The United States and the

Discipline of International Relations:

HEGEMONIC COUNTRY,
HEGEMONIC DISCIPLINE

Steve Smith
University of Essex

This paper focuses on the relationship between the way the dis-
cipline of International Relations (IR) is studied in the U.S. and
U.S. foreign policy itself. Referring to the events of September
11 the paper argues that mainstream U.S. IR defines the appro-
priate methods of how to study international relations in such a
narrow way as to restrict understanding of other cultures and
rationalities. By relying on culturally and historically specific
distinctions between politics and economics, between private and
public, and between domestic and foreign policies, U.S. IR
explains a narrow range of world political events and does so
from a U.S. perspective. This makes it difficult to account for
many of the most pressing inequalities in the world, and thus
raises the question of the linkage between academia, the civil
society in which it is located, and the role that it should serve in
encouraging a wide debate on the motivations and views of those
outside the U.S.

his paper was presented at the ISAAnnual Convention in February 2001.1

T Its main argument, then as now, was the claim that the study of inter-
national relations was dominated by the U.S. academic community in

1
Two sections (The State of the Discipline and Still an American Social Sci-
ence?) are summarized from an earlier article of mine, The Discipline of Inter-
national Relations: Still an American Social Science? published in The British Journal
of Politics and International Relations 2, No. 3 (2000), pp. 374 402.

2002 International Studies Association

Published by Blackwell Publishing Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK.
68 Steve Smith

much the same way as the U.S. dominated world politics. I argued that the
danger was that this might lead to a narrow understanding of world politics and
a tendency to see the world through decidedly U.S. lenses. Since then we have
witnessed the horrific events of September 11, and these, along with the after-
math of a war against (some) terrorism, make me more convinced than ever that
the main arguments of this paper are both correct and of fundamental impor-
tance. There is a significant danger that a myopic discipline of international
relations (IR) might contribute to the continued development of a civil society
in the U.S. that thinks, reflects and analyzes complex international events through
a very narrow set of theoretical lenses, when what is needed is far more in the
way of understanding cultural diversity and difference. In this sense September
11 brings into sharp relief the linkages between theory and practice, and calls
on all of us to reflect on the ways in which our writings and teaching reinforce
or undermine the common sense of political discourse. My central claims in
this revised version are that the discipline of international relations can never
escape normative considerations; that research and teaching are unavoidably
normative in content; that the positivist insistence on a separation between facts
and values is unsustainable; and that the U.S. study of international relations,
by adopting an essentially rational-choice account of the relationship between
interests and identity, runs the risk of failing to understand other cultures and
identities and thereby become more and more a U.S. discipline far removed
from the agendas and concerns of other parts of the world.
What I want to do in this paper is to look at the discipline of international
relations and to ask specifically whether it is a genuinely international disci-
pline, or whether it reflects a specifically U.S. view of the world. Let me state
at the outset that I am not implying that U.S. academics are any more myopic
than other academics; nor do I mean to imply that there is some kind of mono-
lith called the U.S. international relations community, which sees the world in
the same way. I want to be clear that I think there is indeed considerable diver-
sity within the U.S. community, and also that the disputes within that commu-
nity are mirrored in the rest of the world. In short, I am not trying to claim that
there is some kind of U.S.-versus-the-rest phenomenon. But I do want to claim
that there is something about the study of international relations in the United
States that marks it out from other international relations academic communi-
ties. As will become clear, I think this difference has more to do with episte-
mological assumptions than with any simple relationship between U.S. policy
interests and the assumed ontology of U.S. international relations. I want to
argue that the dominance of a specific view of how to create knowledge con-
structs a specific world of international relations, and that world is one that is
decidedly ethnocentric. Moreover, it is a world that does not seem to see
other kinds of inequalities. We have here a double inequality to consider: first,
the dominance of the U.S. academic community in the world community of
 The U.S. and IR 69

international relations; second, that this U.S.-dominated discipline sees a very

specific world to study, one that renders irrelevant other forms of inequality
they simply do not fit the discipline as defined in the United States.
Now, of course, my view of the discipline is a view from somewhere,
mainly related to my social/cultural/gendered setting, and, to be clear, I am not
trying to offer the truth about the nature of the discipline, only one contribu-
tion to thinking about the relationship between how we study the world out of
our own location, context and identity. It is precisely that self-consciousness
that I think is lacking in U.S. international relations, when it presents itself as
reporting on the way the world is. Locked within the territorial trap and
based on a prior (and an a priori ) set of distinctions between inside/outside,
economics/politics, public/private, U.S. international relations focuses on some
inequalities, but deems others to lie outside the international political realm
since they are defined and classified as domestic, or economic, or private. As
such, I think that the discipline reflects U.S. political, economic and cultural
hegemony. Let me reiterate that I am not claiming that the U.S. discipline is in
some way alone in reflecting its context, only that what worries me is its lack of
self-reflection, its inability to take a step back and see its own role in consti-
tuting fields of study and the individuals who act within them. In Foucauldian
terms the dominant, rationalist tendency within U.S. discipline does not engage
in effective history, but rather presents the world as something out there, as
something that can be studied according to the social science canon. I dis-
agree fundamentally with this view, preferring Foucaults position on the rela-
tionship between knowledge and power.
Foucault argues that truth and knowledge are functions of power:
Truth isnt outside power . . . truth isnt the reward of free spirits, the child of
protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberat-
ing themselves. Truth is a thing of this world. . . . Each society has its regime
of truth, its general politics of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it
accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable
one to distinguish true and false statements. . . . Truth is to be understood as
a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution,
circulation, and operation of statements. Truth is linked in a circular relation
with systems of power which produce and sustain it. . . . A regime of truth.2
Similarly, for knowledge:
We should abandon a whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge
can exist only where the power relations are suspended and that knowledge
can develop only outside its injunctions, its demands and its interests. . . . We

