Podcast

Intro: If we want to understand what's going on, of course, we can start now, and we can look and read the papers, and we can think about what we think. But there is an enormous store of knowledge, of ideas out there. It's enormously advantageous, but it's also enormously fascinating to actually read back and understand how people have tried to make sense. And then obviously to ask, well, so do those ideas help us now? Do we have to think of new ones? Are there problems that we've seen before that are reappearing again? AskDifferent, the podcast by the Einstein Foundation with Nancy Fisher. 

Nancy Fischer: This was Andrew Hurrell. International relations are his subject, and they take place all the time. While you are listening to this podcast, European diplomats are calling American diplomats. Emails are written from Asian embassies to Australian ministries. Conferences take place organized by African organizations, and maybe the United Nations are giving a press briefing in that very moment. So shortly, international relations are happening all the time and all over the world. And that's necessary because we are living in politically difficult times with populous politicians and fake news, with climate change, conflicts, and, of course, a pandemic. The political scientist Andrew Hurrell tries to keep an eye on all of that while he analyzes the theory behind it. He is Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford. He's one of the most influential scientists in that field of international relations and Einstein Visiting Fellow. So we are very happy to have you today, Mr. Hurrell. Hello. Welcome to the podcast. 

Andrew Hurrell: Hello. I'm very happy to be here as well. 

Fischer: You research on the theory of international relations. Maybe you can explain to us first, how does a typical workday look like? 

Hurrell: Well, international relations, as your introduction explained very well, in a sense, comprises almost everything that happens in global politics, but with a particular focus on the relations between nation states, and international institutions and global governance. And my own work is particularly concerned with the possibilities of governance and cooperation between states, both one state with another state, and also in and around international institutions and other forms of global governance. So, a great deal of my work is really based around academic research, about student teaching and doctoral supervision and seminars, really investigating those core questions, both what they look like now, but also how they've developed historically over time. 

Fischer: So we see you, we imagine you working on your desk, maybe telephone, conferences online, and most of the time looking online and in books to research all of that. Is that correct? 

Hurrell: Yes. I mean, during the university terms, I suppose most of my working time is involved sitting at a desk looking at a screen. And, of course, during COVID times, it's almost all been sitting at a desk working in a screen. Normally, and certainly over my career, I have traveled and worked in many different countries. After all, I sort of do believe that if you are studying the world and if you're studying international relations and how it looks from different parts in the world, it's very important, not just to sort of look at screens and read books and even to go to archives, but actually to engage with real people in real places. Now some of that is going to international conferences and so on, but a good deal of my work over my career has been actually working in other countries, sometimes as a visiting professor or a visiting academic as I am now in Berlin. But I've worked a good deal, for example, on Latin America and on Brazil. I've lived and I've taught quite a number of times in Brazil and in Latin America. So, you know, if you take my kind of average year, certainly when COVID isn't there, you would usually find me in different parts of the world as well as sitting at my desk either in Oxford or in Berlin. 

Fischer: Now we reach you in Berlin. You just said that as well you work in the cluster called Contestations of the Liberal Script at Die Freie Universität, where you research, if I say it right, the current conflict about liberal order in the world in historical comparative and global perspective. That's the official title. So maybe you can give us an example what that means exactly. 

