waltz, The myth of national interdependence, in Charles Kindelberger (ed.), The
International Corporation (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1970).

510

The Pertinence

of

International Relations

that liberal exponents of interdependence theory had implied - whether in

situations of civil war (Lebanon, Sri Lanka), or in the growth of transnational
processes that were unwelcome - terrorism, pollution and capital flight amongst
them. on-state actors were not all benign: in addition to Oxfam, Bandaid and
Amnesty International, this category included the Mafia and the Medellin cartel.
The Return of International Political Economy

The central issue raised by interdependence concerned the role of the state and
how far changes in the international system had indeed reduced, as distinct from
altered, this. A similar question was raised in a traditional but very much ongoing
field, that of international organization, where the growth of new supranational
bodies, notably the UN and the EC, appeared to modify the sovereign powers of
member states. If the initial expectation that the EC would constitute a new state,
with appropriate powers and legitimacy, was equally discarded by the late 197Os,
the constraints which Community policies placed upon member states across a
wide range of policies did amount to a reduction of previous areas of state
independence. It was in the context of such investigations that many of those who
had begun by advocating interdependence shifted to a new set of issues, those
broadly comprised by the subject international political economy. This has been
defined as the reciprocal and dynamic relation of the pursuit of wealth and
power and involves, as the revived term political economy indicates, a study of
the interaction of political and economic forces, without granting prior
supremacy to either.
As one of the leading figures in this field, Susan Strange, has argued, much
discussion of international politics had proceeded without reference to economic
processes and preconditions, and international economics operated without
~
reference to the enduring and ever-assertive role of s t a t e ~ . International
political economy has acted as a corrective to much of the simplistic internationalization literature common in the 1970s and 1980s. It has stressed that
states, while challenged by changes in the international system, also adapt to
them, seek to take advantage of them (for example, in communications), and
continue to provide the indispensable political, legal and military context for the
operation of economic and market forces. Despite the reduction in some forms of
macroeconomic intervention, states still remain powerful economic actors in
their own right - as employers, taxers, regulators, determinants of interest rates
and money supply, and, not least, promoters of deficits and managers of debt.
At the same time as, in criticism of economists and of those who overstate the
extent of internationalization, she emphasized the role of states, Strange also, in
answer to conventional theorists of realism, denied the autonomy of states and
individual states power within the international system, by developing the
concept of structural power. She criticized Marxism for focusing only on
production, to the detriment of other forms of economic activity and power. At
the same time, she also criticized the traditional realist view of power as
relational, that is, as between two states, in favour of a concept of structural
l4 Susan Strange, International economics and international relations: a case of mutual neglect,
International Aflairs, 48:2 (April 1970); and States and Markets. An Introduction to International
Polifzcal Economy (London, Pinter Publishers, 1988).

FREDHALLIDAY

51 I

power, given by the operation of an international system. Strange argued that the
activities of individual states and economies were being increasingly constrained
not by an asymmetric capitalist international system but by four overlapping
systems of power. One, the security system, was the core of traditional, realist IR.
The other three were the systems ofproduction, finance and knowledge, the latter
including science and technology, culture and life-style. One of the most striking
arguments of her States and Markets is that the growing importance of the
knowledge structure forms an important constituent of continued US hegemony.
The overall power of a state is a function of its position in the four structures. If it
is not clear what the subjects of structural power are - states or the structures
themselves - this theorization none the less represents a powerful revision of
traditional views of power politics.
Amongst the many issues debated within the literature on international
political economy, one, the debate on hegemonic stability theory, may be
illustrative of how this investigation of the states-economies relationship has
proceeded. Hegemonic stability theory originated in the work of Charles
Kindelberger, who argued that a liberal international economic regime required
a hegemon, a state dominant in both political and economic terms, able to ensure
the public goods necessary for the systems functioning and to promote and
enforce the rules by which this system operated. Britain in the nineteenth
century and the US since 1945 played such a, beneficial, hegemonic role. The
implication of this theory is that when a hegemonic power declines, as the US has
been doing since the early 1970s, the system as a whole suffers; hence the call by
several writers, notably Susan Strange and Robert Gilpin, for a reassertion of US
hegemony within the international system, for the good of
This theory has been challenged from a variety of standpoints, empirical and
theoretical. Some historians have argued that the Britain-US analogy is invalid.
Flattering as it may be to inhabitants of these islands today to believe it, Britain
was never an economic hegemon in the nineteenth century. Observers of recent
developments are divided as to how far US hegemony really has declined,
especially in the political-military fields. More theoretically, hegemonic stability
theory has been challenged by the former proponents of interdependence, most
notably Keohane in his After Hegemony. In common with others, he has tried to
identify the ways in which an international system can operate according to
certain norms and rules, even in the absence of a hegemon. These norms, rules
or regimes comprise a set of informal, but generally accepted, expectations and
understandings between states and other actors in the international community.
The maintenance of economic growth by the developed countries would be one
example, as would a limited obligation to provide aid to the third world. While a
hegemonic power may be necessary for the initial setting up of a system and the
laying down of its rules of operation, this no longer applies once the system is in
operation. Hence the decline in US hegemony, the reality of which Keohane, in
common with most other US writers, accepts, need not lead to disorder in the
system. Post-hegemonic cooperation is possible and indeed evident. Through a
Is Charles Kindelberger, The World in Depression, 1929-1939 (Berkeley, University of California
Press, 1973).
l6 Susan Strange, Casino Capitalism (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1986); Robert Gilpin, The Political
Economy of International Relations (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1987).

