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Law in a Transnational Context Historical and Theoretical Perspectives Series of Lectures from January to April 2011
The world of traditional legal theories has become too small. It seems too small for a law that is more and more losing its old territorial, political, and national bonds and that becomes part of worldwide social and economic processes. Law of this kind tends to statelessness. It is no more focussed on a territory, national state, or a local community, but constitutes itself through the communicative networks of highly specialised discourses. The production of law shifts from the nation state to the specific dynamic of social systems which conventional terms and criteria of politically orientated legal theories hardly touch upon. Terms like "constitution", "legislation", "unity", "hierarchy", "sanction" etc. become uncertain. Nowadays law is at home in a world that is fragmentary, that has no centre, no middle point, or unity. Legal pluralism dominates the scenery.
"Globalization" is the common word for this phenomenon, which is accompanied by a review of traditional concepts of law, of their premises and implications. Legal history is constantly confronted with phenomena of this kind, especially when processes of global interlacing beyond territorial and national boundaries are being examined, or when societies with a plurality of norms are being put into perspective.
The Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in cooperation with the Cluster of Excellence at the Goethe-University Frankfurt will start in the winter term 2010/2011 a series of lectures dedicated to historical paradigms and theoretical concepts of such processes. Scholars from different countries and with strong expertise in theory and history of law, in sociology and political sciences will hold lectures about chosen subjects.
Lecture: Wo bleibt der Dritte im Rechtspluralismus? 13. January 2011 Prof. Dr. Klaus Günther, Institut für Kriminalwissenschaften und Rechtsphilosophie der Uni Frankfurt
Lecture: Domesticating Modernities: Transfer of Ideologies and Institutions in Southeastern Europe 3rd February 2011 Prof. Dr. Diana Mishkova, Director of Centre for Advanced Study Sofia (CAS)
Lecture: International Law in a World of Empires: Constructing a Global Prohibition Regime in the Long Nineteenth Century 7th March 2011 Prof. Dr. Lauren Benton, History Department, New York University
Lecture: The New Global Law. A Historical Perspective 14th April 2011 Prof. Dr. Rafael Domingo Oslé, Faculty of Law, Universidad de Navarra
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In 'Against Longtermism', Eric Schwitzgebel writes: "I accept much of Ord's practical advice. I object only to justifying this caution by appeal to expectations about events a million years from now." He offers four objections, which are interesting and well worth considering, but I think ultimately unpersuasive. Let's consider them in turn.(1) There's no chance humanity will survive long-term:All or most or at least many future generations with technological capabilities matching or exceeding our own will face substantial existential risk -- perhaps 1/100 per century or more. If so, that risk will eventually catch up with us. Humanity can't survive existential risks of 1/100 per century for a million years.If this reasoning is correct, it's very unlikely that there will be a million-plus year future for humanity that is worth worrying about and sacrificing for.This seems excessively pessimistic. Granted, there's certainly some risk that we will never acquire resilience against x-risk. But it's hardly certain. Two possible routes to resilience include: (i) fragmentation, e.g. via interstellar diaspora, so that different pockets of humanity could be expected to escape any given threat; or (ii) universal surveillance and control, e.g. via a "friendly AI" with effectively god-like powers relative to humans, to prevent us from doing grave harm.Maybe there are other possibilities. At any rate, I think it's clear that we should not be too quick to dismiss the possibility of long-term survival for our species. (And note that any non-trivial probability is enough to get the astronomical expected-value arguments off the ground.)(2) "The future is hard to see." This is certainly true, but doesn't undermine expected value reasoning.Schwitzgebel writes:It could be that the single best thing we could do to reduce the risk of completely destroying humanity in the next two hundred years is to almost destroy humanity right now... that might postpone our ability to develop even more destructive technologies in the next century. It might also teach us a fearsome lesson about existential risk....What we do know is that nuclear war would be terrible for us, for our children, and for our grandchildren. That's reason enough to avoid it. Tossing speculations about the million-year future into the decision-theoretic mix risks messing up that straightforward reasoning. But that isn't really "reason enough to avoid it", because if Schwitzgebel were right that immediate nuclear war was the only way to save humanity, that would obviously change its moral valence. It would be horribly immoral to let humanity go extinct just because saving it would be "terrible for us". When interests conflict, you can't just ignore the overwhelming bulk of them for the sake of maintaining "straightforward reasoning". (I'm sure confederate slaveowners regarded the abolition of slavery as "terrible for us, for our children, and for our grandchildren," but it was morally imperative all the same!)Of course, I don't really think it's remotely credible that nuclear war has positive expected value in the way that Schwitzgebel speculates. The hope that it "might" teach us a lesson seems far-fetched compared to the more obvious risks of permanently thwarting advanced civilization. (We're not even investing seriously in future pandemic prevention! If we can't learn from the past two years, I'm not confident that a rebuilt civilization centuries or millennia hence would learn anything from tragedies in its distant history. And again, there are serious risks that civilization would never fully rebuild.)So I think longtermism remains practically significant for raising the moral stakes of existential risk reduction. However important you think it is to avoid nuclear war, it's much more important once you take the long term into account (assuming you share my empirical beliefs about its expected harmfulness). It also suggests that there's immense expected value to research that would allow us to form better-grounded beliefs about such matters. We shouldn't just pre-emptively ignore them, as Schwitzgebel seemingly recommends. If it's remotely possible that we might find a way to reliably shape the far-future trajectory in a positive direction, it's obviously important to find this out!(3) "Third, it's reasonable to care much more about the near future than the distant future." Schwitzgebel stresses that this concern can be relational in form (tied to particular individuals or societies and their descendants), which avoids the problems with pure time discounting. That's an important point. But I don't think any reasonable degree of partiality can be so extreme as to swamp the value of the long-term future.To see why, just imagine a Parfitian "depletion" scenario, where we imagine that the harms of global warming are delayed by two centuries. Imagine that everyone currently alive (and a couple of generations hence) could reap a bonanza by burning all the planet's fossil fuels, condemning all distant future people to difficult lives in a severely damaged world. Or they could severely limit consumption while investing significantly in renewables, lowering quality of life over these two centuries while protecting the planet for all who come in the further future. Should they choose depletion or preservation? Obviously preservation, right? It's clearly immoral to drastically discount future generations when the trade-offs are made this explicit.(4) "Fourth, there's a risk that fantasizing about extremely remote consequences becomes an excuse to look past the needs and interests of the people living among us, here and now."It's always possible that a moral view is self-effacing, but that's no objection to the truth of the view. Empirically speaking, the people I know to be most concerned about the far-future (i.e., effective altruists) are also the people who seem to do the most to help the global poor, factory-farmed animals, etc. So this fear doesn't seem empirically well-grounded.By contrast, I think there's a much more credible risk that defenders of conventional morality may use dismissive rhetoric about "grandiose fantasies" (etc.) to discourage other conventional thinkers from taking longtermism and existential risks as seriously as they ought, on the merits, to take them. (I don't accuse Schwitzgebel, in particular, of this. He grants that most people unduly neglect the importance of existential risk reduction. But I do find that this kind of rhetoric is troublingly common amongst critics of longtermism, and I don't think it's warranted or helpful in any way.)Of course, it's possible that enthusiasts might end up drawn towards bad bets if they exaggerate their likely efficacy on influencing the far future. But that's just more reason to think that it's really important to investigate these questions carefully, and get the empirical estimates right. It's not a reason to reject longtermism wholesale.
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I am currently in the most wonderful Helsinki airport, waiting to go back to Berlin. I have been in Helsinki to study the Finnish case for the Phil/Ora/Steve book on Defense Agencies. It has been a great albeit cold and mostly wet week. Definitely glad we have this case in the book, and, yes, it is making it imperative to go to Sweden to see how NATO membership is a common process with perhaps not entirely common politics.First, the joy of Helsinki before I discuss what I have learned for the book project. It is on the Baltics, so when the wind blows, brrrrr. Yes, we got some snow here last night, deep into April. Makes me feel like I am back in Canada, except Ottawa has more sun and not as much cold winds. This is only my second time here, and the first one hardly counts as it was a brief layover between Leningrad (that tells you how long ago it was) and NY. I got used to tramming around town, never using the metro as everyone was very well located in the center except a couple of interviews--one requiring a bus ride to beyond Helsinki and one or two requiring cab rides. Two parliament buildingsand funky sculpture One of my fave new experiences for interviewing was that they had a conference center where folks could hold meetings with far less security and inconvenience than going out to the ministries. I still did manage to go to the Ministry of Interior, which was not far away, and to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that was a 20 minute walk or 15 minute tram ride. The Parliament buildings were not just huge (everyone kept reminding me this is a small country with a small population, but their parliament buildings suggest otherwise), but also had more security than any other legislative building I can recall. Sure, everyone has a front entrance with thick windows, x-ray scanners, etc, but to get from point a to b inside, my escort had to badge the doors every five or ten steps. And, yeah, my escort in was the counsel to the defense committee, and on the way out ... a parliamentarian who was recently the chief of defense! They don't have much of a history, by the way, of senior ex mil leaders serving in parliament but Ukraine changed that. More on that below.reindeer on potatoI am not a huge fan of fish, so I tended to look for non-Finnish food (not all Finnish food is fish, to be clear), so I had Chinese, Italian, Mideast, and Georgian. Pretty sure that was my first time having Georgian food, but the waitress didn't understand my order, so I didn't get the classic big bread thing dish, so I will have to try that in Berlin (I found a Georgian place near my apartment). The people were very friendly, even though I have no Finnish. They all understand that no one speaks Finnish besides Finns, so they all speak Swedish (there is a sizable Swedish minority and the Swedes used to run the place), and English. Some folks remarked that the kids these days are less interested in learning Russian. So much for Russia's soft power....Yes, Russia loomed large here, as the Finns have a strong memory of the trauma of the Winter War--their fight with the Russians during World War II. Apparently, the Ukraine war hit the old folks very hard. I did wonder where the bunkers are, as I had heard that civil defense is a big thing here. I didn't recognize the signs apparently, as I was told that pretty much all of Helsinki has underground facilities. The difference between old US bomb shelters and Finnish bunkers--the latter are used on a daily basis--parking lots, swimming pools, gyms, etc that are underground. This keeps them fresh, their air good, and also, most importantly, has the Finns comfy with going to these places. The economy is not doing well, and it may or may not have much to do with the fact that the Finns have pretty much cut off most trade with Russia. The whole of government thing Canadians and others have a problem doing? Finland has whole of society, comprehensive security. In its history, it has always been alone until ... the last year. So, they are ready to mobilize the entire society if the Russians attack. This means a draft (just for men [all young men including one NBA player], women can join the military but their conscription is voluntary [holy oxymoron]), an extensive reservist system so that the small army can swell to 280,000 and then 900,000, coordination of all parts of society to respond to an attack. The drafted are paid about 5 Euros a day.... which does not go far in super expensive Helsinki. Decorations inside Parl buildingThe military has been running a month-long defense course 4x/year for a long, long time, where they create cohorts of 50 people, elites from across society, to learn about the military and the rest of comprehensive security. This is a hell of a public diplomacy effort--it is not cheap although some companies provide the food and booze and such for free. Companies apparently don't have a big problem with losing an employee for a month. To provide a comparison, the army exercise I did in 2019 was one day. This experience is really important as it came up in almost all of the interviews and mostly without my prompting.In ye old comparative politics, the phrase is war made the state. While not entirely true, the idea is that societies developed more and more extensive political institutions in order to fight and win or survive in international relations. It may be the case that NATO membership has the same but smaller impact. That joining NATO has caused Finland has to dramatically enlarge and perhaps empower its very small Ministry of Defense. NATO requires meetings, document vetting, preparation, the sending of personnel to NATO hq's in Brussels, Mons, and elsewhere. AND most NATO policy is made by civilians even though NATO is far more an organization about military stuff than civilian stuff (hence why much of the effort to build an Afghan government was run by separate national governments (foreign affairs, development agencies) rather than by NATO. The relevance of this is that it gives the MoD a greater role in making defense policy than in the past. That is, the Finnish defense forces made much of the policies but that may be changing now. Oh, and it was the first EU country I have been in where the NATO flags easily outnumber the EU ones.In terms of the project, Finland is an interesting case with a largely autonomous military, that their number two in the MoD is always a retired senior military officer, their MoD is tiny (150 now, swelling recently thanks to NATO), their President is commander in chief which means the military can try to sideline the MoD and the PM by insisting that the President is the one who oversees them, the President and PM have tiny foreign/security offices, and that conscription deeply shapes everything. Sweden will be a fun case to compare since the Swedes had a draft, dropped it, and have recently started it again while also joining NATO recently. Random things I heard along the way:five different Baltic pipelines have had "accidents" since the war in Ukraine started!Finland has reached 2% of GDP on defense because it frontloaded the cost of buying the F35s, which means that when that goes through the system, Finland may have a hard time procuring enough to keep at 2%. Womb chairs! Multiple waiting rooms in govt buildings reminded me of Oberlin's library way back in the day. I do love my job even if it requires me to transcribe my interview notes. I have many more countries to visit and I still have to do some work to figure out the German case as well as write up the Finish case. All I know is that comparative civ-mil relations has been mighty good to me.Next week, Mrs. Spew hits Europe, so we drive through Germany and then fly to Italy. So, a very different bit of fieldwork ahead. Much more focused on comparative cuisine.
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The study of International Relations is founded on a series of assumptions that originate in the monotheistic traditions of the West. For Siba Grovogui, this realization provoked him to question not only IR but to broaden his enquiries into a multidisciplinary endeavor that encompasses law and anthropology, journalism and linguistics, and is informed by stories and lessons from Guinea. In this Talk, he discusses the importance of human encounters and the problem with the Hegelian logic which distorts our understanding of our own intellectual development and the trajectory of the discipline of IR.
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?
I don't want to be evasive, but I actually don't think that International Relations as a field has an object today. And that is the problem with International Relations since Martin Wight and Stanley Hoffmann and all of those people debated what International Relations was, whether it was an American discipline, etc. I believe you can look at International Relations in multiple ways: if you think of à la Hoffmann, as a tool of dominant power, International Relations is to this empire what anthropology was to the last. This not only has to do with the predicates upon which it was founded initially but with its aspirations, for International Relations shares with Anthropology the ambition to know Man—and I am using here a very antiquated language, but that is what it was then—to know Man in certain capacities. In the last empire, anthropology focused on the cultural dimension and, correspondingly separated culture from civilization in a manner that placed other regions of the world in subsidiarity vis-à-vis Europe and European empires. In the reigning empire, IR has focused on the management and administration of an empire that never spoke its name, reason, or subject.
Now you can believe all the stories about liberalism and all of that stuff, but although it was predicated upon different assumptions, the ambition is still the same: it is actually to know Man, the way in which society is organized, to know how the entities function, etc. If you look at it that way, then International Relations cannot be the extension of any country's foreign policy, however significant. This is not to say that the foreign policies of the big countries do not matter: it would be foolish not to study them and take them into account, because they have greater impact than smaller countries obviously. But International Relations is not—or should not be—the extension of any country's foreign policy, nor should it be seen as the agglomeration of a certain restricted number of foreign policies. International Relations suggests, again, interest in the configurations of material, moral, and symbolic spaces as well as dynamics resulting from the relations of moral and social entities presumed to be of equal moral standings and capacities.
If one sees it that way then we must reimagine what International Relations should be. Foreign policy would be an important dimension of it, but the field of foreign policy must be understood primarily in terms of its explanations and justifications—regardless of whether these are bundled up as realism, liberalism, or other. Today, these fields provide different ways of explaining to the West, for itself, as a rational decision, or a justification to the rest, that what it has done over the past five centuries, from conquest to colonization and slavery and colonialism, is 'natural' and that any political entities similarly situated would have done it in that same manner. It follows therefore that this is how things should be. Those justifications, explanations, and rationalizations of foreign policy decisions and events are important to understand as windows into the manners in which certain regions and political entities have construed value, interest, and ethics. But they still belong, in some significant way, to a different domain than what is implied by the concept of IR.
I am therefore curious about the so-called debates about the nature of politics and the proper applicable science or approach to historical foreign policy realms and domains, particularly those of the West: I don't consider those debates to be 'big debates' in International Relations, because they are really about how the West sees itself and justifies itself and how it wants to be seen, and thus as rational. For the West (as assumed by so-called Western scholars), these debates extend the tradition of exculpating the West and seeing the West as the regenerative, redemptive, and progressive force in the world. All of that language is about that. So when you say to me, what are the debates, I don't know what they are, so far, really, in International Relations. The constitution of the 'international', the contours and effects of the imaginaries of its constituents, and the actualized and attainable material and symbolic spaces within it to realize justice, peace, and a sustainable order have thus far eluded the authoritative disciplinary traditions.
Consider the question of China today, as it is posed in the West. The China question, too, emerges from a particular foreign policy rationale, which may be important and particular ways to some people or constituencies in the West but not in the same way to others, for instance in Africa. The narrowness of the framing of the China question is why in the West many are baffled about how Africa has been receiving China, and China's entry into Latin America, etc. In relation to aid, for instance, if you are an African of a certain age, or you know some history, you will know that China formulated its foreign aid policy in 1964 and that nothing has changed. And there are other elements, such as foreign intervention and responsibility to self and others where China has had a distinct trajectory in Africa.
