The four-stroke cycle in security studies GWYN PRINS Among the huge and hugely unexpected trends and events that have burst on to the landscape of world politics with the ending of the East–West Cold War, the impact of global security issues is of rising concern. The means most readily to hand through which we might attempt to understand these pheno- mena is the received version of the discipline of security studies, a subset (because it is less than the whole) in the study of international relations (itself an uncomfortable derivative within the study of history). This received version of security studies is defined by two self-limiting characteristics: by its general permeation with one (only) of the approaches to international relations, namely Classical Realism, and by its particular circumscription of interests, namely high politics—state politics—and military force, which secures the state. Security studies provided notably little help in understanding, let alone foretelling, the eruption of the largely bloodless velvet revolutions at the end of a bloody century, and the agenda of global issues is proving to be awkward. Is this failure more to do with the nature of the issues or with the way in which we examine them? To answer this question, the first task is to understand how Derivative because in practice the principal framework of explanation is historical (I am not persuaded that Fred Halliday’s distinguishing criteria, which contrast factual and specific history with comparative and theoretical IR, are real: F. Halliday, Rethinking international relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ) p. ); uncomfortable both because IR aspires to a more scientific status than history, yet has no distinct methodology, and because it has no generally agreed subject matter. It remains (still) fundamentally in debate how much more IR is than the study of war and peace. In Halliday’s suggested research programme for IR, it is number of ; but that is not the subject of this article. See Halliday, Rethinking international relations, pp. –; S. Guzzini, Realism in international relations and international political economy: the continuing story of a death foretold (London: Routledge, ), pp. –. ‘The central questions are concerned with international violence … A subject that is only remotely related to central political problems of threat perception and management among sovereign states would be regarded as peripheral’ is the briefest shorthand, given by J. S. Nye and S. Lynn-Jones in ‘International security studies: a report of a conference on the state of the field’, International Security , , pp. –. It is endorsed and glossed in a spirited defence of the narrow reading, thus: ‘[Security studies] . explores the conditions that make the use of force more likely, the ways that the use of force affects individuals, states, and societies, and the specific policies that states adopt in order to prepare for, prevent or engage in war’: Stephen M. Walt, ‘The Renaissance of security studies’, International Studies Quarterly , , p. In fact, as will become clear, the reference to individuals is out of place; but the rest of the definition is illuminating. International Affairs , () – Prins.PM6 781 14/9/98, 11:34 am Gwyn Prins we got to where we now are; and therefore, I offer an outline account of the stages through which the study of security has passed since the end of the Second World War. My main interest in doing this is to examine the ‘meta- question’ about security studies: why it has the boundaries that it has. We need to ask this, first, to see why the main preoccupations of security studies have offered so much less than might have been hoped for when the great transformations of the s came upon us. Secondly, the answer will serve as a background against which to propose different foundations for security studies that may contribute to a closer engagement with the emerging agenda of global issues. This is, then, the story of an unfinished journey; and, in keeping with the theme of travel, the four stages in the operation of the internal combustion engine cycle provide us with the titles required to describe the four-stroke cycle in security studies: injection; compression; ignition; power. Injection Shocks In the late s—the last formative moment in thinking about security before the present—four shocks and a specific view of knowledge served to shape the course which security studies took, and in which it has continued. The shocks came in two pairs, interactive and cumulative in effect, searching out and exposing the fault-lines in the existing views of security; and, as always, the view of knowledge current at the time gave intellectual legitimacy to the shape of the enterprise. The evidence of the enormity of the Third Reich and its driving project, the Final Solution, had been known secretly in the upper levels of the political and military establishments for some time. It seeped out at last into public view at Nuremberg and thereafter in books like Lord␣ Russell’s Scourge of the