None of the three presidents of Bosnia and Herzegovina can really be said to be the highest authority in the country: that title is reserved for the “High Representative,” for the last ten years Valentin Inzko – and since the inception of the position in 1995, not by a Bosnian citizen, whether Bosniak, Croat, or Serbian in “ethnic” identity. The High Representative, charged with overseeing the implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement, has the power to adopt binding decisions and to expel (elected) officials from their office should they be judged to have violated the accord or other legal obligations. As Giulio Venneri argues in the linked article, Bosnia and Herzegovina today is the product of an external consensus to establish diffuse, convoluted government founded on projected EU-US values and a fragile balance of tokenistic representation and extreme meta-federalism.

This is not a picture of a sovereign nation-state. Yet Bosnia has its seat with the other “sovereign nation-states” at the UN General Assembly ­­­­­— the next seat occupied by the apropos “Plurinational State of Bolivia.”

The questions begat by such examination are relevant to the question addressed by Benjamin de Carvalho and his coauthors in their 2011 article The Big Bangs of IR: the Myths that your Teachers Still Tell you about 1648 and 1919. Taking a critical historiographical approach, the authors sought to examine an apparent disconnect between common or even gospel international relations pedagogy and the (revisionist) historical literature that addresses events claimed by the discipline in its own account of how it came to be. Looking at two especially prioritized historical milestones, as evidenced by their recurring appearance in a relatively wide sample of IR textbooks, the authors found major problems, from the perspective of those who think knowledge should be fact-based, in the presentation of just what significance the years 1648 and 1919 hold.

1648 was a year best remembered for the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia, which is often (as in today’s lecture) referred to as the defining point when the “sovereign state” and corresponding “anarchical system” were established as Europe’s norm, marking the death of the suzerainty that had characterized the medieval era’s feudal system; 1919 for – in the field of IR – the establishment of the first program explicitly devoted to international relations at the University of Aberystwyth. Such “facts” are recited in a broad range of IR textbooks, and, reportedly, transmitted more pervasively through the classroom.

Carvalho et al. draw from a wide range of historical accounts, including the text of the 1648 treaty itself, to show that in many ways “sovereignty” as a principle had been practiced and promoted from more than a century before (in the 1533 Augsberg treaty) and was actually limited by the agreement that ended the 30 years’ war; and from a comprehensive reading of numerous scholars active during the interwar period – most of whom, as derided “idealists” of one sort or another, had been disregarded without thought by the dominant “realist” school as the discipline became established in the United States – to show that the discipline has roots far deeper than 1919. In temporal terms, the authors show that work on the topic specifically – the works inspiring or informing the “original” interwar scholars, who themselves existed before the war – dates as early as 1880; socially, their sources portray a discipline rooted in diverse forms of racism and white supremacy.

With extensive and wide-ranging citations, and apparently intimate familiarity with the historical material whose representations they are contesting, the article provides a convincing and comprehensive argument. They manage to frame their concerns in a way relevant to the discipline, giving no impression that they might be “critical for criticism’s sake” or simply outsiders engaging only with a facile mischaracterization of the material: while concerned for obvious reasons about the broader implications lingering colonialism and latent racism, their attention here is on the weakness such elements, and moreso the ignorance thereof, imbues within all international relations scholarship and the representations of the world, the very “knowledge” produced. Indeed, critical engagement with the piece can be difficult when each page featured paragraphs that had me nodding in agreement, or audibly going “huh” with each piece of new information.

This reading is intimately connected to many of our recent discussions, beyond the basic shared aspect of examining IR’s origins: the nature and place of interwar “idealist” scholarship; the lack of engagement between insulated groups of contemporary IR scholars; and, most poignantly, the themes of parochialism and plainly block-headed rhetorically “universalist” views that Americans seem to think necessary to hammer into the structure of the discipline as a whole. (I am American, so I’d like to think America-bashing doesn’t just come across as edgy or attention-seeking when I do it.) This is what brought me to Bosnia: not only does this “country” fail to align with our expectations of “sovereign states” that are supposed to be independent and cohesive: it was the site of one of the triumphs of post-Cold War liberalism, during the halcyon unipolar decade when Chechnya, Rwanda, the Congo, Afghanistan, Angola, Sri Lanka, Somalia, Northern Ireland, Ethiopia, East Timor, Sierra Leone, and countless other countries besides the Balkans were ripped apart by conflict – several of these places, most notably Rwanda, also experiencing the tragedy of genocide without eliciting American intervention (not to imply that decisions regarding American intervention were made in isolation from each previous case).

Bosnia is a perfect illustration of the American “parochial” attitudes that, even in the absence of significant commercial interests, claimed an authority to spread their “universal” truths. I am a democrat and republican, and I think it’s safe to say that there’s a generally popular consensus that no conflict is better than any conflict – a consensus most in Bosnia and Herzegovina would probably agree upon. But there are parallels between 1990s American policymakers coming to the conclusion that Bosnia and Herzegovina could not be trusted to exercise its own ostensible right to sovereignty as a state, and cannot 23 years later, and the efforts to maintain imperialism in an “institutionalized,” “internationalized” form by “idealist” President Wilson who himself could not trust the “inferior races” to self-determination of their own.

The authors have the dubious and entirely unintentional honor of citing Wilson in such a way that I considered his point to be almost valid: regarding uprisings taking place across Europe’s imperial possessions, he opines that “you cannot in human experience rush into the light” of self-determination, but must arrive there gradually. Paternalistic, condescending, and, as so often with Wilson, imbued with a remarkable amount of insidious racial venom – but, in ways that he did not intend, and indeed for reasons he likely would not have admitted, insightful in a way.

The possessions and dominions of empires were indeed unprepared, in many cases, for independence; Wilson is wrong in attributing it to the supposed immaturity of the dark-skinned inhabitants of these realms, when really it was the fault of Europe itself. Take the Belgian Congo, for instance: when nearly the entirety of the white administrative class fled the country in advance of the “Congo Crisis,” they left only three locals in the top three ranks and 4642 positions vacant (see page 718 of the linked book). They also left a country whose population had been decimated and oppressed, and dozens of peoples whose traditional governance structures had been demolished, violently, to be replaced by an external extractive regime. Wilson and those of his time may have thought they were doing right by the world’s deprived masses, when in reality they were simply prolonging the situation without resolution that their predecessors had created: for such an “internationalist,” such Eurocentrism – matching the kind Carvalho points out – seems to be as deeply parochial as the American International Relations establishment’s insistence on not only the validity of their perspective, but the inadmissibility of any other.

After much frustration with the “presentism,” to apply Carvalho’s criticism, of the theories we discussed so far, it was refreshing today to have a perspective that doesn’t place itself outside of history. By revealing many of the axioms behind the American (Realist) discipline of IR as purely “myths,” Carvalho also hammers a deep crack into their claims to explain anything at all; we saw that Waltz, obsessed with the bipolar system, seemed to lose a great deal of his prescience when the USSR fell, an event that itself caused a fracture and diversification within the discipline as a whole. I can’t help but agree with Carvalho’s conclusion: critical takes and reexamination of what we treat as “given” can only make the discipline stronger; as a student, such knowledge by no means makes me “lose faith” in it, but rather makes it easier to reconcile these theories with the reality that, in the end, will persist in existing whether in conformity with scholarly prescription or not.