Affiliated with the University of Nicosia |
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RULES AND NORMS IN A POST-WESTERN WORLD A lecture given at the University of Nicosia in honor of Keith Webb By Chris Brown
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Professor of International Relations Department of International Relations, London School of Economics and Political Science |
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It is a
pleasure and privilege to be invited to give this lecture.[i]
Keith Webb and I were colleagues at the
University of Kent at Canterbury for over a decade. This was in the
1980s and early 90s when Kent had a small but thriving postgraduate
programme in International Relations; there were five of us on the
teaching team with different, but – we hoped – complementary talents.
Keith and I were, in many respects, opposites; he was a social scientist
with a solid background in research methods and a firm belief in our
ability to produce reliable knowledge about the social world, I was then
working in international political economy but turning myself into an
applied political philosopher, sceptical of this vision of the social
sciences an focusing increasingly on normative issues.
Still, we were less far apart than this would suggest, because
like our sometime colleague Michael Nicholson, Keith was a ‘positivist’
with firm radical commitments while I was, and am, someone who believes
you can only carry out philosophical speculation on the basis of a good
grasp of empirical reality.
As characters we were also rather
different; I am sure he regarded me as rather uptight and conventional,
while I saw him as a little too much of a free spirit – but I never had
any doubt as to his commitment to his students, or to the pursuit of
truth and, like everyone else who met him, I could not fail to be
impressed by his generosity of spirit.
He was capable of attracting great loyalty – when last Summer a
celebration of his life was held at the University of Kent it was
striking how many of his students came back for the occasion; I was
particularly struck that Madame Fu Ying, Ambassador of the Chinese
People’s Republic to the UK and one of our students from the 1980s made
time in her schedule to attend.
Keith and I differed on many issues
intellectually, but on one point both of us were agreed, and that was
that the so-called ‘structural realist’ theory that was coming to
dominate the American academy in the 1980s was seriously flawed.
I had more sympathy for the older, classical realists than Keith,
but we both agreed that to understand IR as simply the product of
material forces acting upon each other was to miss most of the really
important features of international relations.
We both agreed that norms and values mattered, although we
approached these notions very differently, and this lecture is based on
that agreement. My aim is to
examine the normative foundations for the world order that will emerge
over the coming decades, indeed is already emerging.
In particular I want to investigate the implications of the fact
that it is likely that this order will be in at least one sense of the
term Post-Western in that some of the most important powers will be
neither European nor of essentially European descent.
The core question I wish to pose is whether this matters.
Will the new world order be different because some of the major
players are no longer European?
Before asking this question, the
underlying empirical assumptions upon which these speculations are based
need to be made clear. There are two such assumptions; they can be
stated briefly and are given here with only a very sketchy defence.
First, following the argument of
William Wohlforth and Stephen Brooks, I assume that American military
primacy will remain a feature of the architecture of twenty-first
century international relations for the foreseeable future, that is at
least until mid-century (Wohlforth, 1999: Brooks & Wohlforth, 2008).
Primacy appears to be an objective to which the US political
establishment is committed, and American military expenditures on
hardware and R & D are such as to more or less guarantee the achievement
of this objective, pace Chinese and Russian attempts to upgrade their forces.
The economic crisis will affect all the major powers, but is
unlikely to change the relativities here. In any event, as Wohlforth and
Brooks and Zbigniew Brzezinski
argue, rivalries among the potential challengers to US power will
be as salient a feature of the future world order as their putative
opposition to the US – indeed we are already seeing the development of
naval rivalries between India and China in the Indian Ocean, and
competition for influence in Africa (Brzezinski, 2004).
The existence of nuclear weapons and minimum deterrence
force-postures muddies the picture of US military superiority somewhat,
which is why the US pursues anti-proliferation policies and may soon
commit to the virtual elimination of nuclear weapons, but does not
fundamentally change the fact that the US has force-projection
capacities that no other state can match or is likely to in the near
future. The capacity of the
American military to win the ‘savage wars of peace’ is certainly in
doubt, but at the level of the great powers US superiority is
unchallengeable. In short, and contrary to the argument of structural
realists such as John Mearsheimer or Kenneth Waltz, there will be no
re-emergence of traditional balance-of-power politics, because military
power has always been central to such a balance (Mearsheimer, 1990;
Waltz, 1993).
