History of International Relations

• The world today is in constant flux, with changes in technologies, telecommunications, and travel affecting our daily lives.
• Our everyday choices are influenced by these rapid global changes.
• In a globalized world, from voting to trading, we become part of the international community.
• World events such as wars, catastrophes, and increased people-to-people contact shape our perspectives about global affairs.
• International Relations (IR) seeks to study and understand international politics and processes.
• IR focuses on foreign affairs and global issues among states, including intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and multinational corporations (MNCs).
• IR is both an academic discipline and a public policy field.
• The discipline can be positive, analyzing international politics, or normative, formulating foreign policy for states.
• IR is often considered a branch of political science, but it is interdisciplinary in nature.
• Apart from political science, IR draws on economics, history, law, philosophy, geography, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and cultural studies.
• IR addresses diverse issues such as globalization, state sovereignty, ecological sustainability, nuclear proliferation, nationalism, and economic development.
• It also studies global finance, terrorism, organized crime, human security, foreign interventionism, and human rights.
• Since global developments affect every individual, IR is relevant to everyone, not just diplomats or leaders.
• The systematic study of IR began after the First World War, with universities in Western Europe and the US introducing courses in the 1920s.
• However, relations among states or pre-state political systems existed long before IR became an academic field.
• The Peace Treaty of Westphalia (1648) is considered the birth of modern nation-states in Europe.
• Before modern states, pre-state political systems existed in different parts of the world.
• Relations among these pre-state systems can be viewed as the beginning of international relations, though incoherent and sporadic.
• Historians dispute the history of IR, as interactions among pre-state systems and post-Westphalia states were irregular and controversial.
• After Westphalia, no structured pattern of IR immediately emerged.
• Systematic interactions among nation-states developed only after the French Revolution (1789).
• Some known pre-state political systems include Sumerian city-states (Kish, Ur, Lagash), oriental city-states like Jericho, Greek city-states, and large empires in the West and East.
• Interactions among pre-state systems varied over time, making it difficult to systematize ancient IR.
• The Treaty of Westphalia encouraged the rise of independent nation-states by recognizing territorial sovereignty.
• Westphalia also led to the institutionalization of diplomacy and armies.
• The modern European nation-state system spread to the Americas, Africa, and Asia through colonialism.
• The nation-state system evolved through socio-political, economic, and scientific developments.
• Events like the rise of capitalism, Industrial Revolution, French Revolution, American War of Independence, and colonialism influenced the evolution of states until the 19th century.
• In the 20th century, two world wars, decolonization, nationalist movements, globalization, postmodernism, and IT revolution shaped the nation-state system.
• Despite changes, the basic nature of nation-states remains the same: sovereign territorial units of people sharing common feelings of nationalism.
• IR as a system of interactions among nation-states has changed in practice but retains the same fundamental nature.
• The study of IR now includes non-state actors like international organizations, multinational corporations, and NGOs.
• IR also addresses emerging issues such as environment, globalization, energy, and terrorism.
• The role of non-state actors became significant after the First World War, reshaping the study of international relations.
• IR emerged as a structured academic discipline in the 1920s in European and American universities.
• The Second World War and decolonization created new states in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, giving IR a new dimension.
• The post-WWII world order saw the rise of two nuclear superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union, replacing the earlier European powers.
• Issues like energy, environment, terrorism, globalization, and communication revolution gained prominence in IR after WWII.
• The end of the Cold War led to a unipolar world dominated by the US, but globalization increased interdependence among states.
• Today, IR continues to evolve dynamically, addressing state and non-state actors, global issues, and complex interdependencies in international politics.

