Provisional Title: Theory of International Societies

How dangerous is popular animosity against the external to international order, and to what extent do individuals assert an affiliation beyond the ethnic or national? Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis answered such questions in a form ready to capture imagination of the American public and perfectly prescriptive for the nation’s directionless foreign policy, further “proven” by the September 11^th attacks. The problems with the thesis are innumerable and obvious, but some should be addressed. In brief, the borders were arbitrary and not particularly insightful or reflective of broad knowledge of the groups he was created, and “civilization” itself is a term with an almost ridiculous amount of connotative baggage, both connoting the line between the ‘developed’ and the ‘primitive,’ while on a technical level applied in anthropology to refer to a degree of centralization in human organization.

The Clash thesis might be thrown out, like interwar idealism, on the basis of these failures of its premise. In the broader context of post-Cold War ‘international relations,’ however, particularly its contesting ‘theories’ and schools of thought, certain points of the Clash argument may prove valid. This validity is not due to Huntington himself, and what validity there is was not intentional on his part, but starting from its broad assertions can prove a useful starting point in (re-)conceiving the world.

The thesis carries two important implications: that the interests and actions of a state (actor, agent, etc) are defined and affected by the individuals or collective thereof that comprise it, and, most importantly, that groups of people, through long-standing geographic and historical processes, have come to share a sort of latent identity or worldview beyond their nationality or ethnicity. Such notions can, when applied with more consideration, help decentralize both the American and the Occidental from examinations of the global; taking the thesis’ historical-geographic lens reminds us that the world we study now is particularly young and unshakably European: not only did the ‘sovereign state-system’ originate in Europe to be imposed upon the rest of the world, but so did its institutions and organizations: ambassadors, governments, and the system of diplomacy considered fundamental to our international system were not norms developed through the active participation of the vast majority of today’s states.

Identity, history, and, yet unmentioned but implicit in many of the above concepts, society: within International Relations theory, it is the English School and Constructivism that are best situated to address such questions, in no small part due to the fact that they are the only ‘theories’ that would recognize the validity of such questions. The English School focuses on how states together interact to form an “International Society” of increasing order and regulation from the international system; Constructivists (unknowingly) reiterate the “societal” conceptualization, asserting in more specific terms that international relations are socially constituted – that any given condition of the international system is not inevitable, the result of concrete ‘if – then’ formulae, but dependent on the actors who agree that it is so.

Constructivism’s strength lies in its ability to account for change, but along with the “International Society” approach of the English School it tends to treat the global realm in singular terms, in which all states have come to form a singular society within which allegiances, disputes, and relationships may be formed between actors within the broader society. Considering that this society was, in most cases, smashed upon the ostensibly replaced endemic forms, the expansion of IR’s research scope to account for identities and histories calls into question the completeness of integration and assimilation into the broader order on the part of non-European countries and the reality of the “International Society” itself which, in English School writing, is always referred to in the singular.

Huntington’s Clash thesis – or, more accurately, the “civilization” element of it – here renders itself useful, if only by inspiration. Before the development of the technology that facilitated the (European) Colonial Era, the extent of the ‘world’ for any given group was geographically limited, and even the ‘known,’ due to barriers of time and space, could not necessarily be equated with the ‘present’ as far as an entity’s external outlook was concerned. History and anthropology provide ample evidence for the various large-scale inter-group relationships taking divers forms through time and space, whether European suzerainty-to-sovereignty transitions or the edges of Chinese versus Nomadic cultural spheres.

The question I intend to examine, informed by the historical and social perspectives of these schools, is the extent to which today’s states (nations, global actors, etc.) have actually assimilated to the international society, especially as the United States tends to conceive of it – or whether their identities, and thus their interests, goals, perceptions, and worldview, are informed by a very different set of norms, regulations, and expectations. While such states have adopted the structures and modes of interaction expected in the modern international context (integration), understanding the deeper functions of their existence as social institutions provides more practical understanding of their contemporary behavior and a more comprehensive depiction of the international world overall.

 

Promising Sources

Underlined sources from outside course readings – required and recommended

General information on the relevant theories:

Alexander Wendt (1992) “Anarchy is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics,” International Organization 46(2): 391-426.

Chris Brown, “International Political Theory and the Idea of World Community,” in Steve Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia Zalewski Eds., International Theory: Positivism and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 87-107.

Dunne, Tim. “The English School.” International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity, edited by Tim Dunne et al., 4th ed., Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 107–126.

Fierke, K.M. “Constructivism.” International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity, edited by Tim Dunne et al., 4th ed., Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 161–178.

Tim Dunne (1995) “The Social Construction of International Society,” European Journal of International Relations 1(3): 367-389.