However, second, beyond the realm of
military force I assume that something that does look a little more like
a traditional balance of power will indeed emerge.
China and India may not be able to challenge the US in military
terms, but their current levels of economic growth and increasing
technological sophistication – the former more apparent in China, the
latter in India – means that they will increasing exert influence in
other aspects of international relations, and these other aspects are,
of course, of great, and perhaps increasing, significance.
Recent meeting of the G20 to discuss the global economic crisis
illustrates the point – clearly the voices of the emerging economies
were heard at this meeting in a way they never have been heard before.
The other two of the so-called BRIC countries – Brazil and Russia
– have fewer guarantees of an influential future, but will still look to
exert their influence in world politics when they can, as will the major
West European powers and Japan.
The question that will be discussed
here can now be formulated a
little more precisely; what kind of normative foundations will exist if
the emerging architecture of world politics is going to be characterised
by the dispersal of real power amongst a number of actors, some of whom
will be non-Western and some of whom will be authoritarian (Gat, 2007;
Gat et al, 2009)? To anticipate the argument, my first step will be to
investigate the realist claim that this is, effectively, a non-question
since norms of international conduct are of little significance and the
characteristic patterns of world politics are not culture-specific; I
will then look at the constructivist rebuttal of this position which,
stresses the constitutive role of norms, and the importance of a
deeper understanding of the political, legal and social context which
underpin such norms; and then, at somewhat greater length, I will be
asked whether this demolition of the realist position is, in fact,
culture-specific. To put the
matter more succinctly, even if structural realism’s account of the past
and present international order is flawed, is it possible that this
theory, or something similar, is actually the best guide we have for
understanding how international politics will unfold in the 21st
century? Ultimately the
argument will be that it is not, but the issue is less clear cut than
might be expected.
The Anarchy Problematic
For structural realists – perhaps
for any realist – the question posed here is of little interest, for two
reasons. First, all
anarchical systems are subject to the same imperatives.
It matters not whether the great powers are Britain, France and
Germany or the US, China and India; what matters is that they conduct
their relations with one another under conditions of anarchy.
To quote someone who was not a structural realist, indeed perhaps
was not a realist at all, or at least only occasionally, Martin Wight
argued that ‘international politics is the realm of recurrence and
repetition’ with the same patterns reappearing in different eras (Wight,
1966:26). And, second, in any event, for the realist, norms count for
very little in international relations.
States do what they must, and normative statements are best seen
as rhetorical flourishes, not actual constraints on actions and
certainly should not be taken seriously by analysts.
China and India might, or might not, employ different rhetorics
from each other and from the western powers, but this matters very
little, and certainly cannot be taken to indicate that the behaviour of
these states will be in any meaningful way different from that of their
European predecessors as great powers.
The writer who most successfully
brings together both of these arguments is the American realist Stephen
Krasner (Krasner, 1995, 1999, 2001).
In his book Sovereignty:
Organised Hypocrisy he begins by challenging the conventional
notion that the nature of the European political order changed in a
fundamental way during the course of the ‘long’ sixteenth century;
instead he argues that medieval rulers behaved in much the same way as
the dynasts of the so-called Westphalia System.
In both cases rulers confronted by the imperatives created by a
desire to survive and prosper in a self-help system are obliged to
behave similarly in response to similar structural pressures – although,
possibly, medieval rulers had fewer resources at their disposal than
their dynastic counterparts.
In essence, states attempt to perform the same functions, even if they
do so with different capabilities; this is true of any non-hierarchical
system and medieval Europe was such a system.
Krasner appreciates, of course, that
in the medieval era people thought differently about politics than they
did in early modern times, and that whereas early modern rulers asserted
their sovereignty, medieval rulers generally acknowledged that they
existed within a chain of obligations that precluded such an assertion –
European Christendom was an hierarchy in the sense that Empire and
Papacy claimed superiority over other secular rulers, and those rulers
rarely directly challenged this claim, at least not until the late
fifteenth, early sixteenth centuries.
