Bertrand Badie on the Trump Moment, the Science of Suffering, and IR between Power and Weakness
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IR retains a traditional focus on the game of power between states as its defining characteristic. But what, so asks Bertrand Badie, if this means that our discipline is based on a negation of our humanity? A giant in Francophone IR, Badie has labored to instead place human suffering at the center of analysis of the international, by letting loose sociological insights on a truly global empirical reality. In this Talk, Badie—amongst others—challenges the centrality of the idea of state power, which makes little sense in a world where most of the IR agenda is defined by issues emanating from state weakness; argues for the centrality of suffering to a more apt IR; and uses this to contextualize the Trump Moment.
Print version (pdf) of this Talk
What is (or should be), according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current International Relations? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
Unquestionably, it would be the matter of change. It is time to conceptualize, and further than that, to theorize the change that is happening in the field of International Relations (IR). Humans have always had the feeling that they are living in a period of upheaval, but contemporary IR is really characterized by several landmarks that illustrate the drastic extent of change. I see at least three of them.
The first one concerns the inclusive nature of the international system. For the first time in the history of mankind, the international system covers nearly the whole humanity, while the Westphalian system was an exclusively European dynamic in which the United States of America entered to turn it into a system, that I would call, Euro-North-American.
The second element, around which publications abound (see notably Mary Kaldor's work, Theory Talk #30), is the deep mutation of the nature of conflict. War used to be, in the Westphalian model, a matter of competition between powers. Today we have the feeling that weakness is replacing power, in that power cannot any longer function as central explanatory term of conflictual situations, which are rather manifestations of state weakness. Think of 'failing' or 'collapsing' states, which refers to the coming apart of nations that have been built badly as well as the deliquescence of social ties. This new form of conflictuality completely turns the international environment upside down and constitutes a second indicator of transformation.
The third aspect concerns mobility. Our international system used to be fully based on the idea of territory and boundaries, on the idea that fixity establishes the competences of States in a very precise way. In this perspective, the state refers to territory—as the definition given by Max Weber states very clearly—but today this territorial notion of politics is challenged by a full range of mobilities, composed of international flows that can be either material, informational, or human.
These are three indicators illustrating a deep transformation of the inner nature of IR that encourage me to speak about 'intersocial relations' rather than 'interstate relations'. The notion of interstate relations no longer captures the entirety of the global game. Our whole theory of IR was based on the Westphalian model as it came out of the peace of Westphalia, as it was confirmed by the accomplishment of the nation-state construction process and as it dominated the historical flow of international events until the fall of the Berlin wall.
Until the fall of the wall, all that was not related to Europe or to the United States of America, or more precisely North-America, was simply called 'periphery', which says enough. Today, by contrast, the periphery is central at least regarding conflictuality. We should therefore drop our Westphalian prism and build up new analytical tools for IR that would take these mutations as their point of departure. Doing away with our Westphalian approach to IR would mean questioning both our classical IR theories and questioning the practical models of action in international politics, which means the uses of diplomacy and warfare.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about International Relations?
You know when we write, when we work, we are first of all influenced by our dissatisfaction. The classical Westphalian approach to IR, as I said earlier, did not satisfy me as I had the feeling that it was focusing on events that no longer had the importance that we kept giving them—for instance the arms race, great power politics, or the traditional diplomatic negotiations—while I was seeing, maybe this was the trigger, that the greatest part of suffering in the world was coming from places that IR theory was not really covering.
I have always told my students that IR is the science of human suffering. This suffering exists of course where we are—in Europe, in North America, they exist everywhere in the world—but the greatest part is outside of the Westphalian area, so the classical approach to IR gives a marginal and distorted image. Africa and the Middle East seen through the Westphalian prism are a dull image, strongly different from the extraordinary wealth, both for good and bad, that these areas of the world have. I've also always held that in a world where 6 to 9 million people starve to death each year, the main foci of traditional IR were derisory. Even terrorism, to which we collectively attribute so much importance, hardly comes near how important a challenge food security is.
My three latest books take a stand against traditional IR theories. In Diplomacy of Connivance (2012) I tried to show that the great power game is really a game way that is much more integrated than we usually say and that this game plays out in all multilateral fora. There is indeed a club, and that is precisely what I wanted to describe, a club of powers—one which results to the detriment of less powerful members in the international system.
In Le Temps des humiliés ('the era of the humiliated', 2014), I tried to crystallize what the classical theory could not express, which is domination seen through the lens of the dominated, humiliation as felt by the humiliated, violence as experienced by the desperate. For instance, even if we look at powers as accomplished as China today—sharing the first place with the USA in terms of GDP—we have to admit that their historical experience of humiliation constitutes a huge source of inspiration when it comes to the elaboration of its foreign policy.
And then, in my last book Nous ne sommes plus seuls au monde ('we are no longer alone in the world', 2016), this critique was even more explicit. We are writing an IR that encompasses only about one billion of human beings, while forgetting all the others. Today it is simply no longer true that these old powers are setting the international agenda. Global politics today is written by the little, the weak, the dominated; often with recourse to extreme forms of violence, but this needs to be analyzed and understood, which would mean to totally change the IR theory.
We should not forget that in large part, IR theory was a given as the USA triumphed in 1945. The well-known 'great power politics' that dominates traditional IR theory, inaugurated by Morgenthau and supported by so many others, described what was true at that time: the ability of American power to set us free from the Nazi monster. Today the challenge is strongly different, and it is by the way meaningful that two of the greatest American internationalist political scientists, Robert Keohane (TheoryTalk #9) and Ned Lebow (Theory Talk #53), have both written books that elude to the end of this global order (respectively After Hegemony and Goodbye Hegemony). Well what interests me is exactly to dig into what comes after hegemony.
What would a student need to become a specialist in International Relations or understand the world in a global way?
First of all, I would advise them to rename their science, as I said earlier, and to call it intersocial relations. The future of what we call IR comes down to the ability to understand the extremely rich, multiple and diversified interactions that are happening among and across the world's societies. It does not mean that we have to completely abandon the state-centric perspective, but rather dethrone states from the middle of this multiplicity of actors in order to realize how very often these states are powerless when faced with these different actors. That would be my first advice.
My second advice would be to look ahead and not back. Do not let yourself be dominated by the Westphalian model, and to try to build up what we need—since almost nothing has been done yet today to construct this post-Westphalian, meta-Westphalian model. Beyond power, there are things that we still misidentify or overlook while they are the driving forces of today's and tomorrow's IR. From this point of view, sociology could prove particularly useful. I consider, for instance, that Émile Durkheim is a very important inspiration to understand the world today. Here is an author to study and to apply to IR.
The third advice that I would give them would be to not forget that IR or intersocial relations are indeed the sciences of human suffering. We should be able to place suffering at the core of the thinking. We've lost far too much time staring at power, now it is time to move on to place human suffering at the center. Why? First of all because it is ethically better; maybe will we be able to learn from it? But also because in today's actual international politics suffering is more proactive than power, which is not necessarily optimistic but if recognized, would allow us a better questioning of new forms of conflictuality. Perhaps unfortunately, the international agenda is no longer fixed with canons, but with tears. Maybe this is the key point on which we should concentrate our reflection.
Your insistence on placing suffering at the center of IR scholarship seems to place you firmly alongside those who recognize "grievance" ratherthan "greed" as a central logic of international politics. What do you make of this parallel?
You are right: the idea of grievance, of recrimination, is a structuring logic of the international game today. We did not see it coming for two reasons. First of all because our traditional analysis of international politics presupposed a unity of time, as if the African time, the Chinese time, the Indian time and the European time where all identical. Yet this is completely wrong because we, in our European culture, have not understood that before Westphalia there were political models, political histories, that profoundly marked the people that would then shape contemporary politics. Remember that China is 4000 years of empire, remember that precolonial Africa was composed of kingdoms, empires, civilizations, philosophies, arts... Remember that India also is multi-millenary. The Westphalian time came to totally deny and crush this temporality, this historicity, almost in a negationist way, which means that, in the spirit of those who were defending the Westphalian model, only this model was associated to the Renaissance; and that the age of enlightenment and reason with a big R had a calling to reformat the world as if it were a hard drive. This was a senseless bet, a bet for which our European ancestors who led it had excuses because at that time we did not know all these histories, at that time we did not have all the knowledge we today have of the other and thus we simply resolved it, through the negation of alterity. Yet, IR ought on the contrary aspire to the accomplishment of alterity. Inevitably, all those who saw themselves denied their historicity, over several centuries and even several millenaries, accumulated a feeling of recrimination, of particularly deep grievances.
The second element is that all of this happened in a context of disequilibrium of power resources, linked to different factors that reflected indeed the fact that at a given moment of time western powers were both literally and figuratively better armed than other societies. Abovementioned negation of alterity was mapped onto, and amplified, by the forceful imposition of a multilateral system that turned into the worst situation, into a proclaimed hierarchy of cultures; as a result and there were, as Jules Ferry put it in the France of the 19th century, 'races'; as in, 'We have the obligation to educate inferior races'. It is not the beginning of history, but it is the beginning of a history of humiliation. And through subsequent waves of globalization, this humiliation has turned into a central nerve running through international life. A nerve that has been used by both the powerful, who made a tool out of humiliating the others to better dominate them (think here of the opium wars, colonization) and simultaneously a nerve that fed the reaction of mobilization in the extra-Westphalian world by those that had to stand up against those who were humiliating them. So you see how it truly lies at the basis of IR. In my mind, it became a forceful paradigm, it explains everything, even though others factors continue to weigh in on actual dynamics.
In order to appreciate all this, we need a sociological approach, which has for me two aspects. Both these aspects must be considered together for the approach to be well understood. The first one is a timeless aspect, which is to consider that everywhere and in all eras politics is a social product. Politics cannot be understood as somehow outside society. This I would say contradicts the majority of IR scholars, who believe excessively in the autonomy of politics and of the state—even if only for analytical purposes. The second element of this sociological approach is the historical or temporal component. That is what I was talking about earlier: with globalization the social fabric strongly progressed compared to the political fabric, and considering that intersocial relations grew, we need a sociological approach to understand them.
Do you think that the Trump period constitutes a fundamental break with the conduct of IR?
Trump himself maybe not, but what he represents certainly. If we look at the USA today we see, since the new millennium, three models succeeding each other. After 11-09 there was a time of neo-conservatism where globalization was considered by American leaders as a means or maybe a chance to universalize the American model, willingly or not. By force, as was the case in Iraq in 2003. This model failed.
This lead to a second model which I would describe as a liberal model, neo-liberal, incarnated by Obama who learnt from the lessons of the failure of neo-conservatism, and had the courage to question the hypothesis hitherto considered as indisputable of American leadership in the world, and who considered that the USA could win only through soft power or smart power or free-trade. That is the reason why Obama was just a little bit interventionist and was counting a lot on the TTIP and on all these transregional agreements.
With Trump we arrive at a third model, one that I would call neo-nationalist, that looks at globalization in a different way. In his perspective, globalization constitutes a chance to satisfy the national American interests. The idea of the national comes back after a long interlude of a globalizing vision. It does not mean that we are not interventionist anymore. What happened in Syria proves it. It means that we will intervene not according to the needs of globalization but rather to American interests. It is about sharing a strong and powerful image of the USA on the one hand and on the other serving the concrete interests of the American people and nation.
This neo-nationalist model is not defended only by Trump, that is the reason why I was saying that we should not consider Trump individually. We find it exactly the same way with Putin. We find it by many other world leaders, such as Erdogan or Duterte or Victor Orbán—really different figures—or Marshal Sissi in Egypt.
We find it as well in attitudes, for instance Brexit in Great Britain, in right-wing neo-populism in Europe: Ms. Le Pen, Mr. Wilders... or in a certain left-wing neo-populism as Mélenchon in France. It is in the air, seeming almost a passing fad. But it constitutes perhaps a double rupture within IR. First of all because since the emergence of globalization, let's say around the 70's, the national interest as a thought category was bit by bit replaced with approaches in terms of collective goods. Today by contrast we witness the abandonment of this image of collective goods for a return to the national interest. This is very clear in Trump's renouncing of the COP21 of Paris. At the same time, second, this constitutes some form of the rehabilitation of the idea of power, which again seeps into the language of IR.
You know the IR scholar is not a neutral person, we have to use our science towards positive action and for the definition of sound public policies. Going against the idea of collective goods, casting doubt on the ideas of human security, environmental security, food security, and sanitary security is extremely dangerous because the composition of national interests and egoism will never converge to a globally coherent policy. It is the weak that will suffer first.
And the same time that power is reinstated as a driving principle of IR praxis, the paradox is that great powers are becoming more and more powerless. If we look only since 1989, and ask, when did state power ever triumph in IR? Where did the strongest ever find a battleship enabling him to resolve a problem to his benefit and according to his goals? Never. Not in Somalia, not in Afghanistan, not in Iraq, not in Syria, not in Palestine. Nowhere. Not in Sahel, not in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Nowhere. So I am a little worried, indeed, about this naive and old-fashioned rehabilitation of state power.
Can we say that globalization, or rather the ambition of integration at either the European or global scale, has failed? Can today be considered a good moment to bury of the idea of integration?
I do not like burials, it is not an expression that I would use, but your question is very pertinent. For around twenty years I have been saying and teaching that regional integration constituted an intermediary and realistic level of adaptation between the era of the nation state and that of globalization, which means that I believed for a long time that regional integration was the final step towards a global governance of the world.
I thought for a long time that what was not possible at the global scale, a global government, was possible at the regional level and this would already strongly simplify the world map and thus go in the way of this adhesion to the collective dimension required by globalization. Nevertheless, not only Europe suffers a setback, but all the regional constructions in the world are in a similar situation. Mr. Trump openly shoves the NAFTA agreement, MERCOSUR is down as every State that is composing it has recriminations against it, and we could extend the list… All the forms of integration that have been set by Chavez around his Bolivian ideal have ceased to exist; Africa progresses very slowly in terms of regional integration; the Arab Maghreb Union, which is an essential device, totally failed. Thus indeed the situation does not look good.
In the case of Europe there is a double phenomenon: on the one hand, there is this really grave failure due to the secession of Great Britain from Europe, and then there is a general malaise of the European model. Brexit is really rare, if you look at the contemporary history of IR it is simply unprecedented that a state shuts the door on a regional or global organization. As far as I remember, it only happened a few times before, with Indonesia in the UN in 1964, which lasted only 19 months. It happened with Morocco with the African Union and Morocco is currently reintegrating in it. This British situation came as a thunderbolt, worsened by the fact that paradoxically it is not so much because of regional integration that the British voted against the European Union. It was more from an anti-migration, xenophobic and nationalist (in reference to that nationalism trend that I was earlier talking about) perspective and what is dramatic is that we can clearly see that the nationalist sentiment is really attacking the inner principles of regional integration.
I was saying that in the European case there are internal problems which run even deeper than the British defection, and I will underline at least two of them. First of all there is a democratic deficit of Europe, meaning that Europe was not able to match electoral spaces with the ones where decisions get made; people still vote at the national level while the decisions are taken in Brussels. In consequence, democratic control over these decisions is extremely weak. How to resolve this equation? And here the breakdown is total since very few people are coming up with suggestions. The other factor of this crisis is, according to me, the fact that Europe has been built with success after World War II in a progressive way around association and indeed, Durkheim proved it, the integrative logic makes sense. Unity makes strength and it did make strength once in Europe to prevent war, a third World War, and secondly to encourage the reconstruction of European countries where economy was totally collapsed. This time is now over and it is the fault of Europe to not have known how to recontextualize itself, to react to the new contexts.
Paying one more time tribute to Durkheim who guessed it right, Durkheim said that there are two ways of constructing social ties: around association and around solidarity. I think that the time of association is now over, we should enter in the time of solidarity, which does not consist in saying 'We Germans are associated with Greece', but rather 'We Germans are joined together with Greece because we know that if Greece collapses, in a long term perspective, we will suffer the consequences'. Thus this idea of fundamental unity is an idea that has been a little bit overlooked, abandoned by the Europeans and now they find themselves in a complete paralysis.
Is the decolonization period still having an impact on contemporary IR?
Oh totally, totally. I would first say because it is a major event in the field of IR, which made the World switch from 51 sovereign States of the UN in 1945 to 193 today but above all, a very aggravating circumstance, is that this decolonization has been a complete failure and this failure weighs enormously on international politics.
It has been a failure because decolonization assumed the format of copying the western state model in countries that were accessing independence, while this model was not necessarily adapted, which provoked a proliferation of failed states, and these collapsed states had a terrible effect on IR.
Secondly because decolonization should have led to the enrichment and to the substantial modification of multilateralism, by creating new institutions able to take charge of new challenges resulting from decolonization. Yet, except the creation of UNCTAD in 1964 and of UNDP in 1965, there have been very little innovations in terms of global governance. Thus global governance remains dominated by what I earlier called 'the club', which means the great powers from the north, and this is very dysfunctional for the management of contemporary crises. Then also because the ancient colonial powers happen to find new forms of domination that did somehow complicate the international game. Thus in fact decolonization is a daily aspect of the crisis that the international system faces today.
In conclusion, which question should we have asked? In other terms, which question have we forgot?
I found your questions very pertinent as it allowed the discussion of themes that I consider essentials. Now, the big problem that makes me worry is the great gap between the analysts and the actors in IR. I am not saying that the analysts understood everything, far from it, but I think that IR theorists are very conscious of some of these transformations I have mentioned. If you look at some great authors such as James Rosenau, Ned Lebow or Robert Keohane, to name just a few—there are way more—they all contributed to the reconstruction of IR.
What truly strikes me is the autism of political actors, they think that they are still at the time of the Congress of Vienna and that is an extraordinary source of tension. Thus as long as this spirit of change does not reach political actors, maybe Barack Obama was the first one to enter this game and then the parenthesis was closed, as long as there will not be this move towards the discovery of a new world, maybe as well through the inclusion in our reflection about the international fabric such partners as China, it is not normal that this very powerful China does not have any choice but to share the paradigm and the model of action proper to occidental diplomacy, as long as we would not have done this precise effort, well, we will remain in the negation of the human, and that is the essential problem today, we are unable to understand that at the end there is just one unity, which is the human being.
I had the chance to visit 105 countries and everywhere I met the same men and the same women, with their pain, with their happiness, their hardship, their joy, their sorrow, their needs that were everywhere identical. As long as we will not understand that, well, we will be living in a world that is in total contradiction with what it is truly and essentially. We will live in a world of artifice and thus a world of violence.
Related links
Read Badie's The Arab Spring: A starting point (SER Études 2011) here (pdf)
One of the most pernicious effects of the Marxist schema of base and superstructure is that it posits the economy and ideology as two separate and distinct levels. The base is where the economy does its work, silently and materially, and the superstructure does its work reproducing the relations of production by remaining entirely separate and distinct from the economy, by addressing morals, religion, the nation, everything but economic necessity. This rigid division makes it difficult to think of the ideological dimension of the economy and the economic dimension of ideology. I have written before on what I could call the ideological dimension of the economy, the way that work, wealth, and capital function not just as economic relations but are coded are moralized, made into statements of virtue and worth. I am not taking credit for this idea, it can be found in Hegel, and, more critically, in Marx's discussion of primitive accumulation. I have a whole book coming out which discusses the way that work does a "double shift" as both a fundamental aspect of economic life under capitalism and a central term in capitalist ideology. Beyond that, I think that it might be useful to think of similar double shifts, where the economy functions as ideology, and ideology works in the economy. First example, in analyzing the much discussed, and hopefully fiercely fought cuts at West Virginia University one point comes up repeatedly. Which is that humanities courses like languages and literature, generally bring in more money than they cost. Humanities professors are cheaper than faculty in other departments, such as business, and generally courses involve less costly technology than courses in STEM. There have also been suggestions that other aspects of the university, like its football team, are not only more expensive, with something like fourteen assistant coaches, but cost more than they bring in. I am not sure about that last point, however, and am honestly not going that deep into the matter. There are also larger points about the general decline in state funding for higher education. I am not suggesting that one make an argument defending education primarily in terms of costs and returns--far from it. My main point here is that eliminating language programs is not the result of a simple cost/benefit analysis, a comparison of revenue in and out, but from what could be considered the ideology of economic rationality. Languages, culture, and even puppetry just seem to be extravagant even if they are not. While an instrumental calculation tells us that courses in such departments bring in more revenue, more students, our idea of what is economically rational tells us that they are expensive and not essential to whatever we think a university is, increasingly a job training center. Economical is often a representation of calculation, an idea of what is worthwhile or expensive, rather than an actual calculation based on costs and revenue. Second example: and this comes from Adam Kotsko's post about streaming, streaming services, like other app based transformations such as Uber and Airbnb, seem to be the very model of market efficiency. They have effectively eliminated the middle man, the cable provider, television network, or video store, bringing more profits directly to the studio and more choice to the audience. I am not going to get into the failure of the latter (better reserved for another post), but the truth of the matter is that streaming has not been profitable with most services working at a loss for years. Nonetheless, streaming seems profitable and a model of what it means to be successful capitalist enterprise. So much so that when my university was cutting programs a few years ago a member of the board said that he wanted the university to be like Netflix not Blockbuster, by which I assume that he meant efficient, new. and online. It is the idea, or ideal of disruption, of change and obsolescence that, explains the interest in streaming services and not their actual profitability. Of course it is possible to say that part of the fetishization of apps has more to do with the long game, with the role they play in deskilling work and making working conditions more precarious in order to replace employees with workers with even less security and lower wages. The long game, the overall social effect, is something that capitalist from Adam Smith to Milton Freeman have argued companies are not supposed to not consider--their only concern should be immediate self-interest (or in Freeman's case shareholder interest). Third example, by now you have probably heard of the viral online hit "Rich Men North of Richmond" by Oliver Anthony. I am not going recommend the song as a song, but I have copied some of the lyrics below to discuss it as a cultural moment (albeit one probably forgotten by the time you read this). Livin' in the new worldWith an old soulThese rich men north of RichmondLord knows they all just wanna have total controlWanna know what you think, wanna know what you doAnd they don't think you know, but I know that you do'Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end'Cause of rich men north of RichmondI wish politicians would look out for minersAnd not just minors on an island somewhereLord, we got folks in the street, ain't got nothin' to eatAnd the obese milkin' welfareWell, God, if you're 5-foot-3 and you're 300 poundsTaxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge roundsYoung men are puttin' themselves six feet in the ground'Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin' them downI am going to skip right over the Qanon part about islands of minors and go straight to the representation of the economy. First, we get the usual demon of the right, the welfare queen or king, the song doesn't give us gender just height and weight. That this fiction persists long after the end of "welfare as we know it" is a testament to its power as a myth. To quote Jeff Sharlet, "You can't fact check a myth." Along with this myth that welfare is an incredibly easy life we get one of the other persistent themes of the right, the strange obsession with exactly what poor people consume, in this case fudge rounds, the Little Debbie snackcake that retails for less than three bucks for a nine ounce package. A cheap vice, all things considered. The song seems to suggest that at some particular body mass ratio it would be acceptable for the state to provide these snack cakes, but it is unclear where the cut off is. If you ask me we would be better worrying about the consumption habits of the wealthy than the poor: the former are going to private jet the planet to death while we are drawing cut off lines for snack cake consumption, but I digress.The real line that strikes me in this passage is "Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end." This passage is often cited as the real working class pain that is at the heart of this song. It is hard to deny the first part, the past few years of inflation have driven the buying power of the dollar down. The second part, however, is more dubious. There is no tax increase that explains that decrease. Rates have gone down nationally, but that varies by income bracket, and Virginia (where I assume this is coming from) has remained in the middle range of state income tax with a top rate of 5.75%, West Virginia is slightly higher at 6.50%. However, I would argue that as much as taxes cannot be the true cause of the economic anger at the core of this song, they are its necessary false cause. (To cite Spinoza, "inadequate ideas follow from the same necessity as adequate ideas)To discuss inflation, wages, and so on as causes of the decline of the dollar, of working class conditions, is to criticize capitalism, albeit obliquely. Capitalism, the economy, is not something one can critique, not because it is beyond reproach, held sacred, but because it is seen as a fact of life, the way of the world. To criticize capitalism would be to acknowledge it as an institution, as a human creation. Instead the critical force is reserved for politicians, for those rich men North of Richmond, who have imposed taxes. Of course it is unclear why they would do this, the profit motive is a fairly clear motivating force for exploitation, taking it off of the table often means coming up with even more baroque explanations as to why the rich men are doing what they are doing. To some up briefly, my point here is not that there is nothing like economic determination, or material conditions and causes, but just that even material causes cannot be separated from their representation, how we grasp or image them. The economy, the other scene of politics, has effects only in and through that scene, and vice versa.
October 3, 2023 marks the 30th anniversary of the Battle of Mogadishu, when American forces engaged in a pitched battle with a Somali militia in a densely populated residential neighborhood in Mogadishu, Somalia. This battle has become popularly known as "Black Hawk Down" in reference to the several UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters shot down during the battle, leading to the deaths of 18 U.S. soldiers and at least 300 Somali casualties, including militia and civilians. Much has been written about how this event, and the wider U.S. military intervention in Somalia, was a watershed moment heralding a new "world order" led by the U.S. in the aftermath of the Cold War. However, one of the most consequential impacts of U.S. interventions in Somalia has been the hindrance of local socio-political processes that might have, with time, provided an exit from the condition of permanent conflict. In so doing, these interventions have contributed to the continuation of conflict and historical paralysis in Somalia. The Battle of Mogadishu was the culmination of a U.S.-led UN intervention in Somalia which went through several iterations that progressively became more militarized. It began in April 1992 with United Nations Operations in Somalia I (UNOSOM I), which was mandated to monitor a ceasefire agreement between the warring parties in Mogadishu following the fall of the Somali state in early 1991. The ceasefire, however, never took hold, gravely hampering the delivery of humanitarian aid in the midst of an appalling famine. The harrowing images of starving children broadcasted across the globe partly informed the U.S. decision to offer to organize and lead a multinational force, United Task Force (UNITAF). The UN accepted the offer and UNITAF forces arrived in Somalia in December 1992 with the objective and mandate to provide security and facilitate humanitarian relief efforts. UNITAF was succeeded by UNOSOM II in March 1995 with a force of about 30,000 from 27 countries. The U.S. contributed a little over 1,000 personnel to this force, but exercised significant control over the operations. UNOSOM II not only took over the mandate of UNITAF in terms of securing and facilitating aid delivery, but was further tasked with nation-building, including forcible disarmament. This led to a confrontation between UNOSOM II and one of the militias, Somali National Alliance (SNA) led by General Mohamed Farah Aidid. U.S. forces led this confrontation carrying out raids against SNA militia and Aidid. After a series of increasingly violent reprisal attacks, U.S. forces raided a hotel in Mogadishu October 3, 1993 to capture high ranking SNA personnel. The disastrous result of the raid ultimately led the Clinton administration to change course and withdraw U.S. forces from Somalia in the spring of 1994. The U.N. followed suit and was out of Somalia by early 1995. There has been widespread criticism of various aspects of the U.S./UN intervention: the militarization of the intervention with the inevitably high civilian casualties, the racist violence and abuse of Somali civilians, the caricature and reduction of the crisis to images of starving children and drug-crazed militias, the UN's insistence that its failure to act quickly to avert the famine was entirely due to security concerns and not bureaucratic inertia, and the claim that 80% of food supplies meant for famine victims were being looted. Despite the criticism of the intervention, many also felt that the withdrawal of U.S. forces and the termination of UNOSOM II would lead to a resumption of violence and upsurge in the suffering of the population. The fact that this did not happen is a testament to the dynamics of the conflict and social processes that worked to overcome the conflict. Subsequent to the U.S. and UN withdrawal in early 1995, Somalia not only did not return to a cycle of violence, but experienced relative stability in what one commentator referred to as "governance without government." This period lasting about a decade, 1995-2004/05, was characterized by the formation of various self-governance arrangements based on locality and kinship relations as well as the emergence of conflict adjudication/arbitration centers in urban settings like Mogadishu.The best examples of the autonomous and semi-autonomous local administrations that emerged are Somaliland and Puntland in the north and northeast of the country. While no similarly successful administration emerged in the central and southern regions of the country, large-scale conflicts dissipated there as well as conflicts became localized. With the localization of conflicts, it became easier for communities to find locally-grounded solutions led by a mixture of traditional elders, business people, and civic groups. In some urban centers, meanwhile, there emerged adjudication/arbitration centers that utilized a mixture of sharia and Somali customs (heer) to resolve disputes. The most well-known and successful of these are the sharia courts of Mogadishu. These courts emerged within a year of the disintegration of the central government in 1991 as an expression of neighborhood residents' desire to address the disorder and anarchy. Given the centrality of sharia to the very idea of justice and law in Somali society, the centers began to be referred to as sharia courts. The sharia courts of Mogadishu brought a certain level of security to some neighborhoods in Mogadishu throughout the 90s and early 2000s despite the opposition of warlords and militias. The return of large-scale violence to Somalia coincided with the next U.S. intervention. The sharia courts of Mogadishu attracted the attention of American officials in Nairobi starting in the early 2000s because of a suspicion that individuals associated with some of the sharia courts might be harboring suspects in the 1998 U.S. East African embassy bombings. To help find and capture these suspects, the CIA started funneling money to warlords in Mogadishu. This strategy backfired as the sharia courts, with the massive support of Mogadishu residents, defeated the warlords. Whether perpetrators of the bombings were in Mogadishu or not, it was short-sighted to enlist the support of the warlords and target the sharia courts, as the State Department's political officer for Somalia pointed out at the time, because the courts were not a homogenous entity. They were an assortment of independent adjudication centers reflecting the entire spectrum of Islamist views in Somalia. Moreover, the warlords had a terrible reputation and were disliked by the people. When the warlords failed, the U.S. then supported an Ethiopian invasion of Mogadishu in mid-2006 that eventually disbanded the sharia courts. This invasion also backfired because it conferred legitimacy to the most radical elements within the sharia courts, thus, setting the stage for the rise of al-Shabaab and transformation of Somalia into a frontline state in the global war on terror. These American interventions in Somalia can be critiqued from many angles, but what is often overlooked and more damaging in the long run is the impact they had on local historical processes that might have led to Somalia overcoming its protracted conflict. Every time the U.S. intervenes directly or indirectly, through local or regional proxies, it reshuffles the decks, putting an end to organic political and social processes, thus contributing to the perpetuation of the Somali conflict that is now over three decades old. This is not to suggest that local processes of adaptation and governance will necessarily lead to a centralized government or a liberal democracy. But the presumption that this is the only way for Somalia to exit from conflict is part of the problem.
