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The History of the Future of International Relations1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Donald J. Puchala
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Extract

Most of the significant philosophies of history, ” Pitirim Sorokin observed, and “most of the intelligible interpretations of historical events…have…appeared either in periods of serious crisis, catastrophe, and transitional disintegration, or immediately More or alter such periods.” The twentieth century has been an age of continuing crisis in world politics. In terms of lives sacrificed to political idols, our century, in almost every interpretation, has been a profound catastrophe. This century's last decade is indeed a time of transitional disintegration.

Type
Articles
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 8 , March 1994 , pp. 177 - 202
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1994

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References

2 Pitirim Sorokin, Social Philosophies of an Age of Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950). 3–4.

3 Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties (New York. Harper & Row. 1983), chaps. 8–16.

4 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992), 3–71.

5 In this paper, “international relations” refers to the realm of human behavior defined as relations between states and peoples. “International Relations” refers to the academic discipline concerned with the study of relations between states and peoples. Similarly, “history” refers to the human experience, while “History” refers to the academic discipline concerned with the study of the human experience.

6 John A. Garraty and Peter Gay, eds. The Columbia History of the World (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 49–67, 154–63; Frederick L. Schumann, International Politics: The Western State System and the World Community (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1958), 31–38.

7 Some non-Marxist students of imperialism have looked rather insightfully into pre-Westphalia interstate relations. See, for example, Michael W. Doyle, Empires (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 51–103; George Liska, Imperial America: The International Politics of Primacy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), 9–35; and Joseph Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes (Cleveland: World, 1955). On the whole, contemporary theorizing about international relations has either ignored the pre-Westphalia eras or forced the interpretation of such eras into “comparative state system” molds, where the Westphalia system, or the concepts of political realism, constitute implicit or explicit interpretative norms.

8 Arnold Toynhee, A Sludy of History (New York: Portland House. 1988), 379–177: Sec also. Thompson, Kenneth W.. “Toynbcc and the Theory of International Polities.” Political Science Quarterly 71 (September 1956), 365–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Adda B. Bozeman. Politics and Culture in International History (Prineeton: Princeton University Press. I960), esp. 57–133; F. S. C. Northrop. 'The Meeting of East and West (Woodbridge CT: Ox Bow Press, 1979), 1–15, 436–79.

9 Thompson, ibid., 369.

10 Yale H., Ferguson and Richard W. Mansbach. The Elusive Quest: Theory and International Politics (Columbia SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1988). 32–48: See also, Donald J. Puchala, “Woe to the Orphans of the Scientific Revolution,”Journal of International Affair. 44 (Spring/Summer 1990). 59–80.

11 Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. and trans. Edward Shils and Henry Finch (New York: The Free Press. 1949). 90.

12 E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964) 11–63; Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 130–222.

13 Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 1–13, 117–27, 289–309, 347–56, 387–406, 425–36; See also Adda Bozeman, “American Policy and the Illusion of Congruent Values,”Strategic Review (Winter 1987), 11–22; Adda Bozeman, Strategic Intelligence and Statecraft (McLean VA: Brassey's, 1992); and William Pfaff, Barbarian Sentiments: How the American Century Ends (New York: Hill & Wang, 1989), esp. 3–21.

14 Hans Kohn, The Twentieth Century: A Mid-Way Account of the Western World (New York: Macmillan, 1949), esp. 185–97; John Herman Randall, Jr., The Making of the Modern Mind: A Survey of the Intellectual Background to the Present Age (Cambridge MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1940), 334–88.

l5 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History, xi-xxiii: Daniel Patrick Moynihan. On the Law of Nations (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 33–54; Tennyson, Locksley Hall, as quoted in John Merman Randall. Jr., The Making of the Modern Mind. 444.

16 For an excellent review of apocalyptic thinking in the Western tradition, see Frank E. Manuel, Shades of Philosophical History (Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1965), 1–70.

17 Andrew B. Schmookier, The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution (Boston: lloughton Mifflin, 1984). 1–121.

18 Or. as Schmookler himself would have it, the ominous handwriting on civilization's wall compels a change in human nature and culture that extinguishes the predatory drives.