2
Michel Foucault, Truth and Power, in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader
(London: Penguin Books, 1986), pp. 7274.
70 Steve Smith

should admit rather that power produces knowledge . . . that power and knowl-
edge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the
correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does
not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.3

It is important to note that the academic studying truth and power is not
someone free from the effects of power, but must be regarded as so many
effects of these fundamental implications of power-knowledge. 4 I believe that
the dominant form of the discipline in the U.S. does not reflect on these issues,
but to make good on these bold claims I need to say something about how I see
the state of the discipline in the U.S.

The State of the Discipline

I want to summarize how I see the current state of the discipline by making nine
points:

(1) The current scene can most usefully be divided into a mainstream com-
prising neorealism and neoliberalismWaevers neo-neo synthesis 5 and to
an increasing extent much of the most cited work within social constructivism,
and a set of approaches that lie outside the mainstream. There are many names
for this mainstream, the most common being rationalism, although I find the
label explanatory theory helpful since it accurately links the approaches to
the wider debates in the philosophy of the social sciences. I will discuss the
main features of the rationalist mainstream presently. The other approaches are
united only by an opposition to this rationalist mainstream, and are usually
grouped together under the title of reflectivism, although again I prefer the
generic social science label of constitutive theory. The main elements of reflec-
tivism are critical theory, postmodernism, feminist theory, postcolonial theory,
normative theory, peace studies, anthropological approaches and historical soci-
ology. As is obvious from this list, the differences between these approaches are
enormous, and in many cases the approaches are fundamentally incompatible.
Nonetheless, they share a fundamental opposition to the main claims of ratio-
nalism, and thus the label is useful for the purposes of an initial discussion of
the main features of the discipline.

3
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Per-
egrine Books, 1979), p. 27.
4
Ibid., p. 28.
5
Ole Waever, The Rise and Fall of the Inter-Paradigm Debate, in Steve Smith,
Ken Booth, and Marysia Zalewski, eds., International Theory: Positivism and Beyond
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 149185.
 The U.S. and IR 71

(2) The core differences between neorealism and neoliberalism concern the
extent to which institutions can mitigate the effects of international anarchy,
and whether the main actors in international politics (states) pursue absolute or
relative gains. The main areas of agreement concern the nature of international
politics: it involves states as actors; it focuses on patterns of cooperation and
conflict: actors are unitary and rational; and state interests, determined by the
states position in the international political system, drive foreign policy behav-
ior. These ontological similarities matter considerably, since they mean that
both neorealists and neoliberals see essentially the same world of international
politics. Their differences are not unimportant; after all, it does matter if insti-
tutions matter and whether it is possible to get states to pursue absolute gains,
but I strongly believe that this results in a very limited view of what inter-
national politics is and can be. It serves to rule out of consideration an extensive
set of political, social and economic questions, notably those that focus on
actors other than the state, on issues other than interstate war or economic
cooperation, and on interests and identities other than those given exogenously
by the rationalist worldview. What strikes me most is just how narrow a view of
politics (and even economics) is involved in this mainstream definition of inter-
national relations, and how much and how effectively the discipline is disci-
plined by this move.

(3) As I have argued elsewhere,6 I believe an even more important conse-

quence follows on from the epistemological assumptions that dominate ratio-
nalist IR. Indeed I believe that increasingly it is these assumptions that perform
the leading role in moves to reject much of the work of reflectivist scholars.
The main epistemological assumptions are those of positivism, by which I mean
a belief in naturalism in the social world (that is to say, that the social world is
amenable to the same kinds of analysis as those applicable to the natural world);
a separation between facts and values, by which is meant both that facts are
theory-neutral and that normative commitments should not influence what counts
as facts or as knowledge; a commitment to uncovering patterns and regularities
in the social world, patterns and regularities that exist apart from the methods
used to uncover them; and finally there is a commitment to empiricism as the
arbiter of what counts as knowledge. It is important for me to point out that
virtually no rationalist scholar will accept that his or her work is based on these
assumptions, and at conference after conference in the United States I am told

6
Steve Smith, The Self-Images of a Discipline: A Genealogy of International Rela-
tions Theory, in Ken Booth and Steve Smith, eds., International Relations Theory
Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), pp. 137; and Steve Smith, Positivism and
Beyond, in Smith, Booth, and Zalewski, International Theory, pp. 11 44.
72 Steve Smith

that my view is outdated, that I am referring to a kind of nave positivist who no

longer exists. I leave it to readers to assess this claim. The important point to
note is that most articles do not explicitly subscribe to any one theoretical
position, that is to say they do not announce that they are based on a neorealist
or a neoliberal approach; rather, their theoretical assumptions are contained
implicitly in their methodological (usually quantitative) and epistemological
(nearly always empiricist) commitments. In this sense, most of the U.S. litera-
ture is not explicitly rationalist, but is so implicitly. Ontologically, the literature
tends to operate in the space defined by rationalism, and epistemologically it is
empiricist and methodologically it is positivist. Together these define proper
social science and thereby serve as the gatekeepers for what counts as legiti-
mate scholarship.

