about those realities through offering feasible alternatives about living globally, and
in ways that work for greater portions of humanity.
- Reviving grand international theory for the ‘Great Reckoning’
As it was in the beginning, theorists of International Politics today face a Twenty
Years’ Crisis. Realism helps us understand part of why we are where we are,
historically, because it helped to constitute today’s world affairs by reifying, above
all, statism and its historical adjunct nationalism. These ideas have contributed to the
growth of the most powerful structures through recent centuries, shaping the
collective human consciousness about living globally. Humankind will not cope well
with its ‘Great Reckoning’, however, if political outlooks remain rooted in the
business-as-usual attitudes, structures, and behaviour that got us here in the first
place. Yesterday’s common sense can be tomorrow’s irrationality. ‘Blood and
Belonging’ still simmer in the pots of statism and nationalism, and can easily boil
over in crises; they are certainly not calculated to lead common humanity through
our uncommon collective challenges this century. If this proves to be the case, then
the middle decades of this century are set to be a potential turning point in world
history comparable to the Thirty Years’ War. That period of widespread conflict
and disorder tested the era of religious war to the limit, and led to a different
conception of living globally. The dynamics of statism and nationalism face a similar
test. How the ‘Great Reckoning’ plays out, and its aftermath, will depend greatly
on how the most powerful agents in world politics collectively think about living
globally over the next few decades.
Confronted by the existential reality of living on a smaller and more crowded
planet at a time of old problems and new challenges, with the uneven distribution
of basics such as food, energy and water, students of International Politics have a
special responsibility in contributing to how the world thinks about the world. This
calls for big-picture thinking and grand theorising: an era of question marks about
our planetary future requires more than reductionism, micro-narratives, cultural
relativism, anti-metanarrative metanarratives, ethnocentric worldviews, middle-
range theorising, and the rest. We need a global brainstorm to think how the levels
and pieces of world politics fit together, re-exploring under new conditions the
relationships between units and systems, agents and structures, parsimony and
holism, reductionism and systemic approaches, material and ideational considera-
tions, international and global systems, and national and world histories.
I offer five brief pointers towards this re-exploration. First: pluralism. We cannot
allow the discipline to be captured by one definition of ‘science’ or of ‘theory’: to
do so would be to concede the field to whatever becomes the champion; pluralism
helps sharpen everybody’s thinking. Second: history. As has been suggested in this
and the opening chapter, remaking world affairs begins by rethinking the ideas that
made us. Three: wholes and parts. While abstracting issues for scrutiny, we must
recognise that multiple causes operate at every level, with different causal weight.
And we can learn from Kant about the unity of opposites, when it comes to wholes
The inconvenient truth 339