Watson, Adam (1987) “Hedley Bull, States Systems, and International Societies,” Review of International Studies 13(2): 147-153.

Regarding East Asia for a potential (historical) case study:

Christopher Goscha, Vietnam: a New History (New York: Basic Books, 2016), pp. 12-44.

Roger Epp (2013) “Translation and Interpretation: The English School and IR Theory in China,” E-International Relations, May 5

Foster, Robert W. 2010. “The Silk Road and Chinese Identity, Past and Present.” Chap. 3 in Teaching the Silk Road, edited by Jacqueline M. Moore and Rebecca Woodward Wendelken, 45-58. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Goscha, Christopher. 2016. “Northern Configurations.” Chap. 1 in Vietnam: A New History, by Christopher Goscha, 12-44. New York: Basic Books.

J. Suh, 2007, “War-Like History or Diplomatic History?” Australian Journal of International Affairs, (2017): Read the first six pages (382-388).

Jiyoung Lee, “The Making of Qing Hegemony,” in China’s Hegemony: Four Hundred Years of East Asian Domination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), pp. 135-167. Gang Zhao, The Qing Opening to the Ocean: Chinese Maritime Policies, 1684-1757 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013), pp. 1-40 and 169-186.

Jurgis Elisonas, “Inseparable Trinity: Japan’s Relations with China and Korea,” in The Cambridge History of Japan Volume 4: Early Modern Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 235-300.

Liu, Xinru. 2010. “China Looks West.” Chap. 1 in The Silk Road in World History, by Xinru Liu, 1-19. Oxford University Press.

Peter Frankopan, “Chapter 1: The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, New York: Bloomsbury, 2015)

Pinto, “The Farce of the Wooden Hands,” in Diaz, ed. and trans., The Travels of Mendes Pinto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 513-517.

Robert W. Foster, “The Silk Road and Chinese Identity, Past and Present,” in Teaching the Silk Road: A Guide for College Teachers, eds., Jacqueline M. Moore and Rebecca Woodward Wendelken (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), pp.45-58.

Schottenhammer, Angela. 2016. “China’s Gate to the Indian Ocean: Iranian and Arab Long-Distance Traders.” Havard Journal of Asiatic Studies (Harvard-Yenching Institute) 76 (1&2): 135-179. doi:10.1353/jas.2016.0006.

Wang, Zhenping. 2009. “Ideas concerning Diplomacy and Foreign Policy under the Tang Emperors Gaozu and Taizong.” Asia Major (Academica Sinica) 22 (1): 239-285.

Xinru Liu, “China Looks West,” in The Silk Road in World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 1-19.

Other Examples

Aalto, Pami (2007) “Russia’s Quest for International Society and the Prospects for Regional-Level International Societies.” International Relations 21(4): 459-478.

Acharya, Amitav and Barry Buzan (2007). “Why is there no non-Western international relations theory? An introduction.” International Relations of the Asia-Pacific 7: 287-312.

Benjamin de Carvalho, Halvard Leira and John Hobson (2011) ‘The Myths That Your Teachers Still Tell You about 1648 and 1919’, Millennium 39(3): 735-758.

Immanuel Wallerstein (1995) “The Inter-State Structure of the Modern World System,” in: Steve Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia Zalewski Eds., International Theory: Positivism and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 87-107.

Robert Cox (1981) “Social Forces, States and World Order: Beyond International Relations Theory,” Millennium 10(2): 126-155.

 

None of the three presidents of Bosnia and Herzegovina can really be said to be the highest authority in the country: that title is reserved for the “High Representative,” for the last ten years Valentin Inzko – and since the inception of the position in 1995, not by a Bosnian citizen, whether Bosniak, Croat, or Serbian in “ethnic” identity. The High Representative, charged with overseeing the implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement, has the power to adopt binding decisions and to expel (elected) officials from their office should they be judged to have violated the accord or other legal obligations. As Giulio Venneri argues in the linked article, Bosnia and Herzegovina today is the product of an external consensus to establish diffuse, convoluted government founded on projected EU-US values and a fragile balance of tokenistic representation and extreme meta-federalism.

This is not a picture of a sovereign nation-state. Yet Bosnia has its seat with the other “sovereign nation-states” at the UN General Assembly ­­­­­— the next seat occupied by the apropos “Plurinational State of Bolivia.”

The questions begat by such examination are relevant to the question addressed by Benjamin de Carvalho and his coauthors in their 2011 article The Big Bangs of IR: the Myths that your Teachers Still Tell you about 1648 and 1919. Taking a critical historiographical approach, the authors sought to examine an apparent disconnect between common or even gospel international relations pedagogy and the (revisionist) historical literature that addresses events claimed by the discipline in its own account of how it came to be. Looking at two especially prioritized historical milestones, as evidenced by their recurring appearance in a relatively wide sample of IR textbooks, the authors found major problems, from the perspective of those who think knowledge should be fact-based, in the presentation of just what significance the years 1648 and 1919 hold.