(4) Reflectivist approaches tend to be more united by their opposition to

realism and positivism than by any shared notion of what should replace it. As
can be immediately understood, any label that includes the range of approaches
noted above contains some of the major disputes within the philosophy of social
science. Perhaps part of the problem is that writers such as myself have used
this label reflectivist as a useful way of summarizing their opposition to
rationalism. Nonetheless, the important point to note is that there are a rich
variety of approaches that offer a series of alternatives to both the ontological
and epistemological commitments of rationalism and thus see a different world
of international politics from that seen by rationalism.

(5) Although these differences are significant, the epistemological differ-

ences are probably more important in determining the treatment of reflectivist
approaches in the profession of IR. Precisely because reflectivist approaches do
not share the commitment to the form of foundational positivism found in ratio-
nalist approaches, they are increasingly criticized for not being social science
and thereby not counting as reliable knowledge about the world. Reflectivists
are thus presented by the mainstream as operating outside of the acceptable
realm of academic study; they are not intellectually legitimate. This tendency
has increased during the last decade, as reflectivist work was first ignored, then
seen as irrelevant to the concerns of the real world of international politics, to
the current situation whereby they are attacked for the even more heinous crime
of not being part of the social science enterprise. I think it is very difficult for
academics based in the rest of the world to appreciate the impact of this move
on careers, publication prospects and, of course, for the development of the
discipline in the U.S. Given that reflectivist work is dismissed as intellectually
weak, as illegitimate, then it is not surprising therefore that reflectivist scholars
are not well entrenched in North America, the homeland of the mainstream of
the discipline.
 The U.S. and IR 73

(6) There are three good examples of the claim that reflectivist work is not
legitimate scholarship. The first was that made by Robert Keohane in his 1988
address as President of the International Studies Association. He noted that
the greatest weakness of reflectivist approaches was the lack of a clear re-
flective research program. . . . Until the reflective scholars or others sympa-
thetic to their arguments have delineated such a research program . . . they
will remain on the margins of the field, largely invisible to the preponderance
of empirical researchers, most of whom explicitly or implicitly accept one or
another version of rationalistic premises. 7 What was needed was for reflec-
tivist scholars to develop testable theories without which it will be impos-
sible to evaluate their research program. 8 The most significant point about
this challenge was that it was, not surprisingly, made on the epistemological
terrain of rationalism.
The second example of this de-legitimization of reflectivist approaches comes
in Stephen Walts review of the state of international relations theory.9 Walt
argues that although the key debate in international relations theory has been,
and continues to be, that between realism and liberalism, there is a third approach
which he sees as the main alternative to these two. The important point is that
this approach is not reflectivism nor any of the many approaches commonly
placed under that label; the alternative approach is constructivism. What inter-
ests me about his argument is that he sees constructivism as dealing with the
issues commonly seen as the core concerns of reflectivist approaches. Walt sets
out the main features of these three paradigms (realism, liberalism and con-
structivism) and under the heading of constructivism he lists its unit of analy-
sis as individuals and its main instruments as ideas and discourse. Its
postcold war prediction is agnostic because it cannot predict the content of
ideas and its main limitation is described as better at describing the past
than anticipating the future. Constructivism is portrayed as the approach that
deals with things such as individuals, ideas, discourse and identities. Note just
how de-legitimizing this is of reflectivist work and how it polices the bound-
aries of the discipline.
The third example comes in a 1998 article by Peter Katzenstein, Robert
Keohane, and Stephen Krasner, wherein they characterize the current situation
as one of a new debate between rationalism and constructivism: rationalism
. . . and constructivism now provide the major points of contestation for inter-

7
Robert Keohane, International Institutions and State Power: Essays in Inter-
national Relations Theory (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1989), p. 173.
8
Ibid., pp. 173174.
9
Stephen Walt, International Relations: One World, Many Theories, Foreign
Policy 110 (1998), pp. 29 46.
74 Steve Smith

national relations scholarship. 10 They note three strands of constructivism:

conventional, critical and postmodern. These are defined as follows: Conven-
tional constructivists insist that sociological perspectives offer a general theo-
retical orientation and specific research programs that can rival or complement
rationalism. 11 Critical constructivists focus on identity issues that include,
besides nationalism, subjects such as race, ethnicity, religion, and sexuality. . . .
[They] also accept the possibility of social scientific knowledge based on empir-
ical research. 12 As such, rationalist scholars can debate with both conven-
tional and critical constructivists, since their research programs are open to
rationalist critiques. The problem is with postmodern constructivists: What
separates critical constructivism and postmodernism is not the shared focus on
discourse, but the acknowledgement by critical constructivists of the possibil-
ity of a social science and a willingness to engage openly in scholarly debate
with rationalism. 13 Thus it follows that the journal has published little post-
modern IR work since IO [International Organization] has been committed to
an enterprise that postmodernism denies: the use of evidence to adjudicate
between truth claims. In contrast to conventional and critical constructivism,
postmodernism falls clearly outside of the social science enterprise, and in IR
research it risks becoming self-referential and disengaged from the world, pro-
tests to the contrary notwithstanding. 14

