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Chapter 2. What is International Relations?

서강대학교 교수학습센터
부소장 정유성

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 What is International Relations?

What is international relations,

and how does it differ from other fields of study?

IR – from contacts and interactions among countries,

such as political interactions among governments, wars, alliances, diplomatic
relations, negotiations, and threats of military force.

Traditionally, students of IR have studied these political interactions almost

exclusively.
However, economic, cultural, religious, racial and ethnic ties, and relations
between people living in separately organized states may also fall within the
proper sphere of international relations.

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As a field of study, IR - relatively new and is difficult to define precisely.
First appearance as a field of study in American universities only about eighty
years ago, the study of history, economics, and government (or politics) comes
from the ancient Greeks.
To be sure, IR – understood usually as an adjunct to history or politics.

In most American universities, IR - considered one of the major subfields of

political science.
But, students of international relations are not same as political scientists.

International relations is interdisciplinary in character and, thus, defining

its precise boundaries as a field is difficult.

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Student of international relations includes

mathematicians (who build mathematical models of arms races),

economists (who study the international trade and monetary system),
psychologist (who study the role of perception in international decision-
making)
lawyers (who study international law),
theologians (who study the moral implications of international policy),
historians (who study diplomatic history and the evolution of the state system),
sociologists (who study group behavior among nations),
and anthropologists (who study and compare the interactions of cultures).

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Even physicists and biologists study international relations.

Physicists - active in the nuclear weapons filed and

- voiced concerns about the impact of new weapons systems on IR.

Biologist -studied theories of aggression in the animal kingdom and their

applicability to international phenomena such as war.

The unifying thread among students in these different fields is the study
of interactions between and among separately constituted governments,
societies, and peoples.

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Charles McClelland’s definition of IR:

“The outermost boundaries of international relations are suggested if we

imagine all of the exchanges, transactions, contacts, flows of information, and
actions of every kind going on at this moment of time between and among the
separately constituted societies of the world.

To this picture in the mind, we should add the effects created within societies
from all such interflowing events in earlier times both of the immediate and the
more remote past. Finally, the stream of these actions and responses should be
conceived as moving on to the future of tomorrow and beyond, accompanied by
the expectations, plans, and proposals of all observers of the phenomena.”

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the level-of-analysis problem.

To add some clarity and order to the exploration of the various dimensions of
international relations, it is useful to differentiate
the five levels of analysis:

(1) the individual level,

(2) the subnational group level,
(3) the national level,
(4) the regional level, and
(5) the international (or systemic) level.

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(1) the individual level

key decision makers such as presidents and foreign minister - an impact on

international relations.
Their thoughts, perceptions, and attitudes can determine whether a nation
goes to war or stays at peace.

(2) the subnational group level

the behaviors of subnational interest groups, bureaucracies, governmental

departments, and agencies that influence or formulate a country's foreign
policy should also be studies carefully.

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(3) the national level,

nation-states are the dominant actors in IR,

and their behavior has attracted the great amount of interest among students
and scholars.

(4) the regional level

trade blocs, alliances, and international organizations to help achieve their

mutual interests.

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(5) the international (or systemic) level.

an international environment as well.

all international interactions, regional systems, and the overall distribution of
power between states.

The serious student of international relations should be interested in how the

structure of the international system affects the behavior of states.
- how entities at each level of analysis affect international relations,
- how each level of analysis is affected by the other levels.

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So, international relations is the study of states and other actors and
their interaction at the five levels of analysis.

about the history of IR - how development in the United States?

Unlike most other disciplines in the related social-behavioral sciences,
international relations developed synthetically.
That is,
grew out of adjustments to changes in world politics and trends in the
related social sciences, rather than out of experimentation and discovery.

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no series of logical steps that led to new, systematic advances.
identifying at least three, or possibly five, states of development that led to
the present status of international relations.

In theoretical terms, consisting of both analysis and synthesis, international

relations as a field of study went through

three distinct periods of development:

- traditional,
- behavioral,
- and post-behavioral.

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in historical terms, IR - five phases of development.

(1) the first phase - the historical phase (prior to World War I) –

the emphasis was on reconstructing the past through documentary evidence and
legalistic interpretations.

