Stanley Hoffmann

International Relations: The Long Road to Theory

It has become customary to begin a discussion of the nature and present state of the discipline of international relations with a number of complaints. This article will not abandon the custom; indeed, its purpose is, in the first place, to state the conviction that many of the problems we face in our field can be solved only by far more systematic theoretical work than has been done in the past—a conviction shared by most writers. Secondly, however, I will try to show that recent approaches to a general theory of international relations are unsatisfactory, because each one is, in its own fashion, a short cut to knowledge—sometimes even a short cut to a destination that is anything but knowledge.

International Systems and International Law

The purpose of this essay is twofold. First, it proposes to undertake, in introductory form, one of the many tasks a historical sociology of international relations could perform: the comparative study of one of those relations which appear in almost any international system, i.e., international law. Secondly, this essay will try to present the rudimentary outlines of a theory of international law which might be called sociological or functional. International law is one of the aspects of international politics which reflect most sharply the essential differences between domestic and world affairs. Many traditional distinctions tend to disappear, owing to an “international civil war” which projects what are primarily domestic institutions (such as parliaments and pressure groups) into world politics, and injects world-wide ideological clashes into domestic affairs. International law, like its Siamese twin and enemy, war, remains a crystallization of all that keeps world politics sui generis . If theory is to be primarily concerned with the distinctive features of systems rather than wim the search for regularities, international law becomes a most useful approach to international politics.

International Organization and the International System

Specialists in the field of international organization have noted with some alarm a decline of interest among students and foundations in the study of the United Nations system. There has been a shift toward the study of regionalism and the theory of integration. The former shift reflects one reality of postwar world politics—the division of a huge and heterogeneous international system into subsystems in which patterns of cooperation and ways of controlling conflicts are either more intense or less elusive than in the global system. The interest in integration reflects both the persistence and the transformation of the kind of idealism that originally pervaded, guided, and at times distorted the study of international organization. We have come to understand that integration, in the sense of a process that devalues sovereignty, gradually brings about the demise of the nation-state, and leads to the emergence of new foci of loyalty and authority, is only one, and by no means the most important, of the many functions performed by global international organizations. This has led only in part to a more sober and searching assessment of these functions. It has resulted primarily in a displacement of interest toward those geographically more restricted institutions (like the European Communities) whose main task seems to be to promote integration.

Discord in Community: The North Atlantic Area as a Partial International System

There are many ways in which one could study what is frequently called the Atlantic Community. First, one could trace the history of proposals made in order to strengthen the bond between the United States and nations situated on the other side of the Atlantic. Such suggestions, whether they aimed at federal union or at a close alliance, came either from Britain or from the United States, were always centered on the “British-American connection,†and aimed at making the two great English-speaking peoples the magnet that would attract lesser breeds, the force whose strength and virtues would preserve law, order, and peace in the world. Although such blue-prints rarely left visible traces on official policy in the United States, they are significant, both because British policy since the war often appeared inspired by the hope, or the nostalgia, for a world of this hue, and because overtones of these earlier appeals may have crept into recent American tactics in support of Britains application to the Common Market.

Notes on the Elusiveness of Modern Power

Almost everyone agrees with Raymond Aron that power is not quantifiable and that the concept of power cannot play, in the study of international affairs, the role of the single yardstick which money plays in economics. And yet, since we are all convinced that politics in general, world politics in particular, entails a struggle for power, since many of us have been trained to stress the similarities between the behaviour of cities described by Thucydides and the conduct of states in this century, we tend to see in power, for all the diversity of its components and for all the complexity of its uses, a reasonably stable phenomenon, whose ingredients are not subject to incessant changes and whose exercise follows a limited and well-known number of imperatives or constraints.

The Role of International Organization: Limits and Possibilities

No field of study is more slippery than international relations. The student of government has a clear frame of reference: the state within which occur the developments which he examines. The student of international relations, unhappily, oscillates between the assumption of a world community which does not exist, except as an ideal, and the various units whose decisions and connections form the pattern of world politics—mainly, the nation-states. International organizations therefore tend to be considered either as the first institutions of a world in search of its constitution or as instruments of foreign policies. The scholar who follows the first approach usually blames, correctly enough, the nation-states for the failures of the organization; but he rarely indicates the means which could be used to bring the realities of world society into line with his ideal. The scholar who takes the second approach stresses, accurately enough, how limited the autonomy of international organizations has been and how little they have contributed to the achievement of their objectives; but because he does not discuss his fundamental assumption—the permanence of the nation-states driving role in world politics—he reaches somewhat too easily the conclusion that the only prospect in international affairs is more of the same.