512

The Pertinence of International Relations

study of intra-OECD collaboration in the energy market, he argues that it is

possible to identify such norms and regimes as a substitute for hegemonic
power. Stability need not, therefore, be hegemonic.The retreat from earlier
theories of interdependence is also, however, evident: in regime theory, states are
no longer being marginalized through a growing internationalization of the
world economy but come to assume an important, if less antagonistic, role in
managing the p r o ~ e s s . ~

International Relations in the 1980s

The challenges to realism of behaviouralism, interdependence and international
political economy have eroded the formers monopoly on the subject and
produced a more diverse and competitive discipline. This has in its turn
encouraged a variety of other approaches to emerge, both in vindication of
realism and in further rejection of it.
The reaffirmation of realism, neo-realism, has engaged with the concerns of
international political economy but sought to re-establish the primacy of states,
and politico-military concerns, within the overall analysis. Thus Stephen
Krasner in Structural Conflict ascribed the failure of third world states to gain
acceptance for their New International Economic Order not to their economic
weakness as such, but rather to their weakness as states and their espousal of
principles that clashed with those of the dominant states in the international
system.I8Robert Tucker in The Inequality of Nations stressed the continued role
of great powers and military force in maintaining the international system and
ascribed the poverty of third world states to endogenous political and economic
factors.The central tenets of neo-realism were, however, most clearly laid out in
two major works of the late 1970s - Hedley Bulls The Anarchical Society and
Kenneth Waltzs Theory of International Relations.2o Both recognized, and
sought to refute, the criticisms of the past two decades. Thus they stressed the
primacy of states in the international system, and the subordinate power and role
of non-state actors. At the same time, they argued that economic processes, like
other transnational activities, required states to provide the security and
regulation needed for their continuation. They were sceptical of claims that
interdependence was on the increase and they stressed the continued importance
of the great powers in managing international relations, for better or worse.
Waltz argued cogently that, despite much talk of an increasingly multipolar
world, and attendant reduction in cold war tensions, a bipolar world, with two
main centres of power and responsibility, was preferable to a multipolar one. He
also laid out, in a set of axioms and theoretical expositions, the thesis that
International Relations was concerned with conceptualizing relations between
states, sovereign units, and not with the internal functioning of these units.
Anything that involved such endogenous factors was reductionist. He allowed
of no distinction between a theory that derived all the activities of states from
Robert Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Economy (Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 1984).
Stephen Krasner, Structural Conflict (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1985).
l 9 Robert Tucker, The Inequality of Nations (London, Martin Robertson, 1977).
2n Bull, The Anarchical Society; Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Relations (New York,
Random House, 1979).

