If International Relations lives on the street, what is it doing in the classroom?

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If International Relations lives on the street, what is it doing in the classroom?

Peter ValeUniversity of Johannesburg

AbstractThe argument asserts that International Relations (IR) was (and remains) constructed to serve the interests of the knowledge courts of the north. In South Africa, the discipline is an ‘alien species’ because the imported idea of sovereignty not only disrupted natural patterns of regional migration, but the formation of the region’s first state, the Union of South Africa, divided the country’s people on the grounds of race. The coming of the Union followed upon both the Jameson Raid (1895/1896) and the Boer War (1899–1902) – the former was of interest to E.H. Carr in two instances but only as an attempt to explain events in the global north. The ‘new’ politics of southern Africa, which were based on sovereignty and the rise of Afrikaner Nationalism were ignored by Carr. The migration of IR to South Africa in the 1930s rested in an imperial frame, and the discipline helped create a European state in Africa. The author uses several autobiographical examples to suggest his own dissatisfaction with this condition by using Carr’s notion of ‘site-specificness’. The primacy of English in IR is critiqued because this language closes off perspectives of the international which are carried in other languages. The article concludes with a discussion of the way in which ‘First People’ are excluded by the deliberations around IR.

KeywordsE.H. Carr, language, site-specificness, sociology of knowledge, South Africa, sovereignty

Language ah now you have me … Here I am hiding in/The jungle of mistakes of communication.

Language Ah Now You Have Me (W.S. Graham, 1918–1986)

Most who have delivered this Annual Lecture have shown great fealty to the discipline of International Relations (IR), which is why this particular text may read like that of an

Corresponding author:Peter Vale, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park, Bunting Road Campus, Research Village, House 3. Email: [email protected]

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142 International Relations 28(2)

insurgent. My hope, however, is that it will contribute to the ongoing conversation on the state of this discipline that these lectures have stimulated.

At the outset, we must be clear about one thing: several of my predecessors at this podium, as John Mearsheimer confirmed in the 2004 Lecture, have been ‘card carrying Realists’.1 This is a club whose membership I have never sought – and not only for the Groucho Marx’s quip that he refused to belong to a club that would have him as a mem-ber! This early confession suggests that this contribution will brush against the disci-pline’s accepted grain, to use Walter Benjamin’s 1940 metaphor, by showing how the study of IR both creates and confirms the deep divisions in the world.

The search for an explanation for this outcome must begin with an appreciation that the discipline’s early compass was interested in little else but the deepening ‘internation-alism’ of Europe. My contention is that IR continues to suffer from a tyranny of place primarily because it remains an intellectual project directed by, and towards, knowledge courts of the Global North.

This is not a new claim, of course. It appears, however, to be a difficult claim to sustain in these times. Today, IR evinces a pluralism and heterogeneity that was incon-ceivable when I successfully applied to read for the MA at Aberystwyth in the early 1970s – the acceptance letter for a place which, regrettably, I did not take up, was signed by Ken Booth! From the basic text book in the field to the most erudite journal, the IR of the wider world have certainly been described in great detail and with con-siderable theoretical sophistication. But, and this is at the nub of the argument that follows, the way this world is described and understood reflects Northern preoccupa-tions. This is because the field is often blinded by its own assumptions, and does not reflect on the language it uses to speak about the world. These claims will be illustrated by a discussion of the arrival and development of the discipline in my home country, South Africa.

Plainly, speaking on the northern-centred avocations of IR, the discipline’s unfolding in South Africa is not possible without appreciating that transnational circuits of power and global centres and their peripheries invariably reflect who makes knowledge, who is touched by it and where its power falls. This is linked to a further Foucauldian point – every discourse (and language) transmits and resists power.

Alien form

From the relative security of a modern calling to the field, E.H. Carr’s (1892–1982) life as an IR scholar appears adventurous, even risky. In his day, however, the compliance necessary for a successful career in the field – either in Britain or even South Africa – was not as deep-rooted as it is today. Outside of the Golden Triangle – Oxford, Cambridge and London – and the iron-cage around the study of The Greats, there was much freedom to decide what should be studied (and how this should be done) in what were to become known as the ‘Social Sciences’.2 Indeed, the frequent quarrels between E.H. Carr and the testy David Davies suggests that what constituted IR was (to use a modern idiom) up for grabs. It was no different in other fields. So, ‘… when he accepted a Chair in the subject at Munich, … [Max Weber] … made the wry comment, “I now happen to be a sociolo-gist according to my appointment papers”’.3



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Could Carr have had the same sense of anointment, in 1936, as he read the letter of his appointment to the Woodrow Wilson Chair of International Politics at the then University of Wales, Aberystwyth?

By the time the discipline washed up in other places, it was ostensibly more certain of its identity even though those appointed to dedicated Chairs in the field were no less shots in the proverbial academic dark than were the first appointees in the field at Aberystwyth. The only dedicated IR chair in South Africa, which was established in 1962, has been occupied throughout by the following tribe: a London- and Oxford-trained former British diplomat and peace conference veteran, who was a Realist – pos-sibly in the Carr mould;4 a Chicago-trained public administrator of Afrikaner origin, who was a Realist in the Morgenthau tradition;5 a German-born, American-trained diplomatic historian,6 who was both a Cold War Warrior and proto-Neo-Con; a specialist in Comparative Politics, who is an Ulster-based South African–born sometime-exile and a liberal;7 and by an American foundation and policy type8 who, although nominally a liberal, fiercely propagated the cause of George W. Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ throughout his years in South Africa. Against the tide, the present incumbent, the Kenyan-born Gilbert Khadiagala,9 is an Africanist, with a research interest in Conflict and Mediation.

But the social and political setting within which the discipline took root in South Africa is longer – and far more interesting – than a listing of professors in the field of IR and reciting a roll of their interests.