(7) The main debates in the discipline for the next decade will be between
rationalism and constructivism, but this is a little misleading because it implies
that constructivism is positioned between the two approaches: I think that some
of the most cited authors are not at all positioned between the two, but instead
are really part of rationalism. I would go so far as to say that social construc-
tivism in its dominant (mainly North American) form is very close to the neolib-
eralist wing of the rationalist paradigm. This is precisely why it is seen by Walt,
and by Katzenstein, Keohane, and Krasner as acceptable. For these writers it is
acceptable because it accepts both the ontology and much more important the
epistemology of the mainstream. Some of the leading constructivists also want
to locate constructivism as a middle way between rationalism and reflectivism.
Thus, Alexander Wendts self-proclaimed aim is to build a bridge between the
two IR traditions of rationalism and reflectivism by developing a constructiv-

10
Peter Katzenstein, Robert Keohane, and Stephen Krasner, International Orga-
nization and the Study of World Politics, International Organization 52 (1998), p. 646.
11
Ibid., p. 675.
12
Ibid., p. 676.
13
Ibid., p. 677.
14
Ibid., p. 678.
 The U.S. and IR 75

ism that builds on the shared features of the liberalist wing of the rationalist
tradition and the modern constructivist wing of the reflectivist tradition.15 In
his 1999 book he states his intention as wanting to defend a moderate, thin
constructivism against two positions: on the one hand he wants to argue against
those in the mainstream who reject social constructivism as being tantamount
to postmodernism; on the other he is opposed to those more radical construc-
tivists who want to go much further than he does. He wants to develop a phil-
osophically principled middle way between these positions.16 Similarly.
Emmanuel Adler sees constructivism as the true middle ground between ratio-
nalist and relativist (his wording) approaches.17 Finally, Jeffrey Checkel claims
that [c]onstructivists thus occupy a middle ground between rational choice
theorists and postmodern scholars. 18
All three of these writers want to differentiate constructivism from reflec-
tivism, and crucially the litmus test is, yet again, a commitment to the social
science enterprise. The most extensive justification of this position is to be
found in the work of Wendt.19 As he put it in a by now infamous comment made
in an article he co-wrote with Ronald Jepperson and Peter Katzenstein, The
term identity here is intended as a useful label, not as a signal of commitment
to some exotic (presumably Parisian) social theory. 20 In his 1999 book
Social Theory of International Politics Wendt spends a lot of time discussing
issues of epistemology. One quote gives a flavor of the horse he is trying to
ride: Epistemologically, I have sided with positivists. . . our best hope is social
science . . . [but] . . . on ontologywhich is to my mind the more important
issueI will side with post-positivists. Like them I believe that social life is

15
Alexander Wendt, Anarchy Is What States Make of It, International Organiza-
tion 46 (1992), pp. 393394.
16
Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1999), p. 2.
17
Emmanuel Adler, Seizing the Middle Ground: Constructivism in World Poli-
tics, European Journal of International Relations 3 (1997), p. 322.
18
Jeffrey Checkel, The Constructivist Turn in International Relations Theory,
World Politics 50 (1998), p. 327.
19
See Alexander Wendt, The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations
Theory, International Organization 41 (1987), pp. 335370; Anarchy Is What States
Make of It, pp. 393394, 422 425; Collective Identity Formation and the Inter-
national State, American Political Science Review 88 (1994), pp. 384396; and Social
Theory of International Politics.
20
Ronald Jepperson, Alexander Wendt, and Peter Katzenstein, Norms, Identity,
and Culture in National Security, in Peter Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National
Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press,
1996), p. 34.
76 Steve Smith

ideas all the way down (or almost anyway. . .). 21 He is, he states, a strong
believer in science. . . . I am a positivist. 22 Indeed, I believe that the inconsis-
tency between wanting it to be ideas all the way down and at the same time
wanting to be a social scientist is the key tension running through his recent
book.23 Adler is also explicit in distinguishing between constructivism and reflec-
tivist (or as he terms them, relativist) approaches.24 These approaches are, he
claims, based on untenable assumptions that essentially deny the separate
existence of both foundational truth and an independent reality. Finally, for
Jeffrey Checkel: It is important to note that constructivists do not reject sci-
ence or causal explanation: their quarrel with mainstream theories is ontologi-
cal, not epistemological. The last point is key, for it suggests that constructivism
has the potential to bridge the still vast divide separating the majority of IR
theorists from postmodernists. 25

(8) Not all constructivism is so close to rationalism, and many construc-

tivists will want to disassociate themselves from the kinds of linkages to so-
cial science proposed by Wendt. Thus it is important to distinguish between
the kind of constructivism developed by Wendt and that of two of the other
earlier founders of the approach, Nick Onuf and Friedrich Kratochwil.26 The
essence of this distinction concerns the form of theory appropriate for analyz-
ing the social world. Wendt is fundamentally a positivist and a naturalist on
questions of knowledge. This means that analysis is limited to certain kinds of
things in the social world, and these things can be analyzed by using the same
methods as those used in the natural sciences. The problem with all this is that
there is an important intellectual tradition that sees these worlds as distinct,
requiring distinct and different analytical approaches, and this tradition is the