Enter the DragonWhen I first read that Naomi Klein wrote a book about being confused for her doppelgänger, Naomi Wolf, I was initially amused. I had written earlier about the doppelgänger as the monster of our times, and it seemed that Klein was confirming that thesis. Klein dealing with Wolf seemed like it might be a fun distraction, but as I read the book, I was immediately struck with the fact that Klein is taking on more than a particular case of mistaken identity. Her book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, is in some sense an attempt to make sense of the world we are living in a world dominated by social media doppelgangers in which the work of political and social criticism has its own dark doppelganger in the world of conspiracy theories. It is not just that Naomi Wolf gets confused with Naomi Klein, both are women who wrote mainstream "big idea" books, The Beauty Myth and No Logo, have similar physical appearances, and their husbands are even both named Avi, but that this confusion reveals another doppelgänger, another double, our online or virtual self. As Klein writes, we live in "a culture crowded with various forms of doubling, in which all of us who maintain a persona or avatar online create our own doppelgängers--virtual versions of ourselves that represent us to others. A culture in which many of us have come to think of ourselves as personal brands, forging a partitioned identity that is both us and not us, a doppelgänger we perform ceaselessly in the digital ether as the price of admission in a rapacious attention economy." Klein's struggle with being confused with Wolf is also a recognition, that Klein, the author of No Logo, has another double, her "brand." This is what most people know her as, the author of critical books on the culture, politics, and economy of capitalism. Klein is aware that it is ironic to point out that the author of No Logo has a brand, but such a brand, an identity, are increasingly indispensable factors of living and working as a writer. As she puts it, the idea of a personal brand seemed like a dystopian future when it was proposed in the late nineties, but now it is a dystopian reality, anyone with a social media account has a double, a brand, that they can manage, and some need this brand to survive. The Lady From Shanghai Klein's book is not just about Wolf usurping her digital identity, but about Wolf's own descent into what Klein calls the "mirror world." the world of conspiracy theories, especially those that have metastasized in American culture since Trump and Covid. Wolf's descent into this world is very much a dive of the deep end. Wolf has tweeted about vaccinated people losing their smell, they no longer smell human, about the risk of the feces of the vaccinated contaminating drinking water, and most famously about vaccine passports and contact tracing being the end of human freedom. It is easy to mock all of this, but Klein does not play this for the laughs, she tries to understand the causes and crises underlying the paranoid fantasies. One common retort to the paranoid fears of contact tracing, vaccine passports, and even microchips hidden in vaccines is to simply say, "wait until they hear about cellphones," to point out that the surveillance that is feared is already here and for the most part broadly accepted. Klein supposes instead that they, those who spread such theories, already know about cellphones, already know about surveillance and the loss of a certain kind of anonymity and freedom. It is this awareness that appears backwards and distorted in the fears of vaccines laden with nanotechnology to monitor and control us. Their fears about vaccines, about being tracked and monitored, is in some sense a fantasy that they can do something about this increase of surveillance. They can refuse the vaccine, and thus opt out of what many of us find it impossible to opt out of, a world where our every motion, every transaction, is monitored. Klein's concept of a mirror world is both a reflection and refraction of our existing world. In some sense it reflects our world, but through a kind of distortion, shaped by our illusions and fantasies. Conspiracy theories are right to point to the control of a powerful elite, but wrong in thinking that this elite is secret, or that its motives are anything other than daily life under capitalism. As Klein writes, "There was no need for histrionics about how unvaccinated people were experiencing "apartheid" when there was a real vaccine apartheid between rich and poor countries, no need to cook up fantasies about Covid "internment camps" when the virus was being left to rip through prisons, meat packing plants, and Amazon warehouses as if the people's lives inside had no value at all."The fears of the Covid alarmists of a dark future to come are the reality of existing life under Covid. What Klein proposes is in some sense a symptomatic reading of conspiracy theories, finding their points of reflection and refraction of the existing world. The Man With the Golden Gun(In case it is not clear I am illustrating this with Hall of Mirrors scenes from films)With respect to the latter, the refractions and distortions, reading Doppelganger it is possible to find three causes or conditions underlying the distortions of the mirror world. Three aspects of existing ideology that distort and warp the way that this world responds to actual crises and problems. First, is idea of the individual, of the autonomous individual. This belief in autonomy and self reliance is the common core that connects the "wellness industry," yoga instructors, gym gurus, etc., who deny the need for vaccines and even masks for healthy people, with survivalists, who see them as an imposition by the state. Both insist on a purely individual response to a collective condition. Of course in doing so they are only acting on the basic premise of a capitalist society, which privatizes every social problem into a commodity. During Covid many doubled down on this, insisting that one could get through the pandemic with everything from Vitamin D supplements and essential oils to horse medicine. Yoga instructors, vegans, and Fox News audiences might seem to be politically opposed, but they all are different expressions of what Klein calls hyper-individualism, responding to social collapse with individual responses of wellness and self-protection. As absurd as all of these homegrown cures and remedies were they were perhaps not as absurd as the notion that the US as a society could shift its entire economy and ethics, transforming all of those people we do not think about, the people who grow, ship, make, and deliver our food into essential workers. As Klein writes, "With no warning, the message from much of our political and corporate classes change diametrically. It turned out that we were a society after all, that the young and healthy should make sacrifices for the old and ill; that we should wear masks as an act of solidarity with them, if not for ourselves; and that we should all applaud and thank the very people--many of them Black, many of them women, many of them born in poorer countries--whose lives and labor had been most systematically devalued, discounted and demeaned before the pandemic."Many embraced conspiracies rather than adjust to this new concern for essential workers, the elderly, and the sick, but in doing so they followed to the letter the dominant image of our society, a society founded on isolation, self-interest, and competition. As Klein details, often suspicion of things like free vaccines stemmed from a deeper internalization of the fundamental idea of capitalism. Why would a society that charges for a visit to the emergency room give away a life saving vaccine?This idea of the individual has its own little doppelgänger, the child. A great deal of the opposition to vaccines, mask mandates, and shutdowns was framed as protecting children from the supposed threats these things supposedly represent, spectres like "learning loss" rather than the reality of a pandemic. These threats all stem from a particular idea of a child, a child as extension of the self, and possession of their parents. "So many of the battles waged in the Mirror World--the "anti-woke" laws, the "don't say gay" bills, the blanket bans on gender-affirming medical care, the school board wars over vaccines and masks--come down to the same question: What are children for? Are they their own people, and our job, as parents is to support and protect them as they find their paths? Or are they our appendages, our extensions, our spin-offs, our doubles, to shape and mold and ultimately benefit from? So many of these parents seem convinced that they have a right to exert absolute control over their children without any interference or input: control over their bodies (by casting masks and vaccines as a kind of child rape or poisoning); control over their bodies (by casting masks and vaccines as a kind of child rape or poisoning); control over their minds (by casting anti-racist eductions as the injection of foreign ideas into their minds of their offspring); control over their gender and sexuality (by casting any attempt to discuss the range of possible gender expressions and sexual orientations as "grooming")."If the focus on individual health and the wellbeing of one's offspring sounds like eugenics, that is not accidental. This brings us to the third condition for distortion, race. As Klein argues Naomi Wolf, like many of the anti-vaccination movement, regularly invoke the holocaust or the civil rights struggle in their rhetoric. Wolf has even had her own sit-ins opposing vaccine mandates at lunch counters, her term, even as she singles out Black owned businesses for her protests. Throughout the mirror world there is a desire to appropriate the signs and images of ethnic exclusion, (remember the store that sold yellow stars that said "Not Vaccinated?" ) and racial justice, from sitting in at lunch counters to using Eric Garner's famous cry "I can't breathe" to protest mask mandates. In the mirror world it is white people who are both the true victims of discrimination and the real protagonists of social justice.Us This appropriation of the terms and history of racial justice is coupled with an absolute indifference to its current status. The year of shutdowns and mandates was also the summer of some of the largest protests of the "Black Lives Matter" movement. "If you were a person concerned that Covid marked the dawn of a new age of CCP inspired mass obedience, surely it would be worth mentioning that the largest protests in the history of the United States happened in the Covid era, with millions of people willing to face clouds of tear gas and streams of pepper spray to exercise their rights to speech, assembly and dissent. Come to think of it, if you were a person concerned with tyrannical state actions, you would also be concerned about the murders and mass denials of freedom to incarcerated people that drove the uprising. Yet in all the videos Wolf has put out issuing her dire warnings about how the United States was turning into a nation of sheeple, I have seen her acknowledge neither the existence of this racial justice reckoning nor the reality that if a Black person had pulled the same stunt that she did at the Blue Bottle or Grand Central Station, they very likely would have ended up face down in cuffs--not because vaccine rules were tyrannical, but because of systemic anti-Black racism in policing, the issue that sparked the protests she has so studiously ignored. I would argue that while Naomi Wolf might not have mentioned Black Lives Matter, she definitely noticed it. Her "lunch counter sit in" at a Blue Bottle Cafe would seem to reveal that. It was definitely noticed by the larger mirror world for which the site of millions of people in the streets protesting racism when they could not go to the gym or to a restaurant was a wrong, a violation of the order of the world, that they could not tolerate. As Klein argues much Mirror World thinking is an attempt for white people to rewrite the history of the present--making them the true victims of repression and the true heroes. The real struggle was not in the streets fighting against police repression but screaming at the hostess at the restaurant asking for proof of vaccination. As much as Klein draws the lines of demarcation between "mirror world" thinking, between conspiracies and critical thought, any such division is going to be an unstable one. In the end it is not just that Naomi Wolf is confused for Naomi Klein but that theories about microchips in vaccines or vaccines rewriting our DNA are confused for criticisms of contemporary surveillance and the pharmaceutical industry. Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine has been appropriated and reappropriated by everyone from Second Amendment activists arguing about "false flags" to those that argue that global warming will produce a new global surveillance state. Klein's book ultimately is not just about her own struggle with a doppelgänger, but how any critical thinker, anyone on "the left," for lack of a better word, will always confront a doppelgänger. Every critic of the invasion of Iraq has to deal with "truthers" who claim that 9/11 was an inside job, every critic of the failure of the US to respond to the pandemic will ultimately have to deal with claims of microchips and genetic engineering. What starts out as one persons struggle with a very singular condition of mistaken identity ultimately is a story about all of us. We are all in the hall of mirrors now. Klein has also charted something of a path out, by showing the ideologies of individualism, the family, and the race, that distort any awareness of our conditions into its mirror world opposite. Lastly, Klein like Bruce Lee before her knew that you have to smash a few mirrors to escape a hall of mirrors, and this includes, for Klein, giving up on one's own image, one's brand, learning to think and act collectively rather than individually.
Daniel Deudney on Mixed Ontology, Planetary Geopolitics, and Republican Greenpeace
This is the second in a series of Talks dedicated to the technopolitics of International Relations, linked to the forthcoming double volume 'The Global Politics of Science and Technology' edited by Maximilian Mayer, Mariana Carpes, and Ruth Knoblich
World politics increasingly abrasions with the limits of state-centric thinking, faced as the world is with a set of issues that affect not only us collectively as mankind, but also the planet itself. While much of IR theorizing seems to shirk such realizations, the work of Daniel Deudney has consistently engaged with the complex problems engendered by the entanglements of nuclear weapons, the planetary environment, space exploration, and the kind of political associations that might help us to grapple with our fragile condition as humanity-in-the world. In this elaborate Talk, Deudney—amongst others—lays out his understanding of the fundamental forces that drive both planetary political progress and problems; discusses the kind of ontological position needed to appreciate these problems; and argues for the merits of a republican greenpeace model to political organization.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
The study of politics is the study of human politics and the human situation has been—and is being—radically altered by changes in the human relationships with the natural and material worlds. In my view, this means IR and related intellectual disciplines should focus on better understanding the emergence of the 'global' and the 'planetary,' their implications for the overall human world and its innumerable sub-worlds, and their relations with the realization of basic human needs. The global and the planetary certainly don't comprise all of the human situation, but the fact that the human situation has become global and planetary touches every other facet of the human situation, sometimes in fundamental ways. The simple story is that the human world is now 'global and planetary' due to the explosive transformation over the last several centuries of science-based technology occurring within the geophysical and biophysical features of planet Earth. The natural Earth and its relationship with humans have been massively altered by the vast amplifications in dispersed human agency produced by the emergence and spread of machine-based civilization. The overall result of these changes has been the emergence of a global- and planetary-scale material and social reality that is in some ways similar, but in other important ways radically different, from earlier times. Practices and structures inherited from the pre-global human worlds have not adequately been adjusted to take the new human planetary situation into account and their persistence casts a long and partially dark shadow over the human prospect.
A global and planetary focus is also justified—urgently—by the fact that the overall human prospect on this planet, and the fate of much additional life on this planet, is increasingly dependent on the development and employment of new social arrangements for interacting with these novel configurations of material and natural possibilities and limits. Human agency is now situated, and is making vastly fateful choices—for better or worse—in a sprawling, vastly complex aggregation of human-machine-nature assemblies which is our world. The 'fate of the earth' now partly hinges on human choices, and helping to make sure these choices are appropriate ones should be the paramount objective of political scientific and theoretical efforts. However, no one discipline or approach is sufficient to grapple successfully with this topic. All disciplines are necessary. But there are good reasons to believe that 'IR' and related disciplines have a particularly important possible practical role to play. (I am also among those who prefer 'global studies' as a label for the enterprise of answering questions that cut across and significantly subsume both the 'international' and the 'domestic.')
My approach to grappling with this topic is situated—like the work of now vast numbers of other IR theorists and researchers of many disciplines—in the study of 'globalization.' The now widely held starting point for this intellectual effort is the realization that globalization has been the dominant pattern or phenomenon, the story of stories, over at least the last five centuries. Globalization has been occurring in military, ecological, cultural, and economic affairs. And I emphasize—like many, but not all, analysts of globalization—that the processes of globalization are essentially dependent on new machines, apparatuses, and technologies which humans have fabricated and deployed. Our world is global because of the astounding capabilities of machine civilization. This startling transformation of human choice by technological advance is centrally about politics because it is centrally about changes in power. Part of this power story has been about changes in the scope and forms of domination. Globalization has been, to state the point mildly, 'uneven,' marked by amplifications of violence and domination and predation on larger and wider scales. Another part of the story of the power transformation has been the creation of a world marked by high degrees of interdependence, interaction, speed, and complexity. These processes of globalization and the transformation of machine capabilities are not stopping or slowing down but are accelerating. Thus, I argue that 'bounding power'—the growth, at times by breathtaking leaps, of human capabilities to do things—is now a fundamental feature of the human world, and understanding its implications should, in my view, be a central activity for IR scholars.
In addressing the topic of machine civilization and its globalization on Earth, my thinking has been centered first around the developing of 'geopolitical' lines argument to construct a theory of 'planetary geopolitics'. 'Geopolitics' is the study of geography, ecology, technology, and the earth, and space and place, and their interaction with politics. The starting point for geopolitical analysis is accurate mapping. Not too many IR scholars think of themselves as doing 'geography' in any form. In part this results from of the unfortunate segregation of 'geography' into a separate academic discipline, very little of which is concerned with politics. Many also mistake the overall project of 'geopolitics' with the ideas, and egregious mistakes and political limitations, of many self-described 'geopoliticans' who are typically arch-realists, strong nationalists, and imperialists. Everyone pays general lip service to the importance of technology, but little interaction occurs between IR and 'technology studies' and most IR scholars are happy to treat such matters as 'technical' or non-political in character. Despite this general theoretical neglect, many geographic and technological factors routinely pop into arguments in political science and political theory, and play important roles in them.
Thinking about the global and planetary through the lens of a fuller geopolitics is appealing to me because it is the human relationship with the material world and the Earth that has been changed with the human world's globalization. Furthermore, much of the actual agendas of movements for peace, arms control, and sustainability are essentially about alternative ways of ordering the material world and our relations with it. Given this, I find an approach that thinks systematically about the relations between patterns of materiality and different political forms is particularly well-suited to provide insights of practical value for these efforts.
The other key focus of my research has been around extending a variety of broadly 'republican' political insights for a cluster of contemporary practical projects for peace, arms control, and environmental stewardship ('greenpeace'). Even more than 'geopolitics,' 'republicanism' is a term with too many associations and meanings. By republics I mean political associations based on popular sovereignty and marked by mutual limitations, that is, by 'bounding power'—the restraint of power, particularly violent power—in the interests of the people generally. Assuming that security from the application of violence to bodies is a primary (but not sole) task of political association, how do republican political arrangements achieve this end? I argue that the character and scope of power restraint arrangements that actually serve the fundamental security interests of its popular sovereign varies in significant ways in different material contexts.
Republicanism is first and foremost a domestic form, centered upon the successive spatial expansion of domestic-like realms, and the pursuit of a constant political project of maximally feasible ordered freedom in changed spatial and material circumstances. I find thinking about our global and planetary human situation from the perspective of republicanism appealing because the human global and planetary situation has traits—most notably high levels of interdependence, interaction, practical speed, and complexity—that make it resemble our historical experience of 'domestic' and 'municipal' realms. Thinking with a geopolitically grounded republicanism offers insights about global governance very different from the insights generated within the political conceptual universe of hierarchical, imperial, and state-centered political forms. Thus planetary geopolitics and republicanism offers a perspective on what it means to 'Think Globally and Act Locally.' If we think of, or rather recognize, the planet as our locality, and then act as if the Earth is our locality, then we are likely to end up doing various approximations of the best-practice republican forms that we have successfully developed in our historically smaller domestic localities.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?
Like anybody else, the formative events in my intellectual development have been shaped by the thick particularities of time and place. 'The boy is the father of the man,' as it is said. The first and most direction-setting stage in the formation of my 'green peace' research interests was when I was in 'grade school,' roughly the years from age 6-13. During these years my family lived in an extraordinary place, St Simons Island, a largely undeveloped barrier island off the coast of southern Georgia. This was an extremely cool place to be a kid. It had extensive beaches, and marshes, as well as amazing trees of gargantuan proportions. My friends and I spent much time exploring, fishing, camping out, climbing trees, and building tree houses. Many of these nature-immersion activities were spontaneous, others were in Boy Scouts. This extraordinary natural environment and the attachments I formed to it, shaped my strong tendency to see the fates of humans and nature as inescapably intertwined. But the Boy Scouts also instilled me with a sense of 'virtue ethics'. A line from the Boy Scout Handbook captures this well: 'Take a walk around your neighborhood. Make a list of what is right and wrong about it. Make a plan to fix what is not right.' This is a demotic version of Weber's political 'ethic of responsibility.' This is very different from the ethics of self-realization and self-expression that have recently gained such ground in America and elsewhere. It is now very 'politically incorrect' to think favorably of the Boy Scouts, but I believe that if the Scouting experience was universally accessible, the world would be a much improved place.
My kid-in-nature life may sound very Tom Sawyer, but it was also very Tom Swift. My friends and I spent much of our waking time reading about the technological future, and imaginatively play-acting in future worlds. This imaginative world was richly fertilized by science fiction comic books, television shows, movies, and books. Me and my friends—juvenile technological futurists and techno-nerds in a decidedly anti-intellectual culture—were avid readers of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein, and each new issue of Analog was eagerly awaited. While we knew we were Americans, my friends and I had strong inclinations to think of ourselves most essentially as 'earthlings.' We fervently discussed extraterrestrial life and UFOs, and we eagerly awaited the day, soon to occur, we were sure, in which we made 'first contact.' We wanted to become, if not astronauts, then designers and builders of spaceships. We built tree houses, but we filled them with discarded electronics and they became starships. We rode bicycles, but we lugged about attaché cases filled with toy ray guns, transistor radios, firecrackers, and homemade incendiary devices. We built and fired off rockets, painstaking assembled plastic kit models of famous airplanes and ships, and then we would blow them apart with our explosives. The future belonged to technology, and we fancied ourselves its avant garde.
Yet the prospect of nuclear Armageddon seemed very real. We did 'duck and cover' drills at school, and sat for two terrifying weeks through the Cuban Missile Crisis. My friends and I had copies of the Atomic Energy Commission manuals on 'nuclear effects,' complete with a slide-rule like gadget that enabled us to calculate just what would happen if near-by military bases were obliterated by nuclear explosions. Few doubted that we were, in the words of a pop song, 'on the eve of destruction.' These years were also the dawning of 'the space age' in which humans were finally leaving the Earth and starting what promised to be an epic trek, utterly transformative in its effects, to the stars. My father worked for a number of these years for a large aerospace military-industrial firm, then working for NASA to build the very large rockets needed to launch men and machines to the moon and back. My friends and I debated fantastical topics, such as the pros and cons of emigrating to Mars, and how rapidly a crisis-driven exodus from the earth could be organized.
Two events that later occurred in the area where I spent my childhood served as culminating catalytic events for my greenpeace thinking. First, some years after my family moved away, the industrial facility to mix rocket fuel that had been built by the company my father worked for, and that he had helped put into operation, was struck by an extremely violent 'industrial accident,' which reduced, in one titanic flash, multi-story concrete and steel buildings filled with specialized heavy industrial machinery (and everyone in them) into a grey powdery gravel ash, no piece of which was larger than a fist. Second, during the late 1970s, the US Navy acquired a large tract of largely undeveloped marsh and land behind another barrier island (Cumberland), an area 10-15 miles from where I had lived, a place where I had camped, fished, and hunted deer. The Navy dredged and filled what was one of the most biologically fertile temperate zone estuaries on the planet. There they built the east coast base for the new fleet of Trident nuclear ballistic missile submarines, the single most potent violence machine ever built, thus turning what was for me the wildest part of my wild-encircled childhood home into one of the largest nuclear weapons complexes on earth. These events catalyzed for me the realization that there was a great struggle going on, for the Earth and for the future, and I knew firmly which side I was on.
My approach to thinking about problems was also strongly shaped by high school debate, where I learned the importance of 'looking at questions from both sides,' and from this stems my tendency to look at questions as debates between competing answers, and to focus on decisively engaging, defeating, and replacing the strongest and most influential opposing positions. As an undergraduate at Yale College, I started doing Political Theory. I am sure that I was a very vexing student in some ways, because (the debater again) I asked Marxist questions to my liberal and conservative professors, and liberal and conservative ones to my Marxist professors. Late in my sophomore year, I had my epiphany, my direction-defining moment, that my vocation would be an attempt to do the political theory of the global and the technological. Since then, the only decisions have been ones of priority and execution within this project.
Wanting to learn something about cutting-edge global and technological and issues, I next went to Washington D.C. for seven years. I worked on Capitol Hill for three and a half years as a policy aide, working on energy and conservation and renewable energy and nuclear power. I spent the other three and a half years as a Senior Researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, a small environmental and global issues think tank that was founded and headed by Lester Brown, a well-known and far-sighted globalist. I co-authored a book about renewable energy and transitions to global sustainability and wrote a study on space and space weapons. At the time I published Whole Earth Security: a Geopolitics of Peace (1983), in which my basic notions of planetary geopolitics and republicanism were first laid out. During these seven years in Washington, I also was a part-time student, earning a Master's degree in Science, Technology and Public Policy at George Washington University.
In all, these Washington experiences have been extremely valuable for my thinking. Many political scientists view public service as a low or corrupting activity, but this is, I think, very wrong-headed. The reason that the democratic world works as well as it does is because of the distributive social intelligence. But social intelligence is neither as distributed nor as intelligent as it needs to be to deal with many pressing problems. My experience as a Congressional aide taught me that most of the problems that confront my democracy are rooted in various limits and corruptions of the people. I have come to have little patience with those who say, for example, rising inequality is inherent in capital C capitalism, when the more proximate explanation is that the Reagan Republican Party was so successful in gutting the progressive tax system previously in place in the United States. Similarly, I see little value in claims, to take a very contemporary example, that 'the NSA is out of control' when this agency is doing more or less what the elected officials, responding to public pressures to provide 'national security' loudly demanded. In democracies, the people are ultimately responsible.
As I was immersed in the world of arms control and environmental activism I was impressed by the truth of Keynes's oft quoted line, about the great practical influence of the ideas of some long-dead 'academic scribbler.' This is true in varying degrees in every issue area, but in some much more than others. This reinforced my sense that great potential practical consequence of successfully innovating in the various conceptual frameworks that underpinned so many important activities. For nuclear weapons, it became clear to me that the problem was rooted in the statist and realist frames that people so automatically brought to a security question of this magnitude.
Despite the many appeals of a career in DC politics and policy, this was all for me an extended research field-trip, and so I left Washington to do a PhD—a move that mystified many of my NGO and activist friends, and seemed like utter folly to my political friends. At Princeton University, I concentrated on IR, Political Theory, and Military History and Politics, taking courses with Robert Gilpin, Richard Falk, Barry Posen, Sheldon Wolin and others. In my dissertation—entitled Global Orders: Geopolitical and Materialist Theories of the Global-Industrial Era, 1890-1945—I explored IR and related thinking about the impacts of the industrial revolution as a debate between different world order alternatives, and made arguments about the superiority of liberalist, internationalist, and globalist arguments—most notably from H.G. Wells and John Dewey—to the strong realist and imperialist ideas most commonly associated with the geopolitical writers of this period.
I also continued engaging in activist policy affiliated to the Program on Nuclear Policy Alternatives at the Center for Energy andEnvironmental Studies (CEES), which was then headed by Frank von Hippel, a physicist turned 'public interest scientist', and a towering figure in the global nuclear arms control movement. I was a Post Doc at CEES during the Gorbachev era and I went on several amazing and eye-opening trips to the Soviet Union. Continuing my space activism, I was able to organize workshops in Moscow and Washington on large-scale space cooperation, gathering together many of the key space players on both sides. While Princeton was fabulously stimulating intellectually, it was also a stressful pressure-cooker, and I maintained my sanity by making short trips, two of three weekends, over six years, to Manhattan, where I spent the days working in the main reading room of the New York Public Library and the nights partying and relaxing in a world completely detached from academic life.
When it comes to my intellectual development in terms of reading theory, the positive project I wanted to pursue was partially defined by approaches I came to reject. Perhaps most centrally, I came to reject an approach that was very intellectually powerful, even intoxicating, and which retains great sway over many, that of metaphysical politics. The politics of the metaphysicians played a central role in my coming to reject the politics of metaphysics. The fact that some metaphysical ideas and the some of the deep thinkers who advanced them, such as Heidegger, and many Marxists, were so intimately connected with really disastrous politics seemed a really damning fact for me, particularly given that these thinkers insisted so strongly on the link between their metaphysics and their politics. I was initially drawn to Nietzsche's writing (what twenty-year old isn't) but his model of the philosopher founder or law-giver—that is, of a spiritually gifted but alienated guy (and it always is a guy) with a particularly strong but frustrated 'will to power' going into the wilderness, having a deep spiritual revelation, and then returning to the mundane corrupt world with new 'tablets of value,' along with a plan to take over and run things right—seemed more comic than politically relevant, unless the prophet is armed, in which case it becomes a frightful menace. The concluding scene in Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi (sometimes translated as The Glass Bead Game) summarized by overall view of the 'high theory' project. After years of intense training by the greatest teachers the most spiritually and intellectually gifted youths finally graduate. To celebrate, they go to lake, dive in, and, having not learned how to swim, drown.
