Myths in a Discipline : IR and "the Peace of Westphalia"

This essay is designed to explore the relationship between myths and a discipline, by taking the case of IR. Since the word ‘myth’ has been widely used when some ‘critical’ IR scholars denounce ahistorical misuse or misperception of the disciplinary history prevailing among most of other IR ‘mainstream’ scholars. Be it as 1648, 1919 or 1958 and so-called ‘Great Debates’, IR has embraced such myths when it tries to explain its own historical development. The book by Brian Schmidt, The Discourse of Anarchy (Schmidt 1998) was groundbreaking both for illuminating the ‘reality’ of the disciplinary history of IR by applying his ‘critical internal discursive approach’ to the genesis of IR, which was infl uenced by Professor Gunnell (Gunnell 1998), and for pointing out two tendencies of many of IR ahistorical scholars: presentism and contextualism (Schmidt 2013). In this book and other following works, Schmidt has been successful in breaking up a myth, especially as of 1919 and the fi rst Great Debate (Schmidt ed. 2012). Our project3 is also tackling one of those myths in IR and we owe it enormously to his works and ideas. Recently, we can fi nd many myth-busting academic works in books and journals in IR. This seems to mean that IR scholars have eventually become at least sensitive for myths in their discipline. However, even we cannot underestimate the importance of pointing out ‘A is a myth and the reality is not A but B.’, such act is only a springboard for further investigation. While unveiling the reality, we have to move forward to an analysis for the relationship between myths and IR in general. Such refl ection also might lead us to contemplate about more gerenal relationship between an academic discipline and myths that exist in a given discipline. This paper is going to deal with this aspect and to suggest four speculations as the point of departure for the next step.