21
Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, p. 90.
22
Ibid., p. 39.
23
For a detailed discussion of this tension see Steve Smith, Wendts World, Review
of International Studies 26 (2000), pp. 151163.
24
Adler, Seizing the Middle Ground, p. 330337.
25
Checkel, The Constructivist Turn in International Relations Theory, p. 327.
26
See Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social
Theory and International Relations (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,
1989); Nicholas Onuf, Constructivism: A Users Manual, in Vendulka Kubalkova,
Nicholas Onuf, and Paul Klowert, eds., International Relations in a Constructed World
(Armonk, N.J.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), pp. 5878; Friedrich Kratochwil and John Rug-
gie, International Organization: A State of the Art on the Art of the State, Inter-
national Organization 40 (1986), pp. 753775; Friedrich Kratochwil, Rules, Norms,
and Decisions: On the Conditions of Practical and Legal Reasoning in International
Relations and Domestic Affairs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
 The U.S. and IR 77

one that is the basis of the form of constructivism preferred by Onuf and
Kratochwil. Thus, the crucial distinction is that whereas Wendt ends up paint-
ing a world that seems very similar to that painted by rationalists, the social
worlds seen by Onuf and Kratochwil are very different from those of the ra-
tionalists. The Onuf/Kratochwil form of constructivism sees a very different
kind of social world from that seen by Wendt. It is a world in which actors,
whoever they are, are governed by language, rules and choices. This view
of the social world has its intellectual roots in the work of writers such as
Wittgenstein and Winch, and thus it is a view that does not subscribe to the
naturalism of Wendt.

(9) This distinction between fundamentally different forms of constructiv-

ism fits with my long-stated claim that there are always at least two stories to
tell about the social world.27 In this light the fact that Wendt and Onuf/
Kratochwil have very different forms of social theory underlying their construc-
tivism is not surprising, since they are on different sides of the explaining/
understanding divide. Wendts social theory ultimately has to fall on the
explaining side of the divide, hence his concern to develop causal analysis, and
to see constitutive analysis as secondary to it.28 Having said all this, it is pre-
cisely this fact that makes his form of social constructivism so appealing to the
rationalist mainstream.

Still an American Social Science?

I now want to turn to examining whether IR remains an American social sci-
ence.29 Again, I want to summarize my argument in a set of five points:

(1) In his 1977 article, Stanley Hoffmann famously argued that the disci-
pline of IR developed not in the U.K. (where the first university department had
been founded in 1919) but in the U.S. in the aftermath of the Second World
War. He noted that this was because of the confluence of a specific circum-
stance and three causes. The key circumstance was the rise of the United States

27
See Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, Explaining and Understanding International
Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
28
Smith, Wendts World.
29
For a recent examination of this issue see the essays in Robert Crawford and
Darryl Jarvis, eds., International RelationsStill an American Social Science: Towards
Diversity in International Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001).
78 Steve Smith

to world power, 30 and the causes were intellectual predispositions, political

circumstances, and institutional opportunities. 31 There were three intellec-
tual predispositions: that problems can be solved by the scientific method, and
that this will result in progress; that IR as a social science benefited from the
prestige accorded to the natural sciences and to economics; that European schol-
ars who had emigrated to the U.S. tended to ask much larger questions and to
ask about them more conceptually than their U.S. counterparts.32 The political
circumstances, especially the fact that the U.S.s role in world affairs was
undergoing a fundamental transformation, meant that policy-makers were in-
terested in precisely the kind of expertise and opinions that the developing
IR community were willing to offer. As Hoffmann puts it: What the leaders
looked for, once the cold war started, was some intellectual compass . . .
Realism . . . precisely provided what was necessary. 33 Finally, there were
three sets of institutional opportunities which Hoffmann argues did not exist
anywhere else in the world other than the U.S.: the link between the scholarly
community and government, which meant that academics and policy-makers
moved back and forth between universities and think-tanks, and govern-
ment; the existence of wealthy foundations which linked the kitchens of
power with the academic salons, and thus could create a seamless plural-
ism to link the policy concerns of government to the academic research com-
munity; and the fact that the universities were flexible and operated in a mass
education market which allowed them to innovate and specialize in their re-
search activitiesin short, they were able to respond to the demands of
government in a way that was impossible in the European university sector of
the time.

(2) This view of U.S. dominance was backed up by Kal Holsti in his 1985
survey of the state of the field.34 Holsti, having looked in detail at the discipline
in eight countries, concludes that [m]ost of the mutually acknowledged liter-
ature has been produced by scholars from only two of more than 155 countries,
the United States and Great Britain. There is, in brief, a British-American intel-

30
Stanley Hoffmann, An American Social Science: International Relations (1977),
reprinted in Stanley Hoffmann, ed., Janus and Minerva: Essays in the Theory and
Practice of International Politics (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1987), p. 6.
31
Ibid., pp. 78.
32
Ibid., pp. 89.
33
Ibid., p. 10.
34
Kalevi Holsti, The Dividing Discipline: Hegemony and Diversity in International
Theory (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985).
 The U.S. and IR 79

lectual condominium. 35 But even here, the picture is one of a U.S.-dominated

condominium: in his survey of texts, he found that only 11.1 percent of refer-
ences were to British scholars, compared with 74.1 percent to U.S. scholars. On
the basis of his survey he concludes that there is a reliance solely on Ameri-
cans to produce the new insights, theoretical formulations, paradigms, and data
sets of our fields. . . . [T]he trends are operating in the direction of greater
concentration. 36