But from Krasner’s point of view, this matters little; following
James March and Johann Olsen, he distinguishes between the ‘logic of
expected consequences’ and the ‘logic of appropriateness’ – there are
things we do in response to ends-means calculations, and there are
things we do because we feel we ought to do them – and argues that in
self-help systems, logics of consequence always trump logics of
appropriateness (March & Olsen, 1989). Thus, in the Westphalia System
the norm of non-intervention is frequently invoked, but even more
frequently violated – this, and other ‘[Principles] have been enduring
yet violated’; hence this is a system of ‘organised hypocrisy’ (Krasner,
1999: 90).
It should now be clear why, from a
realist perspective, the question posed in this lecture is actually not
worth posing, let alone trying to answer.
The real international politics of our new century will be the
same as those of the last and of every other era where there is no
hierarchical, functionally-differentiated system of ‘global’ government
– the rhetoric employed by the players may be different, but the game is
the same.
The Constructivist Response
The realist argument set out above
has never gone unchallenged.
In fact, many writers who would generally be considered realist have
allowed for a much more important role for norms than Krasner would
suggest, and present a more historically nuanced account of the
emergence of the current international order than a simple (and
essentially unexplained) shift from hierarchy to anarchy at some
unspecified time in the past.
Hans J Morgenthau – the most famous of all realists – certainly
presents such a nuanced account, and in his discussion of morality and
international relations is happy to use the term ‘international society’
to convey the idea that this has not been simply the realm of power
envisaged by Krasner – indeed, Morgenthau used the term international
society freely before the work of ‘English School’ figures such as Wight
and Bull with which it is usually associated (Morgenthau, 1948; Bull,
1977; Wight, 1978).
But the most sustained and elaborate critique of structural
realism has been launched by constructivist writers.
They have effectively critiqued the idea that states can be
treated simply as place-holders within a structure – identities and
values matter; as J. G. Ruggie argues, it mattered that the USA and not
the USSR was the dominant power immediately after the Second World War (Ruggie,
1998). Identities and
interests cannot simply be seen as exogenously determined, nor can norms
be dismissed simply as establishing standards of appropriate behaviour
that can be ignored at will.
Norms may shape conduct by making certain kinds of action possible, and
others inconceivable.
The constructivist theorist who
offers the most ambitious and the most convincing account of this
position, and assault on Krasner’s, is Friedrich Kratochwil (Kratochwil,
1989a, 1993a, 1995a). Kratochwil demonstrates that Krasner fails to
acknowledge the Wittgensteinian distinction between ‘regulative’ and
‘constitutive’ rules – this sounds rather forbidding, but the point is
actually quite simple. To
take a standard example, consider the game of chess; there are some
rules that regulate the game e.g. ‘touch a piece, move it’ but others
that constitute the game e.g. ‘Bishops move diagonally’.
You can tell the difference between these types of rules by
asking which rules you can waive when teaching a newcomer how to play;
we might allow the novice more time to make her move than we give
ourselves, we might even give her an advantage of a pawn or two, but if
we allow her to move a Bishop horizontally we are not teaching her the
game.
Similarly, it is argued, there are
some rules which actually constitute international society – such as the
norm of non-intervention – that is which make certain kinds of action
possible and other kinds conceptually impossible, and this is not a
matter that can be verified by empirical observation, nor is it a
question of the relative importance of appropriateness as opposed to
consequences, but rather a consequence of the logic of the practice in
question. They simply follow
from how the game is played. Krasner’s
response, that ‘[the] international system …does not have constitutive
rules if such rules are conceived of as making some kinds of action
possible, and precluding others’ confirms that he misses the point that
the international system could not be a system in any meaningful sense
without the existence of constitutive rules (Krasner, 1999: 229).
Kratochwil wins this argument, I
think, but in his ‘Sovereignty as “Dominium’’’
chapter he also presents an argument confronting Krasner’s elision of
the differences between medieval and ‘Westphalian’ rulers, and this
argument, while apparently convincing, does raise some rather disturbing
issues for the question which dominates this chapter (Kratochwil, 1995a).
