The Great Debates. The Second Debate Traditionalism vs. Behaviouralism This debate in IR took place in the 1960s and focused mostly on methodological.

The Great Debates

The Second Debate

Traditionalism vs. Behaviouralism

This debate in IR took place in the 1960s and focused mostly on methodological issues.

The debate was reflective of the wider behavioural revolution that was occurring in the social sciences.

This debate was happened between traditionalists and behavioralists.

Hedley Bull and Morton Kaplan

Stanley Hoffmann characterized it as ‘the battle of the literates versus the numerates’.

Behaviouralism is a school of thought that, drawing on empiricist theory of knowledge and positivist philosophy of science, seeks to study human behavior in reference to observable and measurable behavior patterns.

Behaviouralist focus was on the observation of systems and that those analyses, and any subsequent hypotheses and/or implying of causality, should be subject to empirical testing, mainly via falsification.

The battle lines were drawn between the likes of Hedley Bull on the Traditionalist side, and Morton Kaplan on the Behaviouralist.

Traditionalists maintained that the ebbs and flows of global politics were necessarily interpretive, as one could not impose a neat system on a field with so many variables.

For Behaviouralists, a theory that was not falsifiable was not a theory at all, more a subjective notion to be believed or disbelieved as suited .

Behaviouralism had roots in positivism and so strict application would mean rejecting factors that could not be measured, such as human perception and motivation and would also prevent the development of normative theories since they focused on empirically non-testable ‘what ought to be’.

Behaviouralists countered these criticisms by largely recognizing the potential value of knowledge produced by other methods of research, but they reserved the right to test their own assumptions empirically.

Behaviouralism never sought to be a replacement theory, but a means of discovering one and facilitating Thomas Kuhn’s idea that ‘‘a new area of research spins off from an established one on the basis of a new exemplar’’.

Whether its proponents intended it or not however, Behaviouralism became orthodoxy and Debate victor, its key strength over Traditionalism being the ability of researchers to replicate and analyze their colleagues’ processes and findings, with impacts including the encouragement of diligent and detailed work by IR theorists, and that positivist America came to be seen as a greater engine of political theory discourse.

Curtis & Koivisto observe that ‘behaviouralists like Kaplan celebrated the merits of statistical modelling and other quantitative methods to study what were taken to be causal laws (or regularities) of international relations’. Other famous behaviouralists that shared this point of view included J. David Singer, famous for his work on the Correlates of War and Thomas Schelling, famous for his work on game theory.

Bull even went as far to say behaviouralists ‘have done a great disservice to theory in this field by conceiving of it as the construction of and manipulation of so called models’.

Finally, Bull concluded that practitioners of the scientific approach, by cutting themselves off from history and philosophy, ‘have deprived themselves of the means of self criticism and in consequence have a view of their subject and its possibilities that is callow and brash’.

Despite Bull’s attacks, behaviouralism went on to be quite successful.

Neo-Neo Debate

Neorealism/Neoliberalism

The inter-paradigm debate, also known as the neo-realism versus neo-liberalism debate, took place in the 1980s.

This debate owes its origins to the difficult times experienced by realism in the 1970s when events in the realm of international politics appeared to contradict some key realist assumptions. Critics began to attack the state centric nature of realism.

Kenneth Waltz’s 1979 Theory of International Politics aimed to recover Realism, moving it on from a foundation in human nature towards a Structural Realism more associated with the international system, where Waltz recognized that units, i.e. nation states, could indeed co-act in such an anarchical environment, but that their functional similarities or differences would still determine the extent of such relations.

Realism also took on a more scientific quality compared to past groundings in philosophy, history and human nature.

It moved away from the kinds of generalized reflections Kaplan had criticized and towards precise statements and a vision of theory as advocated by Behaviouralists, earning it the label of Neorealism.

Behaviouralism’s impact also developed Liberalism’s precision and focus in what it sought to analyze, principally on how institutions could influence state behavior through complex interdependence.

Such integration scholarship emerged through the 1940’s and 1950’s, taking on a more regional tone in the 1960’s before a third transnational stage was advocated by Neoliberal institutional theorists .

