The Teaching of International Relations

The Listener, May 27th 1954, pp. 486-7.

After receiving her honorary doctorate at Leeds the other day, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother spoke of the task of the universities – with its bearing on the future of national life – as ‘a tremendous trust’. And so we shall all agree, it surely is. And a part of that trust, I for one would myself suggest, consists in recognising the advent of new disciplines, and finding room for those that by their importance are deserving of place. I believe international relations to be just such a discipline: m ~act, I believe· it _to be-in our propaganda-permeated bomb- bewildered age-of an importance hard indeed to overdo.

For the recent Unesco survey it fell to me to analyse eight national reports, each reflecting a viewpoint of its own. Broadly, what did emerge was that scarcely anywhere as yet was the subject of inter- national relations, seen as a discipline intrinsically distinct, being taught at all: though light in plenty is thrown, if only obliquely, on its subject matter by much that is traditionally taught-by history and so on. Yet international relationships are a multi-dimensional complex of subtly interrelated phenomena about which we all might do well to know more. ·

The Need for ‘Coaching’
Any evening now, from the train, one may see little boys· teaching themselves to bat. Batting takes time to learn; and a little early coaching, given whether by specialists, or by others as a sideline, pays dividends all the way. And, similarly, if a history, or a politics, professor perceives in his students a subsidiary need for coaching in international elementals, and no one locally is specialising in these, he may himself take to presenting them, so to say, on the side. In the United States, especially, university departments of history, of sociology, and above all of political science, have thus, often with great proficiency, gone in for some form of teaching announced as ‘international relations’. It is perhaps natural enough, with these sideline methods, that those who from such divers angles have had the vision and enterprise, and public spirit, to undertake it should tend to suppose that theirs must be the only way in which it can sensibly be attempted.

In London, I ought to explain, the teaching of international relations has throughout been in the specialising hands of persons, themselves in this respect mainly self-taught, who have seen their subject as existing in its own right. But the man whose book of beasts did not include the kangaroo was not able to allow its possibility, even when he met one face to face. And those whose list of disciplines is strictly medieval seem apt to be similarly affected by the subject of international relations. Is it not, they ask, just a part of this or that? What, they ask, ·makes international relations a unitary discipline in itself? To which I would, in part, reply: ‘It exists to serve a single distinctive need: the need we all have to understand the social universe as a whole, and relationships within it, as they are ‘.

For success in social living man’s foremost necessity, I suppose, is judgement. And this takes time to ripen. It appears to best advantage when the situation to be appreciated presents itself to a well-trained mind within a serviceable frame of reference. All merely human minds, let us face.it, are always more or less immature. Each of us carries around with him his own apparatus of preconceptions, unique as a fingerprint and private as a dream, but capable of adaptation to new discoveries from day to day. A relevant frame of reference, a practised judgement – these are among the possible fruits of education. To exclude the teaching of international relations is to leave to fortune a part of the frame.

Perhaps you yourself may understand it all already. But you did not always. Like anyone else’s, your personal picture of the over-all institutional set-up was at first a thing of fantasy and fog. We got our bearings in our world only bit by bit – in the cradle first, the nursery next, the home. Yet always there remained a wider context lying out beyond, a matter for the imagination rather than the eye. Most of us get safely to the stage of feeling at home within a .country: but how many are equally familiar with that form of social living which obtains in the notional society of sovereign states? It is, I submit, to the structure of that international society that the student might early be encouraged – but so seldom is – to address his maturing mind.

For is this wider world-awareness not something to be wished for? If it is, then should it not be striven for, and even provided for? We believe in teaching young people what the world is like in a physical sense. They study it early, on a global scale – with globes. But how commonly do we get round to teaching them about the world in the sense of its social arrangements – its omnipresent outfit of artificial forms, its ancient system of diplomacy, with all its invisible frills, its doctrinal implications?

Within the nation, most of us are well enough at home. We are used to government, as a fact of local life. Not so many people however are comparably able to think in terms not of government but of non-government – of influence merely – the terms in which diplomatic affairs must be understood. Our transition to this plane of thinking may not require a superhuman mental leap; but it does mean moving forward, as it were, into a different kind of country, with a change of conventional gears. And in this new country we shall hardly feel fully at home if still relatively illiterate in the structure of international society – first steps, that is, in the study of international relations.

