The discipline of international relations: still an American social science?

This article reviews the state of the discipline of international relations. It starts from statements made by the editors in their editorial published in the first issue of this journal. The editors noted that there seemed to have been less adherence to positivism in international relations than in other areas of political science and that there was both more opposition to positivism and more methodological and epistemological openness in international relations than in political science generally. The article outlines the current state of the field, focusing on the rationalist mainstream and then on the reflectivist alternatives, before looking at social constructivism, seeing it as the likely acceptable alternative to rationalism in the mainstream literature of the next decade. It then turns to examine whether international relations is still an American social science, before looking at the situation in the United Kingdom. It concludes that the editors’ comments were indeed accurate, but that the fact that there is both more opposition to positivism in international relations and more openness in the UK academic community does not mean that the mainstream US literature is anything like as open or pluralist. The UK community is indeed more able to develop theory relevant to the globalised world at the new millennium, but the US academic community still dominates the discipline. In their editorial in the first issue of the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, the editors made some provocative remarks about the state of the discipline of international relations (IR) in the United Kingdom. In this article I address these comments by examining the state of the discipline at the turn of the millennium. I will focus specifically on the overall character of the discipline, looking at the mainstream and at the © Political Studies Association 2000. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA 374 alternative approaches. My key aims are to assess whether it is still a discipline dominated by the United States, both in terms of its policy agenda and, more importantly, its theoretical orientation, and to see whether the editors’ comments about the shape of the discipline are accurate. The editors went out of their way to point to the intellectual diversity in IR with regards to the challenges within that discipline to the dominance of positivism: ‘we argue for authors explicitly to acknowledge their positions and for more diversity of epistemological approaches. This issue is perhaps most apposite at present in international relations, where recent theoretical work has focused upon an epistemological critique of international relations realism’ (Marsh et al. 1999, 2). Political science, they argue, is dominated both by the lack of an explicit acknowledgement of an epistemological position and by the implicit acceptance of one such position, positivism. I will argue that this assumption is correct, but I will also point out that the fact that there is widespread questioning of epistemological assumptions does not mean that IR is marked by genuine epistemological pluralism: rather, I will argue that positivism dominates, especially in the United States, and dominates to such an extent that other epistemological positions remain peripheral. The editors also made comments about the relationship between IR and the study of British politics. They argued that, just as the study of British politics had largely ignored the international dimension, so the dominant approach within international relations theory, realism, had argued that the international and the domestic were two separate political spheres. They point out that this picture has changed in recent years as it has become increasingly difficult to maintain such a distinction, especially in an era of globalisation and a structural context for British politics in which the EU is a main feature. They also comment that the study of international relations in Britain was based on the behaviouralist assumptions that dominated British political science, characterising the situation as one where behaviouralism: ‘had a much weaker hold on IR in the UK than it has had in the US and, perhaps more contentiously, a weaker hold on IR than on political science in the UK’ (ibid., 8). They claim that British work has been particularly innovative in moving beyond positivism, with the result that IR in Britain is: ‘much more exciting and original than traditionalist IR and, indeed, traditionalist “British politics”’ (ibid., 8). In this article I will wholeheartedly endorse this claim and, indeed, would go so far as to claim that IR is in a far more healthy state in the UK than it is in the US. This article will proceed in the following way. First, I want to say something about the current state of IR and I will set the context for this by International relations: still an American social science? © Political Studies Association 2000. 375 commenting on the ways in which the discipline has represented its development. I will then turn to focus on the question of whether the discipline is still one dominated by the US, before concluding with an assessment of where the UK discipline (or sub-field) fits into this overall picture. My main conclusions will be that: the discipline is still dominated by positivism; this is far more the case in the US than in the rest of the world; this comment notwithstanding, the discipline of IR remains an American social science; and in the UK there is a far more pluralistic approach to questions of epistemology and methodology, which results in a much wider set of questions being seen as legitimate. I will conclude that there is a significant contrast between the ‘state of the field’ in the UK and the US and that the situation in the UK is far more likely to permit the development of an IR discipline relevant to the dominant global questions of the new millennium.