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InThe Global Transformation: History,
Modernity and the Making of Interna-
tional Relations, Barry Buzan and
George Lawson set out on the task of
providing a history of how we came to
think about international relations in the
way we do today. They explore the roots
of our contemporary conceptions of the
state, revolution, the international and
modernity. They identify the long nine-
teenth century, from 1776 to 1914, as
the key period in which the modern state
and international relations as we know
them today were forged. This was a global
transformation in that it reshaped the
bases of power, thereby also reshaping
the relations of power that govern the
relations between states and other agents
today, across the world. In carrying
through this project, Buzan and Lawson
show us not only how the modern world
was transformed, but also the kind of
object it became for the discipline of Inter-
national Relations. This is then also a book
about the assumptions that have shaped,
and continue to shape, that discipline.
In their reviews of the book, Pinar
Bilgin, Ann Towns and David C. Kang take
issue with different aspects of The Global
Transformation. They argue that Buzan
and Lawson have omitted important
aspects from their history (most notably,
gender), as well as important non-
Western histories.
beyond the ‘billiard ball’model of
the international?
pinar bilgin
Department of International Relations, Bilkent University, Ankara, TR-06800, Turkey
The so-called ‘billiard ball’model
of the international is more
entrenched in the minds of students
of the Social Sciences than many
of us would like to believe. Arguably
this is because our understanding of
world history is conditioned by ‘billiard ball’
assumptions, thereby shaping our conce p-
tions of the international. Barry Buzan
and George Lawson’sThe Global Trans-
formation is an important step taken as
part of the broader attempt within the
Social Sciences in general, and Interna-
tional Relations (IR) in particular, to
move beyond the ‘billiard ball’model.
The ‘billiard ball’model of the interna-
tional is one of the most criticized aspects
of the realist (and especially structural rea-
list) theory of IR. Viewed through this
model, states look like unitary (not plura-
listic) and pre-given (not in progress) units
that have surface (not constitutive) inter-
actions with each other. For long, the critics
of realism have argued that states are
better viewed as unfinished projects that
are made and re-made as they construct
their identity and interests in relation to
each other as well as internal dynamics.
The realists, in turn, have responded by
reminding their critics that the ‘billiard
ball’model is a ‘model’. It is a model that
is set up in the attempt to create a ‘closed
system’of international relations so that
theorizing the international becomes
lasse thomassen european political science: 15 2016
117
possible. Their point being that students
of realism know that their portrayal of
world politics is not the ‘reality’, and that
they adopt these assumptions for the pur-
pose of theory building.
If it were only the students of realist IR
alone that suffer from the limitations of the
‘billiard ball’model, but so do many of their
critics in IR and the Social Sciences in
general! For, this is ‘the way we have
learned our own history’, as the anthropol-
ogist Eric Wolf (1982: 4–5) has reminded
us. According to Wolf, we read back into
history as ‘things’notions such as ‘state’,
‘nation’and ‘the West’. As a result, he
argued, we impede our understanding of
the fluid and undetermined nature of the
history of humankind.
By turning names into things we create
false models of reality. By endowing
nations, societies, or culture with the
qualities of internally homogenous
and externally distinctive and bounded
objects, we create a model of the world
as a global pool hall in which the ene-
mies spin off each other like so many
hard and round coloured balls, to
declare that ‘East is East, and West is
West, and never the twain shall meet’.
(Wolf, 1982: 6)
My point being that the ‘billiard ball’
model of the international has deep roots
in the minds of the students of Social
Sciences –roots that go beyond realist
IR. Our understanding of world history is
conditioned by this very model insofar as
Eurocentric accounts of world history look
at the past through (1) state-centric
lenses; (2) often without being aware of
the particularity of the notion of state that
is used; and (3) overlooking relationships
of mutual constitution between peoples,
states, empires and civilizations in differ-
ent parts of the world throughout history.
My second and related point is that if
our attempts to move beyond Eurocentric
limitations of the Social Sciences in gen-
eral and IR in particular are progressing
at an embarrassingly slow pace, this is
because our understanding of world his-
tory is conditioned by the ‘billiard model’,
which does not allow us to see the fluid,
undetermined and intertwined character
of world history.
