Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought The International Thought of Alfred Zimmern Classicism, Zionism and the Shadow of Commonwealth

In what intellectual and political context was the academic field of International Relations (IR) created? It has generally been thought that IR was founded directly after the First World War, with the aim of overcoming the misery of war and exploring peace. This perception is not completely wrong. It is true that the world’s first professorship for IR, the Woodrow Wilson Chair of International Politics, was endowed at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, United Kingdom in 1919. However, this was not exactly the starting point of IR. The scientific knowledge and discourse on international relations existed wide across various academic fields and practices. A proper understanding, then, will be that IR was gradually constructed later years on the basis of such diverse theories and ideas inside and outside academia.
 
This book explores an aspect of these complex origins of IR by approaching it as a political and social thought. Thus, it is also the attempt to illuminate a dimension of the early twentieth-century British political and social thinking from the perspective of international relations. The book focuses principally on the work of Alfred Eckhard Zimmern (1879-1957), analysing not only his published books and articles, but also his unpublished writings, including correspondence, as found in the archives. Zimmern was a notable classicist who wrote The Greek Commonwealth (1911), one of the protagonists of the Round Table, which aimed at the reorganization of the British Empire, and simultaneously a cultural Zionist. In 1919 Zimmern was appointed the inaugural Woodrow Wilson Chair of International Politics. From 1930 he also served as the first Montague Burton Professor of International Relations, a newly established post at the University of Oxford. Having emerged from classicism, the imperial reform campaigning and Zionism, Zimmern’s trajectory itself was a representation of the complex origins of IR. Further, he also promoted international intellectual cooperation under the League of Nations and was involved in the designing of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) during the Second World War.
 
By tracing the so-far-overlooked intellectual development of Zimmern, the book elucidates a distinct facet of the entwined thought and discourse concerning international relations during the first half of the twentieth century. It shows that theorizing about international relations meant much more than arguing on war and peace. It was a complex phenomenon closely associated with contemporary multifarious issues, including imperial reconfiguration, colonial administration, racism, political and cultural nationalism, and even the contested way of imaginary exploration into the ancient world. It is difficult to reduce this complexity to the conventional simplified frame of realism versus idealism.
 
Students interested in IR and the history of political thought (either or both) are strongly encouraged to read this book as it straddles both academic disciplines.

 

(Written by BAJI Tomohito, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences / 2021)