Chief among them were Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, who wished to emphasize the effects transnational relations had on the interstate system, especially in areas of national sovereignty, foreign policies, the challenges posed to international organizations and the impacts such a paradigm would have on equality balance between states and indeed the very study of IR.

Neoliberalism became closer to Neorealism with this acceptance of an anarchical system and state egoism, just as the latter came to accept interrelated entities supported by the former.

Neo-realism and neo-liberalism share a similar scientific, methodological and epistemological approach to IR so the debate qualifies as one of being an intra-paradigm debate as opposed to an inter-paradigm debate.

The ‘Inter-Paradigm’ term in the debate arises because of the two positions not so much being rivaling theories as they are paradigm positions, but as indicated above aspects of Neorealism and Neoliberalism still share common ground.

While Neorealism viewed IR through a prism of competitive relations, Neoliberalism acknowledged this but also advocated the mutual benefits for states through greater cooperative relations.

Ultimately both positions see reality as they want to, and so conclusions from empirical testing are inevitably influenced by the theory behind those observations.

It can be said the Neorealism still focused on high politics and Neoliberalism on the low, but in accepting certain views and their methodologies, both positions were similar enough to give rise to a ‘Neo-Neo Synthesis’ and are incommensurable enough to co-exist, with each paradigm holding its own truth.

The Third DebateRationalism vs. Reflectivism

This Debate, emerging in the mid-Eighties, is arguably one of the most serious.

This debate once again focuses on the issue of science in IR.

According to Yosef Lapid this debate consisted of a ‘disciplinary effort to reassess theoretical options in a post positivist era’.

When looking at this debate we have to look at the explaining/understanding divide in IR.

On one side Rationalists, inclusive of Realist and Liberalist positions, are positivistic in methodology, and while accepting the complexities of the social world, prefer to measure and analyze what can be observed.

Positivism, in Smith’s summation, ‘is a methodological position reliant on an empiricist epistemology of the world in justification by (ultimately brute) experience and thereby licensing methodology and ontology insofar as they are empirically warranted’.

Delimiting its ontological and epistemological dimensions thus, ‘mainstream’ international theory has remained preoccupied with explaining the structural interactions of states-as-rational-actors in a realm exclusive of domestic politics or economics, let alone questions of subjectivity and identity.

That this enterprise has presented but one particular picture of the world, produced by a powerful academic community itself situated in the dominant world power, is masked by the depoliticizing technical assumptions which ‘naturally’ preoccupy international theory as a legitimate scientific enterprise. 

Consequently, the multiple, profound violence effected beyond this narrow purview – from disease or poverty, or race or gender – have been ‘simply marginal if not irrelevant’ to ‘international theory’ so defined.

Positivism has a number of assumptions such as science must be focused on systematic observation. However, positivists avoid talking about realities they cannot observe.

Postpositivists have adapted positivism to take such criticisms into account. Postpositivism seeks to build a unified logic of inference for both quantitative and qualitative inquiry and foreground the role of observation and measurement in the hope of rescuing social science from speculative and unsystematic social inquiry.

Reflectivists reject these positivist methods of knowledge generation, preferring interpretive and subjective study and a belief that values cannot be separate from observation.

Reflectivism includes such alternative approaches to IR theory as post-modernism, feminism, constructivism and critical theory.

Post-Modernism defies the self-fulfilling link between the status quo and the knowledge it generates, asking how ‘real truth’ can be discovered inside such a weighted system, while feminism views issues in IR through the lens of women, their place in world politics and gender issues.

Critical theory is a Marxian spin-off that attempts to analyze, identify and assist emancipatory social changes.

Constructivism is a social theory and has diverse facets itself, but is generally of the view that social ideas define the world and impact on material reality.

These are very basic presentations of positions that are far deeper and more complex, but the range of views is clear. Most agree on their opposition to the establishment but each has a distinct identity and priorities, and each theory can be diverse within itself.

Given their differing group positions, internal discourses and inability to challenge Rationalists on their own terms, it has been difficult for Reflectivists to truly undermine the former; a difficult enough task without these issues, given the unlikelihood that Rationalists would ever willingly deconstruct their fundamental assumptions of IR.

