Peter M. R. Stirk

John H. Herz: realism and the fragility of the international order

John H. Herz is a significant, but comparatively neglected, figure in the development of International Relations (IR) as a discipline. Although he contributed to the emergence of realism as the dominant approach to international relations in the United States, his thought is characterised by an insight into the fragility of the international order and the state which stands in marked contrast to the emphasis upon durability and persistence evident in recent surveys of a self-avowed American realism.

Carl Schmitt's Enemy and the Rhetoric of Anti-Interventionism

This article explores Carl Schmitts concept of the enemy against the backcloth of the international agenda from the 1920s into the Second World War. More specifically it argues for his abiding antipathy to the Anglo-Saxon powers. It identifies his concern with the right of intervention and his strategies for deflecting claims of a right of intervention in the affairs of states. It also explores the tension between his concept of domestic order and international order in the late 1930s and suggests that his attempt to reconcile the two fails. It concludes by suggesting that the rhetorical arguments he deployed are instructive, for they remain the favourite resort of those who have engaged in a continuous and manifest abuse of sovereignty.

The Westphalian Model, Sovereignty and Law in Fin-de-siècle German International Theory

This article considers the Westphalian model and its supposed origins in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century positivist thought. It shows how three German theorists, Georg Jellinek, Heinrich Triepel and Max Huber, subscribed to a weak version of the Westphalian model that allows for a multilateral international community based on law but not the strong version associated with absolute sovereignty and the exclusion of international community. It further shows how their ideas, especially their rejection of private property and contract law analogies, and their treatment of sovereignty, are of continuing relevance. It also serves as a correction to the all too frequent portrayal of German thought at this time in terms of hyper-nationalism and proto-Darwinian approaches to the international order.

The Westphalian model and sovereign equality

Although the Westphalian model takes many forms the association of Westphalian and sovereign equality is a prominent one. This article argues firstly that sovereign equality was not present as a normative principle at Westphalia. It argues further that while arguments for sovereign equality were present in the eighteenth century they did not rely on, or even suggest, a Westphalian provenance. It was, for good reasons, not until the late nineteenth century that the linkages of Westphalia and sovereign equality became commonplace, and even then sovereign equality and its linkage with Westphalia were disputed. It was not until after the Second World War, notably through the influential work of Leo Gross that the linkage of Westphalia and sovereign equality became not only widely accepted, but almost undisputed until quite recently. The article concludes by suggesting that not only did Gross bequeath a dubious historiography but that this historiography is an impediment to contemporary International Relations.

John H. Herz and the International Law of the Third Reich

John H. Herz was unusual amongst the founding fathers of international relations in having paid detailed attention to the ideology and international law of the Third Reich in a study published in 1938. This article sets his investigation in the context of the turn away from law in the emerging discipline of international relations and the competing visions of Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt. It assesses developments in the international law of the Third Reich during the war years against Herzs own expectation of the emergence of a coherent doctrine, and concludes by suggesting that Herzs defence of international law has much to recommend it.

Eros and Civilization revisited

The article consists of a re-examination of Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization in the light of continuing interest in that work. After a brief consideration of Marcuse’s attempt to use Freud to indict contemporary civilization, focusing on the concepts of surplus repression and guilt, the article turns to his utopian sketch of Eros as a culture builder and the reconciliation of reason and instinct. These themes, which form the focus of recent interest, are explored by examining Marcuse’s interpretation of Kant and Schiller as well as Freud. In all cases Marcuse’s interpretation is shown to be flawed. The conclusion is that Marcuse’s attempt to indict established reason in the light of instinct and yet to hold out the prospect of a reconciliation of reason and instinct leads to an impoverished concept of both.

The concept of military occupation in the era of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars

This article accounts for the existence of a clear concept of military occupation, albeit inconsistently used, in the era of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. It sets out the factors favouring such clarity and those militating against it. It argues that accounts of the concept of military occupation in terms of the principle of national self-determination and the French revolutionary renunciation of the right to conquest are insufficient. A full explanation must refer to the practice of occupation by French revolutionary and Napoleonic authorities and their allied opponents, including non-belligerent occupations. It concludes that the law of occupation and court judgements in this period should not be treated as driven by general principles but rather as often-confused responses to specific contexts and problems created by generals, diplomats and recalcitrant inhabitants of occupied territories.

International Law, Émigrés, and the Foundation of International Relations

It is increasingly accepted among historians of international political thought that the stylised stories of the emergence of International Relations as a discipline, stories usually centred on an epic first debate between idealists and realists in which the latter triumphed, are hopelessly inadequate and often entail considerable distortion of the ideas of the supposed protagonists. It is also increasingly accepted in the same circles that a more adequate account has to give a significant place to the impact of that great cultural migration constituted by the flight of European and especially German-speaking scholars from Nazi persecution. More specifically, it has to take into account the impact of German-speaking scholars trained in law who themselves became political scientists with a greater or lesser specialism in International Relations, most notably, but not only, Hans Morgenthau and John Herz. Constructing this account is a complex matter because it is inevitably a series of overlapping accounts. It is, at one level, an account of the trajectories of the lives of individual scholars, trajectories which varied widely and were often determined by the contingencies and capriciousness of exile (Epstein 1991: 116–135). Some of these trajectories would end in assimilation while others would not. It is an account of the emergence of a discipline or subdiscipline, in this case one whose identity was contentious and even in doubt in the eyes of some (Guilhot 2011).

The Development of Post-War German Social and Political Thought

Summary The development of post-war German social sciences is marked by a series of disputes about the nature and implications of positivist methodology. Two of these are selected for consideration here; the ‘positivist dispute’ in German sociology associated with Adorno and Popper, and the more diffuse assault on positivism in the legal sciences. In both cases, self-avowed positivists were in fact hard to find but the debates were important polemical disputes about the past—notably the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich—and the future of the young Federal Republic. It is suggested below that these disputes should be seen in this context and that the polemical claim in both disputes that certain methodological standpoints mandated specific moral and political commitments is more questionable.

The Concept of the State in German Political Thought

It appeared that the troubled history of German political thought had finally come to an end in the consensus of the Bonn Republic about the de-thronement of the concept of the state. Debate in the Berlin Republic, however, suggests that the concept of the state has become contentious once again. In part this is fed by the resonance of past debates and connotations but it is also a product of new complexities in governance. The result is that the state may no longer be linked with the language of crisis. Instead it is associated with the language of paradox.