I was more attracted to Aristotle, Hume, Montesquieu, Dewey and other political theorists with less lofty and comprehensive views of what theory might accomplish; weary of actions; based on dogmatic or totalistic thinking; an eye to the messy and compromised world; with a political commitment to liberty and the interests of the many; a preference for peace over war; an aversion to despotism and empire; and an affinity for tolerance and plurality. I also liked some of those thinkers because of their emphasis on material contexts. Montesquieu seeks to analyze the interaction of material contexts and republican political forms; Madison and his contemporaries attempt to extend the spatial scope of republican political association by recombining in novel ways various earlier power restraint arrangements. I was tremendously influenced by Dewey, studying intensively his slender volume The Public and its Problems (1927)—which I think is the most important book in twentieth century political thought. By the 'public' Dewey means essentially a stakeholder group, and his main point is that the material transformations produced by the industrial revolution has created new publics, and that the political task is to conceptualize and realize forms of community and government appropriate to solving the problems that confront these new publics.
One can say my overall project became to apply and extend their concepts to the contemporary planetary situation. Concomitantly reading IR literature on nuclear weapons, I was struck by fact that the central role that material realities played in these arguments was very ad hoc, and that many of the leading arguments on nuclear politics were very unconvincing. It was clear that while Waltz (Theory Talk #40) had brilliantly developed some key ideas about anarchy made by Hobbes and Rousseau, he had also left something really important out. These sorts of deficiencies led me to develop the arguments contained in Bounding Power. I think it is highly unlikely that I would have had these doubts, or come to make the arguments I made without having worked in political theory and in policy.
I read many works that greatly influenced my thinking in this area, among them works by Lewis Mumford, Langdon Winner's Autonomous Technology, James Lovelock's Gaia, Charles Perrow's Normal Accidents (read a related article here, pdf), Jonathan Schell's Fate of the Earth and The Abolition, William Ophul's Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity... I was particularly stuck by a line in Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (pdf), that we live in a 'spaceship' like closed highly interconnected system, but lack an 'operating manual' to guide intelligently our actions. It was also during this period that I read key works by H.G. Wells, most notably his book, Anticipations, and his essay The Idea of a League of Nations, both of which greatly influenced my thinking.
This aside, the greatest contribution to my thinking has come from conversations sustained over many years with some really extraordinary individuals. To mention those that I have been arguing with, and learning from, for at least ten years, there is John O'Looney, Wesley Warren, Bob Gooding-Williams, Alyn McAuly, Henry Nau, Richard Falk, Michael Doyle (Theory Talk #1), Richard Mathew, Paul Wapner, Bron Taylor, Ron Deibert, John Ikenberry, Bill Wohlforth, Frank von Hippel, Ethan Nadelmann, Fritz Kratochwil, Barry Buzan (Theory Talk #35), Ole Waever, John Agnew (Theory Talk #4), Barry Posen, Alex Wendt (Theory Talk #3), James der Derian, David Hendrickson, Nadivah Greenberg, Tim Luke, Campbell Craig, Bill Connolly, Steven David, Jane Bennett, Daniel Levine (TheoryTalk #58), and Jairus Grove. My only regret is that I have not spoken even more with them, and with the much larger number of people I have learned from on a less sustained basis along the way.
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
I have thought a great deal about what sort of answers to this question can be generally valuable. For me, the most important insight is that success in intellectual life and academia is determined by more or less the same combination of factors that determines success more generally. This list is obvious: character, talent, perseverance and hard work, good judgment, good 'people skills,' and luck. Not everyone has a talent to do this kind of work, but the number of people who do have the talent to do this kind of work is much larger than the number of people who are successful in doing it. I think in academia as elsewhere, the people most likely to really succeed are those whose attitude toward the activity is vocational. A vocation is something one is called to do by an inner voice that one cannot resist. People with vocations never really work in one sense, because they are doing something that they would be doing even if they were not paid or required. Of course, in another sense people with vocations never stop working, being so consumed with their path that everything else matters very little. People with jobs and professions largely stop working when they when the lottery, but people with vocations are empowered to work more and better. When your vocation overlaps with your job, you should wake up and say 'wow, I cannot believe I am being paid to do this!' Rather obviously, the great danger in the life paths of people with vocations is imbalance and burn-out. To avoid these perils it is beneficial to sustain strong personal relationships, know when and how to 'take off' effectively, and sustain the ability to see things as an unfolding comedy and to laugh.
Academic life also involves living and working in a profession. Compared to the oppressions that so many thinkers and researchers have historically suffered from, contemporary professional academic life is a utopia. But academic life has several aspects unfortunate aspects, and coping successfully with them is vital. Academic life is full of 'odd balls' and the loose structure of universities and organization, combined with the tenure system, licenses an often florid display of dubious behavior. A fair number of academics have really primitive and incompetent social skills. Others are thin skinned-ego maniacs. Some are pompous hypocrites. Some are ruthlessly self-aggrandizing and underhanded. Some are relentless shirkers and free-riders. Also, academic life is, particularly relative to the costs of obtaining the years of education necessary to obtain it, not very well paid. Corruptions of clique, ideological factionalism, and nepotism occur. If not kept in proper perspective, and approached in appropriate ways, academic department life can become stupidly consuming of time, energy, and most dangerously, intellectual attention. The basic step for healthy departmental life is to approach it as a professional role.
The other big dimension of academic life is teaching. Teaching is one of the two 'deliverables' that academic organizations provide in return for the vast resources they consume. Shirking on teaching is a dereliction of responsibility, but also is the foregoing of a great opportunity. Teaching is actually one of the most assuredly consequential things academics do. The key to great teaching is, I think, very simple: inspire and convey enthusiasm. Once inspired, students learn. Once students take questions as their own, they become avid seekers of answers. Teachers of things political also have a responsibility to remain even-handed in what they teach, to make sure that they do not teach just or mainly their views, to make sure that the best and strongest versions of opposing sides are heard. Teaching seeks to produce informed and critically thinking students, not converts. Beyond the key roles of inspiration and even-handedness, the rest is the standard package of tasks relevant in any professional role: good preparation, good organization, hard work, and clarity of presentation.
Your main book, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (2007), is a mix of intellectual history, political theory and IR theory, and is targeted largely at realism. How does a reading and interpretation of a large number of old books tell us something new about realism, and the contemporary global?
Bounding Power attempts to dispel some very large claims made by realists about their self-proclaimed 'tradition,' a lineage of thought in which they place many of the leading Western thinkers about political order, such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, and the 'global geopoliticans' from the years around the beginning of the twentieth century. In the book I argue that the actual main axis of western thinking about political order (and its absence) is largely the work of 'republican' thinkers from the small number of 'republics', and that many of the key ideas that realists call realist and liberals call liberal are actually fragments of a larger, more encompassing set of arguments that were primarily in the idioms of republicanism. This entails dispelling the widely held view that the liberal and proto-liberal republican thought and practice are marked by 'idealism'—and therefore both inferior in their grasp of the problem of security-from violence and valuable only when confined to the 'domestic.' I demonstrate that this line of republican security thinkers had a robust set of claims both about material contextual factors, about the 'geopolitics of freedom', and a fuller understanding of security-from-violence. The book shows how perhaps the most important insights of this earlier cluster of arguments has oddly been dropped by both realists (particularly neorealists) and liberal international theorists. And, finally, it is an attempt to provide an understanding that posits the project of exiting anarchy on a global scale as something essentially unprecedented, and as something that the best of our inherited theory leaves us unable to say much about.
The main argument is contained in my formulation of what I think are the actual the two main sets of issues of Western structural-materialist security theory, two problematiques formulated in republican and naturalist-materialist conceptual vocabularies. The first problematique concerns the relationship between material context, the scope of tolerable anarchy, and necessary-for-security government. The second problematic concerns the relative security-viability of two main different forms of government—hierarchical and republican.
This formulation of the first problematic concerning anarchy differs from the main line of contemporary Realist argument in that it poses the question as one about the spatial scope of tolerable anarchy. The primary variable in my reconstruction of the material-contextual component of these arguments is what I term violence interdependence (absent, weak, strong, and intense). The main substantive claim of Western structural-materialist security theory is that situations of anarchy combined with intense violence interdependence are incompatible with security and require substantive government. Situations of strong and weak violence interdependence constitute a tolerable (if at times 'nasty and brutish') second ('state-of-war') anarchy not requiring substantive government. Early formulations of 'state of nature' arguments, explicitly or implicitly hinge upon this material contextual variable, and the overall narrative structure of the development of republican security theory and practice has concerned natural geographic variations and technologically caused changes in the material context, and thus the scope of security tolerable/intolerable anarchy and needed substantive government. This argument was present in early realist versions of anarchy arguments, but has been dropped by neorealists. Conversely, contemporary liberal international theorists analyze interdependence, but have little to say about violence. The result is that the realists talk about violence and security, and the liberals talk about interdependence not relating to violence, producing the great lacuna of contemporary theory: analysis of violence interdependence.
The second main problematique, concerning the relative security viability of hierarchical and republican forms, has also largely been lost sight of, in large measure by the realist insistence that governments are by definition hierarchical, and the liberal avoidance of system structural theory in favor of process, ideational, and economic variables. (For neoliberals, cooperation is seen as (possibly) occurring in anarchy, without altering or replacing anarchy.) The main claim here is that republican and proto-liberal theorists have a more complete grasp of the security political problem than realists because of their realization that both the extremes of hierarchy and anarchy are incompatible with security. In order to register this lost component of structural theory I refer to republican forms at both the unit and the system-level as being characterized by an ordering principle which I refer to as negarchy. Such political arrangements are characterized by the simultaneous negation of both hierarchy and anarchy. The vocabulary of political structures should thus be conceived as a triad-triangle of anarchy, hierarchy, and negarchy, rather than a spectrum stretching from pure anarchy to pure hierarchy. Using this framework, Bounding Power traces various formulations of the key arguments of security republicans from the Greeks through the nuclear era as arguments about the simultaneous avoidance of hierarchy and anarchy on expanding spatial scales driven by variations and changes in the material context. If we recognize the main axis of our thinking in this way, we can stand on a view of our past that is remarkable in its potential relevance to thinking and dealing with the contemporary 'global village' like a human situation.
Nuclear weapons play a key role in the argument of Bounding Power about the present, as well as elsewhere in your work. But are nuclear weapons are still important as hey were during the Cold War to understand global politics?
Since their arrival on the world scene in the middle years of the twentieth century, there has been pretty much universal agreement that nuclear weapons are in some fundamental way 'revolutionary' in their implications for security-from-violence and world politics. The fact that the Cold War is over does not alter, and even stems from, this fact. Despite this wide agreement on the importance of nuclear weapons, theorists, policy makers, and popular arms control/disarmament movements have fundamental disagreements about which political forms are compatible with the avoidance of nuclear war. I have attempted to provide a somewhat new answer to this 'nuclear-political question', and to explain why strong forms of interstate arms control are necessary for security in the nuclear age. I argue that achieving the necessary levels of arms control entails somehow exiting interstate anarchy—not toward a world government as a world state, but toward a world order that is a type of compound republican union (marked by, to put it in terms of above discussion, a nearly completely negarchical structure).
This argument attempts to close what I term the 'arms control gap', the discrepancy between the value arms control is assigned by academic theorists of nuclear weapons and their importance in the actual provision of security in the nuclear era. During the Cold War, thinking among IR theorists about nuclear weapons tended to fall into three broad schools—war strategists, deterrence statists, and arms controllers. Where the first two only seem to differ about the amount of nuclear weapons necessary for states seeking security (the first think many, the second less), the third advocates that states do what they have very rarely done before the nuclear age, reciprocal restraints on arms.
But this Cold War triad of arguments is significantly incomplete as a list of the important schools of thought about the nuclear-political question. There are four additional schools, and a combination of their arguments constitutes, I argue, a superior answer to the nuclear-political question. First are the nuclear one worlders, a view that flourished during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and held that the simple answer to the nuclear political question is to establish a world government, as some sort of state. Second are the populist anti-nuclearists, who indict state apparatuses of acting contrary to the global public's security interests. Third are the deep arms controllers, such as Jonathan Schell, who argue that nuclear weapons need to be abolished. Fourth are the theorists of omniviolence, who theorize situations produced by the leakage of nuclear weapons into the hands of non-state actors who cannot be readily deterred from using nuclear weapons. What all of these schools have in common is that they open up the state and make arguments about how various forms of political freedom—and the institutions that make it possible—are at issue in answering the nuclear-political question.
Yet one key feature all seven schools share is that they all make arguments about how particular combinations and configurations of material realities provide the basis for thinking that their answer to the nuclear-political question is correct. Unfortunately, their understandings of how material factors shape, or should shape, actual political arrangements is very ad hoc. Yet the material factors—starting with sheer physical destructiveness—are so pivotal that they merit a more central role in theories of nuclear power. I think we need to have a model that allows us to grasp how variations in material contexts condition the functionality of 'modes of protection', that is, distinct and recurring security practices (and their attendant political structures).
For instance, one mode of protection—what I term the real-state mode of protection—attempts to achieve security through the concentration, mobilization, and employment of violence capability. This is the overall, universal, context-independent strategy of realists. Bringing into view material factors, I argue, shows that this mode of protection is functional not universally but specifically—and only—in material contexts that are marked by violence-poverty and slowness. This mode of protection is dysfunctional in nuclear material contexts marked by violence abundance and high violence velocities. In contrast, a republican federal mode of protection is a bundle of practices that aim for the demobilization and deceleration of violence capacity, and that the practices associated with this mode of protection are security functional in the nuclear material context.
What emerges from such an approach to ideas about the relation between nuclear power and security from violence is that the epistemological foundations for any of the major positions about nuclear weapons are actually much weaker than we should be comfortable with. People often say the two most important questions about the nuclear age are: what is the probability that nuclear weapons will be used? And then, what will happen when they are used? The sobering truth is that we really do not have good grounds for confidently answering either of those two questions. But every choice made about nuclear weapons depends on risk calculations that depend on how we answer these questions.
You have also written extensively on space, a topic that has not recently attracted much attention from many IR scholars. How does your thinking on this relate to your overall thinking about the global and planetary situation?
The first human steps into outer space during the middle years of the twentieth century have been among the most spectacular and potentially consequential events in the globalization of machine civilization on Earth. Over the course of what many call 'the space age,' thinking about space activities, space futures, and the consequences of space activities has been dominated by an elaborately developed body of 'space expansionist' thought that makes ambitious and captivating claims about both the feasibility and the desirability of human expansion into outer space. Such views of space permeate popular culture, and at times appear to be quite influential in actual space policy. Space expansionists hold that outer space is a limitless frontier and that humans should make concerted efforts to explore and colonize and extend their military activities into space. They claim the pursuit of their ambitious projects will have many positive, even transformative, effects upon the human situation on Earth, by escaping global closure, protecting the earth's habitability, preserving political plurality, and enhancing species survival. Claims about the Earth, its historical patterns and its contemporary problems, permeate space expansionist thinking.
While the feasibility, both technological and economic, of space expansionist projects has been extensively assessed, arguments for their desirability have not been accorded anything approaching a systematic assessment. In part, such arguments about the desirability of space expansion are difficult to assess because they incorporate claims that are very diverse in character, including claims about the Earth (past, present, and future), about the ways in which material contexts made up of space 'geography' and technologies produce or heavily favor particular political outcomes, and about basic worldview assumptions regarding nature, science, technology, and life.
By breaking these space expansionist arguments down into their parts, and systematically assessing their plausibility, a very different picture of the space prospect emerges. I think there are strong reasons to think that the consequences of the human pursuit of space expansion have been, and could be, very undesirable, even catastrophic. The actual militarization of that core space technology ('the rocket') and the construction of a planetary-scope 'delivery' and support system for nuclear war-fighting has been the most important consequence of actual space activities, but these developments have been curiously been left out of accounts of the space age and assessments of its impacts. Similarly, much of actually existing 'nuclear arms control' has centered on restraining and dismantling space weapons, not nuclear weapons. Thus the most consequential space activity—the acceleration of nuclear delivery capabilities—has been curiously rendered almost invisible in accounts of space and assessments of its impacts. This is an 'unknown known' of the 'space age'. Looking ahead, the creation of large orbital infrastructures will either presuppose or produce world government, potentially of a very hierarchical sort. There are also good reasons to think that space colonies are more likely to be micro-totalitarian than free. And extensive human movement off the planet could in a variety of ways increase the vulnerability of life on Earth, and even jeopardize the survival of the human species.
Finally, I think much of space expansionist (and popular) thinking about space and the consequences of humans space activities has been marked by basic errors in practical geography. Most notably, there is the widespread failure to realize that the expansion of human activities into Earth's orbital space has enhanced global closure, because the effective distances in Earth's space make it very small. And because of the formidable natural barriers to human space activity, space is a planetary 'lid, not a 'frontier'. So one can say that the most important practical discovery of the 'space age' has been an improved understanding of the Earth. These lines of thinking, I find, would suggest the outlines of a more modest and Earth-centered space program, appropriate for the current Earth age. Overall, the fact that we can't readily expand into space is part of why we are in a new 'earth age' rather than a 'space age'.
You've argued against making the environment into a national security issue twenty years ago. Do the same now, considering that making the environment a bigger priority by making it into a national security issue might be the only way to prevent total environmental destruction?
When I started writing about the relationships between environment and security twenty years ago, not a great deal of work had been done on this topic. But several leading environmental thinkers were making the case that framing environmental issues as security issues, or what came to be called 'securitizing the environment', was not only a good strategy to get action on environmental problems, but also was useful analytically to think about these two domains. Unlike the subsequent criticisms of 'environmental security' made by Realists and scholars of conventional 'security studies', my criticism starts with the environmentalist premise that environmental deterioration is a paramount problem for contemporary humanity as a whole.
Those who want to 'securitize the environment' are attempting to do what William James a century ago proposed as a general strategy for social problem solving. Can we find, in James' language, 'a moral equivalent of war?' (Note the unfortunately acronym: MEOW). War and the threat of war, James observed, often lead to rapid and extensive mobilizations of effort. Can we somehow transfer these vast social energies to deal with other sets of problems? This is an enduring hope, particularly in the United States, where we have a 'war on drugs', a 'war on cancer', and a 'war on poverty'. But doing this for the environment, by 'securitizing the environment,' is unlikely to be very successful. And I fear that bringing 'security' orientations, institutions, and mindsets into environmental problem-solving will also bring in statist, nationalist, and militarist approaches. This will make environmental problem-solving more difficult, not easier, and have many baneful side-effects.
Another key point I think is important, is that the environment—and the various values and ends associated with habitat and the protection of habitat—are actually much more powerful and encompassing than those of security and violence. Instead of 'securitizing the environment' it is more promising is to 'environmentalize security'. Not many people think about the linkages between the environment and security-from-violence in this way, but I think there is a major case of it 'hiding in plain sight' in the trajectory of how the state-system and nuclear weapons have interacted.
When nuclear weapons were invented and first used in the 1940s, scientists were ignorant about many aspects of their effects. As scientists learned about these effects, and as this knowledge became public, many people started thinking and acting in different ways about nuclear choices. The fact that a ground burst of a nuclear weapon would produce substantial radioactive 'fall-out' was not appreciated until the first hydrogen bomb tests in the early 1950s. It was only then that scientists started to study what happened to radioactive materials dispersed widely in the environment. Evidence began to accumulate that some radioactive isotopes would be 'bio-focused', or concentrated by biological process. Public interest scientists began effectively publicizing this information, and mothers were alerted to the fact that their children's teeth were become radioactive. This new scientific knowledge about the environmental effects of nuclear explosions, and the public mobilizations it produced, played a key role in the first substantial nuclear arms control treaty, the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which banned nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere, in the ocean, and in space. Thus, the old ways of providing security were circumscribed by new knowledge and new stakeholders of environmental health effects. The environment was not securitized, security was partially environmentalized.
Thus, while some accounts by arms control theorists emphasize the importance of 'social learning' in altering US-Soviet relations, an important part of this learning was not about the nature of social and political interactions, but about the environmental consequences of nuclear weapons. The learning that was most important in motivating so many actors (both within states and in mass publics) to seek changes in politics was 'natural learning,' or more specifically learning about the interaction of natural and technological systems.
An even more consequential case of the environmentalization of security occurred in the 1970's and 1980's. A key text here is Jonathan Schell's book, The Fate of the Earth. Schell's book, combining very high-quality journalism with first rate political theoretical reflections, lays out in measured terms the new discoveries of ecologists and atmospheric scientists about the broader planetary consequences of an extensive nuclear war. Not only would hundreds of millions of people be immediately killed and much of the planet's built infrastructure destroyed, but the planet earth's natural systems would be so altered that the extinction of complex life forms, among them homo sapiens, might result. The detonation of numerous nuclear weapons and the resultant burning of cities would probably dramatically alter the earth's atmosphere, depleting the ozone layer that protects life from lethal solar radiations, and filling the atmosphere with sufficient dust to cause a 'nuclear winter.' At stake in nuclear war, scientists had learned, was not just the fate of nations, but of the earth as a life support system. Conventional accounts of the nuclear age and of the end of the Cold War are loath to admit it, but it I believe it is clear that spreading awareness of these new natural-technological possibilities played a significant role in ending the Cold War and the central role that nuclear arms control occupies in the settlement of the Cold War. Again, traditional ways of achieving security-from-violence were altered by new knowledges about their environmental consequences—security practices and arrangements were partly environmentalized.
Even more radically, I think we can also turn this into a positive project. As I wrote two decades ago, environmental restoration would probably generate political externalities that would dampen tendencies towards violence. In other words, if we address the problem of the environment, then we will be drawn to do various things that will make various types of violent conflict less likely.
Your work is permeated by references to 'material factors'. This makes it different from branches of contemporary IR—like constructivism or postmodernism—which seem to be underpinned by a profound commitment to focus solely one side of the Cartesian divide. What is your take on the pervasiveness and implications of this 'social bias'?
Postmodernism and constructivism are really the most extreme manifestations of a broad trend over the last two centuries toward what I refer to as 'social-social science' and the decline—but hardly the end—of 'natural-social science'. Much of western thought prior to this turn was 'naturalist' and thus tended to downplay both human agency and ideas. At the beginning of the nineteenth century—partly because of the influence of German idealism, partly because of the great liberationist projects that promised to give better consequence to the activities and aspirations of the larger body of human populations (previously sunk in various forms of seemingly natural bondages), and partly because of the great expansion of human choice brought about by the science-based technologies of the Industrial Revolution—there was a widespread tendency to move towards 'social-social science,' the project of attempting to explain the human world solely by reference to the human world, to explain social outcomes with reference to social causes. While this was the dominant tendency, and a vastly productive one in many ways, it existed alongside and in interaction with what is really a modernized version of the earlier 'natural-social science.' Much of my work has sought to 'bring back in' and extend these 'natural-social' lines of argument—found in figures such as Dewey and H.G. Wells—into our thinking about the planetary situation.
In many parts of both European and American IR and related areas, Postmodern and constructivist theories have significantly contributed to IR theorists by enhancing our appreciation of ideas, language, and identities in politics. As a response to the limits and blindnesses of certain types of rationalist, structuralist, and functional theories, this renewed interest in the ideational is an important advance. Unfortunately, both postmodernism and constructivism have been marked by a strong tendency to go too far in their emphasis of the ideational. Postmodernism and constructivism have also helped make theorists much more conscious of the implicit—and often severely limiting—ontological assumptions that underlay, inform, and bound their investigations. This is also a major contribution to the study of world politics in all its aspects.
Unfortunately, this turn to ontology has also had intellectually limiting effects by going too far, in the search for a pure or nearly pure social ontology. With the growth in these two approaches, there has indeed been a decided decline in theorizing about the material. But elsewhere in the diverse world of theorizing about IR and the global, theorizing about the material never came anything close to disappearing or being eclipsed. For anyone thinking about the relationships between politics and nuclear weapons, space, and the environment, theorizing about the material has remained at the center, and it would be difficult to even conceive of how theorizing about the material could largely disappear. The recent 're-discovery of the material' associated with various self-styled 'new materialists' is a welcome, if belated, re-discovery for postmodernists and constructivists. For most of the rest of us, the material had never been largely dropped out.
A very visible example of the ways in which the decline in appropriate attention to the material, an excessive turn to the ideational, and the quest for a nearly pure social ontology, can lead theorizing astray is the core argument in Alexander Wendt's main book, Social Theory of International Politics, one of the widely recognized landmarks of constructivist IR theory. The first part of the book advances a very carefully wrought and sophisticated argument for a nearly pure ideational social ontology. The material is explicitly displaced into a residue or rump of unimportance. But then, to the reader's surprise, the material, in the form of 'common fate' produced by nuclear weapons, and climate change, reappears and is deployed to play a really crucial role in understanding contemporary change in world politics.
My solution is to employ a mixed ontology. By this I mean that I think several ontologically incommensurate and very different realities are inescapable parts the human world. These 'unlikes' are inescapable parts of any argument, and must somehow be combined. There are a vast number of ways in which they can be combined, and on close examination, virtually all arguments in the social sciences are actually employing some version of a mixed ontology, however implicitly and under-acknowledged.
But not all combinations are equally useful in addressing all questions. In my version of mixed ontology—which I call 'practical naturalism'—human social agency is understood to be occurring 'between two natures': on the one hand the largely fixed nature of humans, and on the other the changing nature composed of the material world, a shifting amalgam of actual non-human material nature of geography and ecology, along with human artifacts and infrastructures. Within this frame, I posit as rooted in human biological nature, a set of 'natural needs,' most notably for security-from-violence and habitat services. Then I pose questions of functionality, by which I mean: which combinations of material practices, political structures, ideas and identities are needed to achieve these ends in different material contexts? Answering this question requires the formulation of various 'historical materialist' propositions, which in turn entails the systematic formulation of typologies and variation in both the practices, structures and ideas, and in material contexts. These arguments are not centered on explaining what has or what will happen. Instead they are practical in the sense that they are attempting to answer the question of 'what is to be done' given the fixed ends and given changing material contexts. I think this is what advocates of arms control and environmental sustainability are actually doing when they claim that one set of material practices and their attendant political structures, identities and ideas must be replaced with another if basic human needs are to going to continue to be meet in the contemporary planetary material situation created by the globalization of machine civilization on earth.
Since this set of arguments is framed within a mixed ontology, ideas and identities are a vital part of the research agenda. Much of the energy of postmodern and many varieties of critical theory have focused on 'deconstructing' various identities and ideas. This critical activity has produced and continues to produce many insights of theorizing about politics. But I think there is an un-tapped potential for theorists who are interested in ideas and identities, and who want their work to make a positive contribution to practical problem-solving in the contemporary planetary human situation in what might be termed a 'constructive constructivism'. This concerns a large practical theory agenda—and an urgent one at that, given the rapid increase in planetary problems—revolving around the task of figuring out which ideas and identities are appropriate for the planetary world, and in figuring out how they can be rapidly disseminated. Furthermore, thinking about how to achieve consciousness change of this sort is not something ancillary to the greenpeace project but vital to it. My thinking on how this should and might be done centers the construction of a new social narrative, centered not on humanity but on the earth.
Is it easy to plug your mixed ontology and interests beyond the narrow confines of IR or even the walls of the ivory tower into processes of collective knowledge proliferation in IR—a discipline increasingly characterized by compartimentalization and specialization?
The great plurality of approaches in IR today is indispensible and a welcome change. The professionalization of IR and the organization of intellectual life has some corruptions and pitfalls that are best avoided. The explosion of 'isms' and of different perspectives has been valuable and necessary in many ways, but it has also helped to foster and empower sectarian tendencies that confound the advance of knowledge. Some of the adherents of some sects and isms boast openly of establishing 'citation cartels' to favor themselves and their friends. Some theorists also have an unfortunate tendency to assume that because they have adopted a label that what they actually do is the actually the realization of the label. Thus we have 'realists' with limited grasp on realities, 'critical theorists' who repeat rather than criticize the views of other 'critical theorists,' and anti-neoliberals who are ruthless Ayn Rand-like self aggrandizers. The only way to fully address these tendencies is to talk to people you disagree with, and find and communicate with people in other disciplines.
Another consequence of this sectarianism is visible in the erosion of scholarly standards of citation. The system of academic incentives is configured to reward publication, and the publication of ideas that are new. This has a curiously perverse impact on the achievement of cumulativity. One seemingly easy and attractive path to saying something new is to say something old in new language, to say something said in another sect or field in the language of your sect or field, or easiest of all, simply ignore what other people have said if it is too much like what you are trying to say. George Santyana is wide quoted in saying that 'those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.' For academics it can unfortunately be said, 'those who can successfully forget what past academics said are free to say it again, and thus advance toward tenure.' When rampant sectarianism and decline in standards of citation is combined with a broader cultural tendency to valorize self-expression and authenticity, academic work can become an exercise in abstract self expressionism.
