Review of International Studies (1998), 24, v–xii Copyright © British International Studies Association Introduction: The Eighty Years’ Crisis TIM DUNNE, MICHAEL COX, KEN BOOTH It is fitting that Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis should be the point of departure for the first Special Issue of the Review of International Studies. One of the earliest appraisals of Carr’s contribution to international relations appeared in the very first issue of the journal of the British International Studies Association.1 More recently, by publishing the annual E.H.Carr memorial lecture, the Review has been partly responsible for the Carr revival that has gathered momentum.2 Although these lectures have rarely had Carr’s general work or The Twenty Years’ Crisis as their central theme, they have consistently shown how Carr’s thought can be applied to the various sub-fields of international studies. In this first Special Issue we have likewise used Carr’s work as the point of departure in this survey of both subject and subject-matter spanning the 80 years since the subject was placed in an academic setting. Many of the arguments and dilemmas in Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis are relevant to the theory and practice of international politics today. One obvious parallel is that Carr wrote the book against the backdrop of a transition in the organisation and conduct of world politics. In his view, the crisis at the end of the 1930s was brought about by a collapse in the whole edifice of liberal-idealist thinking which had permeated theory and practice in the inter-war period.3 Sixty years on, another sense of crisis pervades the discipline. The Cold War is over yet there is no consensus on what has replaced it. The best we can do it seems is to define our ‘post’-Cold War era only in terms of what it is not.4 And like Carr’s 1 Graham Evans, ‘E.H.Carr and International Relations’, British Journal of International Studies, 1 (1) (1975), pp. 77–97. 2 William T.R. Fox, ‘E.H. Carr and Political Realism: Vision and Revision’, Review of International Studies, 11, (1) (1985), pp. 1–16. Inis L.Claude Jr, ‘Myths about the State’, Review of International Studies, 12, (1) (1986), pp. 1–11. Zara Steiner, ‘Decision-making in American and British Foreign Policy: An Open and Shut Case’, Review of International Studies, 13, (1) (1987), pp. 1–18. W.B. Gallie, ‘Power Politics and War Cultures’, Review of International Studies, 14, (1) (1988), pp. 17–27. Michael Howard, ‘Ideology and International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 15, (1) (1989), pp. 1–10. Laurence Martin, ‘Dismantling Deterrence?’, Review of International Studies, 17 (1991), pp. 215–24. Ernest Gellner, ‘Nationalism Reconsidered and E.H.Carr’, Review of International Studies, 18, (4) (1992). Fred Halliday, ‘The Gulf War 1990–1991 and the Study of International Relations Review of International Studies, 20, (2) (1994), pp. 109–30. Adam Roberts, ‘Communal Conflict as a Challenge to International Organization: The Case of the former Yugoslavia’, Review of International Studies, 21, (4) (1995), pp. 389–410. Andrew Linklater, ‘The Transformation of Political Community: E.H. Carr, Critical Theory and International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 23, (3) (1997), pp. 321–38. Elizabeth Meehan, ‘British-Irish Relations in the Context of the European Union’, Review of International Studies, 25 (1999, forthcoming). 3 E.H.Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1939), p. 62. 4 These uncertain times will be the focus of the second Special Issue to be published in December, 1999. v vi Tim Dunne, Michael Cox, Ken Booth analysis of the 1930s, the uncertainty evident in our thinking about world politics today needs to be situated in the context of a broader intellectual transformation. One possible explanation for the lack of consensus runs deeper than merely acknowledging that the certainties of the past have gone, rather, it questions whether we can even know the world at all. Thus at the same time as we are trying to come to terms with a ‘turbulent world’, the epistemic foundations of truth and reason are also coming under siege from different intellectual quarters. To underline the point that E.H.Carr frames the first Special Issue, we have not only exploited the title of his best-known book in international relations, we have also borrowed his chapter titles and section headings in what follows. The fact that this was easily possible, offers clear testimony to the continuing relevance of Carr’s questions—and indeed some of his answers. Carr has occasionally been criticised for his elastic use of the word ‘crisis’ in the title of his book, on the grounds that it should only be used to refer to very short periods of intense danger: we have stretched it further still, and we think with good cause. The years since 1919 have witnessed the two most