1648 was a year best remembered for the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia, which is often (as in today’s lecture) referred to as the defining point when the “sovereign state” and corresponding “anarchical system” were established as Europe’s norm, marking the death of the suzerainty that had characterized the medieval era’s feudal system; 1919 for – in the field of IR – the establishment of the first program explicitly devoted to international relations at the University of Aberystwyth. Such “facts” are recited in a broad range of IR textbooks, and, reportedly, transmitted more pervasively through the classroom.

Carvalho et al. draw from a wide range of historical accounts, including the text of the 1648 treaty itself, to show that in many ways “sovereignty” as a principle had been practiced and promoted from more than a century before (in the 1533 Augsberg treaty) and was actually limited by the agreement that ended the 30 years’ war; and from a comprehensive reading of numerous scholars active during the interwar period – most of whom, as derided “idealists” of one sort or another, had been disregarded without thought by the dominant “realist” school as the discipline became established in the United States – to show that the discipline has roots far deeper than 1919. In temporal terms, the authors show that work on the topic specifically – the works inspiring or informing the “original” interwar scholars, who themselves existed before the war – dates as early as 1880; socially, their sources portray a discipline rooted in diverse forms of racism and white supremacy.

With extensive and wide-ranging citations, and apparently intimate familiarity with the historical material whose representations they are contesting, the article provides a convincing and comprehensive argument. They manage to frame their concerns in a way relevant to the discipline, giving no impression that they might be “critical for criticism’s sake” or simply outsiders engaging only with a facile mischaracterization of the material: while concerned for obvious reasons about the broader implications lingering colonialism and latent racism, their attention here is on the weakness such elements, and moreso the ignorance thereof, imbues within all international relations scholarship and the representations of the world, the very “knowledge” produced. Indeed, critical engagement with the piece can be difficult when each page featured paragraphs that had me nodding in agreement, or audibly going “huh” with each piece of new information.

This reading is intimately connected to many of our recent discussions, beyond the basic shared aspect of examining IR’s origins: the nature and place of interwar “idealist” scholarship; the lack of engagement between insulated groups of contemporary IR scholars; and, most poignantly, the themes of parochialism and plainly block-headed rhetorically “universalist” views that Americans seem to think necessary to hammer into the structure of the discipline as a whole. (I am American, so I’d like to think America-bashing doesn’t just come across as edgy or attention-seeking when I do it.) This is what brought me to Bosnia: not only does this “country” fail to align with our expectations of “sovereign states” that are supposed to be independent and cohesive: it was the site of one of the triumphs of post-Cold War liberalism, during the halcyon unipolar decade when Chechnya, Rwanda, the Congo, Afghanistan, Angola, Sri Lanka, Somalia, Northern Ireland, Ethiopia, East Timor, Sierra Leone, and countless other countries besides the Balkans were ripped apart by conflict – several of these places, most notably Rwanda, also experiencing the tragedy of genocide without eliciting American intervention (not to imply that decisions regarding American intervention were made in isolation from each previous case).

Bosnia is a perfect illustration of the American “parochial” attitudes that, even in the absence of significant commercial interests, claimed an authority to spread their “universal” truths. I am a democrat and republican, and I think it’s safe to say that there’s a generally popular consensus that no conflict is better than any conflict – a consensus most in Bosnia and Herzegovina would probably agree upon. But there are parallels between 1990s American policymakers coming to the conclusion that Bosnia and Herzegovina could not be trusted to exercise its own ostensible right to sovereignty as a state, and cannot 23 years later, and the efforts to maintain imperialism in an “institutionalized,” “internationalized” form by “idealist” President Wilson who himself could not trust the “inferior races” to self-determination of their own.

The authors have the dubious and entirely unintentional honor of citing Wilson in such a way that I considered his point to be almost valid: regarding uprisings taking place across Europe’s imperial possessions, he opines that “you cannot in human experience rush into the light” of self-determination, but must arrive there gradually. Paternalistic, condescending, and, as so often with Wilson, imbued with a remarkable amount of insidious racial venom – but, in ways that he did not intend, and indeed for reasons he likely would not have admitted, insightful in a way.