In some regard, China may even be closer in outlook to postcolonial African states than the former colonial powers. For instance, neither China nor African states consider the responsibility to protect, to be essentially Western. In this regard, it is worth bearing in mind for instance that Tanzania intervened in Uganda to depose Idi Amin in 1979; Vietnam ended the Khmer Rouge tyranny in Cambodia in 1979; India intervened in Bangladesh in 1971—it wasn't the West. So those kinds of understandings of responsibility, in the way they are framed today in the post-Cold War period, superimposes ideas of responsibility that were already there and were formulated in Bandung in 1955: differences between intervention and interference, the latter of which today comes coded as regime change, were actually hardly debated. So our imaginaries of the world and how it works, of responsibility, of ethics, etc., have always had to compete with those that were formulated since the seventeenth century in Europe, as "international ethics", "international law", "international theory". And in fact that long history full of sliding concepts and similar meanings may be one of the problems for understanding how the world came into being as we know it today. And this is why actually my classes here always begin with a semester-long discussion of hermeneutics, of historiography, and of ethnography in IR and how they have been incorporated.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?
I came to where I am now essentially because of a sense of frustration, that we have a discipline that calls itself "international" and yet seemed to be speaking either univocally or unidirectionally: univocally in imagining the world and unidirectionally in the way it addresses the rest of the world, and a lot of problems result from that.
I had trained as a lawyer in Guinea, and when I came to the US I imagined that International Relations would be taught at law school, which is the case in France, most of the time, and also in some places in Germany in the past, because it is considered a normative science there. But when I came here I was shocked to discover that it was going to be in a field called Political Science, but I went along with it anyway. In the end I did a double major: in law, at the law school in Madison, Wisconsin, and in political science. When I came to America and went the University of Wisconsin, I first took a class called "Nuclear Weapons and World Politics" or something of the sort, it was more theology and less science. It was basically articulated around chosen people and non-chosen people, those who deserve to have weapons and those who don't. There was no rationale, no discussion of which countries respected the Non-Proliferation Treaty, no reasoning in terms of which countries had been wiser than others in using weapons of mass destruction, etc.: there was nothing to it except the underlying, intuitive belief that if something has to be done, we do it and other people don't. I'm being crass here, but let's face it: this was a course I took in the 1980s and it is still the same today! So I began to feel that this is really more theology and less science. Yes, it was all neatly wrapped in rationalism, in game theory, all of these things. So I began to ask myself deeper questions, outside of the ones they were asking, so my Nuclear Weapons and World Politics class was really what bothered me, or you could say it was some kind of trigger.
This way of seeing IR is related to the fact that I don't share the implicit monotheist underpinnings of the discipline. That translates into my perhaps unorthodox teaching style, unorthodox within American academia anyway. Teaching all too often tends to be less about understanding the world and more about proselytizing. In order to try to explore this understanding I like to bring my students to consider the world that has existed, to imagine that sovereignty and politics can be structured differently, especially outside of monotheism with its likening of the sovereign to god, the hierarchy modeled on the church, Saint Peter, Jesus, God, uniformity and the power of life (to kill or let live), and to understand that there have always been places where the sovereign was not in fact that revered. Think of India, for example, where people have multiple gods, and some are mischievous, some are promiscuous, some are happy and some are mean, so there are lots of conceptions and some of these don't translate well into different cultural contexts. The same, incidentally, goes for the Greek gods. Of course, we had to make the Greeks Christians first, before we drew our lineage to them. You see what I mean? Christianity left a very deep impact on Western traditions. Whether you think of political parties and a parallel to the Catholic orders: if you are a Jesuit, the Jesuits are always right; if you are a Franciscan, the Franciscans are always right. The Franciscans for instance think they have the monopoly on Christian social teaching. In a similar way, it doesn't matter what your political party does, you follow whatever your party says. The same thing happens when you study: are you a realist, are you liberalist, etc. You are replicating the Jesuits, the Franciscans, those monks and their orders. But we are all caught within that logic, of tying ourselves into one school of thought and going along with one "truth" over another, instead of permitting multiple takes on reality..
For me, as a non-monotheist myself, everything revolves around this question of truth: whether truth is given or has to be found and how we find it. Truth has to be found, discovered, revealed—we have to continuously search. The significant point is that we never find it absolutely. Truth is always provisional, circumstantial, and pertinent to a context or situation. We all want truth and it is always evading us, but we must look for it. But I don't think that truth is given. It is in the Bible, the Quran, and the Torah. And I am comfortable with that but I am not in the realm of theology. I dwell on human truths and humans are imperfect and not omniscient, at least not so individually.
If I had the truth, then I might be one of those dictators governing in Africa today. I was raised a Catholic by the way, I almost went to the seminary. If you just think through the story of the Revelation in profane terms, you come to the realization that ours are multiple revelations. Again in theology, one truth is given at a time—the Temple Mount, the Tablets, and all that stuff—but that is not in our province. I leave that to a different province and that is unattainable to me. The kind of revelation I want is the one that goes through observing, through looking, through deliberating, through inquiry—that I am comfortable with. There can be a revelation in terms of meeting the unexpected, for example: when I went to the New World, to Latin America for the first time, I said, 'wow, this is interesting'. That was through my own senses, but it had a lot to do with the way I prepared myself in order to receive the world and to interact with the world. That kind of revelation I believe in. The other one is beyond me and I'm not interested in that. When I want to be very blasphemous, even though I was raised a Catholic, I tell my students: the problem with the Temple Mount is that God did not have a Twitter account, so the rest of us didn't hear it—we were not informed. I don't have the truth, and I don't really don't want to have it.
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
I am not sure I want to make a canonical recommendation, if that's what you are asking me for. Let me tell you this: I have trained about eleven PhD students, and none of them has ever done what I do. I am not interested in having clones, I don't want to recreate theology, and in fact I feel this question to betray a very Western disposition, by implying the need to create canons and theology. I don't want that. What I want is to understand the world, and understanding can be done in multiple ways: people do it through music, through art, through multiple things. The problem for me, however, is actually the elements, assumptions, predicates of studies and languages that we use in IR, the question to whom they make sense—I am talking about the types of ethnographies, the ways in which we talk about diplomatic history, and all of those things. The graduate courses that I was talking about have multiple dimensions, but there are times in my seminars here where I just take a look at events like what happened in the New World from 1492 to 1600. This allows me to talk about human encounters. The ones we have recorded, of people who are mutually unintelligible, are the ones that took place on this continent, the so-called New World. And what this does is that it allows me to talk about encounters, to talk about all of the possibilities—you know the ones most people talk about in cultural studies like creolization, hybridization, and all those things—and all of the others things that happened also which are not so helpful, such as violence, usurpation, and so forth.
What that allows me to do is to cut through all this nonsense—yes I am going to call it nonsense—that projects the image that what we do today goes back to Thucydides and has been handed down to us through history to today. There are many strands of thought like that. If you think about thought, and Western thought in general, all of those historically rooted and contingent strands of thought have something to do with how we construct social scientific fields of analysis today—realism, liberalism, etc.—so I'm not dispensing with that. What I'm saying is that history itself has very little to do with those strands of thought, and that people who came here—obviously you had scientists who came to the New World—but the policies on the ground had nothing to do with Thucydides, nothing to do with Machiavelli, etc. Their practices actually had more to do with the violence that propelled those Europeans from their own countries in seeking refuge, and how that violence shaped them, the kind of attachments they had. But it also had to do with the kind of cultural disposition here, and the manner in which people were able to cope, or not. Because that's where we are today in the post-Cold War era, the age of globalization, we must provide analyses that are germane to how the constituents (or constitutive elements) of the historically constituted 'international' are coping with our collective inheritance. For me, this approach is actually much more instructive. This has nothing to do with the Melian Dialogue and the like.
All of the stuff projected today as canonical is interesting to me but only in limited ways. I actually read the classics and have had my students read them, but try to get my students to read them as a resource for understanding where we are today and how we were led there, rather than as a resource for justifying or legitimating the manner in which European conducted their 'foreign' policies or their actions in the New World. No. I know enough to know that no action in the New World or elsewhere was pre-ordained, unavoidable, or inevitable. The resulting political entities in the West must assume the manners in which they acted. It is history, literally. And of course we know through Voltaire, we know through Montaigne, we know even through Roger Bacon, that even in those times people realized that in fact the world had not been made and hence had not been before as it would become later; that other ways were (and still) are possible; and that the pathologies of the violence of religious and civil wars in Europe conditioned some the behaviours displayed in the New World and Africa during conquest and enslavement.
For the same reason I recommend students to read Kant: I tell them to read Kant as a resource for understanding how we might think about the world today, but I am compelled to say often to my students that before Kant, hospitality, and such cultural intermediaries as theDragomans in the Ottoman Empire, the Wangara in West Africa, the Chinese Diaspora in East and Southeast Asia, and so forth, enabled commerce across continents for centuries before Europe was included into the existing trading networks. This is not to dismiss Kant, it is simply to force students to put Kant in conversation with a different trajectory of the development of commercial societies, cross-regional networks, and the movements to envisage laws, rules, and ethics to enable communications among populations and individual groups.
This approach causes many people to ask whether the IR programme at Johns Hopkins really concerns IR theory or something else. I actually often get those kinds of questions, and they are wedded to particular conceptions of IR. I am never able to give a fixed and quick answer but I often illustrate points that I wish to make. Consider how scholars and policymakers relate the question of sovereignty to Africa. Many see African sovereignty as problem, either because they think it is abused or stands in the way of humanitarian or development actions by supposed well-meaning Westerners. I attempt to have my students think twice when sovereignty is evoked in that way: 'sovereignty is a problem; the extents to which sovereignty is a problem in Africa; and why sovereignty is unproblematic in Europe or America'. This questioning and bracketing is not simply a 'postmodernist' evasion of the question.
Rather, I invite my students to reconsider the issue: if sovereignty is your problem, how do you think about the problem? For me, this is a much more interesting question; not what the problem is. For instance, if you start basing everything around a certain mythology of the Westphalia model, particularly when you begin to see everything as either conforming to it (the good) or deviating from it (the bad), then you have lost me. Because before Westphalia there were actually many ways in which sovereigns understood themselves, and therefore organized their realms, and how sovereignty was experienced and appreciated by its subjects. Westphalia is a crucial moment in Europe in these regards—I grant you that. If you want to say what is wrong with Westphalia, that's fine too. But if Westphalia is your starting point, the discussion is unlikely to be productive to me. Seriously!
In your work on political identity in Africa, such as your contribution to the 2012 volume edited by Arlene Tickner and David Blaney, the terms periphery, margin, lack of historicity recur frequently. What regional or perhaps even global representational protagonism can you envisage for IR studies emerging from Africa and its spokespeople?
The subjects of 'periphery' and 'marginalization' come into my own thinking from multiple directions. One of them has to do with the African state and the kind of subsidiarity it has assumed from the colonization onward. That's a critique of the state of affairs and a commentary on how Africa is organized and is governed. But I do also use it sometimes as a direct challenge to people who think they know the world. And my second book, Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy (2006), was actually about that, and that book was triggered by an account of an event in Africa, that everybody in African Studies has repeated and still continues to repeat, which is this: in June 1960, Africans went to defend France, because France asked them to. This is to say that nobody could imagine that Africans—and I am being careful here in terms of how people describe Africans—understood that they had a stake in the 'world' under assault during World War II. And so the book actually begins with a simple question: in 1940, which France would have asked Africans to defend it: Vichy France which was under German control, or the Germans who occupied half of France? But the decision to defend France actually came partly from a discussion between French colonial officers in Chad and African veterans of World War I, who decided that the world had to be restructured for Africa to find its place in it. They didn't do it for France, because it's a colonial power, they did it for the world. That's the thing. And Pétain, to his credit, is the only French official who asked the pertinent question about that, in a letter to his minister of justice (which is an irony, because justice under Pétain was a different question) he said: 'I am puzzled, that in 1918 when we were victorious, Africans rebelled; in 1940, we are defeated, and they come to our aid. Could you explain that to me?' The titular head of Vichy had the decency to ask that. By contrast, every scholar of Africa just repeated, 'Oh, the French asked Africans to go fight, and the Africans showed up'.
Our inability to understand that Africa actually sees itself as a part of the world, as a manager of the world, has so escaped us today that in the case of Libya for instance, when people were debating, you saw in every single newspaper in the world, including my beloved Guardian, that the African Union decided this, but the International Community decided that, as if Africans had surrendered their position in the international society to somebody: to the International Community. People actually said that! The AU, for all its 'wretchedness', after all represents about a quarter of the member states of the UN. And yet it was said the AU decided this and the International Community decided that. The implication is that the International Community is still the West plus Japan and maybe somebody else, and in this case it was Qatar and Saudi Arabia: "good citizens of the world", very "good democracies" etc. That's how deeply-set that is, that people don't even check themselves. Every time they talk they chuck Africa out of the World. Nobody says, America did this and the International Community decided that. All I am saying is that our mindscapes are so deeply structured that nothing about Africa can be studied on its own, can be studied as something that has universal consequence, as something that has universal value, as something that might be universalizing—that institutions in Africa might actually have some good use to think about anything. Otherwise, people would have asked them how did colonial populations—people who were colonized—overcome colonial attempts to strip them of their humanity and extend an act of humanity, of human solidarity, to go fight to defend them? And what was that about? Even many Africans fail to ask that question today!
And it could be argued that this thinking is, to some degree, down to widespread ignorance about Africa. We all are guilty of this. And oddly, especially intellectuals are guilty of this, and worse. Let me give you an example: recently I was in Tübingen in Germany, and I went into a store to buy some shoes—a very fine store, wonderful people—and I can tell you I ended up having a much more rewarding conversation with the people working in the shoe shop than I had at Tübingen University. Because there was a real curiosity. You would like to think that it is not so unusual in this day and age that a person from Guinea teaches in America, but you cannot blame them for being curious and asking many questions. At the university, in contrast, they actually are making claims, and for me that is no longer ignorance, that is hubris.
Your work presents an original take on the role of language in International Relations. How is language tied up with IR theory?
The language problem has many, many layers. The first of these is, simply, the issue of translation. If I were, for instance, to talk to someone in my father's language about Great Power Responsibility, they would look totally lost. Because in Guinea we have been what white people call stateless or acephalous societies, the notion that one power should have responsibility for another is a very difficult concept to translate, because you are running up against imaginaries of power, of authority, etc. that simply don't exist. So when you talk about such social scientific categories to those people, you have to be aware of all the colonial era enlightenment inheritances in them. When we talk about International Relations in Africa, we thus bump into a whole set of problems: the primary problem of translating ideas from here into those languages; another in capturing what kind of institutions exist in those languages; and a third issue has to do with how you translate across those languages. Consider for instance the difference between Loma stateless societies in the rain forest in Guinea, and Malinke who are very hierarchical, especially since SundiataKeita came to power in the 13th century. But the one problem most people don't talk about is the very one that is obsessing me now, is the question how I, as an African, am able to communicate with you through Kant, without you assuming that I am a bad reader of Kant.
The difference that I am trying to make here is actually what in linguistics is called vehicular language which is distinct from vernacular language. Because a lot of you assume that vehicular language is vernacular—that there is Latin and the rest is vernacular; that there is a proper reading of Kant and everything else is vernacular; or you have cosmopolitan and perhaps afropolitan and everything else is the vernacular of it. But this is not in fact always the case. The most difficult thing for linguists to understand, and for people in the social sciences to understand, is that Kant, Hegel and other thinkers can avail themselves as resources that one uses to try to convey imaginaries that are not always available to others—or to Kant himself for that matter. And it is not analogical—it is not 'this is the African Machiavelli'. It is easy to talk about power using Machiavelli, but to smuggle into Machiavelli different kind of imaginaries is more difficult. Nonetheless, I use Machiavelli because there is no other language available to me to convey that to you, because you don't speak my father's language.
Moreover, there is a danger for instance when I speak with my students that they may hear Machiavelli even when I am not speaking of him, and I warn them to be very careful. Machiavelli is a way to bring in a different stream of understanding of Realpolitik, but it's not entirely Machiavelli. If you spoke my father's language, I would tell you in my father's language, but that is not available to me here, so Machiavelli is a vehicle to talk about something else. Sometimes people might say to me 'what you are saying sounds to me like Kant but it's not really Kant' then I remind them that before Kant there were actually a lot of people who talked about the sublime, the moral, the categorical imperative, etc. in different languages; and if you are patient with me then we will get to the point when Kant belongs to a genealogy of people who talked about certain problems differently, and in that context Kant is no longer a European: I place Kant in the context of people who talk about politics, morality, etc. differently and I want to offer you a bunch of resources and please, please don't package me, because you don't own the interpretation of Kant, because even in your own context in Europe today Kant is not your contemporary, so you are making a lot of translations and I am making a lot of translations to get to something else: it is not that I am not a bad reader.
At an ISA conference I once was attacked by a senior colleague in IR for being a bad reader of Hegel, and I had to explain to him that while my using Hegel might be an act of imposition, and a result of having been colonized and given Hegel, but at this particular moment he should consider my gesture as an act of generosity, in the sense that I was reading Hegel generously to find resources that would allow him to understand things that he had no idea exist out there, and Hegel is the only tool available to me at this moment. But because all of you believe in one theology or another, he insisted that if I spoke Hegelian then I was Hegelian, and I retorted that I was not, but that deploying Hegel was merely an instance of vehicular language, allowing me to explore certain predicates, certain precepts and assumptions, and that is all. In this way, I can use Kant, or Hegel, or Hobbes, or Locke, and my problem when I do this is not with those thinkers—I can ignore the limitations of their thinking which was conditioned by the realities of their time—my problem is with those people who think they own traditions originating from long dead European thinkers. Thus, my problem today is less with Kant than with Kantians.
Or take Hobbes: Hobbes talked about the body in the way that it was understood in his time, and about human faculties in the way that they were understood at that time. Anybody who quotes Hobbes today about the faculties of human nature, I have to ask: when was the last time you read biology? I am not saying that Hobbes wasn't a very smart man; he was an erudite, and I am not joking. It is not his problem that people are still trivializing human faculties and finding issue with his view of how the body works—of course he was wrong on permeability, on cohabitation, on what organs live in us, etc.—he was giving his account of politics through metaphors and analogies that he understood at that time. When I think about it this way, my problem is not that Hobbes didn't have a modern understanding of the body, the distribution of the faculties and the extent of human capacities. Nor is my problem that Hobbes is Western. My problem is not with Hobbes himself. My problem is with all these realists who based their understanding of sovereignty or borders strictly on Hobbes' illustrations but have not opened a current book on the body that speaks of the faculties. If they did, even their own analogies may begin to resonate differently. There is new research coming out all the time on how we can understand the body, and this should have repercussions on how we read Hobbes today.
