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Our Enemies and Us: America's Rivalries and the Making of Political Science

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American academic Ido Oren started his research by looking at the common idea that democracies do not fight each other. He shows how studies only support this idea because our concept of democracy is produced by the same historical patterns against which the claims are `tested', a history partly shaped by the USA's international rivalries.

So, before World War One, Woodrow Wilson, the political scientist, described Imperial Germany as an advanced constitutional state, a model for administrative reform. Yet when he became President, Woodrow Wilson took the USA into war against Germany, and described it as an autocracy.

Oren looks at American political science as an ideology: its claims to uphold the ideals of liberal democracy, as expressed, for instance, by Samuel Huntingdon, a past President of the American Political Science Association. Yet the apartheid government used Huntingdon's writings, as when he backed it against `the worse alternative' of a government led by `the revolutionaries of the ANC'. He advised the apartheid government that increased authoritarianism might be necessary for reform, rationalising its repression, and he backed its `centralization of power'. Typically, the CIA funded some of his research.

Oren studies American political science's characterisations of the USA's chief enemies last century, its concomitant characterisations of the USA, and its involvement in the wars against Imperial Germany, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. "I document a systematic pattern of change in the portrayals of these enemies before and after their conflicts with us." Also, he shows the pattern of concurrence between US wars and transformations in political science's visions of the USA. The Soviet Union was seen as all state, no society, the USA as all society, no state.

He chronicles the growth of intimacy between the political science profession and the State Department, especially during the US attack on Vietnam. Oren asks whether `American political science might be more attached to America's regime than to democracy'. He concludes that it indeed works from the US state, not an objective, perspective.

Ido Oren takes a bold, new look at the future of political science, as well as its current state of affairs. In particular, Oren challenges political scientists' claims of objectivity and demonstrates, through well-gathered empirical evidence, that subjectivity is far more present in the discipline than most scholars might believe. Oren challenges the idea of a democratic peace by analyzing the process wherein a state is or is not labeled a "democracy" by scholars, policy makers and the general populace. Is the process of labeling a democracy as simple as adhering to certain standards, or can democracies simply not become democracies because of political circumstances? Oren asks this question and uses the examples of WWI-era Germany, as well as the Soviet Union, to answer this difficult question.

Our Enemies and US is a must-read for any student of political science and anyone with an interest in the nature of democracy, especially in these times where the lines between friend and foe on the international field have become obscured.