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Professor Barry Buzan – London School of Economics

Title: Twentieth Century Benchmark Dates in International Relations: The Three World Wars in Perspective

This paper builds on earlier work by Buzan and Lawson on how to think about benchmark dates in International Relations (IR). The Introduction summarises the analytical scheme from the earlier work and explains how this paper extends the analysis from suggestions made, but not developed, in the article. The second section uses the analytical scheme to look in more depth at the 20th century benchmarks centred around the three world wars (First, Second and Cold). It argues that by these criteria, the changes clustered around the Second World War look to be both deeper and more extensive than those clustered around either the First World War or the Cold War. The third section moves towards opening up a macro-historical perspective on the 20th century. It paves the way by considering how other IR benchmarks represent cluster of events occurring over decades or centuries. And it raises questions about how choices in relation to time and scale affect the construction of macro-historical perspectives. The fourth section chooses a two-century perspective centred on the revolutions of modernity as a way of evaluating the 20th century events. It first sketches out the main lines of this grand narrative, and then assesses the 20th century events within that framing. The Conclusions argue that a 20th century stretching from 1905 to 1989, or possibly 2008, can be seen not just as three world wars, but as an integrated process of working out first order solutions to the problems set up by the revolutions of modernity in the 19th century.

5 October, 2016

3-4.30pm

MS.04 (Zeeman Building) 

The talk will be followed by a wine reception.