The absence of contextualization and historicization has proved a great liability for IR. Historicity allows one to receive Hobbes and all those other writers without indulging in mindless simplicities. It helps get away from simplistic divisions of the world—for instance, the West here and Africa there—from the assumptions that when I speak about postcolonialism in Africa I must be anti-Western. I am in fact growing very tired of those kinds of categories. As a parenthesis, I must ask if some of those guys in IR who speak so univocally and unidirectionally to others are even capable of opening themselves up to hearing other voices. I must also reveal that Adlai Stevenson, not some postcolonialist, alerted me to the problem of univocality when he stated in 1954 during one UN forum that 'Everybody needed aid, the West surely needs a hearing aid'. Hearing is indeed the one faculty that the West is most in need of cultivating. The same, incidentally, could be said of China nowadays.
One of the things I would like to deny Western canonist is their inclination to think of the likes of Diderot as Westerners. In his Supplément au Voyage a Bougainville (1772), Diderot presents a dialogue between himself and Orou, a native Tahitian. Voltaire wrote dialogues, some real, some imaginary, about and with China. The authors' people were reflecting on the world. It is hubris and an act of usurpation in the West today to want to lay claim to everything that is perceived to be good for the West. By the same token that which is bad must come from somewhere else. This act of usurpation has led to the appropriation—or rather internal colonization—of Diderot and Voltaire and like-minded philosophers and publicists who very much engaged the world beyond their locales. I have quarrels with this act of colonization, of the incipit parochialization of authors who ought not to be. I have quarrels with Voltaire's characterization of non-Europeans at times; but I have a greater quarrel with how he has been colonized today as distinctly European. Voltaire rejected European orthodoxies of his day and opted explicitly to enter into dialogue with Chinese and Africans as he understood them. Diderot, too, was often in dialogue with Tahitians and other non-Europeans. In fact, the relationship between Diderot and the Tahitian was exactly the same as the relationship between Socrates and Plato, in that you have an older person talking and a younger person and less wise person listening. A lot of Western philosophy and political theory was actually generated—at least in the modern period—after contact with the non-West. So how that is Western I don't know. I encounter the same problem when I am in Africa where I am accused of being Western just because I make the same literary references. It is a paradox today that even literature is assigned an identity for the purpose of hegemony and/or exclusion. Francis Galton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton) travelled widely and wrote dialogues from this expedition in Africa, so how can we say to what extent the substance of such dialogues was Western or British?
So in sum you are not trying to counter Western thought, but do you feel that the African political experience and your own perspective can bring something new to IR studies?
I am going to try and express something very carefully here, because the theory of the state in Africa brought about untold horrors—in Sierra Leone, in Liberia, and so on—so I am not saying this lightly. But I have said to many people, Africans and non-Africans, that I am glad that the postcolonial African state failed, and I wish many more of them failed, and I'm sure a lot more will fail, because they correspond to nothing on the ground. The idea of constitutions and constitutionalism came with making arrangements with a lot of social elements that were generated by certain entities that aspired to go in certain directions. What happened in Africa is that somebody came and said: 'this worked there, it should work here'—and it doesn't. I'll give you three short stories to illustrate this.
One of the presidents of postcolonial Guinea, the one I despise the most, Lansana Conté (in office 1984-2008), also gave me one of my inspirational moments. Students rebelled against him and destroyed everything in town and so he went on national TV that day and said: 'You know I'm very disheartened. I am disheartened about children who have become Europeans.' Obviously the blame would be on Europe. He continued, 'They are rude, they don't respect people or property. I understand that they may have quarrels with me, but I also understand that we are Africans. And though we may no longer live in the village', and it is important for me that he said that, 'though we may no longer live in the village, when we move in the big city, the council of elders is what parliament does for us now. We don't have the council of elders, instead we have parliament. They, the students, can go to parliament and complain about their father. I am their father, my children are older than all of them. So in the village, they would have gone to the council of elders, and they could have done this and I would have given them my explanation'. And the next morning, the whole country turned against the students, because what he had succeeded in doing was to touch and move people. They went to the head of the student government, who said: 'The president was right. We had failed to understand that our ways cannot be European ways, and we can think about our modern institutions as iterations of what we had in the past, suited to our circumstances, and so we should not do politics in the same way. I agree with him, and in that spirit I want to say that among the Koranko ethnic group, fathers let their children eat meat first, because they have growing needs, and if the father doesn't take care of his children, then they take the children away from the father and give them to the uncle. Our problem at the university is that our stipends are not being paid, and father has all his mansions in France, in Spain, and elsewhere, so we want the uncle.' He was in effect asking for political transition: he was saying they were now going to the council of elders, the parliament, and demand the uncle, for father no longer merits being the father. He was able to articulate political transition and rotation in that language. It was a very clever move.
The second one was my mother who was completely unsympathetic to me when I came home one day and was upset that one of my friends who was a journalist had been arrested. She said, 'if you wish you can go back to your town but don't come here and bother me and be grumpy'. So I started an exchange with her and explained to her why it is important that we have journalists and why they should be free, until our discussion turned to the subject of speaking truth to power. At that moment she said, 'now you are talking sense' and she started to tell me how the griot functioned in West Africa for the past eight hundred years, and why truth to power is part of our institutional heritage. But that truth is not a personal truth, for there is an organic connection between reporter and the community, there is a group in which they collect information, communicate and criticize, and we began to talk about that. And since then I have stopped teaching Jefferson in my constitutional classes in Africa, as a way of talking about the free press, instead I talk about speaking truth to power. But it allows me not only to talk about the necessity of speaking truth to power, but also to criticize the organization of the media, which is so individualised, so oriented toward the people who give the money: think of the National Democratic Institute in Washington, the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Germany, they have no organic connection to the people. And my mother told me, 'as long as it's a battle between those who have the guns and those who have the pen, then nobody is speaking to my problems, then I have no dog in that fight'. And journalists really make a big mistake by not updating their trade and redressing it. Because speaking truth to power is not absent in our tradition, we have had it for eight hundred years, six centuries before Jefferson, but we don't think about it that way. I have to remind my friends in Guinea: 'you are vulnerable precisely because you have not understood what the profession of journalism might look like in this community, to make your message more relevant and effective'. You see the smart young guys tweeting away and how they have been replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood, because we have not made the message relevant to the community. We are communicating on media and in idioms that have no real bearing on people's lives, so we are easily dismissed. That is in fact the tragedy of what happened in Tunisia: the smart, young protesters have so easily been brushed aside for this reason.
The third story is about how we had a constitutional debate in Guinea before multipartism, and people were talking about the separation of powers. And I went to the university to talk to a group of people and I put it to them: why do you waste your time studying the American Constitution and the separation of powers in America? I grant you, it is a wonderful experiment and it has lasted two hundred years, but that would not lead you anywhere with these people. The theocratic Futa Jallon in Guinea (in the 18th and 19th centuries) had one of the most advanced systems of separation of powers: the king was in Labé, the constitution was in Dalaba, the people who interpreted the constitution were in yet another city, the army was based in Tougué. It was the most decentralised organization of government you can imagine, and all predicated on the idea that none of the nine diwés, or provinces, should actually have the monopoly of power. So those that kept the constitution were not allowed to interpret it, because the readers were somewhere else. But to make sure that what they were reading was the right document, they gave it to a different province. So the separation of powers is not new to us.
In sum, the West is a wonderful political experiment, and it has worked for them. We can actualize some of what they have instituted, but we have sources here that are more suited to the circumstances of the people in that region, without undermining the modern ideas of democratic self-governance, without undermining the idea of a republic. Without dispensing with all of those, we must not be tempted to imagine constitution in the same way, to imagine separation of powers in the same way, even to imagine and practice journalism in the same way, in this very different environment. It is going to fail. That is my third story.
Siba N. Grovogui has been teaching at Johns Hopkins University after holding the DuBois-Mandela postdoctoral fellowship of the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in 1989-90 and teaching at Eastern Michigan University from 1993 to 1995. He is currently professor of international relations theory and law at The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Sovereigns, Quasi-Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-determination in International Law (University of Minnesota Press, 1996) and Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy: Memories of International Institutions and Order (Palgrave, April 2006). He has recently completed a ten-year long study partly funded by the National Science Foundation of the rule of law in Chad as enacted under the Chad Oil and Pipeline Project.
Related links
Faculty Profile at Johns Hopkins University Read Grovogui's Postcolonial Criticism: International Reality and Modes of Inquiry (2002 book chapter) here (pdf) Read Grovogui's The Secret Lives of Sovereignty (2009 book chapter) here (pdf) Read Grovogui's Counterpoints and the Imaginaries Behind Them: Thinking Beyond North American and European Traditions (2009 contribution to International Political Sociology) here (pdf) Read Grovogui's Postcolonialism (2010 book chapter) here (pdf) Read Grovogui's Sovereignty in Africa: Quasi-statehood and Other Myths (2001 book chapter in a volume edited by Tim Shaw and Kevin Dunn) here (pdf)
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This is a follow up to last month's post on the attack on education, but rather than use images of people protesting CRT I decided to post the video of the talk referred to below. As I think I have mentioned elsewhere on this blog in the spring I taught a seminar on Race, Class, and Gender. This involved an engagement with both some familiar material, Balibar's writing on race and class, and some material that I have not taught before, Stuart Hall, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Sylvia Wynter, etc. (I should say that in light of the title of this piece that I did not teach CRT specifically, but rather critical writing on race). At the same time that I was expanding my teaching and research the country, or at least parts of it were moving in the other direction, passing laws that outlawed discussions of critical race theory, intersectionality, and gender theory. This was in some sense a teachable moment, or at least should be: I kept coming back to the question of the politics of knowledge and ignorance around race.In Stuart Hall's famous lecture, "Race, The Floating Signifier" he outlines the basic point against the concept of race as a biological concept, "As we know human genetically variability between different populations, normally assigned a racial category, is not significantly greater than it is within those populations." However, as he goes onto to detail in the next section this scientific fact has never been accepted. As Hall writes, "First, [this general position] represents the by now common and conventional wisdom among leading scientists in the field. Second, that fact has never prevented intense scholarly activity being devoted by a minority of committed academics to attempting to prove a correlation between racially defined genetic characteristics and cultural performance. In other words, we are not dealing with a field in which, as it were, the scientifically and rationally established fact prevents scientists from continuing to prove the opposite."Here are my two points about Hall's two points. First, as a matter of historicization, a lot has changed since nineteen ninety seven. Race is no longer the outlier as it once was. The science of global warming, vaccines, even such basic astronomical matters as the size and shape of the Earth, all now have their doubters and alternative facts. A survey of the world of conspiracy theories and people with various crank beliefs demanding to be debated on social media only serves to illustrate Spinoza's fundamental axiom that "Nothing positive which a false idea has is removed by the presence of the true insofar as it is true." Ideas, even adequate or true ideas, have no intrinsic force or power, but must be actualized, materialized by other forces. Which brings me to my second point, if an idea or the criticism of an idea, in this case the criticism of race as a biological reality, does not take hold then the problem may have less to do with the idea itself, its own intrinsic value, than with the forces, social, political, economic, psychic, etc., that are allied against it. Sylvia WynterWhich brings me to my second point of reference, and that is Sylvia Wynter's essay (that reads like a book)"Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man Its Overrepresentation—An Argument/." In that essay which develops its own meta-intellectual history, Wynter engages with a question that seems as far as possible from the question of race, and that is why, given their mathematical sophistication were the ancient greeks incapable of developing a corresponding sophistication of physics. As Wynter writes, "In a 1987 interview, the theoretical physicist David Böhm explained why the rise of the physical sciences would have been impossible in ancient Greece, given the role that the physical cosmos had been made to play in stabilizing and legitimating the structures/hierarchies and role allocations of its social order. If each society, Böhm pointed out, bases itself on a general notion of the world that always contains within it "a specific idea of order," for the ancient Greeks, this idea of order had been projected as that of an "increasing perfection from the earth to the heavens." In consequence, in order for modern physics (which is based on the "idea of successive positions of bodies of matter and the constraints of forces that act on these bodies") to be developed, the "order of perfection investigated by the ancient Greeks" had to become irrelevant. In other words, for such an astronomy and physics to be developed, the society that made it possible would have to be one that no longer had the need to map its ordering principle onto the physical cosmos, as the Greeks and all other human societies had done. The same goes for the need to retain the Greek premise of an ontological difference of substance between the celestial realm of perfection (the realm of and the imperfect realm of the terrestrial (the realm of doxa, of mere opinion). This was not a mutation that could be easily effected. In his recent book The Enigma of the Gift (1999), Maurice Godelier reveals an added and even more powerful dimension as to why the mutation by which humans would cease to map the "idea of order" onto the lawlike regularities of physical nature would not be easily come by."In other words, progress in the physical sciences became possible only once the world, or the cosmos, ceased to play a role in the order and organizing of human social and political life, is no longer part of our sociogenesis, to cite the term that Wynter borrows from Fanon. The social order determines and limits what can be thought or asked. On this point Wynter's argument is similar to the point Marx makes regarding value in Capital. As Marx writes,"There was, however, an important fact which prevented Aristotle from seeing that, to attribute value to commodities, is merely a mode of expressing all labour as equal human labour, and consequently as labour of equal quality. Greek society was founded upon slavery, and had, therefore, for its natural basis, the inequality of men and of their labour powers. The secret of the expression of value, namely, that all kinds of labour are equal and equivalent, because, and so far as they are human labour in general, cannot be deciphered, until the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice. This, however, is possible only in a society in which the great mass of the produce of labour takes the form of commodities, in which, consequently, the dominant relation between man and man, is that of owners of commodities. The brilliancy of Aristotle's genius is shown by this alone, that he discovered, in the expression of the value of commodities, a relation of equality. The peculiar conditions of the society in which he lived, alone prevented him from discovering what, "in truth," was at the bottom of this equality."While the focus is different Marx, Wynter, (and I would argue) Spinoza, are all in some sense focusing on the social and political conditions of knowledge, in order for the natural sciences to become possible or in order for Value to be discovered something had to happen in society first. In the case of the former it is the general secularization of the cosmos. We could add that this process of secularization is always fragmentary and incomplete, the continued existence of flat Earthers, who, when pressed to explain why NASA and the globe industry would lie to them about the earth, they often phrase it in terms that hark back to that old theocratic order, that a round earth spinning about in a solar system of other similar planets makes them feel small and insignificant, and not, the center of God's creation. More to the point, to Wynter's point, the end of an order predicated on the cosmos is the beginning of a new order, one predicate on humanity. To quote Wynter again,"A new notion of the world and "idea of order" was being mapped now, no longer upon the physical cosmos - which beginning with the fifteenth- century voyages of the Portuguese and Columbus, as well as with the new astronomy of Copernicus, was eventually to be freed from having to serve as a projected "space of Otherness," and as such having to be known in the adaptive terms needed by human orders to represent their social structures as extrahumanly determined ones. Instead, the projected "space of Otherness" was now to be mapped on phenotypical and religio-cultural differences between human variations and/or population groups, while the new idea of order was now to be defined in terms of degrees of rational perfection/imperfection, as degrees ostensibly ordained by the Greco-Christian cultural construct deployed by Sepúlveda as that of the "law of nature, " natural law": as a "law" that allegedly functioned to order human societies in the same way as the newly discovered laws of nature served to regulate the processes of functioning of physical and organic levels of reality."Wynter's argument is that in the modern age it is humanity, the anthropos, rather than the universe, the cosmos, that is the basis of our social order. Hierarchies are no longer between the Earth and the other celestial beings, but between different aspects of humanity, or more to the point between humanity and its own internal division, between "Man" understood as the embodiment of rationality and its others. As Wynter writes,"It is this new master code, one that would now come to function at all levels of the social order - including that of class, gender, sexual orientation, superior/inferior ethnicities, and that of the Investor/Breadwinners versus the criminalized jobless Poor (Nas's "black and latino faces") and Welfare Moms antithesis, and most totally between the represented-to-be superior and inferior races and cultures - that would come to function as the dually status-organizing and integrating principle of U.S. society. So that if, before the sixties, the enforced segregation of the Black population in the South as the liminally deviant category of Otherness through whose systemic negation the former Civil War enemies of North and South, together with the vast wave of incoming immigrants from Europe, would be enabled to experience themselves as a We (that is, by means of the shared similarity of their now- canonized "whiteness"), in addition, their segregated status had served another central function. This had been that of enabling a U.S. bourgeoisie, rapidly growing more affluent, to dampen class conflict by inducing their own working class to see themselves, even where not selected by Evolution in class terms, as being compensatorily, altruistically bonded with their dominant middle classes by the fact of their having all been selected by Evolution in terms of race." I will say as something of a parenthetical aside, one that I hope to include in my actual writing this summer, and not just my blogging, that on this point Wynter is close to André Tosel's understanding of neoliberalism. As Tosel argues the more capital justifies itself in terms of an anthropology, as an expression of mankind's rationality, productivity, and individuality, the more its hierarchies are anthropologized as well, which is to say racialized. Poor countries, and the racialized poor within the country's border, are understood to be produced not by history, including the history of discrimination, but human nature. All of which may be a long, a very long way of answering the question posed by Hall, a question which has come to light in the opposition to teaching on race from the 1619 project to Critical Race Theory. The short version of this response is that a society that still needs racism in order to justify and explain itself cannot dispense with the concept of race, with the idea of racial hierarchy, no matter how many scientific studies are published disproving it. Race, and racism, are necessary parts of our social common sense, and thus any attempt to discredit and disprove them threatens that, and, as in the way CRT is represented, can only be understood as a political assault on the existing order and not additions or transformations of knowledge. Moreover, and this is something that I discuss in the podcast below, outlawing any theoretical and historical understanding of race and racism, is tantamount to legislating racism, or, at the very least to making sure that there are no official accounts that contest the dominant common sense around race. It is the modern version of putting Galileo under house arrest, to connect the dots of Wynter's essay.