Confining one's intellectual life within one 'ism' or sect is sure to be self-limiting. Many of the most important and interesting questions arise between and across the sects and schools. Also, there are great opportunities in learning from people who do not fully share your assumptions and approaches. Seriously engaging the work and ideas of scholars in other sects can be very very valuable. Scholars in different sects and schools are also often really taking positions that are not so different as their labels would suggest. Perhaps because my research agenda fits uncomfortably within any of the established schools and isms, I have found particularly great value in seeking out and talking on a sustained basis with people with very different approaches.
My final question is about normativity and the way that normativity is perceived: In Europe and the United States, liberal Internationalism is increasingly considered as hollowed out, as a discursive cover for a tendency to attempt to control and regulate the world—or as an unguided idealistic missile. Doesn't adapting to a post-hegemonic world require dropping such ambitions?
American foreign policy has never been entirely liberal internationalist. Many other ideas and ideologies and approaches have often played important roles in shaping US foreign policy. But the United States, for a variety of reasons, has pursued liberal internationalist foreign policy agendas more extensively, and successfully, than any other major state in the modern state system, and the world, I think, has been made better off in very important ways by these efforts.
The net impact of the United States and of American grand strategy and particularly those parts of American brand strategy that have been more liberal internationalist in their character, has been enormously positive for the world. It has produced not a utopia by any means, but has brought about an era with more peace and security, prosperity, and freedom for more people than ever before in history.
Both American foreign policy and liberal internationalism have been subject to strong attacks from a variety of perspectives. Recently some have characterized liberal internationalism as a type of American imperialism, or as a cloak for US imperialism. Virtually every aspect of American foreign policy has been contested within the United States. Liberal internationalists have been strong enemies of imperialism and military adventurism, whether American or from other states. This started with the Whig's opposition to the War with Mexico and the Progressive's opposition to the Spanish-American War, and continued with liberal opposition to the War in Vietnam.
The claim that liberal internationalism leads to or supports American imperialism has also been recently voiced by many American realists, perhaps most notably John Mearsheimer (Theory Talk #49). He and others argue that liberal internationalism played a significant role in bringing about the War on Iraq waged by the W. Bush administration. This was indeed one of the great debacles of US foreign policy. But the War in Iraq was actually a war waged by American realists for reasons grounded in realist foreign policy thinking. It is true, as Mearsheimer emphasizes, that many academic realists criticized the Bush administration's plans and efforts in the invasion in Iraq. Some self-described American liberal internationalists in the policy world supported the war, but almost all academic American liberal internationalists were strongly opposed, and much of the public opposition to the war was on grounds related to liberal internationalist ideas.
It is patently inaccurate to say that main actors in the US government that instigated the War on Iraq were liberal internationalists. The main initiators of the war were Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Whatever can be said about those two individuals, they are not liberal internationalists. They initiated the war because they thought that the Saddam Hussein regime was a threat to American interests—basically related to oil. The Saddam regime was seen as a threat to American-centered regional hegemony in the Middle East, an order whose its paramount purpose has been the protection of oil, and the protection of the regional American allies that posses oil. Saddam Hussein was furthermore a demonstrated regional revisionist likely to seek nuclear weapons, which would greatly compromise American military abilities in the region. Everything else the Bush Administration's public propaganda machine said to justify the war was essentially window dressing for this agenda. Far from being motivated by a liberal internationalist agenda the key figures in the Bush Administration viewed the collateral damage to international institutions produced by the war as a further benefit, not a cost, of the war. It is particularly ironic that John Mearsheimer would be a critic of this war, which seems in many ways a 'text book' application of a central claim of his 'offensive realism,' that powerful states can be expected, in the pursuit of their security and interests, to seek to become and remain regional hegemons.
Of course, liberal internationalism, quite aside from dealing with these gross mischaracterizations propagated by realists, must also look to the future. The liberal internationalism that is needed for today and tomorrow is going to be in some ways different from the liberal internationalism of the twentieth century. This is a large topic that many people, but not enough, are thinking about. In a recent working paper for the Council on Foreign Relations, John Ikenberry and I have laid out some ways in which we think American liberal internationalism should proceed. The starting point is the recognition that the United States is not as 'exceptional' in its precocious liberal-democratic character, not as 'indispensible' for the protection of the balance of power or the advance of freedom, or as easily 'hegemonic' as it has been historically. But the world is now also much more democratic than ever before, with democracies old and new, north and south, former colonizers and former colonies, and in every civilizational flavor. The democracies also face an array of difficult domestic problems, are thickly enmeshed with one another in many ways, and have a vital role to play in solving global problems. We suggest that the next liberal internationalism in American foreign policy should focus on American learning from the successes of other democracies in solving problems, focus on 'leading by example of successful problem-solving' and less with 'carrots and sticks,' make sustained efforts to moderate the inequalities and externalities produced by de-regulated capitalism, devote more attention to building community among the democracies, and make sustained efforts to 'recast global bargains' and the distribution of authority in global institutions to better incorporate the interests of 'rising powers.'
Daniel Deudney is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. He has published widely in political theory and international relations, on substantive issues such as nuclear weapons, the environment as a security issue, liberal and realist international relations theory, and geopolitics.
Related links
Deudney's Faculty Profile at Johns Hopkins Read Deudney & Ikenberry's Democratic Internationalism: An American Grand Strategy for a Post-exceptionalist Era (Council on Foreign Relations Working Paper, 2012) here (pdf) Read Deudney et al's Global Shift: How the West Should Respond to the Rise of China (2011 Transatlantic Academy report) here (pdf) Read the introduction of Deudney's Bounding Power (2007) here (pdf) Read Deudney's Bringing Nature Back In: Geopolitical Theory from the Greeks to the Global Era (1999 book chapter) here (pdf) Read Deudney & Ikenberry's Who Won the Cold War? (Foreign Policy, 1992) here (pdf) Read Deudney's The Case Against Linking Environmental Degradation and National Security (Millennium, 1990) here (pdf) Read Deudney's Rivers of Energy: The Hydropower Potential (WorldWatch Institute Paper, 1981) here (pdf)
It has taken me a long time to write a follow up to my first post on Bizarro World. That is because once you begin to think about the strange inversions in which the persecuted are made out to be threats, and the comfortable are made out to be threatened, it is hard to not see it. Our entire world seems reversed and inverted, those who are most subject to violence are made into violent threats, and those who are most comfortable have made the threats to their comfort our central concern with the claims of cancel culture. Bizarro world would be one of those "descriptive theories" that Althusser talks about, something that stops thinking because it seems to be such an accurate description of what one is thinking about. I have decided to approach the topic by breaking it up, by trying to grasp the specificity of the different reversals, following what I did earlier with the inversion of the relation of workers and capitalists to that of the relation of human capital and job providers I would now like to examine the way in which margins and mainstream have also become inverted, and what that inversion means for both terms in question, the dominant culture and the marginal subculture. In doing so I would like to start with a particular philosophy, or spontaneous philosophy, that characterized my life as a young teenager. As a nerdy kid interested in comic books, science fiction, and other things, I fostered the belief, shared by many of my kind, that our rather minor marginalization made us sympathetic to the marginalization of others. This was helped in large part by the fact that many of the dominant comic books when I was growing up, such as the X-Men, Spider-Man, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, were all in some sense allegories of oppression and exclusion. With respect to the first in the list, the idea that the X-Men stand in for an oppressed minority, complete with the conflict between Professor X's integrationist philosophy and Magneto's more militant position, is so entrenched in its reception that it ceases to be subtext (even if it is not true). Comic books were at least in the eighties, both in their culture and in their content, stories of the misunderstood, the maligned, and the excluded. One could raise two questions about this mythology. The first has to do with the allegorical distance of framing the stories of marginalization and exclusion through such science fiction content as genetic mutation, or, in other contexts, alien visitors or androids. In some sense these science fiction elements set up the necessary allegorical distance to make the stories palpable as entertainment. The condition of possibility is the condition of impossibility, however, in that the detouring of exclusion and marginalization through such allegories as the "mutant menace" always made it possible that some readers would miss the point. That people actually did is demonstrated by the twitter posts that ask in all sincerity "When did X become political?" where the X in question is some bit of pop culture such as X-Men or Star Trek that was always steeped in political subtexts. Such posts miss the point, but the possibility of missing the point is inscribed in the text in question and is a necessary condition of its popularity. Of course there are comics, television shows, and books that bridged this allegoric divide, more directly connecting the fictional exclusion of mutants and aliens with the actual history of oppression, but they are to some extent exceptions. There is something awkward, however, when the history of imagined exclusions confronts the real history of discrimination. There are the moments when we realize that the Nazis were an actual political ideology, and not just bad guys that seem ready for the four color word of comics. Second, and more importantly, one could argue that the marginalization I felt at the time was slight and temporary, I was (and remain) a white cis male, after all, and being bullied after school, or made fun of in the back of the bus, is nothing compared to what other adolescents face, nor does it really deserve a place in the ongoing history of persecution and discrimination. However, becoming an outcast of sorts, a nerd, and later a punk, can be understood as a becoming minor in Deleuze and Guattari's sense. For Deleuze and Guattari majority and minor are not simply quantitative matters, but the relation between constant and variable. As Deleuze and Guattari write, "Majority implies a constant, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure by which to evaluate it. Let us suppose that the constant or standard is the average adult-white-heterosexual-European-male-speaking a standard language. It is obvious that "man" holds the majority even if he is less numerous than mosquitos, children, women, blacks, peasants, homosexuals, etc. That is because he appears twice, once in the constant and again in the variable from which the constant is extracted."Since we are speaking of comic books, it is worth noting that superhero comics themselves illustrate this majority, not just in the proliferation of various prefixes appearing before the world "man"," bat, super, iron, spider, etc., man is the constant, the norm, but in the fact that white and male is the unstated norm from which the first "black," "Asian," or gay superhero takes their meaning. Marvel comics in particulr does not bother to create new characters and superpowers it is enough to add "-woman" or "she" to Spider or the Hulk to create a new character. The deviations appear meaningful because the norm is assumed. While this is true of comics, and begins to illustrate the limits of the social justice dimension I alluded to above, I think that becoming a comics nerd is itself a kind of becoming-minor. To quote Deleuze and Guattari again, "Minorities, of course, are objectively definable states, states of language, ethnicity, or sex with their own ghetto territorialities, but they must also be thought of as seeds, crystals of becoming whose value is to trigger uncontrollable movements and deterritorializations of the mean or majority."Not to be too autobiographical, but I would describe my entire life as a passage through different minorities, different subcultures, comics, punk, philosophy, etc., all of these where very different territories, with different languages and cultures, but the overall movement was an attempt to evade majority, to not be the constant, a position which Deleuze and Guattari argue, is all the more oppressive because it is occupied by no one. If all of this language of major and minor seems a bit baroque, then I am reminded of a passage from Deleuze and Guattari that seems uncharacteristically direct. After a few lines that state "There is no subject of the becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of the majority; there is no medium of becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of a minority," they bring up a historical/literary example, writing, "As Faulkner said, to avoid ending up a fascist there was no other choice but to become black." This cuts through the particular neologism to make the stakes clear. Such an assertion has a lot to unpack, but I would argue here that a lot of subcultures, especially those that embrace their deviations and exclusions from the mainstream and are, it is worth saying primarily but not exclusively white, are attempts to avoid becoming fascist, to avoid being part of the majority. You cannot change the color of your skin, but you can change the color of your hair, and that seems like enough especially if it gets the same people to hate you. That is my all too glib summation of some of the politics of punk aesthetics. My main reason for bringing up this little theory of subcultures, as well as the subtext of comic books, now is that it seems to have completely exhausted itself. Comic books, or, more to the point, superheroes, have gone from the margins of our culture to the center. They are the dominant culture, have become majoritarian, and as much as one would like to think that they have carried with it their fundamental minoritarian political aspect the opposite seems to be the case. Love of mutants and other imaginary minorities has not extended to a support for actually existing marginalized groups, but has been mobilized to not only perpetuate exclusions but to become the voice of the majority.In part this happens through the politics of nostalgia, which demands that the present, the film adaptation, identically recalls the past, which in this case means that the film must resemble comics written in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, complete with the racial politics of those eras. There have been online freak outs over the casting of Idris Elba to play Heimdall in Thor, of John Boyega playing a central role in Star Wars, of Moses Ingram appearing in Obi Wan Kenobi. These deviations from some supposed canon have all been met with vicious online hate campaigns that have led actors to shut down accounts and retreat from the digital public sphere. The demand to preserve the sanctity of one's childhood memories has led to absolute hostility towards any of the social change that has happened since one was a child. Lest this all seem incredibly minor (in the conventional sense) and all too online, I would argue that this cultural nostalgia, the demand that the present match the past, has been thoroughly weaponized into MAGA nostalgia. This hostility is not limited to changes to the canon, but is extended to include even new characters and stories that do not so much recast or change past memories but create new ones. Both Ms. Marvel and She Hulk have been "review bombed" on online review sites, hit with a flurry of negative reviews almost before they air primarily for the crime of casting a muslim woman or a woman in a comic book themed show. There seems to be an entire online niche of people who hate Brie Larson for not only playing Captain Marvel, but for speaking up for diversity in film and film criticism. We live in an age in which a film that was basically an hour and half long recruitment advertisement for the Air Force is seen by its critics as too woke, too concerned with social justice, because of its cast. All of this criticism coalesces in the online mantra, "Get Woke, Go Broke" which threatens companies and brands with boycotts for embracing "social justice."The world of comic book fans has been no less critical of those who criticize their beloved films for their artistic merits. Martin Scorsese famously declared that Marvel films are not cinema, and he has been ridiculed online ever since. It is not enough that these films, the Marvel films, be commercially dominant, being the most financially successful films that are released each year, and culturally dominant, reshaping all of popular culture in their image, they also most be loved and revered by everyone. Dissent cannot be tolerated. Blockbusters must be acknowledged as art. It is at this point that we get our bizarro world inversion of the comic book nerd. The fan of comic book movies is now something of a "sore winner," who continues to act the victim, marginalized, even in his dominance. I would argue that this "sore winner" idea is integral to our contemporary version of the majority, and even fascism to recall the quote about Faulkner. We are far from Deleuze and Guattari's image of a majority that is all the more powerful in being unstated, in being assumed, now dominance, cultural, political, and economic, focuses on its apparent marginalization in order precisely to reassert its dominance. The inversion is not just that comic books have gone from margins to mainstream, but that marginalization has gone from being the basis of empathy to an expression of dominance. Victimhood is the language of domination. The bizarro world that we are living in is not just that what was once the obsession of a few has become the culture of many, that Moon Knight is now practically a household name, but that grievance against perceived marginalization has become the language of the majority.
Plekhanov/Labriola As a bit of an experiment, coupling my interest in André Tosel and my work on translation, I have decided to try my hand at a few translations of the former when I get the time. These are totally unauthorized, and rough drafts posted for edification and entertainment purposes only. I started on this piece because it is short, and because it works on an area that I need to learn more about, the history of Marxist-Spinozism before Matheron or Althusser. However, the more I worked on this piece, the more I thought that this split between Plekhanov and Labriola, still exists, in the divide between neo-enlightenment Spinozists and what some might call post-modern, but I prefer to call Marxist Spinozists. The Marxist Uses of Spinoza: Lessons of Method The history of the role of Spinoza's thought in the formation and the development of the work of Marx remains to be written, as is that of the history of the diverse Marxist usage (from different Marxisms) of Spinozist philosophical elements. This double history would reveal the work of Marx, and its contradictions, as much it would open up the work of Spinoza himself. Marxisms have reflected their aporias and their hopes onto Spinoza without necessarily truly thinking them through. In other words this is a domain of misunderstandings and equivocations. In order to undertake this history it would be useful to draw some lessons from the encounter of Marx and Marxist thought with Spinoza. First remark. The encounters of Spinoza by Marxists are discontinuous and contradictory. This discontinuity is initially characterized by the lack of a definitive encounter between Marx himself and Spinoza. Marx is formed through the reading of Spinoza, of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, and the correspondence. Not to learn the lessons of materialism, but an ethico-political lesson. Spinoza is considered as philosopher of freedom and autonomy, modern incarnation of Prometheus and continuation of Epicurus, all at once. Marx, in is progression from Kantian-Fichtean idealism to the speculative communism of the 1844 Manuscripts, develops three theses which are the practical theses of philosophical materialism, without the epistemological and ontological theses of this materialist tradition. Thesis One: Philosophy has a fundamental interest in the liberty of humanity, understood as autonomy and as the end of all heteronomies. Thesis Two: Philosophy is critical of all transcendental authorities of all principle of domination which justify and represent their domination through this principle. Thesis Three: Philosophy is eminently a science, knowledge, but knowledge of life, of the simple life of spirit of bodies rendered by their power. All particular sciences and knowledge must be thought from the point of view of science of life and its forms, as forms of life. When Marx elaborates the materialist conception of history he revolutionizes materialism but he does this without ever connecting it to the spinozist theory of nature, of the relations of extension and thought, of bodies and mind. He integrates and modifies the strong ontological and epistemological thesis of materialism, but these theses are taken more from Hobbes and other materialists of the eighteenth century than from Spinoza. Let us state these theses which are capable of a Spinozist formulation, without however assuming such a formulation. Thesis Four: Nature is the original reality and it is organized as matter at different objective levels. Thought cannot be separated from matter. Thesis Five: Nature in its diverse senses is intelligible. It emerges only from itself, excluding all creation. The human order is not a kingdom within a kingdom and susceptible of being understood. Thesis Six: All knowledge presupposes the reality of its object outside of thought. The appropriation by the knowledge of its own object of knowledge presupposes the reference to a real object. It is necessary to pay attention to the debates in Marxism of the Second International in order to see how the question of "Spinoza precursor of Marxist materialism appears." Emerging in the years of the crisis of revisionism the debate engages above all the German and Russian theorists of social democracy: Bernstein, Kautsky, and Plekhanov. It is in part based on the Anti-Dühring of Friedrich Engels and puts into play the complex questions of the relationship between the materialist theory of history with the sciences of nature with the political problem of the alliance of the intellectual groups in the perspective of socialist transition. This debate between 1896-1900 is inscribed in a theoretical problematic, such of Marxist orthodoxy that will find a new actualization with the problems proper to Soviet philosophy between 1917 and 1931, when it is a matter of specifying what would be called "Marxism-Leninism." If the question of materialism assumes the continuity between the Spinoza of the Second International and that of the Third, nothing would be more erroneous than to let oneself be taken in by the apparent continuity of an imaginary history of philosophy. These occurrences are in effect specific, they constitute theoretical and political conjunctures which must be grasped in a way that takes into account the strategic dimensions of the class struggle whether or not it is led by Marxist parties, the problem of alliances, that of the intellectual division of labor. Marxist philosophy, as it is officially constituted, is part of the practice of parties, and the reference to Spinoza is overdetermined by the political and theoretical stakes that have to be elucidated in each specific situation. Here we touch on the second lesson of method: it is necessary to historically specify the conjunctures where Spinoza intervenes and where and how there is a specific usage of this prestigious and troubling reference. This method makes it possible to determine what falls under ideological legitimation, and what is inserted at the level of the practical politics of the party, of the state, of the level of specialized intellectuals. Spinoza does not only appear only in the emergence of Marxist orthodoxy. He intervenes, in a subterranean manner, in the elaboration of theorists where the considerable theoretical importance has never been associated with an actual political importance. This can be found in the crisis over revisionism in the last century, such that Antonio Labriola in his Essays on the Materialist Conception of History (1895-1898) attests to the presence of a different Spinoza than that of his contemporary Plekhanov and a fortiori than that which was celebrated in Soviet Philosophy in 1927 and 1932. Spinoza intervenes as a critic of the same orthodoxy which returns as elements of an older materialism in another theoretical configuration that has solicited different aspects of his philosophy: no longer the parallelism between extension and thought, not a determinist ontology but the mode considered to be at once conceptual and experimental, the same geometrico-genetic method, in that it now excludes the guarantees of teleological philosophies of history. A contradictory intervention which is not without analogies to another occurrence, the most recent, that of Spinoza in the work of Louis Althusser which can be considered as a systematic deconstruction of the Marxist orthodoxy of the Second and Third International. Between Labriola (1898) and Althusser (1965), if we except the Soviet Spinoza, there is little except Ernst Bloch's remarks that no one has yet taken into account for a history of materialism oriented in the direction of a utopian ontology. This appearance of a Spinoza critical of stated and intended Marxist orthodoxies gives a third lesson of method: the diverse contradictory Marxist uses of Spinoza are situated between two poles, the first is that of an orthodoxy elaborated by the intellectuals of the social democratic and communist parties at the end of an a party/state conception of a finalist world and at the other is from thinkers situated in a problematic relation to the party, who look in Spinoza for other ways to make sense of the world and other practices then the becoming state of the worker parties. This opposition can appear to be schematic. It can be developed into provisional and schematic path of investigation. Such an investigation takes one central question: What is it in the philosophy of Spinoza that authorizes these discontinuous usages, determined by their conjunctures, and perhaps violently opposed? Confronting therefore these different usages of Spinoza that can be considered historically significant in the course of history, that is to say in terms of their specific conjunctures. This can be seen with the orthodox use of Spinoza by Plekhanov and the critical usage of Spinoza by Labriola at the heart of the second international. Plekhanov gave himself the task of elaborating the originality of Marx's philosophy and defending it in the face of revisionists who, with Bernstein, contest the self-sufficiency of Marx's philosophy, dividing into an evolutionary sociology and a Kantian inspired ethics. For Plekhanov there is very much a Marxist philosophy. It is inscribed in the materialist current which it revitalizes by giving it a historical dialectical dimension. Spinoza is the direct ancestor of Marx in that it is through the monism of the former that one can unify the science of nature and the science of history of the latter. Marx has revitalized substance as historical-social matter, metabolism of humanity with nature, and has inherited his realist theory of knowledge, thought is nothing other than a moment or function of matter. There is a Spinozism of Marx that is the realization of historical Spinozism as a the affirmation of the materialist conception of the world, one predicated on the knowability of matter in terms of its organization at diverse levels. Only this conception of the world can give the workers' movement its organization and which would permit it to avoid the disorganization that revisionism introduces, neo-Kantian idealism cannot organize the class struggle without harmful compromises. Spinoza is one part of orthodox Marxism returned to during this period. This Spinoza can authorize the theses of Friedrich Engels, in some sense simplifying the complexity of the Anti-Dühring. Concerned to think together the development of the sciences of nature, the materialist conception of history, and developing a philosophy capable of correct reflection and the movement of the specialization of sciences and the political struggle of classes (alliance with the intellectual stratum), Engles had proposed the idea of a materialist dialectic that oscillates between an ontological conception and a methodological conception of this dialectic. These two conceptions are apparently unified in the idea of "the science of the general laws of motion, both of the external world and of human thought — two sets of laws which are identical in substance, but differ in their expression in so far as the human mind can apply them consciously, while in nature and human history (at least up to now), these laws assert themselves unconsciously, in the form of external necessity, in the midst of an endless series of seeming accidents." This parallelism between (laws of) movement of the external world and (the laws of) thought has a Spinozist connotation which reinforces the idea of liberty as the comprehension of necessary laws. However, it remains above all intended to make possible a representation of the dialectic under materialism, without examining its own difficulties. Plekhanov is not interested in these difficulties in elaborating a general materialist conception that Marx completes and fulfills through the mediation of Hegel. Antonio Labriola, who wrote "Origin and Nature of the Passions According to Spinoza's Ethics" at a young age (1866), refuses this ontologization or methodolization of the dialectic in order to develop the idea of a philosophy of praxis as a philosophy immanent to a new conception of history, reflecting the constitution of history as a complex unifying ground and surface. In this sense, the Plekhanov project, apparently Spinozist, of thinking the continuity of nature and society at the heart of a substantial and homogenous causality loses its sense. The process of social life must be desubstantialized at with it the philosophy that is presented as a hyperphilosophy or super science organized as "theosophic or metaphysic of the totality of the world, as if by an act of a transcendent knowledge we can arrive at a vision of substance and all of the phenomena and processes under it." Antonino Labriola as much as he refuses to make man an 'kingdom in a kingdom' refuses the naturalization of history and the transformation of Marxism into a naturalist ontology where social practice becomes a species of being in general. Labriola denounces a matter found on things as a form of metaphysical superstition. Spinoza is evoked as a hero in the struggle against the imagination and ignorance that resurfaces in Marxist orthodoxy under the form of universal materialism. It is necessary above all to think of the diverse levels of the "animation" of matter, and therefore the specificity of the "artificial terrain" which constitutes practice. What Spinoza knew how to do for the theory of passions must be done for praxis: each one, the relations of affects and and those that constitute praxis, are not ruled by a subject and for this reason must be studied through a genetic method. Labriola speaks of a genetic method that also defines the method of Marx in Capital. The genetic method takes its distance from the dialectic and its teleological philosophy of history and established guarantees. For Labriola the turn to Spinoza is less about the strengthening of a materialist monism than it is about the possibility of reinterpreting Marx's Capital as a geometry of capitalist social being. The geometrical method is an instrument of internal purification destined to eliminate the finalism of productive causes and biological predetermination from Marxist orthodoxy. The philosophy of praxis manifests the basic critical and formal tendency of monism: everything is conceivable as a the causal genesis of a complex totality. The materialist dialectic is neither a universal method nor a logic of being, but constitutes the critical movement internal to knowledge which acts on the practice of philosophy and makes it a "conceptual form of explication" parallel to contemporary science. The reference to Spinoza intervenes in the critique of a Marxist orthodoxy which is supposed to include in a dogmatic manner Spinoza's own materialism. Marx and Spinoza are considered as two practitioners of philosophy who refuse the closure of knowledge in favor of the immanent self-reflection of knowledge. The lesson of Spinoza is not to find the unity of knowledge under a principle but to demystify the fetishes which substitute imaginary principles for the movement of practice. One could develop a similar analysis of the confrontation of the Soviet Spinoza of the Third International to the Spinoza of Louis Althusser. The Soviet Spinoza is an impoverished and petrified version of the Spinoza of Plekhanov. With respect to Althusser, Spinoza's critique is referenced constantly and augmented, infinitely better elaborated than in Labriola, since it acts this time not as a critique of metaphysical fetishism, even materialist, but of the metaphysics of the juridical subject characteristic of occidental rationalism. The contributions of R. Zapata and J.-P. Cottent have clarified these points, but it seems opportune to underly the paradox of this history: it is possible to tie together the diverse uses of Spinoza, one against the other. If Spinoza is enrolled in the constitution of a "conception of the world" which intends to complete a current of philosophy and which cannot at any time criticize its presuppositions, it is also possible, as with Althusser, to think the structure of ideological interpellation that constitutes the ideological subject and invalidates philosophy considered as a theory of knowledge. If Spinoza makes possible a conception of the world in which the State Party is supposed to be the subject of history accomplishing its ultimate ends, it also makes it possible for Althusser to try to reconstruct Marxist theory on the ruins of the triple myth of origin, subject, and the end. The Labriolian critique of imaginatio and ignorantia is radically interiorized in the destruction of Marxisms of the Second and Third International. The recourse to structural causality supposed to have been developed in the theory of modes and substance serves as an incomplete program to develop the theoretical revolution of Marx. However, it goes further still: there are two Spinoza's in Althusser himself. The Spinoza critical of any theory of knowledge ultimately occludes the Spinoza of structural causality: the denunciation of the triple myth of origin, subject, and end is lead to the liquidation of the rational modernism present in Marx. However the pars destruens always prevails over the pars construens. The idea of structural causality (such that of substance as the absent cause over the modes and affects) is accompanied with the affirmation of an unknown radicality of Marxist science, but the critique of the metaphysics of subjectivity in the teleology of Marxism that accompanies it announces the crises of Marxist liberation in the last interventions of Althusser. Everything comes to pass as if Althusser deconstructs a dogmatic Spinoza in the name of another Spinoza, more secret and more enigmatic. Spinoza is always divided from Spinozism which claims to define himOriginally published in Bloch, Olivier, Editor, Spinoza au XXe siècle, Paris, PUF, 1993.
Mary Elizabeth King on Civil Action for Social Change, the Transnational Women's Movement, and the Arab Awakening
Nonviolent resistance remains by and large a marginal topic to IR. Yet it constitutes an influential idea among idealist social movements and non-Western populations alike, one that has moved to the center stage in recent events in the Middle East. In this Talk, Mary King—who has spent over 40 years promoting nonviolence—elaborates on, amongst others, the women's movement, nonviolence, and civil action more broadly.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the central challenge or principal debate in International Relations? And what is your position regarding this challenge/in this debate?