Problems With the Great Debates 

There are many problems associated with the way IR views itself.

Schmidt states ‘there are so many problems with and difficulties involved in understanding the history of the field within the framework of the great debates that we might be better off simply to reject discussing this account of how the field has developed’.

The first problem is that not everyone accepts that debates even occurred in the first place. This is especially the case with the first debate as demonstrated by Ashworth and Wilson.

The second problem of the debates was that they did not do justice to the nature of the controversies taking place in the world. The focusing of so much attention on a limited number of debates by IR scholars perhaps detracted from a number of other controversies worthy of study in IR.

The third problem of the debates was that the scholars that contributed to the debates were largely British or American. This geographical divide also spilled over into their work and their failure to reach a consensus on issues did not help with the coherency issues of the debates.

Fourthly, as previously stated, the debates are used by IR practitioners and scholars to define their positions on the way they view the world.

However, boundaries between debates are somewhat blurred at times and a number of important works do not fit neatly into any one debate.

The dominant themes of the great debates did indeed reveal the strengths and weaknesses of their rivals and one can see refinements in the debates being made. Despite this, IR is still developing as a field and further refinements are necessary.

CRITICAL THEORY

In mid-80s IR discipline came under serious challenge from different critical theories.

The Critical Theory of Frankfurt School, Habermas’ critical theory, and post modernism form the milestones of this critical point of view, challenging the primary concerns and assumptions of international theory.

These approaches have been skeptical towards traditional theory and critical of the positivistic and empirically-based knowledge developed by social sciences and towards modernity which emphasized technical and scientific forms of rationality.

They questioned the epistemological foundations, the enlightenment heritage of the idea of progress and rationality and modern science which aims to generalization and the determination of the truth to be imposed on the entire society.

There are two different generations that focused on critical theory. Critical theory was a view of society and social theory that was initiated by the Frankfurt School and Marxism was the starting point.

In the beginning, the Critical Theory is associated with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. As the ideas of the philosophers associated with this institution were articulated and they formed a distinctive theory, the theorists of this Institution came to be known as “the Frankfurt School”. The institution was formed to further and explore the Marxian thinking.

The main thinkers: Marcuse, Adorno and Horheimer

The Frankfurt School had a view of a post-Marxist social and political theory.

The main conceptions of the Critical Theory as it is developed by these three thinkers is enhanced by Jurgen Habermas.

Habermas focuses on the critique of ideology rather than the Marxist criticism of capitalism.

He argues that science and technology take on an ideological function reinforcing the image of society based on a technical model, depriving the individual of political consciousness.

Central to Habermas’s argument are the concepts of “ideal speech situation” and the “knowledge-constitutive interests”.

Habermas argued that communication has its own particular rationality because most of the human activities are based on language and on communications.

Human speech is not meaningless, therefore there must be the possibility of truth, but the only way truth could be established is via rational consensus.

Discourses which questions claims, when distorted by various power relations create an irrationalism which do not make truth claims.

For Habermas, consensus must be a rational consensus and this can be achieved purely on the basis of argument completely free from the distortions of power.

Habermas believes that emancipation of human society through the critical theory will be possible with the nature of human speech.

Another development of Critical Theory came with Robert Cox.

He uses the Habermasian ideas of knowledge and interests.

Cox divides international theory into two categories:

Problem solving and critical theory.

Problem-solving theories can be viewed as all the theories that are initiated before critical theory with the purpose of continuity of existing system rather than attempting to change it.

Problem-solving theories only describe, explain and understand problems within the existing system.

Critical theory is the criticism of all the theories before it. It criticizes not only the problems within the system but the system itself.

It rejects the acceptance of the general trend that systems of capitalism and nation-state will continue to exist forever.

Cox uses the Gramscian explanation of the system and takes the world hegemony as “a social structure, an economic structure, and a political structure; and it cannot be simply be one of these things but must be all three”.

International organizations, in this sense, are given a specific role for maintaining this hegemony.

Critical theory has a historical, a normative and self-reflective critical component and is related to the real world as a practical guide to action.