Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Karl Deutsch’s book was one of the first to theorise about how communities emerge in the world in which war has become unthinkable. He wrote in the 1950s at the beginning of what we call today the Atlantic Alliance and the Euro-Atlantic community – examining how it is that the Atlantic democracies came to be not just allies but members of a political community in which war has been de-legitimated as a tool of statecraft.
You have gone for a change of tack with your next choice, Karl Deutsch’s Political Community in the North Atlantic Area.
Yes, I see the final two books on my list, Karl Deutsch’s Political Community in the North Atlantic Area and John Ikenberry’s After Victory, in some ways as a conceptual antidote to the first three books. The first three books are all about power, about the projection of power, about conflict and the tensions and the geo-political rivalries that emerge among great powers as they contend for primacy.
I am someone who believes that the default position in international politics is one of rivalry; war has been the norm through history. But I am also someone who believes that we can do better. I think that the international system can be tamed and that we can find ways of escaping rivalry.
I think the Deutsch and Ikenberry books have been the most influential in my own thinking about how to tame the international system. What kinds of policy instruments and what kinds of concepts can we gravitate towards to escape from the pattern of the rise and fall of great powers and hegemonic war.
Karl Deutsch’s book was one of the first to theorise about how communities emerge in the world in which war has become unthinkable. He wrote in the 1950s at the beginning of what we call today the Atlantic Alliance and the Euro-Atlantic community – examining how it is that the Atlantic democracies came to be not just allies but members of a political community in which war has been de-legitimated as a tool of statecraft.
The chances of war between the United States and the UK today are very slim to put it mildly and Deutsch tried to figure out how that comes about. He focuses largely on integration, interaction, and the formation of a sense of ‘we-ness’ among nations.
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Charles Kupchan is Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was Director for European Affairs on the National Security Council during the first Clinton administration. He has served as a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs, Columbia University’s Institute for War and Peace Studies, the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, and the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales in Paris. During 2006-2007 he was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Henry A Kissinger Scholar at the Library of Congress.