The field of International Relations is different from Peace and Conflict Studies; it has essentially to do with relationships between states and developed after World War I. In the 1920s, the big debates concerned whether international cooperation was possible, and the diplomatic elite were very different from diplomats today. The roots of Peace and Conflict Studies go back much further. By the late 1800s peace studies already existed in the Scandinavian countries. Studies of industrial strikes in the United States were added by the 1930s, and the field had spread to Europe by the 1940s. Peace and Conflict Studies had firmly cohered by the 1980s, and soon encircled the globe. Broad in spectrum and inherently multi-disciplinary, it is not possible to walk through one portal to enter the field.
To me it is also important that Peace and Conflict studies is not wary of asking the bigger hypothetical questions such as 'Can we built a better world?' 'How do we do a better job at resolving conflicts before they become destructive?' 'How do we create more peaceable societies?' If we do not pose these questions, we are unlikely to find the answers. Some political scientists say that they do not wish to privilege either violence or nonviolent action. I am not in that category, trying not to privilege violence or nonviolent action. The field of peace and conflict studies is value-laden in its pursuit of more peaceable societies. We need more knowledge and study of how conflicts can be addressed without violence, including to the eventual benefit of all the parties and the larger society. When in 1964 Martin Luther King Jr received the Nobel Peace Prize, his remarks in Oslo that December tied the nonviolent struggle in the United States to the whole planet's need for disarmament. He said that the most exceptional characteristic of the civil rights movement was the direct participation of masses of people in it. King's remarks in Oslo were also his toughest call for the use of nonviolent resistance on issues other than racial injustice. International nonviolent action, he said, could be utilized to let global leaders know that beyond racial and economic justice, individuals across the world were concerned about world peace:
I venture to suggest [above all] . . . that . . . nonviolence become immediately a subject for study and for serious experimentation in every field of human conflict, by no means excluding relations between nations . . . which [ultimately] make war. . . .
In the half century since King made his address in Oslo, nonviolent civil resistance has not been allocated even a tiny fraction of the resources for study that have been dedicated to the fields of democratization, development, the environment, human rights, and aspects of national security. Many, many questions beg for research, including intensive interrogation of failures. Among the new global developments with which to be reckoned is the enlarging role of non-state, non-governmental organizations as intermediaries, leading dialogue groups comprised of adversaries discussing disputatious issues and working 'hands-on' to intervene directly in local disputes. The role of the churches and laity in ending Mozambique's civil war comes to mind. One challenge within IR is how to become more flexible in viewing the world, in which the nation state cannot control social change, and with the widening of civil space.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about IR?
I came from a family that was deeply engaged with social issues. My father was the eighth Methodist minister in six generations from North Carolina and Virginia. The Methodist church in both Britain and the United States has a history of concern for social responsibility ― a topic of constant discussion in my home as a child and young adult. When four African American students began the southern student sit-in movement in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960, by sitting-in at a Woolworth's lunch counter, I was still in college. Although I am white, I began to think about how to join the young black people who were intentionally violating the laws of racial segregation by conducting sit-ins at lunch counters across the South. Soon more white people, very like me, were joining them, and the sweep of student sit-ins had become truly inter-racial. The sit-in movement is what provided the regional base for what would become a mass U.S. civil rights movement, with tens of thousands of participants, defined by the necessity for fierce nonviolent discipline. So, coming from a home where social issues were regularly discussed it was almost natural for me to become engaged in the civil rights movement. And I have remained engaged with such issues for the rest of my life, while widening my aperture. Today I work on a host of questions related to conflict, building peace, gender, the combined field of gender and peace-building, and nonviolent or civil resistance. At a very young age, I had started thinking as a citizen of the world and watching what was happening worldwide, rather than merely in the United States.
Martin Luther King (to whom I am not related) would become one of history's most influential agents for propagating knowledge of the potential for constructive social change without resorting to violence. He was the most significant exemplar for what we simply called The Movement. Yet the movement had two southern organizations: in 1957 after the success of the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56, he created, along with others, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The other organization was the one for which I worked for four years: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pron. snick), which initially came into being literally to coordinate among the leaders of the student sit-in campaigns. As the sit-ins spread across the South, 70,000 black, and, increasingly, white, students participated. By the end of 1960, 3,600 would have been jailed.
SCLC and SNCC worked together but had different emphases: one of our emphases in SNCC was on eliciting leadership representing the voices of those who had been ignored in the past. We identified many women with remarkable leadership skills and sought to strengthen them. We wanted to build institutions that would make it easier for poor black southern communities to become independent and move out of the 'serfdom' in which they lived. Thus we put less prominence on large demonstrations, which SCLC often emphasized. Rather, we stressed the building of alternative (or parallel) institutions, including voter registration, alternative political parties, cooperatives, and credit unions.
What would a student need (dispositions, skills) to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
One requirement is a subject that has virtually disappeared from the schools in the United States: the field of geography. It used to be taught on every level starting in kindergarten, but has now been melded into a mélange called 'social sciences'. You would be surprised at how much ignorance exists and how it affects effectiveness. I served for years on the board of directors of an esteemed international non-profit private voluntary organization and recall a secretary who thought that Africa was a country. This is not simplistic — if you don't know the names of continents, countries, regions, and the basic political and economic history, it's much harder to think critically about the world. Secondly, students need to possess an attitude of reciprocity and mutuality. No perfect country exists; there is no nirvana without intractable problems in our world. No society, for example, has solved the serious problems of gender inequity that impede all spheres of life. Every society has predicaments and problems that need to be addressed, necessitating a constant process. So we each need to stand on a platform in which every nation can improve the preservation of the natural environment, the way it monitors and protects human rights, transitions to democratic systems, the priority it places on the empowerment of women, and so on. On this platform, concepts of inferior and superior are of little value.
You also co-authored an article in 1965 about the role of women and how working in a political movement for equality (the civil rights movement) has affected your perceptions of the relationship between men and women. Do you believe that the involvement of women in the Civil Rights Movement brought more gender equality in the USA and do you think involvement in Nonviolent Resistance movements in other places in the world could start such a process?
From within the heart of the civil rights movement I wrote an article with Casey Hayden, with whom I worked in Atlanta in the main office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and in the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964. Casey (Sandra Cason) and I were deeply engaged in a series of conversations involving other women in SNCC about what we had been learning, the lessons from our work aiding poor black people to organize, and asking ourselves whether our insights from being part of SNCC could be applied to other forms of injustice, such as inequality for women. The document reflected our growth and enlarging understanding of how to mobilize communities, how to strategize, how to achieve lasting change, and was a manifestation of this expanding awareness. The title was Sex and Caste – A Kind of Memo. Caste is an ancient Hindu demarcation that not only determines an individual's social standing on the basis of the group into which one is born, but also differentiates and assigns occupational and economic roles. It cannot be changed. Casey and I thought of caste as comparable to the sex of one's birth. Women endure many forms of prejudice, bias, discrimination, and cruelty merely because they are female. For these reasons we chose the term caste. We sent our memorandum to forty women working in local peace and civil rights movements of the United States. The anecdotal evidence is strong that it inspired other women, who started coming together collectively to work on their own self-emancipation in 'consciousness raising groups.' It had appeared in Liberation magazine of the War Resisters League in April 1966 and was a catalyst in spurring the U.S. women's movement; indeed, the consciousness-raising groups fuelled the women's movement in the United States during the 1970s. Historians reflect that the article provided tinder for what is now called 'second-wave feminism', and the 1965 original is anthologized as one of the generative documents of twentieth-century gender studies.
We have to remember that women's organizations are nothing new, but have been poorly documented in history and that much information has been lost. Women have been prime actors for nonviolent social change in many parts of the world for a long time. New Zealand was the first country to grant women the vote, in 1893, after decades of organizing. Other countries followed: China, Iran, later the United States and the United Kingdom. Women in Japan would not vote until 1946. IR expert Fred Halliday contends that one of the most remarkable transnational movements of the modern age was the women's suffrage movement. The movement to enfranchise women may have been the biggest transnational nonviolent movement of human history. It was a significant historical phenomenon that throws light on how it is sometimes easier to bring about social and political change now than in the past.
Nonviolent movements seem to be growing around the world, and not only in dictatorships but also in democracies in Europe and the USA. How do you explain this?
I think that the sharing of knowledge is the answer to this question. Study in the field of nonviolent action has accelerated since the 1970s, often done by people who are both practitioners and scholars, as am I. Organizing nonviolently for social justice is not new, but the knowledge that has consolidated during the last 40 years has been major. The works of Gene Sharp have been significant, widely translated, and are accessible through the Albert EinsteinInstitution. His first major work, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, in three volumes, came out in 1973 (Boston: Porter Sargent Publishers). It marked the development of a new understanding of how this form of cooperative action works, the conditions under which it can be optimized, and the ways in which one can improve effectiveness. Sharp's works have since been translated into more than 40 languages. Also valuable are the works and translations of dozens of other scholars, who often stand on his shoulders. Today there may be 200 scholar-activists in this field worldwide, with a great deal of work now underway in related fields. Knowledge is being shared not only through translated works, but also through organizations and their training programs, such as the War Resisters League International and the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, each of which came into existence in Britain around World War I. Both are still running seminars, training programs, and distributing books. George Lakey's Training for Change and a new database at Swarthmore College that he has developed are sharing knowledge. So is the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, which has built a dramatic record in a short time, having run more than 400 seminars and workshops in more than 139 countries. The three major films that ICNC has produced (for example, 'Bringing Down a Dictator'), have been translated into 20 languages and been publicly broadcast to more than 20 million viewers.
After its success, leaders from the Serbian youth movement Otpor! (Resistance) that in 2000 disintegrated the Slobodan Milošević dictatorship formed a network of activists, including experienced veterans from civil-resistance struggles in South Africa, the Philippines, Lebanon, Georgia, and Ukraine to share their experiences with other movements. People can now more easily find knowledge on the World Wide Web, often in their original language or a second language, and they can find networks that share information about their experiences, including their successes and failures.
I reject the Twitter explanation for the increased use of nonviolent action or civil resistance, because all nonviolent movements appropriate the most advanced technologies available. This pattern is related to the importance of communications for their basic success. Nonviolent mobilizations must be very shrewd in putting across their purpose, their goals and objectives, preparing slogans, and conveying information on how people can become involved. In order for people to join—bearing in mind that numbers are important for success—it is critically important to make clear what goal(s) you are seeking and why you have elected to work with civil resistance. This decision is sometimes hard to understand for people who have suffered great cruelty from their opponent, and who maintain 'but we are the victims', making the sharing of the logic of the technique of civil resistance vital.
What would you say is the importance of Nonviolent Resistance Studies in the field of International Relations and Political Science? And how do you counter those who argue that some forms of structural domination are only ended through violence?
In this case we can look at the evidence and stay away from arguing beliefs or ideology. Thanks to political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, who have produced a discerning work, Why Civil Resistance Works (2011), we now have empirical evidence that removes this question from mystery. They studied 323 violent and nonviolent movements that occurred between 1900 and 2006 and found that the nonviolent campaigns were twice as effective as violent struggles in achieving their goals, while incurring fewer costly fatalities and producing much greater prospects for democratic outcomes after the end of the campaign. They found only one area in which violent movements have been more successful, and that is in secessions. So, we don't need to dwell in the realm of opinion, but can read their findings. Other scholars have written about the same issues using qualitative data ― by doing interviews, developing case studies, and analytical descriptions ― but the work of Chenoweth and Stephan is quantitative, putting it in a different category due to its research methods.
Reading 'Why Civil Resistance Works' it caught my eye that nonviolent campaigns seem less successful in the Middle East and Asia than in other regions. Did you see that also in your own work? And if so, do you have an explanation for it? In addition, do you believe that the 'Arab Awakening' is a significant turn in history, or did the name arise too quickly and will it remain a temporary popular phrase?
What I encountered in working in the Middle East was an expectation, notion, or hope among people that a great leader would save them and bring them out of darkness. This belief seems often to have kept the populace in a state of passivity. Sometimes such pervasive theories of leadership are deeply elitist: one must be well educated to be a leader, one must be born into that role, one must be male, or the first son, etc. Such concepts of leadership discourage the taking of independent civil action.
I think that the Arab Awakening has been significant for a number of reasons. As one example, there had been a widespread (and patronizing) assumption in the United States and the West that the Arabs were not interested in democracy. We have heard from various sources including Israel for decades that Arabs are not attracted to democracy. As a matter of fact, I think that all people want a voice. All human beings wish to be listened to and to be able to express their hopes and aspirations. This is a fundamental basis of democracy and widely applicable, although democracy may take different forms. The Arab Awakening rebutted this arrogant assumption. This does not mean that the course will be easy. One of my Egyptian colleagues said to me, 'We have had dictatorship since 1952, but after Tahir Square you expect us to build a perfect democracy in 52 weeks! It cannot happen!'
Among the first concessions sought by the 2011 Arab revolts was rejection of the right of a dictator's sons to succeed him. The passing of power from father to son has been a characteristic of patriarchal societies, in the Arab world and elsewhere. Anthropologist John Borneman notes, 'The public renunciation of the son's claim to inherit the father's power definitively ends the specific Arab model of succession that has been incorporated into state dictatorships among tribal authorities'. In Tunisia to Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen (not all of which are successes), such movements have sought to end the presumption of father-son inheritance of rule.
I believe that we are seeing the start of a broad democratization process in the Middle East, not its end. The learning and preparation that had been occurring in Egypt prior to Tahrir Square was extensive. Workshops had been underway for 10 to 15 years before people filled Tahrir Square. Women bloggers had for years been monitoring torture and sharing news from outside. One woman blogger translated a comic book into Arabic about the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, from the 1960s, and had it distributed all over Cairo. Labor unions had been very active. According to historian Joel Beinin, from 1998 to 2010 some 3 million laborers took part in 3,500 to 4,000 strikes, sit-ins, demonstrations, and other actions, realizing more than 600 collective labor actions per year in 2007 and 2008. In the years immediately before the revolution, these actions became more coherent. Wael Ghonim, a 30-year-old Google executive, set up a Facebook page and used Google technologies to share ideas and knowledge about what ordinary people can do. The April 6 Youth Movement, set up in 2008, three years before Tahrir, sent one of its members to Belgrade in 2009, to learn how Otpor! had galvanized the bringing down of Milošević. He returned to Cairo with materials and films, lessons from other nonviolent movements, and workshop materials. This all goes back to the sharing of knowledge. Yet the Egyptians have now come to the point where they must assume responsibility and accountability for the whole and make difficult decisions for their society. It will be a long and difficult process. And it raises the question of what kind of help from outside is essential.
Why do you raise this point; do you think outside help is essential?
I know from having studied a large number of nonviolent movements in different parts of the globe that the sharing of lessons laterally among mobilizations and nonviolent struggles is highly effective. African American leaders were traveling by steamer ship from 1919 until the outbreak of World War II to the Indian subcontinent, to learn from Gandhi and the Indian independence struggles. This great interchange between black leaders in the United States and the Gandhian activists, as the historian Sudarshan Kapur shows in Raising Up A Prophet (1992), was critically significant in the solidification of consensus in the U.S. black community on nonviolent means. I have written about how the knowledge moved from East to West in my book Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Scholarly exchanges and interchanges among activists from other struggles are both potentiating and illuminating. Most observers fail to see that nonviolent mobilizations often have very deep roots involving the lateral sharing of experience and know-how.
You have written a book about the first uprising, or 'intifada', in the Occupied Palestinian Territories between 1987 and 1993. The second Palestinian uprising did not contain much nonviolent tactics though. Do you foresee another uprising soon? If not, why? If yes, do you think that Nonviolent Actions will play again an important role in that uprising, or is it more likely to turn violent?
Intifada is linguistically a nonviolent word: It means shaking off and has no violent implication whatsoever. (This word is utterly inappropriate for what happened in the so-called Second Intifada, although it started out as a nonviolent endeavor.) In the 1987 intifada, virtually the entire Palestinian society living under Israel's military occupation unified itself with remarkable cohesion on the use of nonviolent tools. The first intifada (1987-1993, especially 1987-1990) benefited from several forces at work in the 1970s and 1980s, about which I write in A Quiet Revolution (2007), one of which came from Palestinian activist intellectuals working with Israeli groups, who wanted to end occupation for their own reasons. These Israeli peace activists thought the occupation degraded them, made them less than human, in addition to oppressing Palestinians. The second so-called intifada was not a 'shaking off'. For the first time, it bade attacks against the Israeli settlements, which had not occurred before.
Let me put it this way: in virtually every situation, there is some potential for human beings to take upon themselves their own liberation through nonviolent action. We may expect that such potential is dormant and waiting for enactment. Disciplined nonviolent action is underway in a number of village-based struggles against the separation barrier in the West Bank right now, in which Israeli allies are among the action takers. As another example, the Freedom Theatre in Jenin is using Freedom Rides, a concept adopted from the U.S. southern Civil Rights Movement, riding buses to the South Hebron Hills villages and along the way using drama, music, and giant puppets as a way of stimulating debate about Israeli occupation. Bloggers and writers share their experiences (see e.g. this post by Nathan Schneider). For the first time, as we speak, the Freedom Bus will travel from the West Bank to make two performances in historic pre-1948 Palestine (Israel), in Haifa and the Golan, in June 2013. A Palestinian 'Empty Stomach' campaign, led by Palestinian political prisoners in Israel, has had some success in using hunger strikes to press Israeli officials for certain demands. With the purpose of prevailing upon Israel to conform to international resolutions pertaining to the Palestinians and to end its military occupation, Palestinian civic organizations in 2005 launched a Boycott, Divestment Sanctions (BDS) campaign, drawing upon the notable example of third-party sanctions applied in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. The Palestinian Authority has called for non-state observer status at the United Nations and supports the boycotting of products from Israeli settlements resistance.
More and more Palestinians are now saying, 'We must fight for our rights with nonviolent resistance'. Many Israelis are also deeply concerned about the future of their country. I recently got an email from an Israeli who was deeply affected by reading Quiet Revolution and has started to reach out to Palestinians and take actions to bring to light the injustices that he perceives. Tremendous debate is underway about new techniques, novel processes, and how to shift gears to more effective mutual action. The United States government and its people continue to pay for Israel's occupation and militarization, which has abetted the continuation of conflict, although it is often done in the name of peace! The United States has not incentivized the building of peace. It has done almost nothing to help the construction of institutions that could assist coexistence.
Also, it is very important for the entire world, including Israelis, to recognize intentional nonviolent action when they see it. The Israeli government persisted in denying that the 1987 Intifada was nonviolent, when the Palestinian populace had been maintaining extraordinary nonviolent discipline for nearly three years, despite harsh reprisals. Israeli officials continued to call it 'unending war' and 'the seventh war'. Indeed, it was not perfect nonviolent discipline, but enough that was indicative of a change in political thinking among the people in the Palestinian areas that could have been built upon. Although some Israeli social scientists accurately perceived the sea change in Palestinian political thought about what methods to use in seeking statehood and the lifting of the military occupation, the government of Israel generally did not seize upon such popularly enacted nonviolent discipline to push for progress. My sources for Quiet Revolution include interviews with Israelis, such as the former Chief Psychologist of the Israel Defense Force and IDF spokesperson.
Your latest book is about the transitions of the Eastern European countries from being under Soviet rule to independent democracies. You chose to illustrate these transitions with New York Times articles. Why did you chose this approach; do you think the NY Times was important as a media agency in any way or is there another reason?
There is another reason: The New York Times and CQ Press approached me and asked if I would write a reference book on the nonviolent revolutions of the Eastern bloc, using articles from the Times that I would choose upon which to hang the garments of the story. The point of the work is to help particularly young people learn that they can study history by studying newspapers. The book gives life to the old adage that newspaper reporters write the first draft of history. In the book's treatment of these nonviolent revolutions, I chose ten Times articles for each of the major ten struggles that are addressed, adding my historical analysis to complete the saga for each country. It had been difficult for Times reporters to get into Poland, for example, in the late 1970s and the crucial year of 1980; they sometimes risked their lives. Yet it's in the nature of journalism that their on-the-spot reportage needed additional analysis; furthermore newspaper accounts often stress description.
After the 1968 Prague Spring, when the Soviet Union sent 750,000 troops and tanks from five Warsaw Pact countries into Czechoslovakia, crushing that revolt, across Eastern Europe a tremendous amount of fervent work got underway by small non-official committees, often below the radar of the communist party states. This included samizdat (Russian for 'self published'), works not published by the state publishing machinery, underground publications that were promoting new ways of thinking about how to address their dilemma. Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Lithuania were the most active in the Eastern bloc with their major but covert samizdat. As it was illegal in Czechoslovakia for a citizen to own a photocopy machine, 'books' were published by using ten pieces of onion-skin paper interspersed with carbon sheets, 'publishing' each page by typing it and its copies on a manual typewriter.
The entire phenomenon of micro-committees, flying universities, samizdat boutiques, seminars, drama with hidden meanings, underground journals, and rock groups transmitting messages eluded outside observers, who were not thinking about what the people could do for themselves. The economists and Kremlinologists who were observing the Eastern bloc did not discern what the playwrights, small committees of activist intellectuals, local movements, labor unions, academicians, and church groups were undertaking. They did not imagine the scope or scale of what the people were doing for themselves with utmost self-reliance. In essence, no one saw these nonviolent revolutions coming, with the exception of the rare onlooker, such as the historian Timothy Garton Ash. Even today the peaceful transitions to democracy of the Eastern bloc are sometimes explained by saying 'Gorby did it', when Gorbachev did not come to power until 1985. Or by attributing the alterations to Reagan's going to Berlin and telling Gorbachov to tear down the Wall.
By December 1981, Poland was under martial law, which unleashed a high degree of underground organizing, countless organizations of self-help, reimagining of the society, and the publishing of samizdat. Still, even so, some people believe that this sweeping political change was top-down. It is indisputably true that nonviolent action usually interacts with other forces and forms of power, but I would say that we need this book for its accessible substantiation of historically significant independent nonviolent citizen action as a critical element in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
You also mention Al Jazeera as an important media agency in your most recent blog post at 'Waging Nonviolence'. You wrote that Al Jazeera has an important role in influencing global affairs. Could you explain why? And more generally, how important is diversification of media for international politics?
Al Jazeera generally has not been taking the point of view of the official organs of governments of Arab countries and has usually not reported news from ministries of information. Additionally, it often carries reports from local correspondents in the country at issue. If you are following a report from Gaza, it is likely to be a Gazan journalist who is transmitting to Al Jazeera. If it is a report from Egypt, it may well be an Egyptian correspondent. Al Jazeera also has made a point of reporting news from Israel, and utilizing reporters in Tel Aviv, which may be a significant development. Certainly in the 2010-2011 Arab Awakening, it made a huge difference that reports were coming directly from the action takers rather than the official news outlets of Arab governments.
President George W. Bush did not want Al Jazeera to come to the United States, because he considered it too anti-American. I remember reading at the time that the first thing that Gen. Colin Powell said to Al Jazeera was 'can you tone it down a little?' when asking why Al Jazeera couldn't be less anti-American in its news. To me, either you support free speech or you do not; it's free or it's not: You can't have a little bit of control and a little bit of freedom.
Until recently, Al Jazeera was not easily available in the United States, except in Brattleboro, Vermont; Washington, DC; and a few other places. It was difficult to get it straight in the United States. I mounted a special satellite so that I could get Al Jazeera more freely. This does not speak well for freedom of the press in the United States. This may change with the advent of Al Jazeera America, although we still do not know to what degree it will represent an editorially free press.
News agencies are important for civil-resistance movements for major reasons. Popular mobilizations need good communications internally and externally! People need to understand clearly what is the purpose and strategy and to be part of the making of decisions. Learning also crucially needs to take place inside the movement: activist intellectuals often act as interpreters, framing issues anew, suggesting that an old grievance is now actionable. No one expects the butcher, the baker, or the candlestick maker, and everyone else in the movement to read history and theory.
When news media are interested and following a popular movement of civil resistance, they can enhance the spread of knowledge. In the U.S. civil rights movement, the Southern white-owned newspapers considered the deaths of black persons or atrocities against African Americans as not being newsworthy. There was basically a 'black-out', if you want to call it that, with no pun. Yet dreadful things were happening while we were trying to mobilize, organize, and get out the word. So SNCC created its own media, and Julian Bond and others and I set up nationwide alternative outlets. Eventually we had 12 photographers across the South. This is very much like what the people of the Eastern bloc did with samizdat — sharing and disseminating papers, articles, chapters, even whole books. The media can offer a tremendous boost, but sometimes you have to create your own.
Last question. You combine scholarship with activism. How do you reconcile the academic claim for 'neutrality' with the emancipatory goals of activism?
To be frank, I am not searching for neutrality in my research. Rather, I strive for accuracy, careful transcription, and scrupulous gathering of evidence. I believe that this is how we can become more effective in working for justice, environmental protection, sustainable development, pursuing human rights, or seeking gender equity as critical tools to build more peaceable societies. Where possible I search for empirical data. So much has been ignored, for example, with regards to the effects of gendered injustice. I do not seek neutrality on this matter, but strong evidence. For example, since the 1970s, experts have known that the education of women has profoundly beneficial and measurable effects across entire societies, benefiting men, children, and women. Data from Kerala, India; Sri Lanka; and elsewhere has shown that when you educate women the entire society is uplifted and that all indicators shift positively. The problem is that the data have for decades been ignored or trivialized. We need much more than neutrality. We need to interpret evidence and data clearly to make them compelling and harder to ignore. I think that we can do this with methodologies that are uncompromisingly scrupulous.
Mary Elizabeth King is professor of peace and conflict studies at the UN-affiliated University for Peace and and is Scholar-in-Residence in the School of International Service, at the American University in Washington, D.C. She is also a Distinguished Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford, in the United Kingdom. Her most recent book is The New York Times on Emerging Democracies in Eastern Europe (Washington, D.C.: Times Reference and CQ Press/Sage, 2009), chronicling the nonviolent transitions that took place in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic states, Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She is the author of the highly acclaimed A Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada and Nonviolent Resistance (New York: Nation Books, 2007; London: Perseus Books, 2008), which examines crucial aspects of the 1987 uprising overlooked or misunderstood by the media, government officials, and academicians.
