How do you write about existentialism and international relations? I was asked to contribute to a special issue on this topic, and I jumped at the chance, mainly because it was a question that had been on my mind since I was an undergraduate. Not that I formed any clear ideas about it at the time, but during my undergraduate degree in International Relations (IR) I often struggled to connect what I was learning to other intellectual interests and experiences I had inherited before going stand up. One of these experiences was my exposure to existential literature.
Maybe I need to back up here, though. My reading of existentialist books as a teenager had a specific context, which I elaborated further on in the article that eventually appeared in the special issue (Ashworth 2023). My parents moved to the Netherlands and I went on to attend my last two years of high school in Portsmouth. This required a lot of train and ferry travel throughout the year, and since it was the early eighties, entertainment had to be low-tech. As an avid reader, I need plenty of books to fill my boredom while traveling.Early in the process I discovered Jean-Paul Sartre’s the road of freedom Trilogy. Its themes – impending war, personal anxieties, and ultimately war experiences – coincided with the deterioration of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union in the early eighties, which seemed to threaten the annihilation of civilization in thermonuclear war.Even before starting my IR degree, I was reading the road of freedom as IR literal.
This is how I intend to write the articles for the special issue. I will explore existentialism in international relations by considering Sartre’s trilogy as an international relations text. At the same time, I realized Sartre’s own literary views: for him, all prose is political, and readers complete the text through active participation. With this in mind, I didn’t want to just write an IR theoretical analysis of the trilogy, I wanted to write it in a prose style that replicates much of the work’s approach while also involving myself as a reader in the discussion. I therefore planned this essay as a three-way encounter between the text, my first reading of the trilogy forty years ago, and myself as the author now. Interestingly, there is some temporal symmetry here: the events Sartre describes occurred forty years before I read the book, and the time between my first reading and re-reading the book was the same. the road of freedom. It was also a personal journey, then, that brought me back to the world where I first became seriously involved in international affairs. However, underlying all this is the question that first came to my mind during my degree: Why is there no existential theory of international relations?
Of course, this question is wrong. As other contributions to this special issue demonstrate, there is an existential presence in international relations theory, although a more accurate way of putting it is: why is existentialism so understated in international relations? I personalized the question as “If existentialism was so important to my transition to international relations and my understanding of international relations when I started my degree, why have I never cited an existentialist writer until now?” Read to the end of the article, I have an answer to this question. For dramatic effect, I will leave this discussion until the end.
this the road of freedom The trilogy is many things, one of which is the anatomy of a foreign policy crisis. In the first book, the age of reason, this theme is in the background. The main storyline follows Matthew as he attempts to raise funds for his lover’s abortion. We know that this ongoing crisis will end in the war, but it only happens in the background, erupting only occasionally in Mathieu’s consciousness. In contrast, the second book, probation, takes us to the Munich Crisis, where the threat of war is at the heart of the story. Sartre expands the characters beyond the first book, although they still exist. New fictional characters are combined with fictional representations of real political figures involved in diplomacy. probation The style of the novel is also different, with scenes constantly changing between the protagonists in the middle passages, giving a chaotic feel of different stories tied together by a common threat.The final book, published in English as There is iron in the soul, jumps ahead to 1940 and the fall of France. The longer first part covers the different ways in which the protagonist faces the fall of France, while the shorter second part (without paragraph breaks) recounts Brunette’s experience as a prisoner of war.
What stands out most about Sartre’s analysis of crises is his lack of interest in causes, focusing solely on effects. As a field, IR often focuses on causes. As I discuss in my article, the search for causes is problematic for Sartre. Instead, he is interested in the multiple impacts of the crisis. Central to Sartre’s exploration of crisis is luck, an issue that was also a concern during the balance of nuclear terror in the 1980s. Interestingly, in keeping with this downplay of cause and effect in favor of consequences, the trilogy skips over 1939 and the outbreak of war. Instead, we go from 1938 in the second book to 1940 in the third. This makes sense as the focus shifts from causes to effects. It is also related to the work of historian David Reynolds, who has written about 1940 as the pivot point of the twentieth century (Reynolds 2003, Chapter 2). There is a tendency in international relations, especially the potted history found in textbooks, to present the past as a structured story in which events have clear causes. Indeed, as I explore in my article, there were many attempts to make the fall of France understandable from a structural perspective. Sartre and Reynolds, however, ask us to think of 1940 as a product of luck and, beyond that, luck with profound consequences for the future. Perhaps understandably, this was a wake-up call for me when I first read the trilogy myself in the early 1980s.