The ‘discovery’ of South Africa by the Dutch civil servant Jan van Riebeeck (1619–1677) in April 1652 was famously captured in a painting by the Scots-born Charles Davidson Bell (1813–1882) a full 198 years later (see Figure 1). As can be seen, it depicts an:

idealized construction of the arrival of the Dutch: … [providing] … a representation of an exchange between van Riebeeck and his companions and the country’s indigenous inhabitants, the Khoisan. The close pyramidal grouping of Europeans, bathed in light at the centre of the composition,10

represents the glow of their ‘civilization’ under a brooding African sky – the place itself is Devil’s Peak which abuts Cape Town’s iconic Table Mountain.

However, the visual authority of this painting – which was once much celebrated by the country’s English speakers and Afrikaners alike – fades when set against narrative accounts of the arrival of van Riebeeck’s party. Here is one such, by the Afrikaans writer Karel Schoeman, and importantly for the conversation on language that will follow in these pages, it was written in English:

Space first of all, the small wooden ships on the open sea, bounded by the horizon. Three ships brought the first party of colonists to the Cape, with 86 men on board the first, 75 on the second and 20 on the third, besides a small number of women and children, all cooped up for much of the voyage in constricted cabins or between decks. Peasants, farming people and townspeople from the Low Countries, North Germany or Scandinavia, largely illiterate; some of them had seen service abroad as soldiers, sailors or Company officials, but many had now left Europe for the first time and had never been at sea. Their passage was quick, however, and on the afternoon of 5 April 1652 the first mate of the commander’s ship sighted, ‘God be praised, the land of




Cabo de Boa Esperance, namely the Table Mountain, E. and E. of S. at a distance of about 15 to 16 miles’. How many of them had ever seen a mountain? Three puny vessels, their masts, sails and bright pennants dwarfed by the granite mass of mountains before them, the sea stretching out behind, the sky above: Europe encountering Africa, the colonists arriving in the land to which they were laying claim.11

What happened next was a product of religious belief, cultural foundation and the quotidian experience of those who came from afar because they were to provide legiti-macy to the land grab and the ethnic cleansing that would follow and they alone set the political ground rules that would continue until the country’s first democratic election in 1994. As a result, the encounter between the Native and Settler took place within a con-stitutional and legal system that was overshadowed by the triumph of conquest, the lore of Christianity and specific notions of what comprised civilisation.

The importance of these issues as a way to understand the international only became clear when I finally freed myself from the trusses – both professional and personal – that bound me to IR and its canon. This freedom has afforded me with an opening to see the discipline as a form of alien species in southern and South Africa. To understand why, we

Figure 1. The ‘discovery’ of South Africa by the Dutch civil servant, Jan van Riebeeck (1619–1677) in April 1652, captured in a painting by the Scots-born Charles Davidson Bell (1813–1882). ‘The Landing of Van Riebeeck’ is reproduced with the kind permission of the National Library of South Africa, Cape Town Campus.



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must turn to the history of the discipline’s migration to South Africa and to a discussion of the local conditions within which it took root.

Institutionalised IR arrived in the country in the early 1930s ostensibly in the self-same spirit – namely, the human cost of war – that had moved David Davies to establish the Aberystwyth Chair.12 In the form of its migration to the country, the discipline fol-lowed a trajectory – between the imperial metropole and South African colony – that had been taken by most other forms of organised knowledge. As Saul Dubow has pointed out, academic disciples relied on the role of Settlers as reliable but quite self-interested carriers of imperial forms of knowing – the use of the adjective self-interested is impor-tant because settlers would often challenge imperial control and mastery. Dubow writes:

[k]nowledge-based institutions and voluntary societies were one means by which the colonial middle class established its public presence. These organisations, with their constitutions, rules of procedure and etiquette, committee structures and voluntary subscriber lists, operated as fine-grained indicators of hierarchy and achievement. At one level they proclaimed collective advance. At another, they offered a source of public recognition for individuals.13

The first institution that was established to nurture the discipline in South Africa was modelled on the premier IR British institution of the 1930s, Chatham House – indeed, the local version was called the South African Institute of International Affairs. Unsurprisingly, then, the earliest advocates of IR in South Africa were instilled with particular under-standings of what constituted a discipline that purported to describe the international and were accepting of the Social Darwinist thinking around the idea which, at the time, had drawn the country into membership of the League of Nations. This pedigree limited the intellectual horizons of the local discipline mainly to reproducing ‘Eurocentric histories and geographies of world politics’.14

The result was that South Africa’s geographical setting, its polyglot communities and its many emerging nationalisms were effectively ignored by IR even though they pro-vided an array of alternative optics through which to view the emerging idea of the international.

Child of empire

In his 1961 book, What Is History?15 Carr emphasised the significance of (what he called) ‘site-specificness’ for all intellectual work. He illustrated this point with this car-navalistic image: ‘[the] point in the procession at which … [the writer] … finds himself determines his angle of vision over the past’.16 For non-native speakers, who in South Africa constitute the majority of its citizens, English metaphors are often difficult to fol-low – and this may well be one such. Helpfully, however, Carr provided a user-friendly explanation of what he intended to be understood: ‘before you study the history, study the historian’.17

And so, following this advice, any writer in IR (or History) is duty-bound to offer some autobiographical notes, and it is to this humdrum chore that we now turn. Born into an English-speaking family – in which a sense of ‘Britishness’ was triumphant – my own childhood was thought to be like every other in the Commonwealth in the years




immediately after the Second World War. Across the Empire, we learnt the same nursery rhymes, we played with the same toys, and we were taught to value the same organised games. Notwithstanding these certainties, I was soon to discover that the reality that was opening before me – deep in the South African Lowveld – was somewhat at odds with the British-centred world that my mother, the books scattered about the home and my early schooling were instilling in me. For one thing, not everyone understood English; for another, not all those in my young life were White-skinned; and indeed, those who nursed me were Black and spoke a language quite alien even to the ear of my mother.

What we came to understand about the social world, however, was as much a function of our upbringing as of our formal training. Another autobiographical prop helps to illus-trate this point: within the home, I was taught that Afrikaners were different from English speakers – not only was their language and their culture said to be inferior, but they were decidedly antagonistic towards the natural superiority of the imperial project of which (so I was frequently told) I was lucky to be a part.