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It's a well‐known fact in the nation's capital that politicians' rhetoric gets progressively detached from reality as a November election approaches. During a race's final few months, inconvenient things like "facts" and "logic" tend to get thrown out the window as candidates get desperate for votes. On trade, at least, it seems President Biden has kicked off the 2024 "silly season" more than a year early. In particular, Biden's recent proclamation announcing World Trade Week 2023 (and implicitly justifying his tariff‐ and subsidy‐heavy "worker‐centric" trade policy) stated that, "For decades, the middle class and thriving towns across America were hollowed out as good‐paying jobs moved overseas and factories at home closed down." Were this claim in the middle of an early‐autumn stump speech—from Biden or former President Trump—we may have given it a pass. But since the claim comes in the middle of a World Trade Week proclamation from the sitting president of the United States, we feel compelled to correct the record. First, the only "hollowing out" of the American middle class over the last few decades has been due to U.S. households moving up the income ladder, not down. For example, Census Bureau data show that between 1990 and 2019—the era of "peak globalization"—the share of middle‐ and low‐income U.S. households (adjusted for inflation) have both declined, while the share of U.S. households annually earning $100,000 has increased (see Figure 1). Research on individuals' wages shows much of the same thing.
Wage and income gains have been solid for lower‐income Americans over this same period. The Congressional Budget Office, for example, finds a 55 percent increase in the inflation‐adjusted incomes of U.S. households in the bottom 20 percent. These improvements would be even larger after accounting for taxes and transfers. (As noted in the introduction of the new Cato Institute book, Empowering the New American Worker, household income gains are likely not owed to a substantial increase in two‐earner families since 1990.) According to the most recent calculations from economist Michael Strain, moreover, inflation‐adjusted wages increased between 1990 and 2022 by 50, 48, 38, and 39 percent at the 10th, 20th, 30th, and 50th (median) percentiles, respectively (see Figure 2).
Second, while it is undeniably true that the United States has fewer manufacturing workers today than in the 1970s or 1980s and that most jobs (even male‐dominated, blue‐collar ones) are in services, American industrial jobs have not all been "shipped overseas." As explained in a 2022 Cato paper, globalization undoubtedly eliminated some U.S. manufacturing jobs, especially labor‐intensive, low‐wage industries like textiles/apparel and furniture, but the main, long‐term drivers of U.S. manufacturing job‐losses are productivity gains and a shift in U.S. consumption from goods to services. Thus, countries around the world—including ones with large and persistent trade surpluses and active industrial and labor policies—have experienced their own, if not larger, declines in manufacturing jobs, and recent increases in U.S. manufacturing jobs have been accompanied by stagnating U.S. manufacturing productivity. Furthermore, as explained in Empowering, there are still manufacturing jobs available in the United States—for those who want and can qualify for them: Contrary to the conventional wisdom…, the current U.S. manufacturing job situation is not due to a lack of demand for these workers (caused by globalization or automation, for example): in the first quarter of 2022, there were around 850,000 unfilled manufacturing job openings, and new research from Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute estimates that this figure could hit 2.1 million by 2030.
A year later, even after a significant cooling of the U.S. manufacturing sector, job openings there are historically elevated. At the same time, the Census Bureau reports that very few prime‐age American workers are out of work because they can't find a job (Figure 3).
Third, President Biden ignores, as we explained in a 2022 paper, the tens of millions of American jobs in services and in manufacturing that are today dependent on trade and globalization: [A] 2020 report found that trade—imports and exports—directly or indirectly supported approximately 40.6 million jobs in both goods‐producing industries (agriculture, construction, manufacturing, etc.) or services‐producing industries (wholesale/retail trade, transportation, professional services, etc.). Imports alone support an estimated 17.3 million American jobs in transportation, logistics, wholesale and retail trade, and other services industries, which comprise more than 10 percent of total employment in the sector. And almost half of all dollars spent on imported goods go to American workers rather than to the foreigners producing the goods. Thus, new research finds that, while only 6 percent of U.S. firms in manufacturing and services are goods traders, these firms account for half of economy‐wide employment today and supported 60 percent of all new net jobs created after 2008, primarily through the establishment of new businesses. [See Figure 4.] Meanwhile, foreign direct investment supported approximately 8 million jobs in 2019. By contrast, these same American workers are harmed by protectionism: higher input costs, for example, typically mean reduced wages or unemployment in the consuming company or industry at issue.
Surely, not every American worker has come out ahead since the United States became more integrated into the global economy, but—even leaving aside the important consumption benefits that globalization has provided all Americans (even ones who lost jobs from import competition)—the narrative of broad, trade‐driven declines in middle class jobs and lifestyles is simply false. As the Financial Times' Martin Wolf put it in April (citing the latest academic research), "contrary to the widespread view, it is untrue that liberal trade is a dominant or even significant cause of the woes of the working classes of western societies." Indeed. Finally, similar conclusions may be drawn regarding American communities—including ones once dependent on manufacturing. For example, a 2018 Brookings Institution report found that 115 of the 185 counties that had a disproportionate share (20 percent or more) of manufacturing jobs in 1970 had successfully transitioned away from manufacturing by 2016. Of the remaining 70 "older industrial cities", 40 had exhibited "strong" or "emerging" (above‐average) economic performance over the same period. Thus, by 2016 almost 85 percent of American communities once dependent on manufacturing—and thus potentially "hollowed out" by new import competition—had moved or were moving beyond their industrial past. That a handful of U.S. "mill towns" hadn't adjusted in more than four decades reveals other (and deeper) problems than simply exposure to the modern global economy. For example:
"Labor Market Conflict and the Decline of the Rust Belt" https://t.co/WN5RINmBF1"Rising foreign competition plays a more modest role quantitatively, and its effects are concentrated in the 1980s and 1990s, after most of the Rust Belt's decline had already occurred." 👀 pic.twitter.com/4c9xWaWgud— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) May 12, 2023
Anecdotal evidence supports these conclusions. Former textile town Greenville, South Carolina is (along with its next door neighbor Spartanburg) today a bustling metro area with a diverse economy—including several multinational manufacturers. Just up the interstate, Hickory, North Carolina—a former textile and furniture hub that was the poster‐child for the persistent ravages of the so‐called "China Shock"—has just been named by U.S. News and World Report as the "best affordable place to live in the United States" for 2023–24. (Speaking of the China Shock, the authors of those influential studies have since acknowledged that, once you consider the substantial consumer gains from China trade, just 82 of 722 U.S. commuting zones, representing 6.3 percent of the U.S. population, would experience net welfare losses. Other scholars, of course, challenge the China Shock approach and conclusions more broadly.) For Hickory, the USNWR highlights that manufacturing continues to account for most of the area's jobs, yet "the industry is [now] diversified, with plastics, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals playing a bigger role." Moreover, Google and Apple have established data centers in the area, and service‐sector businesses are growing. Recognizing the area's potential, Appalachian State University will open a Hickory‐based campus this August. Coming in second on the same USNWR list is former steel town Youngstown, Ohio, which is "in the midst of a cultural and economic renaissance" driven mainly by service‐sector businesses. So much for being "hollowed out." None of this means, of course, that certain American communities and workers don't face real challenges in today's globalized world. But alleging that trade caused these ills not only ignores the gains that the vast majority of Americans have experienced since the United States opened to the world decades ago, but also distracts from—as Empowering details—"the panoply of federal, state, and local policies that distort markets and thereby raise the cost of health care, childcare, housing, and other necessities; lower workers' total compensation; inhibit their employment, personal improvement, and mobility; and deny them the lives and careers that they actually want (as opposed to the ones DC policymakers think they should want)." Blaming trade for these and other policies' failures might make for a good campaign soundbite, but that doesn't make it any less silly—especially during World Trade Week.
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Balibar print from All Grim Prints An ongoing albeit sporadic project of mine is trying to understand the systematic nature underlying the conjunctural interventions of Etienne Balibar. This semester this investigation dovetailed with a reexamination of his writings on race for a seminar on Race, Class, and Gender. With respect to the latter it seems that there are two elements that are central to Balibar's thinking of race. First, as I have already stressed in a previous post, racism has to be understood as an entire way of thinking, a mode of thought, and not, as is often the case a bias or stereotype, an aberration in thought. As Balibar writes in "Racism and Universalism, ""I think that racism is a genuine mode of thought, that is to say, a mode of connecting not only words with objects, but more profoundly words with images, in order to create concepts. Therefore to overcome racism in one's personal experience or in collective experience is not simply a matter of abandoning prejudices or opening one's eyes to reality with the possible help of science; it has to do with changing one's mode of thinking, something much more difficult." As a mode of thought racism not only defines a particular way of thinking, but one that is indexed to the immediate demands of living. When Balibar writes that racism combines misrecognition with a "will to know,' a violent desire for immediate knowledge of social relations," I understand that violent desire to have something to do with the fundamental questions of social life, who should I trust? who should I fear? who can I desire? etc. Racism promises an answer to all of these questions, one that is immediately legible, written on the body and skin. Racism is as much a way of thinking and a way of living. This is why all challenges to it threaten not just what counts as knowledge, but also what counts as politics, as collectivity, even if the collectivity in question is not divided or demarcated by race. "As feminism has progressively started to demonstrate, the issue with sexism is not, or not merely, to resist male chauvinism or to struggle against male domination: it is to have the male community destroyed from the inside. Similarly, the issue with racism, in the long run and in everyday situations, is to destroy the racist community from within, a community which is both institutional and spontaneous, based on collective privileges (many of them—but not all—imaginary) and the individual desire for knowledge."The connection between a mode of thinking and a mode of living, the order and connection of ideas and the order and connection of things, is a profoundly Spinozist. As André Tosel argues, Spinoza's thought has as its center not a hierarchy between praxis, poiesis, and theoria, as in classical thought, but their mutual implication, a way of thinking is a way of living and producing. As Tosel writes, While the ancient tradition interrogates the nature proper to humanity from the triplet poiesis, praxis, theoria, supposed to represent the hierarchy of distinctly human kinds of life, Spinoza recomposes poiesis, praxis, theoria in the unity of the same form of life. Every form of life, every bios is a specific unity of poiesis, of praxis, and theoria. Or rather, in each kind of life, in each individual body, there is a relation to other bodies in nature (poiesis), and to other bodies of the same human essence (praxis), corresponding to a modality of the existence of the mind or spirit of knowledge (theoria). (That is from Du Materialisme de Spinoza, and I still have plans to work out how Balibar and Tosel arrive at their understandings of race and citizen from Spinoza). For his part, and as I have argued before, Balibar draws a great deal of support for his thought on race from his reading of the dual foundations of the city in Proposition Thirty Seven of Part Four of the Ethics. Here is a long passage on that point from The Politics of Transindividuality. (pg. 92-93 of that book). "While Spinoza's dual foundations of the city cannot be immediately connected to base and superstructure, economics and politics, it does, however, prove useful for understanding politics, the state. Its constitutive ambiguity is not that of the tension between economics and politics, but within political belonging and individuation itself. The state, especially the modern state, which has inherited the ideal of the citizen, of a universal dimension, is always split between nation and state, between an imagined identity and a legal or institutional unity. The imagined identity, 'what makes a people a people,' crosses the same terrain as Spinoza's ingenium, in other words every nation, every nationality, is formed by an organization of the aspects that constitute collective and individual identity. Language and memory play a central role in the formation of nations. In the attempt to constitute a people, to generate a fictive identity, the nation intersects with race as the quintessential fictive ethnicity. Race and nation constantly traverse each other: modern racist organizations consider themselves to be first and foremost national organizations, protecting the purity of the nation, and the national unit and belonging is impossible without the fantasy of a common language and heritage. However, the nation is not synonymous with the state, the modern state, the state that begins with the democratic revolutions, also have an irreducible universalistic dimension, an ideal of the citizen that is not tied to national belonging. Balibar goes so far as to see this division, a division not between bourgeois man and political citizen, but between nation and state, as constitutive of modern political conflict. As Balibar writes, For my part, I consider the demarcation between democratic and liberal policies and conservative or reactionary policies today to depend essentially (if not exclusively) on attitudes towards ethnic discriminations and differences of nationality on whether pride of place is given to national belonging or emancipatory goals (the rights of man or citizen). The dual foundation constitutes two different subjects, two different transindividual individuations. The first is that of homo nationalis, the human individual defined not just through his or her specific language, but most of all, through shared customs, habits and memories. The second is the citizen defined by an open transindividual process, by rights and obligations, which exist only as a collective project that is by definition universal. These individuations coexist, constituting the conflictual basis for different individuations and different politics. National belonging, national identity, especially as it is connected to shared language, history and memory, comes close to racial identity and race, which it can never fully extricate itself from. For Balibar, race is not just a matter of a fictive unity, as a definition of belonging, but is also integral to the manner in which modern democratic societies deal with, or represent, the persistence of hierarchy and division. Hierarchy and division are always a scandal to a society organized according to the citizen, to an individuation of the citizen. There is thus also a proximity of race to class; class can always be racialized, not in the sense that it is ascribed to different races, but becomes attached to a rigid and permanent division in society. The division of mental and manual labour is inseparable from a division of society into 'mind men' and 'body men,' with all of the expected ambiguous connections to animality. Race reinscribes social divisions on divisions of the body, making social hierarchies justified and visible at the same time. Race (and the racialization of class difference) resolves the incomplete nature of the democratic revolution; it is the revival of anthropological difference in societies that have declared such differences to be null and void. As much as race plays a fundamental role as an alibi, explaining the persistence of inequality in a society that claims to be otherwise, it also plays an important role in the social imaginary, a term that is justified in terms of the Spinozist idea of the imaginary. Race is an inadequate idea of social belonging and social division. Racism is an imaginary, an inadequate idea in the full Spinozist sense of the term, it is both immediate, combining affect and imagination and fails to comprehend its causes. It offers an immediate understanding of society, a transparent account of the social divisions and conflicts mapped onto the most superficial signs of bodily or cultural difference."It seems to me that two conclusions follow from thinking about racism as an articulation of thinking and living, of knowledge and politics. First, such politics should not shy a way from the radical nature of what is at stake. Anti-racism is not just a challenge to a few lingering prejudices or biases, but to a whole way of thinking, a way of thinking that is integral to our society. (this is too long to go into here, but I am thinking also of Sylvia Wynter's "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom" and the connection she makes between knowledge and politics, between what can be known and lived). Second, this way of thinking is also a way of living. Which is to say that the reactionaries that have perceived in anti-racism an assault on their way of living, as in the case of Florida, they are right. It benefits no one to pretend that such is not the case. Although I do think that there is work to be done on this issue, to imagine what a post-racial society would look like beyond the image of integration (which was always integration to a community defined by racial exclusion). Lastly, such a society would also entail not just a transformation of race, but of national belonging, and with it, in a longer point that I cannot make now, the class basis of modern society.