19 John Herz, International Relations in the Atomic Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 227–357.

20 Ludwig Dehio, The Precarious Balance: Four Centuries of the European Power Struggle (New York: Vintage Books, 1965); Leopold von Ranke, “The Great Powers,” in George Iggers and Konrad von Moltke, eds., The Theory and Practice of History (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), 65–101; A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), xix-xxxvi; Raymond Aron, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations, trans. Richard Howard and Annette Baker Fox (Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1966), 150–77; Edward V. Gulick, Europe's Classical Balance of Power (New York: W.W. Norton, 1967), 3–94; A. F. K. Organiski, “The Power Transition,”International Politics and Foreign Policy, ed. James N. Rosenau (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961), 367–75.

21 Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 1–38; Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), esp. xv-xxv.

22 Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World: Civilization & Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 3 (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 21–88; Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), esp. 1–36.

23 Morris J. Blachman and Donald J. Puchala, “When Empires Meet: The Long Peace in LongTerm Perspective,” in Charles W. Kegley, Jr., The Long Postwar Peace. Contending Explanations and Projections (New York: Harper Collins. 1991). 177–202. For particularly interesting case examples, sec Robert A. Kann, A Historv of the Habsburg Empire. I526–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); George Ostrogorsky, History of lhe Byzantine State (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press. 1969); Lord Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise ami Fall of the Turkish Empire (New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1979).

24 Conceptualizing here amounts to a very abbreviated exposition of George Liska's very insightful chapter on “Empire and Imperial Politics” in his Imperial America. 9–22.

25 Harold D. Lasswell. World Polities and Personal Insecurity (1935; New York: The Free Press. 1465). 3–39.

26 Ibid., 3.

27 This definition rather closely approximates Arnold Toynbee's. See Toynbee, A Study of History, 43.

28 The literature on the emergence and expansion of great cultures is vast. Sorokin, Social Philosophies, summarizes some of the most outstanding works. Sorokin's Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937; New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1985), is itself a major contribution. See also Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, abr. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Christopher Dawson, The Movement of World Revolution (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1959), 69–98; K. M. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance: A Survey of the Vasco Da Gama Epoch of Asian History, 1498–1945 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1959); and Bozeman, Politics and Culture, esp. 3–237.

29 Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. 228–29.

30 Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of Ameriean Power (New York: Basic Books, 1990). 31- -32.

31 Brzezinski should he redialed with anticipating the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and writing with some prescience about the causes before the effects were readily discernable. See Zhigniew Brzeinski, The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Collier Books, 1989).

32 America's penchant for intervention showed, for example, in the unseating of Mohammed Mussadeq in 1953, the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961. The invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1964. the financing of the Nicaraguan Contras throughout the 1980s, the bombing of Libya in 1987. and the invasion of Panama in 1989. Washington's floutingly world opinion was displayed in episodes such as its long opposition to the seating of mainland China in the United Nations, its reluctance to sanction the apartheid regime in South Africa, its persistent refusal to deal with the Palestine Liberation Organization, its extreme negativism during the debates concerning a New International Economic Order, its refusal to pay assessed dues for United Nations membership, its refusal to recognize World Court jurisdiction, its refusal to sign the Law of the Sea Treaty, and, recently, its rejections stances at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development.

33 The analysis of power contained in this paper follows from the assumption that power is the capacity to act, and such capacity stems from the ability to allocate resources to the support of policy objectives. The amount of such resources available to governments relates ultimately to the vitality of the national economy. See Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, xxii-xxv; Klaus Knorr, The Power of Nations: The Political Economy of International Relations (New York: Basic Books, 1975); Robert Gilpin, War and Change, 123–24; and Donald J. Puchala, International Politics Today (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1971), 171–98.

34 David P. Callao, The Bankrupting of America: How the Federal Budget is Impoverishing the Nation (New York: Morrow, 1992); Friedman, Benjamin M., “The Morning After,” New York Review of Books 39 (August 13, 1992), 11–16Google Scholar; See also David P. Callao, Beyond American Hegemony: The Future of the Western Alliance (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 109–49.