The possessions and dominions of empires were indeed unprepared, in many cases, for independence; Wilson is wrong in attributing it to the supposed immaturity of the dark-skinned inhabitants of these realms, when really it was the fault of Europe itself. Take the Belgian Congo, for instance: when nearly the entirety of the white administrative class fled the country in advance of the “Congo Crisis,” they left only three locals in the top three ranks and 4642 positions vacant (see page 718 of the linked book). They also left a country whose population had been decimated and oppressed, and dozens of peoples whose traditional governance structures had been demolished, violently, to be replaced by an external extractive regime. Wilson and those of his time may have thought they were doing right by the world’s deprived masses, when in reality they were simply prolonging the situation without resolution that their predecessors had created: for such an “internationalist,” such Eurocentrism – matching the kind Carvalho points out – seems to be as deeply parochial as the American International Relations establishment’s insistence on not only the validity of their perspective, but the inadmissibility of any other.

After much frustration with the “presentism,” to apply Carvalho’s criticism, of the theories we discussed so far, it was refreshing today to have a perspective that doesn’t place itself outside of history. By revealing many of the axioms behind the American (Realist) discipline of IR as purely “myths,” Carvalho also hammers a deep crack into their claims to explain anything at all; we saw that Waltz, obsessed with the bipolar system, seemed to lose a great deal of his prescience when the USSR fell, an event that itself caused a fracture and diversification within the discipline as a whole. I can’t help but agree with Carvalho’s conclusion: critical takes and reexamination of what we treat as “given” can only make the discipline stronger; as a student, such knowledge by no means makes me “lose faith” in it, but rather makes it easier to reconcile these theories with the reality that, in the end, will persist in existing whether in conformity with scholarly prescription or not.

My interest in international relations was originally an expansion of my interest in politics in general, and has since supplanted it as domestic and local politics in my red home state have become both less inspiring of optimism and more removed from me physically and personally. On the one hand, I have a compulsive desire to take any given question or unknown and produce a comprehensive answer to it (eliminating uncertainty, which I don’t have much tolerance for in my daily life); on the other, I am fascinated by explorations of the decisions in the human world that have the most impact on the greatest number human lives – and the human world isn’t a particularly certain place, nor one that lends itself to comprehensive answers (as Marx’s writings show, and, clairvoyant or not, I am no Marx).

International relations, for me, provides a whole world to disambiguate that is already neatly problematized, all the more enticing since so many of those talking about it are given free rein to declare themselves “certain” about their view on the basis of certain argumentation while another countervailing perspective can be equally accepted in spite of running completely against the first; who doesn’t like to be right? The unstable epistemological and ontological frameworks of the subject, in other words, only serve to make it more attractive as both a challenge and opportunity to actually apply my brain beyond rote memorization or even the “free” response types of activities that are, in fact, bound by frameworks that strictly dictate just what kind of forms an answer to the freely-chosen problem can take. UBC’s history courses, tightly wound around analysis of and interaction with primary sources, have not been an entirely friendly place for me as I try to surf along more interesting social currents to find things that need explaining.

However, as I found in my original Theories of International Relations course during my first degree in France, I think the way IR “theories” have actually taken hold in my head is in the form of “lenses,” not as explanations with proven quanti-fides of the positivist-rationalist variety, as our book discusses – perhaps under the influence of our professor, a self-styled realist who nonetheless tolerated few bad words against the UN peacekeeping forces in which he was a ranking member (hardly a realist-minded mission, attempting to establish peace through a supranational entity). In fact, since reading John Searle’s book (The Construction of Social Reality, widely credited with the inception of the concept of social constructionism in social philosophy, which, even awarding merit to its critics alleging nothing new had been “inceived,” at least brought the concept to the fore of the fields most intimately tied to social structures), I can’t help but see the world we inhabit and the theories we craft to explain it in constructivist terms: as much as I like to look at the IR field as free and ambiguous, that I completely disregard the possibility of there being a world “out there” to quantify, I find myself at odds with the (former?) basis of this discipline that fascinates me. Maybe it’s a generational thing, but I find people too interesting to atomize them (that is, treat them statically the way the unimaginative who ended up in the natural sciences treat literal atoms).

In this regard, I feel more comfortable in this course than I have in the few other POLI courses I’ve taken at UBC. My patience wears thin with people who are critical for lack of other defining features, but I haven’t rolled my eyes in class yet; I get bored out of my mind when I’m limited by things I can assign a confidence interval to, and feel relatively confident I won’t be required to replace the batteries in my graphing calculator any time soon. But feeling comfortable in the course, not feeling out place, isn’t my way of saying I’m in my comfort zone – my last theory course presented the lenses idea as a given, and skirted around the exceedingly difficult question the word theory poses; this course, that I will admit I expected to be more review than effort, is promising a healthy re-take at what I think I know, and attractive or not, certainty and the ossification it begets are not healthy in the pursuit of knowledge: brittle perspectives can only break with time.