Reintegrating the Subdisciplines of International and Comparative Politics

Abstract

Long before academic disciplines and subdisciplines emerged, the great writers on politics understood well how the fields of knowledge that we call international relations and comparative politics informed each other. The Greeks did not make a distinction between the two. Indeed, Thucydides, often regarded as the first great analyst of international relations, is centrally concerned with domestic politics. He considers how Athens' direct democracy encouraged quick and ill-considered decisions for war, and how failures in war, in turn, undermined that democracy. Although he does not offer contemporary-style generalizations about the international behavior of different regime types, his narrative is devoted to the details of leadership and debates on decision making. His famous statement, What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta (Thucydides 1972:1:23), is ambiguous. As a Greek of his day, Thucydides might well have believed in inevitability. But was it an avoidable fear that made the Peloponnesian War inevitable, or did the fear inevitably follow from the growth of Athenian power? If Thucydides means the latter, his reputation as a realist is fully deserved. His extraordinary concern with the effect of democratic politics, however, suggests something more complex.' Similarly, the second-image reversed is evident in Aristotle's premier text of comparative politics: The Politics. Aristotle sees oligarchies as derived from warriors and is well aware of the role of external intervention and defeat or victory in war in inducing constitutional change. One could go on with similar concerns in most of the canon, notably in Machiavelli's and Rousseau's writings. Hobbes was actually a theorist of the state, and Leviathan would likely fall into the contemporary box of comparative politics; application of his theories to international relations is essentially a twentieth-century phenomenon. Of course, Kant's theory provides an elaborate structure of interactions among domestic systems, wars, and alliances. Despite the rich precedent established by the great writers in politics, the study of international relations remains a distinct focus of analysis in that the security dilemma of self-help in a system of sovereign states conditions any effort to import propositions from comparative politics, which recognizes within most states a greater role for the monopolization of legitimate violence than characterizes the international system. In the shift of late twentieth-century enthusiasm away from