Myth and IR Scholarship

Since universities are part of the sociopolitical order that produces, repro­duces, and challenges the mythology of international politics in its differ­ent dimensions, the four categories of myth concepts outlined above also have far-reaching implications for the discipline of IR.

Determining Myths in IR

With regard to the determining function, the ‘myth of 1919’ about the birth moment of the IR discipline with the establishment of the world’s first Department of International Politics at the University of Wales¹⁵ in Aberystwyth after World War I is certainly one of the most powerful myths in the discipline. It is the constitutive narrative underpinning the public and self-image of IR as ‘a noble discipline that was born in order to solve the tragedy of war for the benefit of all peoples’ (de Carvalho et al. 2011, 749). As Carvalho et al. demonstrate, however,

the overall noble image obscures an “inconvenient truth”: that the over­whelming majority of international theory throughout its existence has been imbued with a specific moral/political purpose—to defend and promote western civilisation—and that the narratives of the discipline have in one way or another always constituted a “West Side Story” (2011, 750).

There are reasons why the ‘1919 myth’ is nurtured. For the discipline as a whole, the ‘1919 myth’ is convenient since it gives it a raison d’etre and its members a shared identity. This explains why the myth has been constantly retold in IR textbooks (de Carvalho et al.

Aberystwyth is, of course, not the only university nurturing its myths; all universities—indeed, all organisations—do, some more successfully than others. The obvious danger of the strategic employment of any myths, understood in the determining sense as a strategic tool, by aca­demic disciplines and institutions lies in the impact that their narratives may have, through their teaching activities and publications, on how the world is imagined by generations of IR students who staff the governmen­tal and non-governmental institutions of world politics. A first task for a self-critical discipline is therefore to uncover the strategic use of powerful narratives about itself, which hide built-in ideologies such as, in the case of the ‘1919 myth’, the Eurocentric outlook of a discipline that claims to be world-encompassing.

Enabling Myths in IR

From the perspective of concepts that stress the enabling, creative side of myths, the IR discipline has possibilities to contest and challenge such dominant (meta-) narratives by offering alternatives. In this sense, the ‘work on myth’—understood as the altering, challenging, or replac­ing of dominant paradigmatic truths—may offer potential for critique, resistance, and emancipation not only in IR theorising¹⁶ but also in how the discipline organises itself and how it engages with social and political actors outside of academia.¹⁷

Often, academics engaged in these debates understand themselves not as academics in an ‘armchair’ sense but as political activists within and/ or outside of academia.

What ties the determining and enabling categories of the strategic use of (or work on) myths in IR together are the ethical questions attached to the way in which narratives are instrumentalised strategically. While there seems to be a difference as to whether the use of myth is meant to conceal an ‘inconvenient truth’ or to effect ‘change for the better’, both uses of myth should raise concerns insofar as they build on the idea of a possibility of non-ideological knowledge and agency based predominantly on choice. As the remaining two categories of myth concepts suggest, however, these two assumptions may be misleading.

Naturalising Myths in IR

What is true in terms of the depoliticising, naturalising functions of myth in international politics also pertains to the discipline of IR. The university today is an example par excellence of the type of organisation ‘whose suc­cess depends on the confidence and stability achieved by isomorphism with institutional rules’ (Meyer and Rowan 1977, 355). While the self-image of many IR academics stresses independence from politics and the economy, universities’ ways of functioning are deeply implicated not only in the neo­liberal structures of contemporary (world) society, but also in the myths that underpin it. Acknowledging the deep implications of academia with broader societal myths seems essential when studying the mythology of international politics, for it would be hypocritical to ‘uncover’ the myths that naturalise the sociopolitical order without reflecting upon the myths that influence the very way in which academia presents itself.

Academic ‘myths at work’ (Bradley et al. 2000) in a narrower sense include those accompanying the neoliberalisation and new public manage­ment of the global university (Academic Rights Watch 2014; Schrecker 2010). ‘Student satisfaction’ is one of the powerful narratives that have accompanied these processes, now providing a benchmark against which academic performance is measured. The fee-paying student is seen as cus­tomer, knowledge and ‘skills’ as products, and the academic as paid pro­vider of services geared to ensure client happiness. Whether this should be the task of a university, however, is questionable (Collini 2012).

‘Impact’ is another example. With the impact-oriented policies of many research funding bodies, and the REF-related impact agenda in the UK more specifically,¹⁸ research is expected to yield results that have some bearing on the broader society. This pushes research projects in IR closer towards the logics of the policy world, where only certain knowledges and their representation qualify as ‘impacting’ or are considered ‘useful’¹⁹— categories which furthermore differ from country to country depending on political culture (Jasanoff 2005). This has hierarchising effects on ways of knowing and values of scholarly knowledge. Messiness and complexity, for instance, seldom make their way into advice to policy circles, where actors prefer simplicity and ‘evidence’—with often appalling results (Law 2004).

In a broader sense, ‘the myths we live by’ (Midgley 2004) as academ­ics are shaped by, and in return reproduce, the fundamental myths of modern Western society such as rationality, positivism, individuality, and effectiveness. Midgley discusses three central enlightenment myths—the ‘social contract’, ‘progress’, and ‘omnicompetent science’—and shows how they interrelate in detrimental ways, ‘not only because they are all over-dramatic and need rethinking, but because the last of them impedes our efforts to deal with the first two, and with many other problems as well’ (2004, Chap.