Raymond Aron and the Theory of International Relations

The scope of Raymond Arons work has always caused his commentators and his disciples to despair. Many unpublished works will probably be released in the near future. However, Arons death makes it possible to study in depth, at last, his scientific contribution and to separate the two activities which he led jointly and never fully distinguished: journalism, or commentaries of current events which he thought he had the duty to clarify and to interpret, and theoretical writings, the works of a philosopher of history who was also a sociologist of contemporary societies and a critic of the social and the political thought of most great writers in history. The only purpose of this essay is to sum up Raymond Arons scientific contribution to the theory of International Relations. I will therefore leave aside books, or parts of books, that deal primarily with current affairs, nor will I examine that part of his work which takes the form of historical narrative, for instance the major parts of The Imperial Republic. Nor will I discuss the first volume of Clausewitz, which belongs in the realm of the criticism of ideas, nor repeat what I wrote 20 years ago in my detailed account of Peace and War, shortly after the publication of this master work in France (Hoffmann, 1965). However, at the end of this essay, I discuss a posthumous publication in which he re-examines his own main concepts and contributions. Nobody who reads again Raymond Arons enormous work can fail to be struck by its originality. He was original by comparison with earlier French writers. Until the early 1 950s foreign policy and the relations among states had been the bailiwick of historians, of lawyers and to a lesser extent of economists. Raymond Aron is the man who, in France, almost single-handedly created an autonomous discipline of international relations at the crossroads of history, law, and economics, but also of political science and sociology. This discipline, as he conceived it, consisted in a coherent and rigorous system of questions aimed at making intelligible the constant rules and the changing forms of a specific and original type of social action: the behavior on the world scene of the agents of the units in contest, i.e. diplomats and soldiers. This is what he called diplomatico-strategic behavior. The laws and forms of this behavior were already being studied during those same years by important colleagues of Aron in the United States. In all his books and articles he never ceased dialoguing with his American counterparts, and particularly with Hans Morgenthau, the German emigre thinker whose influence both on academics and on practitioners has been so enormous in the United States. He also exchanged ideas with Henry Kissinger, who was both an academic and a practitioner. But even if one compares him with American specialists ofintemational relations, Aron seems strikingly original.

De Gaulle, Europe, and the Atlantic Alliance

SINCE January I963, General de Gaulles foreign policy has been subject to many contradictory or erroneous interpretations in the United States. It is necessary, therefore, to indicate its foundations, its main lines, some of the expectations and techniques peculiar to the General, and some of the obstacles it encounters. I will concentrate here on his views and policies toward Frances Atlantic and European partners.

Rousseau on War and Peace

For many reasons Rousseaus writings on international relations should interest students both of Rousseau and of world politics. The former have been celebrating the 200th anniversary of Emile and of The Social Contract . Those works, and the Discourse on Inequality have been analyzed incessantly and well. But Rousseaus ideas on war and peace, dispersed in various books and fragments, some of which are lost, have had only occasional attention, and some of that is of the hit-and-miss variety. Incomplete as his own treatment of the relations between states remains, the frequency and intensity of his references indicate the depth of his concern.

In Search of a Thread: The UN in the Congo Labyrinth

It is possible to distinguish roughly two periods in the history of the United Nations. During the first, which lasted until the middle nineteen fifties, the Western powers had a fairly secure majority in the General Assembly, and Cold War issues tended to dominate. The supreme test of that first phase was the Korean War. It showed both that the new International Organization refused to practice appeasement and that in a bipolar world whose main antagonists were engaged in an ideological struggle and endowed with nuclear weapons, UN intervention in the conflicts between the blocs would either expose the Organization to a demonstration of impotence or submit the world to the risks of escalation. A second phase began when membership of the UN increased, and the newly-independent nations became the biggest group within the Assembly. Now, as Dag Hammarskjold put it in his report to the fifteenth General Assembly, the main task in the area of peace and security shifted to “preventive diplomacy”—rushing to the scene of fires which break out “outside the sphere of bloc differences” before the arrival of the major contenders. The biggest challenge has been the Congo crisis. It has tested all the assumptions which had been made—by scholars as well as by the late Secretary-General—about the role of the UN, its possibilities and its limits, and about the relations between its principal organs and its main groups of members.