The recent growth of interest in the Atlantic, and its 21st Century affairs, is a development that will be watched with much interest. Not a little of this will come from critical international relations (IR) scholars, like myself. This is because, certainly in IR, interest in Atlantic matters has brought out the discipline’s most toxic side [116]
(like the low horizons of Cold War Strategic Studies) which both grew and flourished over concerns around the Atlantic. Indeed, the alloy of the so-called “Golden Age” of Strategic Studies, in no small way, was cast on the idea of the Atlantic Alliance and its adversarial relationship with the Soviet Union. The stultified methodology and laborious jargon of Strategic Studies set the outer agenda for IR for almost three decades. Looking back, we can readily appreciate that most of this literature was embedded in Cold War Realism. As such, it was thick on state-centred interpretations of history, thin on Sociology and, most importantly, too free of true common sense. These were the same sets of understandings that failed to predict either the ending of
178 Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, PDFreebooks.org, 1871, p. 29.
the Cold War or, for that matter, apartheid 179, notwithstanding the claim to knowing and to knowledge of how the future could unfold.
The weakness of this work was the over-riding imperative to position sovereignty at the centre of their epistemology. The failure to understand that sovereignty, for all its analytical privilege. is wrapped up with constructed understandings of complex social phenomenon.
To ignore this – as Strategic Studies did, and much of IR scholarship continues to do – is to miss the social underpinnings of what makes for the international.
Put differently, to study a world which is entirely cast by sovereignty is…well, to miss much of the point.
Interestingly, the post-Cold War study of the Indian Ocean has grasped all this. It was not always so, of course. In the mid- and late-1960s, Indian Ocean studies were almost entirely captured by the Strategic Studies writ. Not a small part of the explanation for this comes from Britain’s shameless abandonment of the Chagossians [117] when, beginning in 1968, they handed first Diego Garcia and then the entire British Indian Ocean Territory to the United States (US) on the platter of their “special relationship”. The averred “threat”
to Western security at the time was an expanding Soviet Navy and, later, India’s purported ambitions in an ocean which, to deliberately insert an irony which was missed by most Indian Ocean experts, was named for India ! But many interested parties with nascent Cold War ambitions, like Australia, were enticed into debates on the strategic significance of the Cold War.
Debates of this kind were of obvious interest to apartheid South Africa which traded upon and drew succor from Britain’s long-time strategic interests in the Indian Ocean, and the United Kingdom’s shrinking international role following the Second World War. This conversation was, like most debates in Strategic Studies, fuelled by a series of slogans and clichés like “British strategic interests east of Suez” and “the Simonstown Agreement” which, of course, has already crossed our path. The net effect was that Britain’s decline as a naval power seemed to reinforce South Africa’s determination to
179 For a high-quality reckoning of South Africa’s history under and after apartheid, see Pieter Wolvaardt, A Diplomat’s Story : Apartheid and Beyond 1969-1998, Alberton, Galago Press, 2005, 336 p.
become a naval power even though it lacked the industrial infrastructure to develop this. There is a rich thread to be followed here but, alas, it lies outside our immediate ambit which was with Indian Ocean Studies.
Today, Indian Ocean Studies are alive with a curiosity that, frankly, beggars belief. Along its littoral, Anthropologists and Sociologists have discovered thriving and inter-linked diasporas who are driving not only thriving economic linkages, but are doing so within cultural codes that reach back several centuries. The Indian Ocean islands, instead of being considered as remote corners of a vast stretch of water, are being seen [118] for what they are : crucial lynch-pins in communities of Indian Ocean citizens. This is a world in which the idea of national sovereignty is entirely secondary to societal interests of all. Complex and multiple identities standing outside narrow nation-state preoccupations have been freed by the reach and the imaginative power of post-colonial studies.
There is a methodological and ontological lesson in this for nascent Atlantic Ocean studies. If the purpose of the reawakening is (as Strategic Studies so often does) to raise the alarm about a power vacuum or, more pointedly, to train a new cadre of area specialists, it must be ridiculed for what it is : an attempt to return us to a dark past, a place where the lights of the Enlightenment cannot burn. In no small part, the fault for the darkness lies with that modern plague, the IR think-tank, which seldom offers anything beyond an exhortation of the US’ “to do something”.
So, the watchword for IR as it ‘rediscovers’ the Atlantic must be drawn not from Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War but, rather, from a Century earlier, the Hippocratic Oath’s undertaking to
“do no harm”.
It may be felt that this brush against the grain has been, perhaps, too harsh. After all, the discipline of IR did get a jolt after the Cold War ended. Its work was words, as Ken Booth famously notes 180, but its words didn’t work anymore. But, and this is the salutatory lesson, the rediscovery of the utility and convenience of armed power has made a frightening return in the conduct of international relations in
180 Ken Booth, “Security and Emancipation”, Review of International Studies, 1991, vol. 17 no 4, p. 313.
the 20 years since that eventful night in Berlin. This return has been both speeded and legitimised by the triumphalism of Western understandings of the world. It is in these times that [119] modernity’s dark side surfaces all too often. So, those who hope that the newly-discovered Atlantic world should be drawn into the benevolent arms of the triumphant West through the Enlightenment understandings offered by IR should best remember Berthold Brecht’s famous warning : “Don’t rejoice too soon at your escape / The womb he crawled from still is going strong” 181.