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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)
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I once contemplated getting my favorite Spinoza proposition as a Vanity Plate In the past few months, longer even, but before the recent wave of student occupations (more on that later), I have found myself in the grips of a kind of depression that stems in part from what can only be described as a gap between theory and practice. How this works is like this, all day, or at least part of it, I read books, and get into discussions understanding how the world works, and what could be done to change it and yet the world goes on unchanged, or, more to the point, it just seems to get worse and worse. (I will let the reader fill this in with whatever ecological, political, or economic calamity that comes to mind) The disconnect between the classroom and the world creates not just division but despair.This has brought me to think about the limitations of philosophy. Perhaps the most famous statement about the limitations of philosophy comes from Karl Marx. The eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach states, "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it." Philosophy, philosophical interpretation, and action, change are positioned on either sides of a great divide. Many have read Marx's own work across this divide, placing the early texts, 1844 Manuscripts, The German Ideology, etc., on one side, as interpretations, and The Communist Manifesto and Capital on the other, as attempts to change the world. The result of this is that Marx is not really Marx when he is philosophical, if you except the standard reading that Marx's early work is heavily influenced by Feuerbach and Hegel, and when he is Marx, he is no longer writing philosophy, but I digress. More to the point, Marx's formulation articulates a division between interpretation and action that is pervasive, shared by many who have never read Marx or care to. It is the divide between theory and practice, thinking and doing. At the same time Marx's formulation is easily critiqued, the very opposition it erects is unstable and seems to almost unravel itself. Is it not also an interpretation, of philosophy, the world, and what it means to transform something? Where does Marx's own formulation fall on the divide it erects between interpretation and transformation Moreover, can transformation take place without interpretation? As André Tosel writes, "It is not enough to transform the world. We still need to understand this transformation to prevent it from following its course blindly. A transformation of the world and of oneself without understanding this transformation is blind. An understanding of the world and of oneself without transformation is empty." Tosel corrects Marx by invoking, or parodying Kant (which explains but does not justify his use of the terms "blind"), it is not a matter of interpreting or changing, but of informing one by the other.Tosel's correction is framed in light of another element of Marx's thought, one more often associated with the second side of the divide, the historical or practical side. It is in Marx's writing on the history of capitalism that he puts forward the important idea that under capitalism not changing, staying the same, is not an option. Whereas previous societies, previous modes of production sought to stay the same, to reproduce themselves, capitalism is in the paradoxical position of reproducing itself while constantly revolutionizing everything else. I am referring of course to Marx's formulation that capitalism is defined by ruthless transformation of everything, as Marx puts it famously in the Manifesto, "Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."Tosel has a lot to say about this formulation both in terms of its claim as theory, of the idea of capital as a transformation of social meaning, but also what this means for thinking about capitalism in practice, what this ruthless modernization has done to society. With respect to the latter, he often uses the term, from Gramsci, "passive revolution" to describe the way in which capital has remade the world, reduced every value to exchange value, and every relation to market relations. Capitalism is very much a "blind transformation" to use Tosel's formulation. This is something that Alain Badiou puts well in his little book The Century. The twentieth century was in part marked by grand utopian projects, by the idea of creating a "new man," these projects announced themselves as transformations that were also interpretations. In their wake we now have transformations without interpretations. To use Badiou's example, genetic engineering offers a massive change on what it means to be human but one that is without any utopian promise. As Badiou writes, "This is because such a change does not correspond to any kind of project. We learn of its possibility from newspapers; that we could have five limbs, or be immortal...In short, we are living through the revenge of what is most blind and objective in the economic appropriation of technics over what is most subjective and voluntary in politics."I am reading Badiou more for the polemic than the ontology here, and would argue that what he and Tosel offer to Marx's famous formulation is that the task of changing the world has to be understood in relation not to some static and fixed reality, but an ongoing transformation that is all the more pernicious in that it takes place without a plan or project. Seems like an appropriate clip: Dr. Malcolm as BadiouThis brings us to my second formulation of the limits of philosophy, one of my favorite propositions from the Ethics, IVP1. "Nothing positive which a false idea has is removed by the presence of the true insofar as it is true."What this means can be clarified (as is often the case) by the Scholium that follows. Spinoza begins by talking about the longstanding image of enlightenment and understanding, the sun, "For example, when we look at the sun, we imagine it to be about two hundred feet away from us. In this we are deceived so long as we are ignorant of its true distance; but when its distance is known, the error isremoved, not the imagination, that is, the idea of the sun, which explains its nature only so far as the body is affected by it. And so, although we come to know the true distance, we shall nevertheless imagine it as near us. For as we said in IIP35S, we do not imagine the sun to be so near because we are ignorant of its true distance, but because the mind conceives the sun's size insofar as the body is affected by the sun. Thus, when the rays of the sun, falling on the surface of the water, are reflected to our eyes, we imagine it as if it were in the water, even if we know its true place."It always seems strange to me that Spinoza does not mention another more important division between the sun as an object of knowledge and as an object of the imagination, namely the idea that the sun orbits the Earth, appearing to rise and set. This was not only the contested object of Spinoza's lifetime (shaping Descartes thought), but perhaps the best example of the persistence of an imagination past the knowledge that would dispell it. To this day we still talk about sunrise and sunset. (which is maybe why flat Earthers never went away. They are simply asserting what the imagination, the effect of the sun on the body tells them.) As Spinoza goes onto clarify: "And so it is with the other imaginations by which the mind is deceived, whether they indicate the natural constitution of the body, or that its power of acting is increased or diminished: they are not contrary to the true, and do not disappear on its presence. It happens, of course, when we wrongly fear some evil, that the fear disappears on our hearing news of the truth. But on the other hand, it also happens, when we fear an evil which is certain to come, that the fear vanishes on our hearing false news. So imaginations do not disappear through the presence of the true insofar as it is true, but because there occur others, stronger than them, which exclude the present existence of the things we imagine, as we showed in lIP 17."That imaginatry images and representations persist long after they have been intellectually unmasked is in some sense the central ethical problem of the Ethics, it is why "we see the better but do the worse." What we know or think is often not as powerful as what we imagine. The political problem of Spinoza could be understood as the question as to how do we make the true not just an object of contemplation, something we think but do not do, but make it as something actually lived, an ideal which is embodied in our practices and our institutions. Spinoza's idea of the limited efficacy of the true, or the need for an idea to become something not just thought but lived, is not without its corollary in Marx. As Marx writes in the Introduction to the Philosophy of Right, "The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses." This is a different understanding of the role and limitation of philosophy, less a stark divide between interpreting and changing than the beginning of a question of how do ideas become material, become effective.Our society does not much believe in ideas, let alone ideals. The modern university is in some sense an education in the ineffectivity of ideas. There is plenty of exposure to ideas, but the unwritten subtext of this exposure and education, is "do not take any of this seriously." Any teacher of philosophy is asked how will these ideas apply to real world, and every student in philosophy is asked what are you going to do with that? These questions are framed against a world in which what really matters, what really governs, is the ceaseless and unthinking transformation of capital, a transformation that takes place without ideas, or with only one, with the idea that anything makes a profit is good. All ideas that deviate from this are at best distractions and at worse harmful.Which brings me to perhaps the only thing to break me from this despair of the ineffectivity of thinking, the recent wave of actions and occupations in protest of the bombing and extermination of Palestinians in Gaza. Before the crackdowns on protests at Columbia, Emory, UT Austin, and elsewhere, there was USC's decision to cancel the graduate speech of Valedictorian Asna Tabassum. I remember learning that she minored in resistance to genocide. It seems absurd to expect students to study genocide and not speak out in the face of genocide. I wonder how many students at the occupations all over the nation are in some sense seeking the same thing, to translate what they have come to think into an action that is consistent with it, refusing the university's imperative "to argue, but obey the dictates of the endowment, donors, and corporate interests," an imperative that reduces all arguments and debates to bullshit because they are disconnected from any realization. Such an interpretation probably gives too much credit to the right's position that universities are dominated by critical race theory, Marxism, and other intellectual bogeymen. All those students at the occupations are probably not minoring in genocide studies. More importantly it overlooks an important aspect of occupations, a thread connection 2010 and 2011 to the current wave of occupations, the occupation library and teach in. The occupations are not just sites of practice, attempts to put theory into practice, but also attempts to understand the world, and most importantly to wrestle with ideas and histories excluded from the curriculum. I wonder how many people at the occupation are trying to just make sense of the images they have seen on various screens, namely, the destruction and death in Gaza that has gone on for months now, not just unhindered but aided by most of the world. It seems to me that the occupations are not some disruption of the university's normal function, but an attempt to fulfill what should be the mission of university: to think and live critically. At this moment in time, they are the university.
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Anyone who has ever taken or taught a philosophy class is familiar with the claim "[Blank] is subjective" in which the [Blank] in question could be anything from literary interpretations to ethical norms. This response effectively ends any and all cultural and philosophical discussion, which is why it is so aggravating. One response is to argue against this claim, to point out that not every interpretation of a poem, novel, or film, is authorized, that there are better or worse interpretations, with respect to cultural version. With respect to the ethical or political arguments it is tempting to point out that the very existence of ethics, of society, presupposes norms that are shared as well as debated and challenged.What if we took a different perspective? Instead of arguing against this view, ask the question of its conditions. To offer a criticism in the Marxist sense. By Marxist sense I mean specifically the criticism that Marx offers of idealism, of philosophy, in The German Ideology. In that text Marx gives the conditions of how it is that the world appears so upside down that ideas and their criticism rather than material conditions drive and determine history. So we could ask a similar question, how has subjectivity, subjective opinion and perspective, has come to appear as so prevalent and powerful. How did we come to live under the reign of subjectivity?In a move that will surprise no one who has read this blog that I find a useful starting point for answering this question Frank Fischbach's book Marx with Spinoza. In that text Fischbach argues that rather than seen alienation as an alienation from subjectivity, a reduction of a subject to an object, it is subjectivity itself that is an alienation, an alienation from objectivity, a privation of the world. As Fischbach argues:"The reduction of human beings, by this abstraction, from natural and living beings to the state of 'subjects' as owners of a socially average labour power indicates at the same time the completion of their reduction to a radical state of impotence: for the individual to be conceived and to conceive of itself as a subject it is necessary that it see itself withdrawn and subtracted from the objective conditions of its natural activity; in other words, it is necessary that 'the real conditions of living labour' (the material worked on, the instruments of labour and the means of subsistence which 'fan the flames of the power of living labour') become 'autonomous and alien existences'"And also: "This is why we interpret Marx's concept of alienation not as a new version of a loss of the subject in the object, but as a radically new thought, of the loss of the essential and vital objects for an existence that is itself essentially objective and vital....Alienation is not therefore the loss of the subject in the object it is the loss of object for a being that is itself objective. But the loss of proper objects and the objectivity of its proper being is also the loss of all possible inscription of one's activity in objectivity, it is the loss of all possible mastery of objectivity, as well as other effects: in brief, the becoming subject is essentially a reduction to impotence. The becoming subject or the subjectivation of humanity is thus inseparable according to Marx from what is absolutely indispensable for capitalism, the existence of a mass of "naked workers"—that is to say pure subjects possessors of a perfectly abstract capacity to work—individual agents of a purely subjective power of labor and constrained to sell its use to another to the same extent that they are totally dispossessed of the entirety of objective conditions (means and tools of production, matter to work on) to put to effective work their capacity to work."At the basis of subjectivity, of subjectivity understood as an abstract and indifferent capacity, there is the indifferent capacity of labor power. Behind the figure of the subject there is the worker. I have already argued elsewhere on this blog that this reading of the Marx/Spinoza connection could be understood as one which reflects and critically addressed our contemporary situation in which subjecitivity, a subjectivity understood as potential and capacity, is seen as the condition of our freedom rather than our subjection. What Fischbach suggests through a reading of Marx and Spinoza that such capacity, capacity abstracted and separated from the material conditions of its emergence and activity, can only really be impotence. Just as a worker cut off from the conditions of labor is actually poverty, a subject cut off from the conditions of its actualization is impotence. What now I find provocative about this analysis is that if we think of it as a general schema in which an objective relation, a relation to objects but also others, is transformed into a subjective potential or capacity it is possible to argue that the constitution of subjectivity through labor power is only one such transformation, and that the current production of subjectivity is itself the product of several successive revolutions in which subjective potentials displace objective relations. One could also talk about the creation of subjectivity as buying power, as a pure capacity to purchase. I know that criticisms of consumer society from the fifties and sixties today seem moralistic and often passé. I am thinking here of Baudrillard, Debord, Lefebvre, and of course Horkheimer and Adorno. It is worth remembering, however, that some of the early critics were less interested in moralizing criticisms of materialism as they were in this kind of constitution of subjectivity. As Jean Baudrillard wrote in The Consumer Society, 'It is difficult to grasp the extent to which the current training in systematic, organized consumption is the equivalent and extension, in the twentieth century, of the great nineteenth-century long process of the training of rural populations for industrial work.'One person who continued such an an analysis is Bernard Stiegler. Stiegler even uses the same word, "proletarianization" to describe both the loss of skills and knowledge by the worker and the loss of skills and knowledge by the consumer. As I wrote in The Politics of Transindividuality:"At first glance, the use of the term proletarianisation to describe the transindividuation of the consumer would seem to be an analogy with the transformation of the labour process: if proletarianisation is the loss of skills, talents, and knowledge until the worker becomes simply interchangeable labour power, then the broader proletarianisation of daily life is the loss of skills, knowledge, and memory until the individual becomes simply purchasing power. Stiegler's use of proletarianisation is thus simultaneously broader and more restricted than Marx, broader in that it is extended beyond production to encompass relations of consumption and thus all of life, but more restricted in that it is primarily considered with respect to the question of knowledge. The transfer of knowledge from the worker to the machine is the primary case of proletarianisation for Stiegler, becoming the basis for understanding the transfer of knowledge of cooking to microwaveable meals and the knowledge of play from the child to the videogame. Stiegler does not include other dimensions of Marx's account of proletarianisation, specifically the loss of place, of stability, with its corollary affective dimension of insecurity and precariousness. On this point, it would be difficult to draw a strict parallel between worker and consumer, as the instability of the former is often compensated for by the desires and satisfactions of the latter. Consumption often functions as a compensation for the loss of security, stability, and satisfaction of work, which is not to say that it is not without its own insecurities especially as they are cultivated by advertising."For the most part Stiegler considers this deskilling to take place in the automation of the knowledge and skill that makes up daily life. Everything from cooking to knowing how to navigate one's own city is now more or less hardwired into precooked meals and the ubiquitous smartphone. Other cultural critics have pointed to the general deskilling of daily life through the decline of repair, tinkering, and mending. The effect of all this is to change the consumer from someone who buys things based on knowledge and familiarity to a pure expression of buying power, an abstract potential. Just as the worker is separated from the means of production, from the objective conditions of their labor to be the subjective capacity to work, the consumer is separated from the knowledge to consume to become a personification of buying power. As with work the conditions to realize this buying power are outside the control of the consumer. We do not decide what to buy based on our knowledge of our needs and desires but on what is advertised to us as a need or desire.As much as the worker and consumer are opposed, making up two sides of economic relations under capitalism, they are unified, connected in the tendency to transform work to abstract labor power and consumption into abstract buying power. While abstract subjectivity is how these two sides of the capitalist economic relation function it is not how they are lived. They are lived as profoundly individual, subjective in the conventional sense of the word. What one does for a living is in some sense considered to be one's identity: "What do you do?" is in some sense equivalent to "Who are You?" Being reduced to abstract labor power, to capacity for work, is lived as a concrete and highly individualized condition, as my particular job and career. If for any one of the myriad reasons what one does is inadequate to constitute an identity, remains just a day job, then consumption or the commodity form steps in to supply the necessary coordinates for an identity. From this perspective we can chart not only the historical progression of the two identities, but also the structural similarities. With respect to the first, consumer society, consumption, and the myriad possibilities to construct an identity through consumption, comes after the worker, after the formation of capitalism. Any attempt to read Marx's Capital for consumer society, for the common sense understanding of commodity fetishism as the overvaluing of commodities, is going to have a hard time navigating the dull world of linen, coats, corn and coal. The consumer comes after the worker. However, it is also possible to see a similarity of a structural condition. In both case subjectivity is abstracted from, or separated from, objectivity, from not just objects, but objective spirit, in Hegel's sense, institutions, norms, and structures. This abstraction is lived as a highly individualized identity, in some sense work and consumption form the basis of individuality as such. However, it only has effects, only functions in the aggregate. As a worker one only has effects, both in terms of the creation of value, and in terms of any disruption of exploitation, as part of a collective. The same could be said for consumerism, even though it is through consumerism that we are encouraged to believe that we can have ethical effects as individuals, green consumerism, cruelty free products, etc. Consumers only matter as a mass, at an economy of scale, even in the age of niche marketing. This can be seen in the impotent attempts to bring back cancelled products, or to change corporate strategies through boycotts. The only demands that make sense to corporations are those that are already effective in terms of buying power. I am wondering if one can see a similar structure of abstract/individual subjectivity in other aspects of society. I am thinking of politics, in which individuals are abstracted from any real connection to their communities and societies only to be constituted as "voting power," an abstract aggregate that is lived as a highly individualized identity. I will have to think more about that one. My point here is to connect the often asserted claim "that everything is subjective" back to its material conditions, to the production of subjectivity in both work and the reproduction of everyday life, production and consumption. It is not just a matter of a bad reading of Nietzsche that is behind such claims, although it is often that as well, but an effect in the sphere of ideas and discussion of what is already at work in the sphere of production. Abstract subjectivity is a material condition before it is an intellectual interpretation. The thread running through both is connection between power and impotence. If everything is subjective then I can offer any interpretation, create my own moral code whole cloth, live as I prefer, but if everything is subjective then I can do very little, nothing at all to alter or change anything. This is the fundamental point of intersection between Marx and Spinoza, subjectivity, individual subjectivity, is not the zenith of our freedom and power, it is the nadir of our subjection. Updated 4/15/24I happened to be rereading Tiqqun's Introduction to Civil War which offers the following on this last point, on the political subject as a subject constituted in alienation. As they write:"In order to become a political subject in the modern State, each body must submit to the machinery that will make it such; it must begin by casting aside its passions (now inappropriate), its tastes (now laughable), its penchants (now contingent), endowing itself instead with interests, which are much more presentable and, even better, representable. In this way, in order to become a political subject each body must first carry out its own autocastration as an economic subject. Ideally, the political subject will be reduced to nothing more than a pure vote, a pure voice."Tiqqun offers an expression of this idea, and in doing so captures what I was starting to think about before. However, they also offer me some reservations, especially in their tendency towards deriving an ontological or existential situation from a social condition. As with work and consumption, the pure subjectivity, the pure labor, buying, or voting power, is presented as the zenith of a kind of power, a capacity, maximize your labor power, express your preferences with consumer choices, and, most absurdly, vote harder, but this power is entirely determined by the existing labor conditions, market relations, and political structures.
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Alexander Dugin on Eurasianism, the Geopolitics of Land and Sea, and a Russian Theory of Multipolarity
IR has long been regarded as an Anglo-American social science. Recently, the discipline has started to look beyond America and England, to China (Theory Talk #51, Theory Talk #45), India (Theory Talk #63, Theory Talk #42), Africa (Theory Talk #57, Theory Talk #10) and elsewhere for non-Western perspectives on international affairs and IR theory. However, IR theorists have paid little attention to Russian perspectives on the discipline and practice of international relations. We offer an exciting peek into Russian geopolitical theory through an interview with the controversial Russian geopolitical thinker Alexander Dugin, founder of the International Eurasian Movement and allegedly an important influence on Putin's foreign policy. In this Talk, Dugin—among others—discusses his Theory of a Multipolar World, offers a staunch critique of western and liberal IR, and lays out Russia's unique contribution to the landscape of IR theory.
Print version of this Talk (pdf) Russian version
What, according to you, is the central challenge or principle debate within IR and what would be your position within this debate or towards that challenge?
The field of IR is extremely interesting and multidimensional. In general, the discipline is much more promising than many think. I think that there is a stereometry today in IR, in which we can distinguish a few axes right away.
