Comment: Traditional approach and its significance. (2003, 20 Marks)
The traditional or classical approach was the dominant way of studying international politics until the behavioural turn of the 1950s. It reads interstate conduct through history, philosophy and law. Hedley Bull, its most forceful defender, described it in “International Theory: The Case for a Classical Approach” (1966) as theorising that derives from these three disciplines and is characterised above all by explicit reliance upon the exercise of judgment. Its significance lies less in rigour than in asking the questions that matter most.
Its strands
- Historical. International politics is understood through cases, from Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War to diplomatic histories of the Concert of Europe and the origins of the World Wars. The lessons drawn are prudential maxims, not laws.
- Philosophical and normative. Classical thinkers on order and justice include Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant and, in India, Kautilya, whose Arthashastra sets out the mandala of enemies and allies. These texts ask what states ought to do as well as what they do.
- Legal-institutional. In the tradition running from Hugo Grotius to the League Covenant and the UN Charter, treaties, law and organisations are the means of taming force. Interwar idealism belongs largely here.
- Classical realism also used these methods. E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis (1939), Hans J. Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations (1948) and Raymond Aron’s Peace and War reasoned from history and judgement, not data.
Common features
- The unique case and its context take priority over the population of cases.
- Facts and values are inseparable, and ethics, legitimacy and obligation are central.
- Explanation is interpretive and holistic, and the outputs are wisdom for statesmen.
- Martin Wight argued that international theory is a “theory of survival”, closer to history than to science.
The behavioural challenge
In this Second Great Debate, Morton A. Kaplan replied in “The New Great Debate” (1966), calling traditionalism unfalsifiable: broad generalisations that no evidence could overturn, and judgements that cannot be inspected. Critics added that it was impressionistic, Eurocentric and dependent on the analyst’s sensibility. Quantitative projects such as J. David Singer’s Correlates of War (1963) promised cumulative, testable knowledge instead.
Significance
- Bull’s dilemma still stands. Strict standards of verification, he argued, leave very little of significance that can be said about international relations. Order, justice and the ethics of force cannot be settled by counting.
- Formal prediction has a poor record. No model foresaw the end of the Cold War or the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. A 2024 study of language-model agents in wargames found unexplained escalation tendencies, which suggests that judgement cannot be automated away.
- It sustains living schools. The English School’s “international society” comes straight from it (Bull’s The Anarchical Society, 1977), as does constructivism’s interpretive turn. Amitav Acharya’s “Global IR” recovers non-Western traditions, Kautilya among them.
- Law remains a frame for order. The ICJ’s unanimous advisory opinion of 23 July 2025 on states’ climate obligations shows the legal approach still shapes interstate argument.
- Indian statecraft is classical in idiom. S. Jaishankar’s The India Way (2020) reads strategic choice through the Mahabharata. Indian diplomacy also routinely draws on Kautilyan realism and Nehruvian normative internationalism.
Limits
It cannot test its own claims, it tends to generalise from European history, and it risks confusing preference with analysis. That was Carr’s charge against the idealists.
Conclusion
The second debate ended in a division of labour, not a defeat. Science took recurrent, codable phenomena such as war-onset data, alliances and trade. The traditional approach kept order, legitimacy, diplomacy and ethics. Its lasting significance is that judgement disciplined by history remains the precondition of any theory, scientific or not.