Back when I was in graduate school, Stanley Hoffmann wrote an essay in Daedalus
entitled "An American Social Science:
International Relations." Among other things, he argued that the field
of international relations was dominated by scholars from North America, and
especially the United States, in part due to the U.S. dominant global role in
post-World War II era. (Foreign-born scholars like Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, Peter Katzenstein, and the late Ernst Haas are exceptions that
support the rule, as each received most if not all of their advanced training
in the United States)
Has this situation changed? I ask this in part because lately I've been
thinking about faculty recruiting at Harvard's Kennedy School. We have a very
strong IR faculty -- my colleagues include Joe Nye, John Ruggie, Graham Allison,
Samantha Power (on leave), Ash Carter (ditto), Monica Toft, Nicholas Burns,
Meghan O'Sullivan, etc. -- but notice that this is a very U.S.-centric group,
even though over 40 percent of our students come from overseas. We are
fortunate to have a few colleagues from other countries (such as Karl Kaiser
and Jacqueline Bhabha), but the center of gravity is decidedly
Washington-focused. And we're no different in this regard than peer
institutions like Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School.
I was discussing this issue with a colleague in D.C. the other day, and he
argued that one reason was the simple fact that there were hardly any
world-class foreign policy intellectuals outside the Anglo-Saxon world. He
wasn't saying that there weren't smart people writing on world affairs in other
countries; his point was that there are very few people writing on foreign
affairs outside North America or Britain whose works become the object of global
attention and debate. In other words, there's no German, Japanese, Russian,
Chinese, or Indian equivalent of Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations,
Frank Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, or Joseph
Nye's various writings on "soft power."
I am definitely not suggesting that there are no good IR scholars outside
the Anglo-Saxon world; names like Ole Waever, Thomas Risse, Kanti Bajpai, Odd
Arne Westad, C. Raja Mohan, Nils Peter Gleditsch, Amitav Acharya, Helga
Haftendorn, and a number of others come easily to mind. And there's no shortage
of "public intellectuals" overseas -- think Kishore Mahbubbani, Tariq
Ramadan, Jurgen Habermas, Julia Kristeva, etc. -- and occasionally they get
broader attention. But I'm still struck by the relative dearth of "big
thinking" on global affairs from people outside the trans-Atlantic axis,
including continental Europe. And by "big thinking" I mean ideas and
arguments that immediately trigger debates that cross national boundaries, and
become key elements in a global conversation.
One might argue that this gap is all due to social networks; people outside
the Anglo-Saxon world don't have access to the same English-language journals
and book publishers that dominate global distribution systems. This problem
might be part of the explanation, and it is consistent with the observation
that plenty of foreign-born intellectuals migrate to the United States or
Britain and become prominent academics or commentators (e.g., Amartya Sen, Dani
Rodrik, Moises Naim, Peter Singer, Fareed Zakaria, and others). But that's
probably not the whole story, because plenty of foreign novelists and
historians working in their home countries don't seem to have much trouble
cracking the global market. And that suggests that journal editors and book
publishers in the United States and Britain would be delighted to publish
authors from nearly anywhere, if they thought they would sell.
My explanation for this anomaly has two parts. The first part is Hoffman's
original explanation: major powers inevitably spend a lot of time thinking
about global affairs and the rest of the world pays a lot of attention to what
thinkers in the major powers are saying because they worry about what the major
powers are going to do. Given that Britain was a major world power for
centuries and the United States has enjoyed a position of primacy for sixty
years or more, it's not surprising that Anglo-Saxon scholarship and commentary
on world affairs has cast such a wide shadow.
The second part has to do with the politics and sociology of the scholarly
community itself. Authoritarian societies like Russia or China or Saudi Arabia
are not going to be very good at social science, for the obvious reason that
these governments cannot permit wide-ranging thought and debate and must
constantly channel discourse in politically permissive directions. You might
have first-class mathematicians or doctors or engineers in such a society, but
you aren't going to generate many (any?) world-class social scientists. Furthermore,
the United States, Canada, and to some extent Britain, have highly competitive
academic markets: instead having a few big institutions and a few key
gatekeepers who can determine who gets appointed or promoted, the academic
world in the United States is much more wide-open. There are more than two
thousand four-year colleges and universities in the United States, which makes
it largely impossible to impose a single intellectual orthodoxy on any field of
study. This is even true in fields like economics, which has a larger core of
accepted principles but still features intense debates between monetarists,
Keynesians, neo-Keynesians, and assorted other tribes.
Put these two reasons together, and it's not surprising that the IR field is
still dominated by scholars from the Anglo-Saxon world (the United States, the
United Kingdom, and Canada).
That said, I do have this nagging doubt that maybe I've missed something or
someone. So nominations are now open: who are the most important writers on
foreign affairs operating outside the Anglo-Saxon world?
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