The first, most traditional axis is realism – the English school – liberalism.
If the debates here are exhausted on an academic level, then on the level of politicians, the media, and journalists, all the arguments and methods appear new and unprecedented each time. Today, liberalism in IR dominates mass consciousness, and realist arguments, already partially forgotten on the level of mass discourse, could seem rather novel. On the other hand, the nuanced English school, researched thoroughly in academic circles, might look like a "revelation" to the general public. But for this to happen, a broad illumination of the symmetry between liberals and realists is needed for the English school to acquire significance and disclose its full potential. This is impossible under the radical domination of liberalism in IR. For that reason, I predict a new wave of realists and neorealists in this sphere, who, being pretty much forgotten and almost marginalized, can full well make themselves and their agenda known. This would, it seems to me, produce a vitalizing effect and diversify the palette of mass and social debates, which are today becoming monotone and auto-referential.
The second axis is bourgeois versions of IR (realism, the English school, and liberalism all together) vs. Marxism in IR. In popular and even academic discourse, this theme is entirely discarded, although the popularity of Wallerstein (Theory Talk #13) and other versions of world-systems theory shows a degree of interest in this critical version of classical, positivistic IR theories.
The third axis is post-positivism in all its varieties vs. positivism in all its varieties (including Marxism). IR scholars might have gotten the impression that postmodern attacks came to an end, having been successfully repelled by 'critical realism', but in my opinion it is not at all so. From moderate constructivism and normativism to extreme post-structuralism, post-positivistic theories carry a colossal deconstructive and correspondingly scientific potential, which has not yet even begun to be understood. It seemed to some that postmodernism is a cheerful game. It isn't. It is a new post-ontology, and it fundamentally affects the entire epistemological structure of IR. In my opinion, this axis remains very important and fundamental.
The fourth axis is the challenge of the sociology of international relations, which we can call 'Hobson's challenge'. In my opinion, in his critique of euro-centrism in IR, John M. Hobson laid the foundation for an entirely new approach to the whole problematic by proposing to consider the structural significance of the "euro-centric" factor as dominant and clarifying its racist element. Once we make euro-centrism a variable and move away from the universalistic racism of the West, on which all systems of IR are built, including the majority of post-positivistic systems (after all, postmodernity is an exclusively Western phenomenon!), we get, theoretically for now, an entirely different discipline—and not just one, it seems. If we take into account differences among cultures, there can be as many systems of IR as there are cultures. I consider this axis extremely important.
The fifth axis, outlined in less detail than the previous one, is the Theory of a Multipolar World vs. everything else. The Theory of a Multipolar World was developed in Russia, a country that no one ever took seriously during the entire establishment of IR as a discipline—hence the fully explainable skepticism toward the Theory of a Multipolar World.
The sixth axis is IR vs. geopolitics. Geopolitics is usually regarded as secondary in the context of IR. But gradually, the epistemological potential of geopolitics is becoming more and more obvious, despite or perhaps partially because of the criticism against it. We have only to ask ourselves about the structure of any geopolitical concept to discover the huge potential contained in its methodology, which takes us to the very complex and semantically saturated theme of the philosophy and ontology of space.
If we now superimpose these axes onto one another, we get an extremely complex and highly interesting theoretical field. At the same time, only one axis, the first one, is considered normative among the public, and that with the almost total and uni-dimensional dominance of IR liberalism. All the wealth, 'scientific democracy', and gnoseological pluralism of the other axes are inaccessible to the broad public, robbing and partly deceiving it. I call this domination of liberalism among the public the 'third totalitarianism', but that is a separate issue.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about IR?
I began with Eurasianism, from which I came to geopolitics (the Eurasianist Petr Savitskii quoted the British geopolitician Halford Mackinder) and remained for a long time in that framework, developing the theme of the dualism of Land and Sea and applying it to the actual situation That is how the Eurasian school of geopolitics arose, which became not simply the dominant, but the only school in contemporary Russia. As a professor at Moscow State University, for six years I was head of the department of the Sociology of International Relations, which forced me to become professionally familiar with the classical theories of IR, the main authors, approaches, and schools. Because I have long been interested in postmodernism in philosophy (I wrote the book Post-philosophy on the subject), I paid special attention to post-positivism in IR. That is how I came to IR critical theory, neo-Gramscianism, and the sociology of IR (John Hobson, Steve Hobden, etc.). I came to the Theory of a Multipolar World, which I eventually developed myself, precisely through superimposing geopolitical dualism, Carl Schmitt's theory of the Grossraum, and John Hobson's critique of Western racism and the euro-centrism of IR.
In your opinion, what would a student need in order to become a specialist in IR?
In our interdisciplinary time, I think that what is most important is familiarity with philosophy and sociology, led by a paradigmatic method: the analysis of the types of societies, cultures, and structures of thought along the line Pre-Modernity – Modernity – Post-Modernity. If one learns to trace semantic shifts in these three epistemological and ontological domains, it will help one to become familiar with any popular theories of IR today. Barry Buzan's (Theory Talk #35) theory of international systems is an example of such a generalizing and very useful schematization. Today an IR specialist must certainly be familiar with deconstruction and use it at least in its elementary form. Otherwise, there is a great danger of overlooking what is most important.
Another very important competence is history and political science. Political science provides generalizing, simplifying material, and history puts schemas in their context. I would only put competence in the domain of economics and political economy in third place, although today no problem in IR can be considered without reference to the economic significance of processes and interactions. Finally, I would earnestly recommend to students of IR to become familiar, as a priority, with geopolitics and its methods. These methods are much simpler than theories of IR, but their significance is much deeper. At first, geopolitical simplifications produce an instantaneous effect: complex and entangled processes of world politics are rendered transparent and comprehensible in the blink of an eye. But to sort out how this effect is achieved, a long and serious study of geopolitics is required, exceeding by far the superficiality that limits critical geopolitics (Ó Tuathail et. al.): they stand at the beginning of the decipherment of geopolitics and its full-fledged deconstruction, but they regard themselves as its champions. They do so prematurely.
What does it entail to think of global power relations through a spatial lens ('Myslit prostranstvom')?
This is the most important thing. The entire philosophical theme of Modernity is built on the dominance of time. Kant already puts time on the side of the subject (and space on the side of the body, continuing the ideas of Descartes and even Plato), while Husserl and Heidegger identify the subject with time altogether. Modernity thinks with time, with becoming. But since the past and future are rejected as ontological entities, thought of time is transformed into thought of the instant, of that which is here and now. This is the basis for the ephemeral understanding of being. To think spatially means to locate Being outside the present, to arrange it in space, to give space an ontological status. Whatever was impressed in space is preserved in it. Whatever will ripen in space is already contained in it. This is the basis for the political geography of Friedrich Ratzel and subsequent geopoliticians. Wagner's Parsifal ends with the words of Gurnemanz: 'now time has become space'. This is a proclamation of the triumph of geopolitics. To think spatially means to think in an entirely different way [topika]. I think that postmodernity has already partly arrived at this perspective, but has stopped at the threshold, whereas to cross the line it is necessary to break radically with the entire axiomatic of Modernity, to really step over Modernity, and not to imitate this passage while remaining in Modernity and its tempolatry. Russian people are spaces [Russkie lyudi prostranstva], which is why we have so much of it. The secret of Russian identity is concealed in space. To think spatially means to think 'Russian-ly', in Russian.
Geopolitics is argued to be very popular in Russia nowadays. Is geopolitics a new thing, from the post-Cold War period, or not? And if not, how does current geopolitical thinking differ from earlier Soviet (or even pre-soviet) geopolitics?
It is an entirely new form of political thought. I introduced geopolitics to Russia at the end of the 80s, and since then it has become extremely popular. I tried to find some traces of geopolitics in Russian history, but besides Vandam, Semyonov-Tyan-Shansky, and a few short articles by Savitskii, there was nothing. In the USSR, any allusion to geopolitics was punished in the harshest way (see the 'affair of the geopoliticians' of the economic geographer Vladimir Eduardovich Den and his group). At the start of the 90s, my efforts and the efforts of my followers and associates in geopolitics (=Eurasianism) filled the worldview vacuum that formed after the end of Soviet ideology. At first, this was adopted without reserve by the military (The Military Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Russia), especially under Igor Rodionov. Then, geopolitics began to penetrate into all social strata. Today, this discipline is taught in the majority of Russian universities. So, there was no Soviet or pre-Soviet geopolitics. There is only the contemporary Eurasian school, which took shape at the end of the 80s. Foundations of Geopolitics was the first programmatic text of this school, although I had published most of texts in that book earlier, and some of them were circulated as texts in government circles. Recently, in 2012, I released two new textbooks: Geopolitics and The Geopolitics of Russia, which together with The War of Continents are the results of work in this field, along four axes.
In your book International Relations, not yet published in English, you set out your Theory of a Multipolar World as a distinct IR theory. What are the basic components of the Theory of a Multipolar World—and how is it different from classical realism?
In order to be understood and not get into the details, I can say that the Theory of a Multipolar World seriously and axiomatically adopts Samuel Huntington's thesis about the plurality of civilizations. Russia has its own author, who claimed the same thing more than a hundred years ago: Nikolay Danilevsky, and then the Eurasianists. However, everything starts from precisely this point: civilization is not one, but many. Western civilization's pretension to universalism is a form of the will to domination and an authoritarian discourse. It can be taken into account but not believed. It is nothing other than a strategy of suppression and hegemony. The following point follows: we must move from thinking in terms of one civilization (the racism of euro-centric versions of IR) to a pluralism of subjects. However, unlike realists, who take as the subject of their theory nation-states, which are themselves products of the European, bourgeois, modern understanding of the Political, the Theory of a Multipolar World proposes to take civilizations as subjects. Not states, but civilizations. I call them 'large politeiai', or civilizations, corresponding to Carl Schmitt's 'large spaces'. As soon as we take these civilizations—'large politeiai'—as subjects, we can then apply to them the full system of premises of realism: anarchy in the international system, sovereignty, the rationality of egoistic behavior, etc. But within these 'politeiai', by contrast, a principle more resembling liberalism, with its pacifism and integration, operates, only with the difference that here we are not talking about a 'planetary' or 'global' world, but about an intra-civilizational one; not about global integration, but about regional integration, strictly within the context of civilizational borders. Post-positivism, in turn, helps here for the deconstruction of the authoritarian discourse of the West, which masks its private interests by 'universal values', and also for the reconstruction of civilizational identity, including with the help of technological means: civilizational elites, civilizational media, civilizational economic algorithms and corporations, etc. That is the general picture.
Your theory of multipolarity is directed against the intellectual, political, and social hegemony of the West. At the same time, while drawing on the tools of neo-Marxist analysis and critical theory, it does not oppose Western hegemony 'from the left', as those approaches do, but on the basis of traditionalism (Rene Guenon, Julius Evola), cultural anthropology, and Heideggerian phenomenology, or 'from the right'. Do you think that such an approach can appeal to Anglo-American IR practitioners, or is it designed to appeal mainly to non-Western theorists and practitioners? In short, what can IR theorists in the West learn from the theory of multipolarity?
According to Hobson's entirely correct analysis, the West is based on a fundamental sort of racism. There is no difference between Lewis Morgan's evolutionistic racism (with his model of savagery, barbarism, civilization) and Hitler's biological racism. Today the same racism is asserted without a link to race, but on the basis of the technological modes and degrees of modernization and progress of societies (as always, the criterion "like in the West" is the general measure). Western man is a complete racist down to his bones, generalizing his ethnocentrism to megalomaniacal proportions. Something tells me that he is impossible to change. Even radical critiques of Western hegemony are themselves deeply infected by the racist virus of universalism, as Edward Said showed with the example of 'orientalism', proving that the anticolonial struggle is a form of that very colonialism and euro-centrism. So the Theory of a Multipolar World will hardly find adherents in the Western world, unless perhaps among those scholars who are seriously able to carry out a deconstruction of Western identity, and such deconstruction assumes the rejection of both Right (nationalistic) and Left (universalistic and progressivist) clichés. The racism of the West always acquires diverse forms. Today its main form is liberalism, and anti-liberal theories (most on the Left) are plagued by the same universalism, while Right anti-liberalisms have been discredited. That is why I appeal not to the first political theory (liberalism), nor the second (communism, socialism), nor to the third (fascism, Nazism), but to something I call the Fourth Political Theory (or 4PT), based on a radical deconstruction of the subject of Modernity and the application of Martin Heidegger's existential analytic method.
Traditionalists are brought in for the profound critique of Western Modernity, for establishing the plurality of civilizations, and for rehabilitating non-Western (pre-modern) cultures. In Russia and Asian countries, the Theory of a Multipolar World is grasped easily and naturally; in the West, it encounters a fully understandable and fully expected hostility, an unwillingness to study it carefully, and coarse slander. But there are always exceptions.
What is the Fourth Political Theory (4PT) and how is it related to the Theory of a Multipolar World and to your criticism of the prevailing theoretical approaches in the field of IR?
I spoke a little about this in the response to the previous question. The Fourth Political Theory is important for getting away from the strict dominance of modernity in the sphere of the Political, for the relativization of the West and its re-regionalization. The West measures the entire history of Modernity in terms of the struggle of three political ideologies for supremacy (liberalism, socialism, and nationalism). But since the West does not even for a moment call into question the fact that it thinks for all humanity, it evaluates other cultures and civilizations in the same way, without considering that in the best case the parallels to these three ideologies are pure simulacra, while most often there simply are no parallels. If liberalism won the competition of the three ideologies in the West at the end of the 20th century, that does not yet mean that this ideology is really universal on a world scale. It isn't at all. This episode of the Western political history of modernity may be the fate of the West, but not the fate of the world. So other principles of the political are needed, beyond liberalism, which claims global domination (=the third totalitarianism), and its failed alternatives (communism and fascism), which are historically just as Western and modern as liberalism. This explains the necessity of introducing a Fourth Political Theory as a political frame for the correct basis of a Theory of a Multipolar World. The Fourth Political Theory is the direct and necessary correlate of the Theory of a Multipolar World in the domain of political theory.
Is IR an American social science? Is Russian IR as an academic field a reproduction of IR as an American academic field? If not, how is IR in Russia specifically Russian?
IR is a Western scientific discipline, and as such it has a prescriptive, normative vector. It not only studies the West's dominance, it also produces, secures, defends, and propagandizes it. IR is undoubtedly an imperious authoritarian discourse of Western civilization, in relation to itself and all other areas of the planet. Today the US is the core of the West, so naturally in the 20th century IR became more and more American as the US moved toward that status (it began as an English science). It is the same with geopolitics, which migrated from London to Washington and New York together with the function of a global naval Empire. As with all other sciences, IR is a form of imperious violence, embodying the will to power in the will to knowledge (as Michel Foucault explained). IR in Russia remains purely Western, with one detail: in the USSR, IR as such was not studied. Marxism in IR did not correspond to Soviet reality, where after Stalin a practical form of realism (not grounded theoretically and never acknowledged) played a big role—only external observers, like the classical realist E.H. Carr, understood the realist essence of Stalinism in IR. So IR was altogether blocked. The first textbooks started to appear only in the 90s and in the fashion of the day they were all liberal. That is how it has remained until now. The peculiarity of IR in Russia today lies in the fact that there is no longer anything Russian there; liberalism dominates entirely, a correct account of realism is lacking, and post-positivism is almost entirely disregarded. The result is a truncated, aggressively liberal and extremely antiquated version of IR as a discipline. I try to fight that. I recently released an IR textbook with balanced (I hope) proportions, but it is too early to judge the result.
Stephen Walt argued in a September article in Foreign Policy that Russia 'is nowhere near as threatening as the old Soviet Union', in part because Russia 'no longer boasts an ideology that can rally supporters worldwide'. Do you agree with Walt's assessment?
There is something to that. Today, Russia thinks of itself as a nation-state. Putin is a realist; nothing more. Walt is right about that. But the Theory of a Multipolar World and the Fourth Political Theory, as well as Eurasianism, are outlines of a much broader and large-scale ideology, directed against Western hegemony and challenging liberalism, globalization, and American strategic dominance. Of course, Russia as a nation-state is no competition for the West. But as the bridgehead of the Theory of a Multipolar World and the Fourth Political Theory, it changes its significance. Russian policies in the post-Soviet space and Russia's courage in forming non-Western alliances are indicators. For now, Putin is testing this conceptual potential very gingerly. But the toughening of relations with the West and most likely the internal crises of globalization will at some point force a more careful and serious turn toward the creation of global alternative alliances. Nevertheless, we already observe such unions: The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, BRICS, the Eurasian Union—and they require a new ideology. Not one like Marxism, any universalism is excluded, but also not simple realist maneuvers of regional hegemons. Liberalism is a global challenge. The response to it should also be global. Does Putin understand this? Honestly, I don't know. Sometimes it seems he does, and sometimes it seems he doesn't.
Vladimir Putin recently characterized the contemporary world order as follows: 'We have entered a period of differing interpretations and deliberate silences in world politics. International law has been forced to retreat over and over by the onslaught of legal nihilism. Objectivity and justice have been sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. Arbitrary interpretations and biased assessments have replaced legal norms. At the same time, total control of the global mass media has made it possible when desired to portray white as black and black as white'. Do you agree with this assessment? If so, what is required as a response to this international situation?
These are true, but rather naïve words. Putin is just indignant that the West establishes rules in its own interests, changes them when necessary, and interprets allegedly 'universal norms' in its own favor. But the issue is that this is the structure of the will to power and the very organization of logo-phallo-phono-centric discourse. Objectivity and justice are not possible so long as speech is a monologue. The West does not know and does not recognize the other. But this means that everything will continue until this other wins back the right to recognition. And that is a long road. The point of the Theory of a Multipolar World is that there are no rules established by some one player. Rules must be established by centers of real power. The state today is too small for that; hence the conclusion that civilizations should be these centers. Let there be an Atlantic objectivity and Western justice. A Eurasian objectivity and Russian justice will counter them. And the Chinese world or Pax Sinica [world/peace: same word in Russian] will look different than the Islamic one. Black and white are not objective evaluations. They depend on the structure of the world order: what is black and what is white is determined by one who has enough power to determine it.
