... Global governance: an English school perspective. Dunne, Tim (2005). Global governance: an En... more ... Global governance: an English school perspective. Dunne, Tim (2005). Global governance: an English school perspective. In ... Publications. Author(s), Dunne, Tim. Title of chapter, Global governance: an English school perspective. ...
In this collection of essays, the contributors help us to make sense of these apparent contradict... more In this collection of essays, the contributors help us to make sense of these apparent contradictions through challenging the way in which the debate about liberalism has been conducted within the IR academy as well as in policy circles. Against the theoreticians, we argue that liberalism has suffered from being too closely tied to the quest for scientific authenticity, resulting in a theoretical perspective with little or no commitment to political values and political vision. By turning the classical liberalism of Kant, Paine, and Mill, into the neoliberalism of Moravcsik, Keohane, and Simmons, liberalism has been shorn of its critical and normative potential. Going beyond the current political debate, we argue that liberalism cannot be understood if its focus is solely directed at the United States and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To be sure, liberal order version 2.0 may be seen as synonymous with American power and American policy, and liberal internationalism is t...
... The International Journal of Human Rights, Vol.6, No.2 (Summer 2002) pp.93 102 PUBLISHED BY .... more ... The International Journal of Human Rights, Vol.6, No.2 (Summer 2002) pp.93 102 PUBLISHED BY .RANK CASS, LONDON Tim Dunne, University of Wales, Aberystwyth ... Nothing signified the triumph of liberalism on a global scale more than the discourse of human rights. ...
The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 2001
International society refers to the dominant diplomatic and normative discourse in the practice o... more International society refers to the dominant diplomatic and normative discourse in the practice of world politics. At a minimum, its rules and institutions regulate interactions by sovereign communities, prescribing permissible forms of behaviour. There is also a deeper sense of society in which members share values about the ‘ends' that communities ought to try and achieve. While this diplomatic and normative discourse is thought to have existed for several centuries, it is only in the last four decades or so that it has become a central concept in academic International Relations. The article begins by re-stating the research agenda for the study of international society as conceived of by writers belonging to the classical English School. It then considers in detail the way in which recent publications have sought to carry these debates forward. Three clusters of issues are dealt with here: system and society; rules and institutions; and the issue of normative change. The art...
It is fitting that Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis should be the point of departure for the first... more It is fitting that Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis should be the point of departure for the first Special Issue of the Review of International Studies. One of the earliest appraisals of Carr's contribution to international relations appeared in the very first issue of the journal of the British International Studies Association. 1 More recently, by publishing the annual E.H.Carr memorial lecture, the Review has been partly responsible for the Carr revival that has gathered momentum. 2 Although these lectures have rarely had Carr's general work or The Twenty Years' Crisis as their central theme, they have consistently shown how Carr's thought can be applied to the various sub-fields of international studies. In this first Special Issue we have likewise used Carr's work as the point of departure in this survey of both subject and subject-matter spanning the 80 years since the subject was placed in an academic setting. Many of the arguments and dilemmas in Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis are relevant to the theory and practice of international politics today. One obvious parallel is that Carr wrote the book against the backdrop of a transition in the organisation and conduct of world politics. In his view, the crisis at the end of the 1930s was brought about by a collapse in the whole edifice of liberal-idealist thinking which had permeated theory and practice in the inter-war period. 3 Sixty years on, another sense of crisis pervades the discipline. The Cold War is over yet there is no consensus on what has replaced it. The best we can do it seems is to define our 'post'-Cold War era only in terms of what it is not. 4 And like Carr's
Millennium - Journal of International Studies, 2008
369 1959 until the early 1980s. It is best known for a collection of essays, Diplomatic Investiga... more 369 1959 until the early 1980s. It is best known for a collection of essays, Diplomatic Investigations (1966), and for its place in the history of the 'English school'of international relations. The Committee has been examined before–by Tim Dunne, in his Inventing International Society (1998)–but in this book Professor Vigezzi, a historian at the University of Milan, provides a rather different treatment of its work. This volume has its origins in a lengthy introductory essay written for the Italian edition of Bull and Watson's The ...
