| This dissertation aims to analyze the developmental trajectories of the International Relations (IR) discipline by going beyond the usual narratives that focus only on the American (and to a lesser extent the British) IR community. While explaining the role of scholars and institutes in establishing IR as an academic discipline in (West) Germany and France, the impact of transnational dynamics plays an important role. The most important actors that lie at the origins of transnationality are American foundations, the American government and military officials, German and French scholars with US educational backgrounds, refugee-scholars who returned to Europe or stayed in the US (both in the 19 th and 20th centuries), German and French political decision-makers, their academic communities and national university structures, and international scholarly organizations. I show how the combined impact of these forces paved the way for the establishment of a hybrid IR in these two continental European countries.;In order to clarify the conditions that marked IR's different trajectories, I highlight the International Studies Conference (ISC), an interwar international association that brought together scholars who were interested in the study of the international. By covering both the interwar years and providing an analysis of the post-1945 pathways of the discipline in Europe, the dissertation expands the temporal and the geographic scope of IR's disciplinary historiography. I analyze the role of Arnold Bergstraesser and the Deutsche Hochschule fur Politik (DHfP) in the German case, and of Pierre Renouvin and Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, as well as Sciences Po Paris, in the French case because these scholarly and institutional actors made the most important contributions to IR's development in these countries. The dissertation shows how IR is a discipline whose past cannot be explained merely in terms of its American development. Understanding IR's different trajectories in Europe helps to gain a better understanding of its present plurality that is being shaped by a less Western-centric world. |