Kratochwil traces the re-emergence of Roman notions of property
that accompanied the recovery of the Roman republican legacy during the
Renaissance. Medieval
notions of property always involved obligations to those above and below
one – thus in the classic ‘feudal’ system (never to be found in life in
pure form), the local fief-holder would have obligations to those who
worked his land and to his superior, the latter in turn would have
obligations to the King, the King to the Emperor, and the Emperor to
God. What one could and
could not do with one’s ‘property’ was limited according to these
obligations. The Roman
notion of real property [dominium]
was very different; the Roman property-owner could do more-or-less
anything he (and it always was a he in Rome) wished with it, so long as
he did not infringe the rights of other property-holders to do whatever
they wished with their property.
Once such ideas gained currency,
princes and kings were able to use them to make claims about their
realms which could not have been expressed during a time when the older
meaning of property held sway.
The detail of this argument may be open to question, as Ben
Holland argues in forthcoming International Studies Quarterly paper, but the general thrust is
clear and difficult to dispute (Holland, forthcoming).
It was, literally, inconceivable
that a medieval monarch could claim to be a sovereign in the way that
e.g. Louis XIV could in the seventeenth century.
Thus, the norm of non-intervention flows from this new claim that
rulers are able to make – just as my neighbour may not interfere with
the way I dispose of my property, unless I do so in ways in which her
property is adversely affected, so one sovereign has no basis for
intervening in the internal policies of another sovereign unless those
policies constitute, in the language of the UN Charter, a threat to
international peace and security.
For a sovereign to claim otherwise is to undermine the basis of
his or her own sovereignty. At some later date, different notions of
property and sovereignty may obtain, as has happened and may now be
happening again – but the key point is not just that the norms of the
system constrain the way in which sovereigns (and everyone else) think
about politics, but that these norms have a very specific history.
The Westphalian political order is a product of both European
Christendom and Neo-Roman political thought – from the latter comes the
notion of sovereignty, which dominates but co-exists uneasily with the
residual idea, inherited from the former, that Europe is ‘one great
republic’, to use a term employed by both Edward Gibbon and Edmund
Burke. Arguably, it is this
very specific history that has shaped the system, and not the operation
of logics of intended consequences in a self-help system, as structural
realists have argued.
Socialising the Newcomers?
The problem is that while this is
the history of the European states who created Westphalia, it is not the
history of most of the rest of the world.
Indeed, the Europeans did not play the Westphalian game
themselves when they were away from home, as Edward Keene has
demonstrated (Keene, 2002). Of course, now is not 1648, and after 1945,
the Westphalian system became genuinely global, with, in principle, the
same rules applied to all – non-intervention being applied to
non-western states, and the ‘standards of civilization’ coming home to
Europe itself in the form of the international human rights regime – but
this process has not been without its difficulties, and, arguably, has
worked as well as it has because the most important states in the system
still remained European, or had populations of predominantly European
origin. Once this ceases to
be the case, as it is assumed it soon will, how will the system fare?
Will an international society
continue to be possible?
A positive answer to this question
is provided by ‘pluralist’ English School theorists.
The pluralist argument, as expressed with great clarity by Terry
Nardin and Robert Jackson, is that the normative foundations of
international society form the basis of an ethics of co-existence that
is of general applicability (Nardin, 1983; Jackson, 2000).
Nardin draws a distinction between those practices which presume
no common project beyond the desire to co-exist under conditions of
peace and justice, and are designed to promote the conditions under
which such co-existence can occur, and those practices that are
orientated towards common purposes that go beyond co-existence.
The former – exemplified by the law of treaties, or the practice
of diplomatic immunity – are a necessary condition for the existence of
an international society and their validity cannot be denied by those
states that wish to be members of such a society.
The latter – exemplified by co-operative institutions such as the
WTO or NATO – are, by their nature, voluntary add-ons; no state can be
obliged to sign-up for such projects.
Jackson presents the argument somewhat differently but to much
the same effect.
Interestingly, both Nardin and
Jackson – Nardin more explicitly than Jackson – draw on the work of
Michael Oakeshott to make their case (Oakeshott, 1975, 1991).
In On Human Conduct,
Oakeshott sets out a distinction between ‘civic associations’ and
‘enterprise associations’, which Nardin rebrands for his purposes as
‘practical’ and ‘purposive’ associations (Oakeshott, 1975).
