Introduction

pp. 3-29

in: Robbie Shilliam, German thought and international relations, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

Abstract

If there is one question that has haunted the discipline of International Relations (IR), it is whether humanity might become a universal political community or whether it will remain fractured by irreducible political differences. Posed more succinctly, the question is whether the value system of liberalism can be universalized, or whether, in fact, the illiberal reality of international politics systematically rules out such a project. This contestation between the liberal project and realist politics is documented in the founding myth of the IR discipline, the "first great debate". Here, a pessimistic and realistic worldview of how things "are" — namely a timeless anarchic world wherein national interest reigns supreme and selfish state interest consistently overrides the formation of a universal community — is purported to have defied an optimistic liberal worldview of how things "ought to be" — namely a project to institutionalize inter-dependency between nations so that the "good life" that individuals enjoy within the state can be universalized progressively across humanity.¹ In effect, the contestation between liberalism and realism has acted as a master framework in which the political-Cphilosophical content of international relations has been arranged into a series of dichotomies that furnish mutually opposing worldviews: ethics versus politics, the universal versus the particular, prescription versus analysis and change versus continuity (Walker 1993; Crawford 2000).