Millennium - Journal of International Studies, 2005
... Tim Dunne ... change as in Adler and Barnett's study of security communities.7 (2) Sho... more ... Tim Dunne ... change as in Adler and Barnett's study of security communities.7 (2) Should the English School, as Dunne advocates, retain ... in the interpretive direction and whether English School scholarship can pick and choose from positivism, scientific realism, and pragmatism ...
This article develops a critical conception of security by showing the limits of traditional real... more This article develops a critical conception of security by showing the limits of traditional realist and pluralist discourses. It does this by exploring the deficiencies of realist and pluralist approaches when it comes to thinking about the promotion of human rights. Realism leads to moral indifference and a myopic approach to security and pluralism is complacent about how the rules and norms of international society exclude humanitarian concerns. The article argues for a critical approach to security that places human rights at the centre of theory and praxis, reflecting the fundamental indivisibility of security and human rights. The article concludes by reflecting on the implications for agency of this position.
The emerging pattern of crisis and war triggered by the terror attacks on New York and Washington... more The emerging pattern of crisis and war triggered by the terror attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001 and sustained through successive wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, provides a new context within which we must re-evaluate the English School claim that international society is a key element in the reality of world politics. From today's perspective, two dilemmas are undermining international society. There is the old fear that international order - meaning the security of the actors and the stability of the system - cannot be sustained without the members of international society participating in the working of common institutions. And there is the new fear that US preponderance is such that even prudential considerations are not sufficient to compel it to act in ways that support international order. Running these arguments together, we are forced to address the question, `How far can international society be maintained alongside a hierarchical system?'
... 'The Rules of the Game are Changing': Fundamental Human Rights in Crisis After 9/11... more ... 'The Rules of the Game are Changing': Fundamental Human Rights in Crisis After 9/11 1. TimDunne a. ... E-mail: [email protected]. ... The explanatory logic of neo-liberalism cannot encapsulate why rational egoists should cooperate out of concern for another country's citizens. ...
110-story, stainless steel towers (which tourists simply call "The Twin Towers") are flanked by a... more 110-story, stainless steel towers (which tourists simply call "The Twin Towers") are flanked by a plaza larger than Piazza San Marco in Venice. When completed, these solid, banal monoliths came to overshadow Lower Manhattan's cluster of filigreed towers, which had previously been the romantic evocation that symbolized the very concept of "skyline". Ten million square feet of office space are offered here: 7 times the area of the Empire State Building, 4 times that of the Pan Am. The public agency that built them (Port Authority of New York and New Jersey) ran amok with both money and aesthetics…(1) I. Introduction [1] This unexceptional description from a guide book sparks our memory as keenly as endless reruns of planes, fireballs and apocalyptic dust clouds chasing office workers. The references to icons of Renaissance Europe and American modernity remind us of the magnitude, the ambition, of what once was. After the fact, the scale of the structures is fathomable only in statistical form. Likewise the human suffering inflicted. Just as '1 and 2 World Trade Center' provided visual orientation points for New Yorkers, the date of their demise gives us a temporal point of reference we could all have done well without. Standing a mere twelve months from those events, the sense of uncertainty and incomprehension remains great. Questions abound. Were the attacks the first in a series marking the commencement of a 'clash of civilisations'? What is the substance of this conflict and its resolution? What are the implications of American hegemony? Most pertinently for present purposes, what is the role of law in this conflict? [2] In the pages of this highly readable volume, Ken Booth and Tim Dunne of the University of Wales Aberystwyth, have assembled a first class collection of responses to such questions. With remarkable speed (the book was published in June 2002), the editors have managed to garner contributions from a genuinely stellar group of scholars of whom Francis Fukuyama, Noam Chomsky, Michael Byers and Robert Keohane are merely the best known. The differences in understanding the post-9/11 world are often sharp. These cleavages sometimes arise from geographical viewpoints. Occasionally divergences appear to originate in disciplinary concerns (international relations scholars feature most prominently, although political economists, international lawyers, political and social theorists are also present). They are sometimes straightforwardly located in political differences. Had this book arisen from an academic conference the personal and