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Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Friday, April 10, 2009 - 10:41 PM
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It's "top ten" week here at Foreign Policy, and the powers that be have asked me to chip in with a list of my own.
The thing is, Steve Walt poached a lot of the books I would have named on my own list of top ten international relations books (if there's real demand for a "top 10" books in international political economy specifically, let me know in the comments and I'll put one up next week).
So, rather than replicate Steve, let's have some fun -- what are the ten worst books in international relations?
In one sense, this question is difficult to answer, in that truly bad books are never read. Smply putting down books by bad people -- Mein Kampf, etc. -- is kind of superfluous. The books matter less than the person.
So, let's be clear on the criteria: to earn a place on this list, we're talking about:
- Books by prominent international policymakers that put you to sleep;
- Books that were influential in some way but also spectacularly wrong, leading to malign consequences.
In chronological order:
1. Norman Angell, The Great Illusion. This book has been widely misinterpreted, so let's be clear about what Angell got right and got wrong. He argued that the benefits from international trade vastly exceeded the economic benefits of empire, and therefore the economic motive for empire no longer existed. He was mostly right about that. He then argued that an enlightened citizenry would glom onto this fact and render war obsolete. Writing this in 1908, he was historically, spectacularly wrong.
2. E.H. Carr, Nationalism and After. Carr's Twenty Years' Crisis is one of the best books about international relations ever written. This is not that book. Here, Carr argues that nationalism is a passing fad and that eventually the number of nation-states in the world will be reduced to less than twenty. Since this book was published, U.N. membership has at least tripled.
3. Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb. The first of many, many, many books in which Ehrlich argued that the world's population was growing at an unsustainable rate, outstripping global resources and leading to inevitable mass starvation. Ehrlich's book committed a triple sin. First, he was wrong on the specifics. Second, by garnering so much attention by being wrong, he contributed to the belief that alarmism was the best way to get people to pay attention to the environment. Third, by crying wolf so many times, Ehrlich numbed many into not buying actual, real environmental threats.
4. Shintaro Ishihara, The Japan That Can Say No: Why Japan Will Be First Among Equals Written at the peak of Japan's property bubble, Shintaro argued that Japan was destined to become the next great superpower. Whoops.
5. Kenichi Ohmae, The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies. Plenty of management consultants have tried to write the Very Big Book. And plenty of authors have predicted the demise of the nation-state in their books. Ohmae encapsulates both of these trends. Still, there's something extra that puts him on this list -- over 90% of the footnotes in this book are to... other works by Kenichi Ohmae. It's the most blatant use of the footnote as a marketing strategy that I have ever seen.
6. Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts. Kaplan argued that "ancient hatreds" guaranteed perpetual conflict in the Balkans. According to his aides, this book heavily influenced Bill Clinton's reluctance to intervene in the Balkans for the first two years of his presidency.
7. Caspar Weinberger, Fighting for Peace: Seven Critical Years in the Pentagon. Back when I was a grad student, I needed to check out the memoirs of Reagan cabinet officials to see if there was anything that could e gleaned about a particular case. George Shultz's memoirs were chock-full of useful bits of information. This book, on the other hand, was a vast wasteland of barren prose.
8. Warren Christopher, In the Stream of History: Shaping Foreign Policy for a New Era. Makes Weinberger's memoirs seem exciting by comparison. ZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
9. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire. Ordinarily, this massive exercise in generating non-falsifiable arguments about an actorless empire would have slipped into obscurity a few months after publication. In this case, however, Emily Eakin claimed in the New York Times that it was the "next big thing" in international relations. Which meant this book was inflicted on a whole generation of poor, unsuspecting IR grad students.
10. Kenneth Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case For Invading Iraq. In the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Pollack's book became the intellectual justification for Democrats to support the invasion. And we now know that result.
Ack! spelling.
I would nominate John Mearsheimer's Tragedy of Great Power Politics. As an undergrad IR student I spent way too much time having to read this and point out its flawed attempt to awkwardly jam a complex history of conflict into a neat theory of "offensive realism." I believe the entire cold war was summed up in about 12 pages.
But if people read the book and become convinced of his prediction of an inevitable conflict between the US and China - and to try to isolate the Chinese, rather than engage them - you get the self-fulfilling effect.
And while I can't speak to its influence, I can say that it is tear-inducingly boring.
RBJ Walker's "Inside/Outside" - He successfully demonstrates he doesn't understand the first thing about political theory. Fortunately not very influential in most circles, but has done some damage in a few IR departments.