swastika, staining deeply and indelibly the cultural optimism of Enlightenment Europe. A spreading realization of what had been defeated, and hence of what it portended had it not been defeated, burned the conscience and sensibilities of scholars in the late s. That realization was not rapidly achieved: it took another human generation before the humiliation of occupation could begin to be openly confronted. This framework may be usefully contrasted with Ken Booth’s more precisely chronological account, with which it does not coincide. He proposes early (–), high (–), late (–) and Post-Cold War phases: Ken Booth, ‘Strategy’, in A. J. R. Groom and Margot Light, eds, Contemporary international relations: a guide to theory (London: Pinter, ), pp. –. Among the most poignant witnesses to have forced this question forward was Primo Levi (especially in The drowned and the saved, New York: Little, Brown, ). The single most eloquent and continuing voice has been George Steiner (‘The hollow miracle’ [] and ‘A note on Gunter Grass’ [], in Language and silence, abr. edn, Harmondsworth: Penguin, ). Made movingly apparent by Michael Howard in an anecdotal, autobiographical interview, interspersed with music, broadcast on BBC Radio , July . Prins.PM6 782 14/9/98, 11:34 am The four-stroke cycle in security studies This first shock was amplified by another. Scholars recoiled in hindsight at the pitiful inadequacy of the interwar structures of international conflict resolution—a project towards which many of them had been sympathetic— created in the League of Nations and flouted by the dictators. That, combined with the popular view of appeasement and with polemical writing, the most influential example of which was the second edition of E. H. Carr’s Twenty years’ crisis, published in , conditioned the intellectual environment of the immediate postwar years to be caustic about alleged ‘idealism’(utopianism, in Carr’s book) in the interests of security. In Carr’s astringent words, ‘the inner meaning of the modern international crisis is the collapse of the whole struc- ture of utopianism based on the concept of the harmony of interests … the unpalatable fact [is] of a fundamental divergence of interest between nations desirous of maintaining the status quo and nations desirous to change it.’ A. J. P.␣ Taylor’s Origins of the Second World War, with its uncomfortable revision of who the appeasers were and why they were so much the norm and not the exception in the later s, was still a decade away. Nor had the founders of Chatham House and the Council on Foreign Relations or the promoters of the formal study of international politics through endowment of the Woodrow Wilson Chair at Aberystwyth—in the first of its kind— been especially unusual or starry-eyed in seeing that something should be done to prevent recurrence of catastrophes like the Great War. In addition to Carr’s book, two further influential stimuli shaping postwar international security studies on each side of the Atlantic, respectively, were the publication in Britain, also in , of Martin Wight’s Chatham House ‘Looking Forward’ pamphlet, and in the United States in of Hans Morgenthau’s Politics among nations. Both these works sought to isolate the underlying principles of the international ‘system’, and to promote accretion of deductive knowledge about it. They were free of the taint of too much optimism about human nature. All these characteristics resonated especially in the subset of international relations that was becoming security studies. Hence these works are especially noteworthy in its intellectual hinterland. The Second World War—the Good War—had been framed and fought in the language of liberation. That might have been confirmation enough of the E. H. Carr, The twenty years’ crisis (London: Macmillan, ; nd edn , repr. ), pp. , . It should be stressed that what Carr actually wrote about utopianism and realism was a lot less stark than the manner in which he has often been portrayed: ‘Utopia and reality are thus the two facets of political science. Sound political thought and sound political life will be found only where both have their place’ (p. ). See further Ken Booth, ‘Security in anarchy: utopian realism in theory and practice,’ International Affairs : , July , pp. –. The most thoughtful and sensitive historical exploration of these questions is to be found in Michael Howard’s Trevelyan Lectures, War and the liberal conscience (London: Temple Smith, ). A. J. P. Taylor, The origins of the Second World War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, edn, containing ‘Foreword: second thoughts’). Martin Wight, Power politics, ‘Looking Forward’ pamphlet no. (London: RIIA, ). The essay was the kernel of Wight’s posthumously published Power politics, ed. Hedley Bull and Carsten Holbraad (RIIA/ Leicester University Press, ). Hans Morgenthau, Politics among nations (New York: Knopf, ). Prins.PM6 783 14/9/98, 11:34 am Gwyn Prins moral and intellectual imperative of Realism for scholars who had lived, and in many cases fought, in it.