intellectual clashes would have been absorbing. What price Fukuyama and Chomsky in the same room, or An-Na'im and Waltz? Precisely because of these internal frictions, the reader is presented with a variety of accounts, analyses and conclusions that cover a broad spectrum of positions in an engaging manner. [3] No short review can do full justice to a collection with thirty-one chapters. Instead, I focus on a small number of themes that feature prominently and are of particular relevance to lawyers. Given the diversity of materials, this means that much fascinating material goes unsurveyed. Nonetheless, by training our attention on two sets of oppositions (cultural convergence versus divergence, and new realism in international relations theory versus the idealism on public international and human rights lawyers), I seek to demonstrate that this intelligently heterogeneous collection makes a significant, timeous, contribution to our comprehension of the 'new' global order. II. The Convergence Thesis v. Divergence [4] Practically everyone who makes their living by writing has dashed off a piece on 9/11. For many this has necessitated the eating of humble pie and the reworking of previous frameworks. For others, such as Sam Huntington, there has been a gleeful dusting down of previously embattled theses.(2) Francis Fukuyama and his 'End of History' thesis, intuitively belong to the first group but, he argues here, better fits with the latter.(3) Fukuyama's (in)famous claim of now a decade's vintage is that the evolution of societal governance has reached its apotheosis in the form of modern liberal democracy combined with market capitalism, and that this will henceforth be the dominant form of government. Written in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's implosion, the triumph of such values seemed plausible, if not mildly bleak. But post-9/11 (and the prior sustained backlash against 'globalisation'), Fukuyama seems less controversial than irrelevant. Not so, says he. He puts his core beliefs as proudly as before: Democracy, individual rights, the rule of law, and prosperity based on economic freedom represent universal aspirations that will ultimately be shared by people all over the world, if given the opportunity. (p. 28) [5] Thus, our current conflict is not a Huntingtonian 'clash of civilisations', for that rubric is both over-and under-inclusive. There is a clash not between 'Islamic culture' and 'Western culture', but rather of 'Islamo-Fascism' with 'Modernity'. The nub of the conflict is modernity's key project of separating church/religion and state. Fukuyama argues that this separation is a necessary feature of a peaceful community of societies ("if politics is based on something like religion, there will never be any civil peace because people cannot agree on fundamental religious values" (p. 30)), a desirable one, and an inevitable one. Such optimism is based on his view that, There is an underlying historical mechanism that encourages a long-term convergence across cultural boundaries, first and most powerfully in economics, then in the realm of politics and finally (and most distinctly) in culture. (p.
It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.' 1 T... more It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.' 1 These words, spoken by Woodrow Wilson in 1913, would have sounded just as appropriate if uttered by Tony Blair prior to his taking office in 1997. During his brief period as leader of the Labour opposition, Blair made no speech on British foreign and defence policy. His colleague Peter Mandelson was once moved to scribble 'won't TB fight wars?' on a redraft of a Labour Party constitutional document that made no mention of defence. 2 After seven years in office, the British Prime Minister has deployed UK troops on enforcement actions on as many occasions, 3 more than any leader in modern political history. As we approach the end of Labour's second term in office, it does indeed seem that Blair's record will in large measure be judged by how he has dealt 'chiefly with foreign affairs'. Of all 'Blair's wars', the decision to join the US mission to disarm Iraq by force will have the most lasting impact. It is not too far-fetched to suggest that it may become a defining moment in UK foreign policy, alongside Munich in 1938 and Suez in 1956. What motivated the Prime Minister to send 46,000 UK troops to fight a war which lacked explicit UN Security Council authorization, not to mention being opposed by 139 MPs in his own party and a significant * I would like to thank a number of colleagues who assisted me in the writing of the article. Lawrence Freedman and John Kampfner provided important insights that could not be gleaned from published sources. Christopher Hill prompted me to think about the European Security Strategy, as did John Keane. In terms of providing helpful feedback on earlier drafts, I am deeply thankful to Theo Farrell, Caroline Kennedy-Pipe, Rhiannon Vickers, Colin Wight, Paul Williams and Nick Wheeler. The lastnamed has been a longstanding partner in writing about British foreign policy, and ideas from previously published co-authored work appear in this article, albeit in altered form. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the admirable role the editor of this journal continues to play in promoting a dialogue between academicians and those involved more directly in the policy process.