Related links
King's personal page Read the book edited by King on Peace Research for Africa (UNU, 2007) here (pdf) Read the book by King Teaching Model: Nonviolent Transformation of Conflict (UNU, 2006) here (pdf)
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
0 0 1 5902 33646 School of Global Studies/University of Gothenburg 280 78 39470 14.0
Like so many I was saddened to learn of the death of Toni Negri. I never really knew him as a person, only very awkwardly meeting him once, but he was someone who fundamentally shaped and transformed philosophy for me. I wrote my first published paper on Negri, a paper that, as is the case with most seminar papers, was an attempt to make sense of the two books I had read, The Savage Anomaly and Marx Beyond Marx. That it was published is not the important part, really a product of grad school hubris, the important part was that I am not sure if I would have stayed in grad school had I not written it, or found someone willing to read and discuss it with me, shoutout here to Bill Haver. Negri made it possible for me to conjoin doing philosophy and engaging the world politically, to see these as two sides of the same process, the same practice of philosophy. I should mention that this was before Empire, but just barely. I am not saying that to claim that I was into Negri before he was cool, but just that my first encounter with Negri was in some sense with an outsider. He was rarely talked about in classes, and his books were more associated with the para-academic presses of Autonomedia and Semiotexte than the presses that were translating and publishing the big names of theory, Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan, etc.With the news of his death I started to think about Negri again for the first time in awhile. I had not read anything by Negri in years (the little book on Spinoza was probably the last), nor really engaged with his writings in a long time. Philosophers still have their effects, still shape our thought long after we stop directly reading and writing about them. It just so happened the day that I learned of Negri's death was the day that we met for the Spinoza and Marx seminar. We spent part of the time talking about the importance of Negri's reading. He was not the first Marxist/Spinozist, but Marx-Spinozism would be fundamentally different without him. This is because Negri puts the intersection of metaphysics and politics, ontology and history at the center of his reading of Spinoza It is well known that Spinoza interrupted his writing of the Ethics, a book he had worked on for years, to write and publish anonymously the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, as political intervention. For Negri this interruption is also a fundamental transformation: Spinoza's engagement with politics and history, with the historical force of the imagination, with the politics of affects, and the reality of power, transforms his understanding of imagination, affects, and power in the Ethics. As Negri writes in a passage that I have cited more than once, and returned to again and again. "After the development of such a radical pars destruens, after the identification of a solid point of support by which the metaphysical perspective re-opens, the elaboration of the pars construens requires a practical moment. The ethics could not be constituted in a project, in the metaphysics of the mode and of reality, if it were not inserted into history, into politics, into the phenomenology of a single and collective life: if it were not to derive new nourishment from that engagement."Negri effectively inverted our image of Spinoza, and with it our image of philosophy, it was no longer a matter of detaching oneself from history and politics in order to contemplate the world, of thinking sub specie aeternitas, but of plunging oneself into the historical moment in order to transform philosophy.In a piece I wrote on Negri that was recently republished in The Production of Subjectivity: Marx and Philosophy I described this transformation as follows:"While the Theologico-Political Treatise constitutes a fundamental displacement of the problems of the Ethics, from order as metaphysical problem to the historicity of the organization of human desires and beliefs, it does not complete this process. The Theologico-Political Treatise does not supplant the Ethics. Negri argues that the Treatise does not follow through on its most radical insights. It begins with the materiality of the imagination, with the power of constitutive praxis, but it ultimately crashes upon the universals of 'natural right' and the 'natural light of religion', universals which undermine the constitutive process. The contract subordinates the powers of society to a transcendent order and a pre-constituted end, thereby limiting the constitutive process. However, the results of the Treatise are fundamentally ambiguous: as much as the contract is introduced as an ordering structure of society, it is modified by the idea of power. As Spinoza writes, 'Nature's right is co-extensive with her power'. This redefinition of right as power fundamentally undermines two of the constitutive dimensions of natural right that philosophy exemplified by the contract, 'the absolute conception of the individual foundation and the absolute conception of the contractual passage'. In place of the absolutely individualistic foundation that paves the way for the absolute authority of the sovereign, Spinoza introduces a new theoretical object, the 'passions of the body social'. Right is coextensive with power: there is no natural state of power nor a final goal, only the historicity of its various organizations. There is thus no transfer of power, no actual passage from potentia to potestas, there is just the organization of potentia, of the striving (conatus), desire (cupiditas), and affects of the multitude. It is precisely this organization that is examined and developed in what Negri calls the 'second foundation' of the Ethics, Parts III and IV which develop the logic and sociability of the passions. This second foundation does not only develop the idea of conatus as the essence of each individual (EIIIP7), it also develops the logic of the affects as the determination of this desire. The affects begin with the most immediate, and simple, determinations – pain, pleasure, love and hate – and gradually unfold to encompass the constitutive conditions and constitutive power of subjectivity, which is not an autonomous starting point but is immersed in the power of affects. 'The nexus of composition, complexity, conflictiveness, and dynamism is a continual nexus of successive dislocations that are neither dialectical nor linear but, rather, discontinuous'. Thus, as much as the Theologico-Political Treatise disrupts the remnants of a metaphysical order, its provocation that the historicity of desire and affects are constitutive of the world, it demands a renewed ontological speculation. It is not the Theologico-Political Treatise or the Ethics that makes up the foundational book of constitutive power, but rather the movement, the displacement, from the one to the other. In Negri's book on Spinoza this movement continues to a reading of the Political Treatise, thus passing from metaphysics (the Ethics) to politics (the Theological Political Treatise) only to return to politics (Political Treatise) which in turn informs a new metaphysics (the 'multitude' as a concept produced in the interstices of the Ethics and the Political Treatise), while at the same time stating that 'Spinoza's true politics is his metaphysics'. This statement should be read not as a choice, placing Spinoza's metaphysical works over his political writings, but as a slogan of displacement. Constitutive power as praxis is developed through a practice of philosophy as a continual displacement that moves from metaphysics to politics and back, and this movement continues beyond a reading of Spinoza."One can find a similar trajectory of movement in Negri's thought in his reading of Marx in which it is the same concepts, most specifically "living labor" that traverse a line from economics, to ontology, and then to politics. Negri reading of Marx, especially in the book known in the US as Insurgencies, but in the rest of the world as Constituent Power, reads the early Marx's idea of democracy back into the latter Marx. Marx's politics is his metaphysics, is labor as the constitution of the world. As Negri writes, "As long as we follow the political Marx, political revolution and social emancipation are two historical matrices that intersect on the same terrain—the constitutional terrain—but still in an external manner, without a metaphysical logic of this intersection being given…This necessity resides at the core of Marx's theory of capital, where living labor appears as the foundation, and the motor of all production, development, and innovation. This essential source also animates the center of our investigation. Living labor against dead labor, constituent power against constituted power: this single polarity runs through the whole schema of Marxist analysis and resolves it in an entirely original theoretical practical totality."What I have tried to focus on here is what I have called, following Althusser and Balibar, is Negri's practice of philosophy, his way of doing philosophy (this was also the focus of the essay cited above). It is a trajectory which constantly moves from history and politics into ontology and from ontology into politics and history without ever, it seems to me, using a historical moment to criticize an ontology or developing an ontology that would ground a politics. It is a trajectory of displacement and transformation in which history, politics, and economics transform philosophical speculation, ontology and metaphysics, while at the same time philosophical speculation transform and reimagine the possibility of political practice. It would seem to me that this is the fundamental orientation that defines Negri's thought, and it is this orientation which is eternal, which continues to live, even after the concepts produced by that trajectory pass away, as they would have to being products of a given historical moment. (Here I have to recommend Roberto Nigro's little book Antonio Negri: Une Philosophie de la Subversion, which I read in the week since Negri's death. Nigro reminds us that the question of the historical relevance of particular concepts, was in some sense the central political and philosophical trajectory of not just Negri's thought but of what is called autonomist thought or post-autonomist thought. Concepts like the mass worker, the social worker, general intellect, and multitude are not just different theoretical positions, but also attempts to make sense of the shifting and changing nature of capitalism itself.) What Negri proposed for philosophy is not easy, and I would even argue that not even Negri always did it well. (In some sense this is a specific version of the general problem of doing philosophy after Marx). It is easy to err on both sides, to simply let a historical, economic, or political transformation stand in for a philosophical analysis, or, on the other side, to dissolve the specificity of a historical moment into a general ontological concept. However, as Spinoza wrote, "all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare." When it is done well such a method of displacement, of pars destruens/pars construens, promises a transformation of both philosophy and politics. (I would say that Negri's Savage Anomaly, Marx Beyond Marx, and the book on constituent power to name a few are nothing less than models of this method). What Negri proposed in his readings of Spinoza and Marx (among others) was nothing less than a transformation of philosophy, to borrow Althusser's formulation, a transformation that would make philosophy radical and materialist--a transformation that is still ongoing, still striving to produce its effects. It is that aspect of Negri's thought which transformed, and continues to transform my approach to philosophy.
Translation is the closest that I have ever come to demonic possession. Let me explain, I used to think that there were books I read, books I wrote about, and books I taught, each category representing a deeper level of familiarity, even intimacy to the point where it is harder and harder to tell where the book's thoughts end and my thoughts begin. Translation, however, is on a whole different level. It is thinking someone else's thoughts. As I have mentioned repeatedly on this blog, on social media, and to random people on the street, I have spent the last year or so translating Frank Fischbach's La production des hommes: Marx avec Spinoza. The translation is now for the most part complete, and should come out from Edinburgh University Press in June of 2023. Translating the book has been a transformative experience. I am even more convinced of one of the book's most controversial theses, that alienation is not the reduction of subjectivity to some object but is the reduction of material objective existence to subjectivity. To be reduced to a bearer of labor power, to pure subjective capacity, is to be cut off from the social relations and objective conditions that make existence and activity possible. In other words, to draw together Spinoza and Marx, to be a kingdom within a kingdom, or to see oneself as such is not the zenith of freedom but the nadir of domination.Beyond this point, Fischbach's book does for Spinoza and the early Marx what Althusser did for Spinoza and the late Marx, effectively destroying that very division. The book goes a long way in making the case that what is often considered Marx's humanism is better understood as naturalism, and the influence or presence of Feuerbach conceals the subterranean influence of Spinoza. I feel like I need to reconsider how I read the early Marx. However, there is one point that I really struggled with and that is Fischbach's engagement with Heidegger, often placing Spinoza, Heidegger, and Marx in the same intellectual lineage. Part of my resistance to this pairing is autobiographical. When I was in graduate school Heideggerianism was everywhere, and Spinoza seemed to be a real alternative, an entirely different orientation of thought. Fischbach's book did make me curious, so curious that I decided to read one of the books he references, Jean-Marie Vaysse's Totalité et Finitude: Spinoza et Heidegger. The first thing that surprised me about the book was the conjunction "and" (et). I expected it to be "or"(ou) as it was for Hegel in Macherey's famous book. Vaysse recognizes that the conjunction is a strange one, that it must be in some sense an "and" that flies in the face of the obvious opposition. Spinoza would seem to be a thinker of metaphysics, of a philosophical system. This alone would oppose his project to Heidegger. As for Heidegger's explicit relation to Spinoza it is more of a non-relation, Spinoza is merely mentioned by Heidegger, and to some extent Spinoza falls outside of the trajectory that Heidegger charts of metaphysics as becoming a metaphysics of subjectivity, to thinking being as being what a subject produces. To go back to Fischbach one last time, Spinoza and Marx can be understood as falling outside of Heidegger's comprehension because for both of them production and subjectivity are not conjoined, each defining each other, but are absolutely opposed. As Fischbach writes, referring once again to Spinoza and Marx (we'll get to Spinoza and Heidegger)"The fundamental point these two philosophers have in common is their being at one and the same time thinkers of production and radical critics of subjectivity – two elements that are completely indissociable. While Heidegger considers the modern metaphysics of subjectivity as the completion and accomplishment of an approach than consists, from Greek philosophy onwards, in taking the productive comportment of humanity as the implicit guiding thread into the sense of being, Spinoza and Marx demonstrate on the contrary that a thought of production leads to the removal of subjectivity from its foundational role. Neither Spinoza nor Marx start from the subject: the former begins from substance and understands it as the infinite activity of production, that is, as the absolute unity of producing (natura naturans) and of product (natura naturata), as the complete immanence of production in the infinity of things produced; the latter begins not from the production as the activity of one or several subjects, but from the ensemble of the relations of production, a productive industry that is at the same time a process of individuation. In neither case is production thought from the subject: for both Spinoza and for Marx there is a production that exceeds all subjectivity, a production which has always already preceded, englobed and exceeded every subjective formation, engendering subjectivity as a secondary and derived aspect. Whether thinking of production as the infinite productivity of substance – which, in its immanence to the infinity of things produced, is demonstrated to be not at all a subject (the latter being conceived as that which precedes or supports the things that are produced, or as the term by which they are assembled) – or thinking of production as primarily an ensemble of relations that precede, condition and determine the formation of individually productive positions, both Spinoza and Marx understand and illustrate that production is never assignable to any foundational subject, that it is the basis of everything without being the act of a founding subject."Despite this claim of omission, Fischbach sees a fundamental simularity of Spinoza, Heidegger, and Marx in that they are all philosophers of the world, not the subject, beginning with the relations that constitute subjectivity rather than the knowing subject as starting point. Vaysse, however sees a different similarity between Heidegger and Spinoza, one that starts with their critical targets, metaphysics and theology. Heidegger's destruction of metaphysics and Spinoza's pars destruens of theology, place the two on similar ground, or as Vaysse puts it, "Spinoza and Heidegger reject the metaphysical opposition between immanence and transcendence." This reject is clearest in what can be considered their methods. On this point Vaysse draws most distinctly from the existential analytic of Being and Time, in which Heidegger traces the very category and concepts of philosophical thought back to the practical comportments that underly them. At first glance this seems far from Spinoza's sub specie aeternitatis, of the Ethics as a system of propositions and demonstrations, however, Vaysse demonstrates that this mode of presentation is in some sense at odds with what it presents, with the understanding of existence that structures and articulates it. Spinoza like Heidegger begins from the assertion that it is is our practical comportment which primarily orients our thinking and acting. It is our desire and our affects that shape how we make sense of the world from the original "consciousness of our desires and ignorance of the causes of things" up to the qualities we attribute to the things that we desire. Our thinking is affective and active before it is reflective and contemplative. To some extent Vaysse's Heidegger and Spinoza comes after the Marxist interrogation of both, after the reading of the former, prompted by the proximity to Lukács that reads Being and Time for its critique of reification and alienation in modern life, and for the reading of the latter that understands Spinoza's philosophy to be as much one of the constitution of modal life as a philosophy of substance.As much as this point brings Heidegger and Spinoza together as thinkers of comportment and activity, it also divides them on this terrain. As Vaysse writes, "If the affects proceeds to a detailed and systemic analysis of affective life, of its variations and conflicts, Heidegger retains only the phenomena of fear." Spinoza and Heidegger are both thinkers of the constitutive nature of affects or Stimmung, but differ in terms of the primacy they attach to different affects and their objects. This difference of affects reflects a fundamentally different understanding of finitude. For Spinoza to be finite, to be a mode, is to be affected in multiple and different ways, to be constantly affected and transformed even as one strives to maintain their being, while for Heidegger finitude is centralized in one primary affective orientation, fear or anxiety framed in terms of one central event, death. This difference relates to a second difference, for Heidegger inauthenticity, our everyday understanding, is primary structured through the anonymous They, while for Spinoza the imagination, the realm of inadequate ideas that constitutes our common sense, is structured around the individual as a kingdom within a kingdom. Of course, Spinoza has his own understanding of what Heidegger might call "inauthenticity" through the imitation of affects, the way our thinking, and feeling, is shaped by a kind of generic figure of what we imagine others love and hate. Such an imaginary constitution of a norm, or a standard, remains secondary to the primary illusion, and it is an illusion of autonomy and independence, an effacement of the relations that sustain and thwart our striving. Which is to say that for Spinoza the question of the quotidian, of our basic comportment, cannot be separated from our collective relations, there is a primacy of ethics and politics to ontology that is unthinkable from Heidegger's point of view. To come to a quick and provisional conclusion, Vaysse's book has the merit of removing the external opposition of Heidegger and Spinoza that would juxtapose ontology to metaphysics, finitude to totality, but in doing so he reveals an internal difference, one predicated on how we make sense of the relationship between our quotidian comportments and philosophical reflections, our finite striving and totality. Vaysse's book begins with Heidegger and Spinoza, tracing an unrecognized similarity of orientation and investigation, only to end with Heidegger or Spinoza, a difference which is political or ethical more than metaphysical. To say it is political or ethical seems fairly lopsided, because, as many have noted, for Spinoza the political, or collective dimension, and the ethical, or practical orientation, were always central to Spinoza's examination of the quotidian formation of the imagination, while Heidegger never directly incorporated ethics or politics to his reflections on everyday comportment with disastrous results.
By the standards of mainstream media coverage of technical economics, Peter Coy's coverage of HANK (Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian) models in the New York Times was actually pretty good. 1) Representative agents and distributions. Yes, it starts with the usual misunderstanding about "representative agents," that models assume we are all the same. Some of this is the standard journalist's response to all economic models: we have simplified the assumptions, we need more general assumptions. They don't understand that the genius of economic theory lies precisely in finding simplified but tractable assumptions that tell the main story. Progress never comes from putting more ingredients and stirring the pot to see what comes out. (I mean you, third year graduate students looking for a thesis topic.) But in this case many economists are also confused on this issue. I've been to quite a few HANK seminars in which prominent academics waste 10 minutes or so dumping on the "assumption that everyone is identical." There is a beautiful old theorem, called the "social welfare function." (I learned this in graduate school in fall 1979, from Hal Varian's excellent textbook.) People can have almost arbitrarily different preferences (utility functions), incomes and shocks, companies can have almost arbitrarily different characteristics (production functions), yet the aggregate economy behaves as if there is a single representative consumer and representative firm. The equilibrium path of aggregate consumption, output, investment, employment, and the prices and interest rates of that equilibrium are the same as those of an economy where everyone and every firm is the same, with a "representative agent" consumption function and "representative firm" production function. Moreover, the representative agent utility function and representative firm production function need not look anything like those of any particular individual person and firm. If I have power utility and you have quadratic utility, the economy behaves as if there is a single consumer with something in between. Defining the job of macroeconomics to understand the movement over time of aggregates -- how do GDP, consumption, investment, employment, price level, interest rates, stock prices etc. move over time, and how do policies affect those movements -- macroeconomics can ignore microeconomics. (We'll get back to that definition in a moment.) Now uniting macro and micro is important. Macro estimation being what it is, it would be awfully nice to use micro evidence. The program kicked off by Kydland and Prescott to "calibrate" macro models from micro evidence would be very useful. Kydland and Prescott may have had a bit of grass-is-greener optimism about just how much precise evidence macroeconomists have on firms and people, but it's a good idea. Adding up micro evidence to macro is hard, however. Here "aggregation theory," often confused with the "social welfare function" theorem comes up, more as a nightmare from graduate school. The conditions under which the representative agent preferences look like individual people are much more restricted. Like all good theorems, this one rests on assumptions, and the assumptions are false. The crucial assumption is complete markets, and in particular complete risk sharing: There is an insurance market in which you can be compensated for every risk, in particular losing your job. A generalized form still works, however. There is still a representative agent, but it cares about distributions. The representative agent utility function depends on aggregate consumption, aggregate labor supply but now also statistics about the distribution of consumption across people. In asset pricing, the Constantinides-Duffie model is a great example: the cross-sectional variance of consumption becomes a crucial state variable for the value of the stock market, not just aggregate consumption. All economic theorems are false of course, in that the assumptions are not literally true. The question is, how false? Conventional macroeconomics comes down to a description of how aggregates evolve over time, based on past aggregates: [aggregate income, consumption, employment, inflation... next year ] = function of [aggregate income, consumption, employment, inflation, policy variables... this year ] + unforecastable shocks. That's it. That's what macroeconomics is. Theory, estimation and calibration to figure out the function. [Update. I added policy variables, e.g. interest rates, to the function. And, the point of macro is to figure out how policies affect the economy, and furthermore with an objective in hand to derive optimal policies. Thanks François Velde for pointing out the omissions in comments.] If HANK is useful to macroeconomics, then, it must be that adding distributional statistics helps to describe aggregate dynamics. Reality must be [aggregate income, consumption, employment, inflation... next year ] = function of [aggregate income, consumption, employment, inflation, distribution of consumption, employment, etc., policy variables,... this year ] + unforecastable shocks. So here is a central question I have for HANK modelers: Is that true? Do statistics on the distribution across people of economic variables really help us to forecast or understand aggregate dynamics? So far, my impression is, not much. The social welfare function theorem can be wrong in its assumptions, yet still a pretty good approximation. And "heterogeneity" has been around macro for a long time, but never has seemed to matter much in the end. (The investment literature of the early 1990s is a great example.) But I would be happy to be proved wrong. This post is as much a suggestion for HANK modelers as a critique. Another possibility: Maybe HANK is about aggregation after all. Can we actually use micro evidence, and add it up constructively, to learn what the representative agent - social welfare function is? Even before HANK, there were good examples. For example, the literature on labor supply: Macro models want people to work more in response to temporarily higher wages. Most individual people work 8 hours a day or zero, so micro evidence finds a small response. But a small number of people move from non-work to work as wages rise. So the representative agent can have a much larger elasticity than individual people. And, you have to understand labor market structure, and the distribution of who is available to work to add up from micro to macro evidence. Here, I would like to know the basic functional form -- how much does the SWF care about today vs. tomorrow, risk, work vs leisure, as well as any distributional effect? 2) Income effectsCoy also goes on with the usual New York Times schtick about how dumb and irrational all the little hoi polloi are. (Of course we of the elite and the federal government handing out nudges would never be behavioral.) But you don't need HANK to assume that the representative investor is dumb either. He goes on to describe pretty well where the current literature is. Behind this is, however, one of the major features of HANK models so far. One of its most important uses has been to put current income in the IS equation. (Economists talk amongst yourselves for a bit while I explain this to regular people. So far, the central description of demand in new Keynesian models is based on "intertemporal substitution:" When the real interest rate is higher, you consume a bit less today, save a bit more, so that you can consume a lot more tomorrow. That is the crucial mechanism by which higher real interest rates (say, induced by the Fed) lower demand today. Old Keynesian models didn't have people in them at all, but hypothesized that consumption simply follows income. That adds a more powerful mechanism, the "multiplier:" an initial income drop lowers consumption, which lowers income and around we go. )HANK models often add some "hand to mouth" consumers. Some people think about today vs. the future, but others just eat what income they make today. You can get this out of "rational, liquidity constrained" people, but that's typically not enough. To get significant effects, you need people who just behave that way. So, there is this little bit of behaviorism in many HANK models. But it's a little spice in the otherwise Lucas soup. In equations, the standard model says consumption today = expected consumption tomorrow - (number) x real interest rateAfter an immense amount of algebra and computer time, HANK models allow you to writeconsumption today = (number) x income today + (number) x expected consumption tomorrow - (number) x real interest rate New Keynesian models were invented on the hope they would turn out to be holy water sprinkled on old-Keynesian thinking, for example justifying big spending multipliers and strong monetary policy. They turned out to be nothing at the sort once you read the equations. A movement is underway to modify (torture?) new-Keynesian models to look like old-Keynesian models, to bring macro back to roughly the 1976 edition of Dornbush and Fisher's textbook. Complex expectation formation theories and this aspect of HANK can be digested that way. So here is my second question for HANK modelers: Is this it? When we boil it all down to the linearized equations of the model you take to data, to explain aggregates and monetary and fiscal policy, is there a big bottom line beyond an excuse to revive bits of the Keynesian consumption function? That too is an honest question, and perhaps a suggestion--show us the textbook back of the envelope bottom line model. (It would be awfully nice if distributions mattered here too, theoretically, empirically, and quantitatively.) 3) Micro implications of macro Maybe you disagreed a few paragraphs ago with my definition of macroeconomics, as only concerned with the movement of aggregates over time. Talking with some of my HANK colleagues, a different purpose is at work -- figuring out the effects of macroeconomics on different people. Recessions fall harder on those who lose jobs, and certain income and other groups; harder on some industries and areas than others. Here HANK dovetails with concerns over income diversity and "equity." That's a perfectly good reason to study it, but let's then be clear. If that's the case, HANK really doesn't change our understanding of how policies and events move aggregates around, it is really just about understanding how those aggregates affect different people differently. That may change calculations of optimal monetary policy. If the objective function cares negatively about income diversity, then adding HANK may produce a model that makes no difference at all for the effect of monetary policy on aggregates, but gives a greater weight to employment vs. inflation. ("May!" Inflation also falls harder on people experiencing low incomes, so concerns for equity could go the other way too. Thanks to a correspondent for pointing that out.) Many models have observationally equivalent predictions for aggregates but different welfare implications, and the same model can have different welfare implications if you put in different preferences for distributions across people. But surely HANK has more to offer than a long-winded excuse for dovishness towards tolerating inflation in place of unemployment. Also, in the big picture this seems like a classic answer in search of a question. If you care about the less fortunate, you start with the big issues: crime, awful schools, family breakdown, opportunity. The additional benefit for the less fortunate from the level of the overnight federal funds rate might be fun to isolate in a model, but we are really staring at a caterpillar on a leaf of a tree and missing the forest of economic misfortune. 4) Last thoughtsI hesitate to write, as I am a consumer not a producer of HANK research, and thus will probably get things wrong or show my limited knowledge of the literature. Please fill the comments with corrections, amplifications, pointers to good papers, etc. There is a tendency in economics to pursue a new technical possibility without really knowing where it's going or why. That's not unhealthy; figure out what you can do first, and what to do later. The why always does come later. This was true of rational expectations, real business cycles, new-Keynesian models and more. Now that HANK is pretty well developed and is coming out in public, with admiring New York Times articles, it is worth assessing the why, the bottom line, what it does. I'm also hesitant to write and especially too critically. I vividly recall being in grad school, and some speaker (I mercifully forgot who) went on a tirade about all these young whippersnappers using too much math and not enough intuition and just being in love with building models. I vowed if I ever thought that I would retire. What do we say to the angel of old age? Not today. Bring it on, and let's all figure out what it means.Update: Alessandro Davis comments below, reminding me of their recent QJE paper "Imperfect Risk Sharing and the Business Cycle." This paper evaluates directly the question, how much does heterogeneity matter for aggregate dynamics? The headline answer is "not much, though maybe more at the zero bound." deviations from perfect risk sharing implied by this class of models account for only 7% of output volatility on average but can have sizable output effects when nominal interest rates reach their lower bound. Now, 7% might actually be a lot. A little secret of contemporary macro models is that none of them explain a lot of output volatility. In my above characterization aggregates next year = function of aggregates today + shocks, the shocks are big and account for most variation in aggregates. Most inflation comes from inflation shocks, not movements in other variables like employment, especially as fed through a model. This isn't necessarily a failing of models. New Keynesian models are designed to understand how monetary policy affects output, not to explain why output varies. Milton Friedman thought that most business cycles were due to monetary policy mistakes, so understanding the former is the same as the latter, but he seems to have been wrong about that, at least since 1982. Or maybe not. The paper's computation takes heterogene in the data, and asks how much does that affect the new-Keynesian model's predictions for output, employment, etc. I have in mind a slightly different question: Even without much theory, how much can data on heterogeneity actually improve forecasts of output, employment, etc. Do distributional variables improve VAR forecasts? Let me know if you have an answer to that one. The paper has a crystal clear summary of the representative agent theorem, and its important extension. They show how distributional variables enter in to a representative agent representation as simple "wedges." Using a representative agent does not mean you assume all people are identical! There is also a great literature review on the general understanding that distributional variables don't matter much for aggregates, starting with Krussell and Smith. A parallel literature in finance qualitatively examined the beautiful Constantinides-Duffie mechanism, finding that uninsured idiosyncratic risk isn't large enough or variable enough to account for asset pricing puzzles. So far -- that's all from the 1990s and a lot of the point of HANK is to reverse that impression. UpdateSee Matthew Rognlie's superb answer below. I ask a lot of questions but seldom get such clear and detailed answers! Thanks for the short course on Hank model big picture! Update 2 Ben Moll writes Hi John, thanks a lot for the very thoughtful post. Lots of great food for thought. In case you hadn't seen it, Tom Sargent posted a new paper a few days ago that has a really great discussion of the main takeaways from HANK. See in particular sections 5 and 7. For example, see the point that HANK "challenges the neoclassical synthesis and a widely-believed prescription for separating macro policy design from policies to redistribute income and wealth." But plenty of other great points there too. Finally, yes, Matt Rognlie's response is really fantastic.Sargent's paper is here. It's fantastic. I'm going to save a review for a separate blog post.
Today marks the anniversary of my doctorate--in the days of yore, before social media, I completed my dissertation, defended it, and then didn't go to graduation as I was already professing as a visitor. With this much time past since those callow days of talking IR theory and job market stuff on the second floor pathway (balcony/terrace/veranda?) outsider our (Motel 6-esque) offices, I wonder about some stuff, am bemused by other aspects, and am mostly quite grateful.Before I get into it, what did I dissertate about? The international relations of secession. I first wondered whether sovereignty was about borders or governments and wanted to contrast the IR of secession vs the IR of revolution. Once I realized the conventional wisdom of the former was wrong, yes, there has been plenty of support for secessionists, I sought to understand why some states support specific secessionists and why other support the government--why countries take sides in other people's ethnic conflicts. Nice to have a question that has enduring relevance. I argued vociferously that the countries are not deterred by their own vulnerability to separatism, and I focused on several secessionist crises--Congo Crisis, Biafra, Bangladesh--and one country that supported multiple separatist movements--Somalia. I argued that the ethnic politics of the potential supporter interacted with the perceived identities of those in conflict--that ethnic ties drove much of this. Which led to the title of the subsequent book, The Ties That Divide, which dropped the Bangladesh case, as it was really about India's intervention, and the Somalia case, as it was really about irredentism (and became the starting point for the next book), and added Yugoslavia's demise, which was largely done by the time I turned to revising the book, and some basic statistics (thanks to the editors of International Organizaiton where I placed a key piece summarizing the dissertation/book). What do I wonder about?Mostly, am I now out of touch with the experience of being a grad student? I know the job market has bounced up and down over time, but it was awful when I finished and much more awful now. So, I have much sympathy for the students finishing today. But I am not sure how much of the process and stresses have remained the same or have gotten worse.On the bright side, the old fashioned job placement at the conference thing is dead--so much stress, so little promise of anything developing. Now it is all electronic and pre-arranged. No more waiting in the job placement room for someone to put a slip of paper into one's box.On the down side, the competition is so much more fierce, and the expectations are so much higher. I do wonder how grad school is these days--has the pressure to publish meant that there is less some for the silly stuff. In my day (I say with an old man's voice), we played soccer every friday, some of the folks would play basketball regularly and get their knees fixed semi-regularly, the last few years we had a regular softball/bbq on Sundays, and more than a few parties. Is there any fun in grad school these days? No idea.I wonder where my career might have gone had I stuck to the IR of ethnic conflict stuff. I have no regrets about moving on to NATO and thus to comparative civil-military relations, but staying in the same spot of research would have led to some different opportunities and perhaps less new lit to review.What am I bemused by?That my dissertation is now as old as I was when we had our daughter. It means that both it and I are, well, much older. I am prouder of the latter than the former, but the former has been pretty good to me, too. That despite my best efforts, the big lessons of the book--that countries are not deterred by their own vulnerability, that precedents don't really matter that much in restraining support for secession--folks still trot out those arguments. Turns out my book didn't re-shape how policy-makers think about this stuff. Given the cynical heart of my dissertation, the assumptions it makes about politicians, I should not be very surprised. Plus as I learned over the years, confirmation bias is a thing.How accidental it all was. I didn't go to grad school to study the international politics of ethnic conflict. I just fell into it.Likewise, I didn't try to do something that was super timely--that I defended my dissertation proposal the same month Yugoslavia flew apart was an accident.I am bemused that the book that is the basis of the first half of my career keeps competing with an article I wrote that is perhaps the most outside my lane for citation: how institutions amerliorate or exacerbate ethnic conflict. What am I grateful for?Damn near everything. This project established my career, made my reputation in the field (whatever that is), gave me not only two books, but a heap of articles and book chapters, and indirectly that next project that led to the life-changing experience in the Pentagon that ultimately led to my second career as a civil-military relations scholar and to the next two jobs.Tis the handiest picture from those daysas my time in grad school precededsmart phones by a couple of decades.Oh, and I was most grateful for this amazing little guy, the Fonz of dogs.I am grateful for having such a terrific supervisor, Miles Kahler, who would let me meander from my initial topic to what I studied, giving me heaps of constructive and often painful feedback along the way, to make sure the project was feasible and then reasonably well-executed. I am also grateful for an amazing committee that gave me much to think about, but didn't force me in any particular direction--Peter Cowhey, Lisa Martin, Arend Lijphart, and Edward Reynolds. I will be eternally thankful that I lucked into a department so chock full of terrific smart silly graduate students, who not only taught me so much about their work which shaped mine, but helped me survive and, yes, thrive, through the difficult process of starting my first act of academic creation (destruction/criticism is far easier than coming up with one's own idea and pursuing it). We all followed the examples set by Debbi Avant and Hendrik Spruyt. The folks in and near my cohort were so very sharp and sweet, tolerating my forays onto the soccer field (basketball? not so much), teasing me about all things Steve, welcoming my wife and later my dog into our various shennanigans. I will always be grateful to Dave, John Carey, both Lisas, Frank, the more dangerous Steve, Neil who left us way too soon, Keith, Judy, Mike, Bart, both Erics, Mona, Chris, Kathy (not my wife, the other one), and all the rest.I am also grateful that this place kept attracting terrific people long after I left, so that I am part of a larger community, which gave me some terrific friends in this business: Wendy, Idean, Cullen, Kathleen and Steve, and so many others.I am definitely not where I expected to be thirty years ago--not in terms of location (Canada?) or research or teaching. It has been from the very start a journey of accidents and surprises, from the grad school I ended up at, to the topic I studied, to the various jobs along the way, to the focus of the second part of my career, to my role these days as pundit and as a leader of a network, and all the stuff that came with it. I used to regret a lot some initial decisions, and I had a lot of frustration on the various job markets. But it all took me here, a perfect spot for me thirty years later. So, no, I don't regret where I went to grad school, nor what I did there, or where I went from there.
