IR: The New World of International Relations

Most young people now enter college with tittle or no background in twentieth-century history. Ask students question about its major events and you are likely to face silence. It is all news to them. But they cannot be blamed; they don't know it because they have never been taught. Accordingly, we take it as our task to do considerable backfilling in recent history which we arrange largely by geographic area and use to illustrate one or more concepts of international relations. Many instructors have thanked us for this approach. Some new texts in international relations pays relatively little attention to history, leaping instead into there future. These are the "world-order" texts that, we think, implicity argue the following: "The twentieth century was a horrible century that showed the worst that humans can do to each other. But i was only an episode in the maturation of humankind and has littles to teach us. The twenty-first century, a time of global cooperation, ecology, and equality, is upon uys. We must concentrate on it and not on the unhappy past." We find "world-order" approaches unjustified, or at least grossly premature. The world became more complex after the Cold War, which kept numerous problems suppressed or frozen. And the mechanisms to deal with these problems still depend on sovereign nations deciding if and when they want to participate. When people are determined to fight for what they believe is justly theirs, UN "peacekeeping" forces are useless. War - "contending by force," in Grotius's classic