My suspicion that there were multiple interpretations of what constituted the interna-tional, in this particular universe, were confirmed when I went to university. As an under-graduate at an English-medium university, I took a major in Literature – not in English, but in the Afrikaans language. In my final year, I studied at the feet of the leading figure in this field, N.P. van Wyk Louw (1906–1970) – poet, playwright and polemicist. He was a towering intellect and critical voice, both in the Afrikaner community and in the coun-try at large: given the questions he raised, it is not surprising that he was often in conflict with the crude nationalism of many Afrikaners. Unlike many of them, however, he was no isolationist. With great distinction, he had once occupied the only Chair in Afrikaans outside of South Africa that was – and remains – located in Amsterdam. Its establishment in 1923 was an early example of the global periphery trying to influence both the cause and course of organised knowledge at a metropolitan centre.

Louw’s love of language, literature and learning had been fostered in an isolated childhood home that curiously, given the national politics of his lifetime, was cosmopoli-tan, not nationalistic. He had been baptised with the Dutch/Afrikaner names Nicolaas Petrus van Wyk but took the initials, N.P., as his writing name and, as many Afrikaners do, used his third name, which was his mother’s maiden name, as an everyday name! A younger brother was also a poet, although not of quite of the same stature. He, too, always used his initials, W.E.G., in his writing because he had been baptised with the wonderfully Edwardian names, William Edward Gladstone, and answered only to the name, Gladstone!18

In most readings of the sociology and history of post-Union South Africa, cultural blending of this type seems counter-intuitive because, as has already been suggested, the English and Afrikaans communities were thought to occupy different, and often very antagonistic, cultural and political universes. But both groups shared a desire to reinforce the links between the African periphery and the European centre. In pursuing this objec-tive, Cape Afrikaners – like the Louw family – were drawn as much to the refinement of Victorian Britain as they were to the nationalism that drove their search for a separate language. As an adult, Louw – with other Afrikaner intellectuals – looked upon the Afrikaans language as a ‘bridge’ between Europe and Africa. The role of codified knowl-edge, in this view, was to mediate the tensions that arose from (what we nowadays far too easily call) the time-and-space divide.



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What are the lessons of all this for Carr’s idea of site-specificness?

Given the close cultural association between Britain and South Africa, it is no surprise that many English-speaking South Africans have seen no difference between the two countries – their cultures, their knowledge base, their place in the world. This has hap-pened in many disciplines – in IR, it began with the University of Cape Town and Oxford-trained Charles Manning (1894–1978), the first of several scholars who relo-cated to Britain in order to pursue successful careers in the field. Often when they have spoken of Africa and the Global South – its context and history, its people and its places – these émigrés have confirmed that there is only a thin – or perhaps no – membrane between the two places when it comes to Carr’s idea of site-specificness.

But I have always felt differently about these things, and, in a forum where, occasion-ally, I blog on matters-IR, I have reflected on the schizophrenia created by IR’s cultural positioning in South Africa. Let me repeat those reflections on this occasion:

In my final year of schooling each pupil was required to commit to memory a piece of English verse. For final marks, we had to recite this in front of our peers. I chose Thomas Hardy’s (1840-1928) poem, The Darkling Thrush, with its bleak description of the wintry English landscape. The appointed day of the examination was in late-November. Nearly fifty years later, I clearly remember looking out of the first floor window of the class-room wondering at the bizarre contrast between my faithful mouthing of Hardy’s lines – ‘I leaned upon a coppice gate/when frost was spectre grey’ etc. – and the shimmering heat on the parched veld, as all South Africans lovingly call the scrubland. The lesson of this for my career in IR has been plain: I have taught Hardy (and Northern understandings of IR) to generations of African students who have lived their lives in a different social universe.19

Distant places

The conceptual tool that explains the social life of an academic discipline is called the Sociology of Knowledge,20 and because he understood the significance of it for the study of IR,21 Carr’s writing has often been judged to be superior from that of his peers.22 Using the Sociology of Knowledge as a point of analytical entry, I turn now to draw from Carr’s seminal work in IR, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, in order to show the limits of the disci-pline’s geographical compass during its formative stage – and will later show that this perspective, I believe, hangs still over it.

But, first, some scattered thoughts on emerging methodological forms from the disci-pline’s formative years: Carr’s intellectual project, as we have just seen, was not to chronicle the progress of the international in the style of much early writing in interna-tional affairs – to separate, momentarily, this genus from international politics or IR. The task of chronicling the story of how international relationships were unfolding across the world took place in the heart of the imperial mother-ship, as it were: notably in the annual Chatham House Survey of IR which was once called the ‘bible’ of British IR. This par-ticular approach to the discipline-in-the-making, however, confirmed Carr’s contention that:




[f]or the past hundred years, and more especially since 1918, the English-speaking peoples have formed the dominant group in the world; current theories of international morality have been designed to perpetuate their supremacy and expressed in an idiom peculiar to them.23

It is plain that Carr was making a universal point here – namely, that the powerful invariably dress their own interests in terms of universalistic morality. A central claim of this lecture, of course, is that this approach continues – and that the Global North holds the intellectual and, so too, the political ring on this issue when it comes to IR.

During his writing of The Twenty Years’ Crisis, Carr twice turned to events in southern Africa to illustrate a point around the doctrine of the ‘harmony of interests’.24 Both of these references drew closer the illustrative value of the botched coup that was mounted against Paul Kruger’s Zuid Afrikaanse Republiek (ZAR) in the mid-1890s, and, momen-tarily, this event (and Carr’s analysis of it) will hold our attention.

Encouraged by South Africa’s richest man Cecil John Rhodes25 (1852–1902), a fierce champion of Empire, who was then the Prime Minister of the Cape of Good Hope, and the Colonial Office, the coup attempt ran from 29 December 1895 until 2 January 1896. Drawn together, the events around it are known as the ‘Jameson Raid’: the name speaks to the Scots-born, London-trained medical doctor, Leander Starr Jameson (1853–1917), who both conceived of the scheme and led it. The motive, as so often is the case when – to use Carr’s term – ‘international morality’ plays out, was exploitable natural resources: in this case, British interest in the gold mines of the Witwatersrand.