However, perhaps it was the way the novel allowed the author to use characters to resolve crises that attracted me to this trilogy. This was a common theme in the early 1980s when bookstores and television broadcasts were flooded with science fiction about possible thermonuclear war.From the graphic novel by Raymond Briggs when the wind blows (Briggs 1983) – follows an elderly couple as they try to understand what happened after a nuclear attack – two classic films of the era: 1983’s the day after tomorrowwhich terrified President Reagan by 1984 Number of execution threads This incorporates the idea of nuclear winter into its setting, thus telling a bleaker story. Like Sartre, these men were not particularly concerned with causes but with devastating multiple effects.
The striking contrast in 1983, however, was the difference between the way the novel used scientific information to explore nuclear war and the way defense intellectuals presented it. The latter presents a world of abstract data and a structured reality that follows a human logic. In this world, nuclear deterrence is reduced to abstractions and acronyms that allow for sober reflection on the unthinkable, Carol Cohen’s 1987 article “Sex and Death in the Rational World of the Defense Intellectual ” (Cohen 1987) discusses this in depth. . From a Sartrean perspective, these defense intellectuals seek to make thermonuclear warfare abstract and clinical, doing so in bad faith: exploiting their freedom to deny their freedom of action. Or, in other words, we act as if we have no freedom of action outside of structural and abstract logic. In the trilogy, Brunet, a communist, behaves like a defense intellectual. Convinced of his knowledge of the true structure of the world.
The brunette acted like he had all the knowledge he needed to understand what was going on in the world. The other characters spend their time trying to piece together what’s going on. In the first book, the age of reasonWhen asked about Mathieu’s search for funds for his lover’s abortion, Brunette responded by suggesting that he join the Communist Party. The book’s narrative itself contradicts Brunette’s simplistic solution to Mathieu’s discomfort. We see conversations between the protagonists from a third-party perspective, but the characters have limited knowledge and are often alienated from each other’s positions, making it difficult to understand each other. This reminds me of something. In the early 1990s, I completed a reading course on diplomacy organized by the late Gilbert R. Winham as part of my doctoral program. The interactions in the trilogy, especially in the first book, reminded me of the classics on diplomacy. More importantly, it is very similar to James Der Derian’s account of diplomacy as mediating alienation in his 1987 work. About diplomacy. This is not surprising, as Der Derian’s use of alienation developed from sources including Sartre, and alienation underpinned his view of diplomacy as alienating mediation (Der Derian 1987).
The conclusion to be drawn from this, however, is that, to some extent, IR has hidden existential approaches in plain sight. Interpreting diplomacy as the mediation of alienation, we might say that the classical study of diplomacy, which originated in early modern texts, is existential at its core. I explore this more in the above article.
This brings me to a question: given the influence of existentialism on my choice to study international relations at university, why have I not cited existential figures until now? Again, you’ll need to read the article to get a fuller answer from me, but my initial finding is that the answer lies in the nature of existentialism itself. For me at least, the influence is more of an ethos than an easily cited source. Deep down we feel that we should not stop at the obvious and parsimonious answers, as Brunette and the defense intellectuals of the 1980s did. On the contrary, there are always more complex and diverse stories behind structural abstractions. This led me to explore the complexities behind IR’s origin story, IR’s lost feminist past, and the recent racism behind early twentieth-century international thought (Ashworth 2014; Ashworth 2011; Ashworth 2022).
In a sense, international relations cannot be reduced to abstract structural arguments based on clear cause-and-effect relationships, and I suspect that I am not the only one writing about international relations under this existential influence.
bibliography
Ashworth, L. (2023) ‘IR’ the road of freedom. Rereading Jean-Paul Sartre’s Trilogy of International Relations Texts,” international research review. 49:5, 924-936.
Ashworth, L. (2022) ‘Fighters, Pacifists and Empire: Race and Racism in International Thought Before 1914’, international affairs. 98:1, 281-381.
Ashworth, L. (2014) International intellectual history. London: Routledge.
Ashworth, L. (2011) ‘Feminism, War and the Prospects of International Government’. Helena Swanwick (1864-1939) and the lost feminists in interwar international relations, International Journal of Feminist Politics. 13:1, 25-43.
Briggs, R. (1983) When the wind blows. London: Penguin.
Cohen, C. (1987) ‘Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals’, logo. 12:4, 687-718.
Derderian(1987) On Diplomacy. Blackwell, Oxford.
Reynolds, D. (2006) From world war to cold war. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Further reading on electronic international relations