Identifying this influence draws attention immediately to some
potential problems. First of
all, it has to be noted that Oakeshott’s attempt to limit the realm of
the political to the terms of association of citizens (cives)
has been singularly unsuccessful in domestic politics; all modern states
actually engage extensively in enterprises on behalf of their citizens,
attempting to providing social security, minimum levels of health care,
and to manage the economy, all activities that Oakeshott believed
improperly extended the realm of the political.
At the international level, although much less successfully,
states have engaged in similar enterprises, and it is by no means clear
that such activity can any longer be described as simply the product of
voluntary co-operation – the costs of abstaining from, e.g. the WTO are
sufficiently high that few states wish to be excluded from membership.
But, rather more importantly for the purposes of this chapter, it
also should be noted that Oakeshott’s work is very explicitly grounded
in the history of the modern European state – the distinction between
civic and enterprise associations is not to be seen as plucked from the
air, but rather as something developed by a tradition of European
thought exemplified by Machiavelli, Hobbes and Hegel, the great
political philosophers of the modern era. The obvious question is
whether this distinction can be made meaningful for those who are not
the inheritors of the European tradition.
To put the matter differently,
Nardin argues that any state which wants to be considered a state in
good standing in international society must adhere to the norms of
practical association – but supposing there are ‘states’ that don’t want
to be considered as members of international society, but would rather
assert their identities in different terms?
Why should such polities – not really the right term – feel
obliged to accept the terms of practical association in the absence of
some form of coercion, even if we assume that practical association is
the best way of describing international society? The pluralist argument
is that those ‘polities’ that do not want to consider themselves members
of a society of states will be unable to sustain this position.
The original social formations upon which such polities are built
may have held different views, seeing themselves as ‘the Middle Kingdom’
for example, or not having any sense of themselves as a polity at all
prior to their membership of the system (true of many states created by
decolonisation), but their very existence as part of a functioning
international society bears witness to the fact that they have been
corralled, one way or another, into this status.
But do they understand the implications of this status in the way
that the pluralists assume they will?
Sovereignty as the Key Norm
It seems quite clear that some such
process of socialisation has taken place.
For example, while it may indeed be the case that some Chinese
leaders still think of themselves as ruling the Middle Kingdom, there is
very little evidence that this is any more salient with respect to
actual behaviour than is, say the French notion of a
mission civilatrice,
British myths about the beneficial nature of the
Pax Britannica, or America’s vision of itself as a ‘city on a
hill’. These national
stereotypes may have some limited impact on
the perceptions of decision-makers, but the unwillingness of the
rest of the world to buy into the benign pictures they paint limits
their actual influence, and usually prevents national leaders from
taking their own claims to a special status too seriously.
In similar vein, contemporary Iran is never likely to forget that
it is an Islamic Republic, and occasionally makes claims to the effect
that this status means that it is not bound by rules designed for less
sanctified regimes – but in practice things are rather different and, at
least in essentials, Iran behaves like a sovereign state amongst other
sovereign states. It is
worth noting that at the very height of the Islamic Revolution in
1979/80, when one of the core practices of international society,
diplomatic immunity, was violated by the occupation of the American
Embassy, a.k.a. the ‘nest of spies’, the Iranian government maintained
the fiction that this occupation was being conducted by revolutionary
students and not by the state.
Similarly, although Libya abolished its overseas Embassies,
replacing them with People’s Bureaus, when in 1984 the personnel of the
London Bureau fired shots which killed a police officer who was
monitoring a demonstration by Libyan dissidents, Colonel Gaddafi was
quick to claim diplomatic immunity on their behalf.
One could go back to the way in which the USSR’s original
revolutionary ambitions were tamed to make the same point.
However, it seems equally clear this
process of socialisation has involved the internalisation of a
particular conception of the norms of international society, and in
particular, has focused on that version of the sovereignty norms which
were established in the long sixteenth century, and restated and
endorsed by the UN Charter of 1945.
More recent attempts to redefine the nature of sovereignty, for
example by understanding sovereignty as incorporating human rights, or
by asserting a generalised ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) populations
from extreme human rights abuse which lies in the first instance with
sovereigns themselves, but then by default with the international
community, have little resonance.