We would also like to thank the editor and the anonymous referees for their comments. An early ve... more We would also like to thank the editor and the anonymous referees for their comments. An early version of this article was presented to the Aberystwyth Humanitarian Forum. The Rt Hon. Robin Cook MP (hereafter Robin Cook), 'British foreign policy', May . Unless stated otherwise, all references to speeches/interviews by the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister, the Rt Hon. Tony Blair MP (hereafter Tony Blair), have been down-loaded from the FCO website available at http://www.fco.gov.uk. The headline in the Daily Telegraph the following morning gives a flavour of the 'spin' put on the ethical dimension by the media: 'Cook to lead the Foreign Office on moral crusade' (Electronic Telegraph, May ). Cook, 'British foreign policy'. Cook's phrase makes a nice contrast with R. J. Vincent's reflection that human rights 'taken in a foreign minister's baggage on a world tour,. .. might, as I once heard one of them say, spoil the whole trip': R. J. Vincent, Human rights in international relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press ), p. .
With a view to providing contextual background for the Special Issue, this opening article analys... more With a view to providing contextual background for the Special Issue, this opening article analyses several dimensions of ‘The end of International Relations theory?’ It opens with a consideration of the status of different types of theory. Thereafter, we look at the proliferation of theories that has taken place since the emergence of the third/fourth debate. The coexistence and competition between an ever-greater number of theories begs the question: what kind of theoretical pluralism should IR scholars embrace? We offer a particular account of theoretical engagement that is preferable to the alternatives currently being practised: integrative pluralism. The article ends on a cautiously optimistic note: given the disciplinary competition that now exists in relation to explaining and understanding global social forces, International Relations may find resilience because it has become theory-led, theory-literate and theory-concerned.
... Global governance: an English school perspective. Dunne, Tim (2005). Global governance: an En... more ... Global governance: an English school perspective. Dunne, Tim (2005). Global governance: an English school perspective. In ... Publications. Author(s), Dunne, Tim. Title of chapter, Global governance: an English school perspective. ...
In this collection of essays, the contributors help us to make sense of these apparent contradict... more In this collection of essays, the contributors help us to make sense of these apparent contradictions through challenging the way in which the debate about liberalism has been conducted within the IR academy as well as in policy circles. Against the theoreticians, we argue that liberalism has suffered from being too closely tied to the quest for scientific authenticity, resulting in a theoretical perspective with little or no commitment to political values and political vision. By turning the classical liberalism of Kant, Paine, and Mill, into the neoliberalism of Moravcsik, Keohane, and Simmons, liberalism has been shorn of its critical and normative potential. Going beyond the current political debate, we argue that liberalism cannot be understood if its focus is solely directed at the United States and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To be sure, liberal order version 2.0 may be seen as synonymous with American power and American policy, and liberal internationalism is t...
... The International Journal of Human Rights, Vol.6, No.2 (Summer 2002) pp.93 102 PUBLISHED BY .... more ... The International Journal of Human Rights, Vol.6, No.2 (Summer 2002) pp.93 102 PUBLISHED BY .RANK CASS, LONDON Tim Dunne, University of Wales, Aberystwyth ... Nothing signified the triumph of liberalism on a global scale more than the discourse of human rights. ...
The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 2001
International society refers to the dominant diplomatic and normative discourse in the practice o... more International society refers to the dominant diplomatic and normative discourse in the practice of world politics. At a minimum, its rules and institutions regulate interactions by sovereign communities, prescribing permissible forms of behaviour. There is also a deeper sense of society in which members share values about the ‘ends' that communities ought to try and achieve. While this diplomatic and normative discourse is thought to have existed for several centuries, it is only in the last four decades or so that it has become a central concept in academic International Relations. The article begins by re-stating the research agenda for the study of international society as conceived of by writers belonging to the classical English School. It then considers in detail the way in which recent publications have sought to carry these debates forward. Three clusters of issues are dealt with here: system and society; rules and institutions; and the issue of normative change. The art...