FREDHALLIDAY

513

their internal processes, one that could properly be called reductionist, and one
that sought to take both exogenous and endogenous factors into account.*
If neo-realism responded to criticism of realism by reasserting traditional
tenets, others took the analysis of IR even further away from established
orthodoxy. In a radical extension of behaviourism, John Burton in his World
Society and other works developed a theory of international relations based upon
individual needs and the system of issue-related linkages established by such
needs. The international system was, therefore, in Burtons view, a cobweb of
issue-defined interactions, within which the specific structures of military and
state power played a distinct but not exclusive or predominant role. With a
special emphasis upon the resolution of conflict through small-group and
individual mediation, Burtons work broke emphatically with the state-centric
view of international relations by introducing not only an alternative analysis but
also an alternative approach to policy. In a parallel development, the World
Order Modelling Project, Richard Falk developed a theory of alternatives and
oppositions to state power at the international level, based again on human needs
and transnational, non-state, interactions.
The growing relationship of Marxism to IR constituted another, unorthodox,
development in the 1970s and 1980s. As already indicated, Marxisms point of
entry into IR was on the issue of underdevelopment and in many ways it
remained confined to this area. Not only was the alternative, more classical,
Marxist view on development downplayed, according to which it was in
capitalisms interest to develop the third world, but Marxist concepts with
more relevance to the central concerns of IR - on the causes of war, role of
classes, character of ideology - were not applied to international analysis in the
same way. In arguing for the primacy of an alternative agenda - north-south
relations and international structures of exploitation - Marxism left the main
terrain of international relations relatively unscathed. This insulation of IR from
Marxist influence, to a degree perhaps greater than in any other area of the social
sciences, was of course compounded by the predominance of American writing
on the subject, reflecting an intellectual climate from which Marxism was largely
absent.
Only in the 1980s has this situation began to change. Within the writing on
international political economy, there has been an application of Marxist
concepts to analyse the causes and consequences of an increasingly internationalized market and the new forms it is taking. Within the writing on foreign policy
analysis, it has become possible to examine not only how bureaucratic and
constitutional factors affect policy outcomes but also how these are themselves
shaped by broader historical, social and economic factors, including class
factors, within the country concerned. The role of military production sectors in
promoting international confrontation and alarm is one obvious, and not
negligible, example of this.**
2 For an exposition and critique of Waltzs views see Robert Keohane, Neo-Realism andits Cri1ic.r
(New York, Columbia University Press, 1986). For further critique of Keohane and Waltz, see Fred
Halliday, Theorising the international, Economy and Society, I8:3 (August 1989).
22 Kaes van der Pijl, The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (London, Verso, 1984) and Stephen
Gills and Barry Law The Global Political Economy: Perspectives, Problems and Policies (Brighton,
Wheatsheaf, 1988).

514

The Pertinence of International Relations

The growth of a historical sociological literature around issues of international

competition and state formation, itself engaging critically with Marxism,
provides a particularly fruitful opportunity for new work on exogenousendogenous relations and on the ways in which states interact with the world
system. This literature has made it possible, more than ever before, to discuss
perhaps the most deeply embedded and neglected element in realism, namely the
legal-territorial conception of the state which it uses. Much of the debate between
realism and Marxism has revolved around the question of the state, yet it has too
rarely been recognized that this involves two quite distinct conceptions of state:
the legal-territorial concept, borrowed by IR from law and traditional political
science, enables one set of questions to be addressed and theorized; the
alternative concept, however, derived from Marxism and Weberian sociology, in
which the state is seen as an administrative-coercive entity, an apparatus within a
country or society rather than that country as a whole, allows a very different set
of questions to be analysed, not least the vexed issue of how the international and
the domestic interact, and how changing relations of states to peoples are affected
by international factors, be these the role of states in warfare, or shifting
international standards of what does and does not constitute legitimate
government .23
An even more recent critical current to emerge within IR has been that
influenced by feminism. Until the mid-l980s, IR appeared to be more indifferent
to issues of gender than any other area of the social sciences, a situation
compounded by widespread acceptance of the distinction between a conventionally male area of high politics, international security and statecraft, and
a female one of domesticity, interpersonal relations and locality. This mutual
indifference has, however, given way in the face of two converging processes. One
comes from the realm of policy: in a range of international policy areas, issues of
gender have come to prominence in recent years. These include questions of
women in development processes, issues in international law and EC policy
pertaining to women, and the varying impacts on men and women of
international socioeconomic processes, among them migration and structural
adjustment policies. The widespread involvement of women in movements
against war and nuclear weapons has made this another point of gender-specific
intersection. In a quite different area, feminist writing has begun to engage with
some of the core concepts of IR theory and to question how far a gender-neutral
view of them is justified. These include the concepts of national interest,
security, power and human rights. All are presented in the mainstream literature
as gender-neutral concepts, yet as feminist re-examination has shown, each has
implicit gender significance. Above all, feminism, in common with other theories
emphasizing individual and social rights, questions the very core of conventional
international relations practice, namely the supreme value of sovereignty. Since
the establishment of independent states has in many countries led to a
deterioration in womens position vis-u-vis men, and assertions of sovereignty
21 Discussed in Halliday State and society. See also Michael Mastanduno, David A. Lake and G.
John Ikenberry, Towards a realist theory of state acton, lnternafionalStudies Quarier/y, 33:4 (Dec.
1989). Mastanduno and his co-authors seem, however, to remain under the illusion that the externalinternal linkage is something recent: they ignore the writings of historical sociologists who have
charted the interaction from the first constitution of the state.