destructive wars in history and the possibility of nuclear Armageddon for over 50 of them; there have been hundreds of inter-state wars and even more civil strife. States have collapsed and come into being, sometimes violently. The technological threat to humanity posed by military innovation has expanded alarmingly, and now includes the danger of biological weaponry. The threat to the global environment has become increasingly apparent over these years; sustainability remains out of reach for the majority of the world’s growing population. Inequalities in the global economy and hierarchies of political power have resulted in the silent genocide of the poor and malnourished. Casualties of the global political economy, from wasted individual lives to collapsing economies, in Russia and parts of Asia, bring up to date Carr’s critique of liberal illusions—this time those of the triumphalists of 1989. Against this backdrop, who would not call these eight decades a ‘crisis’ on a world historical scale? We think Carr would have done.5 Within a few years of publishing The Twenty Years’ Crisis, Carr himself admitted to being rather reticent about the work. It was merely, in his words, ‘a study of the period’ which ‘must be treated on its merits as such’.6 Judging by the subsequent importance of the book in the historiography of international relations, it would be fair to say that Carr’s assessment has not been shared widely within the discipline. Successive generations of scholars have read it as an introductory text only to return to it and discover new meanings and overlooked phrases in later years. It has sold a remarkably high number of copies for an academic text.7 In our judgement, The Twenty Years’ Crisis is one of the few books in 80 years of the discipline which leave us nowhere to hide. One reason for making this claim concerns the intimate connection between the text and the so-called great debates which conventionally define the historiography 5 For a detailed treatment of Carr’s analysis of international politics from the late 1930s to the 1940s, see Charles Jones, Carr on International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 6 Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, preface to the second edition (1946). 7 According to Tim Farmiloe, the Publishing Director at Macmillan, the book has sold 30,660 copies in the second edition alone. Introduction: The Eighty Years’ Crisis 1919–1999 vii of the field. 8 Until the 1980s, few writers challenged the rather heroic interpretation of The Twenty Years’ Crisis as the winner in the struggle for mastery between realism and idealism. The pivotal part played by The Twenty Years’ Crisis in the development of the discipline was partly the result of the fact that it represented a moment of unity between British and American perspectives. After the book, realism became the dominant theory in both communities, and very quickly framed the world-views of politicians and other key decision-makers. However, in Britain, the academic study of international relations was institutionally underdeveloped by comparison, and for the most part those who defined themselves as ‘thinkers’ remained staunchly independent from the policy centred world of the ‘doers’. More significantly, most of the key figures in British international relations theory resisted the polarity of realism and idealism that had structured the first debate. In this sense, British and American perspectives began to part long before the so-called ‘new great debate’ between traditionalists and social scientists in the 1960s.9 The Twenty Years’ Crisis is therefore unique in that it is the only great text in the 80 years crisis of international relations which has been equally highly regarded by both major constituencies of our fragmented discipline. Such an achievement has not been repeated. Four decades later Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics and Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society resonated far more loudly in their own academic back yards than beyond them. Another indication that The Twenty Years’ Crisis leaves the discipline nowhere to hide is evident from its appeal to conservatives and radicals alike. Robert Gilpin, an example of the former, argued on the basis of The Twenty Years’ Crisis that E.H. Carr was one of the all time ‘three great realist writers’.10 At the same time, a leading voice in the emergence of ‘critical theory’, Robert Cox, cites Carr as being one of his three most important influences (along with Vico and Marx).11 A similar pattern can be discerned from diverging interpretations of The Twenty Years’ Crisis. Although it has become fashionable to open texts to multiple interpretations, few have been as controversial and contested. Among contemporary scholars, standard realist readings of the book co-exist alongside rationalist and critical theoretical interpretations.