ABSTRACT
In some ways the first approach to IR as an academic study in modern times was structuralist. The great debate on imperialism in the late nineteenth century and the early decades of this century marks the advent of the discipline. But, apart from Hobson, it was a debate that had its intellectual roots in Central and Eastern Europe and was somewhat alien to the intellectual climate of the English-speaking world. Moreover, it was an approach that later became associated with a particular state – the USSR – which was treated as a diplomatic pariah, and it lay at the basis of a political doctrine – Marxism-Leninism – which was feared, denigrated and reviled by Western elites. Structural approaches, especially those of a Marxist derivation or ethos as well as those of a geopolitical nature, were, for the most part, beyond the pale in the Anglo-American tradition, as the discipline became established in the 1920s and 1930s not to mention the Cold War.