Life is at all levels a series of situations. The power to appraise and, at need to re-appraise, a situation: that is the aptitude which it would, I suggest, be irresponsible to bury in a napkin. For if in future world affairs Britain is to play her proper role, it must be by virtue not of her wealth but of her wisdom. And this can no longer be the wisdom of a blue-blooded, or a broad-acred, ruling few. Sanity, humour, phlegm – assume if you like that these remain. Sanity unsustained by schooled insight is not going to be enough.

‘A Certain Culture‘
A silly story is told of how some foreigner after a day at cricket confessed his wonder at the frequency with which the bowler had managed to hit the moving bat. For the due understanding, a French-woman once coldly informed me, of the finer points of her assessment of Picasso, I required ‘une certaine culture ‘. I bore it – I hope so – like a man, and was not ungrateful for the phrase. One required a certain culture. How true, equally, of cricket. And, of matters inter- national, how true.

In the long story of a people, the generations are like relay runners on a track Those of today have no possibility of ensuring that they of tomorrow shall win. But this they can do: they can make it pretty certain that they shall not. What more salutary service could a community offer to its sons than to help them to disembarrass themselves of their basic misconceptions about the social cosmos, and to identify and so perhaps to nullify their cruder gullibilities? Education in these matters is not conferred once for all like a christening mug. It is a lifelong treatment, and much of it must be self-supplied. But the thing is to get it started on the right assumptions. For not until one has tried one’s hand at teaching ‘structure’, does one really know, believe me, the nature of the need. And when with our students we discuss current issues, the object of the exercise is not that they may pontificate the more glibly upon the issues of today; rather is it that they may come to judge the less unsoundly the issues of tomorrow. Our concern is not with their information but with their minds.

The mind may be likened to a processing plant. The teacher’s job is not to build an informational stockpile, but to help the student to establish beneath his hat the kind of plant which, in years to come, will be the better qualified to cope with what goes in. If it is peace we want, we must think on these things; and create for younger minds; at least the opportunity so to prepare themselves that in due time they may give their thought to the problem of social living in its global dimension more successfully than we.

How comes it, you may well now be asking, that, in this second post-war-query-pre-war age, Britain’s universities have still not established the teaching of international relations in a truly worthy manner? The answer, could it be discovered and written up, would form, I believe not so much a ‘ whodunit ‘ story or even a ‘ whoshouldadunit ‘ story as a ‘whocouldadunit ‘ story – a chapter in the history of social institutions. To me, and to the bee 1n my bonnet, it is, I am afraid, rather as though there were a known, palatable, inexpensive vitamin for reducing appreciably a person’s susceptibility to almost every sort of ill; and it just happened to be nobody’s business in particular to put it within the reach of all. Some of those well-loved societies, the habitations of so many famous and merciful men furnished with ability, erudition and esteem, seem hardly any better able to change their ivy-mantled syllabuses than a cettain pretty animal his spots. As well might one counsel Mr. Dulles to alter the American Constitution. Of a truth, one might be tempted to think, man is everywhere in chains. But is he?

But to come back to the Stationery Office and the Unesco booklet.* The rapporteur for India foresaw some development there in the .teaching of international relations-which is good news. But he rejoiced to think that the lessons of experience learned in Britain and America might be applied in India. Which lessons, I wonder? Even in America, where the international relations specialist has been in general production for quite a time, the American rapporteur himself had misgivings about the conditions in which this was being accomplished. My conviction is that in this field British universities could still lead the world. It is, of course, a newish idea. Newish, I mean, compared with some of the universities. But I am not even tempted to believe that, in this country, even the oldest of them are quite so old as to have lost all control of their faculties.

Besides, there are – praise Heaven – the schools. Let them but discover what they would choose to do, and· this will not be finally forbidden. In France, the top forms go in extensively for what they term ‘philosophie ‘. In it, the fundamentals of social cosmology, of ‘structure’, may not as yet have found explicitly a place. But they might! And, at the risk of a reprimand from the headmaster for talking out of my tum, I venture to surmise that such a thing might happen here. Let England-young England, and those who care about young England’s future-but expect..

* Teaching in the Social Sciences: University Teaching of Social Sciences International Relations. Stationery Office, 4s.