How does your approach help us understand Russia's actions on the world stage better than other IR approaches do? What are IR analyses of Russia missing that do not operate with the conceptual apparatus of multipolarity?
Interesting question. Russia's behavior internationally is determined today by the following factors:
First, historical inertia, accumulating the power of precedents (the Theory of a Multipolar World thinks that the past exists as a structure; consequently, this factor is taken into account from many sides and in detail, while the 'tempocentrism' (Steve Hobden, John Hobson) of classical IR theories drops this from sight. We have to pay attention to this especially taking into consideration the fact that Russia is in many ways still a traditional society and belongs to the 'imperial system' of IR.) There are, besides, Soviet inertia and stable motives ('Stalinism in IR');
Second, the projective logic of opposition to the West, stemming from the most practical, pragmatic, and realist motivations (in the spirit of Caesarism, analyzed by neo-Gramscians) will necessarily lead Russia (even despite the will of its leaders) to a systemic confrontation with American hegemony and globalization, and then the Theory of a Multipolar World will really be needed (classical IR models, paying no attention to the Theory of a Multipolar World, drop from sight the possible future; i.e., they rob themselves of predictive potential because of purely ideological prejudices and self-imposed fears).
But if an opponent underestimates you, you have more chances to land an unexpected blow. So I am not too disturbed by the underestimation of the Theory of a Multipolar World among IR theorists.
In the western world, the divide between academia and policy is often either lamented ('ivory tower') or, in light of the ideal of academic independence, deemed absent. This concerns a broader debate regarding the relations between power, knowledge and geopolitics. How are academic-policy relations in Russia with regards to IR and is this the ideal picture according to you?
I think that in our case both positions have been taken to their extreme. On one hand, today's authorities in Russia do not pay the slightest attention to scholars, dispatching them to an airless and sterile space. On the other hand, Soviet habits became the basis for servility and conformism, preserved in a situation when the authorities for the first time demand nothing from intellectuals, except for one thing: that they not meddle in socio-political processes. So the situation with science is both comical and sorrowful. Conformist scholars follow the authorities, but the authorities don't need this, since they do not so much go anywhere in particular as react to facts that carry themselves out.
If your IR theory isn't based on politically and philosophically liberal principles, and if it criticizes those principles not from the left but from the right, using the language of large spaces or Grossraum, is it a fascist theory of international relations? Are scholars who characterize your thought as 'neo-fascism', like Andreas Umland and Anton Shekhovstov, partially correct? If not, why is that characterization misleading?
Accusations of fascism are simply a figure of speech in the coarse political propaganda peculiar to contemporary liberalism as the third totalitarianism. Karl Popper laid the basis for this in his book The Open Society and its Enemies, where he reduced the critique of liberalism from the right to fascism, Hitler, and Auschwitz, and the criticism of liberalism from the left to Stalin and the GULAG. The reality is somewhat more complex, but George Soros, who finances Umland and Shekhovstov and is an ardent follower of Popper, is content with reduced versions of politics. If I were a fascist, I would say so. But I am a representative of Eurasianism and the author of the Fourth Political Theory. At the same time, I am a consistent and radical anti-racist and opponent of the nation-state project (i.e. an anti-nationalist). Eurasianism has no relation to fascism. And the Fourth Political Theory emphasizes that while it is anti-liberal, it is simultaneously anti-communist and anti-fascist. I think it isn't possible to be clearer, but the propaganda army of the 'third totalitarianism' disagrees and no arguments will convince it. 1984 should be sought today not where many think: not in the USSR, not in the Third Reich, but in the Soros Fund and the 'Brave New World'. Incidentally, Huxley proved to be more correct than Orwell. I cannot forbid others from calling me a fascist, although I am not one, though ultimately this reflects badly not so much on me as on the accusers themselves: fighting an imaginary threat, the accuser misses a real one. The more stupid, mendacious, and straightforward a liberal is, the simpler it is to fight with him.
Does technological change in warfare and in civil government challenge the geopolitical premises of classical divisions between spaces (Mackinder's view or Spykman's) heartland-rimland-offshore continents)? And, more broadly perhaps, does history have a linear or a cyclical pattern, according to you?
Technological development does not at all abolish the principles of classical geopolitics, simply because Land and Sea are not substances, but concepts. Land is a centripetal model of order, with a clearly expressed and constant axis. Sea is a field, without a hard center, of processuality, atomism, and the possibility of numerous bifurcations. In a certain sense, air (and hence also aviation) is aeronautics. And even the word astronaut contains in itself the root 'nautos', from the Greek word for ship. Water, air, outer space—these are all versions of increasingly diffused Sea. Land in this situation remains unchanged. Sea strategy is diversified; land strategy remains on the whole constant. It is possible that this is the reason for the victory of Land over Sea in the last decade; after all, capitalism and technical progress are typical attributes of Sea. But taking into consideration the fundamental character of the balance between Leviathan and Behemoth, the proportions can switch at any moment; the soaring Titan can be thrown down into the abyss, like Atlantis, while the reason for the victory of thalassocracy becomes the source of its downfall. Land remains unchanged as the geographic axis of history. There is Land and Sea even on the internet and in the virtual world: they are axes and algorithms of thematization, association and separation, groupings of resources and protocols. The Chinese internet is terrestrial; the Western one, nautical.
You have translated a great number of foreign philosophical and geopolitical works into Russian. How important is knowledge transaction for the formation of your ideas?
I recently completed the first release of my book Noomachy, which is entirely devoted precisely to the Logoi of various civilizations, and hence to the circulation of ideas. I am convinced that each civilization has its own particular Logos. To grasp it and to find parallels, analogies, and dissonances in one's own Logos is utterly fascinating and interesting. That is why I am sincerely interested in the most varied cultures, from North American to Australian, Arabic to Latin American, Polynesian to Scandinavian. All the Logoi are different and it is not possible to establish a hierarchy among them. So it remains for us only to become familiar with them. Henry Corbin, the French philosopher and Protestant who studied Iranian Shiism his entire life, said of himself 'We are Shiites'. He wasn't a Shiite in the religious sense, but without feeling himself a Shiite, he would not be able to penetrate into the depths of the Iranian Logos. That is how I felt, working on Noomachy or translating philosophical texts or poetry from other languages: in particular, while learning Pierce and James, Emerson and Thoreau, Poe and Pound I experienced myself as 'we are Americans'. And in the volume devoted to China and Japan, as 'we are Buddhists'. That is the greatest wealth of the Logos of various cultures: both those like ours and those entirely unlike ours. And these Logoi are at war; hence, Noomachy, the war of the intellect. It is not linear and not primitive. It is a great war. It creates that which we call the 'human', the entire depth and complexity of which we most often underestimate.
Final question. You call yourself the 'last philosopher of empire'. What is Eurasanism and how does it relate to the global pivot of power distributions?
Eurasianism is a developed worldview, to which I dedicated a few books and a countless number of articles and interviews. In principle, it lies at the basis of the Theory of a Multipolar World and the Fourth Political Theory, combined with geopolitics, and it resonates with Traditionalism. Eurasianism's main thought is plural anthropology, the rejection of universalism. The meaning of Empire for me is that there exists not one Empire, but at minimum two, and even more. In the same way, civilization is never singular; there is always some other civilization that determines its borders. Schmitt called this the Pluriverse and considered it the main characteristic of the Political. The Eurasian Empire is the political and strategic unification of Turan, a geographic axis of history in opposition to the civilization of the Sea or the Atlanticist Empire. Today, the USA is this Atlanticist Empire. Kenneth Waltz, in the context of neorealism in IR, conceptualized the balance of two poles. The analysis is very accurate, although he erred about the stability of a bipolar world and the duration of the USSR. But on the whole he is right: there is a global balance of Empires in the world, not nation-States, the majority of which cannot claim sovereignty, which remains nominal (Stephen Krasner's (Theory Talk #21) 'global hypocrisy'). For precisely that reason, I am a philosopher of Empire, as is almost every American intellectual, whether he knows it or not. The difference is only that he thinks of himself as a philosopher of the only Empire, while I think of myself as the philosopher of one of the Empires, the Eurasian one. I am more humble and more democratic. That is the whole difference.
Alexander Dugin is a Russian philosopher, the author of over thirty books on topics including the sociology of the imagination, structural sociology, ethnosociology, geopolitical theory, international relations theory, and political theory, including four books on the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. His most recent books, only available in Russian at the moment, are Ukraine: My War and the multi-volume Noomachia: Wars of the Intellect. Books translated into English include The Fourth Political Theory, Putin vs. Putin: Vladimir Putin Viewed From the Right, and Martin Heidegger: The Philosophy of Another Beginning.
Related links
Who is Alexander Dugin? Interview with Theory Talks editor Michael Millerman (YouTube) TheFourth Political Theory website (English): Evrazia.tv (Russian) Evrazia.tv (English) Geopolitics.ru (English version) InternationalEurasian Movement (English version) Centerfor Conservative Studies (Russian)
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Robert Wade on Zombie Ideas, Being inside the World Bank, and the Death of Ethics in Economics after the Marginal Revolution
The global economy is at the core of some of the main issues in contemporary International Relations. But how do we understand the global economy and what impact does that have on how we deal with the power politics around it? A fault line seems to have emerged between those who take economic theory seriously and those who denounce it for being part of the problem. Informed by his training as an anthropologist, Robert H. Wade—professor at the LSE—takes a different tack: he bases his engagement with the way in which Adam Smith has been appropriated to advocate for a dominant view of 'free markets' on real-world economics and in-depth accounts of insiders. In this Talk, Wade—among others—discusses experimentation in international economic regimes, why the International Financial Institutions don't fight economic crises, and the powers and perils of being inside the World Bank.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current International Relations? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
If we'd reframe your question as being more broadly about global studies, I think that one of the really fundamental questions is how and why it is that the precepts of neoliberalism have penetrated into every nook and cranny of Western societies, and have penetrated to a very large extent many non-Western countries.
This has happened especially, but not only, through the agency of the IMF and the World bank, which have imbued these neoliberal principles; through the mechanism of graduate education: children of the elites in developing countries go out to American, British, other Western universities, and they learn that this is 'true' economics, or 'true' IPE, or 'true' Political Science, and then they come back and implement these same principles and make them a reality back home. But across the globe, this even holds for the Nordic countries. In Iceland and other Nordic countries, from the 1980s, networks of people sharing a belief in neo-liberal precepts, began to form and sort of place each other in key positions within the state, and in politics, and built a momentum in this direction. These precepts have become understood as just natural, as in Margaret Thatcher's 'there is no alternative'.
I live in the UK, and the great bulk of the British public really does believe that the government is just like a household writ large, and the same rules of budgeting that apply to the household should apply to the state. That when times are tough the household has to tighten its belt, cut back on spending, and it is only fair that the government does the same, and if the government does not, if the government runs a deficit in hard times, then the government is being irresponsible. And this is a completely mistaken and pre-Keynesian idea, but it is a 'zombie idea'—that is, however much arguments and evidence may be mounted against it, it just keeps coming up and up and up, and governments come to power riding on this zombie idea and a flotilla of related ideas.
The persistence of this zombie idea is all the more amazing as we just had a global financial crisis in 2007/8, which would prompt a rethinking of these ideas. But these neoliberal precepts have been, if anything, more strongly reinforced. In previous hard times—and obviously the 1930s depression is the exemplary case—there has been a stronger move towards, what you could call, social democratic precepts. But not this time! Indeed, even after the crisis, the whole of the European Union with 500 million people is even more thoroughly structured on the basis of these ideas. I am thinking of what is popularly known as the Fiscal Compact signed by the EU Member States in 2012, which commits all governments to balance budgets all the time—that is, first, the structural deficit may not rise above 0.5 percent of GDP. Second, the public debt may not rise above 60 percent of GDP. Third, automatic financial sanctions are levied on governments that exceed these two thresholds. Fourth, the whole procedure is supervised by the European Commission, and this is presented as in the name of sound budgeting. This package is presented as justified by the proposition that government is a household writ large. The most elementary principles of Keynesian macroeconomics show why this is not simply mistaken, but a disaster, and will keep generating recessionary pressures. It is sold as a kind of excuse for avoiding to put in place the essential conditions for the monetary union, namely, a common budget and a sizable transfer mechanism to the regions just as exists in the United States. But they do not want to do that, but still they call this agreement 'cooperation', which is all about not cooperation, but about writing these dictates around this zombie idea written into the very basic architecture of the EU. Beyond EU politics, it materializes all the way down to, I don't know, the function of the privatization of the Post Office, it goes all the way down to the sort of capillaries of how universities are run, and the incentive systems that have placed upon academics, and there is very little pushback. The one reason, why I am almost completely delighted about Jeremy Corbyn's election as the leader of the Labour party, is that this is one small case of where there seems to be some concerted pushback against these zombie ideas. The point being that the established Labour party basically bought into this whole set of neo-liberal ideas. It combined maintaining the overall structure of inequality in society with more emphasis on providing some help to the poor, but they had to be hardworking poor.
Yet, one knows that there can be dramatic changes in the prevailing zeitgeist of norms. One knows that there can be big changes in the space of a few decades and the question is can one imagine a scenario in which they might be a big change in norms back to a more kind of social-democratic direction. So where will this take place? Because of technological change in the labor market, there is a real big crisis of employment with many middle-class jobs cut out and polarization in the labor market. This might then induce a political movement to have a much bigger change in income distribution than anybody with power is now talking about. Talk of re-distribution these days is really almost entirely around redistribution through the state, but the point I would make is that if there is to be any significant reduction of inequality, especially inequality at the top, there has to be more attention to changes in market-income distribution.
Let me explain. The share of profits in national income has been going up and the share of labor income has been going down. So we should harness the shareholder structure of the market to affect a more equal income distribution by enabling a much wider section of the population to buy into the profit share. At the moment the profit share goes to senior executives and equity holders, but equity holders are highly concentrating at the top of the income and wealth distribution. If equity earners could be spread much more equally, then a much wider section of the population would get income, while they sleep so to speak. We could institute something like trusts, whose members could be the employees of a company, the customers, the neighbors of the company, and the trust would borrow on capital markets and take out insurance against the repayment of the lending of loan and then it would buy shares, it would use that borrowed money to buy shares in the company, and the company would pay out dividends on the shares and then that dividend income coming out of profits would be distributed to the members of the trust. That would be a way of getting the rising share of profits in national income distributed out to the population at large. I particularly like this metaphor of "earning income while you sleep", since at the moment it is only the rich people, who are earning income while they sleep. Somehow that facility of earning income while you sleep has to be made much more widely and available—by using the market against itself, so to speak.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about International Relations?
I suppose the starting point was really this; my father was a New Zealand diplomat, so we moved quite often. By that time I was twelve my parents were posted to Colombo, Ceylon as it was called then. After having lived just in Western countries, I suddenly encountered at this very formative age Colombo and Sri Lanka. I was just amazed by that experience; by the color, the taste, the exoticness, but I was also very struck by how the many boys at the same age as me, were walking around with no shoes. I particular remember this boy carrying a baby on his shoulder, the baby looked half-dead and covered in scabs, and I think it was then I got the idea of just how unequal the world was. Then at university I studied economics, but I also visited my parents in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and I got another sense of that great disparity in wealth and living standards. At this time I had come across Adam Smith and the wealth of nations question and that helped to encapsulate or to crystalize my interests. So I wanted to go the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex and got enrolled for a PhD in economics, but en route I spent several weeks in India and during that time I began to dwell upon just how boring and how useless everything I studied under the name of microeconomics. I kept thinking of these dreadfully dry textbooks of marginal cost curves and marginal revenue curves and utility function and difference curves etc., which I had forced myself to sit exams in. By this time I had done a little bit of fieldwork, living on Pitcairn Island in the middle of the Pacific.
When I got back to Sussex after fieldwork I announced that I wished to not do a PhD in economics, but to do one in anthropology thinking all the time, that this would actually be more use for understanding why for example India, where I had been, was so very poor. So that's what I did: a PhD in anthropology… In some ways I regard that as having been a mistake, because the sort of mainstream of anthropology is very far away from the Adam Smith questions. Having done the degree in anthropology, pretty soon I began to change direction and pay much more attention to the state, to the state bureaucracy. I went to India and I studied the Irrigation Department and other related departments. I went to South Korea and I studied state irrigation agencies and I went to Taiwan and I studied the state more broadly. So I was kind of moving up from my Italian village, moving kind of up the scale in terms of state agencies and then the state as a whole.
Then I went to work for the World Bank in the 1980s and my main reason for doing that was not to do the research the World Bank wanted me to do, but rather to study the World Bank from the inside as fieldwork. If in some ways switching to anthropology was a mistake, in other ways it was not, because I approached those kind of Wealth-of-Nations-questions in a way very different from how economists approached them. For example when I went to Taiwan and studied the trade regime, the first thing I did was to go and talk to people who operated through the trade regime, whereas I noticed that the published works by economists celebrating Taiwan's free trade regime was based on what the rules said and what certain government officials told them was the case. They had never actually talked to people who traded through the trade regime. If they would have, they would have learned about all the covert controls that went on such that there was quite a distinction between the liberal face of the trade regime and the reality of the trade regime. The reality was that the government was managing trade in line with industrial policy, but the government absolutely did not want the world to know that. So all this was kept hidden and I was really regarded as rather unwelcome visitor—and in fact to this day my book Governing the Market (1990, read the introduction here) is not well received in Taiwan. It says the government of Taiwan did a good job of managing the market, but they want the world to believe that Taiwan is a free trade country. So that is the kind of intellectual trajectory that I have been on.