I must admit the list is basically perfect. I would add stuff like:
Andrew Linklater: anything he wrote;
Podhoretz's The World War IV;
Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations. I developed a healthy hatred for Huntington when I had to write an essay on his simplistic and divisive theory during undergrad. I suppose enough people have written criticisms of it at this point that *hopefully* IR departments are looking for more nuanced analysis.
Came here to post this. I understand the idea went well with the time that it was written, but it turned the world into a spectacularly bad game of Risk. (I wonder where Kampuchea would have ended up in this?) I would go so far as describe it as presenting fairly dangerous ideas in an incredibly simplistic manner. It's a shame that Huntington will not be remembered for his earlier stuff.
Papa Hotnuts would very much like to read your top 10 IPE books list!
Fukuyama's End of History and the Last Man should probably be there, not just because it was wrong, but because of the triumphalism it led to that had such a negative effect on our policies.
Walt/Mearshimer's Israel Lobby could be there as well, although listing a fellow blogger on this site is probably a bit too controversial for you, largely because it took an important and timely topic, the influence of various lobbies on our policymaking and laid atop it a whole bunch of unsupported conspiracy nonsense. They could redeem themselves, however, by making their next book 'The Arab Lobby,' especially timely considering Obama's energy policy (or rather complete lack of realistic energy policy, guaranteed to keep us enslaved to Arab oil), and his recent bowing and scraping to the Saudi king.
Ad.1:You say of Norman Angell: He then argued that an enlightened citizenry would glom onto this fact and render war obsolete..
He was right about that it required an enlightened citizenry. And Germany probably had, but alas had no developed democracy, that could keep the ruler in check. Remember that it was the German Kaiser Wilhelm (the grandchild of Queen Victoria) that out of envy towards the British Empire started it off.
As Neall Ferguson says in his documentary series The Ascent of Money: The period before the War was the worlds first spat of globalisation, with London as the worlds financial center, and Germany as its manufacturing base. Only a fool or an misinformed autocratic ruler -- or both -- would want to destroy that. And as it turned out -- destroyed Germany as well. And it led to the Russian Revolution. And the harsh restitution payments led to the rise of Hitler and the rest is -- as they say -- history.
How can it not be clash? (RIP SPH)
Dr Drezner,
I would be most grateful if you could kindly include the top ten books from Int Political Economy when you get a chance.
Best,
C.
Thomas Friedman seems to the know the Middle East fairly well--see From Beirut to Jerusalem. However, I would might put the World is Flat on the list above.
If I might second Curegian's request, I would also enjoy seeing a top ten list that is IPE specific.
If I'm not mistaken even Kaplan in the intro to the paperback edition of Balkan Ghosts admitted to being taken aback by Clinton's reaction to his book. Ultimately it is difficult not to read BG and not come to the same conclusion Clinton did.
Fukuyama whether misunderstood or not did much more damage in this century with his book than anyone else mentioned. He can spin it however he wants but he has done a 180 and for good reason. As for Friedman he has become unreadable since getting off the beat and gone plane hopping to visit and quote "friends." The World is Flat is awful...Hot Flat and Crowded is marginally better only because it is shorter. At least it only has one edition so far.
Natan Sharansky - The Case for Democracy. This one deeply influenced W's belief that democracy is really the 'natural' andthat US forces would be welcomed as liberators in Iraq.
HartyBoy - The Case for Democracy was published, I believe, in 2004 or 2005. In either case, well after the invasion and therefore had no influence whatsoever on Bush's assumption that we'd be greeted as liberators...because it didn't exist, you see?
Dan - Re: Balkan Ghosts, you can't judge a book because Clinton was out there looking for any intellectual justification to his decision not to intervene. You have to prove Kaplan actually influenced him as such, and wasn't just a useful cover for Clinton's inability to act.
It doesn't fit the criteria- it's not written by international policymakers, and if its influence had malign consequences beyond boring grad students, I haven't heard of them- but more importantly, it's not even about international relations.
It's true that Eakin referred to it as "the next big thing-" she called it the next big thing *in the humanities.* It's a work of philosophy, and since one of its theses is that non-state actors are subsuming the nation-state, I find it unsurprising that students of international relations don't get much mileage out of it.
Reading Empire as part of an education in IR is like reading "The Question Concerning Technology" to learn about engineering. It's a non sequitur, but that's not the book's fault.
Daniel W. Drezner is professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
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