Dirk Messner on the dynamics of global change and the significance of international science and technology cooperation in the post-Western world
This is the fifth in a series of Talks dedicated to the technopolitics of International Relations, linked to the forthcoming double volume 'The Global Politics of Science and Technology' edited by Maximilian Mayer, Mariana Carpes, and Ruth Knoblich
In recent years, the analysis of new emerging powers and shifting global order has become central to the study of international relations. While International Relations, aiming to evolve into a truly global discipline, is only just about to start opening up towards Non-Western perspectives, global power shifts have already led to a restructuring of global governance architecture in large fields of political reality and practice. Dirk Messner illustrates how far global power shifts have to lead to new patterns of international cooperation using international science and technology cooperation as a case in point. He argues that investment in joint knowledge creation and knowledge exchange is vital for managing the earth system. Messner also points to the multitude of tasks related to socio-technical systems which the political sphere is currently facing, particularly with regard to the challenge of managing the climate system.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is the most important challenge facing global politics that should be the central debate in the discipline of International Relations?
The biggest challenge of the next decades which we have to come to terms with is governing the big global commons. When I say global commons I do have in mind the atmosphere, the climate system, and other parts of the earth system, but also international financial markets and global infrastructures, such as the Internet – stability of these and other global commons is a public good much required. We need to stabilize the global commons and then manage them in a cooperative manner.
Three dynamics of global change make it specifically challenging to manage these global commons. The first wave of global change is the globalization wave; the economic globalization, cross-border dynamics, global value chains. It becomes evident that in many areas and especially when it comes to the global commons, regulation exceeds the capacity of individual nation states. The international community is required to institutionalize multilateralism and efficient global governance mechanisms in order to properly address issues arising from global dynamics. The second big global change is the shift from a Western to a post-Western world order. Global power shifts remaking the international system impede governing global commons. The third wave of global change is related to climate change, which adds a new dimension of global dynamics; human beings now have to learn how to steer, to stabilize, and how to govern the earth system as such. We are not only a species living on this planet, depending from resources and ecosystems of the earth systems. With the acceleration of economic globalization during the 1990s and the emergence of new, non-Western economic drivers of change, like China, humankind now significantly impacts the physical structures of the earth system. This trend is new. For the first 4,6 billion years of the existence of the earth system it was driven by the laws of physics, the dynamics of biology and bio-chemical processes. Homo sapiens appeared 220.000 years ago, and the impact of our species on the earth system has been marginal until the industrial revolution started 250 years ago. During the last decades human mankind became a major driver of change at a planetary scale.
How did you arrive in your current thinking about these issues?
I have always been interested in international relations, international policy dimensions, and the global economy. I started at the Free University of Berlin at the beginning of the 80's towards the mid-80's, studying Political Science and Economics. One among those professors who have been particularly important to me is Elmar Altvater. He was the supervisor of my diploma as well as of my Ph.D., and he sent me abroad. This resulted being a pivotal experience to me. I studied the last year of my first degree in Seoul, in South Korea. It was the period, the 80's, when the four Asian Tiger states emerged following Japan's example: South Korea, Taiwan, Hongkong, and Singapur. I had the chance to visit these countries, study there and learn a lot about Asia. I was fascinated by the dynamics of emerging economies and what this implied for the international arena. Somewhat later, the Latin American continent became the center of my interest. I did research in Nicaragua, Uruguay, Chile and some other Latin American countries, trying to understand liberalization-movements, how weaker actors come under pressure in Western-dominated global settings, but also how some countries managed it to become dynamic parts of the global economy (like the "Asian tigers" or Chile) and why others failed. I learnt that it is crucial to understand dynamics of global change in order to being able to build solid and inclusive economic structures and legitimate political systems at national levels. There has always been a political impulse that pulled me into certain fields I decided to work in.
What is your advice for students who would like to get into the field of global change research or international cooperation?
My first advice is: visit and work in different countries and different cultural and political settings. It is one thing to learn from scholars or books, but having studied and having lived in different contexts and countries is absolutely a key experience. This is the way to understand global dynamics, to get a feeling for differences and similarities. My second advice stems from my experience and conviction that we need much more interdisciplinary research than we currently have. We talk a lot about interdisciplinarity, however, we do not have career paths that systematically build interdisciplinary teams.
Looking particularly at global environmental changes and the future of the earth system, at the end of the day, social scientists and natural scientists need to learn how to work together and to understand each other. The future of the oceans, for example, is not a question that can be understood by ocean biologists only. They are the people studying how these elements of the earth system are actually working, the dynamics and drivers - focusing on physical, chemical, and biochemical processes. But when we look at the oceans towards 2100 from the perspective of global change, the most important drivers are now us human beings, our economies, our consumption patterns, our greenhouse gas emissions and their impacts on the oceans. And this implies that to understand dynamics of global change, we need to analyze the interactions, interdependences and feedback loops between three systems: the ecological system(s); social systems (our economies and societies) driven by humans; the technical systems and infrastructures. Therefore natural scientists, social scientists, and engineers need to interact very closely. In the German Advisory Council on Global Change we call this approach: Transformation Research. Currently, we do not possess the appropriate university structures to adequately address this sort of problems. This is an immense institutional challenge. If I were a young scholar I would move into this direction, crossing disciplinary boundaries as much as possible.
What is the role of science and technologies in the dynamics of global change?
There are multiple important dimensions, but I would like to focus on some of them by moving through the aforementioned waves of global change. Technology is driving economic globalization, the first wave of global change. So we need to understand the dynamics of new technologies, especially the impact of ICTs, in order to understand the dynamics of economic globalization. The World Wide Web and social communication media are restructuring industrialization processes and global value chains. ICT infrastructure is also displaying a big potential for less developed regions. In Africa, for example, we saw many African countries jumping from the old telephone technologies to smartphones within less than a decade, because the old, maintenance and capital intensive communications infrastructure was no longer needed. Many African people now have access to smartphones, thus to communication- and information networks, and begin to reshape prize constellations and the global economy. Because of its restructuring effects, the impact of ICTs is relevant in all areas of the global economy. The global trend towards urbanization is similarly related to ICTs. Currently, we approach the global economy via data on national economies. But this might be about to change, as global mega-cities develop into global knowledge and financial hubs, building their own networks. In 2040, 80 percent of the global production, global GDP, global consumption, global exchange might be concentrated in 70 to 80 global cities or city regions.
Technology is also linked to the second wave of global change – the tectonic global power shift – in the way that investment in technology and knowledge in emerging economies are growing rapidly. We are not only facing economic and political power shifts, but also a remaking of the global science and research system itself. From my perspective, international cooperation in the field of science and technology research between "old powers" and "new powers", between Western countries and non-Western countries is extremely important for two reasons: First, we need to pool know-how in order to solve core global challenges and to develop patterns for managing the global commons. Interaction and cooperation in the field of science and technology is especially important for the creation of knowledge that is "better" in any way. For instance, in the field of adaptation policies to the impacts of climate change, most of the knowledge on how societies and local communities actually work or respond under these conditions exists in non-Western societies. The generation of knowledge is context dependent. We need to interact with colleagues from the respective countries for mutual learning and common knowledge improvement. My second argument is that, as an effect of the global power shift, traditional development cooperation is losing legitimacy. Many of these societies, from China to Peru, from Kenya to Vietnam, are no longer interested in our usual business, in our "aid-packages", our money, our experts or our concepts. What they are more interested in is true and reciprocal knowledge exchange and joint knowledge creation. Therefore, investments in respective forms and institutions of knowledge exchange and creation will be a central pillar of/for future oriented development cooperation or international cooperation and beneficial for all partners involved. Joint knowledge creation is a precondition for joint action and legitimate global governance initiatives.
The role of technologies with regard to the implications of climate change is crucial and multifaceted. In the German Advisory Council on Global Change we put forth suggestions concerning the transformation towards a low-carbon global economy. We are relatively optimistic in a technological sense. This statement is partly based on the Global Energy Assessment (GEA) research, which has been driven by Nebojsa Nakicenovic, one of our colleagues, who is working on energy modeling. The perspective there is that we know which kind of technologies we need for the transformation into a low-carbon or even zero-carbon economy. We can even calculate the investment costs and structures of different countries and regions. But we do know relatively little about the transformation processes of entire societies, economies and, eventually, the international system towards low-carbon systems. The transformation towards a low-carbon society is a "great transformation". In the entire history of mankind there might be only two examples for such a profound change: the industrial revolution 250 years ago and the Neolithic revolution 10.000 years ago, which induced the practices of agriculture. Today, we thus witness the third great transformation: the decoupling from fossil resources, from high-carbon to zero-carbon. To achieve the 2° Celsius goal, a complete decarbonization of the basic infrastructures of the global economy (the energy systems, the urban infrastructures and systems, the land use systems) is required – within a very limited period of time, until 2070. Comprehensive knowledge is key to achieve this. Let me emphasize once more the significance of international cooperation in the field of science and technology research, particularly in the IPCC context. I am sure that politicians from China, India, or Brazil only accept what the IPCC is presenting as objective knowledge, as the stand of the art knowledge, because their national scientists are deeply involved. If this were a classical western-based knowledge project it would have resulted in a lack of legitimacy. In the case of global climate policy, it is obvious that investment in joint knowledge creation is also about creating legitimacy for joint action.
What are the main obstacles of the low-carbon transformation?
The first two great transformations have been evolutionary processes. No one "planned" the industrial revolution, not to mention the Neolithic revolution. These have been evolutionary dynamics. The sustainability transformation instead needs to be a governed process right from the beginning. In our institute, we looked at different transformation dynamics, not only the really big ones, the Neolithic, industrial, and the current sustainability transformation. We also examined structural adjustment programs in Latin America and Africa, the collapse of communism at the end of the 80s, the abolition of slavery, and similar other key transformations of human societies. Based on this historical perspective, we have identified four main drivers of transformation: The first one is crisis, this is the most important one. Confronted with strong crises, society and probably also individuals react and change direction. The second important driver is very often technology and scientific (r)evolution. The third driver is vision: If you are confronted with a problem but you do not know where to go to, transformation becomes very difficult. The European Union is the product of a fresh vision among elites after World War II; the United Nations is a result of the disasters of the first half of the 20th century. Advancing a vision is an essential means to move or to transform in a goal-oriented manner. Sustainability, of course, is also a vision. The fourth and last driver of transformation is "knowledge": you know that you have a certain problem constellation, and though the crisis is still not there, you react based on your knowledge in a preventive way.
For the low-carbon transformation, the fourth driver currently is absolutely key. We are able to address problems which would otherwise become much worse in the future, although the climate crisis is latent still – in contrast to, for example, the financial crisis, which is more visible in its effects. The impacts of a global warming of 4 or 5 degrees are still not visible. This makes for a huge difference. In fact, humans are not very good at acting and transforming significantly based on knowledge only. In combination with visible, tangible crises, knowledge is a strong driver of change, but without crisis, it is merely sufficient. Transformations based on knowledge and preventive action only are rare. The ozone hole is one positive example; solving the problem was possible because it required less complex technological change, affecting few industries only. Human beings are risk-averse in a sense, we are conservative, we do not like to change rapidly; we are path-dependent. John Maynard Keynes once said: "It is easy to develop new concepts and ideas. The difficult thing is to forget the old ones". Therefore, scientific tools are needed in order to sketch out future scenarios. Based on scientific knowledge, we need to convince our societies, our political decision-makers that it is necessary and possible to transform societies and economies towards sustainability – in order to avoid disruptive change in the earth system. Pushing towards sustainability at a point where the crisis has not yet materialized implies a specific and new role for science in managing global dynamics. Organizing a deep transformation towards sustainability avoiding significant crises driven by Earth system changes would be a cultural learning process – a civilizational shift.
What are the effects of growing multipolarity for global governance processes?
To start optimistically, I would argue that in contrast to historical situations in which this kind of tectonic power shifts led to conflicts or even wars, the current situation is different. The world is highly interconnected and economic interdependencies are stronger than ever. Charles Kupchan is differentiating between "war", "cold peace" and "warm peace". I think that a big "war" is not very probable, and "cold peace" is what we are in actually. "Warm peace" would be cooperative global governance: we identify our problems, have a joint problem analysis, and subsequently start acting cooperatively on them. But this does not describe the contemporary situation. While there are no severe global conflicts, we do not solve many of the global interdependency problems.
There are many barriers to global cooperation and I would like to mention two or three of those. The first one consists of power conflicts and power struggles. Hopefully realists such as John Mearsheimer are not right in claiming that "a peaceful rise of China is not possible". But the fundamental point remains that the re-organization and shuffling of power resources is rendering cooperation extremely difficult. The second point is that all the important global actors currently have severe domestic challenges to manage. The European countries are coping with the European dept crisis. Similarly, the United States is concerned with financial turbulences and rising social inequalities. China has to keep its annual growth rate of about 8 to 12 per cent and meanwhile stabilize its rapid modernization process. In India, there is still a large group of people suffering from poverty. So, managing that and trying to be a responsible global actor at the same time is not easy at all. In brief, all actors that we would like to see taking on a more responsible role on the global level are overcommitted domestically.
There is consensus among different disciplines on what cooperation is actually about. At the Centre for Global Cooperation Research we did a study on The Behavioural Dimensions of International Cooperation (2013) based on insights of very different disciplines – evolutionary biology, social anthropology, cognitive sciences, psychology, political sciences, behavioral economics – to find out what the basic mechanisms are which help human beings to cooperate at any scale towards global corporation in a world of nine billion people. Finally, we identified seven factors promoting cooperation: trust, communication, joint we-identities, reputation, fairness, enforcement – and reciprocity, which is the most fundamental prerequisite. These factors form an enable environment for cooperation and they are manmade. In contexts, actor constellations, systems, in which these basic mechanisms of cooperation are strong, they help to embed power dynamics, to solve social dilemma problems and to manage interdependencies. In contrast, contexts, actor constellations, and systems in which theses basic mechanisms of cooperation are weak, will be driven mainly by power dynamics and struggles. By looking at these factors one immediately understands why the G20 context is so difficult. We have been able to create and to well establish these factors in our old settings; in the European Union, the Western world, the transatlantic community. But now we are sitting together with new actors rather unknown. The G7/G8 world – the OECD driven and the western driven global economy and global politics – has moved towards G20 since it was acknowledged that one cannot manage any global turbulence without emerging economies. The G20 was created or rather called to meet in 2008, a few days after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers when many feared the collapse of the world's financial markets. Most western economies were highly indebted, whereas the emerging economies, especially China, were holding large currency reserves. From a behavioral perspective we have to invest in these basic factors of cooperation in the G 20 context in order to create the essential preconditions of joint action to solve the big global problems. This represents a long-term project, and unfortunately many of these global problems are highly challenging from the time perspective: a tension derives from the gap between time pressure in many of these areas and the time it probably needs to build up these basic mechanisms of cooperation. In fact, the major feeling is that international cooperation is even weaker now than a decade ago. I usually visualize the current situation of the G20 as a round table with 20 seats but no one is sitting there. Charles Kupchan's "No one's world" or Ian Bremmer's "The G0 world" deal with the same problem: international cooperation, global governance is currently so difficult, although all these interdependency problems rendered the problem of managing the global commons fully obvious. If you talk to our Foreign Ministers or Finance Ministers or Chancellors and Presidents, they of course all know exactly what is out there in terms of globalization impacts. But organizing the necessary global consensus and the governance and cooperation structures is tremendously difficult.
How far is the discipline of development research affected by global change?
This is a complex question, to which I do not have a definite answer. The whole field of development research is currently about to get redefined. In the past, the concept of development was clear: On the one side, there was the developed world, the OECD-world, consisting of 35-40 countries and on the other side, the "underdeveloped" part of the world, all other countries. Understanding the differences between developed and developing, along with thinking about the basic drivers of modernization and wealth creation in less developed countries was at the core of development research for a long period. How can poor countries become rich and as developed as OECD countries already are?
Today, it is highly questionable if even the broader categories of "development research" still serve to analyze the new realities. Do we currently still need "development economists", and how would they differ from classical "economists" doing research in those European countries suffering most from the debt crisis, high unemployment and weak institutions? Situations in many OECD countries nowadays look like what one would expect from a still developing or emerging economy, and the other way around. So, what distinguishes development research? This is an important question. Studying non-OECD countries, do we still need development research based governance theories or democratization theories – thus, theories that are systematically different from those we apply in our research on OECD countries? The discipline of development research is under immense pressure. This debate is linked to the second wave of global change we talked about: the post-western world order, emerging economies catching up, convergence trends in the global economy.
If you look at the role of international technology transfer, the same scenario arises: the North-South, donor-recipient categories have dissolved. Technology transfer has lost its distinct direction, and it is much more reciprocal and diffuse than it used to be. There are several studies currently pointing to the fact that investment rates in R&D and in technology creation are growing fast in several regions around the globe, whereas in many OECD-countries, investment is stagnating, or even decreasing. The whole map of knowledge, if you like to say so, is about to undergo deep changes. This implies that the common assumption that knowledge is based in OECD countries and transferred to the South via development cooperation is just not working any longer. We need new patterns of cooperation between different countries in this area. And we need research on global development dynamics which will be different from classical development research which has been based on the assumption of a systemic North-South divide for a long time.
How do institutions such as the World Bank react to the emerging and redefined agenda of development?
The current reorientation of the World Bank as a Knowledge Bank originates from the assumption that knowledge is just as important as money for global development. The second point is that more and more of their partners in non-OECD countries, classical developing and emerging economies, are more and more interested in the knowledge pools of the World Bank and less in their experts. And: dynamic developing countries and emerging economies are even more interested in investments in their own knowledge systems and joint knowledge creation with the World Bank. The old North-South knowledge transfer model is eroding. You might say that there currently are two contradictory global trends: on the one hand via social media and the Internet, knowledge is being widely distributed – broader than ever before and actually, theoretically accessible at any point in the world –, on the other hand the proliferation of knowledge is accompanied with access restriction and control, and the growing privatization of knowledge. Aiming to play a constructive role in collaborative knowledge generation, the World Bank invests a lot in building up freely accessible data bases and open research tools, including the provision of governance or development indicators of any kind. However, this is a difficult process that is developing slowly.
The World Bank is currently undergoing several basic re-orientations. The structures inside of the World Bank are about to become less hierarchical and more horizontal. Originally, the World Bank has been a much more western dominated organization as the Bretton Woods institutions were formed by the United States and its allies. If you look into the governance structures of the World Bank today, it is still largely dominated by OECD countries, but you can notice that this is changing. It is a global organization but 90 % of people working there have been studying at Anglo-Saxon universities. Actors especially from emerging economies have been criticizing that for long, claiming that the World Bank as a global organization should have to be represented by a global citizenship. Although this had slowly started to change already, all the knowledge and all the qualification procedures still remained very western dominated. So they asked the World Bank to diversify its partner structures, to reach out and cooperate with research institutions from around the world. This is what the World Bank is trying to do at the moment, which is really a break with its culture. Because even though the World Bank is a global organization, it has always been a very inward-looking organization. The World Bank was strong, with fantastic professionals and researchers inside, but without cooperating tools. Now they are trying to broaden their cooperation structures and to learn from and together with other institutions.
What are the opportunities and difficulties of big data analysis for global development?
Access to any kind of data is important for any kind of knowledge creation. It has been very limited for many developing countries over a very long time. So, thinking about how to assure access to serious data is significant. This would be my first point. My second point is that, when it comes to big data and the question of managing large amounts of indicators on, for example, cross-country or cross-sector modeling, I think the new technologies are opening up new research possibilities and opportunities. Big data provides the opportunity to identify patterns. Looking for similar dynamics in very different systems is a very interesting exercise, because you get deeper insights into the basic dynamics of systems. This is what I have learned from my colleague Nakicenovic, whom I have mentioned before, and who is working on the Global Energy Assessment, or from Juergen Kurths, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who is studying basic structures and dynamics of very different complex systems like air traffic networks, global infrastructures and social media networks. Managing big data allows you to see patterns which cannot be seen if you only work with case studies. However, to understand the dynamics of countries and sectors, new actor constellations or communities, you need to go into detail and in this specific moment, big data is only the starting point, the background: you also need qualified, serious, very often qualitative data on the ground. Big data and qualified, specific data: they complement each other.
For sure, an important aspect of big data is that for the most part, it is gathered and stored by private businesses. We started this interview talking about global commons and we actually just defined a global commons: data on development should be a global commons, and we need standards and rules of managing those. Private actors could play a role, but within a set of rules defined by societies and policies, and not the private business sector.
Dirk Messner is the Director of the "German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE)" since 2003 and teaches at the Institute of Political Science, University of Duisburg-Essen. He is Co-Director of the "Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research (KHK/GCR)", University Duisburg-Essen, which was established in 2012. He furthermore is Co-Chair of the "German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU)", member of the "China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development", member of the "Global Knowledge Advisory Commission" of the World Bank and member of the "European Commission's Scientific Advisory Board for EU development policy". Dirk Messner's research interests and work areas include globalisation and global governance, climate change, transformation towards low carbon economies, and development policy. He directed many international research programs and thus created a close international research network.
