Early international relations teaching and teachers in Australia: institutional and disciplinary origins

Abstract

Drawing on the insights of the current literature concerned with the institutions which fostered and supported the emergence of the international relations (IR) discipline, this article reassesses the Australian contribution in the interwar years. From this period, teaching materials and surviving lecture notes, as well as documentation of Australian participation in the International Studies Conference, show that, contrary to the received view, academies and institutions supported a recognisable IR, albeit in its formative stages. Even by the early 1920s there was a developing awareness that ‘international relations’ was a discrete subject worthy of presentation in a specific curriculum. The Melbourne school initiated by William Harrison Moore exerted the greatest influence; an energetic pioneering effort in Sydney under H. Duncan Hall was not maintained after his departure. Law and history departments offered such courses, though their place in wider programs depended upon the contingencies of personalities and appointments. By the 1930s, IR teachers were familiar with the major methodological debates of the era in the UK and the USA. While consistent attention was devoted to international organisation, and ‘collective security’ had its champions, the predominant view, in the terminology of the ‘first debate’, was neither idealist nor realist.

Keywords:

• Australian international history
• Australian international thought
• international relations discipline

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James Cotton

James Cotton, University of New South Wales, ADFA. Most recent books: (with John Ravenhill) Middle Power Dreaming: Australia in World Affairs 2006–2010 (Oxford University Press/AIIA, 2011), (with David Lee), Australia and the United Nations (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2012)