Did the Realist-Idealist Great Debate Really Happen? a Revisionist History of International Relations

Abstract

In the history of international relations, no single idea has been more influential than the notion that there was a `great debate' in the 1920s and 1930s between the advocates of idealism and the champions of realism. In reality, there was never a single `great debate' but rather a multiplicity of discussions which revolved around at least three big questions: does capitalism lead to war; what are the most effective ways of dealing with totalitarian state aggression; and (in the US), is retreat from entangling alliances a reasonable response to a world turned upside down by war and economic depression? Throughout this, the academic study of IR remained strongly liberal and internationalist in orientation. However, liberalism was never seriously challenged by an apolitical realism, but instead by socialist critics - at least in Britain - and isolationists in the United States. Ultimately, the persistence of the notion that there was a real debate between idealism and realism, which the latter apparently won, says less about the actual discussions of the time, and more about the marginalisation of liberal and normative thinking in the IR mainstream in the post-war period.

After Liberalism?

“…Yet, in their estimation, appeasement, which they define "as a strategy of sustained, asymmetrical concessions in response to a threat, with the aim of avoiding war, at least in the short term", has been unfairly denigrated as a strategy of statecraft owing to its close affiliation with British and French diplomacy in the 1930s (2008: 154). It is certainly worth recalling that it was the "realist" Carr who championed appeasement as a way of dealing with a rising Germany, although Lucian Ashworth (2002) slightly exaggerates the degree to which early realist thinkers were supporters of the strategy. Morgenthau, for example, regarded appeasement to be "a corrupted policy of compromise" that would inevitably fail to produce a negotiated settlement with a rising power (1955: 60).…”

The liberal renaissance and the end(s) of history

“…The first concern focuses on the historical development of the discipline itself and has already shattered some of the received and taken-for-granted truths about the discipline's origins and major debates (Schmidt 1994(Schmidt , 1998Wilson 1998;Ashworth 2002;Quirk and Vbigneswaran 2005). A second concern that can be identified in the literature seeks to situate classical thinkers historically, to examine the development of their thought, and to consider critically the ways in which this thought has contributed to contemporary IR research (Walker 1992;Jahn 2006;Shilliam 2006Shilliam , 2007.…”

Feminist Creativities and the Disciplinary Imaginary of International Relations1

“…The story of the coagulation of IR as an autonomous discipline―or its foundational myth (Kahler 1997; Schmidt 2002a)―takes the form of a myth of rescue: as the story goes, IR emerged as a social science when realists saved the study of “the international” from a group of utopian pacifists, the idealists. A closer look at the texts of the period will reveal that the two camps were not so coagulated―in the sense of clusters of scholars sharing the same agendas; that the debate between the camps never occurred―in the sense of extensive and structured reciprocal engagement between the alleged camps; and that relying on this myth implicates more omission than inclusion, if our purpose is mapping out the debate space of the period (Crawford 2000; Ashworth 2002; Schmidt 2002b; Quirk and Vigneswaran 2005).…”