It is fitting that Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis should be the point of departure for the first... more It is fitting that Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis should be the point of departure for the first Special Issue of the Review of International Studies. One of the earliest appraisals of Carr's contribution to international relations appeared in the very first issue of the journal of the British International Studies Association. 1 More recently, by publishing the annual E.H.Carr memorial lecture, the Review has been partly responsible for the Carr revival that has gathered momentum. 2 Although these lectures have rarely had Carr's general work or The Twenty Years' Crisis as their central theme, they have consistently shown how Carr's thought can be applied to the various sub-fields of international studies. In this first Special Issue we have likewise used Carr's work as the point of departure in this survey of both subject and subject-matter spanning the 80 years since the subject was placed in an academic setting. Many of the arguments and dilemmas in Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis are relevant to the theory and practice of international politics today. One obvious parallel is that Carr wrote the book against the backdrop of a transition in the organisation and conduct of world politics. In his view, the crisis at the end of the 1930s was brought about by a collapse in the whole edifice of liberal-idealist thinking which had permeated theory and practice in the inter-war period. 3 Sixty years on, another sense of crisis pervades the discipline. The Cold War is over yet there is no consensus on what has replaced it. The best we can do it seems is to define our 'post'-Cold War era only in terms of what it is not. 4 And like Carr's
Millennium - Journal of International Studies, 2008
369 1959 until the early 1980s. It is best known for a collection of essays, Diplomatic Investiga... more 369 1959 until the early 1980s. It is best known for a collection of essays, Diplomatic Investigations (1966), and for its place in the history of the 'English school'of international relations. The Committee has been examined before–by Tim Dunne, in his Inventing International Society (1998)–but in this book Professor Vigezzi, a historian at the University of Milan, provides a rather different treatment of its work. This volume has its origins in a lengthy introductory essay written for the Italian edition of Bull and Watson's The ...
Millennium - Journal of International Studies, 2005
... Tim Dunne ... change as in Adler and Barnett's study of security communities.7 (2) Sho... more ... Tim Dunne ... change as in Adler and Barnett's study of security communities.7 (2) Should the English School, as Dunne advocates, retain ... in the interpretive direction and whether English School scholarship can pick and choose from positivism, scientific realism, and pragmatism ...
This article develops a critical conception of security by showing the limits of traditional real... more This article develops a critical conception of security by showing the limits of traditional realist and pluralist discourses. It does this by exploring the deficiencies of realist and pluralist approaches when it comes to thinking about the promotion of human rights. Realism leads to moral indifference and a myopic approach to security and pluralism is complacent about how the rules and norms of international society exclude humanitarian concerns. The article argues for a critical approach to security that places human rights at the centre of theory and praxis, reflecting the fundamental indivisibility of security and human rights. The article concludes by reflecting on the implications for agency of this position.
The emerging pattern of crisis and war triggered by the terror attacks on New York and Washington... more The emerging pattern of crisis and war triggered by the terror attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001 and sustained through successive wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, provides a new context within which we must re-evaluate the English School claim that international society is a key element in the reality of world politics. From today's perspective, two dilemmas are undermining international society. There is the old fear that international order - meaning the security of the actors and the stability of the system - cannot be sustained without the members of international society participating in the working of common institutions. And there is the new fear that US preponderance is such that even prudential considerations are not sufficient to compel it to act in ways that support international order. Running these arguments together, we are forced to address the question, `How far can international society be maintained alongside a hierarchical system?'
... 'The Rules of the Game are Changing': Fundamental Human Rights in Crisis After 9/11... more ... 'The Rules of the Game are Changing': Fundamental Human Rights in Crisis After 9/11 1. TimDunne a. ... E-mail: [email protected]. ... The explanatory logic of neo-liberalism cannot encapsulate why rational egoists should cooperate out of concern for another country's citizens. ...