To be sure, the enlightenment myths discussed by Midgley did, of course, play a major role in challenging and changing previous sociopoliti­cal orders characterised by religion, feudalism, monarchy, and so on. In this sense, they can be seen to have had an enabling or deterministic socio­political function, and it is very much the context in which such myths operate which determines their specific function under specific circum­stances. What Midgley’s discussion hints at, however, is that dominant generalised myths of society at any specific time (in this case: in modern Western society) tend to affect knowledge production in that they make up part of the ‘imaginative structure of ideas by which scientists contrive to connect, understand and interpret...facts’ (Midgley 2004, Chap. 1)—con- sciously but more often unconsciously. It is in this sense that the myths we live by as scientists naturalise certain understandings of the world over oth­ers with a tendency to reproduce the modern sociopolitical order as it is.

Constituting Myths in IR

In the ‘constituting’ understanding, myths are inevitable. This is doubt­lessly the most radical implication that myth concepts have for the IR discipline and how it understands itself and its work. Myths are the pow­erful narratives or beliefs through which meaning and significance of the academic’s profession is created (such as the ‘1919 myth’); they are a part of the academic’s habitus through socialisation, and they entail the realisa­tion that all of our academic knowledge is socially constructed, thus flag­ging the need for constant reflexivity.

This perspective also suggests that no matter how much and how precise the knowledge is that we produce about the world, scientific knowledge may not be able to ultimately and unanimously solve the sociopolitical problems of our world (Zehfuss 2014), which has deep implications for the self-understanding of a discipline that has, by and large, relied on the ‘1919 myth’ as its raison d’etre.

Acknowledgements This chapter was partly written during a fellowship at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK) Institute for Advanced Studies, co-financed by the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences, Bremen University, and Jacobs University. I thank my fellow HWK fellows and the participants of the BIGSSS-InIIS colloquium for lively discussions and helpful ideas. Thanks are also due to Inanna Hamati-Ataya, Sybille Münch, Katja Freistein, and Andrew Linklater for insightful comments and critique, and to Alastair Finlan for invaluable advice and support.

Notes

1. I discuss the range of theorists that have been used by the contributors to this book, which only represents a fraction of myth conceptualisations available in different disciplines (and certainly has its own biases). On other myth theories, cf. Bottici (2007); Flood (2013); Lincoln (1999); Scarborough (1994); Segal (2004); Von Hendy (2002).

2. On different epistemological understandings, forms, and functions of myth cf. also Münch (Chap. 3).

3. The positions mapped in the graph represent my reading of the myth con­ceptualisations and their relation to each other. The graph is thus necessar­ily a subjective, and highly simplifying, visualisation.

4. In the English language, ‘narrative’ is often used in the broad sense of ‘frames’ that structure an overarching meta-narrative (e.g., narrative 1 = white, narrative 2 = black, meta-narrative = colourfulness). In contrast, German authors tend to use ‘narration’ to denote the process/activity of storytelling, while the ‘narrative’ is the product and structure of this activity, describing, in the narrower sense, the plot which establishes a relation between differ­ent statements (Gadinger et al. 2014, 21). I use this latter understanding.

5. In Narrative and Time, Ricreur (1984) uses the Aristotelian muthos to signify emplotment, but does not discuss myth as genre. In his earlier work The Symbolism of Evil (Ricreur 1967, part II) he engages with myths in more detail in his aim to explore the human condition, uncovering the intentions behind traditional myths. See also Cooke (Chap. 4); Von Hendy (2002, 306-13).

6. In this book, myth-as-narrative concepts are used by Dany and Freistein (Chap. 12); Goetze (Chap. 7).

7. See also the burgeoning literature of the ‘emotional turn’ in IR; for over­views e.g. Bleiker and Hutchison (2008) and Crawford (2000).

8. Müller and Sondermann (Chap. 13) trace the ‘work on’ the ‘aid effective­ness’ myth.

9. Kühn (Chap. 8) uses Blumenberg’s concept to explore myths regarding the international intervention in Afghanistan.

10. Müller and Sondermann (Chap. 13) draw on Barthes’s ideas in their analy­sis of the myth of ‘aid effectiveness’ in international development coopera­tion; Finlan (Chap. 10) uses them as inspiration to explore myths of contemporary warfare.

11. On the futility of such endeavour, see Cooke (Chap. 4).

12. Cf. Loriaux (2008) on another use of Derrida to deconstruct myths; on Derrida, see also Loriaux and Lynch, Chap. 15.

13. Cf. Neumann and Nexon (2006) on four possible constitutive effects of popular culture on politics.

14. On the methodology of mythographical approaches to international poli­tics, see Müller (Chap. 6).

15. Now Aberystwyth University, where I happen to work.

16. See e.g. Kiersey (2012).

17. See, for example, the critical blog ‘The Disorder of Things’ (http://the- disorderofthings.com/), which regularly features interesting discussions around these questions.

18. REF—Research Excellence Framework—denominates a ‘system for assess­ing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions’ (see http://www.ref.ac.uk). It measures the quality of research outputs (publications), the research environment provided by higher education institutions, and the impact of research in wider society.

19. This is, worryingly, a ‘decivilising process’ in Norbert Elias’ sense, as Andrew Linklater has remarked upon reading this chapter.

20. For fUrther discussion of how to deal with the mythology of IR, see the conclusions by Loriaux and Lynch, Chap. 15.

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