Carr saw the Jameson Raid as evidence of a transition from ‘the apparent harmony [of European] interests to the transparent clash of [national] interests’.26 This, he suggested, emerged because of the intrusion of colonial policies into the European diplomatic sphere. While the Raid is used to illustrate Carr’s critique of the international political universe that engaged his conceptual thinking, the event itself changed the political face of southern Africa – the latter development, however, was entirely ignored by Carr.

Why was this important?

The answer is that the Jameson Raid unleashed a new form of politics in southern Africa. The immediate political background to the Raid included ‘the subcontinent’s mineral revolution … the final conquest of African chiefdoms and polities, and the failed … [British] attempt to impose a form of confederation on the subcontinent’s chaotic mix-ture of … colonies, Boer Republics and African societies’.27 Through these events, a series of overlapping social bundles – indigenous, religious, Republican and modern – collided under the impact of late-imperial ambition and avarice. The upshot was the region’s natal moment, constitutionally speaking: its first sovereign and modern state – the Union of South Africa – was the single most important outcome of the Jameson Raid following, as it did, upon 4 years of war.

The Union, whose success was said to rest on the twin ideas of national reconstruction and the reconciliation between South Africa’s triumphant English speakers and a paci-fied Afrikaans-speaking community, was claimed to be a shining example of the durabil-ity of the imperial project in a world which was increasingly conscious of the idea of the international. However, its formation – as the Raid itself – was only possible because



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there had been an erasure of all but White claims on the territorial space that was to be called ‘South Africa’. This was the result of a combination of factors, including race discrimination, punishing tax regimes, attacks on the authority of traditional chiefs and laws limiting land holdings – these effectively ended any claims on citizenship by the country’s indigenous people.

So, the Act of Union, which had to be passed by Westminster, confirmed South Africa’s racial divide: the majority of the its citizens were excluded from participation in the government of the country and, as we now know, this was to be at the core of the apartheid’s violent rule. But there was more here, the sovereign borders that were drawn around the newly formed State erected barriers through the subcontinent’s social world cutting across the migrant patterns of southern Africa’s nomadic people. It was argued, however, that exclusionary outcomes, like these, were acceptable because the Union Jack was thought to be a glue sufficient to hold together a polyglot population notwith-standing their myriad of loyalties.

The limits of this particular understanding of the region and the politics that were evolving are to be found in Carr’s second reference to southern Africa. This focused on the so-called ‘Kruger Telegram’ which Kaiser Wilhelm II sent to the embattled ZAR commending its President for apprehending the Jameson Raiders. Once again, the imme-diate setting of the event was crucial domestically – once again, this is ignored in Carr’s writing.

To explain, in the Republic’s capital, the Kaiser’s Telegram was read as a message of support from a major European power. This development was certainly a confirmation of Carr’s notion that the affairs of southern Africa – very loosely, to be sure – had intruded upon the late-nineteenth-century European state system with its harmony of interests, its established diplomatic routines and its increasingly elaborate rituals.28 These issues, of course, were also fundamental to the development of the academic discipline that Carr was to help construct but, importantly for our immediate purposes, the centrality of the event for the formation of international relationships in Africa was entirely missed.

In London, the Kruger Telegram was an indication of growing Anglo-German hostil-ity that would end – as it did – in World War. Carr also viewed the telegram through this lens, but he takes it one intriguing step further by suggesting that it was a turning point in the development of British Philosophy. The ‘Kaiser’s Telegram’ (as he called it) ‘and Germany’s naval programme spread the conviction amongst British philosophers that Hegel was less good a philosopher than had been supposed … ’.29 So, the intrusion of German diplomacy into (what was known as) a British sphere of interest helped to close the collective mind of British philosophers. If true, it is an illustrative example of how easily nationalism can close off the openness that is said to be the great strength of organ-ised knowledge.

But, and this is the central point about Carr’s neglect of the region, if the Kruger Telegram closed the window shutters between Germany and Britain, it opened a political door in South Africa. More than any other event, it turned Transvaal Afrikaners – who until that point had considered themselves as simple farmers with a strong Republican zeal – into fierce Nationalists. This Nationalism would, initially, challenge British claims on the region and, later, come to inspire apartheid – the policy that held the country in its grip for four decades.




The cultural force of the English language compounded the antipathy for Britain and the British which was felt by Afrikaners – and, in order to open a conversation on the issue of language, we must follow this thread for a few sentences. One artefact which directly grew out of the Jameson Raid was Rudyard Kipling’s poem, ‘If’, which remains Britain’s most popular piece of verse.30 Apart from celebrating the event, the poem tar-gets Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, and praised the ‘civilizing mission’ of Empire. What is at issue here is not Kipling’s evocation of masculinity and the manifold mythologies around it, but the intersection of greed in the form of imperial ambition, the power of cultural hegemony in the guise of ‘international morality’ – to again use Carr’s words – and assumptions of cultural superiority.

The ignominious failure of the Jameson Raid fuelled the enmity of the British (and, indeed, English-speaking South Africans) towards Afrikaners – a condition that was to continue for several decades. The Afrikaans language – the ‘kombuis taal’ (kitchen lan-guage), as it was called – was targeted in crass and cruel ways, as were other features of Afrikaner culture. The fierce response of Afrikaners including their determination to assert their own language, and their own interpretation of history confirms that the oppressive force of a dominant language and culture can linger over international (and other) social relationships for decades, especially when the writing of history is at stake.

Not for a second can one suggest a causal link between Kipling’s poetry and the sub-sequent course of South African history, but it offers a dimension that is worth thinking about, even in contemporary IR: why has the issue of language largely remained at the edges of the field? Can it be so for much longer? These questions will come to occupy our attention as this article draws to a close.

For now, we must recognise that as Carr, Aberystwyth’s fourth Woodrow Wilson Professor, sets out to write (what was to be) a path-breaking book in the field, his concern for matters – Non-European, shall we say – is fleeting and only occurs when some distant corner of the world impinges on the affairs of the European centre.

