WHAT has morality got to do with international affairs? Everything or nothing, depending on whether we ask a theologian or a political scientist.

Most of us vacillate between the two: between a sense of outrage at the amoral performance of politicians and a sense of cynicism that things could ever be different. Theologians today recoil at the idea that international politics is an arena of moral irrelevance, a field of activity where we must leave aside the ethical principles which guide individual actions.

However, it was an American theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, who played the most prominent role as father to the academic idea that the arena of international politics was nob place for moralists. In his famous discussion of public and private morality, Niebuhr placed the full moral weight of the Christian gospel on the conscience of individuals, exonerating those responsible for the conduct of foreign policy from its obligations.

Coming at the height of the debate about America's involvement in the second World War, it was a timely message for scholars seeking a scientific basis for their discipline and for political leaders in need of moral justification for a major shift in foreign policy.

Although his later writings were more nuanced and withdrew from an ethical gulf between the public and the private realms, Niebuhr's bequest to students and practitioners of international affairs retained that simple message. He made the pursuit of power respectable.

In the anarchic world which governs the behaviour of states, it was argued following Niebuhr, political leaders advanced ethical principle at their peril. Some consideration of ethics might be tolerable at the margins, to placate domestic opinion or for short term tactical advantage in manipulating the balance of power to greater benefit.

But this could not alter the nature of states or of the environment in which they lived. In the longer term, only the pursuit of self interest could guarantee the survival of the state in a world without universal principles of ethics, or any universal authority to enforce them on the sovereign state.

THIS view of the amoral character of the state and of the international order is probably still the dominant one in the academic discipline of international relations. Its appeal is obvious. It rests in the first place on the attraction of making the world of politics an arena of scientific inquiry.

The prestige of natural science has tempted all students of human behaviour - psychologists, economists, sociologists - to narrow the focus of study to what is observable and quantifiable, and to relegate questions of morality and meaning to the zone of irrelevance.

A second and powerful factor is the reading of the evidence about how states actually behave. History teaches us, apparently, that states have a dismal record in regard to morality.

If we could not point to moral behaviour by individuals', we would be forced to conclude that some determining influence outside the individual - human nature - was controlling our actions and negating any attempt to act ethically.

Similarly, if states have always acted from narrow self interest, it is tempting to conclude that the fault lies not in their leaders but in their nature; a nature which is disguised from politicians in opposition, but revealed in all its starkness when they achieve power in government.

In recent years a growing body of academic opinion has begun to question the basic tenets of this view of international affairs. That they are doing so, not from an ideological political platform, but from one which challenges the logic and objectivity of "scientific" view, makes them easily be dismissed as utopians.

FOREMOST among them are Prof Fred Halliday of the London School of Economics, and Richard Falk of Princeton University. Halliday tackles the question at the philosophical level by challenging the moral relativism at the root of the dominant view. Falk, on the other hand, looks at the central problem of security and questions the manner in which the state's understanding of security conflicts with the interests of the people it purports to secure.

Their views on the relevance of ethics to the practice and understanding of international affairs have important implications for the debate on the forthcoming Inter Governmental Conference (IGC) designed to plot the future of the European Union.

The question of security has obvious relevance for Ireland and the other neutral member states, who must now address not only the moral argument of pro neutralists who reject a common defence, but the equally relevant moral claim of those who support it.

A number of the other ethical questions arise. Widespread scepticism about the whole European project has encouraged the view that member states never had, and therefore cannot have, any higher stake in its success than the satisfaction of economic self interest. This view is clearly reinforced by the recent behaviour of some of the major powers bin the EU.

That all members may share in a common interest of the European Union - that integration may serve a community ideal - is an idea dismissed as Euro rhetoric by the political sceptics and rejected as "idealism" by the harder nosed Euro academics.

But it is an argument, forcefully advanced by Vaclav Havel, Harvard professor Joseph Weiler, and a growing number of others who want to challenge the accepted wisdom that morality has no place in international politics.