Hurrell: So the big cluster, the Contestations of the Liberal Script cluster is concerned with almost all aspects of social life and almost all aspects of the way in which liberals have thought about social life. So there are people working on borders and on the economy and on migration on many different topics. My particular part of that, reflecting my work in international relations, is to take the international side and to take the global side and to really think through what or how the recent ideas, liberal ideas about how the world should be governed, how the world should be ordered, and to think through why they're being contested, why they've become the source of such argument and contestation. And we see that contestation grow and develop in many countries, populist movements as you said, that want to take back control from international institutions, that want to put up borders again, that want to reassert their national sovereignty, that want to keep foreign ideas out of their country. So we've seen a big reaction against many of the developments in international institutions and global governments and a big backlash, a lot of contestation. So my part of the Scripts cluster is to really look at the international side, and at the global side. And it's to ask how liberals over time have thought about the international and why the international has been such a problem. After all, in the 1990s after the cold war, there was a lot of optimism amongst liberals. The cold war had ended, the old world of balance of power politics and nuclear deterrence, all of those things seem to be receding away. So, we seem to be concentrating much more on globalization, on the problems of managing globalization and global problems, on building new institutions to cooperate. And the world seemed to be moving, if you like, in a direction that many liberals were fundamentally happy with. In the past ten years, we've seen a whole range of reactions and really negative developments that have got in the way of that. So we have to understand why that's happened, to what extent is it a product of liberal ideas themselves? Sometimes some people, for example, think that it's the very success of globalization and global governance that's created the backlog. Its global institutions have become, you know, so influential that they've created a reaction against it, or, obviously, economic globalization has become so deep that many people feel negatively affected. So is it a reaction inside or is it a reaction from groups and traditions globally that hold different values, maybe illiberal values or anti-liberal values or different kinds of liberal values. So that's the sort of focus really on what my work for the cluster and for the Einstein Foundation is about.

Fischer: So can you name actually what is the biggest challenge these days? There are so many things, climate change, lack of confidence in the political institutions, the terrorism, migration, pandemic. But I think right now when I heard you, it's kind of a mix of all of them, isn't it?

Hurrell: It's a mix of all of them, but I think the biggest challenge is in some ways to bring together or to think together the old-fashioned world, which many people had hoped had gone away of geopolitics, of big powers, hopefully not fighting each other, but certainly competing with each other. So we've seen the rise of US-China relations and the deterioration in US-China relations. And that's a very old theme in international relations. We saw it in the Cold War. We saw it in the first half of the 20th century. How can big states manage to live together, if not always cooperatively, at least seeking to minimize the dangers and the difficulties that come from their conflicts or their competition. So we have that on the one hand. And then as you suggested, we have all of the great challenges of the 20th century, 21st century, that are getting worse and more serious. And sometimes in academic life, people work either on one or on the other. And yet the fundamental challenge is to understand how those two things, if you like, how those two worlds actually relate to each other. So how is it that nuclear relations between the US and China might affect or impact the possibility of reaching agreements on global climate change or on the management of new technologies in the 21st century. So it's bringing really we find ourselves in a situation where that kind of old world that many people hoped had gone away but hasn't and the new world of 21st century challenges sit together and live together. And we have to find ways of understanding how they interact, analytically, theoretically, if you like, but also, of course, practically in terms of policy and building new modes of governance. 

Fischer: Is there a relation amongst all the ones you already mentioned where you say this is actually, at the moment, for me, the most interesting one? There is so much potential for me to research on.

Hurrell: There are individual issues, many important individual issues. And during my career, I've worked across a range of different issues. I was, I suppose, one of the early people who became interested in the global politics of the environment going right back to the 1980s. And I still think and I still, if you said, in a sense, use and take global environmental politics and climate change as emblematic, as symbolic, as illustrative of the new kinds of challenges that we face. Because, you know, one of the great different difficulties and one of the great differences so we live in this world where there's the old world of power politics, there's the new world of global challenges. And one of the great difficulties of bringing them together is that many of the sorts of answers, that academics, practitioners, people like Henry Kissinger used to come up with, it was to say, well, you know, we don't like each other very much and, you know, we find it difficult to live together. Nevertheless, we do have to live together on one planet, not least because if we start fighting, we're gonna destroy everyone. So let's find ways of doing it. And typically, one of the ways of doing it was to, in a sense, have less to do with each other, to have clear borders, clear spheres of influence, to not interfere too much with each other. The problem, of course, is that we deal with something like climate change. We have to deal with what happens in each of our own countries. We can't just reach agreements about what happens at a border because everything we do domestically will in fact affect what happens globally. And that's why it is so difficult and so much more difficult now to think of how we can understand cooperation than it was, say, in the 19th century. 