Imperial legacy

Modernity’s dark side followed upon both the Jameson Raid and the Kruger Telegram. The South African War (1899–1902) was effectively a conflict between the ‘civilized’ – because cultural convention and, indeed, power determined they alone could wrestle out the claims of sovereignty and statehood even in remote corners of the world. The Boer War (as the South African War is also known) almost defeated Britain’s Empire, and helped to draw South Africa and other Settler Colonies – Australia, Canada and New Zealand – into a series of sovereign-centred relationships, underpinned by Imperial (trading) Preferences, that would chart the international form of (what were to be called) the Dominions – eventually these would mutate into the modern Commonwealth.

The legacy of the Boer War, which was to scar South Africa’s political landscape for more than a century, continues to this day as its awful secrets are exposed. Recent work shows that of the nearly 28,000 Afrikaners who perished in the notorious Concentration Camps, 22,074 were children below the age of 16 years.31 As my wife, Louise, put it during a visit we made to the Women’s Monument in Bloemfontein, which was unveiled by the English Quaker, Emily Hobhouse, in 1913, ‘[i]t really was a war against children’.32



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There is no hard evidence that the British targeted Afrikaner children, in particular, but the scorched-earth policy that they followed during the second phase of war was less combat-related and was more of a cruel punishment for Boer families, disrupting espe-cially the lives of children. (Interestingly, a contemporary gaze on the high proportion of civilian casualties, including that of children, suggests that the Boer War was a proto-type of modern war.) There is, however, a sense in which Afrikaner children were spe-cifically targeted in a propaganda war: the education policy in the Concentration Camps which aimed to ‘capture the children’, had its eye on making them ‘happy subjects of the British Empire’33 by using only one language of instruction, English.

More symbolically, and infinitely more horrifying because of the long silence around it, recent research reveals that at least 21,000 Black South Africans perished in a series of parallel Concentration Camps.34 Because the British Army did not keep figures on the deaths of Black South Africans under its care, an accurate figure for their number cannot reliably be established. However, new work claims that:

the mortality rates of children in black camps were as bad if not worse than, those of white children. Between June 1901 and October 1902, it was estimated that 5 160 of the 6 345 deaths, more than 80 percent, recorded in black African camps in the Transvaal were children. Between September and December 1901, 3 093 of the 3 832 reported deaths in the Orange River Colony’s black camps were children.35

What has this got to do with IR in South Africa?

As we have noted, the IR discipline was brought to the country in the spirit of ending war, but the institutional setting on its arrival drew it towards the British imperial project which was the driving force of South Africa’s search for an international role. So, the platform from which IR in South Africa chartered its teleological direction was aligned to the power and the discourse of those who ruled the world and those who wrote its history.

The early habitus (to use Pierre Bourdieu’s ever-helpful term) of IR in South Africa positioned the country between the Empire and the African continent and, importantly, too, used the discipline’s repertoire to chart the course of relations between South Africa and the brooding continent about. As a South African politician put it in 1960, ‘[w]e South Africans live in the leading State in Africa; technically, commercially, industrially and culturally the most advanced country on the continent’.36 This understanding effec-tively set the country apart from the rest of the continent – essentially South Africa was a European state in Africa!

The resulting exceptionalism was fostered by the boundary-making of both politician and mapmaker which stabilised the notion that sovereignty was to be the most important organising principle for all forms of African social life. And it was around the sover-eignty that African states were formed when the idea of self-determination trumped European colonisation after the Second World War.

However, Africa’s borders were not ‘natural’ neither were they coeval with the nations which were living within them. Instead, they were the constructed playthings of power, just as pre-colonial borders had been. The Guinean-born IR scholar, Siba Grovogui, has




underscored this point, with a political import which resonates with the central argument of this lecture:

the process of decolonization transferred rudimentary political powers to the formerly colonized, but it did not transform the structures of domination – that is, the institutional and cultural contexts of Western hegemony in the global international order on the one hand, and African marginalization within it on the other.37

So what of IR in South Africa?

As we have noted, an academic Chair in the field was established in 1962 at the English-medium University of the Witwatersrand. The Chair was sentimentally named after the two-time South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts (1870–1950). A partnership with the South African Institute of International Affairs ensured that the teaching arm of the dis-cipline was caught within the same cultural frame as those who first brought IR to the country’s shores. The result was that throughout the years of colonialism and apartheid, South African IR articulated a sovereign-centred view of the world, making it complicit in the epistemic regime around the sanctity of African borders even though the country’s politicians periodically strayed into regional adventuring.

Not much has changed in IR in post-apartheid South Africa except that the issue of policy-making in a democratic culture has emerged as a major (if imperfect) feature of its life. Here, a simple grammar conjoins nation-building with the latest fashion in eco-nomic thought and ritual gestures towards Africanism. However, and paradoxically, given the ontological hold of sovereignty in the field, the ‘new’ South Africa’s IR posi-tions the slippery doctrine of intervention at the centre of any notion of security. This approach to policy-making was carried into the region after the Cold War under the cover of the idea of security. This was a boost to the country’s confidence because it rescued its claim to be a regional power from the discreditation that the idea had experienced under apartheid.38 This approach to the region and its sovereign borders has ended any hope that social life in southern Africa could be mediated by more than states and imported notions of multilateralism. Today, social relations in southern Africa are ‘a form of … accounting, the day-to-day administration of men and things’, as the late Tony Judt once wrote in a defence of idealism.39

In offering this critique of the discipline’s post-apartheid life, I have tried to suggest that there is more to South and southern African than soil, sovereignty and prefabricated states – the issues that seem to dominate thinking in local IR. But these issues seem alien to the site-specificness of the region’s people where issues like water, health and climate change touch daily life far more than sovereign-centred worries.

Why does this matter to IR?

Understanding social relations in their context and history, as the Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mandani has pointed out, is the only way that the true form of the distant ‘other … [can] be understood’40 – an insight which echoes Carr’s thinking on site-specificness.