The argument about the ‘intertwined’
character of historical processes has been
developed by several scholars across
the Social Sciences including Said
(1993), Subrahmanyam (1997), Buck-
Morss (2009), Mignolo and Tlostanova
(2006) as well as Wolf (1982). Notwith-
standing their noteworthy differences, the
gist of these scholars’argument is that
world history is better understood as com-
munications and connections between peo-
ples and the ideas and institutions they
have generated. Eurocentric exclusions of
the Social Sciences (and Humanities), Said
(in Said et al, 2004: 52) wrote, do not allow
us to see how ‘even in the hotly contested
worlds of politics and religion, cultures are
intertwined and can only be disentangles
from each other by mutilating them’.
Trouill o t (1995: 847) concurred:
the dominant narratives of world his-
tory…do not describe the world; they
offer visions of the world. They appear
to refer to things as they exist, but
because they are rooted in a particular
history, they evoke multiple layers
of sensibilities, persuasions, cultural
assumptions and ideological choices
tied to that localized history.
While many may not see much to
object in Said’sandTrouillot’swords,
such accounts meet considerable back-
lash when presented in the form of non-
Eurocentric histories –as experienced by
Bernal (1987) in the aftermath of the
publication of Black Athena: The Afroa-
siatic Roots of Classical Civilization (see
also Bernal, 2011). The ‘billiard ball’
model is so entrenched in our Euro-
centric accounts of world history that,
even when we are willing to let go of
some of our assumptions (above all, the
european political science: 15 2016 the making of international relations
118
state as the unit of analysis and/or as a
unitary actor), our understanding of the
international remains tied to the cate-
gory of a ‘West’that is assumed to have
evolved autonomously, without incurring
any debts to others. The critics among us
identify ‘Westernness’as a limitation of
IR, without pausing to reflect on the
‘billiard ball’model of the world that has
shaped that very notion of ‘Western’
(Bilgin, 2008).
Buzan and Lawson’sThe Great Transfor-
mation has done a great service by offering
an account of the history of ‘global moder-
nity’that locates its dynamics in a myriad
of locales (including, but not limited to,
‘Europe’). Addressing the limitations of IR,
as with the prevalence of the ‘billiard ball’
model of the international, needs to go
hand in hand with addressing the problem
of Eurocentrism of the historical accounts
that IR draws upon.
References
Bernal, M. (1987) Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization,NewBrunswick,NJ:
Rutgers University Press.
Bernal, M. (2011) ‘Afterword’, in D. Orrells, G.K. Bhambra and T. Roynon (eds.) African Athena:
New Agendas,Oxford:OxfordUniversityPress,pp.398–412.
Bilgin, P. (2008) ‘Thinking past ‘Wester n’IR?’Third World Quarterly 29(1): 5–23.
Buck-Morss, S. (2009) Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press.
Mignolo, W.D. and Tlostanova, M.V. (2006) ‘Theorizing from the borders shifting to geo- and body-politics
of knowledge’,European Journal of Social Theory 9(2): 205–21.
Said, E.W. (1993) Culture and Imperialism,NewYork:Knopf.
Said, E.W., Singh, A. and Johnson, B.G. (2004) Interviews with Edward W. Said, Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi.
Subrahmanyam, S. (1997) ‘Connected histories: Notes toward a reconf iguration of early modern Eurasia’,
Modern Asian Studies 31(3): 735–62.
Tro u i l l o t , M .- R . ( 1 995 ) Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Boston: Beacon
Press.
Wolf , E. R . (19 82 ) Europe and the People Without History,Berkeley:UniversityofCaliforniaPress.
About the Author
Pinar Bilgin is Associate Professor of International Relations at Bilkent University. She is the
author of Regional Security in the Middle East: A Critical Perspective (2005) and The
International in Security, Security in the International (forthcoming).
how grand is this narrative?
ann towns
Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Box 711, 405 30,
Gothenburg, Sweden
In this monumental book, Barry Buzan
and George Lawson provide an out-
standing synthetic history of the
nineteenth century roots of contemporary
international relations. Drawing on
economic history, world history and
lasse thomassen european political science: 15 2016
119