So climate change environment is one area. Another area which I've focused on in a sense as the, let's say, the other extreme, but an example of an issue, which very much illustrates some of the more traditional problems is the question of nuclear politics, nuclear deterrence, nuclear issues, which again many people hoped had, if not gone away, that at least sort of moved into a kind of clear box, you know. Well, nuclear issues, that's a problem with rogue states, with North Korea, with particular countries like Iran. It's not a kind of big global problem. But, of course, now we're seeing both regionally and globally, nuclear politics has come back very much into focus as a central issue. So those are two of the issues, and my particular focus is to look at them from the perspective of governance, international law, international institutions. 

Fischer: And I could talk with you for hours about political international relationships. We have around about 200 countries in this world. There we would never stop, but, also, we would love to learn something about you, of course. So with your special field international relations, you don't only have to know the latest research results, but also recent events. How and where do you inform yourself? 

Hurrell: Well, I mean, international relations is obviously, it is about recent events and current events and following what's going on. But it's also - and I think this is tremendously important for people, maybe younger people who are interested in understanding international relations and studying international relations. International relations is also about trying to generate sets of ideas, theories that are slightly more distant from the day-to-day that help us understand how the world is organized, why we see patterns of conflict, and cooperation. So one of my interests is very much on the history of ideas about international relations. How have ideas about international relations, particularly in the Western world, particularly since, say, the middle of the 18th century, developed. Because if we want to understand what's going on, of course, we can start now, and we can look and read the papers, and we can think about what we think. But there is an enormous store of knowledge of ideas out there, which I think at least as an academic in the subject, it's enormously advantageous, but it's also enormously fascinating to actually read back and understand how people have tried to make sense. And then obviously to ask, well, so do those ideas help us now? Do we have to think of new ones? Are there problems that we've seen before that are reappearing again? And as I suggested earlier on, I think they're very much, in many areas, often negatively problems that are reappearing again. So it makes sense to spend at least some time not just following current events, but also reading historically and reading theoretically about what is, you know, what has been said. So that's one, in a sense, important academic part. 

And the other part, as I indicated earlier, is actually getting out there and doing real work, real research in different places because we live and that's the sort of other theme, I guess, of my work. One theme is about the international relations, big power politics. The other theme is the way in which global politics has changed. We now live in a world which is not just global because of climate change and global problems, it's also global because the number of not just states, actors, individuals, groups who are able to play a part in global politics has expanded enormously. So global politics, international relations can't be just what is studied in Harvard or in Oxford or in Berlin. It has to be about what is being studied and how the world is being understood right across the what we now call the global South, right across the emerging and developing world as well. And you asked about my own sort of background and my own sort of curriculum. After studying in Cambridge as an undergraduate, I then lived in Brazil and in Latin America. And when I came back to do my graduate and doctoral work, I started then to work on problems of the developing and emerging world, particularly Brazil, precisely because of that belief that we can't just live in a narrow little Western bubble. The Western dominated world that was there in the 19th and early 20th century has gone. We live in a much, much more strongly globalized world, and we really have to understand how to think about global international relations from different perspectives and from a global perspective. 

Fischer: So you already started to talk about your academic career. Many people want to make one but never succeed. So how did you manage to end up at the acknowledged Oxford University also to become a member of the British Academy? 

Hurrell: Well, I mean, I was very lucky. Like many people, their careers are always, you know, partly about what you want to do and about planning, but they're also about luck and about contingency. I was also lucky in a sense in starting to work on some of these questions at a time when there were far, far fewer people working on them. As universities, as the academy has become much bigger, much more, quote, unquote, professionalized, so the difficulties for young scholars of entering the profession have grown. So part of my luck was simply being there at a time where there was a lot happening and where there weren't so many people working on these questions. I spend a lot of my time, and I have spent a lot of my time, on the teaching side, working with doctoral students and working with doctoral students whose dominant aim is to become the academics of the future. And I think that's an enormously of course, you know, students have many goals, and there are many, many valid ways to pursue careers. But one part of, I think, what we do as academics is to think about the teachers of the future and to do all that we can to make it possible for those people to develop careers, not just for themselves, but to take the ideas that we need in the future forward into the 21st century. 