FREDHALLIDAY

515

and nationalist identity have been used to deny the legitimacy of raising these
issues, there is room for considerable engagement by feminism, in practice and
theory, with the claims of nationalism and with its correlate, the presumed
authority of the sovereign
Conclusion
There is much that it has not been possible to touch upon in this overview. The
recent revival of normative theory in IR - as in the work of Charles Beitz,
influenced by Rawls, Andrew Linklater and John Vincent - is one case in point,
examining as it does the reiated issues of obligation and rights in the international
~ o n t e x t .A
~ second area meriting much greater attention is that of rational choice
and game theory as applied to IR, in both realist and foreign policy analysis
varieties.26A third, enduring and rich, area of investigation is that of strategy,
where theoretical and historical analysis, enriched as well as diverted by policy
issues, continues to generate work of high
Despite the failure of the
behavioural revolution to transform IR, any more than it transformed political
science as a whole, there is considerable work in applying mathematical methods
to international issues, a current which, if perhaps oversold in the US, receives
too little attention in Britain.**In common with other areas of the social sciences,
IR has recently been influenced by discourse theory and post-structuralism,
with consequences yet to be a ~ c e r t a i n e dAs
. ~ already
~
indicated, newly produced
work in historical sociology has major implications for IR and in particular its
analysis of states, an interaction which may help the discipline to break out of
the current inter-paradigm impasse.
This essay began by arguing that the relationship of IR to other social sciences
can above all be defined by the joint approach which it, and other disciplines,
could make to issues that were both domestic and international and where it is
possible to identify how far the international did and did not play a determinant
role. Three groups ofjointly relevant topic suggest themselves. The first are issues
of political theory in the older, normative, sense of the term: of obligation
- whether to family, state, or cosmopolitan community; of justice, its
24

For initial discussions of the relationship between feminism and IR, see the special issue of

Millennium, 17:2 (Summer 1988)and the subsequent discussion in Millennium, 18:2 (Summer 1989).
2SCharlesBeitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, Princeton University
Press, 1979); Andrew Linklater, Men and Citizens in the Theory of International Relations (London,
Macmillan, 1981); John Vincent, Human Rights and International Relations (Oxford, Oxford

University Press, 1988).

Robert Axelrod, Tile Evolution of Cooperation (New York, Basic Books, 1984); Mancur Olson,
The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growjth, Stagflation and Social Rigidities (New Haven,
Yale University Press, 1984).
27 A major new contribution to the field is Edward N. Luttwak, Strategy: rhe Logic of War and
Peace (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1987). Surveys of the field can be found in A. J. R.
Groom, Strategy, in Margot Light and A. J. R. Groom (eds), International Relations (London,
Frances Pinter, 1985)and Barry Buzan, An Introduction to Strategic Studies: Military Technology and
International Relations (London, Macmillan, 1987).
2n Michael Nicholson, Formal Theories in International Relations (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press. 1989).
29 Mark Hoffman, Critical theory and the inter-paradigm debate, in Hugh Dyer and Leon
Mangasarian (eds), The Study oflnternational Relations (London, Macmillan, 1989). One, unevenly
received, attempt to apply discourse theory to the field of international relations is James Der Derian,
On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Estrangement (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1987).

516

The Pertinence of International Relations

implementation at the national and international levels, and its conflict with rival
values, notably security; of the legitimacy of force and coercion, within and
between states; of the right to resist sovereign states. There are, secondly, a set of
theoretical issues in the more contemporary, analytic sense: the analysis of
power; the relation between political, economic, ideological structures; the
relevance of rational choice models to social and political action, by states,
institutions and individuals within them.
Finally, there is the overarching issue of explaining social and political systems
in the light of both domestic and international determinants. Each level has its
own partial autonomy, yet, as indicated above, the insulation of the two levels of
study, as with political science and IR, has done violence to explanation and
analysis. As already argued, it is not possible to explain the politics of individual
states without reference to a range of international factors, historical and current.
The international is not something out there, an area of policy that occasionally
intrudes, in the form of bombs or higher oil prices, but which can conventionally
be ignored. The international predates, plays a formative role in shaping, the
emergence of the state and the political system. States operate simultaneously at
the domestic and international levels and seek to maximize benefits in one
domain to enhance their positions in the other. The requirements of inter-state
competition explain much of the development of the modern state, while the
mobilization of domestic resources and the internal constraints account for much
of states successes in this competition. Political Science and International
Relations are looking at two dimensions of the same process: without undue
intrusion or denial of the specificity of the other, this might suggest a stable and
fruitful interrelationship.