To illustrate the point here, it is striking that when the notion
of ‘Asian Values’ was briefly popular in the early 1990s, the most vocal
advocates of the view that there was a distinctive Asian take on human
rights were Mahathir Mohamed and Lee Kuan Yew, leaders of Malaysia and
Singapore respectively, and that neither the Indian nor the Chinese
governments took more than a desultory interest in the movement (Bell,
2000). Whereas the leaders
of Malaysia and Singapore were acknowledging the legitimacy of the
contemporary international human rights regime, while attempting to
shape it in ways that served their own interests (and possibly responded
to their views of their populations), the two Asian giants simply took
the high (or perhaps low) road by claiming that their domestic political
and social arrangements were protected by their sovereignty and the
‘domestic jurisdiction’ clause of the UN Charter, Article 2(7) –
although, admittedly, in a half-hearted way China did also throw some
Confucian arguments into the pot (Bell, 2008).
In the case of China this stance is unsurprising since clearly
many Chinese practices actually do violate contemporary human rights
norms, but the Indian position is in some ways more interesting because
the Indian constitution embraces international human rights standards
and is generally respected by the Indian political class.
Indeed, as Amartya Sen has argued, there is a long and
influential tradition of Indian rationalism and respect for the
individual which means that the idea of human rights is in no sense an
alien importation. (Sen, 2005, 2009)
Still, when it comes to foreign policy, the Indian political
class is deeply committed to a very strong, unrestricted notion of
sovereignty and it is striking that in spite of its own, generally quite
positive, record in the area of human rights, India has opposed every
attempt to generate support for international humanitarian interventions
to deal with large scale human rights abuses, always on the grounds that
they would violate the sovereignty of the state intervened against.
It is, of course, not remotely
surprising that China and India should take this position.
Both societies have suffered humiliation at the hands of Western
powers over the last few centuries.
The idea that these same powers should now announce their own
moral superiority and consider themselves justified in criticising the
internal politics of their former victims is understandably hard to take
– but the position taken by these states is not simply to be understood
as a reaction to imperialism.
If that were to be the case, one might have expected that as the
colonial era recedes into the past, attitudes would gradually change and
older resentments fade. In
fact, this does not seem to be the trajectory that we have witnessed
over the last half century.
It seems to be the case that the secularist Western doctrines of Marxism
(in China) and democratic socialism (in India) are actually less salient
to those societies now than they were fifty years ago, and both are
developing their own political forms with fewer references to the
political movements that brought them into existence – but they remain
committed to sovereignty as an ideal and as a practical goal of policy.
To put the matter rather differently, some Western norms have
stuck and indeed become reinforced, but they are the norms which cluster
around the early, undoubtedly Western, notion of state sovereignty, and
not the revisions to that notion that have accrued over time. The
emerging powers have accepted the institutions of sovereignty and the
nation-state but without taking on board the wider context within which
these institutions developed in Europe; it was to that context that
Martin Wight referred when he described the small but important
difference between the morality of the jungle and the 'traditions of
Europe' (Wight, 1978:293).
Sovereignty and Realism
Does the apparently firm commitment
to an uncompromising notion of sovereignty on the part of the emerging
great powers suggest that the structural realists are indeed the best
guides to the new architecture of twenty-first century international
politics? Perhaps not, since
sovereignty still has to be seen as a constitutive norm of the system,
contra Krasner – but the notion that sovereignty is effectively
the only normative
principle of the system certainly has realist roots of a kind.
But this is a position which has more in common with that of the
blood-and-iron realists of the nineteenth century than with either the
‘righteous realists’ or even the structural realists of the twentieth.
(Rosenthal, 1991). Thus,
while the latter could at least comprehend, and indeed in some cases
actually support, the notion that sovereignty brings with it
responsibilities for the condition of one’s own people, for the former
such ideas are meaningless, and institutional developments such as that
of the international human rights regime a pointless irrelevance.
If this conception of international
politics comes to dominate, a grim picture of the future emerges, but
there are some reasons to be a little more positive.
The underlying faith that history is on their side that has
characterised the thinking of advocates of global civil society and an
ever more extensive human rights regime may be misplaced, but the
interdependencies that certainly characterise contemporary world
politics cannot be disregarded.