(3) One result of this dependence on the U.S. IR community is that certain
kinds of insights, theories, paradigms and data sets dominate the IR literature.
Alker and Bierstekers 1984 survey revealed that the U.S. literature is concen-
trated in one kind of methodology and in one kind of theory. They looked at
seventeen reading lists from main U.S. universities and coded the literature into
traditional, behavioral and dialectical. The findings were that 70 percent of the
literature was behavioral, slightly over 20 percent was traditional and less than
10 percent was dialectical. The methodological concentration was very clear,
but there was a similar ontological concentration: of the behavioral literature,
72 percent was neorealist, and of the traditional literature 82 percent was real-
ist.37 Their survey also supported Holstis claims about the parochial character
of U.S. IR. The implication of these findings is that the discipline was then (and
is still, I would argue) both parochial in the U.S. and focused on a specific
methodology and ontology. Together these meant that not only did U.S. theory
dominate IR but so did the specific U.S. commitment to a realist/neorealist
view of the world, and a commitment to studying that world behaviorally.

(4) This concern has been a theme of my own work over the last twenty
years,38 and I still strongly believe that this is still the case today. The effect is

35
Ibid., p. 103.
36
Ibid., p. 128.
37
Hayward Alker and Thomas Biersteker, The Dialectics of World Order: Notes
for a Future Archeologist of International Savoir Faire, International Studies Quar-
terly 28 (1984), pp. 129130.
38
Steve Smith, ed., International Relations: British and American Perspectives
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1985); The Development of International Relations as a Social
Science, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 16 (1987), pp. 189206; Heg-
emonic Power, Hegemonic Discipline? The Superpower Status of the American Study
of International Relations, in James Rosenau, ed., Global Voices: Dialogues in Inter-
national Relations (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993), pp. 5582; and Foreign
Policy Theory and the New Europe, in Walter Carlsnaes and Steve Smith, eds., Euro-
pean Foreign Policy: The EC and Changing Perspectives in Europe (London: Sage,
1994), pp. 1015.
80 Steve Smith

to skew the discipline toward the policy concerns of the U.S., and to ensure that
the available theories for studying these concerns are theories that fit the U.S.
definition of proper social science. This trend is exacerbated by two further
considerations: first, the sheer size of the U.S. IR community compared with
those in the rest of the world; second, the role of the main (U.S.-based) aca-
demic journals both in setting the theoretical agenda and in prestige terms. The
result is a global IR community that has historically followed the lead of
the U.S. IR community, which has played the central role in defining what the
discipline is.

(5) Ole Waever, in an excellent paper,39 argues that there is U.S. hegemony
in IR, and that it is currently centered on the extension of rational choice theory
to examining questions of international relations. Waever looked at eight lead-
ing IR journals (four U.S. and four European) from 1970 to 1995 and found that
in the four U.S. journals American-based authors constituted 88.1 percent of
the total; in the four European journals the picture was much more balanced,
about 40 percent for both American based and European based. He notes that in
the natural sciences U.S. journals tend to have about 4050 percent American
authors, whereas in the social sciences it is typically over 80 percent, with the
two highest figures found in two political science journals (American Political
Science Review, 97%, and American Journal of Political Science, 96.8%).40
Turning to the content of the journals, Waever looked at two from the U.S.
(International Organization and International Studies Quarterly) and two from
Europe (European Journal of International Relations and Review of Inter-
national Studies) to see what kind of IR they published. He coded the articles
into six categories, three rationalist, two reflectivist, and one other which
mainly included historical or policy articles. Note that one of his reflectivist
categories was for non-postmodern constructivism, which, as I have previ-
ously argued, is in fact much closer to rationalism than the other reflectivist
category, and therefore the data somewhat overestimate the figures for reflec-
tivist work. Nonetheless, the data revealed a clear contrast. The three rationalist
categories accounted for 77.9 percent of articles in International Studies Quar-
terly, and 63.9 percent in International Organization, compared with 42.3 per-
cent in European Journal of International Relations and only 17.4 percent in
Review of International Studies. The figures for the two reflectivist categories
were, respectively, 7.8 and 25 percent for the two American journals, and 40.4

39
Ole Waever, The Sociology of a Not So International Discipline: American and
European Developments in International Relations, International Organization 52
(1998), pp. 687727.
40
Ibid., p. 697.
 The U.S. and IR 81

and 40.6 percent for the two European journals.41 The data on postmodern,
Marxist and feminist works are, again respectively, 2.6 and 4.2 percent, 15.4
and 18.8 percent.42 In my view, these data provide overwhelming support for
the claim that the discipline remains a U.S.-dominated one, and also for the
assertion that the form of IR that dominates the U.S. IR community is very
specific and is theory that emerges out of the particular relationship among
political science, IR and the wider social sciences, found in that country but in
virtually no other.