related links:
Profile at German Development Institute Messner, Dirk / Guarín, Alejandro / Haun, Daniel (eds.) (2013): The Behavioural Dimensions of International Cooperation, Global Cooperation Research Papers 1, Centre for Global Cooperation Research (pdf)
Read Jing Gu, John Humphrey, and Dirk Messner's (2007) Global Governance and Developing Countries: The Implications of the Rise of China here (pdf)
Messner, Dirk (2007): The European Union: Protagonist in a Multilateral World Order or Peripheral Power in the »Asia-Pacific« Century? (pdf)
Halloween in Houston The Following is a response to Vardoulakis book Spinoza, The Epicurean that I gave at SPEP. I previously blogged about the book. One of the many merits of Dimitris Vardoulakis' Spinoza, the Epicurean: Authority and Utility in Materialism is that it focuses on the question of obedience as central to the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Obedience is what differentiates revelation from knowledge, scripture from philosophy, action from belief. On one side, the first of these terms, there is obedience, that which falls under the control the state, and on the other freedom, the domain of philosophy. However, such an assertion would suggest obedience is a simple matter, that the line between obedience and freedom can be sharply drawn. Vardoulakis suggests that obedience must be understood through a dialectic of authority and freedom. As Vardoulakis describes this dialectic: Authority requires obedience whereas the drive to calculate our utility presupposes that we make our own practical judgements. Thus, under certain conditions, when authority takes over and suspends our judgements the result is political submission. But, also, under different conditions, we may calculate that it is to our utility to let someone else—for instance, someone with more knowledge or expertise—calculate our utility on our behalf. We can show the same interdependence by starting with utility: it is impossible to conceive of the human in terms of the calculation of utility without admitting that obedience, and hence authority, are necessary in certain circumstances. There is no such a thing as pure reason in human action. There is no human immune to obedience. Vardoulakis formulation is striking in two parts, first, as I have already indicated, in suggesting that the division between obedience and freedom, authority and utility, is not easy to draw, as one necessarily spills over into the other, but more importantly in suggesting that this relation is necessarily dialectical. This is the second major contribution of Vardoulakis' book, in arguing not for a dialectic reading of Spinoza but for a specifically Spinozist dialectic. The idea of a dialectic in Spinoza is a necessarily vexed one. Much of the current turn to Spinoza in contemporary thought, especially that of Gilles Deleuze and Antonio Negri, have promoted Spinoza as an alternative to the dialectic. It is a matter of deciding between affirmation and negation, Spinoza and Hegel. However, Pierre Macherey in the closing of Hegel or Spinoza, puts forward the notion that Spinoza offers a non-teleological dialectic. As Macherey writes, outlining the fundamental problems of this dialectic, What is or what would be a dialectic that functioned in the absence of all guarantees, in an absolutely causal manner, without a prior orientation that would establish within it, from beginning, the principle of absolute negativity, without the promise that all the contradictions in which it engages are by rights resolved, because they carry within them the conditions of their resolution? The contemporary turn to Spinoza is itself split, without a necessary conditions of a guarantee, between those who see Spinoza as opposed to the dialectic, to negativity and contradiction, and those that see in Spinoza not the nondialectical other of the dialectic, but its dialectical correction, a surprising one since, as Macherey argues, in this case the correction comes before the deviation, Spinoza before Hegel. Spinoza makes possible a dialectic without telos or resolution, a materialist dialectic. Vardoulakis' declaration of the dialectic of authority and utility is most productively read against the backdrop of this turn to a Spinozist dialectic, or a dialectic in Spinoza, which is to say along with Pierre Macherey and Etienne Balibar as his central interlocutors. (I say Balibar and Macherey, but for the purpose of this response I am going to focus on the former, but Macherey's Sagesse ou Ignorance would seem to have its own dialectic of obedience). As I will argue, in each case what is examined dialectically is obedience itself, or, what we could call, following contemporary philosophy, subjection. That subjection is dialectical can be glimpsed from Spinoza's well known formulation that the masses fight for "servitude as if it was salvation," the formulation suggests that subjection must be thought not just as something passively endured but something actively strived for, we need to see subjection in activity and activity in subjection. In this way a dialectical reading overcomes the limitations of those interpretations which have apparently found in Spinoza only a theory of subjection, of ideology, or of subversion, of affirmative transformation.. The most obvious of the former would be Louis Althusser, for whom the Spinozist theory of the imagination, with its focus on the subject, is the basis of ideological interpellation. It also overcomes the limitations of those, such as Deleuze and Negri, who find in Spinoza the affirmation of a constitutive and transformative power. Reading Spinoza dialectically means recognize that the very terms of opposition, subjection and constitution, negation and affirmation, must be thought of as thoroughly intertwined. Spinoza is neither a thinker of pure subjection, of the imagination, or first kind of knowledge as ideology, but nor is he the thinker of constituent power or affirmative lines of flight. He is neither of these things, or perhaps both of these things, because subjection and its opposite, lines of flight or constitutive power, are neither of these things. We are always dealing with both, and with both intertwined, that is part of what it means to read Spinoza dialectically. What do we mean by dialectic? In some sense a definition of the dialectic would seem to be, well undialectical, but beyond such an objection, which is both always tempting and always disappointing, I think that we can offer a basic formulation of at least a few common aspects. First, such a dialectic involves both a unity and a contradiction of opposites, but one without a third term or necessary resolution. Authority and Utility do not resolve themselves into some sublation through the authority of utility itself in a kind of enlightened democracy. However, this does not mean that such a dialectic is entirely static. The rejection of a general resolution, of a third term, means that the resolution of these tensions can only be thought in their historical specificity. Spinoza's historical study of Moses is not an illustration of a general principle but specific instances of what in a concrete situation, a political dialectic. As Balibar argues, "Spinoza's definition can be considered dialectical in the sense that the passage from the abstract to the concrete, as the development of the initial formula's contradictions, arises from a historical study." Spinoza's engagement with the singular case in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus is necessary because the contradictions of utility and authority only resolve themselves in a specific situation. The existing historical situation is not just a contradictory unity of authority and utility, but also reason and imagination. Etienne Balibar has made this particular dialectic central to his understanding of Spinoza. Spinoza reflects on the intersections of imagination and reason, affect and intellect, in the constitution of the collective and the individual in at least two places. The first is in terms of the general definition of ambition. Ambition is the affective constitution of society, the desire that others love what I love, that others live according to my temperament [ingenium]. As such it is inseparable from the imagination, from the imaginary constitution of the other's desire and love. In and through ambition we constitute the image of the other, of 'men' [homines] in general, the generic image of others that functions as a guide for our actions and desires (EIIIP29). It is no longer the love or hatred of this or that individual, or collection of individuals that orients an individual's actions, but a generic idea, a kind of 'society effect.' There are two limits to this affective constitution of ambition. First, at the level of sociality, and the conceptual grasp of social relations, 'men' is a universal. For Spinoza all universals stem from the human body's finitude, it is affected by so many images that it can no longer grasp the singular differences (EIIP40S). What is left then is a generic idea that is produced by the inability to imagine all the myriad things, a universal that is always tainted by some particular content: some will imagine man as a rational animal, while others will think of a featherless biped. The 'men' who we strive to act like, whose image governs our loves and hates, is a fiction, an unstable universal that is imagined differently by different individuals. It is as much a condition of discord as harmony. Second, there is a problem at the level of the object of this sociality, that which we want others to love or hate. We desire that others love what we love, the love (or hatred) we feel is strengthened by the idea that others love what we love. This ambition becomes a source of conflict especially if the object that we desire is subject to the rule of scarcity, and thus cannot be possessed by all equally. Ambition is thus internally conflicted. As Spinoza writes, 'those who love are not of one mind in their love—while they rejoice to sing the praises of the thing they love, they fear to be believed' (EIVP37S1). The constitution of society through ambition is inherently contradictory, the very things that draw people together, the desire to love as others love and to have others love what I love, divide them as well. As conflicted as this sociality is, it is a sociality, which is to say that the ambivalence of ambition are not a remnant of the state of nature, but are a product of sociality itself. Society, or, as Spinoza puts it, the city, is not exclusively founded on the ambivalent sociality of the passions. It is also founded on reason, on the powers of the intellect. It is the same conatus, the same striving, underlying reason and ambition. In each case there is a striving to make the temperament of the individual coincide with others, to constitute a collective temperament that would reflect the individual. However, the essential difference is in how this relation to the other and the object is constituted. The rational constitution of the state is based on the recognition that it is more useful to live with others. This idea of man is not the idea of men constituted through the imagination, it is not the universal idea, but the utility of sociality relations. It is not the desire that others live as I live, or that I coordinate my love and hates with others, but mankind can accomplish more collectively than individually (EIVP35S). As Spinoza famously writes, 'nothing is more useful to man than man' (EIVP37S2). This idea of man does not produce the ambivalence that determines the affect of ambition. Individuals guided by reason actually agree with each other, add and assist each other, rather than strive to orient their actions around an impossible object of what the others want. Moreover, reason as an object of desire is truly common, not only can it be shared by all, but its worth increases with the number of people who participate in it (EIVP36). Reason is not scarce, not finite, and is actually increased by others thinking the same thing. Men under the guidance of reason can overcome the contradictions of ambition and actually desire that others desire what they desire. These two different foundations of the city, these two different genesis of sociality, one based on the affect of ambition and the other based on reason, are not two different options: there is not a city of affects and a city of reason supplanting each other as two different phases, two different orders. Spinoza's text presents them as two different demonstrations of the same thing, suggesting the coexistence of these two different constitutions of society. As Balibar writes, 'Sociability is therefore the unity of a real agreement and an imaginary ambivalence, both of which have real effects.' We are always dealing with both affects, with ambition, and reason, with a city founded on a projection of our ideas of man, and a city founded on our rational utility. While there is no telos, no necessary progression by which the city founded on reason, a democracy, necessarily displaces a city founded on founded on superstition and affects, that does no meant that the relation is entirely static. The particular combination of reason and affects defines the nature of a given city, and its particular history. There is no more one generic essence of the city's striving than there is an essence of man's singular striving. The striving, the particular relations that constitute the city, the collective, must be thought from the singular case, from the specific way it is affected and determined. There is thus a history, but this history must be thought from the singular case, from the particular way in which any given city combines ambition and reason, affects and knowledge. For Balibar this is not just a reading of Spinoza, but could be understood to be a general thesis about politics in general, which is always situated between reason, on the fundamental thesis that "nothing is more useful to man than man," that we benefit from living in a society, from the way in which living among others makes our lives better than a solitary life. This fact is true of any society which has an irreducible dimension of utility. At the same time every society is founded on an imaginary institution, an image of what it means to be in a city, what it means to be human. Every city is both rational and imagined, and this contradictory unity of these two scenes exists in each specific case. As much as it is possible to push the city to become more rational, which is to say less exclusive and hierarchal, it is never possible to dispense with the other scene entirely. This limit acts back on political philosophy itself, as Balibar argues any attempt to think through the relation of Spinoza and Marx must necessarily recognize the limit of each to think the other scene. As Balibar writes, It would be easy to conclude that Marx is basically unaware of the "other scene" of politics, the scene of communitarian affiliation, and therefore unaware of symbolic violence as well (although he names it or has bequeathed us with the word ideology, one of the aptest names for it); and to conclude that Spinoza, for his part, basically ignores the irreducible level of economic antagonism (doubtless because, at the economic level, where conatus can perhaps be conceived of as a "productive force," Spinoza is basically an optimist and a utilitarian" (Balibar 2015: 12) The dialectic of imagination and reason means that any philosophy that focuses on reason, on individual or collective interest as the basis of politics, must necessarily contend with imaginary identifications, and any politics of the imagination, or imagined communities, must necessarily contend with the rational basis of any social relation. It is possible to map these two dialectics onto each other, to argue that reason is utility and vice versa, since nothing is more useful to man than man, and, at the same time, that authority is constituted in an through the imagination, since authority, that which cannot be contested often passes through the theological, which is to say superstition which is founded upon the imagination. However, what I would like to suggest is that we see the dialectic of utility and authority and that of imagination and reason as two fundamentally different dialectics, which intersect without necessarily reflecting each other. This is in part because, as Vardoulakis argues, authority cannot be neatly mapped onto the imagination even as it passes through it especially in those forms inflected by religion and superstition. Authority exists in part because humanity does not always recognize what is useful, namely that a political order which combines the efforts of each, is useful. For those who do not recognized the utility of society, or more to the point, those who do not recognize it in the moment, since we see the better and do the worse from time to time, we are all social and anti-social, authority provides another foundation for society. Authority is a necessary supplement to the rational basis of society, and as such it could be described as a rational irrationality, or a-rationality. Authority which is outside of reason because it cannot be contested by reason has a rational basis, or to put it more succinctly, sometimes there is a utility to authority. However, at the exact moment that such a claim can be made, a claim that would unite two into one through the expansive sense of utility, they come asunder because if authority is useful, a necessary supplement to the rational understanding of society, than it can be evaluated in terms of its utility. This is what Negri identifies as the historical criticism of religion. Religion, it is argued, played its part in sustaining and bringing together the human community during a period in which it could not govern itself, as in the case of Moses leading his people out of slavery, but it is no longer useful, creating conflict rather than accord, and functioning as a fetter on the powers and forces of society. Any attempt to unify authority and utility into one term, make authority useful or utility itself authority, necessarily fails, producing its opposite. The two dialectics could also be differentiated in terms of their specific foundations. Imagination and reason are grounded on an anthropological basis, on humanities capacity to affect and be affected. The two images of humanity, the one defined by utility and rationality is an concept of humanity, while the other, that of the imagined community is an image, and like all images it is defined by the bodies inability to hold multiple images together. All images of humanity, or of a common community, are necessarily shaped by particular images of society. In contrast to this, authority is less an anthropological fact than a particular institution, it is artificial, or more to the point it is an attempt to contend with the artificial ground of any social order. This is why there is an appeal to the theological in those moments of foundation. As much as the two dialectics overlap, as reason and utility are two different expressions of the same thing, and imagination and authority pass through the same relation to the past, they cannot be said to be the same thing, the political or institutional cannot be reduced to the anthropological and vice versa. The two different dialectical reflect the fundamental fact that any given political order is at once an effect of anthropology, stemming from human reason and imagination, but exceeds it in that any political order cannot be reduced to imagination and reason. This brings us to what could be considered the third moment of the spinozist dialectic, one that pushes it furthest from a Hegelian understanding, if the first is to be found in the unity of opposites, a basic criteria for a dialectic, and the second in the non-teleology, or, to say the same thing differently in the historical specificity of its resolution, then the third moment is in the necessary overdetermination of the dialectic itself. There is never anything like a contradiction, or even a central contradiction, which would be able to encompass the totality of the historical moment. It is not a matter of a dialectic of authority and utility, of reason and imagination, or of affect and concept, to add another figure but of the necessary overdetermination of any dialectic, as reason and imagination, utility and authority intersect with and complicate each other. This is only to name the two we have briefly considered here, we could also consider the dialectic of desire and the affects which have been explored by Frédéric Lordon. The merit of Vardoulakis book is not just that he has given us a new contradiction, that of authority and utility, which remain outside of the scope of most discussions of Spinoza, but that in insisting on the dialectical dimension of that relation he offers a way to not only encompass the others, but brings us that closer to thinking together Spinoza and dialectical thought.
There are a lot of moving parts to the MMT program. I want to focus on one of these parts today: the relation between monetary and fiscal policy. One thing I find appealing about MMT scholars is their attention to monetary history and institutional details. I've learned a lot from them in this regard. But as is often the case with details, one has to worry about whether they help shed light on a specific question of interest, or whether they sometimes let us not see the forest for the trees. And in terms of the broader picture, since I grew up in that branch of macroeconomics that tries to take money, banking, and debt seriously (i.e., not standard NK theory), I sometimes have a hard time understanding what all the fuss is about. Much of standard monetary theory (SMT) seems perfectly consistent with some of the ideas I seen discussed in MMT proponents; see, for example, The Failure to Inflate Japan.
This post is devoted to better understanding a contribution by Eric Tymoigne. Eric is one of the people I go to whenever I want to learn more about MMT (if you're interested in MMT, you should follow him on Twitter @tymoignee). In this post, I discuss his article "Modern Monetary Theory, and Interrelations Between the Treasury and Central Bank: The Case of the United States." (JEI 2014). Passages quoted from his paper are highlighted in blue. The working paper version of the paper can be found here. Eric has kindly agreed to respond to my comments and let me post our conversation. We had to some editing, hopefully this did not disrupt the flow too much. In any case, I hope you find it interesting. And, as always, feel free to join in on the conversation in the comments section below. -- DA
One of the main contributions of modern money theory (MMT) has been to explain why monetarily sovereign governments have a very flexible policy space. Not only can they issue their own currency to spend and to service their public debt denominated in their own unit of account, but also any self-imposed constraint on budgetary operations can be easily bypassed.
I'm curious to know what the contribution is here relative to standard monetary theory (SMT). In SMT, the government can also issue its own currency to spend and to service the public debt denominated in its own unit of account. So this degree of "flexibility" is already accounted for. As for "self-imposed constraints on budgetary operations," SMT takes several approaches to this issue, depending on the purpose of the analysis. One approach is to take these constraints as given and then to study their implications. But it is also common to consolidate the central bank, treasury and government into a single authority, which implies no self-imposed constraints on budgetary operations.
Perhaps what is meant is that MMT shows how existing self-imposed constraints on budgetary operations can be (or are) bypassed in reality. This leads us to question, however, concerning what those self-imposed constraints are doing there in the first place. Are they there by design and, if so, why? Or are they there by accident (and, if so, how in the world did this happen)?
ET: Yes consolidation is not unique to MMT as we have said repeatedly. Not only is it used quite commonly in the economic literature, but also it is a common rhetorical tool in economic talks, discourse, etc.
DA: Right, so everyone understands this (at least, they should)--it's perfectly consistent with standard monetary theory. So far, so good.
ET: Most economists, politicians and the public don't understand this or its implications. They will interpret the above as saying that it is obvious that the government can create money but it is not a normal way to proceed and it is inflationary. MMT just pushes consolidation to its logical conclusions and shows that institutional details do back those conclusions. In a consolidated framework, the federal government can only implement spending by creating money, this is not abnormal and it is not inflationary by itself. There is no other way to find the necessary dollars to spend. Here is what consolidation means in terms of balance sheets:
For the federal government, taxes destroy currency (L1 falls) and claims on non-fed sectors falls (A1 falls) (an alternative offsetting operation is net worth of government rises). When US spends, it credits accounts (L1 rises). Similarly, bond issuance does not lead to a gain of any asset for the government; all it does is replace a non-interest earning government liability (monetary base) with an interest-earning government liability (Treasury securities).
DA: I am not going to argue against your accounting. As for bond-issuance, in SMT, an open-market operation is modeled as a swap of zero-interest reserves for interest-bearing treasuries. The interest on treasuries is explained by their relative illiquidity (another self-imposed constraint). The economic consequences of such a swap depends on a host of factors, which I'm sure you're familiar with.
ET: Sure, in addition, self-imposed financial constraints (e.g. debt ceiling, no direct financing by the Fed, no monetary power for treasury) have been put in place at various times with the argument that they impose discipline in public finances. MMT argues, these financial constraints are not necessary and are bypassed routinely through Treasury-Central Bank coordination.
DA: Sure, the standard view is that these self-imposed constraints are designed to impose discipline in public finance. The proposition that these financial constraints are or are not necessary, however, must be based on a set of assumptions that may or may not be satisfied in reality. (The fact that these constraints may be bypassed through Treasury-Central Bank coordination does not seem relevant to me -- the conflict emphasized by SMT is between an "independent" central bank and the legislative authority (e.g., the Fed and Congress, not the Fed and Treasury). I'm not sure why a new theory is needed here. We know, for example, that if the legislative branch of government fully trusts itself (and future elected representatives) to behave in a fiscally responsible manner, the notion of an "independent" central bank (and other self-imposed constraints) makes little sense.
ET: Remember that MMT emphasizes the irrelevance of financial/nominal constraints for monetarily sovereign governments (bond vigilantes, risk of insolvency of social security, etc.). One can do that by using the consolidated government (taxes don't finance, bonds don't finance, government spends by crediting accounts, etc.) or by using the unconsolidated government (the central bank helps the Treasury, the Treasury helps the central bank). The second method conforms to actual federal government operations but it is much less easy to use rhetorically and it waters down the core point: government finances are never a financial issue as long as monetary sovereignty applies.
Given that point, as you note, financial constraints are not only irrelevant, but also disruptive and used for political games. MMT wants to make government financial operations as smooth and flexible as possible. Once society has decided how, and to what degree, government should be involved in solving socioeconomic problems, finding the money should not be an issue when monetary sovereignty prevails. That means demystifying and eliminating financial barriers to government operations so the political debate can focus on solving real issues (environment issues, socio-economic issues, etc.). Fearmongering about the public debt and fiscal deficits makes for poor political debates and policy prescriptions.
There is a view, expressed by Paul Samuelson, that if we tell policymakers and the public that there are no financial limits to government spending, policymakers will spend like mad; therefore, economists need to lie to policymakers and the public (and themselves). This is nonsense. We ought to discuss policy choices not on the basis of Noble Lies but rather on the basis of sound and informed premises. Economists needs to make sure that policymakers focus on resource constraints.
In addition, political constraints on government should be geared toward improving the transparency and participatory aspects of government (e.g. limit role of big money in elections, limit wastes, etc.). We already have a government that passes a budget (it needs to do so for transparency and accountability purposes), we already have an auditing process, and we already have some (limited) democratic process, so aim at improving these aspects. MMT proponents are not naive, we know that some politicians are self-interested, we know that policy implementation may lead to mistakes, we know people may try to game the system ("free riders"); however we trust that a transparent and democratic government can (and does) get through these issues. MMT does not see financial constraints as helping in any ways, rather they inhibit the democratic process.
Of course, MMT proponents also have a policy agenda (Job guarantee, financial regulation based on Minsky, etc.) because we do not see market mechanisms as self-promoting full employment, price stability and financial stability. As such, as you said, MMT proponents favor alternative means to achieve these goals through direct government intervention. We don't see the central bank as an effective means to promote price stability. The central bank should focus on financial stability through interest-rate stabilization and financial regulation (an area where the Fed has not performed well).
Finally, yes independence of the central bank is seen as a big deal but MMT disagrees for two reasons. First, MMT emphasizes the lack of effectiveness of monetary policy in managing the business cycle and, second, and probably more importantly, MMT notes that central-bank independence in terms of interest-rate setting and goal settings does not mean independence from the financial needs of the Treasury.
DA: I think it's fair to say most people want to see government operations run smoothly, and would welcome a sober debate over the issues at hand without the fear-mongering that some like to promote. The broad objective seems the same--the debate is more over implementation--how monetary and fiscal policy is to be coordinated--given human frailties.
Having said this, I think you go too far by asserting that "government finances are never an issue as long as monetary sovereignty applies." Of course, technical default on nominal debt is not an issue (we all understand this). But SMT also recognizes the importance of economic default on nominal debt. True, a government can always print money to satisfy its nominal debt obligation, but if money printing dilutes the purchasing power of money, this is a de facto default.
On a related issue, SMT asks "what are the limits to seigniorage?" The fact that a government can print money does not give it the power to command resources without constraint. People can (and do) find substitutes for government money (they may also substitute out of taxed activities into non-taxed activities). SMT treats the limits to seigniorage as a financial constraint. Maybe MMT has a different label for this constraint? Perhaps it is related to what I hear MMT proponents call an "inflation constraint." Maybe one way to reconcile MMT with SMT on this score is by recognizing that SMT usually assumes (sometimes incorrectly) that the inflation constraint is always binding. If this is the case, a monetarily-sovereign government does have a financial constraint, even according to MMT.
ET: Yes, ability to create a currency does not mean ability to command resources because there may not be a demand for the currency. That is where tax liabilities and other dues owed to the government become important (cf. the chartalist theory of money, a component of MMT). That's also why taxes, monetary creation and bond issuance are not conceptualized by MMT as alternative financing means but rather as complementary. The government imposes a tax liability, spends by issuing the currency necessary to pay the tax liability, then taxes and issues bonds. Spending may be inflationary indeed and so there is an inflation constraint; but it is not a financial constraint, it is a resource constraint.
About the "printing" of money by government, inflation and economic default. Regarding the first two, there is no evidence of an automatic relation between money and inflation. In a consolidated view, government always spends by monetary creation but controls the impact on inflation via taxes and the impact on interest rates via bond issuance. In an unconsolidated view, the central bank routinely finances and refinances the Treasury by helping some of the auction bidders and by participating in the auction.
Finally, regarding economic default, governments routinely "default" in that sense with no problems. I don't see that as a relevant concept unless someone can show that economic default raises interest rates or generates rising inflation (it does not); here again, there is no automatic link between inflation and interest rates. That link depends on how the central bank reacts; if it does not then market participants don't either.
DA: Let me return to the manner in which the Fed/Treasury/Congress are consolidated (or not) in SMT and why this matters, in your view. In some SMT treatments, Congress decides spending and taxes, which implies a primary deficit. It's up to the Treasury to finance that deficit, with the Fed playing a supporting role (by determining interest rate and issuing reserves for treasury debt). What's wrong with this approach?
ET: That goes in the right direction with an understanding that the government really has no control over its fiscal position. All this, which relates to the implementation of monetary sovereignty, helps understand why the financial crowding out is not operative, why monetary financing is not by definition inflationary, why i > g is normal. It helps explain why the hysterical rhetoric surrounding the public debt and deficits in nonsense. I recently wrote a piece for Challenge Magazine on that topic. Surpluses are celebrated, governments implement austerity during a recession to "live within our means", Social Security needs to be fixed to avoid bankrupting it, governments need to save more, etc. All of this is incorrect.
DA: I'm not sure why you claim SMT leads to the idea of i > g. The case i < g is perfectly consistent with SMT (see Blanchard's 2019 AEA Presidential address, and also my posts here and here). The correct criticism (I think) is that mainstream economists have assumed i > g as being the empirically relevant case (it is not).
ET: That is what I meant. MMT links that to monetary sovereignty.
DA: I think that's correct. I should like to add that mainstream economists (apart from a small set of monetary theorists) have not appreciated the role of high-grade sovereign debt as an exchange medium in wholesale financial markets and as a global store of value, which in my view likely explains a lot of the "missing inflation." But as for "surpluses being celebrated," you are now talking about individual viewpoints and not SMT per se. There were plenty of calls out there for countercyclical fiscal policy based on standard macroeconomic principles. But I do agree virtually all mainstream economists are (perhaps overly) concerned about "long-run fiscal sustainability." The view is that at the end of the day, stuff has to be paid for -- and that having the ability to print money, while granting an extra degree of flexibility, does not get around this basic fact.
DA: I'd like to ask you about this statement you make:
In (the unconsolidated) case, the Treasury collects taxes and issues securities before it can spend. However, federal taxes and bond offerings also serve another highly important function that is overlooked in standard monetary economics. Specifically, federal taxes and bond offerings result in a drainage of funds from the banking system, and MMT carefully analyzes the implication of this fact. From that analysis, MMT argues that federal taxes and bond offerings are best conceptualized as devices that maintain price and interest-rate stability, respectively (of course, the tax structure also has some important role to play in terms of influencing incentives and income distribution; something not disputed by MMT).
DA: Well, yes, taxes serve both as a revenue device (permitting the government to gain control over resources that would otherwise be in control of the private sector) and as a way to control inflation. I'm not sure about the idea of the Treasury offering bonds for the purpose of achieving interest-rate stability (though this may happen to some extent when the treasury determines which maturity to offer). I don't think this is the way things work in the U.S. today.
ET: Taxes and issuance of treasuries drain reserves and so raise the overnight rate. Hence, on a daily basis, a fiscal surplus raises the overnight rate and a fiscal deficit lowers it. There has been significant Treasury-Fed coordination to smooth the impact of taxes (and treasury spending) on the money market.
DA: Fine, but so what? We all understand "coordination" between Fed and Treasury exists at the operational level.
ET: I think you are too kind to other economists and policymakers. On taxes as price-stabilizing factors, there is indeed some similarities here. On the role of treasuries for interest-rate stability, it does work like this today. It may not be obvious because of the current emphasis on treasuries as Treasury's budgetary tools, but Treasury has issued securities for other purposes than its budgetary needs. In the US, this occurred most recently during the 2008 crisis (SFP bills). In Australia, in the early 2000s, the Treasury issued securities while running surpluses in order to promote financial stability.
DA: But even if this is not the way things actually work (in my view, it's the Fed that stabilizes interest rates, possibly through OMOs involving U.S. Treasuries), I'm not sure what point is being made. I think we can all agree that monetary and fiscal policy can be thought of as being consolidated in some manner. What would be good to know is how a specific MMT consolidation matters (relative to other specifications) for a specific set of questions being addressed. There is nothing in the abstract or introduction of this paper that suggests an answer to this question.
ET: The point being made is that in a consolidated government, tax and bond issuance lose the financial purpose they have for the Treasury but keep their price and interest-stability purposes.
DA: In standard monetary theory, tax and bond issuance keeps its funding purposes for the government and at the same time can be used to influence the price-level (inflation) and interest rates. Is this wrong? I don't think so. At some level, taxes (a vacuum cleaner sucking up money from the private sector) must have some implications for the ability of government to exert command over real resources in the economy. What we label this ability (whether "funding" or ''finance" or whatever, seems inconsequential).
ET: Ok here comes the crucial difference between financial and real sides of the economy. In financial terms, taxes do not increase the capacity of the government to spend, i.e. the government does not earn any money from taxing; taxes destroy the currency. In financial terms, there is no reason to fear a fiscal deficit; deficits are the norm, are sustainable and help other sectors grow their financial net wealth. As such, it is not because a government wants to spend more that it must tax more or lower spending somewhere else. That is the PAYGO mentality. This mentality makes policymakers think of spending and taxing in terms of how they impact the fiscal balance instead of their impact on employment, inflation, incentives, etc. While deficits may have negative consequences, they are not automatic. If one takes a look at the evidence, deficits have no automatic negative impacts on interest rates, tax rates, public-debt sustainability, or inflation.
In real terms, the necessity to increase tax rates to prevent inflation, and so move more resources to the government, depends on the state of the economy and the permanency of the increase in government spending relative to the size of the economy. In an underemployed economy, the government can spend more without raising tax rates. In a fully employed economy, shifting resources to the government without generating inflation does require raising tax rate and/or putting in place other measures such as rationing, price controls, and delayed private-income payment. Here Keynes's "How to Pay for the War" provides the roadmap. Standard economics is full-employment economics so opportunity costs are always present. MMT follows Kalecki, Keynes and the work of their followers (have a look at Lavoie's "Foundations of Post Keynesian Economic Analysis") and note that capitalist economies are usually underemployment and economic growth is demand driven. Put in a picture, the economy is usually at point a.
Put succinctly, the real constraint is conditionally relevant, the financial constraint is irrelevant if monetary sovereignty prevails. That is the proper way to frame the policy debates and to advise policymakers; don't worry about the money, worry about how spending impacts the economy.
ET: Moving to another topic, consolidation of the government brings to the forefront forces that are operating in the current system but that are buried under institutional complications. Namely that a fiscal deficit lowers interest rates and treasuries issuance brings them back up, that spending must come before taxing and treasuries issuance, that monetary financing of the government is not intrinsically unsound and does not mean that tax and treasuries issuance don't have to be implemented.
DA: The statement that "deficit lower interest rates" needs considerable qualification. Among other things, it depends on the monetary policy reaction function. As for the claim that spending *must* come before taxes, this is not a universally valid statement (even if it may be true in some circumstances. But even more importantly, who cares? Mainstream theory does not suggest that monetary financing is intrinsically unsound (seigniorage is fine, if it respects inflation ceiling). As for money, taxes and bonds not being alternative "funding" sources, I worry that this semantics. You can call X a "funding" source or not -- it's just a label. The real question is: what are the macroeconomic implications of X?
ET: Let me emphasize where I agree. Yes, evidence shows the central role of monetary policy for the direction of interest rates, fiscal policy is at best a very small driver. And yes, one ought to focus on the real implications of government spending and we ought to forget about the financial implications. A fiscal deficit is not unsustainable nor abnormal; deficits are the stylized fact of government finances and are financially sustainable if monetary sovereignty is present. So don't try to frame the policy debate and set policy in terms of household finances, bankruptcy, fixing the deficit, etc.
To conclude I see three reasons why the "taxes/bonds don't finance the government" rhetoric is helpful:
1- It is strictly true for the federal government (i.e. consolidation).
2- it brings to the forefront some lesser-known aspects of taxes and treasuries issuance: impacts on money market, role of central bank in fiscal policy, role of treasury in monetary policy.
3- It changes the narrative in terms of policy and political economy: government does not rely on the rich to finance itself, taxes should be set to remove the "bads" not to finance the government (e.g. one should not set tax rates on pollution with the goal of balancing the budget but with the goal of curbing pollution to whatever is considered appropriate, that may lead to much higher tax rates than what is needed to balance the budget), PAYGO is insane, one should focus on the real outcomes of government policies not the budgetary outcomes.
DA:
1. I think this is semantics.
2. Not sure how it helps in this regard.
3. I think all of these positions are defensible without the statement "taxes/bonds don't finance the government", so if this is the ultimate goal (and I think it should be), perhaps we should set aside semantic debates and focus on the real issues at hand.
ET: 1 is not semantic. I know you have in mind taxes as a means to leave resources to the government. MMT makes a clear difference between financial (ability to find the money) and resources constraint (ability to get the goods and services) as explained above. The financial constraint is highly relevant for non-monetarily sovereign governments so it should be noted and clearly separated from the real constraint. Too many policy discussions and decisions by policymakers operating under monetary sovereignty are based on an inexistent inability to find money and the imagined dear financial consequences of budgeting fiscal deficits. 2 helps to understand how monetary sovereignty is implemented in practice. On 3, yes focus on the real issues.
DA: We agree on 3! Thank you for an interesting discussion, Eric. There's so much more to talk about, but let's leave that for another day.