As suggested above, the emerging Great Powers will wish to
preserve their sovereignty and will resist any attempt to redefine what
that means in non-traditional terms, but the advantages of being part of
an interdependent world economy are considerable, and unlikely to be
risked unless core interests are at stake.
Whereas in the past it was common for rising powers to feel that
they had to define their new status by challenging existing
power-holders, building empires and ‘co-prosperity spheres’ and the
like, nowadays, pace
John Mearsheimer, this is no longer necessary, and indeed may be even
more counter productive than previously.
Thus, former Russian President, current Prime Minister Putin’s
overt use of the energy card to buttress his position at home by making
nationalist gestures abroad is actually (and quite predictably) causing
Europeans to think of ways of reducing their dependence on Russian oil
and gas. As numerous writers
remarked at the time of the conjuncture of the conflict in Georgia with
the Beijing Olympics in 2008, China is looking forward to exercising
influence by going with the grain of the new century, while Russia seems
unable to break contact with its imperial past.
No prizes for guessing which strategy is actually more likely to
bring dividends in the medium to long run.
One interesting question is to ask
whether the attitudes I have described above will persist if China and
India continue to grow at their present rate.
Some argue that as they become increasingly important
stakeholders in the global institutional structure, so their attitudes
will shift. John Ikenberry
argues that Russia and China will increasingly become plural societies
committed to the liberal norms of the existing international order. He
envisages a ‘Liberalism 3.0’ in which the major powers dominate these
institutions and China in particular, as the biggest beneficiary of the
liberal economic order will become its strongest advocate, perhaps
replacing the US in this role (Ikenberry, 2009).
Ikenberry also holds that with economic growth internal change
will create liberal societies less wedded to traditional concepts of
sovereignty, and more open to notions such as ‘sovereignty as
responsibility’. Azar Gat, however, argues that there is no reason to
think that the authoritarian politics of China and Russia are unviable
in the long run, and certainly for the time being there is little
evidence that the new Chinese bourgeoisie is pushing for democracy – the
latter seem more frightened of the Chinese people than they are of their
rulers.
Even without buying completely into
Ikenberry’s position it is possible to develop a more optimistic account
of where we are going than the pessimistic account of a contest between
unitary rational egoists offered by modern realists. What may actually
be happening is the return of something a lot like the models of complex
interdependence that were popular in the 1970s, but which were swept
aside by the triumph of neo-utilitarian theory in the 1980s (Keohane &
Nye, 1978). These models
talked of multiple channels of access between societies, the absence of
a hierarchy of international issues, a generally low salience for
military force, and the importance of agenda-setting; these look like a
very promising for analysis.
This model of international relations does not underestimate the
importance of power but understands power to operate differently in a
world of complex interdependence and perhaps offers a middle way between
the over-optimistic vision of theorists of globalization and the
doom-laden scenarios of modern realists.
And yet – this is still a system
that relies heavily, almost exclusively, on material interests to tone
down conflict and promote co-operation.
The normative foundations of this regime look very thin; the
absence of a common past and a common political vocabulary of the sort
identified by Kratochwil make these foundations look even thinner than
those required by the pluralism of Nardin or Jackson.
The key question is whether the interdependencies that hold
things together will continue to do so when things go seriously wrong
with the world economy – the present world recession may provide an
answer to this question, especially if, as seems possible, it deepens
into a depression. It is
possible that the major economic powers, including China and India, will
be able to deliver a collective response to the crisis, but if
interdependencies shrivel and weaken under the impact of a global
depression, then, in the absence of a firmer normative basis for
cooperative behaviour, it is difficult to see what, if anything, will
stand in the way of a return to the worst aspects of the politics of the
old order. The current
crisis is testing the possibilities of co-operation between the major
powers – and we must hope that this is not a test to destruction.
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of Authoritarian Great Powers’
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Justice (London: Allen Lane).
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Politics’, International Security Vol.18, pp 44-79.
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[i]
An earlier version of this lecture was given the International
Relations Theory Workshop at LSE, and to the participants in a
Seminar in honour of Friedrich Kratochwil held in NYC February
2009. I am grateful to participants at both events for comments.
The usual disclaimers apply.
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