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Rivers of Babylon

Recently, the site-specificness of South Africa has encouraged me to explore other understandings of the international that lie beyond the linear one on offer by IR, South African and other. With colleagues from other disciplines, I have edited a book on the diversity of the many intellectual traditions in the country.41 This exercise has shown that the international came to South Africa in many forms and, indeed, in many languages.

Why have these never been recognised?

Exploring the answer to this question brings us fully to the issue of language. Today, English is the accepted currency of educational, cultural and economic exchange. Indeed, its place as the ‘natural order’ of modern knowing has been regularised by the notion of the ‘knowledge economy’ – an ideological construct in which this particular language matters more than all others.42 So, it is no surprise that English has certified the ‘interna-tional’ in the proper noun, IR – put differently, the discipline’s global authority is certi-fied by the English language.

There are, however, profound limitations to our understanding of the social world through the use of English only. As Siba Grovogui has pointed out, the English language – like all others – carries ‘imaginaries that are not always available to others’.43 As a result, the use of the English language as the only language of IR often means a failure to understand history and context – or a failure to locate the site-specificness that Carr so astutely identified.

These limitations run parallel to Edward Said’s (1935–2003) critique of Western forms of knowing. Notwithstanding the fierce debate his work arouses in IR and else-where, Said successfully linked the power of knowledge to the politics which under-pinned the West’s view of ‘the Orient’44 – a notion, he insisted, which simplified a huge region and a swath of people, many religions and many ethnic and other groupings over a considerable period of history.

Certainly, lip-service is paid to the fact that knowledge – especially in IR – is made and spoken in many tongues. But as the late South African social theorist Neville Alexander ceaselessly pointed out, the notion that English is ‘a simple instrument for the transmission of information and knowledge’45 is false. It is not a neutral lingua franca: instead, English is a powerful instrument of controlling (and accessing) knowledge as any non-English speaker struggling to write – or, indeed, read – a contribution to the pages of any IR journal will attest.

The wider role of English as an instrument of global power is confirmed by a record which reveals that it is the tongue in which, for all its lyrical beauty, some of the most vicious atrocities in making the international have been committed – Omdurman (1898), Bethulie (1902), Amritsar (1919), Hiroshima (1946) and Mai Lai (1968). In these, and many others places besides, the English language has helped to make the high-minded goals of humankind the enemy of the true and the just.

It is certainly true that English was the language used to rally against the abuses of British power during the Boer War and, half a century later, against apartheid. In India, too, English was the language used to mobilise against British authority – ironically, this




was the legacy of the introduction of the language as a medium of instruction in 1835. And, as the world knows when in 1976 South Africa’s Afrikaners – failing to learn the lessons of their own history – asserted that Afrikaans became the language of school instruction, Soweto’s courageous children took to the streets insisting on being schooled in the English language – an act which shook the edifice of apartheid.

There are profound questions for the discipline around the Foucauldian uncertainty represented by the language that dominates IR. To briefly explore one of many threads, simple demography suggests that the long-term language of IR will be Mandarin. What will this do to the concepts that currently command the discipline? Will E.H. Carr’s thinking and writing manage the crossing to this new frontier? The issue here is whether IR (as we know it) will be lost in translation.

Curiously, in a discipline in which the idea of self-reflection is said to be important,46 there seems to be no sustained interest in reflecting on the English űber alles culture that pervades the field. The assumption that underpins this idea seems to be that when ‘natives’ speak about social issues, or politics, or IR, they can do so only in English. So, it is that the native tongue has no life in the world of the discipline.

If the English language creates constricted understandings of the international, it has also silenced much of the deep memory of dispossession. As we turn towards home, I want to explore this by a return to the autobiography that has periodically run through these pages.

Several years ago, my intellectual interest turned towards Literature: a familiar move to all students of E.H. Carr’s work – after all, as Jonathan Haslam pointed out, Carr came ‘into things Russian via literature not politics’.47 This step has opened the possibility of understanding the power of knowledge through storytelling, and followed upon an invi-tation to publish with a serious scholar of Literature, the Canadian academic and activist, Ted Chamberlin,48 who researches the tales that First People tell about their association with the land.49

First People, who were dislocated at the very founding moment of sovereign state-hood, find themselves in an awkward place in the modern world. But their plight is at the heart of a myriad of confusions and communication failures, not only in South Africa but in all Settler Colonial societies. Policy mantras suggest that there are complex historical, anthropological, legal and cultural explanations for the conditions in which indigenous people are forced to live in sovereign states. But, personally, I have always appreciated that no explanation was more prescient than the rather base Marxist critique of colonial-ism’s criminal dispossession like the one attributed to Kenya’s first president Jomo Kenyatta (1892–1978). It runs, ‘When the Missionaries arrived, the Africans had the Land and the Missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible’.

In his work, Ted Chamberlin raises questions that also point in the direction of dispos-session – and these have been at the heart of this particular contribution to the E.H. Carr Lectures Series because they mark the discipline out for the silence its language and grammar impose on those who lay outside the discipline’s Northern-centred formal frame.

In order for the point to be effectively made, both lyrically and analytically, Chamberlin’s own voice is best heard:



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The humanities have been returning to the question ‘how can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’ with some urgency over the past fifty years, wondering how people can write poetry after holocaust or whether postcolonial people can sing their songs or tell stories in the languages and liturgies of colonial heritage. But over and over again they do just that, the Subaltern speaking with a clarity that the clever critic still doesn’t want to acknowledge, while survivors of dislocation and dispossession offer impossibly eloquent testimonies to their exile in Babylon.50

Chamberlin’s concern is with a question prior to IR: what has happened to those who have been excluded by the very idea of sovereignty?

This question should matter to the discipline that breathed life into the idea of states and so legitimised the possession upon which Settler colonial states have flourished.51 In South Africa, as in most other places, this appropriation of life, of language and lore, continues as a binary: to assume possession is to dispossess another; to exercise sover-eignty is to permanently exclude.

