ABSTRACT
The end of the Cold War was as surprising to most people as it was dramatic. For the discipline of international relations, it was embarrassing as well. In a hardhitting critique, historian John Lewis Gaddis showed how contemporary international relations theory, for all its scientific claims, had utterly failed to forecast such a hugely transformative event.1 Gaddis went on to dismiss the whole enterprise as inherently incapable of doing the job and concluded that ‘the “scientific” approach to the study of international relations appears to work no better, in forecasting the future, than do the old-fashioned methods it set out long ago to replace’.2 The first criticism has considerable merit, for the discipline had failed to examine the scope for change seriously, and it was not inaccurate to say, as another critic observed, that ‘measured by its own standards, the profession’s performance was embarrassing’.3 But the truth of the matter is that the profession had not really looked at the possible end of the Cold War. To this extent, the fault lay not so much in the discipline but in its practice. In developing countries, this was understandable: the real issue for them was economic, and the debates of the time revolved around issues of global economic structure. In the West, there was concern about the consequences of what was thought to be American decline. Alternatively, it was held that the decline was not serious and that the primary issue was that of systemic stability. The immensely influential work of Kenneth Waltz, around which circled much intellectual combat, centred on this issue. Furthermore, the discipline’s fascination with Waltz’s elegant structural theory meant that serious attention was not paid to ideas as a source of change.4
