They have to count on external recourses in both the economy and security. Generally, small countries are much more sensitive to the international environment than great powers. Nevertheless, there is one factor, omitted by Hoffmann, which makes IR studies a worthwhile project in smaller countries. While the latter obstacle disappeared in 1989 leaving behind a nasty legacy, the former was further strengthened by the split up of Czechoslovakia in 1993 when two even smaller countries came into being. It was a small country with negligible power resources which could never aspire to leadership in international politics and, at the same time, it was a totalitarian state where any social science scholarship was put under stifling constraints. Given that, does it make sense to speak about the Czech discipline of IR at all? Czechoslovakia managed to suffer both obstacles to the development of IR which Hoffmann mentioned. The latter point has been reiterated several times since then, most recently by Wæver (1998) in his excellent sociology of the discipline, based on empirical research.
On the one hand, he drew attention to the selfreflection of the discipline, especially the way it is shaped by the external environment, and to the exclusive position of the United States in IR studies as such. Hoffmanns paper was pathbreaking by exposing two problems which were hidden within the discipline. The latter were condemned either to reflect, more or less slavishly, and with some delays, American fashions or to produce brilliant individual contributions, but unconnected and unsupported which do not make a discipline (ibid.). While in some countries scholars were prevented from undertaking IR scholarship by their totalitarian masters, in other countries scholars were not interested in IR scholarship because their country was lacking power and it could not put their advice into effect in any event.
He proposed several arguments for it, the most potent being (Hoffmann 1995/1977:224): The political preeminence of the United States is the factor I would stress most in explaining why the discipline has fared so badly, by comparison, in the rest of the world (I leave aside countries like the Soviet Union and China, in which it would be hard to speak of free social science scholarship!). Carr, he argued that the fullyfledged discipline of IR is a recent phenomenon which came into being only in the United States after World War II and nowhere else. Even though he was aware of the work and influence of non≪merican IR thinkers from Thucydides through to Edward H.
Stanley Hoffmann (1995/1977) Once called the discipline of International relations (ir) an American Social Science. International Relations in the Czech Republic: A Review of the Discipline Journal of International Relations and Development