Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The wisdom of the principal "interwar idealists" (Norman Angell, Alfred Zimmern, and James T. Shotwell) has been lost; driven from the field of international relations by the realists who succeeded them. The original goals the “idealist” scholars advocated – prohibition of aggression, mutual disarmament, the power of international morality, the development of international law and organization, and the promotion of international education - have all gained increasing acceptance in IR over the past century. Yet, the post-WWII realists were so successful in discrediting the interwar “utopians” for arguments they never made – prohibition of all wars (including self-defense) unilateral disarmament, peace solely through international law and organization, etc. - that their names and their writings have completely disappeared from the standard IR academic literature and curriculum. Consequently, the field of IR has been robbed of its original normative purpose – to make a better world, not a perfect world – and contemporary IR theorists have been relegated to "reinventing" old idealist concepts such as interdependence, the obsolescence of major war, and moral (soft) power. The academic field of IR would be far better off rehabilitating the old interwar idealists and teaching IR students – as the Good Witch of the North advised Dorothy - to “start at the beginning" of the yellow-brick road of IR scholarship: Norman Angell, James T. Shotwell, and Zimmern.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Radical appreciations of the significance of culture in the age of “globalization” must involve continual self-reflexive questioning of the inherited conceptual tools and categories social scientists utilize to study new historical trends. In this paper, I revisit the Marxist project of developing a “materialist” vs. a (Hegelian) “idealist” dialectic, arguing that such an effort was in and of itself an exercise in formal logical thinking, where a thing (in this case, a method), can only be either A or non-A, but not both and neither.

Rather than focusing on the intellectual roots of such a self-defeating methodological praxis in the classical writings, in this paper I try to revisit the abandoned project of formulating a concise and systematic presentation of the dialectical method, but this time stripped of both the Marxist and Hegelian, materialist vs. idealist, predeterminations. Advocating and outlining an alternative postdeterminist approach, I apply the dialectical method to its own exposition through a systematic process of progressive splitting of the phenomenal aspects of the research process in order to penetrate the dialectical logic as the essence of the human creative labor as a whole. Definitions and categories of dialectical ontology, epistemology, and methodology are systematically revisited and reconstructed in terms of the dialectics of part and whole.

In this process the essentially self-reflexive and creative nature of the dialectical method away from its philosophically perpetuated religious vs. scientific dichotomizations are embraced, while the dualism of matter/mind is abandoned in favor of a triadic conception incorporating subconsciousness as a mediating region between the two. It is argued that the nature of this ontologically overlooked subconscious mediation has historically posed the most fundamental challenge to the conscious and intentional human efforts in favor of the good life in self and broader society.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper analyzes part of the post-Cold War discourse on 'international responsibilities' to stabilize international society by interventions in 'failed' states, civil wars, and 'breeding grounds' of terrorism. Early post-Cold War optimism about the ability to steer world politics almost died in Somalia, but still lives on in the Human Security discourse. Nine-eleven has turned preventive action into a paramount urgency of global (Western) self-interest. US interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, however, clearly added a flavour of imperialism to this urgency. Meanwhile, the EU is building military conflict prevention potentials, and China's rise to economic power will probably increase its 'international responsibilities' likewise. Are these echoes of the past (post-WW I idealism combined with 19th-Century power politics) or structural changes (the logic of globalisation replacing the logic of international society) caught in old phrases? The paper will compare selected texts from the 1990s and 2000s with texts from the 1890s and 1920s.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This study shows how national interests affect decision-making by the P-5 on the UN Security Council. In two case studies, speeches of decision-makers of the P-5 are analyzed to prove that national interests do affect decision-making on the UNSC.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The British idealist Michael Oakeshott can help us think through the dominant approaches to political theory and offers an attractive alternative.