Imperialism and Internationalism in the Discipline of International Relations
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This new anthology offers a highly interesting dissection of the early years of the discipline now known as International Relations (IR). With the title’s two themes as leitmotivs, the book’s chapters deliver in different ways on the introduction’s claim that ‘imperialism and internationalism was more deeply embedded in the early discourse of the field than post-World War II accounts have commonly recognized’ (p. 10). They do this by demonstrating how scholars connected in various ways to the more-than-embryonic discipline contributed to the discourse from which it eventually came to life. In this way, the volume offers an additional corrective to the claim, born out of the reception history of E.H. Carr’s Twenty Years Crisis (1939/1964), that pre-war IR intellectuals were unsophisticated, or at least blue-eyed, ‘idealists’, and that IR was born as a logical ‘realist’ reaction hereto. The book also gives us a deep understanding of how influential parts of the English-American discourse of the ‘international’ developed over the early years of the institutionalization of IR. Especially interesting is the view of how this discourse also drew on or grew from the problems of colonial administration, leaving it in many ways preoccupied with problems of hierarchical and co-operative political relations across the international system. As such, the book is an explicit and valuable historiographical contribution to the sub-field of the study of the IR discipline. While this reviewer agrees with the implicit premise that most of the social science tradition’s Anglo-Saxon ways and manners are and should be considered central to the peculiar activity of meta-researching IR, it is nevertheless difficult not to perceive the contours of a straw-man in the idealist–realist dichotomy. Seen from within the European IR community — where reflexivity is more often than not de rigueur — the debate was already settled with Brian C. Schmidt’s own Discourse of Anarchy (1997). So, the added value here lies not so much in the rejection of the ‘outdated, anachronistic and ideological’ idealist–realist dichotomy (p. 2) because as the introduction also amply resumes this argument has already been made (pp. 1–5), but rather in the uncovering of alternative themes common to Journal of International Relations and Development, 2005, 8, (409–412) r 2005 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1408-6980/04 $30.00
www.palgrave-journals.com/jird
Journal of International Relations and Development Volume 8, Number 4, 2005
410
‘some of the forgotten figures and discourse of the field, and (the reconstruction of) the emergence of IR as a scholarly discipline’ (p. 13). The ‘primary justification’ of the volume is simply that ‘we do not know this period very well’ (p. 5) and, as such, the book is already home free in terms of its raison d’eˆtre. However, the book aims not only to contribute with its empirical and historical argument about the central roles of imperialism and internationalism as analytical foci but it also wants to make a ‘theoretical and conceptual’ (p. 9
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