While Charles Davidson Bell’s painting offers a romantic vision of an open, even benign, exchange between Settler and Native, it was certainly not so: it was a moment of great violence – a moment when outsiders became insiders and the insiders became out-siders.52 This was, and remains, an inversion of the Westphalian truism that sovereignty and statehood are invariably rooted in the local. In South Africa, it is not rootedness but mobility – Dutch, British, Indian and African – that has always inspired claims to nationhood.

Ted Chamberlin’s work confirms an idea that is central to this argument: exclusion has made insiders exiles in their own land. This idea is largely unexplored in IR because the discipline’s point of departure is that to be ‘normal’ requires control to be exercised through the three ‘“Ss” that are at its heart – strategy, stability and security. This approach to the social world is located in what Walter Benjamin once called a “homogeneous and empty” time’.53 Thinking about these issues through framings other than IR, as these pages have tried to do, enables one to see that the ‘state of emergency’ in which most excluded people live is not the exception but the rule.54 If those with stories about their land live in a permanent state of emergency, we may well ask what IR is doing in the classroom?

Acknowledgements

This is a greatly revised text of the E.H. Carr Memorial Lecture, delivered at Aberystwyth University on 14 March 2013. Thanks are due to Ken Booth, Julia Gallagher, Estelle H. Prinsloo, Larry Swatuk and Vineet Thaker for reading various drafts and for strengthening the argument.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1. John J. Mearsheimer, ‘E.H. Carr vs. Idealism: The Battle Rages on’, International Relations, 19(2), 2005, pp. 139–52.




2. There is a fine piece of irony (not to mention sexism) which runs through the relationship of the Classics and the Social Sciences, and it has to do with the introduction of the PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) Degree at Oxford. Michael Ignatieff, in his biography of Isaiah Berlin, writes that in 1931, the PPE ‘was a relatively new subject, regarded sus-piciously by many dons, who dismissed it as “girls greats” – that is, an easy alternative to classics, suitable for young women’. See Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin. A Life (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998), p. 58.

3. Peter Burke. Sociology and History (London: Allen & Unwin, 1980), p. 20. 4. Ben Cockram (1903–1971), BA Hons (London), BA Hons, MA (Oxon), PhD (Michigan). 5. Michael H.H. Louw (1914–1987), BA, MA (Pretoria), PhD (Chicago). 6. Dirk Kunert (1941–1991), BA (Dallas), MA. PhD (Georgetown). 7. Adrian Guelke (b. 1947), BA, MA (UCT), PhD (LSE). 8. John Stremlau (b. 1944), BA (Wesleyan), MA, PhD (Tufts). 9. Gilbert Khadiagala (b. 1957), BA Hons (Nairobi), MA (McMaster), PhD (Johns Hopkins).10. Michael Godby, ‘The Art of Charles Bell: An Appraisal’, in Phillida B. Simons (ed.) The Life

and Work of Charles Bell (Cape Town, South Africa: Fernwood Press, 1988), p. 156.11. Karel Schoeman, ‘Fort Ende Thuijn: The Years of Dutch Colonization’, in Hilton Judin and

Ivan Vladislavić (eds) Black: Architecture, Apartheid and after (Amsterdam: NAI Publishers, 1999) p.A5.

12. See A. Leslie Bostock, A Short History of the South African Institute of International Affairs, 1934–1984 (Johannesburg, South Africa: South African Institute of International Affairs, 1970).

13. Saul Dubow, A Commonwealth of Learning: Science, Sensibility and White South Africa 1820–2000 (Cape Town, South Africa: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 3.

14. Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, ‘The Postcolonial Moment in Security Studies’, Review of International Studies, 32(2), 2006, p. 333.

15. Edward H. Carr, What Is History? The George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures Delivered in the University of Cambridge January–March 1962 (London: Macmillan & Co., 1962).

16. Carr, What Is History?, p. 30.17. Keith Thomas, ‘Fighting over History’, 3 December 2009, available at: http://www.nybooks.

com/articles/archives/2009/dec/03/fighting-over-history/ (accessed 19 July 2013).18. Another brother, there were four in total, was christened with his father’s names Bismarck

von Moltke. See J. C. Steyn, Van Wyk Louw. ŉ Lewensverhaal, Deel 1 (Kaapstad, South Africa: Tafelberg, 1998), pp. 8–9.

19. Peter Vale, ‘IR and the Global South: Final Confessions of a Schizophrenic Teacher’, e- International Relations, 30 October 2009, available at: http://www.e-ir.info/2009/10/30/ir-and-the-global-south-%e2%80%93-final-confessions-of-a-schizophrenic-teacher/ (accessed 19 July 2013).

20. Definitions on this abound: I like Robert Merton’s unfussy perspective provided over 60 years ago, that is, Sociology of Knowledge ‘is primarily concerned with the relations between knowledge and other existential factors in society or culture’. See Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1957), p. 456.

21. Carr, What Is History?, pp. 67–8.22. Tim Dunne, ‘Theories as Weapons: E.H. Carr and International Relations’, in Michael Cox

(ed.) E.H. Carr. A Critical Appraisal (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 221.23. Edward H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of

International Relations (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 102.24. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939, pp. 78–9, 91.25. See Denis Judd and Keith Surridge, The Boer War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 36.


http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/dec/03/fighting-over-history/

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/dec/03/fighting-over-history/

http://www.e-ir.info/2009/10/30/ir-and-the-global-south-%e2%80%93-final-confessions-of-a-schizophrenic-teacher/

http://www.e-ir.info/2009/10/30/ir-and-the-global-south-%e2%80%93-final-confessions-of-a-schizophrenic-teacher/


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26. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939, p. 78.27. Saul Dubow, ‘How British Was the British World? The Case of South Africa’, The Journal of

Imperial and Commonwealth History, 37(1), 2009, pp. 1–27.28. See Peter Vale, ‘Revealing All? The Troubled Times of South Africa’s Diplomats’, The Hague

Journal of Diplomacy, 7(3), 2012, pp. 337–49.29. Carr, What Is History?, p. 89.30. Geoffrey Wansell, ‘The Remarkable Story behind Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’ – and the

Swashbuckling Renegade Who Inspired It’, Mail Online, 16 February, 2009, available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1146109/The-remarkable-story-Rudyard-Kiplings-If--swashbuckling-renegade-inspired-it.html (accessed 19 February 2013).