International Relations and Inequality

In my view IR remains an American social science both in terms of the policy
agenda that U.S. IR exports to the world in the name of relevant theory, and in
terms of the dominant (and often implicit) epistemological and methodological
assumptions contained in that theory. This latter dominance is far more insidi-
ous than the former, especially because it is presented in the seemingly neutral
language of being the social science enterprise. The U.S. IR community dom-
inates the study of the subject through its sheer size and its role in producing
theory. At present the U.S. IR community adheres to one dominant theory,
rationalism, which is engaged in debate with a form of constructivism. Other,
reflectivist, approaches receive little attention in U.S. journals, textbooks or
syllabi. That picture is not found in the rest of the world, where IR is a far
more pluralist subject, with no one theoretical approach dominant. In most of
the rest of the world, certainly in Europe and Australasia, IR remains sceptical
of the merits of both positivism and the associated belief that there is one
standard to assess the quality of academic work: a much wider range of work
is seen as legitimate than in the mainstream U.S. literature. This results in a
far more lively, vital and exciting IR community, one that can offer a variety
of responses to the major problems and features of the contemporary global
political system. In the U.S. the central feature is the dominance of rational-
ism, with an emerging consensus around rational choice theory as a method,
and this has the powerful effect of defining what counts as acceptable schol-
arship. This consensus is simply not found in the rest of the world. Nonethe-
less, IR remains an American social science. As the evidence of Holsti, Alker
and Biersteker, and Waever shows, the U.S. continues to be hegemonic in the
discipline, just as the U.S. is hegemonic in the international political and eco-
nomic systems. Waever may be right that the most likely development is for
U.S. IR to become less dominant as it becomes more fixated on rational choice

41
Ibid., pp. 699701.
42
Ibid., p. 727.
82 Steve Smith

theory (an approach he claims does not travel well) and as European IR de-
velops more powerful national (and European) communities; but at the turn of
the millennium Hoffmanns assertions about IR as an American social science
remain accurate.
What does this mean for the theme of inequality? There are two main impli-
cations. The first relates to the simple dominance of the discipline worldwide
by the U.S., and the effect of the ontological, but, mainly, the methodological
and epistemological assumptions of the dominant, rationalist tradition. As noted
above, the need to be part of the social science enterprise is becoming increas-
ingly important in the U.S. literature, and is becoming the litmus test for schol-
arly enquiry. Note that although I believe the social science enterprise so narrowly
defined to be inappropriate for the study of international relations, I am not
saying that it should not be undertaken. My only claim is that this approach
reflects a peculiarly U.S. definition of social science, and to maintain that it is
the standard for measuring whether scholarship is serious, or in the academy, or
is legitimate, is itself a political act. Ultimately I want to see a discipline that is
pluralist in terms of the approaches that are deemed legitimate. This does not
mean that I am a relativist, nor that I would meekly defer to someone who held
a different view: but it does mean that I would not want to use a definition of
what constituted proper social science to demarcate and police the borderline
between legitimate and illegitimate scholarship. My worry, then, is that the
export of the U.S. view of the social science enterprise will lead to inequalities
in the global discipline of international relations if it becomes seen as the trans-
cultural, transhistorical standard of scholarship.
The second implication is that the field of knowledge constituted by the
U.S. mainstream has a very specific impact on the kinds of inequalities seen
by the dominant theories and methodologies. Put simply, and possibly too crudely,
the mainstream of the U.S. discipline sees political and military inequalities,
but it does not deem other forms of inequality as relevant to the discipline. Thus
gender inequalities are either domestic politics or private or both, and questions
of migration, the environment, human rights and cultural clashes either are seen
as falling outside the core of the discipline or are features to be studied accord-
ing to the canon of the social science enterprise, which thereby reconstitutes
them as atomistic and external. Similarly, the massive economic inequalities in
the world are seen as having to do with the discipline of economics, or as
falling into the field of domestic politics or development. Yet, to take one gen-
eral indicator, the aggregate income in 1960 of the countries with the richest
fifth of the worlds population was thirty times as great as the aggregate income
of the countries with the poorest fifth. By 1997 this ratio had grown to 74:1. As
of the mid-1990s, 358 billionaires held more assets than the combined annual
incomes of the poorest 45 percent of the worlds population. International rela-
tions as practiced in the U.S. does not focus on these kinds of issues.
 The U.S. and IR 83

In both these ways I believe that the U.S. discipline of international rela-
tions constructs a field of knowledge and the actors within it in such a way as to
mask its own involvement in the reinforcement and reconstitution of these prac-
tices. Precisely by portraying the discipline as having a core that reflects the
world out there, and precisely by deeming some methods as appropriate (and
others as inappropriate) to studying that world, international relations, U.S.-
style, engages in the politics of forgetting its own role in the practices of inter-
national relations. By objectifying and reifying some aspects of the social world
the discipline engages in politics, never more so than when it rules out of court
some approaches and methodologies as not being serious social science. The
increasing prominence of rational choice theory in the U.S. international rela-
tions community will exacerbate this trend, and thereby limit the possibilities
of creating a discipline that can contribute to the understanding of the main
patterns of international inequality in the new millennium.

