Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 3, No. 2, Summer/Autumn 2018 | Page 4

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS • VOLUME 3, ISSUE 2 • SUMMER/AUTUMN 2018
INTRODUCTION
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
ARE ACOUSTIC. LET’S LISTEN!
FRÉDÉRIC RAMEL
Sciences Po, Paris
are musicians, Realists are jocks” (Walt 2011). By setting up a link between
one of the main general theories in international relations and art, Walt
“Liberals
provides a very common interpretation of music as harmony. Any musical performance
relies on cooperation between musicians and their sounds. So do international
affairs because “for Liberals, world politics is like playing music, and states are just like
members of a band or orchestra. Making good music requires teamwork and cooperation,
and the quality of the music generally improves the more highly skilled the musicians
are” (Walt 2011:n.p.).
As a neo-classical realist, Walt aims at depreciating Liberalism for its utopian nature. In
the realist suppositions, anarchy prevails in the world system producing a permanent
condition of mutual suspicions among states and a propensity toward war. But Walt’s
reference to music is imperfect for two reasons. Firstly, he equates music with peace. As
“a tool for understanding” (Attali 2011:4), music could indeed frame representations of
peace. They speak “both to the heart and to the brain, to the compassion of the heart and
constructions of the brain” (Galtung 2008:60). In the history of European ideas, many
philosophers conceived international order based on the music of cosmic spheres in the
Middle-Ages for highlighting perpetual peace. The same ideas informed the concert of
nations in 1815. But these associations do not cover all the relations between music and
representations of International Relations (IR).
Strategic studies also refer to musical ideas for describing war. The French strategist and
Army Officer André Beaufre defined every war as a hybrid fact that combines major
(regular war) and minor (irregular war) modes (Beaufre 1965). The General has his
“keyboard and his musical score” when he fights ... In such readings, music does not
inspire irenic thoughts.
Walt also mobilizes music as a metaphor for qualifying a theory. The metaphor is taken
from the Greek verb metapherein that means ‘to transfer’. This form of rhetoric does not
suppose an explicit comparison. It is a more figurative than a literal process. By “likening,
comparing, or analogizing” ( ... ) “The maker of a metaphor (or the metaphor itself)
likens the primary subject to the secondary subject” (Hills 2012). These transfers help
to visualize or explain reality through fresh perspectives. These functions of metaphors
have been used for centuries in order to show “how IR works” (Marks 2011:6) and more
1
doi: 10.18278/aia.3.2.1