31. South African History Online, ‘Women & Children in White Concentration Camps during the Anglo-Boer War, 1900–1902’, 2013, available at: http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/women-children-white-concentration-camps-during-anglo-boer-war-1900-1902 (accessed 21 July 2013).

32. Peter Vale, ‘Interpretation of Boer War Key to SA Today’, Daily Dispatch, 16 November 2012, p.9.

33. Se Duff, ‘“Faded Flowers”? Children in the Concentration Camps’, in Bill Nasson and Albert Grundlingh (eds) The War at Home. Women and families in the Anglo-Boer War (Cape Town, South Africa: Tafelberg, 2013), p. 160.

34. Stowell Kessler, The Black Concentration Camps of the Anglo-Boer War 1899–1922 (Bloemfontein, South Africa: The War Museum of the Boer Republics, 2012).

35. Duff, ‘“Faded Flowers”?’, p. 146.36. Japie D. Basson, ‘Africa Our Main Workshop’, in Hildegarde Spottiswoode (ed.) South

Africa: The Road Ahead (Cape Town, South Africa: Howard Timmins, 1960), p. 31.37. Siba N’Z. Grovogui, Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns and Africans: Race and Self-Determination

in International Law (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 2.38. Peter Vale, Security and Politics in South Africa: The Regional Dimension, p. 186, (Colorado:

Lynne Rienner Publishers).39. Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land. A Treatise on Our Present Discontents (London: Allen Lane,

2010), pp. 142–3.40. Bhakti Shringarpure, ‘In Conversation with Mahmood Mamdani’, Warscapes, 15 July 2013,

available at: http://www.warscapes.com/conversations/conversation-mahmood-mamdani (accessed 19 July 2013).

41. See Peter Vale, Lawrence Hamilton and Estelle H. Prinsloo (eds) Intellectual Traditions in South Africa: Ideas, Individuals and Institutions (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2014).

42. See Leon de Kock, ‘South Africa in the Global Imaginary: An Introduction’, in Leon de Kock, Louise Bethlemen and Sonja Laden (eds) South Africa in the Global Imaginary (Pretoria, South Africa: UNISA Press, 2004), pp.1-31.

43. Benjamin Creutzfelt, ‘Theory Talk #57: Siba Grovogui on IR as Theology, Reading Kant Badly, and the Incapacity of Western Political Theory to Travel Very Far in Non-Western Contexts’, Theory Talks, 2013, available at: http://www.isn.ethz.ch/Digital-Library/Publications/Detail/?lng=en&id=168715 (accessed 28 November 2013).

44. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 2003).45. Neville Alexander, ‘The Centrality of the Language Question in Post-Apartheid South Africa:

Revisiting a Perennial Issue’, South African Journal of Science, 108(9/10), 2013, p. 7. This is the last piece published by the late Neville Alexander and is of essential reading for any understanding of the complexities of contemporary South Africa.

46. Anna Leander, ‘Reflexivity’, in Martin Griffiths (ed.) Encyclopedia of International Relations and Global Politics (London: Routledge, 2005), pp.717-719.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1146109/The-remarkable-story-Rudyard-Kiplings-If

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1146109/The-remarkable-story-Rudyard-Kiplings-If

http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/women-children-white-concentration-camps-during-anglo-boer-war-1900-1902

http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/women-children-white-concentration-camps-during-anglo-boer-war-1900-1902

http://www.warscapes.com/conversations/conversation-mahmood-mamdani

http://www.isn.ethz.ch/Digital-Library/Publications/Detail/?lng=en&id=168715

http://www.isn.ethz.ch/Digital-Library/Publications/Detail/?lng=en&id=168715

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1146109/The-remarkable-story-Rudyard-Kiplings-If--swashbuckling-renegade-inspired-it.html



47. Jonathan Haslam, ‘E.H. Carr’s Search for Meaning, 1892-1982’, in Michael Cox (ed.) E.H. Carr. A Critical Appraisal (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 34.

48. See J. Edward Chamberlin and Peter Vale, ‘Can the Humanities Sing Again’, English Studies in Canada, 38(1), 2013, pp. 161–8.

49. J. Edward Chamberlin, If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground (Manchester: Caranet, 2003).

50. J. Edward Chamberlin, ‘Chanting Down Babylon: Innocence in the Contemporary Humanities’ (Speech delivered at the Northrop Frye Conference, University of Toronto, 4–6 October 2012), p. 12.

51. Barkawi and Laffey, ‘The Postcolonial Moment in Security Studies’, p. 347.52. Vale, Security and Politics in South Africa, pp. 45–6.53. Walter Benjamin, ‘On the concept of History’, 1940, < www.marxist.org/reference/archive/

benjamin/1940/history.htm > (13/02/2013)54. Benjamin, On the Concept of History.

Author biography

Peter Vale is Professor of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg and Nelson Mandela Chair in Politics Emeritus at Rhodes University, South Africa. He was co-chair of panel that looked into the Humanities in South Africa, and he currently Chairs the Humanities Standing Committee of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf). His research interests include the politics of higher education, how the international came to South Africa and states and societies in southern Africa. Vale’s publications include Security and Politics in South Africa: The Regional Dimension (2003), Keeping a Sharp Eye. A Century of Cartoons on South Africa’s International Relations (2011) and Re-Imaging the Social in South Africa: Critique & Post-Apartheid Knowledge (2009), a collection he edited with Heather Jacklin. A new book, Political Science in South Africa: The Last Forty Years, which is edited with Pieter Fourie, will be published in June 2014. With Estelle H. Prinsloo he edited Thesis Eleven 115, which, in 2014, will appear in book form.


www.marxist.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm

www.marxist.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm


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If International Relations lives on the street, what is it doing in the classroom?