110-story, stainless steel towers (which tourists simply call "The Twin Towers") are flanked by a... more 110-story, stainless steel towers (which tourists simply call "The Twin Towers") are flanked by a plaza larger than Piazza San Marco in Venice. When completed, these solid, banal monoliths came to overshadow Lower Manhattan's cluster of filigreed towers, which had previously been the romantic evocation that symbolized the very concept of "skyline". Ten million square feet of office space are offered here: 7 times the area of the Empire State Building, 4 times that of the Pan Am. The public agency that built them (Port Authority of New York and New Jersey) ran amok with both money and aesthetics…(1) I. Introduction [1] This unexceptional description from a guide book sparks our memory as keenly as endless reruns of planes, fireballs and apocalyptic dust clouds chasing office workers. The references to icons of Renaissance Europe and American modernity remind us of the magnitude, the ambition, of what once was. After the fact, the scale of the structures is fathomable only in statistical form. Likewise the human suffering inflicted. Just as '1 and 2 World Trade Center' provided visual orientation points for New Yorkers, the date of their demise gives us a temporal point of reference we could all have done well without. Standing a mere twelve months from those events, the sense of uncertainty and incomprehension remains great. Questions abound. Were the attacks the first in a series marking the commencement of a 'clash of civilisations'? What is the substance of this conflict and its resolution? What are the implications of American hegemony? Most pertinently for present purposes, what is the role of law in this conflict? [2] In the pages of this highly readable volume, Ken Booth and Tim Dunne of the University of Wales Aberystwyth, have assembled a first class collection of responses to such questions. With remarkable speed (the book was published in June 2002), the editors have managed to garner contributions from a genuinely stellar group of scholars of whom Francis Fukuyama, Noam Chomsky, Michael Byers and Robert Keohane are merely the best known. The differences in understanding the post-9/11 world are often sharp. These cleavages sometimes arise from geographical viewpoints. Occasionally divergences appear to originate in disciplinary concerns (international relations scholars feature most prominently, although political economists, international lawyers, political and social theorists are also present). They are sometimes straightforwardly located in political differences. Had this book arisen from an academic conference the personal and intellectual clashes would have been absorbing. What price Fukuyama and Chomsky in the same room, or An-Na'im and Waltz? Precisely because of these internal frictions, the reader is presented with a variety of accounts, analyses and conclusions that cover a broad spectrum of positions in an engaging manner. [3] No short review can do full justice to a collection with thirty-one chapters. Instead, I focus on a small number of themes that feature prominently and are of particular relevance to lawyers. Given the diversity of materials, this means that much fascinating material goes unsurveyed. Nonetheless, by training our attention on two sets of oppositions (cultural convergence versus divergence, and new realism in international relations theory versus the idealism on public international and human rights lawyers), I seek to demonstrate that this intelligently heterogeneous collection makes a significant, timeous, contribution to our comprehension of the 'new' global order. II. The Convergence Thesis v. Divergence [4] Practically everyone who makes their living by writing has dashed off a piece on 9/11. For many this has necessitated the eating of humble pie and the reworking of previous frameworks. For others, such as Sam Huntington, there has been a gleeful dusting down of previously embattled theses.(2) Francis Fukuyama and his 'End of History' thesis, intuitively belong to the first group but, he argues here, better fits with the latter.(3) Fukuyama's (in)famous claim of now a decade's vintage is that the evolution of societal governance has reached its apotheosis in the form of modern liberal democracy combined with market capitalism, and that this will henceforth be the dominant form of government. Written in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's implosion, the triumph of such values seemed plausible, if not mildly bleak. But post-9/11 (and the prior sustained backlash against 'globalisation'), Fukuyama seems less controversial than irrelevant. Not so, says he. He puts his core beliefs as proudly as before: Democracy, individual rights, the rule of law, and prosperity based on economic freedom represent universal aspirations that will ultimately be shared by people all over the world, if given the opportunity. (p. 28) [5] Thus, our current conflict is not a Huntingtonian 'clash of civilisations', for that rubric is both over-and under-inclusive. There is a clash not between 'Islamic culture' and 'Western culture', but rather of 'Islamo-Fascism' with 'Modernity'. The nub of the conflict is modernity's key project of separating church/religion and state. Fukuyama argues that this separation is a necessary feature of a peaceful community of societies ("if politics is based on something like religion, there will never be any civil peace because people cannot agree on fundamental religious values" (p. 30)), a desirable one, and an inevitable one. Such optimism is based on his view that, There is an underlying historical mechanism that encourages a long-term convergence across cultural boundaries, first and most powerfully in economics, then in the realm of politics and finally (and most distinctly) in culture. (p.