Meaning of International Relations

• It is not an easy task to give the precise meaning of International Relations, which when capitalized and reduced to the acronym ‘IR’, specifies a field of study taught in universities and colleges as a ‘subject’ or a ‘discipline’.
• The difficulty in defining IR increases because of the tendency to use the terms ‘international relations’ and ‘international politics’ interchangeably.
• Often it is assumed that IR is the study of international politics only.
• Morgenthau and others viewed the core of IR to be international politics, with the subject matter being the struggle for power among sovereign nations.
• Padelford and Lincoln opine that, when people speak of ‘international relations’, they usually mean the relationships between states.
• They further state that such relationships constitute ‘international politics’, which is the interaction of state policies within the changing patterns of power relationships.
• Palmer and Perkins argue that IR is related not just to politics centering on diplomacy and relations among states, but it also means “the totality of the relations among peoples and groups in the world society”.
• Therefore, the term ‘international relations’ is broad and goes beyond the official political relations between governments.
• Hoffman suggested that IR “is concerned with the factors and activities which affect the external policies and the power of the basic units into which the world is divided”.
• Palmer and Perkins observe that IR “encompasses much more than the relations among nation-states and international organizations and groups. It includes a great variety of transitional relationships, at various levels, above and below the level of the nation-state, still the main actor in the international community”.
• Wright contended that IR includes “relations between many entities of uncertain sovereignties”.
• Wright further argued that “it is not only the nations which international relations seek to relate. Varied types of groups—nations, states, governments, peoples, regions, alliances, confederations, international organizations, even industrial organizations, cultural organizations, religious organizations—must be dealt with in the study of international relations, if the treatment is to be realistic”.
• Frankel provides a more convincing definition: “This new discipline is more than a combination of the studies of the foreign affairs of the various countries and of international history—it includes also the study of international society as a whole and of its institutions and processes. It is increasingly concerned not only with the states and their interactions but also with the web of transnational politics”.
• Mathiesen gives a broader definition, stating “International Relations embraces all kinds of relations traversing state boundaries, no matter whether they are of an economic, legal, political, or any other character, whether they be private or official”.
• Mathiesen also notes that IR includes “all human behaviour originating on one side of state boundary and affecting human behaviour on the other side of the boundary”.
• Goldstein opines that IR primarily “concerns the relationship among the world’s governments”.
• However, defining IR only in terms of states is simplistic, and to understand IR holistically, one must also consider international organizations, MNCs, individuals, and other social structures, including economic, cultural, and domestic politics, along with historical and geographical influences.
• Jackson and Sorenson observe that the main reason to study IR is that “the entire populations of the world are divided into separate territorial communities, or independent states, which profoundly affect the way people live”.
• This highlights the centrality of states and the state system in IR.
• Jackson and Sorenson note that “at one extreme the scholarly focus is exclusively on states and inter-state relations; but at another extreme IR includes almost everything that has to do with human relations across the world”.
• They argue that IR seeks to understand how people are provided or not provided with basic values of security, freedom, order, justice, and welfare.
• According to Lawson, in the simplest sense, IR is “taken to denote the study of relations between states”.
• In a broader sense, Lawson states that IR “denotes interactions between state-based actors across state boundaries”, emphasizing concern with non-state actors as well.
• Frederick S. Dunn (1948) defines IR as “the actual relations that take place across national boundaries, or as the body of knowledge which we have of those relations at any given time”.
• Dunn’s definition is comprehensive because it does not limit IR to official relations between states and governments.
• IR scholars have made efforts to move beyond state-centric thinking, recognizing the presence of other actors in international politics.
• IR is a vast field encompassing the relationships among states in all their dimensions.
• It also studies interactions with various other political and non-political groups.
• IR includes the study of international history, international law, and international society.
• It also examines international political economy.
• IR is not limited to the political relations of governments but includes transnational and cross-boundary interactions.
• It emphasizes that states are the main actors, but other actors play important roles in shaping global relations.
• The discipline addresses multi-level interactions, from local and regional to global scales.
• IR considers the influence of economic, legal, political, cultural, and social factors in international interactions.
• It recognizes that human behaviour across borders affects international relations.
• IR provides a framework to understand the complex web of global interactions.
• It studies both official governmental relations and informal transnational processes.
• The discipline incorporates insights from history, law, political science, economics, and sociology.
• IR emphasizes the study of international organizations, multinational corporations, NGOs, and other non-state actors.
• In summary, IR is a comprehensive discipline that seeks to understand state and non-state interactions, international processes, and the totality of relations among peoples and groups across the world.