Abstract
Tragedy is one of the oldest conceptual lenses of Western culture. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that tragedy is constitutive of Western culture itself. Writing more than two millennia ago, Thucydides thought that tragedy was an appropriate lens through which to view international relations.1 We interrogate this assumption. Does tragedy offer a plausible framework for examining international relations? If so, in what ways can the concept of tragedy revealed in ancient Greek, Shakespearean, and later dramas inform and enrich our understanding of international relations today? And, perhaps most importantly, if the lens of tragedy does illuminate aspects of international relations for us, can this knowledge enhance our chances of avoiding or reducing tragic outcomes in the future? The contributors to this volume by no means agree on the answers to these questions. We do, however, agree that these are crucial points of enquiry.
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Notes
S. L. Feagin (1998) ‘Tragedy’, in E. Craig (ed.) Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London: Routledge), vol. 9, pp. 447–52;
M. Weitz (1967) ‘Tragedy’, in P. Edwards (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Philosophy ( London: Collier-Macmillan ), pp. 155–61;
J. Drakakis and N. Conn Liebler (1998) ‘Introduction’, in J. Drakakis and N. Conn Liebler (eds) Tragedy ( London: Longman ), pp. 1–20;
and J. Wallace (2007) The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
For an introduction to this genre and its constitutive concepts in the specific context of international relations, see R. N. Lebow (2003) The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
S. Booth (1983) King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition and Tragedy ( New Haven: Yale University Press ), p. 81.
J. -P. Vernant (1990) ‘Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy’, in J.-P. Vernant and P. Vidal-Naquet (eds) Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece ( New York: Zone Books ), pp. 29–48.
J. -P. Vernant (1972) ‘Greek Tragedy: Problems of Interpretation’, in R. Macksey and E. Donato (eds) The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), pp. 273–88, and Vernant (1990) ‘Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy’; C. Segal (2001) Oedipus Tyrannus: Tragic Heroism and the Limits of Knowledge, 2nd edn (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 15–18, 20–2;
S. Goldhill (1986) Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), and Goldhill (1990) ‘The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology’, in J. J. Winkler and F. I. Zeitlin (eds) Nothing to Do with Dionysos?: Athenian Drama in Its Social Context ( Princeton: Princeton University Press ), pp. 97–129;
J. J. Winkler (1990) ‘The Ephebes’ Song: Tragôidia and Polis’, in Winkler and Zeitlin (eds) Nothing to Do with Dionysos?, pp. 20–62;
F. I. Zeitlin (1986) ‘Thebes: Theater of Self and Society in Athenian Drama’, in J. P. Euben (ed.) Greek Tragedy and Political Theory ( Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press ), pp. 101–41;
J. P. Euben (1990) The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken ( Princeton: Princeton University Press ), pp. 50–9.
A. C. Bradley ([1904] 2007 ) Shakespearean Tragedy, 4th edn ( London: Palgrave Macmillan), p. xlviii.
F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. by Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press (2000)), p. vii. Benjamin Schupmann and Tracy Strong offer valuable analyses of Nietzsche’s account of tragedy in Chapters 10 (pp. 129–143) and 11 (pp. 144–157) of this volume, respectively.
A. Poole (1987) Tragedy: Shakespeare and the Greek Example ( New York: Basil Blackwell ), pp. 5, 7.
F. M. Cornford (1907) Thucydides Mythistoricus ( London: Arnold ), pp. 176–82;
G. Crane, Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity, pp. 241–6;
T. Rood (1999) ‘Thucydides’ Persian Wars’, in C. Shuttleworth Kraus (ed.) The Limits of Historiography: Genre Narrative in Ancient Historical Texts (Leiden: Brill), pp. 141–68; Lebow (2003) The Tragic Vision of Politics, pp. 126–41.
R. N. Lebow (2008) A Cultural Theory of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), Ch. 9 for an analysis of the Bush administration’s motives.
B. Woodward (2004) Plan of Attack (New York: Simon and Schuster);
M. R. Gordon and B. E. Trainor (2006) Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq ( New York: Pantheon);
M. Isakoff and D. Corn (2006) Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War ( New York: Crown);
T. E. Ricks (2006) Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin). Also, see the contributions to this volume by James Mayall, Richard Beardsworth, and Tracy Strong, in Chapters 3 (pp. 44–52), 8 (pp. 97–111) and 11 (pp. 144–157) respectively.
See B. Orend (2006) The Morality of War (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press), pp. 154–7. ‘Normative IR theory’, ‘international political theory’, and ‘international ethics’ are broadly interchangeable labels for a field of study within IR that variously draws on moral philosophy and political theory to explore moral expectations, decisions and dilemmas in world politics. For an introduction to this field, see T. Erskine (2010) ‘Normative IR Theory’, in Dunne, Kurki, and Smith (eds) International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity, 2nd edn, pp. 37–57.
M. Walzer ([1977] 2006) Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 4th edn (New York: Basic Books), pp. 251–68. Note that Walzer does not present this as a ‘moral tragedy’; this is Orend’s unique contribution. Walzer, Orend would maintain, overlooks the tragic dimension of this situation. Nevertheless, as we note below, Walzer’s rationale for the division between jus in bello and jus ad bellum considerations–for which his “supreme emergency” argument is a controversial exception–is an excellent illustration of one of the insights that we have taken from tragedy.
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© 2012 Toni Erskine and Richard Ned Lebow
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Erskine, T., Lebow, R.N. (2012). Understanding Tragedy and Understanding International Relations. In: Erskine, T., Lebow, R.N. (eds) Tragedy and International Relations. Palgrave Studies in International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230390331_1
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