`We choose who we want to be'

Bill McSweeney is a long-standing and perceptive researcher and commentator on international relations, until recently one of the few teaching the discipline in Ireland. In this ambitious book he addresses one of its central concerns, security. He proposes an alternative theoretical framework for analysing the subject, criticising its dominant realist assumptions in the light of recent social theory, events in Europe after the end of the Cold War, and the Northern Ireland peace process.

As head of the International Peace Studies Programme at the Irish School of Ecumenics, McSweeney brings a distinctive perspective to this task. For years peace research has existed as a junior partner of the more prestigious subject of international relations, drawing on the common positivist methodology it shared with political science - but distinguished by its ethical concerns with nuclear disarmament, neutrality and alternatives to war.

McSweeney voiced his dissatisfaction with this role in the introduction to a volume he edited last year, Moral Issues in International Affairs, Problems of European Integration (MacMillan), with contributions from distinguished practitioners such as Fred Halliday, Richard Falk, Joseph Weiler and David Coombes. The end of the Cold War, he argued, was an anomaly which does not fit the realist view that the egoistic behaviour of states is the determined outcome of human nature and structural laws.

Recent anti-positivist approaches in philosophy and sociology have become part of the intellectual ferment in the discipline and allow a much more central place for the idea central to peace research, "that there are alternatives to any existing social order and that human agency and moral choice are fundamental, not marginal, to their realisation".

In this book he sets out to provide the theoretical justification for his case. He proceeds by way of a critique of realist assumptions encapsulated in the phrase "wherever we live, we live in a jungle", with anarchy the normal condition of inter-state relations and order, justice and morality exceptions to that rule. These assumptions were incorporated into the study of security in the early Cold War years mainly by American writers such as Hans Morganthau and Kenneth Waltz, backed up by substantial funding and state support. As he puts it: "National security was a political decision in search of a theoretical foundation." A passion for quantitative research-methods and a desire to emulate the laws of natural science created a self-sustaining discipline confident of its achievements and satisfied that the real world corresponded to its definitions.

So far as McSweeney is concerned, "the attempt to expunge ethics from international relations theory leads more assuredly to distortion than the explicit rejection of its place in the research process". He surveys recent efforts to bring security studies more into line with post-Cold War realities, notably work by the European researchers Barry Buzan and Ole Weaver. They have substantially broadened the definition of security to include distinctions between its military, political, economic, societal and environmental aspects. They have also introduced another dimension, political identity, to their theorising, to take account of renewed nationalisms and ethnic conflicts in recent years. Their work has been very influential among practitioners of security policy as the issue comes fully onto the European Union's agenda. But McSweeney finds their approach wanting, particularly for what he describes as its cultural determinism in defining political identity. He insists that identities are constructed by political and social action and change as material interests shift. Individuals influence those agendas much more than such theorising allows; their actions and preferences are informed by ethical choices. The case is ably developed with reference to contemporary social theory, notably the work of Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu. As McSweeney puts it, "we choose who we are and who we want to be"; although he agrees, with Marx, that this freedom is not exercised in conditions of our own choosing.

The theoretical case about security is convincingly illustrated by reference to the Northern Ireland peace process and European integration. One is left with the thought that besides sociology there is another discipline very relevant to McSweeeney's concerns: history.

Paul Gillespie is Foreign Editor of The Irish Times.