35 Susan J. Pharr, “Japan and the World: The Debate in Japan,”International Review (April/May 1980), 35ff.; Ogata, Sadako, “The Changing Role of Japan in the United Nations,” Journal of International Affairs 37 (Summer 1983), 30ffGoogle Scholar.; Japan Economic Institute, Japan's Role in Multilateral Aid Organizations (Washington, May 20, 1988); John Hughes, “Emerging Japan,”Christian Science Monitor, September 2, 1988; Susan Chira, “Newly Assertive Tokyo,”New York Times, September 6, 1988.

36 Donald J. Puchala, “Integrating the New European Order,” a paper presented at the Conference on Europe and the Post-Cold War World Order, University of Wisconsin, Madison, May 1991.

37 Kennedy. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 447–58: Jonathan Pollack, “China and the Global Strategic Balance.” in Harry Harding, ed., China's Foreign Relations in the 1980s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984): Barnett, A. D.. “Ten Years After Mao,” Foreign Affairs 65 (Fall 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 George Vernadsky, The Mongols and Russia (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 390.

39 Cited in Richard W. Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire (New York: Norton, 1974), 69.

40 Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, The Imperial Temptation: The New World Order and America's Purpose (New York: Council on Foreign Relations. 1992), esp. 192–97.

41 See Bozeman, Strategic Intelligence and Statecraft.

42 The argument developed here closely follows Hans Kohn's interpretation of the intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. See Kohn, The Twentieth Century, esp. 3–75.

43 Kohn, The Twentieth Century, 59

44 Lasswell, World Politics and Personal Insecurity, 5.

45 The notion “mobilized and alienated populations” follows from Karl Deutsch's analysis of social-psychological conditions conducive to the spread of new social-political ideas. See Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1953), 97–138.

46 CE. Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), esp. 49–100.

47 In somewhat broader perspective the Cold War becomes an episode in inter-imperial relations, not entirely unlike the relations between the Roman and Parthian empires, the Byzantine and Turkish empires, or the Austrian and Ottoman empires. See Dehio, The Precarious Balance. 19–71: Walter L. Dorn, Competition for Empire, 1740–1763(New York: Harper & Brothers. 1940); Arthur J. Murder, From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, The Roval Navy in the Fisher Era. 1904–1919. vol. 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1961); Raymond J. Sontag. Germany and England, Baekground of Conflict, 1848'–1918 (New York: Appleton-Century, 1938); Garraty and Gay. The Columbia History. 257; Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State. 87–147. 466–572: and Kinross. The Ottoman Centuries. 182–336.

48 One need not accept Spengler's organic metaphors to appreciate his analysis of the blossoming of Faustian (Western) civilization, which, he argues, reached apogee in the eighteenth century. See Spengler, The Decline of the West. 97–159. For insightful analyses of the outward diffusion of Western culture and its impacts, sec Christopher Dawson. The Movement of World Revolution(New York: Sheed & Ward. 19.59). 5–98; Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominanec. 21–176; and Nirad C. Chaudhuri. The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian(New York: Macmillan. 195]).

49 Panikkar. ibid., 13.

50 The consensus about Western decline among cultural historians is remarkably broad. Sorokin reviews this in Social Philosophies of an Age of Crisis, where he examines and constructively criticizes the work of Danilevsky, Spengler, Toynbee, Schubart, Berdyaev, Northrop, Kroeber, and Schweitzer. See Sorokin, Social Philosophies of an Age of Crisis, 49–186. Sorokin concurs regarding “the twilight of our sensate culture” in his own monumental Social and Cultural Dynamics, 699–704.

51 Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance, 197–278; Dawson, The Movement of World Revolution, 139–58; Edmund Stillmun and William Pfaff, The Politics of Hysteria: The Sources of Twentieth Century Conflict, 1 st ed. (New York; Harper & Row. 1964); Pfaff, Barbarian Sentiments. 13 1 -59. passim.; David C. Gordon, Images of the West: Third World Perspectives(Savage MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1989), 61–109.

52 Northrop. The Meeting of East and West, 1–14, 405–36.

53 Dawson, The Movement of World Revolution, 143.

54 David Diop, “The Vultures,” in Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier, eds., The Penguin Book of Modem African Poetry (London: Penguin Books, 1963), 246.