Abstract
International relations (IR) emerged as a separate discipline at the beginning of the Interwar period in the 1920s and had since to demarcate itself between several well developed sciences, i.e. history, political science, and sociology. The originally mainly historiographical scope of IR aimed at describing the past of its research object based on research conducted in archives and facts otherwise compiled. With the methodological revolution in social sciences in the 1960s introduced by behavioral approaches IR shifted its focus to ongoing international processes with special attention to high-level inter-state contacts and corresponding decision-making processes. Agents were seen as behaving rationally, which of course does not leave much space for the influence of emotions. Transnational and later in particular constructivist approaches in IR theory (during the 1970s and from the end of the 1980s) brought IR more and more under the influence of sociology. Together with the social construction of relations and the identity of agents new IR theories also took an interest in the constitution of perception, which was an important step to bring emotions to the fore in this discipline.
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Notes
- 1.
In this study the abbreviation IR is exclusively used to designate the discipline, not its object.
- 2.
In this volume (131–147), the author of the present contribution adopted a historical sociological approach.
- 3.
In this contribution, we use the terms emotional cultures (or cultures of fear) as well as emotional regimes (or fear regimes). The latter is linked more to the political dimension of norm-setting, whereas the former rather refers to the stabilized social practices sustained by a given regime through time. Both of them constitute corresponding emotional communities.
- 4.
Cultures of fear can also be boosted by accidental events, like the Japanese civil nuclear catastrophe of Fukushima (Weart 2012).
- 5.
“[…] [E]motives are similar to performatives (and differ from constatives) in that emotives do things to the world. Emotives are themselves instruments for directly changing, building, hiding, intensifying emotions, instruments that may be more or less successful. Within the disaggregated self, emotives are a dynamic tool that can be seized by attention in the service of various high-level goals. But emotives are a two-edged sword in that they may have repercussions on the very goals they are intended to serve. It is here, rather than in some putative set of genetically programmed “basic” emotions, that a universal conception of the person can be founded, one with political relevance” (Reddy 2001, p. 105, emphasis added).
- 6.
The pair of terms “underdog”/“topdog” originates in Galtung’s neo-Marxist, structural theory of imperialism but has been used since then also beyond this ideological background (Galtung 1971).
- 7.
Fear is partly present in Scheff’s definition too when he writes: “Feedback loops are also produced by avoiding emotions: avoidance gives rise to backlogs of emotion that get larger and more frightening the larger they grow” (Scheff 2011, emphasis added).
- 8.
The so called Ems Dispatch is Prussian chancellor Bismarck’s edited and sharpened report of a meeting between King Wilhelm I of Prussia and the French ambassador to Prussia Vincent Benedetti in Ems, intentionally released to the press on 13th July 1870 in order to “have the effect of a red rag on the Gallic [French] bull.” It was the trigger for that war (Howard 1961, p. 55).
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Weber, PF. (2015). Cultures of Fear in International Relations: Contribution to an Historical Sociology of Emotions. In: Kleres, J., Albrecht, Y. (eds) Die Ambivalenz der Gefühle. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-01654-8_10
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