former officer in the Great War, invented the university discipline of International
Politics in 1919, he did so as a memorial to the students of the University of Wales,
Aberystwyth, who had fought and died in the war of 1914–18. Through a broad
education in world politics,^23 he hoped to promote international institutions, law
and peace. Present at the discipline’s creation, therefore, was a particular (practice-
oriented) relationship to reality.
The challenges (to understanding and explaining the world, and contributing to
better policy-making) are no less profound today than they were in 1919. In fact,
they are more complex and unpredictable, if not so likely to produce another world
war. Following the surprisingly non-violent endings of the Cold War, symbolised
by the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the much-trumpeted ‘New World Order’
proved to be hollow propaganda; instead, it was followed by the ‘low and dishonest
decade’ of the 1990s.^24 This wasted opportunity, potentially, presages much worse.
This century’s challenge for the discipline is a world-historical crisis I call ‘The
Great Reckoning’.^25 Human society globally is increasingly having to come face-
to-face with the costs of the ideas that made us. World politics, world economics
and world sociology are today the outcome of the interplay through history of the
ideas and structures of patriarchy, proselytising religions, the triumph of capitalism,
statism and nationalism, racism, and consumer democracy. These dominant ideas
and their structures today threaten humankind with a concatenation of dangerous
crises: unless living globally is radically reinvented, decades of disorder and violence
will follow. Already we are in a ‘New Twenty Years’ Crisis’^26 – a time of danger
and opportunity. Human society globally can learn to deal collectively with the
challenges of climate chaos, energy supply, regional security dilemmas, nuclear
proliferation, food and water shortages, population pressures, the continuing
destruction of the natural environment, and the rest, or we can allow the threatening
momentum of these risks to increase and interact, and become supercharged at some
point by feelings of ‘Blood and Belonging’.^27 An era of multi-level world conflict
will ensue, testing the age of statism and nationalism as surely as the Thirty Years
War tested the age of religion.
The challenge to human society as a whole is to change our collective
consciousness about living globally, as the first big step towards reordering human
institutions and behaviour. The challenge for students of a practice-oriented
discipline like International Politics under the shadow of The Great Reckoning is
to contribute to that consciousness-changing by understanding the ideas that made
us, and their usefulness (if any) while thinking beyond the limits of those ideas. For
sure, structural realism purports to tell us some ‘big and important things’, but are
they useful, and if they are, do they tell us enough? Several chapters below answer
in the negative, arguing for example that Waltzian realism does not tell us enough
about where we are in world history (see especially the chapters by Linklater, and
Buzan and Little), or that it does not give enough space to the ‘social logic’ of
anarchy (see especially the chapter by Clark). But criticism of Waltz’s work has not
been confined to those outside the family. Some structural realists, for example, have
argued that Waltz took parsimony too far, and offered various revisions: these
10 Realism redux