(2) the second phase (after World War I) –

a strong belief that the present had been formed from the past and
that this trend could be projected into the future.
Organization and a world order based on the peace settlement at Versailles were
emphasized.
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(3) The Third phase (between the two world wars)
The great powers interplay and the military strategy of geopolitics

(4) The fourth phase - after World War II

the context of a bipolar world overshadowed by ideology and the realist-
versus-idealist controversy.
In the late 1950s Hans Morgenthau's realist explanation
the state actors,
concerning with stability in a conflict-prone world system,
maximizing power in the name of national interest
Until about 1970 the underlying realist assertion that nation-states were the
only actors in the global arena was never challenged.
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(5) fifth phase - in the 1970s the post-behavioral,

a triangular "inter-paradigm" debates (i. e., the realist versus the pluralist and
structuralist), focusing on the assumption of a state-centric world.
The realist : criticized for neglecting to deal with important actors such as
intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and nongovernmental
organizations(NGOs), terrorists, ethnic groups, and religious movements.
: also accused of not paying attention to the state's transnational and
interdependent role in a "cobweb" context of world societal relations.

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1970s, the beleaguered realist regrouped under the label to neo-realists
- launched a counterattack with very different characteristics from traditional
realism.
- adopted a structural mode of analysis that was antithetical to the traditional
realism exported from Europe.

1980s, the behavioralists' criticisms of the realist

– importance of the economy and its political impact on IR:
- the new field of IR called international political economy,
which focuses attention on economic matters, nonstate actors,
interdependence, and issue areas, became institutionalized.

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Neo-realist (Robert Keohane and Stephen Krasner) - their claim by studying
the U. S. role in international finance as a function of world capitalist
development.

On the other hand,

the Marxist version of IPE (Immanuel Wallerstein) rejected both realism and
neo-realism, focusing instead on dependency theory, imperialism, and the
crises and contradictions in capitalism.

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Global modelers - focused on the dynamics of global capitalism
- but were not influenced by neo-Marxist studies of imperialism and
dependency.
- mostly systems engineers and computer modelers who are concerned
with world problems that transcend national boundaries, such as the
population explosion and environmental degeneration.
- Their goal : to reconceptualize the planetary situation by including all
aspects of an interdependent global environment.

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Today, three paradigms (or major explanations) of the international system
and the world society as a whole;

(1) realism : the world society is a system of "billiard ball" states in intermittent
collision.
(2) pluralism : the world society as a network of numerous relationships in a
cobweb-like arrangement and
(3) structuralism: the world society as a many-headed octopus whose powerful
tentacles constantly such wealth from the weakened peripheries toward its
powerful centers or heads - the major powers.

Throughout the 1980s the debate about the respective merits of these three
schools of thought became a focal point in international relations.
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fundamental differences of each paradigm : the question of

- whether the scope of international relations should be limited to state-centric

international politics as the realists argue,

- or whether it should encompass additional actors such as the IGOs and NGOs as
the pluralist maintain,

- or whether it should envelop the entire world system at all levels with an emphasis
on the economic mode of production as the structuralists argue.

The answer to this question will also determine whether concepts such as deterrence
and alliance (in realist terms) are more important than ethnicity and interdependence
(in pluralist terms), or exploitation and dependence (in structuralist terms).

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Of course, several other perceptions and explanations of world society, which can
be attributed to differences in methodology and conceptualization.
no consensus in the IR discipline on how to observe, define, measure, compare,
and classify phenomena. -> Therefore, in many instances the process becomes
more or less a matter of individual choice.

This is not to imply, however, that the field lacks structure, focus, or disciplinary
rigor. Thus our task here is -
not to condemn or endorse these schools of thought
but to identify them in their proper context and to compare them to other
approaches, always with the prevailing question: What is new in the discipline of
international relations?

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As stated earlier, changes in international relations are
- not derived from laboratory experimentation (a series of logical step leading
to new and systematic advances in orderly progression)
- but from adjustments to changes in global politics.

In other words, global transformations and emergent trends have

produced new conditions and phenomena that must be analyzed and
synthesized in order to be incorporated into the discipline as new
knowledge.

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During this process, new issues and cleavages are addressed by testing
old theories and approaches that are relevant to understanding the
changes taking place in the global arena.

Because change in endemic to international relations, emphasis must be

placed
not only on different approaches through which international phenomena
are explained,
but also on the factors that produce change and impact the political actors
on the global stage.

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Therefore, ours does not follow one arbitrarily selected approach that we
consider "the right approach,"

instead, we emphasize issues - new and old - that encompass all dimensions
of contemporary international relations and the analytical perspectives that
have been devised to understand them.

Perhaps our strongest motivation for this issue-oriented approach has been
the absence of a general theory and a lack of consensus among scholars
about the exact scope and method of international relations.

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