The Security Dilemma in International Relations: Background and Present Problems

Abstract

John Herz wrote a number of influential books and articles for students of International Relations in the 1950s. He is best known for coining and elaborating the concept of the ‘security dilemma’, which has been a focus of fruitful research ever since. At the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association in February 2003 (in Portland, Oregon), Professor Ned Lebow organized a panel entitled ‘50 Years of the Security Dilemma: In Honour of John Herz’. At the opening of the meeting, Professor Lebow read out a long e-mail from John Herz, which is reprinted (slightly edited) below. It represents Professor Herz’s half-century reflection on the security dilemma; it is part history of ideas, part argument about why the concept is more relevant than ever. We are very pleased to print this historical document by a figure who has played an important part in our subject’s history. John Herz was born in 1908. He studied law and political science in Weimar Germany and, after the Nazi takeover, specialized in International Relations at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. In 1938, as a Jewish German, he emmigrated to the USA. From 1938 to 1941 he was a Fellow at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. He was one of a number of refugee scholars who were welcomed as faculty members at black colleges and universities. A recent documentary film about their experiences, entitled From Swastika to Jim Crow, includes interviews with Professor Herz. He taught at Howard University and during the war worked in the Office of Strategic Services. Afterward, he served in the Department of State, mainly on the reconstruction of German democracy. For his contribution to the revival of democracy in Germany, he was later awarded the Medal of Merit from the President of the Federal Republic of Germany. From 1952 until his retirement in 1979, he was on the faculty at City College, NYC. He also taught at Marburg University and the Free University of Berlin, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Columbia University, the New School for Social Research, and the CUNY Graduate School. Herz’s scholarly work has been equally divided between comparative politics (chiefly German affairs) and international politics (chiefly theories of international relations). His first book, The National Socialist Doctrine of International Law, was published in German in Zurich in 1938. His Political Realism and Political Idealism (1951) won the Woodrow Wilson prize of the American Political Science Association and is recognized as a major contribution to political theory. Other