It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.' 1 T... more It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.' 1 These words, spoken by Woodrow Wilson in 1913, would have sounded just as appropriate if uttered by Tony Blair prior to his taking office in 1997. During his brief period as leader of the Labour opposition, Blair made no speech on British foreign and defence policy. His colleague Peter Mandelson was once moved to scribble 'won't TB fight wars?' on a redraft of a Labour Party constitutional document that made no mention of defence. 2 After seven years in office, the British Prime Minister has deployed UK troops on enforcement actions on as many occasions, 3 more than any leader in modern political history. As we approach the end of Labour's second term in office, it does indeed seem that Blair's record will in large measure be judged by how he has dealt 'chiefly with foreign affairs'. Of all 'Blair's wars', the decision to join the US mission to disarm Iraq by force will have the most lasting impact. It is not too far-fetched to suggest that it may become a defining moment in UK foreign policy, alongside Munich in 1938 and Suez in 1956. What motivated the Prime Minister to send 46,000 UK troops to fight a war which lacked explicit UN Security Council authorization, not to mention being opposed by 139 MPs in his own party and a significant * I would like to thank a number of colleagues who assisted me in the writing of the article. Lawrence Freedman and John Kampfner provided important insights that could not be gleaned from published sources. Christopher Hill prompted me to think about the European Security Strategy, as did John Keane. In terms of providing helpful feedback on earlier drafts, I am deeply thankful to Theo Farrell, Caroline Kennedy-Pipe, Rhiannon Vickers, Colin Wight, Paul Williams and Nick Wheeler. The lastnamed has been a longstanding partner in writing about British foreign policy, and ideas from previously published co-authored work appear in this article, albeit in altered form. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the admirable role the editor of this journal continues to play in promoting a dialogue between academicians and those involved more directly in the policy process.
We would also like to thank the editor and the anonymous referees for their comments. An early ve... more We would also like to thank the editor and the anonymous referees for their comments. An early version of this article was presented to the Aberystwyth Humanitarian Forum. The Rt Hon. Robin Cook MP (hereafter Robin Cook), 'British foreign policy', May . Unless stated otherwise, all references to speeches/interviews by the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister, the Rt Hon. Tony Blair MP (hereafter Tony Blair), have been down-loaded from the FCO website available at http://www.fco.gov.uk. The headline in the Daily Telegraph the following morning gives a flavour of the 'spin' put on the ethical dimension by the media: 'Cook to lead the Foreign Office on moral crusade' (Electronic Telegraph, May ). Cook, 'British foreign policy'. Cook's phrase makes a nice contrast with R. J. Vincent's reflection that human rights 'taken in a foreign minister's baggage on a world tour,. .. might, as I once heard one of them say, spoil the whole trip': R. J. Vincent, Human rights in international relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press ), p. .
With a view to providing contextual background for the Special Issue, this opening article analys... more With a view to providing contextual background for the Special Issue, this opening article analyses several dimensions of ‘The end of International Relations theory?’ It opens with a consideration of the status of different types of theory. Thereafter, we look at the proliferation of theories that has taken place since the emergence of the third/fourth debate. The coexistence and competition between an ever-greater number of theories begs the question: what kind of theoretical pluralism should IR scholars embrace? We offer a particular account of theoretical engagement that is preferable to the alternatives currently being practised: integrative pluralism. The article ends on a cautiously optimistic note: given the disciplinary competition that now exists in relation to explaining and understanding global social forces, International Relations may find resilience because it has become theory-led, theory-literate and theory-concerned.
Uploads
Papers by Tim Dunne