Fischer: When I hear that from you, I have the impression the idea of having a mentor of somebody who supports you from the outside is maybe also important for you. Did you have somebody like that who helped you through your career, especially at the beginning? 

Hurrell: Oh, yes. I think everybody will have individuals, people, sometimes, you know, formally supervisors and so on, sometimes, informally. So in Oxford, I took over the chair that I've held in Oxford, from, obviously, someone who becomes a very good friend, who was a colleague for a long time, who supported me a great deal, Professor Adam Roberts, who was a previous also professor, president of the British Academy. And he inherited the chair as well from one of the dominant figures in academic international relations of the 20th century, an Australian academic called Hedley Ball, who also taught me as a graduate student. So I'm very much part of that tradition and the mentorship and the ideas that I've inherited. And then on my Latin American side, I have a series of Latin American, again, now friends and colleagues who were tremendously supportive when I said, you know, I want to go and work on Brazil. And lots of people said, well, why do you want to work on Brazil? This is a strange place to go. But they were incredibly supportive. And, you know, as it turned out, you know, Brazil is a very interesting, it's an important country, but it's also a fascinating country to study because it illustrates so many of the issues and problems that we have to grapple with. 

Fischer: If you take advantage of the Einstein fellowship, working with other scientists worldwide, right now we meet you in Berlin, how important are international relations in the academic world and science?

Hurrell: International collaboration is enormously important. It's enormously important in the sense of doing actual projects because I think as so many people recognize, faced by all these enormous problems that, you know, we've discussed and that you've mentioned, no one person can obviously understand everything. No one discipline can approach everything. So collaboration across different fields and different disciplines becomes terribly important. But as I explained earlier, because we're living in a changing global world, and we're living in a world which can't be managed by, you know, some small number of countries at the top. It can't be managed from ideas that only come from one part of the world, say from the transatlantic world or the Anglo-American world or even the, you know, transatlantic European world. It has to involve something much bigger and much broader than that. It has to involve the ideas, the interests, the values that come from different places, and that's something that one can only get at, and one can only do through extensive collaboration, building connections, encouraging academic work and academic production from different places. One of the great challenges facing academia in Europe and in The United States is often that the people who produce knowledge are a very narrow group of people with a very narrow range of backgrounds and traditions, obviously writing overwhelmingly in English, publishing in a very, you know, narrow range of publishers and academic journals. So we need to find ways not just of connecting with individuals, working in different parts of the world, but also finding ways to promote, to encourage, to disseminate the ideas that are coming from those different parts of the world. 

So, you know, collaboration is fundamental. And one of the big problems with COVID, obviously, we can do many things on Zoom. But I think one of my great concerns with the pandemic and with some of the broader changes is the way in which societies are turning inward, and they're becoming less kind of connected in a kind of real working collaborative sense than was the case. And it's hugely important that we recover and take that forward, and that's why, you know, the work of the Einstein Foundation, the work of the Scripts cluster in Berlin, the broader engagement, one of my other things that I do is help promote the research partnership between Oxford and Berlin. All of these things are really, really fundamental for taking forward finding answers to 21st century problems.

Fischer: At the end, I would love some phrases from you to be completed. I start them, and you just continue shortly to finish the phrases. Okay? A world without science would be …

Hurrell: A world without science would be an extremely dangerous world. 

Fischer: If I don't read about international relations, I read about …

Hurrell: I read about literature and history.

Fischer: The most interesting relation is between these two parties. 

Hurrell: It's not so easy to say succinctly. For me, the most interesting set of relations are between the elites, the people who run states, and the populations and the societies that actually make up the states and countries of the world. 

Fischer: Berlin, why I am as an Einstein Fellow, to me is …

Hurrell: One of the great cities where history is always there. 

Fischer: And if you want to succeed in the academic world, you should …

Hurrell: You should really care about what it is that you want both to study and to do.

Fischer: Thank you very much, Mr. Andrew Hurrell, Professor for the Theory of International Relations at the Oxford University and Einstein Visiting Fellow working at the Contestations of the Liberal Script here in Berlin. Thank you very much for your time. AskDifferent, the podcast by the Einstein Foundation.