So I think that the value of the anthropology PhD was that it really taught me, in practical terms, the meaning of the anthropological maxim, which is 'soaking and poking'. To put it another way—I love this—anthropologists are social scientists, who believe that the plural of anecdote is evidence. And indeed I place a lot of weight on anecdotes, on gossip, on the stories people tell, whereas economists would be much happier reducing, let us say, South Korea's trade regime to one data point in a matrix, and then compare that data point with, let us say, Malaysia's data point to see how the trade regimes are correlated with growth, or something like that, and that is really not my interest.
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
Despite what I've just said, I do think that a graduate training in economics is very useful, provided one does not believe it. And that is really difficult, because the socialization pressures are intense: if you do not say the right things—which are neoliberal type things on the whole—then you will likely not get a high grade. But I have noticed that economists tend to know how to think, how to make arguments, they tend to understand the idea of causality, and that may seem an astonishing thing to say on my part, because it implies that students coming from other disciplines are often weak in understanding the very basic ideas of causality, but that is my experience. I had many students coming from, who knows, IR or Political Science or Sociology or Anthropology, who clearly do not have much idea of causality; they can describe things, but they find thinking in terms of cause and effect, in terms of independent and dependent variables, in terms of left and right side, they just find it difficult. So I do think that there is a lot to be said for studying economics, and mastering the maths, provided that the critical facility is not lost. That is point number one.
Point number two is that I think that there is a huge premium on doing fieldwork, and the field work maybe in developing countries, but when I say field work, I don't just mean going out to villages, going out to see poor people 'over there'. I am talking of fieldwork inside bureaucracies: to try and understand the culture, the incentive systems that people are working under—fieldwork at home so to speak, in the countries one comes from. From the students' point of view, it is clearly much easier to sit in the LSE library to do the research. So in my marking I give quite a premium to a student actually doing fieldwork, going out and interviewing, and having the experience of writing up and interpreting the interviews and somehow fitting it back into a larger argument—but really few students actually do that, and I think that that is a real, real big mistake. Mind you, the same risk holds for fieldwork in economics as it does for studying economics: I encourage students to work for (do fieldwork in, experience) the World Bank; and several have—but to the best of my knowledge almost none of them has kept their critical perspective. They really come to buy into it.
The relations between states are settled either through diplomacy or warfare. Why would we have to focus on economics to understand IR?
Because economics—such as for example balances of payment, surpluses and deficits—set the constraints and incentives on countries in terms of their relationships with each other. A great deal of diplomacy is driven by economic pressures: diplomacy to get other countries to for example open their markets, or to cut deals with countries—'if you do this, we will do that'—deals that may relate to areas that are rather different, for instance if you buy more of these of our exports, we will help you fight such and such country, because the manufactures are in my constituency.
So, in a way, the way you framed the question is part of the reason why I react against the discipline of IR: because it tends to treat diplomacy, war, and so on, as somehow rather separate from economic pressures, and I see these economic pressures as very powerful drivers of both of the other two things. As another example, one of the drivers of the Syrian conflict was that there was an acute drought (like Weizman observed in Theory Talk #69, red), which meant that many people were rendered destitute; rural areas flooded into the cities, and the Assad regime just was—understandably—unable to cope; and large numbers of young men, concentrated in cities, rootless and with no jobs, just were recruiting fodder for the Wahhabi sect. I have always thought of economics—not so much as in the making choices in conditions of scarcity, that is sort of Lionel Robin's definition—in the sense of Alfred Marshal, about how people make a living, as a very fundamental driver of a lot of what happens in International Relations.
Pikkety recently published Capital in the 21st Century, causing quite the stir. But why would inequality between people matter for IR?
Let me comment by invoking a very contemporary exhibit—the migration crisis in Europe now. Maybe a decade ago I looked at the figures and if you took the average income of the EU-15 prior to latest extensions and then expressed the average income of countries outside of the EU—including sub-Sahara Africa—as a percentage, then there was a really dramatic falling away of income levels relative to the EU, in countries all around the EU and whether you took market exchange rates or purchasing power parity. If you went round to sub-Sahara Africa and took the average, it was more like two percent in market exchange rates and seven percent in purchasing power parity; and the 'problem' is that there is certainly here a rather thin slither of sea between Africa and the promised land of Europe and to the east there are these great open planes, where armies can go up and down to the speed of light, so to speak, but people can also move pretty quickly across these planes.
So all one has to do—and this might just be only a bit of an exaggeration—if one is on the poor end of this poverty pyramid is hop across the border and you have a chance at least of getting a very appreciable increase in living conditions and income, with which you can then get savings to remit back to home. So the migrations pressures are just huge. So that is one reason for linking inequality to issues in International Relations—really fundamental issues, and very very difficult to dissolve.
You've done anthropological fieldwork inside the World Bank—an institution drawing a lot of criticism from its detractors in IR. Can you shed some kind of light about what kind of 'animal' the World Bank is?
First of all, let me say that at the micro-level—the level of the people you know and the people I know inside the World Bank—I agree that there are people doing a lot of good work. But if you look at the organization more generally—the World Bank and also the IMF—they are clearly instruments mainly of US foreign policy—and any number of US senators, members of the House, have basically said that. When they are defending the International Financial Institutions (they often criticize them), they do so by saying they are important for US foreign policy. And you have to look at the governance structures to see how it is that the US in particular—but Western states more generally—have from the beginning, through the very Articles of Agreement, created a structure which locks in their power, and has made it very difficult for other countries (including Japan) to significantly increase their shareholdings. The US has kept the presidency of the Bank and the much less recognized Number Two position of the IMF, and has used these positions to have a very strong influence.
Just to illustrate what the Bank and the Fund do: at the time of the East-Asian crisis—specifically the Korean crisis in 1997-1998—the IMF mission was in Seoul. The negotiations were in a hotel there. David Lipton from the US Treasury (and a former student of Larry Summers who was by then Deputy Secretary) was just down the corridor of where the negotiations took place, and every so often the IMF people would walk out of the negotiations and consult with David Lipton, then come back in and—as Paul Blustein reports in his book called The Chastening—often said something rather different from what they had been saying before they consulted with David Lipton.
Just to take another example, the US being able to appoint the president of the Bank—to appoint a person known personally to the Treasury Secretary or to the Secretary of the State, or both—is really of great value: when there is a 'trustful relationship'—or a relationship of dependency, the president being dependent on those who appointed him in the Administration—it is possible for those people in the Administration, or people close to them, to just ring up the president of the Bank, and talk in a very informal, confidential, trustful way about what is happening in Latin America, or what is happening in the Middle East, and what the US thinks the Bank should or should not be doing in those places. Larry Summers appointed a protégé of his to one of the regional development banks, and this person—who is very senior in the bank—told me that Larry would frequently ring him, while he is being driven home in the evening from the Treasury, just to have a chat about how things were going in her region, and to pass on suggestions about what the Bank should be doing there, and to get intelligence from her about what was happening in the region, and so on. The point is that, making these personal connections is of immense value, but at the same time, the US Congress, in particular, is very much against having a big Bank against allowing a capital increase for the World Bank—so that the bank could, as it should be doing, increase its lending for infrastructure investment ten times. It is just a complete scandal how little the Bank has been lending for the past 20 years or more for infrastructure, for roads and power stations and so on. The US does not want the Bank providing socialistic competition with the private sector: it says these things are for the private sector to do, and the Bank has to take care of poverty, because the private sector is not interested in poverty.
So the US wants to keep the presidency of the Bank, it wants to keep, secondly, its unique veto right on the big decisions, such as decisions on whether to increase the capital base—but provided those two things are met it does not care that much about the Bank. In the case of the Fund, the US is also very powerful, but of course the Europeans have a bit more relative power. Right now I think the world is in an even more dangerous sort if financial condition than might appear, because the IMF is acutely short of secure or guaranteed lending resources, so if there is to be another round of crisis—as I think is entirely likely within the next five years—the Fund depends upon borrowing short-term from member countries, like on six months terms, but member countries can say 'no', and that means that the Fund's ability to fight crises is quite constrained. The Fund should implement what was agreed in 2010 by all the member countries represented on the board of the IMF: to roughly double the quote of the guaranteed lending resources, that is, resources the countries actually hand over to the Fund, over which they actually give up country control. All the relevant capitals ratified it with one exception—the US—because Congress refused because the individual barons, who are not under that much party discipline, each said to the Treasury: 'look, the question of the IMF is of zero significance to my electorate, so if you want my vote on the IMF, you have to give me things that I want like projects in my constituency and so on'. The Treasury added up the demands of the people, whose vote had to be won, and it considered those demands were just way, way, way over the top. As long as a Democrat is in the presidency, while the House is controlled by Republicans the world is sort of held hostage to this. Beyond this example, this actually entails a structural problem: the US blocking or producing a gridlock in international organizations, because the Congress is hostile to international organizations, because Congress sees it to imply a loss of US sovereignty. The only way to end this gridlock is to end the US veto in the Fund and the Bank, but the problem is that the US can veto any measures.
One response of the big developing countries is to create bypass organizations—such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Banks, such as the new Development Bank, such as the Contingent Reserve arrangement the BRICs have established, and then a growing number of sort of regional development banks. And I think that that is a good thing, but it does raise questions about coordination, about who is looking after, if you will, the global interests, global issues such as climate change. In short, we need a genuine World Bank, rather than the American-Bank-in-the-World we have today.
You engage thoroughly with economics and economic theory. Now there seem to be two kinds of critical approaches to economics in IPE: one criticizes its rationality as flawed, and another buys into its rationality but attempts to point out where actual policy gets it wrong. Where do you stand in this?
If you take the example of how the EU attempted to impose fiscal rules on Greece, you see a notion of rationality which draws upon these very primitive notions that I referred to right at the beginning, where the government is just a household writ large, and the same set of rules that apply to the budgeting of the household must apply to the government as well. Here, the assumption is that any macroeconomic proposition must have microeconomic foundations, that it must be derivable from propositions about microeconomic agents acting in this sort of self-maximizing way, and if you cannot derive macroeconomic propositions from those micro foundations, then there is something unreliable, un-rigorous about your macroeconomics. So what are then the sources of these micro-economic assumptions?
This leads us to one fundamental and almost completely unaddressed weaknesses of economics can be traced back to the Marginal Revolution in the late 19th century. From that moment onwards, there has been an attempt to model economics on physics, and that was very explicit on the part of people like Pareto and Walras, and Jevons, early Marginalist thinkers. They even drew up tables with terms of physics, like velocity, on one side, and then corresponding terms in economics on the other. That had a huge benefit in terms of the 'science' of economics, because it cut economics loose from Adam Smith's and other classical economists' preoccupations with issues of morality and ethics. Adam Smith thought his most important book was not the Wealth of Nations but his Theory of Moral Sentiments, on which he was working, revising yet again, when he died. For Smith, economics and morals were never separate worlds, but intimately related. So for him, the Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations were just twins. The point about the marginalist revolution, and the embrace of physics as the model, was that it cut economics free of all that sort of subjective stuff about values. So economics after the marginalist revolution set off with the assumption that not production, but the movement of individuals in markets engaged in trading with each other became the center of gravity of economics. Making the study of exchange rather than the study of production central was analogous to, say, Boyle's Law in physics. Boyle's Law in physics explained the movement of molecules in gasses, as a function of the pressure applied to the gas. So why did they make that analogy?
The point of likening of individuals in microeconomic actions with molecules in gasses was the following. Everybody knows that we do not apply any consideration of ethics or moral sentiments to the movement of the molecules in gas, so neither should we apply any notions of ethics or moral sentiments to the movements of individuals in market exchanges. And that was the way that all considerations of ethics, of morality were just removed from economics. I for instance asked the question to well-known American growth theorist, as we were walking down the street in Providence at Brown University: 'is it moral for people to freeride?' And he said, 'yes of course, provided they do not break the law'. So ethics and questions of morality have been almost completely expunged from economics in a way that would horrify classical economists including Smith; and a particular idea of rationality has been an important part of cleansing economics from those moral considerations. George DeMartino, editor of the Oxford Handbook of Professional Economics Ethics which just appeared has a wonderful phrase to capture this—'econogenic harm': the harm built into the way that economics, professional economists work.
Haven't specific fields, like development economics—a field you engage with yourself—advanced to overcome these weaknesses in economic theory?
Let me root my answer again in observations about the linkages between theory and practice, for it is in practice that economic theory really does its work and its politics becomes visible. It always amazes me we have had a development industry in place for roughly the past 70 years with vast numbers of people, organizations, money all orchestrated underneath this umbrella of development; yet if you go back and read what the early writers about development and economic growth said—I am thinking of people like Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, Myrdal, Hirschman, Prebisch, but also Moses Abramovitz. If you go back and look at what they were saying, it seems to me that we have not advanced all that much. Sure, we have advanced a lot in terms of econometric techniques, but in terms of substance we have not. One conclusion I draw from that is that it is really important that international regimes—for example, World Bank and IMF loan conditions, but also WTO regimes—give room for experimentation, because it is really not the case that 'there is no alternative'. This Washington Consensus agenda has clearly not been effective in accelerating production, upgrading it, and production diversification, or export upgrading, or export diversification. So, there should be written into the regimes a lot of room for experimentation. But this isn't there because of the political origin of these regimes; because of what western countries want for the rest world, namely, to open the rest of the world to their markets.
In the 80s there were a lot of experts in industrial development in the World Bank and they did good work, promoting industrial growth and investment in productive infrastructure. But then Anne Krueger came in as chief economist, and brought in a whole lot of people with her—who, like here, were arch-neoliberals. The industrial growth people were invited to find employment elsewhere, or to rebrand themselves as experts in who knows what, environmental assessment, primary education, or good governance. There was no room for them. This also fitted well with some bad experiences the Bank had had with investing in infrastructure. It had gotten into a lot of trouble with large-scale infrastructural interventions such as roads and dams and the like from, especially, US NGOs mobilizing Congress—which then put pressure on the Treasury and so on. My lament throughout this whole conversation has been that we seem to have become just locked into this direction that was set in the 1980s, and it is very difficult to see what kind of economic catastrophe would be necessary to give a sufficient shock to reroute the global system of economic governance.
So after the 1980s, the Bank sort of backed off and began saying that development, economic development, was about poverty reduction—the slogan of the Bank became, 'our dream is a world free of poverty'. You can understand that shift partly in terms of pulling out of the concern with production to get into safe territory, but also because poverty reduction seemed to sort of take care of inequality, because you reduced inequality to poverty—to the poor 'over there', and we can feel good about helping them; but we do not want talk about inequality, which involves us, because then there is the question of justice of our income.
But then the most recent turn is that we're seeing a renewed push for infrastructure in the World Bank and western development agencies. I think that you can link this recent infrastructure push to uncertainty about the sources of economic growth. In the West there is a real question about sustaining economic growth without housing bubbles and stock market bubbles—in other words, without endogenously building financial instability. There may well be a similar sort of issue in terms of the growth of developing countries.
Last question. Adam Smith seems to be constantly present in your work as a critical interlocutor. How come?
I kind of engage in a critical debate with Adam Smith, but especially with people today, who believe his ideas. I often start to frame arguments in terms of his famous 40 word summary of the causes of the relative wealth of nations, which he actually wrote in 1755, which is to say long before the first edition of the Wealth of Nations. I will just tell you what these 40 words say, and then I will tell you the significance of them. He said:
'Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism than peace, easy taxes, and tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.'
So I am struck by how today many economists say or imply that this is essentially right; you need some qualifications of course, but essentially that is the nub of it. You might have to translate peace, easy taxes, tolerable administration of justice into more modern terms, but that is the essence of it. For example, Gregory Mankiw—Professor of economics at Harvard, former chair of the National Council of Economic Advisers during the Bush administration, and author of a very popular textbook in economics—said in the Wall Street Journal in 2006: Adam Smith was right to say that – and then he gave the 40 word quote. The renowned economists Timothy Besley and Torsten Persson wrote Pillars of Prosperity, which also begins with Smith's 40 words, and they even see the book as a kind of elaboration, but in that same kind of spirit, of Smith's basic idea. So my point is that these ideas are still current; they are still the sort of front of a lot of neoliberal thinking. I am just astonished these ideas all these centuries later remain so powerful. I have had at the back of my mind the idea of organizing an international competition to provide a contemporary 40 word statement, which is sort of equivalent to Smith's, which would obviously have to be of a more global character, encompassing the globalized world economy.
Robert Hunter Wade worked at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, 1972-95, World Bank, 1984-88, Princeton Woodrow Wilson School 1989/90, MIT Sloan School 1992, Brown University 1996-2000. Fellow of Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton 1992/93, Russell Sage Foundation 1997/98, Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin 2000/01. Fieldwork in Pitcairn Is., Italy, India, Korea, Taiwan. Research on World Bank 1995-continuing. Author of Irrigation and Politics in South Korea (1982), Village Republics: The Economic Conditions of Collective Action in India (1988, 1994), Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asia's Industrialization (1990, 2003). Latter won American Political Science Association's award of Best Book in Political Economy, 1992.
Related links
Faculty profile at LSE Read Wade's The Piketty phenomenon and the future of inequality (2014, real-world economics review) here (pdf) Read Wade's Capitalism and Democracy at Cross-Purposes (2013, Challenge) here (pdf) Read Wade's Rethinking Industrial Policy for Low Income Countries (2007 ADB Conference paper) here (pdf) Read Wade's Bringing the State Back In (2005, IPG) here (pdf) Read Wade's Is Globalization Reducing Poverty and Inequality? (2004, World Development) here (pdf) Read Wade's Creating Capitalisms (Introduction to 2003 book 'Governing the Market') here (pdf)