Conclusion
All of this takes me back to the events of September 11. These events were not
just an attack on the dominance of the U.S. in world politics, they also represent
an attack on many of the assumptions, particularly epistemological ones, of the
mainstream of the discipline of international relations. In one important sense
they brought the use of force back to the center stage of the discipline and thus
reinforced those who see the world through realist eyes. But in a much more
significant sense, both the attacks and the war on terrorism that followed
implicate the ways in which we teach and study international relations. The
discipline of international relations has focused on politics as a realm of social
activity separate from economics, and has tended, in either Waltzian structural
realism or rational choice theory, to treat actors as responding to an overarching
logic of motivation and logic, founded ultimately on universalist assumptions
about human nature. Thus, in the U.S., just as political science generally, and
international relations specifically, increasingly converge on the methodologi-
cal consensus around rational choice theory, September 11 shows that there
may be more than one logic to anarchy and more to identity than interest-based
theories imply. To the extent that international relations, U.S. style, treats iden-
tity as exogenous to interest formation, and as long as it searches for an over-
arching explanation of world politics, it risks missing out on the kinds of
approaches that allow us best to understand (as distinct from explain) events
such as September 11. Ultimately, to comprehend fully the motivations of those
who undertook the attack and of those who celebrated it in many non-Western
countries may require revising the assumptions about individual identity that
pervade positivistic IR theory.
84 Steve Smith

September 11 has also shown that there is no one overarching logic of

world politics, and certainly no trajectory to history. Just as the Federal Bureau
of Investigation (FBI) had no category of terrorist to fit the profile of the nine-
teen men who seized the flights on September 11, so the discipline of inter-
national relations risks being unable to understand why it was that these relatively
Westernized, relatively middle class, and relatively educated men chose (if indeed
they all did choose 43 ) to be part of a suicide mission. Their actions didnt fit the
paradigm of which kinds of people commit terrorist acts since they seemed to
have bought in to modernization and to the Western way of life. Similarly,
international relations faces significant problems when it comes to try and explain
the actions of individuals whose mindset is so different from the kinds of iden-
tities supposedly constructed by interests.
There were many shocks on September 11, not the least of which was the
widespread support for the hijackers in many non-Western parts of the world.
For many, it was good that the U.S. was on the receiving end for a change, and
this begs the question of whether many in the U.S. understand, or wish to
understand, why the U.S. is so unpopular in many parts of the world. Com-
ments about the linkage between the U.S. and Israel do not really scratch the
surface of the problem. My worry is that the discipline of international relations
as currently practiced in the United States does not assist civil society in com-
prehending the complexities, and the many forms of life, of contemporary world
politics. Thus, although the war on terrorism may well satisfy parts of the
U.S. public, the danger remains that it will in the long run undermine U.S.
interests by creating yet another generation of suicide bombers and terrorists,
and yet at the same time, a dominant version of U.S. patriotism has silenced
many U.S. critics of such an approach. This is precisely the kind of occasion
where civil society needs a vibrant and questioning academy, and yet I believe
the overriding logic of U.S. international relations significantly limits the con-
tribution that the discipline can make to the debate. This is ultimately because
the commitment to, and valorization of, a specific and narrow definition of
what counts as legitimate social science undermines exactly those methodolo-
gies and epistemologies that provide the kinds of think descriptions neces-
sary to understand the opposition both to the U.S. as the worlds only superpower,
and to the categories and concepts of these other cultures. Simply resorting to
arguments about an axis of evil (which came as a massive shock to the Euro-
pean leaders who had strongly supported the war in Afghanistan, since there
was no evidence linking at least two of the three states cited as forming the axis
with the events of September 11) may satisfy some, but it is surely not the kind

43
See Steve Smith, Unanswered Questions, in Ken Booth and Tim Dunne, eds.,
Worlds in Collision (London: Palgrave, 2002), forthcoming.
 The U.S. and IR 85

of analysis that will ultimately construct a world order that makes the U.S.
more secure, since it threatens to create exactly the kind of reaction that will
lead to further rejection of the U.S. in large parts of the world.
Finally, the U.S.s reaction to September 11 has been, despite a brief flirta-
tion with a more multilateral approach to foreign policy, far more unilateral-
ist.44 This will severely strain U.S. relations with key allies, with the litmus test
being the likely forthcoming U.S. attack on Iraq. I am not arguing for a direct
linkage between the way international relations is studied in the U.S. and this
move toward an increasingly unilateralist U.S. foreign policy; however, the
similarities are significant. In both cases there is one way to think about the
world, with alternatives being seen as irrelevant at best and at worst dangerous.
It is not that I wish to see the U.S. version of social science jettisoned or replaced,
but I do want to see a more pluralistic and open discipline of international
relations, one that does not rule out more anthropological and hermeneutic
accounts of the world as illegitimate forms of social enquiry. These approaches
are more likely to contribute to an understanding of the events of September 11
than are the theories and models of the mainstream of the discipline because
they admit that there are different rationalities in different cultures and eschew
the idea of one logic of human development.
Ultimately the problem of the hegemonic discourse of U.S. IR is that its
underlying commitment to the social science enterprise, narrowly and
historically/culturally defined, makes the mistake of assuming that its regime
of truth is both self-evident and universal. Under that gaze it sees some inequal-
ities in the world, but it does not see all, since it defines them as lying outside
the purview of the discipline of international relations; they are economic, cul-
tural, social, religious or private. Under that gaze it sees one logic to anarchy,
one pay-off matrix, regardless of identity. Under that gaze it sees one converg-
ing world. But under that gaze it omits by definition much of world politics,
any competing notions of rationality, and any other regimes of truth, and thus
runs the risk of constituting the common sense of tomorrows U.S. civil society
in a specific, and decidedly political, way, all under the guise of being legiti-
mate, neutral, value-free social science.

44
Steve Smith, The End of the Unipolar Moment? September 11 and the Future of
World Order, International Relations 16, No. 2 (2002), forthcoming.